Re: [tied] alb. gji (breast)

Thanks. Well argued and fully convincing, as far as I'm concerned.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: <jer@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2003 3:11 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] alb. gji (breast)


> On Sat, 08 Feb 2003 09:03:59 +0100, Piotr Gasiorowski
> <piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
[...]
> My other candidate is <gjarpër>, which you analyse rather
satisfactorily in PIE terms (but I wonder if you can acount for
<shtërpinj> equally well). [...]

Thanks for the pleasant reaction. I left out shtërpínj because I
could not get it right. I do not normally observe inherited suffixes
to take the accent from the root syllable in Albanian, so I chose to
sidestep the issue. But now I would like to suggest that *that* is a
loanword, based on the Lat. adjective serpenti:nus 'pertaining to
snakes, snakelike'. It would be *very* strange if Alb. and Lat.
should just happen to have the same relatively odd derivative from
the 'snake' word by inheritance. I would therefore rather
like /s^trpín-/ to represent serpentí:n- with retained accent
position and, I believe as a novel suggestion, metathesis of the /t/
much as in hospítium > shtëpí 'house'. The development of /nj/ in
shtërpínj would be as in mullí, pl. mullínj 'mill(s)' from Latin
moli:num, pl. moli:nae and a few others of that kind. Whatever the
exact avenue was here, what applies to one must be true of the other
as well. The first -n- of serpenti:nV- may have been lost by
dissimilation (in which the presence of the -r- would also be a
factor), and gjërpínj would still be a hybrid form as generally
assumed.