Re: Comments on Beekes' pre-Greek

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> 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.")

Some dialects might have pt>p, etc., but how does that show that
gnupetos or any other word with pt is borrowed?

> 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

Or there was no borrowing at all.

> 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.

Why?