From: caotope
Message: 71242
Date: 2013-06-19
> Another thought is on laryngeals. They all have been preserved well in PT, but we can see more laryngeals there than in PIE. It means that proto-IE had even more laryngeals than the reconstructed PIE (it is my deduction, based on the assumption that there really was a proto-IE migration into Tsimshianic Coast). Dunn compares TS *peHl 'tear (to), break in two' with a laryngeal, and PIE *spel- 'split (to), break off' without a laryngeal. The s- here seems to be movable: Polish po'l/ 'half' < Slavic *polU may be derived of the same root. A linguistic puzzle is Finnish puoli 'half' (< *po:l-). If it had been a Slavic borrowing, it would not have had the long vowel. So, maybe this word is older?Indeed it is: Finnic *pooli most likely comes from PU *pälä "half". The development may seem odd, but there are good parallels for this.
> It may be an Uralic cognate of the PIE term (a common heredity from Nostratic) or a borrowing from a very old stage of PIE, when more laryngeals were still present that may be reconstructible now with the normal way. If it was so (and if Dunn is right), both the presence of the long vowel in proto-Finnish and of the laryngeal in proto-Tsimshian would be explained."Primary" long vowels in Finnic have recently been explained in a way that does not require reconstructing an "Uralic laryngeal" *x (in short: a, ä > aa, ää > oo, ee / _{m n l r D}e). There had been no estabilished correlation between this and IE laryngeals, at any rate.