Miguel and his "several objections":
>- "twenty" is *wih1kNtih1, with twice *h1, as shown by Greek ><wikati>,
Yes, you're right. Sorry. My bad.
>- 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").
I see no *d in any attested forms. When I do, I may find it more
parsimonious to accept *d in the reconstruction. Until then, it is more
logical to accept suppletive forms for singular and plural since that's how
it appears in all the later forms in a multitude of languages. Thus, a
singular stem *dek^m- versus a plural stem *k^ont-. I do not need to
reconstruct **penkweH- because the length is caused by analogy with the
lower decads.
Since, we must logically accept the suppletiveness of the stem as
*dek^m-/*k^ont-, the only possible meaning for the apparent **de- prefix in
the singular is for that of "single" or "one". Given that *oinos must be a
later formation, it isn't beyond possibility that an unstressed form *t:e
existed in Early IE for "one". In fact, we do see a similar form /thu/ in
nearby Etruscan and one is tempted to reconstruct the corresponding stressed
form of *t:e as *t:eu (cf. *kWe/*kWei, *se/*seu, *e/*ei). By doing so, we
can explain *t:Wei "two" as an ancient plural formation on *t:eu (*t:eu
"one" + plural *-ei).
The hypothetical numeral however doesn't appear to be connected with *H1edh-
afaik unless we might divide it into *H1e [demonstrative] and **dh- (still
not the phoneme we're looking for) but then again, I don't recall ever
claiming there was a link here.
- gLeN
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