Jens to Miguel:
>You may have your reasons to posit your original system, but the reasons
>appear to be alien to Indo-European. Am I right?
If Miguel admits, as he has, that the Hittite, Avestan or Armenian forms are
supposed to derive directly from Pre-IE forms (???), and to insist on this
ad
absurdum, then there is no salvaging his sanity and I have to conclude that
further debate on this is a complete waste of time for both Miguel and I.
There can be no value to a debate if every rule of IE is contorted to suit
the whims of one person's imagination.
I think Jens and I are in accord about Hittite. A loss of initial vowel
sounds
reasonable too. There are far more immediate possibilities involving a
simple derivation from *usme- than rewriting IE phonology.
The "evidence" that Miguel presents is not terribly distressing to IE as
far as I see. Since *usme- is already reconstructed, Avestan /x^sma/
doesn't look deviant enough from the expected reflex to warrant an
entirely new phoneme **sW in IE to account for it. The only thing I
personally don't know the history behind is the Greek /spH-/ pronouns
and Celtic *swi:, however since we know that *s(w)- becomes /h/
and since Greek /s/ often reflects a softened *t (as in /sou/), I'd still
bet my money for a simpler explanation involving already existent
reconstructions here. I still haven't heard why Celtic *swi:- can't be
based a plural of *swe "self". Jens has already responded to Albanian.
So it seems that everything on Mig's end appears all that more dubious
(as if the odd IE reconstructions didn't give the first clue).
= gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/bcomm&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.msn.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket%3den-ca