On 2006-09-27 22:11, tgpedersen wrote:
> Nothing of the kind. I just wanted you to confirm I've identified
> them correctly. Sorry about the telegraph style.
I see, thanks. Yes, the identification is correct. The *ster- (etc.)
root, as presented by Pokorny, is somewhat problematic. It looks like a
conflation of two similar, and perhaps ultimately related, but
nevertheless distinct roots, *ster- 'throw down, overthrow, scatter'
(hence 'defeat') and *sterh3- 'strew, spread', partly or completely
converging in some of the branches, including Indo-Iranian. Note the
OInd. verbal adjectives str.tá- and sti:rn.á-, with what looks like the
original complementary distribution of *-no- (after obstruents) vs.
*-to- (after resonants) in (pre-)PIE, i.e. *str.-tó- but *str.h3-nó-
(the latter replaced by innovated *str.h3-tó-, with the more productive
suffix, in several branches). Cf. Gk. (Att.) stratós 'army, host'
(*str.-tó-) but stro:tós 'covered, spread' (*str.h3-tó-). It's of course
*sterh3- that forms a (Skt. class 9) present with a nasal _infix_,
*str.nóh3-ti, but, to confound things further, *sterh3- seems to have
had the synonymous variant *streu- (Goth. straujan etc.), hence perhaps
the alternative present *str.néu-ti (OInd. str.nóti). The precise nature
of the relationship has not been worked out yet -- we have no consistent
theory of PIE "root extensions".
Piotr