r and s

[H.M.Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:
>
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>
> >>And there is the Bolghar-Turkic Rhotacism, which changes Common Turkic
> >>*-z-, -z to -r-, -r in the languages of the Bolghar branch, viz. Volga
> >>Bolghar and Modern Chuvash.
> >
> >Of course!  But can we be sure it went from z to r, and not the other
> >way around?
>
> I expected some sort of objections to this, and my answer has to be that we
> can*not* be sure. In fact, within Turkology, two positions exist, one
> taking the sibilant as original (the "Rhotacists") and the other - more at
> home with the proponents of the Altaic theory, but also supported by its
> chief critic, Gerhard Doerfer, that the Rhotic is (the "Zetacists").
 
We are never sure of anything, even the sun rising tomorrow. That is the
famous induction problem of Hume. But by this time we should all be
reasonably used to working under uncertainty. There are reasons why it
is not necessary to posit rhotacization or lambdacization, or
zetacization etc etc.
 
> While consensus is still to be waited for, it might be a safe approach to
> watch out for loan-words which entered either branch of Turkic *before* the
> particular sound change (-z-/-z > -r-/-r or the other way round) occurred.
> For the zetacistic position, this seems to be lacking (i.e. a clear example
> of an Iranian/Chinese/Tokharian, you name it) word with -r-/-r ending up
> zetacised in Common (= non-Chuvash) Turkic. For the rhotacistic position,
> there seem to be a few examples. Among those which I regard as most
> convincing is Chuvash /pir/ "linen" or the like, going back to Arabic baZZ
> and ultimately to Greek byssos (a Mediterranian-Oriental Wanderwort which
> really went places). I don't want to make this mootest of Turkological
> problems seem more easy than it is (it isn't), the bottomline should,
> however, be that both positions are defendable at the moment and that any
> account which states that the problem is "solved" once and for all, is
> therefore in error (hereby I explicitly complain about some pro-Altaistic
> works of the 90's which simply forget to tell their readers that the other
> position exists at all, or, in more belligerent passages, that it is a
> malevolent idee fixe of rabid anti-Altaicists; that this is not the case
> should be clear from Doerfer's position).
 
Since the present de facto standard (which should be called the zeroth
order
approximation) does not take into consideration anything other than a
model
of linguistic descent which is biologically similar to asexual descent
which
is similar to tracing the mtDNA, many things cannot be explained without
going into a more realistic position. I do not believe in this model of
constant divergence. So it is just as easy to believe that some people
whose language was rich in the liquids moved west to east and the
peoples
of the east got an incomplete dosage of the liquids. It seems that most
of
the Altaic arguments are about whether there really was a state of some
language which via constant divergence gave rise to Japanese, Korean,
Tungus,
Turkic, etc. It is not necessary for such things to occur in order for
these languages to form a family. Semitic and IE were formed from a
mixture
of some ancient languages and it is patently clear in the case of
Semitic that
it got "frozen" into some semi-regular or quasi-regular state which can
be seen
in the binyanim. The verb gradations of Hittite are exactly the same
kind of
evidence. They belong to the same type of phenomena as that of the
irregular
verbs in English. It is easy for some people to see layer upon layer in
Japanese, such as proto-Korean, or proto-Altaic over Austronasian etc
but
I can see the layering in English (i.e. Latin layer over a Germanic
layer over
a non-IE layer, mixed in with some Celtic) but the IEnists cannot see
these
layers.
 
 
> And *even* within the framework of "zetacistic pro-Altaistics", it is of
> course commonplace that the input for Commot Tk. /z/ and Bolgh. /r/ cannot
> be simply /r/ (since Common Tk. *does* have /r/ in native words and
> morphemes), but something usually labeled as /r2/, /r'/ or the like,
> sometimes with the implication that it might have been something like Czech
> /R/ in DvoRak. Maybe. But isn't that multiplicare entia praeter
> necessitatem ? Rhotacism is able to make do with *one* proto-phoneme, viz.
> /z/, zetacism needs two /r, r'/.
> The whole /z-r/-mess is  paralleled by a similar Lautgesetz, by which
> Common Tk. /sh/ and Bolgh.-Chuv. /l/ are connected. Again, the direction of
> the change is the object of often fierce discussions (between lambdacists
> and sigmatists, you guessed it), though good (and old) loanwords which
> might help to decide seem to be lacking even more (A. Rona-Tas presented
> some candidates in the corpus of words which he views as Tokharian
> loan-words in Proto-Turkic, but, although I personally happen to like some
> of them, I don't expect them to stand a real chance of ever getting
> generally accepted; it might surprise few at this stage that they seem to
> support lambdacism).
 
Goethe said a long time ago that "When an idea is lacking a word can
always
be found to take its place."
 
Here is something that could have happened. A superstratum P dominates
over
a substratum B. At first only the words of P gets into writing. Since
they
don't have TV and forced education for 12 years the B people can't learn
this
language too well, but over a period of time start to manage. The
offspring of
P mix with B over time. Because of the large numbers of B, eventually
the
offspring of P also start to speak their ancestors' language like B
people.
By this time the B also make it to the top (mixing) and the language
(written
of course) suddenly starts to display some strange characteristics.
These
characteristics, of course, are the imcomplete learning of P by B
people.
Almost as if they did it on purpose things like rhotacization,
lambdacization,
zetacization, voicing etc appear out of nowhere in the language (as
evidenced
by writing) centuries and millennia later when our intrepid linguists
start to decipher these codes.
 
Voila! Changes appear out of nowhere and some nice linguist decides to
become
famous by making up a name for the process. That is how these things are
born. That is much more believable than turning a complex reality into a
comical textbook version only to feed the incomplete theories so that
they
can linger on and on and on....instead of letting them go the way of
the dinosaurs.
 
Making up a name is nice but is it necessary? What does it explain? So
then
what is its value other than holding up a toy model of language change?
 
> And: the rhotacistic process has been called rather exceptional, not very
> wide-spread in this thread. I'm not so sure whether we've already found all
> prominent examples, I think there must be more. On the other hand, what is
> the evidence for r > z being more wide-spread" or, well, "natural" ? What
> parallels can be found ?
 
If there are apparently such changes it probably means that it arose out
of some kind of an interaction of peoples speaking different languages.
 
What all this means is that instead of using principle A (which says
always
attribute everything to "natural" change -- what on earth does natural
mean?)
create a new principle; one that says (no effects without causes).
 
If there is some very good reason to suspect that for some reason people
find it easier to create /r/ than /z/ then we should read about it.
Ditto
for lambdacization.
 
> For the general subject of this thread the conclusion is: *part* of the
> Turkological community views the Chuvash-Common-Turkic /r,z/ relation as
> just another example of Rhotacism. St.G. says: right they are, though the
> opposite opinion is never far away. That's life in Altaic studies.
 
If this rhotacization seems to happen a lot in the West, maybe there is
a
good reason for it. Ooops, there it goes again; another name invented
already called 'areal' phenomena. Could this not simply be due to the
fact
that the indigeneous inhabitants of some region who spoke related
languages
got invaded from all over the place by people speaking similar languages
and reacted to these new languages similarly simply because their
phoneme/phone
repertoire was only capable of producing some sounds and not others?
What other
reason could there be? Certainly nothing the air, the water or the
mountains!
 
 
 
>
> St.G.
>
> Stefan Georg
> Heerstrasse 7
> D-53111 Bonn
> FRG
> +49-228-69-13-32
 
--
Best Regards,
Mark
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