Greek question (night?)
Jim Rader
jrader at m-w.com
Mon Mar 15 10:40:16 UTC 1999
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 ]
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