Re: Exceptional rules

----- Original Message -----

From: Richard Wordingham

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 12:28 AM

Subject: [Courrier indésirable] [tied] Re: Exceptional rules

 > > But we must remember that admitting 'exceptional' rules reduces the
> > quality of an explanation, as does introducing ad hoc rules.

===========

Arnaud

I definitely reject the concepts of "weak rule" and "exceptional rule" 

I suppose Verner's law would never have been inferred by somebody happy with a weak rule allowing exception.

I 'll take a example : the word "egg".

 

IE data are especially erratic :

Greek ô-ion

Latin o:w-um

Welsh wy

Slavic forms have both jajce or vajce

Germanic is worse : Gotic ada < *addja with -dd- !!

Other forms from *ajj-az

 

So how are we supposed to handle this ?

 

The key is the Arabic word : bayd?a "egg"

Root : b_y_d?

d? is an over-featured phoneme : voiced + emphatic dental stop.

 

The rough equivalent of b_y_d? should be *w_y_H2.

but Gotic shows that this -d?- must have survived in early PIE.

-d?- sometimes pops up as -dh- as is the case in *addja.

 

The root *w_y_H2 is ultra weak, and any vowel inserted triggers collapse.

PIE speakers probably had a tough time declensing that root.

Singular could have been *woyd?-m > woydhm

Plural could have been *wiH2-eH2 > *wij-â or *ujj-â

All this morphonological disorder was solved in divergent ways.

 

Gotic ada is "schwierig" but it can be explained.

 

I don't believe in the playground of weak rules and lazy explanations.

Work harder. You'll find what happened.

Arnaud