RE : [tied] Re: North of the Somme

> No, it's /n,W/ in the donor ar-/ur-/ and geminate language. It
> manifests itself in the receiving IE and FU languages as
> /-mm-/-mb-/-mp-/-bb-/-pp-/
> /-n,n,-/-n,g-/-n,k-/-gg-/-kk-/
> Alternation is what we find in the receiving languages.

I can accept that not having /N_w/ themselves, IE languages would substitute things like *m, *gg, *Nk in its stead. I however see no possible motivation for alternation as wide as *mm *mp *mb *bb *pp entirely upon loaning. The acceptors contrast all of those; it is also unlikely that they all would be allophonic in the donor. And is this coda position only, or do we have initial nasal/stop alternation? If not, I would quite certainly take at least the vacillating nasality as a sign of phonemic alternation.

(Or perhaps vowel nasality, but that could only explain *mp ~ *p, not *m ~ *p, nor POA vacillation.)

A question I have not seen mention'd here is - is the nasal alternation limited to the labial and velar POAs, or does it also appear with coronals?

> > I'm talking about these invertebrate words specifically. What do
> > you think is their "family tree"?
>
> That one is complicated. I haven't made my mind up on that one.
>
> But I do have nice etymology for
> ON maðkr, Da. maddike, Sw. mask, mark "maggot", I could give you.

Shoot, you kno you want to.

> > > > and I'm not sure what you are getting at with "dup-".
> > >
> > > You will be, after you read Schrijver's article:
> > > http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/62677
> > > Search 'dup'.
> >
> > That racks up the alternation count a lot actually. How do we figure they're ALL original alternation and not later reshaping?
>
> Reshaped by what? Why would you assign some of them to a substrate and leave some in PIE to influence them later?

You misunderstand. The idea is that some of the "alternation" we are seeing would be modifications specific to the individual languages; not that there are substrate roots, PIE roots and interplay between them.

> > No.
>
> No what?

Hm, good question. I think I may have been about to write something like "Notice that…" but didn't :D

> > _duppe_ works from *-mp- as well.
>
> That's a halfway solution.
> You can always try the compromise solution between trying to jump an obstacle and not trying. The results are rarely satisfactory.

I'm trying to gauge how many original forms we REALLY need. Obviously, the less, the better. It's ludicrous to posit one substrate root which spontaneously splits into some two dozen different roots upon being loan'd into Germanic.

> > There may also be secondary influence from the _deep_ root here
> > and there.
>
> Except that the 'deep' root would be part of the loaned complex, so there would be nothing for it to influence.

No - the roots are distinct on the Germanic side. They would have a lot of time to influence one another during their evolution towards attestation.

> > I sense a methodological issue here. We are supposed to accept an
> > a/u alternation, and at the same time, reduce all consonant
> > alternations to parallel development? Even when parallel forms
> > end up in the same language?
>
> I don't follow you. The a/u alternation is what we find in the receiving languages, the original vowel would have been something like /a,/, a nasal /a/ (Slavic /a,/ becomes Russian /u/).

OK. That may work for Russian, but not so much for Germanic. I think a distributional analysis of a-variants and u-variants is needed before we can call it an allophonic/loaning adaptation issue.

Another thought: original *o, interpreted as *a/*u by Germanic/Balto-Slavic?

John Vertical