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13.2.16.23:56: EGG-XPLANATION

In "(X)egg", I asked,

Also, why does Spanish huevo have an h- absent from Latin ovum and its other descendants (e.g., Portuguese ovo, French oeuf, and Italian uovo)?

David Boxenhorn sent me a link to the answer:

The letter H is always mute [in Spanish]. It is written [...] orthographically [but not etymologically] in initial hue- (in the traditional graphic there was not distinction between U and V and writing without initial h- could suggest the reading ve-), cf.:

hueso (<= L. ossum) bone, huevo (<= L. ovum) egg;

So h was a consonant letter that indicated the absence of a consonant phoneme (i.e., /v/).

龚勋 Gong Xun independently sent me the same solution and reminded me about how Spanish hu- stands for /w/: e.g., in Nahuatl [ˈnaːwatɬ] (in Nahuatl pronunciation).

All this made me realize why French huit 'eight' has a nonetymological h-. Wiktionary confirmed my guess:

From Old French uit, from Latin octō, the h was added to avoid confusion with vit.

But I still don't understand what's going on with 'egg' in Iranian:

Indo-Iranian: *āwya-(ka-)*

Indic: Sanskrit vi- 'bird'

Iranian (no Proto-Iranian form at Wiktionary)

West Iranian:

h- (Baluchi, Kurdish, Zazaki)

x- (Persian)

East Iranian:

Ø- (Avestan, Khotanese, Ossetic)

h- (Pashto)

x- (Yaghnobi)

y- (Khwarezmian; y- was added "irregularly" to initial ā- according to Henning 1977: 489)

Did some dialect(s) of Proto-Iranian develop an initial x/h-?

*2.17.4:51: I don't know how *-ka- can be reconstructed at the Proto-Indo-Iranian level since Sanskrit vi- 'bird' doesn't contain the suffix -ka-. Is there an Indic reflex of *āwya-ka- that I don't know? Or is *āwya-(ka-) a Proto-Iranian rather than a Proto-Indo-Iranian reconstruction?


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