Monday, September 17, 2012

Two more corrections, pg. 26 and pg. 159

Coulter George points out two more mistakes: 

On pg. 26, fn. 17 I give the Etruscan form transcribed kacriqu as an example of the K/C/Q rule, but the attempt to illustrate the actual Etruscan alphabet is marred by the fact that the 4th letter (reading from right to left) is mistakenly a digamma instead of an iota. You can see a correct rendering of the word in question on pg. 23 of Rex Wallace's Zikh Rasna or online here http://tinyurl.com/9hpxkeg


On pg. 159 I give the preform of pessimus as *ped-tm̥mos, but on pg. 359 as *ped-ism̥mos.  So which is it? Both reconstructions have been maintained and both can be made to work, but given the comparative peiior < *ped-yos- and given the fact that superlatives are almost always derivatives of the comparative,  *ped-ism̥mos with *-is- the zero-grade of the comparative suffix is preferable. Sihler 1995:368 opts for *ped-tm̥mo- on the grounds that the -tmo- superlatives typically come in antonymic pairs and *ped-tm̥mo- would form the antonym for optimus that is otherwise missing, but it seems to me that the comparative-superlative relationship is a strongly established universal (see J. Bobaljik 2012, Universals in Comparative Morphology) whereas the antonymic pattern is a Latin specific fact, and thus I prefer to go with the reconstruction *ped-ism̥mos.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

2nd printing error, pg. 77

I don't know how this happened, but Coulter George of the University of Virginia alerts me to an error occurring in the 2nd printing that wasn't in the first!  On pg. 77 of the 2nd printing I cite Pamphylian Greek ϝεχετω 'let me bring' as a representative of the Greek cognates of Latin vehō.  This is doubly erroneous.  First, if the form existed it would, of course, be a 3rd sg. 'let him bring', but as I already noted in an earlier post (http://ohcgl.blogspot.com/2009/11/another-form-bites-dust.html) there is no such form.  There are, in fact, Greek cognates of vehō like Cypr. e-we-kse 'brought' and the nominal form (ϝ)ὄχεα 'carriage' (Hom. +). 

Another strange thing about these lines on pg. 77 is that they seem to suggest that Lat. vehitur is a deponent verb. Latin has a perfectly good active vehō 'I convey' (Plaut. +) that is the exact match for the active forms cited from the other Indo-European languages. Vehitur is only noteworthy in that it is semantically a tiny bit unexpected.