Re: [tied] How many laryngeals?

----- Original Message -----

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2000 2:01 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] How many laryngeals?

>>at any rate, neither the postulated instances of *h1 > Hittite h

>Is that referring to such forms as mehur, sehur?

 

Yes. I'd analyse them differently. For example, the insistence that mehur must be derived from *meh1- 'measure' is oddly modern (we think of time in terms of minutes and hours). Why not *meih2-wr/n- from the root *meih2- 'pass, go by' (as in Latin meo: or Slavic mijati, mimo 'past, by')?

>I find Rasmussen's analysis of Hitt. utne "land, country" <
*h3ud(r/n)- ~ Grk. ou~das (*h3ud-) "ground, floor" ~ Arm. getin
"ground" (*h3wed-) rather convincing.  Maybe *h3u- was lost early in
Hittite.

 

But in *h2u-/*h2w- *h2 wasn't lost, which is a bit strange if the two sounds were similar. Rasmussen's etymology would still hold if you replaced *h3 with *h1 and assumed an o-grade initial syllable (*h1oud-) in Greek and possibly in Hittite. The Armenian form may be related (*h1wed-?) but certainly doesn't match the Greek one directly.

>[On h1 = /h/: I have trouble seeing all forms with Brugmannian initial
*e- as originally [he-] instead of at least sometimes [?e-] (with
"automatic" glottal stop).  However, they all seem to give *@- in the
zero grade (e.g. Hitt. as-, ap-, ad- for the verbs "to be", "to take",
"to eat"), so I can't resist splitting up *h1 into original /h/ and
/?/ (or at least [?]).]

 

Very likely, though hard to demonstrate. After all, the argument that every initial *e- must be *h1e- rests on a number of rather abstract premises. Pace Benveniste and others, I personally see no reason why IE words shouldn't sometimes begin with vowels (or with a non-phonemic glottal catch).

 

>>... the "triple representation" has since been reanalysed e.g. by Lindemann (1982) and the view that it is a Greek innovation has gained much support.

> But an innovation based on what?  Greek quite consistently shows /e/
from *h1, /a/ from *h2 and /o/ from *h3 even in cases where there are
no full grade forms /e:/, /a:/ or /o:/ to relate the zero grade to.
Of course there are problems (is "name" *h3nom- or *h1nom- based on
Grk. onoma/enuma? etc.), but I wouldn't take the backwards step of
considering triple schwa a Greek innovation.

 

Consistently? That's what Beekes set out to prove, with moderate success. The argument is circular in most cases, since there is no independent test for *h1, *h2 or *h3 if the full grade isn't attested. Morphologically motivated forms like thetos, statos, dotos are analogically remodelled to match the full grade (as Kurylowicz observed, where the derivation is less transparent, the "shwas" tend to be levelled out to "a"). Greek dialects show all kinds of variation like stro:tos ~ stra:tos and colouring by "vowel harmony" as in your example or in odous with *h1- > o-. The correlation between prothetic e- and reconstructable *h1- is possibly significant (though it's just my impressionistic judgement), but Greek o- certainly doesn't match independently reconstructable *h3- in a consistent manner. Stepping back is the right thing to do if one can't make progress.

>The origin of the Hitt. hi-conjugation is a whole other can of worms,
but surely there are many hi-verbs with e-vocalism throughout, or with
the most common hi-conjugation ablaut, i.e. -a- in the sg. and -e- in
the plural.  For the root *mel-, I gave my explanation here recently
(*mwel- > *mel- or *mol-, zero grade *mul- as in Greek etc.).

 

Of course, I couldn't cover too much detail in my posting. There is a whole series of interesting articles by Jasanoff, which more or less cover the topic of o-presents (with o/e or o/nil ablaut) and Hittite hi-conjugation. Your hypothesis about *mel- works for this particular root, but it's ad hoc character comes to light if one considers similarly behaving roots beginning with velars, like *k^onk- (Hittite ka:nki, Germanic *xanxiT), where you can't posit a labialised onset to explain the colour of the vowel.

 

Piotr