Re: long o: Nominative

From: dubbelax
Message: 63845
Date: 2009-04-18

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Andrew Jarrette" <anjarrette@...> wrote:
>
> > The only thing I can say is that wo:kWs is a hypothetical word.
>
> Well of course, all PIE words are hypothetical words. *wo:kWs is based on Latin <vo:x> and Sanskrit <va:k, va:c->, so it has a solid basis.
>

That is what I am not quite sure about. If both Latin and Sanskrit have a long vowel throughout their paradigms and Sanskrit has "c" even in those cases where there was originally "k", it means that the paradigms were not free from analogy. Now, if these languages transfered the long vowel from the nominative to other cases, they may have used the consonant from other cases in the nominative as well.

> >, we should reconstruct the protoform with a short vowel. The real forms in various languages, resulting from some loss/compensation, could then have been wo:kW, wo:s or even wo: (if we stick to o-vocalism in Nominative). Everything resembling wo:k(W)s would be secondary and so could be wokWs (although some IE languages might have preserved the original, unlengthened form).
>
>
> Oh, I see what you mean, that the *-s on *wo:kWs might be secondarily added on by analogy after it had been lost and produced *wo:kW by compensatory lengthening. The only thing is, neuters without *-s also could be lengthened, e.g. *k^e:r(d) "heart" and *do:m "house" (of course, both in these neuters and in masculine and feminine root nouns analogical levelling of the vowels of inflected forms often occurred in various languages). It seems to me that this suggests that the primary lengthening factor for these root nouns is that their nom. sg. (and voc. sg.) was a stressed monosyllable. This is what Beekes has also said, casually, in his "Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction", and I'm sure many if not almost all IE linguists have said the same. I forget easily, though.
> Greek <óps> probably has a short vowel either from inflected forms or from related words such as <épos> "word, etc.".
>
> Andrew
>

N/A/V of Slavic neutral n-stems has -eN (a nasal vowel) at the end. Since every Slavic final nasal vowel requires a long underlying vowel, some lost final element should be posited here. It could be a dental, cf. such Latin pairs as cognomen and cognomentum, where the latter perhaps contains the otherwise lost consonant. The same or some other thing can be searched for in root nouns. Well, it seems that I am not a friend of stress-conditioned lengthening in root nouns. I did not know about it myself :-)

Ed