Piotr:
>That's almost identical with my own solution (published 1998, and
>dealing with "other otherwise unsolvable oddities" as well). It may or
>may not be correct, but at least I have some company now :)
Whoops, perhaps I should do more reading and less hypothesizing :)
Except perhaps it doesn't have anything to do with the presence of
a laryngeal per se like I just alluded to.
As I said, I have a funny feeling that *mu:hs is from early Late IE
*mo:uh-s&. Yet if this is true, a change of *o:u to *u: here might
have been simply a way of dealing with an unusually long syllable
(since it would otherwise become **mo:uhs in the nominative and
of the shape CV:CC, having both a terminating consonant cluster
AND a long vowel). BTW, the length of *u: would be a reapplication
of nominative length seen elsewhere since we should still expect
**muhs from syllable reshaping alone. Thus, I would imagine:
(MIE *mauhe se)
eLIE *mouh-s&
> *mo:uh-s ("clipping": *-s& > comp.length+*-s)
> *muh-s (syll.reshap.)
> *mu:h-s (nom.length)
What I was referring to specifically in the previous post in connection
with this potential syllable rule involved verb morphology and aorist
zero-grading. I can't help but notice that the aorist of *weid- "to
see, to perceive" is reconstructed as zero-graded *wid- while that
of *dox- "to give", a natural aorist verb, is guna. Could this be related
to syllable reshaping? Afterall, in the 3ps, we should find both
*widt and *doxt. In the former root, a guna grade would have yielded
**weidt (CVCCC, similar to the above example of hypothetical CV:CC).
So, what I'd propose is a syllable reshaping rule that had affected
verb roots of a certain shape, fueling the analogical spread of a new
zero-grade aorist.
It was just a thought.
= gLeN
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