>Balto-Slavic *intonations* don't, as far as I'm aware, demonstrate
> >laryngeals in the dual endings. If you believe otherwise, show me the
> >evidence. Long vowels do not always result from compensatory
> >lengthening. Why not contraction, e.g. *-o: < *-o-e?
Erh, if *e can be seen as *H1 we would still have compensatory lengthening.
:)
I was thinking. I know that I should cut down a little but I couldn't help
myself. I think I've forgotten some stuff that I figured out before and
let's see if I can't refind it. Let's take a voyage into the unknown...
I reconstruct IndoTyrrhenian *kWetwe for "four" (hence Etruscan /huth/ which
is often seen as "six" but has been also suspected of being "four"). This
would give Early IE *kWetwe and if it weren't for that damn pesky *-n
termination, we would have had IE **kWetu-. Instead, it resulted in
*kWetwen. Due to *-n > *-r, a sound change that caused the heteroclitic
declension, it became *kWetwer. It was optionally given the plural *-ec.
Thus we had in Mid IE both *kWetwer with initial accent and *kWetwerec with
accent on second syllable. The latter won out, producing the regular IE
reflex *kwetwores.
Now, I can't help but suspect that the IE word for "eight" is just the dual
reflex of "four". But how? They don't even look the same of course... except
for some vague phonetic similarities and structure.
We might imagine that our *okto:u is in fact somehow *oktoHu. Perhaps the
initial vowel was tacked on artificially from an earlier form *ktoHu, or
maybe even *kWtoHu. In Mid IE, initial consonant clusters did not exist. Our
*kWtoHu would derive from *kWeteHeu. Now we start to see something
interesting... we see that it could legitimately be a dual form of our Early
IE *kWetwe. Thus we might better reconstruct MidIE *kWetweH-eu. The *-eu is
the dual. The accent, being penultimate, lied on the second syllable in this
case. The real root here was MidIE *kWetwex- for "eight". Now we start to
understand some things.
The reason why we find the ending *-en attached to *kWetwe in the first
place in order to produce *kWetwen in Early IE was to distinguish it clearly
in pronunciation from the dual/plural *kWetwe-x (with *-x, or rather *-H2)
which was used to convey "eight". By the end of the Mid IE period, more
superfluous suffixes were added to further distinguish the two, producing
the opposition *kWetwerec/*kWetwexu. The early part of the Late IE period
saw the contraction of some syllables by heavy stress accent, affecting
"eight" by making it *k(W)twexu. The relationship between "four" and "eight"
began to be lost to IE speakers. The initial *kt- however was resisted and a
prothetic schwa was introduced producing *kWetweres/*ek(W)twexu. Finally,
the schwa *e fractured into three vowels (*@, *e and *o), producing
*kWetwores/*oktoxu.
So there you have it:
"four" "eight"
-----------------------------------------
IndoTyr *kWetwe ?
Early IE *kWetwen *kWetwex
Mid IE (i) *kWetwen *kWetwex
Mid IE (ii) *kWetwer *kWetwex
*kWetwer-ec *kWetwex-eu
Late IE (i) *kWetwer-es *ktwex-u
Late IE (ii) *kWetwor-es *oktox-u
The root of "eight" would be *oktox- with an infused and ancient plural in
*-x (*-H2), not a dual in *-xW (*-H3). Do yous like? :)
>The Kartvelian form doesn't prove much about PIE. Anyway, if >*ok^to:
>'eight' is a dual, the singular should have been >**ok^tos 'four'. The
>assumption that the Proto-Kartvelians borrowed a >dual form with the
>meaning of the corresponding singular is odd and >had better be very
>carefully justified.
The Kartvelian form *octxwe (or *os'txw-) would demonstrate an IE Satem
dialect with *octoxu but not Miguel's dual in *H3.
>As for getting rid of *h3, I'll give you my reasons; just allow me a
> >little time.
I hope you just mean that *H2 and *H3 are related phonemes (aka *x versus
*xW)...
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