Miguel:
>PIE had h1 (h?), h2 (x?) and h3 (G/xW?), so an inventory more or less like
>that of Dutch. Yet in Dutch, `Arafat is pronounced as Arafat, not Harafat,
>Garafat or Charafat.
Yes, but is it genuinely because the Dutch obtained the name directly from
an Arabic source... or via English, our global lingua franca? We also say
"ayin"
not *hayin, but no doubt only because a lack of aspirate seems to mimic
the voiced sound better than "h" can. Yet English seems to equate voiceless
[x] more with [h], as words like "Hanukkah" would seem to suggest.
You're just fighting against the odds. How on earth is treating an OBSERVED
lack of the syllable *-`a- in IE *septm as indicative of an unstressed
syllable
in the donor language less favourable over ASSUMING that Semitic had a
second-syllable accent here and ASSUMING that IE lost a vowel that isn't
even seen nor is necessary to posit??
>>Yet another obvious factor is that IE evidently shows no vowel
>>between *p and *t, let alone accent. To propose Pre-IE *-pVt- is
>>baseless (not based on any adequate and well proven Pre-IE rule)
>
>Zero grade?
No, no, Miguel. I know what you're saying. I understand the premise of
your idea. We're supposed to ASSUME that *-pVt- was reduced to *-pt-
in Late IE. However, it's not that you don't have a Pre-IE rule behind it,
but rather that you don't have any ADEQUATE and WELL PROVEN
Pre-IE rule, at least in the context of *septm. You don't explain why
this MUST be so over the simpler theory that I propose. I will not just
assume that there was some vowel between *-pVt- because there is
nothing to show this. The vowel just simply isn't observed. This is just
idle assumption.
Assumption for the sake of assumption is bad, obviously. It's more
parsimonious to theorize that there was no vowel to begin with, as we
in fact see. That way, we don't need extra theories to explain why
the completely hypothetical vowel went messing. Excuses, excuses.
>Sure, the accent was initial in pre-PIE.
No it wasn't. Accent alternation in paradigms must precede accent
regularization. The alternation in *?esti/?senti for example is not
immediately intuitive. So it was inherited, which isn't surprising for such
a common verb that tends to retain archaisms in all other world
languages anyway. So your theory is on the wrong track entirely,
ignoring how world languages work and ignoring the evidence at hand.
As such then, since Mid IE accent could not have been fixed on the
initial and since the mobile alternation already mentioned can be explained
away by a regular penultimate accent pattern, the accent must have
been on the first syllable in *septm in the past because it is observed
to be two syllables, not three... and again, the shape of the word agrees
with this, showing a first syllable that's full and a weakened second
syllable.
>That doesn't say anything about the donor language. The accent
>is usually the first thing to go when a word gets borrowed into another
>language. Ask Piotr.
Maybe accent is "the first thing to go", but it can so say something
about the donor language's accent even still. Again, a weakly stressed
syllable may not be heard by the recipient. Any lack of syllable from
the donor would hint at the original accent. In re of the final
outcome of *septm and all that I know of the previous stages
leading up to Reconstructed IE, an accent on the initial is the most
likely for Semitic. Not necessarily so, but it _is_ the most likely theory
from a Pre-IE perspective and Semitic _can_ sport an initial accent, it
seems. So everything works most efficiently.
= gLeN
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