On 2008-12-26 18:27, tgpedersen wrote:
> I dissent. Both have Semitic relatives, as I pointed out, so we can't
> exclude the possibility of a loan.
Any root found in several branches of IE including Anatolian (and both
//*h2ent-// and *//k^enk-// meet this criterion) can be confidently
reconstructed as PIE, no matter what the external connections. In
particular, a loan from PSem. to PIE would still be a PIE word. The
whole origins question is a red herring anyway. We are discussing PGmc.,
and from the PGmc. perspective items which had been in the language for
millennia were at least as "native" as <street> and <cheese> are in
modern English, in terms of their morphological behaviour.
> A-hem. I think you mean *jéunk-is-on-. Unless you want to set up a new
> ablaut pattern?
No, it's a pre-VL comparative, but not an IE one. The PIE comparative
adjective meaning 'younger' was, in all likelihood, something like
*h2jéw-jo:s (Skt. yavi:yas-, PCelt. *jowju:s). New analogical
comparatives, based on *h2ju-h3on- (Lat. iu:nior) or *h2ju-h3n.-k^o-
(Gmc. *juNxizan), are of later origin and don't obey the original ablaut
rules, which were no longer productive at the time.
Piotr