Re: [tied] Re: Prenasalization, not ejectives cause of Winter's law?

On 2006-09-20 14:45, tgpedersen wrote:

> Is that harnink- "destroy" with double n-'infix' you want to use
> as primary evidence?

There is no double -n- in the singular. It's 1sg. harnikmi, etc. I
suppose the -nin- in the plural stem (harninkanzi) arose as a hybrid
between harnik- and *har(a)nk-anzi.

>> and some variants even became productive in various branches
>> despite the generally recessive character of nasal infixation.
>> Hence the athematic "suffixes" *-neu-, *-nah2-, extracted from
>> old infixed presents with final *w, *h2, like *tl.nah2-
>> (cf. Lat. tollo:, from infixed *telh2-).
>
> That's *-nu- (<- "now, new") and *-nw-ax-, you Vandal.

Well, it isn't, except perhaps as a secondary association without a
historical basis. The great productivity of *-n(e)u- is due to its early
appearence in factitives derived from adjectives in -u- (like
*dHr.s-né-u-ti 'dare' from *dHr.s-ú- 'bold'; thus alreadu in Hittite). I
think Jens has explained it several times here. The original value of
the infixal *n seems to have been causative/factitive (as in Hittite),
and the "just present" semantics is a later development.

Piotr