Re: [tied] Re: to buy

----- Original Message -----
From: "alex_lycos" <altamix@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2003 9:00 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: to buy



> 1)does polish "sko~pU" means "expensive"?

The Polish word is <ska,py>; *sko~pU is Proto-Slavic. As I said, it means 'meagre, scant' when used of things, but it's easy to see how the South Slavic meaning may have developed. If there's a shortage of a commodity, its price goes up.

> 2)why should change Rom. then an "np" > "mp"?

There never was a Slavic [-np-] in this word. Proto-Slavic had a nasal vowel here. This historical nasal vowel is realised as [om] before a labial stop in Polish, and any language without nasal vowels would almost certainly replace *o~ with a vowel plus a nasal homorganic with the following stop in loans from Slavic. Romanian regularly did so too (*o~C --> uNC ~ âNC, where N has the same place of articulation as the following stop).

Piotr