me wrote:
> Nath Rao wrote:
> > M. Ranjit Mathews wrote:
> >> The standard derivation from PIE is that the Iranian p and Indic v
both
> >> came from PIE /qu/; in the case of the word for horse, PIE /equos/ ->
> >> Indic as'vaH.. Since /qu/ is a phoneme, [...]
> >
> > This has me really confused. The usual reconstruction for the horse
> > word is *h1ek'uo-, with a "palato-velar" (so that we get s' in
Sanskrit
> > and s in Iranian).
>
> So, what would the singular accusative have been in PIE? h1ek'wom?
Yes, that's correct. (Have you seen the Indo-European fable, "Hek'wos
owis kwe"?)
> > If by /qu/ you mean a labio-velar (which is what
> > you "single phoneme" suggests), /equos/ would end up being ?aka-
> > in Sanskrit. [Labio-velars and velars merged in Indo-Iranian,
> > and do not lead to any v or p.]
>
> Ah! Thanks. I didn't read in a single source that it was equos with a
single
> phoneme /qu/. I read (1) in one source that the PIE word had been equos
and
> read (2) in another source that PIE had labio-velar phonemes. Putting
(1)
> and (2) together, wrongly as you make apparent, I presumed that the qu
in
> equos was a single labio-velar phoneme.
Indo-European seems to have contrasted a set of single-phoneme
labiovelars with a sequence of velar stop + labial consonant. That is,
/kw/ (where that w is superscipt) contrasted with /k-w/. The word for
'horse' had the sequence, *H1ek'wos; in Latin, the sequence merged with
the single phoneme, giving equus.
Neeraj Mathur
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