Re: [tied] The phonetic value of PIE *h3 and the 'drink' root.

Dear Jens, Sergei and all,

I have just come back home after a week's absence to find something like a hundred unread messages in my mailbox. I'll do my best to catch up with at least some of the threads. This one is of particular interest to me, since I happen to have a personal theory about Schulze's "natural long diphthongs". I propose to reconstruct the PIE underlier of the "-o:-/-i:-" ablaut as *-eiH-, where *H = *h2 or *h3, and posit the following phonetic developments:

*-eiH-C > *-i:-C

*-oiH-C > *-o:-C

*-oiH-V > *-oj-V

*-eiH-V > *-ej-V

*-iH-C > *-i:-C

*-iH-V > *-i-V

For particulars see my article in IF 103 [1998], where I suggest a number of other examples of pre-laryngeally smoothed diphthongs. The reduplicated present stem *pib-e- would have come from *pí-piH-e-, with the high vowel lost in the reduced form of the "enclitic" root after a reduplication syllable (> *pi-pH-e-). I have so far been agnostic as to whether the phonation change was conditioned by the laryngeal, but I must say that the voicing effect of the Hoffmann suffix is a very attractive piece of supportive evidence. At any rate, under my analysis the thematic aorist *pi-é- comes from *piH-é- (presumably *pih3-e-), in which the voicing (if caused by *h3) naturally cannot apply. The unattestation of *peiH- is explicable if 'drink' was a root with persistent *o vocalism in its strong forms (like, say, *molh2-, cf. Gk. bló:sko:, émolon), not due to colouring by *h3. Hence also derivatives like Lat. po:culum < *poih3-tlom, Gk. po:ma < *poih3-mn, etc.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, July 08, 2002 1:18 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] The phonetic value of PIE *h3 and the 'drink' root.

Dear Sergei and List, let me comment on your stimulating mail: On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, sergejus_tarasovas wrote: > > [...] I would only like to note that the > analogical levelling proposed for Slavic seems a bit tricky to me, > especially considering deverbals like *pivo 'drink', *pijanU 'drunk' > and *pivIca 'drunkard', which don't look like recent formations. Then what *do* they look like? And if they are very old, how can we know they have not been refashioned on the way? To me they look like indications that there was a nucleus of truth to Martinet's notion of a change H3 > w under unknown conditions in PIE. Of course, we'd need to know what that nucleus was. > > Baltic (especially Old Prussian) indeed shows a strong support for > the *po:-, whatever be it's origin (though the accent is not very > clear): > > OPruss. inf. (<sup.) _p(o)u:ton_, inf. _poutwei_, _pou:t_ 'to drink', > 2pl imp. _poieiti_, _pogeitty_, _puieyti_, _puietti_ (lege *puieyti), > 2sg imp. _pogeis_. > On this base Maz^iulis reconstructs sup. *po:tun, inf. *po:t(wei) > (that's easy!) and 2pl imp. *po:jaiti, 2sg. imp. *po:jais resp. pres. > *po:ja- (he considers the imperative forms to be barytones, hence > unstressed *o: > unstressed *u: > (open) *u). You mean "non-barytones", as M. writes. That is contrary to Hirt's Law, but still may be correct, if analogical, reflecting as it does a productive stem-formation of younger reshaping. > OPruss. _poadamynan_ 'süsse Milch', if from *po:dam-in-a- 'drinkable' > (with dialectal merger of *o: and *a: like in _da:t_ 'to give'), > would point to an alternative West Baltic pres. *po:da-, probably > from *po:- + *-da-, cf. Lith. _vérda_ 'is boiling'. > > It's quite possible, that Lith. _puota`_ (acc. _puo~ta,_) 'feast' > also belongs here, if from deverb. adj. *po:ta: 'what is drunk' (with > acute->circumflex metatony, sometimes accompanying derivation adj. -> > subst.). Exactly! That's what nouns derived from adjectives by change of accent placing get if they are formed in so late a period that there were no more acutes to be handed out. It's all in the timing - that's why it hit the Slavic loanwords also (kny~gaN and all that). > As to the phonetic status of *h3, I'm still not sure that this _only_ > example envolving *peh3i- is enough to state it was voiced. It's not based on this alone anymore. Most scholars however accept only this item, or at most Hamp's brilliant analyis of Celtic *abon- 'river' along with it, this being *H2ap-H3Vn- with the "Hoffmann suffix" of belonging (actually a compositional part forming mass nouns, including mass possession when they are bahuvrihis). By the change *-pH3- > -b- the Celtic loss of *-p- (Skt. gen. ap-ás, nom.pl. á:p-as) is prevented. Birgit Olsen has found a rather substantial number of examples of derivatives with this suffix which, when added to stems in -t- (or perhaps better, in -s-/-t-), or to stems in -k- (in part from hardened laryngeals), turn these into derivatives in *-don- and *-gon- respectively; thus Latin de-adjectival abstracts in -tu:s, -tu:t-is have synonyms in -tu:do:, -tu:dinis; and vora:x, -a:cis forms vora:go:, -a:ginis. Particulars are on their way in the press, you'll have to wait a litttle while. The new examples (some of which were in fact presented in the Pedersen memorial volume of 1994) have extracted píbati and afon from their isolation. Jens