Abdullah Konushevci wrote:
> I am afraid that as you, as Marius have arrived to cheese-cake in
> Albanian <pite me djathë>?!
:)
Now, this is a summary of what we know for certain:
1. <ja> is the development of *e > *iä in syllables that were closed in
Proto-Albanian.
2. The <t> in <djathtë> is secondary and so can't be responsible for the
<ja>. What we have to explain with recourse to PIE forms is the <djath->
part (not to be confused with a cube of feta).
3. The reconstructible PIE words for 'right' are *dek^si-no-,
*dek^si-tero-, *dek^si-wo-; the *i was syncopated so early in some
branches (cf. Slavic *desn-, Goth. taíhswa, OHG zeso), that variants
without it might even have existed in the protolanguage.
4. We have at least one certain example of a *-k^s-C- cluster in
Albanian, gjasht < *sek^s- + *-tah2, with early loss of *k^. Note that
the extension is old enough to have conditioned the development of the
diphthong to <ja>. The deletion of *k^ must be a case of cluster
simplification (by dropping the first element). We may therefore expect
other instances of *-k^sC- > *-sC-.
Unsuffixed *dek^s- does not seem to occur with the meaning 'right', and
since Albanian shows no trace of -no- or -tero- in this word,
*dek^siwo-, or rather its syncopated variant *dek^swo- is the likeliest
protoform of <djath->. If *k^s was reduced to *s in Pre-Albanian before
another consonant, the expected development shoukld be like this:
*dek^swo- > *deswo- > ?
We know that before a stressed vowel *sw > *zw > *Dv > Mod.Alb. d. We
would expect the parallel development of *sw > *Tv > T (the voiceless
fricative is never "hardened" to a stop), but no examples have been
proposed so far. But now we have one! To continue,
*deswo- > *diäsw- > *diásw- > *djaTv- > djath-
The *sw cluster accounts for the <ja> and for the <th> at the same time.
We also know what happened to the *k^: it was simply lost, as in the
word for 'six'. All the steps are parallelled by other developments in
Albanian, and tout se tient without any ad hoc tricks.
Piotr