Re: [tied] Re: Eggs from birds and swift horses (was: the palatal s

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 31111
Date: 2004-02-16

----- Original Message -----
From: "elmeras2000" <jer@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2004 1:20 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Eggs from birds and swift horses (was: the palatal sham)


First, my apologies for responding so irregularly, but my home computer is
still out of order and the amount of time I can devote to Cybalist whlie in
my office is limited.

> I do not see any good morphological point in making poll�- IE *poln�-
, nor in deriving such a form from older *pOlno- with the o-infix.

How about the phonological point, then: no reflex of *h1 in <poll�->.

> I know of no other cases where a suffixal -u- of strong cases is being
replaced by -lo- in weak cases.

(You mean -no-, don't you?) Well, a suppletive paradigm needs no special
excuse for being irregular. My claim is that <pollos> and <pol�s> were
originally two different (albeit close-to-synonymous) adjectives, each with
its own suite of cases forms, and that the two paradigms became conflated in
Greek (with the well-known dialectal variation). The fact that the
adjectives in question were related and formaly similar certainly made the
conflation easier.

> I do know of an exactly parallel
distribution of the allomorphs m�ga- and meg�lo-, so I would assume
it is the same suffix, i.e. *-lo-, not *-no-. Also, I am not
sure /ll/ is the regular reflex of *-ln- in Greek.

I'd say it's at least semi-regular, /ll/ being one of the possible outcomes.
What's the alternative here? *pl.h1-l�- won't work.

> And, by the testimony of the other examples, an infix formation from
*pleh1-mn
should be accented *p�lno-.

An infix formation from (unattested) *pelh1-mn. should be, but I'm not sure
we should expect the same kind of stress retraction in a derivative of
*pleh1-mn., with an originally light root.

Piotr