Re: Latin /a/ after labials, IE *mori

From: Petr Hrubis
Message: 63967
Date: 2009-05-30

2009/5/29 Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>:
>
>
> On 2009-05-29 01:50, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
>
>> If for you is Ok to have in the same language mane:re 'to remain' and
>> mane:re 'to warn' and to continue to use them like this for the next 200
>> years than is 'ad-hoc' for sure.
>>
>> But normally anybody wants to can clearly say 'I remain' in place that
>> 'I warn'
>
> Speakers of English must be abnormal if they have put up for centuries
> with the homophony of <die> and <dye> or <lie> [1] 'recline' and <lie>
> [2] 'tell lies'. What we *normally* observe in the history of languages
> is that phonetic changes are *not* blocked to avoid homophony. With a
> pair of verbs one of which ('warn') is transitive and the other
> ('remain') intransitive there is no real ambiguity. Their different
> syntactic properties make confusion impossible.

That's right. In some languages, class prefixes are employed to avoid
homonymy, which may eventually lead to "phonetic changes" (actually,
special cluster resolutions when the prefixes fossilize and loose
their original gender-echoing functions).

Petr