From: stlatos
Message: 68551
Date: 2012-02-14
>Are you saying that 'brother', etc., all happened to have a laryngeal each but 'mother' didn't? Analyzing the common ending as *-ter- not -xter- leads only to baseless folk etymology. Even if from babbling, such a *ma- could have been old enough to undergo a>e, back to a only by the following x (even if not so old, it causes the lengthening seen in historical IE).
> W dniu 2012-02-13 22:03, dgkilday57 pisze:
>
> > With
> > the fading of the prolongative sense of *-t-, *dHug^H&2ter- 'milker,
> > milkmaid' was then formed analogically (root *dHeug^H-, as in Skt. -duh
> > 'milking'). Greek in this view absorbed the laryngeal, *-g^H&2- > -ga-,
> > as in <me'ga>. The root of 'mother' was *meh2- or *meh4- 'suckle' (Lat.
> > <mamma> is dialectal like <Juppiter>, but <ma:milla> shows the Roman
> > Latin vocalism; if *ma:ma 'breast' had /o/-grade, it must be *meh4-).
> > The double laryngeal in *m&2&2ter- or *m&4&2ter became *-a:- in the
> > daughter languages. In my view, only *&4 can aspirate *t (and only in
> > Indic; I believe the cluster became the unvoiced fricative *tT in East
> > Augmentian (i.e. Armeno-Indo-Iranian), *t elsewhere).
>
> I would be surprised if a globally occurring nursery term like <mama>
> (Quechua mama 'mother', Xhosa umáËma 'my/our mother', etc.) had anything
> to do with laryngeals. I'm inclined to think that the 'mother' word was
> simply something like *ma:ter-, with the *ma:- part "borrowed" from baby
> talk, and the *-ter- part analogical to 'father' (babbling lexicalised
> and grammaticalised, if you prefer). The fact that *ma: does not conform
> to the PIE root-structure constraints is immaterial. Nursery "roots" and
> onomatopeias make their own laws.