Richard:
>*markos is 'horse' (> English 'mare'), but what is *wastu? All I
>can think of is Latin _vastus_ 'empty, uncultivated', but I see
>neither u-stem nor major problem in that root, which looks like
>*wah2s to me (Onions has *wa:s).
It would presumably be based on *wes- "to live, reside" plus an
old derivational suffix *-tu. At any rate, the point is that there are
a few items reconstructed with *a that cannot be attributed to
uvular colouring since these *a's don't neighbour any of the possible
uvular consonants. I was sick yesterday with a nasty headache
so I should have listed _all_ consonants with their more traditional
transcriptions: *x (*h2), *q (*k), *G (*g), *GH (*gH). Miguel had
listed the mystery a-roots in a previous post monthes back.
If you don't like *wastu, we might replace it with *gHans- "goose"
(traditionally gH^ans-), an unquestionable root which is again not
attributable to uvular colouring since *gH- is plain here.
My solution for these roots was partly inspired by Miguel's rule.
In my version of it, before *a had become *o in early Late IE,
instances of *a neighbouring labialized phonemes (*m, *w, *hW,
*kW... etc) resisted their own labialization and thus resisted
becoming *o. So some archaic roots retained the uncoloured *a.
This would account for *marko-, *mad- and *pan-. It may also
account for *gHans- but only if it derives from earlier *gHams-.
As a result of the early Late IE vowel shift, the frequency of *a
dropped dramatically and *o rose sharply in the last millenium of
IE's development. During this vowel shift, *e was also shifting
to *A (the a-e digraph in IPA) in uvular environments. When
*a became *o, *A was free to lower to *a and raise the
frequency a little, albeit through the device of allophony.
= gLeN
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