Re: Laryngeals Indo-Uralic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "caotope" <johnvertical@...> wrote:

>
> > > > I don't even have a theory of how those two are
> > > > related. I stick to loans. In this case from a substrate to
> > > > both, presumably one that knew ice.
> > >
> > > > Torsten
> > >
> > > Hm, but if the word is a substrate loan into PIE and PU both,
> > > how do you rule out the possibility of this being of common
> > > inheritance after all?
> >
> > Several small things:
> >
> > 1) My proposal covers both the 'ice' and the 'icle', but they are
> > not relatable within PIE with known rules, which they would have
> > been if they were inherited.
>
> Nothing prevents one of these being a loan (from some IE, Uralic or
> related source) and one inherited. The two elements seem to be of
> different age anyway: "ice" (zero initial?) would fall under the IE
> *H <> Uralic *j correspondence, while "ickle" (< †gicel) has
> likewise *j- and might thus be newer (within IE).
>
> Speaking of derivation, how much of your proposed derivation *iNgs > *eis would be during the IE evolution and how much within the donor
> language? I'm not aware of any regular law of compensatory loss of
> *Ng. If anything, that looks like we should get *ks.

*in,-s- > *i:s- > *eIs-.
And you just answered the question. It would have taken place in the donor language. And since I assume that to be the ar-/ur-, geminate, bird language, it would have -VnC- / -V:C- / -VC:- alternations anyway

>
> > 2) The limited and northern geographical distribution of the PIE
> words cognates (except for the Iranian word, but who knows what
> nomads pick up).
>
> It's only natural that words meaning "ice" might be lost in more
> southern descendants.

'Snow' wasn't.

> Hm, but could it be Iranian palatalized this word to get *-s-, and
> they loaned it to Germanic? Except the voicing doesn't quite fit.

You'd need a high vowel suffix for that.

> > 3) The derivation with a genitive partitive -s as in *gl-a-s (and,
> > I suspect, *gr-a-s) points to Aestian or whatever preceded it.
>
> Where does Aestian come into this?

Because the word glesum "amber" is Aestian, according to Tacitus.

> > > Etherman brought up other examples of a correspondence
> > > of PU *ä to IE *ei not long ago on the Nostratica list.
> >
> > That is not a counter-argument, loans of one and the same path
> > also show regular substitutions.
> >
>
> OTOH regular patterns should be explained as regular loaning only
> if inheritance can be ruled out.

Pokorny is only able to able to unify the "ice" root by postulating semantics-less -s- and -n- suffixes.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/60884
That means that root is not PIE

> (The correspondence is also non-trivial so the point of divergence
> needs to be pre-PU or pre-PIE anyway.)

I don't understand the last sentence.


Torsten