On Sat, 24 Mar 2001 23:36:37 , "Glen Gordon"
<
glengordon01@...> wrote:
>I'm still holding fast to my idea that *dekm was a defective stem, with
>*kont- (senza il *d-) being the plural form. I would suggest something like
>*wix-kntix for "twenty" and *kntom for "100" (not the unproven *dkmtom).
>The word *dekm would simply be a fossil of an older compound literally meaning
>"one ten".
Several objections:
- "twenty" is *wih1kNtih1, with twice *h1, as shown by Greek <wikati>,
<eikosi>. *h2 (= *x?) would have given something like +<eiakosia>.
- What would *wi:-/*wiH- mean? The meaning "two" is carried by a form
*wi-, as in Lat. di:vido, vidua, with short /i/.
- You would also need *triH, *penkweH, etc. to explain the long vowel
in the other decades. It's more parsimonious to conclude that the
lengthening (as if by *h1), and occasional voicing, was caused by the
following morpheme *-h1koNta ~ *-dkoNta.
- *d- "one" has as little going for it as *de- "two" (less, in fact:
*de matches *d in *duo:, while *d does not match *dh in Slavic *h1edh-
[no Winter's lengthening in <jeden>, <odin>], Armenian <ez> "one,
only").
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...