Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt

[Yoel L. Arbeitman]

At 11:52 PM 3/9/99 -0600, you wrote:
>Dear Miguel and IEists:

> -----Original Message-----
>From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
>Date: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 10:40 PM

>>mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote:
><snip>

>>But I must agree with Rich's "moderator comment" elsewhere that
>>in this case the spelling <ku> may reflect all of PIE *kw, *gw or
>>*ghw [*gwh if you prefer].  After all, if the etymon were *kw,
>>the geminate spelling should not be <kk> but <kwkw>, and there is
>>no way of writing that in cuneiform (nor in ASCII, as the
>>recurrent confusions about labiovelars show).

	The question of what was the form of Hittite and Anatolian "drink" has
progressed greatly since Sturtevant's time. In 1980 Morpurgo-Davies showed
that the cognate in Hieroglyphic Luwian was /u:/ and since *gw disappears
in HL, but *kw does not, the problem is solved. Proto-Anatolian had the
verb *e/agw-, known so well in that famed sentence deciphered by Hrozny' nu
NINDA adanzi nu watar akwanzi "And they eat bread and they drink water" .
It was long thought that here was the cognate, as a verb, of Latin aqua
"water". But now it is certain that the iterative-durative form cited
represents /akw=skizzi/ with regressive voice assimilation. And, long
before the 1980 discovery W. Winter proposed the cognation of Latin ebrius
"drunk"/ sobrius "sober"  (with -b- < *-gwh-) as well as Greek ne:phalos
"sober" with -ph- < only *-gwh-. Thus, far from being cognate with Latin
aqua, Anatolian *a/egw- is cognate with Latin ebrius "drunk", Gk. ne:phalos
"sober" and the long ago proposed Tocharian yok- "to drink". All argument
has been closed by the Hiero. Luw. verb which is reduced to a mere /u:/ and
is not open to argument.

YOEL

>This is interesting speculation but not borne out by the data. See
>Sturtevant p. 56:

>durative of 'drink' = ak-k{.}u-uS-ki-iz-zi; however the basic form is
>written with one -k- upon which S. remarks: "The consistent use of single k
>between vowels in the primary verb is difficult, but note -kk- in the
>durative".

>Pat