From: dgkilday57
Message: 68540
Date: 2012-02-10
>It looks difficult, but a native PIE-speaker would have had a different perspective. The 1966 Guinness Book of World Records claimed that Polish <chrzaszcz> was the world's most unpronounceable word. (I doubt the McWhorter brothers knew much Polish.)
> W dniu 2012-02-09 21:59, dgkilday57 pisze:
>
> > > Not as per Olsen, who claims that the laryngeal "preaspiration" was a
> > > PIE phenomenon. The development of *l.h2 > *la: is of course dialectal.
> > > One can therefore imagine something like *tl.h2-tlah2 > *tl.h2tHlah2 >
> > > *t&tHlah2 (dissimilatory loss) > ... > tabula.
> >
> > What are the parade-examples for Olsen's dissimilatory aspiration? If it
> > explains the short vowel of InIr for 'hoof', it would seem that the *h2
> > was absorbed going into PInIr.
>
> As far as I remember, she does not discuss <tabula>. What she says is
> that the non-syllabic allophones of *h1 and *h2 (but not *h3) produced
> aspiration in a following stop. The best examples involve *t, especially
> in the instrument-noun suffix *-tl/ro-, e.g. Lat. pa:bulum
> (*pah2-t[H]lo-), cri:brum (*krih1-t[H]ro-) vs. po:culum (*poh3-tlo-).
> She isn't very specific as to what happened to the laryngeal. Sometimes
> it seems to have been absorbed into the aspirated stop, but the showcase
> examples (including also *tl.h2-tó-) usually keep it. Given the tendency
> of the PIE ictus to be shifted in collectives and related formations,
> there was, somewhat unfortunately, plenty of room for analogical
> levelling, e.g. *stáh2-tHlom/*st&2-tláh2 --> st&2tHlom > stabulum
> (possible but not really provable). The above suggestion concerning
> <tabula> is my own, not Olsen's, and I'm solely responsible for any of
> its defects. It strikes me, though, that if there ever was a real
> tongue-twister, *tl.h2tHlah2 would have been one. Its reduction to
> *t&tHlah2 would be like a full reduplication being reduced to a partial one.