Re: [tied] Tocharian queries

From: Petr Hrubis
Message: 43371
Date: 2006-02-11

--- george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:

> 1. We are told that Tocharian separated from other
> "eastern" IE languages prior to the satemization
> process. What is the current explanation for Toch.
> "four" (STWAR (A) STWER (B)< PIE *kwetwor) How does
> one get that "S"? Is it some sort of late prefix to
> an
> earlier development *kwetwor --> *tw(a,e)r, or is
> the
> "S" an indication that Toch. was influenced by
> satemization in this instance just before "moving
> away"?

Well, I think we're dealing with palatalization of a
later date here. As for /S/, we know it was a palatal
sibilant, but its precise quality is disputed.

According to Ohala's "palatalization hierarchy", its
probability increases, depending on the quality of the
following front vowel (taken from the left to the
right): [i, I, e, E, รค (ae)]. As palatalization is
quite common cross-linguisticly, we shouldn't be too
surprised it happened in Tocharin at some stage.

Well, look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_sound_laws
;)

We know of various numbers of palatalizations of
various kinds at various stages of various
Indoeuropean languages. A good example are the Romance
languages, Slavic languages, etc.

>
> 2. Is there any evidence that Toch. borrowed
> lexically
> from known IE languages other than Indic (Sanskrit)
> or
> Iranian?

Yes, but very very few rather dubious indications. I
don't have my DVD-archive here, so I can't be more
precise at the moment.

> 3. Is there evidence that it borrowed lexically from
> known non-IE languages other than Tibetan, Chinese,
> and Turkic? E.g. Finno-Ugric? NB. In both 2 and 3
> I'm asking about verbal "loans", not about phonetic,
> morphological and other such similarities

Well, I'm not aware of any. Loans from FU, if present,
would - probably - only be mediated by other
languages. We may well find several Dravidian
borrowings, which were, however, mediated by Sanskrit
and other II languages.

Indeed, II languages were the most frequent source,
then Old Chinese, then Turkic and then the rest. ;)



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