Re: The meaning of life: PIE. *gWiH3w-

On 2008-02-11 17:09, fournet.arnaud wrote:

> If I understand you well,
> Bré:ks^ is from *bhreH1-g-sk
> thru bre:gsk > bre:shk > *bre:ksh ??
>
> Another example of this ?

Note the preterite <bre.s^kau>. Do you think it's unrelated to <bre.ks^ta>?

> To be frank
> I think the syllabic over-heavy *bre:gsk- is dubious.
> Equivalent to CCeCCCC- !!!!
> But I let you defend your position.

It isn't my fault that PIE had a class of presents with the suffix
*-sk^e/o-. Obviously, if you add it to a root ending in two consonants,
you get a cluster of four. There's nothing impossible about such
clusters in morphologically complex words, not only in PIE but also in
many present-day IE languages including English (the plural <sixths>
_ends_ in four obstruents). Of course such clusters are clumsy, which is
why *pr.k^-sk^e/o- was simplified to *pr.sk^e/o- perhaps already in PIE,
and why -*g^sk^- was likewise simplified in Balto-Slavic.

> So you can't provide a clean explanation of brezg.

So you may stick with *bre^skU, also attested, if you don't like my
explanation. Or ignore Slavic: the Baltic cluster is always voiceless.

> Latin aurum is
> presumably a loanword form *zahab (Semitic) "gold"

Is there anyone else, apart from you, who presumes so?

Piotr