Re: Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo

--- On Tue, 9/30/08, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> From: tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> Subject: [tied] Re: Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Tuesday, September 30, 2008, 5:08 AM
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:
> >
> > At 6:29:08 PM on Monday, September 29, 2008, Andrew
> Jarrette
> > wrote:
> >
> > > This is slightly off-topic, but would anyone know
> what
> > > explains the <s-> in Brythonic words for
> "seven"?
> >
> > You mean why it's retained instead of yielding the
> usual
> > <h-> in Welsh, Cornish, and Breton? All I know
> is that
> > there is just a handful of such exceptions, few enough
> that
> > Jackson doesn't try to account for them in LHEB.
> (That's
> > not counting borrowings from Latin, which he says
> usually
> > retain initial <s->.) The words for
> 'six', on the other
> > hand, have the expected reflexes of PIE *sw-.
> >
> > For Rick: Gaul. <sextan->, according to
> Matasovic'.
>
> Which all strengthens my suspicion of a substrate in
> Celtic.
>
>
> Torsten

Based on hal- vs. sal- words for "salt"? After all you do seem to have something similar in Bavarian/Austrian topos, or at least in Hallstadt vs. Salzburg. Perhaps there both forms co-existed and some splits of Celtic went for /h/ and others kept /s/ and the transformation was not completely realized