Re: Indo-Uralic?

Please forgive me for taking my shot at this:

I believe the basis for *gWe/e:na- is

*gWe-y-n- + *Ha, 'feminine'

Rather unusually, instead of palatalizing the foregoing *gW, it merely
lengthened the medial vowel but shows up in some forms as *i: Avestan jaini.

It refers to a part of the female anatomy as *gWelbh- does, pars pro toto.


Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2008 10:09 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Indo-Uralic?


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

[>] Jouppe wrote:
>> *gw- is one phoneme (no superscript on my machine, we are talking
>> about the labiovelar stop here, this internet limitation is the
>> reason i use q' on my homepage) and the next is a nasal. Where does
>> the -u- appear from? It is certainly not part of the root!

> **gwneh2- does not exist a word.
> it either *gu--neH2 (with no morphological e/o)
> or *gwe--n (with e)

*gw (plain velar + semivowel), *g^w (Satemising velar + semivowel) and
*gW ('labiovelar', probably a labialised velar, though I could cite
typological evidence suggesting its coarticulated :) are distinguished
in PIE reconstructions. Examples:

*gwes 'branches, leaves'
*g^wer 'to burn and be hot'
*gWem 'come, go'

Tocharian and Sanskrit give evidence of something like zero grade
*gWnah2 for woman, though there may well be yet another laryngeal in
there. Greek _gune:_ is isolated, and is probably a Greek innovation.

Richard.