Re: Fwd: Phonetic change lo-no in some languages

On 2008-03-21 17:58, Kishore patnaik wrote:

> I am struggling to find an answer to this problem related to Santali
> and many languages of India.
>
> lo = nine (Santali)
> noe = nine (Bengali); no_~ = nine (Lahnd.a, Punjabi)
>
> I am told that l-n interchanges are recorded in Pushto and Assamese.

But Assamese has <na> 'nine' (the Pashto word sounds almost the same)
and I'm not aware of any Modern Indo-Aryan or Iranian language with an
initial /l/ in this numeral. You evidently took this word from
Kalyaranaman who'd found it God knows where (I can't check his
reference), but the normal Santali word for 'nine' is <are>, an expected
reflex of the Proto-Munda numeral.

> My problem is deeper. There is an early word for nine in Sanskrit
> (Vedic), also attested in Kikkuli's horse training manual (ca. 1700
> BCE); the word is 'nava'. What could have been the early phonetic
> form of the word for nine? Was it lo or no?

PIE *newn. > PIIr. *nawa. The Mitanni-Aryan, Vedic, Assamese, Pashto,
Bengali, etc. words all derive from it.

Piotr