Hi all,
This is my first posting to this list, so I
thought I should introduce myself. My name is Daniel Baum. Some of you may
know me from the Indo-Iranian list. I am a doctoral student at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem and the University of Leiden (under joint supervision)
and I teach Rigvedic and some other stuff at the HU. I taught the Introduction
to Indo-European last year. The subject of my doctoral dissertation is "The
Imperative in the Rigveda".
Anyway, my question is:
We have Latin super, Greek hyper, Sanskrit upari
and Gothic ufar. On the face of it the first two are identical, as are
the second two. However, the "spiritus asper" is obligatory in Attic Greek on
all words beginning with /u/, so there is no way of telling whether the
Greek form originally had an /s/ or not.
Does anyone have an opinion on the matter? Do other
Greek dialects shine any light on the problem, bearing in mind that some of them
have lost the "spritus asper" altogether?
As I am new here, I hope this has not already come
up (I searched the list archive), and that I am not diverting this apparently
very long and varied thread too far from its topic.
Daniel Baum
>> I'm not sure where <sipër> comes from, but since
it fails to match
>> *super- on two counts I suspect that the
similarity between the two
> is
>> accidental.
>
>
Which two counts?
1) PIE *s : Alb. s is the first mismatch, because
normally initial *s
corresponds to Alb. gj- (in a stressed syllable) or Alb.
sh- (in an
unstressed syllable)
2) PIE *u : Alb. i is the other
mismatch, because PIE u is normally
preserved in
Albanian.
Piotr