[tied] Re: Lexicon of Proto-Indo-European morphological roots

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
<miguelc@...> wrote:

> >Ringe's _From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic_ (OUP, 2006);

this

> >particular chapter is available online as a PDF:
>
> The following paragraph caught my eye:
>
> 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.

Thanks, Miguel, for showing us this. It is of course outrageous.
Hasn't anybody really understood the message of the o-infix theory?
The laryngeal-deleting vocalism is not *just any o*, but *only* the
particular kind of /o/ that emerges from an earlier infixed
consonant (which was still earlier a prefix), as I have presented at
great length in my book Studien zur Morphophonemik der
indogermanischen Grundsprache from 1989. Of the material mentioned,
*tórmos is indeed an example of this, but the thematic optative is
not, and indeed the thematic optative did not lose the laryngeal
which is plain to see in the Balto-Slavic accent. There just is no
vocalization of laryngeals after i-diphthong which is another PIE
phonotactic rule of relevance.

On this list the matter has been discussed a number of times, always
ending on a positive note. The best summary of the theory in
existence is still the message # 30940. I refer anybody interested
to that.

Jens