Re: "Father" in 3B (was Re: Speaking of books... (and a spot of 3B))

----- Original Message -----
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...>

> So I wasn't totally off in assuming that the _v_ of _'xvyse_
> to _*p_! :-)
Indeed not. It's just a bit messy, is all, and subject to further
change in line with the actual
sound changes in Persian, Slavic and Turkic. Right now, I'm just going
for something that "feels"
right, with the intent of tuning it as more information arrives.

> Might you treat me to the reason why you think H2 was [?\],
> and what, then, are h1 and h3? I may have asked before, but
> in that case don't remember the answer.
It seems you've a newer (or different) set of data from Beekes than I.
He reconstructs
/?/, /?\/, /?\^w/ respectively in the book of his I've got, which
method I think is mentioned in the
AHD appendix, and is presented as one of several leading theories on
Wikipedia (which we all know is
NEVER wrong!!! ;-)

> My own rather bland
> hypothesis is h1 = /h/ h2 = /G/ and h3 = /G_w/.
Their nature to me strongly suggests their association with k^, k, kw,
rather than their being a
separate series on their own. There are a number of ways that could
actually have been phonetically
instantiated, though, and something including /G/ and /G^w/ is clearly
plausible.

> Mind you I'm
> not fixed on the allophones at all, there might well have
> been pharyngeal and/or uvular allophones, h1, or some
> instances of it, might earlier have been [x] or [?], but at
> a certain point Ch2 was able to give C_h but Ch1 wasn't.
I only discovered the h1_1, h1_2, h2, h3 theory recently. It's
intriguing from a Pre-PIE standpoint,
but outside the scope of this project.

> I
> even have a hunch there might have been a whole set / ? h x
> x_w G G_w/ but some of the distinctions were lost
> everywhere, and some of them may have merged with phonemes
> outside this group: *x_w > *[W] > *w.
Very interesting indeed, but again it seems to be of primarily Pre-PIE
interest. Any idea whether
that integrates better or worse with Proto-Uralic and/or Nostratic,
Eurasiatic, and kin?

> Note that none of
> these necessarily corresponds to the h4 of Beekes et alii!
As noted, *my* Beekes uses a traditional 3-laryngeal set. I do have a
book by ... *mumble* the
author's name escapes me ... that lists a startlingly large set of
both vowels and laryngeals for
PIE, IIRC 11 and "four or more" respectively. Trouble is, the rest of
the book is decently useful, so
I can't just dismiss the claims out of hand.

> I'm a non-believer in epenthtic vowels, so at some point all
> the H's in Greek need to have been something that could
> actually become a vowel. I'm hard put to believe in any
> synchronic system, except a very ephemeral one, having even
> allophonic aspiration but lacking /h/, and h1 seems to me
> the best candidate. H- dropping varieties of English may be
> a counter-example, but even they have a faculative [h] in
> every V-initial word, which even looks like a likely
> situation for late PIE. The history of French illustrates
> that [?], [h] and [@] may in fact all be allophones of a
> single phoneme.
You just said a bunch of stuff that I mostly have no data on.

> Last but not least may you treat us to the etymology of
> _zörse?i_? Is it related to _*dyaus ph2ter_ at all save in
> meaning? (not that I can't see _*dy_ > _z_, but I can't see
> _xvyse_ in there!)
/z2rseNi/ is a compound of PIE *dieus and PTurk *teNir/*teNri (which I
suspect may have some vague
relationship with Sumerian diNir, but that's a flamewar for another
day...), with the "teNir" >
"seNi" element serving as something of a personal name, and the
"dieus" > "z2r" element being more of
a determinative. More or less. Who can really say for sure how proper
nouns get mishandled over the
centuries?

> And what's the matter with your
> Arabization? It seems to begin in Waaw...
It's a mess. My PC at home seems determined to display Arabic LTR, in
Isolated forms only (within the
character picker), though it looked right (RTL and joined) in Opera.
There's a very real chance that
I made several tupos, as well, and my very poor Arabic reading skillz
failed me. The Arabization
needs about 5000 hours of research followed by at least as much
planning, neither of which has really
even been started.





Paul