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

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

>
> On 2006-09-30 18:36, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > Let me remind you of your ingenious emendation of *gWih3w-e/o-
> > "live" to a reduplicated *gWigW-e/o-.
>
> *gWí-gWw-e/o-, to be precise.
>
> > You ascribe that to
> > dissimilation, but note that the *gWigW- part violates the root
> > constraint against roots of the form *DeD-.
>
> The constraint, which is dissimilatory anyway, didn't affect
> transparent compounds and reduplications. For exaple, the aorist
> root *doh3- produced the reduplicated present
> *di-dóh3-ti/*dé-d(h3)-n.ti, and the perfect of *deik^- was
> *de-dóik^-e, etc. But I agree that in an obscured reduplication,
> no longer regarded as related to something structurally
> simpler, root-internal constraints would possibly have applied.
>
> > This is interesting,
> > since it might give an insight into how PIE dealt with
> > 'perpetrators' which broke the rule, whether they were loan or
> > composition. In other words, from /gW/ you might get /w/ and /h3/.
> > So was it once *stergW- that was hit by something? Does Lat.
> > stercus "manure" have something to do with it?
>
> Not impossible, but why was it hit? There's no other media in sight.
>

I think I might just have confused the issue. Maybe what I want to
argue for is that *-NgW- (standard: *-gW-) went
*-´NgW- -> *-´h3w-
*-NgW´- -> *-ngW´-
so that it was the normal course of events, not an application of
a classical root constraint? There might be a ton of counterexamples,
but I'll plead a Meillet on that: the weirder the data, the truer it
must be. We might explain 'n-infixes' by sticking to the II data and
calling them morphological, but that doesn't explain how they came
about.


Torsten