From: tgpedersen
Message: 46226
Date: 2006-09-30
>Let me remind you of your ingenious emendation of *gWih3w-e/o-
> 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".
>