Re: [tied] The 'lamb' word [Was: Re: Mi- and hi-conjugation in Germ

On 05-03-21 13:37, elmeras2000 wrote:

> What do you mean when you say the presumed etymon *explains* the
> form in an economic way? Surely a protoform with a long vowel
> involving no change would be even more economic.

It would, if there were a convincing explanation of the short vowel in
the other branches. Some of the evidence is dificult to evaluate, but
the key witness is Greek, where hypothetical *a:gWnos would not have
been affected by Osthoffian shortening. On the other hand, no extra cost
is attached to the assumption of lengthening in the ancestor of Slavic,
Winter's Law being an independently established process.

> And, in case that
> matters, how unmotivated would a vrddhi form be in a word denoting
> the young of an animal? That looks to me like a functional component
> that could very well be signalled by a vrddhi structure; also the
> accented thematic vowel structure is fully compatible with vrddhi.

But see above on the implausibility of IE vrddhi already in pre-BSl.
*(H)a:gWnós (I mean "vrddhi" showing up as vowel length; *//h2egWnó-//
with a full vowel may of course represent the widespread type of
formation with infixed *e). As for the possibility of Slavic
morphological lengthening, *-eNt- neuters don't show it, cf. *tel-eNt-
'calf', *s^c^en-eNt- 'whelp, cub'.

Piotr

> I feel it is safest to add this: I am not saying the vowel of jagneN
> *was* long to begin with, I only say we do not know it wasn't.