Re: Greek psephas/knephas/dnophos/zophos: linked?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Tavi" <oalexandre@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
> >
> > > This is precisely my point: your "PIE" is precisely the paleo-IE
> > > dialect where this word became denasalized. As I said many
> > > times, IMHO the so-called "PIE roots" don't belong to a single
> > > language but come from several paleo-dialects.
> >
> > As long as you haven't defined which IE languages this 'paleo-IE
> > dialect' fed words to, it is unnecessary by Occam.
> >
> As I said before, this paleo-IE dialect is actually part of what
> IE-ists reconstruct as PIE, so their output is more or less
> scattered among all the historical IE languages, although more so in
> the "Pontic" or "Kurgan" group, i.e. Indo-Iranian, Greek, Armenian,
> Albanian and partially Celtic.

You didn't answer my question. Why posit an IE language the sole role of which is the transmission of loanwords from certain non-IE languages? I can agree that it is Occam-convenient to concentrate all the denasalisations in the loaning process into a single language, but why would that necessarily be IE?

> > How do you explain then that the "fog" word is denasalized only in
> > Lithuanian, but your examples (presumably) are denasalized in many
> > more IE languages?
> >
> > > The fact the nasal survived to denasalization makes me think the
> > > word had originally a laryngeal at word-initial: *Hn- (clusters
> > > *Hn-/*Hr- are rather common in Proto-NEC, as for example in the
> > > 'night' word), then lost in "PIE".
> >
> > But how would *Hn-/*Hr- explain the d- of debesìs?
> >
> Adrados thinks this happened by analogy with dangùs 'sky'.

So does Pokorny. I'm not convinced.

> > > Remember that besides *nebh- we've also got *ºnbh- (e.g. Greek
> > > aphrós 'foam' < *ºnbh-r-o-).
> >
> > But we don't need a laryngeal for getting a- from zero-grade *n.-.
> >
> Oh, I think I should have warned you not to confuse a *real*
> laryngeal consonant with the so-called PIE "laryngeals".

What you mean here is that your *real* laryngeals are different from the traditional IE laryngeals. Should you have told us that? Yes, I think you should have.


Torsten