Re: Family terms [was: Kluge's Law in Italic?]

W dniu 2012-02-14 02:11, stlatos pisze:

> Are you saying that 'brother', etc., all happened to have a laryngeal
> each but 'mother' didn't? Analyzing the common ending as *-ter- not
> -xter- leads only to baseless folk etymology. Even if from babbling,
> such a *ma- could have been old enough to undergo a>e, back to a only by
> the following x (even if not so old, it causes the lengthening seen in
> historical IE).

I'm open to any explanation that makes sense od the peculiarities of the
PIE family terms. 'Father' can hardly have been originally segmented as
*p-h2ter- (even if it should have been resegmented in this way later
on), and I find *ph2-ter- (a transparently formed agent noun) easier to
swallow than *ph2t-er-. Of course 'mother' can be *ma(:)-h2ter-, as far
as I'm concerned (with *-h2ter- taken from 'father'); all that I'm
saying is that *h2 is unlikely to be part of the "baby talk" element so
comon in 'mother' words the wide world over.

Piotr