More on Persian kinship terms; "daughter" and the laryngeals

Following up on "Turandot and the deep Indo-European roots of 'daughter'" (3/16/20), John Mullan (student of Arabic, master calligrapher, and expert chorister) writes:

As someone who's studied a bit of Persian and a few other Indo European languages, I've always found it odd that most all of the kinship terms in Persian—mādar, pedar, barādar, dokhtar, pesar (cf. 'puer' in Latin and 'pais' in Greek, I assume)—have easy equivalents to my ear, /except/ 'khāhar,' sister. Wiktionary suggests it's still related.

One quite recent finding of mine in PIE. As you probably know, 'Baghdad' is not an Arabic name, but a Persian one. It's composed of 'Bagh,' God (not the word used today), and 'Dād,' Given/Gift. Now I'm familiar with Bagh, ultimately, from listening to way too much Russian choral music and hearing Church Slavonic 'Bozhe.' Similarly, in the deep corners of my Greek student mind I remember names like 'Mithradates'—gift of Mithra or something along those lines—popping up as rulers/governors of city states in Classical Anatolia. What I /didn't/ pick out was the exact same construct as 'Baghdad' hiding in front of my eyes all along. There are two active NBA players named 'Bogdan(ović).' It's the same name as the city, only it's popped up in Serbo-Croatian. Funny stuff.

John Colarusso weighs in on the laryngeal-2 as it pertains to "daughter":

"Daughter' is interesting because it gives strong evidence for the nature of the laryngeal-2.

Greek has an /-a-/ for *h-2, and no change on the preceding /-g-/, while Sanskrit has an /-i-/ and voiced aspiration of the preceding /-g-/.

The only sound that can split into back low as well as front high vowels is a pharyngeal.

Pharyngeals have strong low first formants (acoustic resonances) mimicking high vowels (hence pharyngeal or emphatical softening as Trubetzskoy called it; note Phoenician Ba9al (<9> for voiced pharyngeal) 'lord', vs. Hebrew Be?el).

But pharyngeal articulation involves contraction and lowering of the tongue root, hence it can give low vowels.

So, Greek went with the acoustics of PIE *h.2, while Sanskrit went with the articulation along with some friction reinterpreted as belonging to the preceding voiced sound.

The kinship suffix may have been *-h.2t-er, akin to the full grade *h.2et-el- (-el- a diminutive of endearment) as in OE athel-, Mod E Ethel, Mod G Edel 'noble'.

Some of our most intimate and familiar words hold within them the most profound linguistic secrets.