18-10-03 08:49, alex wrote:
> Question for Slavic:
> If Slavic form for Russian "zijat" is "z^ansera"(*gensera)
It isn't. Why should it be anything so strange? Slavic *zijati 'pant,
gape', *ze^vati- 'yawn', etc. come from Pokorny's *g^He:(i)- (I'd
rewrite it as *g^Heih1-, but I warn you that it's my personal
preference), related to Lat, hio:, hia:tus (*g^Hih1-ah2-).
> then how does
> one has an Slavic *go~sI" for "goose"?Is this not in fact a loan from
> Germanic with Slavic change of /a/>/o/ (gans > go~Si) ?
Short *a and *o merged in Balto-Slavic. *go~sI is either inherited
*g^Hans- which failed to undergo the Satem shift because of its
onomatopoeic value (we represent the voice of geese as /ge~ ge~/ in
Polish), or a loan from some non-Satem language, possibly Germanic (it
may have been a case of phonetic modification caused by foreign
influence). It's hard to choose between the two hypotheses. Baltic
*z^ansi- shows that Slavic /g/ is indeed irregular, anyway.
Piotr