From: elmeras2000
Message: 25937
Date: 2003-09-22
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
[JER:]
> However, the whole business is a mirage: The
> >unlengthened /a/ of Sanskrit ávis is no more of a special case
than,
> >say, the unlengthened /a/ of pátis vs. Gk. pósis.
[MCV:]
> But e.g. apas- is.
That *is* a tricky one indeed. It is very hard to anything in the
order of closed syllables here (*Hop-s- or *HopH-os). If opus/ápas-
is taken at face value, then the PIE form, phonemically /H3épos/,
phonetically had a special o-like vowel in its first syllable. That
is not in itself impossible, although I thought I had found a
decisive example, which happens to speak against it:
Ved. stya:ya- (with ni- in the middle voice 'coagulate'), which I
have analyzed as *stiH3-óye- with the suffix of iteratives, based on
a root *steyH3- (perhaps better *stayH3-) seen in Gk. sô:ma (*stiH3-
) and Goth. stains. In LIV the root is put down as *styeH- with a
note that my observations rather speak for the opposite
vocalization. My analysis was meant to overcome those obstacles.
If correctly derived, sty-á:ya- from *stiH3-óye- would prove that
underlying /e/ (as here in the suffix *-eye-) does undergo
coloration all the way to full merger with /o/ of other sources.
Now, stya:ya- is also a lone example, and it takes very few
surprises for it to be wrong.
I do not know of other examples of the type of ápas-, but perhaps
others do?
Perhaps it deserves to be looked into again if we really know that
Brugmann's law also applies to /o/ before voiceless stops: are
káti 'how many', katará- 'which of two', práti 'against', páti-
'master' really *all* analogical?. Pedersen believed it applied
only before sonants. Hajnal recently made a case for full
application of the law, since that demands the least amount of
Zusatzannahmen. Maybe one should look at it in the light that one
would like to salvage both ápas- and styá:ya-.
Jens