Anatolian /-ant/

[iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu]

On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> I don't happen to think that parna- is necessarily non-IE.  In
> Hittite it's an irregular noun (pir < *perr < *pern, parnas <
> *porn-os), which doesn't fit the loanword theory too well.  And
> the only external source I've ever seen mentioned is Egyptian
> <pr> which doesn't seem appropriate either geographically or
> phonetically (no -n in Egyptian, and Eg. /r/ < *l.  Why not pick
> on Grk. <polis>?)

	Because theres is also Hurrian "purni".  Perhaps the observed
instability in vowels comes from different ways of rendering (or
phonologizing) a syllabic /r/.

> >	But the main thing is that there is no sound-sequence in Anatolian
> >which we would expect to be borrowed into Greek as /-nth-/.

> Whether Hittite <nt> was /ntt/ (/nt/) or /nt/ (/nd/) is not
> recoverable in any way from the orthography.  Maybe Lycian and
> Lydian spellings a millennium later show /nd/ (is that what
> Palmer is going on?), but that doesn't prove much about the
> situation as it was when pre-Greek borrowed these words from some
> Anatolian-like language spoken in Greece.

	Since we are both saying that the Anatolian form was in /nt/, not
/nd/, I do not see why you care about whether a later change of /nt/ ->
/nd/ is posited to account for Palmer/Kretschmer's Mystery Evidence.
	Note that "huakinth-" is yet another word where an Anatolian
voicless plosive was borrowed into Greek as a voiceless plosive _without_
aspiration.  We've got three of those now, without any serious digging.
So why should /t/ after /n/, where even in a language that did have
aspiration this would be lessened or absent, be borrowed as /th/?
	It is also true that the /-ant/ suffix has /a/, not /o/, so the
same sort of question arises:  why would the Greeks not borrow /a/ as /a/?
The obvious answer here is that the borrowing predates the change of /o/
to /a/ in Anatolian, but is there any other reason to date this change so
late, and are there no reasons not to date it earlier?  Falling together
of /a/ and /o/ is not exactly rare in PIE-to-IE (occurring in about half
the family), and is generally considered (as far as I know) quite ancient
where it occurs.
	Finally, is this /-ant/ thing securely established for PIE?  It
does not seem so, on the basis of one or two stray forms in Slavic and
Tocharian, which might be from something else.  Welsh and Gothic have
plurals in /-n-/ that come from things entirely different.  For a pre-IE
derivational suffix to be borrowed would not be that odd, where many
pre-IE words were borrowed.  Compare how English has in effect borrowed
many Latin (and some Greek) derivational suffixes merely as a side-effect
of borrowing lots of Latin and Greek words. More to the point, American
English might be said to have borrowed German /-burg/ as a toponymic
suffix, merely by having a lot of toponyms in /-burg/.  Any American
would recognixe any "X-burg" as a toponym.

					DLW

[ Moderator's comment:
  Isn't this last Anglo-Saxon rather than a German borrowing?  Cf. Edinburg
  (a calque on Dunedin).
  --rma ]