Grzegorz Jagodzinski wrote:
[after quoting many examples]
> And finally, because you do not believe in possibility of irregular
> development of 'to catch' due to frequency, how do you explain colloquial
> Polish trzym instead of trzymaj 'catch!, imper. 2 sg.'?
Hey, spoko[*], aren't you fighting a straw man? Where did I say I didn't
believe in a correlation between irregular development and frequency of
use? For the record, I do. The difference between us is just a matter of
heuristic approach: I object to using "irregular pleading" if other
possibilities haven't been exhausted. One has to remember that the
frequency of use can scarcely be estimated for PIE. *h1esti and *h1senti
were probably amongst the most frequently used words in the
protolanguage, but they somehow managed to survive with little
deformation, so I'm not happy when somebody almost takes irregular
development for granted for any lexeme that _might_ have been frequent.
Germanic *sunuz and *wiraz show an irregularly shortened vowel -- why?
Because they were frequently used? But so were many other words that
don't display any such shortening. And *suHnu- yields regular reflexes
outside of Germanic despite being presumably so common. Perhaps there is
some other reason for the shortening, e.g. frequent occurrence in
compounds, where such clipping is regular (cf. Skt. viraps'á- <
*wi[h1]ro-pk^[w]-ó-). I don't pretend I can know for sure, and I accept
this particular irregularity as a fact of life because the evidence in
favour of reconstructing an underlying laryngeal in each of these words
is incontrovertible.
Piotr
[*] Short for Polish <spokojnie> 'take it easy'.