Syllabicity

[petegray]

Pat suggested:
> (concerning the IE words for 'father, mother, sister,
> brother, etc.) ... you may
> wish to dispute whether -*ter in these cases is *agentive* but that puts you
> in the rather dubious position of arguing that IE had, at least, **two**
> suffixes: -*ter, agentive, and -*ter, meaning unknown,

If I dare to join this debate, I offer two points:

(a) We know IE did indeed have two such suffixes, one the agentive (though I
think *-tor is better than *-ter) and the "contrastive pair" suffix, which
we find in a range of words, such as Latin alter, Greek heteros, etc, and in
the comparative -teros.   It was even suggested in the 70's that it was this
last suffix, the comparative pair, which is found in the family words.

(b) We know that the family suffix is not *-ter but *-6ter.   People have
written articles on it in JIES.

Peter