Re: S mobile (Was : PS Emphatics)

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

>
>
> What is "s mobile" ?
>
> A standard feature of orthodox PIE. Some roots appear both
> with and without initial *s, e.g., *(s)teg- 'to cover' (Gk.
> <stégo:>, Skt. <sthagati> 'to cover, conceal', Lat. <tego:>,
> OIr <tech> 'house', ON <þekja> 'to thatch', etc.).
>
> Brian
> =========
> Tsalam? t?ob
>
> How do you explain
> that the phoneme with no grammatical status
> can be there or not be there ?
>
> Which languages in the real world do that ?

The English prepositions _among(st)_, _amid(st)_ and _toward(s)_
immediately come to mind. Curiously isolated forms include
_thereabouts_ and _whereabouts_. The -s(t) comes from an old use of
the genitive.

There's a similar set of (a)round and, with curious gramatical
differences, (a)live and (a)like. However, you may argue that here we
simply see inconsistent phonetic loss.

Richard.