Re: [tied] Olsen's Law [was: PIE Ploughs]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004 08:27:53 +0000, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

>All right. The idea is, briefly, that stops had aspirated variants
>after the consonantal allophones of *h1 and *h2 (but not *h3), e.g.
>*sjuh1-tlah2 > *sju:tHla: > Lat. su:bula 'awl', *pah2-tlom >
>*pa:tHlom > Lat. pa:bulum, but *poh3-tlom > *po:tlom > Lat. po:culum.

According to Jens, the root *poh3- is actually *poh3i- (with possible
contextual variants *poh3-, *poih3-, *pih3-, *ph3i-), so I was wondering
whether the possibility has been investigated that the different treatment
depends not (only?) on the quality of the laryngeal, but (also?) on the
presence/absence of this *i in the root. Just a thought.

>Apart from this culum-bulum variation in Latin, the proposed rule
>accounts for some relict forms like Lat. verbum (if < *wr.h1-to-),
>ple:bs, Gk. ple:tHu:s (if < *pleh1-tu-), or Skt. ti:rtHa- 'passage,
>road, ford' = Lith. ti`ltas 'bridge' < *tl.h2-to-.
>
>> Calvert Watkins in Ramat & Ramat points to Bartholomae's law as the
>culprit
>> for the variation *t ~ *dh in the suffix under discussion. I think
>that's
>> an excellent idea.
>
>I'm not sure whose idea it was originally. Something of the kind was
>certainly advocated by Kurylowicz (that's probably where Watkins had
>it from). The problem is that we don't find *dH where expected -- but
>then, Olsen's Law can be interpreted as a PIE precursor of
>Bartholomae's Law. It's very much the same thing -- aspiration by
>progressive assimilation.

I was thinking whether there was a way to combine Bartholomae's law (with
its effect /t/ > /dh/) with Olsen's preaspiration law to explain the result
/d/ in Slavic.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...