In Greek mythology, Hēméra was the primeval goddness of the day. From this word and Armenian awr 'day', Indo-Europeanists such as Mallory-Adams1 reconstruct an IE protoform *h2ēm-ər- 'heat (of the day)', which I link to Semitic *ħamm- 'to be hot; warm'2, with the voiceless pharyngeal fricative ħ corresponding to the "laryngeal" h2.
The IE protoform belongs to what I call "IE B"3, corresponding to the "IE A" protoform *səm-/*səm-ro- 'summer'4, whose initial s- is a consequence of the sound shift I call Fournet's Law, by which a post-velar fricative becames fronted to an alveolar articulation point.
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1 J.P. Mallory & Q.D. Adams (2006): The Oxford Introduction to PIE and the PIE World.
2 Also cognate are Hurrian am- 'to burn' and (possibly through an Etruscan intermediate) Latin amāre 'to love', amor 'love'.
2 Also cognate are Hurrian am- 'to burn' and (possibly through an Etruscan intermediate) Latin amāre 'to love', amor 'love'.
3 Mostly represented in Eastern languages, mainly Greek-Armenian and Indo-Iranian, but occasionally also Celtic.
4 The ablaut form *sem- usually quoted in dictionaries isn't attested anywhere.
This hypothetical Fournet's Law you are speaking about, is not found at all in Tyrrhenian,
ReplyDeleteI didn't say otherwise.
and it is very dubious it even existed elsewhere. You are continuing to speak about this item? Well, you have to provide a complete list of roots. The few I saw in the Yahoo list seem to be all but convincing.
Apart from the above example, there a few more:
*seh2l- 'salt' ~ NEC *q’eɦlV (~ -ɫ-) 'bitter' (here we need an intermediate language where the initial stop became a fricative *χ)
*sap- 'thorn' (Hittite sapi-kkusta, sepi-kkusta 'needle', Gaulish *sapo- 'fir', Welsh syb-wydd 'pine', Germanic *saf- 'reed') ~ Latin abi-ēs 'fir tree' ~ Altaic *sjó:phì 'thorn, thorny bush'
*sel- 'dwelling, settlement' (Russian seló 'village', Latin solum 'ground, floor') ~ Kartvelian *xl- 'to dwell, to live'
Don't forget also the Latin doublet sorbus ~ arbutus.
Besides these cases there're also the ones where s- arises from a former palatal, but in these cases we've got *y- as the counterpart:
ReplyDelete*sa(n)k- 'to sanctify' (Latin sacer, sanctus) ~ *yag´- 'to honour, to worship' (Greek hágios)
*sem- 'one' ~ *yem- 'twin'
*seh2-n- 'healthy' (Latin sānus) ~ *yak- 'to cure' (Greek ákos)
It looks like Fournet's Law corresponds to an older IE layer/proto-language than the one where the initial is lost.