From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 48151
Date: 2007-04-01
> On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 21:02:04 +0200, Piotr GasiorowskiThe *wérh1-je/o- --> *wérje/o- rule is Pinault's Law, cf.
> <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
>> There's a pretty long chapter on PIE in Don
>> Ringe's _From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic_ (OUP, 2006); this
>> particular chapter is available online as a PDF:
>>
>> http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-928413-X.pdf
>>
>> Just a little idiosyncratic, but then what isn't. Inflectional
>> morphology covered rather nicely.
>
> Nice summary.
>
> The following paragraph caught my eye:
>
> Finally, it should be noted that laryngeals not adjacent to
> syllabics were apparently deleted by three different rules.
> A laryngeal which was separated from an o-grade vowel by a
> sonorant, but was in the same syllable as the o-grade vowel,
> was dropped (cf. Beekes 1969: 74-6, 238-42, 254-5). For
> instance, whereas the laryngeal of *dheh1- "put" survived in
> the derived noun *dhóh1mos "thing put" (cf. Gk. tho:mós
> "heap" and OE do:m "judgment", both with long vowels that
> reveal the prior presence of a laryngeal), that of *terh1-
> "bore" was dropped in *tórmos "borehole" (cf. Gk tórmos
> "socket" and OE þearm "intestine"). The most important
> application of this rule was in the thematic optative, in
> which the sequence */-o-yh1-/ was reduced to *-oy- in most
> forms. Further, laryngeals were dropped between an
> underlying nonsyllabic and */y/ (in that order) if there was
> a preceding syllable in the same word (cf.Peters 1980: 81
> n.38 with references); thus, though the present (i.e.
> imperfective) stem of *sneh1- "twist, spin" was *snéh1ye/o-,
> with the laryngeal preserved, that of *werh1- "say" was
> *wérye/o- (cf. Homeric Gk /eírei/ "(s)he says"), that of
> *h2erh3- "plow" was *h2érye/o- (cf. Lith. a~ria "(s)he
> plows"), and so on. (A PIE present *wérh1yeti would have
> given 'eréei' in Homeric Gk, while *h2érh3yeti would have
> given 'ária' in Lithuanian.) Finally, it seems clear that a
> laryngeal was dropped if it was the second of four
> underlying nonsyllabics and was followed by a syllable
> boundary (Hackstein 2002 with references); thus, for
> example, the oblique stem of */dhugh2tér-/ "daughter",
> underlyingly */dhugh2tr-'/, surfaced as *dhugtr.-'
> with the laryngeal dropped (at a point in the derivation
> before the operation of Sievers' Law, on which see the
> following section).
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>
> I knew about the H-deletion after /o/ (which cannot be true
> as formulated here: e.g. Slavic pê"ti "sing" < poiH-taj).
> Any comments on this and the other two rules?