Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar Approximant

From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 61114
Date: 2008-10-31

----- Original Message -----
From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 7:40 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar
Approximant


>
> On 2008-10-31 19:36, Arnaud Fournet wrote:
>
>> PIE had a consonantic phoneme /w/ and a vocalic phoneme /u/
>
> Give us some minimal pairs illustrating the contrast.
>
> Piotr
>
==========
I believe the *u in :
kuH2on "dog"
bhudh-m "bottom"
bhuH "grow, plant"
are vowel *u

Some *u as in *H2ud "water" have been reinterpreted as *w,
but as you can see Greek has ud-ôr with a real u,
but it has Fid with a digamma in weid.
This is not far away from a minimal pair,
anyway a minimal pair between a vowel and a consonant does not make sense
as they are not supposed to appear in the same environments.

I know that the "morpho-phono-graphemic" theory of standard PIE confuses *u
and *w (and *i and *y) but I have already made it clear I disagree with that
confusion,
even though this confusion is actually supported by many IE languages where
this confusion is also present.
but there are some traces of *u being a real vowel,
one of them is actuall kuH2on being treated like s^u- in Indic.
the vowel u in *ku- functions differently from a consonant w in *kw.

By the way,

do you have examples of -uH2o- in the standard theory ?

What should we expect from that ?

Arnaud