I think I said "Early IE *wekW" in my previous post. That should be
IndoTyrrhenian since the monosyllabic lengthening occurs in that stage, not
within Early IE itself. Sorry.
I've been thinking again and boy was I athinkin'! I'm sleepy right now and
so I can't go into detail tonight but I suspect that *-u as dual/collective
suffix and as locative doesn't go beyond Late IE and can thus be dated to
5000 BCE or later. There are other things too that are kinda related to it
like the ablative & the genitive plural, locative *-i, the origin of the 1ps
thematic ending & Hittite /uk/, plus more stuff on IE numerals and
analogically derived Late IE duals... it's a tangled mess really.
I'll speak more later. Point is, *genu and *peku should not be ancient
words. This means, for one thing, that Bomhard's attempts to derive *g�nu to
NWC (He notes Circassian *k?an@ "knucklebone") would be conclusively wrong.
Rather it would simply be a Late IE noun derived from *gen-.
Oh, and *x�ui "bird" is probably an ancient root whose origins might be
dated to 7000 BCE or later while *xo:uiom "egg" is purely Late IE and
underivable from a MidIE form, just like *g�nu. And then there is Piotr's
play on the word *o:es "mouth"... So, does this mean that there is an
onomatopoetic verb *o:- meaning something like "to vocalize; to voice out"
lingering about, I wonder...
Anyways, more later about *-u :)
- gLeN
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