Re: [tied] Eating and teeth

05-01-04 21:06, etherman23 wrote:

> Just got a question about laryngeals, and you guys are pretty
> knowledgeable about this stuff. It's said that the words eat and
> tooth are etymologically related. Eat comes from *ed and tooth from
> *dont. This makes sense, until laryngeals come along. According to
> theory these words are *h1ed and *h3dont. The h3 is needed to explain
> the prothetic vowel in Greek. What is the reason for the variation
> between h1 and h3 since h3d- should be the zero grade of h1ed?

<odous>/<odont-> is what you'll find in textbooks, but prothetic <e-> is
also attested in this word (Aeol. edontes). The reflex of *h1- in Greek
is very unstable and prone to harmonic colouring: edont- > odont- , most
likely because *h1 (as opposed to *h2 and *h2) was a "colourless"
laryngeal without a characteristic vowellike quality of its own. This
kind of assimilation is relatively frequent in Greek (cf. also <onoma>,
Aeol./Dor. <onuma> vs. Laconian <enuma> 'name'), so the colour of the
prothetic vowel is not a safe indication of the laryngeal.

Piotr