Re: The palatal sham :) (Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1))

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 01:22:38 -0800 (PST), enlil@... wrote:

>Miguel:
>> I don't see why. The Southern forms (Arabic sitt-, Sabaic sdt_, Ge'ez
>> s&d&s-) unequivocally point to *s-d-t_. Outside of Semitic, we have
>> Egyptian s-r-s- ~ s-j-s- and Berber <sd.is>, which confirm the
>> reconstruction *sidc^-.
>
>Okay, that's convincing enough for me. Thanks a lot, Miguel. But now on to
>more specifics about this *sidc^-. You mentioned Diakonoff's system which
>seems to reinterpret those pesky palatal sibilants as laterals, correct?
>If we follow his idea, this gives phonemic elbowroom for potential
>allophony between *s and *s^ if *s were to become palatalized, no?
>
>As a result, the numeral could have been pronounced as *[S(W)Id(t)S-]
>because of *s- neighbouring *i. As well, one would expect that it would be
>hard to distinguish between *sidc^- and *sids^-. The latter sibilant could
>end up sounding like *c^ merely because of the former *d, don't you think?
>So if we can make *s allophonic with *s^, this would explain *sw- in IE
>(at least in some dialects of IE) for "6" while there is only ever *s- for
>"seven".

This is all unnecessary, really. If you look at the correspondence charts
again, you'll see that PS *s gives /s^/ everywhere except in Arabic and
South Arabian/Ethiopic[*], and PS *c^ (*t_) also gives /s^/ in East and
Northwest Semitic. So the form PIE would most likely to have have been in
contact with outside of the Arabic Peninsula was *s^ids^- or *s^idc^- in
any case (Ugaritic and perhaps Old Akkadian still distinguish between s^
and *t_).

[*] note that "7" is irregular in East Semitic: we have <sebe> for expected
*<s^ebe>.

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