Miguel:
>Assuming for a moment that *swek^s was also in Anatolian, yes:
>the word must have been borrowed before the breakup of IE. That's the
>terminus ante quem, which I would also place in the
>4/5,000 BCE area.
Oh delightful! We agree :)
>The terminus post quem is more difficult to assess. Do only
>Neolithic peples have use for a word for "six"? I have no hard
>evidence for that.
Why wouldn't they? I'm pretty sure that mesolithic people could
have terms for "six" and even required it in their daily life
where trade is concerned, of which we know there was plenty.
It's kinda hard to trade without a "six" at your disposal and
you don't have to be neolithic to trade.
Secondly, it appears that "seven" was also borrowed into pre-IE
and I'm convinced that it was borrowed partly because of an
existing religious symbolism. I'm convinced that the average
pre-IE mesolithic speaker still used numerals up to at least 10.
Concerning the allophonic affricate *[ts]:
>On the other hand, subphonemic allophones can remain stable for
>thousands of years.
With a word like *dHgHo:m, the affricate allophone could only
have formed once the cluster *dHgH- had formed. I've already
dated the loss of unaccented schwa to the point of transition
between Mid IE and Late IE (5000 BCE). This is the event that
caused the clusters in the first place. Wouldn't this be
your "terminus ante quem"?
Me:
>Doesn't Hittite /tekan/ come from an inanimate *dHegH(o)m?
Miguel:
>The plene spelling te-e-kan suggests that the source is indeed
>*dh�g^hom, but *dhg^h�m (like elsewhere in IE) cannot be fully
>excluded (which is why I said "possibly").
If *dHegHom- is more likely, we should side with that until
there is more compelling evidence to support *dhgHom- as the
origin.
Me:
>Why can't Tocharian /tk-/ come from an affricatized *dHgH-?
Miguel:
>Tocharian A has tkam. < *dhg^h�:m and cka:car < *dhugh&2t�:r,
Problem: *dHgHom- and *dHugHxter- are different in that the
former contains an initial consonant cluster and the latter does
not. You neglected to plug that fact into your Occam's Razor
machine.
There must be something that shows what the affricate would
have become in Tocharian. You mean to say that there is no
attestation whatsoever of *sedtos, *edti, *tkei- and the like
in Tocharian?
- gLeN
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