On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 14:13:01 +0000, tgpedersen <
tgpedersen@...>
wrote:
>I believe Miguel said something similar happened in some Semitic
>plurals: a H- slapped on in front to mask the internal misery of the
>root?
I suppose you mean ?a- (e.g. broken plurals of the type nahr ~ ?anha:r).
The glottal stop is automatic, the cluster breaker is prefixed a-. The
phenomenon is not limited to broken plurals, but affects all root patterns
that would otherwise have had initial CC- (e.g. ?a-rba`- "4").
That is of course the big difference with IE, where initial clusters are
quite common. Glen's proposal of "automatic" o-prosthesis does not explain
why we don't have o- in the vast majority of cases (paradigmatic Ausgleich
won't explain *ph2tér- instead of +oph2tér-).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...