*gwh in Gmc.

[proto-language]

Dear Miguel and IEists:

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" <mcv at wxs.nl>
Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2001 10:34 AM

> On Tue, 06 Feb 2001 11:46:25 +0100, "Hans-Werner Hatting"
> <hwhatting at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >MCV wrote:
<snip>

> My proposal makes the most sense within a wider context where _all_
> (pre-)PIE consonants had labialized (and palatalized) variants.  This
> would be comparable to the developments that can be seen later in Old
> Irish (3-way split between "slender", "broad" and "u-coloured"
> consonants) or in Tocharian.  The Tocharian case (where *i, *u and *e
> merged as *@ (*a"), or rather: *e > *@, *i > *(y)@, *u > *(w)@) is
> especially interesting, given the lack of *i and *u in PIE
> [full-grade] root structure (so maybe **CiC > *C(y)eC, **CuC >
> *C(w)eC).  As was the case in Old Irish and pre-Tocharian, such a
> system with a 3-way opposition was inherently unstable, and was
> eventually resolved leaving a number of irregularities.

<snip>

I am so glad to see that someone agrees with my suggestion of a Pontic stage of
development, during which Nostratic transferred the semantic load carried by
vowel quality into consonantal glides (no glide for /a/), and substituted a
Grundvokal for former /e/, /a/, and /o/.

In terms of this discussion, however, I would like to remark that IE g(^)w and
k(^)w seem to me to derive from Nostratic dorsal fricatives (/G/, /x/) rather
than from retained velarized dorsal stops.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
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