Re: [tied] Tyrhennian affiliation

From: enlil@...
Message: 33146
Date: 2004-06-08

Rob:
> Yes. It's also possible, as Glen has stated before, that the PIE
> labiovelar series *kW, *gW, *gWH comes from earlier *q, *G (that is,
> a voiced uvular stop), *GH.

I'm not sure if you understand, Rob. So I'm just going to restate
my views on uvulars. Uvulars in IndoTyrrhenian are actually allophones
of their velar counterparts. So *[q] and *[k] constitute the same
phoneme *k. When *k is next to *a, it is automatically uvularized
as [q]. However, in both IE and Tyrrhenian, the resulting uvular
sounds were phonemicized and therefore became distinct from their
velar counterparts. This is why I say that ITyr *kW before *a in
*kWatWan [qWatWan] 'four' becomes Tyr *xota, not **kota while
*kWere [kWere] 'she creates' becomes Tyr *kere, not **xera. They
derive from the same phoneme but different allophone.

The IE uvular series is also phonemicized from these earlier
allophones in IndoTyrrhenian and we later see an unhistorical IE *q
next to _*e_, causing expected colouring to [a] as we find with *x
(*h2) because that's what uvulars do... they lower sounds.

The aspirates *x (*h2) and *hW (*h3) are not from ITyr's allophony
however! Rather, IE *x comes from MIE *h and medial *-h- (*h1) comes
from MIE *-?- (a glottal stop). That means that MIE had the following
laryngeals: ?, h, hW. It didn't have *x at all. In other words, these
aspirates previously had no uvular counterparts as they later did in
IE, only velar stops had uvulars in IndoTyrrhenian.

So...

IE *k and *q both come from ITyr *k (which was pronounced as [k~q]
depending on the situation) whereas ITyr only had *?, *h and *hW
without any trace of uvular **x.

Got it? Good. Maybe a diagram is in order showing the general sound
correspondances:

ITyr IE Tyr -> Etr
*? *?-/*-h- ZERO ZERO
*h *x *x/ZERO h-/-(cH)v-/ZERO
*hW *hW *x/ZERO h-/-(cH)v-/ZERO

*k [k] *k *k c
*k [q] *q *x h-/-(cH)v-
*kW [kW] *kW *k/*-p- c/-p-
*kW [qW] *kW *x h-/-(cH)v-


Okay, I had to think about that diagram so I hope I didn't make
any mistakes and end up confusing people more.


> I think it's doubtful that -c(h) "and" and verbal preterite -ce are
> related, as the semantics hardly match.

I wouldn't say that either. This preterite, I feel, is related to the
emphatic particle in IE (*ge or *gHe) and this particle was possibly
also used as a modal extension for some verbs (hence the occasional
*-g-/*-gH- extensions on some verb stems). So the skinny of it is
that we have an emphatic particle *k:e in IndoTyrrhenian, becoming
attached to verb stems sometimes to denote an action that is
terminated or 'perfect'. This regularly becomes *-ke in Tyr while *-g-
in IE. However, being that *g was more marked in IE, there would be a
tendency to push a tense *-g- to *-gH-. This also occurs in the free
emphatic particle *ge/*gHe as well and the 1ps *ego:/*egHo: which
I realize was *e- "here" and this same extension. (I believe I said
it was a transitivized *eg-x-o: earlier, sorry about that. That's
definitely wrong.)


= gLeN