Richard:
> Should I take it from this you're confident that the superlative
> suffix (PIE *mo) always had the precursor of the thematic vowel in
> pre-PIE?
I lost you. What does the superlative have to do with *dekm again?
Are you talking about "tenth", a combination of *dekm + genitive *-os
which later is analysed mistakingly as *dekm-mos with the help of its
rhyming twin *septm-mos (a Semitic numeral)? There certainly is no
**dek- meaning "ten" so it's very tentative to relate the two together
based only on similar sounds.
Richard:
> It seems that *penkWe originally meant 'fist' or 'palm'. There are
> Nostratic cognates:
>
> Uralic *peyngo 'fist, palm'
> Altaic *p'aynga
Maybe, maybe not. There's the matter of the odd *kW = g correspondance,
for one thing. Granted, it's not a bad connection.
> I wonder if *dek^ should be glossed as 'attain', with a sense of
> attaining the correct standard. Then *dek^ without any extra
> consonants might once have meant 'right (as opposed to left)'.
Or... there's an old word for ten, namely *kum, which later surfaces
as *dekm in IE with the addition of a now extinct word for "one"
prefixed to it with cognates in Altaic, Uralic, ChukchiKamchatkan
and Yukaghir. The plural is *kumit from whence we get the fossilized
suffix *-kmt- in all decads above ten.
In regards to *dek-, I've been putting my hopes on a Semitic origin,
seperate from *dekm. Akkadian has a similar word to this, apparently
meaning "to summon".
I continue to maintain that mesolithic and even paleolithic people
could indeed have number systems up to ten, especially in trade-intensive
areas. It's an antiquated belief that a number system can only be used
by "civilized" peoples and not by long-ago herders and hunter-gatherers
to boot. It's a large waste of time to obsess over etymologizing all the
numbers reconstructed in IE into cute, mentally challenged phrases as if
early peoples were hairy chimpanzees foraging in the wilderness without
any capability of language. It's just not the case and archaeology has
been proving that they were much more developped than this for decades
now. So why do we still hold on to this silly notion that *dekm MUST come
from some elemental root instead of... from an older numeral?
= gLeN