Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Glen and IEists:

-----Original Message-----
From: Glen Gordon <glengordon01 at hotmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, March 03, 1999 11:42 PM

<snip>

>...but IE laws must be obeyed first and foremost. Odd reconstructions
>with a voiced aspirate must first be fully supportable internally within
>the IE data before pulling Nostratic into this.

I think you are a little behind the discussion. I know of no one, including
myself, who is suggesting *nekhw-.

Alexis and I have suggested *negh-w-(to-).

>If we maintain the traditional IE reconstruction of the sort *nekwt,
>this may not necessarily disobey any Nostratic sound correspondances. It
>all depends on what external cognates you bring into the ante.

It is not necessary to being Nostratic cognates into the discussion to
suggest negh- rather than nek-. Hittite nekuz should be good evidence for
negh- unless you want to maintain that Sturtevant incorrectly assumed that
voiceless consonants were intervocalically indicated by doubling. If it was
nek, it should be Hittite **nekkuz.

>I've seen
>Bomhard's *nitl- for instance which I personally would re-reconstruct as
>Nostratic *nukw (with trailing labiovelar). I have a hard time accepting
>something that evolves so strangely as *tl seems to, in context with the
>fact that more straightforward sound correspondances seem to still offer
>difficulty in this budding Nostratic field. What's more, the scantily
>attested *tl can evolve into a plethora of different ways and makes it
>too easy for anyone to say anything about the etymology especially since
>this phoneme doesn't seem to survive in any reconstructed Nostratic
>daughter language, let alone a written one.

I disagree with Bomhard's [tl] also.

>As Nostraticists seem to accept for the most part, a form like *nukw
>would uneventfully become IE *nekw- as indeed we have in *nekwt with
>additional neuter ending. Perhaps, the form exists in Uralic of the form
>*nuk- although all I have seen is Finnish nukkua.

[ moderator snip ]

>I think IS or Dogolpolsky had a similar reconstructed item, one with an
>Altaic language with */negu"/? I'll have to verify my info.

>Note: Under Bomhard's *nitl, there is a Dravidian cognate *nik- that
>would, if valid, seem to show a vowel shift of *u > *i like the one I
>mentioned for the pronouns (cf. Nostratic *?u > *i-n > ya:n/yan-).

What *nik- would indicate is that Nostratic *negh-w- did not pass the -w-
into the preceding syllable. [e] to [i] would be a simple raising of the
front vowel, a much commoner and likelier change.

>Sorry, Dr. Krisnamurti, Dravidian may have laryngeals (ie yaHn) but I am
>still not sure that they can explain every instance of long vowel.

>At any rate, back to IE, IE *nekwt could come from earlier *nukw with no
>insult to Nostraticists and yet no odd comparisons with Egyptian and
>other unlike languages.

*nukw in what language. If IE, it could only be *nekw or *nokw. [u] is not
part of the apophonic variations.

>A labial MUST be posited for both IE AND Nostratic (if we are to include IE
>*nekwt in a Nostratic cognate series). Even when positing a form with *gh, we
>still can't hide from the labial and in Nostratic terms, this means a labial
>must be posited in some way (in my case, a velar labialized by preceding *u
>which evolved to *e in IE but left behind the labial quality).

A rather farfetched development.

Pat