(no subject)

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 4893
Date: 2000-11-28

Back to the *h3 business.
 
(a) I don't think it's correct to derive the attested perfects of *HeC- stems (in any branch) from the formally expected reduplications *He-HoC- or *He-HC-. Perfects with a lengthened vowel must have developed very early, since the hypothetical alternation *HeHoC- : *HeHC- would have produced extremely untransparent vowel patterns after the loss of the laryngeals. The pivot of the shift was the perfect of *h1eC-, where *h1eh1C- (and perhaps *h1e-h1od- as well) ended up as *e:C- (possibly well before the loss of *h2) producing present : perfect alternations like *ed-mi : *e:d-h2a and providing a model for later vowel-initial stems.
 
Latin o:di may be a perfect of this type, from the root *od-, with morphological lengthening rather than reduplication. But apart from e:di, e:mi, etc., quite a few Latin stems with an initial consonant also occur with a lengthened vowel (fodio : fo:di; lego : le:gi; scabo : sca:bi), and whatever their origin, neither the length nor the colour of the root vowel is of laryngeal origin. Why shouldn't o:di be classed together with fo:di in a "single pattern for verb formation"? The Oscan form is sigmatic, and that's another circumstance that makes one expect vowel lengthening rather than reduplication (as in Latin ve:xi, Slavic aorist *vesU < *we:g^H-s-).
 
(b) "Attic" reduplication. The idea that these forms could be explained with the help of the laryngeal theory was first proposed by Kurylowicz, but there were so many problems with it, that Kurylowicz eventually abandoned his own proposal. First of all, the normal IE reduplication pattern is *h1e-h1l(o)udH- rather than *h1le-h1l(o)udh-, and definitely not *h1de-h1d- for *h1ed- or *h2ke-h2kou- for *h2kou- (Greek ake:koua : akouo:). Other languages support *e:d- as the perfect of *ed- (see above), and Greek ede:da apparently represents an attempt to restore transparent reduplication in the perfect. Similarly, ele:lutha represents "refreshed" *e:l(o)udH-.
 
The productiveness of this formation is evident from its application no matter if the initial vowel is inherited (*h1ed-), prothetic (*h1leudH-) or secondary (as in egre:gora from egeiro:). Since Attic reduplication is a secondary phenomenon which arose in all likelihood after the vocalisation of initial laryngeals in Greek, it doesn't provide any independent evidence for the "colour" of those laryngeals; the vowel it shows is predictably the same as in the base form.
 
Piotr
 
P.S. I've got nothing personal against *h3; I'm only playing the devil's advocate in order to show that the evidence for that particular laryngeal is far less substantial than for *h2 or even for *h1.
 
P.
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: petegray
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2000 8:27 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] How many laryngeals?

(a) Latin o:di < ?h3e-h3d-ai.    This is difficult to explain as h2o-h2d-ai.
If we do not allow o< eh3, and insist on o< oh2, then we have a different
pattern here.   It would be a unique example of early reduplication with an
o vowel (later ones such as momordi are merely vowel harmony within the
perfect, where the perfect vocalism depends on the present).    And it's no
use running to o-grade perfects.   There are none in Latin with
reduplication.   There is also the parallel example of Oscan uupsens =
/o:psens/ < h3e-h3p- (meaning they did, Latin fe:ce:runt; stem found in
Latin opus).
      o < eh3 allows us to keep a single pattern for verb formation, while
o< oh2 makes us postulate different patterns for these two verbs.

(b) Greek "Attic reduplication" (which is not limited to Attic at all).  I
mean perfects of this pattern:
   opo:pa, odo:da, olo:la, omo:moka  etc.
If we do not allow o< eh3, and insist on o< oh2, then we have a different
pattern in these verbs from those in -a- and -e-, such as:
   aka:koa  (Attic ake:koa), ele:laka, ele:luTa,   and so on.
o < eh3 allows us to keep a single pattern for verb formation, whil o< oh2
makes us postulate different patterns for different verbs.