On 2006-06-20 00:38, Andrew Jarrette wrote:
> Could you please explain what Grassmannian dissimilation is, and how
> it operates in *bhardhah2?
The deaspiration of the first of two aspirated consonants appearing in
the same root, as in Indic, Greek and Tocharian. These processes are
known collectively as "Grassmann's Law", but are in fact independent
changes in individual branches. Italic does not normally show
Grassmann's Law, but it has been argued that it occurred in the
prehistory of Latin on a very limited scale, cf. Lat. traho: vs.
Germanic *ðraGan-, allegedly *dHragH- > *dragH- > *drax- > trah- (dr- >
tr- is a special Lat. development not connected with Grassmann's Law).
The evidence is a bit shaky, however, and involves roots with limited
geographical distribution and a-vocalism. One could even imagine early
loanwords from a forgotten IE dialect which had both the merger of *o
and *a and its own version of Grassmann's Law.
> Also, is this word proof that IE really
> did have *a as a phoneme?
First of all, *bHardHah2 is known from Italic, Germanic and
Balto-Slavic, and this kind of distribution hardly guarantees its PIE
status. It may be a relatively late areal term (the same is true of
*bHar(e)s- 'barley', Lat. farr-, which may be related to the 'beard'
word). But there are quite a few better witnesses, and the evidence in
favour of PIE *a has been discussed here before -- search the archives.
Of course if the comparative evidence forces us to reconstruct a
protoform with *a, this overrules all theoretical expectations.
Piotr