From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1942
Date: 2000-03-25
----- Original Message -----From: Glen GordonSent: Friday, March 24, 2000 11:51 AMSubject: [cybalist] *nekWt-
Piotr:
>etc., etc., etc. (also *nekWt- 'get dark' supported directly by >Hittite
>and indirectly by the pan-IE word for 'night').
Actually, in hindsight... what? Are you sure that *nekWt- isn't really the
making of a verb from a noun *nekWts? One might offer a hypothesis that
*nekWts derives from a "nonthematic" Steppe form *nukWit, derived from a
verb *nukW- with *-it (eventually to be the
s-aorist in IE comparable to Uralic *-ta).
So *nukWit then would have developed into IndoTyrrhenian *nekWec (accusative
*nekWtem, genitive *nekWcese) - don't mind the weird *c/*t alternation, a
side-effect of Steppe *-t. Eventually, it would produce IndoAnatolian
*nekWt-s (*nekWtm). A verb would then develop simply by marking *nekWt- with
verbal affixes. Tada! Perhaps this is another source of some of these verbs.
Just an idle thought, though. A source of future discussion.
- gLeN
Hittite has nekuts (= nekWt-s) in the phrase nekuts mehur 'dusk time' (= 'evening'), but the verb neku(ts)tsi 'it's getting dark' (< *nekWt-ti) does not have the structure of other Hittite denominatives; a genuine derived verb would be something like *nekut-ai- or *nekut-ija-. However, the root noun nekWt-s as a zero-derivative of the verb root nekWt- is of course perfectly possible. Note that in Hittite nekuts mehur means literally 'the time of GETTING dark', rather than 'night' (the word for the latter is ispants). It may be a chicken-or-egg problem, but the derivation of the noun from the verb seems to fit the data better than the opposite process.I've read your website stuff. Let me digest it and we can talk about it later. OK?Piotr