[tied] Evening/Night (was Re: The "Mother" Problem)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> >The nasal-infix is understandable, of course. However, I don't
> >understand what would produce an alternation like *weik- ~ *wek-.
>
> There are simply two roots *weik- and *wek-, with the same
> meaning, which both may have been in the shaping of the
> "evening" noun. I think it likely that the two are
> ultimately related, but that's not essential.

If two different roots were employed, that means the word
for "evening" was not a common IE word. In other words, one area
used *weik- and another *wek- to form a new word for "evening". How
likely do you think this could have been?

> >Sorry, I should have specified. I was talking about the /ph/ in
> >Greek pséphas 'darkness'.
>
> Presumably from the suffix -&2s > -as, which usually
> replaces original -ar < -r. in Greek.

I was under the impression that stop+laryngeal sequences did not
develop into aspirated stops in Greek?

Was the protoform, then, something like *kWsépr.?

> >However, since IE was primarily left-branching, possessives
> >overwhelmingly preceded their headwords. So we should expect
> >*<ksperos weiks> instead.
>
> Greenberg's universal #2 is "in languages with prepositions,
> the genitive almost always follows the governing noun, while
> in languages with postpositions it almost always precedes".
> PIE had prepositions, or at least was in the process of
> converting postpositions into prepositions.

It probably was in the process of converting postpositions into
prepositions, but I think it was still primarily left-branching,
meaning that possessives preceded their headwords. We see this
canonical order in the most ancient daughter languages.

- Rob