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

--- 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?

>

I think you didn't understand my point. What I said is that what IE-ists
call "PIE" doesn't represent a single but several languages (i.e.
paleo-IE dialects) which through several replacement and contact
processes superimposed to form the IE family. And in one of these
paleo-IE dialects denasalization happened.

> > 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.
>

But I don't think your alternative is much better.

> > 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.

>

Yes, because the so-called PIE "laryngeals" (notice the use of quotation
marks) aren't actually laryngeals.

> Should you have told us that? Yes, I think you should have.
>

Well, perhaps I overestimated your own intelligence. :-)