Re: PNS

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

>
> On 2006-09-19 20:45, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > That PNS thing suffers from the problem that it gobbles up the
> > *n before anyone sees it. How do you know it was there in the
> > first place?
>
> It doesn't gobble up the *n -- it's partly gobbled up later as a result
> of Nasal Assimilation (Kluge's Law), but survives after long vowels and
> diphthongs, as in the showcase example *taikna- < *doik^-n-ó-. Then,
> there are lexical alternations like *knuþ- ~ *knuð- (commonly with

nasal

> extensions) ~ *knuttan- 'knot', where the last form may be explained as
> analogical (from the pattern (*gnut-on-/*gnut-n- > *knuþ/ð-an-/*knutt-).
>

I just don't feel a rule of the type -Tn- > -TT- makes sense
phonetically. -nT- > -TT- does. Then there's the fact that
is has a semantic variant *knob-/*knopp-.

I'd prefer something like *Nd -> n.t (the stop is unvoiced, so
the preceding nasal is unvoiced) -> nt/ht/tt (for Germanic
substrate words). For that purpose I'm ready to steal the
examples Kortlandt uses in his defense of preglottalisation
of voiced unaspirated.


Torsten