[tied] Re: *bhe-, -y, -w

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:

> tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > 'Iterative' 'be'?
>
> Did you read carefully? It was an original aorist stem, so the

meaning

> can't have been the same as that of *h1es-. It's usually glossed

as

> 'grow, become' ('happen' might be a better approximation), and its
> suppletive relationship to the athematic present *h1es- is post-

PIE. The

> *bHeuh2- root does form iteratives, cf. Slavic *byvati 'to happen

or

> come regularly'.
>
> >>Forms like OHG bim (OE beom), bis(t) (not to mention
> >>birum, birut) are not inherited but analogical.
> >
> >
> > Analogical to what?? Afaik 'pim' is the only verb in OHG with

that

> > athematic ending. And it's 'pim'; 'bim' is taken over from

dialects

> > further north.
>
> The p/b variation is of course the orthographic effect of the HG

shift

> and can be ignored here. The word is a hybrid between *im < *ismi

<

> *h1esmi (Goth. im) and *bijo:.
>
> > One thing that's wrong is your presentation of it: Induction of

the

> > style Popper didn't like results in an unstated rule from which

you

> > deduce the rule you desired. That's not proof. It shows

possibility,

> > not necessity.
>
> The "labial-labial ban" on /fw, vw, pw, bw, mw/ is still there in

Modern

> English, although it's no longer absolute: the clusters are

marginally

> acceptable since they occur in rare loans (pueblo, bwana, Buenos

Aires,

> puissant), often with alternative pronunciations showing that
> English-speakers have not yet come to terms with them. Such

clusters

> don't show up in Germanic where we would expect them for

etymological

> reasons, as in Goth. fo:n (which we _know_ to be related to

*pah2wr/n-,

> and there's no better explanation of the absence of the

etymological

> *w). Compare with that the loss of root-initial *v after the

prefix *ob-

> in Slavic, where *tv-, *dv-, *kv- and *gv- are permissible while

*pv-

> and *bv- are not. I don't claim to have _proved_ that *bijo: lost

its *w

> in early Germanic, but if it had had one after the *b, it would

have

> lost it anyway, so you can't use this form to postulate *bHe-y/w- -

- it

> can be explained without recourse to exotic alternations.
>

I like the proposed mechanism *Bw-i- > *B-i-, for B = labial stop.
That might explain the variation *bay-/*baw- in the AfroAsiatic
root.

And BTW, I still think it would be nice to connect the *bh-w-
(possibly *bh-y-) root with *bh-h2- "appear, come into this world".
The semantic mesh nicely and it could be used to explain the
otherwise unexplainable -ba- of Latin imperfectum.


Torsten