the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Eduard Selleslagh" <edsel at glo.be> wrote:

>What I meant was this (I'm sorry for having been so elliptic), and you may
>agree or not: *kwekwlo (or *kwekulo) looks to me like a reduplicated form,
>probably inspired by the reconstruction from Grk. kyklos. Indeed, it is the
>logical thing to assume if you try to reconstruct from Germanic (Eng. wheel,
>or Du. wiel < hwi:l- < *kwelo)

Only ON hwel < *kwelo-.  The English and Dutch vowels can only
derive from *ew.  The development was: *kwekwlo- > *hwegwlo ~
*hweGwlo > *hwewlo > { OE hwe:ol > wheel | ODu. *hwi at l > wiel }.

Curiously, the loss of -g- here is only semi-regular (or we
wouldn't have OE hweogul), which makes me wonder why Szemere'nyi,
in his "Introduction", chose this example to illustrate the
regularity of sound laws in general (2.1. "... To give an extreme
but by no means untypical example: the correspondence between
Eng. wheel, Gr, kuklos, and OInd cakra-, despite appearances to
the contrary, is exact to a hair (as we shall see later,
4.7.5.1)."  Cakra is exact to hair from *kwekwlo-, but the Greek
word too is only semi-regular (regular would have been **teklos,
would it not?).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl