From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 31141
Date: 2004-02-17
----- Original Message -----
From: "elmeras2000" <jer@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 3:00 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Eggs from birds and swift horses (was: the palatal sham)
> *p�l&1-mn. is attested as Vedic p�ri:-man.- 'F�lle'. That would
indeed put the -o- where you have it, but the accent should be on
the initial. The alternative is that the *whole* story is wrong, and
then there is no support for any part of your analysis.
Well, I mean something different: the pre-form of *pleh1-mn. (as in Gk.
ple:ma) produced *polh1-n�- instead of *ploh1-n�- because the expected
sequence *plRh1-C- was reshuffled to *pRl-C- (with the regular elimination
of the laryngeal) _after_ the period of stress shifts but before the full
vocalisation of *R. The metathesis was motivated by purely phonetic factors,
more or less like *blUxa > blxa > pchl/a 'flea' in Polish. That gives us
both the vowel and the accent in the right places. As for the fate of *-oln-
in Greek, it seems to me that the outcome was dialectally variable, and that
both -oll- and -oul- can be regarded as "expected", even if the former can
usually be attributed to analogical restoration in Attic/Ionic. Of course
<poulu-> also exists as a variant of <polu->, and since an explanation of
its existence seems to be lacking, one could speculate that it resulted from
mutual contamination between *poul�- and <pol�->.
Piotr
Piotr