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Beekes says a sibilant was inserted between two dental stops in PIE, therefore *-tt-, *-dt- > *-tst- and *-d(h)d(h)- > *-d(h)zd(h)- and the cluster is "retained as such in Hittite." Whereas Hittite seems to have cluster -dst-: PIE *h1éd-t(o) ‘he ate’ > Hitt. ezzasta /edsta/. I am wondering why the reflex in Hitt. is -dst- rather than -tst-.

Besides, according to Shevelov's view, "For the East­ Central area a transitory stage of tt > ct may be posited, with later simplifica­tion of the positional, extraphonemic affricate c into s." How should "extraphonemic" be interpreted? Is it equivalent to "nonphonemic"?

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    Some claim that Hittite has both /dz/ and /ts/, but I don’t think that’s a general view; at any rate, I don’t think anyone claims that Hittite is able to show any distinction between /dst/ and /tst/. The root is /ed/, so at least morphophonemically, the form would have a /d/ here as well, but phonetically, it would almost certainly have been [tst]. Commented Jun 9, 2023 at 14:22
  • The Hittite Inherited Lexicon seems distinct /dst/ and /tst/: "Note that I also interpret the outcome of *-tt- or *-dt- as /-tst-/ and /-dst-/. This is indicated by spellings like az-za-aš-te-ni /ʔdsténi/ ‘you eat’ < h1d-th1e and e-ez-za-aš-ta /ʔédsta/ < *h1ed-t(o)."
    – i's
    Commented Jun 9, 2023 at 15:32
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    You have to read that in context: Kloekhorst is talking about how not every ⟨z⟩ automatically represents the single underlying phoneme /tˢ/, but he doesn’t say anything about the actual pronunciation of it. He considers that the outcome of PIE *dt and *tt are parallel to the outcome of *ds and *ts, except with an extra /t/ after. So *h₁éd-onti ‘they eat’ gives /adantˢi/ with monophonemic /tˢ/, whereas *h₁éd-si ‘you eat’ and *h₁éd-to ‘he ate’ give /ʔedsi/ and /ʔédsta/ with diphonemic /ds/. The /d/ part of that is purely a product of the root having /d/ instead of /t/ – as far as → Commented Jun 9, 2023 at 16:06
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    → I know, the actual Cuneiform spellings do not distinguish between /dst/ and /tst/, and I don’t read Kloekhorst’s words as saying that he does either, except on a (morpho)phonemic level. He believes there was some sort of difference between the mono- and diphonemic variants, but that’s it, I believe. Commented Jun 9, 2023 at 16:08

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The interpretation of Hittite /ts/ is still somewhat of an open question.

First, Hittite cuneiform could have distinguished voiced and voiceless stops in many positions…but it didn't. For example, the signs ta and da are used pretty much interchangeably, even though Sumerian and Akkadian uses them consistently to indicate a voicing difference. However, Hittite scribes were consistent (in a way Akkadian and Sumerian scribes never were) in distinguishing between at-ta and a-ta—that is, single vs double consonants.

This is the distinction that Kloekhorst transcribes as /t/ vs /d/, but only for the sake of easier typography: he doesn't claim there was actually a voicing distinction there. It was almost certainly some sort of length instead.

Now, was there a consistently-written difference between az-za and a-za? That's less clear. It certainly wasn't as consistent as at-ta vs a-ta, so it's still debated whether there was a difference between short and long /ts/—or whether length mattered in clusters at all! There are ways that length could have been indicated in consonant clusters, like writing ar-at-ta vs ar-ta (VC-VC sequences were avoided except when writing clusters), but these methods don't seem to have been used.

So whether there was any difference between /dst/ and /dzd/ and /tst/ is an open question. If there was, it certainly wasn't indicated in the writing. Kloekhorst uses this transcription because the root was /ed/ (or maybe /ʔed/). But it's very likely that the difference between /d/ and /t/ was neutralized in this position, and the choice of which transcription to use is a matter of style more than anything measurable.

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