Greek question (night?)

[Jim Rader]

Some wild stabs in the dark, so to speak, here.  Am I the only one
who would be too embarrassed to post guesses without looking in the
standard handbooks of historical phonology for Slavic or Celtic?

At any rate, Polish <noc> and all the cognate words for "night" in
Slavic show regular development of <-kti(:)->.  There is no dropping of
<t>.  Welsh <nos> is the outcome of a derivative, <*nokt-stu->,
according to Pedersen.  The regular outcome of intervocalic <-kt-> in
Welsh is <-th->, a voiceless interdental fricative.  The base <nokt->
shows up regularly  in Welsh in the word <neithiwr> "last night."
The outcome of <-kt-> in Irish is <-cht->, which shows up in Old
Irish <innocht> "tonight," Modern Irish <anocht>.

Jim Rader

> In a message dated 3/13/99 7:41:51 AM, you wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

> So, if I understand correctly, the nominative sing form in Latin and Greek
> reflect the dropping of the -t due to the internal rules of those languages
> regarding "the inventory of phonemes which appear word-finally."  Does this
> also account for the loss of the -t in Welsh and Polish for example?  Does
> Celtic prohibit the ending of a word in /t/?  Can any of these t-less
> nominatives be explained as a borrowing?  Does that make any sense?

> Regards,
> Steve Long

>[ Moderator's response:
>  For Polish and Welsh, presumably so; I am not versed in the histories or the
>  synchronic phonologies of those languages.  Word-final *-t > Proto-Celtic
>  *-d if I remember correctly, but the *t in the word for "night" is not
>  word-final in PIE.  And why should we bother with borrowing when there are
>  perfectly good explanations for the forms encountered that do not require an
>  outside influence?
>   --rma ]