>ProtoAfroAsiatic *rat[h]-/*r&t[h]- "to turn, to roll; to run"
>[...]
>No underdotted t's, underscored ones in Dahalo.
Ah, that's it, yes. I stand corrected. This is what I remember seeing
and I have to admit that I'm intrigued by the possibly of it being
a pre-IE loan.
The corresponding, expected Mid IE form can be transparently
derived from the reconstructed later form *rotx- via the rules that
I've proposed for a while now.
We have *o which must derive from earlier *a (Late IE Vowel Shift),
but this *a then indicates that the first syllable must also have been
accented (Mid IE Vocalic Constraint) since *a can only occur in an
accented syllable. Since the first syllable is accented, there can be only
_one_ syllable following it (Mid IE Penultimate Accent). Thus the Mid
IE form must be *ratxe, the only possible form that could yield *rotx-,
btw.
From this, we may extrapolate that the expected Semitic form based
both on the derived Mid IE form and the evidence above (especially
Arabic rata`a) should probably be from a triliteral verb [rt'] "to walk,
to go off(?)". If I understand correctly about Semitic grammar, a
stative noun could be created from this. It would yield *rat'u-, an
ideal match semantically and phonetically for Mid IE *ratxe > *rotx-.
= gLeN
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