Thanks Piotr for your post. I've
checked on this some more, and this is what I've found.
/rs/ can either be maintained,
or develop into /rr/ (Attic, Lesbian) or /lengthened vowel + r/.
Leonard Palmer, in The Greek
Language, states : "According to the grammarians, initial /r/ was aspirated, as
was the second /r/ in the medial cluster /-rr-/..."
This would provide the /h/ of
the Latin "Tyrrhenus", which is otherwise unexplainable.
So, I was wrong to attribute the
/h/ of Tyrrhenus to Greek /s > h/, but it still seems to be a Greek
phenomenon rather than Latin.
So, while Herodotos used
/tursEno-/ exclusively, the Latin form would be borrowed from a dialect variant
/turREno-/ (R=aspirated /r/).
Regards
Dennis
----- Original Message -----From: Piotr GasiorowskiSent: Tuesday, 25 April, 2000 5:08 PMSubject: Re: [cybalist] Re: Easter----- Original Message -----From: Dennis PoulterSent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 3:06 AMSubject: Re: [cybalist] Re: EasterDennis wrote:Isn't the 'rh' of Tyrrhenos rather a case of the Greek sound change /s > h/, written as rho+rough breathing, represented by the /rh/ graphy in the Latin alphabet?
It is, though it isn't quite regular. In Greek, old *-rs- would have given either -rr- (no rough breathing) or -r- with the compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel (*orso- 'tail, arse' > orro-, ouro- depending on the dialect). Perhaps *turseno- was borrowed too late to undergo the regular changes in the same way as the inherited lexical stock, but I'm not sure about the details. The word seems to have been treated like a compound. I'll give it more thought yet. Maybe someone on the list has a plausible explanation for the -rrh-.Piotr
