Rob:
> Good points. I think there is another error in my reconstruction:
> the presumption that 'house' had a sigmatic nominative. Why would
> this be the case? A house is surely an inanimate noun -- I think it
> is highly unlikely that the speakers of PIE believed that a house
> could ever be capable of action.
Whoa, watch out with that line of reasoning, Rob. It's not solid.
Burushaski, a language stuffed in a remote region of the world
north of India, uses the word /ha/ "house", ironically assigned
to the 'uncountable' gender. This in itself is parallel to what you
logically would rule out above. Well, take another look.
Consider German /mädchen/ "girl" which is neuter. Germans don't think
girls are genderless! Or Latin /agricola/ which acts like a feminine
noun but means "farmer", a job dominated by male workers! I also recall
words for male deities and spirits in Burushaski being in an unexpected
gender. Out of the four genders (abstract, countable, human male, human
female), they are often assigned to the countable class with all the
animal words while the female spirits are 'human female'! Egad, how
androphobic!
So you can't just assume that because "house" is logically an inanimate
concept that it will without exception be reflected in that gender in
the language. Grammar is hardly logical. You have to accept that a
language's gender system will have strange exceptions to the rule, even
in IE.
> For words such as *wlkWos, which do not readily suggest an adjectival
> origin, perhaps its original meaning was something like 'howling
> one.' What, then, drove the re-placement of the accent?
What drove the "replacement of accent" is the very thing you reject --
nominalization of an adjective. I indeed think that *wlkWós would
have been the underlying adjective, perhaps meaning "howling" and
perhaps further based on an echoic verb *welkW- "to howl".
> Hmm. First of all, I have a question: did PIE recognize a difference
> between /kW/ (a labialized velar stop) and /kw/ (plain velar stop
> followed by a labial approximant)?
Yes, *kwon- (Sanskrit /svan-/ with /sv/) shows two seperate phonemes in
the onset, *k and *w. However, in *kWetwores (Sanskrit /catvara/ with
/c/ reflecting a palatalized *kW, not *kw) the sound *kW is a _single_
phoneme that can't be divided any further.
You might distinguish the two by pronouncing a 'light' w in *kW versus
a 'heavy', no-holds-barred w in *kw. In the first, it is merely a slight
rounding of the lips that is barely perceptible to English ears. Pronounce
that kw-sound as you would after being in a freezer for thirty minutes.
It helps if you live in subzero conditions like Winnipeg during winter :)
As for *kw, you could pronounce it like the French would with major
liprounding action. Ask a French person to pronounce /quack/ and you'll
see what I mean. It's almost like koo-ack :)
Hope that clarifies.
= gLeN