Re: [tied] Re: Dating PIE

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001 17:41:59 -0300, "João S. Lopes Filho"
<jodan99@...> wrote:

>Greek is HIPPOS is a paradoxal word. Such usual word *ek^wos must have been
>*ep(p)os, or *ekkos in Greek, without anomalies. I think some anthroponyms
>in Epi- were corrupted forms of a prefix *Epo- "horse". Hippos points to a
>intermediary *hik^wos (< *sik^wos?, *yik^wos?). A form *yik^wos would be
>similar to Tocharian yäkwe. Perhaps a Tocharian-like language was spoken in
>Greece before the Greeks. It's stated that Tocharian was akin to
>Italo-Celtic, may we assume that a Tocharo-Italo-Celtic stock have branches
>in Greece?

Not very likely. A development e- > ye-/yi- is not exceptional (it's
common in e.g. Slavic and Romance). *ek^wos is not attested, I think,
in Albanian, but should have given *yes (through something like
*yetswV). I have no reason to assume the development /e/ > /ye/ in
Albanian dates to the first millennium BC, but no reason to assume
that it didn't either. In any case, the development is common enough
for it to have happened in any of the poorly attested IE languages
neighbouring Greece, or in one of the misty IE substrate languages in
Greece itself. No real need for Tocharian.