>schwa secundum, the reduced vowel, to explain some noun such as
>hadl or similar meaning "seat" or similar, from the *sed- root.
>What is the explanation of this noun (I don't remember its exact
>form but I know for sure it had a and was from the *sed- root),
>i.e. its /a/ vowel? Could there actually have been some sort of
>reduced vowel, a schwa secundum? Or is it perhaps a development of
>unstressed *e or *o, or some other conditioned change?
Personally, I believe roots with /a/ are loans.
Pulleyblank starts with a homophonous root, Chinese 'xi:' < Early
Middle Chinese *sej > Old Chinese *s^&´l "west; roost, perch,
settle". Quote: "The graph for 'west' is interpreted as a bird's
nest in the Shouwen, which adds a 'bird' element not found in
inscriptions or other texts and explains that 'a bird on a nest
represents a bird going to roost when the sun is in the west'.
In his proposed cognates, P. wants an OC ablaut vowel a/& to
correspond to the PIE ablaut e/zero.
Further, he lets O.Ch. /l/ correspond to pre-PIE /l/ > PIE /d/ (and
pre-PIE /L/ (unvoiced /l/) > PIE /l/). It is remarkable that he
doesn't adduce the d/l alternation in the PIE *sed- root as evidence
(Latin solium "seat", perhaps consules). Perhaps one should improve
his proposed phoneme correspondence: PIE /l/ comes not from pre-PIE
unvoiced /L/ but from pre-PIE "thick" /l/, /l/ pinguis (as they are
in solium, consules (I think)).
There is no trace of PIE *ni- or *ve- in the Chinese morpheme.
Perhaps this is what happened: pre-PIE *sad- (> PIE *sed-) is a word
loaned with 'chicken tecnology' (which came the same way) and
meant "west" and "roost". To disambiguate, PIEers added a prefix:
*ni-zd- "down-sit" -> "nest", *we-zd- "away-sit" -> "west".
Torsten