Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/ātr-

ok, but why did you deleted Appendix:Proto-Indo-European/ātr- ? why didn't you just moved it? I worked really hard on it.

We often get people adding incorrect or outdated etymological information to Wiktionary, so we tend to be rather cautious about anything that seems less than legit. I can restore and move the page if you tell me what it should be called according to modern Indo-European linguistics.

Modern Indo-European linguistics has at least 5 different designations of which *atr- or *ater- (both with a long -a-) are the most cited ones. You can choose one of them. In any case, it would be nice if you could restore it at least to my sandbox.

I've placed it at User:1Albin2/ātr-. My main objection to this reconstruction is the long ā, since linguists are pretty confident nowadays that there was no such thing in Indo-European. Another point is that words almost always started with a consonant.

Thank you. I'll have an eye on this subject, even though I think, as long as Indo-Europeanists and other linguists use the long ā in their books, journals and papers, we ain't able to create any entry for PIE in the future, except we use *Hʷet-, *Hʷet˖r-, or *hₓehₓtr- with no defined/fixed meaning for "fire". What do you think about *hₓehₓtr- actually, does it fit?

I don't really know what the x's mean though. Do they indicate that the laryngeal is unknown? And Hʷ is another thing I've never seen before.

Yes, they indicate that the laryngeal is unknown. Some authors tried to solve it with labialization ʷ, but I have also never seen it in the combination with Hʷ before, except for labialized voiceless pharyngeal fricative ħʷ in the Abkhaz language, labialized voiceless glottal fricative hʷ in Akan, Tlingit and Tsakhur languages, and labialized voiceless velar fricative xʷ. The latter one seem to be the source for Iranian Avestan ătarš (-> Labialization#Fricatives). It's a very soft w coming from the throat being combined with the vocals a or o/u. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for now I prefer *hₓehₓtr-, since Serbo-Croatian vātra, Romanian vatră, and Albanian votre can be only explained by Hʷ/hₓ. This would make sense since all three vātra/vatră/votre are thought to have an Iranian Avestan origin. If you are not fine with *hₓehₓtr-, we can also use either *ăt(e)r- (from IEW: 69) or *ăter- (from Wat: 4). They use ă instead of the long ā.

The difficulty is that *HeHtr- (we use H for unknown laryngeals on Wiktionary; see WT:AINE) does not explain the occurrence of -a- in the modern languages. Slavic *a reflects an earlier Balto-Slavic *ā or *ō (and *jē, but that's not relevant here). So what we can say for sure is that the laryngeals were not both h1. I can't say anything for Albanian, and I don't know if the Romanian word is a Slavic loan or a Latin inheritance.

I understand. Can we use *ăt(e)r-/*ăter- or *h₁eh₂ter-/*eh₂ter- for the entry instead, and explain the lemma we have discussed here in the etym. section? For Albanian there are 3 theories: Paleo-Balkanic, Avestan, and Dacian.

But we don't know for sure that the laryngeals were h1 and h2, do we?

True, true.. nonetheless I found reconstructions without laryngeals:

1. PIE *HeHt(e)r- ‘fire’ (Pok. 69) - http://ieed.ullet.net/alb.html <- Alb. votër is here considered < Latin
2. PIE *HeHt- 'fire' - Peter Schrijver: The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Latin. 1991: 54.

Um... I'm not sure what you're looking at, but I see two laryngeals in each reconstruction there.

Pardon, I meant laryngeal specifications. Is it a requirement for an entry?

No. But it would still be good to mention that the laryngeals aren't entirely specified, but that one of them is either h2 or h3.

As mentioned by Benjamin W. Fortson the cover symbol H is used for a laryngeal that cannot or need not be specified, so we can surely use *HeHt(e)r- or *HeHt- for the entry. However, we've 2 other options which can work:

1. *h₂eh₁ter- ("fireplace") - (https://www.academia.edu/16690811/2000_PIE_roots_summary_The_Source_Code_2.4_-_Excel)
2. *hₓehₓtr- ("fire", in *hₓehₓt- at least one laryngeal was h₂ (> *h₂ehₓtr-), perhaps both - p.202) - (https://books.google.com/books?id=tzU3RIV2BWIC) | Michael A. Cahill also lists *hₓehₓtr-.

However Schrijver argues that:

1. "Since it is unlikely that all these forms contain an unmotivated lengthened grade root *h₂et-, a reconstruction *HeHt- is attractive." - (https://books.google.com/books?id=0lNfAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=*HeHt%28e%29r-)
2. ătrōx, āter, and ātarš contain the zero grade of the root *HeHt-. - (http://institucional.us.es/revistas/habis/38/10%20zavaroni.pdf)

The specific origins of Etr. *atr-, Lat. āter/ātro-/ătrōx, Alb. votrë/votër, OIr. áith, Slav. vatra, and Av. ātarš can be then mentioned in the Etymology section. It looks like that even Baltic forms exist. According to this paper, *H3 is the standard symbol for *Hʷ. What does this mean acutally for *Hʷet-, *Hʷet˖r-?

We use lower-case h when we know which laryngeal it is, and upper-case H when we don't (h₁, h₂ and h₃, vs. H). It's inconsistent to mix an upper-case form like Hʷ with lower-case forms like hₓ: the paper you linked to seems to consistently use upper case for everything, so case doesn't mean anything in that context, and doesn't have to be followed. As for the *Hʷ notation itself, the problem is that it makes it look like it could be any laryngeal, but with rounding added, rather than a specific unknown sound that has the property of sometimes causing adjacent vowels to become rounded. I would convert your to notation to ours like this:

• hₓ = H
• Hʷ = h₃

Thus, *Hʷet- would be our h₃et-

Thank you for this introduction. So which reconstruction would you most prefer then? *h₂eh₁ter-, *h₂eh₂ter-, *h₂eHtr-, *HeHtr-, *HeHt(e)r-, *Hḕt-, *h₃et˖r- or *h₃et-?

I'm more familiar with the conventions used by our PIE entries than I am with the intricacies of laryngeal theory itself. I'll let CodeCat answer that