Funny W. More cold water.

[Rory M Larson]

> I haven't checked to see if the "oral" restriction is real.  Seems
strange to me that it would be, but it's up to the evidence.  Altho' it
might well be that you'd get /m/ and /n/ in the more nasal environment on a
regular basis.

That was my line of thought too, assuming the "oral" restriction is real.


>> [...] unless we can also estimate just what the hypothetical prefixes
and initials were.

> wa- 'absolutive'

> wi- 'absolutive' for many animates

> wa- '1st sg. actor'

> As I've said before, those would be my guesses.

Then we'd also need the reactive initial(s).


>  All three have tended to undergo syncope.

Yielding a stop, such as p ?  Or do other values occur after the syncope?


>  *R is the second member of a *w-r cluster in many cases.

Is this *w-r cluster leading to *wR actually attested as such, or do we
only have cases where the *w has developed full oral closure, as in Dakotan
blo/bdo/mdo situations?


>  Other instances aren't so clear, e.g., the doublet demonstratives, *re:
and *Re:.  I suppose some sort of reduplication might have been involved in
Re:, but that's speculation.

I like the idea of reduplication.  Given the rather parallel nature of *W
and *R, could both of them have arisen from syncope of *w- and *r- prefixes
against an initial of the same type?  I.e., *w-w > *W, *r-r > *R ?

Rory
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