Re: [tied] Comments on Beekes' pre-Greek

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From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2007 11:02 AM

Subject: [Courrier indésirable] [tied] Comments on Beekes' pre-Greek

http://www.indo- european. nl/ied/pdf/ pre-greek. pdf

Beekes tries to establish a phoneme inventory for his pre-Greek by
comparing suspected allophones ("interchanges" ) in sets of similar
loans from pre-Greek, eg. polis, ptolis "city", and posits an
"average" of the set of allophones as a pre-Greek phoneme, in this
case pY.

("1a. pt may represent a single phoneme py, as we saw in B 1.
Exx. (Fur. 315ff): gnup- / gnupt- (gnupet-); kolúmbaina / kolúbdaina;
kíbalos / kíbde:s; lúpe: / lúpta; without variants note króssophthon,
sarúphthei~n. ")

But he seems not to be aware of the fact that Greek pt is already
accepted as coming from proto-Greek pj. That means one could envision
another scenario for the loan of these two forms, namely:

1) proto-Greek loans pYolis from pre-Greek
2) proto-Greek pj > Greek pt, pjolis > ptolis
3) Greek borrows pYolis from pre-Greek as polis

The interesting thing is that he finds pre-nasalisation and
nasalisation (b / mb, ph / mb, ph / mb; t / nd / n, d / nd / n, th /
n; g / gg, kh / gkh, kh /gk), and further, that the labial
interchanges include w. I proposed (following Pulleyblank) that PIE
voiced unaspirated stops b, d, g^, g, gW were actually prenasalised,
the labial stop being not Mb but Mw (or mW), thus mW, Nd, Ng^, Ng,
NgW. Now if proto-Greek kept those sounds and was in contact with
pre-Greek, a similar loan scenario becomes possible:

1) Proto-Greek loans a word with prenasalised stop from pre-Greek
2) Proto-Greek prenalised > Greek unnasalised, Pre-Greek loan lose the
prenasalisation.
3) Greek loans the same word again from pre-Greek, this time
prenasalisation is rendered by a preceding nasal.

Torsten