Re: another language reconstruction question

On Thu, 31 Oct 2002 07:01:09 -0500 Muke Tever <mktvr@...> writes:
> If you reconstructed a word like *ataraSii or *kaeru you could
> recognize it
> wasn't normal PIE word by the phonology (/S/, vowels in hiatus...)
> If you
> reconstructed a word like *wahine (sg.), *wa:hine (pl.), you know
> it's not
> normal PIE by the morphology (PIE didn't form plurals that way).
> But in general
> you wouldn't find words like this, because the languages that were
> displaced
> don't survive, and all the evidence of them is seen through their
> being
> assimilated by PIE.  There _are_ words that PIE and its dialects
> borrowed that
> are generally identified as being loanwords either by their strange
> forms or on
> other evidence:  words like *abel- ("apple", strange for having *b,
> thought to
> be from a European lang) or *septm= ("seven", oddly shaped
> altogether, thought to be from Semitic).
>     *Muke!
-

|*septm=| from Semitic?  I can see how |sep| could be related to ||SB|| -
but how do you get |tm=| from /3/ (voiced pharyngeal
fricative/approximant)?


-Stephen (Steg)
 "keil mevaser mevaser vieimer."

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