Reconstruction talk:Proto-Indo-European/upó

About the (s) problem

Is there any proof that it's definitively *upó and not instead *(s)upó? Blahhmosh (talk) 18:49, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Or to put it another way, is there any evidence for mobile s at PIE level? The only branch that clearly has /s/ is Italic. Greek is no evidence either way as initial upsilon always has /h/. Outside Italic there's only the Tocharian B spe (“nearby”). Is this reasonably known to be related? (Okay, a root that gives rise to "under" and "over" could also give "near".) --Hiztegilari (talk) 16:29, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, Latin sub + abl. can mean ‘at the feet of’ and sub + acc. can mean ‘approaching near to’.

S mobile was probably a thing that happened randomly to a huge number of PIE words beginning with an s or a vowel. Even a single example (Latin, possibly Tocharian) is surely not bad evidence of it happening to a given word, since we might expect basically every PIE word starting like that to have been messed up in that manner by a few speakers here and there over the millennia even when all the surviving reflexes coincide in starting with either an s or a vowel. Correctrix (talk) 16:46, 1 October 2024 (UTC)