Miguel:
>Yes. I thought about tt -> tst, but there is no way of telling
>how old this phenomenon is in relation to the possible borrowing
>of "6" from Semitic.
Actually, there is a way. The Semitic borrowings must necessarily
have been introduced into IE during the neolithic. So, we know
the general range to be between 6000 and 4000 BCE for *sweks and
other such loanwords. In fact, 6000 BCE is probably more precise,
if I do say, but you can reach your own conclusions. It must
surely have been well enough before 4000 BCE, if this is to be the
approximate date of the fracture of IE.
However, the affricatization of *tC to [tsC] and *dC- to [dzC]
would seem to date to a time after which the voiceless "fortis"
*t: became voiced *d. I doubt that *dC- would develop as readily
if *d were still a voiceless inaspirate. (By the way, the
topological considerations such as a lack of **b that are used
to prove that IE *d was in fact *t? by the Glottalic IE
camp show that, at the very least, *d must have once been
unvoiced in Pre-IE.)
So, we can pinpoint this to the early Late IE period (approx. 5000
to 4500 BCE). This would be a reasonable date as well because of
the fact that this phenomenon appears to have existed in an
as-yet-unfractured IE and yet it cannot be terribly early since
it doesn't appear there was enough time for the affricate to
become a distinct phoneme yet.
In a nutshell, I really doubt that there was a dental affricate
in IE at the time when *sweks was borrowed. The dental affricate
*c that would explain the t/s alternation would also have already
eroded to *-s and *-t- by then. Afterall, by lacking a dental
affricate, we can see why *ks would be used to pronounce the
correlating Semitic phonemes of that word.
Miguel:
>But Toch. tkam. and possibly Hitt. tekan show that this *ts was
>definitely post-PIE.
Doesn't Hittite /tekan/ come from an inanimate *dHegH(o)m? Why
can't Tocharian /tk-/ come from an affricatized *dHgH-?
- gLeN
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