Re: Lith. žinóti - why not a root g^neHH-?

On 2009-10-13 23:43, alexandru_mg3 wrote:

> I) *g^nh3.h1-sk^e/o- (so a regular R(z)-sk^e/o-) would have been given
> Grk. gnó:sko: (h3. > o) and maybe even the Latin (g)no:sco: (h3. > o)
> The same *g^nh3.h1-sk^e/o- would have been given regularly Alb. njoh <
> *gna:sk- < *gnah1sk- (with h3. > a)

I think the nasal, being a sonorant, would have been more likely to
undergo vocalisation in PIE than the adjacent obstruent, poducing
something like *g^n.h3[h1]sk^e/o- (with the *h1 deleted from the surface
form). The Latin development proposed above, *&3 > o, is ad hoc, cf.
datum < *d&3-tom. The zero-grade of the 'know' root in Latin is
reflected as <gna:-> in <gna:rus> etc.

> II) If h3. > a in Baltic: *g^n.-n-h3.h1-ti- would have been given
> regularly žin-nah1-ti- > žina:-ti > žinoti

The nasal infix is regularly inserted before the _last_ consonant of the
root, so one would expect *g^n.h3-ne-h1-ti instead.

> III) For any o-grade formation I expect that *g^noh3h1- > *g^noh3-
> (based on the lost of laryngeals in o-grades)

Other objections apart, a form with *o from *e coloured by *h3 is not an
o-grade but the phonetic realisation of an underlying e-grade.

Piotr