Re: [tied] West bird

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

>
> On 2006-02-01 18:37, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > Of?
>
> The question is what, if anything, can underlie Germanic *-st-,

Latin

> and Greek -sp-, pre-Armenian *-ks- and Balto-Slavic *-k- in what

seem to

> be variants of the same word, namely *weXero- 'evening, west'?

It's easy

> to explain the Germanic reflex as former *-sp- assimilated to the

*-st-

> of *h2austero-. The rest of the puzzle, i.e. the variation of -sp-

, -k-

> and -ks-, can be solved by assuming an unusually complex cluster,
> reduced in different ways in different IE dialects. The

reconstruction

> *-k(W)sp- preserves the linear order of the segments required by

the

> attested reflexes, and it so happens that *kWsep- 'darkness,

night' is

> reconstructible on the basis of Indo-Iranian, Hittite and Greek.
>

But that doesn't prove that Germanic *we-st- was part of it. And how
about the semantics: "away-darkness"? "away-night"?



Torsten