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I came across the word "tephra" here: Barren Island, Andaman Islands, IndiaQuote:
dense clusters of incandescent tephra of various sizes were ejected from the crater
my dictionary gave me this:
Quote:
tephra |'tefr?| noun
Geology
rock fragments and particles ejected by a volcanic eruption.
ORIGIN 1940s: from Greek, literally ‘ash, ashes.’
I thought, cool, neat word. further digging (via OneLook, et. al.) got me to M-W, and this:
Quote:
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek, ashes; akin to Sanskrit dahati it burns -- more at FOMENT
my question (are you still with me?  ) is this:
how do tephra and dahati relate? not to mention foment? those three words seem so far apart in spelling, that I can see no link.
(sorry, I can't get the schwa to show in the pronunciation...)
formerly known as etaoin...
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When faced with questions like that I always turn to the AHD first. Not a complete answer but the PIE root is dhegwh. If you had trouble with the schwa try that superscript w.
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> PIE root well, that helps some, thanks, though how does one pronounce "dh"? and yeah, superscript w. AHD cheats and uses little gifs... 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Pooh-Bah
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Is "dense clusters of tephra ejected from the crater" not redundent?
Just wonern'.
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ooh, good catch, insel.
(musta had your heat-resistant gloves on.)
formerly known as etaoin...
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/dh/ was thought to be an aspirated voiced dental stop, but then some phonologists (e.g., the late Peter Ladefoged) suggest that aspirated voiced stops are really murmured or breathy voice. Your best bet is to find an Indian who speaks Hindi (or one of the other IE northern languages of India) and have them pronounce words, like dharma with the sound in it. The reconstructed PIE phoneme also had some labial feature, hence the little superscript w. There are current controversies on the exact distinctive features of PIE phoneme inventory. The glottalic theory has the traditional (i.e., Neo-Grammmarian) four-way stop series (a la Sanskrit, i.e., p, ph, b, bh) replaced with a series borrowed from the Kartvelian linguistic family (i.e., Georgian, Abkhardian, et al., with glottalized ingressive stops). NB: the Indo-Iranian languages of India and Pakistan differentiate between dental and retroflex stops. What English grammarians call a dental stop in English is really a alveolar stop, which is closer in sound, and usually transcribed by Indians in loanwords by their retroflex series. The difference is that the tongue touches the teeth in a true dental stop (as the French and other continental Europeans pronounce things), in English the tongue touches the alveolar ridge behind the teeth, and in retroflex, the tongue is curled up and touches the palate immediately behind the alveolar ridge.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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thanks, z. there's a lot to digest there, but it's starting to make some sense. (I think.)
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