On 2006-08-23 00:43, m6 wrote:
> the 's' was lost from 'sah' in some instances - as in Welsh 'heul',
> but the 's' forms are the earliest for IE?
PIE had *s-, and the sibilant has been preserved as such in most of the
daughter languages. Exceptions include Brittonic Celtic, Iranian and
Ancient Greek, where the initial *s- developed into /h/ (in some Ancient
Greek dialects, and eventually in Koine Greek this "rough breathing" was
lost altogether). There may also be some odd special changes here and
there, such as *s(h2)w- > d- in Albanian diell 'sun', but of course the
original value of the first segment of the 'sun' word was /s/.
Piotr