From: tgpedersen
Message: 30925
Date: 2004-02-10
>I believe Miguel said something similar happened in some Semitic
> My theory is that these words with what appears to be a
> prefixed *o- are in fact prothetic in order to avoid some
> potentially yucky phonetics right after the event of syncope
> in early Late IE. You see, when unstressed vowels get slashed
> left and right, sometimes ugly things happen.
>
> An example would have been *kWatWaxa (I think I just wrote
> *kWetWaxe in a previous post but I forgot to update it to my
> current phonetics, sorry!). It would have become *ktwax (yuck!),
> but the accented a-prothesis kicked in, hence *aktwax > *aktwa:
> > *okto:u "eight". A similar example is *osdos "perch". It once
> was a genitival construct based on *set:- "sit", hence initially
> *sat:-asa, becoming *sdas right after syncope (yikes!). So it
> was tidied up with prothetics: *asdas > *osdos. Note that all
> genitival constructs are misanalysed as thematic roots plus
> nominative. Another really snazzy case is *oxwiom "egg" which
> must surely come from *xawi- "bird" somehow but... how?? It
> sure looks similar. Well it IS derived from "bird" thanks to
> a-prothesis. We start with another genitival construct,
> *xawai-ana, this time with *-ana (> *-om gen.pl.) to convey
> collectivity. It is reduced by syncope to *xwian (blech!) and
> is given prothesis to become *axwian > *oxwiom (traditionally
> *o:wiom).
>
> Jens consonant idea makes no sense to me so I hope everybody
> loves my idea which only depends on automatic sound changes.
> :) When Jens mentioned *oxgos, I became titulated since this
> can also work with this hypothesis. It would derive from
> *axgas, a workaround for the disastrous *xgas < MIE *xak:asa,
> genitival construct of *xek:- "to lead". It must be remembered
> that this prothetic rule occurs on nominal roots that become
> divorced of the source of their derivation. So while *sat:asa
> managed to become *(a)sdas even though it derived originally
> from *sed-, the genitive of eLIE *pad (*po:d-s) remained
> *pedas, not **pdas, because of paradigmatic strengthening.
> In other words, *pedas was NEVER divorced from the source
> of its derivation, *pad, thereby retaining a form of the root
> vowel as it occured in the nominative. Or yet another way
> of saying it is: *pedas was part of a larger declensional
> system for *pad, while *(a)sdas was its own root with its
> own declensional system.
>