---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <dgkilday57@...> wrote :
>
Rather than "Kilday's Law", we should be speaking of Kretschmer's Law, since it was Paul Kretschmer who observed and explained its operation in Paeonian, an Illyrian dialect (Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache 247-9, Göttingen 1896). My humble contribution in this area is the recognition that Lusitanian _Iccona_ (= Gaulish _Epona_) places the Lusitanian language into the Illyrian (or "Epiro-Macedonian" or whatever) group. Kretschmer recognized the soundlaw decades before I was in diapers and his name should be on it, not mine.
>
OK, from now on I'll use "Kretschmer's Law" instead.
> Anyhow, it is restricted to the Illyro-Lusitanian group,
>
Not exactly. Celtic has a number of geminated -kk- which can be readily explained by Kretschmer's Law, although they don't fit well in the std PIE theory.
> Reflexes of PIE *h2/4akW- are not restricted to one corner of the IE world and show enough ablaut to qualify them as inherited words.
>
I'd call "laryngeal inflation" the phenomenon of positing laryngeals ad libitum. Sure, the discovery of "laryngeals" (please notice the use of quotation marks) was major breakthrough in IE studies, but in my opinion they're abused of by modern IE-ists.
In my opinion (as well as Villar's), /a/ in *akʷ-ā has nothing to do with "laryngeal" colouring but with an archaic 4-vowel system which lacked /o/. Villar thinks the 5-vowel system found in some IE languages ans which has diffentiated /a/ and /o/ was a later innovation.
> Two long Russian rivers are named _Oká_, beside which we have Latv. _aka_ 'source, spring' and Lith. _akà_ (also _âkas_) 'vent-hole in the ice on a body of water, ice-hole'. Zero-grade formations are Skt. _ká:m_ 'water' (*h2/4kWó:m, formed like *dHgHó:m 'earth') and the Polish river _Kwa_, borrowed from a pre-Slavic centum language. Old Norse _Æ´gir_, the name of a sea-god, reflects the vriddhi *h2/4e:kWjós 'possessing water' i.e. 'owning the sea'.
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It's highly doubtful all these words are actually one and the same than *akʷ-ā, whose meaning is specifically 'river', not 'water'.
> Greek _o:kús_, Skt. _a:s'ú-_ 'swift', Latin _o:cior_ 'swifter', etc. require two laryngeals before the palatal.
>
This could be another case of "laryngeal inflation". ;-)
> One suggestion is an intensive reduplication of the root of *h1ék^wo- 'horse' (i.e. 'swift' or 'running animal'), namely *h1o-h1k^u-. If this connection is rejected, the root could be in normal grade, *h1oh3k^u-.
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This connection is extremely unlikely, because 'horse' happens to be a Middle East Wanderwort relative to ungulate animals, not only horses, as in e.g. Sumerian as^e 'donkey', Kartvelian *eʃw-'pig'.
> The great difference between *h2/4akW- and *h1oh1/3k^u-
>
Leaving aside the misreprentation of "laryngeals", the only significant different is between *kʷ and *k^.
> makes it extremely implausible that they are different forms of the same root, one inherited by "standard" PIE, the other borrowed into the "standard" dialect from some other dialect of PIE. Anyone proposing such a thing has the very difficult task of identifying a large enough body of doublets in the PIE rootstock to establish the soundlaws connecting the "standard" dialect with the presumed other one. Not only must you find needles in all the haystacks on the farm, but you must also show that each needle forms a matched pair with some other needle. Not a very promising project!
>
This is a strawman argument.
> Hans Krahe regarded the language of his Old European Hydronomy (OEH) as Gemeinwestindogermanisch, and dated it to the middle of the 2nd mill. BCE. He would be shocked to learn that in some circles today, OEH is regarded as several millennia older, and more archaic than PIE itself.
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Yes, following Villar, some of these hydronyms could date back to the Mesolithic.