From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 36054
Date: 2005-01-27
> How is "stress retraction [to be] expected if there is a full (non-No, PIE *ph2té:r contained only one phonological vowel (as opposed to
> high) vowel in the first syllable"? If that were the case, it seems
> to me that we should see *péxte:r instead of *pxté:r.
> Was there a root in IE *mex- meaning 'nourish' or something similar?I don't know of any such. But the existence of something like *mama,
> It seems to me that both *méxte:r and *bhréxte:r were recentThe forms with unstressed *e: do look relatively young and analogous to
> developments within IE. If those words had been "coined" when pitch-
> accent was still distinctive(*), we would have seen either *mxté:r
> and *bhrxté:r or *méxto:r and *bhréxto:r. In other words, the
> atonic /e:/ means that the pitch-accent was no longer distinctive.
> I also hypothesize that the suffix *-xter is a reanalysis of theYes, that's a common view.
> word *pxté:r from **p(e)x-tér- to **p(e)-xtér-. Once the meaning
> changed from "protector" or "provider" to "father", it could be
> extended to other kinship terms.
> An interesting related question isAlternating with *-tor-s > *-to:r if the stress was on the verb root.
> this: in nomina agentis, was the nom. sg. originally *-térs, like in
> *pxté:r (< *pxtérs), at least in animate nouns?
> Finally, I propose that the word for "brother" comes from the rootMany people have proposed such a connection, but I'd like to see a
> *bher- "carry": *bhr-xter-. Perhaps the older form of the word was
> *bhrtérs "a (fellow?) carrier".