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

On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 15:06:52 +0000, Rob
<magwich78@...> wrote:

>
>
>--- 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?

Not unlikely at all. Compare Skt. pátir dán or dámpatis,
Av. d&:ng patois^, Grk. despóte:s vs. Skt. vis'pátis, Lith.
vie~s^pat(i)s, where the synonyms *dom- and *weik^- are used
interchangeably.

>> >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?

They did, or we wouldn't have the aspirated perfect
(*..C-h2a), 2sg. -tha, etc. Greek has tended to generalize
the unaspirated variant, Indo-Iranian the aspirated, when
the two were in complementary distribution.

>> >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.

See above (Skt. patir dan and dampatis).


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...