Re: Odp: SV: Piotr: Goliath and Uriah the Hittite as IE -

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 523
Date: 1999-12-09

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Tommy Tyrberg
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 1999 8:42 PM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: SV: Piotr: Goliath and Uriah the Hittite as IE -

Tommy writes:
As for the character of the remnants of Indo-Iranian attested in the Levant
in the Bronze Age it is definitely Proto-Indic, not Proto-Iranian in
character, though there are some differences that suggests that it is not
directly ancestral to Sanskrit, e. g. 'one' is aika rather than eka.
Tommy,
 
Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indic *ai (< *ei, *oi, *ai) is precisely the ancestor of Sanskrit e, just as *au (< *eu, *ou, *au) is the ancestor of Sanskrit o. Such monophthongisations are so widespread that it's difficult to find a language in which nothing of the sort has ever taken place.
 
The Old Indic grammarians state explicitly that in Sanskrit morphology a + i coalesce into e (measuring two matras, i.e. a long vowel) both morpheme-internally and in sandhi. Translating their terminology into ours, they regarded [e:] as the surface phonetic realisation of underlying /ai/. They didn't fully realise that such synchronic rules recapitulate diachronic sound changes, but we know they do.
 
To sum up, *aika- for 'one' is exactly what one would expect to find in a language directly ancestral to Sanskrit; this *aika- would then have changed to e:ka- in the passage from Proto-Indic to historically known Old Indic.
 
Of course from the above one cannot infer that Sanskrit descended directly from the "Indoid" dialects of the Bronze Age Near East. However, it must have descended from something very similar to them.
 
Piotr