Re: Greek hippos < ek^wos... or not?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Joao S. Lopes" <josimo70@...> wrote:

>
> Is it sure to consider Greek hippos < *ek^wos, despite its clear irregular
> shift? Would we expect *epos, instead of hippos? Does hippos come from
> another IE language, or has it no relation to PIE root. Coincidence or not,
> the builder of Trojan Horse was called Epeios, is it a clue for an obsolete
> *epos in older Greek?
>
> > You seemingly don't mention a third possibility: that hippos comes
> > from another PIE root
>

That is, in the ortodox PIE model any item which doesn't fit into regular sound correspondences is put under a different "root". In my view, the ortodox model is inconsistent and divergent sound correspondences like in this case mean divergent word paths.

> You're right, I forgot to mention it: hippos < *sikWkWo-? *yikWkWo- ? The cluster -pp- is very uncommon in Greek. As a variant of -kk-, we can compare it to lakkos < *lak-wo-s.
>

Actually, Gamkrelidze-Ivanov mentioned a possible protoform *s´ik´wo-, where *s´ is their own "compact sibilant" (a rough counterpart of my own sound law regarding post-velar fricatives), giving *s- > h- in Greek and zero elsewhere, but I find little support for it.

In my opinion, Greek -pp- doesn't come from *-kWkW- (which I find rather absurd) but from *-kWw- resulting from regressive assimilation of *-k´w-. Hence *-kWw- > *-pw- > -pp- by reduction and progressive assimilation (possibly these two changes were synchronic) as in *-k´w- > -kk-.


Besides -k´w-, in my opinion other combinations of velar+w produced weird results in some IE languages, especially Celtic and Latin.