Re: [tied] Re: Hittite preterites

I'm slowly getting as allergic to Occam (or is it Ockham?) as I am to
Caland. The questions seems to me to be of the same kind as if you would
ask why there is a root structure *bheydh- and not *bhedhy- turned into
disyllabic *bhedhi-. I wouldn't know how to answer that. Apparently there
isn't. However, I wonder if cases of an apparently meaningless suffix
*-wo- and nasal presents in apparently suffixed *-new-/*-nu- could reflect
roots that were actually longer but lost some material in so many forms
that they were registered in too short a form.

Jens

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Sergejus Tarasovas wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen [mailto:jer@...]
> > Sent: Friday, April 25, 2003 12:36 AM
> > To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> > Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Hittite preterites
> >
> > I don't think any of us knows how much coarticulation there
> > was in PIE phonetics. Without thinking too much about that
> > point, I have myself on an earlier occasion reached the
> > clarification that a sequence -VHyCV- was regularly
> > metathesized to -VyHCV-. The basic reason is the working of
> > Hirt's Law retracting the accent in such sequences. Hirt's
> > law is then always triggered by a syllable-final asyllabic
> > laryngeal, and it only retracts the ictus from the
> > immediately following syllable. I therefore simply accepted
> > the vocalism as /a/, not by coloration, but underlyingly.
>
> Regular metathesis points to some phonotactic constraint (like *erC in
> Proto-Slavic and -SK-C > -KS-C- in Lithuanian). Having assumed for a
> moment that laryngeals are less sonorous than (proper) glides (though
> it's definitely not always the case, since in the environment where
> there's a free choice it's the laryngeal and not the glide which is
> sometimes syllabified) one could formulate such a constraint in terms of
> raising (onset-nucleus) - falling (nucleus-coda) sonority contour of a
> syllable. In that case, the problem is why the language has preferred to
> medicate the unacceptable [-VHj.CV-] with a little help of metathesis
> rather than simply syllabifyng the glide ([-V.Hi.CV-])? Because Ockham
> forbids to multiply syllables sine necessitate et sine ratione?
>
> Sergei
>
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