Re: Sk. Sarpis- and Oss. Carv

At 6:59:03 PM on Tuesday, August 5, 2008,
david_russell_watson wrote:

> As reflexes of PIE *selp- "butter" Germanic, Greek, and
> Sanskrit have, not surprisingly, salb-, elpo-, and sarp-,
> whereas all of the Iranian reflexes, including Khotanese
> tca:rba-, Pahlavi c^arp, Persian c^arb, Sogdian crp, and
> Ossetic carv reflect a proto-indo-iranian *c^arp-.

> Are there other examples of this irregular correspondence,
> and what might its explanation be?

> I don't know anything about Albanian or its sound changes,
> but I see it has gjalpë as cognate. Is 'gj' the expected
> outcome in Albanian of PIE *s in this position, and if
> not, can gjalpë be grouped with the Iranian forms in
> reflecting an original affricate?

According to Fortson, PIE *s has five outcomes in Albanian,
<sh>, <th>, <gj>, <h>, and zero, with no perceptible pattern
accounting for all cases; this suggests that the present
state reflects dialect mixture. Other examples of initial
<gj> are <gjarpër> 'snake' < *serp-en-, <gjumë> 'sleep' from
*sup-no-, and <gjashtë> '6' from *s(w)ek^s-ti-.

Brian