Re: [tied] AfroAsiatic "four"

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001 08:03:17 , "Glen Gordon"
<glengordon01@...> wrote:

>
>Miguel:
>>A sorted list of the Chadic words for "4" (taken off Mark
>>Rosenfelder's site) is:
>>
>>with f-:
>>[...]
>>with h-:
>>[...]
>>with p-, b`-:
>>[...]
>>with w-, v-, u-, etc:
>>[...]
>>others:
>>ga:de, waga:de, ga:de, ka:di, twsít
>
>How do you explain the "others"?

Unrelated forms (that also includes, unless I'm mistaken, the
"woopsies" under /w-/).

>>In Egyptian, /f/ usually comes from PAA */p./ (ejective labial).
>>E.g.: <`ff> "fly" :: Sem. *<d_bb> "fly"; <sfxw> "7" :: Sem. <sb3=t>
>>"7". Occasionally, <f> can reflect (labialized) */h/ or */s^/.
>
>So we CAN get an Egyptian /f/ from *h...

Except I haven't seen any examples of it. Only Kammerzell mentions
this in passing (Loprieno and Schenkel only mention the standard
development *p. > f, and the development -s'u > -f). There are in
fact, according to loprieno, Schenkel and Kammerzell, no Egyptian
/h/'s which can be given a convincing AA etymology.

>So you're saying that the word for
>seven in AA was with a */p./... like *sap.x-?!

Yes (*sap.Ga-?). At least that's the form Semitic and Egyptian go
back to (Berber *sa, like all Berber numbers 5-9, is probably a
borrowing from Semitic [Punic?], with Berber development *b > zero).
It's difficult to extract any kind of protoform from the Omotic,
Cushitic and Chadic data.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...