Re: Exceptional rules

From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 50982
Date: 2007-12-22

 
----- 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