Reconstruction talk:Proto-Uralic/sëne

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Latest comment: 7 years ago by Florian Blaschke
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Do the forms with t- regularly correspond to Proto-Uralic *s-? I am asking, because according to Abaev Khanty tan “sinew” is probably borrowed from the Iranian ancestor of Ossetian тӕн (tæn), тӕнӕ (tænæ, string), ultimately from PIE *ten-. --Vahag (talk) 21:00, 30 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

*s > *t is regular in Mansi, Southern Khanty and Samoyedic, yes. The Southern Khanty form of this lexeme though is /ton/ (with regular *a > o), and other dialects have initial /ɬ ~ l ~ j/, so there is no form tan here at all. But I guess it's possible that Khanty has both an inherited word *ɬan 'vein, sinew' and a nearly homophonous loanword *tan 'sinew'? I can check what Steinitz' megadictionary of the Khanty dialects has to say. --Tropylium (talk) 23:06, 30 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
Steinitz, page 768b, has the forms θan, ton, tɔn. Additionally, Castrén 1858, page 120b, has Surgut dialect tân, with a weird-looking t. Since the t- can be explained by inner-Uralic development and since the meanings are different – “sinew” and “vein” in Uralic, “string” in Iranian – I am now convinced that Abaev is wrong. He himself remarks that the word is absent from Korenchy, Iranische Lehnwörrter in den obugrischen Sprachen, Budapest, 1972. --Vahag (talk) 08:40, 31 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
I would guess Castren's "weird-looking t" might be (U+A749 LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH HIGH STROKE), which I've seen a couple older authors use for transcribing Khanty /ɬ/. --Tropylium (talk) 15:13, 31 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
Not really. See the weird t here, s.v. Sehne. --Vahag (talk) 16:05, 31 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
Clearly used to transcribe /ɬ/, see § 18, p. 6. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:21, 16 June 2016 (UTC)Reply