23-06-03 01:58, Richard Wordingham wrote:
> I gather that 'ablaut now holds few
> secrets'. How do the various words
> for elbow, forearm, e.g. English
> 'ell', Latin 'ulna', Greek
> 'o:lene:', 'o:le:r' and 'o:llon' all
> relate? I've seen the
> Proto-Germanic form cited as
> *alina:; is this an alternative
> notation for *alino:?
Yes, its OED-ese for *alino:. Lat. ulna < *olVna: (with syncope, hence
no assimilation of -ln- > -ll-), whereas Celtic forms (Ir. uileann, Wel.
elin, etc.) point to *oli:na:, I think. So, in that group of languages,
only the suffix shows ablaut. Goth. aleina 'cubit' is treated as a
scribal mistake (for expected *alina) by the OED, but it could be
anything else, from a Gaulish loan to a remodelled variant of the
inherited form. I think the most parsimonious analysis for all of the
above is *ole:n-/*olen- with feminine *-a: added to an originally nasal
stem.
Baltic and Slavic have short-vowelled *alk-/*elk- (the latter perhaps
secondary) plus various suffixes (e.g. PSl. *olkUtI) in their 'elbow'
words, but Baltic also shows a puzzling long-vowel set, cf. Latv.
elkonis 'elbow' but olekts 'ell', Lith. uolekti`s (< *o:lek-t-). If, as
usually assumed, they are related to <ulna> & co., the *-k-
(diminutive?) must have replaced the original stem formant already in
Proto-Balto-Slavic, but don't ask me how and why it happened. I doubt
very much if it makes sense to assign Indo-Iranian *aratn- (no
Brugmannian length in the fist syllable, which means *e rather than *o)
to the same etymon, pace Pokorny.
Greek shows a long vowel consistently in <o:le:n>, <o:lene:> and
<o:llon> (< *o:ln-o-), forms that otherwise look parallel to the Italic,
Celtic and Germanic ones. The whole thing is difficult to analyse,
though not unprecedented. It resembles the variation we find in Gmc.
naman- vs. Lat. no:men, Gk. ono:ma. Perhaps there was an original
paradigm with an underlying long vowel, e.g. nom.sg. *h3ó:ln., oblique
*h3olén-, secondary forms *h3olé:n ~ *h3o:lé:n (oblique *h3o(:)l-en-).
Jens, Miguel, Glen or anyone whose opinions about pre-PIE are more
confident than mine will perhaps see one of their patterns here.