Re: Velar vs Uvular

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

>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...>
>
> >
> > That does not demolish much of anything. The fact remains that ustra
> > is cleary an IE word which has always meant camel in IIr. Mallory
> > and Adams (1997) try to explain this as a shift of meaning from bull
> > to camel as IIr entered new territories.

> I very much doubt that anybody could confuse a bull and a camel.

> The Indo-Iranian word for "bull" *ustra is indeed inherited from PIE.

Are you asserting that the RUKI shift had not been phonemicised in
Proto-Indo-Iranian? If not, you need a diacritic on the sibilant.

> The different forms of the words for "camel" in Indo-Iranian suggest
> multiple LWs to preexisting substrates.
> Out of *ont.o, we got :
> - conservative forms like Hindi unta, unt borrowed from *ont/unt
> - more evolved forms like us^tra < *utt-
> (i suppose that -tt- > -st- is regular and ust > us^t as well)

The notation s^ suggest the palatal sibilant (written s acute,
normally ASCIIfied as s', though I prefer the old-fashined but Latin-1
equivalent ç), but this word has the *retroflex* sibilant, so the
Sanskrit is _us.t.ra_ (Harvard-Kyoto _uSTra_).

The development -tt- > -st- seems not to have happened in
Indo-Iranian. (Alternatively, the allophone [c] of /t/ before /t/ was
replaced by [t].) While replacing -t.t.- by -s.t.- is an obvious
hypersankritisation, would it have occured in Vedic Sanskrit?

Richard.