--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 1:35 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Scythians, Zoroastrians, etc.
>
>
> >> [PG:] The Greeks may have hesitated occasionally over the choice
of zeta or sigma to represent foreign /z/, but there's no real
evidence of s-voicing in Thracian.
>
> > [TP:] Unreal, then?
>
> >> [PG:] Sure cases of etymological *s and *k^ (e.g. hydronyms like
Serme:/Sermius < *ser-mo- 'current, flow') contain <s> in Greek and
Latin orthography.
>
> > [TP:] In other words the Greeks reserved their hesitation
between /s/
> and /z/ to words of uncertain etymology?
>
> No, they hesitated between the _letters_ zeta (which originally
stood for [zd] rather than [z]) and sigma to represent the _sound_ of
[z] (or a similar voiced coronal fricative) in some environments,
also in Greek words (<pelasgikon ~ pelazgikon>, <smurna> ~ <zmurna>).
It was only in late Byzantine Greek that the normal phonetic value of
zeta became [z]. Hence the variation in words like <esb- ~ ezb->,
perhaps also in other positions, e.g. in <semele:> for *zemela: and
in <re:sos> for *re:z-, if their identification as 'Earth'
(personified) and 'king' is correct. But this doesn't work the other
way round. Thracian [s] was consistently rendered as sigma, not as
zeta.
>
> Piotr
Detschew has occurences of <Salmoxis> also. I can't get that to fit
into either *zd-, *dz- or *z-. The original argument was whether
Thracian might have *s- > *z- which you denied. The arguments you
present now try to show that the Greek rendition with /z/ can be
explained from Greek itself. True, but that does not disprove that
Thracian might have had *s- -> *z-. And in spite of the all the
jollity over shaved beavers (I should have anticipated that) I still
think there is a suspicious numbers of "hat" words in the area
(tarabostei, pileati, mithra, Zalmoxis, hjalmberi).
Torsten