H1 and t??

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>

>"Eduard Selleslagh" <edsel at glo.be> wrote:

>>In the case of Eng. 'you', I think you're digging too deep, even though your
>>statement is correct.  But the 'y' is almost certainly derived from a 'g',
>>just like in Dutch: modern 'jij' (acc. 'jou') (j=y) for 2 p. sg. stems from
>>'gij', the old 2 p. pl., still in use in Flanders for both sg. and pl..
>>Another parallel Dutch - English: Middle Dutch 'g(h)eluw' > Du. 'geel', but
>>Eng. 'yellow'. The same applies to the 'y' of  'yard' (Du. 'boom-gaard' =
>>'orchard', i.e. 'tree-yard').

>You're not digging deep enough.  Not only do we have Gothic ju:s,
>we also have Skt. yu:yam, Gath. yu:s^, Lith./Latv. ju:s.  Dutch
>g- is here a case of j- > g-.

[Ed Selleslagh]
Supposing you are right (I have an open mind on this), why would it have
reverted to j (y) in Holland
Dutch in some rare cases, but not in most? (there was already a beginning of
discussion about the possibility of this inverse evolution on this list)
Given this, and the dialectical shift g > j in a number of German dialects,
I keep wondering, notwithstanding 'common knowledge' as cited by Glen Gordon
: "Look, Indo-European *y- = Old
English y-. It's very well known and accepted that IE *yus begets the
English "you", "ye", etc. as well as Dutch "jij/gij". The reason why
we say it's *y- is because of languages like Sanskrit". It looks more like
*y > g > y in Dutch, and therefore _maybe_ also in English; in that case,
Sanskrit would be irrelevant.  The fact that there is no trace of that in OE
might be due to its earlier evolution (Dutch is pretty archaeic -  but not
conservative, btw). Anyway, the y of 'yard' stems almost certainly from the
g of 'gard-', imho.

Sorry for offending the specialists.

Ed.