Re: Kluge's Law in Italic? (was: Volcae and Volsci)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
> W dniu 2012-02-10 23:05, dgkilday57 pisze:
>
> > 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.)
>
> I don't think they did. And they surely didn't know any Georgian.
>
> > As a *dHlo-denier, does Olsen explain Greek <ge'nethlon> by
> > preaspiration of *t by *h1? This would seem to open a real can of worms,
> > with <stato's> against Skt. <sthita'->, <platu's> against <pr.thu'->,
> > and other examples of non-correspondence of Grk and Skt. unvoiced aspirates.
>
> There is a small can of worms here, though not really in these cases.
> Olsen claims that only non-syllabic laryngeals caused the aspiration, so
> *st&2-tó- presents no problem, the Skt. *-tHi- < *-th&- < *-t&2- being
> branch-specific, like for example the aspiration in <duhitar->. Likewise
> in *pl.th2u-, the PIE *h2 followed the stop (though in this particular
> word the *-th2- sequence is possibly the outcome of a very ancient
> metathesis in the protolanguage itself, maybe older than Olsen's rule).
>
> > And if *h2 preaspirates *t, and she only believes in 3 laryngeals,
> > 'father' is a real embarrassment.
>
> Again, it isn't, because the laryngeal in 'father' is syllabic. What
> _is_ problematic is the absence of aspiration in 'mother' and 'brother'
> which has to be explained either by recourse to analogy ('father',
> 'daughter') of by refining the condition of the rule (perhaps
> sensitivity to the placement of accent). Family terms are tricky. After
> all, we have a similar conundrum in Modern English, where <father> and
> <mother> (unlike <brother>) are phonologically aberrant (Chaucer still
> had <fader> and <mo:der> but <bro:ther> 600+ years ago).

I do not see how the laryngeal in *p&2te'r- can be syllabic if the one in *st&2-to'- (I prefer *st&4-to'-) is non-syllabic. And if Olsen explains Italic *-flo-/*-fla:- on the basis of *-&1/2tlo-/*-&1/2tleh2-, she has another can of worms in Latin <status> and all the rest not reflected as *stafus etc., since she effectively posits her *-tH- from *-&1/2t- falling together with *-dH- in Proto-Italic.

Olsen's whole scheme looks like a way to justify denying *-dHlo-/*-dHleh2- by lumping the reflexes together with *-tlo-/*-tleh2-, and while this may be ingenious per se, the ramifications are starting to look as complicated as a system of Ptolemaic epicycles. I think the Copernican thing to do is to accept *-dHlo-/*-dHleh2- (which need not be primary, since *-dH- was a root-extension and *-lo'- a suffix).

MnE <sister> (and some of the pronouns) show Danish influence which was less pervasive in Chaucer's dialect, so this particular comparison is not compelling. I do not deny the trickiness of kinship terms, of course, and I think recomposition did occur in the PIE terms. The basic suffix of *&2/4ner- 'man' was probably agential, with *p&2ter- derived from *peh2-t- 'watch for a long time, guard and feed, graze' etc. With the fading of the prolongative sense of *-t-, *dHug^H&2ter- 'milker, milkmaid' was then formed analogically (root *dHeug^H-, as in Skt. -duh 'milking'). Greek in this view absorbed the laryngeal, *-g^H&2- > -ga-, as in <me'ga>. The root of 'mother' was *meh2- or *meh4- 'suckle' (Lat. <mamma> is dialectal like <Juppiter>, but <ma:milla> shows the Roman Latin vocalism; if *ma:ma 'breast' had /o/-grade, it must be *meh4-). The double laryngeal in *m&2&2ter- or *m&4&2ter became *-a:- in the daughter languages. In my view, only *&4 can aspirate *t (and only in Indic; I believe the cluster became the unvoiced fricative *tT in East Augmentian (i.e. Armeno-Indo-Iranian), *t elsewhere).

At present, of course, I have only a rudimentary sketch of what laryngeals did under these circumstances, subject to revision.

DGK