From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 00:07:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 00:07:52 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990328203003.008d6c20@mail.web4you.dk> Message-ID: Carol Jensen wrote: >I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic and >Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then like >virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and Danish. Swedish and Danish are of course different, but while looking at the differences between Old English and Old Norse the other day in Buck, as compared to those between Swedish and Danish, as well as Sanskrit and Avestan, I was rather surprised to discover that there were zero mismatches, counting generously, between Swedish and Danish in the Swadesh-list words listed by C.D. Buck (against I believe 8 or so between OE and ON, and more, but I didn't count, between Skt. and Avestan). There was an intersting bit by Eugene Holman about the differences between Swedish and Danish Tuesday on sci.lang (Danish/Swedish seems to be in the same category as Portuguese/Spanish: Danes and Portuguese are better at understanding Swedish and Spanish than vice versa). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 1 06:26:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 01:26:27 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/29/99 2:09:37 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I replied: <> In a message dated 3/31/99 11:48:57 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- Old Church Slavonic is simply what was spoken by the Slavs with whom the Byzantines were most familiar. At that point the Slavic peoples all spoke dialects of one language.>> Just as I thought. You have no evidence that OCS "was comprehensible to "all Slavia", at the time" either. The answer is it may not have been. It is curious that this unsubstantiated idea is repeated so often. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 1 08:03:06 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 03:03:06 EST Subject: Lithuanians looking like Tarim Mummies Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >In the arena of genes and language, there's been plenty of reason to watch >out for such "evidence" as Lithuanians looking "much like the Tarim Basin >mummies." Obviously if there are enough Lithuanians, sooner or later, some of >them will like like Egyptian mummies. -- there are lots of tall, radically depigmented Egyptian mummies? That's news to me. You do understand the concept of "percentage", don't you? From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Thu Apr 1 11:07:35 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 06:07:35 -0500 Subject: Sanskrit Tense & Aspect Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >The difference in Sanskrit is slight, at best. I quote Stenzler, (1997): >"In Classical Sanskrit the aorist is used in narrative as a past tense >alongside the imperfect and perfect, without any distinct function." There >is a slight difference in time of reference, (recent or more remote past) >but this is not aspect. Perhaps it is different in Vedic, although my >Vedic grammar tells me the names refer to the formation, and not to the use >of the tenses. The major problem with `Classical Sanskrit' is that there differences based on the primary language(s) of the author/audience and also on the genre. For example, in the dramatic dialogues, past tense is expressed using only the ``past passive participle''. On the other hand in the Upanishads and in earliest Pali, the PPP has a resultative sense. In Kavya Sanskrit, the various forms are used in the same slot, but in different frequencies that correspond to the roles taught in traditional grammar. This makes it hard to see the evolution after 300 BCE. ---------- Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > The question isn't *if* there was something distinguishing the > three forms. Of course there was, or we wouldn't have three > *forms*. Does this mean that different stem formants must have had some distinction in meaning too? If you assume that there was a difference in meaning at some point, how do we know that point was before late PIE. Perhaps, the different stem formants were derivational affixes and collapsed into grammatical categories after the languages split up. > The question is *what* distinguished them. > The imperfect vs. aorist distinction was one of (im)perfective > aspect, that much is clear from the way it is formed (present > stem vs. aorist stem) and the attested uses in Greek. This is not at all clear. This argument relies on two unmentioned assumptions, common in IE aspectology, but questionable on general grounds. The assumptions are that ``usability in the present => atelicity'' and ``atelicity => not usable in perfective. The second is well known to be false for many languages with aspect (see Dahl, Tense and aspect systems). The first depends on how telic events are handled. It may apply to languages with serial verb constructions, but there is no evidence of such for any stage from PIE to Vedic. Otherwise, it is true only of languages with aspect (not even then, for example Lith. jis dabar perras^o lais^ka, `he is rewiring a letter'; Lith also allows presents like is^be'ga, nulipa which are called imperfective in Dambriunas' grammar, but the glosses, `runs out of', `climbs down', suggest telicity). So this argument boils down to assuming aspect to prove it. And the question of the pathway to Vedic is still there. The attempts I have read are quite weak: Gonda has nothing better than ``national character of Indians'' for the use of the alleged imperfective in narration. I hope that I need not belabor this any further. Hoffman posits an intermediate stage in which aspectual distinctions were limited to narratives and remote past (not ``statements'' where aorist was used exclusively). But without other examples of such a division, it is quite unbelievable; no language with aspect is known to do that. Also in such a stage, the perfective would be much more common as perfectives are the usual narrative form.Without other examples of such an evolution, it is hard to see how the imperfect was generalized in narration. [Recently I was referred to H. Rix, Historische Grammatik desGriechischen. Darmstadt 1976 p. 192 sqq., and G. Meiser, Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache, Darmstadt 1998, p. 180 sq. The former is currently checked out from the local library and the latter is not in any nearby library. I will appreciate it if any one can summarize what these say.] Finally, `what else could it be' could have answers other than aspect. Cross-linguistic studies, like Dahl Tense and aspect systems and Bybee et al, The evolution of grammar, turned up an interesting category called `completives' by Bybee et al. These are emphatic/ highly marked forms that are not the usual forms in narration, and often contrast with either a simple past or a perfective that is the usual form in narration. [An in-depth discussion of such a form in Tamil, using viDu as an auxiliary, is found in Annamalai, International journal of Dravidian linguistics vol 11(1982), pp 92--122.] Sanskrit usage might go back to such a distinction rather than perfective-imperfective distinction. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Apr 1 11:26:13 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 12:26:13 +0100 Subject: R: Re: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <19990331123159.81564.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: > Some years ago I was told by Andolin Eguzkitza, a Basque linguist, that > in Euskal Herria the preference for the periphrastic perfect in Spanish > (and/or French) was influenced by Euskera's insistence on distinguishing > between what has happened in the same "day" and what took place in the > time period(s) before. Interesting, though I'm not aware that the use of the compond past ("present perfect") in Spanish is different in the Basque Country and in northern Spain generally. > However, a difficulty arises in reconstructing > the cognitive background of this usage in Euskera since there is clear > evidence that in the not too recent past, it was a "night count" rather > than a "day count" that governed the 24 hr. period in question. The > count went from "sunset" to "sunset" or if you wish from > "night-to-night." Euskaldunak have told me that the periphrastic perfect > needs to be used to talk about what's happened since "you woke up this > morning." Yes, this conforms to my experience. Where an English-speaker uses the simple past, a Basque, much like a Spaniard, uses the "present perfect" for anything that happened earlier on the same day but the other form for anything that happened before today. But the "present perfect" also has other uses in both Basque and Spanish, of course, most of them corresponding to the functions of the English present perfect. American Spanish is generally different here, of course. > Larry would be able to give us more information on this phenomenon as > well as the rules set forth by Euskaltzaindia (the Basque Academy of the > Language) for its "proper usage." I'm afraid I haven't been following the Academy's rulings at all closely. But the Academy is still largely involved in deciding which forms should be used: it hasn't yet given a lot of attention to the circumstances in whose those forms should be used. Anyway, in my capacity as a linguist, I'm interested in what people actually say, and not in the rulings of official bodies. > My impression is that today there is significant variation in usage > among native-speakers of Euskera. Oh, absolutely, and there are important differences in the way the verb-forms are used. Just to cite one of my favorite examples, the French Basques make regular use of the "super-compound" past tenses, such as , which is formally identical to French . The French Basques also use the French form freely, though most other French-speakers I've consulted find this form bizarre. I call this form the `grandfather tense', because it denotes a past so remote that it can only be used of something that happened in the speaker's grandfather's time or earlier: it can't be used with a first-person or second-person subject, because no living person is old enough to have done anything that long ago. The Spanish Basques don't use the super-compound forms so much, and, when they do use them, they don't use them in the same function, in my experience. > There also seems to be evidence of a kind of "narrative style" that > uses the periphrastic perfect for stylistic effect when speaking > about actions in the (remote) past. But I'm a bit out of my depth in > this particular issue. Me too, I'm afraid. I have encountered a number of instances of surprising forms in narratives, but I have little idea what rules exist here. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Apr 1 12:37:14 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 05:37:14 -0700 Subject: Lithuanians looking like Tarim Mummies Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/30/99 10:11:46 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > <<>> > < trace prehistoric migrations.>> > A good example. Sykes and Richards MtDNA studies cast a serious doubt on > Cavalli-Sforza's work. What seems like conclusive science today becomes > inconclusive or Saucer people stuff tommorrow. There are some who still race > to Cavalli-Sforza to support conclusions unsupported by quite possibly the > more valid scientific evidence supplied by mtDNA and isotope analysis of bone > and hair fragments. Undoubtedly the greatest supporters of matching C-S's results with language are Greenberg and Ruhlen. Nearly every one of their books has a neat chart matching C-S's chart of human genetics with their (widely rejected) chart of human linguistic relationships. The only problem is (and they don't even attempt to mask it in the chart although they don't attempt to explain it either) that C-S and G-R don't match. There are at least a dozen glaring inconsistencies. For example, C-S's results indicate that the Pygmies of the Congo Basin are a distinct genetic group in Africa. However, there is NO linguistic evidence to support separating the languages spoken by the Pygmies apart from the remainder of the Bantu languages of subsaharan Africa and NO linguistic evidence to suggest that they didn't originate in the Nigerian/Cameroon borderland as part of the Proto-Bantu ancestral group a few thousand years ago. Another example shows a very close C-S link between Indo-European groups and Afro-Asiatic groups, yet many Nostraticists are becoming sceptical about the inclusion of A-A in Nostratic along with I-E. But I-E and Uralic (the two most popular components of Nostratic) are fairly distinct in C-S's work. These are just two of the major differences between the genetic work of C-S and the results of historical linguistics. Geneticists are questioning C-S's results and linguists have generally rejected their usefulness in telling us anything about the relationship of languages. John McLaughlin Utah State University From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 13:15:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:15:55 GMT Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) In-Reply-To: <000001be7b0a$1a9def40$3470fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> I don't know, maybe the -i originally marked something else >> (imperfective?). For PIE, all we can recover is that it marked >> the present. Compare Akkadian, where the unmarked form (iprus: >> -C1 C2 V C3) was the simple past, versus marked perfective >> [perfect] (ip-ta-ras: -C1 ta C2 V C3) and imperfective [durative] >> (ipar-r-as: -C1 a C2C2 V C3) forms. >I am completely ignorant of Akkadian. But it seems that the >durative/imperfective can also be used in the past. Then the >simple past may have been a perfective limited to the past According to Lipin'ski it was a narrative simple past in Akkadian. It later became a perfective in West Semitic (which form was in turn displaced by the old stative > perfective). >What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede >and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made >from Indo-Greek present stem? The Armenian aorist e-ber is a "root aorist", the present stem is bere-. In any case the endings of the Armenian aorist (and imperfect) are completely unrelated to those of the "Indo-Greek" aorist and imperfect. Slavic mino~ is analogical (vowel stems with -no~- presents always carry over the -no~- to the aorist and ptc.praes.act.). Slavic vede is a Class IA verb, which does not distinguish present and aorist stems (unless ve^de^ was meant, which is a perfect form, the only one surviving in Slavic). These forms may look identical to "Indo-Greek" imperfects, but only if we divorce them from their paradigms and the Armenian and Slavic verbal systems in which they are embedded. >If you mean that these are aorist in Arm/Slavic, then aren't you >comparing apples and oranges here? If Vedic imperfect was not >imperfective, how can we compare it to Armenian, Slavic or Baltic >imperfects (the last of which is said to be past frequentative)? The point is that we *can't* compare it to the Armenian and Slavic imperfects, which are derived from the optative (probably) and from a sigmatic form (-e^ax-), respectively. The unique feature of Greek and Indo-Iranian (and partially Baltic) is that they lack a marked imperfect form (special endings and/or special root extension), such as Italic, Celtic, Tocharian, Armenian, Slavic and Albanian have. There is no strict formal distinction between aorist and imperfect, except for the abstraction of an "aorist" and a "present" root, to which secondary endings are added (and an augment is prefixed). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 13:27:22 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:27:22 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990331015004.94689.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >ME (GLEN): > Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. >MIGUEL: > Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx). >Come on, Miguel. First, why does it end in -nx instead of **-nk? Are >y'sure it's not from IE *-nk-s? Of course it is. The point is that there are (AFAIK) no _neuters_ in -nk, which I explain by hypothesizng that absolute final -nk would have given -r[H2], and a paradigm -rH2/-nk- would have subsequently been the victim of Ausgleich. >I've obviously confused everyone a little. First, whether the >heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes nothing since I've been >saying that there was no pronunciation contrasts in IE between *-t and >*-d (or *-dh). Which is obviously false. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 13:37:14 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:37:14 GMT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >It has been debated for generations whether Basque `bear' might >be borrowed from Celtic * or from a related IE form (this `bear' >word is certainly IE). >The Celtic source is phonologically awkward, though: we would have >expected * to be borrowed as *<(h)artotz>, not as the observed > -- assuming, of course, that it was the nominative that was >borrowed, but the accusative would be even less suitable. And assuming early Celtic borrowings were subject to the same phonotactic constraints as Latin borrowings. >One or two people have suggested an IE source other than Celtic, but no >IE language with an even vaguely suitable form of the word is known to >have been in contact with Basque. >Just to complicate matters, it is very unusual for a Basque lexical item >to end in a consonant cluster. Save only for `black', which we >have good reason to suppose is a syncopated form of earlier *, >all seemingly native words which end in a cluster end in <-rtz>, like > `bear' and `five'. There are some grounds for supposing >that these clusters too are secondary and result from some kind of vowel >loss, but the evidence is not sufficient to support this view securely. The only logical explanation is indeed *(h)a'rtos > hartz, with (pre-Roman period) loss of unstressed vowel. But we should maybe look for more Celtic borrowings with nom. -(V)s giving Basque -tz. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 13:59:43 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:59:43 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <004d01be7bad$26b976c0$8b03703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >Around here (Flanders) it is - more or less - generally believed that the >Frisian people and the closely related West-Flemings (not just >linguistically) are descendants of probably southern Danish or other more or >less Scandinavian tribes that migrated south over the coastal sand >bars/islands, the last remains of which are the Dutch and German >'Waddeneilanden' and part of Sylt. The Frisians and/or Ingvaeones were not Scandinavian (in the sense of North Germanic speaking). They merely inhabitated the North Sea Coast area from the Roman limes up to the tip of Jutland, the latter now linguisticaly Scandinavian territory. After teh collapse of Roman power, they spread along the coast to South Holland, Zeeland and Western Flanders, while presumably exchanging Jutland and Angeln for England. In any case these areas became Danish-speaking, like Skaane and the Danish islands. >I am not sure at all that you can say English wasn't influenced by Dutch/Low >German, albeit in a somewhat convoluted way: Saxon itself is - or was - a >(collection of) Dutch/Low German dialect(s), while Anglian may be considered >to have been something in between Danish and Low German. >[...] >As to 'northwestern Germanic', I am very, very skeptical about that idea. If you say Anglian was "in between Danish and Low German", I don't see how you can be that skeptical. >The least you can say, is that it is not a necessary hypothesis. >Postulating mutual (or one-way west > east?) influence between east- and >west Germanic seems sufficient to explain the observed phenomena. There was >ample opportunity for it to occur after the split of northeast into north >and east Germanic That's indeed all "North-West Germanic" means. Mutual influence between North and West Germanic, after the split between North and East Germanic, and of course long after the split between West and North-East Germanic. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 14:22:43 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 14:22:43 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >The fact that Hittite which is suppose to precede these sound changes >does not abound with -p's and -k's is very relevant to Miguel's >assertions. He might be able to say that Indo-Anatolian *-t becomes a >later *-H1 and get away with it but if no evidence exists of *-p to *-H3 >as he has stated then this is pure speculation. In terms of Greek and >evidence for a -k- (which really shouldn't be there in the first place >if *-k became *-H2 in Centum-Satem) It *should* be there in gunaikos, because *k isn't final there. If we assume a regular development: Nom *gwnaik > *gwnaiH2 Gen *gwnaik-os > *gwnaikos then Greek is regular here. What would be "irregular" is the analogical extension of *H2 to the rest of the paradigm outside of Greek (and in Greek outside of this word). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jrader at m-w.com Thu Apr 1 09:39:49 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 09:39:49 +0000 Subject: Basque <-ar>, <-(t)ar> Message-ID: To the best of my knowledge, Latin has no independent suffix <-aris>. The adjectival suffix <-a:lis> appears as <-a:ris> when the base has an in it: , , etc., but in all other environments <-a:ris>: , , etc., and note vs. . How the suffix <-a:lis> would have been handled by Basque I couldn't say. Jim Rader > > >Does Basque -ar have a connection with Spanish -ar/-al? > It is widely suspected, but not established, that this suffix derives > from one or both of the Latin suffixes <-aris> and <-arius> -- more > likely the first, if anything, since <-arius> appears clearly to be the > source of the Basque professional suffix <-ari> (and variants), as in > `merchant', from `market', and > `jai-alai player', from `jai-alai'. The development of the > variant <-tar> from <-ar> would not be unusual in Basque. From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 15:03:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 15:03:32 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Rick Mc Callister wrote: >>It should be noted that this so-called "Northwest Germanic" phase postdates >>the "Gotho-Nordic" phase, which accounts for the similarities between North >>and East Germanic. We have: >> Proto-Germanic >> / \ >> West Germanic North-East Germanic >> \ / \ >> ("North-West Germanic") East Germanic >> / \ >> West Germanic North Germanic > I've read in some places that the languages formerly spoken in >present Jutland, Schleswig & Holstein were "in between" North Germanic & >West Germanic and that when the Angles migrated to England, that a gradual >linguistic frontier was replaced by a barrier of non-mutually >comprehensible languages. > On one level this has a certain logic but on the other hand, >English & Frisian do seem much closer to Low German. I can appreciate that >Frisian may have been affected by Low German and Dutch but English wasn't. > Another contradiction that I've seen are charts that list East >Germanic with North Germanic. > Why all the confusion? Has all of this been straightened out? The confusion stems from the fact that at different times different dialects which were still to a reasonable degree mutually intelligible interact with each other differently. I believe the general consensus is the one I sketched above: first a split between West Germanic (in what is now N. Netherlands, N. Germany and mainland Denmark) and North-East Germanic (in S. Scandinavia) [but still some contact across the Kattegat], then the split between North Germanic and East Germanic (Goths etc. moved of from Scandinavia to the Baltic and then on to the Ukraine, Balkans, Italy and Spain, etc.), while West Germanic and North Germanic kept interacting, most strongly of course southernmost North Germanic (-> Danish) and northernmost West Germanic (Ingvaeonic = Jutish, Anglian, parts of Saxon, Frisian -> English, Frisian). There are reasons for thinking that the similiraties between N and E Gmc are older than the similarities between W and N Gmc, but I'd have to look them up. In any case, these successive layers ("Gotho-Nordic", "North-West") make it more difficult than it already should be to pin down Proto-Germanic to a particular date. All I can say is that North Germanic feels like a "shallow" group, comparable with Slavic (c. 1500 years), while West Germanic appears to be more diverse, comparable with Romance (c. 2000 years) or slightly more, while Germanic as a whole definitely feels older than Romance, so 3000 years cannot be too far off. In fact, given the interactions that went on, Germanic might be older than it looks. Glottochronology, even seat-of-the-pants glottochronology like the above, is seriously hindered by the fact that most languages never cleanly "separate" to begin with. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Thu Apr 1 14:42:46 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 08:42:46 -0600 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: [ moderator changed the Subject: header ] Dear Mr. or Ms Moderator I am currently engaged in a study of political and judicial developments in England after the Saxon's assult began In the fifth century. Linguistics is not my primary interest, and my skills in languages are even more limited than my interest. But I do have a question about Indo-European as the proto-language for most of Europe. It seems to me the IE is an hypothesis that posits the existence of an Indo-European language that was actually spoken by some ancient population. The hypothesis further asserts that this language is this mother language of many Asian and European languages and subsequently spawned child-languages over Asia and Europe. Celtic, Germanic and Italic languages, to name a few, are, then, child languages of IE. My question is this: is there disagreement among linguists about IE as an hypothesis? Are their linguists who dispute the IE model and posit some alternative model of language development? If so, are the alternative hypotheses credible? Or, is the IE model universally accepted as the only possible explanation for how IE languages developed? If you can answer my question in a manner that would not require much effort, or at least forward it to someonw who could, I would appreciate it greatly. IE figures so large in European historical development that it must be incorporated in any reasonably thorough account of Europena history. But I am uncomfortable that there may be other explanations for the process of how European languages developed. Can you help me? Thanks for considering my request. Sincerely Ray Hendon San Antonio, TX [ Moderator's response: First, I've forwarded this to the list at large because there are others who will disagree with me. There is little disagreement among linguists with training in the methods of historical linguistics and familiarity with the data from the descendant languages that the Indo-European hypothesis is correct. The disagreements here are rather with details of the reconstruction. There have been some well-trained linguists in the past who, for one reason or another, have denied the existence in history of a unified Indo-European language. N. Trubetzkoi, for example, spoke of a group of languages which influenced each other to so great an extent that the result appears to have been a single ancestral language; I believe that F. Boas held a similar idea. It is unclear to me what advantage is to be found in such a formulation. However, once the development into the descendant languages began, everyone agrees that they developed in the manner postulated by the IE hypothesis. There are scholars in other sciences who do not accept that linguists have any idea what they are talking about, who believe in a different mechanism of linguistic change, and who speak of changing the way linguistics is done to prove that linguists have been wrong all along. You may encounter them on other mailing lists. Rich Alderson ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Apr 1 16:37:59 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 10:37:59 -0600 Subject: R: Re: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >> Miguel said: >> >In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect has been abandoned in >> >favour of the preterit. >1) >In the Castilian spoken in *Galicia* ("Castrapo"), the usage is as in >Argentinian Spanish >See Pilar Va'quez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, >1971, p. 95, who speaks of "..the preference for the "pret. indefinido" >instead of the "perfecto compuesto", i.e. "vi" instead of "he visto". >Also, >Alonso Zamora Vicente , "Dialectologia espan~ola", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, >1979, p. 208, says that in some *Asturian* regions, the periphrastic perfect >is not used and that even in the cultured speech of some families, in >Castilian, the use of the composed forms is rejected, e.g. " ? oiste lo que >digo? "; " hoy llovio' todo el di'a ". >North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, is considered, rightly or wrongly, >the most Celtic area of Spain. I've heard Argentines and other South Americans use present perfect [prete/rito perfecto] pretty much the same way as Central Americans do --in an emphatic sense. The type of emphasis depends on the intonation of the speaker. ¿Has ido a la playa? Have you ever been to the beach? ¿Has terminado la tarea? DID you FINISH the homework!? Ha llovido todo el di/a. It HAS RAINED [It's been raining] all day! It's definitely not used as an everyday form and overusage of it does suggest that the speaker is either a Mexican or a non-native speaker. Not all Mexicans overuse this and other compound tenses but they are often stereotyped by other Latin Americans as speaking Spanish with grammatical influence from American English. While Mexican Spanish seems to me to have less English vocabulary than Central American and Caribbean Spanish, its grammar does seem to conform to English usage in the greater use of present perfect, present progressive, and periphrastic future as well as its simplified subjunctive and avoidance of imperatives by many Mexicans. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Apr 1 16:50:51 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 10:50:51 -0600 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You need to keep in mind that "neo-Galician" essentially uses a largely Spanish pronunciation. >In this discussion it should be kept in mind that Old Portuguese and Old >Galician, spoken in the NW corner of the Iberian peninsula, were *the same >language*, from the time when the South of Portugal with Lisbon was still >under the Moors and the local people there spoke a Mozarabic dialect until >quite some time after the independence of Portugal. >So the question is did Portuguese /u/ preserve the older pronunciation or >did modern Galician /o/, (which is described as "very closed" by >phoneticians). >Frank Rossi >Bergamo, Italy >igleasis at axia.it From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Apr 1 16:33:55 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 11:33:55 EST Subject: Testing the testing tool itself Message-ID: In a message dated 3/26/99 8:17:16 PM, John McLaughlin wrote: >The computer program simply gives us a feel for how close >lexical similarity should be before we get excited enough to do the other >comparisons. Nice phrasing, appropriate. I will unfortunately have no time to work on these questions in any detail until summer. But the ability to use actual languages, gaps and all, without assuming we know anything about actual sound changes in advance, is crucial for any proposed computer program. My point is that we NEED TO TEST the purported test! That is, the computer estimate of random similarities needs to be structured so that it CAN be applied to actual data of actual languages, WITHOUT assuming sound changes or anything else in advance. Then we can see to what extent we like its conclusions on cases where the deep work of reconstruction HAS been done, and if we don't, then we have no business applying it to cases where the deep work has not been done. The purported tool (testing for random similarities) cannot be taken as even minimally valid unless it is itself continually TESTED and improved. Seems elementary to me. Have I missed something? Lloyd Anderson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 1 19:02:32 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 14:02:32 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at AOL.COM writes: >But the real question is what rate of change we see in Mycenaean. -- we don't see any change in Mycenaean, because it was only written for a century or two. >Deals were made, jokes were told, treaties were made and lovers talked, all >in spoken Latin. -- official documents were written in it, and scholars sometimes 'talked' in it. It was a dead language, like liturgical Hebrew. There were no Latin- speakers in medieval Europe, only speakers of French, Italian, German and so forth who acquired Latin as a second, learned language. And not very many of them, since it was an overwhelmingly illiterate rural society. >Look what you are saying here. If kids learn language from their parents, >then that language changes. All of creation disagrees with you. Getting it >passed on from your parents is supposed to be what passes it on unchanged. -- all spoken languages undergo change in every generation. Take a look at English. English spelling was highly phonetic when the orthography was standardized. People actually pronounced "knight" as "k-ni-gcht", not "nite", and so forth. It's now wildly un-phonetic because of massive sound-shifts. If you were transported back to Elizabethan England, nobody would know what the hell you were saying without elaborate repititions. The existance of a standardized spelling has not, to put it mildly, stopped this; and the changes continue and will continue. >The distinction you are making isn't rational. -- unfortunately for you, it's a distinction that can be found in any elemenatary linguistics texbook. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 1 19:41:52 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 20:41:52 +0100 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: Ed said: >I think z in Etruscan, certainly when written with Latin characters, was >actually a rendering of Greek zeta, pronounced dz (or maybe ts in certain >contexts) at the time (nowadays it is just English z). So, st > Etruscan z >could be just a metathesis. >Would this be valid? No metathesis is needed. Greek zeta routinely represented both /dz/ and /zd/. The latter is shown in such spellings as Athe:naze for Athe:nas-de (= to Athens). Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 2 05:11:58 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 00:11:58 EST Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: OK, as is commonly known, the Slavic languages are closely similar, and were sharing common developments rather late: Exemplia gratia: the Germanic proper name "Karl" (as in "Charlemagne"), which was loaned into Proto-Slavic and became the generic term for "King", for obvious reasons. (Rather as "Caesar" became "Emperor" in several languages.) This can be dated fairly precisely, since we know Karl the Great's dates (742-814). It then underwent the characteristic shifts of the various branches of Slavic. Which, of course, it wouldn't do if it had been borrowed later. So Common Slavic form would be *korlja, from which we get (Bulgarian) kral, (South Slav) kralj, (Russian) korol, (Czech) kral, and (Polish) krol. (Sorry, no accents on this email system). Therefore the characteristic developments of the various Slavic languages must post-date the early 9th century, at the very least. QED. Just to illustrate how close the Slavic languages _still_ are, the first line of the Lord's Prayer, and keeping in mind that languages get more different over time: OCS: Otice nasi ize jesi na nebesichu: da svetitu se ime tvoje. Polish: Ojcze nasz ktorys jest we niebiesiech: swiec sie imie twoje. Czech: Otce nas kleryz jsi v nebesich: posvet se jmeno tve. Russ: Otce nas suscij na nebesach: da svjatitsja imja tvoje. Serb: Oce nas koji si na nebesima: da se sveti ime tvoje. Bulg: Otce nas, kojto si na nebesata: da se sveti tvoeto ime. -- indicative, one would think, fairly clearly, of the closeness of the links we're talking about (far closer than between the Romance languages) and of reasonably complete mutual comprehensibility if we roll back twelve hundred years or so to OCS times. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Apr 2 05:43:14 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 00:43:14 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/1/99 03:01:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- no, it doesn't. That goes right on happening. Think "optical illusion".>> Please read what I wrote. I said one fights the other. I didn't say either wins. BOTH keep on happening. The need to standardize is just as natural as the urge to change and splinter. When mothers "correct" their childrens grammar and pronounciation, this is part of standardizing. It makes the child's language understandble to others. And it fights the child's natural tendency to play or be loose with the language it is learning. Both go on at the same time. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 2 06:48:55 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 01:48:55 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >That's indeed all "North-West Germanic" means. Mutual influence between North and West Germanic, after the split between North and East Germanic, and of course long after the split between West and North-East Germanic. -- given the existance of bridge dialects like Anglian (and Jutish, since the Jutes came from further north in the Danish peninsula), doesn't the idea of an old and sharp distinction between North and West Germanic look rather iffy? After all, if they'd been sharply separated linguistically at this very early date (500's, the Migration period), they wouldn't share innovations just because they were geographically close. It looks as if there was a fairly smooth continuum from pre-Danish through Jutish to Anglian to Frisian to Saxon. This isn't surprising, given the small area, the short distances, and the frequency and ease of travel by sea. From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 2 07:11:54 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 01:11:54 -0600 Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Sent: Thursday, April 01, 1999 8:22 AM I am very sceptical of final voiceless stops becoming "laryngeals". > Nom *gwnaik > *gwnaiH2 > Gen *gwnaik-os > *gwnaikos I would be much more inclined to see the genitive as having *gwnai-ko-, a regular adjective formation, as its base, and having the -s added by analogy with other genitive forms. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 2 09:23:27 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 09:23:27 GMT Subject: Basque <-ar>, <-(t)ar> In-Reply-To: <14325874320215@m-w.com> Message-ID: "Jim Rader" wrote: >To the best of my knowledge, Latin has no independent suffix <-aris>. > The adjectival suffix <-a:lis> appears as <-a:ris> when the base has >an in it: , , etc., but in all other >environments <-a:ris>: , , etc., and note > vs. . How the suffix <-a:lis> would have been >handled by Basque I couldn't say. Same as -aris: -ali(s) > -ari. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 2 10:20:50 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 03:20:50 -0700 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ray Hendon wrote: > My question is this: is there disagreement among linguists about IE as an > hypothesis? Are their linguists who dispute the IE model and posit some > alternative model of language development? If so, are the alternative > hypotheses credible? Or, is the IE model universally accepted as the only > possible explanation for how IE languages developed? I would go a little further than our esteemed moderator and would venture the opinion that the Indo-European "hypothesis" is probably the only thing that linguists don't argue about. In fact, as the quotes I placed around "hypothesis" show, the only reason we still call it a hypothesis is because of the small detail that we've never actually found a scrap of written Proto-Indo-European or heard a recording of it. John McLaughlin Utah State University From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 2 10:27:52 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 12:27:52 +0200 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] M.Carrasquer wrote: >The Frisians and/or Ingvaeones were not Scandinavian (in the >sense of North Germanic speaking). They merely inhabitated the >North Sea Coast area from the Roman limes up to the tip of >Jutland, the latter now linguisticaly Scandinavian territory. >After the collapse of Roman power, they spread along the coast to >South Holland, Zeeland and Western Flanders, while presumably >exchanging Jutland and Angeln for England. In any case these >areas became Danish-speaking, like Skaane and the Danish islands. [ES] Maybe they spoke that mixture called 'northwest Germanic' (understood as a mixture of west and north, NOT northeast, Germanic), but the linguistic result is the same, although it might not be 'a Scandinavian base profoundly influenced by Dutch/Low German' but just as well the opposite order of influence. On the other hand: I am not so sure the migration started only after the collapse of Roman power. The coastal people have always been a rather independant bunch, beginning with the Celtic Menapii of Caesar's time, probably because of the then still existing geographical isolation I depicted in the previous posting. >>I am not sure at all that you can say English wasn't influenced by >>Dutch/Low German, albeit in a somewhat convoluted way: Saxon itself is - >>or was - a (collection of) Dutch/Low German dialect(s), while Anglian may >>be considered to have been something in between Danish and Low German. >>[...] >>As to 'northwestern Germanic', I am very, very skeptical about that idea. >If you say Anglian was "in between Danish and Low German", I >don't see how you can be that skeptical. [ES] I was referring to the graphically rather confusing diagram of McCallister, that seems to suggest 'NW Germanic' to be a common child of NE and W Germanic, before the split of NE into N and E Germanic. Probably, that interpretation of the diagram was wrong. In that case : sorry. >>The least you can say, is that it is not a necessary hypothesis. >>Postulating mutual (or one-way west > east?) influence between east- and >>west Germanic seems sufficient to explain the observed phenomena. There >>was ample opportunity for it to occur after the split of northeast into >>north and east Germanic [MC] >That's indeed all "North-West Germanic" means. Mutual influence >between North and West Germanic, after the split between North >and East Germanic, and of course long after the split between >West and North-East Germanic. [ES] See above, plus this: I was also speaking about E<=>W mutual influence: a certain (hypothetical?) 'westernization' of Gothic, and some rare cases of E Germanic penetration in the west (mainly toponyms, like the various little rivers called Aa < Ahwa, and derivations like Breda, as far as I know), probably during the migrations of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, I presume. Does anyone have more precise and substantiated data on this? Ed. Selleslagh From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 2 11:20:16 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 13:20:16 +0200 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: M. Carrasquer wrote: >There are reasons for thinking that the similiraties between N >and E Gmc are older than the similarities between W and N Gmc, >but I'd have to look them up. In any case, these successive >layers ("Gotho-Nordic", "North-West") make it more difficult than >it already should be to pin down Proto-Germanic to a particular >date. All I can say is that North Germanic feels like a >"shallow" group, comparable with Slavic (c. 1500 years), while >West Germanic appears to be more diverse, comparable with Romance >(c. 2000 years) or slightly more, while Germanic as a whole >definitely feels older than Romance, so 3000 years cannot be too >far off. In fact, given the interactions that went on, Germanic >might be older than it looks. E. Selleslagh: I completely agree with your diagnostic. Another way of rough dating, which unfortunately cannot include Italic, is by looking at the 'layering' of linguistic territories in Europe: they are indeed bands tilted from SE to NW. If one assumes that this happened during successive migrations (propagation of languages or people or both, or whatever) from roughly the N shore of the Black Sea to the North Sea/Atlantic Ocean, whereby every new layer came geographically 'on top' (more to the NE) of the previous one because the more SW band was already occupied, the oldest are the Celts (not considering the Upper Palaeolithic/Neolithic natives like the Basques), then the Germanic peoples and finally the Balto-Slavic ones (and much later on the Finno-Ugrians in N and E Europe). That leads me to the following presumptions: 1.The split of Germanic into W and NE is probably older than that of Balto-Slavic into its components. 2.but younger than that of Italo-Celtic (for those that believe in it) into Celtic and Italic, 3.but still a lot older than Romance, a late colonial phenomenon. Apart from that, the rather important differences between N Germanic and E Germanic seem to indicate that even the splitup of NE Germanic is pretty old (much older than that of Low - High German anyway). E. Selleslagh From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 2 13:26:37 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 14:26:37 +0100 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] In-Reply-To: <008a01be7c51$b7dd9560$190d4a0c@default> Message-ID: On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote: > But I do have a question about Indo-European as the proto-language > for most of Europe. It seems to me the IE is an hypothesis that > posits the existence of an Indo-European language that was actually > spoken by some ancient population. The hypothesis further asserts > that this language is this mother language of many Asian and > European languages and subsequently spawned child-languages over > Asia and Europe. Celtic, Germanic and Italic languages, to name a > few, are, then, child languages of IE. To be finicky, the hypothesis is that a single ancient language, which we call Proto-Indo-European (PIE), was spoken somewhere in Eurasia some thousands of years ago, that this language -- unrecorded, because its speakers were illiterate -- underwent the ordinary and remorseless processes of language change, that -- as usual -- different changes occurred in different areas, and hence that regional varieties of PIE diverged to such a degree that they became quite distinct and mutually incomprehensible languages, the languages we call the Indo-European languages. This splitting happened repeatedly, so that the several immediate daughters of PIE themselves often gave rise to sub-families of several distinct languages. The core of the hypothesis, then, is the single common ancestor, PIE. The kind of model that we apply to the development of the IE family is called the `family-tree model', and it stresses the centrality of divergence in giving rise to languages. > My question is this: is there disagreement among linguists about IE > as an hypothesis? Not today, no. > Are their linguists who dispute the IE model and posit some > alternative model of language development? Yes, but not for the IE family. At present there are a number of linguists who argue that the family-tree model is not universally valid, and that some languages have developed in other and more complex ways. For example, Bob Dixon argues that the Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia have developed in a very different way, with convergence being more important than divergence. Other types of convergence model have been proposed by Jeff Leer for the Canadian language Tlingit, by Roy Miller for Japanese, by George Grace for certain Melanesian languages, and by Uriel Weinreich, Bob Le Page, C.-J. N. Bailey and others for various cases. Malcolm Ross has recently been defending a complex divergence-convergence model for certain Pacific languages and more generally. And everybody now accepts the reality of mixed languages like Michif, Ma'a and Mednyj Aleut, which clearly have not arisen in a manner consistent with the family-tree model. > If so, are the alternative hypotheses credible? They may well be credible for some cases, and my own view is that they are established beyond dispute in a few cases. I think it is fair to say that historical linguists in general no longer believe that the family-tree model represents the only way in which languages can arise. But there remain disagreements about the degree to which the family-tree model is generally valid. Some of us prefer to see family-tree divergence as the norm, with the other things being rare and eccentric. Others of us see the complex patterns as the norm, with family-tree divergence being unusual. > Or, is the IE model universally accepted as the only possible > explanation for how IE languages developed? The family-tree model is *not* universally accepted as the only possible model of the rise of languages. But it *is* universally accepted today as the best model of the rise of the IE family of languages. In the past, however, such linguists as C. C. Uhlenbeck, Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Antonio Tovar all rejected the family-tree model of the IE family, preferring instead to see the IE languages as having arisen out of some kind of mixture of two or three distinct and unrelated languages. In this view, of course, PIE never existed. But all three of these men are dead, and I know of no linguist who takes such ideas seriously today for IE: we can reconstruct so much intricate and complex grammar for PIE that it simply *must* have existed. A "language mixture" scenario is just not consistent with the elaborate grammatical system which can be reconstructed for PIE and which is substantially preserved in at least the earlier IE languages. As our moderator has noted, non-linguists sometimes believe that we historical linguists have been doing everything wrong for 200 years. I myself am quite satisfied that we have not, and that these outside critics have no idea what they are talking about. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Fri Apr 2 13:55:28 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 15:55:28 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <3718fe36.215719489@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > [...] >There is not a shred of evidence that the neuter nom/acc. forms > should be derived from *-sd, *-rd/*-nd/*-ld, *-id or *-ud. >[...] > I like JER's suggestion of -n > -r (and I would add -nt > -r(t), > to explain yakrt etc., and -mn > -mn to explain the neuter > n-stems), and I like (of course) my own suggestion of -t > -H1, > -k > -H2 (which would make the feminines in -H2 (-H1?) originally > neuters, which is good). Well, thanks for that, words of a kind rarely experienced. As to the hot question of **t going to *H1 in pre-PIE times, I was of course as appalled by the idea as supposedly most everyone else, but it IS a fact that the stative verbs (morpheme /-eH1-/ of Lat. sed-e:-re) and the neuter s-stems go together (Lat. sede:s 'seat'; more impressively e.g. fri:gus/frigeo; rigor/rigeo; tepor/tepeo etc.), in that the s-stems denote the state something is in if the stative verb can be used about it (what friget is in frigore etc.). Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with stm-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. These testify to the earlier existence of an independent phoneme (in PIE a morphophoneme) that could be posited as /c/ and given the "reading rule" that it is realized as /-s/ word-finally, and as /t-/ in other positions. It would be the IE marker of second person, verbal 2sg *-s, 2pl *-te (2du *-t- + unclear stuff, but surely something more than just the -t-), pron. *tu, *t(w)e [I'll keep my derivation of *yu(:)s, *usme and *wos from protoforms with *t(w)- out of this] which shows that the rules run deep. --- Now to the point: Is there any way of formulating a sound rule so as to get a stative noun *le'wk-ot/-es- to contain the same suffix as the stative verb *luk-e'H1-, i.e. have we any way of equating nominal //le'wk-ec-// and verbal //lewk-e'H1-//?? It does not look like a word-final change of *t to *H1. I also think it too simple to have /c/ go to /H1/ immediately after the accent, as the simple formula ivites one to assume. It is perhaps significant that the verbal stem is always followed by verbal morphemes, either the personal markers directly or the durative aspect marker *-ye'/o'- or a mood marker. On the other hand, I do not think it significant that the functional relationship between the noun and the verb appears to differ a bit from that of denominative verbs at large, for, even if *luk-eH1- is not "make light", but to "be light", that may simply be the middle voice of the denominative which would of course explain the middle inflection of the Sanskrit passive which is this category, say s'ru:yate 'is heard' from *k^lu-H1-ye'-tor, where the underlying stem //k^lew-e'H1-// would then be the same alternant of //k^le'w-ec-// (*k^le'w-os 'fame, rumour') as in the other pairs. A change from [t] to [h] (which is what /H1/ was in PIE when retained as a consonant) is parallelled by Irish and Middle Iranian as the development of spirantized /t/. So, if there is reason to believe that a pre-PIE *k could be spirantized to PIE *H2, as in the non-active 1sg marker (perfect *-H2a, middle thematic *-a-H2 corresponding to other Eurasian *-k), we may also envisage a spirantization of the funny dental of the "s-stems" (better, "s/t-stems") into something which thereupon developed further to [h] (H1). But under what conditions? Who can answer this problem by "Ni' hansae"? Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 2 14:42:20 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 08:42:20 -0600 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter &/or Graham Sent: Thursday, April 01, 1999 1:41 PM > No metathesis is needed. Greek zeta routinely represented both /dz/ and > /zd/. The latter is shown in such spellings as Athe:naze for Athe:nas-de > (= to Athens). Is it not just as likely that Greek zd in these circumstances metathesized to dz so that zeta always represents dz? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) [ Moderator's response: Probably not, since inscriptional spellings do occasionally show for . -rma ] From MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Apr 2 16:04:22 1999 From: MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 16:04:22 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] {luna} means "moon" in Latin and also in Russian. But Palmer's book "The Latin Language" says that Latin {luna} < *{louksna:} [= "the white object", after the old IE word *{ma:n-} or similar became taboo due to superstition]. Is the Russian form a loanword from Latin (which seems unlikely) or parallel evolution? How can I get a copy of Palmer's book "The Latin Language"? [ Moderator's response: Amazon.com shows it as available from the University of Oklahoma Press; the ISBN is 080612136X, if you want to order it from a closer source than Amazon.com. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 2 20:18:23 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 20:18:23 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>jorna at web4you.dk writes: >>I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic and >>Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then like >>virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and Danish. >-- exactly. If we put the earliest Avestan around 1000 BCE or a little >earlier, and the earliest of the Vedas around 1200-1500 BCE, which seems >generally accepted... >... then the date for Indo-Iranian unity would be around 2000 BCE. At which >point all the Indo-Iranians were still in Central Asia and points north, >apparently. So how does tis contradict my initial statement that Vedic and Avestan "feel" somewhere in the 500-1500 year range? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Fri Apr 2 22:58:36 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 14:58:36 PST Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Hi Steve (and IEists) In a message dated Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:53:09 EST Steve Long wrote: >In a message dated 3/26/99 04:30:24 AM, xdelamarre at siol.net wrote: ><dialects) is extremely uncertain>> {SL] >I've been confused as to why none of the replies mention a possible Greek >connection. I'm may be missing something very obvious again. Please >forgive me ahead of time. >The old Celtic-Greek contact point in the south of France is well >established. "Aner, andr-" is man (versus female, as opposed to >"anthropos" - man versus beast.) "Androo", to become a man or raise to be >a man, in Classical Greek was sometimes generalized to the feminine. >"Andris" in later Greek I believe came to be used as woman. And in such >terms as "anandria" (want of manhood, eunuch, unmarried woman) the term was >extended beyond the male. Couldn't this be the Greek word with a Romance >feminine ending dropped on it? What have I missed? [RF] Over the years the relationship between the Euskeric form which is in composition has been subjected to a number of interpretations, the most recent, to my knowledge, being Vennemann's (1998) discussion of it which appeared in his article "Andromeda and the Apples of the Hesperides". This was published in the Proceedings of the Ninth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference" JIES Monograph Series No. 28. I would refer you to the section appearing on pp. 12-17. He argues that we are dealing with a item that should be classed as "Vasconic". According to Vennemann's scenario "Vasconic" is one of three language families spoken in post-Ice Age Western Europe (ca. 8000 BC). Hence, in his simulation, the item passed from the lexicon of Vasconic to that of Euskera. It was also passed on from Vasconic to the lexicon(s) of West Indo-European languages. Thus, we are not dealing with a model in which an Euskeric item is posited as the source for the apparent reflexes of it in IE languages, rather there is a higher node that facilitates the transfer. It is from that node that the source of the reflexes found in the lexicons of both Euskera and IE should be sought, again according to Vennemann's model. In reference to the section of Vennemann's article cited above (pp. 12-17), first I should state that I disagree with his interpretation of the ending of the Aquitanian items, and (Gorrochategi 1984: 130-132). He argues that the endings <-xo> and <-xso> do not represent the common diminutive suffix in Euskera, namely, <-txo>, while Larry argues that they do. I fully side with Larry: the suffix is unremarkable from the point of view of Euskera. Having said that, I would suggest that the overall thrust of Vennemann's argument is worthy of consideration, namely, a model that posits a higher node and consequently, an older source for the IE and Euskeric items alike. In such a simulation of events, one could argue that originally the item was used in reference to a "woman" and that over time the term was generalized to refer to "human, person". In the final stages, as the positions held by such persons came to be "masculinized", i.e., as the positions of responsibility and authority (beyond the realm of the household) became more significant and the duties associated with them were fulfilled primarily or even exclusively by males, the expression's referentiality would have changed, i.e., its referent would have become a "masculinized." Here I am speaking of positions in the "public sphere". This line of argument has another advantage in that does not mean simply "woman" in Euskera, rather it is, strictly speaking, a form of address that carries the force (more or less) of "Lady, Mistress" in English. Its counterpart is , as I believe Larry pointed out quite clearly in another message. For example, when called by her name, a schoolteacher is referred to as "(the) Lady/Mistress so-and-so". I would note that as a title is regularly used to refer to post-pubescent females and there is some indication that it was once reserved for women who had born children, but that distinction is not entirely clear. Hence, if, in our model, we posit that initially the expression functioned primarily as a form of address, the shift in meaning would have been even simpler. If I am not mistaken I recall reading somewhere that the translation (or at least one of the translations of) proposed for and (IE) was "mensch" which would imply a wider spectrum of referentiality. Sorry I can't give a source. In addition, there is another piece of evidence that could be brought to bear in such a modeling of events. In Euskal Herria the importance of the role played by the woman in the household, particularly the elder female of the family, is quite well established. Her title was from "house", <-ko> "of". Literally translated, it means "lady-of-(the) house" and is pronounced roughly as . Again the expression is a totally normal one in Euskera today. Some years back while I was doing archival work on Basque law codes, I came across a document from Navarre written in Spanish (Navarrese?). As I recall it was from about the 15th century. There was a section it outlining the duties that were assigned to a group of important males, the of the village. Further research would be needed to determine whether at the time the document was composed, Euskera was still being spoken in the zone where the segment in question was written. However, it is a region in which Euskera had been spoken in centuries past. These individuals called (i.e., sing. ) are referred to throughout the text in the masculine so there is no question about their gender. Moreover, from the duties assigned, it is likely that the group as a whole was composed exclusively of men. In short, in this concrete case there is little question about the ultimate female referentiality of the "title" of , its derivation from . Yet it is likely that those (monolingual) Spanish-speakers who wrote the code in question had little or no idea that the term's original referent was to the "lady-of-the-house." Returning to Vennemann's thesis that / was passed on both Euskera and West Indo-European languages from the earlier so-called "Vasconic" family of languages, the simulation (if it were fully developed, that is, obviously not as it's being presented by me here, namely, in a totally schematic fashion) would elaborate on the evidence available for the type of replacement outlined above. It would emphasize the increasing importance, over long periods of time, assigned to roles played outside the immediate household environment, e.g., outside the socio-political structures of household, by males. For example, for the remote period in question initially we would be talking of small-scale structures characteristic of societal units based on an economy of transhumanic pastoralism and primitive agriculture, supplemented by hunting, fishing and gathering activities. In our simulation, such a society would not have had an elaborately organized "public sphere", i.e., one that was totally separate from the familial one. In the model discussed here, the anecdote cited above concerning serves as an example of what might have happened, naturally, on a much wider scale, when */* (or a phonologically similar prototype) as a title of respect for female elders (and mature females) came to be used with post-pubescent males, also. And eventually, again according to this simulation of events, the expression ended up with an altered referent because of the societal changes taking place, i.e., the increasing importance given to public positions that were held primarily or perhaps exclusively by males as well as the emergence of a more complex organizational structure for the society as a whole. So, Steve, in terms of what you might have missed, maybe it's the possibility of ladies becoming gentlemen. Keep in mind the above is merely a modeling of events in prehistory. Yours is another. It draws on similar data but organizes it differently. For instance, if I am reading your remarks correctly, your model asserts that the original referent of the item was a "male human being, man" and that this meaning was later generalized to mean "woman" given that there appears to be evidence (cited by you) in Greek for the word's field of referentiality to contain "woman" also. But that would be a later development in your simulation. In the one cited above, the reverse would be true. A couple of final comments and queries for you (and others). In your simulation, there is an element that is lacking, in my opinion: a mechanism to explain why it's the secondary meaning of the Gk. word, rather than the primary one that we find showing up in Euskera and Celtic. And on that point I would note that in your modeling of events you speak of a "contact point" in the south of France, which I assume refers to the geographical location where the Gk. term passed into Celtic (as well as being the general vicinity in which Aquitanian/Euskera was spoken). If I am reading your simulation correctly, that would mean that the Gk. term's meaning --at that point in time when the linguistic contacts took place and the expression passed into Celtic (and Euskera?)-- must have been to the female of the human species. Right? Would it be possible for you to provide your model with more specificity in terms of the time frame that we might be talking about for this "contact period". Also, what is the time-depth that should be assigned to the Gk. reflexes according to your model? And for others on the list, does anyone know of possible reflexes of in Romance, e.g., in Occitan, Aragonese or Navarrese? Best regards, Roz Frank Contribution # 3. April 2, 1999 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [currently on leave in Panama] From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 02:29:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 02:29:52 GMT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <1f02534c.2435ab9e@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Exemplia gratia: the Germanic proper name "Karl" (as in "Charlemagne"), >which was loaned into Proto-Slavic and became the generic term for "King", >for obvious reasons. (Rather as "Caesar" became "Emperor" in several >languages.) >This can be dated fairly precisely, since we know Karl the Great's dates >(742-814). >It then underwent the characteristic shifts of the various branches of >Slavic. Which, of course, it wouldn't do if it had been borrowed later. >So Common Slavic form would be *korlja, from which we get (Bulgarian) kral, >(South Slav) kralj, (Russian) korol, (Czech) kral, and (Polish) krol. (Sorry, >no accents on this email system). We can simulate them: Russ-Ukr , BRus , Cze , Pol , Sorbian (< Czech), CS *korljU. >Therefore the characteristic developments of the various Slavic languages >must post-date the early 9th century, at the very least. QED. Except that the date is too late. E.g. Chernyx, "Istorichesko- 3timologicheskij slovar' sovremennogo russkogo jazyka": Obychno, slovo ob"jasnjajut kak odno iz rannix zaimstvovanij iz germanskix jazykov (verojatno, dr.-v.-nem.), kak peredelku na slavjanskoj pochve imeni frankskogo korolja Karla (Velikogo). Pravda, xronologicheskij moment (v VIII-IX vv. obshcheslavjanskie perezhivanija uzhe zakanchivalis' ili zakonchilis', a zdes' predpologaetsja imenno obshcheslavjanskij process: *karl- > *korl-) vnosit izvestnye trudnosti pri ob"jasnenija 3togo slova iz . (Usually, the word is explained as one of the early borrowings from the Germanic languages (probably OHG), as a transformation on Slavic soil of the name of the Frankish king Karl (Charlemagne). It's true that the chronological moment (in the XII-IXth. cc. the common Slavic `experiences' were already ending or had already ended, and what is suggested here is precisely a common Slavic process: *karl- > *korl-) raises the known difficulties at explaining this word from ) [Couldn't resist giving the Russian because of the nice illustration of imperfective/perfective aspect: ] >Just to illustrate how close the Slavic languages _still_ are, the first line >of the Lord's Prayer, and keeping in mind that languages get more different >over time: A careless transcription is worse than no transcription (I'm blaming Mallory, not you). I'll try to set that right, but I don't have access to all the right sources right now: >OCS: Otice nasi ize jesi na nebesichu: da svetitu se ime tvoje. otIc^e nas^I iz^e jesi na nebesIxU: da sve,titU se, ime, tvoje. >Polish: Ojcze nasz ktorys jest we niebiesiech: swiec sie imie twoje. ojcze nasz kto'rys' jest w niebiesiech: s'wie,c' sie, imie, twoje. >Czech: Otce nas kleryz jsi v nebesich: posvet se jmeno tve. otc^e na's^ ktery'z^ jsi v nebesi'ch: posve^t^ se jme'no tve'. >Russ: Otce nas suscij na nebesach: da svjatitsja imja tvoje. otc^e nas^ sus^c^ij na nebesax: da svjatitsja imja tvoe. >Serb: Oce nas koji si na nebesima: da se sveti ime tvoje. oc^e nas^ koji si na nebesima: da se sveti ime tvoje. >Bulg: Otce nas, kojto si na nebesata: da se sveti tvoeto ime. otc^e nas^, kojto si na nebesata: da se sveti tvoeto ime. >-- indicative, one would think, fairly clearly, of the closeness of the links >we're talking about But careful. The Russian above, for instance, is just as idiomatic as English "thy name be hallowed". >(far closer than between the Romance languages) and of >reasonably complete mutual comprehensibility if we roll back twelve hundred >years or so to OCS times. Allright. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 02:41:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 02:41:35 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <92b0028f.2435c257@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>That's indeed all "North-West Germanic" means. Mutual influence between >>North and West Germanic, after the split between North and East Germanic, >>and of course long after the split between West and North-East Germanic. >-- given the existance of bridge dialects like Anglian (and Jutish, since the >Jutes came from further north in the Danish peninsula), I've never seen any Jutish, and Anglian only of the non-continental variety. Neither Kentish (sometimes though to be the continuation of Jutish on Englsih soil) nor Anglian look particularly like "bridge dialects". It's true that O.E. is probably the West Germanic language with most similarities to North Germanic (even before the Viking era). >doesn't the idea of >an old and sharp distinction between North and West Germanic look rather iffy? Old but not sharp. I think it's completely logical that West Germanic and North Germanic started to diverge a long time ago (surely many centuries BC), while at the same time not ceasing to converge... >This isn't surprising, given the small area, the short distances, and the >frequency and ease of travel by sea. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sat Apr 3 03:17:17 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 19:17:17 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Let's see if I get it straight this time... :) Pre-IE IE Anat > CS Greek *-t *-t *-t *-H1 - *-k *-k (*-h) *-k -k *-p *-H3 (*-h) *-H3 - Now, apparently, you love this theory because of its symmetry. Of course, it would be just as symmetric to believe that the earth is in the center of the universe. However, regardless, I see no symmetry here. Where do you manage to find it? It seems to me to be a very false theory for three reasons: 1. **-t > *-H1 Besides the fact that this sound change itself lacks more than one or two examples, *H1 could really be any consonant or even a long vowel according to your "evidence". A <-t> is found only in Anatolian and outside of Anatolian we can't say WHAT laryngeal it should be (if at all) let alone if there's a correlation between these non-Anatolian forms and the Anatolian ones. Your sound change is reduced to this, only on an exceptionally sunny day: **-t ?> *-(H) (?) 2. **-k > *-H2 In your own words: "Anatolian has -t, but not *-k (> *-H2 > -a [n.pl.])". There's no indication in any known IE language of **-k being archaic and a lack of such an entity doesn't require explanation because such a finite set of endings will undoubtedly fail to end in something. IE lacks *-bh, *-g and possibly *-l too but I don't see you crying over this trivia. For this particular sound change, you rely purely on the pecularities of Greek and isolated examples like Sanskrit , which shouldn't have *-k, remember? I shouldn't have to go on. That kind of logic in itself is deplorable and if Greek -k- does point to a laryngeal somehow we cannot, as in the first sound change, nail this down to anything more specific than this: **-k ?> *-(H) (?) 3. **-p > *-H3 Again, let me refer you to yourself who said, "AFAIK, there's no evidence for **-p (or for *-H3 as a grammatical suffix). It's merely there for symmetry." Symmetry or aesthetics? No **-p and no *-H3. It's quite clear. In summary, this is what your very uncertain idea amounts too: **-t ?> IE *-(H) (?) **-k ?> IE *-(H) (?) By the way... ME (GLEN): Come on, Miguel. First, why does it end in -nx instead of **-nk? Are y'sure it's not from IE *-nk-s? MIGUEL: Of course it is. The point is that there are (AFAIK) no _neuters_ in -nk, which I explain by hypothesizng that absolute final -nk would have given -r[H2], and a paradigm -rH2/-nk- would have subsequently been the victim of Ausgleich. Perhaps _I_ was the victim of Ausgleich myself. :) If Greek is animate (VERY animate, I hear) and with *-s I fail to see how this is important to our discussion about an unattested "second" form of an _inanimate_ heteroclitic with an unattested **-k. In the future, make sure that what you say sticks to the topic at hand. Afterall, we WERE talking about Uralic's connection to IE at one time...but I'll let that one slide for now. :P ME (GLEN): First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). MIGUEL: Which is obviously false. Obviously how? There is no **-dh as far as I know and since there aren't many examples of various suffixes ending in *-t and *-d aside from the inanimate and the 3rd person singular in IE, I severely doubt that IE speakers made a phonemic distinction between the two. Since *-t [3psing secondary] could very well be easily associated with the primary *-ti with a solid *-t- by both IE speakers and later IEologists, it's not surprising that we should see a *-t in the third person rather than a *-d but a distinction isn't necessary in IE reconstruction. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 04:17:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 04:17:10 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <003a01be7cfc$2c179b60$d104703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >On the other hand: I am not so sure the migration started only after the >collapse of Roman power. This is true. Or we can say that the collapse itself was a gradual thing (especially in that part of the world, with the Franks accepted into Roman territory as "foederatii" as early as AD 358). >>>As to 'northwestern Germanic', I am very, very skeptical about that idea. >>If you say Anglian was "in between Danish and Low German", I >>don't see how you can be that skeptical. >[ES] >I was referring to the graphically rather confusing diagram of McCallister, >that seems to suggest 'NW Germanic' to be a common child of NE and W >Germanic, before the split of NE into N and E Germanic. Probably, that >interpretation of the diagram was wrong. In that case : sorry. The diagram was mine. Here it is again: Proto-Germanic / \ West Germanic North-East Germanic \ / \ ("North-West Germanic") East Germanic / \ West Germanic North Germanic I tried (by using both quotes and parentheses) to indicate that "North-West Germanic" is not in the same category, Stammbaum-wise, as North-East Germanic (see Larry's message on Dixon/Ross/convergence/divergence, etc.) Maybe without labeling... Proto-Germanic / \ West Germanic North-East Germanic \ / \ \ / \ ) ( East Germanic / \ / \ West Germanic North Germanic Compare Malcolm Ross' diagram for Fijian-Polynesian, where he uses ==== to denote a dialect continuum or "linkage": Central Pacific linkage =========================================== | | | | West Fijian linkage Tokelau-Polynesian linkage =================== ========================== | | | | | | | Tokelau-Fijian linkage Proto-Polynesian | ====================== | | | | | Fijian linkage | ====================================== As in the case of Germanic, this explains the shared innovations between East Fijian (Tokelau means "East") and Polynesian [when both were on East Fiji, relatively separated from West Fiji], as well as those between West and East Fijian to the exclusion of Polynesian [due to renewed contact between West and East Fiji after Proto-Polynesian had left]. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 04:43:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 04:43:13 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <2064C7398D@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: >{luna} means "moon" in Latin and also in Russian. But Palmer's book "The >Latin Language" says that Latin {luna} < *{louksna:} [= "the white object", >after the old IE word *{ma:n-} or similar became taboo due to superstition]. >Is the Russian form a loanword from Latin (which seems unlikely) or parallel >evolution? Parallel evolution. If we apply the usual Slavic soundlaws to *louksna: we get *luxna, which becomes *luna by the Common Slavic open syllable rule. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 05:13:26 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 05:13:26 GMT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990402225910.43298.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "roslyn frank" wrote: >Having said that, I would suggest that the overall thrust of Vennemann's >argument is worthy of consideration, namely, a model that posits a >higher node and consequently, an older source for the IE and Euskeric >items alike. In such a simulation of events, one could argue that >originally the item was used in reference to a "woman" and that over >time the term was generalized to refer to "human, person". Vennemann, as I read him, is not claiming that Greek , G. "man, male" (PIE *H2ner-) has a Vasconic etymology. He merely claims that the element -andr- in a word like and names such as Andromeda, Andromache and Kassandra might be derived from a Vasconic *andr- "woman" instead of Greek "man". >These individuals called (i.e., sing. ) are referred >to throughout the text in the masculine so there is no question about >their gender. Moreover, from the duties assigned, it is likely that the >group as a whole was composed exclusively of men. In short, in this >concrete case there is little question about the ultimate female >referentiality of the "title" of , its derivation from >. I'm not familiar with the term "chandros", who it refers to, or what the history of the word is, but on the evidence presented here, I don't see any compelling reason to derive the word from . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iglesias at axia.it Sat Apr 3 16:36:26 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 08:36:26 PST Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I (Frank Rossi) wrote: >>However, in the area around the city of Rome itself, unlike the country >>districts of Lazio, the language has changed even more due to the outside >>influence of Tuscan, itself a descendant of Latin, but with an Etruscan >>substrate. Rick McCallister, asking me to elaborate ("Oh, dear!"), wrote: >I've read several in several places that the fricativazation of >medial stops is said to be from Etruscan but in others that this phenomenon >only dates back to the 1500s or so. > But given that Etruscan died out around the time of Caesar, it >could not have had too much of an effect on local Italian I took my time answering, as I wanted to check a few things. Facts: a) The Etruscan language had both unvoiced stops (p, t, k) and three "aspirated" stops (ph, th, kh). b) Latin replaced Etruscan in Tuscany, which was "the region less affected by processes of language mixing" (Giacomo Devoto), in part because the Roman colonies (Sutri, Cosa, Heba) and, consequently the colonists, were few in number. This means that the Etruscans (like the Gauls, etc.), without going into the process by which the change took place, changed their language and adopted Latin. c) Florentine, which is the basis of the Italian language, developed from the local Tuscan Latin. d) In modern Italian, there are only the unvoiced stops (p, t, k). e) In modern Tuscan, in various areas and with various degrees of intensity, the unvoiced stops are replaced by the "aspirated" stops (ph, th, kh) (the effect is a bit like Irish English, but I'm not suggesting that the Tuscans are Gaels!). f) The Tuscan dialects are clearly differentiated from the adjacent dialects by concentrated sets of isoglosses. None of these dialects exhibits the same kind of phenomenon. Opinions: a) One school of distinguished linguists (Ascoli, Meyer-Luebke, Pisani, Contini, Rohlfs) maintains, as Rick says, that "Etruscan ... could not have had too much of an effect on local Italian". b) Another school of equally distinguished linguists (Schuchardt, Bertoni, Merlo, Battisti, Castellani, Geissendoerfer) consider this a (delayed effect) substrate phenomenon. Further considerations: - The first mention of this phenomenon, again as Rick says, dates back to the 1500's. However, Dante also spoke of the shocking language of Tuscans ("Tusci in suo turpiloquio obtusi"), without explaining what he meant. - The Tuscan language spread to the rest of Italy (with the notable exception of Venice, where the local language continued in official use alongside Tuscan until the fall of the Republic in 1797) as a written language considered superior (thanks to Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, ...) to all the other alternatives available. In other words, Italian was not carried physically into the rest of Italy by the Tuscans themselves with their own characteristic pronunciation. The various regions adopted Italian, alongside their local dialects (*), with people in each region reading Italian with their own local accents. This is also why, despite some attempts in this century to create a standard Italian pronunciation ("Prontuario di pronuncia della RAI", etc.), spoken Italian is still largely "italiano regionale". (*) The term "dialect" as used in Italy is also confusing. The Milanese "dialect", for instance is considered an "Italian dialect", but it is not a dialect of the Italian language, in the sense that Cockney or Broolyn English are dialects of the English language. Milanese is a Lombard dialect and part of the Gallo-Italic "diasystem" that never developed into a single written language with official status. However, the "italiano regionale" of Lombardy is a dialect or variant of the modern Italian language and is used, at least outside the major cities, in a diglossic situation with the Milanese "dialect" proper. All this *may* mean that the Tuscans, wrote "casa" (probably for etymological reasons), but pronounced "hasa". The other Italians in the meanwhile adopted the written Tuscan language, but read "casa" with /k/. It was only later, when contacts with actual Tuscan speakers became more frequent, that other Italians who used Italian as a written language, but whose native spoken languagage was not Tuscan, began to notice the "strange" pronunciation of the Florentines and other Tuscans, cf. Roberto Benigni ("Yes, in Italian too"). ***** I also mentioned in my original posting the "romanesco" dialect of Rome. To which Rick added: >What I notice about Roman speech is >/-L- > 0/ e.g. figlio > "fio" >/-nd- > -nn-/ e.g. andiamo > "annamo" The first of these phenomena, although in not so extreme a version, is common in other Romance dialects, cf. "yeismo" in Spanish. The second, which is characteristic of Central-Southern Italian dialects, including Neapolitan, etc., but *not* Tuscan and *not* North Italian, is also considered a substrate phenomenon going back to pre Latin times. According to Domenico Silvestri in the chapter of the Italic languages in the Italian version of "The Indo-European Languages" edited by Paolo Ramat (which I assume is similar in the English version), a number of phenomena of assimilation (nd>nn, pan Italic; mb>m, in Umbrian only) that can be observed in the phonetic history of the dialects of the Italo-Romance area clearly have their roots in the Italic tradition. This phenomenon also exists in Spain, in Aragonese, and was discussed by Ramo'n Mene'ndez Pidal in "El Idioma espan~ol en sus primeros tiempos", where he also discusses the delayed substrate effect. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 3 09:11:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 04:11:27 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/1/99 2:03:39 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- there isn't enough difference between the Slavic languages even now for there to have been any significant distinction at that time. >> One has to watch oneself on this list, or one will forget what point one was originally making. Just to repeat: I've still seen no direct evidence that OCS was comprehended or even heard by the northwestern Slavic speakers who lived in the Elbe-Oder area in the time OCS first rolled out. (And possibly include the Poles in that. The Czechs heard OCS, but how much of it they comprehended is another matter.) My ORIGINAL statement was in response to Miguel's point about the original gradiated PIE dialects in Europe being "swallowed up." I said that the "swallowing-up" languages he mentioned were all standardized languages and I included Slavic as being in the process of standardizing from the earliest evidence we have. I wrote: <<<> There is no question that Russian (or Eastern Slavic) and Church Slavonic converged. As Comrie writes: "...Old Russian of this early period was characterized by diglossia [between the] (the low variety) and Church Slavonic (the high variety). With the passage of time, the divergence between the two varieties lessened, in particular with many Church Slavonic forms gaining acceptance into even the lowest forms of language." And from everything that the Greeks tell us, this standardizing was intentional. And it certainly also went on in Serbian and Bulgarian To say that this convergence was already entirely there contradicts this evidence that OCS was a standardizer. Of course, it's a matter of degree. And obviously it is easier to standardize two Slavic languages into a single "official" tongue than it would be Japanese and Bantu. But my point again is that Slavic was already being standardized from the very first evidence of anything Slavic. <> Documented in the case of Latin. But unfortunately for your premise, undocumented in Slavic. And unfortunately for my premise, undocumented in PIE. <<-- sigh. We have written records of Polish and Russian from the 11th century on. Take a look. They were extremely similar back then, too. Much more so than now, in fact.>> Actually, the first sentence in Polish shows up in the late 13th Century and real text comes from middle 14th Century. Before that there are only proper names written with little system so that many sounds are "almost impossible to distinguish." The evidence therefore is some 500 years after OCS originates. The first Russian appears of course in OCS texts, so that it is arguable that it is in fact Russian. At the time of a valid direct comparison between Polish and Russian however there are fairly significant "differences in how words are stressed, vocabulary and numerous syntactic and morphological developments," perhaps more than would be expected "given the extreme instabilities of the borders between the two languages." << Also, the extreme archaism of OCS (and of the Slavic languages generally) argues powerfully that they were quite uniform then.>> And of course as we have learned on this list, Germanic is "archaic," while Slavic is merely conservative - although it shares many features with the "innovative core" that Germanic does not. However it seems that since we assume that all these IE language groups were once "uniform" (for about ten minutes at least) - archaism proves nothing about when they were uniform. Finally, the problem with reconstructions, of course, is that they are to a lesser or greater degree conjectural, which is fine for linguistic modeling. But taking such reconstructions as hard evidence for some broader historical fact or pet theory may be going too far. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 3 09:23:02 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 04:23:02 EST Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 6:40:19 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Wait, are you saying they shared common developments after splitting up? Then that means some of the similarities were due to "mutual contact" and not common ancestry. That goes against your premise. <> What you might as well say is "rather as Caesar became Kaiser or Tsar." Does that prove something about the relation of German and Russian? How do we characterize the sound shifts difference between czar, tsar and kaiser? (More interesting is the relation of "karl" to such words as "churl", "coerl", "krailik" and "czele" and the fact that the individual name "Karl" shows up in a 900 Graeco-Russian treaty alongside of names like "Boris" and "Vlad". That's a little more tricky. Almost makes you wonder which way the borrowing went.) <> Unless of course your original assumption is incorrect and it doesn't specifically refer to Charlesmagne and is earlier. Which is certainly possible. All depends on what "karl" meant before Charlesmagne and whether any Slavic-speakers could have access to that word and meaning, doesn't it? <> Hmmm. Indubitable. <> Or sometimes, as in the case of Russian and OCS, closer. <> I am not going to tell you that this example does not reflect a similarity after at least 1200 years of provable separation. But I wonder what it proves about 800 ace. I just wonder if words like "father," "your", "heaven" and "hallowed" and the common liturgical prayer of Christianity however are where you look to find the active differences between languages. <> This is the problem of how you judge "closeness" again. John Green writes of "the high degree of lexical overlap" between the modern Romance languages, "using the standard lexicostatistical 100-word list." And that "intercomprehensibity...is also good in technical and formal registers, owing to extensive borrowing from Latin..." (Borrowing from a 'dead language' should be illegal.) In any case, I don't think you'd find very much incomprehensibility - if any - of their own pater noster's among Romance speakers. <<...of reasonably complete mutual comprehensibility if we roll back twelve hundred years or so to OCS times.>> I think that all anyone can say with confidence is that it is possible - especially given the "chaotic" way languages behave - if I remember your description in an earlier post correctly. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 3 15:03:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 16:03:01 +0100 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <2064C7398D@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > {luna} means "moon" in Latin and also in Russian. But Palmer's book > "The Latin Language" says that Latin {luna} < *{louksna:} [= "the > white object", after the old IE word *{ma:n-} or similar became > taboo due to superstition]. Is the Russian form a loanword from > Latin (which seems unlikely) or parallel evolution? According to C. D. Buck, Russian is an independent Slavic formation from the stem meaning `bright', just like the Latin word. Even Old Church Slavonic has for `moon'. The same stem provides Armenian , Old Irish , and Welsh , all `moon'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 3 15:43:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 16:43:19 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990402225910.43298.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Well, I'm no IEist, but I confess myself baffled by Vennemann's suggestion (if it is his) that Greek `man' continues a "Vasconic" stem also continued in Basque `lady'. First, it seems clear that the /d/ in the oblique stem of the Greek word, as in genitive , is epenthetic, just like the /d/ in English `thunder', and that must be secondary for original *. Second, all of the admittedly limited sources available in my office agree that the Greek word is straightforwardly derivable from a PIE stem *, or perhaps *. The sense of this stem is disputed, and both `man' and `strong' have been proposed, at least. This stem is taken as the source of all the following: Greek `man' Oscan/Umbrian `man of rank' Latin (personal name) Middle Welsh `chief, master' Old Irish `strength' Sanskrit `man' Avestan `man' Albanian `man' Armenian `man' As far as I -- a non-specialist -- can see, the IE status of the word is demonstrated, and there is no problem to be solved by appealing to an implausible "Vasconic" influence. And anyway Basque has both the wrong form and the wrong meaning. Any comments from the specialists? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roborr at uottawa.ca Sat Apr 3 16:23:04 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 11:23:04 -0500 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: You should also check Golab's "The origins of the Slavs - A linguist's View", which has discussion of Italic-Slavic parallels (p. 121 for the luna example), although one might argue wth the analysis). At 04:04 PM 4/2/99 GMT, you wrote: >{luna} means "moon" in Latin and also in Russian. But Palmer's book "The >Latin Language" says that Latin {luna} < *{louksna:} [= "the white object", >after the old IE word *{ma:n-} or similar became taboo due to superstition]. >Is the Russian form a loanword from Latin (which seems unlikely) or parallel >evolution? [ moderator snip ] From iglesias at axia.it Sat Apr 3 21:00:21 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 13:00:21 PST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In response to my posting: >In this discussion it should be kept in mind that Old Portuguese and Old >Galician, spoken in the NW corner of the Iberian peninsula, were *the same >language*, from the time when the South of Portugal with Lisbon was still >under the Moors and the local people there spoke a Mozarabic dialect until >quite some time after the independence of Portugal. >So the question is did Portuguese /u/ preserve the older pronunciation or >did modern Galician /o/, (which is described as "very closed" by >phoneticians). Rick wrote: >You need to keep in mind that "neo-Galician" essentially uses a largely Spanish pronunciation. We agreed on this in previous postings, but this was not because Castilian completely replaced Galician as it (and Portuguese) replaced Mozarabic in the "reconquered" areas, but rather because modern Galician (dialects) developed in parallel with "Spanish", i.e. Castilian (see Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1971, chapter on "El Gallego"), no doubt because they all formed part of the same state, the Kingdoms of Galicia and Asturias being incorporated in the Kingdom of Leon, which later united with the Kingdom of Castille. The term Neo-Galician needs to be defined. Rick is referring, I assume to the semi-artificial common Galician language that had to be developed when Galician was recognized as an official language, a situation similar to Batua for Basque (comments by Larry and the Basque experts appreciated), and even Catalan in the last century, before Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan Studies Institute, was practically reduced to a series of dialects. True Miguel? However, the Galician dialects continued to be spoken in the country without interruption by at least 80% of the total population, even before the restoration of the official status of Galician, and for these people, Castilian was always a foreign, albeit closely related language. (A Mexican friend and colleague of ours once said to my wife: "Oh, yes, but for you people of Northern Spain in general, Spanish is a foreign language!") Also, since we discussed this, I have been told by contacts in Galicia that the dialects of the Western coast are practically indistinguishable from Northern Portuguese in their pronunciation (no "zeta", etc.), but strangely they are more similar to Castilian in their morphology (PAPEL-PAPELES); the Eastern dialects are the opposite (PAPEL-PAPEIS). The Neo Galician language, with the backing of the Autonomous Government of Galicia, has apparently emphasized the "Spanishness" of Galician - and not the contrary - by using Western morphology and Eastern pronunciation. The Lusophiles in Galicia who want instead to accentuate the roots of their language, use more Portuguese oriented spelling conventions, e.g. Espanha, but they are not in power in the local government and their preferred versions are used, as far as I know, only in a few magazines, books, etc., precisely because of the lack of official support. What I am trying to say is that Neo-Galician for most of the dialect speakers of Galician is not a "Post-Castilian" language, as they never spoke Castilian, except as a foreign language. In Alava, on the other hand, many people have learned Euskera ex novo starting from Castilian. . For the Castilian native speaking minority in Galicia (less than 16%), there are two situations: a) For the Galicians (like my wife Pilar), whose language is objectively Castilian, but with a Galician substrate that is clearly noticeable in their pronunciation and other aspects, learning Neo-Galician is a "return home", as these people (less than 7%) all understand Galician more or less and are very much attached to their roots, cf. the Irish. As we (Frank and Pilar) said before, for the Portuguese, the Galician pronunciation may be very Castilian, but for the other Spaniards it's very "gallego", i.e., spoken or sung by people or even witches (meigas) or cloud-riding sorcerers (nubeiros) on broom (toxo) covered heaths with a background of bagpipe (gaita) music in thick Atlantic mists (bretema) or fine drizzle (orvallo) :) b) For the other Spanish speakers who live in Galicia, although their numbers are limited (less than 9%), and it is to be hoped this does not apply to the Basque and Catalan speakers among them, Neo-Galician may seem a diabolic invention of Galician nationalists to diminish the glory of Spain - Una, Grande, Libre - as they used to say in the times of Franco, but the language is probably here to stay and will probably draw closer to Portuguese. (I have been told, for example, that a lot of Galicians are now subscribing to Brazilian magazines, etc., and this gives them a whole new outlook on the world). It is also interesting to note that, of the three non Castilian official languages in Spain (Galician, Basque and Catalan), Galician is the one with the highest levels of speakers of the language : 91.02% understand Galician 84.19% speak Galician (1991 census data) against: 94% understand Catalan 68% speak Catalan in Catalunya-Catalun~a alone (1991 census data) 88.2% understand Catalan 61,6% speak Catalan in Catalunya, Comunitat Valenciana (Catalan speaking areas) and Illes Balears (1986 data) and 30.09% understand Euskera 22.38% speak Euskera in the Comunidad Auto'noma Vasca-Euskal Autonomi Erkidekoa (Basque Country) only. (1991 data). I gave the figures for Navarra-Nafarroa in an earlier posting, but for completeness I repeat them below: 10.22% speak Euskera understand Euskera 16.4% The situation has apparently improved considerably for all three non Castilian languages since then. Finally, and this is the point, it is probable that not only the Galician dialects, but also standard (Lisbon) Portuguese also changed considerably from the original "galego-portugue's" brought from the North by the "reconquistadores", as can be inferred by the fact that the Northern Portuguese dialects are in many ways still closer to Galician than to standard Portuguese, again as discussed in recent posts. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Apr 3 18:52:18 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 13:52:18 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >edsel at glo.be writes: >probably during the migrations of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, I presume >> -- the Burgundians and Vandals also went through Western Europe, the former permanently; they were East Germanic speakers. Those _Volkerwanderung_ period peoples were extremely mobile. The Vandals started out in what's now Poland, moved down to the Danube, bounced back up and crossed the _whole_ of Germany, crossed the Rhine in 407, moved all the way down to Spain, then crossed to North Africa and went all the way to Tunisia. There were 80,000-100,000 of them in all, too. (Or more; Gaeseric had them counted as they left Spain, but that was after one branch of them was wiped out.) And they did it all in a single lifetime. In fact, if you leave out the stops along the way, they did it in about 10 years. This should give pause to those who consider large-scale long-distance migrations "implausible". The Vandals did it on foot or with ox-carts (minus a short sea-voyage from southern Spain to North Africa). The technology wasn't overwhelmingly different from that available to a similar tribe in 3000 BCE, although the Roman road system would have helped once they'd crossed the Rhine. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Apr 3 19:06:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 14:06:08 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >So how does tis contradict my initial statement that Vedic and Avestan >"feel" somewhere in the 500-1500 year range? >> -- well, if proto-Indo-Iranian unity is around 2000 BCE, and our attested Vedic and Avestan (the Gathas, the oldest layer) are somewhat prior to 1000 BCE, then the range would be 400-800, not 500-1500. That fits with the archaeological data, too. And, of course, the languages remained in contact through a continuous arc running from the Zagros to the Ganges. (The ancient Persians didn't call themselves Iranians, after all; they and the IE-speaking inhabitants of India used the same ethnonym.) One would like to know how peculiarly Indo-Aryan the words in Mitannian are; but there we have the problem that they're loanwords in another language and written in an awkward syllabic script that blurs details. From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Sun Apr 4 04:55:43 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 22:55:43 -0600 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Dear Mr. Trask: Thank you for responding so thoroughly and informatively to my poorly phrased and uninformed questions. I was most reluctant to pose any question about language, given my utter ignorance in the field. I certainly had no intention of sounding a challenge to those in the field of historical linguistics about the veracity or accuracy of IE. Being professionally skeptical, however, I did want to consider the possibility that IE, as an hypothesis, would be subject to the rules of all hypotheses, and vulnerable to evidence that would just as convincingly point to the opposite conclusion as to the expected conclusion. I appreciate your correcting my vocabulary about child vs daughter languages. My choice of words probably was influenced by my work in the computer industry where "child" accounts, "child" processes, etc. are encountered frequently. I can see the necessity of substituting the word daughter for child, as the word child has an immature connotation to it that would not be appropriate for a fully developed language. Your comments and explanation of the family tree model was also most helpful. Certainly in Europe, where the dominate languages share such obvious roots, a family tree model would be the handiest and most logical model to explain divergence. I wonder if the Asian languages of China, Korea and Japan share a similar background of divergence due to isolation. I must confess that your last point relative to the possibility that IE developed from more than one language, did cross my mind as I was investigating the issue. So, I felt it worthwile to ask about it. I am convinced now, that the IE model has stood the test of time, analysis and criticism, and accept your assertion that while IE may not be the only accepted model of linguistic development, it does the best job of explaining how most European languages developed. The only question I have now is, where does the Africian languages (Hebrew and Arabic, primarily) enter the IE equation? Is it assumed that prior to PIE, the Asian and Africian languages that were non PIE were influencial in the ultimate development of PIE? Surely there were many words that came from these sources, given the importance of the religious vocabulary available to the Hebraic people. Thanks again for taking the time to help me out. I am deeply appreciative of your efforts. Ray Hendon From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 4 07:57:34 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 10:57:34 +0300 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: <3710764c.180924324@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >"Glen Gordon" wrote: >>Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. >Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx). Just out of curiosity, is there anything particular about 'lynx' that sets it apart from the numerous other words for animals and birds in Greek* that end with /x/, so that one might think that the final consonant cluster is ancient rather than being a secondary formation using a classificatory marker? * e.g.: glaux "owl" kokkux "cuckoo" korax "crow" ortux "quail" aix "goat" alopex "fox" hyrax "shrew mouse" bombux "silkworm" murex "murex" and even phoenix "(a mythical bird)" Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 4 08:21:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 04:21:27 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 4:00:25 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- official documents were written in it, and scholars sometimes 'talked' in it....There were no Latin-speakers in medieval Europe, only speakers of French, Italian, German and so forth who acquired Latin as a second, learned language. And not very many of them, since it was an overwhelmingly illiterate rural society.>> Everything you've said above is either incorrect or unprovable - except for the point that Medieval Latin was probably always a second language. (EB White disagreed.) You have not and probably cannot find a single primary source that limits Latin in the way you would like. But there are plenty that contradict you. Even someone like William of Nassyngton (1300's), an advocate of English over Latin and French, clearly states that Latin is spoken by the educated, the lawyer, the foreign merchant and at court - his point is while "only some speak" Latin and French, everyone - even "the lewd" - speak English. On the other hand, Welsh or Scottish - or scholars, for that matter- aren't even mentioned. [ Moderator's comment: Wales was not conquered by the English until the 14th Century, so Welsh would not be of concern to a 14th Century Englishman, Scottish--whether you mean Scots or Gaelic--even less so. However, *all* of the examples of speakers of Latin are drawn from the educated classes, so your point is unproven. --rma ] There were many reasons Latin was spoken and sometimes extensively in the middle ages. The need for a common language in international diplomacy, law and trade was an obvious one. Another one was that the early native tongues of Northern Europe were simply inadequate in communicating reliably in detail. This was unambiguously spelled out in the mid 800's by Otfrid - one of the first to produce a written text in west Germanic - in a letter to Liutbert, Archbishop of Mainz. Otfrid points out that the Frankish of the time lacked not only vocabulary, but was "uncultivated and undisciplined", where for example two negatives in a sentence do not make a positive: "... This language, you see, is considered to be country, because by its own speakers it has never been polished in writing nor by any art at any time. Indeed, they do not even memorize the stories of their forbears, as many other peoples do, nor do they embellish their deeds or life for love of their worth. On the other hand, if, though rarely, this does happen, they expound rather in the language of other peoples, that is, Latin or Greek." <<...who acquired Latin as a second, learned language.>> But a language none the less. [ Moderator continues: A second language differs greatly in internal processing from a first, and is used *consciously*, unlike a first. Thus, change in a second language will be different in kind from a first language. --rma ] <> And totally illiterate before the arrival of Latin. But yes there had to be quite a few or they would have stayed illiterate - since they had to be able to use the Latin alphabet and transpose its sounds to become literate. But in any case we can be sure there were certainly hundreds of thousands more than the 70 speakers that can constitute a "language" in New Guinea. <> Here! Here! But that's aside from the point - the point being that writing helps to regularize sounds and pronounciation - if it didn't, we'd know nothing about past languages - since all we know about them is from writing. <> So therefore the following comparison by you is meaningless, because those spellings are not to be trusted. Same with your comparisons of OCS and Polish. <> <<<<<< a meaningless comparison due to the rampant changes language goes through "every generation"!!!>>>> I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- unfortunately for you, it's a distinction that can be found in any elemenatary linguistics texbook.>> I'm not sure you even noticed what the distinction was. And I'm afraid you'll have to give me a cite for any textbook that contradicts what I wrote. I've looked and I can't find one. In a message dated 4/1/99 4:01:28 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<<<-- once a language is no longer used and learned by children from their parents, it fossilizes because it's not subject to the usual pressures of linguistic change. The pace of change in it slows down dramatically.>> I wrote: <> [ Moderator continues: What he said is that languages learned naturally, which is to say as first languages, change in ways that differ greatly from languages learned by intentional schooling. And *of course* languages change when children learn them from their parents--this is one of the tenets of historical linguistics! --rma ] JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<--- all spoken languages undergo change in every generation.>> So QED mothers are the cause of change in language. And the reason Latin doesn't change is because it isn't taught by mothers. All of creation still disagrees with you. [ Moderator's conclusion: You are being argumentative for the sake of argumentation. Mothers are not the cause of language change, children--well, young people--are. And the reason that Latin does not change is that children do not learn it in the same way that they learn their first languages. --rma ] Regards, Steve long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 4 08:24:32 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 04:24:32 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 10:52:28 PM, MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk wrote: <> Just a reminder that Slavonic and Russian are not entirely congruent: 'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' (princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. <> Lidell-Scott suggests 'luna' is contracted from luc-na, v. luceo - to shine. (Lux, lucis, however, is fairly strongly associated with daylight.) L-S also cites Gr, luchnos, leukos; OHG, lioht and - believe it or not - "Sanskrit, 'ruk', to be bright,..." The moon in Cl. Greek is 'meis, menos' (or 'selene' - apparently from the Dorian 'selana'). L-S gives (cross my fingers) '*m&emacrns' as IE stem. [ Moderator's comment: Liddell & Scott can be trusted for definitions, but the etymologies are very often holdovers from pre-Neogrammarian 19th Century thinking, unrevised in more than a century. In any case, _luceo_, _lux_, and congeners are related to English _light_ and Skt. _ruk-_; the questionable item is their _luc-na_. --rma ] <> Interesting. How did we find out about this taboo? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 4 08:50:35 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 04:50:35 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/2/99 4:00:25 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- we don't see any change in Mycenaean, because it was only written for a century or two.>> Although I've been told that language can change wildly or not change at all, for no reason at all, I find this notable if true. There is a curve that is observable with the coming of literacy. A fair number of IE languages do show quite a bit of change in their first centuries of literacy - if for no other reasons then just getting the characters and their sounds straight. If Mycenaean truly shows no sign of change during the centuries from the time it was first written, that would seem unusual. And certainly might suggest some kind of standardizing had gone on before the appearance of Linear B. Or at least the same time. Otherwise we would expect "dialectic gradients," wouldn't we? [ Moderator's query: In accounting ledgers??? --rma ] Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 4 15:31:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 11:31:54 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The NeolithicHypothesis] Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 9:59:31 PM, Larry Trask wrote: <> Without contradicting any of the above, I think it might be worthwhile to point something out. The divergence/family tree model may explain the "rise" of the IE family, but it doesn't completely explain how the IE groups got to where they are today. Two other factors are worth consideration. One is the possible removal of early "branches" that could affect the accuracy of reconstruction. The other is the convergence that occurred when later dialects were standardized or heavily borrowed from. For example in a message dated 3/15/99 5:21:05 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote with regard to early PIE dialects: << ...any initial dialect gradients that came into being have been destroyed by later language spreads. Celtic has been largely swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern Europe with new dialect gradients. Etcetera.>> This kind of "swallowing up" might lead us to accept the trait of an intermediate language as the trait of an earlier ancestor. Another example is John Green's statements in TWML's that Romance could not have evolved directly out of standardized Latin, while yet citing the extensive borrowings from Latin, which implies that at some point Romance and Latin diverged and converged. "Family-tree classifications,...give only crude indications of relationships in Romance and tend to obscure the convergence brought about by centuries of Latin borrowings and criss-crossing patterns of contact [which resulted] in a high degree of lexical overlap in the modern Romance languages." Another example is the observable convergence of Russian and OCS. It makes sense that such convergences, if mistakenly seen as commonalities resulting from a common ancestor or PIE itself, could skew reconstruction away from a true triangulation. This would be especially true in large wholesale characterizations such as centum/satem, where convergences of later diffused terms of trade or uniformity might give a false impression of early ancestry. Given the massive amount of words involved however it would seem that numbers alone favor the reliability of reconstruction in general. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Apr 5 17:01:33 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 10:01:33 -0700 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis Message-ID: >On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote: >> But I do have a question about Indo-European as the proto-language I would of course endorse the responses you have had, especially from sources I respect so much, but I would also add a caveat: the family tree model explains the origin of the PIE languages, but cannot be used exclusively to explain their subsequent development. We also need language-contact models, and convergence models, including the notion of "sprach-bund". This affects individual languages, but there are also scholars who have argued that the entire Germanic language family, for example, is a contact-language; though I believe support for this is not strong at the moment. So alongside the diverging family-tree model, we need other models which describe other linguistic processes, even for IE. Peter From iglesias at axia.it Mon Apr 5 17:02:21 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 10:02:21 -0700 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Further to my posting which ended as follows: >Finally, and this is the point, it is probable that not only the Galician >dialects, but also standard (Lisbon) Portuguese also changed considerably >from the original "galego-portugue's" brought from the North by the >"reconquistadores", as can be inferred by the fact that the Northern >Portuguese dialects are in many ways still closer to Galician than to >standard Portuguese, again as discussed in recent posts. To complete my "pleading", I found the following information on the above in my usual source (Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1971, chapter on "Evolucio'n de la lengua portuguesa", p. 217): "... for Re'vah (1) there must have been a very ancient tendency to close to /u/ all unaccented "o"'s, *except in final position* although this tendency was contrasted by the "cultista" reaction which always replaced the orthographic and etymological "o", while final "e" and "o" were uniformly represented by closed "e" and closed "o" (2) until the early decades of the 18th Century" (1) I.S. Re'vah, "L'e'volution de la prononciation au Portugal et au Bre'sil du XVIe sie'cle a' nos jours" ("Anais do primeiro Congresso Brasileiro da li'ngua falada no teatro", Rio, 1958) and "Comment et jusqu'a' quel point les parlers bre'siliens permettent-ils de reconstituer le syste'me phone'tique des parlers portugais des XVe-XVIIIe sie'cles ("Actas do III Colo'quio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros", vol. I, Lisboa, 1959). (2) It is curious to note that this is the present pronunciation of Galician." [end of quotation] *.. * = my emphasis FR If this is true, then it is demonstrated that Portuguese final /u/ is not a continuation of the Latin nominative case, which was our starting point. In the same context (p. 220) I also found the following: "Important phonetic changes (although no longer reflected in spelling) that took place in the *18th Century* were, for example, the transformation into a fricative (Eng. "sh") of the affricate (Eng. "ch") (1)... (1) While for Joa~o Franco Barreto, who published his "Ortografi'a da li'ngua portuguesa" in 1671, and for Joa~o de Morais Marureira Feijo', whose "Ortografi'a ou arte de escrever e pronunciar com acerto a lingua portuguesa" was published in 1734), the fricative pronunciation of "ch" was a dialectal feature of *Estremadura*, for Luis Antonio Verney ... who published his "verdadeiro Me'todo de Estudar" in 1746, it is the most correct and recommendable pronunciation. [end of quotation] *.. * = my emphasis FR The affricate pronunciation is still used in Galician and Northern Portugal (where however it is *now* considered incorrect), e.g. "chamar" vs. "shamar". The demonstrates simply that, like European and American English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French), in the case of Portuguese and Galician (or, if you prefer, the Galician dialects) sometimes it is one of the variants that innovates and sometimes the other. Portuguese innovated on final "o" and fricative "ch" (= "sh") All Galician (with the exception of a few isolated areas), in parallel with Castilian, Asturian, etc., innovated in the unvoicing of voiced "s" and "zh" and (most of Galicia, but not all) in pronouncing "zeta" as "th". I rest my case. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 5 07:18:10 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 03:18:10 EDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 11:25:13 PM, roslynfrank at hotmail.com wrote, with regard to the following: <> < serves as an example of what might have happened, naturally, on a much wider scale, when */* (or a phonologically similar prototype) as a title of respect for female elders (and mature females) came to be used with post-pubescent males, also.>> I can't say that any of what you or Prof Vennemann have conjectured about the word are not true. I am only questioning whether perhaps more recent influences might account for the word. <> Here's some theories based on documented Greek or Greek/Latin contact in the south of France all before the current era or soon after. One is that the word is a learned word, passing into "French dialects" (and Euskera?) without any necessary phonetic change, from some very specific sources that we have some very firm evidence of. "Andria" appears in a somewhat famous comedy by the Roman playwright Terence. Andria > Woman of Andros. Andros being one of the Cyclades . The story is sometimes titled "The Maid of Andrus". (Thorton Wilder wrote a bestseller titled "Woman of Andros" based on the story. ) More generally, Andrius, a, um, adj., of Andros, one of the Cyclades. There was a late Roman commentary that I didn't quite get that I think suggests that the term "andria" had some wider meaning that was used ironically in the play. (The play is about a courtesan who grows old while being in love with a younger man. Perhaps the irony is that the audience knew "andria" to mean 'maid' or 'lady.' I don't know.) Perhaps it existed in vulgar Latin and we simply have no other record of it. Perhaps it was a proper name that turned into a category (e.g., Caesar, Jezebel, Karl>krol, Rurik>Rus, etc.) Also I would like to known about the the first appearance of the given name "Andrea" and how it might be related. In any case, you have an instance of "andr- andri-a" in use in Classic Latin refering to a woman (a Greek woman.) The passage of the word from 'and-ri-a" to "and-er-a" of course is no more complex than the passage of the proper name 'Alexandros' to 'Alexander'. It could perhaps have gone from Latin to Romance along the same path as other "learned" words (e.g., fragilem> fragile, versus frele.) and then to Euskera. This puts perhaps a rather late date on it. Another theory is that Andros, the Greek island was involved earlier. The island is mentioned by Greek writers as having formed a fair number of early (pre-300bce) colonies, and was associated with the also Ionian Phokia, which is in turn credited with the founding of the Greek colony Massilia (Marseilles) about 600bce. Also just about 80 miles north of Massalia was located ANDERITUM (sometimes called Gabalum as the chief city of the Celtic Gabales), also later a fairly important Roman center. (The word would have moved east and north with other Greek borrowings that occur in early French.) The premise here would be that at some point rich or "patrician" ladies of Greek descent or persuasion were referred to by their ancestral associations. This is a fairly common way of refering to women (but not men) with the use of foreignisms or group self-names. When Mark Twain wrote "the room was blessed here and there with pretty senoritas," he is doing something similar. In English, similar usage happens when a female is referred to as a "coleen" or a "fraulein." or for that matter "hausfrau." Similar is the accepted source of the "polka" (the dance) as "polska" although "polka" without the "-s-" seems to be the self-name. Also, "mazurka." Perhaps a good example as it transfered into English is "madame" - which can connote both status and meaning beyond the male equivalent (monsieur) but comes with an awareness that the word is a foreignism. The last theory is a little tougher. Did "aner, andri-" expanded in meaning as a Greek colonist self-name to include both genders - and then contract to mean only the female? Well perhaps it was originally related to a special traditional female vested right based on Greek descent. There is a parallel of sorts - "dowager" never refers to anyone but a female and is used to convey social status and age and as much as legal status. And like one of my favorite words with a similar stem, "center", it could be a Greek word (kentrum") with multiple meanings that completely jumped Latin and ended up in French with one of those meanings. Also there is the possibility of a calque of "ananderia" which with the prefix "ana-" (without) was used by Classic Greek writers to refer to widows - perhaps a special status in context. None of this is meant to deny a Vasconic derivation, but only to suggest that a later Greek source might be possible, if not probable. Regards, Steve Long From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Apr 5 08:53:26 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 03:53:26 -0500 Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: Have the discussants read Herb Izzo's Etruscan language, dismissing the substrate theory on the origin of gorgia toscana? j p maher Frank Rossi wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Rick McCallister, asking me to elaborate ("Oh, dear!"), wrote: [ moderator snip ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 09:27:22 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 05:27:22 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Old but not sharp. I think it's completely logical that West Germanic and >North Germanic started to diverge a long time ago (surely many centuries >BC), while at the same time not ceasing to converge... -- well, if it's old, wouldn't it be sharp? Jutish and Anglian would have been in physical contact with early Danish -- after all, it's a mightly small peninsula/islands up there. The archaeology shows large boats were in use from the Bronze Age on, and most of the population lived in areas fairly near the coast. Trade and political interaction were close and continuous. And there was plenty of mix-and-match movement during the Migration period; Frisia was in close contact with Scandinavia, and people from Sweden were raiding Gaul in the 6th century. Tales like that of Beowulf were common to the whole area. The original migrants to England seems to have included virtually every Germanic group accessible from the North Sea coast, with the main source area stretching from what's now Holland up through the tip of Denmark. Some groups (the Angles, for instance) apparently moved over _en masse_, permanently affecting the linguistic makeup of the former homelands. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 09:33:45 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 05:33:45 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Just to repeat: I've still seen no direct evidence that OCS was comprehended >or even heard by the northwestern Slavic speakers who lived in the Elbe-Oder >area in the time OCS first rolled out. -- loanwords in the various Slavic languages indicate that their distinctive features emerged fairly late; hence, at the time OCS was written down, it merely represented the southern edge of a dialect continuum which was still mutually comprehensible across the entire area of Slavic speach. Or to put it simply: all the Slavs were still speaking dialects of a common, mutually intelligible language. If they weren't, the loanwords wouldn't have undergone the (subsequent) changes that they did. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 09:47:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 05:47:08 EDT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Wait, are you saying they shared common developments after splitting up? -- no, I'm saying that the existance of common innovations allows us to date the split. Which was late. >What you might as well say is "rather as Caesar became Kaiser or Tsar." -- that's what I said. It's significant in Slavic, because the word was borrowed _uniformly_ into the proto-Slavic language and then underwent the characteristic developments of the various (later) languages. >"Karl" shows up in a 900 Graeco-Russian treaty alongside of names like "Boris" >and "Vlad". That's a little more tricky. Almost makes you wonder which way >the borrowing went.) -- no, it doesn't, unless one is playing useless games. You are aware, aren't you, that Scandinavians founded the Russian state, and constituted a ruling class there for several generations? Complete with their personal names, which only gradually became Slavicized as they were assimilated? You know, Rurik of Jutland, those guys? >All depends on what "karl" meant before Charlesmagne and whether any >Slavic-speakers could have access to that word and meaning, doesn't it? -- the actual meaning in the Germanic languages was roughly "retainer" or "follower", originally. (As in "huscarl"). Charlemagne campaigned extensively in the East; he was the pattern of a "powerful king"; the Slavs, who were at a much more primitive level of political evolution, adopted the word as their term for a ruler. As to access to it, there are Germanic loanwords in proto-Slavic (some specifically Gothic) and the Slavs have always been in at least intermittent contact with the Germanics. >But I wonder what it proves about 800 ace. I just wonder if words like >"father," "your", "heaven" and "hallowed" and the common liturgical prayer of >Christianity however are where you look to find the active differences between >languages. -- take another sentence, then. And how is the religious element going to affect linguistic evolution, in this precise case? Face it, all Slavs could communicate in 800 or so. From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 11:39:46 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 11:39:46 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990403031719.59395.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >Let's see if I get it straight this time... :) >Pre-IE IE Anat > CS Greek > *-t *-t *-t *-H1 - > *-k *-k (*-h) *-k -k > *-p *-H3 (*-h) *-H3 - Not quite. I mentioned no -k in Greek, merely a possible alternation -H2 ~ -k-. >1. **-t > *-H1 >Besides the fact that this sound change itself lacks more than one or >two examples, *H1 could really be any consonant or even a long vowel >according to your "evidence". A <-t> is found only in Anatolian and >outside of Anatolian we can't say WHAT laryngeal it should be (if at >all) let alone if there's a correlation between these non-Anatolian >forms and the Anatolian ones. One good example is all it takes. Beekes reconstructs the instrumental sg. as -(e)H1. The instrumental (where it exists at all and isn't made with *bhi/*mi) shows a lengthened vowel in all roots (-a: for a:-stems, -i: for i-stems, -o: or -e: for o-stems), which can only mean -H1. Hittite has -it (< *-et). If we postulate a development **-t > *-H1, the Hittite form can be connected to the others [as well as to other, extra-IE, instrumentals in -t, if we so wish. I give you Georgian -it, Sumerian -ta]. >2. **-k > *-H2 >In your own words: "Anatolian has -t, but not *-k (> *-H2 > -a >[n.pl.])". There's no indication in any known IE language of **-k being >archaic and a lack of such an entity doesn't require explanation because >such a finite set of endings will undoubtedly fail to end in something. >IE lacks *-bh, *-g and possibly *-l too but I don't see you crying over >this trivia. The supposition is merely that if there are masc/fem. roots in -k or -t (nom. -ks, -ts), we might expect some neuters too, and there aren't any. This may be due to an Auslautgesetz, as suggested by the few clues we have (ins. sg. -t ~ -H1, fem. -H2 ~ -k-). >For this particular sound change, you rely purely on the pecularities of >Greek and isolated examples like Sanskrit , which shouldn't have >*-k, remember? I shouldn't have to go on. That kind of logic in itself >is deplorable and if Greek -k- does point to a laryngeal somehow we >cannot, as in the first sound change, nail this down to anything more >specific than this: > **-k ?> *-(H) (?) Surely -H2, if anything. >3. **-p > *-H3 >Again, let me refer you to yourself who said, "AFAIK, there's no >evidence for **-p (or for *-H3 as a grammatical suffix). It's merely >there for symmetry." Symmetry or aesthetics? No **-p and no *-H3. It's >quite clear. Symmetry is aesthetics, aesthetics is symmetry. >In summary, this is what your very uncertain idea amounts too: > **-t ?> IE *-(H) (?) > **-k ?> IE *-(H) (?) I agree the whole thing is uncertain, but one question mark suffices: **-t > *-H1 (?) **-k > *-H2 (?) >By the way... >ME (GLEN): > Come on, Miguel. First, why does it end in -nx instead of **-nk? Are > y'sure it's not from IE *-nk-s? >MIGUEL: > Of course it is. The point is that there are (AFAIK) no > _neuters_ in -nk, which I explain by hypothesizng that absolute > final -nk would have given -r[H2], and a paradigm -rH2/-nk- would > have subsequently been the victim of Ausgleich. >Perhaps _I_ was the victim of Ausgleich myself. :) If Greek is >animate (VERY animate, I hear) and with *-s I fail to see how this is >important to our discussion about an unattested "second" form of an >_inanimate_ heteroclitic with an unattested **-k. See above. There are in general no formal distinctions in (Pre-)PIE between animate and inanimate nouns as far as the shape of their stems are concerned. So if there are a lot of animate nouns in -nts (and a few in -nks), we'd expect a few neuters in -nt at least. Instead we have a few irregularities involving -r(t), -r(k) and -nt- mixed into the heteroclitics. >ME (GLEN): > First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes > nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation > contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). >MIGUEL: > Which is obviously false. >Obviously how? Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 12:11:28 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 12:11:28 GMT Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Frank Rossi" wrote: >Facts: >a) The Etruscan language had both unvoiced stops (p, t, k) and three >"aspirated" stops (ph, th, kh). >[...] >d) In modern Italian, there are only the unvoiced stops (p, t, k). But for an analysis of the system as a whole, it's not unimportant to add that Italian also has b, d, g; pp, tt, kk and bb, dd, gg... Etruscan *only* had p, t, k and ph, th, kh. >e) In modern Tuscan, in various areas and with various degrees of >intensity, the unvoiced stops are replaced by the "aspirated" stops (ph, >th, kh) (the effect is a bit like Irish English, but I'm not suggesting >that the Tuscans are Gaels!). In fact, I did compare the gorgia to the Goidelic mutations somewhere recently (Romanesco, on the other hand, has Brythonic mutations: la hasa / la gasa). >f) The Tuscan dialects are clearly differentiated from the adjacent >dialects by concentrated sets of isoglosses. None of these dialects >exhibits the same kind of phenomenon. >Opinions: >a) One school of distinguished linguists (Ascoli, Meyer-Luebke, Pisani, >Contini, Rohlfs) maintains, as Rick says, that "Etruscan ... could not have >had too much of an effect on local Italian". Well it could have, but not more than a millennium after its death. >b) Another school of equally distinguished linguists (Schuchardt, Bertoni, >Merlo, Battisti, Castellani, Geissendoerfer) consider this a (delayed >effect) substrate phenomenon. >Further considerations: >- The first mention of this phenomenon, again as Rick says, dates back to >the 1500's. However, Dante also spoke of the shocking language of Tuscans >("Tusci in suo turpiloquio obtusi"), without explaining what he meant. >[...] >All this *may* mean that the Tuscans, wrote "casa" (probably for >etymological reasons), but pronounced "hasa". That's the only hope the Etruscan substrate theory has: that the gorgia went unnoticed and unwritten for over a millennium (maybe in remote illiterate areas of Tuscany?) until it became fashionable in the Tuscan cities, sometime around 1500... I must say I find that hard to believe. Rohlfs also objects that the Corsican dialects show no trace of the gorgia, despite the (physical, not literary) Tuscan influence on Corsican. >According to Domenico Silvestri in the chapter of the Italic languages in >the Italian version of "The Indo-European Languages" edited by Paolo Ramat >(which I assume is similar in the English version), a number of phenomena >of assimilation (nd>nn, pan Italic; mb>m, in Umbrian only) that can be >observed in the phonetic history of the dialects of the Italo-Romance area >clearly have their roots in the Italic tradition. >This phenomenon also exists in Spain, in Aragonese, and was discussed by >Ramo'n Mene'ndez Pidal in "El Idioma espan~ol en sus primeros tiempos", >where he also discusses the delayed substrate effect. And I don't really believe it either for Aragonese (and Catalan). Sure, some Oscan (Osca = Huesca) and Umbrian colonists were present in the area, but I guess they were all over the Empire. The change mb > mm, nd > nn is natural enough for it to have taken place independently. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 12:30:00 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 12:30:00 GMT Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Frank Rossi" wrote: >The term Neo-Galician needs to be defined. Rick is referring, I assume to >the semi-artificial common Galician language that had to be developed when >Galician was recognized as an official language, a situation similar to >Batua for Basque (comments by Larry and the Basque experts appreciated), >and even Catalan in the last century, before Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan >Studies Institute, was practically reduced to a series of dialects. True >Miguel? Sure. Any language without a unitary written standard becomes a series of dialects. In the case of Catalan, the standardization resulted in a compromise between the old, Mediaeval literary standard and the "dialect" of the economically and politically dominant area, the city of Barcelona. In a way, the same is true of Batua, basically a compromise between the old Lapurdian literary standard and the modern Gipuzkoan dialect of San Sebastian (would probably have been Bilbao, if Basque hadn't died out there long ago). In both cases, there was also some conscious effort to get rid of "castellanismes" and "erderismos" as much as possible. How does the Galician standardization compare? To what extent is the choice for Western morphology and Eastern pronunciation, for instance, a conscious "political" move, and to what extent might it be a side effect of either the Mediaeval standard or modern regional economics (as opposed to "national" [or should I say "popular"] politics)? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 12:55:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 12:55:29 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <5513b7bd.2437c0a0@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>So how does tis contradict my initial statement that Vedic and Avestan >>"feel" somewhere in the 500-1500 year range? >> >-- well, if proto-Indo-Iranian unity is around 2000 BCE, and our attested >Vedic and Avestan (the Gathas, the oldest layer) are somewhat prior to 1000 >BCE, then the range would be 400-800, not 500-1500. Close enough, considering. >That fits with the archaeological data, too. I guess that depends on whether one thinks Andronovo was Indo-Iranian or already exclusively Iranian. >One would like to know how peculiarly Indo-Aryan the words in Mitannian are; >but there we have the problem that they're loanwords in another language and >written in an awkward syllabic script that blurs details. The only firm datum is the numeral "1" (Skt. e:ka- vs. Av. aeva-). For all we know, it may have been a fourth branch of Indo-Iranian, which happened to have *aika- for "1", just like Indo-Aryan. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Apr 5 13:50:18 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 08:50:18 -0500 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Re: >'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. >Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' >(princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex >relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. 1. 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally): shouldn' this be separated and put with 'book'? As yet unclarified. Note the velar. 2. (sans accents) - a fascinating word. Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' (princess)... --Damned fascinating. Source is Gothic 'kin-ing' > 'king'. A priest in medieval Christendom held forth in a [fortified} , from medieval Latin . Cf. , < Kassel>... (sans accents), moon as 'prince' seems to match Genesis' "lesser light', as opposed to the "greater light", the sun. j p maher X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [ moderator snip ] > 'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. > Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' > (princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex > relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. [ moderator snip ] From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 14:06:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 14:06:13 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <39791a6e.24387bc0@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. >Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' >(princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex >relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. C.D. Buck's dictionary says: Pol. , displacing in the sense of "moon" [ is still "month"], dim. of in its older meaning of "prince" [now "priest", "prince" is ]. As the sun was the lord of the day, the moon of the night, the latter was the lesser "prince". Brueckner 277. The origin of ksia,dz "prince", like Russian knjaz' etc. is Germanic *kuning(az) (> *kUne~gI > *kUne~dzI) "king". "book" is unrelated, at least it cannot be separated from general Slavic *k(U)n(j)iga "book" (formerly plural, OCS ), despite the nasal vowel (we would expect Pol. *ksiga, and the phonetics probably were influenced by ksia,dz, ksie,z.yc, etc.). The origin of *kUnjiga is uncertain. It may be derived from a Slavic *kUnU (only Pol. kien(') "stump", cf. book/bukva from "beech"), which is itself of uncertain etymology. More it is a borrowing, and according to Dobrovskij somehow connected with Armenian k`nik "pechat'"("seal, stamp", not "printing press" I suppose), Ossetian k`i:nyg "book" (unless that was borrowed from Russian) maybe ultimately from Chinese shih-king (shih-ching) "Classic of poetry" (compiled by Confucius, it seems). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Apr 5 14:18:17 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 09:18:17 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The NeolithicHypothesis] Message-ID: The Stammbaum is a useful fiction. Like the subway [underground] "ma", it gets you from here to there, but is not isomorphic with a surveyor's map. j p maher X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Without contradicting any of the above, I think it might be worthwhile to > point something out. The divergence/family tree model may explain the "rise" > of the IE family, but it doesn't completely explain how the IE groups got to > where they are today. [ moderator snip ] From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 15:00:59 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 15:00:59 GMT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The NeolithicHypothesis] In-Reply-To: <9bc7d561.2438dfea@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Two other factors are worth consideration. One is the possible removal of >early "branches" that could affect the accuracy of reconstruction. The other >is the convergence that occurred when later dialects were standardized or >heavily borrowed from. >For example in a message dated 3/15/99 5:21:05 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote with >regard to early PIE dialects: ><< ...any initial dialect gradients that came into being have been >destroyed by later language spreads. Celtic has been largely >swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian >spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern >Europe with new dialect gradients. Etcetera.>> This kind of "swallowing up" >might lead us to accept the trait of an intermediate language as the trait of >an earlier ancestor. Of course loss of data is by definition a bad thing for reconstruction. And history is lossy. There is always a real possibility that we might mistake later innovations for "proto-stuff" (because only the branches carrying the innovation survived) and miss things that *were* in the proto-language because the branches that retained them have died out. But as long as not all the branches have been ripped off, it should still be possible for us to recognize the "tree", if there is one. >It makes sense that such convergences, if mistakenly seen as commonalities >resulting from a common ancestor or PIE itself, could skew reconstruction >away from a true triangulation. This would be especially true in large >wholesale characterizations such as centum/satem, where convergences of later >diffused terms of trade or uniformity might give a false impression of early >ancestry. Given the massive amount of words involved however it would seem >that numbers alone favor the reliability of reconstruction in general. Indeed. The point is that PIE may well have been a "mixture" of languages, but if so (and it ain't necessarily so), it was a mixture of languages that were closely related to begin with (like Latin and Romance, OCS and Russian, Anglian and Saxon). We still have a tree, just a very bushy one. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Apr 5 16:44:50 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 11:44:50 -0500 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <370f7ddb.39093860@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: I've seen some confusing arguments linking Jutes, Geats & Goths--based only on the resemblance on the names What's the scoop on that? I've also seen arguments linking the Angles to the Frisians, claiming they were basically the "Frisians of Angeln." However, didn't Anglian have /k/ where Frisian and Saxon had /ch/? And I've seen the argument that Scots [Lallans] & Northumbrian are essentially Modern Anglian while R. P. is basically Modern Saxon with some modest Anglian influence [e.g. I < ik instead of ich & 3rd ps -s instead of -eth]. All of this sounds pretty simplistic, so I'd like to hear something a bit more concrete [snip] >I've never seen any Jutish, and Anglian only of the >non-continental variety. Neither Kentish (sometimes though to be >the continuation of Jutish on Englsih soil) nor Anglian look >particularly like "bridge dialects". It's true that O.E. is >probably the West Germanic language with most similarities to >North Germanic (even before the Viking era). [snip] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Apr 5 16:53:51 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 11:53:51 -0500 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <3712a035.47889708@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: The link of possible Vasconic elements to Greek is where Vennemann baffles me. I can understand the idea of a possible Vasconic substrate in Western and Central Europe but Greece seems too far afield. On the other hand, his proposed etymologies based on -andr- are interesting. You just have wonder how they may have been incorporated into Greek --via a third language [i.e. the "Aegean" or Pelasgian substrate] or what. [snip] >Vennemann, as I read him, is not claiming that Greek , G. > "man, male" (PIE *H2ner-) has a Vasconic etymology. He >merely claims that the element -andr- in a word like >and names such as Andromeda, Andromache and Kassandra might be >derived from a Vasconic *andr- "woman" instead of Greek "man". [snip] From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Apr 5 17:13:48 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 19:13:48 +0200 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ROBERT ORR: > Actually, there is evidence to suggest that IE *kuon is probably > from a zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku- > "herd(?)".(...)a comparison between *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. forms > would be a desideratum. GLEN GORDON: > Until we find a *p- before that word in some attested language, it's all > but one of many possibilities (Probably the unlikeliest possibility > too). (...) Allan Bomhard reconstructs a Nostratic item, #652 > *k(h)uwan-/*khuw at n- "dog", to account for both IE *k^won and AfroAsiatic > with similar forms. Illych-Svitychs earlier Nostratic reconstruction > (...) is also based on Uralic forms (...), all of which Bomhard had > trouble finding (...). > Not knowing alot of detail behind the forms sited for AA, it looks > intriguing but IE and AA are very far apart. I'd be interested to know > if others have found these forms in Uralic (...) and if so, could they > simply be borrowed from IE? Even if they were, this wouldn't explain the existence of similar forms in other language families closer to IE than AA. J.Greenberg lists the following Eurasiatic forms, none of which show any trace of *p- or the like: Old Turkish 'bitch', Mongol 'a wild masterless dog', Proto-Tungus <*xina> 'dog', Korean 'dog' (< kani), Gilyak ~ 'dog' and Sirenik 'wolf' (read the y as a gamma). In "On the Origin of Languages", Stanford Univ. Press 1994, J.D.Bengtson and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide range of other language families, even khoisan. Thus, *k^won seems not to be derived from *peku-, but is probably an indivisible word belonging to the very oldest core of human vocabulary. Adam Hyllested From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Apr 5 17:18:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 12:18:47 -0500 Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What you're saying makes me wonder if there wasn't some sort of diglossia going on all along with the upper classes pronouncing casa as /kaza/ and the lower classes as /haza/. Would this work? [snip] >Opinions: >a) One school of distinguished linguists (Ascoli, Meyer-Luebke, Pisani, >Contini, Rohlfs) maintains, as Rick says, that "Etruscan ... could not have >had too much of an effect on local Italian". >b) Another school of equally distinguished linguists (Schuchardt, Bertoni, >Merlo, Battisti, Castellani, Geissendoerfer) consider this a (delayed >effect) substrate phenomenon. >Further considerations: >- The first mention of this phenomenon, again as Rick says, dates back to >the 1500's. However, Dante also spoke of the shocking language of Tuscans >("Tusci in suo turpiloquio obtusi"), without explaining what he meant. [snip] >I also mentioned in my original posting the "romanesco" dialect of Rome. >To which Rick added: >>What I notice about Roman speech is > >/-L- > 0/ e.g. figlio > "fio" > >/-nd- > -nn-/ e.g. andiamo > "annamo" >The first of these phenomena, although in not so extreme a version, is >common in other Romance dialects, cf. "yeismo" in Spanish. Not quite because whenever I've spoken to Romans, I've noticed a complete dropping of /-L-/. I hear /fio/ rather than /fiyo/. But, OTOH, I've spoken to Italians in Latin America and the US. Yei/smo is a bit more complicated since it runs through a whole gamut of sounds including /y^, j, zh & sh/ --with /y^/ representing the "tense " similar to that of rather than that of , which in Spanish is represented by [compare vs. ] >The second, which is characteristic of Central-Southern Italian dialects, >including Neapolitan, etc., but *not* Tuscan and *not* North Italian, is >also considered a substrate phenomenon going back to pre Latin times. "Nabolidan" as I've heard it among both US ethnic Italians and Neapolitans visiting the US had /nd/, as in something similar to /andyamu/ or /andyammu/. But they may have been trying to use a standard pronunciation. [snip] It is said that Roman settlers to Spain were principally from the area around Naples, who brought in characteristics of Osco-Umbrian as well as Greek. But I've usually just heard this remark in passing or seen it as a "truism" From jrader at m-w.com Mon Apr 5 13:47:02 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 13:47:02 +0000 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: I don't know what encyclopedias or general references Mr. Long is taking this information from, but either he or his sources have some basic distinctions muddled--either that or Slavic historical linguistics has changed a lot since I was first exposed to it 20-odd years ago. What I learned was that the basic texts in Glagolitic or Cyrillic that define Old Church Slavic all originated in the Balkans--with the important exception of the oldest text, the Kiev Fragments (Russian ), which has some Czech phonetic features and is a translation of part of the Roman missal. The oldest Old Russian text, the Ostromir Gospels (Ostromirovo evangelie), dated by a colophon to 1056, is coincident in age with the canonical Old Church Slavic texts, but has distinctive East Slavic phonetic features--in particular, the relatively early loss of the nasal vowels, so that the letter for the back nasal and the digraph for [u] are sometimes mixed up. (On the other hand, it doesn't mix the jers up.) There is never any confusion about which texts are OCS and which are Old Russian. It is NOT the case that "the first Russian appears of course in OCS texts, so that it is arguable that it is in fact Russian." I'm writing this from memory because I'm in my office and most of my Slavic books are home, so if I'm wrong, may someone correct me. Jim Rader > Actually, the first sentence in Polish shows up in the late 13th Century and > real text comes from middle 14th Century. Before that there are only proper > names written with little system so that many sounds are "almost impossible > to distinguish." The evidence therefore is some 500 years after OCS > originates. The first Russian appears of course in OCS texts, so that it is > arguable that it is in fact Russian. At the time of a valid direct > comparison between Polish and Russian however there are fairly significant > "differences in how words are stressed, vocabulary and numerous syntactic and > morphological developments," perhaps more than would be expected "given the > extreme instabilities of the borders between the two languages." > Regards, > Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 19:06:32 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 15:06:32 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Although I've been told that language can change wildly or not change at >all, for no reason at all, I find this notable if true. -- it's simple. Linear B, the syllabic script used for Mycenaean after about 1450 BCE (no earlier, possibly later), ceased to be used at all after around 1200 BCE, because Greece lapsed into preliterate status. When the Greeks aquired writing again, about 500 years later, they used a modified form of the alphabetic script developed in the Levant. >If Mycenaean truly shows no sign of change during the centuries from the time >it was first written, that would seem unusual. -- Myceanaean was "written" exclusively for accounting purposes, in a script very badly suited to the sounds of the Greek language; it was adapted from Linear A, which was used to write whatever it was the Minoans spoke. (Which was certainly not Greek, and probably not an Indo-European language at all.) Linear B is a syllabic script (with some logograms) in which all sounds expressed end in vowels. The closest you can come to writing a typical Greek word like "anthropos" is something like a-to-ro-po-se. The multiple meanings of the signs make any but the shortest statement extremely ambiguous, which is probably why the script wasn't used for anything but accounting lists. >Otherwise we would expect "dialectic gradients," wouldn't we? >[ Moderator's query: In accounting ledgers??? --rma ] -- precisely. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 19:25:57 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 15:25:57 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Even someone like William of Nassyngton (1300's), an advocate of English over >Latin and French, clearly states that Latin is spoken by the educated -- that's what I said. It was a secondary language of the literate, used primarily for writing, and secondarily to communicate with people who spoke a different mother tongue in ordinary life. >[ Moderator's comment: However, *all* of the examples of speakers of Latin >are drawn from the educated classes, so your point is unproven. --rma ] -- precisely. >The need for a common language in international diplomacy, law and trade was >an obvious one. -- note that the 9th-century treaty between the descendants of Charlemagne dividing his dominions was written in early versions of French and German, respectively -- because that particular one had to be understood by their noblemen and retainers. (Charlemagne never learned to write, himself, by the way; it was an uncommon accomplishment for anyone but clerics in his day.) >Another one was that the early native tongues of Northern Europe were >simply inadequate in communicating reliably in detail. -- this is a meaningless statement. All languages are perfectly adequate for ordinary communication. You're taking a medieval scholastic prejudice literally. By the way, you have heard of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, haven't you? The vernacular tongue was generally used in pre-Norman England for written documents, such as charters. >But a language none the less. >[ Moderator continues: A second language differs greatly in internal >processing from a first, and is used *consciously*, unlike a first. Thus, >change in a second language will be different in kind from a first >language. --rma ] -- precisely my point; thank you. >And totally illiterate before the arrival of Latin. -- see above re Anglo-Saxon England. For that matter, the pre-Christian Scandinavians wrote in runic and the equivalent Irish Celts in Ogham. >since they had to be able to use the Latin alphabet and transpose its >sounds to become literate. -- you are aware that the vernacular was also written in the Latin alphabet (which is what we're using here) aren't you? And that an alphabet is not a language? >So therefore the following comparison by you is meaningless, because those >spellings are not to be trusted. -- I said the spelling was phonetic in the 16th century; where did you get this "not to be trusted" bit? The spelling of English has changed less than the actual spoken language. This is what happens with actual, living languages, ones not learned primarily from books. (Note that in India, where English _is_ primarily a 'book-language', many archaic forms are still in common use.) >Look what you are saying here. If kids learn language from their parents, >then that language changes. All of creation disagrees with you. Getting it >passed on from your parents is supposed to be what passes it on unchanged.>> >[ Moderator continues: What he said is that languages learned naturally, >which is to say as first languages, change in ways that differ greatly from >languages learned by intentional schooling. And *of course* languages >change when children learn them from their parents--this is one of the >tenets of historical linguistics! --rma ] -- precisely. Some people have difficulty grasping this concept, it seems. >So QED mothers are the cause of change in language. And the reason Latin >doesn't change is because it isn't taught by mothers. All of creation still >disagrees with you. >[ Moderator's conclusion: You are being argumentative for the sake of >argumentation. -- I'm glad that's obvious... 8-). >Mothers are not the cause of language change, children--well, young >people--are. And the reason that Latin does not change is that children do >not learn it in the >same way that they learn their first languages. --rma ] -- precisely. Nobody in Medieval Europe shouted "**it!" in Latin when they hit their thumb with a hammer. From roborr at uottawa.ca Tue Apr 6 00:02:15 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 20:02:15 -0400 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >Just a reminder that Slavonic and Russian are not entirely congruent: Right >'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. >Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' >(princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex >relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. Only on the basis of folk etymology. In Polish *kn+FV or J > *ks [palatalised], can't do diacritics on this programme. ksiezyc, ksiezy, ksiezna etc. < *kne(d)z, Russian knjaz' ksiega < *kniga, Russian kniga From roborr at uottawa.ca Tue Apr 6 00:04:05 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 20:04:05 -0400 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: The Graeco-Russian example is a red herring. Karl in that context would have been a Scandinavian/Varangian name, i.e., also ultimately Germanic. >What you might as well say is "rather as Caesar became Kaiser or Tsar." Does >that prove something about the relation of German and Russian? How do we >characterize the sound shifts difference between czar, tsar and kaiser? >(More interesting is the relation of "karl" to such words as "churl", >"coerl", "krailik" and "czele" and the fact that the individual name "Karl" >shows up in a 900 Graeco-Russian treaty alongside of names like "Boris" and >"Vlad". That's a little more tricky. Almost makes you wonder which way the >borrowing went.) From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 6 01:19:58 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 18:19:58 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: ROBERT WHITING: Just out of curiosity, is there anything particular about 'lynx' that sets it apart from the numerous other words for animals and birds in Greek* that end with /x/, so that one might think that the final consonant cluster is ancient rather than being a secondary formation using a classificatory marker? Thank God. A man with pertinent questions (... or woman, you never know these days what with the faceless internet and all :) I would like to know the answer to this as well, and why Greek's "intrusive" -k-'s are supposed to be ancient rather than innovative - a question that remains mostly neglected, to the contribution of my frustration. JENS RASMUSSEN: [...]it IS a fact that the stative verbs (morpheme /-eH1-/ of Lat. sed-e:-re) and the neuter s-stems go together (Lat. sede:s 'seat'; more impressively e.g. fri:gus/frigeo; rigor/rigeo; tepor/tepeo etc.), in that the s-stems denote the state something is in if the stative verb can be used about it (what friget is in frigore etc.). Does this have anything to do with an IE *-st(i) ending, perhaps? (cf. Hittite talukasti and OSlav. dlugosti) JENS RASMUSSEN: Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with stm-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. These testify to the earlier existence of an independent phoneme (in PIE a morphophoneme) that could be posited as /c/ and given the "reading rule" that it is realized as /-s/ word-finally, and as /t-/ in other positions. Gee, kind of sounds like that **-t > *-s rule that lil' Glenny's been talkin' 'bout. Hmm, it would sure explain alot of things but I've been mentioning it umpteen times already in previous messages. I guess it's too straightforward a theory for people to swallow. It has to have pizzazz and glitz, coated with sugar. We need to posit extra phonemes and such to make it pretty. Poor ol' Occhim. Sigh. I give up. I need a therapist ;( JENS RASMUSSEN: It would be the IE marker of second person, verbal 2sg *-s, 2pl *-te (2du *-t- + unclear stuff, but surely something more than just the -t-), Gee, maybe it's that **-t > *-s thing. Just a thought. Ooops, I forgot. Too simple. We must posit **-c to cloak it in phonetic mystery. What was the reason for **-c again? JENS RASMUSSEN: pron. *tu, *t(w)e [I'll keep my derivation of *yu(:)s, *usme and *wos from protoforms with *t(w)- out of this] Thanks, because there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus. JENS RASMUSSEN: --- Now to the point: Is there any way of formulating a sound rule so as to get a stative noun *le'wk-ot/-es- to contain the same suffix as the stative verb *luk-e'H1-, i.e. have we any way of equating nominal //le'wk-ec-// and verbal //lewk-e'H1-//?? On an ironic note, if you simply accepted my **-t > *-s rather than an off-the-wall **c phoneme, you would be closer to your sound rule goals, in addition to agreeing with a modified version of Miguel's nonsensical sound change of **t > *H1, if you feel necessary to do. JENS RASMUSSEN: So, if there is reason to believe that a pre-PIE *k could be spirantized to PIE *H2, as in the non-active 1sg marker (perfect *-H2a, middle thematic *-a-H2 corresponding to other Eurasian *-k), If we truely want to "envisage" outside of PIE into the world of Eurasiatic, I'm personally not aware of any examples of a /k/ in other Eurasiatic languages aside from a lonely and bizarre Uralic language called Hungarian that has many innovations besides the -k/-l conjugation. I see more examples of an earlier 1rst person **-h though. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 6 03:25:59 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 23:25:59 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/5/99 7:35:48 AM, rma wrote: <> I was reaching for any other nearby languages that might have been mentioned as "spoken." Latin was. These weren't, though they were certainly nearby. <> My point rather was that Latin was "spoken" and quite often. It is clear that the prior post was saying it was rarely spoken and earlier said it was not spoken. The education of speakers to this point is irelevant - where children are extremely educated we don't stop calling them speakers. <<[ Moderator continues: A second language differs greatly in internal processing from a first, and is used *consciously*, unlike a first. Thus, change in a second language will be different in kind from a first language.>> [ Moderator continues: What he said is that languages learned naturally, which is to say as first languages, change in ways that differ greatly from languages learned by intentional schooling. And *of course* languages change when children learn them from their parents--this is one of the tenets of historical linguistics!...>> <> I accept all of the above. (If you look back at this particular dialogue, I think you'll see I was not really challenging the concept of natural languages. But I was reacting to a certain point of view that can use ancient text to prove something about lack of change in language over1000 years and then assert that writing proves nothing about language because it's always changing.) My question (way back when) was whether PIE - even though unwritten - could have continued as a second language the way Latin did. My point was that Latin didn't become just a dead text, but was a continuing powerful spoken and written influence on the existing "first" languages of the middle ages. I've offered some evidence and I have a lot more. In the midst of this discussion I allowed myself to stray. Let me please just address the issues mentioned above. The fact of only educated speakers is irrelevant to my original point since the educated can influence a spoken language as well as the non-educated. Second language is irrelevant to the point - second languages can have a strong influence on first languages if important enough people speak it. In fact, it can demonstrably have a larger effect than even a neighboring first language. Whether Latin was EVER a natural language is irrelevant to my point. It did not have to be a natural language to have the large influence it had as a second language. The idea that Latin was not learned from mothers is irrelevant, because we don't stop learning language when we are children and we can learn and use and pass on a second language as adults. How Latin changed doesn't matter, but rather what it changed. All of the above are irrelevant because Latin could and did continue to change the languages of Europe after it became only a second language. Even if it were only a written language it would have, but it was clearly also a spoken language whose sounds also continued to affect the direction of development in other languages. To assert anything else is just plain against the evidence. What is relevant, as you and Miguel pointed out, is that PIE was never a written language and therefore may not have behaved like Latin - may not have become a standardized second language that continued to affect its daughter languages after it stopped being primary. Finally, I want to point out that this discussion is not so much about change as it is about continuity. That's why its subtitled 'standardization.' Obviously if there was no continuity, there would no evidence of IE. (And of course we wouldn't be able to understand each other from one day to the next.) Of course language changes. But what any discussion of IE is about is not just change. In fact it's mainly about what stayed the same for thousands of years. But I apologize for being argumentative. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 6 04:16:21 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 00:16:21 EDT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: In a message dated 4/4/99 11:48:44 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Seems closer than I've been told it was. Once again the vocabulary (father, heaven, holy) here might tend to create a closer match than less liturgical or idiomatic forms. I compare (w/o knowing if I am transliterating correctly) - for the sake of seeing the "much" greater separation in Romance. French: Notre pere, qui es aux cieux, que ton nom soit sanctifiæ. Latin: Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Not overwhelmingly different, I'd say. BTW- was sent this by e-mail. It is apparently up on the wall of a church in the Holy Lands that has a lot of different Lord's Prayers on the walls: <> (sans accents) This appears to be another "Wendish" dialect than Sorb. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Apr 6 07:52:28 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 08:52:28 +0100 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. It is not the only Greek word ending in -nx. There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), and of course sphinx, and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. These are all -ng stems. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Apr 6 08:02:40 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 09:02:40 +0100 Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: Mycenaean does show some variation, particularly between Pylos and Knossos, (although it is on the whole "extremely uniform"). Pylos, for example, makes much greater use than Knossos of what Chadwick and Ventris call a2 . Texts from Mycenae itself show a distinct preference for 3rd declension dative singular in -i rather than -e. Whether these variations reflect dialects or divergent spelling is ultimately unprovable - but we must not assume that Mycenaean was "unchanging" or without variation. Peter From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Apr 6 09:20:24 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 12:20:24 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 28 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I wrote: ><and neighbors can account for the lexical or basic phonological >differences between Greek and Sanskrit in a relatively short time >(much shorter than the 2000-3000 years you've estimated.) >Ancient German and Latin traveled a much shorter distance to >become modern English and French in a much shorter time.>> >In a message dated 3/25/99 2:00:39 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><didn't travel at all, and it's still very different from Latin.>> >But this is aside from the point being made. >The point was that the difference between Greek and Vedic >Sanskrit and their common ancestor could be explained >geographically. And the counterpoint was that they could be but they don't have to be. >I was saying was that when speakers of a common language go to >different geographical locations, their languages will >predictably lose commonality. And if they stay in the same place and are not in regular and strong contact they will also lose commonality. There are a number of ways for languages or dialects to lose contact. They may be physically separated by migration or by natural barriers (mountains, rivers) or they may be artificially separated by political boundaries or social stratification. Professional argots are also an interesting instance of artificial separation that may include linking across normal language boundaries. >This is rather obvious and I'm sure you are making some other >point, but I'll address it just to be clear. Distance in terms >of geography will predictably have an effect on the way two >languages diverge from a common ancestor. I hope that you are not trying to say that one can predict the degree to which languages will diverge based on the geographical distance between them. I am rather disturbed by your persistent use of "predictably" in all of these statements. If there is one thing that we know about language change, it is that it is not predictable. If it were, we could write algorithms for language change based on time and geographical distance and sit back and let the computers solve all the problems of historical linguistics. The only thing predictable about language change is that languages change. Living languages do it constantly. There are always changes going on, which, for the most part, the speakers of the language are unaware of. It is usually in retrospect that these changes can be identified and analyzed. >Otherwise we'd have to think that, say, the differences between >Low and Upper German had nothing to do with geographical >difference. From the names themselves - geographical >distinctions - distance did split these dialects. Would the split >between Low and Upper German have occurred if all the earlier >speakers have stayed in the same location? Are we to think that >the difference between Norweigan and Danish would have developed >anyway, even if they were not geographically separated? Part of the point is that Swedish and Danish are farther apart linguistically than Danish and (at least some dialects) of Norwegian. The amount of geographical separation cannot predict the degree of divergence. [MCV]: ><language change. It just happens.>> >And this is so obviously untrue that I can only think that I've >misunderstood you here, once again. >[ Moderator's comment: Modern Icelandic has, until very recently, > been unaffected by linguistic externals, yet it has changed > radically in pronunciation from Old Norse. You have obviously > misunderstood MCV's point: Languages change, and they do so > without external cause. The existence of external forces in > some kinds of linguistic change do not necessitate their > existence in all forms of change. > --rma ] >You've mentioned the possible 30% non-IE in German vocabulary. >If you accept that possibility, the only way you can account for >it is "external causes." You mentioned that the way B-S may have >obscured elements of Germanic or Greek may have done the same to >Armenian. These are causes external to the languages themselves. When you get right down to it, almost all language changes are external to the languages themselves. That is why I would prefer the expression "foreign influence" to "external causes." It is my impression that almost all linguistic change is brought about by sociological factors. This impression is based on the following observations: 1) Linguistic change is unpredictable. By this I mean that the onset of a particular change at any given time can not be anticipated. Once a change has started or been completed, it can be analyzed and classified and (probably) parallels for such a change can be found in other languages. But the trigger for the change can not be shown to be the linguistic situation because one can also (probably) find parallel linguistic situations in other languages in which the change did not occur. Therefore the trigger for the change must come from outside the language (or outside language in general). Analogical changes to restore morphological features levelled by phonological change might appear to be an exception (as might analogical change in general, since a model form must already exist in the language for analogy to be productive), but in this case it is simply a reaction to a change (phonological) that did not have its origin in the linguistic situation (on this seeming contradiction, see below, point 5). 2) Any part of language can change. Changes can be observed in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. I think (someone will correct me if I am wrong) that there is no part of a language that can be considered immutable. Even features that were long considered inherent to a language, like word order or intonation, can and do change. 3) Linguistic change is irregular. With the exception of sound changes (which the neogrammarians tell us are without exception and once a sound change is initiated, it will affect every instance of that sound in the language [but even if this is strictly and entirely true, which most linguists today doubt, the unpredictability of point 1 still applies: it cannot be predicted what will change or what it will change into]), a change in a form or construction may or may not affect similar forms or constructions. Or part of a system may change and leave the rest of the system unchanged. 4) Linguistic change is not unidirectional. A change (including phonetic changes) that goes in one direction in one language may go in the opposite direction in another language. One can count up the number of instances for the change in each direction and say which direction is statistically more likely for the change, but in essence, there is no change that is impossible (although some are extremely unlikely). Whether linguistic change is reversible is a different issue from the question on non-unidirectionality. Most linguists tend to avoid discussions of reversibility (although there are clear examples, mostly learned restorations), but I suspect that this is mostly because if changes are reversed, it plays merry hell with historical linguistics. :> 5) Linguistic change can cause conflict in the language. This is a result of an inherent conflict in language between phonology and morphology. Since language expresses meaning through phonological form, there is constantly a conflict between phonological simplicity (ease and speed of articulation) and morphological complexity (more overt morphological marking to disambiguate meaning). What we have, then, is an "engineering trade-off" where changes for the better on one side will usually introduce changes for the worse on the other. Thus a phonological change that reduces overt morphological distinctions will frequently be countered by an analogical change that restores some (if not all) of the lost morphological marking. Thus while it may seem that analogical change is brought about by the linguistic situation, it is rather a response to a natural conflict between two competing systems, and, while it may be systematic, it is still unpredictable and irregular. But even the phonological change that causes the response is not necessarily caused by an attempt a phonological simplification, since many phonological changes result in more complex, or no overall change in, phonology, so even a rule that phonological changes result in simplified phonology is not predictable. Given these observations, it is obvious that the only thing about linguistic change that is predictable is change itself, and that has nothing to do with language per se but is a by-product of the second law of thermodynamics. Furthermore, with the exception of analogical restoration of morphological marking, a linguistic situation is seldom seen to be the trigger for a linguistic change, and even when it is (e.g., extension of morphology by analogy), the nature and extent of the change is not predictable. Since linguistic change cannot be seen to originate within language, it must be imposed (consciously or unconsciously) by its users, human beings, and therefore is sociological in nature since language use is a socio-cultural phenomenon. The sociological factors that affect (or effect) linguistic change would seem to have to do with such things as intergroup relationships and intragroup or cultural bonding. (I am not a sociologist, so this terminology may not be current; I remember sociology as the course where it didn't do any good to have last year's exam -- they always asked the same questions - only the answers changed :).) A high prestige language or dialect is likely to trigger changes in languages or dialects in contact with it by imitation. But it is not just high prestige languages that cause changes. Thus historical linguistics recognizes superstratum languages (higher prestige, e.g., conquerors), adstratum languages (more or less equal prestige, i.e, neighbors or ethno-linguistic mixtures sharing the same territory), and substratum languages (lower prestige, e.g., conquered or servile populations). While the nature of the relationship between the languages may tend to influence the types of changes that may flow between them (based on statistical probability), again, any kind of influence of one language on another is possible. So all that is really needed for one language to influence another is contact. Even direct contact is not needed, because, through writing, even long dead or unused languages can cause changes (English has many Greek and Latin neologisms). Thus languages in almost any kind of contact can cause changes in the lexicon (loan words and loan translations) and grammar (areal features in phonology, morphology and syntax) of one another. And the locus of change as a foreign influence is the bilingual (multilingua) individual. Group or cultural bonding can have the opposite effect of causing a language to deliberately be altered to make it more unlike its neighboring languages. Loanwords may be systematically purged from the language to make it more specific to its culture or group. If linguistic change is sociological in nature, then like other sociological changes (changes in government, religious, and economic systems) it originates with the few, not the many. The many just follow along once the change is set in motion. But whether a change (be it of foreign or native origin) will be accepted is a sociological phenomenon, rather like a hit song, play, or movie, or fashions in dress or hair length. And there is no way to predict this. It just happens. Or it doesn't. >Conversely, if you mention the fact that German retains "archaic" >features, it assumes that change in this case DID NOT "just >happen," but in fact failed to happen. If you don't attribute >some external cause for this, then why is the archaism in German >so singular? Chance? Or isn't it more likely that Germanic was >either cut-off, isolated or geographically distant from the >"innovative core" - all external factors. External to what? -- the language or the culture or both? Is it possible that Germanic peoples are simply conservative by nature, resisting change with a fervor that is perhaps exemplified by the current proposed orthographic revisions in German or the resistance of English speakers to systematic spelling reforms? Linguistic reasons for language change are really thin on the ground. One might as well try to explain why Europeans and North Americans no longer wear three-cornered hats and powdered wigs based on physiology or geography or manufacturing techniques or conquest or substratum populations or the general unsuitability of the hats and wigs themselves, when in fact it is a sociological phenomenon known as fashion. >It may be valuable for methodological purposes to suspend >consideration of external causes in linguistics, but it cannot be >correct to say that you don't "need external causes at all to >account for language change. It just happens" - especially if >you are drawing general historical conclusions based on those >language changes. If the linguistic evidence is going to assume >no external causes for change, then it can tell us nothing about >external events. The point is not that there are no "external" (i.e., foreign) causes of linguistic change. The point is that such causes are not required for linguistic change. Now when we have a historical record, it may be possible to pinpoint a foreign cause for a certain change. But when we go prehistoric, there is no way to tell the origin of a change just by looking at it. Drafting in foreign causes may make for interesting stories, but "you don't need external causes to account for language change." >Finally, the statement that change "just happens" inverts the >question really, doesn't it? If change is so inevitable, then >why should there be any commonalities left to find in IE >languages? Obviously, the key to this whole thing is not what >changed but what didn't. You are missing the point (several points, actually). Change may be inevitable (finding a natural language that hasn't changed at all over several centuries would be really unusual -- anybody got any examples?), but it is unpredictable. There are no natural laws that govern language development so far discovered. Given a language, there is no way to predict what it will look like in 100 years or 500 years or 1000 years. However, if we know what that language looked like 1000 years *ago*, we can observe the changes that have taken place. What historical linguistics tries to do is predict the past by observing these changes and comparing any surviving features in cognate languages and reconstructing the forms that may have been ancestral to all of them. But there are no natural laws that say how to make this prediction. The predictions are based on the classification of observable facts that are taken as far back as the historical records allow us to go and then extrapolated into prehistory. Analogies from known developments in historical times are often used to support a particular reconstruction, but such analogies do not "have to be" valid. When many causes can produce the same effect (as our observations show is true of language change), there is no way to separate out the "correct" cause from all the other possible causes. So it is not a matter of what changed or what didn't change. It is a matter of accounting for all the changes and non-changes in a consistent and concise manner. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From stevegus at aye.net Tue Apr 6 13:55:05 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 09:55:05 -0400 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Another theory is that Andros, the Greek island was involved earlier. The > island is mentioned by Greek writers as having formed a fair number of early > (pre-300bce) colonies, and was associated with the also Ionian Phokia, which > is in turn credited with the founding of the Greek colony Massilia > (Marseilles) about 600bce. Also just about 80 miles north of Massalia was > located ANDERITUM (sometimes called Gabalum as the chief city of the Celtic > Gabales), also later a fairly important Roman center. (The word would have > moved east and north with other Greek borrowings that occur in early French.) I'm reasonably certain that in Bede's Latin (or is it Thomas of Malmesbury?) ANDERIDA is the name of a forest in England, if this sheds any light on the prevalence or meaning of this allegedly Celtic root. I think it's still called the Forest of Andred. If 'andera' means "woman," though, and we're wondering where it came from, my first thought would be to look to Germanic. There's a widespread Germanic root ander-, annar-, meaning 'other.' Perhaps the original idea was something like 'the opposite sex?' -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 6 14:02:03 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 15:02:03 +0100 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 3 Apr 1999, Frank Rossi wrote: > The term Neo-Galician needs to be defined. Rick is referring, I > assume to the semi-artificial common Galician language that had to > be developed when Galician was recognized as an official language, a > situation similar to Batua for Basque (comments by Larry and the > Basque experts appreciated), Yes, Euskara Batua (standard Basque) is an artificial creation in the sense that it results from the decisions of a committee (the Academy) and is not identical to the vernacular speech of any Basque -- though it is broadly most similar to the speech of Gipuzkoa, in the center of the country. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 6 14:21:34 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 15:21:34 +0100 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] In-Reply-To: <001f01be7e57$6760bc40$053a4a0c@default> Message-ID: On Sat, 3 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote: > Thank you for responding so thoroughly and informatively to my > poorly phrased and uninformed questions. I was most reluctant to > pose any question about language, given my utter ignorance in the > field. I certainly had no intention of sounding a challenge to > those in the field of historical linguistics about the veracity or > accuracy of IE. Being professionally skeptical, however, I did want > to consider the possibility that IE, as an hypothesis, would be > subject to the rules of all hypotheses, and vulnerable to evidence > that would just as convincingly point to the opposite conclusion as > to the expected conclusion. Actually, I did not get the impression that you were challenging anything. But I do think IE is an exceptionally good case of a family which is well modeled by the family-tree model. Two other respondents have pointed out that our family tree for IE is muddled by the usual effects of contact and convergence. Indeed it is, and we certainly can't draw a single unambiguous tree covering everything from PIE down to the modern dialects. One of my favorite examples is Norwegian and Icelandic. Iceland was settled from Norway at a time when North Germanic (Scandinavian) already exhibited noticeable regional variation. Accordingly, we would expect Icelandic and Norwegian to form a single node within Germanic. As it happens, however, Norwegian has largely developed in contact with its neighbors Danish and Swedish, and modern Norwegian is much closer to Danish and Swedish -- with which it is at least partly mutually comprehensible -- than it is to Icelandic -- with which it is not mutually comprehensible at all. Consequently, our family tree today usually puts Icelandic (and Faroese) off on a separate branch from the three continental languages, in spite of the historical position. And this example is not isolated. We also have a major problem with the subgrouping of IE: our standard tree posits ten or twelve coordinate branches of IE, all of them seemingly derived from separate daughters of PIE. But nobody considers this realistic. The Pennsylvania group have recently proposed a more normal-looking branching tree for IE, but I haven't yet seen many comments on this. > Your comments and explanation of the family tree model was also most > helpful. Certainly in Europe, where the dominate languages share > such obvious roots, a family tree model would be the handiest and > most logical model to explain divergence. I wonder if the Asian > languages of China, Korea and Japan share a similar background of > divergence due to isolation. Almost everybody seems to accept that the Chinese languages form a branch of a much larger Sino-Tibetan family. But Japanese and Korean continue to be puzzles. There are attempts underway to link these last two to each other, to Tungusic, and to Altaic generally (even though the reality of Altaic is disputed). Nobody knows. > I must confess that your last point relative to the possibility that > IE developed from more than one language, did cross my mind as I was > investigating the issue. So, I felt it worthwile to ask about it. > I am convinced now, that the IE model has stood the test of time, > analysis and criticism, and accept your assertion that while IE may > not be the only accepted model of linguistic development, it does > the best job of explaining how most European languages developed. Yes, I think the family-tree model works reasonably well for IE. But the general validity of that model is very much under debate these days. > The only question I have now is, where does the Africian languages > (Hebrew and Arabic, primarily) enter the IE equation? Is it assumed > that prior to PIE, the Asian and Africian languages that were non > PIE were influencial in the ultimate development of PIE? Surely > there were many words that came from these sources, given the > importance of the religious vocabulary available to the Hebraic > people. Hebrew and Arabic are unquestionably Semitic, and the validity of the Semitic family is doubted by no one. But Semitic is a good example of a family to which the family-tree model is of questionable applicability. The subgrouping of Semitic has proved to be a headache, and some specialists are now leaning toward the view that Semitic existed for a long time as a large dialect continuum, from which the individual languages that we know crystallized only slowly, more or less in the manner defended by Uriel Weinreich, Bob Le Page, and others. The further membership of Semitic in a much larger Afro-Asiatic family is likewise more or less universally accepted, chiefly on morphological grounds, though reconstruction of Proto-AA has proved difficult, and no proposed reconstruction has as yet won any great degree of acceptance. A possible very remote genetic link between IE and AA forms part of the Nostratic hypothesis, but is widely considered to be one of the weakest parts of that hypothesis. Very many people accept the existence of early loan words between IE and Semitic, but the details are debated. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 00:44:31 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 17:44:31 PDT Subject: R: Re: Distance in change In-Reply-To: <37087A06.233E05FB@neiu.edu> Message-ID: j p maher wrote: >Have the discussants read Herb Izzo's Etruscan language, dismissing the >substrate theory on the origin of gorgia toscana? Unfortunately, I haven't read the book yet, but, thanks to Ed Robertson, I do have the reference as follows: Herbert J. Izzo, Tuscan & Etruscan: The problem of linguistic substratum influence in central Italy" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1972) However, the facts I mentioned in my posting do *in my opinion* demonstrate that Etruscan was the substrate of the Latin spoken in Tuscany, i.e.: Before the Roman conquest the people in Tuscany spoke Etruscan. No other people settled in Tuscany between the Etruscans and the Romans. The Romans did not exterminate the Etruscans, and they didn't replace them with Roman colonists. The Etruscans adopted the Latin language. The second point in discussion, i.e. whether the so-called "gorgia toscana" is a consequence of the Etruscan substrate of Tuscan Latin is probably not provable either way. However, to disprove it one must explain why this phenomenon exists in Tuscany and *not* in the adjacent non Tuscan areas. What does Izzo say? As a further contribution, a quotation from Giacomo Devoto's "Il linguaggio d'Italia", 1974, follows: The phenomenon of Tuscan "... aspiration goes back to the early Middle Ages only on one condition, i.e., that it is indeed a development that has its origins in ancient Etruria. The most serious obstacle to this theory is that no author either ancient or modern including Dante ever mentioned this particular feature of the florentine and other adjacent dialects... (in Tuscany). A second obstacle is the fact that the entire development of Latin in Tuscany is characterised by its isolation, by the absence of mixture: it seems strange that this should be the only mixture, so isolated and enigmatic. HOWEVER, not to justify this theory at all costs, but to have a clear picture of the factors to be taken into consideration, a disymmetry may be noted between the various regions of Etruria. In these regions, the signs of a different final balance between the Latin tradition brought in from outside and the pre-existent Etruscan tradition can be evaluated, comparing them with the distribution of consonantal aspiration. The proportion of Etrusan and Latin inscriptions in the northern areas of Tuscany (Luni, Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia, Fiesole, Firenze, Arezzo) is, on the basis of the "Corpus inscriptionum latinarum", 82 Etruscan inscriptions against 505 Latin inscriptions, i.e., the Latin inscriptions are about 6 times more numerous than the Etruscan inscriptions. On the other hand, in the central territories (Volterra, Siena, Cortona, Perugia, Chiusi), the Etruscan inscriptions are 6 times more numerous than the Latin inscriptions (4833 to 785). The Latin dominance in the North of Tuscany is compatable with the hypothesis of an easier achievement of the final balance and language mixing, while the resistance of Etruscan until a late date leads us to presume that the two traditions, not only linguistic, but also socio-cultural, were mutually independent for a long time. The geographical distribution of the Tuscan aspiration corresponds to a large extent to the northern part of Tuscany. In this sense then, it is fair to say that, failing direct proof, the geography of the inscriptions eliminates one obstacle and indicates a possible geographical relationship that offers food for thought". Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 6 18:56:57 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 13:56:57 -0500 Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: <37087A06.233E05FB@neiu.edu> Message-ID: No, unfortunately we don't have a library to speak of and no journals whatsoever. The only book on Etruscan we have is --believe it or not!-- the great Mayani. As I remember, most of what I've read does dismiss the Etruscan substrate theory. Does Izzo say anything new or noteworthy? >Have the discussants read Herb Izzo's Etruscan language, dismissing the >substrate theory on the origin of gorgia toscana? >j p maher [snip] From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Tue Apr 6 19:11:47 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 12:11:47 PDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: >Sat, 3 Apr 1999 16:43:19 +0100 (BST) Larry Trask wrote: [snip] >As far as I -- a non-specialist -- can see, the IE status of the word is >demonstrated, and there is no problem to be solved by appealing to an >implausible "Vasconic" influence. And anyway Basque has both >the wrong form and the wrong meaning. Does this last comment mean that you believe the best simulation would be one that doesn't link the Euskera items and in anyway whatsoever with the IE items? Including the Gk. ones? Best regards, Roz Frank April 6, 1999 From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Tue Apr 6 22:20:36 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 15:20:36 PDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >"roslyn frank" wrote: [RF] >>Having said that, I would suggest that the overall thrust of Vennemann's >>argument is worthy of consideration, namely, a model that posits a >>higher node and consequently, an older source for the IE and Euskeric >>items alike. In such a simulation of events, one could argue that >>originally the item was used in reference to a "woman" and that over >>time the term was generalized to refer to "human, person". [MCV] >Vennemann, as I read him, is not claiming that Greek , G. > "man, male" (PIE *H2ner-) has a Vasconic etymology. He >merely claims that the element -andr- in a word like >and names such as Andromeda, Andromache and Kassandra might be >derived from a Vasconic *andr- "woman" instead of Greek "man". [RF] Yes, Miguel, you are absolutely correct in your representation of Vennemann's claim. What I attempted to say above was that I believed the "overall thrust" of Vennemann's model was an interesting one. I then went on to say that such a model could be used to construct a similation of events such as the one that I presented of the Gk. materials. I apologize for not having made that point clearer. [RF] >>These individuals called (i.e., sing. ) are referred >>to throughout the text in the masculine so there is no question about >>their gender. Moreover, from the duties assigned, it is likely that the >>group as a whole was composed exclusively of men. In short, in this >>concrete case there is little question about the ultimate female >>referentiality of the "title" of , its derivation from >>. [MCV] >I'm not familiar with the term "chandros", who it refers to, or >what the history of the word is, but on the evidence presented >here, I don't see any compelling reason to derive the word from >. [RF] Perhaps I didn't make the context of its usage clear enough. In the Basque law codes that I spent some ten years perusing in one of my research projects, there are certain phrases that reoccur in Spanish. They refer to the householders of the village in question who are "voting" members of the community. The right to "vote" was not individual but rather by "household" and further, there were only certain "households" or "etxe" that held that status of "full-fire voting rights". At times the houses with voting rights are represented as "fuegos". When speaking of these householders, the texts in question often speak of their representatives as "cabezaleros" and "cabezaleras" and/or as "buenos hombres" y "buenos mujeres". Their duties and responsibilities are laid out. Hence, in the particular case in question, there is little doubt that the rank of those involved was conferred by their "house". My assumption is that the expression is derived from Euskera, as are many other odd expressions that pop up in these codes which are written in Spanish. To my knowledge, there is no alternate derivation for the term. Moreover, the phonological reduction of "the lady of the house" to * with the resulting form being "masculinized" by replacement of the <-a> definite pronoun ending with the masculine ending <-o> from Romance seems fairly straight forward to me. However, I might be missing something. On a related note: certainly we know that the compound / (also with the definite article in and ) meaning "new-house", gave rise to a variety of surnames and first names in Spanish, ranging from the very obvious Spanish last name Echeverria to the more obscure first name "Xavier". The same house name became, for example, Dechepare and Chavert in French. It seems to me that odder things have happened, e.g., Ximena (Jimena), the name of El Mio Cid's wife, deriving from in Euskera which means "my (beloved> son." At least that is what one of my professors told me some years back. Again in a marketplace town like medieval Burgos, stomping grounds of El Cid Campeador, it wouldn't be surprising to encounter this sort of thing either given that many of those living there and travelling through were probably bilingual in Castilian and Euskera. If I'm not mistaken the linguistic boundary at that time was a few kilometers north of the Montes de Oca just outside Burgos. In the 70's I spent seven summers teaching in Burgos and found quite a number of curious characteristics in the Spanish of the Burgaleses, many of whom had recently moved to the city from former Basque-speaking zones (that is from zones where Euskera was still spoken in the Middle Ages (help! Larry, with the exact boundary lines). For example, one of our constant headaches was finding families in Burgos for our North American students to live with who did not have a tendency to "speak in infinitives", as we characterized that aspect of their speech. Anyone familiar with Euskera could recognize what was going on in the Spanish of these individuals, usually from the popular rural classes who had just moved into the city of Burgos. Best wishes, Roz Frank April 6, 1999 From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 6 23:41:06 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 19:41:06 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: I wrote <<'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' (princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest...>> In a message dated 4/6/99 4:32:59 PM, jpmaher at neiu.edu wrote: <<--Damned fascinating. Source is Gothic 'kin-ing' > 'king'. A priest in medieval Christendom held forth in a [fortified} , from medieval Latin . Cf. , < Kassel>...>> "Kunnig">"ksiezy"? Hmmm. Until I hear otherwise from Miguel and the Lords of the Sound Laws, I am forced to assign this to the dark confines of the Dubious Etymologies file (in which of course many of my own derivations are also entombed.) B-T-W, I was only pointing to moon>"ksiezyc" (Pol) as a sidenote. It reminded me that there are basic words around that don't entirely support the idea that Slavic was quite so monolithic. But while we're at it let me give you my own dubious derivations: "kosciol" is possibly from something - way back- like "koczow-ac" (Pol) to be encamped, from "koczow-nik", nomad; "koczow-", to wander; "kos", horse blanket. And get a load of this: "Kunnig" is from something like "konn-ica" (Pol), horsemen; "konn-y", mounted; ("koni-arz", horse-trader>?"kunning-az") from "kon", horse. Since horses came from the east, and horses made men kings in horseless lands - "kunnig" entered Germanic from Slavic or proto-Slavic or agricultural Scythian or BSG or, heck, Beta-Tocharian, as a description of the leader of a band of horsemen. Before the domestication of the horse, the root "kon-" referred only to the herd or herding dogs. Once the horse became domesticated, the Slavs/Scythians/generic-IE-nomads, who didn't have herding dogs on the steppes, applied the word directly to the newly domesticated horses. More western tongues kept the indirect canine references (hound, kund), but borrowed or rather learned the self-appelation of the horsemen and their leaders. What Miguel and the Lords of the Sound Laws will do to me I cringe to think. But at least this path of derivation is a bit more logical, historical and doesn't ask me to believe a flood of random consonants like "ksiezy" came out of someone's mouth imitating someone else saying a plain appelant like "kunnig" the king and then promptly applied it to the moon. Lucky it didn't happen to "karl" and "krol". eh? Regards, Steve Long From roborr at uottawa.ca Wed Apr 7 01:07:40 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 21:07:40 -0400 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: At 07:13 PM 4/5/99 +0200, you wrote: >ROBERT ORR: >> Actually, there is evidence to suggest that IE *kuon is probably >> from a zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku- >> "herd(?)".(...)a comparison between *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. forms >> would be a desideratum. >GLEN GORDON: >> Until we find a *p- before that word in some attested language, it's all >> but one of many possibilities (Probably the unlikeliest possibility >> too). (...) Allan Bomhard reconstructs a Nostratic item, #652 >> *k(h)uwan-/*khuw at n- "dog", to account for both IE *k^won and AfroAsiatic >> with similar forms. Illych-Svitychs earlier Nostratic reconstruction >> (...) is also based on Uralic forms (...), all of which Bomhard had >> trouble finding (...). >> Not knowing alot of detail behind the forms sited for AA, it looks >> intriguing but IE and AA are very far apart. I'd be interested to know >> if others have found these forms in Uralic (...) and if so, could they >> simply be borrowed from IE? >Even if they were, this wouldn't explain the existence of similar forms in >other language families closer to IE than AA. J.Greenberg lists the >following Eurasiatic forms, none of which show any trace of *p- or the >like: Old Turkish 'bitch', Mongol 'a wild masterless >dog', Proto-Tungus <*xina> 'dog', Korean 'dog' (< kani), Gilyak >~ 'dog' and Sirenik 'wolf' (read the y as a gamma). >In "On the Origin of Languages", Stanford Univ. Press 1994, J.D.Bengtson >and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide range of other >language families, even khoisan. >Thus, *k^won seems not to be derived from *peku-, but is probably an >indivisible word belonging to the very oldest core of human vocabulary. >Adam Hyllested Maybe I should have posted this one to the whole list. Individuals who have already seen it, please bear with me. "Ironically, although there does seem to be a considerable amount of evidence that the notions 'dog' and 'wolf' can be combined, the reconstruction of Nostratic *küynä, based on a comparison of PIE *kuon with various other forms in Uralic, Afro- Asiatic, etc., may not be a good example of the phenomenon. It has been proposed on and off for nearly a century, starting with Osthoff (1901:199, et passim), that PIE *kuon is in fact originally derived from the root which gives Latin pecus, Gothic faihu, etc., < IE *peku-, and that OCS pisu is also related. According to such a reconstruction *kuon would originally have meant "sheep-dog", and be derived from something similar to *pekuon < *peku- + - on, with PIE *kuon derived from *pkuon, a zero-grade form of *pekuon. Such an etymology allows us to derive, ultimately, both the set of forms normally traced back to IE *kuon, and OCS pisu, from the same root. Osthoff's theory has found a small but steady stream of followers, e.g., Knobloch (1971), Hamp (1980), who have added further refinements." And by way of clarifictaion, recall that Slavic tended to insert jer vowels into old IE zero-grades, thus giving us *piku-. Hamp has a convincng line of argumentation showing how other Slavic derivational forms (e.g., pisynja) could be seen as from pikuon, and how pisu (< *piku-) would be a back formation. This etymology allows to explain OCS pisu, which is troublesome in most reconstructions. It is very likely an old *-u-stem. For IE *kuon < *pekuon, see Hamp, Eric P. 1980. "IE *()kuon - dog". Indogermanische Forschungen 85.35-42. Knobloch, Johann. 1971. "Die indogermanische Benennung des Hundes", Donum Indogermanicum. ed. by Robert Schmitt-Brandt, 39-40. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Osthoff, Hermann. 1901. Etymologische Parerga, Erster Teil, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. And perhaps one could segment Modern Turkish kopek - dog (I don't have dacritics in this programme) as ko + pek, thus providing us with a beautiful parallel from outsde IE?) From jpmaher at neiu.edu Wed Apr 7 01:33:30 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 20:33:30 -0500 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: Given the ablaut of /e - o - ø/ and E. P. Hamp 1980t IF has a good analysis of the morphophonology, including clarification of the anomalous /a/ in Latin CANIS. But his idea that <*p(e)k'uwon> is a "polymorphemic [semantically] unmotivated" construct is itself unmotivated. The copy of Hermann Osthoff's "Hund und Vieh im Indogermanischen" in the Regenstein Library shows that Hamp never borrowed this book, though he should have [sneak or otherwise] read it at Harvard and/or Chicago. [Paul Friedrich is recorded as borrower; computerized library practice loses this precious information.] Osthoff gives firm arguments for IE < *pe/o/øk-'u-> as 'fleece, teased fibers' [early sheep not woolly, but hairy]. This makes IE dog the "sheep-er", cf. German . Same morphophonology in Latin , Greek , plural , from zero-grade <*pk'ten-> 'comb'.. Which gives rise to the question: are there any traces of earlier dog words in IE? See Sievers-Edgerton' Law. j p maher [ moderator snip of Adam Hyllested post ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 02:45:29 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 22:45:29 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/6/99 7:20:56 PM, jrader at m-w.com wrote: > Not that it really makes any difference to the point I was making!!! IN FACT if Russian was discernible from OCS at an early date that just makes it more likely that Slavic was already well diverged by 860. Just a reminder: my point was that there is no direct evidence that OCS was to any great degree comprehensible to the Wends,etc. etc. If you can with your erudition help me out with that I'd appreciate it. In the meantime, here's why I wrote what I wrote: "Although there is some controversy concerning the possible independent, native developement of writing in Russian, it is generally agreed that writing was introduced to Russia with...the liturgical language that...was Old Church Slavonic. At this period OCS and Old Russian was presumably [sic] mutually comprehensible, yet there was still clear differences between them, namely the criterial differences between (East and South)...in such writing the attempt was made to write Church Slavonic, avoiding local East Slavonic dialect peculiarities. In practice, Russian monks writing these manuscripts often erred in allowing East Slavonic forms to creep into the text... The coexistence of East Slavonic and South Slavonic forms from the earliest Old Russian. is one of the salient charactersistics of the language... Both alphabets [Glagolitic and Cyrillic] providing a good fit to the phonemic system of OCS,... [but U]nfortunately the Cyrillic alphabet had no way of distinguishing between the plosive and fricative sounds... [that for example may have distinguished Eastern Slavic dialects, i.e., north and south] so textual evidence is inconclusive." - Bernard Comrie, TWMLs, p 322 et seq This seems to say to me that the earliest texts written in Russia [if not the earliest text, singular - which Comrie does not mention] were written in OCS. And that E. Slavonic was mixed in. Not knowing better, I believed him until I saw what you wrote. Now - informed by you - I believe he is terribly wrong and "muddled," just as you say. Regards, Steve Long From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Apr 7 06:04:10 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:04:10 -0400 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Steven A. Gustafson wrote: > I'm reasonably certain that in Bede's Latin (or is it Thomas of > Malmesbury?) ANDERIDA is the name of a forest in England, if this sheds > any light on the prevalence or meaning of this allegedly Celtic root. I > think it's still called the Forest of Andred. Eilert Ekwall (Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names) s.n. Andred cites or c.425 from the Notitia Dignitatum, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He derives it from a Brit. prefix and Brit. (Welsh ) 'ford' and says that K.L. Jackson renders it 'the great fords'. Brian M. Scott From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 06:24:53 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:24:53 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/5/99 8:14:05 AM, I wrote: <> Our Moderator's replied: <> Well, Linear B wasn't just numbers. This is a sample from "The Codebreakers" by David Kahn: "Koldos the shepherd holds a lease from the village: 48 litres of wheat. One pair of wheels bound with bronze, unfit for service. Four slaves of Koradollos in charge of seed-corn. Two tripods: Aigeus the Cretan brings them." It is said they contain nothing "beside these minutely detailed bureaucratic records of petty commercial transactions." And legal, census, conscription, tax and contractual stuff. However they do obviously contain plenty of what some on the list would call "everyday language." And they reflect the need to be PRECISE and predictable. The writers were not being wishy-washy - four slaves of Koradollas in charge, Aigeus the Cretan, 48 litres of wheat. Pair of wheels, but unfit for service. Very precise. In fact, this is what the overwhelming volume of medieval Latin text is like. Doomsday Books and tax records and birth records and conscription records and official proclamations and who went where when. In a message dated 3/26/99 1:53:30 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> I think I disagree with that first part. I think kings and tax collectors and army commanders want a very clear idea of what is going on, what is owed, what should be paid this year based on what was paid last year. They want precison and consistency in language. They can't have words, forms or meanings changing on them. These are the documents by which we prove who now owns the land when someone dies, how much we owe or are owed, who was born where and when, how much wheat is left, who is in charge of what, etc. But if Miguel is right, we should see these commercial and government scribes being not too fussy about changes in language. Local dialects and changes in sound or morphology and other changes over time should show up without much concern. If Mycenaean changed very little (comparatively) - I don't know myself - in 350 years (I think that's the current guess for Lin B), then it was quite conservative, even for a government/business language. On the level of Latin. Does a language out of nowhere just step up, full blown and take over the Lin A alphabet without losing a beat and without extensive changing? From illiterates to almost Roman-style exactitude in one step? My point is that IF Mycenaean did not experience some serious change from the time it first moved to literacy, it may have already been standardized before it became literate. And this may suggest that in the early days a non-literate language could be a standardized language and stay standardized over time without writing - not just because of priest and poets, but also tax collectors, merchants and Koldos the sheperd and the villiage he owed money to. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 7 06:52:45 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:52:45 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >The only firm datum is the numeral "1" (Skt. e:ka- vs. Av. aeva-). >For all we know, it may have been a fourth branch of Indo-Iranian, which >happened to have *aika- for "1", just like Indo-Aryan. >> -- yeah, since the Hurrians must have picked up that vocabulary before around the early-to-mid-2nd-millenium, when the Mitannian kingdom was founded, it would be interesting to see how a form of Indo-Aryan that archaic looked. Eg., presumably it wouldn't have the layer of Dravidian loan-words that Vedic Aryan has. The capital of Mitanni has never been excavated -- perhaps it will be fairly soon (it was in what's now northeastern Syria). All our Mitannian documents come from the fringe areas of the kingdom, or international correspondence. The actual archives of the Mitannian kings would be a treasure-trove. Of course, they might not have written much if anything in the ancestral IE language, since it's pretty obvious that the Indo-Aryan element was quickly assimilated by the Hurrian. (Eg., the Mitannian kings seem to have had Hurrian personal names and to have adopted Indo-Aryan ones as "throne names" when they succeeded to the office.) It would be nice to find out exactly how the Hurrians acquired this IE superstrata, too; the Kassites, another people from the Iranian plateau, show some indications of doing so as well. How quickly one archaeological discovery can change things. Many works published in the 80's and 90's strongly deny that the chariot was introduced into the Middle East by IE speakers, arguing instead that it was invented in the Middle East in the 2nd millenium BCE. Now we know it was present in the Eurasian steppe no later than the 21st century BCE, and the IE-introduction theory looks better than ever. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 06:54:17 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:54:17 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 4/6/99 11:40:17 PM, you wrote: <> This is nothing but truisms. And they are contradicted by the very fact that there is a Grimm's law and there is an Indo-European language group and there is a way the old sound laws can "predicatably" tell you if one word is cognate with another even if they are centuries apart. That's what predictability means. It means you can look at some word on a clay tablet and make a good guess at whether they are Greek or not. Because it follows from prior experience. That's predictability. It really doesn't take a lot of hard thought to figure out that languages change. It's not a breakthrough idea. I remember reading about an early IEist first looking at Gothic and saying "I thought I was reading Sanskrit." That is the point. If he said, "boy, languages do change don't they?" That would have been trite. Or considerably worse. It's the continuity, not the change. That's the science of it and from what I've seen in the work of some people in this field, the art of it. Where's the pattern, not that there's no pattern. If my you find my speaking of predictability "rather" disturbing, I can only respond that I find you reminding me that languages change unpredictability - well, I'll believe you if you wake up speaking Bantu tomorrow. Otherwise I'll find the whole idea ridiculous. <> Boy wouldn't that be silly. Where would I get a wild idea like that? Isn't French just as close to Chinese as it is to Spanish? Isn't Polish just as close to Mayan as it is to Russian? How could you possibly think I would ever think that? Never occurred to me. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 7 07:04:36 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 03:04:36 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >I've seen some confusing arguments linking Jutes, Geats & Goths--based only >on the resemblance on the names What's the scoop on that? -- Jutes were from Jutland (the Danish peninsula joined to the mainland). The Geats were the people between the Scanian Danes (Scania was part of Denmark until the Early Modern period) and the Swedes proper; Beowulf (probably Bjovulf in Scandinavia) was supposedly a Geat. The Goths had a tradition claiming that they'd originally come from central Sweden. Historically, they first show up as the easternmost of the Germanics, in what's now Poland -- the Vistula area. By the 4th century AD, their eastern branch was in the Ukraine and the western on the Danube. My own guess is that the 'migration' of the Goths from Sweden was a movement of leaders who provided organization, and that the bulk of the groups that later became "Gothic" then took over this small element's foundation-myth. By the time the Goths migrated into the Roman Empire they'd picked up a lot of other elements as part of their ethnogenisis, of course. >I've also seen arguments linking the Angles to the Frisians, claiming they >were basically the "Frisians of Angeln." -- the traditional account has the Angles leaving the mainland _en masse_ for England, and other groups -- Danes and Frisians -- taking over their vacated lands. There were a good many of abandoned settlements in the area the Angles were supposed to come from, at about that time, probably linked to rising sea levels and the loss of farmland and pasture. We'll probably never know the details. >And I've seen the argument that Scots [Lallans] & Northumbrian are >essentially Modern Anglian while R. P. is basically Modern Saxon with some >modest Anglian influence [e.g. I < ik instead of ich & 3rd ps -s instead of >-eth]. -- Lallans developed from the Northumbrian dialect; Lothian was settled by Angles, traditionally. Apart from that we'll never know... 8-). Modern Standard English is essentially an East Midland dialect (with fairly heavy Scandinavian influence) which became the predominant speech of London due to in-migration during the later middle ages and the Early Modern period. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 7 07:22:47 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 03:22:47 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Since horses came from the east -- PIE already had a word for horse. (*ekwos) Horses were domesticated around 4000 BCE (almost certainly by PIE speakers) and the domestic horse was present in central and northern Europe during the 4th millenium BCE. >Once the horse became domesticated, the Slavs/Scythians/generic-IE-nomads, >who didn't have herding dogs on the steppes -- !!!! From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Apr 7 09:07:42 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:07:42 PDT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Alright, let's see if we got it this time. You're saying: Pre-IE IE Anat > CS Greek *-t *-t *-t *-H1 - *-k *-k (*-h) *-H2 - *-p *-H3 (*-h) *-H3 - MIGUEL: Not quite. I mentioned no -k in Greek, merely a possible alternation -H2 ~ -k-. Whoops, of course. Slip on my part. I think I get it now ME (GLEN) concerning **-t > *-H1: Besides the fact that this sound change itself lacks more than one or two examples, *H1 could really be any consonant or even a long vowel according to your "evidence". MIGUEL: One good example is all it takes. I'm afraid not. It's not a good example, it's not even an example. It simply should be thrown out. Beekes may reconstruct a *-(e)H1 if he wishes but anyone with any sense at all has to question the validity of this. So what, there's a lengthened vowel. It still stands as I've said above that there's no clear indication that the lengthening derives from such a change. In fact, I don't even think mediofinal *H1 existed since that in itself is hard to justify. MIGUEL: The instrumental (where it exists at all and isn't made with *bhi/*mi) shows a lengthened vowel in all roots (-a: for a:-stems, -i: for i-stems, -o: or -e: for o-stems), which can only mean -H1. Which can mean either a lengthened vowel or *H1, really. Besides probably Latin?, what evidence of this *-(e)H1 exists? MIGUEL: Hittite has -it (< *-et). If we postulate a development **-t > *-H1, the Hittite form can be connected to the others [as well as to other, extra-IE, instrumentals in -t, if we so wish. I give you Georgian -it, Sumerian -ta]. Yes, that's right. I'm agreement with you but with vastly different reasons. And don't forget Uralic *-ta :) which is most evidently more relatable to the ablative *-ed based on those regular sound changes I mentioned. In fact, my sound changes show more examples than your **-t > *-H1 will ever be able to. If you want to talk external connections, it makes no sense to compare *-eH1 of all things to foreign forms with /t/ when the more comparable (and fully reconstructable, mind you) ablative *-ed is awaiting our discovery. I've outlined how *-ed can be related to Uralic *-ta due to syllable loss that has apparently affected other endings as well. You have not. What I'm saying, I think, is further validated by IE's quirky accentuation that can be explained by the sound changes I've outlined. It seems that Pre-IE **-VCV becomes *-V'C where the ending actually becomes accented from the syllable loss. This explains the accentuation of the 3rd person plural since **-ene > **-e'n and later *-e'nt/*-e'r. Being that *-men and *-ten are patterned on **-e'n (note that *-n does not become *-r in *-men as Miguel might want to think), it should come to no one's surprise that the plural conjugation ended up with accented suffixes. Nor should it be shocking that the genitive *-es (**-ese) is also accented (cf. Etruscan -isa [genitive] and ? Sumerian -se [dative]). MIGUEL: The supposition is merely that if there are masc/fem. roots in -k or -t (nom. -ks, -ts), we might expect some neuters too, and there aren't any. This may be due to an Auslautgesetz, as suggested by the few clues we have (ins. sg. -t ~ -H1, fem. -H2 ~ -k-). Supposition, yes. The fact is there's nothing you've found that shows what you assert. Greek -k- could, in these cases be caused by a reflex of *H2/*H3, in which case, there's enough doubt to call into question the modest clues you give attention to as evidence. ME (GLEN): That kind of logic in itself is deplorable and if Greek -k- does point to a laryngeal somehow we cannot, as in the first sound change, nail this down to anything more specific than this: **-k ?> *-(H) (?) MIGUEL: Surely -H2, if anything. Judging by Greek we might have the following sketchy hypothesis: *-H1-/-H2-/*-H3- >? Greek -k- I of course severely doubt *-H1- as a possibility but lacking evidence that supports Greek's peculiar whims as archaic, you are unable to narrow these choices down. MIGUEL: Symmetry is aesthetics, aesthetics is symmetry. And sometimes, symmetry isn't science nor does it give us the simplest and likeliest solution based on evidence at hand. Pi isn't very symmetric but it's still pretty to some... 3.14159265358979323... :) ME (GLEN): In summary, this is what your very uncertain idea amounts too: **-t ?> IE *-(H) (?) **-k ?> IE *-(H) (?) MIGUEL: I agree the whole thing is uncertain, but one question mark suffices: **-t > *-H1 (?) **-k > *-H2 (?) I'm afraid I have to keep both question marks. A correlation between the *-t in Anatolian and forms without hasn't been properly established with only one example to show! The second is to show the uncertainty of the later posited form. You're lucky I didn't add a third. ME (GLEN): First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). MIGUEL: Which is obviously false. ME (GLEN): Obviously how? MIGUEL: Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. Right, because speakers of IE right down to Sanskrit would have been aware of the relationship of the 3p secondary *[-t] (*-t ~ *-d) to primary *[-ti]. Thus, although *-t derives from **-to and should have become *-d, it only devolved back into *-t due to its primary counterpart. Aside from the ablative and neuter on the one hand and the 3rd person on the other, there really is much to show for final *t/*d contrasts and there's isn't much reason to assume that such distinctions were actively maintained in PIE. Can you find a valid example of IE *-t that doesn't involve the 3rd person? I rest my case. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Apr 7 09:11:02 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:11:02 PDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >The only firm datum is the numeral "1" (Skt. e:ka- vs. Av. >aeva-). For all we know, it may have been a fourth branch of >Indo-Iranian, which happened to have *aika- for "1", just like >Indo-Aryan. You're rejecting evidence in favor of a hypothesis again. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 16:26:33 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 12:26:33 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Fashion) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/6/99 11:40:17 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: <>. Language is a fundamental part of culture and does not exist without it. Language without culture has no referents, no context, no medium, no way of propagating and no reason for being. One of the reasons I cannot honestly argue with Miquel's notion that LBK carried PIE or its descendents into northern Europe is that the evidence does support the existence of a coherent culture or uberkultur that tracks that idea well. You can't support the PIE/LBK premise on human genetics, but its hard to fight it based on the evidence of culture. Once you see a cohesive culture, historically or prehistorically, you see a clear medium for the transmittal and maintenance of an identifiable language. This is historically confirmed again and again. Archeaologically you can pinpoint where you will find Latin inscriptions based on finding Roman cultural remains first. Is it 100% predictable? Of course not. But it is the anamolies that prove the rule. The shock of finding out Linear B was Greek (nobody was predicting it, not Evans or even Ventris) has now faded away because the cultural remains have confirmed a clear demarcation between Minoan and Mycenaean cultures. All of this is hard history. It is not pop sociology. <> Culture and "fashion" are historical evidence. Proto-Geometric was nothing but a fashion but it reliably labels a period, a culture and a developement. You have no idea how important bronze helmets, beaver hats and three cornered hats are to our understanding of history. When we are not identifying a culture by a fashion in material culture, we are identifying it by its language. LaTene becomes Celtic. If you feel that historical linguistic evidence has no pattern, no meaning and is pure frivilous fashion, that's fine. I wouldn't want to talk you out of it. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 7 09:28:40 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 10:28:40 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990406191236.75196.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [LT] > >As far as I -- a non-specialist -- can see, the IE status of the word is > >demonstrated, and there is no problem to be solved by appealing to an > >implausible "Vasconic" influence. And anyway Basque has both > >the wrong form and the wrong meaning. > Does this last comment mean that you believe the best simulation would > be one that doesn't link the Euskera items and in > anyway whatsoever with the IE items? Including the Gk. ones? Yes. I can't see any persuasive reason to connect Basque `lady' with anything in Greek. By the way, it is clear that is the original form of the Basque word. This is the only form recorded in Aquitanian, and the first form recorded in the medieval period (in 1085, according to Sarasola). The contracted form is first recorded in the 12th century; this would have been unpronounceable in Pre-Basque/Aquitanian, but it now predominates in a sizeable area of the country, though most of the east retains today. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 7 16:48:19 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 11:48:19 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Thanks for taking the time to send your remarks on the credibility of the IE hypothesis. I have no problem with believing that at some time in the ancient past, a group of IE speakers migrated from some part of the Eurasian land mass to another, and took their language with them. And the tendency for languages to diverge because of the lack of contact between them, seems imminently sensible to me. Larry Trask was quite eloquent in defending IE, but he was also explicit in pointing out the failing of the IE model at a practical level. He affirmed that the IE model does not explain how the languages that are used in Europe today, got that way. And others have pointed out the failings of IE to explain how other languages developed. In some instances, it seems that convergence of languages is more explanatory of the current linguistic state than a divergence model. But, the similarities of vocabulary among the IE languages, at least to the extent that we know about them, is too strong to ignore. And the IE family model of language divergence does fit the European experience. However, it is not a relaible predictor of specific languages, and the family model upon which it is based is not a reliable predictor of the divergence/convergence dicotomy of all languistic groups. These are the conclusions I draw from what I have read so far. Given the absence of written records, it is remarkable that we can know as much as we do about ancient languages. Along with mathematics, archeology and geology, linguistics has entered the era where the further away we get from an event, the more we know about it. In the future, we will know more of how these things happen. My academic training is in Economics and econometrics, where we build models of economic relationships that explain choices people make when a trade-off confronts them. My first intensive study was on the spread of the use of heroin, and in my investigation I found a dissertation from a graduate student in mathematics at MIT who had adapted an epidemiological model from the medical community to predict the spread of an epidemic of heroin addiction. He showed that the mathematical model used by epidemiologists was applicable to the spread of addiction to herion and herion use, and that the exact same parameters that defined the spread of infectious disease explained the spread of heroin addiction. The parameters were different in magnitude, but the model was accurate for either event. The reason I bring this up is that it seems to me that an over-all theoretical framework of the spread of language has not been developed. Not only the IE model, but all other linguistic models that deal with the development, spread, divergence and convergence of languages, need a theoretical framework if they are to be successful in predicting linguistic adoptions. It seems to me, that the theorectival framework of an epidemicological model of the spread of disease would easily supply this need of the linguistic community. It would not be a herculian task to attempt to specify such a model, and the results could be quite enlightening. Here are the basic parameters of an epidemiological model: You begin with a population which is divided into those who are "susceptible" to the infection vs those who are "unsusceptible". Once that ratio is known, or estimated, the rate of contact between "infecteds" and "susceptibles" is calculated or estimated. From these simple parameters then, the rate of the spread of the infection and the saturation level can be estimated and predicted. Susceptibles, in the linguistic world, would be those who were exposed to the new tongue and those who found a need to learn it: a child attended by a care giver would find it advantageous to learn the language of the care-giver: a merchant who wished to conduct business with a different linguistic group. Both these examples actually share an underlying interest--an advantage seen, in learning a new language. This is the kind of parameter that "susceptiblity" deals with. The exposure side (rate of contact between infecteds and susceptibles) of the equation is easily identified in the linguistic community: The relatively few Romans sent to govern England was not sufficient to generate a critical mass of exposure units for Latin to predominate. And the Romans left local courts and laws stand, lessening the need for everyone to know Latin in order to get along. In this case, the exposure rate was too law for Latin to make the transition of being adopted. This model, if the parameters were known, could be used to explain why the Normans adopted the local French language after they conquered that part of France and why the Saxons kept their language when the conquered England. Do you see any applicability of this kind of mathematical approach to the spread of languages? Has this type of approach been undertaken by anyone in the linguistics community? Ray Hendon From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 15:45:32 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 08:45:32 PDT Subject: R: Re: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <3727a859.246546354@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Miguel CV wrote: > > How does the Galician standardization compare? To what extent is > the choice for Western morphology and Eastern pronunciation, for > instance, a conscious "political" move, and to what extent might > it be a side effect of either the Mediaeval standard or modern > regional economics (as opposed to "national" [or should I say > "popular"] politics)? >From what I've been told, the official Neo-Galician language is very much influenced by "Popular" politics, the basic aim being to keep it as Spanish (i.e., Castilian) as possible and as distant as possible from Portuguese (which as I keep repeating is difficult to do, if we think of the dialects just over the border). However, I'll consult my Galician contacts on this (not my wife!) and come back with a more detailed report. Thanks to both Miguel and Larry for their replies. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From adahyl at cphling.dk Wed Apr 7 17:18:07 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 19:18:07 +0200 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: <003b01be8004$3e6b5a80$47f1abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. It is not > the only Greek word ending in -nx. There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), > and of course sphinx, and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. > These are all -ng stems. and phalanx, an -ng stem too. From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 16:40:46 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 09:40:46 PDT Subject: R: Re: Distance in change In-Reply-To: <3726a26b.245028564@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Miguel CV wrote: > But for an analysis of the system as a whole, it's not > unimportant to add that Italian also has b, d, g; pp, tt, kk and > bb, dd, gg... Etruscan *only* had p, t, k and ph, th, kh. That's correct. > >All this *may* mean that the Tuscans, wrote "casa" (probably for > >etymological reasons), but pronounced "hasa". > That's the only hope the Etruscan substrate theory has: that the > gorgia went unnoticed and unwritten for over a millennium (maybe > in remote illiterate areas of Tuscany?) until it became > fashionable in the Tuscan cities, sometime around 1500... I'm not expert enough to be an authoritative supporter of either theory. But what if all speakers in the areas of Northern Tuscany concerned spoke like this? They wouldn't notice it, and the other Italians wouldn't have dared to criticise them concerning their own language, at least until the Italian literary language became consolidated in their own areas (around 1500), as the Americans (Webster, etc.), I assume, would not have criticised British English before independence, or the Latin Americans (Bello, etc.) Castilian. >I must > say I find that hard to believe. Rohlfs also objects that the > Corsican dialects show no trace of the gorgia, despite the > (physical, not literary) Tuscan influence on Corsican. Yes, the Corsican dialects were subject to strong Tuscan influence, as the island was a colony of Pisa and many Pisans went there physically as colonists. However, the original pre-Pisan Corsican dialects are assumed to be closer to Sardinian, and the difference can still be noted between the north-eastern dialects, closer to Tuscan, and the south-western dialects which were less "contaminated". It is interesting to note that Genoese did not affect Corsican too much, except for the city of Bonifacio which speaks a Ligurian dialect (like Alghero in Sardinia speaks Catalan). This was because the Genoese during their occupation adopted a policy of "Apartheid". The Italian language continued in official use as the written language of Corsica until the 1850's and the last book in standard Italian written by a Corsican author was published there towards the end of the 19th century. The modern Corsican regional language, recognised by the French authorities, is comparable to Neo-Galician and Euskara Batua. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Apr 7 11:06:44 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 04:06:44 PDT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: GLEN GORDON: Until we find a *p- before that word in some attested language, it's all but one of many possibilities (Probably the unlikeliest possibility too). [...] Illych-Svitychs earlier Nostratic reconstruction [...] is also based on Uralic forms [...] I'd be interested to know if others have found these forms in Uralic [...] and if so, could they simply be borrowed from IE? ADAM HYLLESTED: Even if they were, this wouldn't explain the existence of similar forms in other language families closer to IE than AA. [...] Old Turkish 'bitch', Mongol 'a wild masterless dog', Proto-Tungus <*xina> 'dog', Korean 'dog' (< kani), Gilyak ~ 'dog' and Sirenik 'wolf' (read the y as a gamma). Ah, good. Altaic and Siberian languages. That's certainly closer than AA - my heart's a bit more at ease now. Regardless of whether we can firmly conclude inheiritance or borrowing though, *k'won- is undoubtedly very ancient and I wish IEists would finally accept that some words simply can't be explained within IE alone so that really bad theories like **pk'won- might be quickly nipped in the bud as they should be. ADAM HYLLESTED: In "On the Origin of Languages", Stanford Univ. Press 1994, J.D.Bengtson and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide range of other language families, even khoisan. Er, that worries me. So how are we sure for example that Khoisan terms are neither coincidence nor borrowed from AA and sons? Khoisan isn't usually considered to be Nostratic nor Dene-Caucasian. What are they trying to reconstruct with these cognates? Not Proto-World I hope. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's comment: That is precisely what they are trying to reconstruct. --rma ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 17:46:49 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 13:46:49 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/6/99 4:57:24 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: < *kUne~gI > *kUne~dzI) "king".>> The Ls of SL have spoken. I am wrong. However!...8-) Based on a message dated 4/6/99 8:16:37 PM, where roborr at uottawa.ca wrote: << In Polish *kn+FV or J > *ks ksiezyc, ksiezy, ksiezna etc. < *kne(d)z, Russian knjaz' ksiega < *kniga, Russian kniga>> So the source is really Russian! I'd like to suggest that the word did not pass from Gothic to Polish but from Gothic to Russian and then to Polish.... Because, I think we don't really ever see directly kn (Ger) > ks (Pol). We do see knife (mentioned as a possible non-IE word in German)> noz (pol) We do see "knykiec" (knuckle), "knut" (knout), 'kostka" (knuckle, knot), "kolano" (knee), 'galka' (knurl), 'guz' (knob, node), "kolanko" (node), "kurban" (knoll), 'gniesc' (knead), "gryzc" (gnaw), "gnejs" (gneiss), "gnu" (gnu), BUT "kieczec" (kneel) (but still not "ks"). So without more I propose a full circle .... kon'(horse) > kon-ni-ka > kuning(gaz)> knjaz > kiesyc - remember, for want of a horse a kingdom was lost.... Knight to Oueen 4. Regards, Steve Long From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 19:55:38 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 12:55:38 PDT Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick referring to the possible Etruscan substate in Tuscan wrote: > What you're saying makes me wonder if there wasn't some sort of diglossia > going on all along with the upper classes pronouncing casa as /kaza/ and > the lower classes as /haza/. Would this work? Possibly, but I still think it's possible that all classes used the same pronunciation, but they weren't aware of its "strangeness", as the Irish are not aware of their aspirated consonants, or as some Londoners are not aware they are saying "fink" and think they are saying "think". > >>What I notice about Roman speech is > > >/-L- > 0/ e.g. figlio > "fio" > > >/-nd- > -nn-/ e.g. andiamo > "annamo" > >The first of these phenomena, although in not so extreme a version, is > >common in other Romance dialects, cf. "yeismo" in Spanish. > Not quite because whenever I've spoken to Romans, I've noticed a > complete dropping of /-L-/. I hear /fio/ rather than /fiyo/. But, OTOH, > I've spoken to Italians in Latin America and the US. Yei/smo is a bit more > complicated since it runs through a whole gamut of sounds including /y^, j, > zh & sh/ --with /y^/ representing the "tense " similar to that of > rather than that of , which in Spanish is represented by [compare > vs. ] Firstly, I must warn you that my opinions on Romanesco and Neapolitan are those of an outsider. as my native language is English and my other first language is (or as a child was) the Emilian North Italian dialect, but I later adopted standard Italian as a second language. Also, I live in a very North Italian environment among (believe it or not) (semi-)monolingual speakers of Bergamasco. Having said this, according to Gerhard Rohlfs, "Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti", 1949, in Lazio should be pronounced /jj/ , i.e. a geminate semi-consonant like English , which would be a form of "yeismo", right? In my opinion, the speakers of Romanesco have taken this process to its ultimate limits: /fiLLo/ > /fijjo/ > /fio/. > >The second, which is characteristic of Central-Southern Italian dialects, > >including Neapolitan, etc., but *not* Tuscan and *not* North Italian, is > >also considered a substrate phenomenon going back to pre Latin times. > "Nabolidan" as I've heard it among both US ethnic Italians and > Neapolitans visiting the US had /nd/, as in something similar to /andyamu/ > or /andyammu/. But they may have been trying to use a standard > pronunciation. Yes, that is standard Italian "andiamo" with a southern pronunciation. The Neapolitan verb for to go is "jl" or "ghl" and "andiamo" (= let's go) would be "iamme", at least that's what it is in the song "Funicull, Funicul`". :) However, Italian "quando" = Nap. "quanno" (= when); Ital. "colomba" = Nap. "palomma" (= dove); Ital. "gamba" = Nap. "gamma" (= leg) > It is said that Roman settlers to Spain were principally from the > area around Naples, who brought in characteristics of Osco-Umbrian as well > as Greek. But I've usually just heard this remark in passing or seen it as > a "truism" So, Miguel thinks too. Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From adahyl at cphling.dk Wed Apr 7 19:22:30 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 21:22:30 +0200 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: <199904070107.VAA36608@cliff.Uottawa.Ca> Message-ID: ROBERT ORR: > "Ironically, although there does seem to be a considerable amount of > evidence that the notions 'dog' and 'wolf' can be combined, the > reconstruction of Nostratic *küynä (or, at least, velar plosive + vowel + n + vowel - the Nostratic etc. reconstructions are even less authorized than the IE ones) > ,based on a comparison of PIE *kuon with > various other forms in Uralic, Afro- Asiatic, etc., may not be a good > example of the phenomenon. It has been proposed on and off for nearly a > century, starting with Osthoff (1901:199, et passim), that PIE *kuon is in > fact originally derived from the root which gives Latin pecus, Gothic faihu, > etc., < IE *peku-, and that OCS pisu is also related. Hmm, peculiar. But no doubt that OCS pisu is PIE *pek^u- in some form. > According to such a > reconstruction *kuon would originally have meant "sheep-dog", and be derived > from something similar to *pekuon < *peku- + - on, with PIE *kuon derived > from *pkuon, a zero-grade form of *pekuon. Such an etymology allows us to > derive, ultimately, both the set of forms normally traced back to IE *kuon, > and OCS pisu, from the same root. That's comfortable, of course, if you want to reconstruct only on the basis of IE proper. But what about the vast Nostratic etc. material? > Osthoff's theory has found a small but > steady stream of followers, e.g., Knobloch (1971), Hamp (1980), who have > added further refinements." > And by way of clarifictaion, recall that Slavic tended to insert jer vowels > into old IE zero-grades, thus giving us *piku-. Hamp has a convincng line > of argumentation showing how other Slavic derivational forms (e.g., > pisynja) could be seen as from pikuon, and how pisu (< *piku-) would be a > back formation. > This etymology allows to explain OCS pisu, which is troublesome in most > reconstructions. It is very likely an old *-u-stem. More troublesome, though, for the attempt to link the other 'dog'-words to *pek^u- is the fact that NONE of these contain an initial

. Note even Lithuanian . > For IE *kuon < *pekuon, see > Hamp, Eric P. 1980. "IE *()kuon - dog". Indogermanische Forschungen 85.35-42. > Knobloch, Johann. 1971. "Die indogermanische Benennung des Hundes", Donum > Indogermanicum. ed. by Robert Schmitt-Brandt, 39-40. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. > Osthoff, Hermann. 1901. Etymologische Parerga, Erster Teil, Leipzig: S. > Hirzel. All published before the renaissance of cross-linguistic comparison. > And perhaps one could segment Modern Turkish kopek - dog (I don't have > dacritics in this programme) as ko + pek, thus providing us with a beautiful > parallel from outsde IE?) Parallel or common origin? I don't get it either way. If you mean common origin, what is 'ko' then? *pko? ko-pek = sheepdog-sheep? Best regards, Adam Hyllested From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 20:14:52 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 13:14:52 PDT Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Further to my earlier posting, I made a mistake in my phonetic transcription of Romanesco "fio". The correct version is: /fiLLo/ > /fiyyo/ > /fio/ My apologies. I was influenced by Rohlfs transcription with "j" (as in German) = "y" (as in English). Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it [ Moderator's comment: Technically, the IPA transcription *should* be [j]; [y] represents the tense high front rounded vowel. I've noted before that we as a group need to agree on a particular translation of the IPA to ASCII, in order to avoid confusions like this. --rma ] From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Apr 7 20:12:47 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 23:12:47 +0300 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: <003b01be8004$3e6b5a80$47f1abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: Subject: Re: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) >Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. Indeed it was meant as an example, but it is actually the only possible example. Flash Gordon said that there were no IE stems in -(n)k and Miguel replied "Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx)." So to prove the point there has to be an example in Greek that (1) is inherited from PIE and (2) preserves an -nk stem that other IE languages have lost. More below. >It is not the only Greek word ending in -nx. No, there are quite a few. Many of them have meanings having to do with holes, caves, cavities, passages, tubes, pipes, and other little round things or the like, or sounds made by birds or musical instruments or have to do with swirling motions or sounds. In many instances there are variants between forms in -x and -nx. Clearly, the -nx ending is used expressively over a wide part of its range. But lynx (the animal; I will use for upsilon so it will be easier to compare with modern English usage) has a genitive lynkos which makes it stand out like a sore thumb from the rest of the -nx words. Not just any Greek word ending in -nx will do. >There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), and of course sphinx, >and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. Syrinx is one of those pipe/passage words (origin of English "syringe") as are larynx, pharynx, and pharanx (actually this last is "chasm"), but sphinx is just a by-form of an ending in -x. Even the Greeks were aware of this and of the expressive use of the -nx ending. I don't often recommend the Cratylus for accuracy in historical linguistics, but like a stopped watch, it is correct sometimes (Loeb translation, copied from Perseus): Socrates: My friend, you do not bear in mind that the original words have before now been completely buried by those who wished to dress them up, for they have added and subtracted letters for the sake of euphony and have distorted the words in every way for ornamentation or merely in the lapse of time. Do you not, for instance, think it absurd that the letter rho is inserted in the word kaaptron (mirror)? [414d] I think that sort of thing is the work of people who care nothing for truth, but only for the shape of their mouths; so they keep adding to the original words until finally no human being can understand what in the world the word means. So the sphinx, for instance, is called sphinx, instead of phix, and there are many other examples. >These are all -ng stems. Which is where they diverge from lynx, which is an -nk stem. There is also a second lynx word that is an -ng stem, but this means "hiccup" or "retching noise" and is the word that connects with larynx. There may be some confusion between the first and second lynx words by some authors, but that the animal lynx is an -nk stem is shown by the compound lykolynx, "wolf-lynx," which is also an -nk stem (gen. lykolynkos). So getting back to the two criteria that could prove a survival of PIE -nk stems in Greek, there is little doubt that lynx is a PIE word as it occurs in practically all of the main IE branches (see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995, p. 431, 2.1.5.1). However, it is also generally connected with the PIE root *leuk[h]/*luk[h] (ibid.) and I don't see any way to get a consonantal n into this root. It seems more likely that the Greek -nx is expressive, added "to dress them up ... for the sake of euphony" as Plato says (or has Socrates say). But there is still the nagging fact of the -nk stem which goes against all other -nx words in Greek. Can this be laid to the fact that this is a sole surviving PIE -k that received this expressive ending? G & I (ibid.) say: "The phonetic alternations can be ascribed to the fact that this is an animal name; also relevant is the nasalization in Greek , _lun-k-_, paralleled by Lith. dial. _lu,'ns^is_." One can also put this together with Armenian lusanunk` (pl.), but what the significance of this is someone who knows more about Armenian than I do will have to explain. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 7 14:47:56 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 15:47:56 +0100 Subject: and In-Reply-To: <19990406222039.48084.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [on Spanish ] > My assumption is that the expression > is derived from Euskera, as are many other odd expressions > that pop up in these codes which are written in Spanish. To my > knowledge, there is no alternate derivation for the term. The word is unknown to me, and is not listed in Corominas, which last is a little surprising. > Moreover, the phonological reduction of "the lady of the > house" to * with the resulting form being "masculinized" by > replacement of the <-a> definite pronoun ending with the masculine > ending <-o> from Romance seems fairly straight forward to me. However, I > might be missing something. Perhaps not so straightforward. The medieval form of the word for `lady of the house' will have been , or at best , not *. And it is not so easy to see how this could yield the observed , especially since the Basque word is so blatantly and expressly female. Why on earth choose the female term, instead of the male counterpart `master of the house', especially when most of the voting heads of household were male? > On a related note: certainly we know that the compound > / (also with the definite article in > and ) meaning "new-house", gave rise to a variety of > surnames and first names in Spanish, ranging from the very obvious > Spanish last name Echeverria to the more obscure first name "Xavier". > The same house name became, for example, Dechepare and Chavert in > French. Not quite. The name (in French, ) is not related to , but is a distinct formation. The first element is `house', all right, but the second element is obscure. Michelena does not list this name in his etymological dictionary of Basque surnames, but he does discuss it in one of his numerous articles. I've forgotten the details, but he rejects the seemingly obvious `pair' in favor of -- I *think* -- a Basque borrowing of Romance derivative of Latin -- more or less *, I think. I'm also not sure that is the same name as . Assuming the name is Basque at all, I wonder if it might not be a French version of `other-house', another common Basque surname with a number of variants. > It seems to me that odder things have happened, e.g., Ximena > (Jimena), the name of El Mio Cid's wife, deriving from in > Euskera which means "my (beloved> son." At least that is what one of my > professors told me some years back. I am not knowledgeable about Spanish personal names, but this etymology looks deply suspect to me: `my son' for an expressly female name? Anyway, this is only the female form of the common medieval male name . This is of unknown origin: many have seen it as a form of `Simon', though Menendez Pidal derives it from an unrecorded Latin name *. > Again in a marketplace town like medieval Burgos, stomping grounds of El > Cid Campeador, it wouldn't be surprising to encounter this sort of thing > either given that many of those living there and travelling through were > probably bilingual in Castilian and Euskera. If I'm not mistaken the > linguistic boundary at that time was a few kilometers north of the > Montes de Oca just outside Burgos. > In the 70's I spent seven summers teaching in Burgos and found quite a > number of curious characteristics in the Spanish of the Burgaleses, many > of whom had recently moved to the city from former Basque-speaking zones > (that is from zones where Euskera was still spoken in the Middle Ages > (help! Larry, with the exact boundary lines). It is not generally possible to ascertain the southern boundary of Basque with precision at any time before the mid-19th century. There were certainly Basque-speakers in Burgos after its annexation by the Kingdom of Navarre in the 10th-11th centuries, but I don't think anyone knows just how numerous they were or how long the language persisted in Burgos. Place names south of the Ebro are almost invariably Romance, not Basque, though there were formerly several settlements with names like `Town of the Basques'. Even north of the Ebro, place names are mostly Romance today, though things were different in 1025, when the Reja de San Millan records a number of obviously Basque place names in Alava. By the time of the Castilian poet Berceo in the 13th century, the boundary was probably more or less along the Ebro, though it is likely that there was a zone of bilingualism. Berceo, born just south of the river, was a Castilian-speaker, but he clearly knew at least some Basque, since he uses Basque words in his poetry. It seems likely that Basque was still spoken in the vicinity of the city of Vitoria in 1562, when Landucci compiled his dictionary, and it may even still have been spoken in the city itself, though we have no good evidence for this. Today, of course, Basque is gone as a first language in the entire province of Alava, save only for the little finger that pokes between Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, around the town of Ibarra (Spanish Aramaiona). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From lmfosse at online.no Wed Apr 7 21:17:12 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 23:17:12 +0200 Subject: SV: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Larry Trask [SMTP:larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk] skrev 6. april 1999 16:22: > One of my favorite examples is Norwegian and Icelandic. Iceland was > settled from Norway at a time when North Germanic (Scandinavian) already > exhibited noticeable regional variation. Accordingly, we would expect > Icelandic and Norwegian to form a single node within Germanic. As it > happens, however, Norwegian has largely developed in contact with its > neighbors Danish and Swedish, and modern Norwegian is much closer to > Danish and Swedish -- with which it is at least partly mutually > comprehensible -- than it is to Icelandic -- with which it is not > mutually comprehensible at all. Consequently, our family tree today > usually puts Icelandic (and Faroese) off on a separate branch from the > three continental languages, in spite of the historical position. And > this example is not isolated. When you speak about the three Nordic languages Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, it is necessary to remember that these languages in the period between 1350 and 1550 (roughly) were heavily influenced by Platt German. The German Hansa ruled the Nordic world, and its influence upon the Nordic languages was devastating. It has been estimated that about 35 % of the most usual words of everyday communication are derived from Platt (this probably goes both for Swedish and Norwegian), and this is the main reason why a modern Norwegian can't just pick up his Snorri and read it in the original like an Icelander. The situation is therefore a little bit more complex than what you suggest in your mail. Since the development of the Nordic languages is fairly easy to study, they are excellent examples of how a "Wave" can work in language development. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse [ moderator snip ] Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 MobilSvar: 914 03 654 From jer at cphling.dk Wed Apr 7 15:14:45 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 17:14:45 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990406011959.91913.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: In reply to Glen Gordon's post of Mon, 5 Apr 1999 > Does this [viz., s-stems denoting a state] have anything to do with an >IE *-st(i) ending, perhaps? (cf. Hittite talukasti and OSlav. dlugosti) I'm sure it does. If s-stems can derive participle-like adjectives such as Lat. modes-tu-s, augus-tu-s (ptc. of denom.vb., the latter orig. meaning "having made strength", i.e. "being strong, strong"), surely there could also be corresponding abstract formations in *-ti-s ("the situation of having made length, the situation of being long, longness"). It proves the IE apparatus of derivation very large and very old. > Gee, maybe it's that **-t > *-s thing. Just a thought. Ooops, I forgot. > Too simple. We must posit **-c to cloak it in phonetic mystery. What was > the reason for **-c again? My reason was that there is surely also a /t/ that does not go to /s/ when word-final. Actually, that is not the precise rule; we also have /-s-/ before weak case-endings and before the fem. marker in the ptc. in gen. *-us-os, fem.Nsg *-us-iH2, but nom. *-wo:t-s with voc. *-wos; probably *le'wk-o:t-s, dat. *luk-e's-ey. We thus seem also to have /s/ before such morphemes that once constituted syllables of their own; if they were once WORDS, the rule is still "/s/ before word boundary, /t/ elsewhere". That would mean, however, that the strong cases were old inflections, while the weak cases were collocations of stem + postposition, and that SOME suffixes use the old sound rules while others do not; since not all suffixes are equally old this just looks like any normal language. - But the 3sg *-t must be a different morpheme; also, one would not like the consonant of the demonstrative pronoun *to- to be the same as that of the pronoun of 2nd person and, since both appear to have external (non-IE) relatives, the immediate solution is to see here a partial merger of originally separate phonemes. My own Danish has the initial dentals /t-/ and /d-/, but there used to be thorn also - what's the big deal? > JENS RASMUSSEN: > pron. *tu, *t(w)e [I'll keep my derivation of *yu(:)s, *usme and > *wos from protoforms with *t(w)- out of this] > Thanks, because there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus. That's what I believed until I succeeded in deriving them all from a completely regular original system where Eng. you IS the acc.pl. corresponding to nom.sg. thou. I had to invent some more sound laws, but that just cannot be helped if we are digging into a past from where there are no (or very few) other remains. It's like Eng. was/were which are just about the ONLY regular verbal forms in a longer time perspective. > JENS RASMUSSEN: > --- Now[...], [...] have we any > way of equating nominal //le'wk-ec-// and verbal //lewk-e'H1-//?? > On an ironic note, if you simply accepted my **-t > *-s rather than an > off-the-wall **c phoneme, you would be closer to your sound rule goals, > in addition to agreeing with a modified version of Miguel's > nonsensical sound change of **t > *H1, if you feel necessary to do. I don't get this: If *-s is a fine outcome for you, as it is for me from what I have labelled "*-c" (to avoid unwanted clashes), it all seems to boil down to the question, "Can [s] become [h]?" We know the answer to that is yes. But not even a change t > h is "nonsensical", the two alternate in Modern Irish, tu'ath [tu@] 'people' : a thu'ath [@ hu@] 'his people'. The tough thing is the conditioning which has not been found so far. Jens E.R. From adahyl at cphling.dk Wed Apr 7 21:52:40 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 23:52:40 +0200 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <688e7a33.243ae495@aol.com> Message-ID: STEVE LONG: > BTW- was sent this by e-mail. It is apparently up on the wall of a church in > the Holy Lands that has a lot of different Lord's Prayers on the walls: > < Nos fader, tu tui jis va nebisai, sjota varda tuji jaima.>> (sans accents) > This appears to be another "Wendish" dialect than Sorb. Actually, a Lekhitic language (together with Polish and Kashubian), heavily influenced by German, extinct in the 18th century. Adam Hyllested From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Wed Apr 7 15:34:03 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 16:34:03 +0100 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: > < superstition].>> > Interesting. How did we find out about this taboo? > Regards, > Steve Long Yeah. What he said. What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed to a common-or-garden lexical innovation? How could you tell? Does a greater frequency of replacement for certain concepts go with a greater superstitious observance? Or are they somehow morphologically marked? I know respect/avoidance language is widely used in the bear-hunting North (see Joseph Campbell on the Ainu), but might we not expect new terms like "well-intentioned one" or "your excellency" rather than the merely prosaic "it's big and it's brown and it likes a jar of hunny"? Nicholas Widdows P.S. > L-S gives (cross my fingers) '*m&emacrns' as IE stem. Use the semicolon, Luke. But '*mēns' probably won't work on e-mail either. From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Apr 7 22:50:34 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 22:50:34 GMT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990406222039.48084.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "roslyn frank" wrote: >In the >Basque law codes that I spent some ten years perusing in one of my >research projects, there are certain phrases that reoccur in Spanish. >They refer to the householders of the village in question who are >"voting" members of the community. The right to "vote" was not >individual but rather by "household" and further, there were only >certain "households" or "etxe" that held that status of "full-fire >voting rights". At times the houses with voting rights are represented >as "fuegos". When speaking of these householders, the texts in question >often speak of their representatives as "cabezaleros" and "cabezaleras" >and/or as "buenos hombres" y "buenos mujeres". Yes, but are they also known as ? And if not, who are the ? >Moreover, the phonological reduction of "the lady of the >house" to * with the resulting form being "masculinized" by >replacement of the <-a> definite pronoun ending with the masculine >ending <-o> from Romance seems fairly straight forward to me. However, I >might be missing something. It might be easier to derive from . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 16:00:31 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 12:00:31 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) Message-ID: I wrote: <> Ha! I once put up a straw man on this list by asking if *p>f was possibly caused by a change in the shape of the German people's lips. I think Larry Trask replied, "ridiculous." He was kind enough not to say "massive stupidity." There is clear evidence that the Northern European plain up into Jutland was a cultural vacuum at the beginning of the the first millenium bce. In the south, trade and technology were thriving. (From John Collis,'The European Iron Age') .But in the north, "fortified cities were virtually unknown,... Settlements above the size of villiages were unknown, and compared to central Europe industrial organization was at a low level. The potter's wheel, for instance, was not introduced, though known" throughout the rest of Europe. "Burials, where known, contain a minimum of grave goods - usually no more than a rough urn to contain cremated remains." The thriving trade to the north that clearly existed during bronze age disappeared. Old routes of trade and cultural continuity with the Mediterranean are just no longer there. The diagonal routes of LBK and the corded amphorae are gone. There is evidence at certain points that Celts control trade from the south to the north and nothing gets through. Evidence of "even Celtic material contact up through Scandinavia is not just rare, it is fundamentally non-existent." And therefore, as time goes on, the inhabitants of this area begin to develop "burial rites and material culture" markedly distinctive "from their central European neighbors." 700 years later a culture emerges and starts to spread that is "generally termed 'Germanic'." That is the compelling historical and archeaological evidence of ISOLATION. And it is a much better explanation of how Germanic stayed archaic then - oh, they're just like that. In fact I even like the unique lips explanation better. <> There are obviously better explanations for why Germanic stayed archaic. On this very list, we have been told that Slavic speakers can still understand each other after 1500 years since Slavic speakers first appeared on the historical scene. Meanwhile, after some 1500 years of separation, German speakers with no English and English speakers with no German understand nothing each other say. (I've been there and I've seen it.) That is not conservatism. The 'Germanic' we are talking about happened @3000 years ago. Its speakers were primitive, poor and had lost contact with the rich and "linguistically innovative" regions to the south. Is this the only explanation for its archaism? No. But it is better than pop sociology. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Apr 7 23:08:38 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 23:08:38 GMT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <688e7a33.243ae495@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: ><Nos fader, tu tui jis va nebisai, sjota varda tuji jaima.>> (sans accents) >This appears to be another "Wendish" dialect than Sorb. Polabian, the language of the Slavs living on ("po") the Elbe ("Labe"), is West Slavic, but different from Sorbian. Apparently, it was still spoken in the 17th/18th cc., although by that time heavily influenced by Low German, as the above phrase shows (cf. and < Low German [cf. Dutch and ]). I don't know any Polabian, and I'm a bit confused by that "tu tui", which must contain "kto:ry" somehow. I'm guessing is from *swjo~t- "holy". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 8 00:02:05 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 00:02:05 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <1944318.243bf592@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >"Kunnig">"ksiezy"? >Hmmm. Until I hear otherwise from Miguel and the Lords of the Sound Laws, I >am forced to assign this to the dark confines of the Dubious Etymologies file >(in which of course many of my own derivations are also entombed.) I already gave the sound laws for this one: Gmc. kuning(az) > Slav. kUne~gU or kUne~gI (i-stem) > kUne~dzU/kUne~dzI (3rd. palat.) > knjo~dz (loss of jers; Polish e~: > jo~) > ksia,dz (Polish kn' > ks'). >But while we're at it let me give you my own dubious derivations: >"kosciol" is possibly from something - way back- like "koczow-ac" (Pol) to be >encamped, from "koczow-nik", nomad; "koczow-", to wander; "kos", horse >blanket. Pol. (Loc. kos'ciele), with the Polish "przegl~os" (Umlaut) o < *e before hard dentals, is clearly *kostelU < Lat. castellu. >And get a load of this: >"Kunnig" Actually, kuning-, from *kun-ja "kin" (*gon-) and Germanic suffix -ing/-ung. >is from something like "konn-ica" (Pol), horsemen; "konn-y", >mounted; ("koni-arz", horse-trader>?"kunning-az") from "kon", horse. OCS konjI "horse", of unknown origin, possibly *kobnjo- (and further *kopH- "hoof"?) and related to Russ. kobyla, VLat. caballu, etc. >Before the domestication of the horse, the root "kon-" referred only to the >herd or herding dogs. Once the horse became domesticated, the >Slavs/Scythians/generic-IE-nomads, Not generic IE, but (Tocharians aside) satem-IE, I'm afraid. Iranian span-, spaka- "dog", Baltic Lith. s^uo, Latv. suns "dog" [and Russ./Pol. suka "bitch"?]. You can't connect Slavic *konjo- with the dog word. Wrong guttural (though there is Latv. kunja "bitch"). Incidentally, Lith. pekus, OPr. pecku "Vieh", with *k instead of *k^ would seem to be another reason to cast doubts on *k^uon < *pk^uon > Slav. pIsU. The more I think about, the more likely I find it that Slav. pIsU "dog" is simply "Spot", from *peik^- "spotty, motley, tawny" (cf. the dog Kerberos < *k^erbero- "striped, motley"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 8 00:04:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 00:04:13 GMT Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: <003b01be8004$3e6b5a80$47f1abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. It is not >the only Greek word ending in -nx. There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), >and of course sphinx, and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. >These are all -ng stems. I wated to use larynx or pharynx, but they are -ng stems. The animal is an -nk stem. Lugx, lugkos. There's also lugx, luggos "hiccup". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 8 01:17:18 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 01:17:18 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: >It is my impression that almost all linguistic change is brought >about by sociological factors. I would rather say that linguistic change, brought about by articulatory, combinatory, contact-related etc. "mutations", is selected for by sociological factors. This is not unlike biological change, where the mutations are brought about by various factors (both "internal" quirks in the way DNA is structured and is copied, and "external" factors like cosmic rays), and the mutations are then selected for by their effect on the "fitness" or sex-appeal of the phenotype. >4) Linguistic change is not unidirectional. A change (including > phonetic changes) that goes in one direction in one language > may go in the opposite direction in another language. One can > count up the number of instances for the change in each > direction and say which direction is statistically more likely > for the change, but in essence, there is no change that is > impossible (although some are extremely unlikely). Whether > linguistic change is reversible is a different issue from the > question on non-unidirectionality. Most linguists tend to > avoid discussions of reversibility (although there are clear > examples, mostly learned restorations), but I suspect that > this is mostly because if changes are reversed, it plays merry > hell with historical linguistics. :> Personally, I found it rather difficult to swallow the reversal of Semitic */g/ > Arabic /j/ > Eg. Arabic /g/. But apparently, that's exactly what happened. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Thu Apr 8 09:18:58 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 05:18:58 -0400 Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede > >and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made > >from Indo-Greek present stem? > The Armenian aorist e-ber is a "root aorist", the present stem is > bere-. I am not sure what you mean. Do you mean that eber is from *ebhert, or that it is completely new formation without any parallels elsewhere in IE? >...Slavic mino~ is analogical (vowel stems > with -no~- presents always carry over the -no~- to the aorist and > ptc.praes.act.). Slavic vede is a Class IA verb, which does not > distinguish present and aorist stems Do you mean to imply that at some point in PIE to proto-Slavic, there was a point at which present and past always had different stems, so that when we see the same stem in present and aorist in Slavic, it must be an innovation? > These forms may look identical to "Indo-Greek" imperfects, but > only if we divorce them from their paradigms and the Armenian and > Slavic verbal systems in which they are embedded. When you see forms in IA which are formed the same way as imperfects would be Greek, you consider to them to be imperfects with an imperfective value, with no regard for the syntax. But for other languages, syntax matters? If we use syntax as the guide, the so-called IA imperfect is the (narrative) past, the ``aorist'' is the recent past and the perfect is the resultative (at least in RV). To put it bluntly, no argument which depends on the conventional names for Sanskrit forms (and, I may add, names which were picked from Greek grammar with no regard for the target language, and are, to be frank, based on 19th c. prejudices) can be taken seriously. When I substitute the syntax based names, I fail to follow the logic of the argument. And, I repeat, Vedic has a marked past habitual, while in Iranian, optatives used as past habituals are sometimes augmented, while the so-called imperfect is a simple past. How come ignoring this is not divorcing the forms from the verbal system considered as a whole. [Just because present with pura and/or sma or augmented optatives are not mentioned in verbal paradigms of handbooks does not eliminate the fact that they have a special syntactical niche.] > >If you mean that these are aorist in Arm/Slavic, then aren't you > >comparing apples and oranges here? If Vedic imperfect was not > >imperfective, how can we compare it to Armenian, Slavic or Baltic > >imperfects (the last of which is said to be past frequentative)? > The point is that we *can't* compare it to the Armenian and > Slavic imperfects, which are derived from the optative (probably) > and from a sigmatic form (-e^ax-), respectively. The unique > feature of Greek and Indo-Iranian (and partially Baltic) is that > they lack a marked imperfect form (special endings and/or special > root extension), such as Italic, Celtic, Tocharian, Armenian, > Slavic and Albanian have. There is no strict formal distinction > between aorist and imperfect, except for the abstraction of an > "aorist" and a "present" root, to which secondary endings are > added (and an augment is prefixed). The marked imperfects are not similar enough to be traced back to a common form. So they are all innovations. How does this support a common grouping of Greek and I-Ir? But I-Ir ``imperfect'' is syntactically not an imperfect and there is a separate past habitual (present with pura: and/or sma in Vedic, optionally augmented optative in Iranian). Given that past can be formed from any stem in Hittite, this suggests that forms such as eber < ebheret are survivals, from when such forms were simple past and became aorists when new imperfective pasts arose (probably from past habituals if from optative, from past continuative in Latin and Slavic?). Proto-Baltic would be somewhere in between, with a new past continuative/frequentative (-dav), with old pasts continuing pasts more often than elsewhere. [The limitation of old pasts to imperfective due to the use of prefixed verbs for perfective must be an innovation because there are exceptions to such a binary contrast even today in Lith. and is handled differently in Latvian.] From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 8 22:31:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 22:31:35 GMT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/26/99 1:53:30 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><and all they require is a language that is flexible (and thus >changes). >Priests and poets are a different matter. The only (remote) >possibility for PIE or any other pre-literate language to have >been preserved more or less unchanged beyond its "natural >lifespan" is if it was the vehicle of something like the Vedas or >the Homeric poems. It cannot be excluded that something like >that happened to PIE, but it's not a necessary condition...>> >I think I disagree with that first part. I think kings and tax collectors >and army commanders want a very clear idea of what is going on, what is owed, >what should be paid this year based on what was paid last year. They want >precison and consistency in language. They can't have words, forms or >meanings changing on them. But it's no problem when words, forms and meanings change on the tax payers... Having a clear idea of what's going on, what is owed and who to threaten may well involve commodities, subjects and enemies that weren't there last year. Situations change, and so does language. But you have a point for lawyers. Legal language does tend to be conservative. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 00:07:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 00:07:07 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990407090743.36872.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >MIGUEL: > The instrumental (where it exists at all and isn't made with > *bhi/*mi) shows a lengthened vowel in all roots (-a: for a:-stems, > -i: for i-stems, -o: or -e: for o-stems), which can only mean -H1. >Which can mean either a lengthened vowel or *H1, really. Besides >probably Latin?, what evidence of this *-(e)H1 exists? A lengthened vowel in Vedic, Greek, Germanic, Lithuanian. The quality of the vowel is unaffected. Therefore, we must reconstruct *H1 (unless you think that laryngeal-PIE had long vowels *e: and *o:). >MIGUEL: > Hittite has -it (< *-et). If we postulate a development **-t > > *-H1, the Hittite form can be connected to the others [as well as to > other, extra-IE, instrumentals in -t, if we so wish. I give you > Georgian -it, Sumerian -ta]. >Yes, that's right. I'm agreement with you but with vastly different >reasons. And don't forget Uralic *-ta :) which is most evidently more >relatable to the ablative *-ed based on those regular sound changes I >mentioned. Non-Nostraticists look the other way... Indeed: PIE *d == Uralic *t, PIE *t == Uralic *tt. That's why I have taken great care to distinguish between the ablative in *d and the instrumental in *t (cf. again Georgian ablative -dan/adverbial -ad, Sumerian comitative -da). >Being that *-men and *-ten are patterned on **-e'n (note >that *-n does not become *-r in *-men as Miguel might want to think) Actually, what I stated (following Jens) was that -n > -r, except that in -men/-mn, final -n did not change. >it should come to no one's surprise that the plural conjugation ended >up with accented suffixes. Nor should it be shocking that the genitive >*-es (**-ese) is also accented (cf. Etruscan -isa [genitive] and ? >Sumerian -se [dative]). The Etruscan genitives are *-si and *-la (e.g. for the a-stems: Gen *-a-si > -as *-a-la > -al Abl *-a-si-si > -es *-a-la-si > -al(a)s Dat *-a-si-i > -asi *-a-la-i > -ale) The Sumerian dative is -ra. -she3 is the terminative ("towards, into, to"). >MIGUEL: > Surely -H2, if anything. >Judging by Greek we might have the following sketchy hypothesis: > *-H1-/-H2-/*-H3- >? Greek -k- >I of course severely doubt *-H1- as a possibility but lacking evidence >that supports Greek's peculiar whims as archaic, you are unable to >narrow these choices down. I realize that you are new to this laryngeal business, but the a:-stems have *-H2. >Can you find a valid >example of IE *-t that doesn't involve the 3rd person? I rest my case. No, because *-t became *-H1. I rest my case :) ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Fri Apr 9 00:34:03 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 10:34:03 +1000 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 07 Apr 1999 10:28:40 +0100." Message-ID: Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 10:28:40 +0100 (BST) From: Larry Trask [ moderator snip ] By the way, it is clear that is the original form of the Basque word. This is the only form recorded in Aquitanian, and the first form recorded in the medieval period (in 1085, according to Sarasola). The contracted form is first recorded in the 12th century; this would have been unpronounceable in Pre-Basque/Aquitanian, but it now predominates in a sizeable area of the country, though most of the east retains today. Larry, what is the phenomenom of Aquitanian that makes unpronounceable. thanks Jon ______________________________________________________________ The meaning of your communication is the response you get From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 00:34:22 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 00:34:22 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <19990407091102.27791.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: [me:] >>The only firm datum is the numeral "1" (Skt. e:ka- vs. Av. >>aeva-). For all we know, it may have been a fourth branch of >>Indo-Iranian, which happened to have *aika- for "1", just like >>Indo-Aryan. >You're rejecting evidence in favor of a hypothesis again. No I don't. I'm giving an alternative hypothesis that also fits the evidence. In fact, given the contortions that e.g. Mallory must go through ("In Search of the Indo-Europeans", pp. 35-44) to explain the presence of Indo-Aryans in the Near East (instead of Iranians, or some other Indo-Iranian group), and still doesn't succeed in making much sense of it, I don't see how it can hurt to think about alternative hypotheses. The facts are simply: PIE (non-II) has *oi-no- Indo-Aryan and "Mitanni" have *oi-ko- (e:ka-, aika-) Iranian and Nuristani (I think) have *oi-wo- (ae:va-) We also have e:va (*oi-wo-) "only" in Indo-Aryan. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 00:43:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 20:43:08 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Fashion) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Once you see a cohesive culture, historically or prehistorically, you see a >clear medium for the transmittal and maintenance of an identifiable language. -- thus Gothic cathedrals show the spread of French everywhere from Dublin to Warsaw, and Coca-Cola bottles the universal use of English. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 00:56:46 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 20:56:46 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >However they do obviously contain plenty of what some on the list would call >"everyday language." -- not unless your definition of "everyday language" excludes complete sentences. They're all lists, or things of the order "X holds land on rent of Y". Highly stylized. No poetry, no narrative, no laws, no stories, no legends or religious rituals (apart from lists of offerings), no royal announcements -- just record-keeping of a very elementary kind. In fact, Linear B would be extremely unsuited for anything else _but_ this sort of short, brusque note, because of the large numer of alternative meanings for signs. There are seventy different meanings for the wheel-shaped sign generally rendered as "ka", for instance -- ga, kha, kas, kan, and on and on. If you tried to write anything extensive in Linear B, it would quickly become hopelessly ambiguous because the words would have too many alternate meanings. It's as if we had only one way to write the words pot, peter, pyrite, perhaps and puddle and then had to figure out which one was meant from context. The Mycenaean tablets are readable only because the context of the (short) lists makes clear what's meant. It's an abortion of a writing system. >And they reflect the need to be PRECISE and predictable. -- all languages are precise and predictable at that level. Or do you know of any one that isn't? Languages change, but generally so slowly (on a human scale) that nobody's conscious of it in a time-span of less than generations. Ordinary linguistic change generally isn't going to make anything unintelligible in less than centuries. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 01:03:43 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 21:03:43 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >And they are contradicted by the very fact that there is a Grimm's law and >there is an Indo-European language group and there is a way the old sound >laws can "predicatably" tell you if one word is cognate with another even >if they are centuries apart. -- you're confusing description with prediction. Language change _in the past_ can be described and rules deduced, which can then be applied with reasonable confidence to historic languages we don't have direct evidence for. None of this makes us able to predict how the language will change _in the future_. At most we can make educated guesses based on how one sound-shift is likely to affect an adjacent phoneme, or describe how a change already underway is likely to spread (eg., the example of the initial "wh" to "w" shift underway in contemporary English brought up here recently.) Linguistic change is an almost completely unconscious process, and it's chaotic. People, particularly children and youngsters, change the way they speak all the time. It's impossible to tell which innovations will spread, and which will be "corrected" and die out. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 02:12:21 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 19:12:21 PDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: ROSLYN FRANK: Does this last comment mean that you believe the best simulation would be one that doesn't link the Euskera items and in anyway whatsoever with the IE items? Including the Gk. ones? LARRY TRASK: Yes. I can't see any persuasive reason to connect Basque `lady' with anything in Greek. By the way, it is clear that is the original form of the Basque word. [...] The contracted form is first recorded in the 12th century; this would have been unpronounceable in Pre-Basque/Aquitanian, [...] Hmm, after all this talk, I can't help but be enchanted by the similitude of Greek forms and Basque. Question: why does it matter whether the original form is or to the connection with Greek? Afterall, if a form like **andre would have been unpronouncable in Pre-Basque, Pre-Basque would no doubt have inserted a vowel and thus our Pre-Basque *andere, no? But then, are there any other items in Basque that're being debated as having a Hellenic origin beside *andere? And second, excuse me if I missed something (which is possible because I haven't been fully paying attention till now) but, has a Greek form like *andre: (feminine of ) been considered in the discussion? [ Moderator's response: The feminine of _ane:r_ is _gune:_. There is a feminine derivative _andria_ "manhood", which if it goes back to PIE derives from *H_2nriH_2. --rma ] -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 02:20:01 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 02:20:01 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <6726ada5.243cf409@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Because, I think we don't really ever see directly kn (Ger) > ks (Pol). And indeed that was not what was said. PLease note the conditioning factors: > roborr at uottawa.ca wrote: >><< In Polish *kn+FV or J > *ks (FV=front vowel). It's the cluster [k] plus palatalized [n~] which goes to [kC]. Initially at least. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 02:24:28 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 19:24:28 PDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: RAY HENDON: The exposure side (rate of contact between infecteds and susceptibles) of the equation is easily identified in the linguistic community: The relatively few Romans sent to govern England was not sufficient to generate a critical mass of exposure units for Latin to predominate. And the Romans left local courts and laws stand, lessening the need for everyone to know Latin in order to get along. Number might have something to do with it but what about languages or dialects that become viewed as prestigious? I'm sure it's more complicated than the above otherwise we would have had a secure model 100 years ago :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Apr 9 02:26:46 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 21:26:46 -0500 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: Hamp's <*pisynja> can drop the asterisk: there is a Slovene toponym behind German in South Carinthia. Nearby is . Mastiffs vel sim. were bred here. jpm Adam Hyllested wrote: [ a very long post which did not need to be quoted in its entirety and which has therefore been snipped by the moderator ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 02:29:54 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 19:29:54 PDT Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: PETER GRAHAM: Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. It is not the only Greek word ending in -nx. There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), and of course sphinx, and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. These are all -ng stems. ADAM HYLLESTED: and phalanx, an -ng stem too. And don't forget . Happy belated April Fools! :P I think we're going off topic here. Miguel brought this up in connection with his idea that IE once had *-k (??) which was originally in connection to external relationships like Uralic with IE. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Apr 9 02:33:21 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 21:33:21 -0500 Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: Just in case it's not universally known: is from verbated . South Italian is not aphetic from standard , but from Latin hortatory subjunctive 'let's go'. j p maher Frank Rossi wrote: [ a very long post snipped by the moderator ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 02:33:57 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 19:33:57 PDT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: ADAM HYLLESTED: In "On the Origin of Languages", Stanford Univ. Press 1994, J.D.Bengtson and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide range of other language families, even khoisan. ME (GLEN): Khoisan isn't usually considered to be Nostratic nor Dene-Caucasian. What are they trying to reconstruct with these cognates? Not Proto-World I hope. MODERATOR: That is precisely what they are trying to reconstruct. Oh-oh. Speaking of theories that should be quickly nipped in the bud... -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's response: Or discussion moved to the Nostratic list--where they have been beaten to death on more than one occasion. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 03:33:12 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 03:33:12 GMT Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: >G & I (ibid.) say: "The phonetic alternations can be ascribed >to the fact that this is an animal name; also relevant is the >nasalization in Greek , _lun-k-_, paralleled by Lith. dial. >_lu,'ns^is_." One can also put this together with Armenian >lusanunk` (pl.), but what the significance of this is someone >who knows more about Armenian than I do will have to explain. Not sure. The sg. is , and I guess the sg. oblique stem must be . There's one -n- too many (for a simple n-stem based on *leuk^-, we'd expect *lusn (*leuko:n), *lusan- (*leukn.-), pl. *lusunk` (*leukones)). Metathesis leunk ~ leukn? The Balto-Slavic forms (lu:s^is, rysI), on the other hand, suggest *luHk^-, with intrusive laryngeal. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 04:49:38 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 21:49:38 PDT Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: ROBERT WHITING: Indeed it was meant as an example, but it is actually the only possible example. Flash Gordon said that there were no IE stems in -(n)k and Miguel replied "Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx)." So to prove the point there has to be an example in Greek that (1) is inherited from PIE and (2) preserves an -nk stem that other IE languages have lost. I didn't mean that there were no STEMS that ended in *-nk-, just to clarify. I said that such stems always have a suffix after them so that there is no final *-nk ever in IE. In the case of *lunk-, it ends in *-s in the nominative, hence *lunks, or *-m in the accusative, etc. but there's never a complete word like **lunk with a final *-k. Of course, if other IE languages have lost this *-k ending a la Miguel, it'll certainly be difficult to prove its existance - Flash Gordon empathizes. If even Greek has -x (/-ks/) then still, how does this connect with Miguel's neuter **-k? Miguel has alot to figure out just yet. ROBERT WHITING: So getting back to the two criteria that could prove a survival of PIE -nk stems in Greek, there is little doubt that lynx is a PIE word as it occurs in practically all of the main IE branches (see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995, p. 431, 2.1.5.1). However, it is also generally connected with the PIE root *leuk[h]/*luk[h] (ibid.) and I don't see any way to get a consonantal n into this root. The n-affix. Thus from a verb *lu:- (or *leu-, if you wish) we get *lu-n-k- where *-k too is an affix built on the core verb *lu:- but I'm unsure of the etymology of *lunks myself. I mean, if it's actually built on *leuk- "to shine", that makes no sense to me. Yet, *leu- means "to lose", no? Still doesn't make sense. At any rate, I doubt that -nx is meant to be "expressive", in this case at least, and Greek is hardly an example of anything in re of this **-k. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 04:50:54 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 04:50:54 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with >stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- >'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and >the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally and -s- medially. What to make of them? As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From roborr at uottawa.ca Fri Apr 9 05:03:11 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 01:03:11 -0400 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >Incidentally, Lith. pekus, OPr. pecku "Vieh", with *k instead of >*k^ would seem to be another reason to cast doubts on *k^uon < >*pk^uon > Slav. pIsU. The boundary between centum and satem is rather spotty, with some examples of Baltic *k / Slavic *s cf. Lith. klausyti OCS slysati also, (I think) in this example Sanskrit has pasu why could peku-/pisu not be parallel to klausyti/slysati? >The more I think about, the more likely I >find it that Slav. pIsU "dog" is simply "Spot", from *peik^- >"spotty, motley, tawny" (cf. the dog Kerberos < *k^erbero- >"striped, motley"). Eckert 1963 (I think) related pisu to the Common Slavic form cognate with Russian pestryj, with a meaning similar to *peik^- (nb CITED AS AN EXAMPLE RATHER THAN AN ATTEMPT TO CLAIM THAT ALL OF SLAVIC IS DERIVED FROM RUSSIAN). Another life-form commonly referred to as "spotted" is the trout, cf. Polish "pstrag". From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 05:05:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 05:05:55 GMT Subject: Slavic pIsU In-Reply-To: <3713e568.131552504@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >The more I think about, the more likely I >find it that Slav. pIsU "dog" is simply "Spot", from *peik^- >"spotty, motley, tawny" (cf. the dog Kerberos < *k^erbero- >"striped, motley"). For "tawny" and curiosity value, cf. also Basque (R.L. Trask "The History of Basque", p. 267): "... Azkue ["Morfologma Vasca", 46] proposes that all three [colour words] might have been derived from nouns by the addition of the ancient adjective-forming suffix -i. [...his proposal for "yellow" is:] <(h)or> `dog' [...] (In Azkue's account, the word for `yellow' would originally have meant `tawny'.)" It should be noted that Azkue's etymologies are not always beyond reproach. Larry continues: "There appears to be no way of evaluating these proposals". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam [ Moderator's note: MCV has been caught by 7-bit-mail again--that's _Morfologi'a Vasca_ above, I reconstruct. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 05:23:07 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 01:23:07 EDT Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: In a message dated 4/8/99 9:07:20 PM Mountain Daylight Time, nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk writes: >What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" >over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed to >a common-or-garden lexical innovation? Exactly. After all, there was no taboo making the Romance languages shift their work for "horse" from the Latin derivative of *ekwos to "caballus". Aparently it was simply a shift, as if we'd stopped using "horse" and substituted "nag" or "glue-bait" or "cayuse". From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 05:31:31 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 01:31:31 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I'd like to suggest that the word did not pass from Gothic to Polish but >from Gothic to Russian and then to Polish.... -- that would require time-travel, since neither Polish nor Russian existed at the time of Gothic-Slavic contact, and the Goths had moved west by the 6th century. From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Fri Apr 9 05:58:04 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 01:58:04 -0400 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Polabian, the language of the Slavs living on ("po") the Elbe > ("Labe"), is West Slavic, but different from Sorbian. Is "Labe" Slavic or left over from some other language? Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 06:07:38 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 23:07:38 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: ME (GLEN): Gee, maybe it's that **-t > *-s thing. JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN: My reason was that there is surely also a /t/ that does not go to /s/ when word-final. [...] But the 3sg *-t must be a different morpheme; I wouldn't say so. I explain the final *-t/*-d as being from *-tV. Aside from the 3rd person singular, the distinction of *-d and *-t is not clear at all and the 3rd person *-t can be explained through influence of the primary *-ti. Boom, finito. JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN: Actually, that is not the precise rule; we also have /-s-/ before weak case-endings and before the fem. marker in the ptc. in gen. *-us-os, fem.Nsg *-us-iH2, but nom. *-wo:t-s with voc. *-wos; probably *le'wk-o:t-s, dat. *luk-e's-ey. We thus seem also to have /s/ before such morphemes that once constituted syllables of their own; if they were once WORDS, the rule is still "/s/ before word boundary, /t/ elsewhere". "Weak" case-endings? Do you mean endings that don't have an intervening vowel? If that's what you're talking about, everything is fine. We need not consider that the suffixes were once words at all. The Pre-IE nominative was apparently unmarked once as can be deduced by phenomenon within IE itself, even if you don't trust a Nostratic explanation of IE pre-history. Thus, the IE noun stem was once a complete word. Here's a pseudo-example with an imaginary animate word **kut to see what I'm talking about: Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE Nominative **kut **kwes-se **kwes (<**kwes-s) Accusative **kut-im **kwesem **kwesm Genitive **kut-isi **kwesese **kwese's Ablative **kut-ita **kweseta **kwese'd Even though a **-t only existed in the nominative, the change of **-t > *-s spread throughout the paradigm when a complete form **kut no longer was thought of as a complete word, being replaced with the concept of noun stems like **kwes-. When an intervening vowel is present, this is only because that vowel is part of the stem itself. Thus, we should expect *-t- to remain because it always was _medial_, not final. Here's a pseudo-example of the development of a vowel-final stem **kuti: Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE Nominative **kuti **ku:te-se **ku:tes Accusative **kuti-m **ku:tem **ku:tem Genitive **kuti-si **ku:tese **kute's Ablative **kuti-ta **ku:teta **kute'd See now? Nothing contradicts what I'm saying except for one thing - your nominative *-wo:t-s. I'm going to call its reconstruction into question and ask whether we can really tell whether it had *-ts or in fact *-s/*ss. The strong and weak cases are equally old and both derive from postpositions if we go far enough back. JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN: [...] also, one would not like the consonant of the demonstrative pronoun *to- to be the same as that of the pronoun of 2nd person Hungary disagrees. I could be wrong but I thought Hungarian's -l marks both 2nd and 3rd person, but at any rate, such things can and do happen. Look at Swedish. They don't know how to conjugate verbs anymore, tsk, tsk. I suspect you aren't seeing what I'm saying just yet. Maybe I should illustrate another example to make it clearer. Here's the development of the imperfective/perfective in IE the way I see it (sorry for all the "Pre"'s but I have to get into detail here :) Pre-Pre-Pre-IE Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE 1ps *-mu; *-?u *-m; *-h *-m; *-h *-m/*-h 2ps *-tu; *-nu *-t; *-n *-s; ZERO *-s/*-(s)the 3ps *-su; ZERO *-s; ZERO *-s/-t; ZERO *-t/ZERO Some may notice I've suddenly altered my position on the 3rd person to a ZERO instead of *-e. Sorry 'bout that, I'm not perfect(ive) you know. Anyways, according to this illustration, the 2nd and 3rd person temporarily merge in both the imperfective AND the perfective in Pre-IE (oh-oh!). What is the budding Indo-European to do? What it does is attach different suffixes to the endings to distinguish the two persons. In the perfective, it attaches *-the to the 2p derived from the imperative with optional *-s from the imperfective. In the 3rd person sing imperfective, the previously inanimate 3p *-t (derived from *-to) is favored over *-s because of the icky merger (At the same time, **-e'n becomes **-e'n-t > *-e'r). Boom, finito. JENS RASMUSSEN: and, since both appear to have external (non-IE) relatives, the immediate solution is to see here a partial merger of originally separate phonemes. My own Danish has the initial dentals /t-/ and /d-/, but there used to be thorn also - what's the big deal? These are FINAL distinctions I'm talking about and the arguement is only to do with IE, not in general. There aren't many IE dental endings to chose from - that's the big deal. IE 3rd person *-t has an external explanation?? I don't recall, explain please. Perhaps you're talking about a demonstrative in *t that is reconstructed for Nostratic? The suffix *-t whether it derives from an archaic demonstrative or not is unique to IE and the only best explanation is that it recently derives from *-to but then sound rules on syllable loss become necessary (and ultimately **-t > *-s) in order to explain this and much more phenomenon that can't be explained otherwise. ME (GLEN): [...] there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus. JENS RASMUSSEN: That's what I believed until I succeeded in deriving them all from a completely regular original system where Eng. you IS the acc.pl. corresponding to nom.sg. thou. I had to invent some more sound laws, Still don't get it. How does *t- become *y-?? Must be a pretty nifty sound law. Why can't *yus be derived from a verb *yu:- (*yeu-) "to join" as in "a bunch (of people)"? We know, from examples in Japanese, that nouns can at times become pronouns and *yus looks very unique to IE. JENS RASMUSSEN: I don't get this: If *-s is a fine outcome for you, as it is for me from what I have labelled "*-c" (to avoid unwanted clashes), it all seems to boil down to the question, "Can [s] become [h]?" [...] not even a change t > h is "nonsensical", Yes, Nonsensical (when talking about IE though). Of course, the sound changes themselves are fully possible in a general sense but this is the IE list and we aren't discussing general linguistics. A phoneme *c is unmotivated by the evidence and so is **-t > *-H1. What I propose does not necessitate extra phonemes and the sound changes are quite tame by comparison. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 06:11:38 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 06:11:38 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >>GG: >> On an ironic note, if you simply accepted my **-t > *-s rather than an >> off-the-wall **c phoneme, you would be closer to your sound rule goals, >> in addition to agreeing with a modified version of Miguel's >> nonsensical sound change of **t > *H1, if you feel necessary to do. >I don't get this: If *-s is a fine outcome for you, as it is for me from >what I have labelled "*-c" (to avoid unwanted clashes), it all seems to >boil down to the question, "Can [s] become [h]?" We know the answer to >that is yes. But not even a change t > h is "nonsensical", the two >alternate in Modern Irish, tu'ath [tu@] 'people' : a thu'ath [@ hu@] 'his >people'. Yes. Of course I was thinking more in terms of word-final taa' marbuutah (-t > -h) or Late Egyptian/Coptic -t > -?, depending on whether one interprets *H1 as /h/ or /?/ or both. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 07:01:45 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 00:01:45 PDT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: ROBERT ORR: "Ironically, although there does seem to be a considerable amount of evidence that the notions 'dog' and 'wolf' can be combined, the reconstruction of Nostratic *k|ynd [...] ADAM HYLLESTED: (or, at least, velar plosive + vowel + n + vowel - the Nostratic etc. reconstructions are even less authorized than the IE ones) Actually, if we're going to stick our hands into Nostratic on this word (and it's going to be messy), we might as well do it right. We must reconstruct an earlier **kawina with three syllables, not one. Without a *w we can't explain why it exists in IE *k^won-. Thanks to you folks, I might have found another example of my pretty sound rule **-VCV > *-V'C. Thus, **kawini > **kawene > **kawe'n > *k^wen- (but this means that the word originally had *-e-, not *-o-. Objections?). Uralic *ku"ina" is then representative of **kawini alright. Altaic forms with and such are reasonable if they can properly be derived from an earlier **kaini. Further, AA has *kawan- according to Bomhard and others so things seem happy for a long-range explanation of the word, certainly better than **pkuon can do. On a related note, Chinese recently mentioned could be from an IE language but... if this is honestly from an ST item *kwyan (ST is c. 4000 BCE no?) then I severely doubt it due to time and location and thus an eastern Proto-Steppe dialect with *kawina (c. > 9000 BCE) might be a possible explanation. It's all dependant on how secure ST *kwyan is. But I realise I'm getting really conjectural at this point so I'll take other suggestions if nec. Just food for thought. ROBERT ORR: [...] etc., < IE *peku-, and that OCS pisu is also related. ADAM HYLLESTED: Hmm, peculiar. But no doubt that OCS pisu is PIE *pek^u- in some form. Exactly. I still don't see *p- peeping out of from behind a *k. Until then, there's nothing to say. ADAM HYLLESTED: Note even Lithuanian . Way to go, Adam. Let's see if he can wiggle his way out of that one. :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's request: Let's move the Nostratic discussion to that list, please. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 07:22:15 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 07:22:15 GMT Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) In-Reply-To: <001601be81a1$41434d00$2070fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> >What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede >> >and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made >> >from Indo-Greek present stem? >> The Armenian aorist e-ber is a "root aorist", the present stem is >> bere-. >I am not sure what you mean. Do you mean that eber is from *ebhert, or that >it is completely new formation without any parallels elsewhere in IE? Nobody knows where the Armenian aorist comes from: ber-i ber-er e-ber ber-ak` ber-eyk` ber-in It's certainly not simply *-om, *-es, *-et, *-omes, *-etes, *-ent/*-ont, which is why I objected to pulling one form out of the paradigm, and comparing that to a Greek imperfect. >>...Slavic mino~ is analogical (vowel stems >> with -no~- presents always carry over the -no~- to the aorist and >> ptc.praes.act.). Slavic vede is a Class IA verb, which does not >> distinguish present and aorist stems >Do you mean to imply that at some point in PIE to proto-Slavic, there was a >point at which present and past always had different stems, so that when we >see the same stem in present and aorist in Slavic, it must be an innovation? No. All IE languages that distinguish a present stem from an _aorist_ (not past) stem have I think some verbs where the distinction is not made. Verbs like vesti (ved-) can make root-aorists, but also s-aorists (two kinds of them): I IIa IIb vedU ve^sU vedoxU vede vede vede vede vede vede vedomU ve^somU vedoxomU vedete ve^ste vedoste vedo~ ve^se~ vedos^e~ (the present and imperfect are: vedo~ vede^axU vedes^i vede^as^e vedetU vede^as^e vedemU vede^axomU vedete vede^as^ete, -e^aste vedo~tU vede^axo~ ) >> These forms may look identical to "Indo-Greek" imperfects, but >> only if we divorce them from their paradigms and the Armenian and >> Slavic verbal systems in which they are embedded. >When you see forms in IA which are formed the same way as imperfects would >be Greek, you consider to them to be imperfects with an imperfective value, >with no regard for the syntax. But for other languages, syntax matters? I didn't mention syntax. I didn't object to comparing Armenian and Slavic aorists with Greek imperfects because they are aorists. >The marked imperfects are not similar enough to be traced back to a common >form. So they are all innovations. How does this support a common grouping >of Greek and I-Ir? You're right, it doesn't. Shared archaism. >But I-Ir ``imperfect'' is syntactically not an imperfect and there is a >separate past habitual (present with pura: and/or sma in Vedic, optionally >augmented optative in Iranian). Given that past can be formed from any stem >in Hittite, this suggests that forms such as eber < ebheret are survivals, >from when such forms were simple past and became aorists when new >imperfective pasts arose (probably from past habituals if from optative, >from past continuative in Latin and Slavic?). That's true, but there is more. You forget that imperfective *presents* and perfective *pasts* also arose. Hittite has only a present and a past tense (in -mi, -hi and mediopassive flavours), but it can also make a durative/iterative/distributive (present or past) form from any verb, by affixing -sk-. In non-Anatolian IE, -sk- is usually one of the imperfective suffixes, along with -i-, -n-, -neu- and a few others. Most non-Anatolian IE languages (except Germanic, Tocharian and maybe Armenian) also have a specific perfective marker *-s-. The dichotomy between present (imperfective) and aorist (perfective) stems grew out of the addition of both kinds of markers to verbal roots. But the marking was never complete, and there remained many root-presents and root-aorists. Greek and Indo-Iranian can make both presents and pasts from roots suffixed with "imperfective" markers. Forms like Skt. gacchati / agacchat (*gwm-sk-e-ti, *e-gwm-sk-e-t), whatever their synchronic syntactic function or meaning, are historically iteratives, i.e. imperfective Aktionsart. What's the problem? One problem is that root-presents and root-aorists, which are both direct cousins of the Hittite simple past (mi-conjugation), get classified in different categories. Another problem is that the habitual/imperfective *past* was felt not to be marked enough formally or began to lose its imperfective meaning, which is why new formations were created such as the Slavic imperfect with -e^ax-, the Armenian and Tocharian (and, if I understand you correctly, Iranian) imperfect from the optative, the Latin periphrastic imperfect with *bhu-(?). And the Vedic past habitual. If what you're saying is that a Vedic/Skt. "imperfect" like "he carried", without specific imperfective markers, goes back to a simple past tense as in Hittite or indeed Germanic [except for the augment, of course], I fully agree. But the question is, what happened to the meaning of that form when s-aorists like arose? Did it become an imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked "imperfects" like ? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Fri Apr 9 08:13:54 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 10:13:54 +0200 Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal schrieb: > Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the > 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. But Sanskrit (and probably PIE) shows Sandhi and the realization depends on the following word so that there is no difference of -d/-dh/-t at the end of the word. Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Apr 9 09:24:50 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 09:24:50 GMT Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote (Subject: Re: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :)):- > ... the Armenian and Slavic imperfects, which are derived from the optative > (probably) and from a sigmatic form (-e^ax-), respectively. ... I suspect that the Common Slavonic imperfect with its characteristic vowel hiatus {-a.axu} or {- at .axu} (`@' = the {yat'} vowel, it looks like a crossed soft-sign, it may have been pronounced `ia' with the stress on the `i') is derived from the sigmatic aorist {-axu} with the vowel at the end of the stem pronounced with hesitation to indicate durativeness, e.g. "as I wro-ote" for "as I was writing". I suspect also that the IE subjunctive may have arisen (as common IE evolved from its ancestor) as the indicative pronounced with hesitation on the thematic vowel for a similar expressive reason, until the hesitation became phonemic and hardened into an interpolated glottal stop (i.e. the H1 laryngeal), which later disappeared with compensatory vowel lengthening. For long thematic vowel arising from H1, compare in Attic Greek what I call the `subjunctivoid' conjugation, e.g. "I live" {zoo zeeis zeei zoomen zeete zoosi}, and likewise {knoo} = "I scrape" and a few others (double vowel = long), which I suspect arose from IE verbs ending in {-eH1e/o-}: gwjeH1e/o- < root {gw-j-H1}. Greek grammars formally list these as contracted from {-aoo}, e.g. {zoo^} as decontracted {zaoo}, but such a form with an `a' vowel would < IE root {gw-j-H2}, which means "force, power" rather than {life}, and indeed I came across an ancient Greek gloss somewhere that said that uncontracted {zaei} meant {biinei^} (meaning as Latin `futuet') (< I.E. gwiH2-neje/o-) Ionic Greek (e.g. Homer) (more liable than Attic to the persistent bulldozer of `Analogical Levelling' which often destroys amounts of a language's linguistic `archaeology'), seems to regularize these verbs as usually {-eoo}, but {zoo.oo} for {zoo>}. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Apr 9 09:34:21 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 09:34:21 GMT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: Adam Hyllested wrote:- > ... similar forms in other language families closer to IE than AA. > J.Greenberg lists ... Old Turkish 'bitch', ... Also Chinese: Mandarin {ch'u"an}, Ancient Chinese {kjwan} = "dog". Perhaps the word spread along with the animal from whoever first domesticated it. I read recently of work on mitochondrial DNA which seemd to show that domestic dogs are all descended from a very few original female wild wolves. How long ago and where are domestic dog bones first found in archaeology? From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 08:50:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 08:50:35 GMT Subject: imperfect Message-ID: I wrote: >If what you're saying is that a Vedic/Skt. "imperfect" like > "he carried", without specific imperfective markers, >goes back to a simple past tense as in Hittite or indeed Germanic >[except for the augment, of course], I fully agree. But the >question is, what happened to the meaning of that form when >s-aorists like arose? Did it become an >imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) >like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless >narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked >"imperfects" like ? I forgot to add: "assuming the Sanskrit verbal forms I quote above are found in the RV (I'm not sure)". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 9 09:15:56 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 10:15:56 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: <01BE814D.287B80C0.lmfosse@online.no> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Lars Martin Fosse wrote: [on the histories of the Scandinavian languages] > When you speak about the three Nordic languages Norwegian, Swedish and > Danish, it is necessary to remember that these languages in the period > between 1350 and 1550 (roughly) were heavily influenced by Platt German. > The German Hansa ruled the Nordic world, and its influence upon the Nordic > languages was devastating. It has been estimated that about 35 % of the > most usual words of everyday communication are derived from Platt (this > probably goes both for Swedish and Norwegian), and this is the main reason > why a modern Norwegian can't just pick up his Snorri and read it in the > original like an Icelander. The situation is therefore a little bit more > complex than what you suggest in your mail. Since the development of the > Nordic languages is fairly easy to study, they are excellent examples of > how a "Wave" can work in language development. Yes, certainly. But I wasn't trying to oversimplify the picture. My point was simply that Norwegian and Icelandic "started off" as particularly closely related within Scandinavian, but that later developments brought about a position in which Norwegian is, by any reasonable standard, linguistically closer to Swedish and Danish than it is to Icelandic. Consequently, there is a problem in drawing a family tree. Historically, we ought to expect Norwegian and Icelandic to form a single branch of the tree, but nobody draws it that way: every tree I've seen puts Norwegian in a branch with Danish and Swedish, while Icelandic (usually together with Faroese) is off on a separate branch by itself. So, to put it crudely but picturesquely, Norwegian has migrated from one branch of the tree to another. And this is not the kind of phenomenon that the family-tree model can accommodate at all well. Some decades ago, either Trubetzkoy or Jakobson -- I forget which -- suggested that English had ceased to be a Germanic language and become a Romance language. Much more recently, C.-J. N. Bailey has likewise asserted that English is no longer a Germanic language but may perhaps be a Romance language. I think these proposals are rather over the top for English, but they do hint at the potential difficulty faced by the family-tree model in cases of massive contact and convergence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 09:21:29 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 02:21:29 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Hello all, I goofed again. They say "To err is human" but I can only suspect that someone has slipped some hallucinogenics into my Ovaltine. I've re-read what Jens has said about the "weak case-endings" and I realise now that I better correct myself before the death threats start pouring in. Let me re-illustrate, this time properly, the development of the animate t-final stems with a pseudoword **kut (my vowel-final stem illustration of **kuti still stands) and this time note the previously neglected alternation of *t/*s in my paradigm example :( Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE Nominative *kut *kwet-se *kwets *kwets Accusative *kut-im *kwetm *kwetm *kwetm Dative *kwet-i: *kweti: *kwesi: (*kwesey) Genitive *kut-isi *kwetese *kwete's *kwese's Ablative *kut-ita *kweteta *kwete'd *kwese'd Does that look right now? So **-t > *-s still works to explain much however there seems to be an extra sound change lurking about that I've overlooked. It occasionally wreaks havoc with the results. I thought about a possible palatalisation of **t but that wasn't cutting it. Finally, I got it. There's an additional sibilization of intervocalic MEDIAL **t. _That's_ why things are not working properly! Hence, genitive *-us-os. Hence, feminine Nsg *-us-iH2. Hence, *le'wk-o:t-s versus dative *luk-e's-ey. All these examples share the fact that **t would be in an intervocalic medial position throughout its pre-history. This would explain alot more than just the quirky *t/*s alternation of *-wo:ts. It would connect things like IE *ghesr and Uralic *ka"ti "hand" together which could not have been due to any borrowing. They aren't cognates per se but are both based on an earlier verb root **git- and thus show a **-VtV- > *-VsV- sound rule in effect lending further support for genetic relationship. The word *nekwt- "night" derives then from **nug-t with substantive *t that doesn't change because it isn't intervocalic. This might also serve to explain those pesky endings in *-es that Jens mentioned earlier alongside the supposed *-eH1- passive. Instead of *-eH1-, we should reconstruct *-e:- which, due to accent rules and the openness of the syllable, oscillates with *-e- (cf. *tu: versus enclitic *twe). The *-es ending then is really *-e- (passive) + *-s (from earlier **-t, the substantive, and hence a *t/*s alternation in the declension). Okay, that should do it now. I can only pray that makes better sense. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 9 09:27:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 10:27:14 +0100 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <37180062.138459074@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [RW] > > Most linguists tend to > > avoid discussions of reversibility (although there are clear > > examples, mostly learned restorations), but I suspect that > > this is mostly because if changes are reversed, it plays merry > > hell with historical linguistics. :> [MCV] > Personally, I found it rather difficult to swallow the reversal > of Semitic */g/ > Arabic /j/ > Eg. Arabic /g/. But apparently, > that's exactly what happened. I agree that this particular sequence is rather unexpected. But it's not hard to find other examples of reversals. For example, PIE */t/ changed to the dental fricative theta in Proto-Germanic, and then theta changed back to /t/ again in the continental Scandinavian languages. Pre-Basque */n/ generally changed to a palatal nasal in the configuration */inV/, and then, in most eastern varieties of Basque, the palatal nasal changed back to /n/ in the same configuration. While `reversal' is a term of perhaps no great antiquity in English, the German equivalent `Rueckverwandlung' has been around for quite a while, I think. Anybody know when it was first used? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Apr 9 09:39:29 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 12:39:29 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 4/6/99 11:40:17 PM, you wrote: ><in all of these statements. If there is one thing that we know >about language change, it is that it is not predictable. >> >This is nothing but truisms. You do know what a truism is don't you? Since there are indications that you are using a different Webster's than I am, my Webster's says that a truism is "a self-evident, obvious truth." >And they are contradicted by the very fact that And in the next breath you say that "self-evident, obvious truths" can be contradicted. >there is a Grimm's law and there is an Indo-European language >group and there is a way the old sound laws can "predicatably" >tell you if one word is cognate with another even if they are >centuries apart. That's what predictability means. It means you >can look at some word on a clay tablet and make a good guess at >whether they are Greek or not. Because it follows from prior >experience. That's predictability. No, that's history. Grimm's Law and the Indo-European language group are reconstructions based on present information. They are "predictions of the past," not predictions of the future. Now these reconstructions do have predictive power (otherwise they wouldn't be much use). But this power is limited to being able to determine how well a newly discovered language (such as Mycenaean Greek or Hittite) fits into the reconstruction and can be considered IE. If it fits perfectly, then the forms of the new language were "predicted"; if it doesn't fit, then the reconstruction needs adjustment so the forms *can* be "predicted." So the new language is simply more evidence to be fed into the reconstruction (the "prediction of the past"). But there is a big difference between predicting (reconstructing) the past and predicting the future. Now if Grimm's Law and the reconstruction of PIE could tell me what English or French or Russian was going to look like 500 years from now, *that* would be predictability. And what follows from prior experience is not predictability, it is complacency. Just because an event has had a certain outcome in n repetitions does not mean that it will have the same outcome on the n+1th repetition. Statistical probability is what predicts the outcome of an event, not prior experience. >It really doesn't take a lot of hard thought to figure out that >languages change. It's not a breakthrough idea. No, as you have pointed out, it is "a self-evident, obvious truth." >I remember reading about an early IEist first looking at Gothic >and saying "I thought I was reading Sanskrit." That is the >point. If he said, "boy, languages do change don't they?" That >would have been trite. Or considerably worse. Well, it's a good thing he wasn't reading Armenian or your entire perception of historical linguistics might have been different. But again, this is just a matter of predicting the past. The further back you go the more closely cognate language resemble each other (another truism). And you are missing the complement of the statement which is "I didn't think I was reading German or English." In comparing two languages that are closer to the original source, one is more likely to be struck by the similarities. But in comparing the same language at widely separated periods (e.g., Anglo-Saxon and Modern English) one is more likely to be struck by the differences. >It's the continuity, not the change. That's the science of it >and from what I've seen in the work of some people in this field, >the art of it. Where's the pattern, not that there's no >pattern. It's not the continuity or the change. It is the relationship between continuity and change that defines language groups, families, languages, and dialects. And you are right that the pattern is overwhelmingly important. But the pattern consists of both continuity and change. >If my you find my speaking of predictability "rather" disturbing, >I can only respond that I find you reminding me that languages >change unpredictability - well, I'll believe you if you wake up >speaking Bantu tomorrow. Otherwise I'll find the whole idea >ridiculous. No doubt you will. I thought, however, that we were talking about changes *in* language, not changes *of* language. But when I wake up tomorrow I will say one English word, "gnu" and then you can believe me. But if you are suggesting that the population of England woke up one morning and all said to themselves: "Ah, the Great Vowel Shift is scheduled to start today -- must remember to lengthen my short vowels in open syllables and raise my long vowels," that is not merely ridiculous, it is sublime. ><degree to which languages will diverge based on the geographical >distance between them.>> >Boy wouldn't that be silly. Where would I get a wild idea like >that? Isn't French just as close to Chinese as it is to Spanish? >Isn't Polish just as close to Mayan as it is to Russian? How >could you possibly think I would ever think that? Never occurred >to me. And isn't the French of Quebec more distant from the French of France than Basque or Breton are? And isn't Australian English more distant from British English than Welsh is? On the whole, I think it is better to speak in truisms than in non-sequiturs. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Apr 9 12:56:37 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 14:56:37 +0200 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: <19990407110645.23003.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > I wish IEists would finally accept that > some words simply can't be explained within IE alone Me too. But we should recognize the fact that some words are inexplicable even within Nostratic. > J.D.Bengtson and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide > range of other language families, even khoisan. > Er, that worries me. So how are we sure for example that Khoisan terms > are neither coincidence nor borrowed from AA and sons? Khoisan isn't > usually considered to be Nostratic nor Dene-Caucasian. What are they > trying to reconstruct with these cognates? Not Proto-World I hope. > [ Moderator's comment: > That is precisely what they are trying to reconstruct. > --rma ] Proto-World allright, but don't worry. The science of cross-linguistic comparison is still at a cradle stage, and nobody can be *sure* about anything. However, the examples are striking, at least some of them (I already mentioned the Nostratic ones): Archaic Chinese: *khiw at n 'dog' Tibetan: khyi 'dog' Ket (Yenisey-Ostyak): ku:n~e 'wolverine' Basque: haz-koin 'badger' (lit. 'bear-dog') Proto-(North)Caucasian: xHweje 'dog' Achomawi (a Hokan language): kua:n 'silver fox' North Yana (Hokan): kuwan-na 'lynx' Esmeralda (Equatorial): kine 'dog' Pila (Papuan): kawun 'dog' /'Auni (Khoisan): /ka~i~n 'hyena' /Xam (Khoisan): !gwa~i~ 'hyena' etc. etc. Coincidence? Maybe. Certainly not borrowing everywhere. Adam Hyllested [ Moderator's response: Coincidence? Almost certainly. Certainly not demonstrated as "Proto-World" by the techniques espoused by Ruhlen. Please move further discussion to the Nostratic list. --rma ] From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 9 14:07:21 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 08:07:21 -0600 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Nicholas Widdows wrote: > Or are they somehow morphologically marked? I know respect/avoidance > language is widely used in the bear-hunting North (see Joseph Campbell on > the Ainu), but might we not expect new terms like "well-intentioned one" or > "your excellency" rather than the merely prosaic "it's big and it's brown > and it likes a jar of hunny"? When one looks at lexical replacement for 'bear' in North America for taboo/respect reasons, one finds the fairly pedestrian replacements mentioned above or borrowed words, not the "your mighty greatness" variety. So in Comanche, for example, one finds three different roots for 'bear' including older patua (something like "big boy", later shortened to tua and found in tutua 'bear cub'), wasa"pe (" is a Numic morphophonemic marker, in Comanche it keeps the p from being lenited to [v]) (borrowed from Osage wasape), and archaicly wyyta (y is barred i) (the form inherited from Proto-Central Numic and gone in modern Comanche). In fact, when comparing documentary Comanche from 1786 until the present, one finds the three forms for bear in order (wyyta on the way out, patua common; patua on the way out, wasape coming in, wyyta gone; wasape common, patua shortened to tua and almost gone). That's not much of a life span for a non-taboo word. In Colorado River Numic (the language that comprises the Chemehuevi, Southern Paiute, and Ute dialects), we find kwi(j)akanty (j is y and y is barred i) (derived from kwija 'burn', "burned one" or "smoke-colored one"). In Mono and Panamint (one borrowed from the other), we have pahapittsi (derived from pahapi 'swim', "swimmer" or "one who lays in water", with -ttsi affectionate diminutive). All of these groups have a taboo respect for bear, but none of the lexical replacements for older forms shows any particularly high-brow form for the new word. In fact, look at the ways that Americans replace the name of "God" in casual speech--"the man upstairs", for example. I would say that a taboo replacement is probably MORE likely to be a pedestrian form than something special. After all, one needs a word to use in casual speech without the respect inherent in the taboo form. John McLaughlin Utah State University From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Apr 9 17:03:35 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 20:03:35 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Fashion) In-Reply-To: <2708b51.243ce139@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: Subject: Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Fashion) >In a message dated 4/6/99 11:40:17 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: ><>. >Language is a fundamental part of culture and does not exist >without it. Language without culture has no referents, no >context, no medium, no way of propagating and no reason for >being. Ah, so the primary function of language has gone from being communication to being a marker of cultural identity -- no culture, no language. While you are quite right that language and culture are inextricably intertwined and no one should try to separate them, this interdependence does not mean that they are coterminous or coextensive. A language can belong to more than one culture (e.g., a lingua franca such as medieval and modern Latin, or Akkadian used by Egyptians, Canaanites, Hittites, and Hurrians for diplomacy) and a culture can have more than one language (doesn't really need an example). In short, language may be a fundamental part of culture, but no specific language has to be a fundamental part of any specific culture. Entire cultures can change their language. They don't have to, and they don't do it very often, but they can and do (modern Hebrew is an example). Language and culture are in many ways aspects of the same thing. Both are passed on from generation to generation by instruction (i.e., they are not inherited genetically), both are subject to unpredictable change, and both can borrow elements from other languages/cultures. But there are also features of language that are not connected to culture (universals) and there are features of culture (e.g., religion) that are not tied to a language. So it is a quite legitimate question to ask whether a linguistic change had its origin within the language or within the culture or from a source external to both. So what was the point of your comment? >One of the reasons I cannot honestly argue with Miquel's notion >that LBK carried PIE or its descendents into northern Europe is >that the evidence does support the existence of a coherent >culture or uberkultur that tracks that idea well. You can't >support the PIE/LBK premise on human genetics, but its hard to >fight it based on the evidence of culture. Once you see a >cohesive culture, historically or prehistorically, you see a >clear medium for the transmittal and maintenance of an >identifiable language. Or two languages, or three languages. A coherent culture doesn't have to be based on a single language. Historically it often is, but it doesn't have to be. How many languages are there on the Indian sub-continent? A single language may make a plausible story, but plausible stories are not evidence. Plausible stories are what we use to bridge the gaps where there is no evidence. The evidence is the cultural continuum. The plausible story is that it represents one language and that language is presumably IE (or some branch of it). >This is historically confirmed again and again. And again, prior experience is not proof nor is it predictability. Historical analogs are useful for showing that a particular development could have taken place. They do not prove that it *did* take place. >Archeaologically you can pinpoint where you will find Latin >inscriptions based on finding Roman cultural remains first. There is no cultural artifact that is diagnostic of language except writing. If you don't find the Latin inscriptions there is no proof of the presence of the Latin language no matter how many Roman cultural remains you find. You can say Latin was probably the language, but you can't prove it. >Is it 100% predictable? Of course not. But it is the anamolies >that prove the rule. The shock of finding out Linear B was Greek >(nobody was predicting it, not Evans or even Ventris) has now >faded away because the cultural remains have confirmed a clear >demarcation between Minoan and Mycenaean cultures. But only because the discovery of the language made it imperative to find the cultural differences. And without the language we still wouldn't know that Mycenaean was Greek. Even if the cultural differences had been noted, there would still just be two cultures of unknown linguistic affiliation with people probably still positing a mainland colonization from Crete. >All of this is hard history. But it is history based on language, not the other way around. >It is not pop sociology. Oh dear, I seem to have given you another buzz-word, like "walks like a duck..." I expect we'll see a lot of it in the future. ><Americans no longer wear three-cornered hats and powdered wigs >based on physiology or geography or manufacturing techniques or >conquest or substratum populations or the general unsuitability >of the hats and wigs themselves, when in fact it is a >sociological phenomenon known as fashion.>> >Culture and "fashion" are historical evidence. Yes, but they are not evidence for language. >Proto-Geometric was nothing but a fashion but it reliably labels >a period, a culture and a developement. You have no idea how >important bronze helmets, beaver hats and three cornered hats are >to our understanding of history. But not for language. >When we are not identifying a culture by a fashion in material >culture, we are identifying it by its language. LaTene becomes >Celtic. Language and culture are not coextensive. Three-cornered hats were worn from Russia, across Europe, to the East Coast of North America. Now, based on your theory of cultural and linguistic unity, you will tell me that this shows that a single language was spoken across this same area. No, I'll say, three-cornered hats are not related to a single language. Then you will tell me that the languages that belong to three-cornered hats are all Indo-European. No, I'll say, Finns and Magyars and Basques also wore three-cornered hats. Then you'll say that these are the exceptions that prove the rule, that Indo-European languages still go with three-cornered hats. No, I'll say, Indians and Persians did not wear three-cornered hats despite the fact that they speak Indo-European languages. Then you'll say that these are satem languages and obviously three-cornered hats were an innovation of the centum languages. No, I'll say, languages that simply share archaisms do not innovate collectively. Then you'll say that's just pop sociology and the discussion will be over. >If you feel that historical linguistic evidence has no pattern, >no meaning and is pure frivilous fashion, that's fine. I >wouldn't want to talk you out of it. No, I don't feel that, and I didn't say that, though with your proclivity for misunderstanding and your natural contentiousness I can see how you might seize upon that as interpretation of what I did say. What I said was that although languages are constantly changing (although not from English to Bantu :>), linguistic change is unpredictable and most often comes from outside language itself and that patterns of change can usually only be seen and analyzed in retrospect. Historical linguistic evidence is the only thing we have for reconstructing earlier stages of languages. And no number of bronze helmets or three-cornered hats can tell you what language the people who wore them spoke without written records. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 9 17:06:13 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 19:06:13 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >> Thanks, because there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus. > That's what I believed until I succeeded in deriving them all from a > completely regular original system where Eng. you IS the acc.pl. > corresponding to nom.sg. thou. I had to invent some more sound laws, but > that just cannot be helped if we are digging into a past from where there > are no (or very few) other remains. [Ed Selleslagh] In the case of Eng. 'you', I think you're digging too deep, even though your statement is correct. But the 'y' is almost certainly derived from a 'g', just like in Dutch: modern 'jij' (acc. 'jou') (j=y) for 2 p. sg. stems from 'gij', the old 2 p. pl., still in use in Flanders for both sg. and pl.. Another parallel Dutch - English: Middle Dutch 'g(h)eluw' > Du. 'geel', but Eng. 'yellow'. The same applies to the 'y' of 'yard' (Du. 'boom-gaard' = 'orchard', i.e. 'tree-yard'). The transition g > y is quite common, including in some German dialects and in Modern Greek (oikogeneia > ikoyenia, 'family'), where it is systematic before i- and e-phonemes (i.e. oi, ei, eta, ypsilon or ai, epsilon...: the conservative orthography of these phonemes is another, much more complicated matter!). I leave it to the specialists to elaborate along these lines or formulate it more correctly.. E. Selleslagh From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Apr 9 18:34:11 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 20:34:11 +0200 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: <3713e568.131552504@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Let's bring the following passage again, this time under the right headline: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >Before the domestication of the horse, the root "kon-" referred only to the > >herd or herding dogs. Once the horse became domesticated, the > >Slavs/Scythians/generic-IE-nomads, > Not generic IE, but (Tocharians aside) satem-IE, I'm afraid. > Iranian span-, spaka- "dog", Baltic Lith. s^uo, Latv. suns "dog" > [and Russ./Pol. suka "bitch"?]. You can't connect Slavic *konjo- > with the dog word. Wrong guttural (though there is Latv. kunja > "bitch"). > Incidentally, Lith. pekus, OPr. pecku "Vieh", with *k instead of > *k^ would seem to be another reason to cast doubts on *k^uon < > *pk^uon > Slav. pIsU. The more I think about, the more likely I > find it that Slav. pIsU "dog" is simply "Spot", from *peik^- > "spotty, motley, tawny" (cf. the dog Kerberos < *k^erbero- > "striped, motley"). > ======================= > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal > mcv at wxs.nl > Amsterdam [ Moderator's comment: I appreciate the sentiment, but let's not make a habit of this, please. A note referring to the content of another thread should be sufficient. --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 9 18:26:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 19:26:51 +0100 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Ray talked of models for predicting language development. I think Ray has missed the point. Statistical models remain only that - statistical. They might be useful for predicting or explaining language behaviour, or human behaviour, in general terms over large "population samples", but they are of no value whatever for the other major purpose of historical linguistics, which is explaining the actual state of actual languages. Statistics might tell me that 50 % of people who smoke die of a smoking related cause, but it does not tell me why the particular smoker Fred died from that cause. Likewise, statistical models of the kind Ray suggests have their function, in helping us understand the processes involved in language change, but they cannot explain why Sanskrit gacchati is related to Greek baske: and Latin venit. To be specific, Ray said: > others have pointed out the failings of IE to >explain how other languages developed. He means how the family tree model is inadequate on its own; but he forgets that the combined models we actually use are remarkably successful. Various correspondents pointed out to him the inadequacy of the simple model he first posited. He should not think that poor linguists have his simple model as their only available tool. He also said: > it >is not a relaible predictor of specific languages, and the family model upon >which it is based is not a reliable predictor of the divergence/convergence >dicotomy of all languistic groups. The family tree / convergence / sprach bund complex of models is not designed to predict, but to explain actual individual events, and this it does very well. He further said: >It seems to me, that the theorectival framework of an >epidemicological model of the spread of disease would easily supply this >need of the linguistic community. He means the need to predict. Yes, models that help us understand processes and make general predictions have their place. But he should understand that this is a different purpose from his original question, and he should not confuse general statistical prediction with the careful and detailed explanatory work of historical linguistics. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 9 18:40:44 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 19:40:44 +0100 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Bob said: >lynx has a genitive lynkos which makes it stand out like a sore >thumb from the rest of the -nx words. >There is also a second lynx word that is an -ng stem, but this >means "hiccup" ... >animal lynx is >an -nk stem is shown by the compound lykolynx, "wolf-lynx," which >is also an -nk stem (gen. lykolynkos). I was indeed confusing hiccup with the animal - I checked my dictionary too quickly! A slower check however reveals that the -nk is not quite certain. There is an adjective with -ng- : lyggios, and the form lyggourion from "lynx-tail". Of course the -ng- in these can be secondary. But thank you for the reminder of what the discussion and the example was about, and for the disambiguation of hiccups and animals. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 01:50:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 21:50:41 EDT Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: In a message dated 4/8/99 10:07:20 PM, nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk wrote: <> At least when the Hebrews did it, we had a pretty good reason why. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 02:16:11 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 22:16:11 EDT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: In a message dated 4/6/99 8:34:30 PM, roborr at uottawa.ca wrote: <> Not quite. It seems that the name 'Karl' does not appear as a scandinavian (Danish or Swede) name until well into the middle ages. (Or at least that's the way the issue was resolved several times on the old scholarly ONN, and I believe Snorri and Saxo concur.) In fact, the Danes were the mortal enemies of Charlesmagne and the Franks less than 100 years before the document mentioned (Oleg's treaty about 908 or so). The other names on the treaties are apprently either Scandinavian or Slavic. So you may have to conjecture this Karl was a Saxon a long way from home perhaps, but not likely a christian Frank, nor pagan Swede nor Dane. And mcv I think pointed out that something about the way the krol and karol appear in Slavic seem to ask for an earlier date of borrowing than Charles the Great. (Who was BTW big on fighting Danes and Saxons, but had lots of western Slavic allies.) So Oleg's treaties only adds to the problem that pan-Germanic solutions do not solve. One always wonders - how would we have to change our view of history if proto-Karl ended up being Slavic? Just a passing thought. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 05:24:19 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 01:24:19 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: <> In a message dated 4/9/99 11:38:19 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: -- not unless your definition of "everyday language" excludes complete sentences. Sometimes. <> By stylized, do you mean "fill-in the blank" kind of forms? I have not been able to find a big block of Linear B text to look at. Apparently there was enough to identify the language with the historical Arcadian if I understand correctly and build a vocabulary. Are there words that don't show up. <<...no laws,...>> I believe a saw a codicil listing the damages that levied for various offenses against women of different status. <<-- all languages are precise and predictable at that level. Or do you know of any one that isn't?>> At which level? It's an objective of any communication on all levels. Unless you are trying to be confusing. The original point was that a language that splinters into dialects is moving towards imprecision. A language that can somehow be prevented from splintering - or slowed down rather, not to be imprecise - stands a better chance of maintaining precise sound, grapheme and reference. But of course it also means - as mcv pointed out - that language will have problems with flexibility when the real world changes. <> In a message dated 4/2/99 4:00:25 AM, you wrote: <<-- all spoken languages undergo change in every generation. >> Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's comment: Note that the two statements are not contradictory, though you try to make them so. The number of generations may be small--3 or 4 in the case of the New York sociolects studied by Labov--but the changes were essentially invis- ible to the speakers in any adjoining pair of generations. --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 10 18:45:05 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:45:05 -0500 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Sent: Thursday, April 08, 1999 10:33 PM > Not sure. The sg. is , and I guess the sg. oblique stem > must be . There's one -n- too many (for a simple > n-stem based on *leuk^-, we'd expect *lusn (*leuko:n), *lusan- > (*leukn.-), pl. *lusunk` (*leukones)). Metathesis leunk ~ leukn? > The Balto-Slavic forms (lu:s^is, rysI), on the other hand, > suggest *luHk^-, with intrusive laryngeal. I personally subscribe to the idea of 'laryngeals' but those who oppose it rightly complain of 'laryngealitis', a condition characterized by explaining every inconvenient anomaly by supposing a laryngeal ex machina. And since when do 'laryngeals' intrude? What conditions that rude intrusion? Why not just simply explain the long vowel as due to compensatory lengthening? Vnk -> V:k? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 05:43:06 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 01:43:06 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 4/10/99 12:02:12 AM, you wrote: <<-- you're confusing description with prediction. Language change _in the past_ can be described and rules deduced, which can then be applied with reasonable confidence to historic languages we don't have direct evidence for. >> Probability is a tool can be used entirely to evaluate events that occured in the past. Carbon dating for example provides a predicatability in dating accompanying non-organic artifacts that has been found to be very reliable. "Predictability" is a factor that must be present before sampling validly can be used in analysis. Believe me, I'm not confused. <> A subject I don't think I've ever addressed. <> In a message dated 4/9/99 11:38:19 PM, you wrote: <> Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's note: As I noted in a previous message, the two statements are not contradictory. --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 10 18:59:24 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:59:24 -0500 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Glen Gordon Sent: Thursday, April 08, 1999 11:49 PM > I didn't mean that there were no STEMS that ended in *-nk-, just to > clarify. I said that such stems always have a suffix after them so > that there is no final *-nk ever in IE. In the case of *lunk-, it ends > in *-s in the nominative, hence *lunks, or *-m in the accusative, etc. > but there's never a complete word like **lunk with a final *-k. I think you might want to review what a 'stem' is. In the case of Greek lu'gx, lunk- is the *root*, which serves as a base *without* additional formatives (whixh would produce a stem), to which -s is added. [ Moderator's comment: I think you might want to review what a stem is: The stem is whatever is left after the grammatical ending is removed. This may be a root form, or an extended root (which *in some traditions* is called a stem). I would reserve the term "root" for the CVC items described best by Benveniste in _Origines_. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 06:01:10 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 02:01:10 EDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: In a message dated 4/10/99 12:23:37 AM, glengordon01 at hotmail.com wrote: <) been considered in the discussion? [ Moderator's response: The feminine of _ane:r_ is _gune:_. There is a feminine derivative _andria_ "manhood", which if it goes back to PIE derives from *H_2nriH_2. --rma ]>> There is also the Greek term "ananderia" - yes, with -er- that was used commonly enough in Classical Greek to refer to unmarried women or widows. An earlier message said that "andera" was used in Euskera I think to refer to widows or such as a term of honor. The "andria" of Terence was an unmarried Greek woman. I do not know how one would refer to a woman who was from the Gallo-Roman regional capital of Anderitum in Southern France, not far from Greek Messalia, but anderia would certainly be a thought. Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's reply: Classical Greek need not apply: That -er- marks it as a late formation, without relevance for the existence of an earlier "feminine". --rma ] From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Sat Apr 10 23:38:39 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 16:38:39 -0700 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: > RAY HENDON: > The exposure side (rate of contact between infecteds and > susceptibles) of the equation is easily identified in the linguistic > community: The relatively few Romans sent to govern England was not > sufficient to generate a critical mass of exposure units for Latin > to predominate. And the Romans left local courts and laws stand, > lessening the need for everyone to know Latin in order to get along. To which Glen Gordon replied, > Number might have something to do with it but what about languages or > dialects that become viewed as prestigious? I'm sure it's more > complicated than the above otherwise we would have had a secure model > 100 years ago :) Be it noted that the Brits to a great extent followed the Roman model in administering their own Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries: allowing local courts and laws to stand (insofar as they were compatible with fundamental British legal principles, e.g., no slavery) and maintaining a relatively minimal expatriate governing force. HOWEVER, the Brits did strongly encourage local rulers to send their sons to Britain to be educated, necessitating some degree of fluency in English. Does this difference from Roman Imperial policy wrt administrative practice have anything to do with the fact that English remains the dominant language throughout most of the former British Empire? Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 10 23:30:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 18:30:47 -0500 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <370D96EC.31F74B4@montclair.edu> Message-ID: Was this the language of the Obodrites? Or did they speak Slovincian/Pomorze/Pomeranian? >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> Polabian, the language of the Slavs living on ("po") the Elbe >> ("Labe"), is West Slavic, but different from Sorbian. >Is "Labe" Slavic or left over from some other language? >Best Regards, >Mark >-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= >hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey >=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 11 02:05:10 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 22:05:10 EDT Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive Message-ID: In a message dated 4/10/99 6:53:26 PM, mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk wrote: <> Given the general nature of the subject matter, the difference between life, force and power may not be particularly meaningful in a ancient Greek language where the same words can mean skin and color, stick and center, cup and slave. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Apr 10 08:52:37 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 04:52:37 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >to explain the presence of Indo-Aryans in the Near East (instead of Iranians, >or some other Indo-Iranian group) -- well, on the Iranian Plateau, actually. The Hurrians extended that far. It's unclear exactly what was involved in the founding of the Mitannian kingdom and how an Indo-Aryan element came to be involved. My own guess would be, judging by what little evidence there is, that the Indo-Aryans started out as the southernmost of the proto-Indo-Iranian group. They moved south through Central Asia into what's now northern Iran first. Most of them went southeast, into Afghanistan and then the Punjab. A scattering went southwest, established themselves as overlords of some Hurrian-speaking groups in what's now Kurdistan (bringing chariot technology with them) and then were absorbed linguistically, leaving traces in specialized vocabulary, personal names of the elite, and some religious terminology. (Eg., Indra and Mithra, etc.) The Hurrians in question were then instrumental in founding Mitanni in northern Syria after the collapse of the Ur III empire. There were already Hurrians there, of course. This took place sometime between 1800 and 1600 BCE. Some time after that the Iranians proper moved into Iran, starting in the northeast and arriving in the western Iranian plateau sometime around 1000 BCE or a little later, where the Assyrians first encountered the Medes. This migration was more substantial, and succeeded in Indo-Europeanizing the area linguistically, slowly supplanting the previous (Elamite, Kassite, Hurrian) languages. The process was incomplete in historic times -- eg., early Achaemenid documents show that Elamite was still spoken widely in southern Iran. This, I think, is a parsimonious explanation of what happened. From edsel at glo.be Sat Apr 10 09:47:00 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 11:47:00 +0200 Subject: Slavic pIsU Message-ID: >[ Moderator's note: > MCV has been caught by 7-bit-mail again--that's _Morfologi'a Vasca_ above, > I reconstruct. > --rma ] [Ed Selleslagh] The problem is clearly in the xkl.com 's server(s), and probably in some subscribers' PC. I have absolutely no problem with receiving these characters directly from some of the people that have sent such postings to the list.(Using Character set ISO-8859-1) Mr. Moderator, can you do something about this? E. Selleslagh [ Moderator's response: The "problem" is indeed in the mail server used by this list: It is not capable of dealing with 8-bit mail, nor will it ever be. The character set in which e-mail should be sent to this list is US-ASCII; I will not get in the way of MIME-quoted mail, although I cannot read it myself, but I cannot do anything about 8-bit characters coming in. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Apr 11 02:08:12 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 22:08:12 EDT Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >Historically, we ought to expect Norwegian and Icelandic to form a single >branch of the tree, but nobody draws it that way: every tree I've seen puts >Norwegian in a branch with Danish and Swedish, while Icelandic (usually >together with Faroese) is off on a separate branch by itself. -- well, at the time Iceland was settled (10th century CE) Scandinavian was only weakly differentiated. In other words, Icelandic was a West Norwegian dialect, but West Norwegian wasn't much different from what was spoken in Zealand or Uppalsa. After this Icelandic remained much more isolated and conservative than the other Scandinavian languages. Effectively, then, Icelandic is a branch off the trunk of Common Scandinavian, not Norwegian. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 04:53:12 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 04:53:12 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <004601be82ab$5301d4c0$bf04703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >In the case of Eng. 'you', I think you're digging too deep, even though your >statement is correct. But the 'y' is almost certainly derived from a 'g', >just like in Dutch: modern 'jij' (acc. 'jou') (j=y) for 2 p. sg. stems from >'gij', the old 2 p. pl., still in use in Flanders for both sg. and pl.. >Another parallel Dutch - English: Middle Dutch 'g(h)eluw' > Du. 'geel', but >Eng. 'yellow'. The same applies to the 'y' of 'yard' (Du. 'boom-gaard' = >'orchard', i.e. 'tree-yard'). You're not digging deep enough. Not only do we have Gothic ju:s, we also have Skt. yu:yam, Gath. yu:s^, Lith./Latv. ju:s. Dutch g- is here a case of j- > g-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 05:26:45 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 05:26:45 GMT Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: > I suspect that the Common Slavonic imperfect with its characteristic vowel >hiatus {-a.axu} or {- at .axu} (`@' = the {yat'} vowel, it looks like a crossed >soft-sign, it may have been pronounced `ia' with the stress on the `i') is >derived from the sigmatic aorist {-axu} with the vowel at the end of the stem >pronounced with hesitation to indicate durativeness, e.g. "as I wro-ote" for >"as I was writing". Unlikely. Meillet apparently suggested that -e^ax- derives from the copula (j)es- cliticized to the verbal root (cf. the Latin imperfect with *bhu-a:-). But in view of the association of the optative with the imperfect in Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian and maybe Celtic, I would favour a derivation from the optative *-oih1- > e^, followed by -ax- < *-eh2-s-. In other words, a "past optative". >I suspect also that the IE subjunctive may have arisen (as common IE evolved >from its ancestor) as the indicative pronounced with hesitation on the >thematic vowel for a similar expressive reason, until the hesitation became >phonemic and hardened into an interpolated glottal stop (i.e. the H1 >laryngeal), which later disappeared with compensatory vowel lengthening. The doubly thematic subjunctive is only Greek and Indo-Iranian, I believe, and is in my opinion analogical. The primary phenomenon must have been a grammaticalization of the possibilty of conjugating athematic verbs thematically, which we see in the Latin future "I will be". Once the device was formalized as a subjunctive, the logical next step was to thematize the thematic conjugation, giving the Greek and Indo-Iranian doubly thematic subjunctive (according to Beekes, these forms were still disyllabic in Gatha Avestan). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From edsel at glo.be Sat Apr 10 09:47:50 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 11:47:50 +0200 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: zaterdag 10 april 1999 10:51 >In a message dated 4/8/99 9:07:20 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk writes: >>What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" >>over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed to >>a common-or-garden lexical innovation? >Exactly. After all, there was no taboo making the Romance languages shift >their work for "horse" from the Latin derivative of *ekwos to "caballus". >Aparently it was simply a shift, as if we'd stopped using "horse" and >substituted "nag" or "glue-bait" or "cayuse". [E. Selleslagh] Or the corresponding Du. 'ros', (nowadays southern) Germ. 'Ross' > 'paard' (in many Flemish dialects 'peerd' or 'pjeed'), 'Pferd'. Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 10 09:52:17 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 09:52:17 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <199904090503.BAA18712@cliff.Uottawa.Ca> Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: >The boundary between centum and satem is rather spotty, with some examples >of Baltic *k / Slavic *s >cf. Lith. klausyti OCS slysati >also, (I think) in this example Sanskrit has pasu >why could peku-/pisu not be parallel to klausyti/slysati? Of course. Even so, without doing the actual statistics, I have the impression that in cases where Baltic disagrees with Sanskrit on this, Slavic more often than not goes with Baltic (and viceversa). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 10 10:16:43 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:16:43 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) In-Reply-To: <2f07c4c7.243cdb1f@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: Subject: Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) >I wrote: ><either cut-off, isolated or geographically distant from the >"innovative core" - all external factors. What all? What are the subtle differences in meaning that you see between "cut-off", "isolated" and "geographically distant" that makes this three factors instead of one? >The 'Germanic' we are talking about happened @3000 years ago. >Its speakers were primitive, poor and had lost contact with the >rich and "linguistically innovative" regions to the south. Ah, I get it now. The Ur-Germans were too poor to afford new words and too primitive to think up their own so they were just stuck with what they had. I can see it all now: Ur-Hans: What are you doing? Ur-Fritz: I'm making a shoe for my hand. Ur-Hans: What are you going to call it? Ur-Fritz: Call it? -- You know we can't afford new words. Ur-Hans: Well, we sure can't make up any of our own, so I guess it's just a handshoe. Ur-Fritz: Yeah, it's a pity none of those rich foreigners ever come by so we could borrow a word from them. (Author's note: This exchange has been translated from Ur-Germanisch for the benefit of the audience since the purpose is dramatization, not reconstruction.) >Is this the only explanation for its archaism? No. But it is >better than pop sociology. Well, I'm glad to know that "poor" and "primitive" are not sociological factors. Or are you saying that your pop sociology can beat my pop sociology? :> Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 05:46:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 05:46:07 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <199904090813.KAA25490@noel1.noel.gv.at> Message-ID: "Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal schrieb: >> Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the >> 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. >But Sanskrit (and probably PIE) shows Sandhi and the realization depends on >the following word so that there is no difference of -d/-dh/-t at the end of >the word. Oops, you're right about Sanskrit. Still, the Vedic a-stem ablative is always given as <-a:d> and the n. dem. pronoun as , which makes me suspect Vedic sandhi rules were different. Does anybody know? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 10 12:31:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:20 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > Larry, what is the phenomenom of Aquitanian that makes > unpronounceable. thanks The /dr/ cluster. Pre-Basque absolutely lacked plosive-liquid clusters, and, in all early borrowings from Latin and Romance, such clusters were invariably eliminated in one way or another. See sections 18.4-18.5 of Michelena's Fonetica Historica Vasca for a list of examples, including such familiar ones as these: Lat --> Bq `book' Lat --> Bq `glory' Lat --> Bq * --> , `grain' Lat --> Bq `interest, usury' Rom --> Bq * --> `rustic gate' Lat --> Bq `pale yellow' Lat --> Bq `feather' Rom --> old Bq `rule' Rom --> old Bq `cruel' Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 06:52:51 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 06:52:51 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990409092130.11763.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >Let me re-illustrate, this time properly, the development of the >animate t-final stems with a pseudoword **kut (my vowel-final stem >illustration of **kuti still stands) and this time note the previously >neglected alternation of *t/*s in my paradigm example :( > Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE > Nominative *kut *kwet-se *kwets *kwets > Accusative *kut-im *kwetm *kwetm *kwetm > Dative *kwet-i: *kweti: *kwesi: (*kwesey) > Genitive *kut-isi *kwetese *kwete's *kwese's > Ablative *kut-ita *kweteta *kwete'd *kwese'd >Does that look right now? Not if we compare how t-stems are really declined (Beekes, p. 178): *nepo:t Skt. napa:t Lat. nepo:s *nepotm napa:tam nepo:tem *neptos naptur nepo:tis Or for instance Skt. marut "wind" (m.): sg. du. pl. N marut maruta:u marutaH A marutam ,, ,, I maruta: marudbhya:m marudbhiH D marute: ,, marudbhyaH G marutaH maruto:H maruta:m L maruti ,, marutsu etc. There are really only a few forms in which we see t/s alternation, such as the ptc.pf.act. in *-wot-/*-us-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 11 07:43:26 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 10:43:26 +0300 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Apr 1999 Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >Nicholas Widdows wrote: >>Or are they somehow morphologically marked? I know >>respect/avoidance language is widely used in the bear-hunting >>North (see Joseph Campbell on the Ainu), but might we not expect >>new terms like "well-intentioned one" or "your excellency" rather >>than the merely prosaic "it's big and it's brown and it likes a >>jar of hunny"? >When one looks at lexical replacement for 'bear' in North >America for taboo/respect reasons, one finds the fairly >pedestrian replacements mentioned above or borrowed words, not >the "your mighty greatness" variety. >All of these groups have a taboo respect for bear, but none of >the lexical replacements for older forms shows any particularly >high-brow form for the new word. In fact, look at the ways that >Americans replace the name of "God" in casual speech--"the man >upstairs", for example. I would say that a taboo replacement is >probably MORE likely to be a pedestrian form than something >special. After all, one needs a word to use in casual speech >without the respect inherent in the taboo form. The classic example of this (hunting-taboo replacement by a more general word) is often taken from English "deer", originally the general Germanic word for 'wild animal' (cf. Ger. "Tier") which by being used as a euphemism for the hunted animal has come to be specialized in that meaning, with the original meaning being taken up by loanwords ("animal, beast"). On the other hand, or on the other side of the hunter/hunted line, the original general word for 'dog', "hound" (cf. Ger. "Hund"), has come to be specialized as a term for 'hunting dog' in English, presumably through a sort of reverse taboo ("you can't call that thing a hound") and the general word has been replaced by "dog" (of unknown origin) and the now more prestigious "hound" reserved for hunters. Thus "riding to hounds" is hardly the same as a "dog and pony show" (to hunters at least). Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 07:44:23 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 07:44:23 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990409060739.82422.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN: > That's what I believed until I succeeded in deriving them all from a > completely regular original system where Eng. you IS the acc.pl. > corresponding to nom.sg. thou. I had to invent some more sound laws, >Still don't get it. How does *t- become *y-?? It's not that difficult to understand what Jens is saying, whether one agrees or not. The *y- in *yu:s is secondary, and we have *u:s/*wos (Slavic vy < *(w)u:- and vasU, Lat. vo:s, Skt. vas, Alb. ju < *u, etc.). The nifty sound law then becomes *cw- > w- (and I guess alternatively sw-, judging by Hitt. sume:s, OIr. si:, We. chwi, Goth. i-zwis). Interesting to note that Greek hu:meis might be from all of *u:-, *su:-, *wu:- or *yu:- (but not *tw-, which would have given s-). Question for Jens: would this also work somehow for the numeral "6"? (Arm. vec`, We. chwech, OPr. uschts "6th") ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 10 12:49:03 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:49:03 +0100 Subject: rate of language change In-Reply-To: <7add6edd.243eaa4e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > Languages change, but generally so slowly (on a human scale) that > nobody's conscious of it in a time-span of less than generations. Too cautious, I think. My late mother, who had little education, was keenly aware of some of the differences between her own speech and her children's speech. A former girlfriend of mine, a native speaker of Kacchi, was highly aware of the differences between her own speech and her parents' speech, which in fact appeared to be rather substantial, and were regarded by her as substantial. And there is a huge amount of evidence showing that people are frequently aware of the same sorts of differences, even if they sometimes choose to regard these as "corruption" or "slovenliness" rather than as change. > Ordinary linguistic change generally isn't going to make anything > unintelligible in less than centuries. Debatable, I think. Some recent studies of certain Indonesian and Pacific languages reveal dramatic changes in a very short time, and there are hints of similarly rapid change elsewhere. Jim Milroy has observed that mutual comprehensibility between generations may sometimes take a back seat to other social pressures. Abraham Lincoln was born in Illinois. How successful do you think he'd be at understanding present-day Chicagoans? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 10 12:53:27 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:53:27 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990409021222.99524.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > Hmm, after all this talk, I can't help but be enchanted by the > similitude of Greek forms and Basque. Question: why does it matter > whether the original form is or to the connection > with Greek? Afterall, if a form like **andre would have been > unpronouncable in Pre-Basque, Pre-Basque would no doubt have inserted > a vowel and thus our Pre-Basque *andere, no? If Pre-Basque had borrowed an * from another language, the form would have been altered, and * is indeed the most likely outcome. But what Greek source could there be for Basque `lady', and how could a Greek word make it into Basque in the Pre-Roman period, especially without leaving any traces in any other languages? > But then, are there any other items in Basque that're being debated > as having a Hellenic origin beside *andere? There have been a couple of suggestions, but not one them is even mildly persuasive. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 08:19:47 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 08:19:47 GMT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <370D96EC.31F74B4@montclair.edu> Message-ID: "H. Mark Hubey" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> Polabian, the language of the Slavs living on ("po") the Elbe >> ("Labe"), is West Slavic, but different from Sorbian. >Is "Labe" Slavic or left over from some other language? Probably Germanic (or else Celtic or "Alteuropa"isch") *albi- > elbe (with Germanic i-umlaut), and Slav. olb- > *la:b- (with Slavic liquid metathesis). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jer at cphling.dk Sat Apr 10 14:24:09 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 16:24:09 +0200 Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990407090743.36872.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: [Excerpts from discussion with Miguel Carrasquer Vidal:] [snip] > ME (GLEN): > First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes > nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation > contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). > MIGUEL: > Which is obviously false. > ME (GLEN): > Obviously how? > MIGUEL: > Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the > 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. [snip: In reply, Glen invokes analogy with primary *-ti] It should perhaps be pointed out that the choice of "*-d" as the final consonant in the registration of the thematic ablative ending as *-o:d (or *-oad to allow for Balto-Slavic contraction into /-a:-/) is arbitrary: In Sanskrit sandhi, there is full neutralization of word-final /t/ and /d/ (and /dh/ and /th/) in all combinations; Avestan has the special (unexploded?) dental (transcribed by t with subscript tilde) for both, and Old Persian drops both. Thus, Indo-Iranian offers no evidence as to which dental consonant is underlyingly involved here. Nor does Italic where *-t yields /-d/ in Latin and Oscan alike (and is lost in Umbrian). In sum, there is no direct evidence at all. There may still be indirect evidence, and that is to the contrary - much as it would suit me to have a contrast to point to when I explain the choice of /e/ in 3sg *bher-e-t vs. /o/ in neuter pronouns like *to-d by the rule "/e/ before voiceless, /o/ before voiced" - : If the ablative *-o-aD is a recomposition of stem-vowel /o/ + postposition ultimately identcal with Slav. ot(U) 'from' (itself identcal with Lat. ad 'to', OE aet 'at', the semantic shading being caused by the case of the following noun), then one may ask how the original form had been before the recomposition took over. If the postposition had the shape *aD, it would be expected to lose its vowel after the thematic vowel where all ablauting morphemes show zero-grade. Now, depending on the voicing or lack of it in the dental concerned, the result would be either *-o-d or *-e-t. It now so happens that we do have a word *e-t, also extended to *e-t-i which could very well be the ablative of the pronominal stem e/o- (enclitic variant i-). The extended form is Lat. et 'and', Gk. e'ti Skt. a'ti 'in addition, yet', while the unextended form is seen in Av. at (with "funny t"), a frequent sentence opener of probable meaning 'and then'. These all mean practically the same as the Skt. adverb tata's 'from there, thereafter, thereupon, then'. If this is correct (I know it does not have to be) the dental occurring in the ablative ending is a /t/ in the morphophonemics of the protolanguage. There is a case in Germanic of two word-final dentals being treated differently in case of extension, retained to this day in English _that_ vs. _stood_. _That_ is Goth. _thata_ indicating that the dental was still IE *-d or post-soundshift pre-Gmc. *-t at the time of the addition of the particle sitting on the Gothic form. _Stood_ is Gmc. *sto:th (thorn retained in Goth.) from *sta:t-e, a relatively simple reshaping of the inherited root aorist *staH2-t made by adding the productive endings of the IE perfect to the full form of the 3sg, thereby drawing the desinential *-t into the synchronic root. In this case the once-final dental is treated as IE *-t (or post-soundshift pre-Gmc. thorn). If both are to be derived from phonological systems neutralizing mode-of-articulation oppositions in word-final position, the neutralizing habits will have to have changed between the two events. Such change is entirely possibly - it could even be consistent: The result could have been [-t] before the soundshift in *staH2-t > *staH2t-e and [-t] again after the soundshift in *{kw}oD (*{kw}ot ?) > *hwat -> *hwat-o:. But it could also simply be what it looks like, IE *-d and *-t being kept apart all along. This is suggestive, but not entirely probative. Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 10 17:13:45 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 12:13:45 -0500 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <37237c62.235742805@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Watkins distinguishes *med- & *me at - [with *me- being a shortened form of *me at -] He has *met- as the source of mod- [modern, mode, modest, etc.], mete, and empty AS aemetta from --I guess-- *a-met- "not measured, cut to measure, regulated" [ moderator snip ] >As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- >(Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, >me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced >there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Apr 11 08:50:11 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 04:50:11 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Quite true; linguistis is an _explanatory_ discipline. It's more like evolutionary biology than, say, chemistry, let along physics. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 10 17:29:23 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 12:29:23 -0500 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Wasn't it more a case of initially distinguishing between 2 types of horses: caballus, a large lumbering draft horse of horthern European origin as opposed to equus a swift cavalry horse originating in the Caucasus or Caspian region, two different subspecies --at least according to a couple of books on horses I've seen. In that vein, it would correspond to the distinction between "horse" and "pony." won out because not too many people ever came into contact with an , at least on an everyday basis. Curiously, in Spanish while a stallion is a caballo, a mare is a yegua < equa [or something like that]. And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. Pony is related to the name of the horse goddess Epona, right? And so, is cognate to equus, isn't it? >In a message dated 4/8/99 9:07:20 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk writes: >>What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" >>over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed to >>a common-or-garden lexical innovation? >Exactly. After all, there was no taboo making the Romance languages shift >their work for "horse" from the Latin derivative of *ekwos to "caballus". >Aparently it was simply a shift, as if we'd stopped using "horse" and >substituted "nag" or "glue-bait" or "cayuse". From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 11 09:36:42 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 05:36:42 EDT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: In a message dated 4/10/99 10:18:21 PM, mcv was quoted: <> Just a Herodotus note. He claims that the persian Cyrus' ('Kuron') name is an allusion to 'dog'. Seems the woman who fostered him after he was abandoned was named 'dog.' He was left as a baby with a shepherd ..."and his wife was a slave like him; her name was in the Greek language Cyno, in the Median Spako: for "spax" is the Median word for dog." "...ounoma de tei gunaiki en tei sunoikee Kuno kata ten Hellenon glossan, kata de ten Mediken Spako: ten gar kuna kaleousi spaka Medoi." Herdotus says the Medes gave Cyrus his name to embarass him about his foster mother. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 10 18:27:33 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:27:33 -0500 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Glen Gordon Sent: Thursday, April 08, 1999 9:12 PM > And second, excuse me if I missed something (which is possible because > I haven't been fully paying attention till now) but, has a Greek form > like *andre: (feminine of ) been considered in the discussion? > [ Moderator's response: > The feminine of _ane:r_ is _gune:_. > There is a feminine derivative _andria_ "manhood", which if it goes back > to PIE derives from *H_2nriH_2. > --rma ] Are we being quite fair here? There is Old Indian na'ri: and Avestan na:iri:, 'lady (?). [ Moderator's response: The long vowel in the first syllable marks this as a late formation in Indic. It therefore provides no evidence for a "feminine" in the proto-language. --rma ] Based on IE *1. (s)ner-, and Egyptian nrj, 'fear', 'protect', and nrj-jHw, 'ox-herd', and nrw, 'terrible one', and Sumerian nir, 'hero', and 'overcome', I believe it is possible that the basal meaning of this root is 'fear-inspiring', and so would not be restricted to males. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 10 18:35:32 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:35:32 -0500 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Glen Gordon Sent: Thursday, April 08, 1999 9:29 PM > I think we're going off topic here. Miguel brought this up in > connection with his idea that IE once had *-k (??) which was > originally in connection to external relationships like Uralic with > IE. And, even more importantly, we see in lynx a preservation of Nostratic [nk], a dorsal nasal, which shows up in Semitic as [q], but is frequently simplified to IE [k]. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Apr 11 16:39:57 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 17:39:57 +0100 Subject: imperfect Message-ID: Miguel asked about an inherited root "aorist": >>Did it become an >>imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) >>like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless >>narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked >>"imperfects" like ? The question only makes sense if there is a genuine distinction between imperfect and aorist in Vedic. In fact, (despite some grammars too heavily influenced by Greek), there is no clearly discernible difference in meaning between the two. The labels are taken from Greek and refer to the formation, not the function. If a root-stem past tense has a corresponding present, it is called "imperfect" - otherwise it is called "aorist". Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 11 17:23:43 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 13:23:43 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/10/99 2:38:50 PM, you wrote: <<-- that would require time-travel, since neither Polish nor Russian existed at the time of Gothic-Slavic contact, and the Goths had moved west by the 6th century.>> You may need new sources. Just about everywhere Gothic is discussed you'll find references to the attestation of East Gothic being spoken in the Crimea in the 16th Century. See, eg. P. Heather, The Goths, p. 259, Blackwell (pb1998); Hawkins in Comrie, The World's Major Languages at p, 69. I seem to recall also that the missionary-oriented Enthologue mentioned awhile back on this list actually had it that a bible published was published in the language in the 1300's - I can't substantiate that. (As a sidebar, a Danish grandparent of mine - not that she was an authority - would occasionally refer to some Slavs as what I remember as "Gotar" which of course confused me. One explanation might be a name-tranference that may have happened in the middle ages. There was for example "a chronicle from the 12th Century written by Archbishop Grgur of Bar (a city in Boka Kotorska, a region now in Montenegro ). The chronicle represents the oldest historiographic work of Croatian Middle Ages. There exist two redactions, Croatian and Latin. In Croatia, it was called 'Ljetopis popa Dukljanina.' In Latin, it was titled 'Libellus Gothorum'.") Actually the run mcv gave was << Gmc. kuning(az) > Slav. kUne~gU or kUne~gI (i-stem) > kUne~dzU/kUne~dzI (3rd. palat.) > knjo~dz (loss of jers; Polish e~: > jo~) > ksia,dz (Polish kn' > ks')>>, which has it coming into I guess Common Slavonic. I'm having a bit of trouble seeing the king>priest>moon progression, I think I have a solid historical alternative that is phonetically closely related but I'm really struggling with the linguistics. The hard part is the << kuning-, from *kun-ja "kin" (*gon-) and Germanic suffix-ing/-ung>> because *gon- is already in Greek *gno-, possibly before German was invented. After all, if you follow Mallory or Dolukhanov the proto-Slavs were the Agricultural Scythians in 500BCE and therefore had contact with the Greeks before the Germans. (Unless you accept a BSG) And of course if the P-slavs were IE they should have had a *gon/*gnu or *kon/*knu and i-stems quite before they met the Goths. But anyway... Regards, Steve Long From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Apr 11 17:39:59 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 10:39:59 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: EDUARD SELLESLAGH IN REPLY TO JENS RASMUSSEN'S *tuH/*yus PROPOSED CONNECTIONS: In the case of Eng. 'you', I think you're digging too deep, even though your statement is correct. But the 'y' is almost certainly derived from a 'g', just like in Dutch: modern 'jij' (acc. 'jou') (j=y) for 2 p. sg. stems from 'gij', First, someone says *tu is connected to *yus by some very unobservable sound rule and now this?? Look, Indo-European *y- = Old English y-. It's very well known and accepted that IE *yus begets the English "you", "ye", etc. as well as Dutch "jij/gij". The reason why we say it's *y- is because of languages like Sanskrit. Look it up. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Apr 11 20:38:16 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 15:38:16 -0500 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've read so much contradictory info on canid timelines that it makes me wonder if there weren't 2 or more levels of domestication at different times: 1. The semi-domesticated yellowish-brown variety, e.g.: Dingo, New Guinea Singing Dog, SE US "yaller dog" [which is said to go back to pre-Columbian times] 2. modern fully neotenized breeds > Adam Hyllested wrote:- [ moderator snip ] >Also Chinese: Mandarin {ch'u"an}, Ancient Chinese {kjwan} = "dog". Perhaps the >word spread along with the animal from whoever first domesticated it. I read >recently of work on mitochondrial DNA which seemd to show that domestic dogs >are all descended from a very few original female wild wolves. How long ago >and where are domestic dog bones first found in archaeology? From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Apr 12 01:17:52 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 18:17:52 PDT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MIGUEL: The instrumental [...] shows a lengthened vowel in all roots (-a: for a:-stems, -i: for i-stems, -o: or -e: for o-stems), which can only mean -H1. ME (GLEN): Which can mean either a lengthened vowel or *H1, really. Besides probably Latin?, what evidence of this *-(e)H1 exists? MIGUEL: A lengthened vowel in Vedic, Greek, Germanic, Lithuanian. The quality of the vowel is unaffected. Therefore, we must reconstruct *H1 (unless you think that laryngeal-PIE had long vowels *e: and *o:). Well, here's my current position. I accept *H2 and *H3 as being /h/ and /h/ respectively (and thus parallel to the velars). *H1 on the other hand is at most a glottal stop which, iff it occured at all, certainly would not have been a distinct phoneme. Mediofinal *H1 doesn't exist and vowel + *H1 is really a long vowel. The diphthongs *eu and *ei are reinterpreted as *u: and *i:. I prefer not to accept *e: (*eH1) as of yet in IndoAnatolian IE and reinterpret it as *a:. The vowel *e is from unstressed **i/**u in closed syllable (cf. *ter-, *es-, usw.) or throughout enclitics (cf. *ne, *me, *twe, *se, *swe, blah, blah). [ Moderator's query: Why would a glottal stop "certainly not be" a distinct phoneme? I can think of several languages off the top of my head in which it is, so there is no reason other than _a priori_ bias to reject in for PIE. --rma ] In light of this, the instrumental, if we can confidentally reconstruct it in IndoAnatolian, is at most *-e: in nonAnatolian IE in my view. Of course, a **t could also theoretically disappear in final position so this says nothing in the end about your hypothesis. However, I'm not hearing credible and regular Anatolian cognates with other IE branches aside from an out-of-joint example of ablative- instrumentals with dental which show what you're saying. That together with lack of extra worthy examples of **-t > *-H1 makes me conclude that the instrumental was being conveyed with the ablative and the endings we see in later IE are only an innovation. Instrumental as it exists in later IE languages can't be all that archaic. MIGUEL: [...] I give you Georgian -it, Sumerian -ta]. ME (GLEN): Yes, that's right. I'm agreement with you but with vastly different reasons. And don't forget Uralic *-ta :) which is most evidently more relatable to the ablative *-ed based on those regular sound changes I mentioned. MIGUEL: Non-Nostraticists look the other way... Indeed: PIE *d == Uralic *t, PIE *t == Uralic *tt. That's why I have taken great care to distinguish between the ablative in *d and the instrumental in *t (cf. again Georgian ablative -dan/adverbial -ad, Sumerian comitative -da). You should take greater care. In fear of having this topic zapped away from too much talk of Nostratic, I just will briefly illuminate this arguement for what it is for those that don't understand the Nostratic hypotheses involved. First, Allan Bomhard states that PIE *-t- == Uralic *-t(t)-. Note the parentheses? Doesn't look like he's all that certain, does it? Second, the terms that you try to connect are with, what would be, Nostratic *d. It is far more certain that a Nostratic *d == IE *dh. So if you want to do comparisons like this that fit the Nostratic model as well as IE itself, perhaps what you need is the locative in *-dhi (as in Greek oiko-thi "at home"; synonymous with Etruscan -thi, -ti) which would be more at sync with a Sumerian commitative afterall. Finally, how do you know that this supposed process that causes **-t- to become Uralic *-t(t)- occured before or after the first occurence of post-position affixing that created this declension that we see in Uralic and IE. Perhaps, an ablative postposition *ta was suffixed AFTER this change? Too much uncertainty - enough of that. [ Moderator's comment: That is standard notation for the longer "PIE *-t- corresponds to Uralic *-t- and *-tt-." So I'm sure that Bomhard is quite certain, myself. And this thread needs to move to the Nostratic list. Far too much time has been spent on the IE list in discussions that aren't really on topic. --rma ] At any rate, I fail to see where that point is going since one would reason that if it's true that Pre-IE **-tV > *-d and that *-t = *-d = *-dh then we should have as a follow-up rule: **-TV > *-d where T = [any dental]. Your arguement here is not of much concern to both IE studies and those of Nostratic. ME (GLEN): Nor should it be shocking that the genitive *-es (**-ese) is also accented (cf. Etruscan -isa [genitive] and ? Sumerian -se [dative]). MIGUEL: The Etruscan genitives are *-si and *-la (e.g. for the a-stems: [...] The Sumerian dative is -ra. -she3 is the terminative ("towards, into, to"). Gee, "towards, into, to" sounds like a dative case to me. :) Clever, but no cigar. This is all interesting and irrelevant. The ending <-si> still shows a vowel originally occured after the *s genitive in Etruscan that no longer shows itself in IE, aside from the mysterious accentuation. It only validates my views. I put a question mark before the Sumerian dative -she because it is a budding theory of mine and I'm unsure of it. However it is an intriguing premise for IE studies regardless of the fact that my theory admittedly originated from observations in Nostratic. I note that the genitive in *s is unique to Indo-Etruscan. Outside of IEtr, languages viewed as Nostratic consistently use an ending with sibilant for the _dative_, not for the genitive. Now, ignoring the distant external examples like Sumerian -she, Georgian , etc. it's still interesting that Uralic has no genitive in *s either and that Finnish has -ssa (< -s-na) and -lla (< -l-na) being used for duty as inessive and adessive (which are kinds of locative/dative cases), endings which bare similarity to Etruscan and Anatolian's s- and l-genitives. It's not impossible for the dative to become genitive. Food for thought. ME (GLEN): Judging by Greek we might have the following sketchy hypothesis: *-H1-/-H2-/*-H3- >? Greek -k- MIGUEL: I realize that you are new to this laryngeal business, but the a:-stems have *-H2. Alright, let's be gracious and give you this one. Let's say that *-H2- becomes Greek -k-. What next? You're only showing that complete IE words can end with *H2 and this is something we both agree with, even though I think *-H2 < **-H2-s [nominative]. Now, finally, will you explain how one goes about showing that *-H2 is really from **-k? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 13 16:45:51 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:45:51 -0700 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: RICK McCALLISTER: Why? Why can't it be **pkwVn with /kw/ as a labial velar stop and then seeing such forms as **kVwVn- as a product of unpacking? Not following. Unpacking? IE *k^won- does not and never did have a labiovelar. The initial *k^w- is a consonant cluster involving TWO seperate phonemes. Further, the *k^- is curiously palatal. How does a single phoneme *k irregularly become a complex consonant cluster *k^w with palatal?? No matter how hard we try, the **pek^uon- myth doesn't work, both inside and out of IE studies. The form definitely points to an earlier **kV1wV2n- where V1 is one of [*a,*e,*i] to account for the palatal velar. This is why I suggest an earlier form **kawina. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Apr 12 01:47:07 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 18:47:07 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: JENS RASMUSSEN: Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. MIGUEL: I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally and -s- medially. What to make of them? "-t word-finally"?? I'm shocked that you would utter those words. How does this bode for **-t > *H1? MIGUEL: As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. Why does Pokorny write it *me-t- instead of *met- and why can't we consider *-t- a verbal affix or possibly two different verbs? Why are you considering a MEDIAL *H1 as example of your **-t > *H1?? Why does *meH1not(s) occur instead of **metnot(s)? Why do I have so many questions? :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 12 02:18:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 22:18:41 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/10/99 8:47:47 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: <> I wrote: <> whiting at cc.helsinki.fi replied: <> FYI: New Oxford Dictionary adds that, in Logic, truism is "a proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms." Without addressing ideas like >language changes except when it doesn't<, I must admit that in the past I've been guilty of a few truisms myself. But this is how you can declare a statement a truism and still contradict the underlying proposition: >From Uniform Rules for Debate, HDS/GUDS(1962) "A debator who runs a truism will fail... by jumping to a conclusion made necessary by virtue of his definition. A truism will also be irrelevant because it will not be resolving one of the issues that could otherwise have been debated." Since a truism simply restates the premise and is irrelevant, "a pleading in the alternative ...allows the challenger to both assert an objection to the truism and [at the same time] attack the underlying proposition..." Functionally consistent with Merriam/Webster's a "truth...too obvious for mention." Regards, Steve Long From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Mon Apr 12 02:28:17 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 19:28:17 PDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Part 1. On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [on Spanish ] [RF] > My assumption is that the expression > is derived from Euskera, as are many other odd expressions > that pop up in these codes which are written in Spanish. To my > knowledge, there is no alternate derivation for the term. [LT] The word is unknown to me, and is not listed in Corominas, which last is a little surprising. [RF] As I said in my previous message, when one works with such law codes one discovers many words that people like Corominas missed. I don't find it surprising since many of the codes and archival documents from Euskal Herria have only recently been transcribed and many more are still waiting to be copied from the leather-parchment that they were written on. A major project is underway in the Tolosa archives. Yet, to my knowledge there is still no complete glossary of these expressions. Some of them are very interesting and should be examined by linguists for a variety of reasons. For example, as is well known, legal terms are frequently more conservative (or less innovative) than the rest of the lexicon. I think Steve Long or perhaps someone else on the list recently mentioned that the standardizing influence of law and religion. Similarly, in a situation of orality, such as the one that we would be speaking about for the Basque case, the formulaic nature of the legal terms in question would have aided in their retention. Keep in mind we were talking about the Middle Ages. Furthermore, when the law codes were finally put into written form, the language chosen was not Euskera, but in the language of the rulers or at least those who didn't know Euskera. At least some of those who were assigned the onerous task of faithfully rendering the pre-existing formulas into a Romance language, had to have been bilingual, although some might have been more dominant in Euskera and others in Navarrese, for example. In any case, the bleed-through of Euskera into the codes takes on several forms: 1) grammatical calques; 2) odd-sounding translations of the original formula or expression; 3) direct rendering of pre-existing expressions as if there were Navarrese, although they were originally in Euskera and had already passed into the legal lexicon of the speakers at some earlier point and, therefore, were considered by the translators to be acceptable in Navarrese; 4). expressions that are nothing more than Euskera, whose shape was slightly modified by those attempting to write them down as they heard them --which didn't necessarily reflect the way that the Basque speakers were saying them nor the actual composition of the words, i.e., their component parts. We assume that these folks were not trained phoneticians and hence were not necessarily capable of or willing to disambiguate what they heard, dividing it neatly into the distinct morphological elements making up the expressions, rather they attempted to render them in written form, reproducing "faithfully" in this way they heard or, if you wish, in this situation (for those living almost exclusively according to the norms of orality, priority seems to have been given to oral representation. Nonetheless, for a linguist, a careful examination of these expressions ought to provide insights into the structure and phonology of Euskera in the Middle Ages, a point in time for which there is a dearth of evidence. My understanding is that a significant amount of work has been done on place names and some proper names, but there are only a few studies, to my knowledge, that systematically attempt to deal with the archival records existing at the more popular level, e.g., land transfers, donations to churches, etc., rather than the _ Fuero general de Navarra _, for instance. [RF] > Moreover, the phonological reduction of "the lady of the > house" to * with the resulting form being "masculinized" by > replacement of the <-a> definite pronoun ending with the masculine > ending <-o> from Romance seems fairly straight forward to me. However, I > might be missing something. [LT] Perhaps not so straightforward. The medieval form of the word for `lady of the house' will have been , or at best , not *. [RF] I'm not so certain that in all speech events in which this phrase occurred there was no reduction of to . Perhaps I've been spending too much time with those illiterate Basque shepherds and farmers up in the hills, but I don't get the impression that they would have spoken much "plainer" or clearly enunciated each and everyone of all those letters way back when much better than they do so today. But that is just my impression after having done dozens of taped interviews with them. I must be hanging out with the wrong crowd. I would emphasize that some of the richest and most complex Euskera is spoken by precisely these individuals, many of whom still are illiterate in Euskera, mainly because their schooling was done in Spanish under Franco when the use of Euskera was banned from the classroom (as well as other settings). [LT] And it is not so easy to see how this could yield the observed , especially since the Basque word is so blatantly and expressly female. [RF] Yes, Larry, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. Something else had to be going on. [LT] Why on earth choose the female term, instead of the male counterpart `master of the house', especially when most of the voting heads of household were male? [RF] In the period that we are talking about and long afterwards, the vote was a "house" vote, it was not one cast by an individual. Or stated differently, the "house" was a legal entity and had political status as such, including a "seat" or in the Church or local hermitage. The vote was cast on behalf of the or "fire". The "house vote" was transmitted publicly usually at an outdoor site, e.g., around a tree, often an oak, but not always. These trees are also encountered in Spanish as the "arboles juraderos" that in turn are associated with or gave rise to the "hermitas juraderas" nearby such as the one near Burgos where El Mio Cid swore his allegiance to his king, as I recall. Let me explain more explicitly. We are talking about what might be understood as a place equivalent to the English or New England "commons" and to the equivalent of "town meetings" where the "householders" cast their votes. In the Basque case, however, that vote represented the consensus of all the householders in question. As you may have pointed out on this list previously, in the late Middle Ages (as well as later) we would be talking the Basque farmsteads called a compound of "forest" and <(h)erri> which Azkue translates, and I think correctly, as "pueblo" or "lugar habitado". It is the same element found in Euskal Herria, often translated simply as the "Basque Country" Hence, the translation of the term gives some idea of the number of people, often times unrelated, that lived and worked in these operations. We would be talking about twenty or more people per "house", with a significant number of them being adults, the inheritor (often the daughter), her husband, her parents, their children, ummarried aunts and uncles from the woman's parent's generation, the brothers and sisters of the inheritor, as well as various helping hands who sometimes spent their entire lives with the same family. I would note that the family's name derived from the house's name. Even into recent times this has continued to be true. The house carried the name, not the individual. The individual derived his/her name from the house. Later this pattern was replaced by the one we know today, but the older system seems to have been quite widespread until the Council of Trent instituted the "sacrament of matrimony" replacing what earlier had been a civil contract drawn up by the two families of the individuals involved. The early naming process was further complicated by the fact that the Crown wanted knowledge of their subjects, birth records began to be kept and, in the process, the authorities could identify and keep track of those young males who were obligated to serve in the ruler's armies. Hence, at the town meeting, the male householder -for it was the male who publicly carried the vote, at least in more recent times- was able to do so because he had previously consulted with the members of the household, including his wife and mother-in-law. One needs to keep clearly in mind that with the Pyrenean system of primogeniture, not only were daughters not barred from inheriting, there were definite advantages that accrued to the house-lineage when they did, but that is a long involved story that requires going into the law codes themselves (there is plenty of bibliography on all this). Hence, the husband's should not be portrayed as if he were some sort of patriarchal dictator, but rather an individual who actually carried out his duties as "administrator" with the legal proviso that he would do so properly. If he did not he could be legally separate from his "husbandry" duties. This was done after a group of his peers ("good men and good women" representing the "community") were consulted and the grievances laid out. In the law codes, however, there was considerable debate, even into the 16th century, whether the inheritor was obligated to feed and clothe him once he had been removed from his office as administrator. The "witnesses" sometimes were drawn into this aspect of the legal contract since they were the ones that vouched for any losses caused to the household by the "husband-administrator" in case his own parents were unable to cover them. The "witnesses" were the co-signatories of the contract, along with the parents. In order to insure the capabilities of the individual chosen, the later was frequently contracted as a "hired hand" for a period of "seven years and a day" by the first generation parents and during that period he would reside in the . In all of this the main character is the itself (the "stammhaus>) and it was the 's continuity and health that was being guaranteed by what was an intricate set of checks and balances.In no sense did the female or male) inheritor exercise these rights as an individual. The rights, responsibilities and duties, were entirely "positional" not "personal." It is, nonetheless, a system that appears to have had a strong matrifocal component, perhaps because the lineage of the woman's offspring was always known and not one that required elaborate sexual taboos to be imposed on either party. All offspring were legitimate. It was the that participated in the , usually composed of some eight to twenty scattered across the country-side, i.e., non-nucleated. The relationship of the parts to the social whole was one of mutual dependence and/or interdependence, if you wish. The survival of the depended on its ability to participate in the and in turn the health, and stability of the depended on its ability to depend on the "community-work/labor" provided by its members (cleaning the brush from the woodlands commons, repairing roads and paths, rebuilding commonal storehouses, etc.). In rural zones of Gipuzkoa these projects take place throughout the year, although at times a household will pay others to do their "share." In return for their The members of the in turn gained access, through their participation in a that was a "voting member", to the common lands, the highland pastures for their animals, the communal orchard, the right to enter and harvest what are called in Spanish legalese of the time "las frutas de la tierra" of the communal forest (hunting, fishing, nutting and fire-wood collection rights). These "rights" were fundamental since, particularly, in Iparralde into recent times, the lands legally "belonging" to the ended at the drip line of the house's eaves. Even in the twentieth century, many a had only a few acres of land associated with it, and these were often distant from the house itself. The separation of these small plots from the house is explained by the fact that previously the cultivation of the communal lands rotated through the household comprising the , sometimes by means of a simple lottery system. Later, the "right" to cultivate a given plot ended up falling to a given family/'s own holdings. Nonetheless, it is not unusual even today the or farmer to have to take his animals to a different location, i.e., distant from the barn, and/or harvest hay from plots that are not adjacent to the . In addition, there is some indication that the opinion of the eldest female was considered particularly important -this is reflected by her prominent role at the site in the church as well as her function as mistress-of-ceremonies both in the church and at home (cf. Barandiaran's many writings on the subject). This might respond to the fact she was the eldest in the household lineage, the mother of the inheritor. Indeed she herself could have inherited the house (and hence, the political rights and responsibilities belonging to the house) from her own mother. Moreover, the importance of the position of the elder female in the household is underlined by the fact that when her daughter (or son) inherited, that inheritance represented only a partial transfer of the estate and related goods. The other half stayed in the name of the parents. That procedure was built into the codes so as to insure that the children (of the second generation) would take good care of their aging parents (of the first generation). The codes are quite pragmatic in their complexity showing a keen awareness of human nature. In conclusion, one needs to keep in mind that we are not talking about modern nuclear families and the voting rights associated with the individuals forming them in contemporary nation-states. Indeed, many books have been written on Pyrenean "regime", the unique laws of primogeniture that prevailed in the Pyrenean region. These not only permitted but favored the inheritance of the by the first-born daughter (although it was not always the first-born if she was found in some way to be incompetent). It is that regime that would have given rise to the status and power of the a.k.a and the possibility that the expression's referential "gender" was altered, perhaps quite unwittingly by those who were no longer fluent in Euskara. Today we have the opposite phenomenon going on all around us: words that previously had exclusively male referents are being used to refer to females. And, if over time some of these professions were to become female ghettos, it's possible that what was a masculine term could end up with an exclusively female referent. There is also the rather notorious example of "guys", an expression that in the US is now used by girls/women to refer to groups of other girls/women (of course, the guys still use it to talk about guys, too). The case I've mentioned is somewhat different, but not all that unusual, especially given that cultural backing for such an interpretation of the data is found in the socio-political history of Euskal Herria. For those interested in multi-pronged investigations of cultural and linguistic norms, I would recommend the classic article by the well-known French geneticists Jean Bernard and Jacques Ruffie, Hematologie et Culture: Le Peuplement de l'Europe de l'Ouest" in _ Annales, Economies, Societes, Civlizations_ (1976) vol. 31, num. 31 (July-Dec.): 661-675. In it they show maps with the isoglosses of this regime overlaid on maps with the isoglosses of Euskeric-Aquitanian linguistic features (e.g., morphological elements found in the toponyms of the region) as well as genetic data. In general one sees that the regime's domain shrank over time and that the shrinkage or "retreat" in question can be traced by the retreat of the Basque/Aquitanian language in the zone from the earliest recorded period forward. Equally fascinating in its implications is the work of Jacques Poumarede (1972), _ Les successions dans le Sud-Ouest de France au Moyen Age _ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Poumarede was one of the investigators involved in conducting the very original and highly detailed spade work required for the mapping by studying law codes, inheritance records, and hundreds of other related documents, etc. This was done in order to map the retreat of the regime of inheritance in question. In my opinion, his study is one of the best and most complete on this particular topic. And, on another note, certainly today many of those kids in Bilbao who speak only Spanish but find it "hip" to talk about going home to "hacer las lanas" have little or no idea what the word really means in Euskara, for them its their "homework", a perfectly valid Spanish word, a feminine noun regularly used in the plural. In Euskera, the word is obviously not masculine or feminine (Euskera has no gender marking in nouns), nor is used only in the plural to refer exclusively to "homework." Agur t'erdi, Roz Frank April 11, 1999 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [currently on leave in Panama] [ Moderator's note: We seem to have drifted far beyond the topic of Indo-European studies in this thread. Given the high traffic volumes on this list, I have to ask that the interested parties move to another forum for further discussion. I'm inclined to be more flexible on the Nostratic list, if no other more appropriate list exists. (Is there a Basque-L?) --rma ] From jer at cphling.dk Mon Apr 12 14:36:07 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 16:36:07 +0200 Subject: -s. vs. (-)t- In-Reply-To: <37237c62.235742805@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > >Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with > >stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- > >'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and > >the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. > I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an > inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; > and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) > etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally > and -s- medially. What to make of them? You are right, and I have adjusted the "reading rule" in a separate mail. It seems that the morphophoneme concerned, which I would call //c// for practical purposes, surfaces as /s/ before some boundary which is a bit hard to define, viz. word-finally (Vedic vocative -vas, 2sg *-s, ntr. -vat then being analogical on masc. *-wo:t-s) and before "weak" case endings (i.e. all except nom., voc., acc.), and before SOME, but not all, derivational suffixes: fem. *-us-iH2, but *nem-et-o-s. Glen Gordon's generalization of -s- to intervocalic position (in a separate mail) does not explain its occurrence word-finally > As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- > (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, > me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced > there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. Certainly worth considering. I have toyed with the idea of "preaspiration", i.e. *H2meH1-ti > *H2methi -> *H2meti -> *H2met-e-ti involving absorption of the aspiarting laryngeal in to following consonant, then restoration of the unaspirated ending and, finally, resegmentation drawing the desinential /t/ to the root and productive inflection. But it is nice if can be as simple as phonetically regular. Jens From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Apr 12 14:36:16 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 17:36:16 +0300 Subject: Socilological vs natural selection (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: <37180062.138459074@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Robert Whiting wrote: > >It is my impression that almost all linguistic change is brought > >about by sociological factors. > I would rather say that linguistic change, brought about by > articulatory, combinatory, contact-related etc. "mutations", is > selected for by sociological factors. I'm sure there's a better formulation of what I said, and "sociologically selected" might be it. > This is not unlike biological change, where the mutations are > brought about by various factors (both "internal" quirks in the > way DNA is structured and is copied, and "external" factors like > cosmic rays), and the mutations are then selected for by their > effect on the "fitness" or sex-appeal of the phenotype. On the other hand, I'm somewhat leery of drawing strong parallels between linguistic change and biological change, because so many people, particularly non-linguists, seem to take them literally (i.e., assume that languages change the same way that biological organisms do) or extend the analogy in ways that are not applicable. For one thing, forms can be taken over for reasons like prestige of the source language or dialect, or because the speakers find a word with a sound or meaning that they just happen to like in another language, and there is, as far as I know, no mechanism that duplicates this in biological change. Secondly, sociological change does not have to be survival-enhancing (people, especially as a group, don't always know what is good for them, and even if they do, they don't always do it), whereas biological change, because of natural selection, will preserve survival-enhancing mutations by its very nature. I guess what I am saying is that while the analogy of selection for change may be good, the analogy of sociological selection versus natural selection seems less so. Sociological selection would seem more likely to produce a figurative duck-billed platypus than a cheetah. Now I'm sure that the duck-billed platypus is marvellously adapted to its environment, but it does look more like it was created by a committee that could never agree on anything than by natural selection. And you know, walks like a duck-billed platypus... Sociological selection of linguistic changes seems more likely to produce change for the sake of change (i.e., just to be different [or to be more the same]) than change that is likely to enhance the survival of either the society (culture) or the language. Only the use of language, not any specific language in any specific form, seems to be a survival technique in Homo sapiens. And indeed, it is only a language acquisition device that is genetically transmitted, not an acquisition device for any particular language. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Apr 12 19:47:11 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 21:47:11 +0200 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > Norwegian and Icelandic "started off" as > particularly closely related within Scandinavian, but later > developments brought about a position in which Norwegian is, by any > reasonable standard, linguistically closer to Swedish and Danish than it > is to Icelandic. Consequently, there is a problem in drawing a family > tree. Historically, we ought to expect Norwegian and Icelandic to form > a single branch of the tree, but nobody draws it that way: every tree > I've seen puts Norwegian in a branch with Danish and Swedish, while > Icelandic (often together with Faroese) is off at one separate branch > for itself. Then take a glance at my tree (upside-down). NORDIC LANGUAGES WEST NORDIC EAST NORDIC Old Norse (+) *Old East Nordic (+) Icelandic Swedish Faroese Gutnish (+) Norn (+) Danish Norwegian Norwegian (Nynorsk) (Bokmål) It should be noted that there are (at least) two standard varieties of written Norwegian: Nynorsk, which is a mixture of the original West Nordic dialects, and Bokmål, which is essentially written Danish with some West Nordic features (and pronounced in a Norwegian way). One of the main criteria for classifying the modern Nordic languages is their treatment of the original diphthongs, which are monophthongized in East Nordic, but retained in West Nordic.: compare Nynorsk 'drive' to Bokmål and Danish '(to) drive'. However, overlapping isoglosses create fluid borderlines between the varieties, and in many cases even standard Bokmål retains old diphthongs: compare Nynorsk and Bokmål <øy> to Danish <ø> 'island'. > So, to put it crudely but picturesquely, Norwegian has migrated from one > branch of the tree to another. And this is not the kind of phenomenon > that the family-tree model can accommodate at all well. > Some decades ago, either Trubetzkoy or Jakobson -- I forget which -- > suggested that English had ceased to be a Germanic language and become a > Romance language. Much more recently, C.-J. N. Bailey has likewise > asserted that English is no longer a Germanic language but may perhaps > be a Romance language. To me, that doesn't make sense. The genetic classification of languages is based on origins, not on linguistic similarities caused by later foreign influence. A Germanic language stays Germanic forever, no matter how unrecognizeable it may have become. The leaves of a family language tree simply cannot move from one branch to another. Problems in family-tree classification occur, however, in cases of some pidgin languages with roots in two (or more) language groups, or in cases of "mixed languages" where the antecedents, including the direction of influence, remain unclear. Adam Hyllested From edwardheil at usa.net Mon Apr 12 20:52:13 1999 From: edwardheil at usa.net (Edward Heil) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 15:52:13 CDT Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Hi. I just read Winifred Lehmann's _Theoretical Bases of Proto-Indo-European Linguistics_ (I believe that's the name; don't have my copy next to me). He refers to the theory set forth in his earlier _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_ that there were no phonemic vowels in early PIE, that on the contrary there was a non-segmental phonemic quality which he calls "syllabicity" which would result in the phonetic manifestation of vowels in certain positions. Unfortunately, he doesn't give enough details for me to understand exactly how this process would have worked, and I don't have access to his earlier book. I wonder if anyone familiar with this idea could give me a quick rundown on the details? Ed [ Moderator's comment: Lehmann's analysis is a monument to the structuralism of the 1940s. In any reasonable phonological theory, this analysis could not be made. (If looked at from the viewpoint of Stampe's natural phonology, Lehmann's "syllabicity" is simply the vowel /a/, with allophonic variation becoming phonemicized over time.) For another example of the same kind of analysis, one which has been examined in the literature, see Aert Kuipers' monograph on Kabardian from the 1960s. I forget the exact title, but it was published in the _Janua Lingua- rum, Series Minor_ by Mouton; it should be available in a university library. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 03:54:11 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 23:54:11 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >People, particularly children and youngsters, change the way they >speak all the time. >> >In a message dated 4/9/99 11:38:19 PM, you wrote: >Languages change, but generally so slowly (on a human scale) that nobody's >conscious of it....>> -- as the moderator pointed out, these statements are not contradictory. There's a continual 'fog' of small changes from moment to moment. A limited number of them 'stick'; that is, they spread and are adopted. Over a _very long period_ these accumulate and become substantial, eventually changing a language into its successors, as Old English became the modern tongue. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 03:48:26 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 23:48:26 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >By stylized, do you mean "fill-in the blank" kind of forms? -- essentially. All the Linear B documents are to do with the management of palace holdings. >The original point was that a language that splinters into dialects is >moving towards imprecision. -- no, it isn't. It's not become less precise, it's developing differences. Speakers of the same dialect will have no problem with it. >precise sound, grapheme and reference. -- what exactly do you _mean_ by this? From BMScott at stratos.net Tue Apr 13 07:02:25 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 03:02:25 -0400 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Although textbooks don't mention it [at least as far as I > remember], I've wondered if there was a /ph/ stage, given that standard /f/ > is often pronounced /ph/ and it would balance out /bh/. So maybe it was /f > > ph > h > 0/. Ralph Penny suggests that in OSp before the 13th c. or so /P/ (representing Vulg. Lat. F-) was realized as [W] before [w], as [h] before all syllabic vowels and [j], and as [P] before /r/. ([P] is the voiceless bilabial fricative (phi), and [W] is the voiceless labial-velar fricative (inverted-w).) He further suggests that only in later OSp were the allophones [W] and [P] modified to [f]. Brian M. Scott From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 07:36:26 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 03:36:26 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw writes: >Does this difference from Roman Imperial policy wrt administrative practice >have anything to do with the fact that English remains the dominant language >throughout most of the former British Empire? -- however, English became the -native language- only in areas of the British Empire that were (a) settled by English emigrants (non-francophone Canada, New Zealand, Australia) to whom later emigrants had to conform, or (b) by slaves or other migrants who came from many linguistic groups and had to adopt English or an English-based pidgin to communicate with each other and their English-speaking masters (Carribean, American South). The language of a homogenous, densely settled agricultural population is an extraordinarily stubborn thing, difficult to dislodge even when all the resources of a modern State are bent to it, with compulsory education of children, conscription, etc. Language replacement usually requires something more drastic; settlement of native speakers, combined with widespread social and demographic disorganization of the native community. Or mass urbanization, which has many of the same characteristics. From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Apr 13 09:46:21 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 10:46:21 +0100 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: Bob mentioned the German "Handschuh" as a light-hearted example of compounding from language poverty. Shifting from Neolithic to modern, many German explanatory compounds are due to the lack of a standardised or central dialect at a time when wider communication (e.g. for commercial purposes) was becoming necessary. You could not advertise "semmel" in areas that used some other word for it, but "broetchen" (= "little bread") could be understood readily anywhere. So some at least of these explanatory compounds derive not from poverty but from excess. Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 13 11:08:52 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 12:08:52 +0100 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Apr 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Wasn't it more a case of initially distinguishing between 2 types > of horses: caballus, a large lumbering draft horse of horthern European > origin as opposed to equus a swift cavalry horse originating in the > Caucasus or Caspian region, two different subspecies --at least according > to a couple of books on horses I've seen. Years ago, I read somewhere that was originally Roman soldiers' slang, comparable to `nag'. I have no idea if there is any truth in this, but it is not inconsistent with the proposal above. In any case, it is not strange to see a word for `workhorse' developing into generic `horse'. Late Latin had another word for `horse', . This meant specifically `packhorse', and it was derived from `load', itself of Greek origin. However, in eastern Basque, the Latin word was borrowed as , and it just means `horse' generically, competing in this function with native . Of course, in the mountainous Basque Country, fleet cavalry horses would have been useless anyway, and very likely the only horses the ancient Basques ever saw were pack animals or draft animals. > In that vein, it would correspond to the distinction between > "horse" and "pony." Well, for me, ponies are distinguished by their size, not by their function. [snip] > And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said > to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the direct source. The stories are: (1) of unknown origin; (2) from , the wind god, because of the animal's speed; (3) from some Italian development of a Latin * `wild horse; (4) from an unspecified Congolese language; (5) from Amharic `zebra'. You pays your money... (1) is undiscussable. (2) looks fanciful to me. (3) seems to have a phonological problem, unless there were Italian dialects in which /kw/ was reduced to /k/ very early. (4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in the Congolese rain forests. (5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) > Pony is related to the name of the horse goddess Epona, right? And > so, is cognate to equus, isn't it? The sources at my disposal do not support this. The word was originally specifically Scots, and all my sources see the word as most likely (though not certainly) derived from an obsolete Old French `little colt', diminutive of `colt', itself ultimately from Latin `young animal, foal'. This would make `pony' partially cognate with English `foal'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Tue Apr 13 12:00:02 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 08:00:02 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: >The classic example of this (hunting-taboo replacement by a more >general word) is often taken from English "deer", originally the >general Germanic word for 'wild animal' (cf. Ger. "Tier") which >by being used as a euphemism for the hunted animal has come to be >specialized in that meaning, with the original meaning being >taken up by loanwords ("animal, beast"). I suppose the question is, what justifies calling any of these processes a 'taboo?' I can think of few literary or historical sources suggesting that the "hart" --- a word which, of course, was still current in Shakespeare's and King James' English, and thanks to literary preservation, remains understood today --- was an object of particular reverence, awe, terror, or disgust, so that the -vox propria- became somehow too hallowed for everyday use, or too indecent. This would be an excellent test for the hypothesis, in that it took place during recorded history, among literate people, whose religious and social customs are set forth in many sources. -Taboo- has a relatively specific meaning in cultural anthropology; does this linguistic process fit that definition? If 'hart' became the object of a -taboo- they're likely to explain it somewhere. After all, they -do- offer us clues as to why -thou- became obsolete. (Whether those reasons are properly called a 'taboo' are another matter; the point is, they dropped the pronoun for a reason, which is explained for us.) --- With wind we blowen; with wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen; with weopinge we passun. With steringe we beginnen; with steringe we enden; With drede we dwellen; with drede we wenden. ---- Anon, Lambeth Ms. no. 306 From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 13 12:40:10 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 07:40:10 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: I like the example Steven used to explain how English became the dominate language among elites of India whereas Latin failed to become the same thing to the English. It well demonstrates the complexity of the make-up of the "exposure" and "susceptibility" variables in the epidemiological model. But, there is an important difference in the situation in India vis-a-vies theEnglish, or at least I think there is. Wasn't the language spoken in pre-Roman Brittain more uniform than the language spoken in India. I have Indian friends that tell me that there is a different language every fifty miles or so throughout India--actually there are dialictical differences, I presume. But English, learned by the wealthiest elites would be a unifying languages in the sense that it had strong utilitarian uses in meeting to settle legislative issues, etc. Sending their children to school to learn English, for example, is a conscious seeking out of exposure, implying a strong preference for a particular language of the rulling elites. Their "susceptibility" to learning English was obviously quite high. One last question: do many people speak English in India today, i.e., people outside the elites? Ray Hendon From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 13 13:21:15 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 08:21:15 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >Ray talked of models for predicting language development. >I think Ray has missed the point. Statistical models remain only that - >statistical. The model for predicting language development that I had in mind is a mathematical model-a theoretical model that needs the help of those in the linguistic community to specify. A statistical model is quite different: it attempts to test a mathematical model once it has been specified. Statistical processes are great for getting an idea of the accuracy of your idea and how confident you can be that the relationship between things you tested are not attributed to chance. You are entirely correct when you warn about the inability of statistics alone to prove anything one way or another. Therefore, if statistical work is to mean anything to anyone, it must first be preceeded by thoroughly professional analysis and observation. Long before any statistical procedures can be applied or even thought about, the model itself-the cause-effect theory must first be fully explored. Here, in supplying possibel cause-effect relationships, a linguist is the only person who could be of help. But in this theoretical realm I see what I believe to be a propery analogous situation from medical research: their use of a mathematical probability modeling technique to predict the spread of infectious disease among a community. The draw-back of the model is its seeming simplicity. Every scholar in the field of linguistics, especially historical linguistics, knows how complex the process of language adoption and spread is. A two-variable model because of its simplicity immediately repels them. This, I believe, is what the main objection of the professionals to using this potential tool would be. What I failed to emphasize in my earlier suggestion is each variable is itself a function, dependent upon many things. But, all the miriad other things that influence what langage a given population is likely to speak are accounted for with the "exposure" and "susceptibility" variables. Just as there are many reasons why some people are vulnerable to influenza, and there are many reasons why a person is exposed to the virus, in the end it doesn't matter. They have either been exposed to it or not, and if there is no exposure there will be no influenza. If they are exposed, they are either susceptible to the infection or they are not susceptible to the infection. The why's and wherefore's are a different matter. In adopting a language, a child or adult is either exposed or not exposed to another language. And if they are exposed, some are more likely to begin using it than others. Some people seek out exposure and actively pursue learning a language, others attempt to isolate themselves from a specific language, showing a strong prererence not to learn another one. But for an objective observer, looking at a linguistic community, all these variations in preference, interests and exposure, will average out, and there will be a community-wide exposure level and an average susceptibility of some magnitude. If these magnitudes are known or can be reasonably well estimated, then predictions can be made with regard to which language will become dominate. Keep in mind also that when we say prediction, the time-direction of the prediction can be forward or backward. We can predict what percentage of the residents of Rome spoke Latin in 250 BCE using the same model as for predicting what language will be spoken in San Antonia, Texas in the year AD 2300 or London in 1067. Prediction relates to estimating the unknown, not only to future events. A limiting factor in this model, however, is its time/place specificity. I live in a linguistic soup of English, South Texas English, Border Spanish, Spanglish, and all points in between. I am curious that in the year 2500, which language will dominate. What will be the balance between Spanish and Texas English. It seems to me, that if I had an exposure/susceptibility model, I cold make that prediction with some degree of precision. But the prediction is limited by the certainty of our knowledge that what we define as English in 1999 will not be what English will be in 2500, if it exists at all. Certainly the effects of time can be accomodated by the epidemiological model, but there must be other models that account for changes within the language itself. These are more metaphysical in nature, and need separate treatment. The epidemiological model accounts for adoption of a language within an area or population-in other words, the time/space relationship of language adoption. Why we speak at all and what accounts for changes within a language, are separate issues. The strengths of the epidemiological model is in its robustness and effectiveness. It is robust enough to handle convergence or disbursement, invasion, snob-appeal, migration, technological change, trade, education and religion. It is effective because it allows you to dicotomize any population of language-speakers. Every person is either susceptible or not, and every person is or is not exposed to the language. At a practical level we know that there are many variants as to how susceptible one person is over another, and the quantity and quality of the exposure will vary greatly between individuals. But I am not sure that these fine-tuning features could not be accounted for once the model was fully developed. Whether this is of any use to the community of linguists, however, is something that I do not know. I am most interested in the responses I have received so far, and look forward to the discussion that may arise. Ray Hendon From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 13:30:35 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:30:35 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >Abraham Lincoln was born in Illinois. -- Kentucky, actually. >How successful do you think he'd be at understanding present-day Chicagoans? -- quite successful; each would simply appear to have a strong accent to the other. (Lincoln would sound rather like a hillbilly, pronouncing words like "idea" as "idear"). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 13:37:27 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:37:27 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >My late mother, who had little education, was keenly aware of some of the >differences between her own speech and her children's speech. -- moving between different languages, sociolects or dialects is not exactly the same thing as the general process of linguistic change. Eg., my grandmother, who was from a small town in inland Lancashire, spoke slightly old-fashioned "BBC English", herself, learned from her parents and in her boarding school prior to World War One; it differed from my own General American only in accent. She could "do" broad Lancashire, though, which was very different. English regional/class dialects have converged strongly with Standard English over the past generation or two; but this is not in itself a process of change within Standard English, if you see what I mean. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 13:49:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:49:51 EDT Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Wasn't it more a case of initially distinguishing between 2 types of horses: >caballus, a large lumbering draft horse of horthern European >origin as opposed to equus a swift cavalry horse originating in the >Caucasus or Caspian region -- folk-entymology. "Caballus" is generally given simply as "nag". cf. Greek "kaballes". It was a slang term. >Caballus> won out because not too many people ever came into contact with an >equus -- no, equus was the generalized word for "horse". >And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said >to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. -- Vulgar Latin *eciferus, from Latin equiferus (equi + ferus), "wild horse". >Pony is related to the name of the horse goddess Epona, right? And >so, is cognate to equus, isn't it? -- no; another folk-entymology. It's from Latin "pullus" which meant "colt". Via French poulenet, which is a diminutivie of poulain, which means, of course, "colt". The derivation "young horse" ==> "small horse" is fairly obvious, I think. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 14:03:33 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 10:03:33 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Just about everywhere Gothic is discussed you'll find references to the >attestation of East Gothic being spoken in the Crimea -- true, and you'll also find that the period of Slavic-Gothic contact leading to loan-word deposition is prior to the 5th century CE. The loans were into Proto-Slavic, not any of the later Slavic languages. >already in Greek *gno-, possibly before German was invented. -- invented is not the word you're looking for. "Developed" or "evolved". Not even Mallory would place the emergence of a distinct proto-Germanic any later than 1000 BCE or so. Late isoglosses indicate that Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic (and Baltic) were in continuous contact as they emerged from PIE. The Balts were to the northeast of the earliest Germans, the Slavs to the east-southeast. >After all, if you follow Mallory or Dolukhanov the proto-Slavs were the >Agricultural Scythians in 500BCE and therefore had contact with the Greeks >before the Germans. -- take a look at the map. The Greeks sailed to the Black Sea coast, which was inhabited by _Iranian_ speakers, the Scythians proper. Beyond the _Iranian_ speakers were the Slavs, and beyond them -- and therefore in contact with them -- were the Germanics. ie., the "Agricultural Scythians" were the southeastern fringe of the Slavic-speaking area, not the whole of it. >And of course if the P-slavs were IE -- this is not in dispute. >they should have had a *gon/*gnu or *kon/*knu and i-stems quite before they >met the Goths. -- they probably also had words for "house" and "stable" and "loaf of bread", but all these words were replaced by loans from Germanic in the Proto-Slavic period. Just as English adoped words for "mutton" and "beef" French, replacing perfectly adequate native terms. We retained the native sheep-cow names for the animals and used the French ones (which are simply the names for the animals, in French) for their products. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 13 14:06:48 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:06:48 -0500 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Sent: Saturday, April 10, 1999 1:59 PM [ moderator snip ] > I think you might want to review what a 'stem' is. In the case of Greek > lu'gx, lunk- is the *root*, which serves as a base *without* additional > formatives (which would produce a stem), to which -s is added. > [ Moderator's comment: > I think you might want to review what a stem is: The stem is whatever is > left after the grammatical ending is removed. This may be a root form, or > an extended root (which *in some traditions* is called a stem). I would > reserve the term "root" for the CVC items described best by Benveniste in > _Origines_. > --rma ] Well, I understand your position. I was relying on Trask's definition on page 259 of his _ A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguitsics_: "stem. . . In morphology, a bound form of a lexical item which typically consists of a root to which one or more morphological formatives have been added and which serves as the immediate base for the formation of some further form or set of forms." Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 13 14:29:42 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:29:42 -0500 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Patrick C. Ryan To: Sent: Saturday, April 10, 1999 1:27 PM Subject: Re: andera 'woman' Celtic ? > Are we being quite fair here? There is Old Indian na'ri: and Avestan > na:iri:, 'lady (?). > [ Moderator's response: > The long vowel in the first syllable marks this as a late formation in > Indic. It therefore provides no evidence for a "feminine" in the proto- > language. > --rma ] Not sure I follow. Would not *HnVr lead to *nV:r? [ Moderator's response: In Indo-Iranian, *HC > C, for all values of H & C. The long vowel in _na:r_, the nominative singular, is original (i. e., can be reconstructed for PIE), and has been explained as compensatory lengthening in the proto-language when the nominative ending *-s was lost after resonants. The long vowel seen in _na:ri:_ is, on the other hand, not confirmed by the other dialects, and can be the result of taking the nominative singular as the starting point of the derivation. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 13 15:20:27 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 10:20:27 -0500 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <37115914.423218435@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >"H. Mark Hubey" wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>Is "Labe" Slavic or left over from some other language? >Probably Germanic (or else Celtic or "Alteuropa"isch") *albi- > >elbe (with Germanic i-umlaut), and Slav. olb- > *la:b- (with >Slavic liquid metathesis). So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English & German From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 13 15:28:19 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 10:28:19 -0500 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <2d8fac0f.2442349f@aol.com> Message-ID: [snip] >You may need new sources. Just about everywhere Gothic is discussed you'll >find references to the attestation of East Gothic being spoken in the Crimea >in the 16th Century. See, eg. P. Heather, The Goths, p. 259, Blackwell >(pb1998); Hawkins in Comrie, The World's Major Languages at p, 69. The vast majority of the Goths went west to conquer Spain [the Visigoths] and Italy [the Ostrogoths]. I forget whether those who ended up in Crimea were descended from Goths who managed to escape from the Huns when their power was broken or what In any case, Spaniards are still sometimes referred to as "Goths" [snip] From edsel at glo.be Tue Apr 13 15:20:05 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 17:20:05 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >"Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >>In the case of Eng. 'you', I think you're digging too deep, even though your >>statement is correct. But the 'y' is almost certainly derived from a 'g', >>just like in Dutch: modern 'jij' (acc. 'jou') (j=y) for 2 p. sg. stems from >>'gij', the old 2 p. pl., still in use in Flanders for both sg. and pl.. >>Another parallel Dutch - English: Middle Dutch 'g(h)eluw' > Du. 'geel', but >>Eng. 'yellow'. The same applies to the 'y' of 'yard' (Du. 'boom-gaard' = >>'orchard', i.e. 'tree-yard'). >You're not digging deep enough. Not only do we have Gothic ju:s, >we also have Skt. yu:yam, Gath. yu:s^, Lith./Latv. ju:s. Dutch >g- is here a case of j- > g-. [Ed Selleslagh] Supposing you are right (I have an open mind on this), why would it have reverted to j (y) in Holland Dutch in some rare cases, but not in most? (there was already a beginning of discussion about the possibility of this inverse evolution on this list) Given this, and the dialectical shift g > j in a number of German dialects, I keep wondering, notwithstanding 'common knowledge' as cited by Glen Gordon : "Look, Indo-European *y- = Old English y-. It's very well known and accepted that IE *yus begets the English "you", "ye", etc. as well as Dutch "jij/gij". The reason why we say it's *y- is because of languages like Sanskrit". It looks more like *y > g > y in Dutch, and therefore _maybe_ also in English; in that case, Sanskrit would be irrelevant. The fact that there is no trace of that in OE might be due to its earlier evolution (Dutch is pretty archaeic - but not conservative, btw). Anyway, the y of 'yard' stems almost certainly from the g of 'gard-', imho. Sorry for offending the specialists. Ed. From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 13 19:34:07 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 14:34:07 -0500 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: The discussion you guys are having now reminds me of Earnest Hemmingway's wonderfully simple phrase from Islands in the Sun, when he had the dying hero say to his faithful companion, "They are all right." He meant, I believe, that on any issue there will be contention and that all sides are correct--there is truth on all sides. A somewhat contentious issue in the community of linguists, at least for what I can see from my email, is that of making predictions. I read much that says "It is not the job of linguists to provide prediction as to what will happen, but only to describe what we know has happened." The contention of this group is that prediction is entirely outside the ken of linguists. Description is king; prediction is for other fields. These folks are anti-prognosticators or anti-advocates of prediction. A second group, less unforgiving in its disdain of quantitative methods, are the non-advocate group, the agnostics. The agnostics do not advocate prognostication, but their objections are not based on the belief that predicting is bad, just that it is wrong. We do not know enough, they say, to predict what will happen in any language over time, and thus attempts at predicting are bound to fail. Lack of sufficient information is the basis of their concern. Their focus in on analyzing existing languages, but not on predicting what will happen in the future. There is certainly truth in the contention of the non-advocate agnostics. The simple truth is we cannot know how things will change in the future that are both exogenous to our culture and beyond our control . As was pointed out, we all speak a slightly different language than our fathers and mothers spoke when they were our age. When I tell my 88 year-old father about my email conversations, he has some idea of what I mean, but I doubt he has ever used the word "email" in his life. There is no way he could have predicted even fifty years ago that the word "email" would one day enter his vocabulary. My suggestion for the applicability of quantitative methods is not applicable for all domains of linguistics. I leave this category of speculation and projection to those with more insight than I. Metaphysics has never been my strength, and I generally agree with those who assert that some things are too complex to predict. A third group of linguists could be called pro-advocacy-lite. Their advocacy of prediction is constrained to the macro domain and largely to the past. They accept that predicting linguistic development may be done, but it can be done only at an aggregated level and of past events. The followers of the IE hypothesis, for example, say that their model of linguistic development is sufficiently informed so as to predict what language you would hear spoken if you were to go back to 7000 BCE in a certain area in Europe/Asia and listen. They can predict how a certain word would be pronounced or used in Sumaria in 3000 BCE, or Rome in 250 BCE, or London in 1070 ACE. They believe in the inherent possibility that language can be predicted, or at least certain aspects can be predicted. But they are wisely skeptical of moving their predictions into the future and prefer to keep the time-line of their prediction facing the past. But there may be another group of linguists who work in a domain that overlaps some but not entirely with other groups. This domain deals with the adoption of a language within a specific geographical area at a certain time. A macro-orientation, dealing with an aggregated concept of language--collections of words that constitutes Old Saxon, Middle English, etc. This domain takes as its ken the interfacing of languages. The movement of a language into an area, the interaction and intersection of two or more languages within a given population are their subjects. This domain is not concerned so much with changes within a language, but the adoption of a specific language by a specific population. History is full of episodes of invaders taking their language with them and imposing it upon the conquer people. And, history is full of peoples who absorb a linguistic invasion without changing the fundamental structure of their mother tongue. It is also filled with examples where a new language develops from parts of many other languages. In the adoption domain I propose that a quantitative model or prediction may hold some promise as a predictive tool. To this last group I still urge skepticism about prediction, but skepticism of both sides. Be skeptical of the proposition, "predictions can be made," but also be skeptical of the proposition that "all predictions are wrong." There are some things that we can predict with great precision. Perhaps linguistics is sufficiently mature now, thanks to the hundreds of years of work done by earlier scholars, to begin using tools of other sciences and take up the ultimate challenge of all scientific study: predict as well as explain. As long as it know the limits of how its predictions will fare, and into which domain to confine its inquiry, I do not see in the existing arguments reasons for not trying. To the mathematician and statistician, it doesn't matter which direction you face. You can build a model that deals with expectations of both the future and the past. In one sense, it doesn't matter which because the same procedures are used for both directions. Regards, Ray Hendon From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 13 20:31:37 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 13:31:37 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: I suggested the following development of the IE declension of t/s stems as follows with a pseudo-example *kut: Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE Nominative *kut *kwet-se *kwets *kwets Accusative *kut-im *kwetm *kwetm *kwetm Dative *kwet-i: *kweti: *kwesi:(*kwesey) Genitive *kut-isi *kwetese *kwete's *kwese's Ablative *kut-ita *kweteta *kwete'd *kwese'd MIGUEL: Not if we compare how t-stems are really declined (Beekes, p. 178): *nepo:t Skt. napa:t Lat. nepo:s *nepotm napa:tam nepo:tem *neptos naptur nepo:tis Hmm, odd. That reconstruction doesn't look right. Are you sure there's no lurking laryngeal? Maybe something like... *nepH:t (compensatory lengthening from loss of *-s) *nepHt-m *nepHt-e's The problem with this example, Miguel, is that Sanskrit is clearly innovative and doesn't represent the original state of affairs. Neither does Latin. MIGUEL: Or for instance Skt. marut "wind" (m.): sg. du. pl. N marut maruta:u marutaH A marutam ,, ,, I maruta: marudbhya:m marudbhiH D marute: ,, marudbhyaH G marutaH maruto:H maruta:m L maruti ,, marutsu Sure, at first glance it looks contradictory but I have a question: Is the paradigm related to forms outside Indo-Aryan? Is it a foreign word? Is it derived from a native IE word? To make clear, if it's not an ancient word then this example is void and null because it could have entered the language AFTER the **t > *s changes took place. MIGUEL: There are really only a few forms in which we see t/s alternation, such as the ptc.pf.act. in *-wot-/*-us-. I don't think this is necessarily a bad statistic. There would be strict characteristics that such a root would have to follow in order to acquire this alternation. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 13 20:47:33 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 13:47:33 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: ME (GLEN) IN RESPONSE TO JENS' SOUND RULE FOR *yu:s "you": Still don't get it. How does *t- become *y-?? MIGUEL: It's not that difficult to understand what Jens is saying, whether one agrees or not. The *y- in *yu:s is secondary, and we have *u:s/*wos (Slavic vy < *(w)u:- and vasU, Lat. vo:s, Skt. vas, Alb. ju < *u, etc.). The nifty sound law then becomes *cw- > w- (and I guess alternatively sw-, judging by Hitt. sume:s, OIr. si:, We. chwi, Goth. i-zwis). Hmm, perhaps it takes that special someone to "understand" what Jens is really saying. Now I know why I wasn't getting it. It's too farfetched for me to have considered. The forms in *yu- are found throughout the wide gambit of IE (Germanic and Indo-Aryan) and of course *u- minus the initial *y- in enclitic forms are equally spread out. I fail to see how this consistent and persistent *y- arises from a **cw- exactly but I CAN understand how a Hittite can arise from a form with *yu- ...but then I often have difficulty understanding these things... :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 13 20:57:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 15:57:30 -0500 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990412014708.22182.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Watkins has *med- & *me- [< *me@], and one would guess that *med- is from *me- so the final -d- or -t- if that's the case, definitely seems to be some type of suffix [ moderator snip ] >Why does Pokorny write it *me-t- instead of *met- and why can't we >consider *-t- a verbal affix or possibly two different verbs? Why are >you considering a MEDIAL *H1 as example of your **-t > *H1?? Why does >*meH1not(s) occur instead of **metnot(s)? Why do I have so many >questions? :) >-------------------------------------------- >Glen Gordon >glengordon01 at hotmail.com >Kisses and Hugs >-------------------------------------------- From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 13 21:26:43 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 14:26:43 PDT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MODERATOR: Why would a glottal stop "certainly not be" a distinct phoneme? I can think of several languages off the top of my head in which it is, so there is no reason other than _a priori_ bias to reject in for PIE. Are you speaking again? Think all you want about several languages. Have a linguist party and invite your multilingual friends. You seem to have no clue what "bias" means as your "biasedly" quick-to-respond comments would indicate. I'm strictly talking about IE itself and my "bias" is motivated purely by observations within IE itself. It is because of pairs like *tuH and *twe (and other phenomena) which lead me to believe that there were, on top of long vowels from loss of laryngeals, differing lengthes of vowels determined by stress accent and shape of syllable which cause some of the anomalies present WITHIN IE. Hence a more credible *tu:/*twe without "intrusive and inexplicable H" fully explainable by accent. I'm surprised someone who wishes to take the topic away from external focus should be talking about "several" outside languages. I'm not concerned whether Abkhaz for instance has medial glottal stops or not. I AM concerned about whether IE had medial *H1 and I find no indication so far that this necessarily has to be the case. If you do, speak or forever hold your peace and reserve words like "bias" for proper occasions. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- [ Moderator's response: >Message-ID: <19990412011754.39210.qmail at hotmail.com> >From: "Glen Gordon" >Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 18:17:52 PDT >Well, here's my current position. I accept *H2 and *H3 as being /h/ >and /h/ respectively (and thus parallel to the velars). *H1 on the >other hand is at most a glottal stop which, iff it occured at all, >certainly would not have been a distinct phoneme. Your original statement reads as an _a priori_ rejection of glottal stop as a possible phoneme in any language. That may not be what you meant, but it is assuredly what you wrote, and on that basis, I asked the question above. Further, I was not thinking of any of the Caucasian languages (some of which, as you note, have a glottal stop phoneme), but of the Polynesian languages. It is always permissible, in Indo-European studies as anywhere else in linguistics, to cite parallels from other languages; it is simply off-topic on this list to discuss other languages to the exclusion of Indo-European, more especially so when there exist fora in which to discuss them. --rma ] From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 13 23:22:10 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 01:22:10 +0200 Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive In-Reply-To: <373a2aad.411354214@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [...] > > The doubly thematic subjunctive is only Greek and Indo-Iranian, I > believe, and is in my opinion analogical. [...] You are right about analogical, but not about the geographic limitation. A form such as *bhereet(i), the subj. to go with ind. *bhereti or inj. *bheret must be of relatively late (if probably still pre-PIE) making, for the general rule that the "thematic vowel" becomes /o/ before anything voiced, including vowels, is not obeyed. If *deywe/o- + dative sg. *-ey, dual *-e, and nom.pl. *-es becomes *deywo:y (better *deywo::y?), *deywo: and *deywo:s, the o-timbre must have come from the thematic vowel, wherefore one expects *bhere/o- + e/o + t(i) to yield **bhero:ti, but the form is *bhereeti (yes, with disyllabic -ee- reflected by Gathic). The formation with *-ee- is also found in Latin (fut. lege:s) and perhaps Armenian, if Birgit Olsen's derivation of the morpheme -ich- from *-e:ty, based on the use of the 3sg *-eeti as a new stem, is correct. The same formation accounts for the fact that Albanian has no umlaut in the subjunctive, while the prs. indicative shows fronting umlaut in the 2.3.sg and 2pl, i.e. in the places that had a front thematic vowel in IE; since e: goes to o in Albanian (no doubt via a:), it is no wonder that this category as no umlaut. I would of course have liked to see the long-vowel subjunctive in more languages, but I think we have enough to accept it as PIE. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 13 23:39:34 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 01:39:34 +0200 Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive In-Reply-To: <373a2aad.411354214@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [...] > Unlikely. Meillet apparently suggested that -e^ax- derives from > the copula (j)es- cliticized to the verbal root (cf. the Latin > imperfect with *bhu-a:-). But in view of the association of the > optative with the imperfect in Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian and > maybe Celtic, I would favour a derivation from the optative > *-oih1- > e^, followed by -ax- < *-eh2-s-. In other words, a > "past optative". [...] You have overlooked that the Slavic imperfect caused first palatalization, not second as a derivation of the jat' from *-oi- would demand: tec^aaxU 'I was running' must have once begun with *tek-e:-. I take this to be the thematic present stem *tek-e- with renewed endings, 3sg *-et as also in the old root aorist where 3sg *H2nek^-t > *nes was embellished to nes-e. That enables the identification of the Sl. ipf. with the Lith. prt., e.g. Sl. vede^-axU, -as^e : Lith. vede. (second e dotted); the underlying circumflex of the Lith. -e.- will reflect the encounter of the two e's of the preform *vede-et. Jens From stevegus at aye.net Wed Apr 14 00:52:27 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 20:52:27 -0400 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >Too cautious, I think. My late mother, who had little education, was >keenly aware of some of the differences between her own speech and her >children's speech. A former girlfriend of mine, a native speaker of >Kacchi, was highly aware of the differences between her own speech and >her parents' speech, which in fact appeared to be rather substantial, >and were regarded by her as substantial. And there is a huge amount of >evidence showing that people are frequently aware of the same sorts of >differences, even if they sometimes choose to regard these as >"corruption" or "slovenliness" rather than as change. U.S. television watchers might find it amusing to figure out what exactly it is in the current batch of Tylenol commercials that make the narrator's voice sound distinctly old-fashioned. Not only does she fumble her r's, she uses the /aa/ vowel, close to the backwards 'c' of the IPA, a sound present in my grandmother's version of Swedish, but which is not a phoneme in current majority English --- and what astounds me is that she uses it in the name of the product, which she pleases to call /'tai l@ ,naal/. --- With wind we blowen; with wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen; with weopinge we passun. With steringe we beginnen; with steringe we enden; With drede we dwellen; with drede we wenden. ---- Anon, Lambeth Ms. no. 306 From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Apr 14 02:37:53 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 19:37:53 PDT Subject: -s. vs. (-)t- Message-ID: MIGUEL: I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally and -s- medially. What to make of them? JENS: You are right, and I have adjusted the "reading rule" in a separate mail. [...] Glen Gordon's generalization of -s- to intervocalic position (in a separate mail) does not explain its occurrence word-finally Well, it wasn't meant to. That's why I had _two_ rules going on at the same time, the **-t > *s to account for the final (I've had that one brewing in my head for some time) and a **-VtV- > *s rule to account for the medial ...but come to think of it, maybe it's not enough like you say. Maybe these two rules of mine are one and the same. Try this instead. As always, **-t > *-s but I'm wrong about the intervocalic medial **t which may not have changed after all. In fact, I'm wrong about the pre-history of IE's declension! Instead, the forms that have an alternative *s alongside *t might very well allude to a relatively recent (that is, IndoEtruscan) prehistory where the suffixes were seperate from the stem such as the ablative, genitive, etc where they were only postpositions like **ta, **se, etc. Thus, we could explain this *-s- as being reminiscent of a time when the root was complete as itself and when **t was in final position in the non-nomino-accusative, later becoming *-s, right on schedule. To account for the nominative and accusative forms, these case endings must be viewed as older than the rest of the declension that we now find in IE. Forms like *nemetos then would not be affected by such a rule because they are nothing but *nemeto-s with _medial_ *t. Likewise, forms with *-ter and other medial-*t-suffixes do not interfere with the rule. There is one case like *nekwt- that I can think of that apparently doesn't follow this rule of t/s alternation but then again *nekwt- ends in a consonant cluster that may have prevented this change from happening. So... Revised rule: Pre-IE **-Vt > IE *Vs but Pre-IE **-Ct > IE *Ct Does that explain everything now? Gettin' out the check list... 2nd person *-s? Check. Relationship of substantive/aorist? Check. The infamous *t/*s alternation. Check. Examples where final **t doesn't become *s? Maybe. Jens? Miguel? What do you say? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 02:57:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 22:57:24 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/13/99 7:40:58 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- no, it isn't. It's not become less precise, it's developing differences. Speakers of the same dialect will have no problem with it.>> Please be patient and hang with me and I think you'll see what I trying to get at. King Nestor's people have just settled two new provinces. Now he governs three provinces, in which his people all speak the same language and dialect. They all refer to cows, aurochs and yaks with the same sounds and written words. And they and his ministers understand his tax laws to refer to his exact expectations as far as taxes go. Years pass, ministers come and go. And Nestor notices in one province oddly low counts of cows and aurochs and no yaks at all. Upon investigation, he finds that a dialect has developed locally, where cows now mean cows and aurochs, aurochs mean yaks and yaks have a new name. And he finds that his law "you must pay taxes on all animals" in this new dialect means "you may pay taxes on animals." We may just see a "difference" between the dialects here. (A structural difference.) But Nestor sees this as a functional matter - the common language has become "imprecise." Words no longer refer to the same thing and do not have the same effect with this new dialect. I hope you will understand that the imprecision here is not between speakers of the new dialect. It is between speakers of the different dialects. And that would be a reason for Nestor to try to "standardize" the language across his provinces, despite languages natural tendency to splinter. I wrote: "precise sound, grapheme and reference." <<-- what exactly do you _mean_ by this?>> What Nestor would like his tax collectors to hear is everyone using (more or less) the same sounds to refer to cows; the same graphemes ("the smallest unit in writing capable of causing a change in meaning"); and that they both referred to the same thing (cows or more specifically cows that will yield the payment of taxes.) Ventris used this breakdown. I didn't invent it. I hope you will find this makes some small sense. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 03:55:02 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 23:55:02 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: <> In a message dated 4/13/99 8:24:41 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- however, English became the -native language- only in areas of the British Empire that were (a) settled by English emigrants (non-francophone Canada, New Zealand, Australia) to whom later emigrants had to conform, or....>> This may be a bit off. "Later emigrants" - "non-native speaking" - didn't necessarily "have to conform." Their children did however have to go to school (under compulsory education laws) where they would learn English and it would become their "native language." The best example is of course the US, where the majority of the population is not descended from "English emigrants." It was in no small part the government and compulsory education that transformed most of those foreign native speakers into native English speakers - very, very often in one generation. In 1960, the vast majority of children of emigrants considered English their native language, obviously not the native language of their parents. The survival of French in Canada on the other hand was strongly supported by the non-centralized government and now is a matter of law. While the Dutch majority in Old New York pretty much adopted English in a single generation as a practical matter when the government and shipping went English. And obviously the Pennsylvania Amish did not feel they "had to conform" and make English their native tongue - and there are cases going back to the 1850's that said this was their right. Another instance of non-totalitarian government action affecting the directions speakers will go over time. <> Or it simply requires people who are willing and who have very good reasons to change languages or encourage their children's to change languages. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 08:08:26 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 04:08:26 EDT Subject: Conservatism Message-ID: In a message dated 4/13/99 4:16:17 PM, roslynfrank at hotmail.com wrote: <> FROM The Sociolinguistics of Interlingual Communication by E. A. NIDA: <> Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 04:20:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 00:20:54 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: In a message dated 4/13/99 5:07:08 AM, you wrote: <> Evolutionary biology is not any more or any less explanatory than chemistry or physics. Evolutionary biology is a powerful tool in the lab and a highly predictive discipline in the field. The test of science is reproducible results. Which is what "predictability" in science means. (Not prognostication.) Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 14 09:03:24 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 05:03:24 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >rayhendon at worldnet.att.net writes: >One last question: do many people speak English in India today, i.e., >people outside the elites? -- about 70 million. >> From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 10:14:59 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 11:14:59 +0100 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] In-Reply-To: <005c01be85ab$10942a40$d90e4a0c@default> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote: > One last question: do many people speak English in India today, i.e., > people outside the elites? Depends what you mean by "many". An estimated 4% of Indians speak English regularly. This doesn't look like a large figure, but it adds up to over 30 million speakers. This means India has more English-speakers than Canada or Australia -- more, indeed, than any other country in the world except for the USA and the UK. And this is India alone, not counting the other countries of the subcontinent. But, of course, it is true that a knowledge of English in India is almost entirely confined to educated people. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roborr at uottawa.ca Wed Apr 14 04:47:09 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 00:47:09 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: LARRY TRASK: >> And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said >> to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. >This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five >different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the >direct source. The stories are: >(1) of unknown origin; >(2) from , the wind god, because of the animal's speed; >(3) from some Italian development of a Latin * `wild horse; >(4) from an unspecified Congolese language; >(5) from Amharic `zebra'. >You pays your money... >(1) is undiscussable. >(2) looks fanciful to me. >(3) seems to have a phonological problem, unless there were Italian > dialects in which /kw/ was reduced to /k/ very early. >(4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese > language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in > the Congolese rain forests. >(5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word > get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese > were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) when you consider what you have to assume to get Tamil yaanai-kolra - "elephant killer" 1) borrowed into Portuguese 2) transferred all the way to South America 3) become establsihed enough in the language to refer to another giant snake, i.e., "anaconda" (the exact path taken by stages 2 and 3 is open to debate), (5) above doesn't really look like a problem at all. From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Apr 14 06:10:06 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 02:10:06 -0400 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" > with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English > & German Ernst Schwarz derives it from Sorbian 'Lindenort' (Russ. and Pol. 'linden'). Brian M. Scott From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 10:22:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 11:22:08 +0100 Subject: rate of language change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: [LT] > >Abraham Lincoln was born in Illinois. > -- Kentucky, actually. Whoops, sorry. I knew that looked wrong when I wrote it, but I didn't check. Stupid. If my high-school history teacher were here today, he'd probably box my ears. [LT] > >How successful do you think he'd be at understanding present-day > >Chicagoans? > -- quite successful; each would simply appear to have a strong > accent to the other. (Lincoln would sound rather like a hillbilly, > pronouncing words like "idea" as "idear"). I'm not so sure. Quite apart from language change in the narrowest sense, Lincoln would encounter such a vast number of words for objects and concepts unfamiliar to him that I think he'd be bewildered. He'd pick up a newspaper and read something like "Tribe blank Pale Hose" or "Ram raiders net ATM", and he'd wonder what planet he was on. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jpmaher at neiu.edu Wed Apr 14 06:05:55 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 01:05:55 -0500 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Rick Mc Callister wrote: > So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" > with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English > & German No. LEIPZIG < LIPSK < LIPA 'linden/lime/tilia'. Cf. LIPICA > LIPIZZA[NER], Slovene town, near Triest, location of the stud Also LEIBNIZ < LIPNICA... jpm. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 10:41:15 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 11:41:15 +0100 Subject: `stem' In-Reply-To: <004101be85b6$e0358ae0$75d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >>[ Moderator's comment: >> I think you might want to review what a stem is: The stem is whatever is >> left after the grammatical ending is removed. This may be a root form, or >> an extended root (which *in some traditions* is called a stem). I would >> reserve the term "root" for the CVC items described best by Benveniste in >> _Origines_. >> --rma ] > Well, I understand your position. I was relying on Trask's definition on > page 259 of his _ A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguitsics_: > "stem. . . In morphology, a bound form of a lexical item which typically > consists of a root to which one or more morphological formatives have been > added and which serves as the immediate base for the formation of some > further form or set of forms." But, for IE languages, my definition is largely equivalent to the one above. Generally speaking, in IE languages, things work like this: root (the minimal form of a lexical morpheme) root + formative = stem (to which inflectional endings are added) stem + inflectional ending = word-form Of course, even in IE languages, not every word-form is constructed in exactly this manner. For example, there may be more than one formative present. And, outside of IE, the facts may be rather different. All this has led to some variation in the use of terms like `root', `stem', `theme' and `base'. In my dictionary, I was not speaking specifically of the IE tradition, but rather I was trying to cater to a wider tradition, and not all linguists use the term `stem' in the rather strict IE sense. I myself would prefer it if we all did use these terms identically, but that's not the way things are. I agree, though, that my definition could have been a little more explicit in recognizing competing usages, and I'll try to attend to that in the second edition, when that happens. Thanks for drawing my attention to it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 06:35:51 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 02:35:51 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: <> In a message dated 4/13/99 10:47:31 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- moving between different languages, sociolects or dialects is not exactly the same thing as the general process of linguistic change.>> This is along the same vein. If "moving between languages" means anything, it means changing languages. And if it means bilingualism or changing languages between generations, it is one very important form of linguistic change. For Mallory, "moving between languages" was the crux of the whole Indo-European issue. (ISIE, p257) I read in D, Crystal that the loss of inflection in English has been closely connected with the bilingualism effected by the Danish invasions (CamEncyl Eng Lang p 32). It's often written that the disappearance of Gallic began with the adoption of bilingual Latin by the Gauls. These all represent major linguistic changes and they all have to do with "moving between languages." <> So only differences within Standard English constitute linguistic change and English dialects and convergence to SE are "not in itself a process of change within Standard English." I hope the moderator will ask you for a cite on this one. Here's part you edited out of LT's post: <> There's no mention of the daughter speaking a completely separate "sociolect" or dialect of Kacchi. And you have no way of knowing that this wasn't just change between generations, due to what language always does - change. And of course going back to the real point - which somehow typically got lost, she was aware of that change in her "natural first language" (taught to her by her mother) as it was happening. Steve Long From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 14 11:10:08 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 06:10:08 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Earlier I wrote: I like the example Steven used to explain how English became the dominate language among elites of India whereas Latin failed to become the same thing to the English. It well demonstrates the complexity of the make-up of the "exposure" and "susceptibility" variables in the epidemiological model. But, there is an important difference in the situation in India vis-a-vie the English, or at least I think there is. Wasn't the language spoken in pre-Roman Brittain more uniform than the language spoken in India. I did not consider that when Caesar Brought his legions into England, the year was about 56 ace and the language in the area was probably Celtic, not English. I don't know how uniform Celtic was at that time, but the Celts were primarily an agricultural population, not needing anything of a centralized nature in terms of administration or governmental entities. Please accept my appology for not being as careful as I should have been in assessing the situation at the time and for posting a question that makes no sense. Ray Hendon From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Wed Apr 14 06:55:25 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 08:55:25 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Glen Gordon schrieb: > In the 3rd person sing imperfective, the previously inanimate 3p *-t > (derived > from *-to) is favored over *-s because of the icky merger (At the same > time, **-e'n becomes **-e'n-t > *-e'r). In fact, -CnD# > -Cr(D)# (cf. http://members.pgv.at/homer/indoeuro/phonlaw.htm) as can be seen at -r/-n-neuters and 3rd pers. pl. secondary/perfect [abibharur vs. abharan < *e-bhi-bher-nt vs. *e-bher-ont; yakrt/yaknas < *yekwnt/*yekwnes]. Not -Cn# > -Cr# as maintained by some list members, so what about *h1newn "9" with final -n ? -- Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From jrader at m-w.com Wed Apr 14 09:21:11 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 09:21:11 +0000 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: In response to Rick McCallister's post: I don't have the literature at hand, but I'm quite certain has an accepted Slavic etymology, based on Common Slavic <*lipa> "linden tree." Leipzig, Dresden, and a number of other toponyms in the basin of the middle and upper Elbe have Slavic etymologies. Note current Czech = Leipzig, (originally an ethnonym, I think) = Dresden, where the root-suffix boundaries are a little clearer. If anyone is really interested in the details I can look them up. Jim Rader > >Probably Germanic (or else Celtic or "Alteuropa"isch") *albi- > > >elbe (with Germanic i-umlaut), and Slav. olb- > *la:b- (with > >Slavic liquid metathesis). > So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" > with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English > & German From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 07:10:37 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 03:10:37 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: <> (My snip) In a message dated 4/9/99 11:38:19 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> -- as the moderator pointed out, these statements are not contradictory.>> Never said they were. In fact they are partially true. And that's the problem. They are the usual overstatements. Taken as a plain statement, "people change the way they speak all the time" can mean anything. And it therefore proves nothing. People also speak the same an awful lot or they wouldn't understand each other. I write posts about how language must have been kept from changing, given that language changes all the time. And you answer that language wasn't kept from changing because it's changing all the time. I write that well if Mycenaean didn't change in all those years, that's unusual. And you reply not really, "languages change, but generally so slowly that nobody's consious of it..." as if it mattered to why Mcycenaean didn't change in all those years. The fact is languages can change quickly, can change slowly, can change internally or due to external causes, can change consciously and unconsciously. What caused the difference in the changes covered in the history of IE languages seems very relevant to me. By offering rules like "people change the way they speak all the time" it should be burningly obvious that you're adding nothing. Steve Long From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 14 14:35:36 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 09:35:36 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: RAY HENDON: The exposure side (rate of contact between infecteds and susceptibles) of the equation is easily identified in the linguistic community: The relatively few Romans sent to govern England was not sufficient to generate a critical mass of exposure units for Latin to predominate. And the Romans left local courts and laws stand, lessening the need for everyone to know Latin in order to get along. Number might have something to do with it but what about languages or dialects that become viewed as prestigious? I'm sure it's more complicated than the above otherwise we would have had a secure model 100 years ago :) Glen Gordon -------------------------------------------- I think that prestige can be readily accommodated by the model. A language that is viewed as prestigious in a certain population would have a higher average susceptibility to learning the language. Thus the susceptibility rate for a prestige-seeking population would be higher than for a population of non-prestige-seekers. Also, the exposure rate between the non-speakers and speakers would be increased, as those wishing to learn the prestigious language would actively seek to out those "infected" with the language so they could learn it more quickly. An example I think of first of this type of snob-appeal in a language was exhibited by the elite Filipinos after Spain conquered them. In the late 1980s I talked with a young woman from the Philippines who said that her family spoke Spanish and was very proud of it. It was definitely a prestige factor in her family. Certainly a population of prestige-seeking people will exhibit a higher penetration rate of the prestigious language, and a higher level of saturation than other, non-prestige-seeking populations. Your second concern, that if mathematical modeling were applicable to the field of linguistics it would already have been done, is one of which I am quite skeptical. Mathematical modeling was not developed until World War II, and it was not being applied in civilian areas of research or universities until after the war (with the exception of physics, where modeling has been used for centuries--Newton, Einstein, e.g.). The development of multiple regression analysis, for instance, which was a great boon to the ability to actually test the mathematical model developed, did not occur until around 1955. The computers it took to make the incredibly complex calculations for multiple regression were not generally available until well after the 1950s. The first test of the medical model of the spread of infection was applied to heroin addiction in the late 1960's. This is still a relatively new field. Also, I do not know if the training for an academic linguist involves advanced mathematics and statistics. Are these subjects taken by Ph.D. candidates? If linguists are well trained in mathematics as another language, then I would be surprised that no quantitative work would have been done. But if they are not as a group well versed in these disciplines, I would be equally surprised if there had been much done. I can see a certain level of knowledge about statistics among some of the members of this interest group. All the scientific dating techniques of artifacts, for example, must involve the use of statistical probability, so you must be generally aware of the use of that tool. But, so far, at least, I haven't run into any work. If I don't see some soon, I may take a look at the journal literature in your field and see what I can find. I think this approach,while perhaps limited in its applicability to linguistics, may be of some help in forecasting the effects of invasions, migrations and general population movements. It may be an area that deserves looking into. Regards, Ray Hendon rayhendon at worldnet.att.net [ Moderator's comment: I think that in the typical program in linguistics, whether undergraduate or graduate, the only real exposure to statistics is in experimental phonetics, where simple statistics (Student's T, chi-square, analysis of variance, etc.) are needed to assure the validity of results. Few other subdisciplines use stats, since most of the work is done by individual introspection. --rma ] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 08:28:39 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 08:28:39 +0000 Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: Adam Hyllested writes: [on my remark about the placement of Norwegian] > Then take a glance at my tree (upside-down). > > NORDIC LANGUAGES > WEST NORDIC EAST NORDIC > Old Norse (+) *Old East Nordic (+) > Icelandic Swedish > Faroese Gutnish (+) > Norn (+) Danish > Norwegian Norwegian (Nynorsk) (Bokmål) Well, I guess this cuts the Gordian knot, all right. ;-) [snip] [LT] >> So, to put it crudely but picturesquely, Norwegian has migrated from one >> branch of the tree to another. And this is not the kind of phenomenon >> that the family-tree model can accommodate at all well. >> Some decades ago, either Trubetzkoy or Jakobson -- I forget which -- >> suggested that English had ceased to be a Germanic language and become a >> Romance language. Much more recently, C.-J. N. Bailey has likewise >> asserted that English is no longer a Germanic language but may perhaps >> be a Romance language. > To me, that doesn't make sense. The genetic classification of languages is > based on origins, not on linguistic similarities caused by later foreign > influence. Exactly. So, based on origins, we'd expect Norwegian to form a branch with Icelandic. Yet all the published trees I've ever seen group Norwegian with Danish and Swedish, in defiance of the original state of affairs, but in line with modern realities. I'm not defending any particular analysis here, merely pointing to an inadequacy of our family-tree model. > A Germanic language stays Germanic forever, no matter how > unrecognizeable it may have become. The leaves of a family language tree > simply cannot move from one branch to another. According to the family-tree model, this is correct. But my point was that this model does not suffice to capture all aspects of language history: sometimes reality is more complicated than this model can allow for. I might add that the well-known Pennsylvania tree for the IE family sees the entire Germanic branch as having done something similar: this view sees Germanic as having started off as part of an eastern cluster of IE languages, but then as having "migrated" (linguistically, I mean) into a western cluster. The authors' final decision is to put Germanic into a western branch, but they explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of this decision. > Problems in family-tree > classification occur, however, in cases of some pidgin languages with > roots in two (or more) language groups, or in cases of "mixed languages" > where the antecedents, including the direction of influence, remain > unclear. Yes, and this too is something I had in mind. The assorted "mixed languages", "portmanteau languages", "metatypic languages" and what not that have been recognized or argued for just don't fit comfortably into any family tree. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 15:42:05 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 11:42:05 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/13/99 11:22:51 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- true, and you'll also find that the period of Slavic-Gothic contact leading to loan-word deposition is prior to the 5th century CE. The loans were into Proto-Slavic, not any of the later Slavic languages.>> How do you know that and why are you so sure of it? Particularly how do you date the various sound shifts and on what grounds? How do you get your 5th Century date? How do you know it was Proto-Slavic and not Common Slavic and is there a difference? What's wrong with a 6th c. date, for example? Jordanes is almost 7th Century and he is a cleric who says he speaks Gothic and he lives in Constantinople. Some of these sound shifts are described as *PIE>Slavic, why couldn't it happen that way? <> I would be very interested in those late isoglosses and how they were derived. I wrote: <> JS wrote: <<-- take a look at the map. The Greeks sailed to the Black Sea coast, which was inhabited by _Iranian_ speakers, the Scythians proper. Beyond the _Iranian_ speakers were the Slavs, and beyond them -- and therefore in contact with them -- were the Germanics.>> It just doesn't shell out like that. There are the remains of a number of other distinct cultural groups between the Agricultural Scythians and north central Europe in the middle of the 1st millenium bce. See Dolukhanov, The Early Slavs (pb 1996) the map on page 134, which shows the AgScyths stretching across the mid Ukraine from the Bug to the Donets, mostly below the 50th parallel and less than a 100 miles from most of the major Greek settlements. Greek artfacts in this area from this period are not uncommon. On the other hand, Jastrof does not reach the upper Oder River until 500 bce. There are distinct concentrations of cultural remains in between Jastrof and the Central Ukraine and as far as I know very little evidence of material contact between the two. There is however both material evidence and attestation of contact between the AgScyths and the Greeks right about 500bce. JS wrote: <> Again, I don't know how you can be so sure about these things. The AgScyths are of course a name from Herodotus attached to rather distinct archaeological finds - and they jive well. If the AgScyths were the ProtoSlavs, they do not go west of the Daco-Thracian and are clearly culturally different than the more northern Milogradians. Herodotus simply says the "Neuri" are north of the AgScyths. Dolukhanov posits that Proto-Slavic developed from the AgScyths as a lingua franca of trade along the Russian rivers and up into the Novogrod area. But even here the contact with Jastrof is minimal until the current era. Mallory discusses the positions of Przeworsk versus AgScyth and Priapet in ISIE, although he seems to have his dates a little out of whack - Przeworsk being later and appearing in the Liebersee grave fields near Dresden only about the ToC. But needless to say all these Proto-Slavs cover a huge amount of ground - from the Elbe to the Danube to the Donets to Lake Ladoga - about the size of western Europe. Which I think shows that nothing is quite as certain as you suggest. If - and only if, I do not know for sure - the Proto-Slavs were the AgScyths, then their contact with Greeks (especially through the "Graeco-Scythian" Callipidae) is much more probable than with the early Germans. I wrote: <> JS wrote: <<-- they probably also had words for "house" and "stable" and "loaf of bread", but all these words were replaced by loans from Germanic in the Proto-Slavic period.>> I think the word for house shows up as "dom, domu-" in WS, which looks pretty PIE to me. Just curious, do you know any Proto-Slavic words that were borrowed by Germanic or was it all one way? And how sure are you of all this? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 07:35:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 03:35:41 EDT Subject: Prediction Message-ID: In a message dated 4/14/99 12:57:35 AM, rayhendon at worldnet.att.net wrote: <> Unfortunately, the meanings of the word "prediction" are the problem here. In the strict sense of the scientific method, predictability refers to the need to test a hypothesis. What you predict depends on your hypothesis. So if you hypothesize that Cicero wrote in Latin, then you might predict that there is a text somewhere by Cicero in Latin or better yet a Latin text where Cicero wrote in his own hand, "I'm writing in Latin." By predicting such evidence, you are showing how you would test your hypothesis. You or someone else will know what evidence to look for, based on this prediction. This is basic scientific methodology. If your hypothesis is that French will lose all sounds but "en" in the next twenty years, you may predict in support of that hypothesis that there is evidence of it now. If you predict there is only en or on coming out of French speakers now, you are providing someone a way to test your hypothsis. If they find that it is true, the confirmation of your prediction supports your hypothesis. "Predictability" is not pronostication. It is the way we test hypothesis. Whether a scientific prediction is about the future, or just about what one will find if one looks or experiments, all depends on the hypothesis. Hope this clears this up some. Regards, Steve Long From Sunnet at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 14 16:08:52 1999 From: Sunnet at worldnet.att.net (Eugene Kalutsky) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 12:08:52 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: zaterdag 10 april 1999 10:51 >In a message dated 4/8/99 9:07:20 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk writes: >>What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" >>over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed >>to a common-or-garden lexical innovation? My grandfather taught me when taking me to the taiga in Siberia that one should avoid saying the word "medved' " (Rus. 'bear', lit. 'he who knows honey' - already a taboo replacement) aloud while in the forest, because "he just might show up to see who's calling his name", i.e. to avoid a dangerous encounter with a bear while gathering berries or mushrooms. Instead he told me to use the words "xoz'ain" (master) or "kosolapyj" (the intoed). At the same time he instructed me to always put the first berry or mushroom found on top of a stump as a gift to the "khoz'ain lesa" ("master of the forest"). Doesn't this count as evidence for taboo replacement? >Exactly. After all, there was no taboo making the Romance languages shift >their work for "horse" from the Latin derivative of *ekwos to "caballus". >Aparently it was simply a shift, as if we'd stopped using "horse" and >substituted "nag" or "glue-bait" or "cayuse". In support of the above: In Modern Russian usage there are several words for "horse" - the most common - "loshad' " - is emotionally neutral, another commonly used term is "kon' " - which is more affectionate and can be used to describe a warhorse ("loshad' " just doesn't sound right when talking about a warhorse). The third most commonly used term is "kobyla" and it has a derogative sense - just one notch above "kl'acha" (nag). Gene Kalutsky From adahyl at cphling.dk Wed Apr 14 16:15:51 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 18:15:51 +0200 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Uh-oh. Nemesis made my Nordic family tree below look a bit surrealistic. What I meant was: WEST NORDIC: Old Norse (+) > Icelandic, Faroese, Norn (+), and Norwegian (Nynorsk) EAST NORDIC: *Old East Nordic (+) > Swedish, Gutnish (+), Danish, and Norwegian (Bokmål) On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Adam Hyllested wrote: > Then take a glance at my tree (upside-down). > NORDIC LANGUAGES > WEST NORDIC EAST NORDIC > Old Norse (+) *Old East Nordic (+) > Icelandic Swedish > Faroese Gutnish (+) > Norn (+) Danish > Norwegian Norwegian (Nynorsk) (Bokmål) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 16:54:05 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 17:54:05 +0100 Subject: gender assignment In-Reply-To: <19990412022833.20074.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [The moderator has pulled the plug on the purely historical discussion, but perhaps I might comment on the interesting linguistic point raised at the end of Roz's posting.] > And, on another note, certainly today many of those kids in Bilbao who > speak only Spanish but find it "hip" to talk about going home to > "hacer las lanas" have little or no idea what the word really means in > Euskara, for them its their "homework", a perfectly valid Spanish > word, a feminine noun regularly used in the plural. In Euskera, the > word is obviously not masculine or feminine (Euskera has no gender > marking in nouns), nor is used only in the plural to refer > exclusively to "homework." A Basque noun or adjective is most commonly used with the suffixed article <-a> attached, and hence Spanish-speakers would be more likely to hear rather than merely for `work'. When they borrowed the word, they had to assign it a gender, and it's not surprising that the word was made feminine, since final <-a> is the usual feminine marker in Spanish. But I can't guess why the word became plural in Spanish, or how it came to be restricted to `homework'. There are other such cases. A nice one is this. As is well known, the name of even the tiniest settlement gives rise in Spanish to a derived noun/adjective meaning `(person) from [that place]'. I've no idea what the traditional Spanish derivative for the Basque town of San Sebastian (Basque ) might be, or even if there is one. But, in recent years, the Basque word `(person) from SS' has been taken into Spanish, where it is assigned two forms: masculine and feminine . It is possible that the Basque word was borrowed without the article, and that Spanish then added its own typical feminine ending to get the feminine form. But I consider it more likely that the more frequent Basque definite form was borrowed, interpreted as feminine because of its final <-a>, and then given the obvious Spanish masculine counterpart. Anyway, this word is now used throughout Spain. Some others are confined to the local Spanish of the north, such as the feminine noun , taken from Basque , the definite form of the noun `a certain type of sausage'. Of course, many Basque words happen to end in <-a> or <-o> anyway, and, when these are borrowed into the local Spanish, they are usually assigned a Spanish gender matching the ending. So, `hood', `scoring token in the game of mus' and `stew' are masculine in Spanish, while `tug of war', `Basque-language school' and `turnip green' are feminine. An exception is `female teacher in a Basque-language school', which in spite of its form is feminine in Spanish, because of its meaning. Interestingly, the genderless Basque has started borrowing gender from Spanish. A number of Spanish adjectives, such as `nice' and `stupid, foolish', have been taken into Basque complete with their Spanish gender distinctions: hence Basque and , and , with the forms in <-a> applied to females and the forms in <-o> used in all other cases. This is fairly new. Previously Basque just borrowed a Romance adjective in its masculine form and used it invariantly. The new pattern has even spread to a few native words. For example, native `poor fellow', whose final <-o> is coincidental and has nothing to do with any sex-marking, has, for many speakers, acquired a counterpart , applied to women, in line with the Spanish system of marking gender. Basque may perhaps be in the early stages of acquiring from its neighbor a gender system which it formerly lacked absolutely. [moderator] > (Is there a Basque-L?) Yes, there is, and both Roz and I subscribe to it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Apr 14 19:58:54 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 20:58:54 +0100 Subject: Re Sanskrit t & d Message-ID: On final t and d in Sanskrit: If it's any help, even W S Allen ("Sandhi in Sanskrit") is little use. He reaffirms that there is absolutely no difference in practice between words ending in t and d. He says that this allows analysis either as -t# or as -d# (not his wording - and of course there are further possible analyses as well, such as -th or -dh). Then the significant bit: he seems to suggest that Panini analysed some forms as word final -d, but others as -t. Presumably then later writers simply followed Panini. But Allen doesn't help us see any basis for Panini's analysis. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 15 02:28:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 21:28:31 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Edward Heil Sent: Monday, April 12, 1999 3:52 PM >Hi. I just read Winifred Lehmann's _Theoretical Bases of Proto-Indo-European >Linguistics_ (I believe that's the name; don't have my copy next to me). >He refers to the theory set forth in his earlier _Proto-Indo-European >Phonology_ that there were no phonemic vowels in early PIE, that on the >contrary there was a non-segmental phonemic quality which he calls >"syllabicity" which would result in the phonetic manifestation of vowels in >certain positions. >Unfortunately, he doesn't give enough details for me to understand exactly >how >this process would have worked, and I don't have access to his earlier book. >I wonder if anyone familiar with this idea could give me a quick rundown on >the details? >[ Moderator's comment: > Lehmann's analysis is a monument to the structuralism of the 1940s. In any > reasonable phonological theory, this analysis could not be made. (If looked > at from the viewpoint of Stampe's natural phonology, Lehmann's "syllabicity" > is simply the vowel /a/, with allophonic variation becoming phonemicized > over time.) For another example of the same kind of analysis, one which has > been examined in the literature, see Aert Kuipers' monograph on Kabardian > from the 1960s. I forget the exact title, but it was published in the > _Janua Linguarum, Series Minor_ by Mouton; it should be available in a > university library. > --rma ] I have a very different opinion from our moderator. For me, Lehmann's concept of syllabicity is the sine qua non of any successful effort to link Indo-European and Semitic. Without it, no sense can be made of IE apophony or Semitic consonantal roots. Without it, all attempts to understand the structure of Nostratic as the ancestor of IE and Semitic will be doomed. Unfortunately, none of the Nostraticists have understood this. As a consequence, the work of Illich-Svitych and Bomhard and others is tragically flawed. Most interestingly, the relationship between IE and Semitic was not a desideratum for Lehmann when he made his analysis, which was made solely on the strength of the facts in IE. The basic scenario is so simple that I am amazed that most linguists have not understood and adopted Lehmann's basic theory. 1) we find in IE roots with short vowels exclusively of the basic form Ce/oC (where neither C is a 'laryngeal' [H]); 2) we have two choices for the reconstruction of the root vowel(s) for *any* earlier stage of IE or ancestor of IE: a) to assume that apophony was present in every earlier stage of IE and in every ancestor of IE, including Nostratic; and beyond or b) to assume that apophony was not present in every earlier stage of IE and in every ancestor of IE, including Nostratic; and beyond. 3) None of the Nostraticists have assumed a); in fact, I presently know of no one who would assert a). 4) Facts like palatized dorsals (g{^}, g{^}, k{^}) argue strongly for an ancestor of IE that had phonemic [e], i.e. suggests b). 5) Facts such as roots of identical phonetic shape, like *1. pe/ol-, 'flow'; *2a. pe/ol-, 'push'; *2b. pe/ol-, 'dust'; *3a. pe/ol-, 'fold'; *3b. pe/ol-, 'cover', *4. pe/ol-, 'plate'; *5. pe/ol-, 'sell'; *6. pe/ol-, 'gray'; etal., indicate that some device distinguished among these roots *prior* to the extensive use of root-extensions; any other explanation than originally phonemic vowels is unnecessarily speculative, and has no basis in the later facts of IE. 6) Personally, I believe that Lehmann's "syllabicity" can be phonetically identified as [a] however it is not necessary to assume this. A Lehmann root like *p_l (with [ _ ] indicating syllabicity), might have had multiple realizations of _ so long as the vocalic realizations were allophones of [ _ ], and did not provide semantic differentiation. Thus, the comparison with Kuipers' analysis of Kabardian is not necessarily appropriate. 7) Based on the fact that Semitic shows no signs whatsoever of phonemic vowels, we can presume that the parent of Semitic expressed semantic differences solely through the consonants. If Lehmann's syllabicity is acknowledged, then IE also expressed semantic differences *solely* through the consonants, and the Nostratic parent of them both, at least at a late stage, must have been monovocalic (as I believe) or indifferently vocalic. Although Lehmann addressed only IE facts, his theory of "syllabicity" is the only rational basis for constructing a Nostratic that can successfully unify IE and Semitic. It is one of the most significant results of analysis in linguistics of the 20th century. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Apr 15 04:22:07 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 21:22:07 PDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: RAY HENDON: [...] in this theoretical realm I see what I believe to be a propery analogous situation from medical research: their use of a mathematical probability modeling technique to predict the spread of infectious disease among a community. I'm not sure if that is a proper analogy. Consider this. A virus is fully definable, that is, by its genetic code. We can define and distinguish different strains unambiguously this way. There might be a cytosine instead of a guanine down the RNA sequence that shows a discrete difference between two strains of virus. In order to make this analogy between "spread of infectious disease" and "spread of language" stick, wouldn't you need to be able to just as accurately define and distinguish between different languages and dialects? Afterall, language is the subject of your model and without it properly being explained and understood, the results would be meaningless. However what defines a particular language as unambiguously unique from another? How do we define "English"? There are many dialects of English. Do we consider all the English dialects as part of a single language or consider them seperate? How many dialects should there be of English? At what point do the differences between one speech form and another become insignificant or significant in these definitions? Should Proto-Indo-European, Germanic or the descendant of English 500 years from now be considered "English"? What number of people need to speak a particular speech form before it is considered a seperate and statistically significant speech form. Is Eyak a real language? What about artificial languages like Esparanto (some million or so strong so I hear) or Klingon (you know how prevalent Trekkies are)? Etc.... RAY HENDON: What I failed to emphasize in my earlier suggestion is each variable is itself a function, dependent upon many things. But, all the miriad other things that influence what langage a given population is likely to speak are accounted for with the "exposure" and "susceptibility" variables. Well, after "language" is defined, you need to contrive a way of measuring "exposure" and "susceptibility". First off, what constitutes "exposure"? The measurement of such a thing is further complicated by recent technological advances in mass communications (TV, radio, internet, etc) that redefine "exposure" as a potentially ubiquitous thing that no longer has to arise from side-by-side contact of two cultures. Measuring the exposure rate of a language cannot be accurately done by simply counting how many people of one language group physically co-exist with another group. Lurking social variables (part of your "suspectibility" variable) always have something to do with this equation but how does one discover them and again how does one define these variables, especially when dealing with the remote past? One would think that by now, English strongly affects all languages more or less equally and its "exposure" rate is thus the same but Finnish is a type of language that resists foreign words by creating it's own like for "telephone". Same for Mandarin "railroad", "television". Or as a friend of mine enjoyed sharing, his example of the term "screaming broom" for the modern word "vaccuum" in his language, Low German. Yet, Japanese has been hard hit by English with items like "computer", "McDonald's" and during that highly publicized vomiting incident by President Bush, my personal favourite "to do a Bush". And what happens when one language is considered "lower-class" than another, like Yiddish or American Indian languages have been in this century. How could we possibly predict that these kinds of social circumstances would have occured or when and how they will occur in the future? RAY HENDON: Just as there are many reasons why some people are vulnerable to influenza, and there are many reasons why a person is exposed to the virus, in the end it doesn't matter. They have either been exposed to it or not, and if there is no exposure there will be no influenza. If they are exposed, they are either susceptible to the infection or they are not susceptible to the infection. The why's and wherefore's are a different matter. This is what makes the spread of infectious disease different from language. The medical community is blessed with discrete variables to measure. Linguists aren't so lucky. Language is a human and social process - the why's and wherefore's _do_ matter very much. Unfortunately, they can't be reasonably measured just as "love" and "hate" can't be measured. These are human variables and we can be very unpredictable little monkies. Perhaps a psychological model, although I'm still skeptical, would be better suited to this task. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Apr 15 14:46:43 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 17:46:43 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <40f27b6c.2442b201@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I wrote: > <> > In a message dated 4/10/99 8:47:47 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: > < indications that you are using a different Webster's than I am, > my Webster's says that a truism is "a self-evident, obvious > truth.">> > I wrote: > <> > whiting at cc.helsinki.fi replied: > < truths" can be contradicted...>> > FYI: > New Oxford Dictionary adds that, in Logic, truism is "a proposition that > states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms." I'm glad to see that you a learning how to use British dictionaries. This is a big step for an American. But it doesn't do any good if this is simply a means of extending your range of misunderstanding. "A proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms" is like "I don't like my tea too hot." I.e., "too hot" has no referent beyond what is liked and simply means "I don't like my tea any hotter than I like it" without ever saying how hot "too hot" is. It imparts no new information and is a "truism" in the trivial sense of the word. This, however, is fundamentally different from truisms like "the sky is blue" or "the sun rises in the east," which are simply self-evident obvious truths. Now when you label "linguistic change is unpredictable" as a truism, it is clearly of the "self-evident, obvious truth" type rather than of the "states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms" type. Therefore, by labelling it a "self-evident, obvious truth" you are pleading nolo contendere. No further proof is needed. > Without addressing ideas like >language changes except when it doesn't<, I > must admit that in the past I've been guilty of a few truisms myself. But > this is how you can declare a statement a truism and still contradict the > underlying proposition: > >From Uniform Rules for Debate, HDS/GUDS(1962) > "A debator who runs a truism will fail... by jumping to a conclusion made > necessary by virtue of his definition. A truism will also be irrelevant > because it will not be resolving one of the issues that could otherwise have > been debated." Since a truism simply restates the premise and is irrelevant, > "a pleading in the alternative ...allows the challenger to both assert an > objection to the truism and [at the same time] attack the underlying > proposition..." This is all very interesting, but irrelevant because this refers to a truism used as an argument. It does not have to do with the truth of the truism, but with its relevance. But in the case at hand, there is no underlying proposition. The truism is the proposition. "Linguistic change is unpredictable" was presented as an observation (much along the lines of "the sun rises in the east") that is so well documented that it fits into the self-evident and obvious category (see, e.g., H. H. Hock, _Principles of Historic Linguistics_ (Berlin - New York - Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991 [2nd ed.]), Section 20.5 "The Linguistic unpredictability of change"; if you don't have access to Hock, you can probably find a similar statement in most any other handbook on historical linguistics). But I'm glad that you brought up the question of the relevance of truisms used as arguments because a really great example of it is your often-used "walks like a duck..." Now this is your shorthand flag for the truism "if X and Y are indistinguishable, then X is the same as Y," which is of the "states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms" type (i.e., it translates into "if two things aren't different, they are the same," a simple pairing of one word with its negated antonym). I'm sure you see this as an incontestable argument (or else you just like the sound of the words), but those who have not only read the handbook but also understood it just see it as an irrelevant truism. > Functionally consistent with Merriam/Webster's a "truth...too obvious for > mention." Don't mention it. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Apr 15 15:22:12 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 10:22:12 -0500 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: Peter wrote: >Bob mentioned the German "Handschuh" as a light-hearted example of >compounding from language poverty. It's not, actually. My Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der deutschen Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), say the following (my translation of German original): Germanic *_andasko:haz_ 'countershoe' [Kluge glosses as _Gegenschuh_, the meaning of which is at least very obscure], also found in the Old English given name _Andsce:oh_, has been reinterpreted into Old High German _hantscuoh_ [hand-shoe]; the place name _Handschuhsheim_ is also related. Place names in -_heim_ often have a personal name as the first component. Kluge adds that there was at least one Germanic word word for glove, the form of which must have been approximately *_wand_-, referring to something knitted ("wound"), with a possible second one *_skinthaz_ 'hide' borrowed into Finnish to yield modern _kinnas_ (genitive _kintaan_) 'glove'. If Kluge is right, _Handschuh_ represents not compounding for lack of a proper word, but rather folk etymology. >Shifting from Neolithic to modern, many German explanatory compounds are due >to the lack of a standardised or central dialect at a time when wider >communication (e.g. for commercial purposes) was becoming necessary. You >could not advertise "semmel" in areas that used some other word for it, but >"broetchen" (= "little bread") could be understood readily anywhere. Really? Do you think German bakers shipped their wares cross-country in the sixteenth century? And even if they had, _Broetchen_ wouldn't help, since many areas didn't (and don't) use -_chen_ as a diminutive. And really finally, _Broetchen_ is *not* a compound, since -_chen_ is merely a suffix. >So some at least of these explanatory compounds derive not from poverty but >from excess. Compounding in German has gone on as long as the language is recorded. Since the Germanic compounding types are identical to those found in Greek and Sanskrit, compounding must be seen as an Indo-European process. But there's no denying that German has exploited it even more than English (recall that _white wine_ is a compound, not adjective + noun!). A very large source is the calquing of Latin compounds: _in-cipere_ < *_in-capere_ 'begin' was calqued as _an-fangen_. Though both literally say "catch on", both actually mean 'begin'. And sometimes there's more than one stage: Greek _sym-pathia_ ("feeling with') was calqued to yield Latin _com-passio_ (ditto), which the 14-century mystics converted to the equivalent of modern _Mit-leid_ -- still "feeling with", but meaning 'sympathy'. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Apr 15 16:09:25 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 11:09:25 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Ed wrote: >Hi. I just read Winifred Lehmann's _Theoretical Bases of Proto-Indo-European >Linguistics_ (I believe that's the name; don't have my copy next to me). >He refers to the theory set forth in his earlier _Proto-Indo-European >Phonology_ that there were no phonemic vowels in early PIE, that on the >contrary there was a non-segmental phonemic quality which he calls >"syllabicity" which would result in the phonetic manifestation of vowels in >certain positions. rma added: >[ Moderator's comment: > Lehmann's analysis is a monument to the structuralism of the 1940s. In any > reasonable phonological theory, this analysis could not be made. (If looked > at from the viewpoint of Stampe's natural phonology, Lehmann's "syllabicity" > is simply the vowel /a/, with allophonic variation becoming phonemicized > over time.) For another example of the same kind of analysis, one which has > been examined in the literature, see Aert Kuipers' monograph on Kabardian > from the 1960s. I forget the exact title, but it was published in the > _Janua Linguarum, Series Minor_ by Mouton; it should be available in a > university library. > --rma ] Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a mess. The Neogrammarians had realized that the vowels [i u] tend to alternate with [y w] under conditions which no one has ever been able to specify *exactly*; since this was apparently his dissertation, he felt obligated to say this within the framework dominant at the time: PIE [i u] were allophones of /y w/, not "true" vowels, just as PIE syllabic [M N L R] were allophones of /m n l r/. Furthermore, though the laryngeals were unambiguously consonants in PIE (his view and mine, though others differ), the attested IE languages often have vowels where there were once laryngeals. The Neogrammarians had posited PIE Schwa in just such places. While rejecting Neo-grammarian Schwa, Lehmann adopted Hermann Hirt's theory of PIE ablaut, which entailed a weak vowel ("schwa secundum") in addition to the more commonly accepted ablaut grades. He writes subscript e for this. Within HIrt's framework, Schwa secundum represented those cases in which full-grade PIE /e/ or /o/ did not vanish in an unstressed syllable, but rather remained as Schwa secundum -- in other words, a syllable was weakened but not lost. (Like the Neogrammarians, Lehmann saw PIE /e o e: o:/ as real vowels, always syllabic but subject to weakening or loss. He differed in claiming that [a a:] were allophones of /e e:/ next to a-coloring laryngeals, and in analyzing most apparent long vowels as sequences of short vowel + laryngeal.) Lehmann then claimed that the traditional PIE Schwa was actually a sequence of Schwa secundum + laryngeal: the weak vowel was affected enough by the laryngeal that it was phonetically different than in non-laryngeal environments. I have read Lehmann's book numerous times (though not recently) and have learned much from it (as well as recognizing numerous errors and contradictions). But I simply do not remember his ever making any use of "syllabicity" beyond the obvious ones: /m n l r y w/ had syllabic realizations between non-syllabic segments, and the "vocalization (as many call it) of the laryngeals was due to a preceding weak vowel, Schwa secundum. Nothing mysterious when all is said and done; the only question is whether one can accept any given part of this whole poorly-integrated theory. (Personally, I accept Schwa secundum, but virtually no one else does these days.) Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis [ Moderator's comment: The "syllabicity" in question is in the final chapter of the book, in the discussion of the stages of pre-IE vocalism leading up to the vowel system seen in PIE, by which I mean that reconstructible from the daughter languages in Neogrammarian fashion. The earliest stage which he posits is one in which there is *no* phonemic vowel at all. I was charmed by the notion for years as an undergraduate, but then I learned more phonology. --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 16 07:26:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 08:26:35 +0100 Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Glen said: >I AM concerned about whether IE had medial *H1 and I find no >indication so far that this necessarily has to be the case. There are examples of medial *h1 at least in: *yeh1g youth *meh1n-s month I'm sure others out there can find more. Peter From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 16 08:08:37 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 01:08:37 PDT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Mr. Gordon has unsubscribed from the Indo-European mailing list. If you wish him to see any reply, please send a private copy to him as well as to the list. --rma ] MODERATOR: Why would a glottal stop "certainly not be" a distinct phoneme? I can think of several languages off the top of my head in which it is, so there is no reason other than _a priori_ bias to reject in for PIE. ME (GLEN): [...] It is because of pairs like *tuH and *twe (and other phenomena) which lead me to believe that there were, on top of long vowels from loss of laryngeals, differing lengthes of vowels determined by stress accent and shape of syllable which cause some of the anomalies present WITHIN IE. Hence a more credible *tu:/*twe without "intrusive and inexplicable H" fully explainable by accent. MODERATOR: >Message-ID: <19990412011754.39210.qmail at hotmail.com> >From: "Glen Gordon" >Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 18:17:52 PDT > >Well, here's my current position. I accept *H2 and *H3 as being >/h/ and /h/ respectively (and thus parallel to the velars). >*H1 on the other hand is at most a glottal stop which, iff it >occured at all, certainly would not have been a distinct phoneme. Your original statement reads as an _a priori_ rejection of glottal stop as a possible phoneme in any language. That may not be what you meant, but it is assuredly what you wrote, and on that basis, I asked the question above. It's not at all what I wrote unless you are to interpret *H1, *H2 and *H3 as being anything other than RECONSTRUCTED PHONEMES. I don't understand. What does the "*" symbol mean to you? Surely, anyone reading this would understand that I'm speaking only of a particular reconstructed language at the very least, if not IE itself to which *H2 and *H3 are often associated. Being the IE list, I figure unless I specify another proto-language, *H1-*H3 are purely IE entities and the statements that follow are statements solely concerning IE. Perhaps you aren't reading slow enough and striving to understand what you are reading before jumping off the trigger with irrelevant charges. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Apr 16 10:45:49 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 11:45:49 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >I might add that the well-known Pennsylvania tree for the IE family sees the >entire Germanic branch as having done something similar: this view sees >Germanic as having started off as part of an eastern cluster of IE languages, >but then as having "migrated" (linguistically, I mean) into a western >cluster. The authors' final decision is to put Germanic into a western >branch, but they explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of this decision. Well-known, but not to me, alas: could we have a reference? Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 16 11:44:41 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 13:44:41 +0200 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: vrijdag 16 april 1999 11:18 [snip] >For Mallory, "moving between languages" was the crux of the whole >Indo-European issue. (ISIE, p257) I read in D, Crystal that the loss of >inflection in English has been closely connected with the bilingualism >effected by the Danish invasions (CamEncyl Eng Lang p 32). >Steve Long [Ed Selleslagh] That may be right, but how do you explain the same, and simultaneous, phenomenon in Dutch, a closely (geographically and linguistically) related language, which underwent only a very minor influence from the Viking invasions? The rest of Low-German equally lost a major part of its inflection, in contrast with High-German - and a lot of the little that's left may be attributed to High-German influence, or even re-introduction by analogy (HG being the language of education). Could it be that this phenomenon is the dominant one in Germanic, and that High-German is the exception? (and why, or 'how come'?) BTW, I don't know the answer. Ed. From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Apr 16 13:06:26 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 14:06:26 +0100 Subject: gender assignment Message-ID: Interestingly, the genderless Basque has started borrowing gender from Spanish. [snip] The new pattern has even spread to a few native words. For example, native `poor fellow', whose final <-o> is coincidental and has nothing to do with any sex-marking, has, for many speakers, acquired a counterpart , applied to women, in line with the Spanish system of marking gender. Basque may perhaps be in the early stages of acquiring from its neighbor a gender system which it formerly lacked absolutely. Most interesting. Are there any cases of it happening on non-o/a stems, e.g. * 'old (man)' or * by reinterpretation of the native <-a>? Or is it a restricted lexical thing, the way we have in English with fiance/e and blond/e? Of course these are pronounced the same but being literate we have to decide how to write them, and do consistently mark gender. Words where there's a spoken difference are so rare that perhaps we don't have to decide. He is always nai"ve, as is she, but she is a... faux-nai"f? I would say 'a Filipino housemaid', because if I decide that maids are Filipin-a, what is the Filipin-o/a language, culture, etc... Rather than having to think "now what gender is ?" it's easier to force gender out, they way we have with employee, divorcee, naive. The influence of French is small enough that these will remain oddities like foreign plurals rather than influence the grammar. Nicholas Widdows From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 16 13:22:38 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 07:22:38 -0600 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: > >This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five > >different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the > >direct source. The stories are: > >(4) from an unspecified Congolese language; > >You pays your money... > >(4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese > > language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in > > the Congolese rain forests. Not to mention the problem that there are over a hundred "Congolese" languages. Which one? John McLaughlin Utah State University From jrader at m-w.com Fri Apr 16 09:33:36 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 09:33:36 +0000 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: A few comments on the discussion below, though we are drifting rather far from Indo-European: as a source for , the Tamil compound translated as "elephant killer" is cited in Yule and Burnell's _Hobson-Jobson_, but retracted more or less in a parenthetical note in later editions in favor of a Sinhalese word . As far as I know, no one has ever seriously disputed the etymology. The Sinhalese word was borrowed into English, not Portuguese, and the misapplication to a South American snake was due to confusion among biologists. The Brazilian Portuguese word for the anaconda (Eunectes murinus) is , with many variants, borrowed from Tupi. If exists in current Portuguese, it is as a borrowing of an international zoological term. I don't think Robert poses a really valid objection to Larry's points. Jim Rader > LARRY TRASK: > >> And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said > >> to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. > > >This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five > >different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the > >direct source. The stories are: > > >(1) of unknown origin; > >(2) from , the wind god, because of the animal's speed; > >(3) from some Italian development of a Latin * `wild horse; > >(4) from an unspecified Congolese language; > >(5) from Amharic `zebra'. > > >You pays your money... > > >(1) is undiscussable. > >(2) looks fanciful to me. > >(3) seems to have a phonological problem, unless there were Italian > > dialects in which /kw/ was reduced to /k/ very early. > >(4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese > > language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in > > the Congolese rain forests. > >(5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word > > get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese > > were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) ROBERT ORR: > when you consider what you have to assume to get Tamil yaanai-kolra > - "elephant killer" 1) borrowed into Portuguese 2) transferred all the way > to South America 3) become establsihed enough in the language to refer to > another giant snake, i.e., "anaconda" (the exact path taken by stages 2 and > 3 is open to debate), (5) above doesn't really look like a problem at all. From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Apr 16 14:17:08 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 16:17:08 +0200 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: EGO: > The genetic classification of languages is > based on origins, not on linguistic similarities caused by later foreign > influence. LARRY TRASK: > Exactly. So, based on origins, we'd expect Norwegian to form a branch > with Icelandic. There should be absolutely no doubt that one of the Norwegian standards, Nynorsk (lit. 'New Norwegian' or 'Modern Norwegian' - actually, the archaic variety) belongs to the West Nordic Group together with Icelandic and Faroese. Nynorsk is based on the original dialects of Norway, and these all share the typical West Nordic linguistic features. The problem arouses when one tries to include Bokmål (lit. 'Book Language' or 'Written Language'), because this second standard has developed from written *Danish* with Norwegian as a substrate. LARRY TRASK: > Yet all the published trees I've ever seen group Norwegian with > Danish and Swedish, in defiance of the original state of affairs, but in > line with modern realities. Again, with one modification: this is only true of Bokmål. EGO: > A Germanic language stays Germanic forever, no matter how > unrecognizeable it may have become. The leaves of a family language tree > simply cannot move from one branch to another. LARRY TRASK: > According to the family-tree model, this is correct. But my point was that > this model does not suffice to capture all aspects of language history Should it? To me, the family tree model is purely genetic. LARRY TRASK: > I might add that the well-known Pennsylvania tree for the IE family sees the > entire Germanic branch as having done something similar: this view sees > Germanic as having started off as part of an eastern cluster of IE languages, > but then as having "migrated" (linguistically, I mean) into a western > cluster. The authors' final decision is to put Germanic into a western > branch, but they explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of this decision. If Germanic started off as part of an eastern IE cluster, then even today I would group it into this cluster to show its Eastern IE heritage. Best regards, Adam Hyllested From jer at cphling.dk Fri Apr 16 15:00:41 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 17:00:41 +0200 Subject: -s. vs. (-)t- In-Reply-To: <19990414023755.96828.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > MIGUEL: [...] > To account for the nominative and accusative forms, these case endings > must be viewed as older than the rest of the declension that we now > find in IE. That's what I've been saying all along, so I cannot disagree. [...] > Revised rule: Pre-IE **-Vt > IE *Vs > but Pre-IE **-Ct > IE *Ct > > Does that explain everything now? Gettin' out the check list... > 2nd person *-s? Check. No: We also have 2sg *-s after consonants! > Relationship of substantive/aorist? Check. Incomprehensible to me; what are you talking about? > The > infamous *t/*s alternation. Check. That is correct in so far as the alternant /s/ (when there _is_ an alternation) is restricted to word-final position and to the position at the old boundary before the added "wak-case ending". However, we also have /s/ before some stem-elaborating suffixes, certainly the fem. ptc. in *-us-iH2. > Examples where final **t doesn't > become *s? Maybe. Impossible: We cannot dispense with an element /t/ that never becomes /s/. Jens From stevegus at aye.net Fri Apr 16 14:32:16 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 10:32:16 -0400 Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > Exactly. So, based on origins, we'd expect Norwegian to form a branch with > Icelandic. Yet all the published trees I've ever seen group Norwegian with > Danish and Swedish, in defiance of the original state of affairs, but in line > with modern realities. I'm not defending any particular analysis here, > merely pointing to an inadequacy of our family-tree model. Phonologically, the mainland Scandinavian languages all seem relatively conservative. There seems to have been, moreover, a common literary form of Scandinavian that was in use throughout the entire region during the "Old Norse" period; of course, this may be an artifact of the fact that most of the literature from this period that has been preserved for us, has been preserved in Iceland. AAR, it may have been that this Common Scandinavian may have kept some mutual understandability, at least at the "let's go in that house" level, with other Germanic tongues with which it was in contact, such as Old English in the north of England, and later, with North German in the Baltic area. This served as an anchor that kept the phonology relatively constant, and relatively close to the parent language --- even as it wore down the inflection system. Of course, English borrowed -pronouns- from Scandinavian; -they, them- and perhaps the long 'u' in -thou- were apparently taken; and basic words like -give- (instead of *yive) show profound Scandinavian influence. Of course, even now, (Bokmel) Norwegian and Swedish are for the most part mutually understood, and Danish is also understandable with some difficulty. Danish (and southern Swedish) have undergone some phonological innovations not shared by standard Swedish or Norwegian; on the other hand, the vocabulary of Danish is shared with Norwegian more than with Swedish. Interestingly, Icelandic and Ffroese, the "conservative" versions of Scandinavian, that keep most of the inflectional system and lack the Low German vocabulary shared by Common Scandinavian, are perhaps the most phonologically innovative. Ffroese, especially, being apparently the most isolated tongue of them all, shows some profound sound changes that are largely obscured by its archaizing spelling system. This would seem to bear out the hypothesis that the mainland Scandinavian languages were "anchored," not only to one another, but indeed to neighbouring Germanic speech that was even farther away on the family tree. It is of course an advantage to have your language understood by your neighbours, even if they speak a different variety of a related tongue. I suspect that this mutual intelligibility more or less anchored Scandinavian, not only to its neighbour North Germanic dialects whose divergence is largely a matter of political accident, but indeed to some extent to High German, English, and other West Germanic dialects. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Fri Apr 16 16:41:11 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 11:41:11 -0500 Subject: Prediction Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >"Predictability" is not pronostication. It is the way we test hypothesis. >Hope this clears this up some. >Regards, >Steve Long The test of an hypothesis is a test of the reliability of the prediction the hypothesis makes. If the predictive power of the hypothesis is good, i.e., if it is a reliable predictor, predicting again and again the actual events, then we generally accept the hypothesis as valid. If I am seeking out manuscripts that were written in and around Rome in the year AD 100, your hypothesis might be that I should expect to find these documents written in Latin. If I look at the documents and find they were indeed in Latin, and if most other scholars finds the same thing, your hypothesis will generally be accepted as true. It accurately and reliably accounts for the facts we find of that period at that place. To make any assertion of the past is a prediction as to what one would find if one went there and looked or listened. I cannot see, with all due respect, that an hypothesis is anything else at its core, than a prediction that two things are related in a cause-effect manner, and that the relationship is predictable. I could have used a less perjorative term like "expected," rather than "predicted, " although they are the same in a statistical sense. We are not saying something should happen, but is likely, or expected, to happen. But I intentionally used "predict" so as no to try and cover up this most fundamental nature of an hypothesis. If I had a recording of every word spoken during Cicero's life, and I counted the words he spoke and classified each word as belonging to certain linguistic group, I could then compute what percentage of his words were of one language and what of another. Using this kind of modal calculation I might then advance the hypotesis that I would expect Cicero would speak in Latin, since the overwhelming body of evidence I possess is of his speaking this tongue. Although there is a mystical, somewhat unacceptable connotation to the words"predict" or "forecast," mathematical modeling and non-mathematical modeling still have a predictive quality that I do not see can be avoided. I don't mean this in an argumentative way. I may be just dense on the matter and fail to see the obvious, but fail to see it ,I do. The word "expected" demystifies the statement of predictibility, and puts it in on more or less a scientific footing, but an hypothesis is still a prognostication. Sincerely, Ray Hendon From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Apr 16 17:32:54 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 12:32:54 -0500 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: So, are you saying that Bokmål is pretty much Norwegianized Danish? [snip] >WEST NORDIC: >Old Norse (+) > Icelandic, Faroese, Norn (+), and Norwegian (Nynorsk) >EAST NORDIC: >*Old East Nordic (+) > Swedish, Gutnish (+), Danish, and Norwegian (Bokmål) > [snip] Is Gutnish the same as Skanian? I've run into people from southern Sweden who claim Skanian as their native language. I've also run into people from Bornholm who claim that a distinctive Scandinavian language is spoken there. Are these dialects or transitional languages? From jer at cphling.dk Fri Apr 16 17:50:06 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 19:50:06 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990413204734.81479.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > ME (GLEN) IN RESPONSE TO JENS' SOUND RULE FOR *yu:s "you": > Still don't get it. How does *t- become *y-?? [...] Dear friends, I had not anticipated that the list would be discussing what I might possibly mean by a passing comment. Maybe I can save you some trouble by specifying what I had in mind. Twenty years ago I was giving a course in IE morphology and, just before we were to deal with the personal pronouns, there was a one-week vacation. I prepared a series of handouts containing all attested forms from the diverse branches together with their probable history. For each branch I tried to specify a intermediate proto-stage (like, Indo-Iranian or Proto- Germanic), and for the whole thing, of course, an IE stage. It then became obvious that the result lent itself to further analysis, and it was now my idea to get as far into that as I could. I was working on the assumption that there ought to be some connection between the pronominal forms and the personal markers of the verb. I also considered it probably, not to say evident, that the personal markers recur in neighbouring linguistic families like Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut (I knew too little of the other Nostratic branches). The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in Evid.f.Laryng. as *eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) *me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) I have some difficulty only with the 2du acc. for which the Skt. stem yuva- (with y- from the nom.) rather points to *uH3e, probably with dissimilatory loss of the *-w-. The other cases are formed from the acc. by the addition of postpostions, cf. Vedic dat. asma-bhyam 'to us', abl. ma-t, tva-t, asma-t, yuSma-t etc. The disyllabic acc.s have enclitic variats consisting in the first (underlying) syllable, *noH3, *woH3, *nos, *wos, for med a time when there was a vowel /o/ in that syllable. Possessive adjectives are formed from the acc. by vrddhi: *tew-o-s, *no:H3-o-s, *wo:H3-o-s, *no:s-o-s, *wo:s-o-s. The 1sg *me had to prefix the vrddhi vowel because there was only one consonant, *emo-s 'my'. The reason is that there is no variant *mwe parallel with *t(w)e and *s(w)e, but that is obviously due to simple sound change, *mwe > *me completed before the poss.adj. was derived. >From the poss.adj.s were formed substantivized uninflected forms used as genitives of the personal pronoun: *tewe 'of thee', *no:se 'of us' etc. In the 1sg, *eme was adjusted to *meme by adoption of the same beginning as the other cases, then dissimilated to PIE *mene (Av. mana, OCS mene). Now it appears that there are so many unexpected u- or w-elements that something just has to be included into the underlying forms to account for this. Note that, while *tu:, *yu:s are 2nd person, there is /w/ in the 1st person du./pl. *we:, *wey. That must be accounted for. I can suggest only the presence of a STEM consonant /w/ originally present in ALL forms and thus meaning something like "person" or "speech-act participant", because that's what all the forms have in common. It is plain that *nH3we : *nsme contain the number markers, /H3/ for dual, /s/ for plural, while the -me is the casemarker of the acc.; the -we occurring after the dual markers appears to represent a development of -me in that position (cf. the VERBAL 1du in -we as opposed to 1pl -me which were probably also originally accompanied by du. vs. pl. markers). As number markers we find *H3 (something like a voiced labiovelar spirant), not at all out of style with what is found in Eskimo-Aleut (a velar spirant) and Uralic (a velar spirant in Vogul). For the pl. we have in IE *-y and *-s, perhaps in complementary distribution, and not quite unlike Esk.-Al. /D/ (dental spirant), cf. also Finn. -j-/-t. A therefore calculate with /G/ (velar spirant) for the dual and /D/ dental spirant) for the plural. The vocalization appears to be simple: The nominatives have a vowel before the last consonant, while the acc. adds *-m to the full nom. form, this triggering the addition of *-e after the resulting final cluster. There is final accent throughout. We cannot explain *eg' 'I' as part of the original system, but all the rest can be relatively artlessly derived from a completely regular underlying inflection: 1. person 2. person nom. acc. nom. acc. Sg. (m-w) m-w-m t-w t-w-m Du. m-w-G m-w-G-m t-w-G t-w-G-m Pl. m-w-D m-w-D-m t-w-D t-w-D-t With vocalization - and suggested stages of the phonetic development: mew-me tew tew-me mweG mweG-me tweG tweG-me mweD mweD-me tweD tweD-me tuw nweGme twuG weD nweDme twuD mewe tewe weG neGme DwuG DweGme neDme DwuD DweDme DuG DuD tu neGwe DweGwe weGwe weDme juG wej nezme juz wezme mowe towe we' noG-we ju' woG-we noz-me woz-me mwe tu twe we nH3we yu wH3we wey nsme yus wsme > PIE me tu twe we nH3we yu uH3(w)e wey nsme yus usme with enclit. me te noH3 woH3 nos wos The changes are in part pure invention, but not unnatural and not without intrinsic coherence: 1. The vocalization is normally with /e/, only assimilated to /u/ in the nom.s of the 2nd person *tuw *twuG *twuD. No such assimilation took place in the forms beginning with *m- (1st person), which must be a dissmilatory brake on the rounding influence ("ma non troppo"). 2. *mw-Gm- and *mw-Dm- changed the initial to *n- (dissimilation). 3. wm > w, mw > w, nw > n, tw > Dw 4.5.6. wu > u, Gm > Gw, Dw > w 7. D > j- initially, -z- medially (before consonant?), but word-finally -z after high vowel (-uz in juz, cf. instr.pl. in -bhis), -j after non-high vowel (-ej in wej, cf. toy 'they'); -z (> -s) finally after consonant does not apply here. 8. On its way to zero, unaccented /e/ becomes /o/ as already known. Final G is lost (presumably through change into a feature on the preceding vowel, perhaps glottlization). After that time, the first-syllable stretches of the du. and pl. accusatives are singled out as enclitics, this giving *noH3 and *woH3 with retained spirants, pl. *nos, *wos. 9. Unstressed short vowels are completely lost, and the cluster mw thereby arising is reduced to m. 10 (not in the chart). Monosyllabic forms develop long-vowel (emphatic?) variants: *tu:, *t(w)e(:), etc. Viewed in this fashion, 'us' IS the acc.pl. of 'me', 'ye' the nom.pl of 'thou, thee', etc. The system may be fully regular, based on normal inflection. The use of dual and plural number is elliptic: the dual of 'me' means 'me and someone else', the plural 'me and some others', i.e. what is normally called 'us'; note that this is normal IE syntax. The sound-change postulates for the oldest periods cannot be verified because we can analyze nothing else that far back. But the second half or so of the chart consists of changes that are already known; therefore, teh suggestions at least integrate the forms of the personal pronouns into a general picture of IE language history. Until a few day ago, this analysis had only been published in the Copenhagen institute papers APILKU, vol. 6 from 1987, but now my old and hidden papers have been collected in two volumes of "Selected Papers in Indo-European Linguistics", published by Museum Tusculanum in Copenhagen (700 pp., $70, www.mtp.dk), and this one is among them. It may not be true, but no one shuld call it impossible. Jens From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 16 18:11:26 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 20:11:26 +0200 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Date: Friday, April 16, 1999 5:07 PM Leo A. Connolly wrote: [snip] >Kluge adds that there was at least one Germanic word word for glove, the form >of which must have been approximately *_wand_-, referring to something knitted >("wound"), with a possible second one *_skinthaz_ 'hide' borrowed into Finnish >to yield modern _kinnas_ (genitive _kintaan_) 'glove'. If Kluge is right, >_Handschuh_ represents not compounding for lack of a proper word, but rather >folk etymology. [Ed Selleslagh] Very interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Dutch still uses the word 'want' for 'mitten'. 'Glove' is 'handschoen', a similar formation as in German. BTW, the stem 'and-' is frequent in toponyms in German and Dutch speaking areas, usually to indicate a place opposite something, mostly on the other side of a river etc. (Antwerpen, Elst/Andelst, Baden/Ennetbaden... and also in Greece: Rion/Andirion) and of couse also in 'Antwort/antwoord', but that's common knowledge I guess. Note that the meaning of 'and-' is rather 'opposite, in front of, before ('gegenueber/tegenover') than 'counter-' ('gegen-/tegen-', 'anti-' in the modern sense), just like the preposition 'ante' in Latin (in its spatial meaning). Ed Selleslagh From alemko.gluhak at infocentar.tel.hr Fri Apr 16 18:57:29 1999 From: alemko.gluhak at infocentar.tel.hr (Alemko Gluhak) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 20:57:29 +0200 Subject: Leipzig (was: Re: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages) Message-ID: ---------- > Von: Rick Mc Callister > An: Indo-European at xkl.com > Betreff: Re: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages > Datum: 1999. travanj 13 17:20 > So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" > with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English > & German It seems to me that Leipzig is of Slavic origin, *lip7sk7, with *lipa "linden". Alemko Gluhak From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 16 19:00:40 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 14:00:40 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM > Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to > Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis > for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE > consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd > developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a > mess. It is profoundly irresponsible to label anything written by Lehmann as a "mess". He is one of the preeminent IEists of the 20th century, and to cavalierly dismiss his work as "Neogrammarian", as if a label could discount his achievements and contributions, is tragically unjustified. > The Neogrammarians had realized that the vowels [i u] tend to alternate > with [y w] under conditions which no one has ever been able to specify > *exactly*; This is, in my opinion, totally misleading. The condition has been exactly specified, and in such simple terms, that hardly anyone, who does not have a predisposition to think that the latest fads in linguistics are the last word, could not understand them: initial ['Y/WVC] is ['y/wVC]; initial [Y/WV'C] is [i/u'C]; ['CVY/WC] is ['CVi/uC]; [CV'Y/WVC] is ['Cy/wVC]; [CVY/W'C] is [Ci/u'C]. Now, what was so difficult about that? > since this was apparently his dissertation, he felt obligated to say this > within the framework dominant at the time: PIE [i u] were allophones of /y > w/, not "true" vowels, I do not know if Beekes had such an argument in *his* dissertation but in a book published as late as 1995, he is still asserting what Lehmann's dissertation asserted. So, though you may disagree, many eminent IEists still maintain that IE [y/w] are primarily consonontal. And, as any Nostraticist can assure you, IE [y/w] reflects Semitic [y/w]. If Nostratic [i/u] -- presuming they actually existed -- showed up as Semitic [0], you might have a talking point but they do not. > just as PIE syllabic [M N L R] were allophones of /m n l r/. The syllabic status of [M/N/L/R] is a totally unrelated matter. These become syllabic when deprived of the stress-accent. > Furthermore, though the laryngeals were unambiguously consonants in PIE (his > view and mine, though others differ), the attested IE languages often have > vowels where there were once laryngeals. The Neogrammarians had posited PIE > Schwa in just such places. I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. > While rejecting Neo-grammarian Schwa, Lehmann adopted Hermann Hirt's theory > of PIE ablaut, which entailed a weak vowel ("schwa secundum") in addition to > the more commonly accepted ablaut grades. He writes subscript e for this. > Within Hirt's framework, Schwa secundum represented those cases in which > full-grade PIE /e/ or /o/ did not vanish in an unstressed syllable, but > rather remained as Schwa secundum -- in other words, a syllable was weakened > but not lost. (Like the Neogrammarians, Lehmann saw PIE /e o e: o:/ as real > vowels, always syllabic but subject to weakening or loss. He differed in > claiming that [a a:] were allophones of /e e:/ next to a-coloring > laryngeals, and in analyzing most apparent long vowels as sequences of short > vowel + laryngeal.) I differ with Lehmann here. I believe that IE [a:] is a retention of the vowel quality of the vowel which *followed* the 'laryngeal', having been lengthened at its disappearance by compensatory lengthening. So I would say - laryngeal + short vowel, with the *preceding* short vowel having been lost. > Lehmann then claimed that the traditional PIE Schwa was actually a sequence > of Schwa secundum + laryngeal: the weak vowel was affected enough by the > laryngeal that it was phonetically different than in non-laryngeal > environments. > I have read Lehmann's book numerous times (though not recently) and have > learned much from it (as well as recognizing numerous errors and > contradictions). But I simply do not remember his ever making any use of > "syllabicity" beyond the obvious ones: /m n l r y w/ had syllabic > realizations between non-syllabic segments, and the "vocalization (as many > call it) of the laryngeals was due to a preceding weak vowel, Schwa secundum. > Nothing mysterious when all is said and done; the only question is whether > one can accept any given part of this whole poorly-integrated theory. > (Personally, I accept Schwa secundum, but virtually no one else does these > days.) > [ Moderator's comment: > The "syllabicity" in question is in the final chapter of the book, in the > discussion of the stages of pre-IE vocalism leading up to the vowel system > seen in PIE, by which I mean that reconstructible from the daughter > languages in Neogrammarian fashion. The earliest stage which he posits is > one in which there is *no* phonemic vowel at all. I was charmed by the > notion for years as an undergraduate, but then I learned more phonology. > --rma ] Rich, I would be interested to know what phonological principles you believe Lehmann's "syllabism" violates? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 16 20:17:01 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 13:17:01 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Mr. Gordon has unsubscribed from the Nostratic mailing list. If you wish him to see any reply, please send a private copy to him as well as to the list. --rma ] GLEN (THAT'S ME!): In the 3rd person sing imperfective, the previously inanimate 3p *-t (derived from *-to) is favored over *-s because of the icky merger (At the same time, **-e'n becomes **-e'n-t > *-e'r). MAG.HANS-JOACHIM ALSCHER: In fact, -CnD# > -Cr(D)# [...] -r/-n-neuters and 3rd pers. pl. secondary/perfect [abibharur vs. abharan < *e-bhi-bher-nt vs. *e-bher-ont; yakrt/yaknas < *yekwnt/*yekwnes]. Not -Cn# -Cr# as maintained by some list members, so what about *h1newn "9" with final -n ? Actually I'm curious whether you find -C- to be a necessary part of this rule and whether it can simply suffice to say *-nD# > *-r(D)#. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 21:50:16 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 21:50:16 GMT Subject: gender assignment In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >A Basque noun or adjective is most commonly used with the suffixed >article <-a> attached, and hence Spanish-speakers would be more likely >to hear rather than merely for `work'. When they borrowed >the word, they had to assign it a gender, and it's not surprising that >the word was made feminine, since final <-a> is the usual feminine >marker in Spanish. But I can't guess why the word became plural in >Spanish, or how it came to be restricted to `homework'. 'Homework' in Spanish is 'deberes', which explains the plural. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:16:46 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:16:46 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <2d8fac0f.2442349f@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >The hard part is the << kuning-, from *kun-ja "kin" (*gon-) and Germanic >suffix-ing/-ung>> because *gon- is already in Greek *gno-, possibly before >German was invented. Invented? >After all, if you follow Mallory or Dolukhanov the >proto-Slavs were the Agricultural Scythians in 500BCE and therefore had >contact with the Greeks before the Germans. (Unless you accept a BSG) And of >course if the P-slavs were IE they should have had a *gon/*gnu or *kon/*knu >and i-stems quite before they met the Goths. But anyway... Slavic hasn't preserved *gen(H)- except in the derivation ze~tI (*gen(@)tis) "son-in-law, sister's husband". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:19:34 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:19:34 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990412014708.22182.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >JENS RASMUSSEN: > Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with > stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; > *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome > *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. >MIGUEL: > I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an > inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; > and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) > etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally > and -s- medially. What to make of them? > >"-t word-finally"?? I'm shocked that you would utter those words. How >does this bode for **-t > *H1? This is *-ts. >MIGUEL: > As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- > (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, > me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced > there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. > >Why does Pokorny write it *me-t- instead of *met- and why can't we >consider *-t- a verbal affix or possibly two different verbs? We could consider it an affix if the alternation had been *me-, *met- (or *me:- ~ *me:t-). But it's *me:- ~ *met- ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:23:15 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:23:15 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <007801be85c1$274b9640$e703703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: [jij ~ gij:] >Supposing you are right (I have an open mind on this), why would it have >reverted to j (y) in Holland >Dutch in some rare cases, but not in most? I don't think it did. j- > g- in the South only. Irregular development (not unexpected in a personal pronoun). The accusative was clearly never *gu. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:30:37 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:30:37 GMT Subject: `stem' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: [ moderator snip ] >Of course, even in IE languages, not every word-form is constructed in >exactly this manner. For example, there may be more than one formative >present. Or none at all, in which case root == stem. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:40:36 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:40:36 GMT Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >(5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word > get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese > were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) Oh yes. The Portuguese were very interested in Ethiopia (which they thought was the land of the legendary Prester John), feeling they badly needed a Christian ally against the Muslims in East Africa. They dispatched an army of 400 musketeers to Ethiopia in 1541 to help against a Muslim army, and remained the main power in Ethiopia for a century [until they overplayed their hand by forcing Catholicism on the Ethiopian Christians]. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:43:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:43:52 GMT Subject: imperfect In-Reply-To: <003f01be843c$107bb700$983763c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Miguel asked about an inherited root "aorist": >>>Did it become an >>>imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) >>>like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless >>>narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked >>>"imperfects" like ? >The question only makes sense if there is a genuine distinction between >imperfect and aorist in Vedic. In fact, (despite some grammars too heavily >influenced by Greek), there is no clearly discernible difference in meaning >between the two. The labels are taken from Greek and refer to the >formation, not the function. If a root-stem past tense has a corresponding >present, it is called "imperfect" - otherwise it is called "aorist". Anadyatana ("not of today") and adyatana ("of today") in Panini's terms. Panini *does* distinguish between the two. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:44:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:44:55 GMT Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >[...] >> Unlikely. Meillet apparently suggested that -e^ax- derives from >> the copula (j)es- cliticized to the verbal root (cf. the Latin >> imperfect with *bhu-a:-). But in view of the association of the >> optative with the imperfect in Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian and >> maybe Celtic, I would favour a derivation from the optative >> *-oih1- > e^, followed by -ax- < *-eh2-s-. In other words, a >> "past optative". [...] >You have overlooked that the Slavic imperfect caused first palatalization Sure. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 22:50:37 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 22:50:37 GMT Subject: Socilological vs natural selection (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: >On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> This is not unlike biological change, where the mutations are >> brought about by various factors (both "internal" quirks in the >> way DNA is structured and is copied, and "external" factors like >> cosmic rays), and the mutations are then selected for by their >> effect on the "fitness" or sex-appeal of the phenotype. >On the other hand, I'm somewhat leery of drawing strong parallels >between linguistic change and biological change, because so many >people, particularly non-linguists, seem to take them literally >(i.e., assume that languages change the same way that biological >organisms do) or extend the analogy in ways that are not applicable. >For one thing, forms can be taken over for reasons like prestige >of the source language or dialect, or because the speakers find a >word with a sound or meaning that they just happen to like in another >language, and there is, as far as I know, no mechanism that duplicates >this in biological change. Sexual selection? >Secondly, sociological change does not >have to be survival-enhancing (people, especially as a group, don't >always know what is good for them, and even if they do, they don't >always do it), whereas biological change, because of natural selection, >will preserve survival-enhancing mutations by its very nature. True, although I think most biological changes are in fact survival-neutral. But there is indeed no "survival of the fittest" about language change. The emphasis of my analogy was on the side of genetic/linguistic drift, occurring for "no" reason (or at least not for reasons that have anything to do with their being selected). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 22:52:01 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 22:52:01 GMT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <72a87ee5.24400e6b@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >And mcv I think pointed out that >something about the way the krol and karol appear in Slavic seem to ask for >an earlier date of borrowing than Charles the Great. Nothing linguistical. It's just that we know that there was no Common Slavic anymore by the time of Charles the Great. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Apr 17 08:40:00 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 09:40:00 +0100 Subject: glottalic theory Message-ID: HI folks I've read recently that early Finnish borrowings from Germanic (e.g. aja- "drive") show that the traditional plain voiced stops (PIE *g & *d) were indeed voiced in proto-Germanic. This means they could not have been voiceless ejectives as the glottalicists suggest. (Voiced implosives would not explain the near absence of *b). The writer of the article suggested a process by which voiceless ejectives became voiced in Germanic, and then devoiced, which rather removes any advantage the glottalic theory has over the traditional theory in explaining the Germanic sound shift. Can anyone out there confirm the Finnish evidence, and if it is indeed accurate, can anyone show how we can continue to support the glottalic theory in the face of it? Peter From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Sat Apr 17 12:45:25 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 12:45:25 GMT Subject: Scribere / screiben / scrifan Message-ID: Latin {scri:bere} = "to write" German {schreiben} = "to write" Anglo-Saxon {scri:fan} = "to appoint" Was there an native Common Germanic word {skri:ban} = "to appoint"? Or did that word come from Latin when the Romans and the Germans came into contact, and the meaning "appoint" came via Roman edicts being sent round in writing? From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 17 16:15:58 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 19:15:58 +0300 Subject: : German compounds In-Reply-To: <01JA237B0OTU94L4NT@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Thu, 15 Apr 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >Peter wrote: >>Bob mentioned the German "Handschuh" as a light-hearted example >>of compounding from language poverty. >It's not, actually. My Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der >deutschen Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), say the following (my >translation of German original): > Germanic *_andasko:haz_ 'countershoe' [Kluge glosses as > _Gegenschuh_, the meaning of which is at least very > obscure], also found in the Old English given name > _Andsce:oh_, has been reinterpreted into Old High German > _hantscuoh_ [hand-shoe]; the place name _Handschuhsheim_ is > also related. >Place names in -_heim_ often have a personal name as the first >component. Kluge adds that there was at least one Germanic word >word for glove, the form of which must have been approximately >*_wand_-, referring to something knitted ("wound"), with a >possible second one *_skinthaz_ 'hide' borrowed into Finnish to >yield modern _kinnas_ (genitive _kintaan_) 'glove'. If Kluge is >right, _Handschuh_ represents not compounding for lack of a >proper word, but rather folk etymology. I find this all a bit difficult to accept uncritically. First, Buck, DSS, doesn't have any problem with a compound of 'hand' and 'shoe'. Although this is now 50 years old, here is what he has to say (p. 435, 6.58 glove): OHG hantscuoh, NHG handschuh (OE handscio: only a proper name; see now Bosworth-Toller, Suppl. s.v.), Du. handschoen, MLG hantsche (> late ON hanzki, Dan., Sw, handske), cpd. of words for 'hand' and 'shoe'. Falk-Torp 380. Of course the problem is that we don't have the word in Gothic so the developments become speculative. But if we consider that OHG hantscuoh is a folk etymology then either all the other forms are loans (or at least reconvergence) from OHG (not impossible, especially as Buck sees the Scandinavian word coming from MLG) or all the other branches used the same folk etymology (unlikely). Accepting 'hand' + 'shoe' just seems more likely all around. Second, I am curious about the discrepancy between the two forms (Andsce:oh in Kluge and handscio: in Buck (and presumably in Toller, although I can't check it), since Buck's seems to confirm *hand- rather than *anda-. Third, both 'hand' and 'shoe' are PIE words so there is no difficulty getting them into a much earlier stage of Germanic than OHG. *_andasko:haz should mean 'other shoe' so it is less specific than "handshoe." And if 'shoe' is correctly etymologized as coming from the PIE root 'to cover' (ultimately the same root that produced English 'sky') then the original meaning is "covering" and the compound "handcovering" sounds less risible than "handshoe" and less unlikely than "other covering." "Shoe"/"handshoe" would then just be unmarked/marked counterparts; "shoe" being the more common (all God's chillun got shoes), "handshoe" gets the marking (rather than the other way around "shoe"/"footshoe"). Fourth, words for 'glove/mitten' in IE languages often have the word for 'hand' in them [subconscious-level double entendre, discovered on proofreading], e.g., Gk. xeiris, Lat. manica, Russ. rukavic'a, etc., so there is nothing a priori implausible about "handshoe" as a coining for 'glove', especially if "shoe" still had the meaning 'covering'. All in all, I find less difficulty with an original 'hand' + 'shoe' than with a folk-etymologized word for 'glove' that did not already contain the word for 'hand'. I also think that the word was likely to have been older than OHG. I would even go so far as to suggest that there was originally a pair, "handshoe" and *"footshoe," meaning "hand covering" and "foot covering" respectively, and that *"footshoe," through frequent use, was shortened to "shoe" while "handshoe" remained. The change from *"footshoe" to "shoe" would have happened already in Proto-Germanic since all the Germanic languages (including Gothic) have only the "shoe" word. To me, Kluge's explanation sounds like an attempt to get rid of a form, Handschuh, that has often been a source of amusement. But in the final analysis I think that the form is a quite logical development that has just happened to leave a humorous relic. It is fortunate that the words for 'hat/cap' developed from a different IE root for 'cover, protect' else German might have ended up with "headshoe"* which would have been a perennial gag writer's delight. I will agree, however, that German "Handschuh" does not represent compounding for lack of a proper word; but, rather than folk etymology, it was simply a logical development. Please remember that the purpose of the original posting was to make fun of the idea that Proto-Germanic was linguistically "poor" or "primitive," not to prove that it was actually the case. The other Germanic words for 'glove/mitten' are interesting as well (ON vo,ttr ~ EFris. want/wante, "mitten"; ON glo:fi ~ OE glo:f, "glove"), but this is long enough already. I will only say that want/wante is more likely to refer to a 'winding' than to something knitted, and was apparently strips of cloth wrapped around the hand to protect it from sword-blows (cf. Buck. loc. cit.). This word went from Frankish (wanth) to OFrench as want/guant/gant and then from MFrench into English as gantelet (diminutive) to become modern English gauntlet. >And really finally, _Broetchen_ is *not* a compound, since >-_chen_ is merely a suffix. Don't be too quick to dismiss "mere suffixes" from compounds. The process by which separate words become suffixes or case endings through compounding or cliticization is called grammaticalization and is quite common. I don't know about -chen, but many forms that look like "mere suffixes" are originally separate words. In German drittel, viertel, etc., the -tel looks like a suffix, but it is actually a form of Teil, thus "third part," "fourth part," etc. English -hood (~ German -heit/-keit) was once a separate word (ha:d) meaning "state, rank, position" but now is only a noun-formative suffix. The list of examples is very long. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Apr 17 16:59:22 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 17:59:22 +0100 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Please bear with this long introduction if you're interested in the topic. These quotes from the discussion are needed for what follows. >>Bob mentioned the German "Handschuh" as a light-hearted example of >>compounding from language poverty. Leo said:> >It's not, actually. >_Handschuh_ represents not compounding for lack of a proper word, but rather >folk etymology. I (Peter) said: >>many German explanatory compounds are due to the lack of a standardised >>dialect at a time when wider communication (e.g. for commercial purposes) was >>becoming necessary. You could not advertise "semmel" in areas that used some >>other word for it, but "broetchen" (= "little bread") could be understood >>readily anywhere. Leo said: >Really? Do you think German bakers shipped their wares cross-country in the >sixteenth century? And even if they had, _Broetchen_ wouldn't help, since >many areas didn't (and don't) use -_chen_ as a diminutive. And really >finally, _Broetchen_ is *not* a compound, since -_chen_ is merely a suffix. The example makes the point well enough. Berlin has Schrippe, Stuttgart Wecken, Bern Weggi, not to mention Laabla and Kipfl in other parts. If you wish to refer to "a bread roll" and there is no standard term, a descriptive term is your best solution. Commerce is only one example of the many areas of discourse where wider communication was becoming necessary at that time, and the large lexical differences between dialects was a significant factor in the development of explanatory compounds. >Compounding in German has gone on as long as the language is recorded. Of course. You can't use resources a language doesn't have. You use the resources a language does have - hence explanatory compounds are a neat solution to a particularly German medieval problem. Oh, and you know perfectly well what I mean by calling "Broetchen" a compound. Furthermore, the diminutive -chen is not productive in some areas (in fact most of Germany!) but is thoroughly understood in all since Luther's Bible. I refer you to page 157 of Koenig's Atlas zur deutschen Sprache, where the text says (my translation): "Even today there are two forms side by side in the modern written language: in high prose the forms in -chen predominate, while -lein is stylistically more a sign of a popularist tone." Peter From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Sun Apr 18 06:07:58 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 01:07:58 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [Most of my long treatise on Lehmann 1955 omitted] >I have read Lehmann's book numerous times (though not recently) and have >learned much from it (as well as recognizing numerous errors and >contradictions). But I simply do not remember his ever making any use of >"syllabicity" beyond the obvious ones: /m n l r y w/ had syllabic realizations >between non-syllabic segments, and the "vocalization (as many call it) of the >laryngeals was due to a preceding weak vowel, Schwa secundum. rma added: >[Moderator's comment: > The "syllabicity" in question is in the final chapter of the book, in the > discussion of the stages of pre-IE vocalism leading up to the vowel system > seen in PIE, by which I mean that reconstructible from the daughter languages > in Neogrammarian fashion. The earliest stage which he posits is one in which > there is *no* phonemic vowel at all. I was charmed by the notion for years > as an undergraduate, but then I learned more phonology. > --rma ] I opened Lehmann and immediately put my finger on syllabicity in the last chapter. Embarrassing! But I know why I didn't recall it: that chapter (a) had no relevance to my actual interest, viz. Germanic reflexes of laryngeals, and (b) it struck me as utterly nonsensical. My gut feeling aside, there's an obvious problem with it even in terms of structuralist theory. On p. 112 Lehmann states: "If we find no phonemes in complemetary distribution at the peak of the syllable, we cannot assume a segmental phoneme for this position." Surely not "phonemes in complementary distribution" -- *contrasting* phonemes, or something of the sort. Whether complementary or contrastive, the supposed difficulty arises because Lehmann (against Brugmann & Co.) arbitrarily defines [i u] as syllabic allophones of resonant phonemes /y w/ -- Brugmann's notation, where [y w] are written with subscript half-moons, implicitly makes the vocalic /i u/ fundamental, whereas for /m n l r/ the non-syllabic realizations are (hence subscript circle beneath the syllabic realizations). With /i u/ there is contrast in position between non-syllabics, and Lehmann's justification for a prosodic feature of "syllabicity" vanishes. -- I should add that on p. 113, Lehmann incautiously says that at the next stage of PIE, with phonemic stress, syllabicity with minimum stress "remains non-segmental between obstruents..." "Between"? How so? Anything that can be between phonemes sounds segmental enough to me! Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From roborr at uottawa.ca Sun Apr 18 06:16:13 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 02:16:13 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: At 09:33 AM 4/16/99 +0000, you wrote: >A few comments on the discussion below, though we are drifting rather >far from Indo-European: as a source for , the Tamil >compound translated as "elephant killer" is cited in Yule and >Burnell's _Hobson-Jobson_, but retracted more or less in a >parenthetical note in later editions in favor of a Sinhalese word >. As far as I know, no one has ever seriously disputed >the etymology. The Sinhalese word was borrowed into >English, not Portuguese, and the misapplication to a South American >snake was due to confusion among biologists. The Brazilian >Portuguese word for the anaconda (Eunectes murinus) is , with >many variants, borrowed from Tupi. If exists in current >Portuguese, it is as a borrowing of an international zoological term. >I don't think Robert poses a really valid objection to Larry's >points. Not surprising, as the anaconda comment was meant to be in SUPPORT of point 5) (but thanks for the clarification of the "anaconda" etymology) Robert Orr >Jim Rader >> LARRY TRASK: [ moderator snip ] >> >(5) from Amharic `zebra'. [ moderator snip ] >> >(5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word >> > get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese >> > were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) >ROBERT ORR: >> when you consider what you have to assume to get Tamil yaanai-kolra >> - "elephant killer" 1) borrowed into Portuguese 2) transferred all the way >> to South America 3) become establsihed enough in the language to refer to >> another giant snake, i.e., "anaconda" (the exact path taken by stages 2 and >> 3 is open to debate), (5) above doesn't really look like a problem at all. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 18 06:57:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 02:57:57 EDT Subject: Prediction Message-ID: In a message dated 4/17/99 10:08:33 PM, rayhendon at worldnet.att.net wrote: <> "Predictability" as it applies to the scientific method is a "term of art." It's a matter of usage as much as anything else. Physicists for example will not only speak in terms of a hypothesis being confirmed by its predicting results but also judge a theory or "laws" based on "predictive power." Here are some excerpts from my e-files that illustrate how the term is used: (these are from abstracts): "Quantum mechanics does not predict when the individual nucleus will decay, although if many similar nuclei are surveyed, one can predict what fraction will decay in any time interval." "One hypothesis is that the human brain encourages the consumption of foods that contain valuable calories, while discouraging ingestion of life-threatening substances. This hypothesis leads to the prediction that sweet-tasting foods are edible and nutritious whereas extremely bitter-tasting materials are toxic, which is generally the case." "Terzaghi's work introduced scientific methods for predicting the behavior of soils and developed a basis for rational engineering design." And here's Victor J. Stenger, a physicist, writing about Newtonian physics: "The classical paradigm provides us with the means for predicting the motion of all material systems in the classical domain. Whether continuous or discrete, these systems of bodies are treated as composed of constituents that obey Newton's laws of particle motion and the various principles derived from them. Given the initial position and velocity of the constituent, and knowing the net force on it, you predict its future position and velocity." Other connotations may confuse the use of the word, but when it is used by scientists, "predictive" will very usually refer to the testability of a hypothesis or the confirmation of a theory. As you point out, the evidence can be in the form of experimental results or observations (Cicero's letters). "Expectations" seems like a fine word to me, but it is not what scientists generally use. Obviously this definition of "prediction" does not have to refer to anything as grand as where all language will go in the future. It can be as qualified as Grimm's Law. Where there was a *p, we can predict there was an f, under the right circumstances, more or less. Historical linguistics is a science that relies heavily upon this kind of methodological "predictability" both in following the history of a "word" and in reconstruction. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 18 08:14:11 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 08:14:11 GMT Subject: : German compounds In-Reply-To: <002a01be8834$ebdf27e0$3403703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >Dutch still uses the word 'want' for 'mitten'. 'Glove' is 'handschoen', a >similar formation as in German. So Dutch both begins and ends with a non-etymological segment. [Final -n is a misanalyzed plural: pl. ==> , pl. ]. >BTW, the stem 'and-' is frequent in toponyms in German and Dutch speaking >areas, usually to indicate a place opposite something, mostly on the other >side of a river etc. (Antwerpen, I vaguely recall there being some folk etymology of Antwerpen involving the throwing of hands ("hand werpen") by a giant? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iglesias at axia.it Sun Apr 18 17:35:02 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 10:35:02 PDT Subject: Celtic substrate influence Message-ID: Recently, in another thread, I asked the following question, but no one answered and, as I am still curious, I would like to put the question again more specifically: Given that: 1) in North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, which are considered, rightly or wrongly, the most Celtic areas of Spain, the two forms of the past tense have been reduced in normal usage to one (the simple past) and 2) a similar phenomenon can be observed in Northern France, Northern Italy and SOUTH GERMANY, where in the Pre-Roman period the La Tene Iron Age culture and presumably dialects of the Gallic language were prevalent if not univarsal, although in this case it is the compound past that has replaced the simple past, Question: Could there be a parallel influence of the Celtic substrate in both areas, in the sense of a rejection of two forms for the past tense, i.e. either the simple or the compound past, but not both? What do the experts on Celtic languages think? In other words, are there any similar phenomena in the Celtic languages, ancient and modern? Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 18 09:43:21 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 05:43:21 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/18/99 12:12:20 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Well, unless it does some damage I'm not aware of, I prefer the word. I have every reason to believe language is a human artifact and not something growing under plant light. Not that Germanic was invented by any particular person with the idea of getting a patent. But there is more common intention and common purpose behind any language than there is random noises, and therefore invented seems a better word than "first evolved." I wrote: <> mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Please be patient with me here. I'm trying. I'm not sure why the -(H)- is there, but let me get back to that. Do you mean: 1. that intial *gn- never passed directly into historic Slavic as an initial /kn/ or an initial /-n/? (By directly I mean not through a sister language but from *PIE to *p-Slavic to Slavic or a particular Slavic tongue.) I'm distinguishing here from the "first palatalization" which would have the *g- change before an original front vowel but I'm thinking not necessarily a *gn-. Here the analogy is to *glava (pSl)> glowa (pol), golova (rus w/tort). 2. I see *gen> gno- or something like that happen in Greek (and maybe German). If you accept that, does it mean that this transformation did not happen in PIE or that it could not have occurred or passed into proto-Slavic? 3. It seems the gen- and gno- coexisted in Homer. Both "genea" and "gnotos" refer to relatives. Obviously which form would have affected how the word passed from *PIE into the daughter languages or from, say, Greek into another IE language. (Oddly I have OCS "daughter-in-law" sn~xa (Pol c~rka /synowa) and I believe the Sanskrit also has as intial snu- for daughter-in-law. And znuots, Lett.) Does this "diglossia" (if this is the right word) allow the suggestion that the same process could have happened some time in the early Slavic? Or that both forms could not have appeared as they did in Greek? 4. You say that <>. I don't understand the -(H)-. How would you see that passing into Greek as both "genea" and "gnotos" or "gnosis"? Finally, isn't it peculiar that *gen- or *gen(H)- a root/stem with tremendous amount of extensions in Greek (even Homer) and German (and Sanskrit as far as I can tell) - shows up in Slavic in only one word? And just as peculiar that it reenters (e.g., ksiezyc) in so many meanings only through Germanic? Does that possibly cast doubt on the whole way this reconstruction has been approached? That sounds more confident than I am about these questions. But I am having I think a reasonable problem with how gno- (Greek or otherwise) is being left out of the *kuningaz equation. My best source on this (Stieber, translated for me out of Polish by a helper) is not helping me with this - especially how it fits chronologically. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Apr 18 10:37:22 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 11:37:22 +0100 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Pat said: >I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by >Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. There is some evidence in Sanskrit that requires them to be a consonant: (a) the failure to lengthen IE /o/ in the 1st person singular perfect, while lengthening did take place in the 3rd: 1 sing: cakara < ke-ker-He, as opposed to 3 sing caka:ra < ke-ker-e. This is usually explained by the presence of the now invisible consonant H in the 1 sing. [ Moderator's comment: *ke-kor-H_2e vs. *ke-kor-e (Brugmann's Law). --rma ] (b) A similar point - set roots fail to lengthen the vowel in causatives - again usually explained by the presence of a laryngeal consonant. A laryngeal must have been present, but a vowel would have allowed lengthening. (c) Reduplication of roots beginning with a laryngeal. We find an unexpected -i-: e.g. gan-igm-at < Hgen-Hgn-. If the H at the beginning of the root had vanished, the -i- would not appear (as it does not in roots without initial H-) and if it had become a vowel, it would appear at the beginning of the reduplicated syllable as well. The only explanation is a consonantal H, which then shares the later usual interconsonantal development to -i-. (d) If H has already become a vowel in (for example) the IE root *kerH "to proclaim", how do we explain the reflexes of an apparent long r in ppp ki:rta-? Why not *krVt-, as if from a CrV root? (e) The development of voiceless aspirates is impossible to explain if the H is a vowel, because they do not develop regularly before other vowels, but only occur only where we expect an H, e.g. a-khya < a-kH-ya, compared with cayati < keH-ya-ti. (f) In Skt H develops to -i- between consonants. If it were already a vowel, it would have caused palatalisation, but in fact it prevents palatalisation, when it comes between a consonant and a following front vowel - e.g. in the example above, a-kh-ya as opposed to the palatalised cayati. Outside Sanskrit there are also bits of evidence, for example: (a) Roots with initial H. In the form HReC, if H has already become a vowel, we will not find the pattern ReC, but VReC in Latin etc; if it is lost, we would not find the prothetic vowel in Greek & Armenian. Therefore it survives as a consonant. (b) Avestan patterns of consonants such as you find in the word for "path": nominative panta: < pent-oH, but genitive paTo: (interdental fricative) < pntH-os, and oblique pad-. These are not explicable if H were a vowel. So I need to see some good evidence for your position, Pat, before I am convinced! Peter From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 18 10:52:56 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 10:52:56 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in >Evid.f.Laryng. as >*eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) >*me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) >I have some difficulty only with the 2du acc. for which the Skt. stem >yuva- (with y- from the nom.) rather points to *uH3e, probably with >dissimilatory loss of the *-w-. Why *H3 in the dual forms? Couldn't it be *H1(w) with o-Stufe? In principle, I'd go along with Beekes in reconstructing *-H1 for the dual of nouns (in view of Greek consonant stem -e < *-H1, and lengthened vowel elsewhere). I won't comment in detail on the postulated pre-proto-paradigm and all the intermediate stages leading to the PIE forms above, except to note that in the proposed *tw- > *Dw- > *w- (2nd.p. du./pl.) I miss a reference to the phoneme *c, as postulated earlier. My own vague thoughts about the prehistory of the PIE personal pronouns go in a different direction. I note an apparently ancient pattern -i-/-u- for sg. vs. pl., as found e.g. in Afro-Asiatic (Hausa sg. ni *ki si, pl. mu ku su), Basque (sg. ni hi, pl. gu zu) and Kartvelian (Georgian sg. me s^en pl. c^ven tkven). This would suggest that the pronouns for pre-PIE might have been sg. *mi *ti vs. pl. *mu *tu. Apparently, pl. *tu acquired singular meaning (modern day parallels are legion), and a new plural was created, maybe something like *s-tu or *t-s-u (JER's *cu ?), which went to *u- (but *su- in Anatolian?). So a tentative paradigm would be (I and U denote unstressed i and u): 1.sg. *mi' [replaced by *eg^-] acc. *mI-me' > *mene; *mme > *eme 1.du. *mu-e't > *weh1 acc. *mU-t-me' > *mtwe > *ntwe > *nh1we 1.pl. *mu-e's > *wes acc. *mU-s-me' > *msme > *nsme 2.sg. *tu' [emph. *tu:] acc. *tU-me' > *tUwe > *twe, *te 2.du. *cu'-et > *(y)u(:)h1 acc. *cU-t-me' > *utwe > *uh1we 2.pl. *cu'-es > *(y)u(:)s, Hitt. sumes (*suwes) acc. *cU-s-me' > *usme >Until a few day ago, this analysis had only been published in the >Copenhagen institute papers APILKU, vol. 6 from 1987, but now my old and >hidden papers have been collected in two volumes of "Selected Papers in >Indo-European Linguistics", published by Museum Tusculanum in Copenhagen >(700 pp., $70, www.mtp.dk), and this one is among them. Great! Consider one copy sold (as soon as I get some money, that is). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 18 12:19:44 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 15:19:44 +0300 Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: <68a05acc.24403eea@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 4/10/99 12:02:12 AM, you [JS] wrote: > <<-- you're confusing description with prediction. Language change > _in the > past_ can be described and rules deduced, which can then > be applied with reasonable confidence to historic languages we don't > have direct evidence for.>> > Probability is a tool can be used entirely to evaluate events that > occured in the past. Carbon dating for example provides a > predicatability in dating accompanying non-organic artifacts that has > been found to be very reliable. "Predictability" is a factor that > must be present before sampling validly can be used in analysis. Exactly backwards. Statistical analysis is the basis for probability. The probability obtained from statistical analysis is used to predict future events whose outcomes are unknown. It is statistical analysis that makes for "predictability," not "predictability" that makes statistical analysis possible. The limitation on this is that the statistical sample has to large enough to ensure that it is representative. "Predictability" is always present but it is not accurate until the sample size is statistically stabilized. > Believe me, I'm not confused. Oh, I believe you. In general, the less one knows, the less likely one is to be confused. If one has only one point of view, it is almost impossible to be confused. So I do believe that you are not confused. No more were the Church Fathers who forced Galileo to recant his heretical idea that the earth moved around the sun confused. Wrong, yes -- confused, no. There is a certainty that comes with single-mindedness that does not allow for confusion. > < _in the > future_.>> > A subject I don't think I've ever addressed. You address it when you use the terms predictability and probability, because both of these terms are specific to future events. Of course you don't realize that you are doing this because you don't know what predictability and probability mean. And this lack of knowledge happily keeps you from being confused, for as the poet says "... where ignorance is bliss; 'Tis folly to be wise." But what you see as a commendable lack of confusion others see as blissful ignorance. Technically speaking, probability does not refer to events that took place in the past. The term that applies to events that have already occurred is "likelihood." I present the definition of this term from the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics (available on the web at http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~eww6n/math/math.html Likelihood The hypothetical Probability that an event which has already occurred would yield a specific outcome. The concept differs from that of a probability in that a probability refers to the occurrence of future events, while a likelihood refers to past events with known outcomes. And, again, since there are still indications that you are using a different Webster's than I am, I offer you the following from Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary (1994): predict: v.t. 1. to tell in advance; prophesy. -- v.i. 2. to foretell the future; make a prediction. -- Syn. 1, 2. presage, divine, augur, project, prognosticate, portend. PREDICT, PROPHECY, FORESEE, FORECAST mean to know or tell (usually correctly) beforehand what will happen. ... predictive: adj. 1. of or pertaining to prediction. 2. used or useful for predicting or foretelling the future. 3. being an indication of the future or of future conditions. (NB: etymologies and examples deleted without indication) So, again, when you say that you don't think you've ever addressed the subject of changes in the future through your use of "predictability," I believe you. Doubtless you do think this, but if so, it is just further evidence (if any is needed) that what you think can't affect reality. On Wed, 7 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote > And they [truisms about the unpredictability of linguistic > change] are contradicted by the very fact that there is a > Grimm's law and there is an Indo-European language group and > there is a way the old sound laws can "predicatably" tell you > if one word is cognate with another even if they are centuries > apart. That's what predictability means. It means you can look > at some word on a clay tablet and make a good guess at whether > they are Greek or not. Because it follows from prior experience. > That's predictability. I have already responded to this once, but your subsequent postings (with one exception) indicate that you still do not comprehend the difference between definition and prediction, so I thought it best to come back here to try once more to make it clear. So let's take it step by step (all of you who already know the difference, please bear with us). First of all, as I said elsewhere, a truism can't be contradicted. It is true by definition (even if it is trivial). All one can do with a truism is point out that a trivial truism (one that simply restates the premise and adds no new information) is irrelevant as an argument. But when the premise is identified as a truism then the premise is true by definition. So saying that "a truism is contradicted" is an oxymoron. This being the case, it is obvious that Grimm's Law and the IE language group cannot contradict the truism that linguistic change is unpredictable. Now if someone says that "Grimm's Law predicts that a word that is inherited from PIE that has initial /p/ in Latin will have initial /f/ in English," this is a loose, figurative use of the word "predict" not a literal one. This is not a prediction based on Grimm's law; this *is* Grimm's Law (in part). The statement would be better construed as "Grimm's Law states ..." or "According to Grimm's Law, ...". Grimm's Law is a reconstruction of a (series of) sound shift(s) that took place in the Germanic language. In fact, far from being evidence that language change is predictable, it is confirmation that linguistic change is unpredictable. For if Grimm's Law was a predictable linguistic change then all IE languages should have ("predictably") undergone this change at some time or another, not just Germanic (and indeed, all languages everywhere that had these sounds should have shifted in the same way if this was a "predictable" linguistic change). So Grimm's Law is not a "predictable" linguistic change because it cannot be generalized to all languages. However, because it is not "predictable" it retains its predictive power in being able to identify Germanic languages in the overall scheme of IE. Now if one uses a set of data to create a reconstruction and then turns around and says that the reconstruction "predicts" the data, this is simply circularity. This is how linguists, both historical and descriptive, get the reputation of operating a discipline based on circular reasoning. If a historical linguist reconstructs a sound shift and then says that the sound shift is predictable because of the reconstruction, or if a descriptive linguist writes rules that describe sound changes and then says that the sounds changed because of the rules, this is circular reasoning and it is an easy trap to fall into. This is why historical reconstructions and descriptive rules do not predict anything. They are simply descriptions based on a data set. They cannot say anything about the data set without being circular. Of what value then are these hard-won reconstructions like Grimm's Law and Verner's Law? These reconstructions are descriptions (of events that took place long ago when no one was around to record them) based on observations, and descriptions can be used in definitions. So by reconstructing PIE we are defining it through description. By reconstructing the sound changes that took place in the various branches (e.g., Grimm's Law) we are describing the various branches in terms of PIE. But we are not "predicting" the various forms in the present languages because we already have those. They are the data on which the reconstructions are based. At best we may "predict" (reconstruct) some intermediate forms that are not attested, but this is a "prediction of the past" because that's what reconstruction is. As an example, if we observe that a horse has four legs (one on each corner) then we can use this observation as a description that makes up part of the definition of "horse." Aha, you will say based on your idea of predictability, that means that we can predict that a horse has four legs. No, I will say, this is not a prediction, this is simply part of the definition of "horse." Anything that is a "horse" will have four legs because that is part of the definition of "horse." If it doesn't have four legs it won't be called a "horse." And the definition stands because no one has ever seen a horse that didn't have four legs. This is a matter of consistency of observation and prior experience. But "a horse has four legs" is not a prediction, it is a definition. If someone finds a type of horse that doesn't have four legs, then the definition will have to be revised. Similarly, when we look at the words of a language like Mycenaean, we are not "predicting" what that language is, we are seeing how closely it matches our description / definition / reconstruction of various languages and classifying it according to which of these it resembles most. Analyzing these words is not a matter of "predicting" that they are Greek. It is a matter of seeing how closely these words match our definition of Greek as reconstructed for the appropriate time period. Matching them will be a function both of whether they are Greek or not and of how accurate our description / reconstruction is. If they match closely enough to be reasonably sure that they are Greek but not closely enough to confirm the reconstruction in detail, then the reconstruction / description / definition will have to be revised. So when you say: That's what predictability means. It means you can look at some word on a clay tablet and make a good guess at whether they are Greek or not. your use of "predictability" is completely idiosyncratic (and, based on prior experience with such terms as cognate and stem, why am I not surprised by this?). You are saying that "predictability" is the ability to form a hypothesis while everybody else is saying that "predictability" is the likelihood of a hypothesis being correct. To you, if you can form a hypothesis about something, that is "predictability" (particularly if the hypothesis has already been shown to be correct). But "predictable" means "capable of being determined in advance" and "predictability" means "the quality of being predictable." "Predictable" does not mean "capable of being hypothesized about (in retrospect)" as you seem to think. Prediction is something that happens a priori. So looking at some word on a clay tablet and deciding whether it is Greek or not is not a matter of predictability. It is a matter of how well one knows the definition of Greek. It is simply a matter of using the data set and the reconstruction. Now if one could make a good guess at whether the words were Greek or not *without* looking at the tablet (or without being able to read the tablet) *that* would be predictability. In a separate posting you said The shock of finding out Linear B was Greek (nobody was predicting it, not Evans or even Ventris) ..., so, obviously, at some point you *couldn't* look at some word on a clay tablet and guess whether it was Greek or not. Nobody was predicting it, therefore, there was a lack of predictability (although not a lack of hypotheses). Then as soon as the language is identified as Greek, you *can* look at some word on a clay tablet and guess whether it is Greek or not, and that's supposed to be "predictability." And this is the evidence upon which we are to accept your statement that you are not confused? But don't worry, I still believe that you are not confused. You are just using a different language from everybody else and thereby confusing them because they think you are trying to use the same language they are. So if everybody else will just substitute "describability" whenever you use "predictability" we will all be talking about the same thing. I did mention the one exception to your misunderstanding of the term "predictability," and I would also like to take up the few shreds of predictability that exist in historical linguistics, but this is too long already so I will save that for another posting. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From stevegus at aye.net Sun Apr 18 12:49:47 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 08:49:47 -0400 Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: Rick McCallister writes: >Is Gutnish the same as Skanian? I've run into people from southern >Sweden who claim Skanian as their native language. I've also run into >people from Bornholm who claim that a distinctive Scandinavian language is >spoken there. Are these dialects or transitional languages? Gutnish is (now) usually considered a Swedish dialect. It was (is) spoken on the island of Gvtland, on the east side of Sweden in the Baltic. Skanian is spoken in the Swedish province of Skene, in the south of Sweden, the area of Lund and Malmv. This province was formerly a part of Denmark. As such, Skanian is generally considered to be transitional with Danish. --- With wind we blowen; with wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen; with weopinge we passun. With steringe we beginnen; with steringe we enden; With drede we dwellen; with drede we wenden. ---- Anon, Lambeth Ms. no. 306 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Apr 18 12:59:10 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 13:59:10 +0100 Subject: Pennsylvania tree for IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Sheila Watts wrote: [on my reference to the Penn tree] > Well-known, but not to me, alas: could we have a reference? Sorry. It's this: Tandy Warnow, Donald Ringe and Ann Taylor. 1995. Reconstructing the evolutionary history of natural languages. Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, IRCS Report 95-16. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. The tree itself is reproduced on page 369 of my textbook: R. L. Trask. 1996. Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold. The tree was constructed by selecting a sizeable number of "characters" found in some but not all IE languages, and then asking a computer program to construct a "best tree". The authors report that most branches of the family fall pretty naturally into a tree, but that Germanic is rather perverse: morphologically, it clusters with Balto-Slavic, but, in its lexicon, it falls between Italic and Celtic. Their conclusion is that Germanic started off as an eastern branch of IE but that its speakers then migrated westward, adopting large numbers of western lexical items as a result. Incidentally, I was in error the other day when I reported that the published tree puts Germanic into the western group: it shows Germanic in the eastern group, though the authors acknowledge the awkwardness of this decision. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Apr 18 13:36:58 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 14:36:58 +0100 Subject: gender assignment In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Nicholas Widdows wrote: [on the introduction of sex-marking into Basque] > Most interesting. Are there any cases of it happening on non-o/a > stems, e.g. * 'old (man)' or * by reinterpretation > of the native <-a>? I am aware of no such case. Sex-marking of the o/a sort in native words (as opposed to borrowed ones) is still extremely rare, in my experience. Sex-marking in native words is not particularly prominent at all, and, where it does occur, it is usually expressed either by a lexical distinction or by a sex-marked suffix. > Or is it a restricted lexical thing, the way we have in English with > fiance/e and blond/e? So far, it is heavily lexically restricted. > Of course these are pronounced the same but being literate we have > to decide how to write them, and do consistently mark gender. Words > where there's a spoken difference are so rare that perhaps we don't > have to decide. He is always nai"ve, as is she, but she is a... > faux-nai"f? I would say 'a Filipino housemaid', because if I decide > that maids are Filipin-a, what is the Filipin-o/a language, culture, > etc... Rather than having to think "now what gender is ?" > it's easier to force gender out, they way we have with employee, > divorcee, naive. The influence of French is small enough that these > will remain oddities like foreign plurals rather than influence the > grammar. Yes, these things are unnatural and a nuisance. A couple of years ago, I used the word (as in "he's a poet manque'") with reference to a woman. I could find no mention of this in the usage handbooks, and all my English dictionaries give as the only possible form, so that's what I wrote, but my copy-editor changed it to anyway. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Apr 18 13:42:00 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 14:42:00 +0100 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: <3717399E.DC93FFC5@brigham.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton wrote: > Robert Orr wrote: (Actually, it was me -- LT.) > > >This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five > > >different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the > > >direct source. The stories are: > > >(4) from an unspecified Congolese language; > > >You pays your money... > > >(4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese > > > language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in > > > the Congolese rain forests. > Not to mention the problem that there are over a hundred "Congolese" > languages. Which one? No idea: the source here is the OED, which flatly declares "Congolese", without another word, to be the source. Since I'm an advisor to the OED, perhaps I'll ask them to reconsider that entry in the next edition. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Apr 18 19:20:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 14:20:12 -0500 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish and other similar groups, is more or less a "relic language" in that the vocabulary and not much else are from the original language [mainly a mix of German dialects of the Upper Rhine valley such as Swiss German, Swabian and Alsatian]. The syntax and the morphology are principally from American English. I taught for a while at a college in an Amish area and my colleague in German thought they were pulling his leg until he heard little kids speaking it. [snip] >LARRY TRASK: >> I might add that the well-known Pennsylvania tree for the IE family sees the >> entire Germanic branch as having done something similar: this view sees >> Germanic as having started off as part of an eastern cluster of IE >>languages, >> but then as having "migrated" (linguistically, I mean) into a western >> cluster. The authors' final decision is to put Germanic into a western >> branch, but they explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of this decision. >If Germanic started off as part of an eastern IE cluster, then even today >I would group it into this cluster to show its Eastern IE heritage. [snip] From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Apr 18 13:20:43 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 09:20:43 -0400 Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: > >Do you mean to imply that at some point in PIE to proto-Slavic, there was > >a point at which present and past always had different stems, so that when > >we see the same stem in present and aorist in Slavic, it must be an > >innovation? > No. All IE languages that distinguish a present stem from an > _aorist_ (not past) stem have I think some verbs where the > distinction is not made. If aorist is post-PIE, all inherited aorist forms must have been simple pasts in PIE, right? I think that I don't understand the relative chronology you have in mind. > Verbs like vesti (ved-) can make root-aorists, but also s-aorists > (two kinds of them): I think that the only question that matters is which are inherited and which are new in Slavic. We find old forms supplementing newer forms in many languages. Just because a form is found imbedded in a new paradigm does not mean that it is also new. > That's true, but there is more. You forget that imperfective > *presents* and perfective *pasts* also arose. I am not sure what you mean here. I understood that your theory was that at the point when Anatolian split off, the distinction was just present vs past, that is to say, past was not limited to perfective. Root, reduplicated, -neu and -ske/o and probably nasal presents existed at this point. So their pasts were not limited to imperfective. If a new imperfective present arose before Vedic, it can only have been bhereti type thematics. But other presents abound in RV. What do we do with them, especially their pasts which date back to the time before aspect? There is another peculiarity here: Outside Greek, the imperfective past is often formed not from the present stem but something else. To me it looks like a new imperfective past (not a new imperfective that formed both presents and pasts) arose, making pre-existing pasts into `perfectives', while old (''Indo-Hittite'') present continued to exist (though thematicization, either instead of or in addition to other formants kept gaining ground). >[deleted comments on -ske/o and -s etc.] > Forms like Skt. > gacchati / agacchat (*gwm-sk-e-ti, *e-gwm-sk-e-t), whatever their > synchronic syntactic function or meaning, are historically > iteratives, i.e. imperfective Aktionsart. What's the problem? The problem is that, to me, it is not obvious that gwmske/o- was an iterative only and not directed durative. [This was basically Meillet's suggestion]. I also object to ``iterative, i.e imperfective'' on general grounds: `imperfective' and `perfective' should be limited to languages with a binary contrast. If there are several different stem formations, but without binary contrasts of complete/total vs incomplete/partial, and with telic stems forming both true presents and simple pasts, the language does not have aspect. [It might be on its way, but not completely there yet.] [agacchat occurs once in Mandala 3, once in Mandala 8 and several times in Mandalas 1 and 10. There are a couple of instances in the family books where we have -Agacchat, where sandhi interferes.] > One problem is that root-presents and root-aorists, which are > both direct cousins of the Hittite simple past (mi-conjugation), > get classified in different categories. >(and, if I understand you correctly, Iranian) imperfect > from the optative, Past habitual in Old Persian and Avestan, not a general imperfective, and I don't know anything about Middle Iranian. [Mahabharata and to a lesser extent, Ramayana have optative endings used in past sense; but I have not seen any special meaning attributed to them.] > If what you're saying is that a Vedic/Skt. "imperfect" like > "he carried", without specific imperfective markers, > goes back to a simple past tense as in Hittite or indeed Germanic > [except for the augment, of course], I fully agree. But the > question is, what happened to the meaning of that form when > s-aorists like arose? Did it become an > imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) > like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless > narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked > "imperfects" like ? [avahat is marked (in contrast to root opt uhi:ta or imprv voLhvam), no? ] The first question is precisely what I asked. To me, it seems to be simpler to pick the latter rather than to assume an oscillation from past to imperfective to past. agacchat is no problem: it was a telic and so its past was not limited to imperfective. I see root extensions in -s as possible in pre-IE and slowly becoming grammaticized, leading to sigmatic aorists. Vedic sigmatic aorists (which continue to expand, becoming more common in Brahmanas than in RV, while root `aorists' becming less common) were perhaps ``completives'' (a la Bybee et al, The evolution of grammar). The other languages with sigmatic forms would have gone through such a stage, but the more clearly marked sigmatic forms ousted the other pasts, or like in Greek, expanded in frequency becoming perfective the same way that the prefixed verbs did in Slavic. A similar thing happened in Pali, where the sigmatic forms form the majority of the preterites, but with many more old ``imperfects'' mixed in than we see in Balto-Slavic. The problem with my argument is with *avahat. If *uegh'et started as a subjunctive, then *euegh'et must have had an conative meaning, with a root form *(e)weght (not *(e)weghst) being the past. If this was the case, then Greek expanded the imperfective meaning to all stems usable in the present from this starting point, while IA eroded the past subjunctive meaning in analogy with -sk-, -neu- and -n- stems which were limitd to telic functions (not general imperfective). Of course, if thematic present and the subjunctive developed from a common origin (Renou's ``thema eventualis'' (sp?) ) it would be easier to explain the Indic, while for Greek, we need to assume expansion of a `completive' to perfective. From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 19 03:13:01 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 23:13:01 EDT Subject: Socilological vs natural selection (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/18/99 6:27:42 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Although I think you are correct about many biological changes - which I take to mean inherited traits - "most" is probably too many. Some evolutionist would say not any that can arise with any significant frequency in a population. Possibly more relevant is the notion of vestigal traits - traits that once had a functional advantage in the environment, but no longer do. These traits can disappear quickly or slowly or find a new function, but they sometimes defy immediate explanation until the surrounding contingencies are found. (The large size of avocado pits for example has been explained as a seed distribution strategy taking advantages of the large digestive tracts of the giant mammals who inhabited the Americas more than ten millenia ago. This was obviously not the first explanation that came to mind.) <> Of course, "survival of the fittest" presumes a competition for limited resources that is not necessary in the development of differentiated traits. For example, out of a common predator ancestor who is a generalist, two different species might evolve along side of one another - one with mouse-catching traits and one with bird-catching traits. There is no competition between the two, and both sets of traits have survival value. As far as language goes, advantageous "traits" that do not conflict with one another can presumably differentiate and coexist. "Sweat" and "perspiration" don't need to eliminate one another, since they serve different functions in communication - like the two different predatory traits above. <> Although I am not saying this is wrong in anyway, I'd like to point out that any language feature or "trait" that has even a temporary value in communicating (a function of language) should have a better chance of coming into usage. But a temporary (communicative) advantage simply does not rule in language as it often does in biological evolution. A simple example is word length (in English if not in German). Obviously if every common English word were a "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," there might be an extreme hindrance to the communicative function. Words this long should not have a lot of "survival value." But it is important to understand that truly random trait generation would not favor short words over very long ones. If long ones show up randomly they should stick as well as short ones. But something inhibits the random generation of new very long words. That is why I've pointed out that truly random change generation is not the engine behind language as it is behind biological evolution. Language change is closer to animal husbandry or horticultural hybridization. The range of changes is controlled. Random forms unconnected with older forms do not suddenly displace those older forms on a daily basis. "Acceptance" requires more than just incidential or short term success in communication. Language change is more genetic engineering than random mutation. If it weren't, we should see little or no vestige of PIE in Indo-European languages. But language is much more conservative than that. While evolution is not. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 19 04:48:07 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 00:48:07 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: I wrote: << I read in D, Crystal that the loss of inflection in English has been closely connected with the bilingualism effected by the Danish invasions (CamEncyl Eng Lang p 32).>> In a message dated 4/17/99 7:26:13 PM, [Ed Selleslagh] replied: <> Did the Norse or Danes settle in Frisia (or the correct location for Dutch to be effected?) I'm only aware of raids, at least at the times of Charlesmagne and say Knut. The difference might be important, since the Danes did clearly settle in northern England. Perhaps that explains it. I was really doing no more than citing Crystal and he does say it is only a theory. But it would seem that you'd need a more permanent or constant level of interaction to need to "streamline" a language in this way. <> I don't know what explanations have been offered for this. I don't know that the bilingual accomodation Crystal offers applies to this situation. Though there were a lot of Danes to the north and Wends to the east that could have supplied the same kind of need for loss of complex inflections. <> Same here. Regards, Steve Long From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Mon Apr 19 05:19:03 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 00:19:03 -0500 Subject: Broetchen and Handschuh Message-ID: -chen in Broetchen and elsewhere must be analyzed as a suffix, for two reasons: 1. The meaning of a German compound is essentially that of the last element, the others being what naive speakers call "modifiers". E.g. _Bierhefe_ is 'brewer's yeast' (lit. "beer yeast"), not 'yeasty beer'. Though suffixes determine the syntactic category (and the gender of nouns), it is the root that expresses/determines the "meaning". -heit was once a noun, but no more: _Freiheit_ is an abstraction ('freedom'), not a kind of free anything. _Broetchen_ can be compared only to _Freiheit_, not to _Bierhefe_. 2. It causes umlaut of the preceding element: /bro:t/ + /-x at n/ ==> [bro":tc, at n], not *[bro:tc, at n]. This never happens in compounds. If _Handschuh_ is original (and logically and formally there could be no objection), why do we find the personal names in OE and (at least underlying Handschuhheim) German? Kluge can be spectacularly wrong, but this time I think he got it right. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 19 13:21:14 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 09:21:14 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/13/99 3:02:01 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: <> I didn't catch this when it came on the list. And B-T-W that's not what I wrote. And I'm sure the writer is aware of that. Let's go to our [ironic] Ur friends to get back on track: Ur-Hans: UF, why is whiting at cc.helsinki.fi talking about handshoes when he should be talking about "archaisms" the way Miguel used the term in those earlier posts? Ur-Fritz: I don't know, Hans-to-be. Perhaps whiting at cc.helsinki.fi is avoiding the issue. Ur-Hans: Well, if we were cut off from the so-called "innovative core" does that explain why we would compound words? Ur-Fritz: The Greeks used compounds and recycled words all the time. No, it's probably just whiting at cc.helsinki.fi - that archaeological evidence was a bit too much. Honest dialogue might address whether the idea of a cut-off is valid in terms of history and linguistics. It's easier to just make us up than to actually address the evidence presented. Ur-Hans: What was it that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote? Oh, here it is... <> Although we will have to wait for re-contact with Greek culture to develop terms that have -ology in them, I'd bet my handshoe that is "pop sociology". Ur-Fritz: Or worse, Hans-someday. If I'm right, we may actually be Ur-Danes and we Danes will learn not to like that "ubergeist" kind of talk. But more importantly, Germanic is not conservative. Even we know the functional difference between archaic and conservative. Ur-Hans: And us being poor and cut-off by the Celts from the south, isn't that sociology? Ur-Fritz: No, it's called hard evidence about what happened in pre-history, proto-Hans. It may explain certain features (but not handshoe) in Germanic -that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi doesn't care to address - in terms of "mutual contact" or lack of it. Cultural anthropologists, historians, archaeologist and linguists use the term. Although sociology can use hard statistical evidence, you have to be rigorous or you'll end up saying very unscientific things like <>. That's pseudo-science. Ur-Hans: Sounds like that could cause some trouble in the days ahead. Ur-Fritz: Oh, it will, Hans. It will. That's the latest [irony] from Ur- Steve Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Apr 19 18:58:49 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 21:58:49 +0300 Subject: Socilological vs natural selection (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: <3719ba9e.6524072@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Robert Whiting wrote: > >For one thing, forms can be taken over for reasons like prestige > >of the source language or dialect, or because the speakers find a > >word with a sound or meaning that they just happen to like in another > >language, and there is, as far as I know, no mechanism that duplicates > >this in biological change. > Sexual selection? No, Lamarckian transmission. A language can take a form from a completely unrelated language just because it sounds good in its speakers mouths. A biological organism cannot imitate a feature that it sees in another species and expect it to be passed on to its offspring. The way that language is passed from generation to generation is simply different from the way that a biological organism replicates its genotype. > >Secondly, sociological change does not > >have to be survival-enhancing (people, especially as a group, don't > >always know what is good for them, and even if they do, they don't > >always do it), whereas biological change, because of natural selection, > >will preserve survival-enhancing mutations by its very nature. > True, although I think most biological changes are in fact > survival-neutral. But there is indeed no "survival of the > fittest" about language change. The emphasis of my analogy was > on the side of genetic/linguistic drift, occurring for "no" > reason (or at least not for reasons that have anything to do with > their being selected). Indeed, I expect that most biological changes are survival-neutral as well. And I don't say that linguistic/biological analogies are completely without value. What I say is that it is important to know where the analogies break down so that one does not get drawn into the trap of trying to explain linguistic change as the same mechanism as biological change. Languages just don't have DNA. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Apr 19 20:05:37 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 22:05:37 +0200 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > So, are you saying that Bokmål is pretty much Norwegianized Danish? >From the middle of the 15th century till the liberation from Denmark in 1814, the written language of Norway was Danish, whereas the spoken language continued to be Norwegian. From this state of diglossia, two modern standard languages evolved: the somewhat artificial, but entirely West Nordic *Nynorsk*, a mixture of local dialects, and the increasingly Norwegianized *Bokmål*, based on the written language (Danish). Nowadays, despite its obviously East Nordic character, Bokmål contains some important West Nordic features such as (1) the three-gender distinction, (2) the postpositive possessive pronoun: Bokmål ~ Danish 'my teacher', (3) some retained diphthongs <øy, stein> ~ Danish <ø, sten> 'island, stone'. But the similarities between Bokmål and Nynorsk are far outnumbered by the features uniting Bokmål and Danish in opposition to Nynorsk: Bokmål ~ Danish ~ Nynorsk 'she, you (acc.pl.), who (interr.), comes, onion, (to) drive, loneliness, prolongation'. > Is Gutnish the same as Skanian? I've run into people from southern > Sweden who claim Skanian as their native language. I've also run into > people from Bornholm who claim that a distinctive Scandinavian language is > spoken there. Are these dialects or transitional languages? Gutnish is an extinct East Nordic language, spoken on the Swedish island of Gothland in the viking age and medieval times. Gutnish retained old diphthongs (already at that time monophthongized in Swedish and Danish) and sometimes even developed triphthongs as in ~ Danish 'wheel'. Some say that Gutnish features are reflected in the pronounciation of modern Gothland Swedish. Today, Scanian is a Swedish dialect (on an East Danish substratum), phonetically very distinct from its northern sisters. The Bornholm dialect is the last real representative of East Danish. It shares a lot of features with Swedish, and Swedes understand the dialects of Bornholm much more easily than they understand standard Danish. Adam Hyllested From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Apr 19 20:05:46 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 21:05:46 +0100 Subject: Sanskrit t & d Message-ID: Miguel's question (why some Sanskrit forms are quoted with an etymologically correct final -d when all occurrences of the word in Skt would neutralise the difference between final t and d) still intrigues me. Is it possible that it is a question of internal sandhi, rather than external? The rules are different, and at least one book says that the difference between voiced and voiceless consonants is maintained in internal sandhi. It then offers the unhelpful example of tad-apas "accustomed to that work". If compounds of a root such as vrt maintain the /t/ in that position, there would be the answer to the question. Unfortunately a quick troll through my Sanskrit literature yielded nothing - unsurprisingly. Nonetheless, the vrt root does not alter t to d when a voiced suffix is added - nivartitum "to turn back". Any reactions? And does someone have more detail than I could find in the library? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Apr 19 20:12:47 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 21:12:47 +0100 Subject: imperfect Message-ID: Miguerl said: >>imperfect and aorist in Vedic. >Anadyatana ("not of today") and adyatana ("of today") in Panini's >terms. Panini *does* distinguish between the two. Panini does. Vedic does not. Or more accurately, the texts do not really support the traditional meanings ascribed to the tenses. The aorist is strictly separate from the imperfect and perfect in the Brahmanas, but not regularly in the earlier vedas. A difference can sometimes be seen, but it is not as clear-cut, nor as consistent, as some traditional grammars say. My objection is that Sanskrit evidence is used to project aspect differences back into PIE, when in fact the evidence does not support the argument. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 20 01:28:35 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 20:28:35 -0500 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Friday, April 16, 1999 12:50 PM > The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in > Evid.f.Laryng. as > *eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) > *me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) > I have some difficulty only with the 2du acc. for which the Skt. stem > yuva- (with y- from the nom.) rather points to *uH3e, probably with > dissimilatory loss of the *-w-. > The other cases are formed from the acc. by the addition of postpostions, > cf. Vedic dat. asma-bhyam 'to us', abl. ma-t, tva-t, asma-t, yuSma-t etc. > The disyllabic acc.'s have enclitic variants consisting in the first > (underlying) syllable, *noH3, *woH3, *nos, *wos, for med a time when there > was a vowel /o/ in that syllable. > Possessive adjectives are formed from the acc. by vrddhi: *tew-o-s, > *no:H3-o-s, *wo:H3-o-s, *no:s-o-s, *wo:s-o-s. The 1sg *me had to prefix > the vrddhi vowel because there was only one consonant, *emo-s 'my'. The > reason is that there is no variant *mwe parallel with *t(w)e and *s(w)e, > but that is obviously due to simple sound change, *mwe > *me completed > before the poss.adj. was derived. One of the greatest problems in linguistic studies is the overeager facility with which anomalies are explained with an unjustified mechanism like that above: "simple sound change". There is not the slightest shred of evidence for *mwe in IE. And, in fact, suggesting its (*mwe) former presence obscures a better analysis of the existing facts. Is it not true that the majority of IEists would subscribe to the idea, which has been advanced by Beekes, that the IE nominal nominative developed out of an earlier ergative, in form derived from the genitive? And that, therefore, the nominal accusative, earlier an absolutive, represents the basal form? Now I know some will quibble over whether or not the same logic should apply to pronouns, and yes, I am aware of what seems to be a more conservative retention of older inflections in the pronouns, but, based on the experience we have we languages around the world, there is, IMHO, absolutely no justification for separating nominal and pronominal developments absolutely. On this basis, it is rather easy to see that the *basal* forms of the 1st and 2nd persons, in the singular and plural, are *me, *te, *ne, *ye. There is no necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. Apparently before this inflection (or particle), an alternative form for the first person, analyzable as *He (demonstrative) + *g{^}V (meaning unknown or disputed), suppleted *me for the ergative or later nominative, making a *mwe totally unnecessary as a nominative/ergative although we can surely see it in zero-grade as the Hittite enclitic -mu --- an additional reason for regarding a "simple sound change" (*mew -> *me) as unnecessary and ill-advised. It is also rather easy to see that the pronouns have retained an inflection of -w (or attachment of -w) of which only dubious traces remain in IE nouns. The 2nd person dual and plural are particularly indicative: these forms (*yu: / *yu:s [both built on *yew) I must confess I am completely at a loss to understand a reconstruction of the first and second person accusatives (formerly absolutives) of *nsme and *usme when *-sme is clearly nothing more that an asseverative particle particularly in view of *ne. How can we blithely accept *nsme in view of forms like Homeric no{^}i which is almost certainly simply derived from *ne/o + *wi:? These are not my only objections to the analysis Jens has provided but I will address the other issues later if it seems there is interest. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 20 08:35:05 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 09:35:05 +0100 Subject: Celtic substrate influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Frank Rossi wrote: > Given that: > 1) in North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, which are considered, > rightly or wrongly, the most Celtic areas of Spain, the two forms of > the past tense have been reduced in normal usage to one (the simple > past) and > 2) a similar phenomenon can be observed in Northern France, Northern > Italy and SOUTH GERMANY, where in the Pre-Roman period the La Tene > Iron Age culture and presumably dialects of the Gallic language were > prevalent if not univarsal, although in this case it is the compound > past that has replaced the simple past, > Question: > Could there be a parallel influence of the Celtic substrate in both > areas, in the sense of a rejection of two forms for the past tense, > i.e. either the simple or the compound past, but not both? What do > the experts on Celtic languages think? In other words, are there any > similar phenomena in the Celtic languages, ancient and modern? Well, I'm no Celticist, but I find it very hard to believe that Celtic speech lasted long enough in any region to have any effect upon the development of the Romance verbal system. The Romance preterite directly continues the Latin perfect, which had both preterite and perfect functions. The Romance periphrastic perfect did not exist in classical Latin, but seems to have become well established by the 5th or 6th century -- by which time Celtic speech had surely disappeared everywhere on the Continent. The question is when the contrast between the Romance preterite and perfect was lost, in the areas in which it has been lost. In Parisian French, the preterite seems to have disappeared from speech by about the 16th century, according to Price, but conclusions are difficult because the written language (which is all that is generally recorded) has retained the distinction down to the present day. For Iberia, I have no information. But I might add that the loss of the preterite/perfect contrast is far from rare generally. Even in those Romance languages that retain it today, like Castilian, the original force of the contrast has been significantly altered. And, of course, contemporary American English vernacular has lost the perfect in favor of the preterite in certain circumstances, such as `We did it!' for traditional `We've done it!' Further, in most varieties of American Spanish, the preterite has displaced the perfect to a greater or lesser extent. I don't think that the loss of this contrast is a surprising phenomenon requiring any external explanation. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Apr 20 09:42:54 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 11:42:54 +0200 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Since the derivation of 'zebra' ultimately from Amharic seems to have gained some popularity here recently (I apologise if I've not been following the discussion attentively; I cannot exclude that everyone mentioning it was in fact rejecting it), I might ask knowledgable readers to point me to an Amharic dictionary *with* /zebra/, /zäbra/, or /ze:bra/ in it. In exchange I could offer to name some *without* it. For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of the language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., if it exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. Maybe someone knows more about this. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 20 12:09:43 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 08:09:43 EDT Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/20/99 1:44:51 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: << "Predictable" does not mean "capable of being hypothesized about >> Lest any readers be confused about this: 'Predictability' and 'reproducible results' are the two 'traditional' requisites of scientific methodology. This is from Dewey and those fellows. The basic idea is that a hypothesis or premise ought to predict observable results. Otherwise it cannot be tested. "Reproducible results" means that the premise can also be tested by others. The predictions of course don't ordinarily confirm the premise in its entirety. They are usually designed to create an inference that the premise is true. Such inferences are generally subject to probability theory, sampling and statistical analysis or to logic or sometimes even to common sense. (In this way, as phenomenologists and such have often pointed out, the "laws of physics" and other scientific truths are never directly observed, but always inferred from limited sets of events. I.e., we don't really know "for sure" that the law of gravity will apply tomorrow. But we really have no evidence that the law of gravity has ever been suspended.) Regards, Steve Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Apr 20 12:44:14 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 15:44:14 +0300 Subject: Broetchen and Handschuh In-Reply-To: <01JA7450ZH2Q94OEWL@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: > -chen in Broetchen and elsewhere must be analyzed as a suffix, for two > reasons: > 1. The meaning of a German compound is essentially that of the last > element, the others being what naive speakers call "modifiers". E.g. > _Bierhefe_ is 'brewer's yeast' (lit. "beer yeast"), not 'yeasty beer'. > Though suffixes determine the syntactic category (and the gender of > nouns), it is the root that expresses/determines the "meaning". -heit > was once a noun, but no more: _Freiheit_ is an abstraction ('freedom'), > not a kind of free anything. _Broetchen_ can be compared only to > _Freiheit_, not to _Bierhefe_. > 2. It causes umlaut of the preceding element: /bro:t/ + /-x at n/ ==> > [bro":tc, at n], not *[bro:tc, at n]. This never happens in compounds. I will grant you that -chen is a clitic, not a compound and that there is no indication that it was ever a separate word in Germanic, but I think you are missing something when you say that Broetchen can only be compared with Freiheit, not with Bierhefe. Just as Bierhefe means 'yeast of the beer (= 'brewer's yeast") so Freiheit means 'state of being free', an old compound of 'free' and 'state', much as English motherhood means 'state of being a mother', etc. So these old compounds still have the genitive + noun format of compounds, it's just that one of the nouns that made up the compounds has been grammaticalized into a suffix and the noun has subsequently been lost from the language. > If _Handschuh_ is original (and logically and formally there could be no > objection), why do we find the personal names in OE and (at least > underlying Handschuhheim) German? Kluge can be spectacularly wrong, but > this time I think he got it right. Unfortunately, Kluge no longer seems to think he had it right. You originally referred to Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der deutschen Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), but when I went to the library to check, I found only the 23rd edition (1995) which has no mention of Germanic *_andasko:haz_, but says of Handschuh merely "durchsichtige Bildung." But in looking around, I found that a 1963 edition of Duden said "die oft vertretene Ansicht das Wort sei aus einem *antscuoh "Gegenschuh" umgedeutet, ist verfehlt." So while differences of opinion make for book reviews and horse races, there seems to be a consensus at the moment that Handschuh is simply 'hand' + 'shoe'. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 20 17:42:03 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 19:42:03 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <003801be8acd$45786740$95d2fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Dear Jens and IEists: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen > Sent: Friday, April 16, 1999 12:50 PM > > > The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in > > Evid.f.Laryng. as > > *eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) > > *me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) [...] > One of the greatest problems in linguistic studies is the overeager facility > with which anomalies are explained with an unjustified mechanism like that > above: "simple sound change". There is not the slightest shred of evidence > for *mwe in IE. Except that one expects it in the light of the alternants *te/*twe and *se/*swe, and that *mwe could not continue to live if it ever has. > And, in fact, suggesting its (*mwe) former presence obscures a better > analysis of the existing facts. Not if the analysis is done my way, in which case the form is needed. > Is it not true that the majority of IEists would subscribe to the idea, > which has been advanced by Beekes, that the IE nominal nominative developed > out of an earlier ergative, in form derived from the genitive? And that, > therefore, the nominal accusative, earlier an absolutive, represents the > basal form? I don't know about opinion statics in the population of IE-ists, nor would I be rank them higher than arguments based on facts. IE itself combines the nom. *-s with the thematic vowel to form *-os, but that of the gen. to form *-es +-yo, which indicates that the two sibilants were not identical; in addition, the gen. morpheme had a vowel (*-os) and formed a weak case, while the nom.sg. ended in pure *-s (perhaps once voiced). Even so, however, we cannot exclude that they are _ultimately_ two different variants of the same original entity. - In the inflection of the IE pronouns the acc. plainly has a morpheme which is absent in the nom. - but all the weak cases are based on the accusative. In this, PIE has a system differing from all other PIE inflection and looking more like Modern Indic or Tocharian. This is not an ergative system, but there may or may not have been one elsewhere in the morphology beside it. > Now I know some will quibble over whether or not the same logic should apply > to pronouns, and yes, I am aware of what seems to be a more conservative > retention of older inflections in the pronouns, but, based on the experience > we have we languages around the world, there is, IMHO, absolutely no > justification for separating nominal and pronominal developments absolutely. In English you must: What's the "me-form" of _house_? What's the s-genitive of _I_? > On this basis, it is rather easy to see that the *basal* forms of the 1st > and 2nd persons, in the singular and plural, are *me, *te, *ne, *ye. There > is no necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. Then why are they there? Why does Old Germanic agree with Old Indic in this respect? By chance? > Apparently before this inflection (or particle), an alternative form for > the first person, analyzable as *He (demonstrative) + *g{^}V (meaning > unknown or disputed), suppleted *me for the ergative or later nominative, > making a *mwe totally unnecessary as a nominative/ergative although we can > surely see it in zero-grade as the Hittite enclitic -mu --- an additional > reason for regarding a "simple sound change" (*mew -> *me) as unnecessary > and ill-advised. Since -mu is the enclitic of ammuk 'me' it has every likelihood of having taken over the -u- from there; ammuk has it from the nom. /uk/, that in turn from *tu (variant of *tu: which gave Anat. *ti: > Hitt. zi-k with -k from 'I'). > It is also rather easy to see that the pronouns have retained an inflection > of -w (or attachment of -w) of which only dubious traces remain in IE nouns. > The 2nd person dual and plural are particularly indicative: these forms > (*yu: / *yu:s [both built on *yew) Yes, there is a /w/ in the inflection of the pronouns, thanks for the support, intended or not. > I must confess I am completely at a loss to understand a reconstruction of > the first and second person accusatives (formerly absolutives) of *nsme and > *usme when *-sme is clearly nothing more that an asseverative particle > particularly in view of *ne. How can we blithely accept *nsme in view of > forms like Homeric no{^}i which is almost certainly simply derived from > *ne/o + *wi:? Confession accepted. The Gk. form is dual, its oldest form is believed to be /no:e/ (Whatelet); that would match Av. /a:va/ as *nH3we. To strain your blood pressure, I take the Skt. sma(:) 'verily' to be parallel with *nsme *usme, only made form the reflexive plural, IE *sme from **sweD-me, through invented stages like *sfeDme > *sfezme > *sfozme > *sphozme > *sphzme > *sphme > acc. *sme 'the ones mentioned', of which it may be the instr. *sme-H1 "per se". > These are not my only objections to the analysis Jens has provided but I > will address the other issues later if it seems there is interest. Some of the objections actually express agreement if you look. > ... Jens From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Apr 20 19:12:12 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 20:12:12 +0100 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: Steve wrote: > It seems the gen- and gno- coexisted in Homer. Both "genea" and "gnotos" >refer to relatives. I have always taken "gnotos" to be from *g'nh3 (to know) and "genea" to be from *g'nh1 (to give birth etc). Are you suggesting the same origin for them both? Or that the "know" word had h1? Or have I missed something? Peter From edsel at glo.be Tue Apr 20 19:02:24 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 21:02:24 +0200 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Date: Tuesday, April 20, 1999 6:25 AM >"Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >>Dutch still uses the word 'want' for 'mitten'. 'Glove' is 'handschoen', a >>similar formation as in German. >So Dutch both begins and ends with a >non-etymological segment. [Final -n is a misanalyzed plural: > pl. ==> , pl. ]. >>BTW, the stem 'and-' is frequent in toponyms in German and Dutch speaking >>areas, usually to indicate a place opposite something, mostly on the other >>side of a river etc. (Antwerpen, >I vaguely recall there being some folk etymology of Antwerpen >involving the throwing of hands ("hand werpen") by a giant? >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal [E. Selleslagh] Yes, this is a well known folk etymology, but it has nothing to do with 'the opposite side'. It's a variant of David and Goliath: Brabo (David) freed the users of the waterway from the toll levied by the giant Antigon (Goliath) by hacking his hand off and throwing it in the river. The story seems no older than the Renaissance days of Rubens and Van Dyck. The amateur folklorist Canon Floris Prims (early 20th century) thought it meant 'opposite the wharf' ('werf') as the city is on the deep outer side of the meander. The actual etymology is as follows: in old Dutch texts the word 'antwerp' is used to describe a kind of defense against the water; the 'ant-' part refers to 'against', and 'werp' to the verb 'werpen' = 'to throw', like Fr. 'jeter' in 'jetée' > Eng. 'jetty', so it means something like 'an earthen dam thrown up against the water'. The '-en' ending is still somewhat obscure, but my guess is that it is the Scandinavian suffixed definite article. As a matter of fact, it is generally accepted that the city was founded by the Vikings around the 9th century, as a military camp to control the access via the river. What's left of a wooden palisade around their first settlement on a little butte near the river Scheldt, was actually dug up. (The local (Frankish) dialectal pronunciation 'Antwa^rpen' (stress on first syllable) coincides pretty well with present-day Icelandic pronunciation of the correponding word for ' to cast' (like in 'sko´nwarp' (= TV) or something like that in Iceland, if I remember well. Specialists: please correct me). Throughout its history, the city has never really been integrated into its surroundings (the earstwhile Duchy of Brabant/ Holy Roman Empire), even today. And the opposite bank used to belong to another 'country', the County of Flanders (semi-independent of France), with a very different class of Dutch dialects (basically Ingvaeonic, later influenced by Frankish). It was a city-state (and Hanzestad) and now the second biggest port in Europe, after Rotterdam. Ed. Selleslagh From edsel at GLO.BE Tue Apr 20 19:41:34 1999 From: edsel at GLO.BE (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 21:41:34 +0200 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Tuesday, April 20, 1999 11:52 AM >I wrote: ><< I read in D, Crystal that the loss of inflection in English has been >closely connected with the bilingualism effected by the Danish invasions >(CamEncyl Eng Lang p 32).>> >In a message dated 4/17/99 7:26:13 PM, [Ed Selleslagh] replied: ><phenomenon in Dutch, a closely (geographically and linguistically) related >language, which underwent only a very minor influence from the Viking >invasions?>> >Did the Norse or Danes settle in Frisia (or the correct location for Dutch to >be effected?) I'm only aware of raids, at least at the times of Charlesmagne >and say Knut. [ES] So am I. >The difference might be important, since the Danes did clearly >settle in northern England. Perhaps that explains it. [ES] I don't understand that: If the difference is important, the difference in degree of loss of inflection should have been equally significant, quod non. >I was really doing no more than citing Crystal and he does say it is only a >theory. But it would seem that you'd need a more permanent or constant level >of interaction to need to "streamline" a language in this way. [ES] I fully agree, so I don't think Crystal was right about bilinguism being the cause. ><inflection, in contrast with High-German...>> >I don't know what explanations have been offered for this. I don't know that >the bilingual accomodation Crystal offers applies to this situation. Though >there were a lot of Danes to the north and Wends to the east that could have >supplied the same kind of need for loss of complex inflections. [ES] Maybe, but only sufficiently to the north and in Frisian regions. ><> >Same here. [ES] So, we're still stuck with the fact that only High German kept its complex inflection more or less intact. Maybe we should rather look for an explanation for THAT. Isolation in the Alpine region and then spread to the sub-Alpine regions, as opposed to the open space of NW Europe and the very mobile populations of N and NW Europe, at least in certain times, which might even coincide with the split of High and Low German? Maybe Crystal is right after all, albeit in some more complex way. Any ideas or knowledge (from anybody)? Ed. Selleslagh From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 20 23:03:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 18:03:31 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter &/or Graham Sent: Sunday, April 18, 1999 5:37 AM > Pat said: > >I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by > >Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. > There is some evidence in Sanskrit that requires them to be a consonant: > (a) the failure to lengthen IE /o/ in the 1st person singular perfect, while > lengthening did take place in the 3rd: 1 sing: cakara < ke-ker-He, as > opposed to 3 sing caka:ra < ke-ker-e. This is usually explained by the > presence of the now invisible consonant H in the 1 sing. > [ Moderator's comment: > *ke-kor-H_2e vs. *ke-kor-e (Brugmann's Law). > --rma ] I will attempt to address each of the phenomena you have kindly listed but, in turn, would be more helpful, I think. First, let me address the point raised by Rich. What he wrote suggests that this phenomenon is explained by Brugmann's Law but is it not truer to say that Brugmann proposed a vowel () which manifested itself as in Indo-Aryan in all open syllables and in closed syllables but as in Armenian, Hellenic, Italic and Slavic --- and as in Celtic, Germanic, and Baltic? With some emendations, Brugmann's Law "in the Kleinhans formulation (limiting the phenomenon to positions before a R; later expanded to Lehmann to 'before a semivowel'" lumbered along, half-heartedly endorsed, until Kurylowicz proposed the "laryngeal" explanation in 1927. By 1956, according to Szemerenyi, Kurylowicz had abandoned his emendation (that of a 'laryngeal' preventing the syllable from being open), and this is the formulation of the "Law" with which Rich is working: Kleinhans-Lehmann-Kurylowicz version of Brugmann's Law. Oddly, Kurylowicz' adherents maintained the position he had abandoned; and Gonda (1971) calls the Law "long disputed and now refuted". Frankly, when the Captain abandons ship, it is wise for the sailors to think about the lifeboats also. As some may know, Burrow (1975) came up with another explanation. Now, we *all* are guilty from time to time of citing those authors who support our ideas and rather cavalierly overlooking objections, and there do seem to be a great number of them, posed not by amateurs like myself but by trained IEists --- including the man who first proposed the 'laryngeal' explanation. In view of the unsettled status of consensus regarding the Law, I honestly do not feel that it can be used effectively as a refutation of the idea that, by IE times, 'laryngeals' had graduated into vowels. Now, ideally, I would, of course, be able to offer the "correct" answer to the variation of vowel length in the Sanskrit perfect but I do not claim to be an IEist, and so many IEists have tried and failed to explain this to the satisfaction of their peers that I would flatter myself overduly to think I could propose the final answer to this intriguing problem. I will offer only two thoughts in this connection: 1) I believe it is a mistake to reconstruct any *pre*-IE formant as simply V. 2) I suspect that the answer to the riddle is somewhat along the lines that a 1st person HV and 3rd person HV led to the same phonological result in Indo-Aryan, and that length, in the form of vrddhi differentiation, was introduced to distinguish the two inflected forms, possibly in conjunction with the stress-accent. However, I certainly will not insist that this is the final answer. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Apr 21 05:27:52 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 01:27:52 -0400 Subject: Pennsylvania tree for IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:59 PM 4/18/99 +0100, you wrote: >On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Sheila Watts wrote: >[on my reference to the Penn tree] >> Well-known, but not to me, alas: could we have a reference? >Sorry. It's this: >Tandy Warnow, Donald Ringe and Ann Taylor. 1995. Reconstructing the >evolutionary history of natural languages. Institute for Research in >Cognitive Science, IRCS Report 95-16. Philadelphia: University of >Pennsylvania. I read this report when it came out. I would be very interested to hear what others think of their research model. Also, I would like to pose a question to the IEists and especially the Balto-Slavic specialists on the list. It is my understanding that Balto-Slavic is located opposite Tocharian on the AHD representation of our Tree. Could someone explain to me what the features are of Balto-Slavic which have gained it this prominant position in the model? I am most interested in learning precisely which syntactical and morphological features are at play. Some years ago I read Prof. Beard's book in which, as I recall, he speaks of certain aspects of Slavic lexical formations as being distinctive. Thanks, Roz Frank Department of Spanish and Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Apr 21 05:42:52 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 01:42:52 -0400 Subject: gender assignment In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:36 PM 4/18/99 +0100, you wrote: >On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Nicholas Widdows wrote: >[on the introduction of sex-marking into Basque] >> Most interesting. Are there any cases of it happening on non-o/a >> stems, e.g. * 'old (man)' or * by reinterpretation >> of the native <-a>? Although not meeting the criteria you have set up, the following are three items cited by Iraide Ibarretxe in which the morph <-sa> is imported to set off a "feminine" form from a "masculine" one. Again, I emphasize that these examples don't correspond to what you are asking for and in that sense I agree with Larry's statements below. However, in the examples listed, the sex-marking is expressed by a non-Basque "sex-marked suffix" that parallels that of the Castilian and , the "mayor" and his "wife" even though today we have women serving as mayors so the could be the "mayor" herself. Examples: ad. alargun - alarguntsa "widower/widow" jaiko - jaikosa "god/goddess" aktore - aktoresa "actor/actress" Of these three only the second has much currency to my knowledge, although the pronunciation I've heard is . It is based on and that form on "the lord-on-high". The third is a calque of sorts from Castilian and, therefore, the term has already been "copied" in Euskera. The native word is totally different. [LT] >I am aware of no such case. Sex-marking of the o/a sort in native words >(as opposed to borrowed ones) is still extremely rare, in my experience. >Sex-marking in native words is not particularly prominent at all, and, >where it does occur, it is usually expressed either by a lexical >distinction or by a sex-marked suffix. Agur t'erdi, Roz Frank From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Apr 21 03:30:19 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 21:30:19 -0600 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Voegelin and Voegelin list 'Bunda' as a dialect of Hungu (all but one of its relatives is in Dem Rep of Congo, not Angola according to Ethnologue), Zone H of Guthrie. Curiously, it's not listed in Ethnologue (although it's mentioned in one of the sister language's articles), but Ruhlen has it listed in the Yaka subgroup of Zone H. The Comparative Bantu On-Line Dictionary is a bust right now, so I can't look anything up (the only Bantu dictionary I have at hand is Swahili (Zone G)). Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: [ moderator snip ] > For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique > sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from > Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been > unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of > the language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., > if it exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. Maybe > someone knows more about this. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 21 06:58:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 02:58:57 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/20/99 11:16:23 PM, Peter wrote: <> I'm not sure. I'm presuming that both are derivative of *gen- or *gen(-H-) (or the *gno- I see occasionally.) It seems relevant however that "gnotos" is used to refer both to knowledge and kinship by Homer. ("kin and ken".) If the difference between the two connotations was expressed earlier or later with h1 and h3, it doesn't seem to show up in Homer's "gnotos" (later "gnostos.") To make it worse, "gignomai" (later ginomai) will mean to be born - but can mean things like join up, but "gignosko" (later ginosko) usually means to know in a number of senses, including to be familiar with. (But also to know, fut. in Homer: "gnosomai".) But it seems "gignomai" in the passive reverts to "gegenemai." Hard to keep track of. And I don't know if any of these stems reflect the h1 and h3 difference. [ Moderator's comment: No. There are two different roots here, *gno:- = *gn{e/o}H_3 "know" and *genH_1 "beget, give birth". The verbal adjective collapses due to sound change in Greek, but the very data you provide show the difference. Compare Latin (g)no:sco: vs. genus, Skt. jn~a:-ta- "known" vs. ja:-ta- "born". --rma ] I brought up "genea"/"genos" because it appears to exist alongside of "gnotos" in Homer and both are used to refer to kin or relatives. (Alongside btw of things like "goneus"> father, parent.) I haven't had the time to see if all this is just the result of Homer's multiple dialects, but now I'm just trying to get an idea of the chronology of how /gno-/ travelled. [ Moderator's note: Compare the English phrase "kith and kin", originally "those known and those related", not "relatives" only. "kith" < *gnoH_3, "kin" < *genH_1. --rma ] Is h1 versus h3 supposed to be connected with the absence or presence of the gen-/gn- transposition? Where does the h1/h3 distinction come from in the *g'n- reconstruction? Is it from Hittite or Sanskrit? [ Moderator's response: It represents two difference consonants which explain the difference in vowel quality in the descendant forms. See Saussure, _Me'moire_. --rma ] Hope this makes sense. Regards, Steve Long From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Wed Apr 21 07:00:32 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 09:00:32 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Glen Gordon schrieb: [ moderator snip ] > MAG.HANS-JOACHIM ALSCHER: > In fact, -CnD# > -Cr(D)# [...] -r/-n-neuters and 3rd pers. pl. > secondary/perfect [abibharur vs. abharan < *e-bhi-bher-nt vs. > *e-bher-ont; yakrt/yaknas < *yekwnt/*yekwnes]. Not -Cn# > -Cr# as maintained by some list members, so what about *h1newn "9" > with final -n ? > Actually I'm curious whether you find -C- to be a necessary part of > this rule and whether it can simply suffice to say *-nD# > *-r(D)#. [ moderator snip ] C is the symbol for any consonant and # for the end of the word, so the law should be read "the cluster sonantic n + dental in final word position changes to sonantic r [+ dental which disappears normally] in final word position". Consonantic n + dental in final word position remains, as you can see by considering the pair a-bhar-an from *e-bher-ont vs. a-bi-bhar-ur from *e-bhi-bher-nt and so on. -- Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 21 07:13:31 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 03:13:31 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: In a message dated 4/20/99 11:54:07 PM, edsel at GLO.BE wrote: <> You're right. I got confused. I wrote: <> [ES] wrote: <> And I forgot to bring up, to the South, the Romance speakers, the ever-considered but often rejected Gauls and I guess at a certain point Franks becoming Romance speakers and of course speakers of medieval Latin. And Hungarian in the farther southeast. That rounds it up pretty good except for those in << Isolation in the Alpine region...>> Regards, Steve Long From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Wed Apr 21 07:21:04 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 09:21:04 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal schrieb: > "Glen Gordon" wrote: > >JENS RASMUSSEN: > > Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with > > stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; > > *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome > > *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. > >MIGUEL: > > I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an > > inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; > > and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) > > etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally > > and -s- medially. What to make of them? > >"-t word-finally"?? I'm shocked that you would utter those words. How > >does this bode for **-t > *H1? > This is *-ts. > >MIGUEL: > > As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- > > (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, > > me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced > > there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. > > > >Why does Pokorny write it *me-t- instead of *met- and why can't we > >consider *-t- a verbal affix or possibly two different verbs? > We could consider it an affix if the alternation had been *me-, > *met- (or *me:- ~ *me:t-). But it's *me:- ~ *met- I believe that the enclitic forms of ancient Greek me / se / he (< * me, twe, swe) represent the original forms without any affixes. As you can read at http://members.pgv.at/homer/indoeuro/ I consider those forms as the original subject form of personal pronouns (the recent accusative originally had the function of an absolute case with the ending -e for non-gender-marked words as personal pronouns and the endings -m for animate / -D for inanimate [cf. Latin quem / quid; heteroclita in -Cr[D] / -Cn+ending from *-CnD / -Cn+ending]. I am assuming that the later perfect originally had the function of a [stativic] intransitive and showed concordance to the ending -e of the subject case of personal pronouns, therefore: *mE / *t[w]E / *s[w]E reduplication+E -verb- h2E / t[h2]E / 0E, cf. "primary" [transitive] reduplication+I -verb- mI / sI / tI / ntI with concordance to locative in -I [original ergative]... -- Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Wed Apr 21 07:29:53 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 09:29:53 +0200 Subject: glottalic theory Message-ID: Peter &/or Graham schrieb: > I've read recently that early Finnish borrowings from Germanic (e.g. aja- > "drive") show that the traditional plain voiced stops (PIE *g & *d) were > indeed voiced in proto-Germanic. This means they could not have been > voiceless ejectives as the glottalicists suggest. (Voiced implosives would > not explain the near absence of *b). The writer of the article suggested a > process by which voiceless ejectives became voiced in Germanic, and then > devoiced, which rather removes any advantage the glottalic theory has over > the traditional theory in explaining the Germanic sound shift. > Can anyone out there confirm the Finnish evidence, and if it is indeed > accurate, can anyone show how we can continue to support the glottalic > theory in the face of it? Do you know the theory of Merlingen that *bh/*dh/*gh... represent original implosive b / d / g ...? [PIE system *p,t,k,kw,k´/*(b),d,g,gw,g´/*implosive b,d,g,gw,g´ ~ 'b,'d,'g,'gw,'g´]. -- Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 21 07:59:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 08:59:01 +0100 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: > Since the derivation of 'zebra' ultimately from Amharic seems to have > gained some popularity here recently (I apologise if I've not been > following the discussion attentively; I cannot exclude that everyone > mentioning it was in fact rejecting it), I might ask knowledgable readers > to point me to an Amharic dictionary *with* /zebra/, /zäbra/, or /ze:bra/ > in it. In exchange I could offer to name some *without* it. I was the one who first drew attention to the proposed Amharic origin, from a reported Amharic `zebra'. This is the etymology given as "probable" in Partridge's _Origins_; Partridge attributes this to Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. I did cover myself by saying something like "this looks good if the Amharic word is real." > For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique > sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from > Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been > unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of > the language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., > if it exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. Maybe > someone knows more about this. I've just checked the Ethnologue page on Angola, at http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/Ango.html This reports a Bantu language called Mbunda or Chimbunda, spoken in both Angola and Zambia. It also mentions a second and quite distinct language called Mbunda or Gimbunda, which is apparently spoken in Zaire and Zambia, but not in Angola. I note also that the site reports another Bantu language for Angola, called Luchazi, with an alternative name Ponda, and still another Bantu language, called Mbundu or Bondo, among many other things. The Africanists have my deepest sympathy in trying to cope with this dizzying blizzard of alternative names. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Apr 20 20:11:44 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 16:11:44 -0400 Subject: Celtic substrate influence Message-ID: Frank Rossi wrote > 1) in North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, which are considered, > rightly or wrongly, the most Celtic areas of Spain, the two forms of the > past tense have been reduced in normal usage to one (the simple past) > and > 2) a similar phenomenon can be observed in Northern France, Northern Italy > and SOUTH GERMANY Reduction of different ways of expressing past events is found elsewhere also. In IE languages, it happened twice in Indian: Imperfect and aorist coalace in Pali into a single past tense; the new preiphrastic resultative based on the PPP was created to replace the reduplicated perfect. The latter then supplanted the former in latter Prakrits. Latin Perfect contains forms that go back to the aorist or perfect in PIE. That too suggests a resultative => `present perfect' => past. Bybee et al ``The evolution of grammar'' give more likely examples of resultative/present perfect becoming either simple past or a perfective past. It seems that we do not need substratum explanations for this. -Nath From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Wed Apr 21 11:58:27 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:58:27 +1000 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:20 +0100." Message-ID: [ note to moderator snipped ] Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:20 +0100 (BST) From: Larry Trask On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > Larry, what is the phenomenom of Aquitanian that makes > unpronounceable. thanks The /dr/ cluster. Pre-Basque absolutely lacked plosive-liquid clusters, and, in all early borrowings from Latin and Romance, such clusters were invariably eliminated in one way or another. See sections 18.4-18.5 of Michelena's Fonetica Historica Vasca for a list of examples, including such familiar ones as these: Lat --> Bq `book' Lat --> Bq `glory' Lat --> Bq * --> , `grain' Lat --> Bq `interest, usury' Rom --> Bq * --> `rustic gate' Lat --> Bq `pale yellow' Lat --> Bq `feather' Rom --> old Bq `rule' Rom --> old Bq `cruel' Further to Larry's assertion that the plosive-liquid cluster was not available in early euksara and have been elimenated I have found the following entries made by Azkue that he asserts are native words. Larry would you say that there is not one word in this list that is not problematic for your thesis, that is you can source every single one of these words from outside euskara. I would be certainly grateful for the source of each of them. cheers jon patrick -BR- abra abrasta abrastasun abre abrigu abruzko allibre bragaro brager brai braiel brama branda branga brantza brasa brast bratz bratzen brau brazen brazeri brazilia breiel breka breska bri brial brianda brida brila brina brinbel bringa brintza brintzal briskoka brist britxi briu broga broju broka brokal broketa brokil broska brosta brozel brrrrra brrrrtxo brukul brus bruxka debru diabru dulabre ebri golanbre hebro inobre kalanbria kobru kolobru lanbri lanbro lanbrots lebra lenbreina pebre salobre zabrandila zanbro -GL- danglo garrangla glask glope ingla sengle txingla zingle -GR- binagrera engreinatu engrenatu graba grainoe grangina grango granpoi grantzu grask graspa gredale greinu greste greu grilo grima grimu grina gripa grisela grisola grosain ingresti -KR- azukre kankredo krak kraka krakada krako kramela kranka krask kresal krial krik krika kriket krima krinka krisela krisk krisket krisketa kriskitin krisma krispi kristegi krizkina kroka krokaildu kroska krosko kroskoil krozka krozta kruselu kruspet kruxenta lakrikun -KL- atxiklandara beklaire istaklok karrankla kilimiliklik klak klaka klaska klasketa klausk klink kliska kloka kloska kluk kluka klunka klunklun maxkla -BL- ablieste arranblatu blanka blau bleta blink bloka blunda ebli enblai kobla txibli -PR- anproi april apriti eskalaproi eskopre kepra kuprits lapran litxiprin prei presa primal printz prizt progu txipristin -PL- enpla kanplengo kopla kupla mazapla pla plabux plai plaiut plapa plast plau plaust plausta plautiri plaxu ple plen pleta plox ploxa plunp plust sipla txanplet txapla txaplata txiplita txiploi txirriplot zapla zarraplaka zipla ziplo -TR- aaztru astru atraka atralaka atrapa atrapario atreka atruiz azitrai aztru balestra balotra butroe buztre entrabalo erretrain estrabia estramina estrazia estrongo estroxa iztrepu jikotria kalamastra kaletra kalostra kamastra katramila kontra kotra kulastra kutrilo lantro lantrotxa lantru laratro laustro letranta mastra matraka matran matraza matrazu maztranga mostratxa motrotx muskentra mustratxa ostro patraka petraile petral petreska pitrika potro potroska putrus sastra sestra sostra sostroko traba trabaila trabela trabes trafa tragas tragatz tragu traila traka trakel trakulo tramada tramakulu traman tramu tranbalaldi tranbil tranbuila tranga trangala trankart trantxela traol trapal trapala trapasa trapata trapika trapil traska traskil trasko trasmail trata trauski traust trebe trebes treheil treina tremes trenkada trenta trentin trentxairu trepel tresabi tresen treska tresna tretxu tretza triaga triba trigun trikimaka trikimako trikote triku trila trimin trimulu tringa tringit tringitz tringu trinka tripikio tripili tripot triska trisku trispi triza troba troil troka troko trokol trokot trokota tronpoilo tropita trozal trozel truin truisu truk truka trukut trumil trunbil truntxu trupita zalatrako zitraino zintrino ziztraka ziztrin -TL- none -DR- adrailu almadraka andra andrapo andre andreina baladre bildri boldrio draga dragatz drak drangal drank draul draun drausk dretxu drin dritxo drola dronda drosel drunda drungulu eldro endratxa endrezera endrezu faldra foldra ijendro ildroski indriska indrizilu izendru kolondrin landrila lodrot mandran mendrezka mindrin olandriko pindrua podra txandria txandrio txildrin txilindron zalandra zendrailu zilindroin zoldra -DL- none Jon ---------------------------------------------------------- Prof. Jon Patrick BH +61-2-9351 3524 Sybase Chair of Information Systems FX +61-2-9351 3838 Basser Dept. of Computer Science University of Sydney Sydney, 2006 NSW Australia WEB: http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~jonpat ----------------------------------------------------------- From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 21 13:12:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 14:12:08 +0100 Subject: Pennsylvania tree for IE In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990420193230.30af1844@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote: [on the Pennsylvania tree for IE] > I read this report when it came out. I would be very interested to > hear what others think of their research model. So would I. I have seen virtually no commentary, but then I don't see the IEist journals. A potential difficulty, of course, is that the authors have arbitrarily, if carefully, selected the particular characters to be fed into their tree-drawing program. It is always possible that a different set of characters might yield a different tree. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Apr 21 15:09:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 10:09:19 -0500 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 1999 12:42 PM >On Mon, 19 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>>The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in >>>Evid.f.Laryng. as >>>*eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) >>>*me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) >>One of the greatest problems in linguistic studies is the overeager facility >>with which anomalies are explained with an unjustified mechanism like that >>above: "simple sound change". There is not the slightest shred of evidence >>for *mwe in IE. >Except that one expects it in the light of the alternants *te/*twe and >*se/*swe, and that *mwe could not continue to live if it ever has. That is only if you assume that *te and *se developed from *twe and *swe, which I specifically deny. And, *te/*twe are not, IMHO, true "alternants"; rather, they are the absolutive (*te) and w-inflection (*twe) of a pronominal root *te. >>And, in fact, suggesting its (*mwe) former presence obscures a better >>analysis of the existing facts. >Not if the analysis is done my way, in which case the form is needed. I specifically deny that. And doing the analysis your way is what I am, of course, questioning. >>Is it not true that the majority of IEists would subscribe to the idea, which >>has been advanced by Beekes, that the IE nominal nominative developed out of >>an earlier ergative, in form derived from the genitive? And that, therefore, >>the nominal accusative, earlier an absolutive, represents the basal form? >I don't know about opinion statistics in the population of IE-ists, nor would >I be rank them higher than arguments based on facts. IE itself combines the >nom. *-s with the thematic vowel to form *-os, but that of the gen. to form >*-es +-yo, which indicates that the two sibilants were not identical; I would be very interested to hear how you justify concluding that the "two sibilants were not identical". I find that surprising since we know only of one sibilant for IE. But if you believe IE had both and , why not say so? As far as nominative -o-s and genitive -es is concerned, Beekes and I would consider the formulation genitive/ergative -e/os. Now we also know of "genitives" in -y in some branches; I consider this inflection to simply be a specialized use of adjectival -y. As for the "form *-es +-yo", which you correctly segment, it seems very likely that adding -yV to the genitive is an attempt to differentiate the genitive-ergative -e/os into genitive -e/os+yV and ergative -e/os. >in addition, the gen. morpheme had a vowel (*-os) and formed a weak case, >while the nom.sg. ended in pure *-s (perhaps once voiced). I am suspicious of all "pure" items. It seems to me that reality is always slightly adulterated. >Even so, however, we cannot exclude that they are _ultimately_ two different >variants of the same original entity. Yes, here we are in agreement. But for "cannot", I would subsititute "may not". > - In the inflection of the IE pronouns the acc. plainly has a morpheme which >is absent in the nom. - And what plain morpheme is that if I may ask for clarification? >but all the weak cases are based on the accusative. In this, PIE has a system >differing from all other PIE inflection and looking more like Modern Indic or >Tocharian. Do not see this at all. >This is not an ergative system, but there may or may not have been one >elsewhere in the morphology beside it. A quick look at Lehmann's _Syntactic Typology_, one of his finest works, will inform you that there is no "magic bullet" for ergative systems, no universal pattern for marking. <0>for the absolutive is common but not diagnostic. >>Now I know some will quibble over whether or not the same logic should apply >>to pronouns, and yes, I am aware of what seems to be a more conservative >>retention of older inflections in the pronouns, but, based on the experience >>we have we languages around the world, there is, IMHO, absolutely no >>justification for separating nominal and pronominal developments absolutely. >In English you must: What's the "me-form" of _house_? What's the s-genitive of >_I_? I normally expand my view over more than English. >>On this basis, it is rather easy to see that the *basal* forms of the 1st and >>2nd persons, in the singular and plural, are *me, *te, *ne, *ye. There is no >>necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. >Then why are they there? You tell me. >Why does Old Germanic agree with Old Indic in this respect? By chance? You are conflating two issues. I maintain, with most IEists I presume, that dual inflection is later in time than singular and plural inflections, and *is built on them*. >>Apparently before this inflection (or particle), an alternative form for the >>first person, analyzable as *He (demonstrative) + *g{^}V (meaning unknown or >>disputed), suppleted *me for the ergative or later nominative, making a *mwe >>totally unnecessary as a nominative/ergative although we can surely see it in >>zero-grade as the Hittite enclitic -mu --- an additional reason for regarding >>a "simple sound change" (*mew ->*me) as unnecessary and ill-advised. >Since -mu is the enclitic of ammuk 'me' it has every likelihood of having >taken over the -u- from there; ammuk has it from the nom. /uk/, that in turn >from *tu (variant of *tu: which gave Anat. *ti: >Hitt. zi-k with -k from 'I'). This is hopelessly muddled as far as I am concerned. Hittite ammuk is a stressed form for 'me' fairly certainly combining IE *e-, demonstrative + *me, 1st person + *-w, inflection (I believe its signficance is to mark topicality) + *g^-, pronominal marker (I believe its original significance is to mark maleness). It is backassward to suggest that -mu has "taken over the -u- from" ammuk. Rather, ammuk has incorporated mu into a fuller form expanded by a- and -k. >>It is also rather easy to see that the pronouns have retained an inflection >>of -w (or attachment of -w) of which only dubious traces remain in IE nouns. >>The 2nd person dual and plural are particularly indicative: these forms (*yu: >>/ *yu:s [both built on *yew) >Yes, there is a /w/ in the inflection of the pronouns, thanks for the support, >intended or not. I am always willing to support what seems to be the best answer of the moment. >>I must confess I am completely at a loss to understand a reconstruction of >>the first and second person accusatives (formerly absolutives) of *nsme and >>*usme when *-sme is clearly nothing more that an asseverative particle >>particularly in view of *ne. How can we blithely accept *nsme in view of >>forms like Homeric no{^}i which is almost certainly simply derived from *ne/o >>+ *wi:? >Confession accepted. The Gk. form is dual, its oldest form is believed to be >/no:e/ (Whatelet); that would match Av. /a:va/ as *nH3we. To strain your blood >pressure, I take the Skt. sma(:) 'verily' to be parallel with *nsme *usme, >only made form the reflexive plural, IE *sme from **sweD-me, through invented >stages like *sfeDme > *sfezme > *sfozme > *sphozme > *sphzme > *sphme > acc. >*sme 'the ones mentioned', of which it may be the instr. *sme-H1 "per se". Invention is the mother of comedy. >>These are not my only objections to the analysis Jens has provided but I >>will address the other issues later if it seems there is interest. >Some of the objections actually express agreement if you look. Yes, I have looked, and we do agree on a -w inflection for IE pronouns. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Apr 21 16:51:00 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 11:51:00 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Sunday, April 18, 1999 1:07 AM [ moderator snip ] > I opened Lehmann and immediately put my finger on syllabicity in the last > chapter. Embarrassing! But I know why I didn't recall it: that chapter (a) > had no relevance to my actual interest, viz. Germanic reflexes of laryngeals, > and (b) it struck me as utterly nonsensical. Why do you not explain why you consider it "nonsensical". > My gut feeling aside, there's an obvious problem with it even in terms of > structuralist theory. On p. 112 Lehmann states: "If we find no phonemes in > complemetary distribution at the peak of the syllable, we cannot assume a > segmental phoneme for this position." My own gut feeling is that there is no problem whatsoever. I will quote what Lehmann says before this quotation: "We can construct one more stage of pre-IE, a pre-stress period. If stress gave rise to conditioned variants [e e{sub} e:], an an earlier periodsuch stress must have been non-distinctive. In accordance with its most common reflex the most open segment of the pre-IE syllable, the syllabic peak, is usually written e, as in Benveniste's reconstruction of the IE root. The syllabic peak does not, however, contrast *directly* with any vowel. Consequently an analysis of the pre-stress stage of pre-IE with a vowel phoneme e is misleading. If we find no phonemes in complementary distribution at the peak of a syllable, we cannot assume a segmental phoneme for this position. The peak of the syllable, syllabicity, must have been a prosodic feature." All Lehmann is saying is that since no specific vowel can be specified at the syllabic peak, one that becomes phonemic by contrast with other phonemic vowels (where "phonemic" is defined as providing a semantic differentiation: CVC is a different word than CV{1}C), we cannot assume *one* specific vowel (e or anything else) at the syllabic peak in stressed positions. "Syllabicity" is just a innovative way of describing V{?}. > Surely not "phonemes in complementary distribution" -- *contrasting* > phonemes, or something of the sort. "Complementary distribution" in Trask's dictionary means "The relation which holds in a given speech variety between two phones which never occur in the same environment." With the exception of the qualification "two", this describes the situation that Lehmann has supposed for the stress-period of IE (e e{sub} e:). You may question his analysis but his terminology seems perfectly in accordance with standard usage. > Whether complementary or contrastive, the supposed difficulty arises because > Lehmann (against Brugmann & Co.) arbitrarily defines [i u] as syllabic > allophones of resonant phonemes /y w/ -- There is nothing arbitrary about this at all. If we assume that IE and AA are related through Nostratic (which you may not prefer to do), the decision is mandatory. IE CiC does not show up in AA as normal C-C but rather always as C-y-C. > Brugmann's notation, where [y w] are written with subscript half-moons, > implicitly makes the vocalic /i u/ fundamental, That is reading a lot into a simple notational device. And what if Brugmann didbelieve this. IE studies have moved along a little bit in the last hundred years. Whatever Brugmann's assumptions may or may not have been, not inconsiderable IEists like Beekes consider as vocalic realizations of consonantal . If you wish to dispute that, the question is currently being discussed on the Nostratic list. So far, the only information there we have to support your position is Bomhard's *mention* of a paper by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov *with no details*. Do you have any arguments for your position? > whereas for /m n l r/ the non-syllabic realizations are (hence subscript > circle beneath the syllabic realizations). A subscript circle does not work very well under a . > With /i u/ there is contrast in position between non-syllabics, I have no idea what this means. Could you explain it? > and Lehmann's justification for a prosodic feature of "syllabicity" vanishes. > -- I should add that on p. 113, Lehmann incautiously says that at the next > stage of PIE, with phonemic stress, syllabicity with minimum stress "remains > non-segmental between obstruents..." "Between"? How so? Anything that can > be between phonemes sounds segmental enough to me! How about zero-grade "vowels"? Perhaps you would prefer another way to describe it but Lehmann's meaning is rather clear to me. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From edsel at glo.be Wed Apr 21 18:20:00 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 20:20:00 +0200 Subject: Suffix -ar in IE and Vennemann's Vasconic Message-ID: Not being an IE-ist myself, I would like to ask the knowledgeable people on this list for more (IE) information about the suffixes '-(t)ar' and '-ar' which exist in both IE and in Basque, apparently with roughly the same function and meaning: the former is an ethnonymic-forming device (with 't' after final vowel), while the latter can have a series of meanings, often expressing occupational relationship with something, or something more difficult to describe in a general way (e.g. collectivity, multiplicity). Apart from the non-IE Basque, the languages that use '-ar' frequently and productively I am aware of, are Slavic (e.g. Serbo-Croat 'put/putar' = 'road/road worker'), Albanian (e.g. 'Shqiperia/Shqip(e)tar', 'Albania/ (an) Albanian'), (I'm not sure about other satem lgs.like Indo-Iranian) and maybe Latin (ending -arius and -or(?)). In Germanic there are various suffixes like '-er', at least in some usages (e.g. Londoner, painter(?)), that might qualify. For those who believe in Vennemann's 'Vasconic' substrate theory, this cannot be a coincidence, but my questions are not really about that: 1. What is the Proto-Slavic form, or forms if the -ar suffixes in various usages are not the same? 2. What is their reconstructed PIE form? 3. What about the Germanic -er (one or more)? 4. What about Latin -or (actor) and -arius (and -alis, -aris, etc.)? Ed. Selleslagh [ Moderator's comment: Latin -tor is cognate with Skt. -tar "agent, actor", Hittite -tar "idem"; the suffix is not "-or". --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Apr 21 20:16:30 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:16:30 +0100 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Sanskrit : 1 sing: cakara as >> opposed to 3 sing caka:ra >> [ Moderator's comment: >> *ke-kor-H_2e vs. *ke-kor-e (Brugmann's Law). >> --rma ] [Thanks for the correction, Rich - it was a silly mistake of mine.] Pat then offers material, which I suspect is from Collinge, offering criticisms of Bruggmann's Law, which I accept as valid (though not decisive). He then goes on: >As some may know, Burrow (1975) came up with another explanation. And as you know, Pat, Burrow's explanation doesn't work either. It appears to work because as Collinge puts it (page 18 in my edition) "Burrow allows analogies of his own choosing, but not of others'" Pat then sugggests: >I suspect that the answer to the riddle is somewhat along the lines that >a 1st person HV and 3rd person HV led to the same phonological result in >Indo-Aryan, and that length, in the form of vrddhi differentiation, was >introduced to distinguish the two inflected forms, possibly in conjunction >with the stress-accent. In fact the process seems to have been the other way: Vedic (I believe) distinguishes 1 sing and 3 sing fairly regularly, but in Classical Sanskrit the 1 sing could take vrddhi grade just like the 3 sing., so analogy (or whatever) worked to make the two forms identical, rather than to disambiguate them. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Apr 21 20:00:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:00:51 +0100 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >><>inflection, in contrast with High-German...>> >So, we're still stuck with the fact that only High German kept its complex >inflection more or less intact. Maybe we should rather look for an >explanation for THAT. Isolation in the Alpine region ... Hardly. The High German dialects covered perhaps two thirds of the modern Germany-speaking area. The standard language is most closely allied to the dialect around Meissen, precisely because that was the dialect most widely known. Nowhere near the Alps. We might however look at the timing. Luther's Bible fixes High German to some extent (e.g. the -e endings in ich mache etc, for which he was laughed at even in his own time). Without a literary standard the Low German dialects could change more rapidly. So just when did their loss of inflection occur? Peter From dalazal at hotmail.com Thu Apr 22 05:06:25 1999 From: dalazal at hotmail.com (Diogo Almeida) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 22:06:25 PDT Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: >For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique >sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from >Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been >unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of the >language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., if it >exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. As a Brazilian, I'm familiar with the word /Bunda/. In Brazilian Portuguese, this is the common word for "buttock". The dictionary gives /mbunda/, from the "Quimbundo" language as the etymology for it. There is a great amount of words in Brazilian Portuguese that comes from Bantu languages, due to the slaves that were brought from Angola and Mozambique. A /Bundo/ in Brazilian Portuguese is a member of the Bundo tribe of Angola. The Bundo are a Bantu people. Their language is, according to the dictionary, "Bundo", "Ambundo" or "Quimbundo". In Comrie's "The World's Major Languages", there is a map on page 992, showing the Bantu-speaking area, in which we see "Kimbundu", "Lunda" and "Umbundu", together with "Kongo", as four Bantu languages geographicaly close to each other, on the region of Angola. Angola's capital is Luanda (maybe there is something to do with, I don't know). Historically, the Portuguese were already in close contact with Swahili-speaking people in the middle of the sixteenth century, when they already had conquered Malindi (around 1505), which is in today's Kenya, I think. There are borrowings from Portuguese in Swahili that dates from that time (Comrie's "World Major Lgs" pg.1013). There was a portuguese attack to the city of Aden in 1513 (Aden is in the extreme south-west of the Arabic Peninsula, facing today's Somalia), because they were trying to monopolize the commerce of the Red Sea. It does not seem impossible that a borrowing from Amharic (if "zebra" really comes from Amharic) could have happened at that time or even before, maybe directly from Ahmaric, maybe via Swahili or Arabic. Or even from one of the Bantu languages mentioned before, who would have already borrowed it from Amharic via Swahili. If "zebra" really comes from a Congolese language, be it one of the mentioned above or be it one closely related to those, the explanation is easier, since the Portuguese were already in contact with people speaking those languages in the second half of the fifteenth century (discovery of Congo's and Angola's coast between 1474-1485 by Diogo Cco; expedition on the Congo River in 1484). Well, that's all the information I can give. I hope it helps. Kind Regards, Diogo Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida From edsel at glo.be Thu Apr 22 11:08:09 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 13:08:09 +0200 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Peter &/or Graham Date: Thursday, April 22, 1999 10:16 AM [ moderator snip ] >Hardly. The High German dialects covered perhaps two thirds of the modern >German-speaking area. The standard language is most closely allied to the >dialect around Meissen, precisely because that was the dialect most widely >known. Nowhere near the Alps. We might however look at the timing. >Luther's Bible fixes High German to some extent (e.g. the -e endings in ich >mache etc, for which he was laughed at even in his own time). Without a >literary standard the Low German dialects could change more rapidly. So >just when did their loss of inflection occur? [Ed. Selleslagh] Aren't you speaking about a relatively late period, when High German had already spread to more northern regions, maybe, inter alia, under the centralizing (but generally opposed) influence of the Holy Roman Empire e.g. ? Do you - or anybody else - have any data about the 'advancement' of HG, let's say from the large-scale migrations onward? I'm not sure, but dialects like that from the N Rhineland seem to indicate a progressing encroachment by HG. The lack of a litterary standard for Low German is not entirely true: Dutch is just that for a subset of Low German dialects. Even though there are virtually no Dutch texts from before the 10th century, all available evidence points to an early loss of most of its inflection, only slightly less than in English. The choice of Luther for High German instead of Low German is probably due to 'marketing opportunism' brought about by the linguistic situation in his time, as described in your posting. Anyway, his choice paved the road for HG to become the standard for the whole of the High and Low German speaking regions, except the Low Countries by the sea. (The isolated, basically HG, Schwyzertuetsch resisted for a long time, but is caving in except for informal conversation - but that is also true for Hamburg Low German, which, BTW, sounds a lot like Antwerp Flemish dialect and is mutually quite intelligible). Best regards, Ed. Selleslagh From jrader at m-w.com Thu Apr 22 10:14:21 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 10:14:21 +0000 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: The supposed Bantu origin of is discussed in an article by R. Loewe in _Zeitschrift fu"r vergleichende Sprachforschung_, v. 61 (1933-34). Loewe refutes a conjectured Amharic origin. Castro and Menendez Pidal completely demolished the African speculations in the '30's, though, by pointing out that , , , , etc., were attested as Iberian Romance names for the wild ass in the Middle Ages (1207 for Castilian, 13th cent. in the Galician version of Alfonso X's _General Historia_ ; see Corominas s.v. for the details and bibliography). I do not have immediate access to Machado's Portuguese etymological dictionary, which might document when the name was transferred from the wild ass to one or more species of zebra. That such a transfer took place seems pretty indisputable--whatever the ulterior origin of the Iberian Romance word. English dictionaries are very slow to update information. _The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology_ (1966) and _The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology_ (1986) continue the long discredited "Congolese" origin. By 1993 Oxford finally saw the light and plumped for the Romance origin the _New Shorter Oxford_. Jim Rader [ moderator snip ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 22 14:32:05 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 09:32:05 -0500 Subject: Suffix -ar in IE and Vennemann's Vasconic Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 1999 1:20 PM > [ Moderator's comment: > Latin -tor is cognate with Skt. -tar "agent, actor", Hittite -tar "idem"; > the suffix is not "-or". > --rma ] For whatever it may be worth, I believe that IE -*te/or is a combination of the simpler elements -*te/o (collective/iterative) and -*(He/o)r(e/o), 'man'. Both elements occur in AA so that there seems to be no need to assume a substrate influence to account for them in IE. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 22 14:40:06 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 09:40:06 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter &/or Graham Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 1999 3:16 PM > Pat then offers material, which I suspect is from Collinge Quite correct. >, offering > criticisms of Bruggmann's Law, which I accept as valid (though not > decisive). He then goes on: > >As some may know, Burrow (1975) came up with another explanation. > And as you know, Pat, Burrow's explanation doesn't work either. It appears > to work because as Collinge puts it (page 18 in my edition) "Burrow allows > analogies of his own choosing, but not of others'" Yes, I was trying implicitly (but should have been explicit) to indicate the the question has not really been satisfactorily answered, and *so* cannot be very decisive for the question of using consonantal 'laryngeals' to explain these interesting long and short vowel phenomena. > Pat then sugggests: > >I suspect that the answer to the riddle is somewhat along the lines that > >a 1st person HV and 3rd person HV led to the same phonological result in > >Indo-Aryan, and that length, in the form of vrddhi differentiation, was > >introduced to distinguish the two inflected forms, possibly in conjunction > >with the stress-accent. > In fact the process seems to have been the other way: Vedic (I believe) > distinguishes 1 sing and 3 sing fairly regularly, but in Classical Sanskrit > the 1 sing could take vrddhi grade just like the 3 sing., so analogy (or > whatever) worked to make the two forms identical, rather than to > disambiguate them. I bow to your better knowledge of Indic. But, the question is: do you still believe that "Brugmann's Law" is a serious argument for the consonantal nature of 'laryngeals' in IE? If you agree with me that it *might* be of significance but not necessarily so, wecan move on to another point if you want. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From DFOKeefe at aol.com Thu Apr 22 17:55:08 1999 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 13:55:08 EDT Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: [ Moderator's comment: To say "Posted without comment" is to comment... --rma ] Hello I-E Listmembers, We have placed a paper we have written entitled 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH AND FINNISH WORDS WITH AN IRISH TIE-IN TO URALIC in section 1. (A.) of our Web page, http://members.aol.com/IrishWord/page/index.htm. We believe that Finnish is related to Indo-European. We suspect that Finnish/Estonian consonantal gradation and Hungarian consonantal alteration are the same phenomenon as Celtic initial mutation and this similarity suggests that Celtic initial mutation is much older than 650 AD, which is the time frame some experts believe it started. Best regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Apr 22 18:51:43 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 13:51:43 -0500 Subject: Broetchen and Handschuh Message-ID: >From: IN%"Indo-European at xkl.com" 20-APR-1999 22:48:05.09 >Subj: RE: Broetchen and Handschuh >On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >> -chen in Broetchen and elsewhere must be analyzed as a suffix, for two >> reasons: >> 1. The meaning of a German compound is essentially that of the last >> element, the others being what naive speakers call "modifiers". E.g. >> _Bierhefe_ is 'brewer's yeast' (lit. "beer yeast"), not 'yeasty beer'. >> Though suffixes determine the syntactic category (and the gender of >> nouns), it is the root that expresses/determines the "meaning". -heit >> was once a noun, but no more: _Freiheit_ is an abstraction ('freedom'), >> not a kind of free anything. _Broetchen_ can be compared only to >> _Freiheit_, not to _Bierhefe_. >> 2. It causes umlaut of the preceding element: /bro:t/ + /-x at n/ ==> >> [bro":tc, at n], not *[bro:tc, at n]. This never happens in compounds. >I will grant you that -chen is a clitic, not a compound and that there >is no indication that it was ever a separate word in Germanic, but I >think you are missing something when you say that Broetchen can only be >compared with Freiheit, not with Bierhefe. Just as Bierhefe means >'yeast of the beer (= 'brewer's yeast") so Freiheit means 'state of >being free', an old compound of 'free' and 'state', much as English >motherhood means 'state of being a mother', etc. So these old >compounds still have the genitive + noun format of compounds, it's >just that one of the nouns that made up the compounds has been >grammaticalized into a suffix and the noun has subsequently been lost >from the language. My choice of _Freiheit_ as an example was not good, for many of the reasons you pointed out. Semantics aside, I still believe that _Freiheit_ and _freedom_ are not compounds, if only because they do not have the stress and intonation pattern of compounds. (This is more obvious in the English example.) That they once *were* compounds is, of course, undeniable. But I should point out that compounds do not normally have a "genitive + noun" format, as you said. Synchronically, genitive-like -s- is very rare in English, while in German it is particularly common on *feminine* first elements, which precisely do *not* have -s in the genitive case: formations such as _Universitaet-s-praesident_ do not contain a genitive formant. No a surprise, really; the PIE type used the *stem* of the first element, with no case ending. >> If _Handschuh_ is original (and logically and formally there could be no >> objection), why do we find the personal names in OE and (at least >> underlying Handschuhheim) German? Kluge can be spectacularly wrong, but >> this time I think he got it right. >Unfortunately, Kluge no longer seems to think he had it right. You >originally referred to Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der deutschen >Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), but when I went to the library to check, >I found only the 23rd edition (1995) which has no mention of Germanic >*_andasko:haz_, but says of Handschuh merely "durchsichtige Bildung." >But in looking around, I found that a 1963 edition of Duden said "die >oft vertretene Ansicht das Wort sei aus einem *antscuoh "Gegenschuh" >umgedeutet, ist verfehlt." So while differences of opinion make for >book reviews and horse races, there seems to be a consensus at the >moment that Handschuh is simply 'hand' + 'shoe'. The latest edition of Kluge has changed much, mainly for the best, it seems. But then the personal names must be mere coincidence, and _Handschuhheim_ folk etymology? >Bob Whiting >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 22 20:58:28 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 21:58:28 +0100 Subject: glottalic theory Message-ID: Hans-Joachim Alscher said: >Do you know the theory of Merlingen that *bh/*dh/*gh... represent original >implosive b / d / g ...? [PIE system *p,t,k,kw,k4/*(b),d,g,gw,g4/*implosive >b,d,g,gw,g4 ~ 'b,'d,'g,'gw,'g4]. Yes, I do. The main advantage I can see is that it explains the extraordinary number of occurrences of voiced aspirates at the beginning of words, as opposed to medial or final (about 6 times as many; while for both "plain voiced" and voiceless, it is only about 3 times as many). As is well known, implosives are commoner at the beginnings of words - for example Sindhi implosives only occur word-initially. Unfortunately a velar implosive, although not impossible, is rather rare. J C Salmons "The Glottalic Theory" is a useful resource for this kind of information. Peer From jer at cphling.dk Thu Apr 22 22:16:32 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 00:16:32 +0200 Subject: Pers.pron. In-Reply-To: <001401be8c09$0f725ce0$0d9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [Personal pronouns in PIE; snip of a lot] >>[... O]ne expects [*mwe beside *me] >>in the light of the alternants *te/*twe and >>*se/*swe, and that *mwe could not continue to live if it ever has. > That is only if you assume that *te and *se developed from *twe and *swe, > which I specifically deny. And, *te/*twe are not, IMHO, true "alternants"; > rather, they are the absolutive (*te) and w-inflection (*twe) of a > pronominal root *te. Where is the evidence for their differentiated use? Does YOUR system not force YOU to assume that the "w-inflection" of *me changed from *mwe to *me by the rule you won't have? That also answers the following remark of yours: > I specifically deny that [viz., that earlier *mwe is need under "my > system"]. And doing the analysis your way is what I am, of > course, questioning. Everything should be questioned. >>[...] IE itself combines the >>nom. *-s with the thematic vowel to form *-os, but that of the gen. to form >>*-es +-yo, which indicates that the two sibilants were not identical; > I would be very interested to hear how you justify concluding that the "two > sibilants were not identical". I find that surprising since we know only of > one sibilant for IE. But if you believe IE had both and , why not say > so? I do say so, only in the variant, "IE had had both and ", i.e. the opposition belong to the prehistory of the protolanguage in which they constitute two different morphophonemes for analyses of some depth. The sibilant marking the nominative in IE had two properties not shared by (most) other s's: (1) It causes lengthening of V in the environment VC(C)s#, e.g. nom. *dye:w-s as opposed to 2sg *k^lew-s; (2) it causes a preceding thematic vowel to take on the form /o/, while other s's take /e/: nom. *yo-s 'he who' vs. 2sg *bhere-s (but *yo-m like 1sg inj. *bhero-m and nom.pl. *to-y 'they' like opt. *bhero-yH1-t, etc.). The lengthening is also exhibited by some s's that just happened to occur root-finally (as all consonants could): *ters 'dryness' > *te:rs, reshaped to *te:r-os (like *men-s -> *men-os 'thought'), whence Celtic *ti:ros > OIr. ti:r 'land' (ntr. s-stem); also Ved. ma:s 'flesh' from *me:ms has undergone the further lengthening leading to a form rhyming with m-stem nominatives like Ved. ksa:s 'earth', Av. zii 'winter' - this must have been different from the form of the acc.pl. which once must have ended in stem + -m-s, in the o-stems *-o:ns, which therefore probably once had a different sibilant from the one marking the nominative. Lengthening is also seen in the s-aorist which then apparently had the lengthening s. Now, the derivative present to go with the s-aorist appears too often to be the type in -sk^e/o- for this to be fortuitous (the arrangement of Ved. prcchati : aor. apra:ksam). Other derivative presents are formed with the suffix *-ye/o- (*-e-H2-[ye/o-], stative aor. *-eH1- vs. stative prs. *-H1-ye/o-, denom. in zero as opposed to denom. in *-ye/o- presumably reflecting the two aspect stems, desid. or "future" in *-H1s- vs. *-H1s-ye/o-, etc.), therefore one would like to derive *-sk^e/o- from older *-s-ye/o-. A change of "lengthening s + /y/" to -sk^- may (by only just MAY) be seen in the suffix *-isko-s "belonging to" which may simply be an old izafet-like construction in *-is + *yos with the relative pronoun tagged on to an old nom. in *-is (itself manifestly a reduced variant of *-os): Thus a word like Danish would have meant "Dane who (is", as indeed it does in "a Dane who is king" = "a Danish king". The (non- lengthening) s of the desiderative (future) does not change a follwoing /y/ into -k^-, cf. the cited desid. durative (Skt. future) in *-H1s-ye/o-. It seems rather plain that IE /s/ has more than one source to it. [...] >>in addition, the gen. morpheme had a vowel (*-os) and formed a weak case, >>while the nom.sg. ended in pure *-s (perhaps once voiced). > I am suspicious of all "pure" items. It seems to me that reality is always > slightly adulterated. If so, they are adulterated in two different ways under the same circumstances, and that spells opposition to an unbiased analyst, doesn't it? If you say no to that, investigation stops, and discussion becomes impossible. There is the open backdoor of "vanished variables". But one should not refrain from saying out loud what one observes in places where observations CAN be made, and that's all I'm doing. >>Even so, however, we cannot exclude that they are _ultimately_ two different >>variants of the same original entity. > Yes, here we are in agreement. But for "cannot", I would subsititute "may > not". If you would state a reason for this will of yours I just might take it seriously. BTW, the exact modality of "may not" escapes me in this context. >> - In the inflection of the IE pronouns the acc. plainly has a morpheme which >>is absent in the nom. - > And what plain morpheme is that if I may ask for clarification? The accusative-forming segment *-me (dual variant *-we). >>but all the weak cases are based on the accusative. In this, PIE has a system >>differing from all other PIE inflection and looking more like Modern Indic or >>Tocharian. > Do not see this at all. Then look at the inflection of the Vedic pers.prons. in your Grassmann. They all go the same, and the simply add endings to the accusative - as it is, or as you can esaily unravel it if you're willing. >>This is not an ergative system, but there may or may not have been one >>elsewhere in the morphology beside it. > A quick look at Lehmann's _Syntactic Typology_, one of his finest works, > will inform you that there is no "magic bullet" for ergative systems, no > universal pattern for marking. <0>for the absolutive is common but not > diagnostic. >>>Now I know some will quibble over whether or not the same logic should apply >>>to pronouns, and yes, I am aware of what seems to be a more conservative >>>retention of older inflections in the pronouns, but, based on the experience >>>we have we languages around the world, there is, IMHO, absolutely no >>>justification for separating nominal and pronominal developments absolutely. >>In English you must: What's the "me-form" of _house_? What's the s-genitive >>of _I_? > I normally expand my view over more than English. Then I misunderstood you - as you me: This was restricted to IE, and that goes like English in the respect concerned. >>> There is no necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. >>Then why are they there? > You tell me. What about this: To express dual number? Can't we accept the dual when we SEE it? >>Why does Old Germanic agree with Old Indic in this respect? By chance? > You are conflating two issues. I maintain, with most IEists I presume, that > dual inflection is later in time than singular and plural inflections, and > *is built on them*. That's not the way anything I know looks. On the contrary, the dual is everywhere in the process of being eliminated, and it just beats me why some scholars want that to reflect a stage of uncompleted creation. In addition, the dual has some morphemes all its own, that's not at all the way analogy works, but it IS the way archaisms look. You might as well explain the irregular inflections of the verb "to be" in most IE branches as due to new morphological trends that got cut off. That is very definitely the wrong track, and I would not accept it even if there were unanimity about it. [...] >>Since -mu is the enclitic of ammuk 'me' it has every likelihood of having >>taken over the -u- from there; ammuk has it from the nom. /uk/, that in turn >>from *tu (variant of *tu: which gave Anat. *ti: >Hitt. zi-k with -k from >>'I'). > This is hopelessly muddled as far as I am concerned. Hittite ammuk is a > stressed form for 'me' fairly certainly combining IE *e-, demonstrative + > *me, 1st person + *-w, inflection (I believe its signficance is to mark > topicality) + *g^-, pronominal marker (I believe its original significance > is to mark maleness). It is backassward to suggest that -mu has "taken over > the -u- from" ammuk. Rather, ammuk has incorporated mu into a fuller form > expanded by a- and -k. Nobody can _guess_ these things. But IF (1) Hittite is an IE language and so prone to contain elements corresponding to those found in other IE languages, (2) the vocalism /u/ is not found in these pronouns elsewhere except in the nom.sg. 'thou', and (3) enclitic and orthotone forms are sometimes found to influence each other, also in the direction I propose (a well-known case among many is Germanic *mi:na-z 'my' from *meyn-o-s, a reshaping of *emo-s based on the orthotone gen. *mene influenced by the enclitic gen. *moy; also Lat. meu-s from *meyo-s has taken the /y/ from the enclit. *moy), THEN you can link Hitt. to the rest of IE in a smooth and unforced way if you assume that the /u/ has propagated from 'thou' to 'I' and from 'I' to 'me', and finally from orthotone 'me' to enclit. 'me'. All these steps of spread then occur between closely associate forms. Is that more "backassward" than an explanation based on a morphology the language does not otherwise have? BTW, what is the basis for taking the *-g^ to express topicality? [...] >>To strain your blood >>pressure, I take the Skt. sma(:) 'verily' to be parallel with *nsme *usme, >>only made from the reflexive plural, IE *sme from **sweD-me, through >>invented stages like *sfeDme > *sfezme > *sfozme > *sphozme > *sphzme > >>*sphme > acc. *sme 'the ones mentioned', of which it may be the instr. >>*sme-H1 "per se". > Invention is the mother of comedy. Maybe so, but it is less amusing that some scholars - in this case not you - claim that there is no way from A to B just because they have not even tried to find one. I have shown how the IE system of pers.prons. MAY be seen as underlyingly regular, you may have a different way of achieving the same; but NOBODY should claim that there is NO conceivable way this system could be originally regular. My system, which was only a suggestion, may have its flaws, so don't stop criticizing it, just because I have ready answers to the things I have heard said about it over the years. This IS a dialectic business. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Thu Apr 22 23:11:15 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 01:11:15 +0200 Subject: IE pers.pron. In-Reply-To: <371da06d.79573377@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > [On my IE rec. of pers.pron. - mainly after Cowgill in > >Evid.f.Laryng., viz.:] > >*eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) > >*me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) > Why *H3 in the dual forms? Couldn't it be *H1(w) with o-Stufe? > In principle, I'd go along with Beekes in reconstructing *-H1 for > the dual of nouns (in view of Greek consonant stem -e < *-H1, and > lengthened vowel elsewhere). The Gk. /-e/ cannot be a syllabic *-H1 if it is to match OLith. augus-e 'the two grown ones' or OIr. di: pherid 'two heels', only IE *-e will do here. However, as the vowel must be a secondary prop-vowel since it has not caused accent/ablaut to move, this is neutral as to whether the consonant ultimately at work was *-H3 or *-H1. Certainly *-H2 is excluded since its well-known effect of lengthening is not caused in the nom.-acc. dual. If there is a long vowel in the 1st dual ending of thematic verbs, Skt. -a:vas, Goth. -o:s, then it cannot be *-oH1-wos if the choice of -e- and -o- as the form of the "thematic vowel" depends on the voicing of the following segment, and of course the Goth. form cannot come from *-eH1wos, so only *-oH3wos would then do. But can we really exclude *-o-wos with no laryngeal? That depends on the rules of Germanic. If Gk. no:^e is identical with Avest. /a:va/ (Skt. a:va:m with added -am), then the etymon can only be *nH3we - but the Gk. omega could have been taken from the enclitic which would be *noH with any laryngeal. Even so there is nothing that directly points to -H1- as the dual marker - unless somebody can dissect the neuter dual in *-yH1 so as to make /H1/ a common dual marker; what would be the morphological principle of that? [...] You say you miss a reference to the (morpho)phoneme /c/ in my assumption of a development of *tw- via *Dw- to *y-/*w- in 'you'. It IS that element I have in mind, only the two problems do not overlap so that I can decide if the stage /c/ has bee reached by the time relevant here. [...] Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Apr 23 03:54:44 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 23:54:44 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: In a message dated 4/22/99 9:37:53 PM, edsel at glo.be wrote: <> The early fragmentation of German dialects has been divided into Low, Central and Upper, but obviously a larger number of dialects were involved. Before the 1400's and the beginning of modern standardization (coeval with the use of German instead of Latin in legal records, the printing press, and Luther's Bible), there were apparently prior tendencies towards standardizing. John Hawkins mentions that "in the north, Low German enjoyed a privileged status until the seventeenth century as the commercial language of the Hanseatic League and was even used as a lingua franca throughout northern Europe." TWML p. 114. (He also mentions "das gemeyne Deutsch" and states that "the basis for the emerging standard language, however, was East Central German.") As a lingua franca (again shared with Franks, Danes, Wends, English, etc.) existing pre-Hanseatic but already with strong foreign exposure, Low German may faced similar conditions to those described in English. This could accomodate the early dates you find for inflection loss. The term High German apparently is used to distinguish upper and central German (both having undergone to some extent the Second Sound Shift) from Low German. Hawkins suggests that High German was in fact a second language to outlying Low German speakers in for example Prussia. This might also suggest some earlier need for inflectional simplification in Low regional dialects before New High German provided an alternative approach to standardization. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 23 06:38:10 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 01:38:10 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Thursday, April 22, 1999 5:16 PM > On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [ moderator snip ] >> That is only if you assume that *te and *se developed from *twe and *swe, >> which I specifically deny. And, *te/*twe are not, IMHO, true "alternants"; >> rather, they are the absolutive (*te) and w-inflection (*twe) of a >> pronominal root *te. > Where is the evidence for their differentiated use? What kind of evidence would you accept? > Does YOUR system not force YOU to assume that the "w-inflection" of *me > changed from *mwe to *me by the rule you won't have? That also answers the > following remark of yours: No, actually it does not. My strong suspicion is that *mwe, *twe, *swe designated topicality, and their use in other cases is transference of function. I believe that *me, *te, and *se are original absolutive/accusative forms, and there is no need to derive them from any other form. Secondly, for your idea to be even vaguely plausible, you should be able to show Cwe -> Ce in non-pronominal words, and, as far as I know, this is not recognized in IE studies are as normal phonological developement. >> I specifically deny that [viz., that earlier *mwe is need under "my >> system"]. And doing the analysis your way is what I am, of >> course, questioning. > Everything should be questioned. That is fair-minded of you, and no sarcasm is intended or implied. [ moderator snip ] >> I would be very interested to hear how you justify concluding that the >> "two sibilants were not identical". I find that surprising since we know >> only of one sibilant for IE. But if you believe IE had both and , >> why not say so? > I do say so, only in the variant, "IE had had both and ", i.e. the > opposition belong to the prehistory of the protolanguage in which they > constitute two different morphophonemes for analyses of some depth. The > sibilant marking the nominative in IE had two properties not shared by > (most) other s's: (1) It causes lengthening of V in the environment > VC(C)s#, e.g. nom. *dye:w-s as opposed to 2sg *k^lew-s; I do not believe that I have ever seen this kind of lengthening mechanism asserted. What is wrong with simply *dyVHw- for a lengthening mechanism? [ Moderator's comment: There is no evidence for a laryngeal in this stem; the length is due to Ablaut ("apophony"), unexplained as yet. --rma ] > (2) it causes a preceding thematic vowel to take on the form /o/, while > other s's take /e/: nom. *yo-s 'he who' vs. 2sg *bhere-s (but *yo-m like > 1sg inj. *bhero-m and nom.pl. *to-y 'they' like opt. *bhero-yH1-t, etc.). I am also not aware of any IE who has successfully asserted that apophony is governed by specific consonants. [ Moderator's comment: It appears to be current in some European schools, that *e/o is [e] before voiceless obstruents and [o] before voiced. I find that there are too many exceptions to accept this. --rma ] Frankly, I wish you could identify a for IE; it would simplify my AA-IE comparisons since, from all I can see, AA and correspond to IE with no indication of apophonic influence. > The lengthening is also exhibited by some s's that just happened to occur > root-finally (as all consonants could): *ters 'dryness' > *te:rs, reshaped > to *te:r-os (like *men-s -> *men-os 'thought'), whence Celtic *ti:ros > > OIr. ti:r 'land' (ntr. s-stem); also Ved. ma:s 'flesh' from *me:ms has > undergone the further lengthening leading to a form rhyming with m-stem > nominatives like Ved. ksa:s 'earth', Av. zii 'winter' - this must have > been different from the form of the acc.pl. which once must have ended in > stem + -m-s, in the o-stems *-o:ns, which therefore probably once had a > different sibilant from the one marking the nominative. I think the more likely explanation of these lengthenings is the presence of a resonant; also, I am rather sceptical of IE <*z> exercising its lengthening across an intervening consonant (if only a resonant). > Lengthening is also seen in the s-aorist which then apparently had the > lengthening s. Now, the derivative present to go with the s-aorist appears > too often to be the type in -sk^e/o- for this to be fortuitous (the > arrangement of Ved. prcchati : aor. apra:ksam). I agree that this is an interesting congruity. > Other derivative presents are formed with the suffix *-ye/o- (*-e-H2-[ye/o-], > stative aor. *-eH1- vs. stative prs. *-H1-ye/o-, denom. in zero as opposed > to denom. in *-ye/o- presumably reflecting the two aspect stems, desid. or > "future" in *-H1s- vs. *-H1s-ye/o-, etc.), therefore one would like to > derive *-sk^e/o- from older *-s-ye/o-. I think that is playing rather loosely with normal phonological developments. > A change of "lengthening s + /y/" to -sk^- may (by only just MAY) be seen in > the suffix *-isko-s "belonging to" which may simply be an old izafet-like > construction in *-is + *yos with the relative pronoun tagged on to an old > nom. in *-is (itself manifestly a reduced variant of *-os): Thus a word like > Danish would have meant "Dane who (is", as indeed it does in "a Dane who is > king" = "a Danish king". *-ko by itself means 'belonging to'; the *-s is simply a plural formant. > The (non- lengthening) s of the desiderative (future) does not change a > follwoing /y/ into -k^-, cf. the cited desid. durative (Skt. future) in > *-H1s-ye/o-. It seems rather plain that IE /s/ has more than one source to > it. If your proposal of lengthening foregoing vowels is based on such unusual phonological developments (at least for IE), I can hardly put much trust in it. >>> in addition, the gen. morpheme had a vowel (*-os) and formed a weak case, >>> while the nom.sg. ended in pure *-s (perhaps once voiced). >> I am suspicious of all "pure" items. It seems to me that reality is >> always slightly adulterated. > If so, they are adulterated in two different ways under the same > circumstances, and that spells opposition to an unbiased analyst, doesn't > it? I do not doubt that different results indicate different conditioning factors but I see no major objection to supposing that the conditioning factor is probably stress-accent if not simply a desire to differentiate phonologically identical forms fulfilling gradually differentiated functions. > If you say no to that, investigation stops, and discussion becomes > impossible. I have not said "no". > There is the open backdoor of "vanished variables". But one should not > refrain from saying out loud what one observes in places where observations > CAN be made, and that's all I'm doing. I agree 100%. >>> Even so, however, we cannot exclude that they are _ultimately_ two >>> different variants of the same original entity. >> Yes, here we are in agreement. But for "cannot", I would subsititute >> "may not". > If you would state a reason for this will of yours I just might take it > seriously. BTW, the exact modality of "may not" escapes me in this > context. -may not- implies that we are not permitted to exclude --- even though we might be able to. You must know that I am merely accepting Beekes on this point. I also once toyed with two different s'es but I am convinced that the explanation offered by Beekes is the stronger and more economical explanation. >>> - In the inflection of the IE pronouns the acc. plainly has a morpheme >>> which is absent in the nom. - >> And what plain morpheme is that if I may ask for clarification? > The accusative-forming segment *-me (dual variant *-we). You certainly seem to like "variants". A look at AA may convince you (e.g. Egyptian -wj, dual) that, most likely, the dual -w has a separate origin. After all, although a variation is attested is some IE languages like Hittite, it is not, so far as I know, established for IE. >>> but all the weak cases are based on the accusative. In this, PIE has a >>> system differing from all other PIE inflection and looking more like >>> Modern Indic or Tocharian. >> Do not see this at all. > Then look at the inflection of the Vedic pers.prons. in your Grassmann. > They all go the same, and the simply add endings to the accusative - as it > is, or as you can esaily unravel it if you're willing. Not trying to be obtuse but I do not really understand your point here. [ moderator snip ] >>> In English you must: What's the "me-form" of _house_? What's the >>> s-genitive of _I_? >> I normally expand my view over more than English. > Then I misunderstood you - as you me: This was restricted to IE, and that > goes like English in the respect concerned. English has been so buffeted by the winds of linguistic chance that I would not feel comfortable asserting anything about IE from English patterns. And this is to be expected. Apparently nearly every identifiable ethnic identity in Western European has invaded the island at one time or another; and all have left their marks. >>>> There is no necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. >>> Then why are they there? >> You tell me. > What about this: To express dual number? Can't we accept the dual when we > SEE it? All I was saying is that most IEists do not believe (and I agree) that the dual is as old as the singular and plural in IE. A dual is certainly not necessary in any language to express "two of" something. >>> Why does Old Germanic agree with Old Indic in this respect? By chance? >> You are conflating two issues. I maintain, with most IEists I presume, that >> dual inflection is later in time than singular and plural inflections, and >> *is built on them*. > That's not the way anything I know looks. On the contrary, the dual is > everywhere in the process of being eliminated, and it just beats me why > some scholars want that to reflect a stage of uncompleted creation. Well, as we all know, the pendulum swings both ways. > In addition, the dual has some morphemes all its own, that's not at all the > way analogy works, but it IS the way archaisms look. Obviously, after the dual *was* developed, its rather specialized (and less frequent) use would tend to preserve its forms in an archaic state. > You might as well explain the irregular inflections of the verb "to be" in > most IE branches as due to new morphological trends that got cut off. I would rather say generally that IE probably be not have a verb for "to be", and that a verb "to sit" (be at) was introduced in some dialects to fill the need while others borrowing a root for "to grow" (come to be at) and yet others liked "to stay" (persistently be at"). If "to be" existed in earliest IE, the need for suppletion would be unmotivated. > That is very definitely the wrong track, and I would not accept it even if > there were unanimity about it. Well, I have a few of those myself. [ moderator snip ] >> This is hopelessly muddled as far as I am concerned. Hittite ammuk is a >> stressed form for 'me' fairly certainly combining IE *e-, demonstrative + >> *me, 1st person + *-w, inflection (I believe its signficance is to mark >> topicality) + *g^-, pronominal marker (I believe its original significance >> is to mark maleness). It is backassward to suggest that -mu has "taken over >> the -u- from" ammuk. Rather, ammuk has incorporated mu into a fuller form >> expanded by a- and -k. > Nobody can _guess_ these things. Correct. All we can do is offer explanations that are in concordance with observed phenomena and common sense but, you are right, no absolute proof is possible. > But IF (1) Hittite is an IE language and so prone to contain elements > corresponding to those found in other IE languages, (2) the vocalism /u/ is > not found in these pronouns elsewhere except in the nom.sg. 'thou', and (3) > enclitic and orthotone forms are sometimes found to influence each other, > also in the direction I propose (a well-known case among many is Germanic > *mi:na-z 'my' from *meyn-o-s, a reshaping of *emo-s based on the orthotone > gen. *mene influenced by the enclitic gen. *moy; also Lat. meu-s from *meyo-s > has taken the /y/ from the enclit. *moy), This is, IMHO, a completely erroneous analysis. Germanic *mi:na-z is composed of IE *me + -y, adjectival/genitive + -nV, nominalizer + -s (case marker). *e-mo-s is an emphatic expansion of *me by *e-, in keeping with a general tendency to expand monosyllables to disyllables + -s, case marking. It has only the last two elements in common with *meynos. > THEN you can link Hitt. to the rest of IE in a smooth and unforced way if you > assume that the /u/ has propagated from 'thou' to 'I' and from 'I' to 'me', > and finally from orthotone 'me' to enclit. 'me'. I do not assume that the basal form is *tu(:), and so cannot justify migrating 's. > All these steps of spread then occur between closely associate forms. Is > that more "backassward" than an explanation based on a morphology the > language does not otherwise have? The basis for suspecting "topicality" for -w is not present in IE nouns. It is necessary to reach beyond IE to "justify" it. > BTW, what is the basis for taking the *-g^ to express topicality? I do not take it so. I believe it expresses 'maleness', based on analysis of IE roots containing and extra-IE morphemes. [ moderator snip ] >> Invention is the mother of comedy. > Maybe so, but it is less amusing that some scholars - in this case > not you - claim that there is no way from A to B just because they have > not even tried to find one. I have shown how the IE system of pers.prons. > MAY be seen as underlyingly regular, you may have a different way of > achieving the same; but NOBODY should claim that there is NO conceivable > way this system could be originally regular. Again, I cannot help but willingly agree. The original system should have been overwhelmingly "regular" but the pattern is difficult to see now --- even in our reconstructions for earliest IE. > My system, which was only a suggestion, may have its flaws, so don't stop > criticizing it, just because I have ready answers to the things I have > heard said about it over the years. This IS a dialectic business. My! We agree more in this post than we ever have. I only hope that is an omen for the future. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 23 11:21:06 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 13:21:06 +0200 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Even though I cannot contribute to the etymology of 'zebra', I can help to clarify the confusion around the various names of the Bantu languages cited. In fact, many of the names containing e.g. 'mbunda' are actually the same. The cause of this is that most Congo-Kordofanian lgs. and Bantu in particular, use mainly PREfixes as grammatical and other devices. Just a choice (the actual set of prefixes varies according to the 'class' of the root): 1.-mbunda : root, or 'a' mbunda tribe member. Note that the mb is one phoneme (also Ba-ntu!). 2.ba/wa-mbunda : plural (like Wa-tutsi and Ba-hutu) (but : mtoto/vitoto = child/children) 3.ki/gi/tshi-mbunda : the 'Mbundese' language (ki- is the basic form, the voiced or palatalized forms are secondary), actually 'something of the Mbundese kind'. (Wa-tutsi and Ba-hutu speak Ki-rundi, also called Ki-rwanda). 4.u-mbunda . the land of the Mbunda etc.. 5. etc.... [I'm not sure all these prefixed forms actually exist in the case of Mbunda, but for the Ganda , Kongo and the Luba tribes e.g., at least two or three of them do] Conclusions: a) always look for the root b) looking things up in IE-styled dictionary is not straightforward at all. Sorry for informing those that already knew. Ed. Selleslagh P.S. I have this information from an africanologist, a colleague of mine. From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 23 15:00:41 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 16:00:41 +0100 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: <14080059213363@m-w.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, Jim Rader wrote: > English dictionaries are very slow to update information. _The > Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology_ (1966) and _The Concise > Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology_ (1986) continue the long > discredited "Congolese" origin. By 1993 Oxford finally saw the light > and plumped for the Romance origin the _New Shorter Oxford_. I note that Collins English Dictionary (1979) s.v. zebra says [C16: via Ita;ian from Old Spanish: wild ass, probably from Vulgar Latin * wild horse, from Latin from horse + wild] which is no doubt the Romance etymology mentioned before. is attested in Pliny (2 passages) according to Lewis & Short, but I've a hunch it's a pretty odd kind of compound. Are [N+A]N compounds normal in Latin? How secure is this word in Latin? Might we have some folk etymology here? Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 23 16:12:32 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 17:12:32 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: [on my claim that Pre-Basque did not permit plosive-liquid clusters] [A plosive is any one of /p t k b d g/; a liquid is any one of /l ll r rr/.] > Further to Larry's assertion that the plosive-liquid cluster was not > available in early euksara and have been elimenated I have found the > following entries made by Azkue that he asserts are native words. > Larry would you say that there is not one word in this list that is > not problematic for your thesis, that is you can source every single > one of these words from outside euskara. I would be certainly > grateful for the source of each of them. Let's start with a couple of clarifications. First, I claim only that Pre-Basque did not permit such clusters. In fact, these clusters apparently remained impossible in Basque for quite a few centuries after the Roman period, but eventually, under Romance influence, they became acceptable in Basque. Today they are moderately frequent. Second, there is a big difference between a word which is *native* and a word which is *ancient*. These two are independent. For example: `man' native and ancient `woman' native but not ancient `book' ancient but not native `airplane' neither native nor ancient Now, the claim is that plosive-liquid clusters do not occur in words which are ancient, whether or not the words are native. Native and ancient words never contained such clusters. Foreign words containing such clusters, when borrowed into early Basque, were re-shaped so as to eliminate these clusters. In comparatively modern times, Basque has accepted such clusters. So, Basque can borrow Spanish `globe' as with no problem. Native words can acquire such clusters by phonological change, so that, for example, `lady' has become or in many varieties. And, most importantly, *new* native words can be coined within Basque which possess these clusters, such as the word , which occurs in the expression `drenched in sweat' (this word is nowhere recorded before the 1880s). Third, Azkue does not claim that the words entered in his dictionary are native. On the contrary, he declares explicitly, in section IX of his prologue, that he is entering words of foreign origin which are well established in Basque -- and a very sensible policy this is, too. It would have absurd to produce a dictionary of Basque which excluded such everyday words as `book', `law', `beech', `money' and `church', merely because these are of foreign origin. That said, I cannot possibly comment on every word in Jon's long list. But I will pick a few words as examples. > abrastasun This is merely a secondary form of `wealth', a derivative of `domesticated animal', which itself is borrowed from Romance. > brazilia This is transparently borrowed from a Romance word related to French `basilica'. The curious extra /r/ illustrates a sporadic but moderately common phenomenon in Basque: note, for example, how Spanish `Dutch' appears in many varieties of Basque as . > brrrrra This is not even a lexical item, but only a representation of a noise used by shepherds to call their sheep. It's on a par with English noises like `brrr', `tsk-tsk' and `psst'. > debru > diabru I hardly need to point out the Romance origin of this word for `devil'. > ebri This is merely a secondary form of common `rain', illustrating a process similar to the one which turns `the night' into in some varieties. > lanbro This word for `fog' is first recorded as in 1627, but from the 17th century it appears as . Apparently the same process as in above. > glask This is strictly an imitative word, on a par with for a gunshot. > grina This word is a famous problem, but it is probably nothing more than a borrowing from Bearnais. > azukre I don't think I need to say much about this word for `sugar', though its form is somewhat unexpected. > krak Another imitative word. > kresal Another instance of /r/-insertion: compare the variant form . > klunklun This word for `toad', more familiar to me as (not in Azkue), is an expressive formation of reduplicated nature. > ebli Another secondary form, this time for common `fly'. > kobla > kopla This word for `couplet' is of obvious Romance origin (Spanish ). > kontra The Romance origin is plain. > potro A very interesting word, and one of a vast cluster of words in both Basque and Romance with meanings centered on `small animal', `chubby', `cute little thing' and `sex organ'. This word is recorded from 1657 in the sense of `foal', but only from 1905 in the sense of `testicle' -- though the domination of Basque writing by priests probably has something to do with its late attestation. > traska Even Azkue describes this as "onomatpoeic". But I note that, in Roncalese, the word means `layabout, good-for-nothing'. I love it! It's bad enough being called in Basque; if I had to go to Roncal and introduce myself as , the locals would be falling about laughing. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 23 19:32:01 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 20:32:01 +0100 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: >But, the question is: do you still believe that "Brugmann's Law" is a >serious argument for the consonantal nature of 'laryngeals' in IE? >If you agree with me that it *might* be of significance but not necessarily >so, wecan move on to another point if you want. I believe it is a serious argument, though not without flaws. Your objections to it are soundly based. Your position seems reasoned and moderate and I am happy to move on. Peter From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Apr 24 03:30:07 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 23:30:07 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:20 +0100 (BST) From: Larry Trask On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > Larry, what is the phenomenon of Aquitanian that makes > unpronounceable. thanks [LT] The /dr/ cluster. Pre-Basque absolutely lacked plosive-liquid clusters, and, in all early borrowings from Latin and Romance, such clusters were invariably eliminated in one way or another. See sections 18.4-18.5 of Michelena's Fonetica Historica Vasca for a list of examples, including such familiar ones as these: Lat --> Bq `book' Lat --> Bq `glory' [snip] It seems to me that perhaps we are perhaps talking at cross purposes here. Let me cite an example. In Euskera we find a root stem such as whose phonological structure is native. However, in actual speech practice we find that accent in Euskera is not precisely "word specific". I don't know the proper linguistic term for this phenomenon. Rather where the accent will fall depends on to a great degree on the suffixing elements added to the root stem as well as the overall placement of that lexical chain in the utterance. Furthermore, somewhat as what occurs in English, unstressed vowels often become schwa and/or essentially disappear in actual speech. Often there is a "ghost" or "shadow" left over from the template of the intervening vowel, just enough for the interlocutor to "disambiguate" the morphological elements in the utterance. Sorry, but I don't know what you all call these kinds of highly reduced sounds. For example, "of the head" (sometimes with a referential field comprising "scarf; pillow") is, depending on its placement, sometimes heard as and at others as . The speaker is fully aware that the form is but that is not what s/he is actually "saying." In the case of it strikes me that the same thing happens with the result being or when the definite article is attached. In other words, I would agree with Larry that the cluster did not exist, in principle, but I am less certain whether it wasn't present in actual speech practice, for example, in Aquitainian/Euskera. Certainly other languages have similar phenomena: one phonological set of features characterizes the language at one level but a significantly different one is found operating at another, e.g., when one sits down to listen to actual speech samples, especially from non-literate informants. Furthermore, I would argue that one of the most difficult things for a non-native speaker to acquire is an intuitive knowledge of these subtleties in the second language. this is especially true when the second language is studied and consequently learnt in an instructional/school setting. Indeed, we are talking of extremely complex rules that govern such changes. These are far too complex for the foreign language teacher to teach explicitly or for a student to acquire "rationally". Yet the changes are "known" intuitively by a native-speaker. The latter will pick up immediately on the fact that the person is a non-native speaker when that person attempts to "mis-pronounce" a word, e.g., change speech registers, for example. Comments? Best regards, Roz Frank Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Fri Apr 23 21:17:02 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 17:17:02 -0400 Subject: Celtic substrate influence Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > In Parisian French, the preterite seems to have disappeared from > speech by about the 16th century, according to Price, I have seen the statement made that in the 17th c., the distinction was that perfect = past of today and attributed to something called Port Royale Grammar. [Comrie's book on Tense might have been the source.] I don't know if this refers to the written language, but that seems a bit odd. -Nath From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Fri Apr 23 21:26:50 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 17:26:50 -0400 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: [ Moderator's comment: > No. There are two different roots here, *gno:- = *gn{e/o}H_3 "know" and > *genH_1 "beget, give birth". The verbal adjective collapses due to sound > change in Greek, but the very data you provide show the difference. Compare > Latin (g)no:sco: vs. genus, Skt. jn~a:-ta- "known" vs. ja:-ta- "born". > --rma ] We can't tell gneH1 from gneH3 in Sanskrit, but jn~a:ti ``relative'' occurs in RV 7.55.5 (AV-like charm) and three times in Mandala 10. [Otherwise, all erivatives of jan- are jan(i)- < genH or ja: < gnH.] I also find the semantics of gneH3/gno: curious. It is presumably an eventive and not a stative like ``know'' (which is the function of woide). Sanskrit has a nasal present which is generally said to reflect a process, Latin uses -ske/o and Greek reduplication + -ske/o which are generally taken to represent iteration/duration. What was the original meaning? -Nath [ Moderator's response: The Greek and Latin reflexes seem to mean "come to know, learn"; a durative would then mean "know by having learned", an iterative "get to know". In Latin, -sco- is an inchoative as often as an iterative, so "begin to learn, start to know". And I should have checked Grassmann for _jn~a:-_ forms from *genH_1, but it's packed for a few weeks until we move into the new house. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 23 22:22:26 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 22:22:26 GMT Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: >For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique >sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from >Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been >unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of >the language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., >if it exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. Maybe >someone knows more about this. Well if it's Angola, it's probably either Kimbundu (the lingua franca of Luanda) or Umbundu (the language of the largest ethnic group, the Ovimbundu). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Sat Apr 24 05:39:47 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 00:39:47 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Some responses to Pat's critique of my remarks re. Lehmann's "syllabicity": >>I opened Lehmann and immediately put my finger on syllabicity in the last >>chapter. Embarrassing! But I know why I didn't recall it: that chapter (a) >>had no relevance to my actual interest, viz. Germanic reflexes of laryngeals, >>and (b) it struck me as utterly nonsensical. >Why do you not explain why you consider it "nonsensical". No need to, since I was not claiming that it was, but only that it *struck* me as such some years ago. If you want reasons, the ambiguity of his formulations, and his insistance that syllabicity was a "prosodic feature" rather than a segmental phone would be reason enough. >>My gut feeling aside, there's an obvious problem with it even in terms of >>structuralist theory. On p. 112 Lehmann states: "If we find no phonemes in >>complemetary distribution at the peak of the syllable, we cannot assume a >>segmental phoneme for this position." >My own gut feeling is that there is no problem whatsoever. [Lehmann quote omitted] >All Lehmann is saying is that since no specific vowel can be specified at >the syllabic peak, one that becomes phonemic by contrast with other phonemic >vowels (where "phonemic" is defined as providing a semantic differentiation: >CVC is a different word than CV{1}C), we cannot assume *one* specific vowel >(e or anything else) at the syllabic peak in stressed positions. >"Syllabicity" is just a innovative way of describing V{?}. Innovative to the point that a vowel is somehow not a vowel. But let it pass. You're missing the meaning of what I wrote next: >>Surely not "phonemes in complementary distribution" -- *contrasting* >>phonemes, or something of the sort. >"Complementary distribution" in Trask's dictionary means "The relation which >holds in a given speech variety between two phones which never occur in the >same environment." Right! "Phones." That is, raw sounds. Allophones of a single phoneme. But Lehmann wrote "phonemes", which makes no sense in that context. That's why I suggested "contrasting phonemes". >With the exception of the qualification "two", this describes the situation >that Lehmann has supposed for the stress-period of IE (e e{sub} e:). You >may question his analysis but his terminology seems perfectly in accordance >with standard usage. No way. >>Whether complementary or contrastive, the supposed difficulty arises because >>Lehmann (against Brugmann & Co.) arbitrarily defines [i u] as syllabic >>allophones of resonant phonemes /y w/ -- >There is nothing arbitrary about this at all. If we assume that IE and AA >are related through Nostratic (which you may not prefer to do), the decision >is mandatory. IE CiC does not show up in AA as normal C-C but rather always >as C-y-C. Even if your Nostratic correspondence is correct, it would still tell us nothing about the phonemic situation of any stage of PIE, since the phonemes of any stage of any language must be defined in terms of that stage alone. We need reasons within PIE itself why [i u] must be analyzed as /y w/ rather than /i u/. And while I realize that the matter is debated, Lehmann's notion of syllabicity seems to entail the consonantal analysis, else [e] etc. *must* be analyzed as one or more segmental vowel phonemes. But let's be real: regardless of what has been done in the past, would any competent phonologist now analyze a language with at least contrasting [i u e] as having *no* vowel phonemes? [stuff omitted] >So far, the only information there we have to support your position is >Bomhard's *mention* of a paper by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov *with no details*. >Do you have any arguments for your position? huh? I don't make the connection here to anything your or I have said. [more omitted] >>With /i u/ there is contrast in position between non-syllabics, >I have no idea what this means. Could you explain it? I just did, but in case I wasn't clear: Lehmann's analysis of [e e: e{sub}] as something other than a vowel phoneme is possible only because he posits no other vowel phonemes. With [i u] analyzed as /y w/, this is weird and forced, but perhaps not wholly impossible: the language would have had no other vowel phonemes between two consonants, hence [e] etc. need not be analyzed as a segmental phoneme, since it would not be *contrasting* with any vowel phonemes. But if [i u] are analyzed as vowel phonemes /i u/, then *contrasting vowels* between consonants are possible, and any justification for treating [e] etc. as something other than a vowel phoneme falls by the wayside. Remember that phonemes are *contrasting* sounds; they are not in complementary distribution, though the allophones (realizations) of any given phoneme may be (and usually are). >>-- I should add that on p. 113, Lehmann incautiously says that at the next >>stage of PIE, with phonemic stress, syllabicity with minimum stress "remains >>non-segmental between obstruents..." "Between"? How so? Anything that can >>be between phonemes sounds segmental enough to me! >How about zero-grade "vowels"? That puzzles me for a variety of reasons, but leads to a question. I don't mean to be snide, and I hope you won't be offended; but how familiar are you with phonemic theory (any version will do)? "Prosodic features" and "non-segmental" items are generally called "suprasegmentals", because they apply on top of some segmental phoneme or sequence of phonemes. Pitch and stress have a domain of at least one syllable. It makes no sense to say that they occur between segmental phonemes, and no one claims they do. Yet Lehmann claims here that one such suprasegmental does exactly that. -- A more modern version could analyze the zero grade more neatly: a sequence /CVC/ might be realized in various ways, depending on stress: [CVC] or even [CV:C] under stress, [C at C] or even [CC] when not stressed. This last is zero grade (but not a "zero-grade 'vowel'"). But this works only if /V/ is a real vowel phoneme, which Lehmann did not want to concede. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 24 08:57:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 03:57:31 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter &/or Graham Sent: Sunday, April 18, 1999 5:37 AM > Pat said: > >I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by > >Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. We have discussed the first point [a)]. > (b) to be discussed later > (c) Reduplication of roots beginning with a laryngeal. We find an > unexpected -i-: e.g. gan-igm-at < Hgen-Hgn-. I am not really sure why this is unexpected. We are all familiar with *p6te{'}:r (which is probably built on the root *pe/oH{2}), which yields Sanskrit ; this shows that a zero-grade of the second segment regular shows up as in Sanskrit. > If the H at the beginning of > the root had vanished, the -i- would not appear (as it does not in roots > without initial H-) I cannot see that this is really argued, only asserted. After all, the conditioning environments are different. If the IE form had been *H(e/o)gen-, there is no reason I know of to suppose that it could not have occurred in Sanskrit (e.g. cf. from IE *He/onos) at some point as *a(:)gan-. If we now give it a full reduplication, *a{:}"ganagan-, I see no great hurdle in supposing that the stress-unaccented initial of the second syllable became Sanskrit (*a{:}"ganigan-) and that the second stress-unaccented became zero-grade (*a{:}"ganig-n-), and that the first vowel, if previously long, became first (*a"ganig-n-) then <0> (*[0]"ganig-n-) > and if it had become a vowel, it would appear at the > beginning of the reduplicated syllable as well. Certainly, if stress-accented; and are you so sure it would show up if stress-unaccented? Now, it is certainly appropriate to ask why initial stress-unaccented *and* the final stress-unaccented show up as <0> when the stress-unaccented of the reduplicated root shows up as . If it were <0> also, we would have (*[0]"gan-g-n-), something a little difficult to pronounce, and which, without a euphonic vowel, would obscure the reduplicated nature of the root. > The only explanation is a > consonantal H, which then shares the later usual interconsonantal > development to -i-. Well, here is an attempt at a possible explanation in addition to the "only" explanation. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 24 09:49:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 09:49:29 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><(*gen(@)tis) "son-in-law, sister's husband".>> >Please be patient with me here. I'm trying. I'm not sure why the -(H)- is >there, but let me get back to that. >Do you mean: >1. that intial *gn- never passed directly into historic Slavic as an initial >/kn/ or an initial /-n/? (By directly I mean not through a sister language >but from *PIE to *p-Slavic to Slavic or a particular Slavic tongue.) I'm >distinguishing here from the "first palatalization" which would have the *g- >change before an original front vowel but I'm thinking not necessarily a >*gn-. Here the analogy is to *glava (pSl)> glowa (pol), golova (rus w/tort). The Slavic palatalizations are not applicable here, only the satem palatalization *g^ > z. Cf. znaju "I know" from *g^en(H3)- "to know". >2. I see *gen> gno- or something like that happen in Greek (and maybe >German). If you accept that, does it mean that this transformation did not >happen in PIE or that it could not have occurred or passed into proto-Slavic? Not sure what you mean. The zero grade variant is PIE. >3. It seems the gen- and gno- coexisted in Homer. Both "genea" and "gnotos" >refer to relatives. Obviously which form would have affected how the word >passed from *PIE into the daughter languages or from, say, Greek into another >IE language. (Oddly I have OCS "daughter-in-law" sn~xa (Pol c~rka /synowa) >and I believe the Sanskrit also has as intial snu- for daughter-in-law. Wholly different root: *snusos (Lat. nurus, Arm. nu, Grk. nuos, Skt. snus.a:). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 24 10:18:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 10:18:29 GMT Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >> traska >Even Azkue describes this as "onomatpoeic". But I note that, in >Roncalese, the word means `layabout, good-for-nothing'. I love it! >It's bad enough being called in Basque; if I had to go to Roncal >and introduce myself as , the locals would be falling >about laughing. Where can mean, among other things, "sad, bitter; vomit; sick, dizzy, anxious, nervous; big, fat, pregnant"... On the subject of "layabout, good-for-nothing": that seems to be, as I've discovered, the basic meaning of Aragonese/Navarrese "chandro" [chandro: gandul, haragan, holgazan], discussed here recently. Aragonese initial ch- points to *sandro or *jandro (personal name Sandro, Alejandro?), unless the word is somehow derived from Provencal (Limousin) chantor/chantre (> Cat. xantre, xandre) "singer, minstrel". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Apr 24 10:51:15 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 12:51:15 +0200 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: <372ef200.559083362@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: We may be getting somewhere with those zebras and those obscure African languages. First of all, thanks to Jim Rader for mentioning Loewe's article in KZ 61, which I've started reading yesterday, obviously simultaneously with him (""Uber einige europ"aische W"orter exotischer Herkunft", 37-136). This is a very interesting article, and its author was much at pains to dig out the most oblique sources needed to find out how certain words came first to european languages (i.a. cannibal, tobacco, chocolate, banana, gnu etc.). Sometimes, their "exotic" pedigree is confirmed, sometimes rejected. For /zebra/, we can learn from Loewe that Amharic is definitely out, since the original locus for this allegation (Hiob Ludolf - the pioneer of Ethiopic studies - "Historia Aethiopica" 1681) doesn't even talk about such an Amharic word. It mentions /zecora/, which, however, I again can't find in my Amharic dictionaries. This doesn't mean much, they could be inadequate, the word could long be obsolete, or I could be too stupid to find it. Now, Ludolf adds that the animal in question is called /Zebra/ "congensibus", without getting precise. Loewe tried to secure its source, without, however, reaching a definite solution. He finds the form /zerba/ in Girolamo Merolla's 1692 "Relazione del viaggio nel Regno di Congo". Since Merolla *was* in the congolese empire, and Ludolf wasn't, the latter form may be closer to the actual source, than our /Zebra/. Loewe, for reasons I'm not repeating here, narrows the search down to Bunda, i.e that language, which was described inter alia by Cannecattim. Chatelain 1888-89 calls this same language /Kimbunda/ ("Grammatica Elementar du Kimbunda ou Lingua de Angola"). This should be enough to determine, among all those mindboggling similar names, which language is spoken about (I have another tiny thing here, rather a phrase-book than a grammar, by Schatteburg "Sprachschatz des 'Umbundu'",1931, which is about a similar language (I'm aware of role of prefixes in Bantu grammar and the fact that even in the specialist literature sometimes language names get confused with ethnonyms or place-names; look for the root, with credits to Eduard Selleslagh), from much the same region (it is called the "Eingeborenen-Hauptverkehrssprache in portugiesisch Angola"), however a superficial inspection of both booklets with my untrained eye shows me clearly closely related, but not identical languages (e.g. I find rather different numerals aso.). Now, why Kimbunda in the first place ? Loewe was unable to find /zerba/ or anything close to it in the sources of these languages, his assigning the word to "Bunda" is largely based on - educated and sophisticated - conjecture (btw, the "Umbundu"-phrasebook gives for "zebra" /ongollo/). So, after all this, we don't really have an African source for /zebra/, Amharic was a misunderstanding, and the "congolese" source can not be verified, and was based on conjecture in the first place. All this brings us back to Europe, and I think the fact, brought to our attention again by May Wheeler, but mentioned before, that actually we have forms like (en)zebro, (en)zebra, ezebra, azebra, cebrario, ezebrario for the "wild ass" in Old Spanish and Old Portuguese. This is usually taken as going back to Latin /equifer/. Someone (I forgot who) objectioned that this etymology requires an intermediary state *ecifer- and found no motivation for the -qu- > -c- development. While this may be important and indeed problematical, it does not remove the existence of those Old Iberoromance words, which are still with us, regardless whether there Latin > Romance derivation is problem-free or not. So, foraging into Africa was, I'd say, a wrong move in the first place. The wild ass, called by the words mentioned, died out on the peninsula towards the 16th century, its name being transferred to an interesting animal found (somewhere)in Africa by Portuguese seamen. Whether any native African word resembling it incidentally played a role in keeping this old word with the new (but related) meaning, remains open, until the Bunda-word will actually be found, which may be never. I find Latin /equifer, -i: m; -us is late/ well attested, but, as Max Wheeler observes it maybe an odd compound (though I'd use the formula N+A here < equus + ferus); some explain this as a loan-translation from Greek /hipp-agros/ (cf. caprifer). This type of compounds is labelled "post-classical" in my sources (e.g. Debrunner "Griechische Wortbildungslehre"). The problem of the Latin > Romance derivation seems to remain, since Latin -kwi- should have yielded -gi- in Spanish (). The pre-iberoromance form *ecifer- seems indeed hard to motivate, but I think we go to far if we simply rule it out, and, especially, by preferring an African etymology for /Zebra/, as if the Old Spanish words never existed. Instead of a hitherto unknown sound-law, which we will never find, we should think about some analogy here (especially common in zoological terminology all over the world). In this respect, some attention should be due to Latin /cervus/ "deer" and its reflexes (kat. cervo, sp. ciervo, pg. cervo); this is not the same, and it contains /r/ and /v/ in the opposite order, but to think of some analogical influence here, it is sufficient to concentrate on the initial consonant. In fact, I do think this is, by and large, the story of /zebra/. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 24 13:11:22 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 16:11:22 +0300 Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: <655461bd.244dc887@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 20 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 4/20/99 1:44:51 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: > << "Predictable" does not mean "capable of being > hypothesized about >> > Lest any readers be confused about this: > 'Predictability' and 'reproducible results' are the two 'traditional' > requisites of scientific methodology. This is from Dewey and those > fellows. And this is absolutely correct so long as "predictability" means knowing what will happen in advance and "reproducible results" means that the same thing (within the limits of experimental error) will happen every time. > The basic idea is that a hypothesis or premise ought to predict > observable results. No, this is not the basic idea of hypothesis. It is just your idea of what a hypothesis should be; it is "fuzzy-think" based on inaccurate definitions and incomplete reasoning. The following is what a hypothesis is according to the definition at http://www.writedesignonline.com/organizers/hypothesize.html hypothesis - 1. a proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigating (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts. 2. a proposition assumed as a premise in an argument. 3. the antecedent of a conditional proposition. 4. a mere assumption or guess. You will notice that none of this says anything about predictions. Prediction is not part of the definition of hypothesis. A hypothesis may make predictions, but it does not have to. A hypothesis (in the scientific sense, i.e., definition 1 above) is simply an explanation put forth to account for observed facts. But the hypothesis cannot make predictions about these observed facts without being circular. If the hypothesis is created to explain the observed facts one cannot say that the observed facts are "predicted" by the hypothesis. The only prediction that is implied by the hypothesis is that the hypothesis is true, which is trivial ("the universe works the way it does because that's the way the universe works"; "this hypothesis is true because it explains the observed data"). Now for any set of observed data there are an infinite number of explanations of how that data came to be. But while anything is possible, not everything is probable. Some explanations will just be more plausible than others. Predictions often come from an attempt to generalize the hypothesis so that it accounts not only for the observed facts, but also for other facts not yet observed. This reasoning from the specific to the general is called induction. But the problem with induction is deciding which of the competing hypotheses is the one that should be generalized, because it is often not at all obvious which hypothesis is more plausible than the others. This is summed up neatly by Conan Doyle when he has Holmes say: "Ah! my dear Watson, there we come into those realms of conjecture, where the most logical mind may be at fault. Each may form his own hypothesis upon the present evidence, and yours is as likely to be correct as mine." Another way that predictions arise from hypotheses is by assuming the truth of the hypothesis and using it as a major premise to deduce some consequence that would follow from the truth of the hypothesis. This logical consequent seems to be what you are considering to be the "prediction" that the hypothesis makes. This process is called deductive reasoning. One of the problems with this is that it is full of pitfalls, especially for those not trained in it. Although a true major premise and a true minor premise connected by a valid argument must produce a true conclusion, any other combination of true and/or false premises and/or valid and/or invalid arguments can produce either a true or false conclusion. Furthermore, using a different hypothesis as the major premise in conjunction with a different minor premise and/or a different argument might very well result in the same conclusion (logical consequent). Some people reserve "theory" for a hypothesis that satisfactorily explains new observations, but I don't know that this is standardized. My Webster's says that the shared meaning element of 'hypothesis', 'theory' and 'law' is "a formulation of a natural principle based on inference from observed data." Some people have a strict hierarchical ranking of these, with hypothesis referring only to explanations of observed data, theory referring to satisfactory explanation of new observations, and law referring to a time-tested theory that has never failed to explain any observation (thus the law of gravity, the theory of relativity, and the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change). On the other hand, many people use some (or all) of these terms interchangeably. > Otherwise it cannot be tested. Many hypotheses make predictions but still can't be tested. Many hypotheses do not make predictions but still can be rejected. The scientific method is extremely simple: 1) a problem is identified, 2) relevant data is collected, 3) a hypothesis is formulated to account for the data, 4) the hypothesis is empirically tested. Steps 1 and 2 do not have to occur in this order. The problem may emerge during the collecting of data or may become apparent only after data has been collected for some other reason. But step 3 should be preceded by 1 and 2 in whatever order they may come. Formulating a hypothesis and then collecting data to support it is not part of the scientific method. It is known as "speculating in advance of the evidence" or "counting chickens before they hatch"; or as the famous recipe for hassenpfeffer begins: "First, catch your hare..." But your claim that only a hypothesis that makes predictions can be tested is false for a number of reasons. First let me quote to you from S. F. Barker, _Induction and Hypothesis: A Study in the Logic of Confirmation_ (Ithaca, 1957), 157: ... the uncritical proponent of the method of hypothesis is claiming that any hypothesis is confirmed if and only if consequents deducible ["predictions"] from it are verified; but this would entail that many hypotheses which we set store by cannot be confirmed at all in a direct and natural way. Hypotheses universal in form would fall under this ban for instance. Only observational statements are verifiable and an observational statement needs to be existential in form; but from a universal statement no existential statement can be deduced. Thus no universal statement (considered in isolation) can have any verifiable consequent, and thus no universal statement can be directly confirmed. This would be a serious defect in the method of hypothesis. Second, verifying "predictions" (logical consequents) of a hypothesis does not necessarily confirm a hypothesis, because competing hypotheses might have the same or similar "predictions" and confirming the one could just as easily be considered as confirming the others. It is a test that is a non-test. The testing of hypotheses, then, is not based on confirming the "predictions" of the hypothesis, but rather on confirming some rival hypothesis, or, as it is often stated, "falsifying" the original hypothesis. If a hypothesis that conflicts with the original hypothesis can be confirmed, then the original hypothesis is falsified and must be either rejected or reformulated. This concept of "falsification" was put forth by Karl Popper in the mid-1930's and has since become the standard on which modern theories of hypothesis testing are based. If a hypothesis has no test for falsification (i.e., there exists no hypothesis that would contradict the original hypothesis that is capable of being confirmed) then the hypothesis is labelled "non-falsifiable" and considered to lie outside the scientific method. Thus it is not "making predictions," but rather "falsifiability" that is the principal criterion of a well-formulated hypothesis. Many quite valuable hypotheses do not make predictions that have any observable results, but this does not mean that they are not scientific or must be considered poor hypotheses. Rather it is the "non-falsifiable" hypothesis that should be considered unscientific, regardless of whether it makes predictions or not. So either a hypothesis will be falsified and rejected (a hypothesis that has a test for falsification but is not falsified is not "proved", it simply gains credibility), or no new observations will be possible and it will simply remain one hypothesis among many, or it will be confirmed by more and more observations and confidence in it will increase. But even when it has been confirmed repeatedly, it still can't be proved. It always remains provisional even though as confidence in it increases it may be upgraded from hypothesis to theory to law. But no matter how many times the results of experiments agree with a theory, one can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict it. > "Reproducible results" means that the premise can also be > tested by others. No, this is not what it means. It implies this, but what it means is that every time an event that is accounted for by a theory with reproducible results is repeated (by whomever), the result will be the same. Predictability and repeatability are indeed the hallmarks of a sound scientific theory. But they are the results of hypothesis testing, not the basis for hypothesis formulation and testing. What they imply is that it is possible to use Newton's laws of motion and gravity (his "Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis") to design a lunar lander that, despite severe limitations on size and weight, will be able to generate the required amount of thrust to lift it and its specified payload off the moon's surface and put it in orbit around the moon *without ever having been to the moon*, and that it will work every time. Now *that's* predictability and repeatability. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Sat Apr 24 14:54:56 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 15:54:56 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick McAllister wrote: > Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish and other similar groups, >is more or less a "relic language" in that the vocabulary and not much else >are from the original language [mainly a mix of German dialects of the >Upper Rhine valley such as Swiss German, Swabian and Alsatian]. The syntax >and the morphology are principally from American English. 'Principally' is one of those words that can mean whatever you like, BUT written PennDu, at least, has 3 genders, 3 cases, personal rendings on verbs in the present tense separable verbs and rules for verb second and verb last which look pretty like those of standard German - to mention just a selection of features not terribly like US English. I'm willing to admit to not haveing met any real live speakers myself, but I'd be surprised if my large selection of textbooks on the subject is entirely misleading. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From dalazal at hotmail.com Sat Apr 24 15:37:38 1999 From: dalazal at hotmail.com (Diogo Almeida) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 08:37:38 PDT Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: >I note that Collins English Dictionary (1979) s.v. zebra says [C16: via >Ita;ian from Old Spanish: wild ass, probably from Vulgar Latin >* wild horse, from Latin from horse + > wild] which is no doubt the Romance etymology mentioned before. > is attested in Pliny (2 passages) according to Lewis & >Short, but I've a hunch it's a pretty odd kind of compound. Are [N+A] N >compounds normal in Latin? How secure is this word in Latin? Might we >have some folk etymology here? I've looked it up in the "Dicionario Etimolsgico Nova Fronteira da Lmngua Portuguesa" by Anttnio Geraldo da Cunha, and it is said there that "zebra" is from unknown etymology, maybe from Vulgar Latin <*eciferus> (Classical Latin ). In Old Portuguese there is an attested in the XIII century, as a feminine form of or , also from the XIII century, which meant "wild horse" (cavalo selvagem). There is also , that dates from the XVI century (with the same meaning, I believe). Kind Regards, Diogo A. de A. e Almeida From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 24 16:43:53 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 11:43:53 -0500 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A Latin derivation seems to the most likely --of those presented-- but the road seems pretty rocky. This word must have bounced around among different languages to get the form it has. Given that the initial vowel was dropped from ecebra with = /c/. I'm wondering if the word was perceived by Spanish speakers as an Arabic word or if indeed it did pass through Andalusian Arabic as something like S-b-r, th-b-r, dh-b-r, DH-b-r, z-b-r, although I suppose the latter would only apply to a certain attribute. [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 24 17:03:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 12:03:12 -0500 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Could these be "hypercorrections" based on the speaker's knowledge of Spanish, where labial stop + another consonant often [or usually] results in /uC, wC, Cu, Cw/ [or mutation to another stop] in the spoken language, so then where /uC/ or intervocal /u/ does occur as a standard spelling and pronunciation [or semi-standard pronunciation], /B/ [or /p/] is inserted as a hypercorrection e.g. abstinencia > *austinencia /awstinensya/ acepto > *aceuto /asewto/ garuar > *garubar ausencia > *apsencia /apsensya/ Or, conversely, could Spanish be influenced by Basque [snip] >> ebri >This is merely a secondary form of common `rain', illustrating a >process similar to the one which turns `the night' into in >some varieties. [snip] >> kresal [snip]> >> ebli >Another secondary form, this time for common `fly'. [snip] From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 24 18:23:42 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 13:23:42 -0500 Subject: IE pers.pron. (dual forms) Message-ID: Dear Jebs and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Thursday, April 22, 1999 6:11 PM > On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > [On my IE rec. of pers.pron. - mainly after Cowgill in > > >Evid.f.Laryng., viz.:] > > >*we: *yu: (nom.) > > >*nH3we *uH3we (acc.) > > Why *H3 in the dual forms? Couldn't it be *H1(w) with o-Stufe? > > In principle, I'd go along with Beekes in reconstructing *-H1 for > > the dual of nouns (in view of Greek consonant stem -e < *-H1, and > > lengthened vowel elsewhere). I, also, would question the need for a reconstruction of H{3} in the dual. > The Gk. /-e/ cannot be a syllabic *-H1 if it is to match OLith. augus-e > 'the two grown ones' or OIr. di: pherid 'two heels', only IE *-e will do > here. The main problem, however, is one that I think we run into far more often than we generally recognize, and that is that some linguists *contrive* very complicated rules to be able to ascribe a common origin to forms that are simply not commensurable. Beekes, I feel, does just this when he attempts to link the Sanskrit masculine and feminine dual forms (-a:[u], -u:, -a:[u], -e) with those of other IE languages like Greek: -e, -ei, -o:, [-a:]). It is as if Beekes had never heard the word "Nostratic"! Egyptian, for example, has a simple mechanism for forming masculine duals: -wj, with a plural in -w. Also, nearly every cardinal number has a -w suffix; and AA plurals (collectives in origin) in -u{:} are well-known. I interpret these facts (and others) to indicate that Nostratic had a collective suffix -w(V), and that these suffix was one of those employed to form a dual in IE. I would analyze Sanskrit -a:(u) as (C)wa in opposition to Beekes' -H{1}e. [ Moderator's comment: The final -u in the Sanskrit dual is not Indo-European, but an Indic develop- ment that is not present even in Iranian. --rma ] But, another method of indicating the dual was almost certainly the suffix -y, here, not an adjective formant but just a suufix of differentiation. This will be the source of those dual endings like Greek -e, and Beekes recognizes the phonological process when he suggests on p. 195, that "Gr. o{'}sse, 'eyes' comes from *ok{w}-ye" but then goes on to derive *ok{w}-ye, IMHO incorrectly, from earlier *ok{w}-iH{1}, in a misguided attempt to unify -e and -a:(u). Of course, there are sporadic forms like Greek no{'}: from *no:wi, combining *ne/o + *wi:, 'two', and a 'laryngeal' is not necessary to explain the in a stress-accented open syllable; a mechanism as simple as transference of length back to the stress-accented syllable from *-wi: could explain it. >However, as the vowel must be a secondary prop-vowel since it > has not caused accent/ablaut to move, this is neutral as to whether the > consonant ultimately at work was *-H3 or *-H1. Certainly *-H2 is excluded > since its well-known effect of lengthening is not caused in the nom.-acc. > dual. If there is a long vowel in the 1st dual ending of thematic verbs, > Skt. -a:vas, Goth. -o:s, then it cannot be *-oH1-wos if the choice of -e- > and -o- as the form of the "thematic vowel" depends on the voicing of the > following segment, and of course the Goth. form cannot come from *-eH1wos, > so only *-oH3wos would then do. But can we really exclude *-o-wos with no > laryngeal? That depends on the rules of Germanic. If Gk. no:^e is > identical with Avest. /a:va/ (Skt. a:va:m with added -am), then the etymon > can only be *nH3we - but the Gk. omega could have been taken from the > enclitic which would be *noH with any laryngeal. Even so there is nothing > that directly points to -H1- as the dual marker - unless somebody can > dissect the neuter dual in *-yH1 so as to make /H1/ a common dual marker; > what would be the morphological principle of that? > [...] Yes, I generally agree. But would go the further step of suggesting that a 'laryngeal' is not required to be reconstructed at all. > You say you miss a reference to the (morpho)phoneme /c/ in my assumption > of a development of *tw- via *Dw- to *y-/*w- in 'you'. It IS that element > I have in mind, only the two problems do not overlap so that I can decide > if the stage /c/ has bee reached by the time relevant here. > [...] As an aside, I am correct in presuming that indicates /ts/ and /dz/? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Apr 25 08:06:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 09:06:51 +0100 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: Nath said: >We can't tell gneH1 from gneH3 in Sanskrit, but jn~a:ti ``relative'' occurs I don't know what your Sanskrit is like, but I have no difficulty whatever, when reading Sanskrit, in telling the two roots apart. Perhaps this reflects the fact that my Sanskrit is not all that good! PIE *gneh3 gives ja:na:ti ( a ninth class present, revealing the laryngeal); and the causative jn~a:payati, and various forms in jn~a: e.g. jn~a:tr (someone who knows). So jn~a:ti is clearly cognate with the Greek gno:tos, and is from the knowing root. PIE *genH1 (note the different ablaut form from *gneh3, attested in a number of IE languages) gives the Sanskrit root jan, present class four (ja:yate) causative janayati (lack of lengthening in the first syllable reveals the laryngeal) and various forms in ja:- or jan- e.g. janman (birth) and janayitr (begetter); and past participle ja:ta, whence noun ja:ti ("birth"). >Sanskrit has a nasal present ... >which is generally said to reflect a process, >Latin uses -ske/o and Greek reduplication + -ske/o which are generally taken >to represent iteration/duration. What was the original meaning? In addition to the moderator's comments on Latin & Greek, a further objection to this approach is that it is very difficult to ascribe clear distinctions to the various present formations we find in PIE. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Apr 25 08:12:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 09:12:14 +0100 Subject: knowing Message-ID: Further to the discussion on the gneh3 root ("to know"), I have a daft question: The formation *gneh3-mn would mean, if it existed, that by which we know something - i.e. its name. But in fact we find *h3neh3-mn. Does anyone have any bright ideas for connecting the attested word for "name" with the root "to know"? Peter From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 25 18:17:34 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 21:17:34 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) In-Reply-To: <4a16b459.244c87ca@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 4/13/99 3:02:01 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: ><words and too primitive to think up their own so they were just >stuck with what they had. I can see it all now:>> >I didn't catch this when it came on the list. Not surprising; you seem to have missed a lot (including an epistemology course in college). >And B-T-W that's not what I wrote. And I'm sure the writer is >aware of that. Okay, so you don't know what "irony" means either, which is shown both by your misunderstanding of my use of the term and your own misuse of it. Yes, that is not what you wrote, it is what I wrote with a large "irony" label in front of it. Again, for the lexically challenged, irony is "1. a figure of speech in which the literal meaning of a locution is the opposite of that intended" or "2. an utterance or the use of words to express a meaning which is different from, and often the direct opposite of, the literal meaning." Now the purpose of the "irony" label was to alert readers to the fact that what was said was not what was meant. But one cannot expect anyone who doesn't know what "irony" means to understand that. So to make it clear at last, the purpose of the "ironic" dialogue was to ridicule the idea that "poor" and "primitive" cultures use "poor" and "primitive" languages, which you have advanced as an explanation for the archaisms in Germanic languages. >Let's go to our [ironic] Ur friends to get back on track: I'm afraid that your Ur-friends are not ironic, but merely sarcastic. And since you seem to think that irony and sarcasm are the same thing, for those who don't understand the difference my Webster's says "Irony differs from sarcasm in greater subtlety and wit. In sarcasm ridicule or mockery is used harshly, often crudely and contemptuously, for destructive purposes." So as long as you are using your Ur-friends to say what you actually think, you are not being ironic, but just sarcastic. >Ur-Hans: UF, why is whiting at cc.helsinki.fi talking about >handshoes when he should be talking about "archaisms" the way >Miguel used the term in those earlier posts? >Ur-Fritz: I don't know, Hans-to-be. Perhaps >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi is avoiding the issue. Ersatz Ur-Fritz should have continued: Or perhaps the man behind the curtain who is operating our switches and levers doesn't realize that 'handshoe' is an archaism or understand what irony is. It's a pity he didn't catch Miguel's answer to his earlier question when it came on the list or he might not be making us say such ridiculous things as if we really believed them. And Ersatz Ur-Hans should have replied: Yes, he does seem to miss a lot, and I find it embarrassing saying such silly things when they aren't ironic, but do you mean Miguel's answer when the man behind the curtain said: And what about "peripheral conservatism?" Isn't that really a matter of distance or what is peripheral about? and Miguel replied on Mon, 29 Mar 1999: It's about location. There are indeed cases where location (geography) matters. We expect "archaisms" to turn up in peripheral, or mountainous areas, where isogloss waves do not travel so fast or so often. But that doesn't mean that "peripheral" languages don't change: they do, and the changes often look very striking (odd, bizarre), precisely because they are shared by no-one else. And it doesn't mean that archaisms cannot survive in central areas. They do. And Ersatz Ur-Fritz would have replied: Yes, that's what I mean. If he had seen that he would have realized that "archaisms" don't necessarily have to be connected with isolation. He would have realized that different areas that are not in direct and regular contact don't necessarily have more archaisms than the other area, they just have different ones because the languages aren't necessarily developing in the same direction and that peripheral areas may be affected by different factors such as language loyalty in the face of pressure from neighboring areas of distinctly different languages that core areas don't have. And I think it is funny that he seems to see a connection between "peripheral conservatism" and "archaism" but can't make a connection between "conservatism" and "archaism." >Ur-Hans: Well, if we were cut off from the so-called "innovative >core" does that explain why we would compound words? >Ur-Fritz: The Greeks used compounds and recycled words all the >time. No, it's probably just whiting at cc.helsinki.fi - that >archaeological evidence was a bit too much. Honest dialogue >might address whether the idea of a cut-off is valid in terms of >history and linguistics. It's easier to just make us up than to >actually address the evidence presented. I'm sure Ur-Hans and Ur-Fritz are smart enough to realize that compounding words is an archaic feature of IE and the fact that it appears in so many IE languages is just a shared archaism. And I'm sure they are also smart enough to realize that compounding words is not the issue. But I doubt that they are smart enough to realize that the archaeological evidence is simply irrelevant to language classification. I have said this before, but it seems to be among the things that you didn't catch, so I will say it again: there is no cultural artifact that is diagnostic of language except writing. Without written records (that can be read) there is nothing that can be said about the nature of a culture's language (or languages) no matter how rich or poor the archaeological record may be. The most that you can say is that if there is archaeological evidence for something then there was probably a word for that something in the culture's language. But without inscriptional evidence, there is no way of telling what that word might have been and thereby gaining a clue to the nature of the language. The fact that archaeology shows that a culture was "poor" or "primitive" says absolutely nothing about the nature of the language that it spoke. "Poor" cultures do not speak "poor" languages and "primitive" cultures do not speak "primitive" languages. In fact, there is no such thing as a "primitive" language, at least not as far back as historical linguistics has so far been able to reconstruct language. To the extent that every language fulfills the needs of the speech community that uses it, all languages are equal. If a linguistic community finds a need to express something that the language has no mechanism for expressing, a means of expressing it will be developed. Germanic is a branch of PIE. PIE was not a "primitive" language. Therefore Germanic is no more primitive than PIE was. What Germanic has is a number of archaisms that are not found in other branches of IE. The retention of archaisms does not mean that the language is "primitive," it merely means that older forms have been preserved. Germanic also has a number of innovations that other branches of IE do not have (e.g., Grimm's Law). And this is indeed an indication of isolation from other branches of IE where these innovations did not occur. But it is not an indication of a "primitive" language. Knowing a language can tell us a great deal about the culture that used or uses it. But no amount of archaeological evidence of a culture that lacks inscriptional material can tell us anything about the nature of the language(s) that the culture used. So there is no such thing as "honest dialogue" about what archaeological evidence tells us about the nature of language. The dialogue consists of only one word: NOTHING. What then of the various theories of Gimbutas, Renfrew, Mallory, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, et cetera, et cetera, that try to locate the IE homeland and to connect the various branches of IE with specific archaeologically identified cultures? They are just that, theories (or hypotheses) that attempt to identify various archaeologically reconstructed cultures with various linguistically reconstructed languages or language stages. By now you should know that a hypothesis is an explanation put forth to account for some group of observed phenomena. These hypotheses attempt to connect two sets of observed data that have no observable connection. That is, they try to link the observed (reconstructed through observations) prehistoric stages of languages with the observed prehistoric cultural assemblages on the ground. To do this, they must account for such things as the time-depth that the linguistic reconstructions indicate, the other (reconstructed) language groups that each of these languages or language stages must have been in contact with during their prehistory, and the geographic locations that the languages must have been in for these contacts to have taken place at the proper times. Since these are hypotheses, they can never be "proved." "Proof" could only come from the discovery of readable inscriptional material, in which case these cultures would no longer be "prehistoric." They can only be confirmed to a level that invites confidence that any particular hypothesis is more likely than its rivals. Ultimately the most acceptable hypothesis will be the one that accounts for the greatest number of observations in the most concise or parsimonious fashion. But no hypothesis is likely to be generally accepted unless it accounts for all the observed data in a consistent and coherent way. But the very reason for this proliferation of hypotheses about the identity of prehistoric languages with prehistoric cultures stems from the fact that archaeological remains without inscriptional material tell us absolutely nothing about the nature of the language(s) involved. If they did, there would be no need for this mass of competing theories. So advancing archaeological evidence as an explanation for the nature of any prehistoric (reconstructed) language is not even pseudo-science. It is just drivel. >Ur-Hans: What was it that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote? Oh, >here it is... <conservative by nature, resisting change with a fervor...>> >Although we will have to wait for re-contact with Greek culture >to develop terms that have -ology in them, I'd bet my handshoe >that is "pop sociology". Generally speaking, conservatism is not a sociological phenomenon, but a psychological one. It refers to a certain type of mindset that resists change. If an entire culture is conservative, it can become a sociological factor, but by and large cultures are made up of conservative and non-conservative elements in varying proportions (there are notable exceptions). Some segments of a society tend to be more conservative than others. For instance religions and the legal profession are usually conservative (particularly in language usage, but frequently in other areas as well), while merchants often are not (always looking for something new to buy or sell and someone new to buy it from or sell it to). Those with a vested interest in the status quo (e.g., hereditary nobility) tend to be conservative. The "haves" are almost always conservative; the "have-nots" are usually not. Politicians are either conservative or ready for change depending on whether they are in office at the moment or not. Conservatism is almost always a conscious choice -- a refusal to accept change (although it often also arises from simple inertia if change requires action and no change doesn't). Linguistic change is almost always unconscious. That is, the users of a language usually do not realize that a change is taking place. If a language retains a disproportionate number of archaisms, it indicates that something in the speech community is acting to block change. Now it doesn't matter what it is that is blocking change, because if conservatism is resistance to change then a language that does not innovate is conservative by definition. But since language change is for the most part unconscious and conservatism is a conscious choice, a conservative language must be so by the conscious choice of its users (simple inertia would allow the change to go through). Therefore an archaic language implies a conservative speech community. >Ur-Fritz: Or worse, Hans-someday. If I'm right, we may actually >be Ur-Danes and we Danes will learn not to like that "ubergeist" >kind of talk. But more importantly, Germanic is not >conservative. If Proto-Germanic has more than its share of archaisms then Germanic is conservative by definition. But some elements of Germanic are more conservative than others. It has been noted elsewhere on the list that High German preserves the old case system almost intact while all the other branches have innovated it away in varying degrees. That makes High German conservative by definition. It was also noted, quite correctly, that "the Pennsylvania Amish did not feel they 'had to conform' and make English their native tongue." Again, resistance to change is conservatism, and while this is not the only example to be had of a small language community that has refused to adopt the language of a larger language community by which it is surrounded, it is an example of what is possibly the most conservative type of society one could imagine. So while it may be true that Germanic is not conservative in all its present-day branches, there is clearly a conservative element in Germanic that has been observable from prehistoric times down to the present day. >Even we know the functional difference between archaic and >conservative. It will save a lot of time if you will never claim that you know what a word means or that you know the difference between the meanings of words. As a hypothesis, this simply does not account for the observed facts. Just use the words in a sentence that has context and then we can tell if you know what they mean or not. But even if you know the difference between archaic and conservative, you obviously don't know what the connection between them is. So again to the Webster's: conservative: tending to prefer an existing situation to change. archaic: surviving from an earlier period. So, again, conservatism leads to archaism. Being archaic and conservative basically means being old-fashioned and liking it that way. Now "archaic" also has a meaning "of, relating to, or characteristic of an earlier or more primitive time," so I can see how you can come to the conclusion that "archaic" equates to "primitive" and archaeological evidence of a "primitive" culture accounts for the "archaic" nature of Germanic because "primitive" cultures have "primitive" (= "archaic") languages. And this conclusion would have been right in the mainstream in the 18th or 19th century when nationalistic fervor had more to say about language and culture than linguistic evidence did. But it really won't make it at the end of the 20th century. >Ur-Hans: And us being poor and cut-off by the Celts from the >south, isn't that sociology? >Ur-Fritz: No, it's called hard evidence about what happened in >pre-history, proto-Hans. It may explain certain features (but >not handshoe) in Germanic -that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi doesn't >care to address - in terms of "mutual contact" or lack of it. >Cultural anthropologists, historians, archaeologist and linguists >use the term. Although sociology can use hard statistical >evidence, you have to be rigorous or you'll end up saying very >unscientific things like <conservative by nature, resisting change with a fervor...>>. >That's pseudo-science. I rather like your opposition of sociology and hard evidence, but even the existence of hard evidence doesn't prove that something is not sociological. But then again, conservatism is not really a sociological phenomenon unless it is a characteristic of a society as a whole. On the other hand, there is certainly no shortage of examples of conservative societies. >Ur-Hans: Sounds like that could cause some trouble in the days ahead. >Ur-Fritz: Oh, it will, Hans. It will. >That's the latest [irony] from Ur-Steve Long Unless you actually meant the opposite of what you said, it is not irony. But, sadly, I get the impression that you actually did mean it, so it is just sarcasm. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From jer at cphling.dk Mon Apr 26 00:10:20 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 02:10:20 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns In-Reply-To: <005101be8d53$dc4a2040$f9d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, I found: > [ Moderator's comment: > There is no evidence for a laryngeal in this stem; the length is due to > Ablaut ("apophony"), unexplained as yet. > --rma ] It seems to be part of the _definition_ of ablaut that it is unexplained. Well, I am at least trying to explain the ablaut. The whole matter is simply one of internal reconstruction. There is no more ablaut in IE than there is umlaut and breaking in Old Norse or Old English. Though that _is_ quite a lot, it has not kept scholars from successfully pointing out the rules of co-variation which can often be detected by comparing different parts of the language itself. In PIE there is a lot of such co-variation, in that the vocalism manifestly varies with the accent and - to a more limited, but specifiable, extent - with reduplication and special morphemes. A stem-final vowel ("thematic vowel") is not lost, but varies e/o according to rules of its own (see on next comment). If we find that the nom.sg. in *-s is restricted to certain stem classes, while others have zero, but they all have lengthening when the stem ends in a consonant, an obvious _possibility_ is that this reflects pure phonetic chnge. And if, on top of this, we find that some neuter stems ending in consonant + s behave just as if their s were the nominative marker, which of course it cannot be in a neuter noun, our guess is confirmed: Then there is little room for any understanding except by simple phonetic change. If that demystifies ablaut, so be it. I also found: > [ Moderator's comment: > It appears to be current in some European schools, that *e/o is [e] before > voiceless obstruents and [o] before voiced. I find that there are too many > exceptions to accept this. > --rma ] Oh yeah? That's nice, tell me where - for I have been preaching this sermon since the mid seventies, encountering nothing but scorn and disbelief, except with a few unbiased colleagues who bothered to get informed and, it seems, now some very young Germans who want to look at the facts for themselves with an open mind and are now finding the same thing, plus own students who have heard enough about the matter. I have later seen that Saussure actually formulated what I believe is the correct rule, but only to give it up for a wrong and narrower formulation; he believed the active feature to be rounding, deriving the 3pl *-nt from earlier *-mt which is not possible (West Germanic specifically demands *-nth, not *-mft which would have been the outcome of *-mth; and if the rule is also to explain the active participle in *-ont-, Lithuanian /-ant-/ proves n, not m) and of course contrary to forms like *-od and *-oy which do not have rounding, but do have voice. - There ARE many exceptions, but they are principled and harmless: This particular rule applies only to the "thematic vowel", i.e. pure vowels in stem-final position. It explains the interchange e/o in the stem final of thematic verbs, where there are no sure exceptions at all, and in pronouns where inflections retaining maximum alternation show the very same distribution as the verbs. It explains only a few, but precious, forms of the nouns where the alternation hardly occurs, presumably because of a simple standardization of the variant *-o-. Even in the noun, however, we do have *-e in the vocative (before zero, just as the verb has *-e in the imperative), and the fem.-ntr.pl. in PIE *-aH2 must be from *-e-H2 since *-o- can be proved not to get coloured by /H2/ (the verb plays along in the 1sg.mid. *bher-e-H2-i > *bheraH2i, the necessary common point of departure of Skt. bhare and Gk. pheromai). - Note that the rule also works for a stem-final vowel ("thematic vowel") before another suffix, i.e. not only before desinences: ptc. *-o-nt-, *-o-mH1no-, opt. *-o-yH1-, stative *-e-H1-, factitive *-e-H2- (> *-aH2-), adjectival abstract *-e-taH2- (Goth. diupitha which cannot be analogical; Gk. neo'te:s can). The rule no longer applies to new coinings, thus the compositional vowel is a standardized *-o-, just as there is *-o- in the hypochoristic suffixal array *-o-ko-. It is like /s/ in Greek: Anybody can see that /s/ is lost intervocalically in old forms (kre'as, gen. kre'a-os), but often restored in younger forms (lu:'so:, e'lu:sa on the pattern of kle'pso:, e'klepsa). Just as the Greek "s rule" may appear to be disproved by reference to cases of actually occurring intervocalic /s/, thus the IE "thematic vowel rule" could be seemingly disproved by its exceptions. Such counterevidence only disproves the productivity of the rule, not its earlier existence and its explanatory adequacy for a great many forms lying around in the morphology and the lexicon. - But thanks for the comments; this is the way to make progress. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Mon Apr 26 02:15:30 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 04:15:30 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns In-Reply-To: <005101be8d53$dc4a2040$f9d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [...] My strong suspicion is that *mwe, *twe, *swe > designated topicality, and their use in other cases is transference of > function. I believe that *me, *te, and *se are original > absolutive/accusative forms, and there is no need to derive them from any > other form. Even so, the non-occurrence of the very FORM *mwe (in any function) does look as strong evidence for a rule *mw- > *m-. The rule, however, has a broader foundation, cf., e.g., Gk. mo:^mar 'blemished' vs. amu:'mo:n 'unblemished' where /mo:-/ : /mu:-/ can only be seen as a regular alternation if derived from *mwoH-/*muH-. > Secondly, for your idea to be even vaguely plausible, you should be able to > show Cwe -> Ce in non-pronominal words, and, as far as I know, this is not > recognized in IE studies are as normal phonological developement. We do have *swe'so:r and *swe'k^s without the *-w- in some languages. [On the "nominative lengthening":] > I do not believe that I have ever seen this kind of lengthening > mechanism asserted. [...] You have now. It goes back a long way in the literature, over a century actually. I have given it a twist of my own, but only a little. [...] > I am also not aware of any IE who has successfully asserted that apophony is > governed by specific consonants. This part of it is, whether assertion to this effect proves successful or not. [...] > Frankly, I wish you could identify a for IE; it would simplify my AA-IE > comparisons since, from all I can see, AA and correspond to IE > with no indication of apophonic influence. I'd like to, of course, and I have let you in on the indications I know. But all indications are to the effect that the two - if ever opposed - have merged in PIE. It may be like *o and *a in Germanic which used to be different, but have merged. Nostratic, though definitely on a productive track, is in its infancy, and the time may not have come for giving Nostr. evidence priority over the testimony of IE itself. I admit, however, that I would probably have welcomed external evidence, had it been postitive. [... Further on the length of nominatives:] > I think the more likely explanation of these lengthenings is the presence of > a resonant; also, I am rather sceptical of IE <*z> exercising its > lengthening across an intervening consonant (if only a resonant). The nominative lengthening also works on stops: *ne'po:t-s, *wo:'{kw}-s. It never works on an immediately preceding vowel: *-os. I do not see how its lengthening effect can be used to decide against its being earlier voiced. Strictly, we can only say - and that's all I claim - that the nominative marker appears to have been voiced in word-final position when preceded by a vowel. That could be an effect exerted upon it by the environment, but then it is an effect to which the *-s marking the 2sg was immune, so even then we would need two different s's. What is so bad about that - Hindi /s/ has _three_ known sources. > > Lengthening is also seen in the s-aorist which then apparently had the > > lengthening s. [...] > I agree that this is an interesting congruity. That's a pleasant reaction. [...] > I do not doubt that different results indicate different conditioning > factors but I see no major objection to supposing that the conditioning > factor is probably stress-accent if not simply a desire to differentiate > phonologically identical forms fulfilling gradually differentiated > functions. But what is the probability that morphological differentiation not based in phonetic change gets to LOOK so much like the result of phonetic change that its variation can be stated in terms of consistent phonetic rules? [...] > You must know that I am merely accepting Beekes on this point. I also once > toyed with two different s'es but I am convinced that the explanation > offered by Beekes is the stronger and more economical explanation. It would be if it explained the facts as they are. The trouble with Leiden-style IE morphology is that so much of the material has to be explained as secondary. I want to respect the material - or at least the parts of it that I cannot explain away. [...] > You certainly seem to like "variants". Yes, that's all there is to work on in internal reconstruction. Without morphophonemic alternation, there is no clue to the prehistory of the forms. > A look at AA may convince you (e.g. > Egyptian -wj, dual) that, most likely, the dual -w has a separate origin. > After all, although a variation is attested is some IE languages like > Hittite, it is not, so far as I know, established for IE. I would of course change my mind if I got to know external evidence well enough to be able to control it and to see its relevance, and then found it to be in conflict with my present views. Such events would consitute quite big surprises, for the IE amount of co-variation is not exactly negligeable, but some of it could of course still be illusory. - That an m/w alternation is not established for IE is precisely the reason why I write about it, for it seems to be there. - BTW, I find it difficult to see that -w- expresses the dual in Egyptian, if the plural ends in -w and the dual in -wy - and the dual personal suffixes simply add -y to the plural forms where (outside of the 3rd person) there is no -w-. [..] > Not trying to be obtuse but I do not really understand your point here. I was saying that, in the personal pronouns, the oblique cases are all built on the acc.: Skt. dat. asma-bhyam, abl. asma-t, loc. asme /asma-y/ parallel to ma-hyam, ma-t tva-t, tve /tva-y/, even instr. tva: and yuSma:-datta- 'given by you', the underlying acc. being found in Skt. in the extended form ma:m /ma + -am/, tva:m /tva + -am/ and the normalized acc.pls. asma:n, yuSma:n - unextended forms seen in Avestan ma, thwa, ahma. That IS a system like that of Modern Indic where case-forming postposition are added to the old accusative. [...] > All I was saying is that most IEists do not believe (and I agree) that the > dual is as old as the singular and plural in IE. A dual is certainly not > necessary in any language to express "two of" something. That is no valid reason for considering the IE dual forms as we find them younger than the sg. and pl. forms we find. The real weight of the actual evidence rather tips the balance the other way: If a dual category is superfluous, and the IE dual forms are not characterized by productive elements, the dual looks like a cumbersome luxury present only because the older generations had it, and not for any important purpose of its own. That spells archaism if anything does. [...] > Obviously, after the dual *was* developed, its rather specialized (and less > frequent) use would tend to preserve its forms in an archaic state. If its forms could be in an archaic state, it must have been old enough to allow me to take it seriously in my analysis of the IE personal pronouns. That was all it was mentioned for. [...On 'me' and 'my':] > This is, IMHO, a completely erroneous analysis. Germanic *mi:na-z is > composed of IE *me + -y, adjectival/genitive + -nV, nominalizer + -s (case > marker). *e-mo-s is an emphatic expansion of *me by *e-, in keeping with a > general tendency to expand monosyllables to disyllables + -s, case marking. > It has only the last two elements in common with *meynos. If that is so, you cannot use the same system to account for the occurrence of /w/ in *tewe 'of thee' (Skt. tava, Lith. poss.adj. tava-) and /n/ in *mene 'of me' (Av. mana, OCS mene, Lith. poss.adj. mana-). > > THEN you can link Hitt. to the rest of IE in a smooth and unforced way > > if you assume that the /u/ has propagated from 'thou' to 'I' and from 'I' > > to 'me', and finally from orthotone 'me' to enclit. 'me'. > I do not assume that the basal form is *tu(:), and so cannot justify > migrating 's. Then why not change your assumption about 'thou' and get the benefits? [...] > The basis for suspecting "topicality" for -w is not present in IE nouns. It > is necessary to reach beyond IE to "justify" it. Fine with me, that makes it even older and more deeply rooted when we find it in the pronouns, where it is then definitely a component to be accounted for in the underlying forms. > > BTW, what is the basis for taking the *-g^ to express topicality? > I do not take it so. I believe it expresses 'maleness', based on analysis of > IE roots containing and extra-IE morphemes. Sorry, I misread you. But why "maleness"? Did women not say *eg^? [...] Thank you for your trouble with rethinking this intricate question. We cannot expect full agreement to be right around the corner. Jens From Anthony.Appleyard at umist.ac.uk Mon Apr 26 07:09:29 1999 From: Anthony.Appleyard at umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 08:09:29 +0100 Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: DFOKeefe at aol.com wrote:- > Hello I-E Listmembers, We have placed a paper we have written entitled > 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH AND FINNISH WORDS WITH AN IRISH TIE-IN TO URALIC in > section 1. (A.) of our Web page, > http://members.aol.com/IrishWord/page/index.htm.... (1) Finnish has picked a lot of loanwords from IE languages down the ages. (2) What work has been done on the statistics of the likely proportion of accidental resemblances between words in any two completely unrelated languages? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Apr 26 07:39:49 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 08:39:49 +0100 Subject: Suffix -ar in IE and Vennemann's Vasconic In-Reply-To: <003e01be8c23$a36fa6e0$da06703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > Not being an IE-ist myself, I would like to ask the knowledgeable > people on this list for more (IE) information about the suffixes > '-(t)ar' and '-ar' which exist in both IE and in Basque, apparently > with roughly the same function and meaning: the former is an > ethnonymic-forming device (with 't' after final vowel), while the > latter can have a series of meanings, often expressing occupational > relationship with something, or something more difficult to describe > in a general way (e.g. collectivity, multiplicity). The Basque suffix <-(t)ar> is indeed an ethnonymic. In older formations, it appears as <-tar> after a consonant and as <-ar> after a vowel, a common type of alternation in Basque, though newer formations do not always respect this distribution. But I'm not sure what other suffix is intended here. It is true that a number of nouns end in a morph <-ar> and that many of these denote things which are commonly encountered in bunches, like `pea', `star', `sand', `branch', and so on, but nobody knows if this ending represents a fossilized suffix or not. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Anthony.Appleyard at umist.ac.uk Mon Apr 26 07:30:13 1999 From: Anthony.Appleyard at umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 08:30:13 +0100 Subject: -t versus no consomant in 3p sg verb forms in common IE Message-ID: It is usually said that the 3rd person singular in IE ended in -ti (primary) or -t (secondary). But Greek has the forms {luei} = "(he) releases)", {elue} = "(he) was releasing". {elue} may well < I.E. {eluet} : notice that in Greek it adds an "n ephelkoustikon" if the next word starts with a vowel, which doesn't happen in the similar imperative form {lue) = "release!" which didn't lose a final consonant; as if the n-ephelkoustikon replaces an earlier etymological t-ephelkoustikon. But re Greek present {luei}: did this form come from *{lueit}?; or perhaps it never ended in a {-t} in the first place. IE *{lueti} would > Attic Greek **{luesi}. Perhaps in early IE times the final -t was only present when the verb had no noun subject, and ultimately derives from an adhering postposited pre-IE subject pronoun. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Apr 26 07:52:12 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 08:52:12 +0100 Subject: Celtic substrate influence In-Reply-To: <004c01be8dd0$1c1b0780$b270fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: > Larry Trask wrote: > > In Parisian French, the preterite seems to have disappeared from > > speech by about the 16th century, according to Price, > I have seen the statement made that in the 17th c., the distinction > was that perfect = past of today and attributed to something called > Port Royale Grammar. [Comrie's book on Tense might have been the > source.] I don't know if this refers to the written language, but > that seems a bit odd. This is precisely the state of affairs in Castilian Spanish today: the perfect is used as a past tense to denote events occurring earlier on the same day. Such a form has been dubbed a `hodiernal past'. The perfect was indeed used likewise as a hodiernal past in the kind of French described in the Port Royal grammar. That grammar, I think, describes the formal literary French of the day, rather than vernacular speech, so it need not be inconsistent with Price's conclusion. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From inaki.agirre at si.unirioja.es Mon Apr 26 10:01:58 1999 From: inaki.agirre at si.unirioja.es (Inaki Agirre Perez) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 11:01:58 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: A couple of objections to LT's points: > Third, Azkue does not claim that the words entered in his dictionary are > native. On the contrary, he declares explicitly, in section IX of his > prologue, that he is entering words of foreign origin which are well > established in Basque Azkue remarked the words he thought native with a different typeset in his dictionary. > > brrrrra > This is not even a lexical item, but only a representation of a noise > used by shepherds to call their sheep. It's on a par with English > noises like `brrr', `tsk-tsk' and `psst'. > > glask > This is strictly an imitative word, on a par with for a > gunshot. I wonder how is it that a language which rejects clusters and plosive initial words is so kind to produce imitative or expresive words within these parameters. Not to say the 'm' problem. I would bet that less of 10% of imitative/nursery/expresive words commit the well-established phonotactics of Pre-Basque. Is this normal? Or Basque got its quite rich expresiveness just in modern times? Inaki Agirre (not a zoologist, but ye an elephant!) From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Apr 26 14:33:00 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 15:33:00 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: [snip...] sometimes heard as and at others as . The speaker is fully aware that the form is but that is not what s/he is actually "saying." In the case of it strikes me that the same thing happens with the result being or when the definite article is attached. The speaker knows (perhaps only unconsciously) that the phoneme sequence is /buruko/, even if the phone sequence may be [bruko] or [burko]. But (except in scribe-influenced languages like English or French) the modern reflex is always a descendant of actual spoken forms. If historical linguists can state that Old Basque didn't have plosive + liquid clusters then it's because such occasional phone clusters were never psychologically elevated to phoneme clusters, and no change of the co-occurrence rule can be reconstructed from the historical data. Although, as you say, there are microdifferences in pronounciation that distinguish native from non-native on what should be almost identical sounds, these differences are probably held at a broader phonological level. For example, in my own speech and may differ only in that the [tr] of is an affricate (cf. ~ ), at least in quick speech. Or although I normally say both and as [dZu:n], they're not precisely identical, because feels the influence of its phonemic form /dju:n/ and can fluctuate in degree of affrication. The psychological difference is still large. I would suggest (and I freely admit I have no idea whether this is true, but I suggest) that to be carried along diachronically a sound reduction of the kind or or would have to go through a reinterpretation of its abstract phonemic form. In Old Basque * broke a firm rule and would not survive. In modern Basque, does [burko] have the tap of /buruko/ or the roll of */burko/? In my English initial [tr] can come from both /tr/ and /t at r/. Once they lose the possibility of reversion to the old phonology, the vowel can be considered gone. The non-standard pronunciations can be very divergent. For I catch myself saying all sorts of things, [aINg at nt@] and [aNgan@] and [QNg at n@] and [aNn@], none of which I would want to dignify with a phonemic form. When they settle down to any one or more forms as stable as and then they can be entered in my idiolect dictionary. That said, forms like and and have acquired a stable written form and can then be enunciated without being the actual slurred forms that gave rise to them. So this is not to deny that saltations like could have occurred; I just suspect that the ordinary lability of speech is not ordinarily enough to generate them. Nicholas Widdows From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Mon Apr 26 15:10:49 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 10:10:49 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Earlier, Glen Gordon wrote: "However what defines a particular language as unambiguously unique from another? How do we define "English"? There are many dialects of English. Do we consider all the English dialects as part of a single language or consider them seperate? How many dialects should there be of English? At what point do the differences between one speech form and another become insignificant or significant in these definitions? Should Proto-Indo-European, Germanic or the descendant of English 500 years from now be considered "English"? What number of people need to speak a particular speech form before it is considered a seperate and statistically significant speech form. Is Eyak a real language? What about artificial languages like Esparanto (some million or so strong so I hear) or Klingon (you know how prevalent Trekkies are)? Etc...." The definition of a language can be as simple or as complex as you wish. Since you work in the field of linguistics, don't you have a definition that is workable for you professionally? The same can be done for mathematical uses. Dictionaries are compiled, limited and incomplete as they are. But, larger and more comprehensive dictionaries can be compiled when needed. My first guess about the nature of a linguistic dictionary would be a simple data base of words-the most elemental unit that I can think of for a language. If I compiled a dictionary of spoken and written words, I could then record a conversation between people and compare each word used in the conversation with the data base of words. Using a simple "hit"--"no-hit" measuring device, I could then measure the percentage of the words used in the conversation with words in the data base. I could measure the compliance of south Australian with Bristol English or Brooklyn, NY English. Other measure like this "compliance ratio" could also be developed, according to the needs of the researcher. Thess types of statistics could be used as a consistent measureing device for the degree of compliance and of dispersion of a given population to a given linguistic dictionary. For example: if I recorded 1500 random conversations in English in San Antonio, Texas and did the same in London, England on the same date, I could then use these conversations to complie a spoken dictionary for each location and time. I would have a vocabulary list of words likely to be spoken in south Texas and in London. These two data bases could then be compared in an almost infinite number of ways, depending on what you were looking for. Admittedly, a simple word list leaves out all the rules of usage, non-verbal clues, etc. It is certainly not a perfect measurement of what constitutes a language, but is could be valuable as a tool for measuring differences-which it seems to me is an important issue in linguistics. It would be a workable starting point from which a more thorough or specialized definition may be worked out as experience is gained. What I am suggesting, at bottom, is the application of mathematical techniques to the problems of linguistic analysis. I guess such a field of study would be called linguistimetrics, similar to econometrics as the application of quantitative techniques to economic problems. I haven't found this word in any of my dictionaries, but I would place a bet that it, or some other word meaning the same thing, will eventually be part of your vocabulary. The reason I am so confident about this prediction is because I know how much the use of quantitative techniques has meant to other fields of study, and I have not seen anything yet that convinces me that some of the same techniques could not be used by linguists. I am posting soon another note that addresses other questions that have been raised about the efficacy of a medical model to linguistic change. I wish I could give more concise responses, but I am mushing around in a field whose vocabulary is alien to me. But, I am confident that I know the scientific method, and it is this vocabulary that unites us. To confess my meager credentials in the lingusitic field, I have studied only two languages other than English-Russian and French. And to call them studies is an insult to anyone who has undertaken a serious study of a foreign language. My study of these languages was superficial at best. A slight bolstering of my case rests on other, non-spoken languages I have experiences with: mathematics-algebra, calculus, statistics and geometry, and computer languages-FORTRAN, BASIC, C and COBOL, plus a few data base manipulation languages, again, on a generally superficial level. If the field of linguistimterics does develop, these are some of the tools that would probably be needed by a budding linguistimetrician. Best Regards, Ray Hendon From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Tue Apr 27 04:12:29 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:12:29 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: <373695c6.600980876@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: At 10:18 AM 4/24/99 GMT, Miguel Carraquer Vidal wrote: [snip] >On the subject of "layabout, good-for-nothing": that seems to be, >as I've discovered, the basic meaning of Aragonese/Navarrese >"chandro" [chandro: gandul, haragan, holgazan], discussed here >recently. Aragonese initial ch- points to *sandro or *jandro >(personal name Sandro, Alejandro?), unless the word is somehow >derived from Provencal (Limousin) chantor/chantre (> Cat. xantre, >xandre) "singer, minstrel". Or derived from a pre-Romance language spoken in the same zone, e.g., from _etxekoanderea_ > etxe(ko)and(e)r(e)a > *echandra > *chandra > chandro where the ending of _*chandra_ originally referring to a female householder was "masculinized", i.e., the /a/ was changed to /o/. As I recall, in the legal text there is no negative connotation to the word. Here it would seem that we might be dealing with some sort of development analogous in some sense to _puta/puto_ where _puta_ refers to a "whore" and was/is the original form (???). In any case the plot thickens with the addition of Miguel's evidence. Izan untsa Roz Frank From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Apr 26 21:55:58 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 16:55:58 -0500 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The Amish conduct religious services in High German [or an archaic version of it] and are literate in the language but they don't speak it at home. >Rick McCallister wrote: >> Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish and other similar groups, >>is more or less a "relic language" in that the vocabulary and not much else >>are from the original language [mainly a mix of German dialects of the >>Upper Rhine valley such as Swiss German, Swabian and Alsatian]. The syntax >>and the morphology are principally from American English. >'Principally' is one of those words that can mean whatever you like, BUT >written PennDu, at least, has 3 genders, 3 cases, personal rendings on >verbs in the present tense separable verbs and rules for verb second and >verb last which look pretty like those of standard German - to mention just >a selection of features not terribly like US English. I'm willing to admit >to not haveing met any real live speakers myself, but I'd be surprised if >my large selection of textbooks on the subject is entirely misleading. >Sheila Watts [ moderator snip ] From stevegus at aye.net Tue Apr 27 00:17:11 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 20:17:11 -0400 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >All this brings us back to Europe, and I think the fact, brought to our >attention again by May Wheeler, but mentioned before, that actually we have >forms like (en)zebro, (en)zebra, ezebra, azebra, cebrario, ezebrario for the >"wild ass" in Old Spanish and Old Portuguese. This is usually taken as going >back to Latin /equifer/. Someone (I forgot who) objectioned that this >etymology requires an intermediary state *ecifer- and found no motivation for >the -qu- > -c- development. Some of these look like they might be more plausibly derived from, or at least contaminated by, Latin -asinu(m)-, the ass. I am not that familiar with Ibero-Romance philology to know exactly what the circumstances are that changed proto-Romance -inV to -brV, but the examples of homine(m) > hombre femina(m) > hembre might go further in explaining how -asinu(m)- ?> -ezebra-. In this case the problematic compound *equifera would no longer be needful. --- With wind we blowen; with wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen; with weopinge we passun. With steringe we beginnen; with steringe we enden; With drede we dwellen; with drede we wenden. ---- Anon, Lambeth Ms. no. 306 [ moderator snip ] From ALDERSON at netcom.com Tue Apr 27 01:53:58 1999 From: ALDERSON at netcom.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 18:53:58 -0700 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >From: >Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM >> Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to >> Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis >> for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE >> consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd >> developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a >> mess. >It is profoundly irresponsible to label anything written by Lehmann as a >"mess". He is one of the preeminent IEists of the 20th century, and to >cavalierly dismiss his work as "Neogrammarian", as if a label could discount >his achievements and contributions, is tragically unjustified. Lehmann is no more a god than is Szemere'nyi, Brugmann, Beekes, Watkins, or Cowgill. He falls down on certain issues, as do all the others, and gets some things right, as do all the others. But much of what he wrote 50 years ago-- and that is about how long ago it was written--is a mess. However, Leo Connolly's use of "Neo-Grammarian" to describe his work is no more dismissive than to so label the work of Carl Brugmann. It assumes the system reconstructed in Brugmann & Delbrueck, and attempts to explain exceptions in a way which the _Grundriss_, Hirt, or Meillet would have approved (whether or not they would have agreed with them). Unfortunately, the _Junggrammatiker_ system needed to be re-examined, and by not doing so Lehmann causes himself problems. >> The Neogrammarians had realized that the vowels [i u] tend to alternate >> with [y w] under conditions which no one has ever been able to specify >> *exactly*; >This is, in my opinion, totally misleading. The condition has been exactly >specified, and in such simple terms, that hardly anyone, who does not have a >predisposition to think that the latest fads in linguistics are the last >word, could not understand them: initial ['Y/WVC] is ['y/wVC]; initial >[Y/WV'C] is [i/u'C]; ['CVY/WC] is ['CVi/uC]; [CV'Y/WVC] is ['Cy/wVC]; >[CVY/W'C] is [Ci/u'C]. Now, what was so difficult about that? It's extremely simple. However, what evidence do you have to back it up? It certainly does not appear in _Grundriss_ or Meillet. >> since this was apparently his dissertation, he felt obligated to say this >> within the framework dominant at the time: PIE [i u] were allophones of /y >> w/, not "true" vowels, >I do not know if Beekes had such an argument in *his* dissertation but in a >book published as late as 1995, he is still asserting what Lehmann's >dissertation asserted. So, though you may disagree, many eminent IEists >still maintain that IE [y/w] are primarily consonontal. And, as any >Nostraticist can assure you, IE [y/w] reflects Semitic [y/w]. If Nostratic >[i/u] -- presuming they actually existed -- showed up as Semitic [0], you >might have a talking point but they do not. Read very carefully what Leo Connolly wrote: Not that *y *w were not consonan- tal, but that in the structuralist framework (alive and well in the 1940s) made Lehmann choose one way or the other, and he chose to see *y *w as primary, and *i *u as secondary. That's a problem with structuralism, not with whether *y and *w were or were not consonantal. In structuralist terms, two phones in complementary distribution *must* be, cannot *not* be, allophones of a single phoneme. (Although a lemma requiring something called "phonetic similarity" was inserted into the theory when it was pointed out that in a pure framework, the English phones [h] and [N], as in _hang_ [h&N], must be allophones of a single phoneme...) Therefore, in the prevailing structuralist framework of the 1940s, Lehmann *had* to define *i and *u as allophones respectively of *y and *w. >> just as PIE syllabic [M N L R] were allophones of /m n l r/. >The syllabic status of [M/N/L/R] is a totally unrelated matter. These become >syllabic when deprived of the stress-accent. So the fact that all *six* resonants pattern the same is irrelevant? That *ey/oy/i parallels *en/on/.n by accident? Then you disagree with Lehmann? What of his god-like status? Never mind, rhetorical questions. In a structuralist framework, if two processes appear to be the same, they must *be* the same, and you cannot separate *y *w from *n *m *r *l in this way. >> Furthermore, though the laryngeals were unambiguously consonants in PIE (his >> view and mine, though others differ), the attested IE languages often have >> vowels where there were once laryngeals. The Neogrammarians had posited PIE >> Schwa in just such places. >I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by >Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. Your belief has nothing to do with the evidence. As pointed out elsewhere by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, there is evidence for *consonantal* reflexes of one or more laryngeals in non-Anatolian languages; Germanicists have long argued for the presence of consonantal laryngeals in Germanic (and Lehmann is included in this group). All Indo-Europeanists who accept laryngeals (and this is very nearly all of them by now) accept that they were consonantal in PIE. [ snip ] >> But I simply do not remember his ever making any use of "syllabicity" beyond >> the obvious ones: /m n l r y w/ had syllabic realizations between >> non-syllabic segments >> [ Moderator's comment: >> The "syllabicity" in question is in the final chapter of the book, in the >> discussion of the stages of pre-IE vocalism leading up to the vowel system >> seen in PIE, by which I mean that reconstructible from the daughter >> languages in Neogrammarian fashion. The earliest stage which he posits is >> one in which there is *no* phonemic vowel at all. I was charmed by the >> notion for years as an undergraduate, but then I learned more phonology. >> --rma ] >Rich, I would be interested to know what phonological principles you believe >Lehmann's "syllabism" violates? This is the reason it has taken me a week to get around to responding to this posting, and not wearing my moderator hat to do so. It's a very large question with an answer unlikely to satisfy the questioner. First, you must understand that I follow David Stampe's "Natural Phonology", as outlined in his dissertation and other works, and in the works of his students. Most important in this context is the work by Patricia (Donegan) Stampe on the phonology of vowel systems. Natural Phonology is process-oriented and requires that both lexical representations and derivations always be pronounceable; it is thus distinguished from Chomsky & Halle's _Sound Pattern of English_-style generative phonology, in which underlying (lexical) representations of English reproduce the Great English Vowel Shift. (See, for example, her dissertation, _The Natural Phonology of Vowels_, available as an Ohio State Working Paper in Linguistics, No. 27 I think.) On this basis, as an undergraduate I began an examination of the monovocalic analysis of Indo-European 25 years ago. I started out with what I considered the most interesting analysis of IE vowels, that of W. P. Lehmann, and looked for parallels in other languages (as the only way to demonstrate that an analy- sis is valid is for it to explain not only historical but synchronic phenomena in more than one language). This led me to look at Abkhaz, Abaza, Ubykh, and Kabardian, all of which have very large obstruent systems and very small vowel systems. Natural Phonology is, as well as process-oriented, constraint-oriented and hierarchical: The presence of certain phonological entities entails the presence of others. Thus, vowel systems are constrained: Certain kinds of vowel system are more stable than others, and unstable vowel systems rapidly turn into stable systems by either eliminating contrast or by adding contrast. In addition, processes which are not repressed may increase distinctions between vowels in the system (long vowels may become tense, for example, or a distinction in palatality vs. labiality may arise as in Arabic short /a/ vs. long /a:/ = [&] vs. [O:]). There is no such thing, in the world's languages, as a system with only one phonemic vowel (and _a fortiori_ no such thing as a language with none). The smallest phonemic vowel inventories yet found are in the languages I named above--and the analyses which shrink them to two vowels may violate one or more of the axioms of natural phonology. Thus, Lehmann violates a major principle when he asserts that any stage of Indo-European lacked a phonemic vowel: If a phone is present in a language, it has a psychological status in the lexicon, and while it may alternate with other sounds in the language because of morphological rules or unconstrained processes, it cannot be denied phonemic status. Rich Alderson From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Apr 28 02:12:59 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 21:12:59 -0500 Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard wrote: [ moderator snip ] > (2) What work has been done on the statistics of the likely proportion > of accidental resemblances between words in any two completely unrelated > languages? Try the following link which discusses just that: ======================================================= Tom Wier ICQ#: 4315704 AIM: Deuterotom Website: "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. - Thomas Jefferson ======================================================== From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 03:00:45 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 22:00:45 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, April 24, 1999 12:39 AM >Some responses to Pat's critique of my remarks re. Lehmann's "syllabicity": >>Why do you not explain why you consider it "nonsensical". >No need to, since I was not claiming that it was, but only that it *struck* >me as such some years ago. If you want reasons, the ambiguity of his >formulations, W. P. Lehmann is one of the finest IEists of this century; and his writing has been considered by most IEists lucid and cogent. If by "ambiguity" you mean "uncertainness" or "doubtfulness", you are certainly entitled to your opinion, unshared as it will be. If by "ambiguity" you mean "susceptibility of multiple interpretations", then most readers of Lehmann will not share your opinion. His writing is unusually concise and exacting. >and his insistance that syllabicity was a "prosodic feature" rather than a >segmental phone would be reason enough. You are betraying your age. In the 1950's, J. R. Firth defined "prosody" somewhat differently you you seem to think is appropriate *now* *for you*. Obviously, you are unfamiliar with this concept of "prosody" which had a certain popularity at the time. In keeping with Firth's idea of "prosody" ("a wide range of [other] phonetic and phonological characteristics"; Larry's dictionary of Phonetics, p. 293). Now whether you personally subscribe to Firth or not, to judge Lehmann's writing of 1955 in terms of *your* present preference for usage of the word is nonsensical. Lehmann was not required to tailor his vocabulary to your ability to understand its terms of reference 45 years later. >>>My gut feeling aside, there's an obvious problem with it even in terms of >>>structuralist theory. On p. 112 Lehmann states: "If we find no phonemes in >>>complemetary distribution at the peak of the syllable, we cannot assume a >>>segmental phoneme for this position." >>My own gut feeling is that there is no problem whatsoever. >[Lehmann quote omitted] >>All Lehmann is saying is that since no specific vowel can be specified at >>the syllabic peak, one that becomes phonemic by contrast with other phonemic >>vowels (where "phonemic" is defined as providing a semantic differentiation: >>CVC is a different word than CV{1}C), we cannot assume *one* specific vowel >>(e or anything else) at the syllabic peak in stressed positions. >>"Syllabicity" is just a innovative way of describing V{?}. >Innovative to the point that a vowel is somehow not a vowel. But let it >pass. You're missing the meaning of what I wrote next: Sorry you insist on understanding it only in your own terms. Can you not grasp the concept of "undefined vowel", you know, what we mean we we write today? >>>Surely not "phonemes in complementary distribution" -- *contrasting* >>>phonemes, or something of the sort. >>"Complementary distribution" in Trask's dictionary means "The relation which >>holds in a given speech variety between two phones which never occur in the >>same environment." >Right! "Phones." That is, raw sounds. Allophones of a single phoneme. But >Lehmann wrote "phonemes", which makes no sense in that context. That's why >I suggested "contrasting phonemes". I almost feel you have some personal axe to grind here since you insist on being, what to me, appears to be obtuse. May I suggest that you obtain some good dictionary of phonetics (like Larry's)? -- where you can read on p. 265: "Both the British school and the American Structuralists regard the phoneme as indivisible and as minimally abstract, a conception often labelled the autonomous (or classical) phoneme. In this view, the phoneme is essentially a structureless object which none the less has identifiable phonetic characteristics; it may be realized in speech by phonetically different phones in different environments." Again, it appears to mean that Lehmann's use of the terminology is perhaps not yours but was shared with a number of other linguists 45 years ago. >>With the exception of the qualification "two", this describes the situation >>that Lehmann has supposed for the stress-period of IE (e e{sub} e:). You >>may question his analysis but his terminology seems perfectly in accordance >>with standard usage. >No way. What do you not expand on that a bit? >>>Whether complementary or contrastive, the supposed difficulty arises >>>because Lehmann (against Brugmann & Co.) arbitrarily defines [i u] as >>>syllabic allophones of resonant phonemes /y w/ -- A totally separate question. >>There is nothing arbitrary about this at all. If we assume that IE and AA >>are related through Nostratic (which you may not prefer to do), the decision >>is mandatory. IE CiC does not show up in AA as normal C-C but rather always >>as C-y-C. >Even if your Nostratic correspondence is correct, it would still tell us >nothing about the phonemic situation of any stage of PIE, since the phonemes >of any stage of any language must be defined in terms of that stage alone. If you do not think that a phoneme which is in some positions, which can become a in other positions, is different, from say an , then all I can say is that your are entitled to your opinion but I consider it illogical. >We need reasons within PIE itself why [i u] must be analyzed as /y w/ rather >than /i u/. And Beekes has obviously found them. >And while I realize that the matter is debated, Lehmann's notion of >syllabicity seems to entail the consonantal analysis, It does entail. And, on the basis of AA cognates (among other indications), that is certainly the correct view. >else [e] etc. *must* be analyzed as one or more segmental vowel phonemes. No idea what this is supposed to mean: too ambiguous. >But let's be real: regardless of what has been done in the past, would any >competent phonologist now analyze a language with at least contrasting [i u >e] as having *no* vowel phonemes? You insist on misunderstanding Lehmann. While the contrast [e {sub}e e:] may be minimal, it is still a contrast; and you are missing the obvious point: that the actual phonetic quality of the vowel is immaterial because not differentiating. >[stuff omitted] >>So far, the only information there we have to support your position is >>Bomhard's *mention* of a paper by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov *with no details*. >>Do you have any arguments for your position? >huh? I don't make the connection here to anything your or I have said. Bomhard cited a paper by G&I as "proving" the existence of "pure" and for IE, which is, I assume, your as yet unsupported position. >[more omitted] >>>With /i u/ there is contrast in position between non-syllabics, >>I have no idea what this means. Could you explain it? >I just did, but in case I wasn't clear: Lehmann's analysis of [e e: e{sub}] as >something other than a vowel phoneme is possible only because he posits no >other vowel phonemes. I think you might want to review Lehmann again, and try to understand the distinction between the pre-stress and stress periods. >With [i u] analyzed as /y w/, this is weird and forced, but perhaps not >wholly impossible: the language would have had no other vowel phonemes >between two consonants, hence [e] etc. need not be analyzed as a segmental >phoneme, since it would not be *contrasting* with any vowel phonemes. Now you are getting closer to Lehmann's meaning whether you agree with it or not. >But if [i u] are analyzed as vowel phonemes /i u/, then *contrasting vowels* >between consonants are possible, and any justification for treating [e] etc. >as something other than a vowel phoneme falls by the wayside. Remember that >phonemes are *contrasting* sounds; they are not in complementary >distribution, though the allophones (realizations) of any given phoneme may >be (and usually are). Again, I suggest you attempt to distinguish between the stress and pre-stress periods. >>>-- I should add that on p. 113, Lehmann incautiously says that at the next >>>stage of PIE, with phonemic stress, syllabicity with minimum stress >>>"remains non-segmental between obstruents..." "Between"? How so? >>>Anything that can be between phonemes sounds segmental enough to me! >>How about zero-grade "vowels"? >That puzzles me for a variety of reasons, but leads to a question. I don't >mean to be snide, and I hope you won't be offended; but how familiar are you >with phonemic theory (any version will do)? "Prosodic features" and >"non-segmental" items are generally called "suprasegmentals", because they >apply on top of some segmental phoneme or sequence of phonemes. Pitch and >stress have a domain of at least one syllable. It makes no sense to say that >they occur between segmental phonemes, and no one claims they do. Yet >Lehmann claims here that one such suprasegmental does exactly that. -- A more >modern version could analyze the zero grade more neatly: a sequence /CVC/ >might be realized in various ways, depending on stress: [CVC] or even [CV:C] >under stress, [C at C] or even [CC] when not stressed. This last is zero grade >(but not a "zero-grade 'vowel'"). But this works only if /V/ is a real vowel >phoneme, which Lehmann did not want to concede. I am familiar with the way in which you would like to define these words. But you may not insist that Lehmann, writing 45 years ago, defines them in exactly the same way you choose to do now. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 27 04:29:49 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:29:49 EDT Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/26/99 3:32:41 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: <> I'm happy we agree about something, more or less. <> Scientifically valid hypotheses (be they right or wrong) "predict" results and this is the basis of experimentation. The term "predictability" may be somewhat arbitrary, but once again it is the common term of art. E.g., Bayes' Theorem extends that predictability to a measure of probability: "Bayes' Theorem provides a way to apply quantitative reasoning to what we normally think of as 'the scientific method'. When several alternative hypotheses are competing for our belief, we test them by deducing consequences of each one, then conducting experimental tests to observe whether or not those consequences actually occur. If an hypothesis predicts that something should occur, and that thing does occur, it strengthens our belief in the truthfulness of the hypothesis. Conversely, an observation that contradicts the prediction would weaken (or destroy) our confidence in the hypothesis. "In many situations, the predictions involve probabilities-- one hypothesis might predict that a certain outcome has a 30% chance of occurring, while a competing hypothesis might predict a 50% chance of the same outcome. In these situations, the occurrence or non-occurrence of the outcome would shift our relative degree of belief from one hypothesis toward another." See the neat Bayes' Theorem Calculator at http://m2.aol.com/johnp71/bayes.html With regard to the coexistence of two contrary hypotheses, the obvious objective for the experimenter is to generate a test which resolves the situation. From the abstract to P.Adorján, J.B. Levitt, J.S. Lund, and K.Obermayer. A model for the intracortical origin of orientation preference and tuning in macaque striate cortex., Visual Neuroscience, 16:1-16, 1999:"...In contrast to models based on an afferent orientation bias, however, the intracortical hypothesis predicts that orientation tuning gradually evolves from an initially nonoriented response and a complete loss of orientation tuning when the recurrent excitation is blocked, but new experiments must be designed to unambiguously decide between both hypotheses." A hypothesis must predict before it can be proven false by experimentation. E.g.: "Our results are inconsistent with the detoxification hypothesis that predicts that a large proportion of the heavy metals passing through the gut are absorbed and stored permanently. We found for both zinc and copper that the quantity in the abdomen was not proportional to the concentration of these metals in the consumed food but was, instead, relatively invariant. For these reasons, we suggest that regulated biological availability, not detoxification, may be the primary benefit of zinc and copper storage." - Abstract, MeV-ion microprobe analyses of whole Drosophila suggest that zinc and copper accumulation is regulated storage not deposit excretion. Robert M. S. Schofield, John H. Postlethwait and Harlan W. Lefevre; Journal of Experimental Biology v.200(24)1997 What is most relevant about the three quotes above (as well as thousands of others) is that they all include the phrase "hypothesis predicts." As a matter of language the two terms very often come together in this way in scientific usage. And this reflects clearly an understanding that the "predictions" of the hypothesis are what is being tested. Whether that is philosophically right or wrong is another matter. Regards, Steve Long From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Apr 27 04:55:00 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:55:00 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: Inaki Agirre Perez wrote: > I wonder how is it that a language which rejects clusters and plosive > initial words is so kind to produce imitative or expresive words within > these parameters. Not to say the 'm' problem. I would bet that less of > 10% of imitative/nursery/expresive words commit the well-established > phonotactics of Pre-Basque. Is this normal? Or Basque got its quite rich > expresiveness just in modern times? Well, I can think of a number of onomotopoeic (sp?) words in English which violate normal phonotactics, such as "pshaw" /pSa/, "tsk tsk" which normally indicates the dentalveolar click, "baa", /b&/, where /&/ is normally not allowed in open syllables. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 05:21:29 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:21:29 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Sunday, April 25, 1999 9:15 PM First, please let me apologize for misspelling your first name in an earlier posting. It was entirely unintentional. >On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >>[...] My strong suspicion is that *mwe, *twe, *swe designated topicality, >>and their use in other cases is transference of function. I believe that >>*me, *te, and *se are original absolutive/accusative forms, and there is >>no need to derive them from any other form. >Even so, the non-occurrence of the very FORM *mwe (in any function) does >look as strong evidence for a rule *mw- > *m-. Not strong! Not evidence! This seems completely illogical to me. >The rule, however, has a broader foundation, cf., e.g., Gk. mo:^mar >'blemished' vs. amu:'mo:n 'unblemished' where /mo:-/ : /mu:-/ can only be >seen as a regular alternation if derived from *mwoH-/*muH-. Irrelevant to the question of the pronominal form *mwe but, in any case, why not *mouH-/*muH? >>Secondly, for your idea to be even vaguely plausible, you should be able >>to show Cwe -> Ce in non-pronominal words, and, as far as I know, this is >>not recognized in IE studies are as normal phonological developement. >We do have *swe'so:r and *swe'k^s without the *-w- in some languages. One sallow does not a swallow make. >[On the "nominative lengthening":] >>I do not believe that I have ever seen this kind of lengthening mechanism >>asserted. [...] >You have now. It goes back a long way in the literature, over a century >actually. I have given it a twist of my own, but only a little. The twist makes it very difficult to recognize. >>I am also not aware of any IE who has successfully asserted that apophony >>is governed by specific consonants. >This part of it is, whether assertion to this effect proves successful or >not. Unless "assertion to this effect (does) proves successful", I feel comfortable in not considering it a viable factor. >[...] >>Frankly, I wish you could identify a for IE; it would simplify my >>AA-IE comparisons since, from all I can see, AA and correspond to >>IE with no indication of apophonic influence. >I'd like to, of course, and I have let you in on the indications I know. >But all indications are to the effect that the two - if ever opposed - >have merged in PIE. It may be like *o and *a in Germanic which used to be >different, but have merged. Nostratic, though definitely on a productive >track, is in its infancy, and the time may not have come for giving >Nostr. evidence priority over the testimony of IE itself. I admit, >however, that I would probably have welcomed external evidence, had it >been postitive. Well, if you are maintaining that pre-IE had both and then it would seem to me that that Nostratic evidence through, e.g. Arabic, where and have been maintained, would be crucial. But I can give you a little nudge: I am sure that the of the IE genitive could *not* have been . >[... Further on the length of nominatives:] >>I think the more likely explanation of these lengthenings is the presence >>of a resonant; also, I am rather sceptical of IE <*z> exercising its >>lengthening across an intervening consonant (if only a resonant). >The nominative lengthening also works on stops: *ne'po:t-s, *wo:'{kw}-s. Why can you not accept that *ne'po:t-s is the result of *nepoH-t-s? >But what is the probability that morphological differentiation not based >in phonetic change gets to LOOK so much like the result of phonetic change >that its variation can be stated in terms of consistent phonetic rules? That is a tough one. I have not ready answer. >>You must know that I am merely accepting Beekes on this point. I also once >>toyed with two different s'es but I am convinced that the explanation >>offered by Beekes is the stronger and more economical explanation. >It would be if it explained the facts as they are. The trouble with >Leiden-style IE morphology is that so much of the material has to be >explained as secondary. I want to respect the material - or at least the >parts of it that I cannot explain away. No one can be faulted for that. >>A look at AA may convince you (e.g. Egyptian -wj, dual) that, most likely, >>the dual -w has a separate origin. After all, although a variation >>is attested is some IE languages like Hittite, it is not, so far as I >>know, established for IE. >I would of course change my mind if I got to know external evidence well >enough to be able to control it and to see its relevance, and then found >it to be in conflict with my present views. Such events would consitute >quite big surprises, for the IE amount of co-variation is not exactly >negligeable, but some of it could of course still be illusory. - That an >m/w alternation is not established for IE is precisely the reason why I >write about it, for it seems to be there. Well, let us chew on a smaller bite. Why do you not give us your best arguments for proposing a non-Hittite alternation *outside of the pronoun series*? >- BTW, I find it difficult to see that -w- expresses the dual in Egyptian, >if the plural ends in -w and the dual in -wy - and the dual personal >suffixes simply add -y to the plural forms where (outside of the 3rd person) >there is no -w-. Before we go to far afield on the IE list, let us restrict our view to the simplest and most transparent case: the nominal dual and plural in Egyptian. Here, we find -w as the regular masculine plural ending. I consider that a collective suffix. When the need for a dual came to be felt, the plural (from collective) suffix was simply differentiated by -j. I propose an analogous process of differentiation and suffixation provides an economical explanation for the main thrust of dual formation in IE. By the way, it is customary to distinguish between (one reed leaf) and (two reed leaves) in Egyptian transcriptions. [ moderator snip ] >I was saying that, in the personal pronouns, the oblique cases are all >built on the acc.: Skt. dat. asma-bhyam, abl. asma-t, loc. asme /asma-y/ >parallel to ma-hyam, ma-t tva-t, tve /tva-y/, even instr. tva: and >yuSma:-datta- 'given by you', the underlying acc. being found in Skt. in >the extended form ma:m /ma + -am/, tva:m /tva + -am/ and the normalized >acc.pls. asma:n, yuSma:n - unextended forms seen in Avestan ma, thwa, >ahma. That IS a system like that of Modern Indic where case-forming >postposition are added to the old accusative. Well, does this not suggest the primacy of the accusative? before the addition of -m to designate animate accusatives? >>All I was saying is that most IEists do not believe (and I agree) that the >>dual is as old as the singular and plural in IE. A dual is certainly not >>necessary in any language to express "two of" something. >That is no valid reason for considering the IE dual forms as we find them >younger than the sg. and pl. forms we find. I have tried to show that that is exactly the case: that the dual forms incorporate -y, which is not specifically dual but only differentiating. And, we may even be getting a glimpse of the collective -w I propose in the locative plural ending -su. >The real weight of the actual evidence rather tips the balance the other >way: If a dual category is superfluous, and the IE dual forms are not >characterized by productive elements, the dual looks like a cumbersome >luxury present only because the older generations had it, and not for any >important purpose of its own. That spells archaism if anything does. Yes, but there is different archaic horizons --- some earlier than others. >>Obviously, after the dual *was* developed, its rather specialized (and >>less frequent) use would tend to preserve its forms in an archaic state. >If its forms could be in an archaic state, it must have been old enough to >allow me to take it seriously in my analysis of the IE personal pronouns. >That was all it was mentioned for. Perhaps it is just a question of emphasis? >[...On 'me' and 'my':] >>This is, IMHO, a completely erroneous analysis. Germanic *mi:na-z is >>composed of IE *me + -y, adjectival/genitive + -nV, nominalizer + -s (case >>marker). *e-mo-s is an emphatic expansion of *me by *e-, in keeping with a >>general tendency to expand monosyllables to disyllables + -s, case >>marking. It has only the last two elements in common with *meynos. >If that is so, you cannot use the same system to account for the >occurrence of /w/ in *tewe 'of thee' (Skt. tava, Lith. poss.adj. tava-) >and /n/ in *mene 'of me' (Av. mana, OCS mene, Lith. poss.adj. mana-). I do not see why I cannot. Some uses of the genitive are very close to being topical: "of thee let me say that . . ." The forms for "of me" are simply an alternative method of composition: *me- + *-nV, nominalizer. Or would you not agree that there was some variation of formation in IE --- even at its earliest. The Acade{'}mie Indo-Europe{'}enne was not around in those days. >>>THEN you can link Hitt. to the rest of IE in a smooth and unforced way if >>>you assume that the /u/ has propagated from 'thou' to 'I' and from 'I' to >>>'me', and finally from orthotone 'me' to enclit. 'me'. >>I do not assume that the basal form is *tu(:), and so cannot justify >>migrating 's. >Then why not change your assumption about 'thou' and get the benefits? If this were a friendly drinking bout, I would be accomodating and agree. But are we not both trying to approximate the truth as closely as we are able? >>The basis for suspecting "topicality" for -w is not present in IE nouns. It >>is necessary to reach beyond IE to "justify" it. >Fine with me, that makes it even older and more deeply rooted when we >find it in the pronouns, where it is then definitely a component to be >accounted for in the underlying forms. >>> BTW, what is the basis for taking the *-g^ to express topicality? >>I do not take it so. I believe it expresses 'maleness', based on analysis of >>IE roots containing and extra-IE morphemes. >Sorry, I misread you. But why "maleness"? Did women not say *eg^? Only Valkyries. Other women, probably *em-. >Thank you for your trouble with rethinking this intricate question. We >cannot expect full agreement to be right around the corner. I am always interested in new ideas, and while I may not accept them, they stimulate all of us to rethink our reason for accepting other assumptions so, IMHO, they are always welcome as long as they are not purely frivolous, and I do not believe your ideas are. Actually, this discussion has benefited my thinking because I have always wanted to connect Arabic -t with IE -t (which, on the basis of a plentitude of other cognates, is impossible), but, on the basis on the neuter personal pronouns in -d, and the possibility that neuter and feminine were once a combined non-male classification, the smoke is starting to clear a little. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Apr 27 05:20:00 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 01:20:00 -0400 Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard wrote: > (2) What work has been done on the statistics of the likely proportion > of accidental resemblances between words in any two completely unrelated > languages? Go to http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 05:27:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:27:31 -0500 Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: Dear Anthony and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Anthony Appleyard Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 2:09 AM [ moderator snip ] > (2) What work has been done on the statistics of the likely proportion > of accidental resemblances between words in any two completely unrelated > languages? Those who are interested in this aspect of Nostratic might enjoy reading: _Nostratic - Sifting the Evidence_, ed. Joseph C. Salmons andd Brian D, Joseph, 1998, John Benjamins (so you know it will be overpriced), in which Donald Ringe has _A Probabilistic Evaluation of Indo-Euralic, and especially, Response to Oswalt and Ringe by William H. Baxter. Our friend Alexis Manaster-Ramer has a nice co-authored article on Exploring the Nostratic Hypothesis in it also. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 05:42:20 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:42:20 -0500 Subject: Suffix -ar in IE and Vennemann's Vasconic Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 2:39 AM [ moderator snip ] > The Basque suffix <-(t)ar> is indeed an ethnonymic. In older > formations, it appears as <-tar> after a consonant and as <-ar> after a > vowel, a common type of alternation in Basque, though newer formations > do not always respect this distribution. > But I'm not sure what other suffix is intended here. It is true that a > number of nouns end in a morph <-ar> and that many of these denote > things which are commonly encountered in bunches, like `pea', > `star', `sand', `branch', and so on, but nobody > knows if this ending represents a fossilized suffix or not. Larry, no need to tell me that you do not accept any connection of this last Basque <-ar> with anything outside of Basque but some readers might be interested in the idea that this termination, rather than denoting "things ... in bunches" is more narrowly defined as an 'indefinite amount', which I take to be a motivating factor of IE r/n-declension. I explain this at: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison-AFRASIAN-3-r-N-declens ion.htm Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Apr 27 05:41:39 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 01:41:39 -0400 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Ray Hendon wrote: > Earlier, Glen Gordon wrote: > "However what defines a particular language as unambiguously unique from > another? How do we define "English"? There are many dialects of English. Do > we consider all the English dialects as part of a single > language or consider them seperate? How many dialects should there be > of English? At what point do the differences between one speech form > and another become insignificant or significant in these definitions? > Should Proto-Indo-European, Germanic or the descendant of English > 500 years from now be considered "English"? What number of people need > to speak a particular speech form before it is considered a seperate > and statistically significant speech form. Is Eyak a real language? > What about artificial languages like Esparanto (some million or so > strong so I hear) or Klingon (you know how prevalent Trekkies are)? > Etc...." This has an analog with other fields like biology. In most cases, something like 99% of cases, there's no difficulty in determining *synchronic* species. Chimps and gorillas cannot mate, therefore, they are seperate species. Analagously, without learning each other's languages, a Spanish-speaker and an English-speaker cannot understand each other. Therefore, they are seperate languages. There are complications like dialect chains, where dialects A and D are mutually unintelligible, distinct languages, but A & B, B & C, and C & D are all mutually intelligible pairs. This occurs in biology as well, subspecies A & B can mate, as can B &C and C & D, but A & D cannot. Perhaps a good example might be dogs, a chihuahua and a St. Bernard probably couldn't mate (altho artificial methods might make a hybrid, provided the mother is the St. Bernard), but they're considered the same species. Diachronic, on the other hand, is purely arbitrary. H. Erectus and H. Sapiens are considered seperate species. In all liklihood, we could not mate with them, were some to be brought forward in time. Yet, where you draw the line is entirely arbitrary. In the same way, Old English is often said to have begun in 450 AD, when the Anglo-Saxons invaded England. Is that English? We couldn't understand them if they came forward in time. English's descendant 20 years from now will be very much the same as now, the differences will be minor. 200 years from now is a bit larger, but probably still intelligible to us. 2000 years from now will be a totally distinct language. When did it "become" this language? That'll be an arbitrary decision for linguist in 3999. Or maybe they'll continue to call their language "English", and just make more divisions, just as "Greek" goes back thousands of years to Ancient Greek. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Apr 27 06:00:23 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 02:00:23 -0400 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Steve Gustafson wrote: > I am not that familiar with Ibero-Romance philology to know exactly > what the circumstances are that changed proto-Romance -inV to -brV, > but the examples of > homine(m) > hombre > femina(m) > hembre What happened here, as I understand it, is that _homine_ became _homne_ (> French _homme_), then dissimilation occured, creating _homre_, and an epinthetic /b/ was added to make _hombre_ > might go further in explaining how > -asinu(m)- ?> -ezebra-. However, it wasn't in --> br, it was min --> mn --> mr --> mbr. in --> br has no phonological motivation. It's a very unlikely change. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Tue Apr 27 08:08:49 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:08:49 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: If this is meant to be Rick McAllister's response to my mail then sorry, everyone, I must have been completely incomprehensible. I am not talking about High German. Indeed, the Amish do use it in religious services - Lutheran German, which is not really 'archaic', just a little old-fashioned, like the English of the (King James) bible. It's still used in German-speaking countries, so it's not certainly not archaic in the religious context. What I was talking about were written texts in 'Pensilfaanisch', Pennsylvania Dutch, or whatever we want to call it, in which there is a substantial body of literature. These texts show Pennsilfaanisch as having a morphology and syntax which are like those of other German dialects and pretty like those of modern standard German. Not, therefore, at all like US English, as RMcA claimed in his original posting. The main English influence in Pennsilfaanisch is in the vocabulary. >>Rick McCallister wrote: >>> Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish and other similar groups, >>>is more or less a "relic language" in that the vocabulary and not much else >>>are from the original language [mainly a mix of German dialects of the >>>Upper Rhine valley such as Swiss German, Swabian and Alsatian]. The syntax >>>and the morphology are principally from American English. Sheila Watts wrote: >>'Principally' is one of those words that can mean whatever you like, BUT >>written PennDu, at least, has 3 genders, 3 cases, personal rendings on >>verbs in the present tense separable verbs and rules for verb second and >>verb last which look pretty like those of standard German - to mention just >>a selection of features not terribly like US English. I'm willing to admit >>to not haveing met any real live speakers myself, but I'd be surprised if >>my large selection of textbooks on the subject is entirely misleading. > Rick McAllister replied: > The Amish conduct religious services in High German [or an archaic >version of it] and are literate in the language but they don't speak it at >home. _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 27 09:10:52 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 10:10:52 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: <37243996.B393841C@si.unirioja.es> Message-ID: On Mon, 26 Apr 1999, Inaki Agirre Perez wrote: > A couple of objections to LT's points: [LT] > > Third, Azkue does not claim that the words entered in his dictionary are > > native. On the contrary, he declares explicitly, in section IX of his > > prologue, that he is entering words of foreign origin which are well > > established in Basque > Azkue remarked the words he thought native with a different typeset in > his dictionary. Not exactly. He explains in section XXIV.5 of his prologue that he uses a distinctive typeface (capital letters) for headwords which he regards as "primitive" (that is, monomorphemic), such as `arm'. He also uses capitals for words which he regards as bimorphemic but for which he believes he can identify only one of the two morphemes, such as `lose', for which <-du> is obvious but is not, and `ax', which he believes (wrongly, in my view) to be a derivative of `stone, crag'. > > > brrrrra > > This is not even a lexical item, but only a representation of a noise > > used by shepherds to call their sheep. It's on a par with English > > noises like `brrr', `tsk-tsk' and `psst'. > > > glask > > This is strictly an imitative word, on a par with for a > > gunshot. > I wonder how is it that a language which rejects clusters and plosive > initial words is so kind to produce imitative or expresive words within > these parameters. Not to say the 'm' problem. I would bet that less of > 10% of imitative/nursery/expresive words commit the well-established > phonotactics of Pre-Basque. Is this normal? Or Basque got its quite rich > expresiveness just in modern times? I wish I knew the answer to that last question. Unfortunately, we lack the data to say anything very substantial about the historical development of expressive formations in Basque. But it is essential, in any case, to distinguish lexical items from noises. In English, we have expressive formations which are lexical items -- that is, real words of the language. Examples include things like `glop', `teensy-weensy', `zap', `icky' and `pizzazz'. But we also have noises which are not real words of the language, like `tsk-tsk', `shhh', `pssst', and `brrr'. Basque is much the same. Things like `bang!' are lexical items, while things like the shepherds' call are noises. In all likelihood, Basque, like any other language, has had both expressive lexical items and noises for as long as it has existed. But it has surely had different ones at different times. Now, it is perfectly possible for a language to have expressive lexical items which violate the ordinary phonological structure of the language. English doesn't do this much, but some other languages do quite a lot of it. It is *possible*, therefore, that ancient or medieval Basque permitted expressive words with "illegal" forms, but we have no evidence to support such a suggestion. What we do know is that the patterns for constructing expressive words have changed over the centuries, and that the patterns used have not been everywhere the same. For example, the Lapurdian dialect is very fond of expressive words beginning with or , and it has quite a few of these, while the other dialects do not appear to use words of this type at all. On the other hand, almost all dialects have long been fond of coining expressive adjectives beginning with or to denote physical or moral defects. Every dialect seems to have some of these things, but different dialects have different ones. Examples: `deformed', `drunk', `obese', `washed out, colorless', `bent, curved', `rough, crude', `feeble, insipid', `insubstantial, feather-headed', `sterile, barren', `fragile', `chubby, mushy', `tricky, deceitful', and so on, and so on, all these examples coming from different dialects. So, the *pattern* is widespread, but the actual *words* used are different in different places. Another popular expressive device is /m/-reduplication, as in expressive words like `drizzle', `murmur, rumor, gossip', `pretext, excuse', and `trash, rubbish'. Most dialects seem to have some of these, but different dialects have different ones. It seems clear, then, that the Basques have felt free to coin these things for a long time, and that some patterns of formation have been popular throughout the language, while others have gained a foothold only in particular regions. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From DFOKeefe at aol.com Tue Apr 27 10:17:53 1999 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 06:17:53 EDT Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: Good Morning Anthony, Bjorn Collinder's book FENNO-UGRIC VOCABULARY (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1955) helps to answer your question about IE words in Finnish. There are about 502 Fenno-Ugric etymologies, 479 Uralic etymologies and (pp. 129-131) about 13 IE etymologies. In our judgmental selection of 2,650+ Finnish words, we saw numerous borrowings from the Scandinavian and Slavic languages which were obvious, we didn't select them. Still, even if a few got through, it would have little effect on the validity of the overall sample. I don't know about the statistical cutoff point where chance resemblances between words of two languages turns into non-chance resemblance between words of two languages. A priori, it must be well over 50%. In order to eliminate the possibility of chance, we compared 502 Fenno-Ugric etymologies and 479 Uralic etymologies (from Collinder's book) to IE roots and found that most can be reasonably explained by IE roots. You may check this out in our paper SIMILAR URALIC, FENNO-UGRIC AND INDO-EUROPEAN ROOTS at our Web page (http://members.aol.com/IrishWord/page/index.htm in section 1. (B.).). If most of these Fenno-Ugric and Uralic etymologies can be reasonably explained by IE roots, then chance cannot be a factor. Hope this helps. Thanks for your interest. Best regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 27 11:19:39 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:19:39 +0100 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 24 Apr 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > A Latin derivation seems to the most likely --of those presented-- > but the road seems pretty rocky. This word must have bounced around among > different languages to get the form it has. Given that the initial vowel > was dropped from ecebra with = /c/. I'm wondering if the word was > perceived by Spanish speakers as an Arabic word or if indeed it did pass > through Andalusian Arabic as something like S-b-r, th-b-r, dh-b-r, DH-b-r, > z-b-r, although I suppose the latter would only apply to a certain > attribute. But this pass via (Andalusian) Arabic is unnecessary if what we want to account for is the form OSp /dzebro/. In *eciferum would palatalize/affricate before a front vowel > [ts] and would lenite to [dz] intervocalically, as would /f/ > [v]. The second would be lost by syncope in a post-stressed non-final open syllable. <-um> > /-o/ is entirely regular, as is short > /e/. That gives us /dzevro/. Now we sometimes find, without it being exactly regular, /br/ or /rb/ for expected */vr/ or */rv/. A case in point would be > Ebro (intervocalic normally lenited to /v/ in OSp). The aphaeresis of is the most irregular feature, but not all that surprising, and not assisted by the Andalusian Arabic story. The above is precisely why Romance philologists proposed *eciferus. The > *eci- remains ad hoc. Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From henryh at ling.upenn.edu Tue Apr 27 14:36:56 1999 From: henryh at ling.upenn.edu (Henry M. Hoenigswald) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:36:56 -0500 Subject: -t versus no consomant in 3p sg verb forms in common IE In-Reply-To: <37241605.AF852043@umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: > It is usually said that the 3rd person singular in IE ended in -ti >(primary) or -t (secondary). But Greek has the forms {luei} = "(he) >releases)", {elue} = "(he) was releasing". > {elue} may well < I.E. {eluet} : notice that in Greek it adds an "n >ephelkoustikon" if the next word starts with a vowel, which doesn't >happen in the similar imperative form {lue) = "release!" which didn't >lose a final consonant; as if the n-ephelkoustikon replaces an earlier >etymological t-ephelkoustikon. > But re Greek present {luei}: did this form come from *{lueit}?; or >perhaps it never ended in a {-t} in the first place. IE *{lueti} would > >Attic Greek **{luesi}. > Perhaps in early IE times the final -t was only present when the verb >had no noun subject, and ultimately derives from an adhering postposited >pre-IE subject pronoun. For a try, see HMHoenigswald, 'Some considerations of relative chronology: The Greek thematic present', in A.Etter (ed.), _o-o-pe-ro-siŠ Risch_ , pp. 372-5. Berlin, de Gruyter (1986). Henry M. Hoenigswald 908 Westdale Avenue Swarthmore PA 19081-1804 Tel: 1-610 543-8086 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 27 14:03:00 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:03:00 -0500 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: <009201be9043$8934cca0$884435cf@oemcomputer> Message-ID: What happened was that -minV > -mnV > -mrV > -mbrV so hominem > homine > homne > homre > hombre /ombre/ feminam > femina > hemna > hemra > hembra /embra/ Asinus become asno [snip] >I am not that familiar with Ibero-Romance philology to know exactly >what the circumstances are that changed proto-Romance -inV to -brV, >but the examples of >homine(m) > hombre >femina(m) > hembre >might go further in explaining how >-asinu(m)- ?> -ezebra-. >In this case the problematic compound *equifera would no longer be >needful. From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Apr 27 14:13:18 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 17:13:18 +0300 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: <000c01be85a5$2a741020$5d5673ce@oemcomputer> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Steve Gustafson wrote: >Robert Whiting wrote: >>The classic example of this (hunting-taboo replacement by a more >>general word) is often taken from English "deer", originally the >>general Germanic word for 'wild animal' (cf. Ger. "Tier") which >>by being used as a euphemism for the hunted animal has come to be >>specialized in that meaning, with the original meaning being >>taken up by loanwords ("animal, beast"). >I suppose the question is, what justifies calling any of these >processes a 'taboo?' First, they are based on superstition; that is, the belief, not based on reason or knowledge, in the ominous significance in the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like. So the question becomes whether a superstitious prohibition is a taboo or not. There are numerous taboos that are based on reason or knowledge (at least empirical knowledge), so a taboo does not have to be superstitious. But I think hunting taboos by and large are. Hunters tend to be a superstitious lot -- apparently always have been and still are. The superstition here is that if you mention the "true" name of an animal when hunting (or even if you are in the wild for some other purpose) something bad will happen. There are two opposing superstitions: If you mention the "true" name of a ferocious animal, you are likely to call it forth when you are not prepared for it. If you mention the "true" name of an animal that you are hunting, it is likely to hear its name and be warned. This has already been stated in print by J. Knobloch, "Der Mensch -- und die indogermanische Jaegersprache," _Studia Etymologica Indoeuropaea_ (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 45, Louvain: Peeters Press, 1991), 155: In der Jaegersprache erfolgen solche Umschreibungen einerseits aus der Furcht, der wahre Name des Tiers koennte dieses anlocken, aber auch aus dem primitiven Glauben heraus, die Jagdtiere verstuenden die Menschensprache und waeren durch die Nennun ihrer Namen gewarnt. I think of the first of these as the "Speak of the Devil" syndrome. The very mention of something calls it forth. In Arabic one does not mention something unpleasant lest it actually come to pass. If one has to mention something unpleasant one adds ma:sha:'alla:h "what(ever) God (wills)." In English one generally adds "God forbid" to ward off the danger. This danger of inadvertent calling forth is complemented by the belief that knowledge of the "true" name of something gives you power over it; power to call it forth and make it do your bidding. I think of this as the "Rumpelstiltskin" syndrome. This power creates a taboo against using the "true" name in vain, both through fear of calling the spirit of the named thing accidentally and through fear of losing the power by using it frivolously. Paleolithic cave art would seem to indicate that this communication with the spirit of the hunted animal through solemn ritual was part of the preparation for a successful hunt. It was only during such solemn rituals that the "true" name of the hunted animal would be used. If this, admittedly speculative, reconstruction is correct, then hunting taboos of this type were originally religious or ritual taboos and would have had a very long history (or prehistory). >I can think of few literary or historical sources suggesting that >the "hart" --- a word which, of course, was still current in >Shakespeare's and King James' English, and thanks to literary >preservation, remains understood today --- was an object of >particular reverence, awe, terror, or disgust, so that the -vox >propria- became somehow too hallowed for everyday use, or too >indecent. This would be an excellent test for the hypothesis, in >that it took place during recorded history, among literate >people, whose religious and social customs are set forth in many >sources. With the second type of prohibition against mentioning the hunted animal's name, in which it is believed that the animal will hear its name and be warned, there is less of a ritual element and hence less reason for calling it a taboo. But it is still a superstitious prohibition. It is not a matter of reverence, awe, terror, or disgust. It is a simple prohibition against the possibility that the quarry may hear its "true" name and thereby know that it is being hunted. Again, in Arabic one does not ask after the health of member's of a friend's family by name, lest the evil spirits hear the names and decide to take an interest in them. Buck, DSS, has some thoughts on whether these shifts in animal names are a result of taboo or not. On pp. 135-36 he has this to say: The loss of certain inherited animal names, like that of the 'bear' in Slavic and Germanic and those for 'wolf', 'serpent', 'hare', and 'mouse' here and there is attributed to taboo (cf. esp. Meillet, Ling. hist. 281 ff.). This has doubtless played a part in individual cases. But one hesitates to make too much of this factor when one observes that virtually every inherited animal name (and for that matter nearly every inherited word in other classes, as in the words of relationship, etc.) has been displaced in one or another of the IE languages. The IE word for 'horse' attested in most IE languages in the early period (Grk. hippos, Lat. equus, etc. 3.41) has been displaced in every modern European language (only the fem. Sp. yegua, Rum. iapa\ 'mare' surviving), and no one will ascribe this to taboo. [This last has already been discussed on the list.] But while Buck advises caution in ascribing shifts of animal names to taboo replacement, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) have jumped back on the taboo replacement bandwagon with a vengeance. According to G & I (pp. 437-38) "hart" (and cognates in other Germanic languages, Latin, and Celtic) is already a taboo replacement for the PIE words for 'deer' based on a root *el-, *ol- with various suffixes, and point out that Iranian and Slavic made the same semantic shift from 'deer' to 'horned/antlered animal' (although using different roots). But if G & I are right (ibid.) that the PIE words are based on a root meaning 'brown, red', then this looks like it too is already a replacement of yet another word for 'deer'. Bomhard and Kearns reconstruct a Proto-Nostratic root *?il-/*?el- for 'hoofed, cud-chewing animal' (this is a description of its use, not a meaning) (p. 582, no. 452.). PAA cognates include words for 'ram' and 'sheep', but this is not unexpected, as in IE "horned animal" is used not only for hart, 'stag' but for other horned animals as well (cf. Lith. karve' 'cow' vs. Lat cervus 'stag'; ON hru:tr 'ram' vs. ON hjo,rtr 'stag', etc.). One could propose for English 'stag/deer' the following history: The "true" name of the 'stag/deer' --> ... --> "the brown/red one" (PN ~ PIE *el-/*ol-) --> "the horned one" (late PIE dialectal from PIE k^er-) --> "the animal" (beginning in OE, complete by Modern English with "hart" marginalized and archaic). The ... stands for an indefinite number of shifts (which might be zero) prior to those that can be reconstructed. >-Taboo- has a relatively specific meaning in cultural >anthropology; does this linguistic process fit that definition? The linguistic process is just a prohibition against using a certain word. It may be from reverence (the name of God), superstition (hunting, gambling), or disgusting or embarrassing (bodily functions) or distressing (death, etc.) connotations. Whether these would match the cultural anthropological definitions in all cases, I don't know (but I doubt it). Linguistic taboo is often a matter of good manners and manners change like everything else. One of the things that makes taboo a likely factor in the replacement of some animal names is the repeated shifts. This is characteristic of linguistic taboo replacement. The connection between the euphemism and the taboo term becomes so well established that a euphemism for the euphemism has to be found and so on ad infinitum. I doubt that this is paralleled by cultural anthropological taboo. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 27 14:40:45 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:40:45 -0500 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990426172457.2c173cdc@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: is definitely the most common and stable form but goes back a long ways. I don't have access to Corominas, so I can't check it but the common explanations of are that 1) it's an abbreviation of or 2) that it's related to "butt" "piece of ass" seems to have a different meaning just about everywhere you go. In Costa Rica, it refers to either a male who has a lot of women or to one who visits whorehouses. In Mexico it either refers to a male prostitute or is a derogatory word for gays On other places, it can mean "pimp," someone obsessed with pornography or just an all-purpose word of abuse, etc. As an adjective, it means something like "damned"; e.g. "No tengo puta idea donde deje/ las llaves" or "Voy a botar ese puto televisor que no sirve" This last usage is pretty universal from what I've seen [snip] >Here it would seem >that we might be dealing with some sort of development analogous in some >sense to _puta/puto_ where _puta_ refers to a "whore" and was/is the >original form (???). From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 27 14:52:25 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:52:25 -0500 Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) Message-ID: Cited from NY Times editorial page: "Opinion polls have shown that Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who mostly live in the eastern part of the country where there is nostalgia for the Soviet Union, are twice as likely to side with their Slavic brothers as they are with NATO. But the same polls show that Ukrainian speakers, many of whom live in the western part of the country and have historical ties to the West dating from the Hapsburg Empire, are twice as likely to support NATO. " If any of you are ever called upon to discuss the role of language in our civil lives, the above quote from the NY Times editorial may provide a specific instance that can be endlessly discussed. It seems in Ukrane that the combined effects of culture, politics, economics and history can be reduced to a simple linguistic definition. If you know the childhood language spoken to a Ukaranian citizen by its mother, you can predict with good precision what that person's attitude toward NATO will be today. The primary language one speaks thus appears to subsume all the cultural, political, economic and historical effects into a single substitute varialble, so to speak. This simple observation, with which, I presume, no too many will disagree, provides me with a straightforward way of answering many of the questions that have been asked about the efficacy of adopting the medical model of the spread of infectious disease to the process of language adoption. The unique history of Ukrane provides us with an excellent way of testing the hypothesis that exposure and susceptibility to a language explains the adoption of the language. For those who are interested in this topic, I am posting a second note that contains the core of my argument and answers to many of your points and questions about this hypothesis. Best regards, Ray Hendon From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:22:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:22:08 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >And Nestor notices in one province oddly low counts of cows and aurochs and >no yaks at all. Upon investigation, he finds that a dialect has developed >locally, where cows now mean cows and aurochs, aurochs mean yaks and yaks >have a new name. -- this is, to put it mildly, not a real problem. You're confusing historic time with the everyday, ordinary-priorities variety. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:31:04 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:31:04 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This may be a bit off. "Later emigrants" - "non-native speaking" - didn't >necessarily "have to conform." -- they did if they wanted to communicate usefully. See "founder effect". The population of the US is mostly descended from non-anglophone immigrants, but each group of newcomers found themselves in an English-speaking environment. The usual result, whether with German-speakers in 1750 or Italian-speakers in 1900 or Spanish-speakers in 1990, is for a three-generation process of linguistic succession which starts with monoglot non-English speakers in the first generation and ends up with monoglot English-speakers in the third. The same thing happened with Hugenots in England or Prussia in the 18th century. It's the natural course of events, in the absence of some very unusual sociopolitical factor. >While the Dutch majority in Old New York pretty much adopted English in a >single generation -- Dutch was still spoken in Dutch-settled rural areas of the Hudson Valley into the late 18th century, over 120 years after the English conquest. Language succession was slow, and generally involved close social interaction with native speakers of English. >And obviously the Pennsylvania Amish did not feel they "had to conform" -- most of the German immigrants to Pennsylvania did. The Amish are a special case, rather like the East European Jews and Yiddish. Note that as social segregation broke down in this century, the surviving Jews of the area stopped using Yiddish. Which was itself a German dialect, of course. >Language replacement usually requires something more drastic; settlement of >native speakers, combined with widespread social and demographic >disorganization of the native community.>> >Or it simply requires people who are willing and who have very good reasons >to change languages or encourage their children's to change languages. -- that's what I said. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:37:40 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:37:40 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This is along the same vein. If "moving between languages" means anything, >it means changing languages. And if it means bilingualism or changing >languages between generations, it is one very important form of linguistic >change. -- you're being a little obtuse here. "Changing languages" -- as in linguistic succession, people abandoning, say, Celtiberian for Latin -- is a different phenomenon from "linguistic change", say Marcus ==> Marco. If someone who originally spoke Standard Italian learns to speak Standard English and then speaks that around their children, who then grow up as Standard English speakers, we have people who've changed languages. Neither English nor Italian has changed in the process, however. Substratum influence is another factor, of course. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:40:23 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:40:23 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >rayhendon at worldnet.att.net writes: >I like the example Steven used to explain how English became the dominate >language among elites of India whereas Latin failed to become the same thing >to the English. -- Latin _did_ become the language of the Romano-British elite and of a substantial proportion of the urban population there, at least. It vanished (along with Brythonic Celtic) during the Saxon conquest. The Saxons (and Frisians and Jutes and whatnot) came from outside the Empire. >Wasn't the language spoken in pre-Roman Brittain more uniform than the >language spoken in India. -- India contains dozens of distinct languages. Britain probably had mutually-intelligible dialects of a single Celtic language. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:42:15 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:42:15 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I write that well if Mycenaean didn't change in all those years -- all what years? Virtually all our Mycenaean documents date from the same period. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:55:44 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:55:44 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >How do you know that and why are you so sure of it? -- sort of a mixture of "it's in the textbooks" and "basic logic". >I would be very interested in those late isoglosses and how they were derived. -- right there in the texts. >There are the remains of a number of other distinct cultural groups between >the Agricultural Scythians and north central Europe in the middle of the >1st millenium bce. -- you have inscriptions, or other linguistic data? Pots are not people. >Proto-Slavic developed from the AgScyths as a lingua franca of trade along >the Russian rivers and up into the Novogrod area. -- this is news. (glyph of irony). Slavic developed from PIE in the same areas of E. Europe in which Slavs are found in the earliest historical sources, in what's now eastern Poland and parts of White Russia and the Ukraine. Early loanwords from both Iranian and Germanic show that the proto-Slavs were in contact with both. And, of course, the Baltic and Slavic show common innovations with Indo-Iranian at a very early date, long before their division into separate languages. They (or Balto-Slavic) were on the extreme northwestern fringe of the kmtom-satem phenomenon, for instance. >But needless to say all these Proto-Slavs cover a huge amount of ground -- yup. They're the "original" IE-speaking population of the area east of the Germanics and south of the Balts, as far east as the Iranian-speakers who predominated in the steppe zone of the Ukraine from at least the Bronze Age onwards. >And how sure are you of all this? -- these are commonplaces. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 17:15:25 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 13:15:25 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >and therefore invented seems a better word than "first evolved." -- it's actively misleading. Nobody says: "OK, we used to speak Latin, but let's change it into French". It "just happens". Linguistic change is generally unconscious. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Apr 27 18:00:52 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 14:00:52 -0400 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: Peter wrote: > > (me) We can't tell gneH1 from gneH3 in Sanskrit, > I don't know what your Sanskrit is like, but I have no difficulty whatever, > when reading Sanskrit, in telling the two roots apart. ... > PIE *gneh3 gives ja:na:ti ... > PIE *genH1 (note the different ablaut form from *gneh3 ... I don't have any trouble telling genH1 from gneH3, but my PIE is not good enough to say that gneH1 did not exist. There are two roots, mna: and dhma: that use these generally except in the present stem which are mana- and dhama-, [dhamita occurs once in RV] suggesting an alternation of menH/mneH and dhemH/dhmeH. I was hesitant to deny that something like that could not occur in case of genH1. > In addition to the moderator's comments on Latin & Greek, a further > objection to this approach is that it is very difficult to ascribe clear > distinctions to the various present formations we find in PIE. But the idea that present/aorist were eventive seems to be generally accepted. -Nath From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 27 21:16:25 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 16:16:25 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis]-Second post Message-ID: Before I read the article on Ukrane I was attempting to phrase my answer to several questions that had been raised as to the appropriateness of using the medical model of disease spread to describe the spread of a language. As you may recall, the medical model postulates two primary variables that are to be used in predicting the spread of a disease: the number or people who are susceptible to the infections and the exposure they receive from those that are already infected. Knowing these two values allows the modelr to predict how the disease spreads amoung a population. Transfering this approach to the study of languages I had thought that each variable must be viewed within certain age-groups of the population. So, for example, the exposure variable would be quite different for an infant as opposed to a school-aged child, and that of a school-aged child would be different from that of an adult. It doesn't take much explanation to see why this variable must be defined to accommodate different ages. An infant spends its time hearing its mother and father and possibly other close relatives speak. Since its exposure to language speakers is not a matter of decision for the child, it is entirely passive in this regard. Thus the exposure could be measured by defining how many words per day of a specific language the child eexperienced. This is probably not much of a variable in an aggregate sense, i.e., it is probably fairly stable over all populations and all languages, since the requirements of motherhood and parenting are universal. A Korean child being raised by Korean-speaking parents would, I presume, have the same probability of learning Korean as a Russian child would of learning Russian from his family. But, once the child is of age to go to school, its exposure to languages may change. In my area, for example, while probably half of the children hear Spanish all the time while at home, when they come to school their exposure to English increases by seven or eight hours a day. Therefore, children of school age may change their exposure to a certain language. The variable, the number of words heard per day of English, will substantially change from their lives as infants if they live in a bi-lingual community. Finally, the exposure of an adult to a given language would be subject to another set of forces, such as the language spoken in the workplace and on the streets. Taking these three levels of exposure, computing them for each age-group and then weighting the average of all three age-groups would give us an average level of exposure for the society at a specific time to a certain language. An average value, the expected value in an arithematic sense, could be used to describe the average level of exposure to all citizens. On the susceptibility side of the equation, the same three age-groups could be used. An infant, given that there is no choice in the matter, would have a susceptibility dependent entirely on its ability to hear and comprehend the sounds it hears. There would be some fixed distribution of linguistic abilities in any population: deafness, intelectual adequacy and other envirnomental variables would yield a fairly constant value of susceptibility for infants and school-aged children. There would probably be some variation in the general interest-level of a school-aged child to learning a language, but I suspect the distribution of interest in other languages would be stable for children of any culture. But for adults the susceptibility variable changes considerably. Requirements of work, business, politics, and other economic effects would come into play, causing the susceptibility level to change from that of childhood. Most of the merchants and salespeople I encounter in the Mexican border towns have learned to speak English, presumably because it is in their economic interest to do so, given their exposure to tourists and the dollars they might spend while visiting. They probably do not speak it at home, but they do learn it voluntarily and use it in the workplace. Their exposure and susceptibility is thus enhanced by economic and possibly political reasons. The same is true on the other side of the border, where bilingualism is observed among many business personnel, clerks, recptionists, etc. It is in the interest of the business people on the American side of the border just as it is on the other side, depending on what language they are likely to encounter while conducting business. To capture these variables, some means of measuring them must be devised. And I believe they can be measured, in any number of ways, some of which I just mentioned. The number of words of a specific language spoken per day in the life of a child, for example, is a number that could be observed, and the same could be done in school and in the workplace. Economic and political motives could be measured with dollar values. Sales or shipments of goods to parties of other linguistic groups, for example, is a value that could be calculated. And, I suspect it would have a significant effect on the susceptibility of a given population to learning a given language. Prestigue, and other psychological variables that are thought to influence susceptibility could also be accounted for and measured or at least estimated. If I knew these values and the population mix in time period one, it would be possible to predict the penetration of a specific language within a given population in time period two, time period three, etc. The Ukarainain situation gives the linguistimetrician a somewhat unique opportunity to measure these variables because of the fairly discrete times that critical variables changed. The Russian language was probably introduced into Ukrainian schools at some specific time in their history. If so measurements of Russian penetration of Ukrainian could be made on both time-sides of this change and the school-exposure values could be estimated. The same is true for migrations of Russian-speaking people into Ukrane. Plus, many Ukrainians are alive today that lived there before these migrations and school-related changes took place. Their memories of linguistic changes at specific times could be invaluable in estimating the precise effects of the influence these variables have on language adoption. Ther are many other issues related to this case. Longitudinal and horizontal studies of linguistic changes could be accomplished, and with the end of Russian domination, the reverse effects could be estimated. The incidence of loan-words, changes in the Russian spoken by those living in Ulkrane, and on Ukrinain by the Russian speakers could be measured. Perhaps this kind of effort would be worthwile in helping us understand the dynamics of this complicated process and make predictions about the future more useful. Best wishes, Ray Hendon From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 27 21:44:07 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 23:44:07 +0200 Subject: IE pers.pron. (dual forms) In-Reply-To: <000c01be8e7f$96520120$83d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Sat, 24 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Dear Jebs and IEists: [ moderator snip ] > > The Gk. /-e/ cannot be a syllabic *-H1 if it is to match OLith. augus-e > > 'the two grown ones' or OIr. di: pherid 'two heels', only IE *-e will do > > here. > The main problem, however, is one that I think we run into far more often > than we generally recognize, and that is that some linguists *contrive* very > complicated rules to be able to ascribe a common origin to forms that are > simply not commensurable. It only makes things worse if you reconstruct _against_ the rules: The dual forms mentioned can all derived from *-e, the Greek one alone also from *-H1, but then the forms indeed are not commensurable. BTW, I fail to see the serious objection (if it is meant to be one): What is complicated by deriving /-e/ of one language and /-e/ of another from a common protoform *-e ? > Beekes, I feel, does just this when he attempts to link the Sanskrit > masculine and feminine dual forms (-a:[u], -u:, -a:[u], -e) with those of > other IE languages like Greek: -e, -ei, -o:, [-a:]). > It is as if Beekes had never heard the word "Nostratic"! Egyptian, for > example, has a simple mechanism for forming masculine duals: -wj, with a > plural in -w. Also, nearly every cardinal number has a -w suffix; and AA > plurals (collectives in origin) in -u{:} are well-known. It even looks as if Beekes considers the IE languages more closely related to each other than to Egyptian. > I interpret these facts (and others) to indicate that Nostratic had a > collective suffix -w(V), and that this suffix was one of those employed > to form a dual in IE. I fail to see that such a morpheme has left any palpable imprint on IE. But show us where! > I would analyze Sanskrit -a:(u) as (C)wa in opposition to Beekes' -H{1}e. > [ Moderator's comment: > The final -u in the Sanskrit dual is not Indo-European, but an Indic > development that is not present even in Iranian. > --rma ] It is present in Goth. ahtau, Skt. aSta:/-au, Av. ashta. It appears to be a special Indic _choice_ out of an Indo-Iranian pair of sandhi variants which proceed from an IE pair of variants. > But, another method of indicating the dual was almost certainly the > suffix -y, here, not an adjective formant but just a suufix of > differentiation. This will be the source of those dual endings like > Greek -e, and Beekes recognizes the phonological process when he suggests on > p. 195, that "Gr. o{'}sse, 'eyes' comes from *ok{w}-ye" but then goes on to > derive *ok{w}-ye, IMHO incorrectly, from earlier *ok{w}-iH{1}, in a > misguided attempt to unify -e and -a:(u). I think Beekes is basically right here. The neuter dual did end in *-iH in IE, and judging by Greek the laryngeal was H1, so *H3(o)k{w}-iH1 is correct. Note that the laryngeal is even proved by the Skt. thematic ntr.du. in -e which is sandhi resistent ("pragrhya"). As for the connection of -e and -a:(u), the Skt. ending is of course that of the thematic stems, i.e. identical with Gk. -o: ; -e is the original ending of non-neuter dual of consonant stems, so the thematic *-o:(w) quite obviously represents the combination of thematic stem *-o- + ending *-e. Note that you get exactly the same result in the perfect of "long-vowel" verbs like dha:-, viz. dadhau from *dhe-dhoH1-e (Avest. dada here too without the diphthongization), i.e. IE *-o- + *-e with or without intervening laryngeal gives Indo-Ir. *-a:(u). > Of course, there are sporadic forms like Greek no{'}: from *no:wi, combining > *ne/o + *wi:, 'two', and a 'laryngeal' is not necessary to explain the > in a stress-accented open syllable; a mechanism as simple as transference of > length back to the stress-accented syllable from *-wi: could explain it. Are you talking about a metathesis of quantity, *nowi: > *no:wi? If so, what makes you think that was a rule? Or is it an invention - mother of comedy, huh - like some of my early stages? [... On the 1st person dual pronoun:] >I [...] would go the further step of suggesting that a > 'laryngeal' is not required to be reconstructed at all. Then what would be the enclitic form meaning "us two" in IE? */no:/ ending in a long vowel? [... On my notation:] > As an aside, am I correct in presuming that indicates /ts/ and > /dz/? No, I meant to be a spirant d ("edh"), but the ts is right. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 27 22:04:12 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 00:04:12 +0200 Subject: Greek 3sg prs. In-Reply-To: <37241605.AF852043@umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Mon, 26 Apr 1999, Anthony Appleyard wrote: >[... On Gk. 3sg prs. -ei vs. other IE *-eti] > Perhaps in early IE times the final -t was only present when the verb > had no noun subject [...]. That song has been popular before, but it takes more to constitute a new morphological parameter of the IE verb. Most importantly, it would be very odd that, out of such a duplicity, the unmarked form should be consistently chosen by thematic verbs, and the marked one by athematic verbs - and the marked one by ALL verbs in all other IE languages. The form was explained by Cowgill at the VI.Fachtagung as the phonetically regular outcome of IE *-eti in Greek unaccented position. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 22:49:02 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 17:49:02 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Rich Alderson Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 8:53 PM > On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >>From: >>Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM First, let me tell you that I appreciate your taking the time to write a magisterial summary of the questions involved. Leo writes: >>> Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to >>> Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis >>> for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE >>> consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd >>> developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a >>> mess. Rich writes: > Lehmann is no more a god than is Szemere'nyi, Brugmann, Beekes, Watkins, or > Cowgill. He falls down on certain issues, as do all the others, and gets > some things right, as do all the others. But much of what he wrote 50 years > ago-- and that is about how long ago it was written--is a mess. I am sorry but I cannot agree with the terminology "mess". What Lehmann wrote may or may not have been superseded by better formulations but what he wrote then was thought-provoking and ground-breaking, and quite of important at the time. > However, Leo Connolly's use of "Neo-Grammarian" to describe his work is no > more dismissive Pat writes: It was specifically the word "mess" to which I object in both Leo's and your characterization. And I agree: we have no gods on earth but some men outperform their fellows so brilliantly that they deserve a little consideration and *tact*. Rich writes: > than to so label the work of Carl Brugmann. It assumes the system > reconstructed in Brugmann & Delbrueck, and attempts to explain exceptions in > a way which the _Grundriss_, Hirt, or Meillet would have approved (whether > or not they would have agreed with them). Unfortunately, the > _Junggrammatiker_ system needed to be re-examined, and by not doing so > Lehmann causes himself problems. Leo writes: >>> The Neogrammarians had realized that the vowels [i u] tend to alternate >>> with [y w] under conditions which no one has ever been able to specify >>> *exactly*; Pat writes: >>This is, in my opinion, totally misleading. The condition has been exactly >>specified, and in such simple terms, that hardly anyone, who does not have a >>predisposition to think that the latest fads in linguistics are the last >>word, could not understand them: initial ['Y/WVC] is ['y/wVC]; initial >>[Y/WV'C] is [i/u'C]; ['CVY/WC] is ['CVi/uC]; [CV'Y/WVC] is ['Cy/wVC]; >>[CVY/W'C] is [Ci/u'C]. Now, what was so difficult about that? Rich writes: > It's extremely simple. However, what evidence do you have to back it up? > It certainly does not appear in _Grundriss_ or Meillet. Pat writes: Do you dispute it? Leo writes: >>> since this was apparently his dissertation, he felt obligated to say this >>> within the framework dominant at the time: PIE [i u] were allophones of /y >>> w/, not "true" vowels, Pat writes: >>I do not know if Beekes had such an argument in *his* dissertation but in >>a book published as late as 1995, he is still asserting what Lehmann's >>dissertation asserted. So, though you may disagree, many eminent IEists >>still maintain that IE [y/w] are primarily consonontal. And, as any >>Nostraticist can assure you, IE [y/w] reflects Semitic [y/w]. If Nostratic >>[i/u] -- presuming they actually existed -- showed up as Semitic [0], you >>might have a talking point but they do not. Rich writes: > Read very carefully what Leo Connolly wrote: Not that *y *w were not > consonantal, but that in the structuralist framework (alive and well in the > 1940s) made Lehmann choose one way or the other, and he chose to see *y *w > as primary, and *i *u as secondary. That's a problem with structuralism, > not with whether *y and *w were or were not consonantal. Pat writes: In whatever framework one wishes to operate, the idea that consonantal are primary is the only idea that makes sense. Would you call Beekes a Junggrammatiker? Rich writes: > In structuralist terms, two phones in complementary distribution *must* be, > cannot *not* be, allophones of a single phoneme. (Although a lemma > requiring something called "phonetic similarity" was inserted into the > theory when it was pointed out that in a pure framework, the English phones > [h] and [N], as in _hang_ [h&N], must be allophones of a single phoneme...) > Therefore, in the prevailing structuralist framework of the 1940s, Lehmann > *had* to define *i and *u as allophones respectively of *y and *w. Pat writes: Lehmann was under no obligation to be consistently structuralist, and your assumption that he was is pure conjecture. By "syllabicity", Lehmann indicated that he was quite willing to strike out on uncharted paths. If the evidence had indicated anything different, I am positive Lehmann would have embraced the position it made mandatory. Leo writes: >>> just as PIE syllabic [M N L R] were allophones of /m n l r/. Pat writes: >>The syllabic status of [M/N/L/R] is a totally unrelated matter. These become >>syllabic when deprived of the stress-accent. Rich writes: > So the fact that all *six* resonants pattern the same is irrelevant? Pat writes: In my opinion, it is a mistake to include [Y/W] among the resonants. Phonologically, [j] is the voiced palato-dorsal fricative; [w] is the voiced bilabial fricative. *And they do not pattern the same*. Rich writes: > That *ey/oy/i parallels *en/on/.n by accident? Then you disagree with > Lehmann? What of his god-like status? Never mind, rhetorical questions. Pat writes: I do not consider Lehmann god-like although I do believe that most people on their best days will not equal what has has written on his worst. I also do not shrink from disagreeing with his written opinions but, in view of his sagacity, I do so with great caution. And I reject the idea totally that *ey/oy/i and *ew/ow/u parallel *en/on/n{.}. Rich writes: > In a structuralist framework, if two processes appear to be the same, they > must *be* the same, and you cannot separate *y *w from *n *m *r *l in this > way. Leo writes: >>> Furthermore, though the laryngeals were unambiguously consonants in PIE >>> (his view and mine, though others differ), the attested IE languages often >>> have vowels where there were once laryngeals. The Neogrammarians had >>> posited PIE Schwa in just such places. Pat writes: >>I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by >>Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. Rich writes: > Your belief has nothing to do with the evidence. As pointed out elsewhere > by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, there is evidence for *consonantal* reflexes of > one or more laryngeals in non-Anatolian languages; Germanicists have long > argued for the presence of consonantal laryngeals in Germanic (and Lehmann > is included in this group). All Indo-Europeanists who accept laryngeals > (and this is very nearly all of them by now) accept that they were > consonantal in PIE. Pat writes: We have been investigating the "evidence" on which you ( and others) bas their belief, and so far, I have not seen a compelling argument. Would you like to take over for Peter? Pat writes: >>Rich, I would be interested to know what phonological principles you believe >>Lehmann's "syllabism" violates? > This is the reason it has taken me a week to get around to responding to > this posting, and not wearing my moderator hat to do so. It's a very large > question with an answer unlikely to satisfy the questioner. > First, you must understand that I follow David Stampe's "Natural Phonology", > as outlined in his dissertation and other works, and in the works of his > students. Most important in this context is the work by Patricia (Donegan) > Stampe on the phonology of vowel systems. Natural Phonology is process- > oriented and requires that both lexical representations and derivations > always be pronounceable; Pat writes: I subscribe to this idea without reservation. Rich continues: > it is thus distinguished from Chomsky & Halle's _Sound Pattern of English_- > style generative phonology, in which underlying (lexical) representations of > English reproduce the Great English Vowel Shift. (See, for example, her > dissertation, _The Natural Phonology of Vowels_, available as an Ohio State > Working Paper in Linguistics, No. 27 I think.) > On this basis, as an undergraduate I began an examination of the monovocalic > analysis of Indo-European 25 years ago. I started out with what I > considered the most interesting analysis of IE vowels, that of W. P. > Lehmann, and looked for parallels in other languages (as the only way to > demonstrate that an analysis is valid is for it to explain not only > historical but synchronic phenomena in more than one language). Pat writes: You surely would include diachronic phenomena, would you not? Rich continues: > This led me to look at Abkhaz, Abaza, Ubykh, and Kabardian, all of which > have very large obstruent systems and very small vowel systems. > Natural Phonology is, as well as process-oriented, constraint-oriented and > hierarchical: The presence of certain phonological entities entails the > presence of others. Thus, vowel systems are constrained: Certain kinds of > vowel system are more stable than others, and unstable vowel systems rapidly > turn into stable systems by either eliminating contrast or by adding > contrast. In addition, processes which are not repressed may increase > distinctions between vowels in the system (long vowels may become tense, for > example, or a distinction in palatality vs. labiality may arise as in Arabic > short /a/ vs. long /a:/ = [&] vs. [O:]). Pat writes: Although this is not really an argument against the point you are making, Arabic long /a:/ does not become [o:]; this is reserved for reductions of /aw/. Rich continues: > There is no such thing, in the world's languages, as a system with only one > phonemic vowel (and _a fortiori_ no such thing as a language with none). > The smallest phonemic vowel inventories yet found are in the languages I > named above--and the analyses which shrink them to two vowels may violate > one or more of the axioms of natural phonology. Pat writes: A very interesting qualification. Rich continues: > Thus, Lehmann violates a major principle when he asserts that any stage of > Indo-European lacked a phonemic vowel: If a phone is present in a language, > it has a psychological status in the lexicon, and while it may alternate > with other sounds in the language because of morphological rules or > unconstrained processes, it cannot be denied phonemic status. Pat writes: IMHO, this is incorrect. If we accept Trask's definition of a phoneme as "the smallest unit which can make a difference in meaning" and restrict "meaning" to "semantic difference" vs. grammatical difference, then a language in which CaC, CeC, CiC, CoC, CuC, etc. represent different grammatical stems of a root CVC, which has *one*, meaning, then the "syllabicity" in the root makes no difference, and hence cannot be considered "phonemic". But, why all the fuss about monosyllabicity when Sanskrit provides us with the next logical outcome of a language that, at an earlier stage, was monovocalic (at least, phonemically). Anything other than in Sanskrit is a result of + , , or , or a combination thereof. That is why Sanskrit does not bother to indicate an in its writing system (only ). Only combinations of + *need* to be indicated. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com Wed Apr 28 17:22:06 1999 From: ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:22:06 -0700 Subject: Moderator absence Message-ID: The Indo-European and Nostratic lists will not be available from late Thursday, 29 April 1999, until late Thursday, 6 May 1999. I will send out anything received before 17:00 PDT on the 29th, (= 30 April 0:00 GMT), then resume sending out the list after 17:00 on the 6th. This may engender a small backlog, but that will clear up over the following weekend. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator ------- From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Thu Apr 29 02:40:50 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 22:40:50 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:33 PM 4/26/99 +0100, Nicholas Widdow wrote: > >[snip...] sometimes heard >as and at others as . The speaker is fully aware that >the form is but that is not what s/he is actually "saying." In the >case of it strikes me that the same thing happens with the result >being or when the definite article is attached. [RF] First, thanks very much for your detailed reply. It helps to see how these phenomena can be expressed clearly. [snip] [NW] >I would suggest (and I freely admit I have no idea whether this is true, but >I suggest) that to be carried along diachronically a sound reduction of the >kind or or would have to go through a >reinterpretation of its abstract phonemic form. In Old Basque * broke >a firm rule and would not survive. [RF] Perhaps I could describe what I envision to be the situation in the following way: while * was a spoken alternative to and, indeed, considered within the range of "standard (reduced) native pronunciations" at the time (whenever that was) of the root-stem in question, that variant did not affect the phonological shape of the root-stem itself in Euskera at that stage. Such a shift from to * (as a root-stem) would not have taken place in Euskera because the native-speakers of that language were cognizant at some level, that the formation * did not reflect the actual shape of the root-stem. Even today I would wager that many if not most native speakers would argue that they tend to use as a root-stem in composition, but they would also recognize as the older or "authentic" free-standing root-stem. However, in my much earlier remarks I was actually speaking of what happens when an expression passes from the lexicon of the speakers of one language to the lexicon of speakers of another language, i.e, horizontal (?) transmissions. In such cases it is often not possible or even likely that all speakers of the second contact language would be familiar with the subtleties of the phonotactic system of the first language (unless of course we are talking of a sociolinguistic situation of absolute/balanced bilingualism). For this reason they would "copy" the word as they believed they heard it. The case in point was that of and a simulation in which when the term was "copied" into Navarrese and/or Aragonese, the latter speakers copied what they heard, i.e., a phonologically reduced/slurred version of the lexical chain in questions, *<(e)chandra>, for which they then extrapolated a masculine counterpart. In other words, my argument was not that Larry is mis-stating the phonotactic rules of pre-Basque (or Proto-Basque), but rather that when one is speaking about the transmission of expressions from one language to another in a situation of orality, the speakers of the second language tend to imitate what they actually *hear* and in this scenario they would have been incapable of reconstructing from what they thought they heard people saying. Furthermore, we could be talking about the way in which speakers of Navarrese and/or Aragonese may have attempted to mimic what they were hearing, based on the repertoire of phonotactic rules in their own language at that time. In other words, in the case of I am not arguing that this form itself nor * were ever commonplace in Euskera, but rather that * was the "transitional" form, the one that the second group of speakers "thought" they were hearing. As a result it was the form that they ended up pronouncing and hence stabilizing in their own lexicon. We could also consider the effect of cases of vertical transmissions in situations in which knowledge of the first language was being lost. I could imagine the following scenario in which the grandparents still were speaking Euskera, the parents being more or less bilingual however chosing to speak with their own children in Navarrese. In this case the grandparents would have been the ones that their grandchildren would have spoken to the most in Euskera and it would have been these interactions in which standard "mis-pronunciations" would have been understood to be authentic renditions of the terms in question. It would seem to me that such confusions arise in sociolinguistic settings in which knowledge and/or intuitive understandings of the phonotactic rules of the first language, the donor language, are limited. Again this observation is based on many years as a language teacher as well as field work in Euskal Herria. Stated in another way, the fact that the phonotactic rules of pre-Euskera did not "permit" a liquid cluster in no way interferes with the possibility that an expression such as * (namely, originally ) was heard and copied over into their lexicon by speakers of Navarrese and/or Aragonese where it later gained a masculine counterpart . I'm not arguing that in reality this is what happened. Rather we are dealing with problems related to creating plausible scenarios or simulations of the data and the premises undergirding such models. On that note, I'm curious. Miguel, did you come across any reference to a feminine form for as "gandul, etc." in the dictionary you are using. What exactly was the source you were using? (Thanks in advance for the bibliographic reference). [NW] In modern Basque, does [burko] have the >tap of /buruko/ or the roll of */burko/? [RF] I'll leave this one for Larry or Miguel to answer. They're much better at explaining these finer points. Or perhaps if there are native-speakers on the list they could comment. [NW] In my English initial [tr] can come >from both /tr/ and /t at r/. Once they lose the possibility of reversion to the >old phonology, the vowel can be considered gone. [RF] In Euskera the case is somewhat different from that of English since the loss of the possibility of reversion to the old phonology requires that one or more of the following conditions be met (there are probably other conditions, too, that could be cited): 1) the loss of awareness of the phonological structure of the free-standing root-stem upon which the "word" or lexical chain in question is initially based. That means that the free-standing root-stem would no longer be available in its free-standing form or recognizable as such. And linked to 1) is 2) the loss of awareness of the semantic and hence cultural logic of the lexical chain itself, i.e., the reasons that led to a given root-stem being suffixed in the way that it was. In other words, there are situations in which changes in the cultural norms of a society end up leaving an expression high and dry, so to speak. Sometimes the expression takes on an entirely new, but analogous meaning. However, in Euskera in such cases the expression's field of referentiality tends to be projected, not by the original set of meanings generated by the root-stem and the rest of morphemes of the lexical chain, but by qualities associated with the "object/thing" in question that was projected as being within the domain or field. At that point, the speaker is no longer able to deconstruct the lexical chain and identify the root-stem and its meaning-giving suffixes, or morphemes. 3) this situation could create a situation in which the reduced form results in a reinterpretation of its (original) abstract phonemic form. However, again I would emphasize, in Euskera the native speaker looks to the meaning of the root-stem and such a speaker usually has a fairly clear notion of free-standing root-stems available. When s/he comes across a lexical chain composed of three or four syllables that can't be analyzed, either it is assumed to be a loan word or that it's been misheard. This does not mean that there aren't unanalyzable lexical chains or "words" in Euskera that are three or more syllables long. Indeed, there is a small number of opaque expressions whose root-stems are no longer free-standing, i.e., cannot be utilized productively and whose original meaning is obscure. Stated differently, in the case of Euskera discussions of these problems are complicated by assumptions concerning what a "word" is, i.e., by transferring terminology that works perfectly well to describe features of IE languages, but which becomes very clumsy when brought to bear as tools to describe Euskera. Indeed, with respect to the way that its lexical chains are constructed, I would argue that Euskera has far more in common with Slavic languages than it does with a language like English. Jon Patrick and Larry might be able to add more about the percentage of unanalyzable chains in Euskera in the case of items with three or four syllables. Also, please keep in mind that my comments above simplify a somewhat more complex situation. In reference to the phonology of /buruko/ and /burko/ I would close with the following brief commentary. Among the names commonly used to refer to the location of baserriak (farmsteads/Stammbaum houses) in Euskera, are those that incorporate the term in a geometric sense and in reference to the other houses of the community. The expression seems to refer to in terms of being an anchoring point of a geometric figure composed of all of the baserriak in the auzoa. Thus there are names like , the "first end/head/extreme...house", etc. In one case that I know of, this housename ended up becoming in which the loss of the vowel provoked the voicing of the /k/. However, there is good reason to believe that the underlying form is the commonplace . Again, thanks for your comments, Nicholas. They have been very helpful. Ondo ibili, Roz Frank From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 28 03:38:28 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 23:38:28 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/26/99 6:11:33 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi replied: <> Nobody said "necessarily." But isolation is a plausible explanation for the archaisms mcv has mentioned in previous posts. My bringing up the archaeological evidence of an isolation of Germanic specifically related to the archaisms referred to in those previous posts, that mainly begin in a thread called "How weird is Hittite?" E.g.: In a message dated 1/26/99 8:32:31 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> In a message dated 2/7/99 4:10:50 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> To the best of my recollection, mcv did not mention compounding. My reference to northern European speakers being poor, primitive and cut-off was not meant to be derogatory. (Others IE speakers were in the same circumstance at the same time.) They were specifically in reference to a series of statements regarding cultural continuity and that proto-Germanic could not have been affected by outside factors. E.g.,: (message dated 2/2/99 12:26:15 AM) <> The evidence appears to be otherwise. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 28 05:08:31 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 01:08:31 EDT Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >I note also that the site reports another Bantu language for Angola, called >Luchazi, with an alternative name Ponda, and still another Bantu language, >called Mbundu or Bondo -- the number of Bantu "languages" varies in a colorful and rather arbitrary manner, due to differing opinions on what constitutes a language and what a dialect. The Bantu migration is so recent, and the number of standardized (still less written) Bantu languages until recently so small, that the situation is rather chaotic. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 28 05:10:53 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 01:10:53 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Without a literary standard the Low German dialects could change more >rapidly. -- loss of inflection appears to have been most pronounced in English, next in Frisian, and then in Low German. Hmmm. Possibly a northwestern locus for the original changes? From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 28 08:00:58 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 04:00:58 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/23/99 11:03:38 PM, vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu wrote: <> In a message dated 4/26/99 5:36:56 PM, petegray at btinternet.com wrote: << So jn~a:ti is clearly cognate with the Greek gno:tos, and is from the knowing root.>> But note what happens here. Here is some small evidence of *genH3 sometimes showing up as "relative" in Sanskrit. And in Homer 'gnotos' not only means a thing known or perceived, it also can mean a 'relative' (gnotoi te gnotai te, Illiad 15.350, 'brothers", "sisters"). Note that this gives the form a meaning that crosses with such words as "kin" which are supposed to come from *genH1. Whether or not this comes from vowel changes or incorrect usage or some earlier common root, it could mean that borrowings (applied to new senses or referents) in other languages may have experienced the same kind of crossover. And although Sanskrit is relevant, the usages in Greek are particularly meaningful, because of the way they may have influenced other IE languages. Words like gnostic and gonus reentered other IE languages and may have done so before our earliest direct evidence of those languages. I'm interested in how one discriminates between a form that entered an IE language from very early Greek for example as opposed to directly from PIE. vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu wrote: <> Actually, I may be wrong, but I don't think our moderator is 'objecting' to this approach. And the distinction between the two kinds of "know" - if they are reflected in the verb forms - may give a better sense of not only the meaning but also of how they evolved. What is the difficulty with the non-stative possibility described above? <> Does 'jn~a:tr' actually occur in the texts? <> Is that the basis of the ablaut difference, that it is attested in for example Greek? Is that difference accounted for in Gothic and Latin? I believe earlier someone pointed to *genH3. Is the vowel grade supposed to be in some way caused by the presence of H3 versus H1? What is one to make of the ablaut analysis with regard to 'gignomai' and 'gnotos'? Regards, Steve Long From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 28 11:56:25 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 06:56:25 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: There are many analogies between language and biological processes, as you pointed out. Defining anything is a matter of some arbitrariness. And, contrary to what one's belief might be, a definition is itselt an hypothesis. If I hand you a list of words and rules for their usage, I have defined a language, but I have also put forward a hypothesis that the definition proffered is adequate to the task and that the important things that make up a language are contained in my definition. I think it was Isaiah Berlin that said, every sentence is an hypothesis. Ray Hendon From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Apr 28 14:14:55 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 09:14:55 -0500 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'm wondering if the word was PERCEIVED by Spanish speakers as an Arabic word, thus the initial vowel as dropped as an "article" or whether indeed the word may have passed from Romance to Arabic to Spanish as some words did [snip] >But this pass via (Andalusian) Arabic is unnecessary if what we want to >account for is the form OSp /dzebro/. In *eciferum would >palatalize/affricate before a front vowel > [ts] and would lenite to >[dz] intervocalically, as would /f/ > [v]. The second would be lost >by syncope in a post-stressed non-final open syllable. <-um> > /-o/ is >entirely regular, as is short > /e/. That gives us /dzevro/. Now we >sometimes find, without it being exactly regular, /br/ or /rb/ for >expected */vr/ or */rv/. A case in point would be > Ebro >(intervocalic normally lenited to /v/ in OSp). The aphaeresis of > is the most irregular feature, but not all that surprising, and not >assisted by the Andalusian Arabic story. > The above is precisely why Romance philologists proposed >*eciferus. The > *eci- remains ad hoc. [snip] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Apr 28 14:34:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 09:34:47 -0500 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I lived in New Wilmington PA for 3 years, which is about half Amish. The language the Amish used there was essentially English with German dialect vocabulary. They spoke this with Amish who visited from other areas, including Lancaster Co PA. My colleague in German, who was German, as well as the German tutors from Germany all stated that a German who did not know English would not be able to understand them because they used English syntax and English idioms in their language. The Amish themselves agreed with this assessment and said that was why they taught High German in their schools. They said that they did not write in their spoken language but rather in High German. It's possible that their High German may be strongly influenced by the spoken language. This at least is the situation now. In the past, it was certainly different. The local variety of English is said to have some German influence and some people did say things like "He's there yet" for "He's still there" but just as many people spoke something similar to "Burghese" --the working class dialect of Pittsburgh. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Apr 28 14:53:44 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 09:53:44 -0500 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You're right that taboo replacement goes far beyond superstition and reverence." Otherwise, we wouldn't expect taboo words in modern societies e.g. "cock" is taboo in American English and male chicken are known as "roosters" On the Columbia River east of Portland there is a tall erect pinnacle known as "Rooster Rock" which was bowdlerized from the original "Cock Rock" Yet we also see "resurrected taboo words" such as "jock," which formerly meant "penis" and now means "athlete" [at least in America] and even "jockette" for a female athlete [snip] >The linguistic process is just a prohibition against using a >certain word. It may be from reverence (the name of God), >superstition (hunting, gambling), or disgusting or embarrassing >(bodily functions) or distressing (death, etc.) connotations. >Whether these would match the cultural anthropological >definitions in all cases, I don't know (but I doubt it). >Linguistic taboo is often a matter of good manners and manners >change like everything else. >One of the things that makes taboo a likely factor in the >replacement of some animal names is the repeated shifts. This is >characteristic of linguistic taboo replacement. The connection >between the euphemism and the taboo term becomes so well >established that a euphemism for the euphemism has to be found >and so on ad infinitum. I doubt that this is paralleled by >cultural anthropological taboo. >Bob Whiting >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From stevegus at aye.net Wed Apr 28 15:22:59 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 11:22:59 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > >-Taboo- has a relatively specific meaning in cultural > >anthropology; does this linguistic process fit that definition? > The linguistic process is just a prohibition against using a > certain word. It may be from reverence (the name of God), > superstition (hunting, gambling), or disgusting or embarrassing > (bodily functions) or distressing (death, etc.) connotations. > Whether these would match the cultural anthropological > definitions in all cases, I don't know (but I doubt it). > Linguistic taboo is often a matter of good manners and manners > change like everything else. A taboo, generally speaking, reserves or sets aside something for sacred or special use. For some taboos, the tabooed item is always forbidden; in others, it can be made use of at special times or places, but is forbidden otherwise. People who obey taboos, obviously, know what they are; they can give an account of what is forbidden, and usually can tell you why. Taboos are necessarily -conscious- processes. This is why I think invoking taboo to explain changes in a lexicon is problematic. Of course, there are plenty of linguistic taboos in modern English. For example, we still know what coffins are, even if folks in the coffin trade use some other word to refer to their wares. We all know they're coffins, though, and are not fooled. A live taboo does not remove a tabooed word from the lexicon, or render it obsolete. People need to know what words they are forbidden to use if they hope to avoid using them. Moreover, they will deliberately continue to use the forbidden words in various social contexts, from formal ritual to the heat of anger; and the forbidden words will be understood by their hearers. If actual replacement has occurred, and the former word is forgotten, the taboo cannot still be in effect. There is no problem in applying the anthropological category 'taboo' to certain rules a language's users make about the appropriate use of its lexicon. Those factors may ultimately result in lexical change. But, when that change is actually happening, the word 'taboo' seems an imprecise fit. Words cannot be removed from the lexicon by taboos, only by the ghosts of forgotten taboos. (This is also why I have difficulty explaining the loss of the word, 'hart,' by taboo. In certain circles it may be considered daring to call a coffin a coffin. No such cachet seems to surround the word 'hart,' even if it is a word that gets spoken only in church if it is spoken at all.) -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From stevegus at aye.net Wed Apr 28 15:31:59 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 11:31:59 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister (I think) wrote: > is definitely the most common and stable form > but goes back a long ways. > I don't have access to Corominas, so I can't check it > but the common explanations of are that > 1) it's an abbreviation of or > 2) that it's related to "butt" "piece of ass" I think the most plausible explanation for -puta-, Fr. -putain- &c., is to trace them back to Latin -puteo, putere-, "stink." I suspect this is one of those roots that comes originally from an interjection, and will tend to be re-introduced despite the phonetic vicissitudes of any more elaborate words compounded from it. /pu/ is not unknown in modern English as a reaction to a bad smell. };-) -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From stevegus at aye.net Wed Apr 28 14:46:41 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:46:41 -0400 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Nik Taylor wrote: > > -asinu(m)- ?> -ezebra-. > However, it wasn't in --> br, it was min --> mn --> mr --> mbr. in --> > br has no phonological motivation. It's a very unlikely change. Actually it seemed to me to be somewhat unlikely as well; just a thought, really. There does seem be a Latin noun-making suffix -ber, found in the names of the months, and words like -tuber- (tu[mescere] + ber) and -uber- (related to Gk. -outhar- and E. -udder-). This suffix was apparently still productive in late Latin, being added to late borrowed words like -zingiber- (ginger) and used to form -coluber- (viper). The 'e' here was usually weak, at least in words of three or more syllables. -Coluber- has the attested alternative and feminine form -colubra-, and the months, of course, decline "September, Septembris. . ." This alternation is also found in early modern English, or at least early modern American, where, especially after a long vowel, -CrV frequently alternated with -CR, with a syllabic 'R,' and often with the preceding vowel shortened. Noah Webster proposed "zeber" as a spelling pronunciation of 'zebra,' though whether he intended 'zeeber,' 'zebber,' or 'zibber' is a tad unclear to me, the pronunciation being obsolete. This alternation is of course also attested in an infamous letter by John Rolfe. AAR, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the original might have had -ber instead of -bra. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From jer at cphling.dk Wed Apr 28 15:42:49 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 17:42:49 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns In-Reply-To: <007b01be906d$cf883dc0$b69ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [...] > (JER:) > >Even so, the non-occurrence of the very FORM *mwe (in any > >function) does look as strong evidence for a rule *mw- > *m-. > Not strong! Not evidence! This seems completely illogical to me. But you can't deny the existence of *te and *se along with *twe and *swe, a variation for which there seems to be no tangible reason. Nor can one deny that *me *te *se look parallel (and inflect in very parallel fashion). Is the non-occurrence of a **mwe to join the w-forms *two *swe then not a thing to be noted and explained? What if we do have rules to explain it - isn't it then worth talking about? [On Gk. mo:^mar : amu:'mo:n as reflecting *mwoH-/*muH-:] > Irrelevant to the question of the pronominal form *mwe but, in any case, why > not *mouH-/*muH? Because the Gk. full-grade form is not **mow(V)-, bot /mo:-/. [On the "thematic vowel" e/o:] > >>I am also not aware of any IE who has successfully asserted that apophony > >>is governed by specific consonants. > >This part of it is, whether assertion to this effect proves successful or > >not. > Unless "assertion to this effect (does) proves successful", I feel > comfortable in not considering it a viable factor. It belongs to the generally accepted descriptive facts of IE that the "thematic vowel" alternations in its own fashion. Saussure recognized it and suggested a rule, Hirt spent half a lifetime working on it, Kurylowicz suggested several explanations. At least in the verb, if a stem-final vowel is followed by /m, nt, y, r, w/, it has the shape /o/, whereas if /t, s, H2/ or zero follows, it turns up as /e/. In pronouns we find the same: *to-m, *to-y, *to-r 'there', likewise before /d/ in *to-d 'that' and before a vowel in *to-e > *to: 'those two', but /e/ before /s/ in *te-syo, *te-smo:y and before /H2/ in *te-H2 > *ta-H2 'those things'. In the noun we mostly find *-o- generalized, but here too we have remains of regular /e/ before zero in voc. *-e and fem./coll. *-e-H2 > *-a-H2. - It is often claimed that the "thematic vowel" is a latecomer to IE wordforms, since thematiuc forms show more than one full vowel in a word, but that simply cannot be the reason, for, if it were, OLD vowels would also have been hit by the alternation rules that plainly work _only_ in the thematic vowels. Therefore, despite the immense productivity of thematic stems, their original form must go very far back in the prehistory of PIE - back to a time when the "thematic vowel" had a phonetic shape that could exempt it from the usual havoc played by the accent and instead make it susceptible to influence from the following segment which other vowels are not. - BTW, if it matter to you if such an assertion were successful, you can MAKE it successful by taking it seriously - I trust you will once you really check with the facts. Look at Greek, Germanic and Celtic, then you can't miss the rule - and from the basis you thus define you can then derive any of the lesser clear languages with no force at all. > >[... Further on the length of nominatives:] > >The nominative lengthening also works on stops: *ne'po:t-s, > *wo:'{kw}-s. > Why can you not accept that *ne'po:t-s is the result of *nepoH-t-s? Because other forms, esp. derivatives, show that the suffix was -Vt-, not -VHt-, e.g. the fem. Skt. napti:-, Lat. neptis. And even if it were *-oHt-s, then other words behaving just the same certainly had no laryngeal; what about 'foot'? > >But what is the probability that morphological differentiation not based > >in phonetic change gets to LOOK so much like the result of phonetic change > >that its variation can be stated in terms of consistent phonetic rules? > That is a tough one. I have not ready answer. I'd say that is decisive, for such is the situation at hand. And pointing out such case of morphological variation LOOKING exactly like the results of consistent phonetic change by specifiable rules is ALL we can do in internal reconstruction. Our task is here to specify how the rules ought to look in case they constitute the reason for the variation - for then we have something to check next time we find a relevant piece of the puzzle. May I add that most, if not all of my pre-PIE rules were originally formulated on the basis of only a subset of the observations for which I have later found them to supply regularity. > Why do you not give us your best > arguments for proposing a non-Hittite alternation *outside of the > pronoun series*? I am not sure there was such an alternation elsewhere. I have found two cases where in-depth analysis leads me to postulate *-G-m- (G being the dual marker, I suggest a voiced velar fricative, but do not insist on it) as an older form of what I find surfacing as *-w- or *-H3w-. In one case the *-m- is the 1st person marker, in the other it is the marker of the accusative. Since I cannot believe that the 1st person and the accusative was one semantic entity, the homonymy must be accidental, so that the covariation can only be due to real phonetic change, i.e. a sound law *-Gm- > *-Gw- (~ *-w-). Both of these involve pronouns where we get to look into some very distant older periods of the language. Of course one would then have liked to find the same change of m to w when a suffix-initial /m/ is added to a root-final /H3/, but we find no such thing, e.g. Lat. no:men. I suspect the answer to this lies in the chronology: the two sets of observations are ages apart. [...JER:] > >I was saying that, in the personal pronouns, the oblique cases are all > >built on the acc.: Skt. dat. asma-bhyam, abl. asma-t, loc. asme /asma-y/ > >[...] > Well, does this not suggest the primacy of the accusative? before the > addition of -m to designate animate accusatives? It spells primacy of the acc. over other non-nominative cases in the system implemented by IE for the personal pronouns. > >>All I was saying is that most IEists do not believe (and I agree) that the > >>dual is as old as the singular and plural in IE. > >[JER: but it is not formed by productive components] > [PCR: ...]the dual forms > incorporate -y, which is not specifically dual but only differentiating. > [...] Your task is to demonstrate the youth of the dual. You could do this by showing us that its forms are derived according to rules of younger periods than those of the plural. In that case the dual should be more directly transparent than the plural. If anything, the dual is more _opaque_ than the plural. If the y's of some dual forms are there to differentiate, then demonstrate that such is their business elsewhere and that they have been implemented by the pertinent rules. [...] > >>I do not assume that the basal form is *tu(:), and so cannot justify > >>migrating 's. > >Then why not change your assumption about 'thou' and get the benefits? > If this were a friendly drinking bout, I would be accomodating and agree. > But are we not both trying to approximate the truth as closely as we are > able? I would be serious even over a beer. The "benefits" I'm talking about comprise the possibility to explain more in a coherent and principled way, in general experience no bad measure for closeness to the truth, if not without its pitfalls. [...] Jens From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Apr 28 16:31:27 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 12:31:27 -0400 Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: Sheila Watts wrote: > The main English influence in Pennsilfaanisch is in the vocabulary. But this is a pretty extensive influence, yes? -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Apr 28 17:07:35 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 13:07:35 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > One of the things that makes taboo a likely factor in the > replacement of some animal names is the repeated shifts. Question: Could at least a few of these "replacements" merely be dialectal variations within PIE? Perhaps when the Indo-Europeans encountered the horse, the dialect which eventually became Latin adopted something that became equus, and the proto-Greek dialect adopted the ancestor of _hippos_ and so on. For that matter, could some also just be a substrate influence from the pre-IE peoples? [ Moderator's note: Greek _hippos_ is usually taken to be a development of *ek'wos. This is one of the animal names that extends across the family. --rma ] -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 28 18:58:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 14:58:24 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/13/99 7:40:58 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- no, it isn't. It's not become less precise, it's developing differences. Speakers of the same dialect will have no problem with it.>> I wrote << And Nestor notices in one province oddly low counts of cows and aurochs.... Upon investigation, he finds that a dialect has developed locally, where cows now mean cows and aurochs,... And he finds that his law "you must pay taxes on all animals" in this new dialect means "you may pay taxes on animals." We may just see a "difference" between the dialects here. (A structural difference.) But Nestor sees this as a functional matter - the common language has become "imprecise." Words no longer refer to the same thing and do not have the same effect with this new dialect.">> In a message dated 4/28/99 6:36:26 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- this is, to put it mildly, not a real problem. You're confusing historic time with the everyday, ordinary-priorities variety.>> Doesn't "everyday" time become "historic time?" To put it just as mildly, you don't know what you are talking about. You're confusing blarney with saying something. For anyone else on the list who might have even a little serious interest in the subject, there is large volume of legal and some linguistic scholarship on how the dialectical differences or new dialects can affect the precision of old terms of custom and law and how those imprecisions have been corrected. A very relevant example: English encountered this with the word "cattle" where dialect came to use it to refer to only to livestock, while in its earliest sense it originally referred to any form of personal (versus real) property. Cognate with "capital", the form travelled into English with the Conquest as Anglo-Norman "catel" and then "chatel." By the 15th century, "cattel" (in various spellings w/o /ch/) was being used in the West Country only to refer to livestock, but in London, in Parliament and the common law courts, it continued to be used interchangaeably with "chattel" to mean all goods and personal property. The eventual distinction between cattle and chattel took some time to happen. In the Taming of the Shrew, we read, "Shee is my goodes, my chattels, she is my house." In the Trial of the Regicides, eg, the instruction is to determine "what Goods, and Chattels" the convicted might have, specifying livestock was separate. Drayton and de la Pryme use "chattel" to refer to livestock in the 1600's. By this time, however, this split meaning was creating problems in terms of census, taxes, rents and inheritance. In 1741, Parliament specifically narrowly defined "cattle": "By cattle in this act, it is understood any bull, cow, ox, steer, bullock, heifer, calf, sheep and lamb, and no other cattle whatever." Act 15 & 16 Geo II 34, excluding chickens and bees and personal property. This followed the common law courts in converting from "cattle" to "chattel." Cattle continued however to refer to horses and other domesticated quadrupeds into the 19th Century. See Ash Sheep Co. v. US, 252 US 159. Finally in the US, based on "the sense in which the term is used in the western states," the term cattle was recognized to refer only to members of "bovine genus" in various western state courts. State v. Dist Ct Nye County, 42 Nev 218. It would be some time however before this primary sense came into popular usage in the eastern US and was included in legislative definitions. See Bell v Erie R Co, 171 NYS 341, 343. But still today "chattel" in contracts and in the speech of lawyers and bankers means any personal property. >From all this, when we picture such culturally vivid things as cattlemen, cattle drive, cattle town or cattlecatcher, we do not include either sheep, bees or objects obtained at a neighbor's yard sale - although they were all once 'cattle.' This is a pretty good example of how ambiguoty created by dialectical usage caused an unacceptible imprecision from the official perspective and resulted in effective official standardization to cancel the ambiguoty. There are hundreds of examples like this in English that materially changed the course and the history of the language and the culture. One of my favorites is the path of change in meaning, morphology and phonetics that the word "saloon" went through thanks to officialdom. And of course - to get back on track - it might have been so with the Mycenenaeans. Hope this was of use, Steve Long From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Apr 28 20:46:36 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 15:46:36 -0500 Subject: On Lehmann and Neogrammarians Message-ID: I don't know how I missed this one when it was first circulated, but I did. I think I ought to reply and clarify things now, even though our moderator has already done so. So here goes: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >From: >Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM >> Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to >> Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis >> for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE >> consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd >> developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a >> mess. >It is profoundly irresponsible to label anything written by Lehmann as a >"mess". He is one of the preeminent IEists of the 20th century, and to >cavalierly dismiss his work as "Neogrammarian", as if a label could discount >his achievements and contributions, is tragically unjustified. I agree completely that Lehmann is one of the preeminent Indoeuropeanists of the century. But even the best of us make mistakes ("Et dormitat Homerus", as one of my old Latin teachers used to say), and the eminent get to be eminent by being bold, which *always* entails the possibility of being spectacularly wrong in one thing or another. We respect him because he is right more often than he is wrong. But that's not the problem. I should add that I do not use "Neogrammarian" as a put-down. Nor "structuralist". Nor "laryngealist", or even "Nostraticist"! Without the Neogrammarians, we wouldn't even have the traditional IE framework that some of us love to fulminate against. Their contribution is enormous, far more than yours or mine. They, and later the structuralists, produced almost coherent systems which accounted for a great many facts -- of IE, of synchronic theory, etc. Lehmann attempted to combine the two, while adding Sturtevant's version of laryngeals to the stew, and then used this to try to explain some very odd features of Germanic languages. But if one studies his explanations critically, it turns out that most of them are either wrong or else no better than other available explanations which do not involve laryngeals. I'll spare you the details, but I've reconsidered and corrected several of his proposals in some articles published between 1977 and 1983. (I also accepted some of his proposals about which I now have grave doubts.) The book is, I'm afraid, a mess -- but an original, valuable, and highly stimulating mess. Kind of like Chomsky's _Syntactic Structures_. (I wonder if there's even one word in that book that Chomsky would now accept? No matter; he stimulated us, and sometimes that's the only thing that matters. So too with Lehmann's work.) Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From jer at cphling.dk Wed Apr 28 23:36:20 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 01:36:20 +0200 Subject: "syllabicity" In-Reply-To: <000801be9100$8b723da0$c19ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [...] > Rich continues: >> Thus, Lehmann violates a major principle when he asserts that any stage of >> Indo-European lacked a phonemic vowel: If a phone is present in a language, >> it has a psychological status in the lexicon, and while it may alternate >> with other sounds in the language because of morphological rules or >> unconstrained processes, it cannot be denied phonemic status. I think he violates an even more fundamental rule: If a segment is opposed to zero, it exists! Thus, since even an extremist monovocalic IE phonology would oppose a 3sg in *-t to a 2pl in *-te, it must have a phoneme /e/. This of course does not detract from the stimulating effect of the book - just look at us! [... PCR:] > But, why all the fuss about monosyllabicity when Sanskrit provides us with > the next logical outcome of a language that, at an earlier stage, was > monovocalic (at least, phonemically). I believe this is right even synchronically, barring words of marginal phonological integration: In Sanskrit, [a:] is identical with /a/ +/a/ [i] is a realization of /y/ [u] is a realization of /v/ [i:] is identical with [i] + [i], thus a realization of /yy/ [u:] is identical with [u] + [u], thus a realization of /vv/ [r.] is a realization of /r/ [r.:] is identical with [r.] + [r.], thus a realization of /rr/ [l.] is a realization of /l/ [e:] is a realization of /ay/ [o:] is a realization of /av/ [a:u] is a realization of /aav/ [a:i] is a realization of /aay/ Thus, in Sanskrit, short /a/ is the only true vowel demanded to allow an unambiguous notation of all (normal) words. This is a one-vowel system of the kind dismissed as a typological impossibility for PIE. - I rush to add that the acceptability of this analysis for Sanskrit does not make it correct for PIE which, for completely independent reasons, appears to need at least the vowels /a, e, o/ on the phonemic level - and even long /a:, e:, o:/ and underlying /i, u/ (opposed to /y, w/!) on an abstract morphophonemic level. In Sanskrit, as in PIE, the rules stipulating a given sonant/semivowel to appear syllabic or nonsyllabic are relatively clear. Such an element is nonsyllabic when contiguous with a vowel, otherwise it is syllabic. Only Sievers and a touch of analogy compromise predictability. Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 04:15:31 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 00:15:31 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/28/99 7:23:04 AM, you wrote: <<-- you're being a little obtuse here. "Changing languages" -- as in linguistic succession, people abandoning, say, Celtiberian for Latin -- is a different phenomenon from "linguistic change", say Marcus ==> Marco.>> Nobody said they were the same thing. But "changing languages" is an established and important way in which linguistic change happens. Remember the cite I gave you for Mallory, IE and bilingualism? Get a chance to read it? Didn't think so. "Changing dialects" is of course a more common way in which language changes, but the difference is quantitative not qualitative. Early English speakers (including Johnson) who recognized the GVS described it simply as "a change in dialect." "Acceptance" of innovations has often meant acceptance and often individual awareness that one is speaking in a new way. Even where speakers are not aware of the changes they are adopting, "acceptance" requires a change not in one speaker but in many. And in the interim the new and old must exist alongside one another. And the contrast is often obvious. And of course it takes a certain obtuseness to talk as if "changing languages" had no connection at all with "linguistic change." Obviously a group of people changing languages or dialects are undergoing linguistic change. In fact, in between the new and the old language or dialect, there is the potential for the most extreme and permanent kind of linguistic change. See e.g., Katsue Akiba-Reynolds, cited in Lehmann's HL p. 314, for solid evidence that Japanese had its origins as a hybrid of two languages. And - going back to the original topic - whether speakers are aware or unaware that they are accepting changes in their language may be quite irrelevant to the fact of that change. S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 04:22:20 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 00:22:20 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/28/99 8:11:15 AM, you wrote: <<-- all what years? Virtually all our Mycenaean documents date from the same period.>> What are you talking about? Is a "period" supposed to be shorter than "all those years"? The Jurassic Period was a few million years. Is that enough for you? Do you specialize in meaningless objections? S. Long [ Moderator's comment: The Mycenaean documents span roughly 200 years, very little time speaking in historical linguistic terms. The objection is warranted and hardly without meaning. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 05:01:12 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 01:01:12 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/28/99 8:36:39 AM, you wrote: << -- this is news. (glyph of irony).>> Please quote me accurately. What I wrote was: <> And this is not news. The Early Slavs was published in the 80's and it is just about one of the few modern sources in English on the archaeological record. If you are not aware of it, you shouldn't mislead other readers. <<-- you have inscriptions, or other linguistic data? Pots are not people.>> Does this seem disingenuous to you in any way based on the innumerable posts mentioning Corded Ware and how it proves all kinds of things? <> I can't disagree with this. But as early as @600 ace Fredegar has the Frank king Dagobert remitting a 500 hide tribute owed by the Saxons in exchange for their defending the border against the Wends, who are already on the eastern bank of the Elbe. Its the pots - not the historical records - that tell us that they were not always there. <> But the question is when. In the first half of the first millenium bce the nature of those contacts is not clear. I repeat: <> S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 05:23:18 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 01:23:18 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/28/99 9:13:05 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> What does this mean? That it happens while people are knocked out or sleeping? If you mean that people are not always aware that the structure of their language has changed, I don't disagree. But language itself is filled with purpose, intentionality and function. And if the structure of a language does not serve those purposes and functions, it will change, sooner or later. People don't pay attention to the structure of their language, but they are very aware of how it functions. Here, as everywhere else, form ultimately follows function - with or without awareness. I wrote: <> Its far more misleading to pretend that language is something that grows on the side of a hill. I'm trying to recover a computer generated "family tree" of automobiles and their designs that I saw back in the 80's. It looked exactly like one of Larry Trask's IE family trees, only a little more "unconscious" and complex. Human invention - whether it is language or cars - developes in ways that are in striking contrast to random growth. Intentionality is the difference. S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 05:59:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 01:59:27 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis]-Second post Message-ID: In a message dated 4/28/99 10:13:03 AM, rayhendon at worldnet.att.net wrote: <> In a message dated 4/29/99 12:19:14 AM, you wrote: <> Let me suggest a directional problem that you might want to consider. What drives the spread of microbial infection in a medical model is the interest of the microbe. But we know that language serves other functions besides the survival of the language itself. Communication, cultural survival and basic self-orientation are all human objectives in language. This may mean that the analogy is more to the spread of sources of nutrition or medical treatment than it is to disease. Also, the traits of a particular microbe do not transfer to other unrelated strains. If common traits, they develop independently. In language, effective traits can be borrowed in their full maturity. And finally using addiction as the infection form for your medical model adds another factor that may not be analogous - the physiological need that is counterfunctional to individual survival, which (hopefully) language does not share. Regards, Steve Long From fortytwo at ufl.edu Thu Apr 29 11:08:21 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 07:08:21 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: "Steven A. Gustafson" wrote: > A live taboo does not remove a tabooed word from the lexicon, or render > it obsolete. People need to know what words they are forbidden to use > if they hope to avoid using them. Perhaps. However, consider this: how did you first learn the word "shit"? From hearing someone violating the taboo. No one told you "Don't say shit". You probably learned not to use it when you got in trouble for using it. If a taboo is thorough enough, it may be that the word *will* be forgotten, or at least restricted. Of course, as you pointed out, it would no longer be taboo, being non-existent! > (This is also why I have difficulty explaining the loss of the word, > 'hart,' by taboo. In certain circles it may be considered daring to > call a coffin a coffin. No such cachet seems to surround the word > 'hart,' even if it is a word that gets spoken only in church if it is > spoken at all.) Perhaps. Indeed, in that case, I doubt that the word "hart" would've been used in the KJV translations if it were taboo. Altho, the taboo could've arisen later. Reminds me of the use of "ass" in older Biblical translations: "Thou shalt not covet they neighbor's ... ass". :-) -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Apr 29 13:41:45 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 08:41:45 -0500 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: <372729EF.AAEFC0F8@aye.net> Message-ID: sure, it makes sense --perhaps also as a root for poto In modern Spanish & [occasionally] are the common interjections for stench >Rick Mc Callister (I think) wrote: >> is definitely the most common and stable form >> but goes back a long ways. >> I don't have access to Corominas, so I can't check it >> but the common explanations of are that >> 1) it's an abbreviation of or >> 2) that it's related to "butt" "piece of ass" >I think the most plausible explanation for -puta-, Fr. -putain- &c., is >to trace them back to Latin -puteo, putere-, "stink." I suspect this is >one of those roots that comes originally from an interjection, and will >tend to be re-introduced despite the phonetic vicissitudes of any more >elaborate words compounded from it. /pu/ is not unknown in modern >English as a reaction to a bad smell. };-) > [snip] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 29 14:44:53 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 09:44:53 -0500 Subject: On Lehmann and Neogrammarians Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 1999 3:46 PM > But if one studies his explanations critically, it turns out that most of > them are either wrong or else no better than other available explanations > which do not involve laryngeals. I'll spare you the details, but I've > reconsidered and corrected several of his proposals in some articles > published between 1977 and 1983. (I also accepted some of his proposals > about which I now have grave doubts.) The book is, I'm afraid, a mess -- but > an original, valuable, and highly stimulating mess. Kind of like Chomsky's > _Syntactic Structures_. (I wonder if there's even one word in that book that > Chomsky would now accept? No matter; he stimulated us, and sometimes that's > the only thing that matters. So too with Lehmann's work.) "An original, valuable, and highly stimulating mess"? I think even Lehmann would be delighted with such a characterization. But, stubborn as I am, I would prefer "olio". Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 29 16:16:49 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 12:16:49 EDT Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Yet we also see "resurrected taboo words" such as "jock," which formerly >meant "penis" and now means "athlete" [at least in America] and even >"jockette" for a female athlete -- if a word stays out of circulation long enough, it loses its 'ooomph' as a forbidden term and can be reused, if it hasn't been altogether forgotten. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 29 16:33:59 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 12:33:59 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Doesn't "everyday" time become "historic time?" -- not in the frame we're discussing. Almost all our Mycenaean documents come from the end of the Mycenaean period, literally -- from the destruction level of the great palaces, clay tablets preserved by the fires that burned them down. In fact, they're monthly tallies. Evidently the Mycenaeans used clay for running totals and then transfered the information to some other medium, one that hasn't survived. (We know this because while the extant tablets concern only a short period, there are references to the previous year's records on them.) And the entire period of Mycenaean literacy was barely 200-250 years, by the way. Possibly less. >English encountered this with the word "cattle" where dialect came to use it >to refer to only to livestock -- ah... you are aware that most early IE languages used the same word for "cattle" and "wealth in general"? Eg., the origins of "pecunium"? Herds = wealth. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 29 16:41:04 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 12:41:04 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >In 1741, Parliament specifically narrowly defined "cattle": >> -- in other words, the official, written language was changed to bring it more into line with popular spoken useage. Selah. My point is proved. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Apr 30 03:50:34 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 23:50:34 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/26/99 1:43:38 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: < z. Cf. znaju "I know" from *g^en(H3)- "to know".>> I got surprised here. Doesn't satemization result in an 's'? With, e.g., 'sto' (hundred), 'dziesiec' (ten) in Polish, it seems definitely an /s/. [ Moderator's reply: No. (There really is no such process as "satemization", by the way, not in the way you apparently intend it.) Several sub-families of Indo-European all share a common development of the palatals, from stops to fricatives. This occurs in *all* *three* series (voiceless, voiced, voiced aspirate), not just the voiceless series; the different series develop differently, rather than all turning to voiceless fricatives. --rma ] Where I do find *g > z is the first SL palatization - before original front vowels. (I have here as example, OCS ziv~, cf. Lith gyvas.) The second also yielded g > z, but where the front vowel has occured because of monophthongisation (example OCS cena, cf Lith kaina.) Also, if this *g behaved like a /k/ in satemization, wouldn't we see it also in 'gniazd-o' (Pol. nest), 'gno-ic' (Pol. fertilize, use manure on a field) and 'gniesc' (bring close together, press together, squeeze together)? - All these seem to reflect very basic meanings and are documented early lexical features that would suggest that they may not have been borrowed. And if *g did yield /s/ and not /z/, wouldn't that point to other forms - e.g., 'siedczy' (Pol, investigate, find out, judge), 'snac' (Pol, adv, apparently, from what we know), 'snowac' (Pol, unfold, develope, muse) - as older forms. (I'm using Polish here as presumably one of the least Greekified SL languages.) [ Moderator's comment: *g does not > **s in Slavic, but to *z. --rma ] Might this suggest that 'znac' and similar forms might be borrowings coming after satem? [ Moderator's reply: No. --rma ] Regards, Steve Long From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Apr 30 07:55:43 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 08:55:43 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick McAllister wrote: > I lived in New Wilmington PA for 3 years, which is about half >Amish. The language the Amish used there was essentially English with >German dialect vocabulary. They spoke this with Amish who visited from >other areas, including Lancaster Co PA. My colleague in German, who was >German, as well as the German tutors from Germany all stated that a German >who did not know English would not be able to understand them because they >used English syntax and English idioms in their language. The Amish >themselves agreed with this assessment and said that was why they taught >High German in their schools. They said that they did not write in their >spoken language but rather in High German. It's possible that their High >German may be strongly influenced by the spoken language. > This at least is the situation now. In the past, it was certainly >different. It's always nice to meet native speakers and get their view of their language - but they aren't always right, and what they describe for themselves doesn't necessarily apply to their whole speech community. There are speakers of Pennsilfaanisch who write in dialect, and I have texts written in dialect by such native speakers. I know, Rick, you were there and all that, but that doesn't make other people's experiences or knowledge invalid. I used to subscribe to a paper called 'The Budget' which had a weekly dialect column which was written by DIFFERENT native speakers, not the ones you met. Yes, they did write in dialect, not in High German, and yes, it did have High German-like syntax and morphology. (I do actually know what I'm talking about, and, having taught both NHG and German dialects for over 10 years, I can tell the difference). And I subscribed in the late 1980s. At that time a paper called the 'Allentown Morning Call' also had a dialect column. Whether either paper still does, I don't know. But I'm not talking about the distant past. 'Germans from Germany' aren't the most wonderful authority either, since comprehension of regional German dialects by people from other regions is not great. Lots of Germans from Germany don't understand Swiss, or Low German, or Bavarian, or.... However, there really isn't any need for anyone to insist on the exclusive right to be right. I imagine we both are: Amish schoolkids probably do use a very anglicised form of the dialect, and don't write it down. At the same time, I imagine that older rural speakers use something closer to the original dialect, and some enthusiasts do write it down, probably in a slightly archaising form, as this is the tradition in dialect writing. By the way - and I have no way of testing this - the former president of the Pennsylvania German Society, the Reverend Druckenbrod, once wrote to me that he was tired of people saying that the Amish spoke the best Pennsylvania German, since in his view, this was far from being the case (he was, I think, a Baptist, which of course, _may_ have influenced his views). At least he was living proof that some non-Amish speak Pennsilfaanisch too. best wishes, Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From peter at petegray.freeserve.co.uk Fri Apr 30 19:59:31 1999 From: peter at petegray.freeserve.co.uk (Peter Whale) Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 20:59:31 +0100 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: SOmeone (depedning how many arrows there were before the quote) said: >. IE CiC does not show up in AA as normal C-C but rather always >>as C-y-C. Perhaps this is because only words with AA C-y-C were suggested as cognates. Nostratic is still very young - so is this a case of theory coming before evidence? Peter From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 00:07:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 00:07:52 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990328203003.008d6c20@mail.web4you.dk> Message-ID: Carol Jensen wrote: >I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic and >Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then like >virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and Danish. Swedish and Danish are of course different, but while looking at the differences between Old English and Old Norse the other day in Buck, as compared to those between Swedish and Danish, as well as Sanskrit and Avestan, I was rather surprised to discover that there were zero mismatches, counting generously, between Swedish and Danish in the Swadesh-list words listed by C.D. Buck (against I believe 8 or so between OE and ON, and more, but I didn't count, between Skt. and Avestan). There was an intersting bit by Eugene Holman about the differences between Swedish and Danish Tuesday on sci.lang (Danish/Swedish seems to be in the same category as Portuguese/Spanish: Danes and Portuguese are better at understanding Swedish and Spanish than vice versa). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 1 06:26:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 01:26:27 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/29/99 2:09:37 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I replied: <> In a message dated 3/31/99 11:48:57 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- Old Church Slavonic is simply what was spoken by the Slavs with whom the Byzantines were most familiar. At that point the Slavic peoples all spoke dialects of one language.>> Just as I thought. You have no evidence that OCS "was comprehensible to "all Slavia", at the time" either. The answer is it may not have been. It is curious that this unsubstantiated idea is repeated so often. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 1 08:03:06 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 03:03:06 EST Subject: Lithuanians looking like Tarim Mummies Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >In the arena of genes and language, there's been plenty of reason to watch >out for such "evidence" as Lithuanians looking "much like the Tarim Basin >mummies." Obviously if there are enough Lithuanians, sooner or later, some of >them will like like Egyptian mummies. -- there are lots of tall, radically depigmented Egyptian mummies? That's news to me. You do understand the concept of "percentage", don't you? From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Thu Apr 1 11:07:35 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 06:07:35 -0500 Subject: Sanskrit Tense & Aspect Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >The difference in Sanskrit is slight, at best. I quote Stenzler, (1997): >"In Classical Sanskrit the aorist is used in narrative as a past tense >alongside the imperfect and perfect, without any distinct function." There >is a slight difference in time of reference, (recent or more remote past) >but this is not aspect. Perhaps it is different in Vedic, although my >Vedic grammar tells me the names refer to the formation, and not to the use >of the tenses. The major problem with `Classical Sanskrit' is that there differences based on the primary language(s) of the author/audience and also on the genre. For example, in the dramatic dialogues, past tense is expressed using only the ``past passive participle''. On the other hand in the Upanishads and in earliest Pali, the PPP has a resultative sense. In Kavya Sanskrit, the various forms are used in the same slot, but in different frequencies that correspond to the roles taught in traditional grammar. This makes it hard to see the evolution after 300 BCE. ---------- Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > The question isn't *if* there was something distinguishing the > three forms. Of course there was, or we wouldn't have three > *forms*. Does this mean that different stem formants must have had some distinction in meaning too? If you assume that there was a difference in meaning at some point, how do we know that point was before late PIE. Perhaps, the different stem formants were derivational affixes and collapsed into grammatical categories after the languages split up. > The question is *what* distinguished them. > The imperfect vs. aorist distinction was one of (im)perfective > aspect, that much is clear from the way it is formed (present > stem vs. aorist stem) and the attested uses in Greek. This is not at all clear. This argument relies on two unmentioned assumptions, common in IE aspectology, but questionable on general grounds. The assumptions are that ``usability in the present => atelicity'' and ``atelicity => not usable in perfective. The second is well known to be false for many languages with aspect (see Dahl, Tense and aspect systems). The first depends on how telic events are handled. It may apply to languages with serial verb constructions, but there is no evidence of such for any stage from PIE to Vedic. Otherwise, it is true only of languages with aspect (not even then, for example Lith. jis dabar perras^o lais^ka, `he is rewiring a letter'; Lith also allows presents like is^be'ga, nulipa which are called imperfective in Dambriunas' grammar, but the glosses, `runs out of', `climbs down', suggest telicity). So this argument boils down to assuming aspect to prove it. And the question of the pathway to Vedic is still there. The attempts I have read are quite weak: Gonda has nothing better than ``national character of Indians'' for the use of the alleged imperfective in narration. I hope that I need not belabor this any further. Hoffman posits an intermediate stage in which aspectual distinctions were limited to narratives and remote past (not ``statements'' where aorist was used exclusively). But without other examples of such a division, it is quite unbelievable; no language with aspect is known to do that. Also in such a stage, the perfective would be much more common as perfectives are the usual narrative form.Without other examples of such an evolution, it is hard to see how the imperfect was generalized in narration. [Recently I was referred to H. Rix, Historische Grammatik desGriechischen. Darmstadt 1976 p. 192 sqq., and G. Meiser, Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache, Darmstadt 1998, p. 180 sq. The former is currently checked out from the local library and the latter is not in any nearby library. I will appreciate it if any one can summarize what these say.] Finally, `what else could it be' could have answers other than aspect. Cross-linguistic studies, like Dahl Tense and aspect systems and Bybee et al, The evolution of grammar, turned up an interesting category called `completives' by Bybee et al. These are emphatic/ highly marked forms that are not the usual forms in narration, and often contrast with either a simple past or a perfective that is the usual form in narration. [An in-depth discussion of such a form in Tamil, using viDu as an auxiliary, is found in Annamalai, International journal of Dravidian linguistics vol 11(1982), pp 92--122.] Sanskrit usage might go back to such a distinction rather than perfective-imperfective distinction. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Apr 1 11:26:13 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 12:26:13 +0100 Subject: R: Re: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <19990331123159.81564.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: > Some years ago I was told by Andolin Eguzkitza, a Basque linguist, that > in Euskal Herria the preference for the periphrastic perfect in Spanish > (and/or French) was influenced by Euskera's insistence on distinguishing > between what has happened in the same "day" and what took place in the > time period(s) before. Interesting, though I'm not aware that the use of the compond past ("present perfect") in Spanish is different in the Basque Country and in northern Spain generally. > However, a difficulty arises in reconstructing > the cognitive background of this usage in Euskera since there is clear > evidence that in the not too recent past, it was a "night count" rather > than a "day count" that governed the 24 hr. period in question. The > count went from "sunset" to "sunset" or if you wish from > "night-to-night." Euskaldunak have told me that the periphrastic perfect > needs to be used to talk about what's happened since "you woke up this > morning." Yes, this conforms to my experience. Where an English-speaker uses the simple past, a Basque, much like a Spaniard, uses the "present perfect" for anything that happened earlier on the same day but the other form for anything that happened before today. But the "present perfect" also has other uses in both Basque and Spanish, of course, most of them corresponding to the functions of the English present perfect. American Spanish is generally different here, of course. > Larry would be able to give us more information on this phenomenon as > well as the rules set forth by Euskaltzaindia (the Basque Academy of the > Language) for its "proper usage." I'm afraid I haven't been following the Academy's rulings at all closely. But the Academy is still largely involved in deciding which forms should be used: it hasn't yet given a lot of attention to the circumstances in whose those forms should be used. Anyway, in my capacity as a linguist, I'm interested in what people actually say, and not in the rulings of official bodies. > My impression is that today there is significant variation in usage > among native-speakers of Euskera. Oh, absolutely, and there are important differences in the way the verb-forms are used. Just to cite one of my favorite examples, the French Basques make regular use of the "super-compound" past tenses, such as , which is formally identical to French . The French Basques also use the French form freely, though most other French-speakers I've consulted find this form bizarre. I call this form the `grandfather tense', because it denotes a past so remote that it can only be used of something that happened in the speaker's grandfather's time or earlier: it can't be used with a first-person or second-person subject, because no living person is old enough to have done anything that long ago. The Spanish Basques don't use the super-compound forms so much, and, when they do use them, they don't use them in the same function, in my experience. > There also seems to be evidence of a kind of "narrative style" that > uses the periphrastic perfect for stylistic effect when speaking > about actions in the (remote) past. But I'm a bit out of my depth in > this particular issue. Me too, I'm afraid. I have encountered a number of instances of surprising forms in narratives, but I have little idea what rules exist here. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Apr 1 12:37:14 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 05:37:14 -0700 Subject: Lithuanians looking like Tarim Mummies Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/30/99 10:11:46 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > <<>> > < trace prehistoric migrations.>> > A good example. Sykes and Richards MtDNA studies cast a serious doubt on > Cavalli-Sforza's work. What seems like conclusive science today becomes > inconclusive or Saucer people stuff tommorrow. There are some who still race > to Cavalli-Sforza to support conclusions unsupported by quite possibly the > more valid scientific evidence supplied by mtDNA and isotope analysis of bone > and hair fragments. Undoubtedly the greatest supporters of matching C-S's results with language are Greenberg and Ruhlen. Nearly every one of their books has a neat chart matching C-S's chart of human genetics with their (widely rejected) chart of human linguistic relationships. The only problem is (and they don't even attempt to mask it in the chart although they don't attempt to explain it either) that C-S and G-R don't match. There are at least a dozen glaring inconsistencies. For example, C-S's results indicate that the Pygmies of the Congo Basin are a distinct genetic group in Africa. However, there is NO linguistic evidence to support separating the languages spoken by the Pygmies apart from the remainder of the Bantu languages of subsaharan Africa and NO linguistic evidence to suggest that they didn't originate in the Nigerian/Cameroon borderland as part of the Proto-Bantu ancestral group a few thousand years ago. Another example shows a very close C-S link between Indo-European groups and Afro-Asiatic groups, yet many Nostraticists are becoming sceptical about the inclusion of A-A in Nostratic along with I-E. But I-E and Uralic (the two most popular components of Nostratic) are fairly distinct in C-S's work. These are just two of the major differences between the genetic work of C-S and the results of historical linguistics. Geneticists are questioning C-S's results and linguists have generally rejected their usefulness in telling us anything about the relationship of languages. John McLaughlin Utah State University From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 13:15:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:15:55 GMT Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) In-Reply-To: <000001be7b0a$1a9def40$3470fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> I don't know, maybe the -i originally marked something else >> (imperfective?). For PIE, all we can recover is that it marked >> the present. Compare Akkadian, where the unmarked form (iprus: >> -C1 C2 V C3) was the simple past, versus marked perfective >> [perfect] (ip-ta-ras: -C1 ta C2 V C3) and imperfective [durative] >> (ipar-r-as: -C1 a C2C2 V C3) forms. >I am completely ignorant of Akkadian. But it seems that the >durative/imperfective can also be used in the past. Then the >simple past may have been a perfective limited to the past According to Lipin'ski it was a narrative simple past in Akkadian. It later became a perfective in West Semitic (which form was in turn displaced by the old stative > perfective). >What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede >and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made >from Indo-Greek present stem? The Armenian aorist e-ber is a "root aorist", the present stem is bere-. In any case the endings of the Armenian aorist (and imperfect) are completely unrelated to those of the "Indo-Greek" aorist and imperfect. Slavic mino~ is analogical (vowel stems with -no~- presents always carry over the -no~- to the aorist and ptc.praes.act.). Slavic vede is a Class IA verb, which does not distinguish present and aorist stems (unless ve^de^ was meant, which is a perfect form, the only one surviving in Slavic). These forms may look identical to "Indo-Greek" imperfects, but only if we divorce them from their paradigms and the Armenian and Slavic verbal systems in which they are embedded. >If you mean that these are aorist in Arm/Slavic, then aren't you >comparing apples and oranges here? If Vedic imperfect was not >imperfective, how can we compare it to Armenian, Slavic or Baltic >imperfects (the last of which is said to be past frequentative)? The point is that we *can't* compare it to the Armenian and Slavic imperfects, which are derived from the optative (probably) and from a sigmatic form (-e^ax-), respectively. The unique feature of Greek and Indo-Iranian (and partially Baltic) is that they lack a marked imperfect form (special endings and/or special root extension), such as Italic, Celtic, Tocharian, Armenian, Slavic and Albanian have. There is no strict formal distinction between aorist and imperfect, except for the abstraction of an "aorist" and a "present" root, to which secondary endings are added (and an augment is prefixed). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 13:27:22 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:27:22 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990331015004.94689.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >ME (GLEN): > Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. >MIGUEL: > Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx). >Come on, Miguel. First, why does it end in -nx instead of **-nk? Are >y'sure it's not from IE *-nk-s? Of course it is. The point is that there are (AFAIK) no _neuters_ in -nk, which I explain by hypothesizng that absolute final -nk would have given -r[H2], and a paradigm -rH2/-nk- would have subsequently been the victim of Ausgleich. >I've obviously confused everyone a little. First, whether the >heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes nothing since I've been >saying that there was no pronunciation contrasts in IE between *-t and >*-d (or *-dh). Which is obviously false. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 13:37:14 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:37:14 GMT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >It has been debated for generations whether Basque `bear' might >be borrowed from Celtic * or from a related IE form (this `bear' >word is certainly IE). >The Celtic source is phonologically awkward, though: we would have >expected * to be borrowed as *<(h)artotz>, not as the observed > -- assuming, of course, that it was the nominative that was >borrowed, but the accusative would be even less suitable. And assuming early Celtic borrowings were subject to the same phonotactic constraints as Latin borrowings. >One or two people have suggested an IE source other than Celtic, but no >IE language with an even vaguely suitable form of the word is known to >have been in contact with Basque. >Just to complicate matters, it is very unusual for a Basque lexical item >to end in a consonant cluster. Save only for `black', which we >have good reason to suppose is a syncopated form of earlier *, >all seemingly native words which end in a cluster end in <-rtz>, like > `bear' and `five'. There are some grounds for supposing >that these clusters too are secondary and result from some kind of vowel >loss, but the evidence is not sufficient to support this view securely. The only logical explanation is indeed *(h)a'rtos > hartz, with (pre-Roman period) loss of unstressed vowel. But we should maybe look for more Celtic borrowings with nom. -(V)s giving Basque -tz. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 13:59:43 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:59:43 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <004d01be7bad$26b976c0$8b03703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >Around here (Flanders) it is - more or less - generally believed that the >Frisian people and the closely related West-Flemings (not just >linguistically) are descendants of probably southern Danish or other more or >less Scandinavian tribes that migrated south over the coastal sand >bars/islands, the last remains of which are the Dutch and German >'Waddeneilanden' and part of Sylt. The Frisians and/or Ingvaeones were not Scandinavian (in the sense of North Germanic speaking). They merely inhabitated the North Sea Coast area from the Roman limes up to the tip of Jutland, the latter now linguisticaly Scandinavian territory. After teh collapse of Roman power, they spread along the coast to South Holland, Zeeland and Western Flanders, while presumably exchanging Jutland and Angeln for England. In any case these areas became Danish-speaking, like Skaane and the Danish islands. >I am not sure at all that you can say English wasn't influenced by Dutch/Low >German, albeit in a somewhat convoluted way: Saxon itself is - or was - a >(collection of) Dutch/Low German dialect(s), while Anglian may be considered >to have been something in between Danish and Low German. >[...] >As to 'northwestern Germanic', I am very, very skeptical about that idea. If you say Anglian was "in between Danish and Low German", I don't see how you can be that skeptical. >The least you can say, is that it is not a necessary hypothesis. >Postulating mutual (or one-way west > east?) influence between east- and >west Germanic seems sufficient to explain the observed phenomena. There was >ample opportunity for it to occur after the split of northeast into north >and east Germanic That's indeed all "North-West Germanic" means. Mutual influence between North and West Germanic, after the split between North and East Germanic, and of course long after the split between West and North-East Germanic. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 14:22:43 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 14:22:43 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >The fact that Hittite which is suppose to precede these sound changes >does not abound with -p's and -k's is very relevant to Miguel's >assertions. He might be able to say that Indo-Anatolian *-t becomes a >later *-H1 and get away with it but if no evidence exists of *-p to *-H3 >as he has stated then this is pure speculation. In terms of Greek and >evidence for a -k- (which really shouldn't be there in the first place >if *-k became *-H2 in Centum-Satem) It *should* be there in gunaikos, because *k isn't final there. If we assume a regular development: Nom *gwnaik > *gwnaiH2 Gen *gwnaik-os > *gwnaikos then Greek is regular here. What would be "irregular" is the analogical extension of *H2 to the rest of the paradigm outside of Greek (and in Greek outside of this word). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jrader at m-w.com Thu Apr 1 09:39:49 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 09:39:49 +0000 Subject: Basque <-ar>, <-(t)ar> Message-ID: To the best of my knowledge, Latin has no independent suffix <-aris>. The adjectival suffix <-a:lis> appears as <-a:ris> when the base has an in it: , , etc., but in all other environments <-a:ris>: , , etc., and note vs. . How the suffix <-a:lis> would have been handled by Basque I couldn't say. Jim Rader > > >Does Basque -ar have a connection with Spanish -ar/-al? > It is widely suspected, but not established, that this suffix derives > from one or both of the Latin suffixes <-aris> and <-arius> -- more > likely the first, if anything, since <-arius> appears clearly to be the > source of the Basque professional suffix <-ari> (and variants), as in > `merchant', from `market', and > `jai-alai player', from `jai-alai'. The development of the > variant <-tar> from <-ar> would not be unusual in Basque. From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 1 15:03:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 15:03:32 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Rick Mc Callister wrote: >>It should be noted that this so-called "Northwest Germanic" phase postdates >>the "Gotho-Nordic" phase, which accounts for the similarities between North >>and East Germanic. We have: >> Proto-Germanic >> / \ >> West Germanic North-East Germanic >> \ / \ >> ("North-West Germanic") East Germanic >> / \ >> West Germanic North Germanic > I've read in some places that the languages formerly spoken in >present Jutland, Schleswig & Holstein were "in between" North Germanic & >West Germanic and that when the Angles migrated to England, that a gradual >linguistic frontier was replaced by a barrier of non-mutually >comprehensible languages. > On one level this has a certain logic but on the other hand, >English & Frisian do seem much closer to Low German. I can appreciate that >Frisian may have been affected by Low German and Dutch but English wasn't. > Another contradiction that I've seen are charts that list East >Germanic with North Germanic. > Why all the confusion? Has all of this been straightened out? The confusion stems from the fact that at different times different dialects which were still to a reasonable degree mutually intelligible interact with each other differently. I believe the general consensus is the one I sketched above: first a split between West Germanic (in what is now N. Netherlands, N. Germany and mainland Denmark) and North-East Germanic (in S. Scandinavia) [but still some contact across the Kattegat], then the split between North Germanic and East Germanic (Goths etc. moved of from Scandinavia to the Baltic and then on to the Ukraine, Balkans, Italy and Spain, etc.), while West Germanic and North Germanic kept interacting, most strongly of course southernmost North Germanic (-> Danish) and northernmost West Germanic (Ingvaeonic = Jutish, Anglian, parts of Saxon, Frisian -> English, Frisian). There are reasons for thinking that the similiraties between N and E Gmc are older than the similarities between W and N Gmc, but I'd have to look them up. In any case, these successive layers ("Gotho-Nordic", "North-West") make it more difficult than it already should be to pin down Proto-Germanic to a particular date. All I can say is that North Germanic feels like a "shallow" group, comparable with Slavic (c. 1500 years), while West Germanic appears to be more diverse, comparable with Romance (c. 2000 years) or slightly more, while Germanic as a whole definitely feels older than Romance, so 3000 years cannot be too far off. In fact, given the interactions that went on, Germanic might be older than it looks. Glottochronology, even seat-of-the-pants glottochronology like the above, is seriously hindered by the fact that most languages never cleanly "separate" to begin with. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Thu Apr 1 14:42:46 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 08:42:46 -0600 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: [ moderator changed the Subject: header ] Dear Mr. or Ms Moderator I am currently engaged in a study of political and judicial developments in England after the Saxon's assult began In the fifth century. Linguistics is not my primary interest, and my skills in languages are even more limited than my interest. But I do have a question about Indo-European as the proto-language for most of Europe. It seems to me the IE is an hypothesis that posits the existence of an Indo-European language that was actually spoken by some ancient population. The hypothesis further asserts that this language is this mother language of many Asian and European languages and subsequently spawned child-languages over Asia and Europe. Celtic, Germanic and Italic languages, to name a few, are, then, child languages of IE. My question is this: is there disagreement among linguists about IE as an hypothesis? Are their linguists who dispute the IE model and posit some alternative model of language development? If so, are the alternative hypotheses credible? Or, is the IE model universally accepted as the only possible explanation for how IE languages developed? If you can answer my question in a manner that would not require much effort, or at least forward it to someonw who could, I would appreciate it greatly. IE figures so large in European historical development that it must be incorporated in any reasonably thorough account of Europena history. But I am uncomfortable that there may be other explanations for the process of how European languages developed. Can you help me? Thanks for considering my request. Sincerely Ray Hendon San Antonio, TX [ Moderator's response: First, I've forwarded this to the list at large because there are others who will disagree with me. There is little disagreement among linguists with training in the methods of historical linguistics and familiarity with the data from the descendant languages that the Indo-European hypothesis is correct. The disagreements here are rather with details of the reconstruction. There have been some well-trained linguists in the past who, for one reason or another, have denied the existence in history of a unified Indo-European language. N. Trubetzkoi, for example, spoke of a group of languages which influenced each other to so great an extent that the result appears to have been a single ancestral language; I believe that F. Boas held a similar idea. It is unclear to me what advantage is to be found in such a formulation. However, once the development into the descendant languages began, everyone agrees that they developed in the manner postulated by the IE hypothesis. There are scholars in other sciences who do not accept that linguists have any idea what they are talking about, who believe in a different mechanism of linguistic change, and who speak of changing the way linguistics is done to prove that linguists have been wrong all along. You may encounter them on other mailing lists. Rich Alderson ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Apr 1 16:37:59 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 10:37:59 -0600 Subject: R: Re: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >> Miguel said: >> >In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect has been abandoned in >> >favour of the preterit. >1) >In the Castilian spoken in *Galicia* ("Castrapo"), the usage is as in >Argentinian Spanish >See Pilar Va'quez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, >1971, p. 95, who speaks of "..the preference for the "pret. indefinido" >instead of the "perfecto compuesto", i.e. "vi" instead of "he visto". >Also, >Alonso Zamora Vicente , "Dialectologia espan~ola", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, >1979, p. 208, says that in some *Asturian* regions, the periphrastic perfect >is not used and that even in the cultured speech of some families, in >Castilian, the use of the composed forms is rejected, e.g. " ? oiste lo que >digo? "; " hoy llovio' todo el di'a ". >North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, is considered, rightly or wrongly, >the most Celtic area of Spain. I've heard Argentines and other South Americans use present perfect [prete/rito perfecto] pretty much the same way as Central Americans do --in an emphatic sense. The type of emphasis depends on the intonation of the speaker. ?Has ido a la playa? Have you ever been to the beach? ?Has terminado la tarea? DID you FINISH the homework!? Ha llovido todo el di/a. It HAS RAINED [It's been raining] all day! It's definitely not used as an everyday form and overusage of it does suggest that the speaker is either a Mexican or a non-native speaker. Not all Mexicans overuse this and other compound tenses but they are often stereotyped by other Latin Americans as speaking Spanish with grammatical influence from American English. While Mexican Spanish seems to me to have less English vocabulary than Central American and Caribbean Spanish, its grammar does seem to conform to English usage in the greater use of present perfect, present progressive, and periphrastic future as well as its simplified subjunctive and avoidance of imperatives by many Mexicans. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Apr 1 16:50:51 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 10:50:51 -0600 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You need to keep in mind that "neo-Galician" essentially uses a largely Spanish pronunciation. >In this discussion it should be kept in mind that Old Portuguese and Old >Galician, spoken in the NW corner of the Iberian peninsula, were *the same >language*, from the time when the South of Portugal with Lisbon was still >under the Moors and the local people there spoke a Mozarabic dialect until >quite some time after the independence of Portugal. >So the question is did Portuguese /u/ preserve the older pronunciation or >did modern Galician /o/, (which is described as "very closed" by >phoneticians). >Frank Rossi >Bergamo, Italy >igleasis at axia.it From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Apr 1 16:33:55 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 11:33:55 EST Subject: Testing the testing tool itself Message-ID: In a message dated 3/26/99 8:17:16 PM, John McLaughlin wrote: >The computer program simply gives us a feel for how close >lexical similarity should be before we get excited enough to do the other >comparisons. Nice phrasing, appropriate. I will unfortunately have no time to work on these questions in any detail until summer. But the ability to use actual languages, gaps and all, without assuming we know anything about actual sound changes in advance, is crucial for any proposed computer program. My point is that we NEED TO TEST the purported test! That is, the computer estimate of random similarities needs to be structured so that it CAN be applied to actual data of actual languages, WITHOUT assuming sound changes or anything else in advance. Then we can see to what extent we like its conclusions on cases where the deep work of reconstruction HAS been done, and if we don't, then we have no business applying it to cases where the deep work has not been done. The purported tool (testing for random similarities) cannot be taken as even minimally valid unless it is itself continually TESTED and improved. Seems elementary to me. Have I missed something? Lloyd Anderson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 1 19:02:32 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 14:02:32 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at AOL.COM writes: >But the real question is what rate of change we see in Mycenaean. -- we don't see any change in Mycenaean, because it was only written for a century or two. >Deals were made, jokes were told, treaties were made and lovers talked, all >in spoken Latin. -- official documents were written in it, and scholars sometimes 'talked' in it. It was a dead language, like liturgical Hebrew. There were no Latin- speakers in medieval Europe, only speakers of French, Italian, German and so forth who acquired Latin as a second, learned language. And not very many of them, since it was an overwhelmingly illiterate rural society. >Look what you are saying here. If kids learn language from their parents, >then that language changes. All of creation disagrees with you. Getting it >passed on from your parents is supposed to be what passes it on unchanged. -- all spoken languages undergo change in every generation. Take a look at English. English spelling was highly phonetic when the orthography was standardized. People actually pronounced "knight" as "k-ni-gcht", not "nite", and so forth. It's now wildly un-phonetic because of massive sound-shifts. If you were transported back to Elizabethan England, nobody would know what the hell you were saying without elaborate repititions. The existance of a standardized spelling has not, to put it mildly, stopped this; and the changes continue and will continue. >The distinction you are making isn't rational. -- unfortunately for you, it's a distinction that can be found in any elemenatary linguistics texbook. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 1 19:41:52 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 20:41:52 +0100 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: Ed said: >I think z in Etruscan, certainly when written with Latin characters, was >actually a rendering of Greek zeta, pronounced dz (or maybe ts in certain >contexts) at the time (nowadays it is just English z). So, st > Etruscan z >could be just a metathesis. >Would this be valid? No metathesis is needed. Greek zeta routinely represented both /dz/ and /zd/. The latter is shown in such spellings as Athe:naze for Athe:nas-de (= to Athens). Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 2 05:11:58 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 00:11:58 EST Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: OK, as is commonly known, the Slavic languages are closely similar, and were sharing common developments rather late: Exemplia gratia: the Germanic proper name "Karl" (as in "Charlemagne"), which was loaned into Proto-Slavic and became the generic term for "King", for obvious reasons. (Rather as "Caesar" became "Emperor" in several languages.) This can be dated fairly precisely, since we know Karl the Great's dates (742-814). It then underwent the characteristic shifts of the various branches of Slavic. Which, of course, it wouldn't do if it had been borrowed later. So Common Slavic form would be *korlja, from which we get (Bulgarian) kral, (South Slav) kralj, (Russian) korol, (Czech) kral, and (Polish) krol. (Sorry, no accents on this email system). Therefore the characteristic developments of the various Slavic languages must post-date the early 9th century, at the very least. QED. Just to illustrate how close the Slavic languages _still_ are, the first line of the Lord's Prayer, and keeping in mind that languages get more different over time: OCS: Otice nasi ize jesi na nebesichu: da svetitu se ime tvoje. Polish: Ojcze nasz ktorys jest we niebiesiech: swiec sie imie twoje. Czech: Otce nas kleryz jsi v nebesich: posvet se jmeno tve. Russ: Otce nas suscij na nebesach: da svjatitsja imja tvoje. Serb: Oce nas koji si na nebesima: da se sveti ime tvoje. Bulg: Otce nas, kojto si na nebesata: da se sveti tvoeto ime. -- indicative, one would think, fairly clearly, of the closeness of the links we're talking about (far closer than between the Romance languages) and of reasonably complete mutual comprehensibility if we roll back twelve hundred years or so to OCS times. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Apr 2 05:43:14 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 00:43:14 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/1/99 03:01:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- no, it doesn't. That goes right on happening. Think "optical illusion".>> Please read what I wrote. I said one fights the other. I didn't say either wins. BOTH keep on happening. The need to standardize is just as natural as the urge to change and splinter. When mothers "correct" their childrens grammar and pronounciation, this is part of standardizing. It makes the child's language understandble to others. And it fights the child's natural tendency to play or be loose with the language it is learning. Both go on at the same time. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 2 06:48:55 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 01:48:55 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >That's indeed all "North-West Germanic" means. Mutual influence between North and West Germanic, after the split between North and East Germanic, and of course long after the split between West and North-East Germanic. -- given the existance of bridge dialects like Anglian (and Jutish, since the Jutes came from further north in the Danish peninsula), doesn't the idea of an old and sharp distinction between North and West Germanic look rather iffy? After all, if they'd been sharply separated linguistically at this very early date (500's, the Migration period), they wouldn't share innovations just because they were geographically close. It looks as if there was a fairly smooth continuum from pre-Danish through Jutish to Anglian to Frisian to Saxon. This isn't surprising, given the small area, the short distances, and the frequency and ease of travel by sea. From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 2 07:11:54 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 01:11:54 -0600 Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Sent: Thursday, April 01, 1999 8:22 AM I am very sceptical of final voiceless stops becoming "laryngeals". > Nom *gwnaik > *gwnaiH2 > Gen *gwnaik-os > *gwnaikos I would be much more inclined to see the genitive as having *gwnai-ko-, a regular adjective formation, as its base, and having the -s added by analogy with other genitive forms. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 2 09:23:27 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 09:23:27 GMT Subject: Basque <-ar>, <-(t)ar> In-Reply-To: <14325874320215@m-w.com> Message-ID: "Jim Rader" wrote: >To the best of my knowledge, Latin has no independent suffix <-aris>. > The adjectival suffix <-a:lis> appears as <-a:ris> when the base has >an in it: , , etc., but in all other >environments <-a:ris>: , , etc., and note > vs. . How the suffix <-a:lis> would have been >handled by Basque I couldn't say. Same as -aris: -ali(s) > -ari. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 2 10:20:50 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 03:20:50 -0700 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ray Hendon wrote: > My question is this: is there disagreement among linguists about IE as an > hypothesis? Are their linguists who dispute the IE model and posit some > alternative model of language development? If so, are the alternative > hypotheses credible? Or, is the IE model universally accepted as the only > possible explanation for how IE languages developed? I would go a little further than our esteemed moderator and would venture the opinion that the Indo-European "hypothesis" is probably the only thing that linguists don't argue about. In fact, as the quotes I placed around "hypothesis" show, the only reason we still call it a hypothesis is because of the small detail that we've never actually found a scrap of written Proto-Indo-European or heard a recording of it. John McLaughlin Utah State University From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 2 10:27:52 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 12:27:52 +0200 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] M.Carrasquer wrote: >The Frisians and/or Ingvaeones were not Scandinavian (in the >sense of North Germanic speaking). They merely inhabitated the >North Sea Coast area from the Roman limes up to the tip of >Jutland, the latter now linguisticaly Scandinavian territory. >After the collapse of Roman power, they spread along the coast to >South Holland, Zeeland and Western Flanders, while presumably >exchanging Jutland and Angeln for England. In any case these >areas became Danish-speaking, like Skaane and the Danish islands. [ES] Maybe they spoke that mixture called 'northwest Germanic' (understood as a mixture of west and north, NOT northeast, Germanic), but the linguistic result is the same, although it might not be 'a Scandinavian base profoundly influenced by Dutch/Low German' but just as well the opposite order of influence. On the other hand: I am not so sure the migration started only after the collapse of Roman power. The coastal people have always been a rather independant bunch, beginning with the Celtic Menapii of Caesar's time, probably because of the then still existing geographical isolation I depicted in the previous posting. >>I am not sure at all that you can say English wasn't influenced by >>Dutch/Low German, albeit in a somewhat convoluted way: Saxon itself is - >>or was - a (collection of) Dutch/Low German dialect(s), while Anglian may >>be considered to have been something in between Danish and Low German. >>[...] >>As to 'northwestern Germanic', I am very, very skeptical about that idea. >If you say Anglian was "in between Danish and Low German", I >don't see how you can be that skeptical. [ES] I was referring to the graphically rather confusing diagram of McCallister, that seems to suggest 'NW Germanic' to be a common child of NE and W Germanic, before the split of NE into N and E Germanic. Probably, that interpretation of the diagram was wrong. In that case : sorry. >>The least you can say, is that it is not a necessary hypothesis. >>Postulating mutual (or one-way west > east?) influence between east- and >>west Germanic seems sufficient to explain the observed phenomena. There >>was ample opportunity for it to occur after the split of northeast into >>north and east Germanic [MC] >That's indeed all "North-West Germanic" means. Mutual influence >between North and West Germanic, after the split between North >and East Germanic, and of course long after the split between >West and North-East Germanic. [ES] See above, plus this: I was also speaking about E<=>W mutual influence: a certain (hypothetical?) 'westernization' of Gothic, and some rare cases of E Germanic penetration in the west (mainly toponyms, like the various little rivers called Aa < Ahwa, and derivations like Breda, as far as I know), probably during the migrations of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, I presume. Does anyone have more precise and substantiated data on this? Ed. Selleslagh From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 2 11:20:16 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 13:20:16 +0200 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: M. Carrasquer wrote: >There are reasons for thinking that the similiraties between N >and E Gmc are older than the similarities between W and N Gmc, >but I'd have to look them up. In any case, these successive >layers ("Gotho-Nordic", "North-West") make it more difficult than >it already should be to pin down Proto-Germanic to a particular >date. All I can say is that North Germanic feels like a >"shallow" group, comparable with Slavic (c. 1500 years), while >West Germanic appears to be more diverse, comparable with Romance >(c. 2000 years) or slightly more, while Germanic as a whole >definitely feels older than Romance, so 3000 years cannot be too >far off. In fact, given the interactions that went on, Germanic >might be older than it looks. E. Selleslagh: I completely agree with your diagnostic. Another way of rough dating, which unfortunately cannot include Italic, is by looking at the 'layering' of linguistic territories in Europe: they are indeed bands tilted from SE to NW. If one assumes that this happened during successive migrations (propagation of languages or people or both, or whatever) from roughly the N shore of the Black Sea to the North Sea/Atlantic Ocean, whereby every new layer came geographically 'on top' (more to the NE) of the previous one because the more SW band was already occupied, the oldest are the Celts (not considering the Upper Palaeolithic/Neolithic natives like the Basques), then the Germanic peoples and finally the Balto-Slavic ones (and much later on the Finno-Ugrians in N and E Europe). That leads me to the following presumptions: 1.The split of Germanic into W and NE is probably older than that of Balto-Slavic into its components. 2.but younger than that of Italo-Celtic (for those that believe in it) into Celtic and Italic, 3.but still a lot older than Romance, a late colonial phenomenon. Apart from that, the rather important differences between N Germanic and E Germanic seem to indicate that even the splitup of NE Germanic is pretty old (much older than that of Low - High German anyway). E. Selleslagh From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 2 13:26:37 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 14:26:37 +0100 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] In-Reply-To: <008a01be7c51$b7dd9560$190d4a0c@default> Message-ID: On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote: > But I do have a question about Indo-European as the proto-language > for most of Europe. It seems to me the IE is an hypothesis that > posits the existence of an Indo-European language that was actually > spoken by some ancient population. The hypothesis further asserts > that this language is this mother language of many Asian and > European languages and subsequently spawned child-languages over > Asia and Europe. Celtic, Germanic and Italic languages, to name a > few, are, then, child languages of IE. To be finicky, the hypothesis is that a single ancient language, which we call Proto-Indo-European (PIE), was spoken somewhere in Eurasia some thousands of years ago, that this language -- unrecorded, because its speakers were illiterate -- underwent the ordinary and remorseless processes of language change, that -- as usual -- different changes occurred in different areas, and hence that regional varieties of PIE diverged to such a degree that they became quite distinct and mutually incomprehensible languages, the languages we call the Indo-European languages. This splitting happened repeatedly, so that the several immediate daughters of PIE themselves often gave rise to sub-families of several distinct languages. The core of the hypothesis, then, is the single common ancestor, PIE. The kind of model that we apply to the development of the IE family is called the `family-tree model', and it stresses the centrality of divergence in giving rise to languages. > My question is this: is there disagreement among linguists about IE > as an hypothesis? Not today, no. > Are their linguists who dispute the IE model and posit some > alternative model of language development? Yes, but not for the IE family. At present there are a number of linguists who argue that the family-tree model is not universally valid, and that some languages have developed in other and more complex ways. For example, Bob Dixon argues that the Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia have developed in a very different way, with convergence being more important than divergence. Other types of convergence model have been proposed by Jeff Leer for the Canadian language Tlingit, by Roy Miller for Japanese, by George Grace for certain Melanesian languages, and by Uriel Weinreich, Bob Le Page, C.-J. N. Bailey and others for various cases. Malcolm Ross has recently been defending a complex divergence-convergence model for certain Pacific languages and more generally. And everybody now accepts the reality of mixed languages like Michif, Ma'a and Mednyj Aleut, which clearly have not arisen in a manner consistent with the family-tree model. > If so, are the alternative hypotheses credible? They may well be credible for some cases, and my own view is that they are established beyond dispute in a few cases. I think it is fair to say that historical linguists in general no longer believe that the family-tree model represents the only way in which languages can arise. But there remain disagreements about the degree to which the family-tree model is generally valid. Some of us prefer to see family-tree divergence as the norm, with the other things being rare and eccentric. Others of us see the complex patterns as the norm, with family-tree divergence being unusual. > Or, is the IE model universally accepted as the only possible > explanation for how IE languages developed? The family-tree model is *not* universally accepted as the only possible model of the rise of languages. But it *is* universally accepted today as the best model of the rise of the IE family of languages. In the past, however, such linguists as C. C. Uhlenbeck, Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Antonio Tovar all rejected the family-tree model of the IE family, preferring instead to see the IE languages as having arisen out of some kind of mixture of two or three distinct and unrelated languages. In this view, of course, PIE never existed. But all three of these men are dead, and I know of no linguist who takes such ideas seriously today for IE: we can reconstruct so much intricate and complex grammar for PIE that it simply *must* have existed. A "language mixture" scenario is just not consistent with the elaborate grammatical system which can be reconstructed for PIE and which is substantially preserved in at least the earlier IE languages. As our moderator has noted, non-linguists sometimes believe that we historical linguists have been doing everything wrong for 200 years. I myself am quite satisfied that we have not, and that these outside critics have no idea what they are talking about. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Fri Apr 2 13:55:28 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 15:55:28 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <3718fe36.215719489@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > [...] >There is not a shred of evidence that the neuter nom/acc. forms > should be derived from *-sd, *-rd/*-nd/*-ld, *-id or *-ud. >[...] > I like JER's suggestion of -n > -r (and I would add -nt > -r(t), > to explain yakrt etc., and -mn > -mn to explain the neuter > n-stems), and I like (of course) my own suggestion of -t > -H1, > -k > -H2 (which would make the feminines in -H2 (-H1?) originally > neuters, which is good). Well, thanks for that, words of a kind rarely experienced. As to the hot question of **t going to *H1 in pre-PIE times, I was of course as appalled by the idea as supposedly most everyone else, but it IS a fact that the stative verbs (morpheme /-eH1-/ of Lat. sed-e:-re) and the neuter s-stems go together (Lat. sede:s 'seat'; more impressively e.g. fri:gus/frigeo; rigor/rigeo; tepor/tepeo etc.), in that the s-stems denote the state something is in if the stative verb can be used about it (what friget is in frigore etc.). Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with stm-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. These testify to the earlier existence of an independent phoneme (in PIE a morphophoneme) that could be posited as /c/ and given the "reading rule" that it is realized as /-s/ word-finally, and as /t-/ in other positions. It would be the IE marker of second person, verbal 2sg *-s, 2pl *-te (2du *-t- + unclear stuff, but surely something more than just the -t-), pron. *tu, *t(w)e [I'll keep my derivation of *yu(:)s, *usme and *wos from protoforms with *t(w)- out of this] which shows that the rules run deep. --- Now to the point: Is there any way of formulating a sound rule so as to get a stative noun *le'wk-ot/-es- to contain the same suffix as the stative verb *luk-e'H1-, i.e. have we any way of equating nominal //le'wk-ec-// and verbal //lewk-e'H1-//?? It does not look like a word-final change of *t to *H1. I also think it too simple to have /c/ go to /H1/ immediately after the accent, as the simple formula ivites one to assume. It is perhaps significant that the verbal stem is always followed by verbal morphemes, either the personal markers directly or the durative aspect marker *-ye'/o'- or a mood marker. On the other hand, I do not think it significant that the functional relationship between the noun and the verb appears to differ a bit from that of denominative verbs at large, for, even if *luk-eH1- is not "make light", but to "be light", that may simply be the middle voice of the denominative which would of course explain the middle inflection of the Sanskrit passive which is this category, say s'ru:yate 'is heard' from *k^lu-H1-ye'-tor, where the underlying stem //k^lew-e'H1-// would then be the same alternant of //k^le'w-ec-// (*k^le'w-os 'fame, rumour') as in the other pairs. A change from [t] to [h] (which is what /H1/ was in PIE when retained as a consonant) is parallelled by Irish and Middle Iranian as the development of spirantized /t/. So, if there is reason to believe that a pre-PIE *k could be spirantized to PIE *H2, as in the non-active 1sg marker (perfect *-H2a, middle thematic *-a-H2 corresponding to other Eurasian *-k), we may also envisage a spirantization of the funny dental of the "s-stems" (better, "s/t-stems") into something which thereupon developed further to [h] (H1). But under what conditions? Who can answer this problem by "Ni' hansae"? Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 2 14:42:20 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 08:42:20 -0600 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter &/or Graham Sent: Thursday, April 01, 1999 1:41 PM > No metathesis is needed. Greek zeta routinely represented both /dz/ and > /zd/. The latter is shown in such spellings as Athe:naze for Athe:nas-de > (= to Athens). Is it not just as likely that Greek zd in these circumstances metathesized to dz so that zeta always represents dz? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) [ Moderator's response: Probably not, since inscriptional spellings do occasionally show for . -rma ] From MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Apr 2 16:04:22 1999 From: MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 16:04:22 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] {luna} means "moon" in Latin and also in Russian. But Palmer's book "The Latin Language" says that Latin {luna} < *{louksna:} [= "the white object", after the old IE word *{ma:n-} or similar became taboo due to superstition]. Is the Russian form a loanword from Latin (which seems unlikely) or parallel evolution? How can I get a copy of Palmer's book "The Latin Language"? [ Moderator's response: Amazon.com shows it as available from the University of Oklahoma Press; the ISBN is 080612136X, if you want to order it from a closer source than Amazon.com. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 2 20:18:23 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 20:18:23 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>jorna at web4you.dk writes: >>I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic and >>Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then like >>virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and Danish. >-- exactly. If we put the earliest Avestan around 1000 BCE or a little >earlier, and the earliest of the Vedas around 1200-1500 BCE, which seems >generally accepted... >... then the date for Indo-Iranian unity would be around 2000 BCE. At which >point all the Indo-Iranians were still in Central Asia and points north, >apparently. So how does tis contradict my initial statement that Vedic and Avestan "feel" somewhere in the 500-1500 year range? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Fri Apr 2 22:58:36 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 14:58:36 PST Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Hi Steve (and IEists) In a message dated Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:53:09 EST Steve Long wrote: >In a message dated 3/26/99 04:30:24 AM, xdelamarre at siol.net wrote: ><dialects) is extremely uncertain>> {SL] >I've been confused as to why none of the replies mention a possible Greek >connection. I'm may be missing something very obvious again. Please >forgive me ahead of time. >The old Celtic-Greek contact point in the south of France is well >established. "Aner, andr-" is man (versus female, as opposed to >"anthropos" - man versus beast.) "Androo", to become a man or raise to be >a man, in Classical Greek was sometimes generalized to the feminine. >"Andris" in later Greek I believe came to be used as woman. And in such >terms as "anandria" (want of manhood, eunuch, unmarried woman) the term was >extended beyond the male. Couldn't this be the Greek word with a Romance >feminine ending dropped on it? What have I missed? [RF] Over the years the relationship between the Euskeric form which is in composition has been subjected to a number of interpretations, the most recent, to my knowledge, being Vennemann's (1998) discussion of it which appeared in his article "Andromeda and the Apples of the Hesperides". This was published in the Proceedings of the Ninth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference" JIES Monograph Series No. 28. I would refer you to the section appearing on pp. 12-17. He argues that we are dealing with a item that should be classed as "Vasconic". According to Vennemann's scenario "Vasconic" is one of three language families spoken in post-Ice Age Western Europe (ca. 8000 BC). Hence, in his simulation, the item passed from the lexicon of Vasconic to that of Euskera. It was also passed on from Vasconic to the lexicon(s) of West Indo-European languages. Thus, we are not dealing with a model in which an Euskeric item is posited as the source for the apparent reflexes of it in IE languages, rather there is a higher node that facilitates the transfer. It is from that node that the source of the reflexes found in the lexicons of both Euskera and IE should be sought, again according to Vennemann's model. In reference to the section of Vennemann's article cited above (pp. 12-17), first I should state that I disagree with his interpretation of the ending of the Aquitanian items, and (Gorrochategi 1984: 130-132). He argues that the endings <-xo> and <-xso> do not represent the common diminutive suffix in Euskera, namely, <-txo>, while Larry argues that they do. I fully side with Larry: the suffix is unremarkable from the point of view of Euskera. Having said that, I would suggest that the overall thrust of Vennemann's argument is worthy of consideration, namely, a model that posits a higher node and consequently, an older source for the IE and Euskeric items alike. In such a simulation of events, one could argue that originally the item was used in reference to a "woman" and that over time the term was generalized to refer to "human, person". In the final stages, as the positions held by such persons came to be "masculinized", i.e., as the positions of responsibility and authority (beyond the realm of the household) became more significant and the duties associated with them were fulfilled primarily or even exclusively by males, the expression's referentiality would have changed, i.e., its referent would have become a "masculinized." Here I am speaking of positions in the "public sphere". This line of argument has another advantage in that does not mean simply "woman" in Euskera, rather it is, strictly speaking, a form of address that carries the force (more or less) of "Lady, Mistress" in English. Its counterpart is , as I believe Larry pointed out quite clearly in another message. For example, when called by her name, a schoolteacher is referred to as "(the) Lady/Mistress so-and-so". I would note that as a title is regularly used to refer to post-pubescent females and there is some indication that it was once reserved for women who had born children, but that distinction is not entirely clear. Hence, if, in our model, we posit that initially the expression functioned primarily as a form of address, the shift in meaning would have been even simpler. If I am not mistaken I recall reading somewhere that the translation (or at least one of the translations of) proposed for and (IE) was "mensch" which would imply a wider spectrum of referentiality. Sorry I can't give a source. In addition, there is another piece of evidence that could be brought to bear in such a modeling of events. In Euskal Herria the importance of the role played by the woman in the household, particularly the elder female of the family, is quite well established. Her title was from "house", <-ko> "of". Literally translated, it means "lady-of-(the) house" and is pronounced roughly as . Again the expression is a totally normal one in Euskera today. Some years back while I was doing archival work on Basque law codes, I came across a document from Navarre written in Spanish (Navarrese?). As I recall it was from about the 15th century. There was a section it outlining the duties that were assigned to a group of important males, the of the village. Further research would be needed to determine whether at the time the document was composed, Euskera was still being spoken in the zone where the segment in question was written. However, it is a region in which Euskera had been spoken in centuries past. These individuals called (i.e., sing. ) are referred to throughout the text in the masculine so there is no question about their gender. Moreover, from the duties assigned, it is likely that the group as a whole was composed exclusively of men. In short, in this concrete case there is little question about the ultimate female referentiality of the "title" of , its derivation from . Yet it is likely that those (monolingual) Spanish-speakers who wrote the code in question had little or no idea that the term's original referent was to the "lady-of-the-house." Returning to Vennemann's thesis that / was passed on both Euskera and West Indo-European languages from the earlier so-called "Vasconic" family of languages, the simulation (if it were fully developed, that is, obviously not as it's being presented by me here, namely, in a totally schematic fashion) would elaborate on the evidence available for the type of replacement outlined above. It would emphasize the increasing importance, over long periods of time, assigned to roles played outside the immediate household environment, e.g., outside the socio-political structures of household, by males. For example, for the remote period in question initially we would be talking of small-scale structures characteristic of societal units based on an economy of transhumanic pastoralism and primitive agriculture, supplemented by hunting, fishing and gathering activities. In our simulation, such a society would not have had an elaborately organized "public sphere", i.e., one that was totally separate from the familial one. In the model discussed here, the anecdote cited above concerning serves as an example of what might have happened, naturally, on a much wider scale, when */* (or a phonologically similar prototype) as a title of respect for female elders (and mature females) came to be used with post-pubescent males, also. And eventually, again according to this simulation of events, the expression ended up with an altered referent because of the societal changes taking place, i.e., the increasing importance given to public positions that were held primarily or perhaps exclusively by males as well as the emergence of a more complex organizational structure for the society as a whole. So, Steve, in terms of what you might have missed, maybe it's the possibility of ladies becoming gentlemen. Keep in mind the above is merely a modeling of events in prehistory. Yours is another. It draws on similar data but organizes it differently. For instance, if I am reading your remarks correctly, your model asserts that the original referent of the item was a "male human being, man" and that this meaning was later generalized to mean "woman" given that there appears to be evidence (cited by you) in Greek for the word's field of referentiality to contain "woman" also. But that would be a later development in your simulation. In the one cited above, the reverse would be true. A couple of final comments and queries for you (and others). In your simulation, there is an element that is lacking, in my opinion: a mechanism to explain why it's the secondary meaning of the Gk. word, rather than the primary one that we find showing up in Euskera and Celtic. And on that point I would note that in your modeling of events you speak of a "contact point" in the south of France, which I assume refers to the geographical location where the Gk. term passed into Celtic (as well as being the general vicinity in which Aquitanian/Euskera was spoken). If I am reading your simulation correctly, that would mean that the Gk. term's meaning --at that point in time when the linguistic contacts took place and the expression passed into Celtic (and Euskera?)-- must have been to the female of the human species. Right? Would it be possible for you to provide your model with more specificity in terms of the time frame that we might be talking about for this "contact period". Also, what is the time-depth that should be assigned to the Gk. reflexes according to your model? And for others on the list, does anyone know of possible reflexes of in Romance, e.g., in Occitan, Aragonese or Navarrese? Best regards, Roz Frank Contribution # 3. April 2, 1999 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [currently on leave in Panama] From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 02:29:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 02:29:52 GMT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <1f02534c.2435ab9e@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Exemplia gratia: the Germanic proper name "Karl" (as in "Charlemagne"), >which was loaned into Proto-Slavic and became the generic term for "King", >for obvious reasons. (Rather as "Caesar" became "Emperor" in several >languages.) >This can be dated fairly precisely, since we know Karl the Great's dates >(742-814). >It then underwent the characteristic shifts of the various branches of >Slavic. Which, of course, it wouldn't do if it had been borrowed later. >So Common Slavic form would be *korlja, from which we get (Bulgarian) kral, >(South Slav) kralj, (Russian) korol, (Czech) kral, and (Polish) krol. (Sorry, >no accents on this email system). We can simulate them: Russ-Ukr , BRus , Cze , Pol , Sorbian (< Czech), CS *korljU. >Therefore the characteristic developments of the various Slavic languages >must post-date the early 9th century, at the very least. QED. Except that the date is too late. E.g. Chernyx, "Istorichesko- 3timologicheskij slovar' sovremennogo russkogo jazyka": Obychno, slovo ob"jasnjajut kak odno iz rannix zaimstvovanij iz germanskix jazykov (verojatno, dr.-v.-nem.), kak peredelku na slavjanskoj pochve imeni frankskogo korolja Karla (Velikogo). Pravda, xronologicheskij moment (v VIII-IX vv. obshcheslavjanskie perezhivanija uzhe zakanchivalis' ili zakonchilis', a zdes' predpologaetsja imenno obshcheslavjanskij process: *karl- > *korl-) vnosit izvestnye trudnosti pri ob"jasnenija 3togo slova iz . (Usually, the word is explained as one of the early borrowings from the Germanic languages (probably OHG), as a transformation on Slavic soil of the name of the Frankish king Karl (Charlemagne). It's true that the chronological moment (in the XII-IXth. cc. the common Slavic `experiences' were already ending or had already ended, and what is suggested here is precisely a common Slavic process: *karl- > *korl-) raises the known difficulties at explaining this word from ) [Couldn't resist giving the Russian because of the nice illustration of imperfective/perfective aspect: ] >Just to illustrate how close the Slavic languages _still_ are, the first line >of the Lord's Prayer, and keeping in mind that languages get more different >over time: A careless transcription is worse than no transcription (I'm blaming Mallory, not you). I'll try to set that right, but I don't have access to all the right sources right now: >OCS: Otice nasi ize jesi na nebesichu: da svetitu se ime tvoje. otIc^e nas^I iz^e jesi na nebesIxU: da sve,titU se, ime, tvoje. >Polish: Ojcze nasz ktorys jest we niebiesiech: swiec sie imie twoje. ojcze nasz kto'rys' jest w niebiesiech: s'wie,c' sie, imie, twoje. >Czech: Otce nas kleryz jsi v nebesich: posvet se jmeno tve. otc^e na's^ ktery'z^ jsi v nebesi'ch: posve^t^ se jme'no tve'. >Russ: Otce nas suscij na nebesach: da svjatitsja imja tvoje. otc^e nas^ sus^c^ij na nebesax: da svjatitsja imja tvoe. >Serb: Oce nas koji si na nebesima: da se sveti ime tvoje. oc^e nas^ koji si na nebesima: da se sveti ime tvoje. >Bulg: Otce nas, kojto si na nebesata: da se sveti tvoeto ime. otc^e nas^, kojto si na nebesata: da se sveti tvoeto ime. >-- indicative, one would think, fairly clearly, of the closeness of the links >we're talking about But careful. The Russian above, for instance, is just as idiomatic as English "thy name be hallowed". >(far closer than between the Romance languages) and of >reasonably complete mutual comprehensibility if we roll back twelve hundred >years or so to OCS times. Allright. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 02:41:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 02:41:35 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <92b0028f.2435c257@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>That's indeed all "North-West Germanic" means. Mutual influence between >>North and West Germanic, after the split between North and East Germanic, >>and of course long after the split between West and North-East Germanic. >-- given the existance of bridge dialects like Anglian (and Jutish, since the >Jutes came from further north in the Danish peninsula), I've never seen any Jutish, and Anglian only of the non-continental variety. Neither Kentish (sometimes though to be the continuation of Jutish on Englsih soil) nor Anglian look particularly like "bridge dialects". It's true that O.E. is probably the West Germanic language with most similarities to North Germanic (even before the Viking era). >doesn't the idea of >an old and sharp distinction between North and West Germanic look rather iffy? Old but not sharp. I think it's completely logical that West Germanic and North Germanic started to diverge a long time ago (surely many centuries BC), while at the same time not ceasing to converge... >This isn't surprising, given the small area, the short distances, and the >frequency and ease of travel by sea. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sat Apr 3 03:17:17 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 19:17:17 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Let's see if I get it straight this time... :) Pre-IE IE Anat > CS Greek *-t *-t *-t *-H1 - *-k *-k (*-h) *-k -k *-p *-H3 (*-h) *-H3 - Now, apparently, you love this theory because of its symmetry. Of course, it would be just as symmetric to believe that the earth is in the center of the universe. However, regardless, I see no symmetry here. Where do you manage to find it? It seems to me to be a very false theory for three reasons: 1. **-t > *-H1 Besides the fact that this sound change itself lacks more than one or two examples, *H1 could really be any consonant or even a long vowel according to your "evidence". A <-t> is found only in Anatolian and outside of Anatolian we can't say WHAT laryngeal it should be (if at all) let alone if there's a correlation between these non-Anatolian forms and the Anatolian ones. Your sound change is reduced to this, only on an exceptionally sunny day: **-t ?> *-(H) (?) 2. **-k > *-H2 In your own words: "Anatolian has -t, but not *-k (> *-H2 > -a [n.pl.])". There's no indication in any known IE language of **-k being archaic and a lack of such an entity doesn't require explanation because such a finite set of endings will undoubtedly fail to end in something. IE lacks *-bh, *-g and possibly *-l too but I don't see you crying over this trivia. For this particular sound change, you rely purely on the pecularities of Greek and isolated examples like Sanskrit , which shouldn't have *-k, remember? I shouldn't have to go on. That kind of logic in itself is deplorable and if Greek -k- does point to a laryngeal somehow we cannot, as in the first sound change, nail this down to anything more specific than this: **-k ?> *-(H) (?) 3. **-p > *-H3 Again, let me refer you to yourself who said, "AFAIK, there's no evidence for **-p (or for *-H3 as a grammatical suffix). It's merely there for symmetry." Symmetry or aesthetics? No **-p and no *-H3. It's quite clear. In summary, this is what your very uncertain idea amounts too: **-t ?> IE *-(H) (?) **-k ?> IE *-(H) (?) By the way... ME (GLEN): Come on, Miguel. First, why does it end in -nx instead of **-nk? Are y'sure it's not from IE *-nk-s? MIGUEL: Of course it is. The point is that there are (AFAIK) no _neuters_ in -nk, which I explain by hypothesizng that absolute final -nk would have given -r[H2], and a paradigm -rH2/-nk- would have subsequently been the victim of Ausgleich. Perhaps _I_ was the victim of Ausgleich myself. :) If Greek is animate (VERY animate, I hear) and with *-s I fail to see how this is important to our discussion about an unattested "second" form of an _inanimate_ heteroclitic with an unattested **-k. In the future, make sure that what you say sticks to the topic at hand. Afterall, we WERE talking about Uralic's connection to IE at one time...but I'll let that one slide for now. :P ME (GLEN): First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). MIGUEL: Which is obviously false. Obviously how? There is no **-dh as far as I know and since there aren't many examples of various suffixes ending in *-t and *-d aside from the inanimate and the 3rd person singular in IE, I severely doubt that IE speakers made a phonemic distinction between the two. Since *-t [3psing secondary] could very well be easily associated with the primary *-ti with a solid *-t- by both IE speakers and later IEologists, it's not surprising that we should see a *-t in the third person rather than a *-d but a distinction isn't necessary in IE reconstruction. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 04:17:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 04:17:10 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <003a01be7cfc$2c179b60$d104703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >On the other hand: I am not so sure the migration started only after the >collapse of Roman power. This is true. Or we can say that the collapse itself was a gradual thing (especially in that part of the world, with the Franks accepted into Roman territory as "foederatii" as early as AD 358). >>>As to 'northwestern Germanic', I am very, very skeptical about that idea. >>If you say Anglian was "in between Danish and Low German", I >>don't see how you can be that skeptical. >[ES] >I was referring to the graphically rather confusing diagram of McCallister, >that seems to suggest 'NW Germanic' to be a common child of NE and W >Germanic, before the split of NE into N and E Germanic. Probably, that >interpretation of the diagram was wrong. In that case : sorry. The diagram was mine. Here it is again: Proto-Germanic / \ West Germanic North-East Germanic \ / \ ("North-West Germanic") East Germanic / \ West Germanic North Germanic I tried (by using both quotes and parentheses) to indicate that "North-West Germanic" is not in the same category, Stammbaum-wise, as North-East Germanic (see Larry's message on Dixon/Ross/convergence/divergence, etc.) Maybe without labeling... Proto-Germanic / \ West Germanic North-East Germanic \ / \ \ / \ ) ( East Germanic / \ / \ West Germanic North Germanic Compare Malcolm Ross' diagram for Fijian-Polynesian, where he uses ==== to denote a dialect continuum or "linkage": Central Pacific linkage =========================================== | | | | West Fijian linkage Tokelau-Polynesian linkage =================== ========================== | | | | | | | Tokelau-Fijian linkage Proto-Polynesian | ====================== | | | | | Fijian linkage | ====================================== As in the case of Germanic, this explains the shared innovations between East Fijian (Tokelau means "East") and Polynesian [when both were on East Fiji, relatively separated from West Fiji], as well as those between West and East Fijian to the exclusion of Polynesian [due to renewed contact between West and East Fiji after Proto-Polynesian had left]. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 04:43:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 04:43:13 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <2064C7398D@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: >{luna} means "moon" in Latin and also in Russian. But Palmer's book "The >Latin Language" says that Latin {luna} < *{louksna:} [= "the white object", >after the old IE word *{ma:n-} or similar became taboo due to superstition]. >Is the Russian form a loanword from Latin (which seems unlikely) or parallel >evolution? Parallel evolution. If we apply the usual Slavic soundlaws to *louksna: we get *luxna, which becomes *luna by the Common Slavic open syllable rule. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 3 05:13:26 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 05:13:26 GMT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990402225910.43298.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "roslyn frank" wrote: >Having said that, I would suggest that the overall thrust of Vennemann's >argument is worthy of consideration, namely, a model that posits a >higher node and consequently, an older source for the IE and Euskeric >items alike. In such a simulation of events, one could argue that >originally the item was used in reference to a "woman" and that over >time the term was generalized to refer to "human, person". Vennemann, as I read him, is not claiming that Greek , G. "man, male" (PIE *H2ner-) has a Vasconic etymology. He merely claims that the element -andr- in a word like and names such as Andromeda, Andromache and Kassandra might be derived from a Vasconic *andr- "woman" instead of Greek "man". >These individuals called (i.e., sing. ) are referred >to throughout the text in the masculine so there is no question about >their gender. Moreover, from the duties assigned, it is likely that the >group as a whole was composed exclusively of men. In short, in this >concrete case there is little question about the ultimate female >referentiality of the "title" of , its derivation from >. I'm not familiar with the term "chandros", who it refers to, or what the history of the word is, but on the evidence presented here, I don't see any compelling reason to derive the word from . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iglesias at axia.it Sat Apr 3 16:36:26 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 08:36:26 PST Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I (Frank Rossi) wrote: >>However, in the area around the city of Rome itself, unlike the country >>districts of Lazio, the language has changed even more due to the outside >>influence of Tuscan, itself a descendant of Latin, but with an Etruscan >>substrate. Rick McCallister, asking me to elaborate ("Oh, dear!"), wrote: >I've read several in several places that the fricativazation of >medial stops is said to be from Etruscan but in others that this phenomenon >only dates back to the 1500s or so. > But given that Etruscan died out around the time of Caesar, it >could not have had too much of an effect on local Italian I took my time answering, as I wanted to check a few things. Facts: a) The Etruscan language had both unvoiced stops (p, t, k) and three "aspirated" stops (ph, th, kh). b) Latin replaced Etruscan in Tuscany, which was "the region less affected by processes of language mixing" (Giacomo Devoto), in part because the Roman colonies (Sutri, Cosa, Heba) and, consequently the colonists, were few in number. This means that the Etruscans (like the Gauls, etc.), without going into the process by which the change took place, changed their language and adopted Latin. c) Florentine, which is the basis of the Italian language, developed from the local Tuscan Latin. d) In modern Italian, there are only the unvoiced stops (p, t, k). e) In modern Tuscan, in various areas and with various degrees of intensity, the unvoiced stops are replaced by the "aspirated" stops (ph, th, kh) (the effect is a bit like Irish English, but I'm not suggesting that the Tuscans are Gaels!). f) The Tuscan dialects are clearly differentiated from the adjacent dialects by concentrated sets of isoglosses. None of these dialects exhibits the same kind of phenomenon. Opinions: a) One school of distinguished linguists (Ascoli, Meyer-Luebke, Pisani, Contini, Rohlfs) maintains, as Rick says, that "Etruscan ... could not have had too much of an effect on local Italian". b) Another school of equally distinguished linguists (Schuchardt, Bertoni, Merlo, Battisti, Castellani, Geissendoerfer) consider this a (delayed effect) substrate phenomenon. Further considerations: - The first mention of this phenomenon, again as Rick says, dates back to the 1500's. However, Dante also spoke of the shocking language of Tuscans ("Tusci in suo turpiloquio obtusi"), without explaining what he meant. - The Tuscan language spread to the rest of Italy (with the notable exception of Venice, where the local language continued in official use alongside Tuscan until the fall of the Republic in 1797) as a written language considered superior (thanks to Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, ...) to all the other alternatives available. In other words, Italian was not carried physically into the rest of Italy by the Tuscans themselves with their own characteristic pronunciation. The various regions adopted Italian, alongside their local dialects (*), with people in each region reading Italian with their own local accents. This is also why, despite some attempts in this century to create a standard Italian pronunciation ("Prontuario di pronuncia della RAI", etc.), spoken Italian is still largely "italiano regionale". (*) The term "dialect" as used in Italy is also confusing. The Milanese "dialect", for instance is considered an "Italian dialect", but it is not a dialect of the Italian language, in the sense that Cockney or Broolyn English are dialects of the English language. Milanese is a Lombard dialect and part of the Gallo-Italic "diasystem" that never developed into a single written language with official status. However, the "italiano regionale" of Lombardy is a dialect or variant of the modern Italian language and is used, at least outside the major cities, in a diglossic situation with the Milanese "dialect" proper. All this *may* mean that the Tuscans, wrote "casa" (probably for etymological reasons), but pronounced "hasa". The other Italians in the meanwhile adopted the written Tuscan language, but read "casa" with /k/. It was only later, when contacts with actual Tuscan speakers became more frequent, that other Italians who used Italian as a written language, but whose native spoken languagage was not Tuscan, began to notice the "strange" pronunciation of the Florentines and other Tuscans, cf. Roberto Benigni ("Yes, in Italian too"). ***** I also mentioned in my original posting the "romanesco" dialect of Rome. To which Rick added: >What I notice about Roman speech is >/-L- > 0/ e.g. figlio > "fio" >/-nd- > -nn-/ e.g. andiamo > "annamo" The first of these phenomena, although in not so extreme a version, is common in other Romance dialects, cf. "yeismo" in Spanish. The second, which is characteristic of Central-Southern Italian dialects, including Neapolitan, etc., but *not* Tuscan and *not* North Italian, is also considered a substrate phenomenon going back to pre Latin times. According to Domenico Silvestri in the chapter of the Italic languages in the Italian version of "The Indo-European Languages" edited by Paolo Ramat (which I assume is similar in the English version), a number of phenomena of assimilation (nd>nn, pan Italic; mb>m, in Umbrian only) that can be observed in the phonetic history of the dialects of the Italo-Romance area clearly have their roots in the Italic tradition. This phenomenon also exists in Spain, in Aragonese, and was discussed by Ramo'n Mene'ndez Pidal in "El Idioma espan~ol en sus primeros tiempos", where he also discusses the delayed substrate effect. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 3 09:11:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 04:11:27 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/1/99 2:03:39 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- there isn't enough difference between the Slavic languages even now for there to have been any significant distinction at that time. >> One has to watch oneself on this list, or one will forget what point one was originally making. Just to repeat: I've still seen no direct evidence that OCS was comprehended or even heard by the northwestern Slavic speakers who lived in the Elbe-Oder area in the time OCS first rolled out. (And possibly include the Poles in that. The Czechs heard OCS, but how much of it they comprehended is another matter.) My ORIGINAL statement was in response to Miguel's point about the original gradiated PIE dialects in Europe being "swallowed up." I said that the "swallowing-up" languages he mentioned were all standardized languages and I included Slavic as being in the process of standardizing from the earliest evidence we have. I wrote: <<<> There is no question that Russian (or Eastern Slavic) and Church Slavonic converged. As Comrie writes: "...Old Russian of this early period was characterized by diglossia [between the] (the low variety) and Church Slavonic (the high variety). With the passage of time, the divergence between the two varieties lessened, in particular with many Church Slavonic forms gaining acceptance into even the lowest forms of language." And from everything that the Greeks tell us, this standardizing was intentional. And it certainly also went on in Serbian and Bulgarian To say that this convergence was already entirely there contradicts this evidence that OCS was a standardizer. Of course, it's a matter of degree. And obviously it is easier to standardize two Slavic languages into a single "official" tongue than it would be Japanese and Bantu. But my point again is that Slavic was already being standardized from the very first evidence of anything Slavic. <> Documented in the case of Latin. But unfortunately for your premise, undocumented in Slavic. And unfortunately for my premise, undocumented in PIE. <<-- sigh. We have written records of Polish and Russian from the 11th century on. Take a look. They were extremely similar back then, too. Much more so than now, in fact.>> Actually, the first sentence in Polish shows up in the late 13th Century and real text comes from middle 14th Century. Before that there are only proper names written with little system so that many sounds are "almost impossible to distinguish." The evidence therefore is some 500 years after OCS originates. The first Russian appears of course in OCS texts, so that it is arguable that it is in fact Russian. At the time of a valid direct comparison between Polish and Russian however there are fairly significant "differences in how words are stressed, vocabulary and numerous syntactic and morphological developments," perhaps more than would be expected "given the extreme instabilities of the borders between the two languages." << Also, the extreme archaism of OCS (and of the Slavic languages generally) argues powerfully that they were quite uniform then.>> And of course as we have learned on this list, Germanic is "archaic," while Slavic is merely conservative - although it shares many features with the "innovative core" that Germanic does not. However it seems that since we assume that all these IE language groups were once "uniform" (for about ten minutes at least) - archaism proves nothing about when they were uniform. Finally, the problem with reconstructions, of course, is that they are to a lesser or greater degree conjectural, which is fine for linguistic modeling. But taking such reconstructions as hard evidence for some broader historical fact or pet theory may be going too far. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 3 09:23:02 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 04:23:02 EST Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 6:40:19 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> Wait, are you saying they shared common developments after splitting up? Then that means some of the similarities were due to "mutual contact" and not common ancestry. That goes against your premise. <> What you might as well say is "rather as Caesar became Kaiser or Tsar." Does that prove something about the relation of German and Russian? How do we characterize the sound shifts difference between czar, tsar and kaiser? (More interesting is the relation of "karl" to such words as "churl", "coerl", "krailik" and "czele" and the fact that the individual name "Karl" shows up in a 900 Graeco-Russian treaty alongside of names like "Boris" and "Vlad". That's a little more tricky. Almost makes you wonder which way the borrowing went.) <> Unless of course your original assumption is incorrect and it doesn't specifically refer to Charlesmagne and is earlier. Which is certainly possible. All depends on what "karl" meant before Charlesmagne and whether any Slavic-speakers could have access to that word and meaning, doesn't it? <> Hmmm. Indubitable. <> Or sometimes, as in the case of Russian and OCS, closer. <> I am not going to tell you that this example does not reflect a similarity after at least 1200 years of provable separation. But I wonder what it proves about 800 ace. I just wonder if words like "father," "your", "heaven" and "hallowed" and the common liturgical prayer of Christianity however are where you look to find the active differences between languages. <> This is the problem of how you judge "closeness" again. John Green writes of "the high degree of lexical overlap" between the modern Romance languages, "using the standard lexicostatistical 100-word list." And that "intercomprehensibity...is also good in technical and formal registers, owing to extensive borrowing from Latin..." (Borrowing from a 'dead language' should be illegal.) In any case, I don't think you'd find very much incomprehensibility - if any - of their own pater noster's among Romance speakers. <<...of reasonably complete mutual comprehensibility if we roll back twelve hundred years or so to OCS times.>> I think that all anyone can say with confidence is that it is possible - especially given the "chaotic" way languages behave - if I remember your description in an earlier post correctly. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 3 15:03:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 16:03:01 +0100 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <2064C7398D@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > {luna} means "moon" in Latin and also in Russian. But Palmer's book > "The Latin Language" says that Latin {luna} < *{louksna:} [= "the > white object", after the old IE word *{ma:n-} or similar became > taboo due to superstition]. Is the Russian form a loanword from > Latin (which seems unlikely) or parallel evolution? According to C. D. Buck, Russian is an independent Slavic formation from the stem meaning `bright', just like the Latin word. Even Old Church Slavonic has for `moon'. The same stem provides Armenian , Old Irish , and Welsh , all `moon'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 3 15:43:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 16:43:19 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990402225910.43298.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Well, I'm no IEist, but I confess myself baffled by Vennemann's suggestion (if it is his) that Greek `man' continues a "Vasconic" stem also continued in Basque `lady'. First, it seems clear that the /d/ in the oblique stem of the Greek word, as in genitive , is epenthetic, just like the /d/ in English `thunder', and that must be secondary for original *. Second, all of the admittedly limited sources available in my office agree that the Greek word is straightforwardly derivable from a PIE stem *, or perhaps *. The sense of this stem is disputed, and both `man' and `strong' have been proposed, at least. This stem is taken as the source of all the following: Greek `man' Oscan/Umbrian `man of rank' Latin (personal name) Middle Welsh `chief, master' Old Irish `strength' Sanskrit `man' Avestan `man' Albanian `man' Armenian `man' As far as I -- a non-specialist -- can see, the IE status of the word is demonstrated, and there is no problem to be solved by appealing to an implausible "Vasconic" influence. And anyway Basque has both the wrong form and the wrong meaning. Any comments from the specialists? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roborr at uottawa.ca Sat Apr 3 16:23:04 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 11:23:04 -0500 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: You should also check Golab's "The origins of the Slavs - A linguist's View", which has discussion of Italic-Slavic parallels (p. 121 for the luna example), although one might argue wth the analysis). At 04:04 PM 4/2/99 GMT, you wrote: >{luna} means "moon" in Latin and also in Russian. But Palmer's book "The >Latin Language" says that Latin {luna} < *{louksna:} [= "the white object", >after the old IE word *{ma:n-} or similar became taboo due to superstition]. >Is the Russian form a loanword from Latin (which seems unlikely) or parallel >evolution? [ moderator snip ] From iglesias at axia.it Sat Apr 3 21:00:21 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 13:00:21 PST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In response to my posting: >In this discussion it should be kept in mind that Old Portuguese and Old >Galician, spoken in the NW corner of the Iberian peninsula, were *the same >language*, from the time when the South of Portugal with Lisbon was still >under the Moors and the local people there spoke a Mozarabic dialect until >quite some time after the independence of Portugal. >So the question is did Portuguese /u/ preserve the older pronunciation or >did modern Galician /o/, (which is described as "very closed" by >phoneticians). Rick wrote: >You need to keep in mind that "neo-Galician" essentially uses a largely Spanish pronunciation. We agreed on this in previous postings, but this was not because Castilian completely replaced Galician as it (and Portuguese) replaced Mozarabic in the "reconquered" areas, but rather because modern Galician (dialects) developed in parallel with "Spanish", i.e. Castilian (see Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1971, chapter on "El Gallego"), no doubt because they all formed part of the same state, the Kingdoms of Galicia and Asturias being incorporated in the Kingdom of Leon, which later united with the Kingdom of Castille. The term Neo-Galician needs to be defined. Rick is referring, I assume to the semi-artificial common Galician language that had to be developed when Galician was recognized as an official language, a situation similar to Batua for Basque (comments by Larry and the Basque experts appreciated), and even Catalan in the last century, before Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan Studies Institute, was practically reduced to a series of dialects. True Miguel? However, the Galician dialects continued to be spoken in the country without interruption by at least 80% of the total population, even before the restoration of the official status of Galician, and for these people, Castilian was always a foreign, albeit closely related language. (A Mexican friend and colleague of ours once said to my wife: "Oh, yes, but for you people of Northern Spain in general, Spanish is a foreign language!") Also, since we discussed this, I have been told by contacts in Galicia that the dialects of the Western coast are practically indistinguishable from Northern Portuguese in their pronunciation (no "zeta", etc.), but strangely they are more similar to Castilian in their morphology (PAPEL-PAPELES); the Eastern dialects are the opposite (PAPEL-PAPEIS). The Neo Galician language, with the backing of the Autonomous Government of Galicia, has apparently emphasized the "Spanishness" of Galician - and not the contrary - by using Western morphology and Eastern pronunciation. The Lusophiles in Galicia who want instead to accentuate the roots of their language, use more Portuguese oriented spelling conventions, e.g. Espanha, but they are not in power in the local government and their preferred versions are used, as far as I know, only in a few magazines, books, etc., precisely because of the lack of official support. What I am trying to say is that Neo-Galician for most of the dialect speakers of Galician is not a "Post-Castilian" language, as they never spoke Castilian, except as a foreign language. In Alava, on the other hand, many people have learned Euskera ex novo starting from Castilian. . For the Castilian native speaking minority in Galicia (less than 16%), there are two situations: a) For the Galicians (like my wife Pilar), whose language is objectively Castilian, but with a Galician substrate that is clearly noticeable in their pronunciation and other aspects, learning Neo-Galician is a "return home", as these people (less than 7%) all understand Galician more or less and are very much attached to their roots, cf. the Irish. As we (Frank and Pilar) said before, for the Portuguese, the Galician pronunciation may be very Castilian, but for the other Spaniards it's very "gallego", i.e., spoken or sung by people or even witches (meigas) or cloud-riding sorcerers (nubeiros) on broom (toxo) covered heaths with a background of bagpipe (gaita) music in thick Atlantic mists (bretema) or fine drizzle (orvallo) :) b) For the other Spanish speakers who live in Galicia, although their numbers are limited (less than 9%), and it is to be hoped this does not apply to the Basque and Catalan speakers among them, Neo-Galician may seem a diabolic invention of Galician nationalists to diminish the glory of Spain - Una, Grande, Libre - as they used to say in the times of Franco, but the language is probably here to stay and will probably draw closer to Portuguese. (I have been told, for example, that a lot of Galicians are now subscribing to Brazilian magazines, etc., and this gives them a whole new outlook on the world). It is also interesting to note that, of the three non Castilian official languages in Spain (Galician, Basque and Catalan), Galician is the one with the highest levels of speakers of the language : 91.02% understand Galician 84.19% speak Galician (1991 census data) against: 94% understand Catalan 68% speak Catalan in Catalunya-Catalun~a alone (1991 census data) 88.2% understand Catalan 61,6% speak Catalan in Catalunya, Comunitat Valenciana (Catalan speaking areas) and Illes Balears (1986 data) and 30.09% understand Euskera 22.38% speak Euskera in the Comunidad Auto'noma Vasca-Euskal Autonomi Erkidekoa (Basque Country) only. (1991 data). I gave the figures for Navarra-Nafarroa in an earlier posting, but for completeness I repeat them below: 10.22% speak Euskera understand Euskera 16.4% The situation has apparently improved considerably for all three non Castilian languages since then. Finally, and this is the point, it is probable that not only the Galician dialects, but also standard (Lisbon) Portuguese also changed considerably from the original "galego-portugue's" brought from the North by the "reconquistadores", as can be inferred by the fact that the Northern Portuguese dialects are in many ways still closer to Galician than to standard Portuguese, again as discussed in recent posts. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Apr 3 18:52:18 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 13:52:18 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >edsel at glo.be writes: >probably during the migrations of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, I presume >> -- the Burgundians and Vandals also went through Western Europe, the former permanently; they were East Germanic speakers. Those _Volkerwanderung_ period peoples were extremely mobile. The Vandals started out in what's now Poland, moved down to the Danube, bounced back up and crossed the _whole_ of Germany, crossed the Rhine in 407, moved all the way down to Spain, then crossed to North Africa and went all the way to Tunisia. There were 80,000-100,000 of them in all, too. (Or more; Gaeseric had them counted as they left Spain, but that was after one branch of them was wiped out.) And they did it all in a single lifetime. In fact, if you leave out the stops along the way, they did it in about 10 years. This should give pause to those who consider large-scale long-distance migrations "implausible". The Vandals did it on foot or with ox-carts (minus a short sea-voyage from southern Spain to North Africa). The technology wasn't overwhelmingly different from that available to a similar tribe in 3000 BCE, although the Roman road system would have helped once they'd crossed the Rhine. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Apr 3 19:06:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 14:06:08 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >So how does tis contradict my initial statement that Vedic and Avestan >"feel" somewhere in the 500-1500 year range? >> -- well, if proto-Indo-Iranian unity is around 2000 BCE, and our attested Vedic and Avestan (the Gathas, the oldest layer) are somewhat prior to 1000 BCE, then the range would be 400-800, not 500-1500. That fits with the archaeological data, too. And, of course, the languages remained in contact through a continuous arc running from the Zagros to the Ganges. (The ancient Persians didn't call themselves Iranians, after all; they and the IE-speaking inhabitants of India used the same ethnonym.) One would like to know how peculiarly Indo-Aryan the words in Mitannian are; but there we have the problem that they're loanwords in another language and written in an awkward syllabic script that blurs details. From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Sun Apr 4 04:55:43 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1999 22:55:43 -0600 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Dear Mr. Trask: Thank you for responding so thoroughly and informatively to my poorly phrased and uninformed questions. I was most reluctant to pose any question about language, given my utter ignorance in the field. I certainly had no intention of sounding a challenge to those in the field of historical linguistics about the veracity or accuracy of IE. Being professionally skeptical, however, I did want to consider the possibility that IE, as an hypothesis, would be subject to the rules of all hypotheses, and vulnerable to evidence that would just as convincingly point to the opposite conclusion as to the expected conclusion. I appreciate your correcting my vocabulary about child vs daughter languages. My choice of words probably was influenced by my work in the computer industry where "child" accounts, "child" processes, etc. are encountered frequently. I can see the necessity of substituting the word daughter for child, as the word child has an immature connotation to it that would not be appropriate for a fully developed language. Your comments and explanation of the family tree model was also most helpful. Certainly in Europe, where the dominate languages share such obvious roots, a family tree model would be the handiest and most logical model to explain divergence. I wonder if the Asian languages of China, Korea and Japan share a similar background of divergence due to isolation. I must confess that your last point relative to the possibility that IE developed from more than one language, did cross my mind as I was investigating the issue. So, I felt it worthwile to ask about it. I am convinced now, that the IE model has stood the test of time, analysis and criticism, and accept your assertion that while IE may not be the only accepted model of linguistic development, it does the best job of explaining how most European languages developed. The only question I have now is, where does the Africian languages (Hebrew and Arabic, primarily) enter the IE equation? Is it assumed that prior to PIE, the Asian and Africian languages that were non PIE were influencial in the ultimate development of PIE? Surely there were many words that came from these sources, given the importance of the religious vocabulary available to the Hebraic people. Thanks again for taking the time to help me out. I am deeply appreciative of your efforts. Ray Hendon From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 4 07:57:34 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 10:57:34 +0300 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: <3710764c.180924324@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >"Glen Gordon" wrote: >>Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. >Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx). Just out of curiosity, is there anything particular about 'lynx' that sets it apart from the numerous other words for animals and birds in Greek* that end with /x/, so that one might think that the final consonant cluster is ancient rather than being a secondary formation using a classificatory marker? * e.g.: glaux "owl" kokkux "cuckoo" korax "crow" ortux "quail" aix "goat" alopex "fox" hyrax "shrew mouse" bombux "silkworm" murex "murex" and even phoenix "(a mythical bird)" Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 4 08:21:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 04:21:27 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 4:00:25 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- official documents were written in it, and scholars sometimes 'talked' in it....There were no Latin-speakers in medieval Europe, only speakers of French, Italian, German and so forth who acquired Latin as a second, learned language. And not very many of them, since it was an overwhelmingly illiterate rural society.>> Everything you've said above is either incorrect or unprovable - except for the point that Medieval Latin was probably always a second language. (EB White disagreed.) You have not and probably cannot find a single primary source that limits Latin in the way you would like. But there are plenty that contradict you. Even someone like William of Nassyngton (1300's), an advocate of English over Latin and French, clearly states that Latin is spoken by the educated, the lawyer, the foreign merchant and at court - his point is while "only some speak" Latin and French, everyone - even "the lewd" - speak English. On the other hand, Welsh or Scottish - or scholars, for that matter- aren't even mentioned. [ Moderator's comment: Wales was not conquered by the English until the 14th Century, so Welsh would not be of concern to a 14th Century Englishman, Scottish--whether you mean Scots or Gaelic--even less so. However, *all* of the examples of speakers of Latin are drawn from the educated classes, so your point is unproven. --rma ] There were many reasons Latin was spoken and sometimes extensively in the middle ages. The need for a common language in international diplomacy, law and trade was an obvious one. Another one was that the early native tongues of Northern Europe were simply inadequate in communicating reliably in detail. This was unambiguously spelled out in the mid 800's by Otfrid - one of the first to produce a written text in west Germanic - in a letter to Liutbert, Archbishop of Mainz. Otfrid points out that the Frankish of the time lacked not only vocabulary, but was "uncultivated and undisciplined", where for example two negatives in a sentence do not make a positive: "... This language, you see, is considered to be country, because by its own speakers it has never been polished in writing nor by any art at any time. Indeed, they do not even memorize the stories of their forbears, as many other peoples do, nor do they embellish their deeds or life for love of their worth. On the other hand, if, though rarely, this does happen, they expound rather in the language of other peoples, that is, Latin or Greek." <<...who acquired Latin as a second, learned language.>> But a language none the less. [ Moderator continues: A second language differs greatly in internal processing from a first, and is used *consciously*, unlike a first. Thus, change in a second language will be different in kind from a first language. --rma ] <> And totally illiterate before the arrival of Latin. But yes there had to be quite a few or they would have stayed illiterate - since they had to be able to use the Latin alphabet and transpose its sounds to become literate. But in any case we can be sure there were certainly hundreds of thousands more than the 70 speakers that can constitute a "language" in New Guinea. <> Here! Here! But that's aside from the point - the point being that writing helps to regularize sounds and pronounciation - if it didn't, we'd know nothing about past languages - since all we know about them is from writing. <> So therefore the following comparison by you is meaningless, because those spellings are not to be trusted. Same with your comparisons of OCS and Polish. <> <<<<<< a meaningless comparison due to the rampant changes language goes through "every generation"!!!>>>> I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- unfortunately for you, it's a distinction that can be found in any elemenatary linguistics texbook.>> I'm not sure you even noticed what the distinction was. And I'm afraid you'll have to give me a cite for any textbook that contradicts what I wrote. I've looked and I can't find one. In a message dated 4/1/99 4:01:28 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<<<-- once a language is no longer used and learned by children from their parents, it fossilizes because it's not subject to the usual pressures of linguistic change. The pace of change in it slows down dramatically.>> I wrote: <> [ Moderator continues: What he said is that languages learned naturally, which is to say as first languages, change in ways that differ greatly from languages learned by intentional schooling. And *of course* languages change when children learn them from their parents--this is one of the tenets of historical linguistics! --rma ] JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<--- all spoken languages undergo change in every generation.>> So QED mothers are the cause of change in language. And the reason Latin doesn't change is because it isn't taught by mothers. All of creation still disagrees with you. [ Moderator's conclusion: You are being argumentative for the sake of argumentation. Mothers are not the cause of language change, children--well, young people--are. And the reason that Latin does not change is that children do not learn it in the same way that they learn their first languages. --rma ] Regards, Steve long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 4 08:24:32 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 04:24:32 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 10:52:28 PM, MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk wrote: <> Just a reminder that Slavonic and Russian are not entirely congruent: 'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' (princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. <> Lidell-Scott suggests 'luna' is contracted from luc-na, v. luceo - to shine. (Lux, lucis, however, is fairly strongly associated with daylight.) L-S also cites Gr, luchnos, leukos; OHG, lioht and - believe it or not - "Sanskrit, 'ruk', to be bright,..." The moon in Cl. Greek is 'meis, menos' (or 'selene' - apparently from the Dorian 'selana'). L-S gives (cross my fingers) '*m&emacrns' as IE stem. [ Moderator's comment: Liddell & Scott can be trusted for definitions, but the etymologies are very often holdovers from pre-Neogrammarian 19th Century thinking, unrevised in more than a century. In any case, _luceo_, _lux_, and congeners are related to English _light_ and Skt. _ruk-_; the questionable item is their _luc-na_. --rma ] <> Interesting. How did we find out about this taboo? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 4 08:50:35 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 04:50:35 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/2/99 4:00:25 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- we don't see any change in Mycenaean, because it was only written for a century or two.>> Although I've been told that language can change wildly or not change at all, for no reason at all, I find this notable if true. There is a curve that is observable with the coming of literacy. A fair number of IE languages do show quite a bit of change in their first centuries of literacy - if for no other reasons then just getting the characters and their sounds straight. If Mycenaean truly shows no sign of change during the centuries from the time it was first written, that would seem unusual. And certainly might suggest some kind of standardizing had gone on before the appearance of Linear B. Or at least the same time. Otherwise we would expect "dialectic gradients," wouldn't we? [ Moderator's query: In accounting ledgers??? --rma ] Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 4 15:31:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 11:31:54 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The NeolithicHypothesis] Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 9:59:31 PM, Larry Trask wrote: <> Without contradicting any of the above, I think it might be worthwhile to point something out. The divergence/family tree model may explain the "rise" of the IE family, but it doesn't completely explain how the IE groups got to where they are today. Two other factors are worth consideration. One is the possible removal of early "branches" that could affect the accuracy of reconstruction. The other is the convergence that occurred when later dialects were standardized or heavily borrowed from. For example in a message dated 3/15/99 5:21:05 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote with regard to early PIE dialects: << ...any initial dialect gradients that came into being have been destroyed by later language spreads. Celtic has been largely swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern Europe with new dialect gradients. Etcetera.>> This kind of "swallowing up" might lead us to accept the trait of an intermediate language as the trait of an earlier ancestor. Another example is John Green's statements in TWML's that Romance could not have evolved directly out of standardized Latin, while yet citing the extensive borrowings from Latin, which implies that at some point Romance and Latin diverged and converged. "Family-tree classifications,...give only crude indications of relationships in Romance and tend to obscure the convergence brought about by centuries of Latin borrowings and criss-crossing patterns of contact [which resulted] in a high degree of lexical overlap in the modern Romance languages." Another example is the observable convergence of Russian and OCS. It makes sense that such convergences, if mistakenly seen as commonalities resulting from a common ancestor or PIE itself, could skew reconstruction away from a true triangulation. This would be especially true in large wholesale characterizations such as centum/satem, where convergences of later diffused terms of trade or uniformity might give a false impression of early ancestry. Given the massive amount of words involved however it would seem that numbers alone favor the reliability of reconstruction in general. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Apr 5 17:01:33 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 10:01:33 -0700 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis Message-ID: >On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote: >> But I do have a question about Indo-European as the proto-language I would of course endorse the responses you have had, especially from sources I respect so much, but I would also add a caveat: the family tree model explains the origin of the PIE languages, but cannot be used exclusively to explain their subsequent development. We also need language-contact models, and convergence models, including the notion of "sprach-bund". This affects individual languages, but there are also scholars who have argued that the entire Germanic language family, for example, is a contact-language; though I believe support for this is not strong at the moment. So alongside the diverging family-tree model, we need other models which describe other linguistic processes, even for IE. Peter From iglesias at axia.it Mon Apr 5 17:02:21 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 10:02:21 -0700 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Further to my posting which ended as follows: >Finally, and this is the point, it is probable that not only the Galician >dialects, but also standard (Lisbon) Portuguese also changed considerably >from the original "galego-portugue's" brought from the North by the >"reconquistadores", as can be inferred by the fact that the Northern >Portuguese dialects are in many ways still closer to Galician than to >standard Portuguese, again as discussed in recent posts. To complete my "pleading", I found the following information on the above in my usual source (Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1971, chapter on "Evolucio'n de la lengua portuguesa", p. 217): "... for Re'vah (1) there must have been a very ancient tendency to close to /u/ all unaccented "o"'s, *except in final position* although this tendency was contrasted by the "cultista" reaction which always replaced the orthographic and etymological "o", while final "e" and "o" were uniformly represented by closed "e" and closed "o" (2) until the early decades of the 18th Century" (1) I.S. Re'vah, "L'e'volution de la prononciation au Portugal et au Bre'sil du XVIe sie'cle a' nos jours" ("Anais do primeiro Congresso Brasileiro da li'ngua falada no teatro", Rio, 1958) and "Comment et jusqu'a' quel point les parlers bre'siliens permettent-ils de reconstituer le syste'me phone'tique des parlers portugais des XVe-XVIIIe sie'cles ("Actas do III Colo'quio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros", vol. I, Lisboa, 1959). (2) It is curious to note that this is the present pronunciation of Galician." [end of quotation] *.. * = my emphasis FR If this is true, then it is demonstrated that Portuguese final /u/ is not a continuation of the Latin nominative case, which was our starting point. In the same context (p. 220) I also found the following: "Important phonetic changes (although no longer reflected in spelling) that took place in the *18th Century* were, for example, the transformation into a fricative (Eng. "sh") of the affricate (Eng. "ch") (1)... (1) While for Joa~o Franco Barreto, who published his "Ortografi'a da li'ngua portuguesa" in 1671, and for Joa~o de Morais Marureira Feijo', whose "Ortografi'a ou arte de escrever e pronunciar com acerto a lingua portuguesa" was published in 1734), the fricative pronunciation of "ch" was a dialectal feature of *Estremadura*, for Luis Antonio Verney ... who published his "verdadeiro Me'todo de Estudar" in 1746, it is the most correct and recommendable pronunciation. [end of quotation] *.. * = my emphasis FR The affricate pronunciation is still used in Galician and Northern Portugal (where however it is *now* considered incorrect), e.g. "chamar" vs. "shamar". The demonstrates simply that, like European and American English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French), in the case of Portuguese and Galician (or, if you prefer, the Galician dialects) sometimes it is one of the variants that innovates and sometimes the other. Portuguese innovated on final "o" and fricative "ch" (= "sh") All Galician (with the exception of a few isolated areas), in parallel with Castilian, Asturian, etc., innovated in the unvoicing of voiced "s" and "zh" and (most of Galicia, but not all) in pronouncing "zeta" as "th". I rest my case. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 5 07:18:10 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 03:18:10 EDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: In a message dated 4/2/99 11:25:13 PM, roslynfrank at hotmail.com wrote, with regard to the following: <> < serves as an example of what might have happened, naturally, on a much wider scale, when */* (or a phonologically similar prototype) as a title of respect for female elders (and mature females) came to be used with post-pubescent males, also.>> I can't say that any of what you or Prof Vennemann have conjectured about the word are not true. I am only questioning whether perhaps more recent influences might account for the word. <> Here's some theories based on documented Greek or Greek/Latin contact in the south of France all before the current era or soon after. One is that the word is a learned word, passing into "French dialects" (and Euskera?) without any necessary phonetic change, from some very specific sources that we have some very firm evidence of. "Andria" appears in a somewhat famous comedy by the Roman playwright Terence. Andria > Woman of Andros. Andros being one of the Cyclades . The story is sometimes titled "The Maid of Andrus". (Thorton Wilder wrote a bestseller titled "Woman of Andros" based on the story. ) More generally, Andrius, a, um, adj., of Andros, one of the Cyclades. There was a late Roman commentary that I didn't quite get that I think suggests that the term "andria" had some wider meaning that was used ironically in the play. (The play is about a courtesan who grows old while being in love with a younger man. Perhaps the irony is that the audience knew "andria" to mean 'maid' or 'lady.' I don't know.) Perhaps it existed in vulgar Latin and we simply have no other record of it. Perhaps it was a proper name that turned into a category (e.g., Caesar, Jezebel, Karl>krol, Rurik>Rus, etc.) Also I would like to known about the the first appearance of the given name "Andrea" and how it might be related. In any case, you have an instance of "andr- andri-a" in use in Classic Latin refering to a woman (a Greek woman.) The passage of the word from 'and-ri-a" to "and-er-a" of course is no more complex than the passage of the proper name 'Alexandros' to 'Alexander'. It could perhaps have gone from Latin to Romance along the same path as other "learned" words (e.g., fragilem> fragile, versus frele.) and then to Euskera. This puts perhaps a rather late date on it. Another theory is that Andros, the Greek island was involved earlier. The island is mentioned by Greek writers as having formed a fair number of early (pre-300bce) colonies, and was associated with the also Ionian Phokia, which is in turn credited with the founding of the Greek colony Massilia (Marseilles) about 600bce. Also just about 80 miles north of Massalia was located ANDERITUM (sometimes called Gabalum as the chief city of the Celtic Gabales), also later a fairly important Roman center. (The word would have moved east and north with other Greek borrowings that occur in early French.) The premise here would be that at some point rich or "patrician" ladies of Greek descent or persuasion were referred to by their ancestral associations. This is a fairly common way of refering to women (but not men) with the use of foreignisms or group self-names. When Mark Twain wrote "the room was blessed here and there with pretty senoritas," he is doing something similar. In English, similar usage happens when a female is referred to as a "coleen" or a "fraulein." or for that matter "hausfrau." Similar is the accepted source of the "polka" (the dance) as "polska" although "polka" without the "-s-" seems to be the self-name. Also, "mazurka." Perhaps a good example as it transfered into English is "madame" - which can connote both status and meaning beyond the male equivalent (monsieur) but comes with an awareness that the word is a foreignism. The last theory is a little tougher. Did "aner, andri-" expanded in meaning as a Greek colonist self-name to include both genders - and then contract to mean only the female? Well perhaps it was originally related to a special traditional female vested right based on Greek descent. There is a parallel of sorts - "dowager" never refers to anyone but a female and is used to convey social status and age and as much as legal status. And like one of my favorite words with a similar stem, "center", it could be a Greek word (kentrum") with multiple meanings that completely jumped Latin and ended up in French with one of those meanings. Also there is the possibility of a calque of "ananderia" which with the prefix "ana-" (without) was used by Classic Greek writers to refer to widows - perhaps a special status in context. None of this is meant to deny a Vasconic derivation, but only to suggest that a later Greek source might be possible, if not probable. Regards, Steve Long From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Apr 5 08:53:26 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 03:53:26 -0500 Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: Have the discussants read Herb Izzo's Etruscan language, dismissing the substrate theory on the origin of gorgia toscana? j p maher Frank Rossi wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Rick McCallister, asking me to elaborate ("Oh, dear!"), wrote: [ moderator snip ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 09:27:22 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 05:27:22 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Old but not sharp. I think it's completely logical that West Germanic and >North Germanic started to diverge a long time ago (surely many centuries >BC), while at the same time not ceasing to converge... -- well, if it's old, wouldn't it be sharp? Jutish and Anglian would have been in physical contact with early Danish -- after all, it's a mightly small peninsula/islands up there. The archaeology shows large boats were in use from the Bronze Age on, and most of the population lived in areas fairly near the coast. Trade and political interaction were close and continuous. And there was plenty of mix-and-match movement during the Migration period; Frisia was in close contact with Scandinavia, and people from Sweden were raiding Gaul in the 6th century. Tales like that of Beowulf were common to the whole area. The original migrants to England seems to have included virtually every Germanic group accessible from the North Sea coast, with the main source area stretching from what's now Holland up through the tip of Denmark. Some groups (the Angles, for instance) apparently moved over _en masse_, permanently affecting the linguistic makeup of the former homelands. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 09:33:45 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 05:33:45 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Just to repeat: I've still seen no direct evidence that OCS was comprehended >or even heard by the northwestern Slavic speakers who lived in the Elbe-Oder >area in the time OCS first rolled out. -- loanwords in the various Slavic languages indicate that their distinctive features emerged fairly late; hence, at the time OCS was written down, it merely represented the southern edge of a dialect continuum which was still mutually comprehensible across the entire area of Slavic speach. Or to put it simply: all the Slavs were still speaking dialects of a common, mutually intelligible language. If they weren't, the loanwords wouldn't have undergone the (subsequent) changes that they did. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 09:47:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 05:47:08 EDT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Wait, are you saying they shared common developments after splitting up? -- no, I'm saying that the existance of common innovations allows us to date the split. Which was late. >What you might as well say is "rather as Caesar became Kaiser or Tsar." -- that's what I said. It's significant in Slavic, because the word was borrowed _uniformly_ into the proto-Slavic language and then underwent the characteristic developments of the various (later) languages. >"Karl" shows up in a 900 Graeco-Russian treaty alongside of names like "Boris" >and "Vlad". That's a little more tricky. Almost makes you wonder which way >the borrowing went.) -- no, it doesn't, unless one is playing useless games. You are aware, aren't you, that Scandinavians founded the Russian state, and constituted a ruling class there for several generations? Complete with their personal names, which only gradually became Slavicized as they were assimilated? You know, Rurik of Jutland, those guys? >All depends on what "karl" meant before Charlesmagne and whether any >Slavic-speakers could have access to that word and meaning, doesn't it? -- the actual meaning in the Germanic languages was roughly "retainer" or "follower", originally. (As in "huscarl"). Charlemagne campaigned extensively in the East; he was the pattern of a "powerful king"; the Slavs, who were at a much more primitive level of political evolution, adopted the word as their term for a ruler. As to access to it, there are Germanic loanwords in proto-Slavic (some specifically Gothic) and the Slavs have always been in at least intermittent contact with the Germanics. >But I wonder what it proves about 800 ace. I just wonder if words like >"father," "your", "heaven" and "hallowed" and the common liturgical prayer of >Christianity however are where you look to find the active differences between >languages. -- take another sentence, then. And how is the religious element going to affect linguistic evolution, in this precise case? Face it, all Slavs could communicate in 800 or so. From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 11:39:46 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 11:39:46 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990403031719.59395.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >Let's see if I get it straight this time... :) >Pre-IE IE Anat > CS Greek > *-t *-t *-t *-H1 - > *-k *-k (*-h) *-k -k > *-p *-H3 (*-h) *-H3 - Not quite. I mentioned no -k in Greek, merely a possible alternation -H2 ~ -k-. >1. **-t > *-H1 >Besides the fact that this sound change itself lacks more than one or >two examples, *H1 could really be any consonant or even a long vowel >according to your "evidence". A <-t> is found only in Anatolian and >outside of Anatolian we can't say WHAT laryngeal it should be (if at >all) let alone if there's a correlation between these non-Anatolian >forms and the Anatolian ones. One good example is all it takes. Beekes reconstructs the instrumental sg. as -(e)H1. The instrumental (where it exists at all and isn't made with *bhi/*mi) shows a lengthened vowel in all roots (-a: for a:-stems, -i: for i-stems, -o: or -e: for o-stems), which can only mean -H1. Hittite has -it (< *-et). If we postulate a development **-t > *-H1, the Hittite form can be connected to the others [as well as to other, extra-IE, instrumentals in -t, if we so wish. I give you Georgian -it, Sumerian -ta]. >2. **-k > *-H2 >In your own words: "Anatolian has -t, but not *-k (> *-H2 > -a >[n.pl.])". There's no indication in any known IE language of **-k being >archaic and a lack of such an entity doesn't require explanation because >such a finite set of endings will undoubtedly fail to end in something. >IE lacks *-bh, *-g and possibly *-l too but I don't see you crying over >this trivia. The supposition is merely that if there are masc/fem. roots in -k or -t (nom. -ks, -ts), we might expect some neuters too, and there aren't any. This may be due to an Auslautgesetz, as suggested by the few clues we have (ins. sg. -t ~ -H1, fem. -H2 ~ -k-). >For this particular sound change, you rely purely on the pecularities of >Greek and isolated examples like Sanskrit , which shouldn't have >*-k, remember? I shouldn't have to go on. That kind of logic in itself >is deplorable and if Greek -k- does point to a laryngeal somehow we >cannot, as in the first sound change, nail this down to anything more >specific than this: > **-k ?> *-(H) (?) Surely -H2, if anything. >3. **-p > *-H3 >Again, let me refer you to yourself who said, "AFAIK, there's no >evidence for **-p (or for *-H3 as a grammatical suffix). It's merely >there for symmetry." Symmetry or aesthetics? No **-p and no *-H3. It's >quite clear. Symmetry is aesthetics, aesthetics is symmetry. >In summary, this is what your very uncertain idea amounts too: > **-t ?> IE *-(H) (?) > **-k ?> IE *-(H) (?) I agree the whole thing is uncertain, but one question mark suffices: **-t > *-H1 (?) **-k > *-H2 (?) >By the way... >ME (GLEN): > Come on, Miguel. First, why does it end in -nx instead of **-nk? Are > y'sure it's not from IE *-nk-s? >MIGUEL: > Of course it is. The point is that there are (AFAIK) no > _neuters_ in -nk, which I explain by hypothesizng that absolute > final -nk would have given -r[H2], and a paradigm -rH2/-nk- would > have subsequently been the victim of Ausgleich. >Perhaps _I_ was the victim of Ausgleich myself. :) If Greek is >animate (VERY animate, I hear) and with *-s I fail to see how this is >important to our discussion about an unattested "second" form of an >_inanimate_ heteroclitic with an unattested **-k. See above. There are in general no formal distinctions in (Pre-)PIE between animate and inanimate nouns as far as the shape of their stems are concerned. So if there are a lot of animate nouns in -nts (and a few in -nks), we'd expect a few neuters in -nt at least. Instead we have a few irregularities involving -r(t), -r(k) and -nt- mixed into the heteroclitics. >ME (GLEN): > First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes > nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation > contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). >MIGUEL: > Which is obviously false. >Obviously how? Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 12:11:28 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 12:11:28 GMT Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Frank Rossi" wrote: >Facts: >a) The Etruscan language had both unvoiced stops (p, t, k) and three >"aspirated" stops (ph, th, kh). >[...] >d) In modern Italian, there are only the unvoiced stops (p, t, k). But for an analysis of the system as a whole, it's not unimportant to add that Italian also has b, d, g; pp, tt, kk and bb, dd, gg... Etruscan *only* had p, t, k and ph, th, kh. >e) In modern Tuscan, in various areas and with various degrees of >intensity, the unvoiced stops are replaced by the "aspirated" stops (ph, >th, kh) (the effect is a bit like Irish English, but I'm not suggesting >that the Tuscans are Gaels!). In fact, I did compare the gorgia to the Goidelic mutations somewhere recently (Romanesco, on the other hand, has Brythonic mutations: la hasa / la gasa). >f) The Tuscan dialects are clearly differentiated from the adjacent >dialects by concentrated sets of isoglosses. None of these dialects >exhibits the same kind of phenomenon. >Opinions: >a) One school of distinguished linguists (Ascoli, Meyer-Luebke, Pisani, >Contini, Rohlfs) maintains, as Rick says, that "Etruscan ... could not have >had too much of an effect on local Italian". Well it could have, but not more than a millennium after its death. >b) Another school of equally distinguished linguists (Schuchardt, Bertoni, >Merlo, Battisti, Castellani, Geissendoerfer) consider this a (delayed >effect) substrate phenomenon. >Further considerations: >- The first mention of this phenomenon, again as Rick says, dates back to >the 1500's. However, Dante also spoke of the shocking language of Tuscans >("Tusci in suo turpiloquio obtusi"), without explaining what he meant. >[...] >All this *may* mean that the Tuscans, wrote "casa" (probably for >etymological reasons), but pronounced "hasa". That's the only hope the Etruscan substrate theory has: that the gorgia went unnoticed and unwritten for over a millennium (maybe in remote illiterate areas of Tuscany?) until it became fashionable in the Tuscan cities, sometime around 1500... I must say I find that hard to believe. Rohlfs also objects that the Corsican dialects show no trace of the gorgia, despite the (physical, not literary) Tuscan influence on Corsican. >According to Domenico Silvestri in the chapter of the Italic languages in >the Italian version of "The Indo-European Languages" edited by Paolo Ramat >(which I assume is similar in the English version), a number of phenomena >of assimilation (nd>nn, pan Italic; mb>m, in Umbrian only) that can be >observed in the phonetic history of the dialects of the Italo-Romance area >clearly have their roots in the Italic tradition. >This phenomenon also exists in Spain, in Aragonese, and was discussed by >Ramo'n Mene'ndez Pidal in "El Idioma espan~ol en sus primeros tiempos", >where he also discusses the delayed substrate effect. And I don't really believe it either for Aragonese (and Catalan). Sure, some Oscan (Osca = Huesca) and Umbrian colonists were present in the area, but I guess they were all over the Empire. The change mb > mm, nd > nn is natural enough for it to have taken place independently. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 12:30:00 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 12:30:00 GMT Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Frank Rossi" wrote: >The term Neo-Galician needs to be defined. Rick is referring, I assume to >the semi-artificial common Galician language that had to be developed when >Galician was recognized as an official language, a situation similar to >Batua for Basque (comments by Larry and the Basque experts appreciated), >and even Catalan in the last century, before Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan >Studies Institute, was practically reduced to a series of dialects. True >Miguel? Sure. Any language without a unitary written standard becomes a series of dialects. In the case of Catalan, the standardization resulted in a compromise between the old, Mediaeval literary standard and the "dialect" of the economically and politically dominant area, the city of Barcelona. In a way, the same is true of Batua, basically a compromise between the old Lapurdian literary standard and the modern Gipuzkoan dialect of San Sebastian (would probably have been Bilbao, if Basque hadn't died out there long ago). In both cases, there was also some conscious effort to get rid of "castellanismes" and "erderismos" as much as possible. How does the Galician standardization compare? To what extent is the choice for Western morphology and Eastern pronunciation, for instance, a conscious "political" move, and to what extent might it be a side effect of either the Mediaeval standard or modern regional economics (as opposed to "national" [or should I say "popular"] politics)? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 12:55:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 12:55:29 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <5513b7bd.2437c0a0@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>So how does tis contradict my initial statement that Vedic and Avestan >>"feel" somewhere in the 500-1500 year range? >> >-- well, if proto-Indo-Iranian unity is around 2000 BCE, and our attested >Vedic and Avestan (the Gathas, the oldest layer) are somewhat prior to 1000 >BCE, then the range would be 400-800, not 500-1500. Close enough, considering. >That fits with the archaeological data, too. I guess that depends on whether one thinks Andronovo was Indo-Iranian or already exclusively Iranian. >One would like to know how peculiarly Indo-Aryan the words in Mitannian are; >but there we have the problem that they're loanwords in another language and >written in an awkward syllabic script that blurs details. The only firm datum is the numeral "1" (Skt. e:ka- vs. Av. aeva-). For all we know, it may have been a fourth branch of Indo-Iranian, which happened to have *aika- for "1", just like Indo-Aryan. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Apr 5 13:50:18 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 08:50:18 -0500 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Re: >'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. >Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' >(princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex >relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. 1. 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally): shouldn' this be separated and put with 'book'? As yet unclarified. Note the velar. 2. (sans accents) - a fascinating word. Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' (princess)... --Damned fascinating. Source is Gothic 'kin-ing' > 'king'. A priest in medieval Christendom held forth in a [fortified} , from medieval Latin . Cf. , < Kassel>... (sans accents), moon as 'prince' seems to match Genesis' "lesser light', as opposed to the "greater light", the sun. j p maher X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [ moderator snip ] > 'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. > Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' > (princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex > relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. [ moderator snip ] From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 14:06:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 14:06:13 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <39791a6e.24387bc0@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. >Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' >(princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex >relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. C.D. Buck's dictionary says: Pol. , displacing in the sense of "moon" [ is still "month"], dim. of in its older meaning of "prince" [now "priest", "prince" is ]. As the sun was the lord of the day, the moon of the night, the latter was the lesser "prince". Brueckner 277. The origin of ksia,dz "prince", like Russian knjaz' etc. is Germanic *kuning(az) (> *kUne~gI > *kUne~dzI) "king". "book" is unrelated, at least it cannot be separated from general Slavic *k(U)n(j)iga "book" (formerly plural, OCS ), despite the nasal vowel (we would expect Pol. *ksiga, and the phonetics probably were influenced by ksia,dz, ksie,z.yc, etc.). The origin of *kUnjiga is uncertain. It may be derived from a Slavic *kUnU (only Pol. kien(') "stump", cf. book/bukva from "beech"), which is itself of uncertain etymology. More it is a borrowing, and according to Dobrovskij somehow connected with Armenian k`nik "pechat'"("seal, stamp", not "printing press" I suppose), Ossetian k`i:nyg "book" (unless that was borrowed from Russian) maybe ultimately from Chinese shih-king (shih-ching) "Classic of poetry" (compiled by Confucius, it seems). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Apr 5 14:18:17 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 09:18:17 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The NeolithicHypothesis] Message-ID: The Stammbaum is a useful fiction. Like the subway [underground] "ma", it gets you from here to there, but is not isomorphic with a surveyor's map. j p maher X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Without contradicting any of the above, I think it might be worthwhile to > point something out. The divergence/family tree model may explain the "rise" > of the IE family, but it doesn't completely explain how the IE groups got to > where they are today. [ moderator snip ] From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Apr 5 15:00:59 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 15:00:59 GMT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The NeolithicHypothesis] In-Reply-To: <9bc7d561.2438dfea@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Two other factors are worth consideration. One is the possible removal of >early "branches" that could affect the accuracy of reconstruction. The other >is the convergence that occurred when later dialects were standardized or >heavily borrowed from. >For example in a message dated 3/15/99 5:21:05 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote with >regard to early PIE dialects: ><< ...any initial dialect gradients that came into being have been >destroyed by later language spreads. Celtic has been largely >swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian >spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern >Europe with new dialect gradients. Etcetera.>> This kind of "swallowing up" >might lead us to accept the trait of an intermediate language as the trait of >an earlier ancestor. Of course loss of data is by definition a bad thing for reconstruction. And history is lossy. There is always a real possibility that we might mistake later innovations for "proto-stuff" (because only the branches carrying the innovation survived) and miss things that *were* in the proto-language because the branches that retained them have died out. But as long as not all the branches have been ripped off, it should still be possible for us to recognize the "tree", if there is one. >It makes sense that such convergences, if mistakenly seen as commonalities >resulting from a common ancestor or PIE itself, could skew reconstruction >away from a true triangulation. This would be especially true in large >wholesale characterizations such as centum/satem, where convergences of later >diffused terms of trade or uniformity might give a false impression of early >ancestry. Given the massive amount of words involved however it would seem >that numbers alone favor the reliability of reconstruction in general. Indeed. The point is that PIE may well have been a "mixture" of languages, but if so (and it ain't necessarily so), it was a mixture of languages that were closely related to begin with (like Latin and Romance, OCS and Russian, Anglian and Saxon). We still have a tree, just a very bushy one. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Apr 5 16:44:50 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 11:44:50 -0500 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <370f7ddb.39093860@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: I've seen some confusing arguments linking Jutes, Geats & Goths--based only on the resemblance on the names What's the scoop on that? I've also seen arguments linking the Angles to the Frisians, claiming they were basically the "Frisians of Angeln." However, didn't Anglian have /k/ where Frisian and Saxon had /ch/? And I've seen the argument that Scots [Lallans] & Northumbrian are essentially Modern Anglian while R. P. is basically Modern Saxon with some modest Anglian influence [e.g. I < ik instead of ich & 3rd ps -s instead of -eth]. All of this sounds pretty simplistic, so I'd like to hear something a bit more concrete [snip] >I've never seen any Jutish, and Anglian only of the >non-continental variety. Neither Kentish (sometimes though to be >the continuation of Jutish on Englsih soil) nor Anglian look >particularly like "bridge dialects". It's true that O.E. is >probably the West Germanic language with most similarities to >North Germanic (even before the Viking era). [snip] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Apr 5 16:53:51 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 11:53:51 -0500 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <3712a035.47889708@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: The link of possible Vasconic elements to Greek is where Vennemann baffles me. I can understand the idea of a possible Vasconic substrate in Western and Central Europe but Greece seems too far afield. On the other hand, his proposed etymologies based on -andr- are interesting. You just have wonder how they may have been incorporated into Greek --via a third language [i.e. the "Aegean" or Pelasgian substrate] or what. [snip] >Vennemann, as I read him, is not claiming that Greek , G. > "man, male" (PIE *H2ner-) has a Vasconic etymology. He >merely claims that the element -andr- in a word like >and names such as Andromeda, Andromache and Kassandra might be >derived from a Vasconic *andr- "woman" instead of Greek "man". [snip] From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Apr 5 17:13:48 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 19:13:48 +0200 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ROBERT ORR: > Actually, there is evidence to suggest that IE *kuon is probably > from a zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku- > "herd(?)".(...)a comparison between *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. forms > would be a desideratum. GLEN GORDON: > Until we find a *p- before that word in some attested language, it's all > but one of many possibilities (Probably the unlikeliest possibility > too). (...) Allan Bomhard reconstructs a Nostratic item, #652 > *k(h)uwan-/*khuw at n- "dog", to account for both IE *k^won and AfroAsiatic > with similar forms. Illych-Svitychs earlier Nostratic reconstruction > (...) is also based on Uralic forms (...), all of which Bomhard had > trouble finding (...). > Not knowing alot of detail behind the forms sited for AA, it looks > intriguing but IE and AA are very far apart. I'd be interested to know > if others have found these forms in Uralic (...) and if so, could they > simply be borrowed from IE? Even if they were, this wouldn't explain the existence of similar forms in other language families closer to IE than AA. J.Greenberg lists the following Eurasiatic forms, none of which show any trace of *p- or the like: Old Turkish 'bitch', Mongol 'a wild masterless dog', Proto-Tungus <*xina> 'dog', Korean 'dog' (< kani), Gilyak ~ 'dog' and Sirenik 'wolf' (read the y as a gamma). In "On the Origin of Languages", Stanford Univ. Press 1994, J.D.Bengtson and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide range of other language families, even khoisan. Thus, *k^won seems not to be derived from *peku-, but is probably an indivisible word belonging to the very oldest core of human vocabulary. Adam Hyllested From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Apr 5 17:18:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 12:18:47 -0500 Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What you're saying makes me wonder if there wasn't some sort of diglossia going on all along with the upper classes pronouncing casa as /kaza/ and the lower classes as /haza/. Would this work? [snip] >Opinions: >a) One school of distinguished linguists (Ascoli, Meyer-Luebke, Pisani, >Contini, Rohlfs) maintains, as Rick says, that "Etruscan ... could not have >had too much of an effect on local Italian". >b) Another school of equally distinguished linguists (Schuchardt, Bertoni, >Merlo, Battisti, Castellani, Geissendoerfer) consider this a (delayed >effect) substrate phenomenon. >Further considerations: >- The first mention of this phenomenon, again as Rick says, dates back to >the 1500's. However, Dante also spoke of the shocking language of Tuscans >("Tusci in suo turpiloquio obtusi"), without explaining what he meant. [snip] >I also mentioned in my original posting the "romanesco" dialect of Rome. >To which Rick added: >>What I notice about Roman speech is > >/-L- > 0/ e.g. figlio > "fio" > >/-nd- > -nn-/ e.g. andiamo > "annamo" >The first of these phenomena, although in not so extreme a version, is >common in other Romance dialects, cf. "yeismo" in Spanish. Not quite because whenever I've spoken to Romans, I've noticed a complete dropping of /-L-/. I hear /fio/ rather than /fiyo/. But, OTOH, I've spoken to Italians in Latin America and the US. Yei/smo is a bit more complicated since it runs through a whole gamut of sounds including /y^, j, zh & sh/ --with /y^/ representing the "tense " similar to that of rather than that of , which in Spanish is represented by [compare vs. ] >The second, which is characteristic of Central-Southern Italian dialects, >including Neapolitan, etc., but *not* Tuscan and *not* North Italian, is >also considered a substrate phenomenon going back to pre Latin times. "Nabolidan" as I've heard it among both US ethnic Italians and Neapolitans visiting the US had /nd/, as in something similar to /andyamu/ or /andyammu/. But they may have been trying to use a standard pronunciation. [snip] It is said that Roman settlers to Spain were principally from the area around Naples, who brought in characteristics of Osco-Umbrian as well as Greek. But I've usually just heard this remark in passing or seen it as a "truism" From jrader at m-w.com Mon Apr 5 13:47:02 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 13:47:02 +0000 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: I don't know what encyclopedias or general references Mr. Long is taking this information from, but either he or his sources have some basic distinctions muddled--either that or Slavic historical linguistics has changed a lot since I was first exposed to it 20-odd years ago. What I learned was that the basic texts in Glagolitic or Cyrillic that define Old Church Slavic all originated in the Balkans--with the important exception of the oldest text, the Kiev Fragments (Russian ), which has some Czech phonetic features and is a translation of part of the Roman missal. The oldest Old Russian text, the Ostromir Gospels (Ostromirovo evangelie), dated by a colophon to 1056, is coincident in age with the canonical Old Church Slavic texts, but has distinctive East Slavic phonetic features--in particular, the relatively early loss of the nasal vowels, so that the letter for the back nasal and the digraph for [u] are sometimes mixed up. (On the other hand, it doesn't mix the jers up.) There is never any confusion about which texts are OCS and which are Old Russian. It is NOT the case that "the first Russian appears of course in OCS texts, so that it is arguable that it is in fact Russian." I'm writing this from memory because I'm in my office and most of my Slavic books are home, so if I'm wrong, may someone correct me. Jim Rader > Actually, the first sentence in Polish shows up in the late 13th Century and > real text comes from middle 14th Century. Before that there are only proper > names written with little system so that many sounds are "almost impossible > to distinguish." The evidence therefore is some 500 years after OCS > originates. The first Russian appears of course in OCS texts, so that it is > arguable that it is in fact Russian. At the time of a valid direct > comparison between Polish and Russian however there are fairly significant > "differences in how words are stressed, vocabulary and numerous syntactic and > morphological developments," perhaps more than would be expected "given the > extreme instabilities of the borders between the two languages." > Regards, > Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 19:06:32 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 15:06:32 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Although I've been told that language can change wildly or not change at >all, for no reason at all, I find this notable if true. -- it's simple. Linear B, the syllabic script used for Mycenaean after about 1450 BCE (no earlier, possibly later), ceased to be used at all after around 1200 BCE, because Greece lapsed into preliterate status. When the Greeks aquired writing again, about 500 years later, they used a modified form of the alphabetic script developed in the Levant. >If Mycenaean truly shows no sign of change during the centuries from the time >it was first written, that would seem unusual. -- Myceanaean was "written" exclusively for accounting purposes, in a script very badly suited to the sounds of the Greek language; it was adapted from Linear A, which was used to write whatever it was the Minoans spoke. (Which was certainly not Greek, and probably not an Indo-European language at all.) Linear B is a syllabic script (with some logograms) in which all sounds expressed end in vowels. The closest you can come to writing a typical Greek word like "anthropos" is something like a-to-ro-po-se. The multiple meanings of the signs make any but the shortest statement extremely ambiguous, which is probably why the script wasn't used for anything but accounting lists. >Otherwise we would expect "dialectic gradients," wouldn't we? >[ Moderator's query: In accounting ledgers??? --rma ] -- precisely. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Apr 5 19:25:57 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 15:25:57 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Even someone like William of Nassyngton (1300's), an advocate of English over >Latin and French, clearly states that Latin is spoken by the educated -- that's what I said. It was a secondary language of the literate, used primarily for writing, and secondarily to communicate with people who spoke a different mother tongue in ordinary life. >[ Moderator's comment: However, *all* of the examples of speakers of Latin >are drawn from the educated classes, so your point is unproven. --rma ] -- precisely. >The need for a common language in international diplomacy, law and trade was >an obvious one. -- note that the 9th-century treaty between the descendants of Charlemagne dividing his dominions was written in early versions of French and German, respectively -- because that particular one had to be understood by their noblemen and retainers. (Charlemagne never learned to write, himself, by the way; it was an uncommon accomplishment for anyone but clerics in his day.) >Another one was that the early native tongues of Northern Europe were >simply inadequate in communicating reliably in detail. -- this is a meaningless statement. All languages are perfectly adequate for ordinary communication. You're taking a medieval scholastic prejudice literally. By the way, you have heard of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, haven't you? The vernacular tongue was generally used in pre-Norman England for written documents, such as charters. >But a language none the less. >[ Moderator continues: A second language differs greatly in internal >processing from a first, and is used *consciously*, unlike a first. Thus, >change in a second language will be different in kind from a first >language. --rma ] -- precisely my point; thank you. >And totally illiterate before the arrival of Latin. -- see above re Anglo-Saxon England. For that matter, the pre-Christian Scandinavians wrote in runic and the equivalent Irish Celts in Ogham. >since they had to be able to use the Latin alphabet and transpose its >sounds to become literate. -- you are aware that the vernacular was also written in the Latin alphabet (which is what we're using here) aren't you? And that an alphabet is not a language? >So therefore the following comparison by you is meaningless, because those >spellings are not to be trusted. -- I said the spelling was phonetic in the 16th century; where did you get this "not to be trusted" bit? The spelling of English has changed less than the actual spoken language. This is what happens with actual, living languages, ones not learned primarily from books. (Note that in India, where English _is_ primarily a 'book-language', many archaic forms are still in common use.) >Look what you are saying here. If kids learn language from their parents, >then that language changes. All of creation disagrees with you. Getting it >passed on from your parents is supposed to be what passes it on unchanged.>> >[ Moderator continues: What he said is that languages learned naturally, >which is to say as first languages, change in ways that differ greatly from >languages learned by intentional schooling. And *of course* languages >change when children learn them from their parents--this is one of the >tenets of historical linguistics! --rma ] -- precisely. Some people have difficulty grasping this concept, it seems. >So QED mothers are the cause of change in language. And the reason Latin >doesn't change is because it isn't taught by mothers. All of creation still >disagrees with you. >[ Moderator's conclusion: You are being argumentative for the sake of >argumentation. -- I'm glad that's obvious... 8-). >Mothers are not the cause of language change, children--well, young >people--are. And the reason that Latin does not change is that children do >not learn it in the >same way that they learn their first languages. --rma ] -- precisely. Nobody in Medieval Europe shouted "**it!" in Latin when they hit their thumb with a hammer. From roborr at uottawa.ca Tue Apr 6 00:02:15 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 20:02:15 -0400 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >Just a reminder that Slavonic and Russian are not entirely congruent: Right >'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. >Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' >(princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest a rather complex >relationship in the old days involving the moon or the lunar cycle perhaps. Only on the basis of folk etymology. In Polish *kn+FV or J > *ks [palatalised], can't do diacritics on this programme. ksiezyc, ksiezy, ksiezna etc. < *kne(d)z, Russian knjaz' ksiega < *kniga, Russian kniga From roborr at uottawa.ca Tue Apr 6 00:04:05 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 20:04:05 -0400 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: The Graeco-Russian example is a red herring. Karl in that context would have been a Scandinavian/Varangian name, i.e., also ultimately Germanic. >What you might as well say is "rather as Caesar became Kaiser or Tsar." Does >that prove something about the relation of German and Russian? How do we >characterize the sound shifts difference between czar, tsar and kaiser? >(More interesting is the relation of "karl" to such words as "churl", >"coerl", "krailik" and "czele" and the fact that the individual name "Karl" >shows up in a 900 Graeco-Russian treaty alongside of names like "Boris" and >"Vlad". That's a little more tricky. Almost makes you wonder which way the >borrowing went.) From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 6 01:19:58 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 18:19:58 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: ROBERT WHITING: Just out of curiosity, is there anything particular about 'lynx' that sets it apart from the numerous other words for animals and birds in Greek* that end with /x/, so that one might think that the final consonant cluster is ancient rather than being a secondary formation using a classificatory marker? Thank God. A man with pertinent questions (... or woman, you never know these days what with the faceless internet and all :) I would like to know the answer to this as well, and why Greek's "intrusive" -k-'s are supposed to be ancient rather than innovative - a question that remains mostly neglected, to the contribution of my frustration. JENS RASMUSSEN: [...]it IS a fact that the stative verbs (morpheme /-eH1-/ of Lat. sed-e:-re) and the neuter s-stems go together (Lat. sede:s 'seat'; more impressively e.g. fri:gus/frigeo; rigor/rigeo; tepor/tepeo etc.), in that the s-stems denote the state something is in if the stative verb can be used about it (what friget is in frigore etc.). Does this have anything to do with an IE *-st(i) ending, perhaps? (cf. Hittite talukasti and OSlav. dlugosti) JENS RASMUSSEN: Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with stm-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. These testify to the earlier existence of an independent phoneme (in PIE a morphophoneme) that could be posited as /c/ and given the "reading rule" that it is realized as /-s/ word-finally, and as /t-/ in other positions. Gee, kind of sounds like that **-t > *-s rule that lil' Glenny's been talkin' 'bout. Hmm, it would sure explain alot of things but I've been mentioning it umpteen times already in previous messages. I guess it's too straightforward a theory for people to swallow. It has to have pizzazz and glitz, coated with sugar. We need to posit extra phonemes and such to make it pretty. Poor ol' Occhim. Sigh. I give up. I need a therapist ;( JENS RASMUSSEN: It would be the IE marker of second person, verbal 2sg *-s, 2pl *-te (2du *-t- + unclear stuff, but surely something more than just the -t-), Gee, maybe it's that **-t > *-s thing. Just a thought. Ooops, I forgot. Too simple. We must posit **-c to cloak it in phonetic mystery. What was the reason for **-c again? JENS RASMUSSEN: pron. *tu, *t(w)e [I'll keep my derivation of *yu(:)s, *usme and *wos from protoforms with *t(w)- out of this] Thanks, because there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus. JENS RASMUSSEN: --- Now to the point: Is there any way of formulating a sound rule so as to get a stative noun *le'wk-ot/-es- to contain the same suffix as the stative verb *luk-e'H1-, i.e. have we any way of equating nominal //le'wk-ec-// and verbal //lewk-e'H1-//?? On an ironic note, if you simply accepted my **-t > *-s rather than an off-the-wall **c phoneme, you would be closer to your sound rule goals, in addition to agreeing with a modified version of Miguel's nonsensical sound change of **t > *H1, if you feel necessary to do. JENS RASMUSSEN: So, if there is reason to believe that a pre-PIE *k could be spirantized to PIE *H2, as in the non-active 1sg marker (perfect *-H2a, middle thematic *-a-H2 corresponding to other Eurasian *-k), If we truely want to "envisage" outside of PIE into the world of Eurasiatic, I'm personally not aware of any examples of a /k/ in other Eurasiatic languages aside from a lonely and bizarre Uralic language called Hungarian that has many innovations besides the -k/-l conjugation. I see more examples of an earlier 1rst person **-h though. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 6 03:25:59 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 5 Apr 1999 23:25:59 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/5/99 7:35:48 AM, rma wrote: <> I was reaching for any other nearby languages that might have been mentioned as "spoken." Latin was. These weren't, though they were certainly nearby. <> My point rather was that Latin was "spoken" and quite often. It is clear that the prior post was saying it was rarely spoken and earlier said it was not spoken. The education of speakers to this point is irelevant - where children are extremely educated we don't stop calling them speakers. <<[ Moderator continues: A second language differs greatly in internal processing from a first, and is used *consciously*, unlike a first. Thus, change in a second language will be different in kind from a first language.>> [ Moderator continues: What he said is that languages learned naturally, which is to say as first languages, change in ways that differ greatly from languages learned by intentional schooling. And *of course* languages change when children learn them from their parents--this is one of the tenets of historical linguistics!...>> <> I accept all of the above. (If you look back at this particular dialogue, I think you'll see I was not really challenging the concept of natural languages. But I was reacting to a certain point of view that can use ancient text to prove something about lack of change in language over1000 years and then assert that writing proves nothing about language because it's always changing.) My question (way back when) was whether PIE - even though unwritten - could have continued as a second language the way Latin did. My point was that Latin didn't become just a dead text, but was a continuing powerful spoken and written influence on the existing "first" languages of the middle ages. I've offered some evidence and I have a lot more. In the midst of this discussion I allowed myself to stray. Let me please just address the issues mentioned above. The fact of only educated speakers is irrelevant to my original point since the educated can influence a spoken language as well as the non-educated. Second language is irrelevant to the point - second languages can have a strong influence on first languages if important enough people speak it. In fact, it can demonstrably have a larger effect than even a neighboring first language. Whether Latin was EVER a natural language is irrelevant to my point. It did not have to be a natural language to have the large influence it had as a second language. The idea that Latin was not learned from mothers is irrelevant, because we don't stop learning language when we are children and we can learn and use and pass on a second language as adults. How Latin changed doesn't matter, but rather what it changed. All of the above are irrelevant because Latin could and did continue to change the languages of Europe after it became only a second language. Even if it were only a written language it would have, but it was clearly also a spoken language whose sounds also continued to affect the direction of development in other languages. To assert anything else is just plain against the evidence. What is relevant, as you and Miguel pointed out, is that PIE was never a written language and therefore may not have behaved like Latin - may not have become a standardized second language that continued to affect its daughter languages after it stopped being primary. Finally, I want to point out that this discussion is not so much about change as it is about continuity. That's why its subtitled 'standardization.' Obviously if there was no continuity, there would no evidence of IE. (And of course we wouldn't be able to understand each other from one day to the next.) Of course language changes. But what any discussion of IE is about is not just change. In fact it's mainly about what stayed the same for thousands of years. But I apologize for being argumentative. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 6 04:16:21 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 00:16:21 EDT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: In a message dated 4/4/99 11:48:44 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Seems closer than I've been told it was. Once again the vocabulary (father, heaven, holy) here might tend to create a closer match than less liturgical or idiomatic forms. I compare (w/o knowing if I am transliterating correctly) - for the sake of seeing the "much" greater separation in Romance. French: Notre pere, qui es aux cieux, que ton nom soit sanctifi?. Latin: Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Not overwhelmingly different, I'd say. BTW- was sent this by e-mail. It is apparently up on the wall of a church in the Holy Lands that has a lot of different Lord's Prayers on the walls: <> (sans accents) This appears to be another "Wendish" dialect than Sorb. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Apr 6 07:52:28 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 08:52:28 +0100 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. It is not the only Greek word ending in -nx. There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), and of course sphinx, and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. These are all -ng stems. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Apr 6 08:02:40 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 09:02:40 +0100 Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: Mycenaean does show some variation, particularly between Pylos and Knossos, (although it is on the whole "extremely uniform"). Pylos, for example, makes much greater use than Knossos of what Chadwick and Ventris call a2 . Texts from Mycenae itself show a distinct preference for 3rd declension dative singular in -i rather than -e. Whether these variations reflect dialects or divergent spelling is ultimately unprovable - but we must not assume that Mycenaean was "unchanging" or without variation. Peter From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Apr 6 09:20:24 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 12:20:24 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 28 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I wrote: ><and neighbors can account for the lexical or basic phonological >differences between Greek and Sanskrit in a relatively short time >(much shorter than the 2000-3000 years you've estimated.) >Ancient German and Latin traveled a much shorter distance to >become modern English and French in a much shorter time.>> >In a message dated 3/25/99 2:00:39 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><didn't travel at all, and it's still very different from Latin.>> >But this is aside from the point being made. >The point was that the difference between Greek and Vedic >Sanskrit and their common ancestor could be explained >geographically. And the counterpoint was that they could be but they don't have to be. >I was saying was that when speakers of a common language go to >different geographical locations, their languages will >predictably lose commonality. And if they stay in the same place and are not in regular and strong contact they will also lose commonality. There are a number of ways for languages or dialects to lose contact. They may be physically separated by migration or by natural barriers (mountains, rivers) or they may be artificially separated by political boundaries or social stratification. Professional argots are also an interesting instance of artificial separation that may include linking across normal language boundaries. >This is rather obvious and I'm sure you are making some other >point, but I'll address it just to be clear. Distance in terms >of geography will predictably have an effect on the way two >languages diverge from a common ancestor. I hope that you are not trying to say that one can predict the degree to which languages will diverge based on the geographical distance between them. I am rather disturbed by your persistent use of "predictably" in all of these statements. If there is one thing that we know about language change, it is that it is not predictable. If it were, we could write algorithms for language change based on time and geographical distance and sit back and let the computers solve all the problems of historical linguistics. The only thing predictable about language change is that languages change. Living languages do it constantly. There are always changes going on, which, for the most part, the speakers of the language are unaware of. It is usually in retrospect that these changes can be identified and analyzed. >Otherwise we'd have to think that, say, the differences between >Low and Upper German had nothing to do with geographical >difference. From the names themselves - geographical >distinctions - distance did split these dialects. Would the split >between Low and Upper German have occurred if all the earlier >speakers have stayed in the same location? Are we to think that >the difference between Norweigan and Danish would have developed >anyway, even if they were not geographically separated? Part of the point is that Swedish and Danish are farther apart linguistically than Danish and (at least some dialects) of Norwegian. The amount of geographical separation cannot predict the degree of divergence. [MCV]: ><language change. It just happens.>> >And this is so obviously untrue that I can only think that I've >misunderstood you here, once again. >[ Moderator's comment: Modern Icelandic has, until very recently, > been unaffected by linguistic externals, yet it has changed > radically in pronunciation from Old Norse. You have obviously > misunderstood MCV's point: Languages change, and they do so > without external cause. The existence of external forces in > some kinds of linguistic change do not necessitate their > existence in all forms of change. > --rma ] >You've mentioned the possible 30% non-IE in German vocabulary. >If you accept that possibility, the only way you can account for >it is "external causes." You mentioned that the way B-S may have >obscured elements of Germanic or Greek may have done the same to >Armenian. These are causes external to the languages themselves. When you get right down to it, almost all language changes are external to the languages themselves. That is why I would prefer the expression "foreign influence" to "external causes." It is my impression that almost all linguistic change is brought about by sociological factors. This impression is based on the following observations: 1) Linguistic change is unpredictable. By this I mean that the onset of a particular change at any given time can not be anticipated. Once a change has started or been completed, it can be analyzed and classified and (probably) parallels for such a change can be found in other languages. But the trigger for the change can not be shown to be the linguistic situation because one can also (probably) find parallel linguistic situations in other languages in which the change did not occur. Therefore the trigger for the change must come from outside the language (or outside language in general). Analogical changes to restore morphological features levelled by phonological change might appear to be an exception (as might analogical change in general, since a model form must already exist in the language for analogy to be productive), but in this case it is simply a reaction to a change (phonological) that did not have its origin in the linguistic situation (on this seeming contradiction, see below, point 5). 2) Any part of language can change. Changes can be observed in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. I think (someone will correct me if I am wrong) that there is no part of a language that can be considered immutable. Even features that were long considered inherent to a language, like word order or intonation, can and do change. 3) Linguistic change is irregular. With the exception of sound changes (which the neogrammarians tell us are without exception and once a sound change is initiated, it will affect every instance of that sound in the language [but even if this is strictly and entirely true, which most linguists today doubt, the unpredictability of point 1 still applies: it cannot be predicted what will change or what it will change into]), a change in a form or construction may or may not affect similar forms or constructions. Or part of a system may change and leave the rest of the system unchanged. 4) Linguistic change is not unidirectional. A change (including phonetic changes) that goes in one direction in one language may go in the opposite direction in another language. One can count up the number of instances for the change in each direction and say which direction is statistically more likely for the change, but in essence, there is no change that is impossible (although some are extremely unlikely). Whether linguistic change is reversible is a different issue from the question on non-unidirectionality. Most linguists tend to avoid discussions of reversibility (although there are clear examples, mostly learned restorations), but I suspect that this is mostly because if changes are reversed, it plays merry hell with historical linguistics. :> 5) Linguistic change can cause conflict in the language. This is a result of an inherent conflict in language between phonology and morphology. Since language expresses meaning through phonological form, there is constantly a conflict between phonological simplicity (ease and speed of articulation) and morphological complexity (more overt morphological marking to disambiguate meaning). What we have, then, is an "engineering trade-off" where changes for the better on one side will usually introduce changes for the worse on the other. Thus a phonological change that reduces overt morphological distinctions will frequently be countered by an analogical change that restores some (if not all) of the lost morphological marking. Thus while it may seem that analogical change is brought about by the linguistic situation, it is rather a response to a natural conflict between two competing systems, and, while it may be systematic, it is still unpredictable and irregular. But even the phonological change that causes the response is not necessarily caused by an attempt a phonological simplification, since many phonological changes result in more complex, or no overall change in, phonology, so even a rule that phonological changes result in simplified phonology is not predictable. Given these observations, it is obvious that the only thing about linguistic change that is predictable is change itself, and that has nothing to do with language per se but is a by-product of the second law of thermodynamics. Furthermore, with the exception of analogical restoration of morphological marking, a linguistic situation is seldom seen to be the trigger for a linguistic change, and even when it is (e.g., extension of morphology by analogy), the nature and extent of the change is not predictable. Since linguistic change cannot be seen to originate within language, it must be imposed (consciously or unconsciously) by its users, human beings, and therefore is sociological in nature since language use is a socio-cultural phenomenon. The sociological factors that affect (or effect) linguistic change would seem to have to do with such things as intergroup relationships and intragroup or cultural bonding. (I am not a sociologist, so this terminology may not be current; I remember sociology as the course where it didn't do any good to have last year's exam -- they always asked the same questions - only the answers changed :).) A high prestige language or dialect is likely to trigger changes in languages or dialects in contact with it by imitation. But it is not just high prestige languages that cause changes. Thus historical linguistics recognizes superstratum languages (higher prestige, e.g., conquerors), adstratum languages (more or less equal prestige, i.e, neighbors or ethno-linguistic mixtures sharing the same territory), and substratum languages (lower prestige, e.g., conquered or servile populations). While the nature of the relationship between the languages may tend to influence the types of changes that may flow between them (based on statistical probability), again, any kind of influence of one language on another is possible. So all that is really needed for one language to influence another is contact. Even direct contact is not needed, because, through writing, even long dead or unused languages can cause changes (English has many Greek and Latin neologisms). Thus languages in almost any kind of contact can cause changes in the lexicon (loan words and loan translations) and grammar (areal features in phonology, morphology and syntax) of one another. And the locus of change as a foreign influence is the bilingual (multilingua) individual. Group or cultural bonding can have the opposite effect of causing a language to deliberately be altered to make it more unlike its neighboring languages. Loanwords may be systematically purged from the language to make it more specific to its culture or group. If linguistic change is sociological in nature, then like other sociological changes (changes in government, religious, and economic systems) it originates with the few, not the many. The many just follow along once the change is set in motion. But whether a change (be it of foreign or native origin) will be accepted is a sociological phenomenon, rather like a hit song, play, or movie, or fashions in dress or hair length. And there is no way to predict this. It just happens. Or it doesn't. >Conversely, if you mention the fact that German retains "archaic" >features, it assumes that change in this case DID NOT "just >happen," but in fact failed to happen. If you don't attribute >some external cause for this, then why is the archaism in German >so singular? Chance? Or isn't it more likely that Germanic was >either cut-off, isolated or geographically distant from the >"innovative core" - all external factors. External to what? -- the language or the culture or both? Is it possible that Germanic peoples are simply conservative by nature, resisting change with a fervor that is perhaps exemplified by the current proposed orthographic revisions in German or the resistance of English speakers to systematic spelling reforms? Linguistic reasons for language change are really thin on the ground. One might as well try to explain why Europeans and North Americans no longer wear three-cornered hats and powdered wigs based on physiology or geography or manufacturing techniques or conquest or substratum populations or the general unsuitability of the hats and wigs themselves, when in fact it is a sociological phenomenon known as fashion. >It may be valuable for methodological purposes to suspend >consideration of external causes in linguistics, but it cannot be >correct to say that you don't "need external causes at all to >account for language change. It just happens" - especially if >you are drawing general historical conclusions based on those >language changes. If the linguistic evidence is going to assume >no external causes for change, then it can tell us nothing about >external events. The point is not that there are no "external" (i.e., foreign) causes of linguistic change. The point is that such causes are not required for linguistic change. Now when we have a historical record, it may be possible to pinpoint a foreign cause for a certain change. But when we go prehistoric, there is no way to tell the origin of a change just by looking at it. Drafting in foreign causes may make for interesting stories, but "you don't need external causes to account for language change." >Finally, the statement that change "just happens" inverts the >question really, doesn't it? If change is so inevitable, then >why should there be any commonalities left to find in IE >languages? Obviously, the key to this whole thing is not what >changed but what didn't. You are missing the point (several points, actually). Change may be inevitable (finding a natural language that hasn't changed at all over several centuries would be really unusual -- anybody got any examples?), but it is unpredictable. There are no natural laws that govern language development so far discovered. Given a language, there is no way to predict what it will look like in 100 years or 500 years or 1000 years. However, if we know what that language looked like 1000 years *ago*, we can observe the changes that have taken place. What historical linguistics tries to do is predict the past by observing these changes and comparing any surviving features in cognate languages and reconstructing the forms that may have been ancestral to all of them. But there are no natural laws that say how to make this prediction. The predictions are based on the classification of observable facts that are taken as far back as the historical records allow us to go and then extrapolated into prehistory. Analogies from known developments in historical times are often used to support a particular reconstruction, but such analogies do not "have to be" valid. When many causes can produce the same effect (as our observations show is true of language change), there is no way to separate out the "correct" cause from all the other possible causes. So it is not a matter of what changed or what didn't change. It is a matter of accounting for all the changes and non-changes in a consistent and concise manner. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From stevegus at aye.net Tue Apr 6 13:55:05 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 09:55:05 -0400 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Another theory is that Andros, the Greek island was involved earlier. The > island is mentioned by Greek writers as having formed a fair number of early > (pre-300bce) colonies, and was associated with the also Ionian Phokia, which > is in turn credited with the founding of the Greek colony Massilia > (Marseilles) about 600bce. Also just about 80 miles north of Massalia was > located ANDERITUM (sometimes called Gabalum as the chief city of the Celtic > Gabales), also later a fairly important Roman center. (The word would have > moved east and north with other Greek borrowings that occur in early French.) I'm reasonably certain that in Bede's Latin (or is it Thomas of Malmesbury?) ANDERIDA is the name of a forest in England, if this sheds any light on the prevalence or meaning of this allegedly Celtic root. I think it's still called the Forest of Andred. If 'andera' means "woman," though, and we're wondering where it came from, my first thought would be to look to Germanic. There's a widespread Germanic root ander-, annar-, meaning 'other.' Perhaps the original idea was something like 'the opposite sex?' -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 6 14:02:03 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 15:02:03 +0100 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 3 Apr 1999, Frank Rossi wrote: > The term Neo-Galician needs to be defined. Rick is referring, I > assume to the semi-artificial common Galician language that had to > be developed when Galician was recognized as an official language, a > situation similar to Batua for Basque (comments by Larry and the > Basque experts appreciated), Yes, Euskara Batua (standard Basque) is an artificial creation in the sense that it results from the decisions of a committee (the Academy) and is not identical to the vernacular speech of any Basque -- though it is broadly most similar to the speech of Gipuzkoa, in the center of the country. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 6 14:21:34 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 15:21:34 +0100 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] In-Reply-To: <001f01be7e57$6760bc40$053a4a0c@default> Message-ID: On Sat, 3 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote: > Thank you for responding so thoroughly and informatively to my > poorly phrased and uninformed questions. I was most reluctant to > pose any question about language, given my utter ignorance in the > field. I certainly had no intention of sounding a challenge to > those in the field of historical linguistics about the veracity or > accuracy of IE. Being professionally skeptical, however, I did want > to consider the possibility that IE, as an hypothesis, would be > subject to the rules of all hypotheses, and vulnerable to evidence > that would just as convincingly point to the opposite conclusion as > to the expected conclusion. Actually, I did not get the impression that you were challenging anything. But I do think IE is an exceptionally good case of a family which is well modeled by the family-tree model. Two other respondents have pointed out that our family tree for IE is muddled by the usual effects of contact and convergence. Indeed it is, and we certainly can't draw a single unambiguous tree covering everything from PIE down to the modern dialects. One of my favorite examples is Norwegian and Icelandic. Iceland was settled from Norway at a time when North Germanic (Scandinavian) already exhibited noticeable regional variation. Accordingly, we would expect Icelandic and Norwegian to form a single node within Germanic. As it happens, however, Norwegian has largely developed in contact with its neighbors Danish and Swedish, and modern Norwegian is much closer to Danish and Swedish -- with which it is at least partly mutually comprehensible -- than it is to Icelandic -- with which it is not mutually comprehensible at all. Consequently, our family tree today usually puts Icelandic (and Faroese) off on a separate branch from the three continental languages, in spite of the historical position. And this example is not isolated. We also have a major problem with the subgrouping of IE: our standard tree posits ten or twelve coordinate branches of IE, all of them seemingly derived from separate daughters of PIE. But nobody considers this realistic. The Pennsylvania group have recently proposed a more normal-looking branching tree for IE, but I haven't yet seen many comments on this. > Your comments and explanation of the family tree model was also most > helpful. Certainly in Europe, where the dominate languages share > such obvious roots, a family tree model would be the handiest and > most logical model to explain divergence. I wonder if the Asian > languages of China, Korea and Japan share a similar background of > divergence due to isolation. Almost everybody seems to accept that the Chinese languages form a branch of a much larger Sino-Tibetan family. But Japanese and Korean continue to be puzzles. There are attempts underway to link these last two to each other, to Tungusic, and to Altaic generally (even though the reality of Altaic is disputed). Nobody knows. > I must confess that your last point relative to the possibility that > IE developed from more than one language, did cross my mind as I was > investigating the issue. So, I felt it worthwile to ask about it. > I am convinced now, that the IE model has stood the test of time, > analysis and criticism, and accept your assertion that while IE may > not be the only accepted model of linguistic development, it does > the best job of explaining how most European languages developed. Yes, I think the family-tree model works reasonably well for IE. But the general validity of that model is very much under debate these days. > The only question I have now is, where does the Africian languages > (Hebrew and Arabic, primarily) enter the IE equation? Is it assumed > that prior to PIE, the Asian and Africian languages that were non > PIE were influencial in the ultimate development of PIE? Surely > there were many words that came from these sources, given the > importance of the religious vocabulary available to the Hebraic > people. Hebrew and Arabic are unquestionably Semitic, and the validity of the Semitic family is doubted by no one. But Semitic is a good example of a family to which the family-tree model is of questionable applicability. The subgrouping of Semitic has proved to be a headache, and some specialists are now leaning toward the view that Semitic existed for a long time as a large dialect continuum, from which the individual languages that we know crystallized only slowly, more or less in the manner defended by Uriel Weinreich, Bob Le Page, and others. The further membership of Semitic in a much larger Afro-Asiatic family is likewise more or less universally accepted, chiefly on morphological grounds, though reconstruction of Proto-AA has proved difficult, and no proposed reconstruction has as yet won any great degree of acceptance. A possible very remote genetic link between IE and AA forms part of the Nostratic hypothesis, but is widely considered to be one of the weakest parts of that hypothesis. Very many people accept the existence of early loan words between IE and Semitic, but the details are debated. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 00:44:31 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 17:44:31 PDT Subject: R: Re: Distance in change In-Reply-To: <37087A06.233E05FB@neiu.edu> Message-ID: j p maher wrote: >Have the discussants read Herb Izzo's Etruscan language, dismissing the >substrate theory on the origin of gorgia toscana? Unfortunately, I haven't read the book yet, but, thanks to Ed Robertson, I do have the reference as follows: Herbert J. Izzo, Tuscan & Etruscan: The problem of linguistic substratum influence in central Italy" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1972) However, the facts I mentioned in my posting do *in my opinion* demonstrate that Etruscan was the substrate of the Latin spoken in Tuscany, i.e.: Before the Roman conquest the people in Tuscany spoke Etruscan. No other people settled in Tuscany between the Etruscans and the Romans. The Romans did not exterminate the Etruscans, and they didn't replace them with Roman colonists. The Etruscans adopted the Latin language. The second point in discussion, i.e. whether the so-called "gorgia toscana" is a consequence of the Etruscan substrate of Tuscan Latin is probably not provable either way. However, to disprove it one must explain why this phenomenon exists in Tuscany and *not* in the adjacent non Tuscan areas. What does Izzo say? As a further contribution, a quotation from Giacomo Devoto's "Il linguaggio d'Italia", 1974, follows: The phenomenon of Tuscan "... aspiration goes back to the early Middle Ages only on one condition, i.e., that it is indeed a development that has its origins in ancient Etruria. The most serious obstacle to this theory is that no author either ancient or modern including Dante ever mentioned this particular feature of the florentine and other adjacent dialects... (in Tuscany). A second obstacle is the fact that the entire development of Latin in Tuscany is characterised by its isolation, by the absence of mixture: it seems strange that this should be the only mixture, so isolated and enigmatic. HOWEVER, not to justify this theory at all costs, but to have a clear picture of the factors to be taken into consideration, a disymmetry may be noted between the various regions of Etruria. In these regions, the signs of a different final balance between the Latin tradition brought in from outside and the pre-existent Etruscan tradition can be evaluated, comparing them with the distribution of consonantal aspiration. The proportion of Etrusan and Latin inscriptions in the northern areas of Tuscany (Luni, Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia, Fiesole, Firenze, Arezzo) is, on the basis of the "Corpus inscriptionum latinarum", 82 Etruscan inscriptions against 505 Latin inscriptions, i.e., the Latin inscriptions are about 6 times more numerous than the Etruscan inscriptions. On the other hand, in the central territories (Volterra, Siena, Cortona, Perugia, Chiusi), the Etruscan inscriptions are 6 times more numerous than the Latin inscriptions (4833 to 785). The Latin dominance in the North of Tuscany is compatable with the hypothesis of an easier achievement of the final balance and language mixing, while the resistance of Etruscan until a late date leads us to presume that the two traditions, not only linguistic, but also socio-cultural, were mutually independent for a long time. The geographical distribution of the Tuscan aspiration corresponds to a large extent to the northern part of Tuscany. In this sense then, it is fair to say that, failing direct proof, the geography of the inscriptions eliminates one obstacle and indicates a possible geographical relationship that offers food for thought". Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 6 18:56:57 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 13:56:57 -0500 Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: <37087A06.233E05FB@neiu.edu> Message-ID: No, unfortunately we don't have a library to speak of and no journals whatsoever. The only book on Etruscan we have is --believe it or not!-- the great Mayani. As I remember, most of what I've read does dismiss the Etruscan substrate theory. Does Izzo say anything new or noteworthy? >Have the discussants read Herb Izzo's Etruscan language, dismissing the >substrate theory on the origin of gorgia toscana? >j p maher [snip] From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Tue Apr 6 19:11:47 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 12:11:47 PDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: >Sat, 3 Apr 1999 16:43:19 +0100 (BST) Larry Trask wrote: [snip] >As far as I -- a non-specialist -- can see, the IE status of the word is >demonstrated, and there is no problem to be solved by appealing to an >implausible "Vasconic" influence. And anyway Basque has both >the wrong form and the wrong meaning. Does this last comment mean that you believe the best simulation would be one that doesn't link the Euskera items and in anyway whatsoever with the IE items? Including the Gk. ones? Best regards, Roz Frank April 6, 1999 From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Tue Apr 6 22:20:36 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 15:20:36 PDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >"roslyn frank" wrote: [RF] >>Having said that, I would suggest that the overall thrust of Vennemann's >>argument is worthy of consideration, namely, a model that posits a >>higher node and consequently, an older source for the IE and Euskeric >>items alike. In such a simulation of events, one could argue that >>originally the item was used in reference to a "woman" and that over >>time the term was generalized to refer to "human, person". [MCV] >Vennemann, as I read him, is not claiming that Greek , G. > "man, male" (PIE *H2ner-) has a Vasconic etymology. He >merely claims that the element -andr- in a word like >and names such as Andromeda, Andromache and Kassandra might be >derived from a Vasconic *andr- "woman" instead of Greek "man". [RF] Yes, Miguel, you are absolutely correct in your representation of Vennemann's claim. What I attempted to say above was that I believed the "overall thrust" of Vennemann's model was an interesting one. I then went on to say that such a model could be used to construct a similation of events such as the one that I presented of the Gk. materials. I apologize for not having made that point clearer. [RF] >>These individuals called (i.e., sing. ) are referred >>to throughout the text in the masculine so there is no question about >>their gender. Moreover, from the duties assigned, it is likely that the >>group as a whole was composed exclusively of men. In short, in this >>concrete case there is little question about the ultimate female >>referentiality of the "title" of , its derivation from >>. [MCV] >I'm not familiar with the term "chandros", who it refers to, or >what the history of the word is, but on the evidence presented >here, I don't see any compelling reason to derive the word from >. [RF] Perhaps I didn't make the context of its usage clear enough. In the Basque law codes that I spent some ten years perusing in one of my research projects, there are certain phrases that reoccur in Spanish. They refer to the householders of the village in question who are "voting" members of the community. The right to "vote" was not individual but rather by "household" and further, there were only certain "households" or "etxe" that held that status of "full-fire voting rights". At times the houses with voting rights are represented as "fuegos". When speaking of these householders, the texts in question often speak of their representatives as "cabezaleros" and "cabezaleras" and/or as "buenos hombres" y "buenos mujeres". Their duties and responsibilities are laid out. Hence, in the particular case in question, there is little doubt that the rank of those involved was conferred by their "house". My assumption is that the expression is derived from Euskera, as are many other odd expressions that pop up in these codes which are written in Spanish. To my knowledge, there is no alternate derivation for the term. Moreover, the phonological reduction of "the lady of the house" to * with the resulting form being "masculinized" by replacement of the <-a> definite pronoun ending with the masculine ending <-o> from Romance seems fairly straight forward to me. However, I might be missing something. On a related note: certainly we know that the compound / (also with the definite article in and ) meaning "new-house", gave rise to a variety of surnames and first names in Spanish, ranging from the very obvious Spanish last name Echeverria to the more obscure first name "Xavier". The same house name became, for example, Dechepare and Chavert in French. It seems to me that odder things have happened, e.g., Ximena (Jimena), the name of El Mio Cid's wife, deriving from in Euskera which means "my (beloved> son." At least that is what one of my professors told me some years back. Again in a marketplace town like medieval Burgos, stomping grounds of El Cid Campeador, it wouldn't be surprising to encounter this sort of thing either given that many of those living there and travelling through were probably bilingual in Castilian and Euskera. If I'm not mistaken the linguistic boundary at that time was a few kilometers north of the Montes de Oca just outside Burgos. In the 70's I spent seven summers teaching in Burgos and found quite a number of curious characteristics in the Spanish of the Burgaleses, many of whom had recently moved to the city from former Basque-speaking zones (that is from zones where Euskera was still spoken in the Middle Ages (help! Larry, with the exact boundary lines). For example, one of our constant headaches was finding families in Burgos for our North American students to live with who did not have a tendency to "speak in infinitives", as we characterized that aspect of their speech. Anyone familiar with Euskera could recognize what was going on in the Spanish of these individuals, usually from the popular rural classes who had just moved into the city of Burgos. Best wishes, Roz Frank April 6, 1999 From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 6 23:41:06 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 19:41:06 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: I wrote <<'Moon' in Polish is most often 'ksiezyc' (sans accents) - a fascinating word. Words like 'ksiezy' (priest), 'ksie-stwo' (principality), 'ksiezna' (princess) and 'ksie-g' (cashbook, register, tally) suggest...>> In a message dated 4/6/99 4:32:59 PM, jpmaher at neiu.edu wrote: <<--Damned fascinating. Source is Gothic 'kin-ing' > 'king'. A priest in medieval Christendom held forth in a [fortified} , from medieval Latin . Cf. , < Kassel>...>> "Kunnig">"ksiezy"? Hmmm. Until I hear otherwise from Miguel and the Lords of the Sound Laws, I am forced to assign this to the dark confines of the Dubious Etymologies file (in which of course many of my own derivations are also entombed.) B-T-W, I was only pointing to moon>"ksiezyc" (Pol) as a sidenote. It reminded me that there are basic words around that don't entirely support the idea that Slavic was quite so monolithic. But while we're at it let me give you my own dubious derivations: "kosciol" is possibly from something - way back- like "koczow-ac" (Pol) to be encamped, from "koczow-nik", nomad; "koczow-", to wander; "kos", horse blanket. And get a load of this: "Kunnig" is from something like "konn-ica" (Pol), horsemen; "konn-y", mounted; ("koni-arz", horse-trader>?"kunning-az") from "kon", horse. Since horses came from the east, and horses made men kings in horseless lands - "kunnig" entered Germanic from Slavic or proto-Slavic or agricultural Scythian or BSG or, heck, Beta-Tocharian, as a description of the leader of a band of horsemen. Before the domestication of the horse, the root "kon-" referred only to the herd or herding dogs. Once the horse became domesticated, the Slavs/Scythians/generic-IE-nomads, who didn't have herding dogs on the steppes, applied the word directly to the newly domesticated horses. More western tongues kept the indirect canine references (hound, kund), but borrowed or rather learned the self-appelation of the horsemen and their leaders. What Miguel and the Lords of the Sound Laws will do to me I cringe to think. But at least this path of derivation is a bit more logical, historical and doesn't ask me to believe a flood of random consonants like "ksiezy" came out of someone's mouth imitating someone else saying a plain appelant like "kunnig" the king and then promptly applied it to the moon. Lucky it didn't happen to "karl" and "krol". eh? Regards, Steve Long From roborr at uottawa.ca Wed Apr 7 01:07:40 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 21:07:40 -0400 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: At 07:13 PM 4/5/99 +0200, you wrote: >ROBERT ORR: >> Actually, there is evidence to suggest that IE *kuon is probably >> from a zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku- >> "herd(?)".(...)a comparison between *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. forms >> would be a desideratum. >GLEN GORDON: >> Until we find a *p- before that word in some attested language, it's all >> but one of many possibilities (Probably the unlikeliest possibility >> too). (...) Allan Bomhard reconstructs a Nostratic item, #652 >> *k(h)uwan-/*khuw at n- "dog", to account for both IE *k^won and AfroAsiatic >> with similar forms. Illych-Svitychs earlier Nostratic reconstruction >> (...) is also based on Uralic forms (...), all of which Bomhard had >> trouble finding (...). >> Not knowing alot of detail behind the forms sited for AA, it looks >> intriguing but IE and AA are very far apart. I'd be interested to know >> if others have found these forms in Uralic (...) and if so, could they >> simply be borrowed from IE? >Even if they were, this wouldn't explain the existence of similar forms in >other language families closer to IE than AA. J.Greenberg lists the >following Eurasiatic forms, none of which show any trace of *p- or the >like: Old Turkish 'bitch', Mongol 'a wild masterless >dog', Proto-Tungus <*xina> 'dog', Korean 'dog' (< kani), Gilyak >~ 'dog' and Sirenik 'wolf' (read the y as a gamma). >In "On the Origin of Languages", Stanford Univ. Press 1994, J.D.Bengtson >and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide range of other >language families, even khoisan. >Thus, *k^won seems not to be derived from *peku-, but is probably an >indivisible word belonging to the very oldest core of human vocabulary. >Adam Hyllested Maybe I should have posted this one to the whole list. Individuals who have already seen it, please bear with me. "Ironically, although there does seem to be a considerable amount of evidence that the notions 'dog' and 'wolf' can be combined, the reconstruction of Nostratic *k?yn?, based on a comparison of PIE *kuon with various other forms in Uralic, Afro- Asiatic, etc., may not be a good example of the phenomenon. It has been proposed on and off for nearly a century, starting with Osthoff (1901:199, et passim), that PIE *kuon is in fact originally derived from the root which gives Latin pecus, Gothic faihu, etc., < IE *peku-, and that OCS pisu is also related. According to such a reconstruction *kuon would originally have meant "sheep-dog", and be derived from something similar to *pekuon < *peku- + - on, with PIE *kuon derived from *pkuon, a zero-grade form of *pekuon. Such an etymology allows us to derive, ultimately, both the set of forms normally traced back to IE *kuon, and OCS pisu, from the same root. Osthoff's theory has found a small but steady stream of followers, e.g., Knobloch (1971), Hamp (1980), who have added further refinements." And by way of clarifictaion, recall that Slavic tended to insert jer vowels into old IE zero-grades, thus giving us *piku-. Hamp has a convincng line of argumentation showing how other Slavic derivational forms (e.g., pisynja) could be seen as from pikuon, and how pisu (< *piku-) would be a back formation. This etymology allows to explain OCS pisu, which is troublesome in most reconstructions. It is very likely an old *-u-stem. For IE *kuon < *pekuon, see Hamp, Eric P. 1980. "IE *()kuon - dog". Indogermanische Forschungen 85.35-42. Knobloch, Johann. 1971. "Die indogermanische Benennung des Hundes", Donum Indogermanicum. ed. by Robert Schmitt-Brandt, 39-40. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Osthoff, Hermann. 1901. Etymologische Parerga, Erster Teil, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. And perhaps one could segment Modern Turkish kopek - dog (I don't have dacritics in this programme) as ko + pek, thus providing us with a beautiful parallel from outsde IE?) From jpmaher at neiu.edu Wed Apr 7 01:33:30 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 20:33:30 -0500 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: Given the ablaut of /e - o - ?/ and E. P. Hamp 1980t IF has a good analysis of the morphophonology, including clarification of the anomalous /a/ in Latin CANIS. But his idea that <*p(e)k'uwon> is a "polymorphemic [semantically] unmotivated" construct is itself unmotivated. The copy of Hermann Osthoff's "Hund und Vieh im Indogermanischen" in the Regenstein Library shows that Hamp never borrowed this book, though he should have [sneak or otherwise] read it at Harvard and/or Chicago. [Paul Friedrich is recorded as borrower; computerized library practice loses this precious information.] Osthoff gives firm arguments for IE < *pe/o/?k-'u-> as 'fleece, teased fibers' [early sheep not woolly, but hairy]. This makes IE dog the "sheep-er", cf. German . Same morphophonology in Latin , Greek , plural , from zero-grade <*pk'ten-> 'comb'.. Which gives rise to the question: are there any traces of earlier dog words in IE? See Sievers-Edgerton' Law. j p maher [ moderator snip of Adam Hyllested post ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 02:45:29 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 22:45:29 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/6/99 7:20:56 PM, jrader at m-w.com wrote: > Not that it really makes any difference to the point I was making!!! IN FACT if Russian was discernible from OCS at an early date that just makes it more likely that Slavic was already well diverged by 860. Just a reminder: my point was that there is no direct evidence that OCS was to any great degree comprehensible to the Wends,etc. etc. If you can with your erudition help me out with that I'd appreciate it. In the meantime, here's why I wrote what I wrote: "Although there is some controversy concerning the possible independent, native developement of writing in Russian, it is generally agreed that writing was introduced to Russia with...the liturgical language that...was Old Church Slavonic. At this period OCS and Old Russian was presumably [sic] mutually comprehensible, yet there was still clear differences between them, namely the criterial differences between (East and South)...in such writing the attempt was made to write Church Slavonic, avoiding local East Slavonic dialect peculiarities. In practice, Russian monks writing these manuscripts often erred in allowing East Slavonic forms to creep into the text... The coexistence of East Slavonic and South Slavonic forms from the earliest Old Russian. is one of the salient charactersistics of the language... Both alphabets [Glagolitic and Cyrillic] providing a good fit to the phonemic system of OCS,... [but U]nfortunately the Cyrillic alphabet had no way of distinguishing between the plosive and fricative sounds... [that for example may have distinguished Eastern Slavic dialects, i.e., north and south] so textual evidence is inconclusive." - Bernard Comrie, TWMLs, p 322 et seq This seems to say to me that the earliest texts written in Russia [if not the earliest text, singular - which Comrie does not mention] were written in OCS. And that E. Slavonic was mixed in. Not knowing better, I believed him until I saw what you wrote. Now - informed by you - I believe he is terribly wrong and "muddled," just as you say. Regards, Steve Long From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Apr 7 06:04:10 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:04:10 -0400 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Steven A. Gustafson wrote: > I'm reasonably certain that in Bede's Latin (or is it Thomas of > Malmesbury?) ANDERIDA is the name of a forest in England, if this sheds > any light on the prevalence or meaning of this allegedly Celtic root. I > think it's still called the Forest of Andred. Eilert Ekwall (Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names) s.n. Andred cites or c.425 from the Notitia Dignitatum, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. He derives it from a Brit. prefix and Brit. (Welsh ) 'ford' and says that K.L. Jackson renders it 'the great fords'. Brian M. Scott From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 06:24:53 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:24:53 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/5/99 8:14:05 AM, I wrote: <> Our Moderator's replied: <> Well, Linear B wasn't just numbers. This is a sample from "The Codebreakers" by David Kahn: "Koldos the shepherd holds a lease from the village: 48 litres of wheat. One pair of wheels bound with bronze, unfit for service. Four slaves of Koradollos in charge of seed-corn. Two tripods: Aigeus the Cretan brings them." It is said they contain nothing "beside these minutely detailed bureaucratic records of petty commercial transactions." And legal, census, conscription, tax and contractual stuff. However they do obviously contain plenty of what some on the list would call "everyday language." And they reflect the need to be PRECISE and predictable. The writers were not being wishy-washy - four slaves of Koradollas in charge, Aigeus the Cretan, 48 litres of wheat. Pair of wheels, but unfit for service. Very precise. In fact, this is what the overwhelming volume of medieval Latin text is like. Doomsday Books and tax records and birth records and conscription records and official proclamations and who went where when. In a message dated 3/26/99 1:53:30 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> I think I disagree with that first part. I think kings and tax collectors and army commanders want a very clear idea of what is going on, what is owed, what should be paid this year based on what was paid last year. They want precison and consistency in language. They can't have words, forms or meanings changing on them. These are the documents by which we prove who now owns the land when someone dies, how much we owe or are owed, who was born where and when, how much wheat is left, who is in charge of what, etc. But if Miguel is right, we should see these commercial and government scribes being not too fussy about changes in language. Local dialects and changes in sound or morphology and other changes over time should show up without much concern. If Mycenaean changed very little (comparatively) - I don't know myself - in 350 years (I think that's the current guess for Lin B), then it was quite conservative, even for a government/business language. On the level of Latin. Does a language out of nowhere just step up, full blown and take over the Lin A alphabet without losing a beat and without extensive changing? From illiterates to almost Roman-style exactitude in one step? My point is that IF Mycenaean did not experience some serious change from the time it first moved to literacy, it may have already been standardized before it became literate. And this may suggest that in the early days a non-literate language could be a standardized language and stay standardized over time without writing - not just because of priest and poets, but also tax collectors, merchants and Koldos the sheperd and the villiage he owed money to. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 7 06:52:45 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:52:45 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >The only firm datum is the numeral "1" (Skt. e:ka- vs. Av. aeva-). >For all we know, it may have been a fourth branch of Indo-Iranian, which >happened to have *aika- for "1", just like Indo-Aryan. >> -- yeah, since the Hurrians must have picked up that vocabulary before around the early-to-mid-2nd-millenium, when the Mitannian kingdom was founded, it would be interesting to see how a form of Indo-Aryan that archaic looked. Eg., presumably it wouldn't have the layer of Dravidian loan-words that Vedic Aryan has. The capital of Mitanni has never been excavated -- perhaps it will be fairly soon (it was in what's now northeastern Syria). All our Mitannian documents come from the fringe areas of the kingdom, or international correspondence. The actual archives of the Mitannian kings would be a treasure-trove. Of course, they might not have written much if anything in the ancestral IE language, since it's pretty obvious that the Indo-Aryan element was quickly assimilated by the Hurrian. (Eg., the Mitannian kings seem to have had Hurrian personal names and to have adopted Indo-Aryan ones as "throne names" when they succeeded to the office.) It would be nice to find out exactly how the Hurrians acquired this IE superstrata, too; the Kassites, another people from the Iranian plateau, show some indications of doing so as well. How quickly one archaeological discovery can change things. Many works published in the 80's and 90's strongly deny that the chariot was introduced into the Middle East by IE speakers, arguing instead that it was invented in the Middle East in the 2nd millenium BCE. Now we know it was present in the Eurasian steppe no later than the 21st century BCE, and the IE-introduction theory looks better than ever. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 06:54:17 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:54:17 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 4/6/99 11:40:17 PM, you wrote: <> This is nothing but truisms. And they are contradicted by the very fact that there is a Grimm's law and there is an Indo-European language group and there is a way the old sound laws can "predicatably" tell you if one word is cognate with another even if they are centuries apart. That's what predictability means. It means you can look at some word on a clay tablet and make a good guess at whether they are Greek or not. Because it follows from prior experience. That's predictability. It really doesn't take a lot of hard thought to figure out that languages change. It's not a breakthrough idea. I remember reading about an early IEist first looking at Gothic and saying "I thought I was reading Sanskrit." That is the point. If he said, "boy, languages do change don't they?" That would have been trite. Or considerably worse. It's the continuity, not the change. That's the science of it and from what I've seen in the work of some people in this field, the art of it. Where's the pattern, not that there's no pattern. If my you find my speaking of predictability "rather" disturbing, I can only respond that I find you reminding me that languages change unpredictability - well, I'll believe you if you wake up speaking Bantu tomorrow. Otherwise I'll find the whole idea ridiculous. <> Boy wouldn't that be silly. Where would I get a wild idea like that? Isn't French just as close to Chinese as it is to Spanish? Isn't Polish just as close to Mayan as it is to Russian? How could you possibly think I would ever think that? Never occurred to me. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 7 07:04:36 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 03:04:36 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >I've seen some confusing arguments linking Jutes, Geats & Goths--based only >on the resemblance on the names What's the scoop on that? -- Jutes were from Jutland (the Danish peninsula joined to the mainland). The Geats were the people between the Scanian Danes (Scania was part of Denmark until the Early Modern period) and the Swedes proper; Beowulf (probably Bjovulf in Scandinavia) was supposedly a Geat. The Goths had a tradition claiming that they'd originally come from central Sweden. Historically, they first show up as the easternmost of the Germanics, in what's now Poland -- the Vistula area. By the 4th century AD, their eastern branch was in the Ukraine and the western on the Danube. My own guess is that the 'migration' of the Goths from Sweden was a movement of leaders who provided organization, and that the bulk of the groups that later became "Gothic" then took over this small element's foundation-myth. By the time the Goths migrated into the Roman Empire they'd picked up a lot of other elements as part of their ethnogenisis, of course. >I've also seen arguments linking the Angles to the Frisians, claiming they >were basically the "Frisians of Angeln." -- the traditional account has the Angles leaving the mainland _en masse_ for England, and other groups -- Danes and Frisians -- taking over their vacated lands. There were a good many of abandoned settlements in the area the Angles were supposed to come from, at about that time, probably linked to rising sea levels and the loss of farmland and pasture. We'll probably never know the details. >And I've seen the argument that Scots [Lallans] & Northumbrian are >essentially Modern Anglian while R. P. is basically Modern Saxon with some >modest Anglian influence [e.g. I < ik instead of ich & 3rd ps -s instead of >-eth]. -- Lallans developed from the Northumbrian dialect; Lothian was settled by Angles, traditionally. Apart from that we'll never know... 8-). Modern Standard English is essentially an East Midland dialect (with fairly heavy Scandinavian influence) which became the predominant speech of London due to in-migration during the later middle ages and the Early Modern period. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 7 07:22:47 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 03:22:47 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Since horses came from the east -- PIE already had a word for horse. (*ekwos) Horses were domesticated around 4000 BCE (almost certainly by PIE speakers) and the domestic horse was present in central and northern Europe during the 4th millenium BCE. >Once the horse became domesticated, the Slavs/Scythians/generic-IE-nomads, >who didn't have herding dogs on the steppes -- !!!! From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Apr 7 09:07:42 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:07:42 PDT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Alright, let's see if we got it this time. You're saying: Pre-IE IE Anat > CS Greek *-t *-t *-t *-H1 - *-k *-k (*-h) *-H2 - *-p *-H3 (*-h) *-H3 - MIGUEL: Not quite. I mentioned no -k in Greek, merely a possible alternation -H2 ~ -k-. Whoops, of course. Slip on my part. I think I get it now ME (GLEN) concerning **-t > *-H1: Besides the fact that this sound change itself lacks more than one or two examples, *H1 could really be any consonant or even a long vowel according to your "evidence". MIGUEL: One good example is all it takes. I'm afraid not. It's not a good example, it's not even an example. It simply should be thrown out. Beekes may reconstruct a *-(e)H1 if he wishes but anyone with any sense at all has to question the validity of this. So what, there's a lengthened vowel. It still stands as I've said above that there's no clear indication that the lengthening derives from such a change. In fact, I don't even think mediofinal *H1 existed since that in itself is hard to justify. MIGUEL: The instrumental (where it exists at all and isn't made with *bhi/*mi) shows a lengthened vowel in all roots (-a: for a:-stems, -i: for i-stems, -o: or -e: for o-stems), which can only mean -H1. Which can mean either a lengthened vowel or *H1, really. Besides probably Latin?, what evidence of this *-(e)H1 exists? MIGUEL: Hittite has -it (< *-et). If we postulate a development **-t > *-H1, the Hittite form can be connected to the others [as well as to other, extra-IE, instrumentals in -t, if we so wish. I give you Georgian -it, Sumerian -ta]. Yes, that's right. I'm agreement with you but with vastly different reasons. And don't forget Uralic *-ta :) which is most evidently more relatable to the ablative *-ed based on those regular sound changes I mentioned. In fact, my sound changes show more examples than your **-t > *-H1 will ever be able to. If you want to talk external connections, it makes no sense to compare *-eH1 of all things to foreign forms with /t/ when the more comparable (and fully reconstructable, mind you) ablative *-ed is awaiting our discovery. I've outlined how *-ed can be related to Uralic *-ta due to syllable loss that has apparently affected other endings as well. You have not. What I'm saying, I think, is further validated by IE's quirky accentuation that can be explained by the sound changes I've outlined. It seems that Pre-IE **-VCV becomes *-V'C where the ending actually becomes accented from the syllable loss. This explains the accentuation of the 3rd person plural since **-ene > **-e'n and later *-e'nt/*-e'r. Being that *-men and *-ten are patterned on **-e'n (note that *-n does not become *-r in *-men as Miguel might want to think), it should come to no one's surprise that the plural conjugation ended up with accented suffixes. Nor should it be shocking that the genitive *-es (**-ese) is also accented (cf. Etruscan -isa [genitive] and ? Sumerian -se [dative]). MIGUEL: The supposition is merely that if there are masc/fem. roots in -k or -t (nom. -ks, -ts), we might expect some neuters too, and there aren't any. This may be due to an Auslautgesetz, as suggested by the few clues we have (ins. sg. -t ~ -H1, fem. -H2 ~ -k-). Supposition, yes. The fact is there's nothing you've found that shows what you assert. Greek -k- could, in these cases be caused by a reflex of *H2/*H3, in which case, there's enough doubt to call into question the modest clues you give attention to as evidence. ME (GLEN): That kind of logic in itself is deplorable and if Greek -k- does point to a laryngeal somehow we cannot, as in the first sound change, nail this down to anything more specific than this: **-k ?> *-(H) (?) MIGUEL: Surely -H2, if anything. Judging by Greek we might have the following sketchy hypothesis: *-H1-/-H2-/*-H3- >? Greek -k- I of course severely doubt *-H1- as a possibility but lacking evidence that supports Greek's peculiar whims as archaic, you are unable to narrow these choices down. MIGUEL: Symmetry is aesthetics, aesthetics is symmetry. And sometimes, symmetry isn't science nor does it give us the simplest and likeliest solution based on evidence at hand. Pi isn't very symmetric but it's still pretty to some... 3.14159265358979323... :) ME (GLEN): In summary, this is what your very uncertain idea amounts too: **-t ?> IE *-(H) (?) **-k ?> IE *-(H) (?) MIGUEL: I agree the whole thing is uncertain, but one question mark suffices: **-t > *-H1 (?) **-k > *-H2 (?) I'm afraid I have to keep both question marks. A correlation between the *-t in Anatolian and forms without hasn't been properly established with only one example to show! The second is to show the uncertainty of the later posited form. You're lucky I didn't add a third. ME (GLEN): First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). MIGUEL: Which is obviously false. ME (GLEN): Obviously how? MIGUEL: Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. Right, because speakers of IE right down to Sanskrit would have been aware of the relationship of the 3p secondary *[-t] (*-t ~ *-d) to primary *[-ti]. Thus, although *-t derives from **-to and should have become *-d, it only devolved back into *-t due to its primary counterpart. Aside from the ablative and neuter on the one hand and the 3rd person on the other, there really is much to show for final *t/*d contrasts and there's isn't much reason to assume that such distinctions were actively maintained in PIE. Can you find a valid example of IE *-t that doesn't involve the 3rd person? I rest my case. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Apr 7 09:11:02 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 02:11:02 PDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >The only firm datum is the numeral "1" (Skt. e:ka- vs. Av. >aeva-). For all we know, it may have been a fourth branch of >Indo-Iranian, which happened to have *aika- for "1", just like >Indo-Aryan. You're rejecting evidence in favor of a hypothesis again. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 16:26:33 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 12:26:33 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Fashion) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/6/99 11:40:17 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: <>. Language is a fundamental part of culture and does not exist without it. Language without culture has no referents, no context, no medium, no way of propagating and no reason for being. One of the reasons I cannot honestly argue with Miquel's notion that LBK carried PIE or its descendents into northern Europe is that the evidence does support the existence of a coherent culture or uberkultur that tracks that idea well. You can't support the PIE/LBK premise on human genetics, but its hard to fight it based on the evidence of culture. Once you see a cohesive culture, historically or prehistorically, you see a clear medium for the transmittal and maintenance of an identifiable language. This is historically confirmed again and again. Archeaologically you can pinpoint where you will find Latin inscriptions based on finding Roman cultural remains first. Is it 100% predictable? Of course not. But it is the anamolies that prove the rule. The shock of finding out Linear B was Greek (nobody was predicting it, not Evans or even Ventris) has now faded away because the cultural remains have confirmed a clear demarcation between Minoan and Mycenaean cultures. All of this is hard history. It is not pop sociology. <> Culture and "fashion" are historical evidence. Proto-Geometric was nothing but a fashion but it reliably labels a period, a culture and a developement. You have no idea how important bronze helmets, beaver hats and three cornered hats are to our understanding of history. When we are not identifying a culture by a fashion in material culture, we are identifying it by its language. LaTene becomes Celtic. If you feel that historical linguistic evidence has no pattern, no meaning and is pure frivilous fashion, that's fine. I wouldn't want to talk you out of it. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 7 09:28:40 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 10:28:40 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990406191236.75196.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [LT] > >As far as I -- a non-specialist -- can see, the IE status of the word is > >demonstrated, and there is no problem to be solved by appealing to an > >implausible "Vasconic" influence. And anyway Basque has both > >the wrong form and the wrong meaning. > Does this last comment mean that you believe the best simulation would > be one that doesn't link the Euskera items and in > anyway whatsoever with the IE items? Including the Gk. ones? Yes. I can't see any persuasive reason to connect Basque `lady' with anything in Greek. By the way, it is clear that is the original form of the Basque word. This is the only form recorded in Aquitanian, and the first form recorded in the medieval period (in 1085, according to Sarasola). The contracted form is first recorded in the 12th century; this would have been unpronounceable in Pre-Basque/Aquitanian, but it now predominates in a sizeable area of the country, though most of the east retains today. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 7 16:48:19 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 11:48:19 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Thanks for taking the time to send your remarks on the credibility of the IE hypothesis. I have no problem with believing that at some time in the ancient past, a group of IE speakers migrated from some part of the Eurasian land mass to another, and took their language with them. And the tendency for languages to diverge because of the lack of contact between them, seems imminently sensible to me. Larry Trask was quite eloquent in defending IE, but he was also explicit in pointing out the failing of the IE model at a practical level. He affirmed that the IE model does not explain how the languages that are used in Europe today, got that way. And others have pointed out the failings of IE to explain how other languages developed. In some instances, it seems that convergence of languages is more explanatory of the current linguistic state than a divergence model. But, the similarities of vocabulary among the IE languages, at least to the extent that we know about them, is too strong to ignore. And the IE family model of language divergence does fit the European experience. However, it is not a relaible predictor of specific languages, and the family model upon which it is based is not a reliable predictor of the divergence/convergence dicotomy of all languistic groups. These are the conclusions I draw from what I have read so far. Given the absence of written records, it is remarkable that we can know as much as we do about ancient languages. Along with mathematics, archeology and geology, linguistics has entered the era where the further away we get from an event, the more we know about it. In the future, we will know more of how these things happen. My academic training is in Economics and econometrics, where we build models of economic relationships that explain choices people make when a trade-off confronts them. My first intensive study was on the spread of the use of heroin, and in my investigation I found a dissertation from a graduate student in mathematics at MIT who had adapted an epidemiological model from the medical community to predict the spread of an epidemic of heroin addiction. He showed that the mathematical model used by epidemiologists was applicable to the spread of addiction to herion and herion use, and that the exact same parameters that defined the spread of infectious disease explained the spread of heroin addiction. The parameters were different in magnitude, but the model was accurate for either event. The reason I bring this up is that it seems to me that an over-all theoretical framework of the spread of language has not been developed. Not only the IE model, but all other linguistic models that deal with the development, spread, divergence and convergence of languages, need a theoretical framework if they are to be successful in predicting linguistic adoptions. It seems to me, that the theorectival framework of an epidemicological model of the spread of disease would easily supply this need of the linguistic community. It would not be a herculian task to attempt to specify such a model, and the results could be quite enlightening. Here are the basic parameters of an epidemiological model: You begin with a population which is divided into those who are "susceptible" to the infection vs those who are "unsusceptible". Once that ratio is known, or estimated, the rate of contact between "infecteds" and "susceptibles" is calculated or estimated. From these simple parameters then, the rate of the spread of the infection and the saturation level can be estimated and predicted. Susceptibles, in the linguistic world, would be those who were exposed to the new tongue and those who found a need to learn it: a child attended by a care giver would find it advantageous to learn the language of the care-giver: a merchant who wished to conduct business with a different linguistic group. Both these examples actually share an underlying interest--an advantage seen, in learning a new language. This is the kind of parameter that "susceptiblity" deals with. The exposure side (rate of contact between infecteds and susceptibles) of the equation is easily identified in the linguistic community: The relatively few Romans sent to govern England was not sufficient to generate a critical mass of exposure units for Latin to predominate. And the Romans left local courts and laws stand, lessening the need for everyone to know Latin in order to get along. In this case, the exposure rate was too law for Latin to make the transition of being adopted. This model, if the parameters were known, could be used to explain why the Normans adopted the local French language after they conquered that part of France and why the Saxons kept their language when the conquered England. Do you see any applicability of this kind of mathematical approach to the spread of languages? Has this type of approach been undertaken by anyone in the linguistics community? Ray Hendon From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 15:45:32 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 08:45:32 PDT Subject: R: Re: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <3727a859.246546354@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Miguel CV wrote: > > How does the Galician standardization compare? To what extent is > the choice for Western morphology and Eastern pronunciation, for > instance, a conscious "political" move, and to what extent might > it be a side effect of either the Mediaeval standard or modern > regional economics (as opposed to "national" [or should I say > "popular"] politics)? >From what I've been told, the official Neo-Galician language is very much influenced by "Popular" politics, the basic aim being to keep it as Spanish (i.e., Castilian) as possible and as distant as possible from Portuguese (which as I keep repeating is difficult to do, if we think of the dialects just over the border). However, I'll consult my Galician contacts on this (not my wife!) and come back with a more detailed report. Thanks to both Miguel and Larry for their replies. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From adahyl at cphling.dk Wed Apr 7 17:18:07 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 19:18:07 +0200 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: <003b01be8004$3e6b5a80$47f1abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. It is not > the only Greek word ending in -nx. There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), > and of course sphinx, and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. > These are all -ng stems. and phalanx, an -ng stem too. From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 16:40:46 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 09:40:46 PDT Subject: R: Re: Distance in change In-Reply-To: <3726a26b.245028564@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Miguel CV wrote: > But for an analysis of the system as a whole, it's not > unimportant to add that Italian also has b, d, g; pp, tt, kk and > bb, dd, gg... Etruscan *only* had p, t, k and ph, th, kh. That's correct. > >All this *may* mean that the Tuscans, wrote "casa" (probably for > >etymological reasons), but pronounced "hasa". > That's the only hope the Etruscan substrate theory has: that the > gorgia went unnoticed and unwritten for over a millennium (maybe > in remote illiterate areas of Tuscany?) until it became > fashionable in the Tuscan cities, sometime around 1500... I'm not expert enough to be an authoritative supporter of either theory. But what if all speakers in the areas of Northern Tuscany concerned spoke like this? They wouldn't notice it, and the other Italians wouldn't have dared to criticise them concerning their own language, at least until the Italian literary language became consolidated in their own areas (around 1500), as the Americans (Webster, etc.), I assume, would not have criticised British English before independence, or the Latin Americans (Bello, etc.) Castilian. >I must > say I find that hard to believe. Rohlfs also objects that the > Corsican dialects show no trace of the gorgia, despite the > (physical, not literary) Tuscan influence on Corsican. Yes, the Corsican dialects were subject to strong Tuscan influence, as the island was a colony of Pisa and many Pisans went there physically as colonists. However, the original pre-Pisan Corsican dialects are assumed to be closer to Sardinian, and the difference can still be noted between the north-eastern dialects, closer to Tuscan, and the south-western dialects which were less "contaminated". It is interesting to note that Genoese did not affect Corsican too much, except for the city of Bonifacio which speaks a Ligurian dialect (like Alghero in Sardinia speaks Catalan). This was because the Genoese during their occupation adopted a policy of "Apartheid". The Italian language continued in official use as the written language of Corsica until the 1850's and the last book in standard Italian written by a Corsican author was published there towards the end of the 19th century. The modern Corsican regional language, recognised by the French authorities, is comparable to Neo-Galician and Euskara Batua. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Apr 7 11:06:44 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 04:06:44 PDT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: GLEN GORDON: Until we find a *p- before that word in some attested language, it's all but one of many possibilities (Probably the unlikeliest possibility too). [...] Illych-Svitychs earlier Nostratic reconstruction [...] is also based on Uralic forms [...] I'd be interested to know if others have found these forms in Uralic [...] and if so, could they simply be borrowed from IE? ADAM HYLLESTED: Even if they were, this wouldn't explain the existence of similar forms in other language families closer to IE than AA. [...] Old Turkish 'bitch', Mongol 'a wild masterless dog', Proto-Tungus <*xina> 'dog', Korean 'dog' (< kani), Gilyak ~ 'dog' and Sirenik 'wolf' (read the y as a gamma). Ah, good. Altaic and Siberian languages. That's certainly closer than AA - my heart's a bit more at ease now. Regardless of whether we can firmly conclude inheiritance or borrowing though, *k'won- is undoubtedly very ancient and I wish IEists would finally accept that some words simply can't be explained within IE alone so that really bad theories like **pk'won- might be quickly nipped in the bud as they should be. ADAM HYLLESTED: In "On the Origin of Languages", Stanford Univ. Press 1994, J.D.Bengtson and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide range of other language families, even khoisan. Er, that worries me. So how are we sure for example that Khoisan terms are neither coincidence nor borrowed from AA and sons? Khoisan isn't usually considered to be Nostratic nor Dene-Caucasian. What are they trying to reconstruct with these cognates? Not Proto-World I hope. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's comment: That is precisely what they are trying to reconstruct. --rma ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 17:46:49 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 13:46:49 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/6/99 4:57:24 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: < *kUne~gI > *kUne~dzI) "king".>> The Ls of SL have spoken. I am wrong. However!...8-) Based on a message dated 4/6/99 8:16:37 PM, where roborr at uottawa.ca wrote: << In Polish *kn+FV or J > *ks ksiezyc, ksiezy, ksiezna etc. < *kne(d)z, Russian knjaz' ksiega < *kniga, Russian kniga>> So the source is really Russian! I'd like to suggest that the word did not pass from Gothic to Polish but from Gothic to Russian and then to Polish.... Because, I think we don't really ever see directly kn (Ger) > ks (Pol). We do see knife (mentioned as a possible non-IE word in German)> noz (pol) We do see "knykiec" (knuckle), "knut" (knout), 'kostka" (knuckle, knot), "kolano" (knee), 'galka' (knurl), 'guz' (knob, node), "kolanko" (node), "kurban" (knoll), 'gniesc' (knead), "gryzc" (gnaw), "gnejs" (gneiss), "gnu" (gnu), BUT "kieczec" (kneel) (but still not "ks"). So without more I propose a full circle .... kon'(horse) > kon-ni-ka > kuning(gaz)> knjaz > kiesyc - remember, for want of a horse a kingdom was lost.... Knight to Oueen 4. Regards, Steve Long From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 19:55:38 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 12:55:38 PDT Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick referring to the possible Etruscan substate in Tuscan wrote: > What you're saying makes me wonder if there wasn't some sort of diglossia > going on all along with the upper classes pronouncing casa as /kaza/ and > the lower classes as /haza/. Would this work? Possibly, but I still think it's possible that all classes used the same pronunciation, but they weren't aware of its "strangeness", as the Irish are not aware of their aspirated consonants, or as some Londoners are not aware they are saying "fink" and think they are saying "think". > >>What I notice about Roman speech is > > >/-L- > 0/ e.g. figlio > "fio" > > >/-nd- > -nn-/ e.g. andiamo > "annamo" > >The first of these phenomena, although in not so extreme a version, is > >common in other Romance dialects, cf. "yeismo" in Spanish. > Not quite because whenever I've spoken to Romans, I've noticed a > complete dropping of /-L-/. I hear /fio/ rather than /fiyo/. But, OTOH, > I've spoken to Italians in Latin America and the US. Yei/smo is a bit more > complicated since it runs through a whole gamut of sounds including /y^, j, > zh & sh/ --with /y^/ representing the "tense " similar to that of > rather than that of , which in Spanish is represented by [compare > vs. ] Firstly, I must warn you that my opinions on Romanesco and Neapolitan are those of an outsider. as my native language is English and my other first language is (or as a child was) the Emilian North Italian dialect, but I later adopted standard Italian as a second language. Also, I live in a very North Italian environment among (believe it or not) (semi-)monolingual speakers of Bergamasco. Having said this, according to Gerhard Rohlfs, "Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti", 1949, in Lazio should be pronounced /jj/ , i.e. a geminate semi-consonant like English , which would be a form of "yeismo", right? In my opinion, the speakers of Romanesco have taken this process to its ultimate limits: /fiLLo/ > /fijjo/ > /fio/. > >The second, which is characteristic of Central-Southern Italian dialects, > >including Neapolitan, etc., but *not* Tuscan and *not* North Italian, is > >also considered a substrate phenomenon going back to pre Latin times. > "Nabolidan" as I've heard it among both US ethnic Italians and > Neapolitans visiting the US had /nd/, as in something similar to /andyamu/ > or /andyammu/. But they may have been trying to use a standard > pronunciation. Yes, that is standard Italian "andiamo" with a southern pronunciation. The Neapolitan verb for to go is "jl" or "ghl" and "andiamo" (= let's go) would be "iamme", at least that's what it is in the song "Funicull, Funicul`". :) However, Italian "quando" = Nap. "quanno" (= when); Ital. "colomba" = Nap. "palomma" (= dove); Ital. "gamba" = Nap. "gamma" (= leg) > It is said that Roman settlers to Spain were principally from the > area around Naples, who brought in characteristics of Osco-Umbrian as well > as Greek. But I've usually just heard this remark in passing or seen it as > a "truism" So, Miguel thinks too. Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From adahyl at cphling.dk Wed Apr 7 19:22:30 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 21:22:30 +0200 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: <199904070107.VAA36608@cliff.Uottawa.Ca> Message-ID: ROBERT ORR: > "Ironically, although there does seem to be a considerable amount of > evidence that the notions 'dog' and 'wolf' can be combined, the > reconstruction of Nostratic *k?yn? (or, at least, velar plosive + vowel + n + vowel - the Nostratic etc. reconstructions are even less authorized than the IE ones) > ,based on a comparison of PIE *kuon with > various other forms in Uralic, Afro- Asiatic, etc., may not be a good > example of the phenomenon. It has been proposed on and off for nearly a > century, starting with Osthoff (1901:199, et passim), that PIE *kuon is in > fact originally derived from the root which gives Latin pecus, Gothic faihu, > etc., < IE *peku-, and that OCS pisu is also related. Hmm, peculiar. But no doubt that OCS pisu is PIE *pek^u- in some form. > According to such a > reconstruction *kuon would originally have meant "sheep-dog", and be derived > from something similar to *pekuon < *peku- + - on, with PIE *kuon derived > from *pkuon, a zero-grade form of *pekuon. Such an etymology allows us to > derive, ultimately, both the set of forms normally traced back to IE *kuon, > and OCS pisu, from the same root. That's comfortable, of course, if you want to reconstruct only on the basis of IE proper. But what about the vast Nostratic etc. material? > Osthoff's theory has found a small but > steady stream of followers, e.g., Knobloch (1971), Hamp (1980), who have > added further refinements." > And by way of clarifictaion, recall that Slavic tended to insert jer vowels > into old IE zero-grades, thus giving us *piku-. Hamp has a convincng line > of argumentation showing how other Slavic derivational forms (e.g., > pisynja) could be seen as from pikuon, and how pisu (< *piku-) would be a > back formation. > This etymology allows to explain OCS pisu, which is troublesome in most > reconstructions. It is very likely an old *-u-stem. More troublesome, though, for the attempt to link the other 'dog'-words to *pek^u- is the fact that NONE of these contain an initial

. Note even Lithuanian . > For IE *kuon < *pekuon, see > Hamp, Eric P. 1980. "IE *()kuon - dog". Indogermanische Forschungen 85.35-42. > Knobloch, Johann. 1971. "Die indogermanische Benennung des Hundes", Donum > Indogermanicum. ed. by Robert Schmitt-Brandt, 39-40. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. > Osthoff, Hermann. 1901. Etymologische Parerga, Erster Teil, Leipzig: S. > Hirzel. All published before the renaissance of cross-linguistic comparison. > And perhaps one could segment Modern Turkish kopek - dog (I don't have > dacritics in this programme) as ko + pek, thus providing us with a beautiful > parallel from outsde IE?) Parallel or common origin? I don't get it either way. If you mean common origin, what is 'ko' then? *pko? ko-pek = sheepdog-sheep? Best regards, Adam Hyllested From iglesias at axia.it Wed Apr 7 20:14:52 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 13:14:52 PDT Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Further to my earlier posting, I made a mistake in my phonetic transcription of Romanesco "fio". The correct version is: /fiLLo/ > /fiyyo/ > /fio/ My apologies. I was influenced by Rohlfs transcription with "j" (as in German) = "y" (as in English). Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it [ Moderator's comment: Technically, the IPA transcription *should* be [j]; [y] represents the tense high front rounded vowel. I've noted before that we as a group need to agree on a particular translation of the IPA to ASCII, in order to avoid confusions like this. --rma ] From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Apr 7 20:12:47 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 23:12:47 +0300 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: <003b01be8004$3e6b5a80$47f1abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: Subject: Re: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) >Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. Indeed it was meant as an example, but it is actually the only possible example. Flash Gordon said that there were no IE stems in -(n)k and Miguel replied "Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx)." So to prove the point there has to be an example in Greek that (1) is inherited from PIE and (2) preserves an -nk stem that other IE languages have lost. More below. >It is not the only Greek word ending in -nx. No, there are quite a few. Many of them have meanings having to do with holes, caves, cavities, passages, tubes, pipes, and other little round things or the like, or sounds made by birds or musical instruments or have to do with swirling motions or sounds. In many instances there are variants between forms in -x and -nx. Clearly, the -nx ending is used expressively over a wide part of its range. But lynx (the animal; I will use for upsilon so it will be easier to compare with modern English usage) has a genitive lynkos which makes it stand out like a sore thumb from the rest of the -nx words. Not just any Greek word ending in -nx will do. >There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), and of course sphinx, >and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. Syrinx is one of those pipe/passage words (origin of English "syringe") as are larynx, pharynx, and pharanx (actually this last is "chasm"), but sphinx is just a by-form of an ending in -x. Even the Greeks were aware of this and of the expressive use of the -nx ending. I don't often recommend the Cratylus for accuracy in historical linguistics, but like a stopped watch, it is correct sometimes (Loeb translation, copied from Perseus): Socrates: My friend, you do not bear in mind that the original words have before now been completely buried by those who wished to dress them up, for they have added and subtracted letters for the sake of euphony and have distorted the words in every way for ornamentation or merely in the lapse of time. Do you not, for instance, think it absurd that the letter rho is inserted in the word kaaptron (mirror)? [414d] I think that sort of thing is the work of people who care nothing for truth, but only for the shape of their mouths; so they keep adding to the original words until finally no human being can understand what in the world the word means. So the sphinx, for instance, is called sphinx, instead of phix, and there are many other examples. >These are all -ng stems. Which is where they diverge from lynx, which is an -nk stem. There is also a second lynx word that is an -ng stem, but this means "hiccup" or "retching noise" and is the word that connects with larynx. There may be some confusion between the first and second lynx words by some authors, but that the animal lynx is an -nk stem is shown by the compound lykolynx, "wolf-lynx," which is also an -nk stem (gen. lykolynkos). So getting back to the two criteria that could prove a survival of PIE -nk stems in Greek, there is little doubt that lynx is a PIE word as it occurs in practically all of the main IE branches (see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995, p. 431, 2.1.5.1). However, it is also generally connected with the PIE root *leuk[h]/*luk[h] (ibid.) and I don't see any way to get a consonantal n into this root. It seems more likely that the Greek -nx is expressive, added "to dress them up ... for the sake of euphony" as Plato says (or has Socrates say). But there is still the nagging fact of the -nk stem which goes against all other -nx words in Greek. Can this be laid to the fact that this is a sole surviving PIE -k that received this expressive ending? G & I (ibid.) say: "The phonetic alternations can be ascribed to the fact that this is an animal name; also relevant is the nasalization in Greek , _lun-k-_, paralleled by Lith. dial. _lu,'ns^is_." One can also put this together with Armenian lusanunk` (pl.), but what the significance of this is someone who knows more about Armenian than I do will have to explain. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 7 14:47:56 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 15:47:56 +0100 Subject: and In-Reply-To: <19990406222039.48084.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [on Spanish ] > My assumption is that the expression > is derived from Euskera, as are many other odd expressions > that pop up in these codes which are written in Spanish. To my > knowledge, there is no alternate derivation for the term. The word is unknown to me, and is not listed in Corominas, which last is a little surprising. > Moreover, the phonological reduction of "the lady of the > house" to * with the resulting form being "masculinized" by > replacement of the <-a> definite pronoun ending with the masculine > ending <-o> from Romance seems fairly straight forward to me. However, I > might be missing something. Perhaps not so straightforward. The medieval form of the word for `lady of the house' will have been , or at best , not *. And it is not so easy to see how this could yield the observed , especially since the Basque word is so blatantly and expressly female. Why on earth choose the female term, instead of the male counterpart `master of the house', especially when most of the voting heads of household were male? > On a related note: certainly we know that the compound > / (also with the definite article in > and ) meaning "new-house", gave rise to a variety of > surnames and first names in Spanish, ranging from the very obvious > Spanish last name Echeverria to the more obscure first name "Xavier". > The same house name became, for example, Dechepare and Chavert in > French. Not quite. The name (in French, ) is not related to , but is a distinct formation. The first element is `house', all right, but the second element is obscure. Michelena does not list this name in his etymological dictionary of Basque surnames, but he does discuss it in one of his numerous articles. I've forgotten the details, but he rejects the seemingly obvious `pair' in favor of -- I *think* -- a Basque borrowing of Romance derivative of Latin -- more or less *, I think. I'm also not sure that is the same name as . Assuming the name is Basque at all, I wonder if it might not be a French version of `other-house', another common Basque surname with a number of variants. > It seems to me that odder things have happened, e.g., Ximena > (Jimena), the name of El Mio Cid's wife, deriving from in > Euskera which means "my (beloved> son." At least that is what one of my > professors told me some years back. I am not knowledgeable about Spanish personal names, but this etymology looks deply suspect to me: `my son' for an expressly female name? Anyway, this is only the female form of the common medieval male name . This is of unknown origin: many have seen it as a form of `Simon', though Menendez Pidal derives it from an unrecorded Latin name *. > Again in a marketplace town like medieval Burgos, stomping grounds of El > Cid Campeador, it wouldn't be surprising to encounter this sort of thing > either given that many of those living there and travelling through were > probably bilingual in Castilian and Euskera. If I'm not mistaken the > linguistic boundary at that time was a few kilometers north of the > Montes de Oca just outside Burgos. > In the 70's I spent seven summers teaching in Burgos and found quite a > number of curious characteristics in the Spanish of the Burgaleses, many > of whom had recently moved to the city from former Basque-speaking zones > (that is from zones where Euskera was still spoken in the Middle Ages > (help! Larry, with the exact boundary lines). It is not generally possible to ascertain the southern boundary of Basque with precision at any time before the mid-19th century. There were certainly Basque-speakers in Burgos after its annexation by the Kingdom of Navarre in the 10th-11th centuries, but I don't think anyone knows just how numerous they were or how long the language persisted in Burgos. Place names south of the Ebro are almost invariably Romance, not Basque, though there were formerly several settlements with names like `Town of the Basques'. Even north of the Ebro, place names are mostly Romance today, though things were different in 1025, when the Reja de San Millan records a number of obviously Basque place names in Alava. By the time of the Castilian poet Berceo in the 13th century, the boundary was probably more or less along the Ebro, though it is likely that there was a zone of bilingualism. Berceo, born just south of the river, was a Castilian-speaker, but he clearly knew at least some Basque, since he uses Basque words in his poetry. It seems likely that Basque was still spoken in the vicinity of the city of Vitoria in 1562, when Landucci compiled his dictionary, and it may even still have been spoken in the city itself, though we have no good evidence for this. Today, of course, Basque is gone as a first language in the entire province of Alava, save only for the little finger that pokes between Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, around the town of Ibarra (Spanish Aramaiona). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From lmfosse at online.no Wed Apr 7 21:17:12 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 23:17:12 +0200 Subject: SV: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Larry Trask [SMTP:larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk] skrev 6. april 1999 16:22: > One of my favorite examples is Norwegian and Icelandic. Iceland was > settled from Norway at a time when North Germanic (Scandinavian) already > exhibited noticeable regional variation. Accordingly, we would expect > Icelandic and Norwegian to form a single node within Germanic. As it > happens, however, Norwegian has largely developed in contact with its > neighbors Danish and Swedish, and modern Norwegian is much closer to > Danish and Swedish -- with which it is at least partly mutually > comprehensible -- than it is to Icelandic -- with which it is not > mutually comprehensible at all. Consequently, our family tree today > usually puts Icelandic (and Faroese) off on a separate branch from the > three continental languages, in spite of the historical position. And > this example is not isolated. When you speak about the three Nordic languages Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, it is necessary to remember that these languages in the period between 1350 and 1550 (roughly) were heavily influenced by Platt German. The German Hansa ruled the Nordic world, and its influence upon the Nordic languages was devastating. It has been estimated that about 35 % of the most usual words of everyday communication are derived from Platt (this probably goes both for Swedish and Norwegian), and this is the main reason why a modern Norwegian can't just pick up his Snorri and read it in the original like an Icelander. The situation is therefore a little bit more complex than what you suggest in your mail. Since the development of the Nordic languages is fairly easy to study, they are excellent examples of how a "Wave" can work in language development. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse [ moderator snip ] Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 MobilSvar: 914 03 654 From jer at cphling.dk Wed Apr 7 15:14:45 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 17:14:45 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990406011959.91913.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: In reply to Glen Gordon's post of Mon, 5 Apr 1999 > Does this [viz., s-stems denoting a state] have anything to do with an >IE *-st(i) ending, perhaps? (cf. Hittite talukasti and OSlav. dlugosti) I'm sure it does. If s-stems can derive participle-like adjectives such as Lat. modes-tu-s, augus-tu-s (ptc. of denom.vb., the latter orig. meaning "having made strength", i.e. "being strong, strong"), surely there could also be corresponding abstract formations in *-ti-s ("the situation of having made length, the situation of being long, longness"). It proves the IE apparatus of derivation very large and very old. > Gee, maybe it's that **-t > *-s thing. Just a thought. Ooops, I forgot. > Too simple. We must posit **-c to cloak it in phonetic mystery. What was > the reason for **-c again? My reason was that there is surely also a /t/ that does not go to /s/ when word-final. Actually, that is not the precise rule; we also have /-s-/ before weak case-endings and before the fem. marker in the ptc. in gen. *-us-os, fem.Nsg *-us-iH2, but nom. *-wo:t-s with voc. *-wos; probably *le'wk-o:t-s, dat. *luk-e's-ey. We thus seem also to have /s/ before such morphemes that once constituted syllables of their own; if they were once WORDS, the rule is still "/s/ before word boundary, /t/ elsewhere". That would mean, however, that the strong cases were old inflections, while the weak cases were collocations of stem + postposition, and that SOME suffixes use the old sound rules while others do not; since not all suffixes are equally old this just looks like any normal language. - But the 3sg *-t must be a different morpheme; also, one would not like the consonant of the demonstrative pronoun *to- to be the same as that of the pronoun of 2nd person and, since both appear to have external (non-IE) relatives, the immediate solution is to see here a partial merger of originally separate phonemes. My own Danish has the initial dentals /t-/ and /d-/, but there used to be thorn also - what's the big deal? > JENS RASMUSSEN: > pron. *tu, *t(w)e [I'll keep my derivation of *yu(:)s, *usme and > *wos from protoforms with *t(w)- out of this] > Thanks, because there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus. That's what I believed until I succeeded in deriving them all from a completely regular original system where Eng. you IS the acc.pl. corresponding to nom.sg. thou. I had to invent some more sound laws, but that just cannot be helped if we are digging into a past from where there are no (or very few) other remains. It's like Eng. was/were which are just about the ONLY regular verbal forms in a longer time perspective. > JENS RASMUSSEN: > --- Now[...], [...] have we any > way of equating nominal //le'wk-ec-// and verbal //lewk-e'H1-//?? > On an ironic note, if you simply accepted my **-t > *-s rather than an > off-the-wall **c phoneme, you would be closer to your sound rule goals, > in addition to agreeing with a modified version of Miguel's > nonsensical sound change of **t > *H1, if you feel necessary to do. I don't get this: If *-s is a fine outcome for you, as it is for me from what I have labelled "*-c" (to avoid unwanted clashes), it all seems to boil down to the question, "Can [s] become [h]?" We know the answer to that is yes. But not even a change t > h is "nonsensical", the two alternate in Modern Irish, tu'ath [tu@] 'people' : a thu'ath [@ hu@] 'his people'. The tough thing is the conditioning which has not been found so far. Jens E.R. From adahyl at cphling.dk Wed Apr 7 21:52:40 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 23:52:40 +0200 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <688e7a33.243ae495@aol.com> Message-ID: STEVE LONG: > BTW- was sent this by e-mail. It is apparently up on the wall of a church in > the Holy Lands that has a lot of different Lord's Prayers on the walls: > < Nos fader, tu tui jis va nebisai, sjota varda tuji jaima.>> (sans accents) > This appears to be another "Wendish" dialect than Sorb. Actually, a Lekhitic language (together with Polish and Kashubian), heavily influenced by German, extinct in the 18th century. Adam Hyllested From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Wed Apr 7 15:34:03 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 16:34:03 +0100 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: > < superstition].>> > Interesting. How did we find out about this taboo? > Regards, > Steve Long Yeah. What he said. What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed to a common-or-garden lexical innovation? How could you tell? Does a greater frequency of replacement for certain concepts go with a greater superstitious observance? Or are they somehow morphologically marked? I know respect/avoidance language is widely used in the bear-hunting North (see Joseph Campbell on the Ainu), but might we not expect new terms like "well-intentioned one" or "your excellency" rather than the merely prosaic "it's big and it's brown and it likes a jar of hunny"? Nicholas Widdows P.S. > L-S gives (cross my fingers) '*m&emacrns' as IE stem. Use the semicolon, Luke. But '*mēns' probably won't work on e-mail either. From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Apr 7 22:50:34 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 22:50:34 GMT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990406222039.48084.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "roslyn frank" wrote: >In the >Basque law codes that I spent some ten years perusing in one of my >research projects, there are certain phrases that reoccur in Spanish. >They refer to the householders of the village in question who are >"voting" members of the community. The right to "vote" was not >individual but rather by "household" and further, there were only >certain "households" or "etxe" that held that status of "full-fire >voting rights". At times the houses with voting rights are represented >as "fuegos". When speaking of these householders, the texts in question >often speak of their representatives as "cabezaleros" and "cabezaleras" >and/or as "buenos hombres" y "buenos mujeres". Yes, but are they also known as ? And if not, who are the ? >Moreover, the phonological reduction of "the lady of the >house" to * with the resulting form being "masculinized" by >replacement of the <-a> definite pronoun ending with the masculine >ending <-o> from Romance seems fairly straight forward to me. However, I >might be missing something. It might be easier to derive from . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 7 16:00:31 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 12:00:31 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) Message-ID: I wrote: <> Ha! I once put up a straw man on this list by asking if *p>f was possibly caused by a change in the shape of the German people's lips. I think Larry Trask replied, "ridiculous." He was kind enough not to say "massive stupidity." There is clear evidence that the Northern European plain up into Jutland was a cultural vacuum at the beginning of the the first millenium bce. In the south, trade and technology were thriving. (From John Collis,'The European Iron Age') .But in the north, "fortified cities were virtually unknown,... Settlements above the size of villiages were unknown, and compared to central Europe industrial organization was at a low level. The potter's wheel, for instance, was not introduced, though known" throughout the rest of Europe. "Burials, where known, contain a minimum of grave goods - usually no more than a rough urn to contain cremated remains." The thriving trade to the north that clearly existed during bronze age disappeared. Old routes of trade and cultural continuity with the Mediterranean are just no longer there. The diagonal routes of LBK and the corded amphorae are gone. There is evidence at certain points that Celts control trade from the south to the north and nothing gets through. Evidence of "even Celtic material contact up through Scandinavia is not just rare, it is fundamentally non-existent." And therefore, as time goes on, the inhabitants of this area begin to develop "burial rites and material culture" markedly distinctive "from their central European neighbors." 700 years later a culture emerges and starts to spread that is "generally termed 'Germanic'." That is the compelling historical and archeaological evidence of ISOLATION. And it is a much better explanation of how Germanic stayed archaic then - oh, they're just like that. In fact I even like the unique lips explanation better. <> There are obviously better explanations for why Germanic stayed archaic. On this very list, we have been told that Slavic speakers can still understand each other after 1500 years since Slavic speakers first appeared on the historical scene. Meanwhile, after some 1500 years of separation, German speakers with no English and English speakers with no German understand nothing each other say. (I've been there and I've seen it.) That is not conservatism. The 'Germanic' we are talking about happened @3000 years ago. Its speakers were primitive, poor and had lost contact with the rich and "linguistically innovative" regions to the south. Is this the only explanation for its archaism? No. But it is better than pop sociology. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Apr 7 23:08:38 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 23:08:38 GMT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <688e7a33.243ae495@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: ><Nos fader, tu tui jis va nebisai, sjota varda tuji jaima.>> (sans accents) >This appears to be another "Wendish" dialect than Sorb. Polabian, the language of the Slavs living on ("po") the Elbe ("Labe"), is West Slavic, but different from Sorbian. Apparently, it was still spoken in the 17th/18th cc., although by that time heavily influenced by Low German, as the above phrase shows (cf. and < Low German [cf. Dutch and ]). I don't know any Polabian, and I'm a bit confused by that "tu tui", which must contain "kto:ry" somehow. I'm guessing is from *swjo~t- "holy". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 8 00:02:05 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 00:02:05 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <1944318.243bf592@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >"Kunnig">"ksiezy"? >Hmmm. Until I hear otherwise from Miguel and the Lords of the Sound Laws, I >am forced to assign this to the dark confines of the Dubious Etymologies file >(in which of course many of my own derivations are also entombed.) I already gave the sound laws for this one: Gmc. kuning(az) > Slav. kUne~gU or kUne~gI (i-stem) > kUne~dzU/kUne~dzI (3rd. palat.) > knjo~dz (loss of jers; Polish e~: > jo~) > ksia,dz (Polish kn' > ks'). >But while we're at it let me give you my own dubious derivations: >"kosciol" is possibly from something - way back- like "koczow-ac" (Pol) to be >encamped, from "koczow-nik", nomad; "koczow-", to wander; "kos", horse >blanket. Pol. (Loc. kos'ciele), with the Polish "przegl~os" (Umlaut) o < *e before hard dentals, is clearly *kostelU < Lat. castellu. >And get a load of this: >"Kunnig" Actually, kuning-, from *kun-ja "kin" (*gon-) and Germanic suffix -ing/-ung. >is from something like "konn-ica" (Pol), horsemen; "konn-y", >mounted; ("koni-arz", horse-trader>?"kunning-az") from "kon", horse. OCS konjI "horse", of unknown origin, possibly *kobnjo- (and further *kopH- "hoof"?) and related to Russ. kobyla, VLat. caballu, etc. >Before the domestication of the horse, the root "kon-" referred only to the >herd or herding dogs. Once the horse became domesticated, the >Slavs/Scythians/generic-IE-nomads, Not generic IE, but (Tocharians aside) satem-IE, I'm afraid. Iranian span-, spaka- "dog", Baltic Lith. s^uo, Latv. suns "dog" [and Russ./Pol. suka "bitch"?]. You can't connect Slavic *konjo- with the dog word. Wrong guttural (though there is Latv. kunja "bitch"). Incidentally, Lith. pekus, OPr. pecku "Vieh", with *k instead of *k^ would seem to be another reason to cast doubts on *k^uon < *pk^uon > Slav. pIsU. The more I think about, the more likely I find it that Slav. pIsU "dog" is simply "Spot", from *peik^- "spotty, motley, tawny" (cf. the dog Kerberos < *k^erbero- "striped, motley"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 8 00:04:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 00:04:13 GMT Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: <003b01be8004$3e6b5a80$47f1abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. It is not >the only Greek word ending in -nx. There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), >and of course sphinx, and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. >These are all -ng stems. I wated to use larynx or pharynx, but they are -ng stems. The animal is an -nk stem. Lugx, lugkos. There's also lugx, luggos "hiccup". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 8 01:17:18 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 01:17:18 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: >It is my impression that almost all linguistic change is brought >about by sociological factors. I would rather say that linguistic change, brought about by articulatory, combinatory, contact-related etc. "mutations", is selected for by sociological factors. This is not unlike biological change, where the mutations are brought about by various factors (both "internal" quirks in the way DNA is structured and is copied, and "external" factors like cosmic rays), and the mutations are then selected for by their effect on the "fitness" or sex-appeal of the phenotype. >4) Linguistic change is not unidirectional. A change (including > phonetic changes) that goes in one direction in one language > may go in the opposite direction in another language. One can > count up the number of instances for the change in each > direction and say which direction is statistically more likely > for the change, but in essence, there is no change that is > impossible (although some are extremely unlikely). Whether > linguistic change is reversible is a different issue from the > question on non-unidirectionality. Most linguists tend to > avoid discussions of reversibility (although there are clear > examples, mostly learned restorations), but I suspect that > this is mostly because if changes are reversed, it plays merry > hell with historical linguistics. :> Personally, I found it rather difficult to swallow the reversal of Semitic */g/ > Arabic /j/ > Eg. Arabic /g/. But apparently, that's exactly what happened. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Thu Apr 8 09:18:58 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 05:18:58 -0400 Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede > >and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made > >from Indo-Greek present stem? > The Armenian aorist e-ber is a "root aorist", the present stem is > bere-. I am not sure what you mean. Do you mean that eber is from *ebhert, or that it is completely new formation without any parallels elsewhere in IE? >...Slavic mino~ is analogical (vowel stems > with -no~- presents always carry over the -no~- to the aorist and > ptc.praes.act.). Slavic vede is a Class IA verb, which does not > distinguish present and aorist stems Do you mean to imply that at some point in PIE to proto-Slavic, there was a point at which present and past always had different stems, so that when we see the same stem in present and aorist in Slavic, it must be an innovation? > These forms may look identical to "Indo-Greek" imperfects, but > only if we divorce them from their paradigms and the Armenian and > Slavic verbal systems in which they are embedded. When you see forms in IA which are formed the same way as imperfects would be Greek, you consider to them to be imperfects with an imperfective value, with no regard for the syntax. But for other languages, syntax matters? If we use syntax as the guide, the so-called IA imperfect is the (narrative) past, the ``aorist'' is the recent past and the perfect is the resultative (at least in RV). To put it bluntly, no argument which depends on the conventional names for Sanskrit forms (and, I may add, names which were picked from Greek grammar with no regard for the target language, and are, to be frank, based on 19th c. prejudices) can be taken seriously. When I substitute the syntax based names, I fail to follow the logic of the argument. And, I repeat, Vedic has a marked past habitual, while in Iranian, optatives used as past habituals are sometimes augmented, while the so-called imperfect is a simple past. How come ignoring this is not divorcing the forms from the verbal system considered as a whole. [Just because present with pura and/or sma or augmented optatives are not mentioned in verbal paradigms of handbooks does not eliminate the fact that they have a special syntactical niche.] > >If you mean that these are aorist in Arm/Slavic, then aren't you > >comparing apples and oranges here? If Vedic imperfect was not > >imperfective, how can we compare it to Armenian, Slavic or Baltic > >imperfects (the last of which is said to be past frequentative)? > The point is that we *can't* compare it to the Armenian and > Slavic imperfects, which are derived from the optative (probably) > and from a sigmatic form (-e^ax-), respectively. The unique > feature of Greek and Indo-Iranian (and partially Baltic) is that > they lack a marked imperfect form (special endings and/or special > root extension), such as Italic, Celtic, Tocharian, Armenian, > Slavic and Albanian have. There is no strict formal distinction > between aorist and imperfect, except for the abstraction of an > "aorist" and a "present" root, to which secondary endings are > added (and an augment is prefixed). The marked imperfects are not similar enough to be traced back to a common form. So they are all innovations. How does this support a common grouping of Greek and I-Ir? But I-Ir ``imperfect'' is syntactically not an imperfect and there is a separate past habitual (present with pura: and/or sma in Vedic, optionally augmented optative in Iranian). Given that past can be formed from any stem in Hittite, this suggests that forms such as eber < ebheret are survivals, from when such forms were simple past and became aorists when new imperfective pasts arose (probably from past habituals if from optative, from past continuative in Latin and Slavic?). Proto-Baltic would be somewhere in between, with a new past continuative/frequentative (-dav), with old pasts continuing pasts more often than elsewhere. [The limitation of old pasts to imperfective due to the use of prefixed verbs for perfective must be an innovation because there are exceptions to such a binary contrast even today in Lith. and is handled differently in Latvian.] From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Apr 8 22:31:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 22:31:35 GMT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/26/99 1:53:30 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><and all they require is a language that is flexible (and thus >changes). >Priests and poets are a different matter. The only (remote) >possibility for PIE or any other pre-literate language to have >been preserved more or less unchanged beyond its "natural >lifespan" is if it was the vehicle of something like the Vedas or >the Homeric poems. It cannot be excluded that something like >that happened to PIE, but it's not a necessary condition...>> >I think I disagree with that first part. I think kings and tax collectors >and army commanders want a very clear idea of what is going on, what is owed, >what should be paid this year based on what was paid last year. They want >precison and consistency in language. They can't have words, forms or >meanings changing on them. But it's no problem when words, forms and meanings change on the tax payers... Having a clear idea of what's going on, what is owed and who to threaten may well involve commodities, subjects and enemies that weren't there last year. Situations change, and so does language. But you have a point for lawyers. Legal language does tend to be conservative. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 00:07:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 00:07:07 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990407090743.36872.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >MIGUEL: > The instrumental (where it exists at all and isn't made with > *bhi/*mi) shows a lengthened vowel in all roots (-a: for a:-stems, > -i: for i-stems, -o: or -e: for o-stems), which can only mean -H1. >Which can mean either a lengthened vowel or *H1, really. Besides >probably Latin?, what evidence of this *-(e)H1 exists? A lengthened vowel in Vedic, Greek, Germanic, Lithuanian. The quality of the vowel is unaffected. Therefore, we must reconstruct *H1 (unless you think that laryngeal-PIE had long vowels *e: and *o:). >MIGUEL: > Hittite has -it (< *-et). If we postulate a development **-t > > *-H1, the Hittite form can be connected to the others [as well as to > other, extra-IE, instrumentals in -t, if we so wish. I give you > Georgian -it, Sumerian -ta]. >Yes, that's right. I'm agreement with you but with vastly different >reasons. And don't forget Uralic *-ta :) which is most evidently more >relatable to the ablative *-ed based on those regular sound changes I >mentioned. Non-Nostraticists look the other way... Indeed: PIE *d == Uralic *t, PIE *t == Uralic *tt. That's why I have taken great care to distinguish between the ablative in *d and the instrumental in *t (cf. again Georgian ablative -dan/adverbial -ad, Sumerian comitative -da). >Being that *-men and *-ten are patterned on **-e'n (note >that *-n does not become *-r in *-men as Miguel might want to think) Actually, what I stated (following Jens) was that -n > -r, except that in -men/-mn, final -n did not change. >it should come to no one's surprise that the plural conjugation ended >up with accented suffixes. Nor should it be shocking that the genitive >*-es (**-ese) is also accented (cf. Etruscan -isa [genitive] and ? >Sumerian -se [dative]). The Etruscan genitives are *-si and *-la (e.g. for the a-stems: Gen *-a-si > -as *-a-la > -al Abl *-a-si-si > -es *-a-la-si > -al(a)s Dat *-a-si-i > -asi *-a-la-i > -ale) The Sumerian dative is -ra. -she3 is the terminative ("towards, into, to"). >MIGUEL: > Surely -H2, if anything. >Judging by Greek we might have the following sketchy hypothesis: > *-H1-/-H2-/*-H3- >? Greek -k- >I of course severely doubt *-H1- as a possibility but lacking evidence >that supports Greek's peculiar whims as archaic, you are unable to >narrow these choices down. I realize that you are new to this laryngeal business, but the a:-stems have *-H2. >Can you find a valid >example of IE *-t that doesn't involve the 3rd person? I rest my case. No, because *-t became *-H1. I rest my case :) ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Fri Apr 9 00:34:03 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 10:34:03 +1000 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 07 Apr 1999 10:28:40 +0100." Message-ID: Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 10:28:40 +0100 (BST) From: Larry Trask [ moderator snip ] By the way, it is clear that is the original form of the Basque word. This is the only form recorded in Aquitanian, and the first form recorded in the medieval period (in 1085, according to Sarasola). The contracted form is first recorded in the 12th century; this would have been unpronounceable in Pre-Basque/Aquitanian, but it now predominates in a sizeable area of the country, though most of the east retains today. Larry, what is the phenomenom of Aquitanian that makes unpronounceable. thanks Jon ______________________________________________________________ The meaning of your communication is the response you get From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 00:34:22 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 00:34:22 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <19990407091102.27791.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: [me:] >>The only firm datum is the numeral "1" (Skt. e:ka- vs. Av. >>aeva-). For all we know, it may have been a fourth branch of >>Indo-Iranian, which happened to have *aika- for "1", just like >>Indo-Aryan. >You're rejecting evidence in favor of a hypothesis again. No I don't. I'm giving an alternative hypothesis that also fits the evidence. In fact, given the contortions that e.g. Mallory must go through ("In Search of the Indo-Europeans", pp. 35-44) to explain the presence of Indo-Aryans in the Near East (instead of Iranians, or some other Indo-Iranian group), and still doesn't succeed in making much sense of it, I don't see how it can hurt to think about alternative hypotheses. The facts are simply: PIE (non-II) has *oi-no- Indo-Aryan and "Mitanni" have *oi-ko- (e:ka-, aika-) Iranian and Nuristani (I think) have *oi-wo- (ae:va-) We also have e:va (*oi-wo-) "only" in Indo-Aryan. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 00:43:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 20:43:08 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Fashion) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Once you see a cohesive culture, historically or prehistorically, you see a >clear medium for the transmittal and maintenance of an identifiable language. -- thus Gothic cathedrals show the spread of French everywhere from Dublin to Warsaw, and Coca-Cola bottles the universal use of English. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 00:56:46 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 20:56:46 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >However they do obviously contain plenty of what some on the list would call >"everyday language." -- not unless your definition of "everyday language" excludes complete sentences. They're all lists, or things of the order "X holds land on rent of Y". Highly stylized. No poetry, no narrative, no laws, no stories, no legends or religious rituals (apart from lists of offerings), no royal announcements -- just record-keeping of a very elementary kind. In fact, Linear B would be extremely unsuited for anything else _but_ this sort of short, brusque note, because of the large numer of alternative meanings for signs. There are seventy different meanings for the wheel-shaped sign generally rendered as "ka", for instance -- ga, kha, kas, kan, and on and on. If you tried to write anything extensive in Linear B, it would quickly become hopelessly ambiguous because the words would have too many alternate meanings. It's as if we had only one way to write the words pot, peter, pyrite, perhaps and puddle and then had to figure out which one was meant from context. The Mycenaean tablets are readable only because the context of the (short) lists makes clear what's meant. It's an abortion of a writing system. >And they reflect the need to be PRECISE and predictable. -- all languages are precise and predictable at that level. Or do you know of any one that isn't? Languages change, but generally so slowly (on a human scale) that nobody's conscious of it in a time-span of less than generations. Ordinary linguistic change generally isn't going to make anything unintelligible in less than centuries. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 01:03:43 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 21:03:43 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >And they are contradicted by the very fact that there is a Grimm's law and >there is an Indo-European language group and there is a way the old sound >laws can "predicatably" tell you if one word is cognate with another even >if they are centuries apart. -- you're confusing description with prediction. Language change _in the past_ can be described and rules deduced, which can then be applied with reasonable confidence to historic languages we don't have direct evidence for. None of this makes us able to predict how the language will change _in the future_. At most we can make educated guesses based on how one sound-shift is likely to affect an adjacent phoneme, or describe how a change already underway is likely to spread (eg., the example of the initial "wh" to "w" shift underway in contemporary English brought up here recently.) Linguistic change is an almost completely unconscious process, and it's chaotic. People, particularly children and youngsters, change the way they speak all the time. It's impossible to tell which innovations will spread, and which will be "corrected" and die out. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 02:12:21 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 19:12:21 PDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: ROSLYN FRANK: Does this last comment mean that you believe the best simulation would be one that doesn't link the Euskera items and in anyway whatsoever with the IE items? Including the Gk. ones? LARRY TRASK: Yes. I can't see any persuasive reason to connect Basque `lady' with anything in Greek. By the way, it is clear that is the original form of the Basque word. [...] The contracted form is first recorded in the 12th century; this would have been unpronounceable in Pre-Basque/Aquitanian, [...] Hmm, after all this talk, I can't help but be enchanted by the similitude of Greek forms and Basque. Question: why does it matter whether the original form is or to the connection with Greek? Afterall, if a form like **andre would have been unpronouncable in Pre-Basque, Pre-Basque would no doubt have inserted a vowel and thus our Pre-Basque *andere, no? But then, are there any other items in Basque that're being debated as having a Hellenic origin beside *andere? And second, excuse me if I missed something (which is possible because I haven't been fully paying attention till now) but, has a Greek form like *andre: (feminine of ) been considered in the discussion? [ Moderator's response: The feminine of _ane:r_ is _gune:_. There is a feminine derivative _andria_ "manhood", which if it goes back to PIE derives from *H_2nriH_2. --rma ] -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 02:20:01 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 02:20:01 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <6726ada5.243cf409@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Because, I think we don't really ever see directly kn (Ger) > ks (Pol). And indeed that was not what was said. PLease note the conditioning factors: > roborr at uottawa.ca wrote: >><< In Polish *kn+FV or J > *ks (FV=front vowel). It's the cluster [k] plus palatalized [n~] which goes to [kC]. Initially at least. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 02:24:28 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 19:24:28 PDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: RAY HENDON: The exposure side (rate of contact between infecteds and susceptibles) of the equation is easily identified in the linguistic community: The relatively few Romans sent to govern England was not sufficient to generate a critical mass of exposure units for Latin to predominate. And the Romans left local courts and laws stand, lessening the need for everyone to know Latin in order to get along. Number might have something to do with it but what about languages or dialects that become viewed as prestigious? I'm sure it's more complicated than the above otherwise we would have had a secure model 100 years ago :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Apr 9 02:26:46 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 21:26:46 -0500 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: Hamp's <*pisynja> can drop the asterisk: there is a Slovene toponym behind German in South Carinthia. Nearby is . Mastiffs vel sim. were bred here. jpm Adam Hyllested wrote: [ a very long post which did not need to be quoted in its entirety and which has therefore been snipped by the moderator ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 02:29:54 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 19:29:54 PDT Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: PETER GRAHAM: Lynx was surely intended by whoever mentioned it as an example. It is not the only Greek word ending in -nx. There is also syrinx (shepherd's pipe), and of course sphinx, and (shame on you all for not spotting it!) larynx. These are all -ng stems. ADAM HYLLESTED: and phalanx, an -ng stem too. And don't forget . Happy belated April Fools! :P I think we're going off topic here. Miguel brought this up in connection with his idea that IE once had *-k (??) which was originally in connection to external relationships like Uralic with IE. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Apr 9 02:33:21 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 21:33:21 -0500 Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: Just in case it's not universally known: is from verbated . South Italian is not aphetic from standard , but from Latin hortatory subjunctive 'let's go'. j p maher Frank Rossi wrote: [ a very long post snipped by the moderator ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 02:33:57 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 19:33:57 PDT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: ADAM HYLLESTED: In "On the Origin of Languages", Stanford Univ. Press 1994, J.D.Bengtson and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide range of other language families, even khoisan. ME (GLEN): Khoisan isn't usually considered to be Nostratic nor Dene-Caucasian. What are they trying to reconstruct with these cognates? Not Proto-World I hope. MODERATOR: That is precisely what they are trying to reconstruct. Oh-oh. Speaking of theories that should be quickly nipped in the bud... -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's response: Or discussion moved to the Nostratic list--where they have been beaten to death on more than one occasion. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 03:33:12 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 03:33:12 GMT Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: >G & I (ibid.) say: "The phonetic alternations can be ascribed >to the fact that this is an animal name; also relevant is the >nasalization in Greek , _lun-k-_, paralleled by Lith. dial. >_lu,'ns^is_." One can also put this together with Armenian >lusanunk` (pl.), but what the significance of this is someone >who knows more about Armenian than I do will have to explain. Not sure. The sg. is , and I guess the sg. oblique stem must be . There's one -n- too many (for a simple n-stem based on *leuk^-, we'd expect *lusn (*leuko:n), *lusan- (*leukn.-), pl. *lusunk` (*leukones)). Metathesis leunk ~ leukn? The Balto-Slavic forms (lu:s^is, rysI), on the other hand, suggest *luHk^-, with intrusive laryngeal. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 04:49:38 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 21:49:38 PDT Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: ROBERT WHITING: Indeed it was meant as an example, but it is actually the only possible example. Flash Gordon said that there were no IE stems in -(n)k and Miguel replied "Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx)." So to prove the point there has to be an example in Greek that (1) is inherited from PIE and (2) preserves an -nk stem that other IE languages have lost. I didn't mean that there were no STEMS that ended in *-nk-, just to clarify. I said that such stems always have a suffix after them so that there is no final *-nk ever in IE. In the case of *lunk-, it ends in *-s in the nominative, hence *lunks, or *-m in the accusative, etc. but there's never a complete word like **lunk with a final *-k. Of course, if other IE languages have lost this *-k ending a la Miguel, it'll certainly be difficult to prove its existance - Flash Gordon empathizes. If even Greek has -x (/-ks/) then still, how does this connect with Miguel's neuter **-k? Miguel has alot to figure out just yet. ROBERT WHITING: So getting back to the two criteria that could prove a survival of PIE -nk stems in Greek, there is little doubt that lynx is a PIE word as it occurs in practically all of the main IE branches (see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995, p. 431, 2.1.5.1). However, it is also generally connected with the PIE root *leuk[h]/*luk[h] (ibid.) and I don't see any way to get a consonantal n into this root. The n-affix. Thus from a verb *lu:- (or *leu-, if you wish) we get *lu-n-k- where *-k too is an affix built on the core verb *lu:- but I'm unsure of the etymology of *lunks myself. I mean, if it's actually built on *leuk- "to shine", that makes no sense to me. Yet, *leu- means "to lose", no? Still doesn't make sense. At any rate, I doubt that -nx is meant to be "expressive", in this case at least, and Greek is hardly an example of anything in re of this **-k. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 04:50:54 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 04:50:54 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with >stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- >'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and >the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally and -s- medially. What to make of them? As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From roborr at uottawa.ca Fri Apr 9 05:03:11 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 01:03:11 -0400 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >Incidentally, Lith. pekus, OPr. pecku "Vieh", with *k instead of >*k^ would seem to be another reason to cast doubts on *k^uon < >*pk^uon > Slav. pIsU. The boundary between centum and satem is rather spotty, with some examples of Baltic *k / Slavic *s cf. Lith. klausyti OCS slysati also, (I think) in this example Sanskrit has pasu why could peku-/pisu not be parallel to klausyti/slysati? >The more I think about, the more likely I >find it that Slav. pIsU "dog" is simply "Spot", from *peik^- >"spotty, motley, tawny" (cf. the dog Kerberos < *k^erbero- >"striped, motley"). Eckert 1963 (I think) related pisu to the Common Slavic form cognate with Russian pestryj, with a meaning similar to *peik^- (nb CITED AS AN EXAMPLE RATHER THAN AN ATTEMPT TO CLAIM THAT ALL OF SLAVIC IS DERIVED FROM RUSSIAN). Another life-form commonly referred to as "spotted" is the trout, cf. Polish "pstrag". From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 05:05:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 05:05:55 GMT Subject: Slavic pIsU In-Reply-To: <3713e568.131552504@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >The more I think about, the more likely I >find it that Slav. pIsU "dog" is simply "Spot", from *peik^- >"spotty, motley, tawny" (cf. the dog Kerberos < *k^erbero- >"striped, motley"). For "tawny" and curiosity value, cf. also Basque (R.L. Trask "The History of Basque", p. 267): "... Azkue ["Morfologma Vasca", 46] proposes that all three [colour words] might have been derived from nouns by the addition of the ancient adjective-forming suffix -i. [...his proposal for "yellow" is:] <(h)or> `dog' [...] (In Azkue's account, the word for `yellow' would originally have meant `tawny'.)" It should be noted that Azkue's etymologies are not always beyond reproach. Larry continues: "There appears to be no way of evaluating these proposals". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam [ Moderator's note: MCV has been caught by 7-bit-mail again--that's _Morfologi'a Vasca_ above, I reconstruct. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 05:23:07 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 01:23:07 EDT Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: In a message dated 4/8/99 9:07:20 PM Mountain Daylight Time, nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk writes: >What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" >over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed to >a common-or-garden lexical innovation? Exactly. After all, there was no taboo making the Romance languages shift their work for "horse" from the Latin derivative of *ekwos to "caballus". Aparently it was simply a shift, as if we'd stopped using "horse" and substituted "nag" or "glue-bait" or "cayuse". From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Apr 9 05:31:31 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 01:31:31 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I'd like to suggest that the word did not pass from Gothic to Polish but >from Gothic to Russian and then to Polish.... -- that would require time-travel, since neither Polish nor Russian existed at the time of Gothic-Slavic contact, and the Goths had moved west by the 6th century. From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Fri Apr 9 05:58:04 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 01:58:04 -0400 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Polabian, the language of the Slavs living on ("po") the Elbe > ("Labe"), is West Slavic, but different from Sorbian. Is "Labe" Slavic or left over from some other language? Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 06:07:38 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 23:07:38 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: ME (GLEN): Gee, maybe it's that **-t > *-s thing. JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN: My reason was that there is surely also a /t/ that does not go to /s/ when word-final. [...] But the 3sg *-t must be a different morpheme; I wouldn't say so. I explain the final *-t/*-d as being from *-tV. Aside from the 3rd person singular, the distinction of *-d and *-t is not clear at all and the 3rd person *-t can be explained through influence of the primary *-ti. Boom, finito. JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN: Actually, that is not the precise rule; we also have /-s-/ before weak case-endings and before the fem. marker in the ptc. in gen. *-us-os, fem.Nsg *-us-iH2, but nom. *-wo:t-s with voc. *-wos; probably *le'wk-o:t-s, dat. *luk-e's-ey. We thus seem also to have /s/ before such morphemes that once constituted syllables of their own; if they were once WORDS, the rule is still "/s/ before word boundary, /t/ elsewhere". "Weak" case-endings? Do you mean endings that don't have an intervening vowel? If that's what you're talking about, everything is fine. We need not consider that the suffixes were once words at all. The Pre-IE nominative was apparently unmarked once as can be deduced by phenomenon within IE itself, even if you don't trust a Nostratic explanation of IE pre-history. Thus, the IE noun stem was once a complete word. Here's a pseudo-example with an imaginary animate word **kut to see what I'm talking about: Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE Nominative **kut **kwes-se **kwes (<**kwes-s) Accusative **kut-im **kwesem **kwesm Genitive **kut-isi **kwesese **kwese's Ablative **kut-ita **kweseta **kwese'd Even though a **-t only existed in the nominative, the change of **-t > *-s spread throughout the paradigm when a complete form **kut no longer was thought of as a complete word, being replaced with the concept of noun stems like **kwes-. When an intervening vowel is present, this is only because that vowel is part of the stem itself. Thus, we should expect *-t- to remain because it always was _medial_, not final. Here's a pseudo-example of the development of a vowel-final stem **kuti: Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE Nominative **kuti **ku:te-se **ku:tes Accusative **kuti-m **ku:tem **ku:tem Genitive **kuti-si **ku:tese **kute's Ablative **kuti-ta **ku:teta **kute'd See now? Nothing contradicts what I'm saying except for one thing - your nominative *-wo:t-s. I'm going to call its reconstruction into question and ask whether we can really tell whether it had *-ts or in fact *-s/*ss. The strong and weak cases are equally old and both derive from postpositions if we go far enough back. JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN: [...] also, one would not like the consonant of the demonstrative pronoun *to- to be the same as that of the pronoun of 2nd person Hungary disagrees. I could be wrong but I thought Hungarian's -l marks both 2nd and 3rd person, but at any rate, such things can and do happen. Look at Swedish. They don't know how to conjugate verbs anymore, tsk, tsk. I suspect you aren't seeing what I'm saying just yet. Maybe I should illustrate another example to make it clearer. Here's the development of the imperfective/perfective in IE the way I see it (sorry for all the "Pre"'s but I have to get into detail here :) Pre-Pre-Pre-IE Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE 1ps *-mu; *-?u *-m; *-h *-m; *-h *-m/*-h 2ps *-tu; *-nu *-t; *-n *-s; ZERO *-s/*-(s)the 3ps *-su; ZERO *-s; ZERO *-s/-t; ZERO *-t/ZERO Some may notice I've suddenly altered my position on the 3rd person to a ZERO instead of *-e. Sorry 'bout that, I'm not perfect(ive) you know. Anyways, according to this illustration, the 2nd and 3rd person temporarily merge in both the imperfective AND the perfective in Pre-IE (oh-oh!). What is the budding Indo-European to do? What it does is attach different suffixes to the endings to distinguish the two persons. In the perfective, it attaches *-the to the 2p derived from the imperative with optional *-s from the imperfective. In the 3rd person sing imperfective, the previously inanimate 3p *-t (derived from *-to) is favored over *-s because of the icky merger (At the same time, **-e'n becomes **-e'n-t > *-e'r). Boom, finito. JENS RASMUSSEN: and, since both appear to have external (non-IE) relatives, the immediate solution is to see here a partial merger of originally separate phonemes. My own Danish has the initial dentals /t-/ and /d-/, but there used to be thorn also - what's the big deal? These are FINAL distinctions I'm talking about and the arguement is only to do with IE, not in general. There aren't many IE dental endings to chose from - that's the big deal. IE 3rd person *-t has an external explanation?? I don't recall, explain please. Perhaps you're talking about a demonstrative in *t that is reconstructed for Nostratic? The suffix *-t whether it derives from an archaic demonstrative or not is unique to IE and the only best explanation is that it recently derives from *-to but then sound rules on syllable loss become necessary (and ultimately **-t > *-s) in order to explain this and much more phenomenon that can't be explained otherwise. ME (GLEN): [...] there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus. JENS RASMUSSEN: That's what I believed until I succeeded in deriving them all from a completely regular original system where Eng. you IS the acc.pl. corresponding to nom.sg. thou. I had to invent some more sound laws, Still don't get it. How does *t- become *y-?? Must be a pretty nifty sound law. Why can't *yus be derived from a verb *yu:- (*yeu-) "to join" as in "a bunch (of people)"? We know, from examples in Japanese, that nouns can at times become pronouns and *yus looks very unique to IE. JENS RASMUSSEN: I don't get this: If *-s is a fine outcome for you, as it is for me from what I have labelled "*-c" (to avoid unwanted clashes), it all seems to boil down to the question, "Can [s] become [h]?" [...] not even a change t > h is "nonsensical", Yes, Nonsensical (when talking about IE though). Of course, the sound changes themselves are fully possible in a general sense but this is the IE list and we aren't discussing general linguistics. A phoneme *c is unmotivated by the evidence and so is **-t > *-H1. What I propose does not necessitate extra phonemes and the sound changes are quite tame by comparison. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 06:11:38 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 06:11:38 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >>GG: >> On an ironic note, if you simply accepted my **-t > *-s rather than an >> off-the-wall **c phoneme, you would be closer to your sound rule goals, >> in addition to agreeing with a modified version of Miguel's >> nonsensical sound change of **t > *H1, if you feel necessary to do. >I don't get this: If *-s is a fine outcome for you, as it is for me from >what I have labelled "*-c" (to avoid unwanted clashes), it all seems to >boil down to the question, "Can [s] become [h]?" We know the answer to >that is yes. But not even a change t > h is "nonsensical", the two >alternate in Modern Irish, tu'ath [tu@] 'people' : a thu'ath [@ hu@] 'his >people'. Yes. Of course I was thinking more in terms of word-final taa' marbuutah (-t > -h) or Late Egyptian/Coptic -t > -?, depending on whether one interprets *H1 as /h/ or /?/ or both. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 07:01:45 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 00:01:45 PDT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: ROBERT ORR: "Ironically, although there does seem to be a considerable amount of evidence that the notions 'dog' and 'wolf' can be combined, the reconstruction of Nostratic *k|ynd [...] ADAM HYLLESTED: (or, at least, velar plosive + vowel + n + vowel - the Nostratic etc. reconstructions are even less authorized than the IE ones) Actually, if we're going to stick our hands into Nostratic on this word (and it's going to be messy), we might as well do it right. We must reconstruct an earlier **kawina with three syllables, not one. Without a *w we can't explain why it exists in IE *k^won-. Thanks to you folks, I might have found another example of my pretty sound rule **-VCV > *-V'C. Thus, **kawini > **kawene > **kawe'n > *k^wen- (but this means that the word originally had *-e-, not *-o-. Objections?). Uralic *ku"ina" is then representative of **kawini alright. Altaic forms with and such are reasonable if they can properly be derived from an earlier **kaini. Further, AA has *kawan- according to Bomhard and others so things seem happy for a long-range explanation of the word, certainly better than **pkuon can do. On a related note, Chinese recently mentioned could be from an IE language but... if this is honestly from an ST item *kwyan (ST is c. 4000 BCE no?) then I severely doubt it due to time and location and thus an eastern Proto-Steppe dialect with *kawina (c. > 9000 BCE) might be a possible explanation. It's all dependant on how secure ST *kwyan is. But I realise I'm getting really conjectural at this point so I'll take other suggestions if nec. Just food for thought. ROBERT ORR: [...] etc., < IE *peku-, and that OCS pisu is also related. ADAM HYLLESTED: Hmm, peculiar. But no doubt that OCS pisu is PIE *pek^u- in some form. Exactly. I still don't see *p- peeping out of from behind a *k. Until then, there's nothing to say. ADAM HYLLESTED: Note even Lithuanian . Way to go, Adam. Let's see if he can wiggle his way out of that one. :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's request: Let's move the Nostratic discussion to that list, please. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 07:22:15 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 07:22:15 GMT Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) In-Reply-To: <001601be81a1$41434d00$2070fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> >What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede >> >and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made >> >from Indo-Greek present stem? >> The Armenian aorist e-ber is a "root aorist", the present stem is >> bere-. >I am not sure what you mean. Do you mean that eber is from *ebhert, or that >it is completely new formation without any parallels elsewhere in IE? Nobody knows where the Armenian aorist comes from: ber-i ber-er e-ber ber-ak` ber-eyk` ber-in It's certainly not simply *-om, *-es, *-et, *-omes, *-etes, *-ent/*-ont, which is why I objected to pulling one form out of the paradigm, and comparing that to a Greek imperfect. >>...Slavic mino~ is analogical (vowel stems >> with -no~- presents always carry over the -no~- to the aorist and >> ptc.praes.act.). Slavic vede is a Class IA verb, which does not >> distinguish present and aorist stems >Do you mean to imply that at some point in PIE to proto-Slavic, there was a >point at which present and past always had different stems, so that when we >see the same stem in present and aorist in Slavic, it must be an innovation? No. All IE languages that distinguish a present stem from an _aorist_ (not past) stem have I think some verbs where the distinction is not made. Verbs like vesti (ved-) can make root-aorists, but also s-aorists (two kinds of them): I IIa IIb vedU ve^sU vedoxU vede vede vede vede vede vede vedomU ve^somU vedoxomU vedete ve^ste vedoste vedo~ ve^se~ vedos^e~ (the present and imperfect are: vedo~ vede^axU vedes^i vede^as^e vedetU vede^as^e vedemU vede^axomU vedete vede^as^ete, -e^aste vedo~tU vede^axo~ ) >> These forms may look identical to "Indo-Greek" imperfects, but >> only if we divorce them from their paradigms and the Armenian and >> Slavic verbal systems in which they are embedded. >When you see forms in IA which are formed the same way as imperfects would >be Greek, you consider to them to be imperfects with an imperfective value, >with no regard for the syntax. But for other languages, syntax matters? I didn't mention syntax. I didn't object to comparing Armenian and Slavic aorists with Greek imperfects because they are aorists. >The marked imperfects are not similar enough to be traced back to a common >form. So they are all innovations. How does this support a common grouping >of Greek and I-Ir? You're right, it doesn't. Shared archaism. >But I-Ir ``imperfect'' is syntactically not an imperfect and there is a >separate past habitual (present with pura: and/or sma in Vedic, optionally >augmented optative in Iranian). Given that past can be formed from any stem >in Hittite, this suggests that forms such as eber < ebheret are survivals, >from when such forms were simple past and became aorists when new >imperfective pasts arose (probably from past habituals if from optative, >from past continuative in Latin and Slavic?). That's true, but there is more. You forget that imperfective *presents* and perfective *pasts* also arose. Hittite has only a present and a past tense (in -mi, -hi and mediopassive flavours), but it can also make a durative/iterative/distributive (present or past) form from any verb, by affixing -sk-. In non-Anatolian IE, -sk- is usually one of the imperfective suffixes, along with -i-, -n-, -neu- and a few others. Most non-Anatolian IE languages (except Germanic, Tocharian and maybe Armenian) also have a specific perfective marker *-s-. The dichotomy between present (imperfective) and aorist (perfective) stems grew out of the addition of both kinds of markers to verbal roots. But the marking was never complete, and there remained many root-presents and root-aorists. Greek and Indo-Iranian can make both presents and pasts from roots suffixed with "imperfective" markers. Forms like Skt. gacchati / agacchat (*gwm-sk-e-ti, *e-gwm-sk-e-t), whatever their synchronic syntactic function or meaning, are historically iteratives, i.e. imperfective Aktionsart. What's the problem? One problem is that root-presents and root-aorists, which are both direct cousins of the Hittite simple past (mi-conjugation), get classified in different categories. Another problem is that the habitual/imperfective *past* was felt not to be marked enough formally or began to lose its imperfective meaning, which is why new formations were created such as the Slavic imperfect with -e^ax-, the Armenian and Tocharian (and, if I understand you correctly, Iranian) imperfect from the optative, the Latin periphrastic imperfect with *bhu-(?). And the Vedic past habitual. If what you're saying is that a Vedic/Skt. "imperfect" like "he carried", without specific imperfective markers, goes back to a simple past tense as in Hittite or indeed Germanic [except for the augment, of course], I fully agree. But the question is, what happened to the meaning of that form when s-aorists like arose? Did it become an imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked "imperfects" like ? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Fri Apr 9 08:13:54 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 10:13:54 +0200 Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal schrieb: > Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the > 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. But Sanskrit (and probably PIE) shows Sandhi and the realization depends on the following word so that there is no difference of -d/-dh/-t at the end of the word. Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Apr 9 09:24:50 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 09:24:50 GMT Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote (Subject: Re: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :)):- > ... the Armenian and Slavic imperfects, which are derived from the optative > (probably) and from a sigmatic form (-e^ax-), respectively. ... I suspect that the Common Slavonic imperfect with its characteristic vowel hiatus {-a.axu} or {- at .axu} (`@' = the {yat'} vowel, it looks like a crossed soft-sign, it may have been pronounced `ia' with the stress on the `i') is derived from the sigmatic aorist {-axu} with the vowel at the end of the stem pronounced with hesitation to indicate durativeness, e.g. "as I wro-ote" for "as I was writing". I suspect also that the IE subjunctive may have arisen (as common IE evolved from its ancestor) as the indicative pronounced with hesitation on the thematic vowel for a similar expressive reason, until the hesitation became phonemic and hardened into an interpolated glottal stop (i.e. the H1 laryngeal), which later disappeared with compensatory vowel lengthening. For long thematic vowel arising from H1, compare in Attic Greek what I call the `subjunctivoid' conjugation, e.g. "I live" {zoo zeeis zeei zoomen zeete zoosi}, and likewise {knoo} = "I scrape" and a few others (double vowel = long), which I suspect arose from IE verbs ending in {-eH1e/o-}: gwjeH1e/o- < root {gw-j-H1}. Greek grammars formally list these as contracted from {-aoo}, e.g. {zoo^} as decontracted {zaoo}, but such a form with an `a' vowel would < IE root {gw-j-H2}, which means "force, power" rather than {life}, and indeed I came across an ancient Greek gloss somewhere that said that uncontracted {zaei} meant {biinei^} (meaning as Latin `futuet') (< I.E. gwiH2-neje/o-) Ionic Greek (e.g. Homer) (more liable than Attic to the persistent bulldozer of `Analogical Levelling' which often destroys amounts of a language's linguistic `archaeology'), seems to regularize these verbs as usually {-eoo}, but {zoo.oo} for {zoo>}. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Apr 9 09:34:21 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 09:34:21 GMT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: Adam Hyllested wrote:- > ... similar forms in other language families closer to IE than AA. > J.Greenberg lists ... Old Turkish 'bitch', ... Also Chinese: Mandarin {ch'u"an}, Ancient Chinese {kjwan} = "dog". Perhaps the word spread along with the animal from whoever first domesticated it. I read recently of work on mitochondrial DNA which seemd to show that domestic dogs are all descended from a very few original female wild wolves. How long ago and where are domestic dog bones first found in archaeology? From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 9 08:50:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 08:50:35 GMT Subject: imperfect Message-ID: I wrote: >If what you're saying is that a Vedic/Skt. "imperfect" like > "he carried", without specific imperfective markers, >goes back to a simple past tense as in Hittite or indeed Germanic >[except for the augment, of course], I fully agree. But the >question is, what happened to the meaning of that form when >s-aorists like arose? Did it become an >imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) >like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless >narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked >"imperfects" like ? I forgot to add: "assuming the Sanskrit verbal forms I quote above are found in the RV (I'm not sure)". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 9 09:15:56 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 10:15:56 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: <01BE814D.287B80C0.lmfosse@online.no> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Lars Martin Fosse wrote: [on the histories of the Scandinavian languages] > When you speak about the three Nordic languages Norwegian, Swedish and > Danish, it is necessary to remember that these languages in the period > between 1350 and 1550 (roughly) were heavily influenced by Platt German. > The German Hansa ruled the Nordic world, and its influence upon the Nordic > languages was devastating. It has been estimated that about 35 % of the > most usual words of everyday communication are derived from Platt (this > probably goes both for Swedish and Norwegian), and this is the main reason > why a modern Norwegian can't just pick up his Snorri and read it in the > original like an Icelander. The situation is therefore a little bit more > complex than what you suggest in your mail. Since the development of the > Nordic languages is fairly easy to study, they are excellent examples of > how a "Wave" can work in language development. Yes, certainly. But I wasn't trying to oversimplify the picture. My point was simply that Norwegian and Icelandic "started off" as particularly closely related within Scandinavian, but that later developments brought about a position in which Norwegian is, by any reasonable standard, linguistically closer to Swedish and Danish than it is to Icelandic. Consequently, there is a problem in drawing a family tree. Historically, we ought to expect Norwegian and Icelandic to form a single branch of the tree, but nobody draws it that way: every tree I've seen puts Norwegian in a branch with Danish and Swedish, while Icelandic (usually together with Faroese) is off on a separate branch by itself. So, to put it crudely but picturesquely, Norwegian has migrated from one branch of the tree to another. And this is not the kind of phenomenon that the family-tree model can accommodate at all well. Some decades ago, either Trubetzkoy or Jakobson -- I forget which -- suggested that English had ceased to be a Germanic language and become a Romance language. Much more recently, C.-J. N. Bailey has likewise asserted that English is no longer a Germanic language but may perhaps be a Romance language. I think these proposals are rather over the top for English, but they do hint at the potential difficulty faced by the family-tree model in cases of massive contact and convergence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 9 09:21:29 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 02:21:29 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Hello all, I goofed again. They say "To err is human" but I can only suspect that someone has slipped some hallucinogenics into my Ovaltine. I've re-read what Jens has said about the "weak case-endings" and I realise now that I better correct myself before the death threats start pouring in. Let me re-illustrate, this time properly, the development of the animate t-final stems with a pseudoword **kut (my vowel-final stem illustration of **kuti still stands) and this time note the previously neglected alternation of *t/*s in my paradigm example :( Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE Nominative *kut *kwet-se *kwets *kwets Accusative *kut-im *kwetm *kwetm *kwetm Dative *kwet-i: *kweti: *kwesi: (*kwesey) Genitive *kut-isi *kwetese *kwete's *kwese's Ablative *kut-ita *kweteta *kwete'd *kwese'd Does that look right now? So **-t > *-s still works to explain much however there seems to be an extra sound change lurking about that I've overlooked. It occasionally wreaks havoc with the results. I thought about a possible palatalisation of **t but that wasn't cutting it. Finally, I got it. There's an additional sibilization of intervocalic MEDIAL **t. _That's_ why things are not working properly! Hence, genitive *-us-os. Hence, feminine Nsg *-us-iH2. Hence, *le'wk-o:t-s versus dative *luk-e's-ey. All these examples share the fact that **t would be in an intervocalic medial position throughout its pre-history. This would explain alot more than just the quirky *t/*s alternation of *-wo:ts. It would connect things like IE *ghesr and Uralic *ka"ti "hand" together which could not have been due to any borrowing. They aren't cognates per se but are both based on an earlier verb root **git- and thus show a **-VtV- > *-VsV- sound rule in effect lending further support for genetic relationship. The word *nekwt- "night" derives then from **nug-t with substantive *t that doesn't change because it isn't intervocalic. This might also serve to explain those pesky endings in *-es that Jens mentioned earlier alongside the supposed *-eH1- passive. Instead of *-eH1-, we should reconstruct *-e:- which, due to accent rules and the openness of the syllable, oscillates with *-e- (cf. *tu: versus enclitic *twe). The *-es ending then is really *-e- (passive) + *-s (from earlier **-t, the substantive, and hence a *t/*s alternation in the declension). Okay, that should do it now. I can only pray that makes better sense. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 9 09:27:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 10:27:14 +0100 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <37180062.138459074@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [RW] > > Most linguists tend to > > avoid discussions of reversibility (although there are clear > > examples, mostly learned restorations), but I suspect that > > this is mostly because if changes are reversed, it plays merry > > hell with historical linguistics. :> [MCV] > Personally, I found it rather difficult to swallow the reversal > of Semitic */g/ > Arabic /j/ > Eg. Arabic /g/. But apparently, > that's exactly what happened. I agree that this particular sequence is rather unexpected. But it's not hard to find other examples of reversals. For example, PIE */t/ changed to the dental fricative theta in Proto-Germanic, and then theta changed back to /t/ again in the continental Scandinavian languages. Pre-Basque */n/ generally changed to a palatal nasal in the configuration */inV/, and then, in most eastern varieties of Basque, the palatal nasal changed back to /n/ in the same configuration. While `reversal' is a term of perhaps no great antiquity in English, the German equivalent `Rueckverwandlung' has been around for quite a while, I think. Anybody know when it was first used? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Apr 9 09:39:29 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 12:39:29 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 4/6/99 11:40:17 PM, you wrote: ><in all of these statements. If there is one thing that we know >about language change, it is that it is not predictable. >> >This is nothing but truisms. You do know what a truism is don't you? Since there are indications that you are using a different Webster's than I am, my Webster's says that a truism is "a self-evident, obvious truth." >And they are contradicted by the very fact that And in the next breath you say that "self-evident, obvious truths" can be contradicted. >there is a Grimm's law and there is an Indo-European language >group and there is a way the old sound laws can "predicatably" >tell you if one word is cognate with another even if they are >centuries apart. That's what predictability means. It means you >can look at some word on a clay tablet and make a good guess at >whether they are Greek or not. Because it follows from prior >experience. That's predictability. No, that's history. Grimm's Law and the Indo-European language group are reconstructions based on present information. They are "predictions of the past," not predictions of the future. Now these reconstructions do have predictive power (otherwise they wouldn't be much use). But this power is limited to being able to determine how well a newly discovered language (such as Mycenaean Greek or Hittite) fits into the reconstruction and can be considered IE. If it fits perfectly, then the forms of the new language were "predicted"; if it doesn't fit, then the reconstruction needs adjustment so the forms *can* be "predicted." So the new language is simply more evidence to be fed into the reconstruction (the "prediction of the past"). But there is a big difference between predicting (reconstructing) the past and predicting the future. Now if Grimm's Law and the reconstruction of PIE could tell me what English or French or Russian was going to look like 500 years from now, *that* would be predictability. And what follows from prior experience is not predictability, it is complacency. Just because an event has had a certain outcome in n repetitions does not mean that it will have the same outcome on the n+1th repetition. Statistical probability is what predicts the outcome of an event, not prior experience. >It really doesn't take a lot of hard thought to figure out that >languages change. It's not a breakthrough idea. No, as you have pointed out, it is "a self-evident, obvious truth." >I remember reading about an early IEist first looking at Gothic >and saying "I thought I was reading Sanskrit." That is the >point. If he said, "boy, languages do change don't they?" That >would have been trite. Or considerably worse. Well, it's a good thing he wasn't reading Armenian or your entire perception of historical linguistics might have been different. But again, this is just a matter of predicting the past. The further back you go the more closely cognate language resemble each other (another truism). And you are missing the complement of the statement which is "I didn't think I was reading German or English." In comparing two languages that are closer to the original source, one is more likely to be struck by the similarities. But in comparing the same language at widely separated periods (e.g., Anglo-Saxon and Modern English) one is more likely to be struck by the differences. >It's the continuity, not the change. That's the science of it >and from what I've seen in the work of some people in this field, >the art of it. Where's the pattern, not that there's no >pattern. It's not the continuity or the change. It is the relationship between continuity and change that defines language groups, families, languages, and dialects. And you are right that the pattern is overwhelmingly important. But the pattern consists of both continuity and change. >If my you find my speaking of predictability "rather" disturbing, >I can only respond that I find you reminding me that languages >change unpredictability - well, I'll believe you if you wake up >speaking Bantu tomorrow. Otherwise I'll find the whole idea >ridiculous. No doubt you will. I thought, however, that we were talking about changes *in* language, not changes *of* language. But when I wake up tomorrow I will say one English word, "gnu" and then you can believe me. But if you are suggesting that the population of England woke up one morning and all said to themselves: "Ah, the Great Vowel Shift is scheduled to start today -- must remember to lengthen my short vowels in open syllables and raise my long vowels," that is not merely ridiculous, it is sublime. ><degree to which languages will diverge based on the geographical >distance between them.>> >Boy wouldn't that be silly. Where would I get a wild idea like >that? Isn't French just as close to Chinese as it is to Spanish? >Isn't Polish just as close to Mayan as it is to Russian? How >could you possibly think I would ever think that? Never occurred >to me. And isn't the French of Quebec more distant from the French of France than Basque or Breton are? And isn't Australian English more distant from British English than Welsh is? On the whole, I think it is better to speak in truisms than in non-sequiturs. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Apr 9 12:56:37 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 14:56:37 +0200 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: <19990407110645.23003.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > I wish IEists would finally accept that > some words simply can't be explained within IE alone Me too. But we should recognize the fact that some words are inexplicable even within Nostratic. > J.D.Bengtson and M.Ruhlen boldly add probable cognates from a wide > range of other language families, even khoisan. > Er, that worries me. So how are we sure for example that Khoisan terms > are neither coincidence nor borrowed from AA and sons? Khoisan isn't > usually considered to be Nostratic nor Dene-Caucasian. What are they > trying to reconstruct with these cognates? Not Proto-World I hope. > [ Moderator's comment: > That is precisely what they are trying to reconstruct. > --rma ] Proto-World allright, but don't worry. The science of cross-linguistic comparison is still at a cradle stage, and nobody can be *sure* about anything. However, the examples are striking, at least some of them (I already mentioned the Nostratic ones): Archaic Chinese: *khiw at n 'dog' Tibetan: khyi 'dog' Ket (Yenisey-Ostyak): ku:n~e 'wolverine' Basque: haz-koin 'badger' (lit. 'bear-dog') Proto-(North)Caucasian: xHweje 'dog' Achomawi (a Hokan language): kua:n 'silver fox' North Yana (Hokan): kuwan-na 'lynx' Esmeralda (Equatorial): kine 'dog' Pila (Papuan): kawun 'dog' /'Auni (Khoisan): /ka~i~n 'hyena' /Xam (Khoisan): !gwa~i~ 'hyena' etc. etc. Coincidence? Maybe. Certainly not borrowing everywhere. Adam Hyllested [ Moderator's response: Coincidence? Almost certainly. Certainly not demonstrated as "Proto-World" by the techniques espoused by Ruhlen. Please move further discussion to the Nostratic list. --rma ] From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 9 14:07:21 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 08:07:21 -0600 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Nicholas Widdows wrote: > Or are they somehow morphologically marked? I know respect/avoidance > language is widely used in the bear-hunting North (see Joseph Campbell on > the Ainu), but might we not expect new terms like "well-intentioned one" or > "your excellency" rather than the merely prosaic "it's big and it's brown > and it likes a jar of hunny"? When one looks at lexical replacement for 'bear' in North America for taboo/respect reasons, one finds the fairly pedestrian replacements mentioned above or borrowed words, not the "your mighty greatness" variety. So in Comanche, for example, one finds three different roots for 'bear' including older patua (something like "big boy", later shortened to tua and found in tutua 'bear cub'), wasa"pe (" is a Numic morphophonemic marker, in Comanche it keeps the p from being lenited to [v]) (borrowed from Osage wasape), and archaicly wyyta (y is barred i) (the form inherited from Proto-Central Numic and gone in modern Comanche). In fact, when comparing documentary Comanche from 1786 until the present, one finds the three forms for bear in order (wyyta on the way out, patua common; patua on the way out, wasape coming in, wyyta gone; wasape common, patua shortened to tua and almost gone). That's not much of a life span for a non-taboo word. In Colorado River Numic (the language that comprises the Chemehuevi, Southern Paiute, and Ute dialects), we find kwi(j)akanty (j is y and y is barred i) (derived from kwija 'burn', "burned one" or "smoke-colored one"). In Mono and Panamint (one borrowed from the other), we have pahapittsi (derived from pahapi 'swim', "swimmer" or "one who lays in water", with -ttsi affectionate diminutive). All of these groups have a taboo respect for bear, but none of the lexical replacements for older forms shows any particularly high-brow form for the new word. In fact, look at the ways that Americans replace the name of "God" in casual speech--"the man upstairs", for example. I would say that a taboo replacement is probably MORE likely to be a pedestrian form than something special. After all, one needs a word to use in casual speech without the respect inherent in the taboo form. John McLaughlin Utah State University From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Apr 9 17:03:35 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 20:03:35 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Fashion) In-Reply-To: <2708b51.243ce139@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: Subject: Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Fashion) >In a message dated 4/6/99 11:40:17 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: ><>. >Language is a fundamental part of culture and does not exist >without it. Language without culture has no referents, no >context, no medium, no way of propagating and no reason for >being. Ah, so the primary function of language has gone from being communication to being a marker of cultural identity -- no culture, no language. While you are quite right that language and culture are inextricably intertwined and no one should try to separate them, this interdependence does not mean that they are coterminous or coextensive. A language can belong to more than one culture (e.g., a lingua franca such as medieval and modern Latin, or Akkadian used by Egyptians, Canaanites, Hittites, and Hurrians for diplomacy) and a culture can have more than one language (doesn't really need an example). In short, language may be a fundamental part of culture, but no specific language has to be a fundamental part of any specific culture. Entire cultures can change their language. They don't have to, and they don't do it very often, but they can and do (modern Hebrew is an example). Language and culture are in many ways aspects of the same thing. Both are passed on from generation to generation by instruction (i.e., they are not inherited genetically), both are subject to unpredictable change, and both can borrow elements from other languages/cultures. But there are also features of language that are not connected to culture (universals) and there are features of culture (e.g., religion) that are not tied to a language. So it is a quite legitimate question to ask whether a linguistic change had its origin within the language or within the culture or from a source external to both. So what was the point of your comment? >One of the reasons I cannot honestly argue with Miquel's notion >that LBK carried PIE or its descendents into northern Europe is >that the evidence does support the existence of a coherent >culture or uberkultur that tracks that idea well. You can't >support the PIE/LBK premise on human genetics, but its hard to >fight it based on the evidence of culture. Once you see a >cohesive culture, historically or prehistorically, you see a >clear medium for the transmittal and maintenance of an >identifiable language. Or two languages, or three languages. A coherent culture doesn't have to be based on a single language. Historically it often is, but it doesn't have to be. How many languages are there on the Indian sub-continent? A single language may make a plausible story, but plausible stories are not evidence. Plausible stories are what we use to bridge the gaps where there is no evidence. The evidence is the cultural continuum. The plausible story is that it represents one language and that language is presumably IE (or some branch of it). >This is historically confirmed again and again. And again, prior experience is not proof nor is it predictability. Historical analogs are useful for showing that a particular development could have taken place. They do not prove that it *did* take place. >Archeaologically you can pinpoint where you will find Latin >inscriptions based on finding Roman cultural remains first. There is no cultural artifact that is diagnostic of language except writing. If you don't find the Latin inscriptions there is no proof of the presence of the Latin language no matter how many Roman cultural remains you find. You can say Latin was probably the language, but you can't prove it. >Is it 100% predictable? Of course not. But it is the anamolies >that prove the rule. The shock of finding out Linear B was Greek >(nobody was predicting it, not Evans or even Ventris) has now >faded away because the cultural remains have confirmed a clear >demarcation between Minoan and Mycenaean cultures. But only because the discovery of the language made it imperative to find the cultural differences. And without the language we still wouldn't know that Mycenaean was Greek. Even if the cultural differences had been noted, there would still just be two cultures of unknown linguistic affiliation with people probably still positing a mainland colonization from Crete. >All of this is hard history. But it is history based on language, not the other way around. >It is not pop sociology. Oh dear, I seem to have given you another buzz-word, like "walks like a duck..." I expect we'll see a lot of it in the future. ><Americans no longer wear three-cornered hats and powdered wigs >based on physiology or geography or manufacturing techniques or >conquest or substratum populations or the general unsuitability >of the hats and wigs themselves, when in fact it is a >sociological phenomenon known as fashion.>> >Culture and "fashion" are historical evidence. Yes, but they are not evidence for language. >Proto-Geometric was nothing but a fashion but it reliably labels >a period, a culture and a developement. You have no idea how >important bronze helmets, beaver hats and three cornered hats are >to our understanding of history. But not for language. >When we are not identifying a culture by a fashion in material >culture, we are identifying it by its language. LaTene becomes >Celtic. Language and culture are not coextensive. Three-cornered hats were worn from Russia, across Europe, to the East Coast of North America. Now, based on your theory of cultural and linguistic unity, you will tell me that this shows that a single language was spoken across this same area. No, I'll say, three-cornered hats are not related to a single language. Then you will tell me that the languages that belong to three-cornered hats are all Indo-European. No, I'll say, Finns and Magyars and Basques also wore three-cornered hats. Then you'll say that these are the exceptions that prove the rule, that Indo-European languages still go with three-cornered hats. No, I'll say, Indians and Persians did not wear three-cornered hats despite the fact that they speak Indo-European languages. Then you'll say that these are satem languages and obviously three-cornered hats were an innovation of the centum languages. No, I'll say, languages that simply share archaisms do not innovate collectively. Then you'll say that's just pop sociology and the discussion will be over. >If you feel that historical linguistic evidence has no pattern, >no meaning and is pure frivilous fashion, that's fine. I >wouldn't want to talk you out of it. No, I don't feel that, and I didn't say that, though with your proclivity for misunderstanding and your natural contentiousness I can see how you might seize upon that as interpretation of what I did say. What I said was that although languages are constantly changing (although not from English to Bantu :>), linguistic change is unpredictable and most often comes from outside language itself and that patterns of change can usually only be seen and analyzed in retrospect. Historical linguistic evidence is the only thing we have for reconstructing earlier stages of languages. And no number of bronze helmets or three-cornered hats can tell you what language the people who wore them spoke without written records. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 9 17:06:13 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 19:06:13 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >> Thanks, because there IS no connection between *tu: and *yus. > That's what I believed until I succeeded in deriving them all from a > completely regular original system where Eng. you IS the acc.pl. > corresponding to nom.sg. thou. I had to invent some more sound laws, but > that just cannot be helped if we are digging into a past from where there > are no (or very few) other remains. [Ed Selleslagh] In the case of Eng. 'you', I think you're digging too deep, even though your statement is correct. But the 'y' is almost certainly derived from a 'g', just like in Dutch: modern 'jij' (acc. 'jou') (j=y) for 2 p. sg. stems from 'gij', the old 2 p. pl., still in use in Flanders for both sg. and pl.. Another parallel Dutch - English: Middle Dutch 'g(h)eluw' > Du. 'geel', but Eng. 'yellow'. The same applies to the 'y' of 'yard' (Du. 'boom-gaard' = 'orchard', i.e. 'tree-yard'). The transition g > y is quite common, including in some German dialects and in Modern Greek (oikogeneia > ikoyenia, 'family'), where it is systematic before i- and e-phonemes (i.e. oi, ei, eta, ypsilon or ai, epsilon...: the conservative orthography of these phonemes is another, much more complicated matter!). I leave it to the specialists to elaborate along these lines or formulate it more correctly.. E. Selleslagh From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Apr 9 18:34:11 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 20:34:11 +0200 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: <3713e568.131552504@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Let's bring the following passage again, this time under the right headline: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >Before the domestication of the horse, the root "kon-" referred only to the > >herd or herding dogs. Once the horse became domesticated, the > >Slavs/Scythians/generic-IE-nomads, > Not generic IE, but (Tocharians aside) satem-IE, I'm afraid. > Iranian span-, spaka- "dog", Baltic Lith. s^uo, Latv. suns "dog" > [and Russ./Pol. suka "bitch"?]. You can't connect Slavic *konjo- > with the dog word. Wrong guttural (though there is Latv. kunja > "bitch"). > Incidentally, Lith. pekus, OPr. pecku "Vieh", with *k instead of > *k^ would seem to be another reason to cast doubts on *k^uon < > *pk^uon > Slav. pIsU. The more I think about, the more likely I > find it that Slav. pIsU "dog" is simply "Spot", from *peik^- > "spotty, motley, tawny" (cf. the dog Kerberos < *k^erbero- > "striped, motley"). > ======================= > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal > mcv at wxs.nl > Amsterdam [ Moderator's comment: I appreciate the sentiment, but let's not make a habit of this, please. A note referring to the content of another thread should be sufficient. --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 9 18:26:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 19:26:51 +0100 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Ray talked of models for predicting language development. I think Ray has missed the point. Statistical models remain only that - statistical. They might be useful for predicting or explaining language behaviour, or human behaviour, in general terms over large "population samples", but they are of no value whatever for the other major purpose of historical linguistics, which is explaining the actual state of actual languages. Statistics might tell me that 50 % of people who smoke die of a smoking related cause, but it does not tell me why the particular smoker Fred died from that cause. Likewise, statistical models of the kind Ray suggests have their function, in helping us understand the processes involved in language change, but they cannot explain why Sanskrit gacchati is related to Greek baske: and Latin venit. To be specific, Ray said: > others have pointed out the failings of IE to >explain how other languages developed. He means how the family tree model is inadequate on its own; but he forgets that the combined models we actually use are remarkably successful. Various correspondents pointed out to him the inadequacy of the simple model he first posited. He should not think that poor linguists have his simple model as their only available tool. He also said: > it >is not a relaible predictor of specific languages, and the family model upon >which it is based is not a reliable predictor of the divergence/convergence >dicotomy of all languistic groups. The family tree / convergence / sprach bund complex of models is not designed to predict, but to explain actual individual events, and this it does very well. He further said: >It seems to me, that the theorectival framework of an >epidemicological model of the spread of disease would easily supply this >need of the linguistic community. He means the need to predict. Yes, models that help us understand processes and make general predictions have their place. But he should understand that this is a different purpose from his original question, and he should not confuse general statistical prediction with the careful and detailed explanatory work of historical linguistics. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 9 18:40:44 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 19:40:44 +0100 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Bob said: >lynx has a genitive lynkos which makes it stand out like a sore >thumb from the rest of the -nx words. >There is also a second lynx word that is an -ng stem, but this >means "hiccup" ... >animal lynx is >an -nk stem is shown by the compound lykolynx, "wolf-lynx," which >is also an -nk stem (gen. lykolynkos). I was indeed confusing hiccup with the animal - I checked my dictionary too quickly! A slower check however reveals that the -nk is not quite certain. There is an adjective with -ng- : lyggios, and the form lyggourion from "lynx-tail". Of course the -ng- in these can be secondary. But thank you for the reminder of what the discussion and the example was about, and for the disambiguation of hiccups and animals. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 01:50:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 21:50:41 EDT Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: In a message dated 4/8/99 10:07:20 PM, nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk wrote: <> At least when the Hebrews did it, we had a pretty good reason why. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 02:16:11 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 22:16:11 EDT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: In a message dated 4/6/99 8:34:30 PM, roborr at uottawa.ca wrote: <> Not quite. It seems that the name 'Karl' does not appear as a scandinavian (Danish or Swede) name until well into the middle ages. (Or at least that's the way the issue was resolved several times on the old scholarly ONN, and I believe Snorri and Saxo concur.) In fact, the Danes were the mortal enemies of Charlesmagne and the Franks less than 100 years before the document mentioned (Oleg's treaty about 908 or so). The other names on the treaties are apprently either Scandinavian or Slavic. So you may have to conjecture this Karl was a Saxon a long way from home perhaps, but not likely a christian Frank, nor pagan Swede nor Dane. And mcv I think pointed out that something about the way the krol and karol appear in Slavic seem to ask for an earlier date of borrowing than Charles the Great. (Who was BTW big on fighting Danes and Saxons, but had lots of western Slavic allies.) So Oleg's treaties only adds to the problem that pan-Germanic solutions do not solve. One always wonders - how would we have to change our view of history if proto-Karl ended up being Slavic? Just a passing thought. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 05:24:19 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 01:24:19 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: <> In a message dated 4/9/99 11:38:19 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: -- not unless your definition of "everyday language" excludes complete sentences. Sometimes. <> By stylized, do you mean "fill-in the blank" kind of forms? I have not been able to find a big block of Linear B text to look at. Apparently there was enough to identify the language with the historical Arcadian if I understand correctly and build a vocabulary. Are there words that don't show up. <<...no laws,...>> I believe a saw a codicil listing the damages that levied for various offenses against women of different status. <<-- all languages are precise and predictable at that level. Or do you know of any one that isn't?>> At which level? It's an objective of any communication on all levels. Unless you are trying to be confusing. The original point was that a language that splinters into dialects is moving towards imprecision. A language that can somehow be prevented from splintering - or slowed down rather, not to be imprecise - stands a better chance of maintaining precise sound, grapheme and reference. But of course it also means - as mcv pointed out - that language will have problems with flexibility when the real world changes. <> In a message dated 4/2/99 4:00:25 AM, you wrote: <<-- all spoken languages undergo change in every generation. >> Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's comment: Note that the two statements are not contradictory, though you try to make them so. The number of generations may be small--3 or 4 in the case of the New York sociolects studied by Labov--but the changes were essentially invis- ible to the speakers in any adjoining pair of generations. --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 10 18:45:05 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:45:05 -0500 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Sent: Thursday, April 08, 1999 10:33 PM > Not sure. The sg. is , and I guess the sg. oblique stem > must be . There's one -n- too many (for a simple > n-stem based on *leuk^-, we'd expect *lusn (*leuko:n), *lusan- > (*leukn.-), pl. *lusunk` (*leukones)). Metathesis leunk ~ leukn? > The Balto-Slavic forms (lu:s^is, rysI), on the other hand, > suggest *luHk^-, with intrusive laryngeal. I personally subscribe to the idea of 'laryngeals' but those who oppose it rightly complain of 'laryngealitis', a condition characterized by explaining every inconvenient anomaly by supposing a laryngeal ex machina. And since when do 'laryngeals' intrude? What conditions that rude intrusion? Why not just simply explain the long vowel as due to compensatory lengthening? Vnk -> V:k? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 05:43:06 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 01:43:06 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 4/10/99 12:02:12 AM, you wrote: <<-- you're confusing description with prediction. Language change _in the past_ can be described and rules deduced, which can then be applied with reasonable confidence to historic languages we don't have direct evidence for. >> Probability is a tool can be used entirely to evaluate events that occured in the past. Carbon dating for example provides a predicatability in dating accompanying non-organic artifacts that has been found to be very reliable. "Predictability" is a factor that must be present before sampling validly can be used in analysis. Believe me, I'm not confused. <> A subject I don't think I've ever addressed. <> In a message dated 4/9/99 11:38:19 PM, you wrote: <> Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's note: As I noted in a previous message, the two statements are not contradictory. --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 10 18:59:24 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:59:24 -0500 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Glen Gordon Sent: Thursday, April 08, 1999 11:49 PM > I didn't mean that there were no STEMS that ended in *-nk-, just to > clarify. I said that such stems always have a suffix after them so > that there is no final *-nk ever in IE. In the case of *lunk-, it ends > in *-s in the nominative, hence *lunks, or *-m in the accusative, etc. > but there's never a complete word like **lunk with a final *-k. I think you might want to review what a 'stem' is. In the case of Greek lu'gx, lunk- is the *root*, which serves as a base *without* additional formatives (whixh would produce a stem), to which -s is added. [ Moderator's comment: I think you might want to review what a stem is: The stem is whatever is left after the grammatical ending is removed. This may be a root form, or an extended root (which *in some traditions* is called a stem). I would reserve the term "root" for the CVC items described best by Benveniste in _Origines_. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Apr 10 06:01:10 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 02:01:10 EDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: In a message dated 4/10/99 12:23:37 AM, glengordon01 at hotmail.com wrote: <) been considered in the discussion? [ Moderator's response: The feminine of _ane:r_ is _gune:_. There is a feminine derivative _andria_ "manhood", which if it goes back to PIE derives from *H_2nriH_2. --rma ]>> There is also the Greek term "ananderia" - yes, with -er- that was used commonly enough in Classical Greek to refer to unmarried women or widows. An earlier message said that "andera" was used in Euskera I think to refer to widows or such as a term of honor. The "andria" of Terence was an unmarried Greek woman. I do not know how one would refer to a woman who was from the Gallo-Roman regional capital of Anderitum in Southern France, not far from Greek Messalia, but anderia would certainly be a thought. Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's reply: Classical Greek need not apply: That -er- marks it as a late formation, without relevance for the existence of an earlier "feminine". --rma ] From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Sat Apr 10 23:38:39 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 16:38:39 -0700 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: > RAY HENDON: > The exposure side (rate of contact between infecteds and > susceptibles) of the equation is easily identified in the linguistic > community: The relatively few Romans sent to govern England was not > sufficient to generate a critical mass of exposure units for Latin > to predominate. And the Romans left local courts and laws stand, > lessening the need for everyone to know Latin in order to get along. To which Glen Gordon replied, > Number might have something to do with it but what about languages or > dialects that become viewed as prestigious? I'm sure it's more > complicated than the above otherwise we would have had a secure model > 100 years ago :) Be it noted that the Brits to a great extent followed the Roman model in administering their own Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries: allowing local courts and laws to stand (insofar as they were compatible with fundamental British legal principles, e.g., no slavery) and maintaining a relatively minimal expatriate governing force. HOWEVER, the Brits did strongly encourage local rulers to send their sons to Britain to be educated, necessitating some degree of fluency in English. Does this difference from Roman Imperial policy wrt administrative practice have anything to do with the fact that English remains the dominant language throughout most of the former British Empire? Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 10 23:30:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 18:30:47 -0500 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <370D96EC.31F74B4@montclair.edu> Message-ID: Was this the language of the Obodrites? Or did they speak Slovincian/Pomorze/Pomeranian? >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> Polabian, the language of the Slavs living on ("po") the Elbe >> ("Labe"), is West Slavic, but different from Sorbian. >Is "Labe" Slavic or left over from some other language? >Best Regards, >Mark >-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= >hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey >=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 11 02:05:10 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 22:05:10 EDT Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive Message-ID: In a message dated 4/10/99 6:53:26 PM, mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk wrote: <> Given the general nature of the subject matter, the difference between life, force and power may not be particularly meaningful in a ancient Greek language where the same words can mean skin and color, stick and center, cup and slave. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Apr 10 08:52:37 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 04:52:37 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >to explain the presence of Indo-Aryans in the Near East (instead of Iranians, >or some other Indo-Iranian group) -- well, on the Iranian Plateau, actually. The Hurrians extended that far. It's unclear exactly what was involved in the founding of the Mitannian kingdom and how an Indo-Aryan element came to be involved. My own guess would be, judging by what little evidence there is, that the Indo-Aryans started out as the southernmost of the proto-Indo-Iranian group. They moved south through Central Asia into what's now northern Iran first. Most of them went southeast, into Afghanistan and then the Punjab. A scattering went southwest, established themselves as overlords of some Hurrian-speaking groups in what's now Kurdistan (bringing chariot technology with them) and then were absorbed linguistically, leaving traces in specialized vocabulary, personal names of the elite, and some religious terminology. (Eg., Indra and Mithra, etc.) The Hurrians in question were then instrumental in founding Mitanni in northern Syria after the collapse of the Ur III empire. There were already Hurrians there, of course. This took place sometime between 1800 and 1600 BCE. Some time after that the Iranians proper moved into Iran, starting in the northeast and arriving in the western Iranian plateau sometime around 1000 BCE or a little later, where the Assyrians first encountered the Medes. This migration was more substantial, and succeeded in Indo-Europeanizing the area linguistically, slowly supplanting the previous (Elamite, Kassite, Hurrian) languages. The process was incomplete in historic times -- eg., early Achaemenid documents show that Elamite was still spoken widely in southern Iran. This, I think, is a parsimonious explanation of what happened. From edsel at glo.be Sat Apr 10 09:47:00 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 11:47:00 +0200 Subject: Slavic pIsU Message-ID: >[ Moderator's note: > MCV has been caught by 7-bit-mail again--that's _Morfologi'a Vasca_ above, > I reconstruct. > --rma ] [Ed Selleslagh] The problem is clearly in the xkl.com 's server(s), and probably in some subscribers' PC. I have absolutely no problem with receiving these characters directly from some of the people that have sent such postings to the list.(Using Character set ISO-8859-1) Mr. Moderator, can you do something about this? E. Selleslagh [ Moderator's response: The "problem" is indeed in the mail server used by this list: It is not capable of dealing with 8-bit mail, nor will it ever be. The character set in which e-mail should be sent to this list is US-ASCII; I will not get in the way of MIME-quoted mail, although I cannot read it myself, but I cannot do anything about 8-bit characters coming in. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Apr 11 02:08:12 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 22:08:12 EDT Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >Historically, we ought to expect Norwegian and Icelandic to form a single >branch of the tree, but nobody draws it that way: every tree I've seen puts >Norwegian in a branch with Danish and Swedish, while Icelandic (usually >together with Faroese) is off on a separate branch by itself. -- well, at the time Iceland was settled (10th century CE) Scandinavian was only weakly differentiated. In other words, Icelandic was a West Norwegian dialect, but West Norwegian wasn't much different from what was spoken in Zealand or Uppalsa. After this Icelandic remained much more isolated and conservative than the other Scandinavian languages. Effectively, then, Icelandic is a branch off the trunk of Common Scandinavian, not Norwegian. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 04:53:12 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 04:53:12 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <004601be82ab$5301d4c0$bf04703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >In the case of Eng. 'you', I think you're digging too deep, even though your >statement is correct. But the 'y' is almost certainly derived from a 'g', >just like in Dutch: modern 'jij' (acc. 'jou') (j=y) for 2 p. sg. stems from >'gij', the old 2 p. pl., still in use in Flanders for both sg. and pl.. >Another parallel Dutch - English: Middle Dutch 'g(h)eluw' > Du. 'geel', but >Eng. 'yellow'. The same applies to the 'y' of 'yard' (Du. 'boom-gaard' = >'orchard', i.e. 'tree-yard'). You're not digging deep enough. Not only do we have Gothic ju:s, we also have Skt. yu:yam, Gath. yu:s^, Lith./Latv. ju:s. Dutch g- is here a case of j- > g-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 05:26:45 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 05:26:45 GMT Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: > I suspect that the Common Slavonic imperfect with its characteristic vowel >hiatus {-a.axu} or {- at .axu} (`@' = the {yat'} vowel, it looks like a crossed >soft-sign, it may have been pronounced `ia' with the stress on the `i') is >derived from the sigmatic aorist {-axu} with the vowel at the end of the stem >pronounced with hesitation to indicate durativeness, e.g. "as I wro-ote" for >"as I was writing". Unlikely. Meillet apparently suggested that -e^ax- derives from the copula (j)es- cliticized to the verbal root (cf. the Latin imperfect with *bhu-a:-). But in view of the association of the optative with the imperfect in Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian and maybe Celtic, I would favour a derivation from the optative *-oih1- > e^, followed by -ax- < *-eh2-s-. In other words, a "past optative". >I suspect also that the IE subjunctive may have arisen (as common IE evolved >from its ancestor) as the indicative pronounced with hesitation on the >thematic vowel for a similar expressive reason, until the hesitation became >phonemic and hardened into an interpolated glottal stop (i.e. the H1 >laryngeal), which later disappeared with compensatory vowel lengthening. The doubly thematic subjunctive is only Greek and Indo-Iranian, I believe, and is in my opinion analogical. The primary phenomenon must have been a grammaticalization of the possibilty of conjugating athematic verbs thematically, which we see in the Latin future "I will be". Once the device was formalized as a subjunctive, the logical next step was to thematize the thematic conjugation, giving the Greek and Indo-Iranian doubly thematic subjunctive (according to Beekes, these forms were still disyllabic in Gatha Avestan). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From edsel at glo.be Sat Apr 10 09:47:50 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 11:47:50 +0200 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: zaterdag 10 april 1999 10:51 >In a message dated 4/8/99 9:07:20 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk writes: >>What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" >>over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed to >>a common-or-garden lexical innovation? >Exactly. After all, there was no taboo making the Romance languages shift >their work for "horse" from the Latin derivative of *ekwos to "caballus". >Aparently it was simply a shift, as if we'd stopped using "horse" and >substituted "nag" or "glue-bait" or "cayuse". [E. Selleslagh] Or the corresponding Du. 'ros', (nowadays southern) Germ. 'Ross' > 'paard' (in many Flemish dialects 'peerd' or 'pjeed'), 'Pferd'. Ed. Selleslagh From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 10 09:52:17 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 09:52:17 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <199904090503.BAA18712@cliff.Uottawa.Ca> Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: >The boundary between centum and satem is rather spotty, with some examples >of Baltic *k / Slavic *s >cf. Lith. klausyti OCS slysati >also, (I think) in this example Sanskrit has pasu >why could peku-/pisu not be parallel to klausyti/slysati? Of course. Even so, without doing the actual statistics, I have the impression that in cases where Baltic disagrees with Sanskrit on this, Slavic more often than not goes with Baltic (and viceversa). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 10 10:16:43 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:16:43 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) In-Reply-To: <2f07c4c7.243cdb1f@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: Subject: Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) >I wrote: ><either cut-off, isolated or geographically distant from the >"innovative core" - all external factors. What all? What are the subtle differences in meaning that you see between "cut-off", "isolated" and "geographically distant" that makes this three factors instead of one? >The 'Germanic' we are talking about happened @3000 years ago. >Its speakers were primitive, poor and had lost contact with the >rich and "linguistically innovative" regions to the south. Ah, I get it now. The Ur-Germans were too poor to afford new words and too primitive to think up their own so they were just stuck with what they had. I can see it all now: Ur-Hans: What are you doing? Ur-Fritz: I'm making a shoe for my hand. Ur-Hans: What are you going to call it? Ur-Fritz: Call it? -- You know we can't afford new words. Ur-Hans: Well, we sure can't make up any of our own, so I guess it's just a handshoe. Ur-Fritz: Yeah, it's a pity none of those rich foreigners ever come by so we could borrow a word from them. (Author's note: This exchange has been translated from Ur-Germanisch for the benefit of the audience since the purpose is dramatization, not reconstruction.) >Is this the only explanation for its archaism? No. But it is >better than pop sociology. Well, I'm glad to know that "poor" and "primitive" are not sociological factors. Or are you saying that your pop sociology can beat my pop sociology? :> Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 05:46:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 05:46:07 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <199904090813.KAA25490@noel1.noel.gv.at> Message-ID: "Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal schrieb: >> Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the >> 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. >But Sanskrit (and probably PIE) shows Sandhi and the realization depends on >the following word so that there is no difference of -d/-dh/-t at the end of >the word. Oops, you're right about Sanskrit. Still, the Vedic a-stem ablative is always given as <-a:d> and the n. dem. pronoun as , which makes me suspect Vedic sandhi rules were different. Does anybody know? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 10 12:31:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:20 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > Larry, what is the phenomenom of Aquitanian that makes > unpronounceable. thanks The /dr/ cluster. Pre-Basque absolutely lacked plosive-liquid clusters, and, in all early borrowings from Latin and Romance, such clusters were invariably eliminated in one way or another. See sections 18.4-18.5 of Michelena's Fonetica Historica Vasca for a list of examples, including such familiar ones as these: Lat --> Bq `book' Lat --> Bq `glory' Lat --> Bq * --> , `grain' Lat --> Bq `interest, usury' Rom --> Bq * --> `rustic gate' Lat --> Bq `pale yellow' Lat --> Bq `feather' Rom --> old Bq `rule' Rom --> old Bq `cruel' Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 06:52:51 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 06:52:51 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990409092130.11763.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >Let me re-illustrate, this time properly, the development of the >animate t-final stems with a pseudoword **kut (my vowel-final stem >illustration of **kuti still stands) and this time note the previously >neglected alternation of *t/*s in my paradigm example :( > Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE > Nominative *kut *kwet-se *kwets *kwets > Accusative *kut-im *kwetm *kwetm *kwetm > Dative *kwet-i: *kweti: *kwesi: (*kwesey) > Genitive *kut-isi *kwetese *kwete's *kwese's > Ablative *kut-ita *kweteta *kwete'd *kwese'd >Does that look right now? Not if we compare how t-stems are really declined (Beekes, p. 178): *nepo:t Skt. napa:t Lat. nepo:s *nepotm napa:tam nepo:tem *neptos naptur nepo:tis Or for instance Skt. marut "wind" (m.): sg. du. pl. N marut maruta:u marutaH A marutam ,, ,, I maruta: marudbhya:m marudbhiH D marute: ,, marudbhyaH G marutaH maruto:H maruta:m L maruti ,, marutsu etc. There are really only a few forms in which we see t/s alternation, such as the ptc.pf.act. in *-wot-/*-us-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 11 07:43:26 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 10:43:26 +0300 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Apr 1999 Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >Nicholas Widdows wrote: >>Or are they somehow morphologically marked? I know >>respect/avoidance language is widely used in the bear-hunting >>North (see Joseph Campbell on the Ainu), but might we not expect >>new terms like "well-intentioned one" or "your excellency" rather >>than the merely prosaic "it's big and it's brown and it likes a >>jar of hunny"? >When one looks at lexical replacement for 'bear' in North >America for taboo/respect reasons, one finds the fairly >pedestrian replacements mentioned above or borrowed words, not >the "your mighty greatness" variety. >All of these groups have a taboo respect for bear, but none of >the lexical replacements for older forms shows any particularly >high-brow form for the new word. In fact, look at the ways that >Americans replace the name of "God" in casual speech--"the man >upstairs", for example. I would say that a taboo replacement is >probably MORE likely to be a pedestrian form than something >special. After all, one needs a word to use in casual speech >without the respect inherent in the taboo form. The classic example of this (hunting-taboo replacement by a more general word) is often taken from English "deer", originally the general Germanic word for 'wild animal' (cf. Ger. "Tier") which by being used as a euphemism for the hunted animal has come to be specialized in that meaning, with the original meaning being taken up by loanwords ("animal, beast"). On the other hand, or on the other side of the hunter/hunted line, the original general word for 'dog', "hound" (cf. Ger. "Hund"), has come to be specialized as a term for 'hunting dog' in English, presumably through a sort of reverse taboo ("you can't call that thing a hound") and the general word has been replaced by "dog" (of unknown origin) and the now more prestigious "hound" reserved for hunters. Thus "riding to hounds" is hardly the same as a "dog and pony show" (to hunters at least). Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 07:44:23 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 07:44:23 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990409060739.82422.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >JENS ELMEGAARD RASMUSSEN: > That's what I believed until I succeeded in deriving them all from a > completely regular original system where Eng. you IS the acc.pl. > corresponding to nom.sg. thou. I had to invent some more sound laws, >Still don't get it. How does *t- become *y-?? It's not that difficult to understand what Jens is saying, whether one agrees or not. The *y- in *yu:s is secondary, and we have *u:s/*wos (Slavic vy < *(w)u:- and vasU, Lat. vo:s, Skt. vas, Alb. ju < *u, etc.). The nifty sound law then becomes *cw- > w- (and I guess alternatively sw-, judging by Hitt. sume:s, OIr. si:, We. chwi, Goth. i-zwis). Interesting to note that Greek hu:meis might be from all of *u:-, *su:-, *wu:- or *yu:- (but not *tw-, which would have given s-). Question for Jens: would this also work somehow for the numeral "6"? (Arm. vec`, We. chwech, OPr. uschts "6th") ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 10 12:49:03 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:49:03 +0100 Subject: rate of language change In-Reply-To: <7add6edd.243eaa4e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > Languages change, but generally so slowly (on a human scale) that > nobody's conscious of it in a time-span of less than generations. Too cautious, I think. My late mother, who had little education, was keenly aware of some of the differences between her own speech and her children's speech. A former girlfriend of mine, a native speaker of Kacchi, was highly aware of the differences between her own speech and her parents' speech, which in fact appeared to be rather substantial, and were regarded by her as substantial. And there is a huge amount of evidence showing that people are frequently aware of the same sorts of differences, even if they sometimes choose to regard these as "corruption" or "slovenliness" rather than as change. > Ordinary linguistic change generally isn't going to make anything > unintelligible in less than centuries. Debatable, I think. Some recent studies of certain Indonesian and Pacific languages reveal dramatic changes in a very short time, and there are hints of similarly rapid change elsewhere. Jim Milroy has observed that mutual comprehensibility between generations may sometimes take a back seat to other social pressures. Abraham Lincoln was born in Illinois. How successful do you think he'd be at understanding present-day Chicagoans? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sat Apr 10 12:53:27 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:53:27 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990409021222.99524.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > Hmm, after all this talk, I can't help but be enchanted by the > similitude of Greek forms and Basque. Question: why does it matter > whether the original form is or to the connection > with Greek? Afterall, if a form like **andre would have been > unpronouncable in Pre-Basque, Pre-Basque would no doubt have inserted > a vowel and thus our Pre-Basque *andere, no? If Pre-Basque had borrowed an * from another language, the form would have been altered, and * is indeed the most likely outcome. But what Greek source could there be for Basque `lady', and how could a Greek word make it into Basque in the Pre-Roman period, especially without leaving any traces in any other languages? > But then, are there any other items in Basque that're being debated > as having a Hellenic origin beside *andere? There have been a couple of suggestions, but not one them is even mildly persuasive. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 11 08:19:47 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 08:19:47 GMT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <370D96EC.31F74B4@montclair.edu> Message-ID: "H. Mark Hubey" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> Polabian, the language of the Slavs living on ("po") the Elbe >> ("Labe"), is West Slavic, but different from Sorbian. >Is "Labe" Slavic or left over from some other language? Probably Germanic (or else Celtic or "Alteuropa"isch") *albi- > elbe (with Germanic i-umlaut), and Slav. olb- > *la:b- (with Slavic liquid metathesis). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jer at cphling.dk Sat Apr 10 14:24:09 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 16:24:09 +0200 Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990407090743.36872.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: [Excerpts from discussion with Miguel Carrasquer Vidal:] [snip] > ME (GLEN): > First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes > nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation > contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). > MIGUEL: > Which is obviously false. > ME (GLEN): > Obviously how? > MIGUEL: > Sanskrit, for instance, has -d for the ablative, -t for the > 3rd.p. sg. Reason enough. [snip: In reply, Glen invokes analogy with primary *-ti] It should perhaps be pointed out that the choice of "*-d" as the final consonant in the registration of the thematic ablative ending as *-o:d (or *-oad to allow for Balto-Slavic contraction into /-a:-/) is arbitrary: In Sanskrit sandhi, there is full neutralization of word-final /t/ and /d/ (and /dh/ and /th/) in all combinations; Avestan has the special (unexploded?) dental (transcribed by t with subscript tilde) for both, and Old Persian drops both. Thus, Indo-Iranian offers no evidence as to which dental consonant is underlyingly involved here. Nor does Italic where *-t yields /-d/ in Latin and Oscan alike (and is lost in Umbrian). In sum, there is no direct evidence at all. There may still be indirect evidence, and that is to the contrary - much as it would suit me to have a contrast to point to when I explain the choice of /e/ in 3sg *bher-e-t vs. /o/ in neuter pronouns like *to-d by the rule "/e/ before voiceless, /o/ before voiced" - : If the ablative *-o-aD is a recomposition of stem-vowel /o/ + postposition ultimately identcal with Slav. ot(U) 'from' (itself identcal with Lat. ad 'to', OE aet 'at', the semantic shading being caused by the case of the following noun), then one may ask how the original form had been before the recomposition took over. If the postposition had the shape *aD, it would be expected to lose its vowel after the thematic vowel where all ablauting morphemes show zero-grade. Now, depending on the voicing or lack of it in the dental concerned, the result would be either *-o-d or *-e-t. It now so happens that we do have a word *e-t, also extended to *e-t-i which could very well be the ablative of the pronominal stem e/o- (enclitic variant i-). The extended form is Lat. et 'and', Gk. e'ti Skt. a'ti 'in addition, yet', while the unextended form is seen in Av. at (with "funny t"), a frequent sentence opener of probable meaning 'and then'. These all mean practically the same as the Skt. adverb tata's 'from there, thereafter, thereupon, then'. If this is correct (I know it does not have to be) the dental occurring in the ablative ending is a /t/ in the morphophonemics of the protolanguage. There is a case in Germanic of two word-final dentals being treated differently in case of extension, retained to this day in English _that_ vs. _stood_. _That_ is Goth. _thata_ indicating that the dental was still IE *-d or post-soundshift pre-Gmc. *-t at the time of the addition of the particle sitting on the Gothic form. _Stood_ is Gmc. *sto:th (thorn retained in Goth.) from *sta:t-e, a relatively simple reshaping of the inherited root aorist *staH2-t made by adding the productive endings of the IE perfect to the full form of the 3sg, thereby drawing the desinential *-t into the synchronic root. In this case the once-final dental is treated as IE *-t (or post-soundshift pre-Gmc. thorn). If both are to be derived from phonological systems neutralizing mode-of-articulation oppositions in word-final position, the neutralizing habits will have to have changed between the two events. Such change is entirely possibly - it could even be consistent: The result could have been [-t] before the soundshift in *staH2-t > *staH2t-e and [-t] again after the soundshift in *{kw}oD (*{kw}ot ?) > *hwat -> *hwat-o:. But it could also simply be what it looks like, IE *-d and *-t being kept apart all along. This is suggestive, but not entirely probative. Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 10 17:13:45 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 12:13:45 -0500 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <37237c62.235742805@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Watkins distinguishes *med- & *me at - [with *me- being a shortened form of *me at -] He has *met- as the source of mod- [modern, mode, modest, etc.], mete, and empty AS aemetta from --I guess-- *a-met- "not measured, cut to measure, regulated" [ moderator snip ] >As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- >(Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, >me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced >there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Apr 11 08:50:11 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 04:50:11 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Quite true; linguistis is an _explanatory_ discipline. It's more like evolutionary biology than, say, chemistry, let along physics. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 10 17:29:23 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 12:29:23 -0500 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Wasn't it more a case of initially distinguishing between 2 types of horses: caballus, a large lumbering draft horse of horthern European origin as opposed to equus a swift cavalry horse originating in the Caucasus or Caspian region, two different subspecies --at least according to a couple of books on horses I've seen. In that vein, it would correspond to the distinction between "horse" and "pony." won out because not too many people ever came into contact with an , at least on an everyday basis. Curiously, in Spanish while a stallion is a caballo, a mare is a yegua < equa [or something like that]. And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. Pony is related to the name of the horse goddess Epona, right? And so, is cognate to equus, isn't it? >In a message dated 4/8/99 9:07:20 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk writes: >>What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" >>over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed to >>a common-or-garden lexical innovation? >Exactly. After all, there was no taboo making the Romance languages shift >their work for "horse" from the Latin derivative of *ekwos to "caballus". >Aparently it was simply a shift, as if we'd stopped using "horse" and >substituted "nag" or "glue-bait" or "cayuse". From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 11 09:36:42 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 05:36:42 EDT Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: In a message dated 4/10/99 10:18:21 PM, mcv was quoted: <> Just a Herodotus note. He claims that the persian Cyrus' ('Kuron') name is an allusion to 'dog'. Seems the woman who fostered him after he was abandoned was named 'dog.' He was left as a baby with a shepherd ..."and his wife was a slave like him; her name was in the Greek language Cyno, in the Median Spako: for "spax" is the Median word for dog." "...ounoma de tei gunaiki en tei sunoikee Kuno kata ten Hellenon glossan, kata de ten Mediken Spako: ten gar kuna kaleousi spaka Medoi." Herdotus says the Medes gave Cyrus his name to embarass him about his foster mother. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 10 18:27:33 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:27:33 -0500 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Glen Gordon Sent: Thursday, April 08, 1999 9:12 PM > And second, excuse me if I missed something (which is possible because > I haven't been fully paying attention till now) but, has a Greek form > like *andre: (feminine of ) been considered in the discussion? > [ Moderator's response: > The feminine of _ane:r_ is _gune:_. > There is a feminine derivative _andria_ "manhood", which if it goes back > to PIE derives from *H_2nriH_2. > --rma ] Are we being quite fair here? There is Old Indian na'ri: and Avestan na:iri:, 'lady (?). [ Moderator's response: The long vowel in the first syllable marks this as a late formation in Indic. It therefore provides no evidence for a "feminine" in the proto-language. --rma ] Based on IE *1. (s)ner-, and Egyptian nrj, 'fear', 'protect', and nrj-jHw, 'ox-herd', and nrw, 'terrible one', and Sumerian nir, 'hero', and 'overcome', I believe it is possible that the basal meaning of this root is 'fear-inspiring', and so would not be restricted to males. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 10 18:35:32 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:35:32 -0500 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Glen Gordon Sent: Thursday, April 08, 1999 9:29 PM > I think we're going off topic here. Miguel brought this up in > connection with his idea that IE once had *-k (??) which was > originally in connection to external relationships like Uralic with > IE. And, even more importantly, we see in lynx a preservation of Nostratic [nk], a dorsal nasal, which shows up in Semitic as [q], but is frequently simplified to IE [k]. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Apr 11 16:39:57 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 17:39:57 +0100 Subject: imperfect Message-ID: Miguel asked about an inherited root "aorist": >>Did it become an >>imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) >>like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless >>narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked >>"imperfects" like ? The question only makes sense if there is a genuine distinction between imperfect and aorist in Vedic. In fact, (despite some grammars too heavily influenced by Greek), there is no clearly discernible difference in meaning between the two. The labels are taken from Greek and refer to the formation, not the function. If a root-stem past tense has a corresponding present, it is called "imperfect" - otherwise it is called "aorist". Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 11 17:23:43 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 13:23:43 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/10/99 2:38:50 PM, you wrote: <<-- that would require time-travel, since neither Polish nor Russian existed at the time of Gothic-Slavic contact, and the Goths had moved west by the 6th century.>> You may need new sources. Just about everywhere Gothic is discussed you'll find references to the attestation of East Gothic being spoken in the Crimea in the 16th Century. See, eg. P. Heather, The Goths, p. 259, Blackwell (pb1998); Hawkins in Comrie, The World's Major Languages at p, 69. I seem to recall also that the missionary-oriented Enthologue mentioned awhile back on this list actually had it that a bible published was published in the language in the 1300's - I can't substantiate that. (As a sidebar, a Danish grandparent of mine - not that she was an authority - would occasionally refer to some Slavs as what I remember as "Gotar" which of course confused me. One explanation might be a name-tranference that may have happened in the middle ages. There was for example "a chronicle from the 12th Century written by Archbishop Grgur of Bar (a city in Boka Kotorska, a region now in Montenegro ). The chronicle represents the oldest historiographic work of Croatian Middle Ages. There exist two redactions, Croatian and Latin. In Croatia, it was called 'Ljetopis popa Dukljanina.' In Latin, it was titled 'Libellus Gothorum'.") Actually the run mcv gave was << Gmc. kuning(az) > Slav. kUne~gU or kUne~gI (i-stem) > kUne~dzU/kUne~dzI (3rd. palat.) > knjo~dz (loss of jers; Polish e~: > jo~) > ksia,dz (Polish kn' > ks')>>, which has it coming into I guess Common Slavonic. I'm having a bit of trouble seeing the king>priest>moon progression, I think I have a solid historical alternative that is phonetically closely related but I'm really struggling with the linguistics. The hard part is the << kuning-, from *kun-ja "kin" (*gon-) and Germanic suffix-ing/-ung>> because *gon- is already in Greek *gno-, possibly before German was invented. After all, if you follow Mallory or Dolukhanov the proto-Slavs were the Agricultural Scythians in 500BCE and therefore had contact with the Greeks before the Germans. (Unless you accept a BSG) And of course if the P-slavs were IE they should have had a *gon/*gnu or *kon/*knu and i-stems quite before they met the Goths. But anyway... Regards, Steve Long From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Apr 11 17:39:59 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 10:39:59 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: EDUARD SELLESLAGH IN REPLY TO JENS RASMUSSEN'S *tuH/*yus PROPOSED CONNECTIONS: In the case of Eng. 'you', I think you're digging too deep, even though your statement is correct. But the 'y' is almost certainly derived from a 'g', just like in Dutch: modern 'jij' (acc. 'jou') (j=y) for 2 p. sg. stems from 'gij', First, someone says *tu is connected to *yus by some very unobservable sound rule and now this?? Look, Indo-European *y- = Old English y-. It's very well known and accepted that IE *yus begets the English "you", "ye", etc. as well as Dutch "jij/gij". The reason why we say it's *y- is because of languages like Sanskrit. Look it up. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Apr 11 20:38:16 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 15:38:16 -0500 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've read so much contradictory info on canid timelines that it makes me wonder if there weren't 2 or more levels of domestication at different times: 1. The semi-domesticated yellowish-brown variety, e.g.: Dingo, New Guinea Singing Dog, SE US "yaller dog" [which is said to go back to pre-Columbian times] 2. modern fully neotenized breeds > Adam Hyllested wrote:- [ moderator snip ] >Also Chinese: Mandarin {ch'u"an}, Ancient Chinese {kjwan} = "dog". Perhaps the >word spread along with the animal from whoever first domesticated it. I read >recently of work on mitochondrial DNA which seemd to show that domestic dogs >are all descended from a very few original female wild wolves. How long ago >and where are domestic dog bones first found in archaeology? From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Apr 12 01:17:52 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 18:17:52 PDT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MIGUEL: The instrumental [...] shows a lengthened vowel in all roots (-a: for a:-stems, -i: for i-stems, -o: or -e: for o-stems), which can only mean -H1. ME (GLEN): Which can mean either a lengthened vowel or *H1, really. Besides probably Latin?, what evidence of this *-(e)H1 exists? MIGUEL: A lengthened vowel in Vedic, Greek, Germanic, Lithuanian. The quality of the vowel is unaffected. Therefore, we must reconstruct *H1 (unless you think that laryngeal-PIE had long vowels *e: and *o:). Well, here's my current position. I accept *H2 and *H3 as being /h/ and /h/ respectively (and thus parallel to the velars). *H1 on the other hand is at most a glottal stop which, iff it occured at all, certainly would not have been a distinct phoneme. Mediofinal *H1 doesn't exist and vowel + *H1 is really a long vowel. The diphthongs *eu and *ei are reinterpreted as *u: and *i:. I prefer not to accept *e: (*eH1) as of yet in IndoAnatolian IE and reinterpret it as *a:. The vowel *e is from unstressed **i/**u in closed syllable (cf. *ter-, *es-, usw.) or throughout enclitics (cf. *ne, *me, *twe, *se, *swe, blah, blah). [ Moderator's query: Why would a glottal stop "certainly not be" a distinct phoneme? I can think of several languages off the top of my head in which it is, so there is no reason other than _a priori_ bias to reject in for PIE. --rma ] In light of this, the instrumental, if we can confidentally reconstruct it in IndoAnatolian, is at most *-e: in nonAnatolian IE in my view. Of course, a **t could also theoretically disappear in final position so this says nothing in the end about your hypothesis. However, I'm not hearing credible and regular Anatolian cognates with other IE branches aside from an out-of-joint example of ablative- instrumentals with dental which show what you're saying. That together with lack of extra worthy examples of **-t > *-H1 makes me conclude that the instrumental was being conveyed with the ablative and the endings we see in later IE are only an innovation. Instrumental as it exists in later IE languages can't be all that archaic. MIGUEL: [...] I give you Georgian -it, Sumerian -ta]. ME (GLEN): Yes, that's right. I'm agreement with you but with vastly different reasons. And don't forget Uralic *-ta :) which is most evidently more relatable to the ablative *-ed based on those regular sound changes I mentioned. MIGUEL: Non-Nostraticists look the other way... Indeed: PIE *d == Uralic *t, PIE *t == Uralic *tt. That's why I have taken great care to distinguish between the ablative in *d and the instrumental in *t (cf. again Georgian ablative -dan/adverbial -ad, Sumerian comitative -da). You should take greater care. In fear of having this topic zapped away from too much talk of Nostratic, I just will briefly illuminate this arguement for what it is for those that don't understand the Nostratic hypotheses involved. First, Allan Bomhard states that PIE *-t- == Uralic *-t(t)-. Note the parentheses? Doesn't look like he's all that certain, does it? Second, the terms that you try to connect are with, what would be, Nostratic *d. It is far more certain that a Nostratic *d == IE *dh. So if you want to do comparisons like this that fit the Nostratic model as well as IE itself, perhaps what you need is the locative in *-dhi (as in Greek oiko-thi "at home"; synonymous with Etruscan -thi, -ti) which would be more at sync with a Sumerian commitative afterall. Finally, how do you know that this supposed process that causes **-t- to become Uralic *-t(t)- occured before or after the first occurence of post-position affixing that created this declension that we see in Uralic and IE. Perhaps, an ablative postposition *ta was suffixed AFTER this change? Too much uncertainty - enough of that. [ Moderator's comment: That is standard notation for the longer "PIE *-t- corresponds to Uralic *-t- and *-tt-." So I'm sure that Bomhard is quite certain, myself. And this thread needs to move to the Nostratic list. Far too much time has been spent on the IE list in discussions that aren't really on topic. --rma ] At any rate, I fail to see where that point is going since one would reason that if it's true that Pre-IE **-tV > *-d and that *-t = *-d = *-dh then we should have as a follow-up rule: **-TV > *-d where T = [any dental]. Your arguement here is not of much concern to both IE studies and those of Nostratic. ME (GLEN): Nor should it be shocking that the genitive *-es (**-ese) is also accented (cf. Etruscan -isa [genitive] and ? Sumerian -se [dative]). MIGUEL: The Etruscan genitives are *-si and *-la (e.g. for the a-stems: [...] The Sumerian dative is -ra. -she3 is the terminative ("towards, into, to"). Gee, "towards, into, to" sounds like a dative case to me. :) Clever, but no cigar. This is all interesting and irrelevant. The ending <-si> still shows a vowel originally occured after the *s genitive in Etruscan that no longer shows itself in IE, aside from the mysterious accentuation. It only validates my views. I put a question mark before the Sumerian dative -she because it is a budding theory of mine and I'm unsure of it. However it is an intriguing premise for IE studies regardless of the fact that my theory admittedly originated from observations in Nostratic. I note that the genitive in *s is unique to Indo-Etruscan. Outside of IEtr, languages viewed as Nostratic consistently use an ending with sibilant for the _dative_, not for the genitive. Now, ignoring the distant external examples like Sumerian -she, Georgian , etc. it's still interesting that Uralic has no genitive in *s either and that Finnish has -ssa (< -s-na) and -lla (< -l-na) being used for duty as inessive and adessive (which are kinds of locative/dative cases), endings which bare similarity to Etruscan and Anatolian's s- and l-genitives. It's not impossible for the dative to become genitive. Food for thought. ME (GLEN): Judging by Greek we might have the following sketchy hypothesis: *-H1-/-H2-/*-H3- >? Greek -k- MIGUEL: I realize that you are new to this laryngeal business, but the a:-stems have *-H2. Alright, let's be gracious and give you this one. Let's say that *-H2- becomes Greek -k-. What next? You're only showing that complete IE words can end with *H2 and this is something we both agree with, even though I think *-H2 < **-H2-s [nominative]. Now, finally, will you explain how one goes about showing that *-H2 is really from **-k? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 13 16:45:51 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:45:51 -0700 Subject: IE *k^won and its origin Message-ID: RICK McCALLISTER: Why? Why can't it be **pkwVn with /kw/ as a labial velar stop and then seeing such forms as **kVwVn- as a product of unpacking? Not following. Unpacking? IE *k^won- does not and never did have a labiovelar. The initial *k^w- is a consonant cluster involving TWO seperate phonemes. Further, the *k^- is curiously palatal. How does a single phoneme *k irregularly become a complex consonant cluster *k^w with palatal?? No matter how hard we try, the **pek^uon- myth doesn't work, both inside and out of IE studies. The form definitely points to an earlier **kV1wV2n- where V1 is one of [*a,*e,*i] to account for the palatal velar. This is why I suggest an earlier form **kawina. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Apr 12 01:47:07 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 18:47:07 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: JENS RASMUSSEN: Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. MIGUEL: I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally and -s- medially. What to make of them? "-t word-finally"?? I'm shocked that you would utter those words. How does this bode for **-t > *H1? MIGUEL: As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. Why does Pokorny write it *me-t- instead of *met- and why can't we consider *-t- a verbal affix or possibly two different verbs? Why are you considering a MEDIAL *H1 as example of your **-t > *H1?? Why does *meH1not(s) occur instead of **metnot(s)? Why do I have so many questions? :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 12 02:18:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 22:18:41 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/10/99 8:47:47 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: <> I wrote: <> whiting at cc.helsinki.fi replied: <> FYI: New Oxford Dictionary adds that, in Logic, truism is "a proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms." Without addressing ideas like >language changes except when it doesn't<, I must admit that in the past I've been guilty of a few truisms myself. But this is how you can declare a statement a truism and still contradict the underlying proposition: >From Uniform Rules for Debate, HDS/GUDS(1962) "A debator who runs a truism will fail... by jumping to a conclusion made necessary by virtue of his definition. A truism will also be irrelevant because it will not be resolving one of the issues that could otherwise have been debated." Since a truism simply restates the premise and is irrelevant, "a pleading in the alternative ...allows the challenger to both assert an objection to the truism and [at the same time] attack the underlying proposition..." Functionally consistent with Merriam/Webster's a "truth...too obvious for mention." Regards, Steve Long From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Mon Apr 12 02:28:17 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 19:28:17 PDT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: Part 1. On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [on Spanish ] [RF] > My assumption is that the expression > is derived from Euskera, as are many other odd expressions > that pop up in these codes which are written in Spanish. To my > knowledge, there is no alternate derivation for the term. [LT] The word is unknown to me, and is not listed in Corominas, which last is a little surprising. [RF] As I said in my previous message, when one works with such law codes one discovers many words that people like Corominas missed. I don't find it surprising since many of the codes and archival documents from Euskal Herria have only recently been transcribed and many more are still waiting to be copied from the leather-parchment that they were written on. A major project is underway in the Tolosa archives. Yet, to my knowledge there is still no complete glossary of these expressions. Some of them are very interesting and should be examined by linguists for a variety of reasons. For example, as is well known, legal terms are frequently more conservative (or less innovative) than the rest of the lexicon. I think Steve Long or perhaps someone else on the list recently mentioned that the standardizing influence of law and religion. Similarly, in a situation of orality, such as the one that we would be speaking about for the Basque case, the formulaic nature of the legal terms in question would have aided in their retention. Keep in mind we were talking about the Middle Ages. Furthermore, when the law codes were finally put into written form, the language chosen was not Euskera, but in the language of the rulers or at least those who didn't know Euskera. At least some of those who were assigned the onerous task of faithfully rendering the pre-existing formulas into a Romance language, had to have been bilingual, although some might have been more dominant in Euskera and others in Navarrese, for example. In any case, the bleed-through of Euskera into the codes takes on several forms: 1) grammatical calques; 2) odd-sounding translations of the original formula or expression; 3) direct rendering of pre-existing expressions as if there were Navarrese, although they were originally in Euskera and had already passed into the legal lexicon of the speakers at some earlier point and, therefore, were considered by the translators to be acceptable in Navarrese; 4). expressions that are nothing more than Euskera, whose shape was slightly modified by those attempting to write them down as they heard them --which didn't necessarily reflect the way that the Basque speakers were saying them nor the actual composition of the words, i.e., their component parts. We assume that these folks were not trained phoneticians and hence were not necessarily capable of or willing to disambiguate what they heard, dividing it neatly into the distinct morphological elements making up the expressions, rather they attempted to render them in written form, reproducing "faithfully" in this way they heard or, if you wish, in this situation (for those living almost exclusively according to the norms of orality, priority seems to have been given to oral representation. Nonetheless, for a linguist, a careful examination of these expressions ought to provide insights into the structure and phonology of Euskera in the Middle Ages, a point in time for which there is a dearth of evidence. My understanding is that a significant amount of work has been done on place names and some proper names, but there are only a few studies, to my knowledge, that systematically attempt to deal with the archival records existing at the more popular level, e.g., land transfers, donations to churches, etc., rather than the _ Fuero general de Navarra _, for instance. [RF] > Moreover, the phonological reduction of "the lady of the > house" to * with the resulting form being "masculinized" by > replacement of the <-a> definite pronoun ending with the masculine > ending <-o> from Romance seems fairly straight forward to me. However, I > might be missing something. [LT] Perhaps not so straightforward. The medieval form of the word for `lady of the house' will have been , or at best , not *. [RF] I'm not so certain that in all speech events in which this phrase occurred there was no reduction of to . Perhaps I've been spending too much time with those illiterate Basque shepherds and farmers up in the hills, but I don't get the impression that they would have spoken much "plainer" or clearly enunciated each and everyone of all those letters way back when much better than they do so today. But that is just my impression after having done dozens of taped interviews with them. I must be hanging out with the wrong crowd. I would emphasize that some of the richest and most complex Euskera is spoken by precisely these individuals, many of whom still are illiterate in Euskera, mainly because their schooling was done in Spanish under Franco when the use of Euskera was banned from the classroom (as well as other settings). [LT] And it is not so easy to see how this could yield the observed , especially since the Basque word is so blatantly and expressly female. [RF] Yes, Larry, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. Something else had to be going on. [LT] Why on earth choose the female term, instead of the male counterpart `master of the house', especially when most of the voting heads of household were male? [RF] In the period that we are talking about and long afterwards, the vote was a "house" vote, it was not one cast by an individual. Or stated differently, the "house" was a legal entity and had political status as such, including a "seat" or in the Church or local hermitage. The vote was cast on behalf of the or "fire". The "house vote" was transmitted publicly usually at an outdoor site, e.g., around a tree, often an oak, but not always. These trees are also encountered in Spanish as the "arboles juraderos" that in turn are associated with or gave rise to the "hermitas juraderas" nearby such as the one near Burgos where El Mio Cid swore his allegiance to his king, as I recall. Let me explain more explicitly. We are talking about what might be understood as a place equivalent to the English or New England "commons" and to the equivalent of "town meetings" where the "householders" cast their votes. In the Basque case, however, that vote represented the consensus of all the householders in question. As you may have pointed out on this list previously, in the late Middle Ages (as well as later) we would be talking the Basque farmsteads called a compound of "forest" and <(h)erri> which Azkue translates, and I think correctly, as "pueblo" or "lugar habitado". It is the same element found in Euskal Herria, often translated simply as the "Basque Country" Hence, the translation of the term gives some idea of the number of people, often times unrelated, that lived and worked in these operations. We would be talking about twenty or more people per "house", with a significant number of them being adults, the inheritor (often the daughter), her husband, her parents, their children, ummarried aunts and uncles from the woman's parent's generation, the brothers and sisters of the inheritor, as well as various helping hands who sometimes spent their entire lives with the same family. I would note that the family's name derived from the house's name. Even into recent times this has continued to be true. The house carried the name, not the individual. The individual derived his/her name from the house. Later this pattern was replaced by the one we know today, but the older system seems to have been quite widespread until the Council of Trent instituted the "sacrament of matrimony" replacing what earlier had been a civil contract drawn up by the two families of the individuals involved. The early naming process was further complicated by the fact that the Crown wanted knowledge of their subjects, birth records began to be kept and, in the process, the authorities could identify and keep track of those young males who were obligated to serve in the ruler's armies. Hence, at the town meeting, the male householder -for it was the male who publicly carried the vote, at least in more recent times- was able to do so because he had previously consulted with the members of the household, including his wife and mother-in-law. One needs to keep clearly in mind that with the Pyrenean system of primogeniture, not only were daughters not barred from inheriting, there were definite advantages that accrued to the house-lineage when they did, but that is a long involved story that requires going into the law codes themselves (there is plenty of bibliography on all this). Hence, the husband's should not be portrayed as if he were some sort of patriarchal dictator, but rather an individual who actually carried out his duties as "administrator" with the legal proviso that he would do so properly. If he did not he could be legally separate from his "husbandry" duties. This was done after a group of his peers ("good men and good women" representing the "community") were consulted and the grievances laid out. In the law codes, however, there was considerable debate, even into the 16th century, whether the inheritor was obligated to feed and clothe him once he had been removed from his office as administrator. The "witnesses" sometimes were drawn into this aspect of the legal contract since they were the ones that vouched for any losses caused to the household by the "husband-administrator" in case his own parents were unable to cover them. The "witnesses" were the co-signatories of the contract, along with the parents. In order to insure the capabilities of the individual chosen, the later was frequently contracted as a "hired hand" for a period of "seven years and a day" by the first generation parents and during that period he would reside in the . In all of this the main character is the itself (the "stammhaus>) and it was the 's continuity and health that was being guaranteed by what was an intricate set of checks and balances.In no sense did the female or male) inheritor exercise these rights as an individual. The rights, responsibilities and duties, were entirely "positional" not "personal." It is, nonetheless, a system that appears to have had a strong matrifocal component, perhaps because the lineage of the woman's offspring was always known and not one that required elaborate sexual taboos to be imposed on either party. All offspring were legitimate. It was the that participated in the , usually composed of some eight to twenty scattered across the country-side, i.e., non-nucleated. The relationship of the parts to the social whole was one of mutual dependence and/or interdependence, if you wish. The survival of the depended on its ability to participate in the and in turn the health, and stability of the depended on its ability to depend on the "community-work/labor" provided by its members (cleaning the brush from the woodlands commons, repairing roads and paths, rebuilding commonal storehouses, etc.). In rural zones of Gipuzkoa these projects take place throughout the year, although at times a household will pay others to do their "share." In return for their The members of the in turn gained access, through their participation in a that was a "voting member", to the common lands, the highland pastures for their animals, the communal orchard, the right to enter and harvest what are called in Spanish legalese of the time "las frutas de la tierra" of the communal forest (hunting, fishing, nutting and fire-wood collection rights). These "rights" were fundamental since, particularly, in Iparralde into recent times, the lands legally "belonging" to the ended at the drip line of the house's eaves. Even in the twentieth century, many a had only a few acres of land associated with it, and these were often distant from the house itself. The separation of these small plots from the house is explained by the fact that previously the cultivation of the communal lands rotated through the household comprising the , sometimes by means of a simple lottery system. Later, the "right" to cultivate a given plot ended up falling to a given family/'s own holdings. Nonetheless, it is not unusual even today the or farmer to have to take his animals to a different location, i.e., distant from the barn, and/or harvest hay from plots that are not adjacent to the . In addition, there is some indication that the opinion of the eldest female was considered particularly important -this is reflected by her prominent role at the site in the church as well as her function as mistress-of-ceremonies both in the church and at home (cf. Barandiaran's many writings on the subject). This might respond to the fact she was the eldest in the household lineage, the mother of the inheritor. Indeed she herself could have inherited the house (and hence, the political rights and responsibilities belonging to the house) from her own mother. Moreover, the importance of the position of the elder female in the household is underlined by the fact that when her daughter (or son) inherited, that inheritance represented only a partial transfer of the estate and related goods. The other half stayed in the name of the parents. That procedure was built into the codes so as to insure that the children (of the second generation) would take good care of their aging parents (of the first generation). The codes are quite pragmatic in their complexity showing a keen awareness of human nature. In conclusion, one needs to keep in mind that we are not talking about modern nuclear families and the voting rights associated with the individuals forming them in contemporary nation-states. Indeed, many books have been written on Pyrenean "regime", the unique laws of primogeniture that prevailed in the Pyrenean region. These not only permitted but favored the inheritance of the by the first-born daughter (although it was not always the first-born if she was found in some way to be incompetent). It is that regime that would have given rise to the status and power of the a.k.a and the possibility that the expression's referential "gender" was altered, perhaps quite unwittingly by those who were no longer fluent in Euskara. Today we have the opposite phenomenon going on all around us: words that previously had exclusively male referents are being used to refer to females. And, if over time some of these professions were to become female ghettos, it's possible that what was a masculine term could end up with an exclusively female referent. There is also the rather notorious example of "guys", an expression that in the US is now used by girls/women to refer to groups of other girls/women (of course, the guys still use it to talk about guys, too). The case I've mentioned is somewhat different, but not all that unusual, especially given that cultural backing for such an interpretation of the data is found in the socio-political history of Euskal Herria. For those interested in multi-pronged investigations of cultural and linguistic norms, I would recommend the classic article by the well-known French geneticists Jean Bernard and Jacques Ruffie, Hematologie et Culture: Le Peuplement de l'Europe de l'Ouest" in _ Annales, Economies, Societes, Civlizations_ (1976) vol. 31, num. 31 (July-Dec.): 661-675. In it they show maps with the isoglosses of this regime overlaid on maps with the isoglosses of Euskeric-Aquitanian linguistic features (e.g., morphological elements found in the toponyms of the region) as well as genetic data. In general one sees that the regime's domain shrank over time and that the shrinkage or "retreat" in question can be traced by the retreat of the Basque/Aquitanian language in the zone from the earliest recorded period forward. Equally fascinating in its implications is the work of Jacques Poumarede (1972), _ Les successions dans le Sud-Ouest de France au Moyen Age _ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Poumarede was one of the investigators involved in conducting the very original and highly detailed spade work required for the mapping by studying law codes, inheritance records, and hundreds of other related documents, etc. This was done in order to map the retreat of the regime of inheritance in question. In my opinion, his study is one of the best and most complete on this particular topic. And, on another note, certainly today many of those kids in Bilbao who speak only Spanish but find it "hip" to talk about going home to "hacer las lanas" have little or no idea what the word really means in Euskara, for them its their "homework", a perfectly valid Spanish word, a feminine noun regularly used in the plural. In Euskera, the word is obviously not masculine or feminine (Euskera has no gender marking in nouns), nor is used only in the plural to refer exclusively to "homework." Agur t'erdi, Roz Frank April 11, 1999 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [currently on leave in Panama] [ Moderator's note: We seem to have drifted far beyond the topic of Indo-European studies in this thread. Given the high traffic volumes on this list, I have to ask that the interested parties move to another forum for further discussion. I'm inclined to be more flexible on the Nostratic list, if no other more appropriate list exists. (Is there a Basque-L?) --rma ] From jer at cphling.dk Mon Apr 12 14:36:07 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 16:36:07 +0200 Subject: -s. vs. (-)t- In-Reply-To: <37237c62.235742805@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > >Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with > >stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; *lewk-ot/-es- > >'daylight', and the eternally troublesome *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and > >the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. > I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an > inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; > and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) > etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally > and -s- medially. What to make of them? You are right, and I have adjusted the "reading rule" in a separate mail. It seems that the morphophoneme concerned, which I would call //c// for practical purposes, surfaces as /s/ before some boundary which is a bit hard to define, viz. word-finally (Vedic vocative -vas, 2sg *-s, ntr. -vat then being analogical on masc. *-wo:t-s) and before "weak" case endings (i.e. all except nom., voc., acc.), and before SOME, but not all, derivational suffixes: fem. *-us-iH2, but *nem-et-o-s. Glen Gordon's generalization of -s- to intervocalic position (in a separate mail) does not explain its occurrence word-finally > As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- > (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, > me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced > there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. Certainly worth considering. I have toyed with the idea of "preaspiration", i.e. *H2meH1-ti > *H2methi -> *H2meti -> *H2met-e-ti involving absorption of the aspiarting laryngeal in to following consonant, then restoration of the unaspirated ending and, finally, resegmentation drawing the desinential /t/ to the root and productive inflection. But it is nice if can be as simple as phonetically regular. Jens From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Apr 12 14:36:16 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 17:36:16 +0300 Subject: Socilological vs natural selection (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: <37180062.138459074@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Robert Whiting wrote: > >It is my impression that almost all linguistic change is brought > >about by sociological factors. > I would rather say that linguistic change, brought about by > articulatory, combinatory, contact-related etc. "mutations", is > selected for by sociological factors. I'm sure there's a better formulation of what I said, and "sociologically selected" might be it. > This is not unlike biological change, where the mutations are > brought about by various factors (both "internal" quirks in the > way DNA is structured and is copied, and "external" factors like > cosmic rays), and the mutations are then selected for by their > effect on the "fitness" or sex-appeal of the phenotype. On the other hand, I'm somewhat leery of drawing strong parallels between linguistic change and biological change, because so many people, particularly non-linguists, seem to take them literally (i.e., assume that languages change the same way that biological organisms do) or extend the analogy in ways that are not applicable. For one thing, forms can be taken over for reasons like prestige of the source language or dialect, or because the speakers find a word with a sound or meaning that they just happen to like in another language, and there is, as far as I know, no mechanism that duplicates this in biological change. Secondly, sociological change does not have to be survival-enhancing (people, especially as a group, don't always know what is good for them, and even if they do, they don't always do it), whereas biological change, because of natural selection, will preserve survival-enhancing mutations by its very nature. I guess what I am saying is that while the analogy of selection for change may be good, the analogy of sociological selection versus natural selection seems less so. Sociological selection would seem more likely to produce a figurative duck-billed platypus than a cheetah. Now I'm sure that the duck-billed platypus is marvellously adapted to its environment, but it does look more like it was created by a committee that could never agree on anything than by natural selection. And you know, walks like a duck-billed platypus... Sociological selection of linguistic changes seems more likely to produce change for the sake of change (i.e., just to be different [or to be more the same]) than change that is likely to enhance the survival of either the society (culture) or the language. Only the use of language, not any specific language in any specific form, seems to be a survival technique in Homo sapiens. And indeed, it is only a language acquisition device that is genetically transmitted, not an acquisition device for any particular language. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Apr 12 19:47:11 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 21:47:11 +0200 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > Norwegian and Icelandic "started off" as > particularly closely related within Scandinavian, but later > developments brought about a position in which Norwegian is, by any > reasonable standard, linguistically closer to Swedish and Danish than it > is to Icelandic. Consequently, there is a problem in drawing a family > tree. Historically, we ought to expect Norwegian and Icelandic to form > a single branch of the tree, but nobody draws it that way: every tree > I've seen puts Norwegian in a branch with Danish and Swedish, while > Icelandic (often together with Faroese) is off at one separate branch > for itself. Then take a glance at my tree (upside-down). NORDIC LANGUAGES WEST NORDIC EAST NORDIC Old Norse (+) *Old East Nordic (+) Icelandic Swedish Faroese Gutnish (+) Norn (+) Danish Norwegian Norwegian (Nynorsk) (Bokm?l) It should be noted that there are (at least) two standard varieties of written Norwegian: Nynorsk, which is a mixture of the original West Nordic dialects, and Bokm?l, which is essentially written Danish with some West Nordic features (and pronounced in a Norwegian way). One of the main criteria for classifying the modern Nordic languages is their treatment of the original diphthongs, which are monophthongized in East Nordic, but retained in West Nordic.: compare Nynorsk 'drive' to Bokm?l and Danish '(to) drive'. However, overlapping isoglosses create fluid borderlines between the varieties, and in many cases even standard Bokm?l retains old diphthongs: compare Nynorsk and Bokm?l to Danish 'island'. > So, to put it crudely but picturesquely, Norwegian has migrated from one > branch of the tree to another. And this is not the kind of phenomenon > that the family-tree model can accommodate at all well. > Some decades ago, either Trubetzkoy or Jakobson -- I forget which -- > suggested that English had ceased to be a Germanic language and become a > Romance language. Much more recently, C.-J. N. Bailey has likewise > asserted that English is no longer a Germanic language but may perhaps > be a Romance language. To me, that doesn't make sense. The genetic classification of languages is based on origins, not on linguistic similarities caused by later foreign influence. A Germanic language stays Germanic forever, no matter how unrecognizeable it may have become. The leaves of a family language tree simply cannot move from one branch to another. Problems in family-tree classification occur, however, in cases of some pidgin languages with roots in two (or more) language groups, or in cases of "mixed languages" where the antecedents, including the direction of influence, remain unclear. Adam Hyllested From edwardheil at usa.net Mon Apr 12 20:52:13 1999 From: edwardheil at usa.net (Edward Heil) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 15:52:13 CDT Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Hi. I just read Winifred Lehmann's _Theoretical Bases of Proto-Indo-European Linguistics_ (I believe that's the name; don't have my copy next to me). He refers to the theory set forth in his earlier _Proto-Indo-European Phonology_ that there were no phonemic vowels in early PIE, that on the contrary there was a non-segmental phonemic quality which he calls "syllabicity" which would result in the phonetic manifestation of vowels in certain positions. Unfortunately, he doesn't give enough details for me to understand exactly how this process would have worked, and I don't have access to his earlier book. I wonder if anyone familiar with this idea could give me a quick rundown on the details? Ed [ Moderator's comment: Lehmann's analysis is a monument to the structuralism of the 1940s. In any reasonable phonological theory, this analysis could not be made. (If looked at from the viewpoint of Stampe's natural phonology, Lehmann's "syllabicity" is simply the vowel /a/, with allophonic variation becoming phonemicized over time.) For another example of the same kind of analysis, one which has been examined in the literature, see Aert Kuipers' monograph on Kabardian from the 1960s. I forget the exact title, but it was published in the _Janua Lingua- rum, Series Minor_ by Mouton; it should be available in a university library. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 03:54:11 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 23:54:11 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >People, particularly children and youngsters, change the way they >speak all the time. >> >In a message dated 4/9/99 11:38:19 PM, you wrote: >Languages change, but generally so slowly (on a human scale) that nobody's >conscious of it....>> -- as the moderator pointed out, these statements are not contradictory. There's a continual 'fog' of small changes from moment to moment. A limited number of them 'stick'; that is, they spread and are adopted. Over a _very long period_ these accumulate and become substantial, eventually changing a language into its successors, as Old English became the modern tongue. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 03:48:26 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 23:48:26 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >By stylized, do you mean "fill-in the blank" kind of forms? -- essentially. All the Linear B documents are to do with the management of palace holdings. >The original point was that a language that splinters into dialects is >moving towards imprecision. -- no, it isn't. It's not become less precise, it's developing differences. Speakers of the same dialect will have no problem with it. >precise sound, grapheme and reference. -- what exactly do you _mean_ by this? From BMScott at stratos.net Tue Apr 13 07:02:25 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 03:02:25 -0400 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Although textbooks don't mention it [at least as far as I > remember], I've wondered if there was a /ph/ stage, given that standard /f/ > is often pronounced /ph/ and it would balance out /bh/. So maybe it was /f > > ph > h > 0/. Ralph Penny suggests that in OSp before the 13th c. or so /P/ (representing Vulg. Lat. F-) was realized as [W] before [w], as [h] before all syllabic vowels and [j], and as [P] before /r/. ([P] is the voiceless bilabial fricative (phi), and [W] is the voiceless labial-velar fricative (inverted-w).) He further suggests that only in later OSp were the allophones [W] and [P] modified to [f]. Brian M. Scott From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 07:36:26 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 03:36:26 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw writes: >Does this difference from Roman Imperial policy wrt administrative practice >have anything to do with the fact that English remains the dominant language >throughout most of the former British Empire? -- however, English became the -native language- only in areas of the British Empire that were (a) settled by English emigrants (non-francophone Canada, New Zealand, Australia) to whom later emigrants had to conform, or (b) by slaves or other migrants who came from many linguistic groups and had to adopt English or an English-based pidgin to communicate with each other and their English-speaking masters (Carribean, American South). The language of a homogenous, densely settled agricultural population is an extraordinarily stubborn thing, difficult to dislodge even when all the resources of a modern State are bent to it, with compulsory education of children, conscription, etc. Language replacement usually requires something more drastic; settlement of native speakers, combined with widespread social and demographic disorganization of the native community. Or mass urbanization, which has many of the same characteristics. From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Apr 13 09:46:21 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 10:46:21 +0100 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: Bob mentioned the German "Handschuh" as a light-hearted example of compounding from language poverty. Shifting from Neolithic to modern, many German explanatory compounds are due to the lack of a standardised or central dialect at a time when wider communication (e.g. for commercial purposes) was becoming necessary. You could not advertise "semmel" in areas that used some other word for it, but "broetchen" (= "little bread") could be understood readily anywhere. So some at least of these explanatory compounds derive not from poverty but from excess. Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 13 11:08:52 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 12:08:52 +0100 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Apr 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Wasn't it more a case of initially distinguishing between 2 types > of horses: caballus, a large lumbering draft horse of horthern European > origin as opposed to equus a swift cavalry horse originating in the > Caucasus or Caspian region, two different subspecies --at least according > to a couple of books on horses I've seen. Years ago, I read somewhere that was originally Roman soldiers' slang, comparable to `nag'. I have no idea if there is any truth in this, but it is not inconsistent with the proposal above. In any case, it is not strange to see a word for `workhorse' developing into generic `horse'. Late Latin had another word for `horse', . This meant specifically `packhorse', and it was derived from `load', itself of Greek origin. However, in eastern Basque, the Latin word was borrowed as , and it just means `horse' generically, competing in this function with native . Of course, in the mountainous Basque Country, fleet cavalry horses would have been useless anyway, and very likely the only horses the ancient Basques ever saw were pack animals or draft animals. > In that vein, it would correspond to the distinction between > "horse" and "pony." Well, for me, ponies are distinguished by their size, not by their function. [snip] > And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said > to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the direct source. The stories are: (1) of unknown origin; (2) from , the wind god, because of the animal's speed; (3) from some Italian development of a Latin * `wild horse; (4) from an unspecified Congolese language; (5) from Amharic `zebra'. You pays your money... (1) is undiscussable. (2) looks fanciful to me. (3) seems to have a phonological problem, unless there were Italian dialects in which /kw/ was reduced to /k/ very early. (4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in the Congolese rain forests. (5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) > Pony is related to the name of the horse goddess Epona, right? And > so, is cognate to equus, isn't it? The sources at my disposal do not support this. The word was originally specifically Scots, and all my sources see the word as most likely (though not certainly) derived from an obsolete Old French `little colt', diminutive of `colt', itself ultimately from Latin `young animal, foal'. This would make `pony' partially cognate with English `foal'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Tue Apr 13 12:00:02 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 08:00:02 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: >The classic example of this (hunting-taboo replacement by a more >general word) is often taken from English "deer", originally the >general Germanic word for 'wild animal' (cf. Ger. "Tier") which >by being used as a euphemism for the hunted animal has come to be >specialized in that meaning, with the original meaning being >taken up by loanwords ("animal, beast"). I suppose the question is, what justifies calling any of these processes a 'taboo?' I can think of few literary or historical sources suggesting that the "hart" --- a word which, of course, was still current in Shakespeare's and King James' English, and thanks to literary preservation, remains understood today --- was an object of particular reverence, awe, terror, or disgust, so that the -vox propria- became somehow too hallowed for everyday use, or too indecent. This would be an excellent test for the hypothesis, in that it took place during recorded history, among literate people, whose religious and social customs are set forth in many sources. -Taboo- has a relatively specific meaning in cultural anthropology; does this linguistic process fit that definition? If 'hart' became the object of a -taboo- they're likely to explain it somewhere. After all, they -do- offer us clues as to why -thou- became obsolete. (Whether those reasons are properly called a 'taboo' are another matter; the point is, they dropped the pronoun for a reason, which is explained for us.) --- With wind we blowen; with wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen; with weopinge we passun. With steringe we beginnen; with steringe we enden; With drede we dwellen; with drede we wenden. ---- Anon, Lambeth Ms. no. 306 From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 13 12:40:10 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 07:40:10 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: I like the example Steven used to explain how English became the dominate language among elites of India whereas Latin failed to become the same thing to the English. It well demonstrates the complexity of the make-up of the "exposure" and "susceptibility" variables in the epidemiological model. But, there is an important difference in the situation in India vis-a-vies theEnglish, or at least I think there is. Wasn't the language spoken in pre-Roman Brittain more uniform than the language spoken in India. I have Indian friends that tell me that there is a different language every fifty miles or so throughout India--actually there are dialictical differences, I presume. But English, learned by the wealthiest elites would be a unifying languages in the sense that it had strong utilitarian uses in meeting to settle legislative issues, etc. Sending their children to school to learn English, for example, is a conscious seeking out of exposure, implying a strong preference for a particular language of the rulling elites. Their "susceptibility" to learning English was obviously quite high. One last question: do many people speak English in India today, i.e., people outside the elites? Ray Hendon From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 13 13:21:15 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 08:21:15 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >Ray talked of models for predicting language development. >I think Ray has missed the point. Statistical models remain only that - >statistical. The model for predicting language development that I had in mind is a mathematical model-a theoretical model that needs the help of those in the linguistic community to specify. A statistical model is quite different: it attempts to test a mathematical model once it has been specified. Statistical processes are great for getting an idea of the accuracy of your idea and how confident you can be that the relationship between things you tested are not attributed to chance. You are entirely correct when you warn about the inability of statistics alone to prove anything one way or another. Therefore, if statistical work is to mean anything to anyone, it must first be preceeded by thoroughly professional analysis and observation. Long before any statistical procedures can be applied or even thought about, the model itself-the cause-effect theory must first be fully explored. Here, in supplying possibel cause-effect relationships, a linguist is the only person who could be of help. But in this theoretical realm I see what I believe to be a propery analogous situation from medical research: their use of a mathematical probability modeling technique to predict the spread of infectious disease among a community. The draw-back of the model is its seeming simplicity. Every scholar in the field of linguistics, especially historical linguistics, knows how complex the process of language adoption and spread is. A two-variable model because of its simplicity immediately repels them. This, I believe, is what the main objection of the professionals to using this potential tool would be. What I failed to emphasize in my earlier suggestion is each variable is itself a function, dependent upon many things. But, all the miriad other things that influence what langage a given population is likely to speak are accounted for with the "exposure" and "susceptibility" variables. Just as there are many reasons why some people are vulnerable to influenza, and there are many reasons why a person is exposed to the virus, in the end it doesn't matter. They have either been exposed to it or not, and if there is no exposure there will be no influenza. If they are exposed, they are either susceptible to the infection or they are not susceptible to the infection. The why's and wherefore's are a different matter. In adopting a language, a child or adult is either exposed or not exposed to another language. And if they are exposed, some are more likely to begin using it than others. Some people seek out exposure and actively pursue learning a language, others attempt to isolate themselves from a specific language, showing a strong prererence not to learn another one. But for an objective observer, looking at a linguistic community, all these variations in preference, interests and exposure, will average out, and there will be a community-wide exposure level and an average susceptibility of some magnitude. If these magnitudes are known or can be reasonably well estimated, then predictions can be made with regard to which language will become dominate. Keep in mind also that when we say prediction, the time-direction of the prediction can be forward or backward. We can predict what percentage of the residents of Rome spoke Latin in 250 BCE using the same model as for predicting what language will be spoken in San Antonia, Texas in the year AD 2300 or London in 1067. Prediction relates to estimating the unknown, not only to future events. A limiting factor in this model, however, is its time/place specificity. I live in a linguistic soup of English, South Texas English, Border Spanish, Spanglish, and all points in between. I am curious that in the year 2500, which language will dominate. What will be the balance between Spanish and Texas English. It seems to me, that if I had an exposure/susceptibility model, I cold make that prediction with some degree of precision. But the prediction is limited by the certainty of our knowledge that what we define as English in 1999 will not be what English will be in 2500, if it exists at all. Certainly the effects of time can be accomodated by the epidemiological model, but there must be other models that account for changes within the language itself. These are more metaphysical in nature, and need separate treatment. The epidemiological model accounts for adoption of a language within an area or population-in other words, the time/space relationship of language adoption. Why we speak at all and what accounts for changes within a language, are separate issues. The strengths of the epidemiological model is in its robustness and effectiveness. It is robust enough to handle convergence or disbursement, invasion, snob-appeal, migration, technological change, trade, education and religion. It is effective because it allows you to dicotomize any population of language-speakers. Every person is either susceptible or not, and every person is or is not exposed to the language. At a practical level we know that there are many variants as to how susceptible one person is over another, and the quantity and quality of the exposure will vary greatly between individuals. But I am not sure that these fine-tuning features could not be accounted for once the model was fully developed. Whether this is of any use to the community of linguists, however, is something that I do not know. I am most interested in the responses I have received so far, and look forward to the discussion that may arise. Ray Hendon From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 13:30:35 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:30:35 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >Abraham Lincoln was born in Illinois. -- Kentucky, actually. >How successful do you think he'd be at understanding present-day Chicagoans? -- quite successful; each would simply appear to have a strong accent to the other. (Lincoln would sound rather like a hillbilly, pronouncing words like "idea" as "idear"). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 13:37:27 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:37:27 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >My late mother, who had little education, was keenly aware of some of the >differences between her own speech and her children's speech. -- moving between different languages, sociolects or dialects is not exactly the same thing as the general process of linguistic change. Eg., my grandmother, who was from a small town in inland Lancashire, spoke slightly old-fashioned "BBC English", herself, learned from her parents and in her boarding school prior to World War One; it differed from my own General American only in accent. She could "do" broad Lancashire, though, which was very different. English regional/class dialects have converged strongly with Standard English over the past generation or two; but this is not in itself a process of change within Standard English, if you see what I mean. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 13:49:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:49:51 EDT Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Wasn't it more a case of initially distinguishing between 2 types of horses: >caballus, a large lumbering draft horse of horthern European >origin as opposed to equus a swift cavalry horse originating in the >Caucasus or Caspian region -- folk-entymology. "Caballus" is generally given simply as "nag". cf. Greek "kaballes". It was a slang term. >Caballus> won out because not too many people ever came into contact with an >equus -- no, equus was the generalized word for "horse". >And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said >to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. -- Vulgar Latin *eciferus, from Latin equiferus (equi + ferus), "wild horse". >Pony is related to the name of the horse goddess Epona, right? And >so, is cognate to equus, isn't it? -- no; another folk-entymology. It's from Latin "pullus" which meant "colt". Via French poulenet, which is a diminutivie of poulain, which means, of course, "colt". The derivation "young horse" ==> "small horse" is fairly obvious, I think. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 13 14:03:33 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 10:03:33 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Just about everywhere Gothic is discussed you'll find references to the >attestation of East Gothic being spoken in the Crimea -- true, and you'll also find that the period of Slavic-Gothic contact leading to loan-word deposition is prior to the 5th century CE. The loans were into Proto-Slavic, not any of the later Slavic languages. >already in Greek *gno-, possibly before German was invented. -- invented is not the word you're looking for. "Developed" or "evolved". Not even Mallory would place the emergence of a distinct proto-Germanic any later than 1000 BCE or so. Late isoglosses indicate that Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic (and Baltic) were in continuous contact as they emerged from PIE. The Balts were to the northeast of the earliest Germans, the Slavs to the east-southeast. >After all, if you follow Mallory or Dolukhanov the proto-Slavs were the >Agricultural Scythians in 500BCE and therefore had contact with the Greeks >before the Germans. -- take a look at the map. The Greeks sailed to the Black Sea coast, which was inhabited by _Iranian_ speakers, the Scythians proper. Beyond the _Iranian_ speakers were the Slavs, and beyond them -- and therefore in contact with them -- were the Germanics. ie., the "Agricultural Scythians" were the southeastern fringe of the Slavic-speaking area, not the whole of it. >And of course if the P-slavs were IE -- this is not in dispute. >they should have had a *gon/*gnu or *kon/*knu and i-stems quite before they >met the Goths. -- they probably also had words for "house" and "stable" and "loaf of bread", but all these words were replaced by loans from Germanic in the Proto-Slavic period. Just as English adoped words for "mutton" and "beef" French, replacing perfectly adequate native terms. We retained the native sheep-cow names for the animals and used the French ones (which are simply the names for the animals, in French) for their products. From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 13 14:06:48 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:06:48 -0500 Subject: Lynx (was Re: Uralic and IE) Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Sent: Saturday, April 10, 1999 1:59 PM [ moderator snip ] > I think you might want to review what a 'stem' is. In the case of Greek > lu'gx, lunk- is the *root*, which serves as a base *without* additional > formatives (which would produce a stem), to which -s is added. > [ Moderator's comment: > I think you might want to review what a stem is: The stem is whatever is > left after the grammatical ending is removed. This may be a root form, or > an extended root (which *in some traditions* is called a stem). I would > reserve the term "root" for the CVC items described best by Benveniste in > _Origines_. > --rma ] Well, I understand your position. I was relying on Trask's definition on page 259 of his _ A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguitsics_: "stem. . . In morphology, a bound form of a lexical item which typically consists of a root to which one or more morphological formatives have been added and which serves as the immediate base for the formation of some further form or set of forms." Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 13 14:29:42 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 09:29:42 -0500 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Patrick C. Ryan To: Sent: Saturday, April 10, 1999 1:27 PM Subject: Re: andera 'woman' Celtic ? > Are we being quite fair here? There is Old Indian na'ri: and Avestan > na:iri:, 'lady (?). > [ Moderator's response: > The long vowel in the first syllable marks this as a late formation in > Indic. It therefore provides no evidence for a "feminine" in the proto- > language. > --rma ] Not sure I follow. Would not *HnVr lead to *nV:r? [ Moderator's response: In Indo-Iranian, *HC > C, for all values of H & C. The long vowel in _na:r_, the nominative singular, is original (i. e., can be reconstructed for PIE), and has been explained as compensatory lengthening in the proto-language when the nominative ending *-s was lost after resonants. The long vowel seen in _na:ri:_ is, on the other hand, not confirmed by the other dialects, and can be the result of taking the nominative singular as the starting point of the derivation. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 13 15:20:27 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 10:20:27 -0500 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <37115914.423218435@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >"H. Mark Hubey" wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>Is "Labe" Slavic or left over from some other language? >Probably Germanic (or else Celtic or "Alteuropa"isch") *albi- > >elbe (with Germanic i-umlaut), and Slav. olb- > *la:b- (with >Slavic liquid metathesis). So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English & German From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 13 15:28:19 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 10:28:19 -0500 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <2d8fac0f.2442349f@aol.com> Message-ID: [snip] >You may need new sources. Just about everywhere Gothic is discussed you'll >find references to the attestation of East Gothic being spoken in the Crimea >in the 16th Century. See, eg. P. Heather, The Goths, p. 259, Blackwell >(pb1998); Hawkins in Comrie, The World's Major Languages at p, 69. The vast majority of the Goths went west to conquer Spain [the Visigoths] and Italy [the Ostrogoths]. I forget whether those who ended up in Crimea were descended from Goths who managed to escape from the Huns when their power was broken or what In any case, Spaniards are still sometimes referred to as "Goths" [snip] From edsel at glo.be Tue Apr 13 15:20:05 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 17:20:05 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >"Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >>In the case of Eng. 'you', I think you're digging too deep, even though your >>statement is correct. But the 'y' is almost certainly derived from a 'g', >>just like in Dutch: modern 'jij' (acc. 'jou') (j=y) for 2 p. sg. stems from >>'gij', the old 2 p. pl., still in use in Flanders for both sg. and pl.. >>Another parallel Dutch - English: Middle Dutch 'g(h)eluw' > Du. 'geel', but >>Eng. 'yellow'. The same applies to the 'y' of 'yard' (Du. 'boom-gaard' = >>'orchard', i.e. 'tree-yard'). >You're not digging deep enough. Not only do we have Gothic ju:s, >we also have Skt. yu:yam, Gath. yu:s^, Lith./Latv. ju:s. Dutch >g- is here a case of j- > g-. [Ed Selleslagh] Supposing you are right (I have an open mind on this), why would it have reverted to j (y) in Holland Dutch in some rare cases, but not in most? (there was already a beginning of discussion about the possibility of this inverse evolution on this list) Given this, and the dialectical shift g > j in a number of German dialects, I keep wondering, notwithstanding 'common knowledge' as cited by Glen Gordon : "Look, Indo-European *y- = Old English y-. It's very well known and accepted that IE *yus begets the English "you", "ye", etc. as well as Dutch "jij/gij". The reason why we say it's *y- is because of languages like Sanskrit". It looks more like *y > g > y in Dutch, and therefore _maybe_ also in English; in that case, Sanskrit would be irrelevant. The fact that there is no trace of that in OE might be due to its earlier evolution (Dutch is pretty archaeic - but not conservative, btw). Anyway, the y of 'yard' stems almost certainly from the g of 'gard-', imho. Sorry for offending the specialists. Ed. From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 13 19:34:07 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 14:34:07 -0500 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: The discussion you guys are having now reminds me of Earnest Hemmingway's wonderfully simple phrase from Islands in the Sun, when he had the dying hero say to his faithful companion, "They are all right." He meant, I believe, that on any issue there will be contention and that all sides are correct--there is truth on all sides. A somewhat contentious issue in the community of linguists, at least for what I can see from my email, is that of making predictions. I read much that says "It is not the job of linguists to provide prediction as to what will happen, but only to describe what we know has happened." The contention of this group is that prediction is entirely outside the ken of linguists. Description is king; prediction is for other fields. These folks are anti-prognosticators or anti-advocates of prediction. A second group, less unforgiving in its disdain of quantitative methods, are the non-advocate group, the agnostics. The agnostics do not advocate prognostication, but their objections are not based on the belief that predicting is bad, just that it is wrong. We do not know enough, they say, to predict what will happen in any language over time, and thus attempts at predicting are bound to fail. Lack of sufficient information is the basis of their concern. Their focus in on analyzing existing languages, but not on predicting what will happen in the future. There is certainly truth in the contention of the non-advocate agnostics. The simple truth is we cannot know how things will change in the future that are both exogenous to our culture and beyond our control . As was pointed out, we all speak a slightly different language than our fathers and mothers spoke when they were our age. When I tell my 88 year-old father about my email conversations, he has some idea of what I mean, but I doubt he has ever used the word "email" in his life. There is no way he could have predicted even fifty years ago that the word "email" would one day enter his vocabulary. My suggestion for the applicability of quantitative methods is not applicable for all domains of linguistics. I leave this category of speculation and projection to those with more insight than I. Metaphysics has never been my strength, and I generally agree with those who assert that some things are too complex to predict. A third group of linguists could be called pro-advocacy-lite. Their advocacy of prediction is constrained to the macro domain and largely to the past. They accept that predicting linguistic development may be done, but it can be done only at an aggregated level and of past events. The followers of the IE hypothesis, for example, say that their model of linguistic development is sufficiently informed so as to predict what language you would hear spoken if you were to go back to 7000 BCE in a certain area in Europe/Asia and listen. They can predict how a certain word would be pronounced or used in Sumaria in 3000 BCE, or Rome in 250 BCE, or London in 1070 ACE. They believe in the inherent possibility that language can be predicted, or at least certain aspects can be predicted. But they are wisely skeptical of moving their predictions into the future and prefer to keep the time-line of their prediction facing the past. But there may be another group of linguists who work in a domain that overlaps some but not entirely with other groups. This domain deals with the adoption of a language within a specific geographical area at a certain time. A macro-orientation, dealing with an aggregated concept of language--collections of words that constitutes Old Saxon, Middle English, etc. This domain takes as its ken the interfacing of languages. The movement of a language into an area, the interaction and intersection of two or more languages within a given population are their subjects. This domain is not concerned so much with changes within a language, but the adoption of a specific language by a specific population. History is full of episodes of invaders taking their language with them and imposing it upon the conquer people. And, history is full of peoples who absorb a linguistic invasion without changing the fundamental structure of their mother tongue. It is also filled with examples where a new language develops from parts of many other languages. In the adoption domain I propose that a quantitative model or prediction may hold some promise as a predictive tool. To this last group I still urge skepticism about prediction, but skepticism of both sides. Be skeptical of the proposition, "predictions can be made," but also be skeptical of the proposition that "all predictions are wrong." There are some things that we can predict with great precision. Perhaps linguistics is sufficiently mature now, thanks to the hundreds of years of work done by earlier scholars, to begin using tools of other sciences and take up the ultimate challenge of all scientific study: predict as well as explain. As long as it know the limits of how its predictions will fare, and into which domain to confine its inquiry, I do not see in the existing arguments reasons for not trying. To the mathematician and statistician, it doesn't matter which direction you face. You can build a model that deals with expectations of both the future and the past. In one sense, it doesn't matter which because the same procedures are used for both directions. Regards, Ray Hendon From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 13 20:31:37 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 13:31:37 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: I suggested the following development of the IE declension of t/s stems as follows with a pseudo-example *kut: Pre-Pre-IE Pre-IE IE Nominative *kut *kwet-se *kwets *kwets Accusative *kut-im *kwetm *kwetm *kwetm Dative *kwet-i: *kweti: *kwesi:(*kwesey) Genitive *kut-isi *kwetese *kwete's *kwese's Ablative *kut-ita *kweteta *kwete'd *kwese'd MIGUEL: Not if we compare how t-stems are really declined (Beekes, p. 178): *nepo:t Skt. napa:t Lat. nepo:s *nepotm napa:tam nepo:tem *neptos naptur nepo:tis Hmm, odd. That reconstruction doesn't look right. Are you sure there's no lurking laryngeal? Maybe something like... *nepH:t (compensatory lengthening from loss of *-s) *nepHt-m *nepHt-e's The problem with this example, Miguel, is that Sanskrit is clearly innovative and doesn't represent the original state of affairs. Neither does Latin. MIGUEL: Or for instance Skt. marut "wind" (m.): sg. du. pl. N marut maruta:u marutaH A marutam ,, ,, I maruta: marudbhya:m marudbhiH D marute: ,, marudbhyaH G marutaH maruto:H maruta:m L maruti ,, marutsu Sure, at first glance it looks contradictory but I have a question: Is the paradigm related to forms outside Indo-Aryan? Is it a foreign word? Is it derived from a native IE word? To make clear, if it's not an ancient word then this example is void and null because it could have entered the language AFTER the **t > *s changes took place. MIGUEL: There are really only a few forms in which we see t/s alternation, such as the ptc.pf.act. in *-wot-/*-us-. I don't think this is necessarily a bad statistic. There would be strict characteristics that such a root would have to follow in order to acquire this alternation. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 13 20:47:33 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 13:47:33 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: ME (GLEN) IN RESPONSE TO JENS' SOUND RULE FOR *yu:s "you": Still don't get it. How does *t- become *y-?? MIGUEL: It's not that difficult to understand what Jens is saying, whether one agrees or not. The *y- in *yu:s is secondary, and we have *u:s/*wos (Slavic vy < *(w)u:- and vasU, Lat. vo:s, Skt. vas, Alb. ju < *u, etc.). The nifty sound law then becomes *cw- > w- (and I guess alternatively sw-, judging by Hitt. sume:s, OIr. si:, We. chwi, Goth. i-zwis). Hmm, perhaps it takes that special someone to "understand" what Jens is really saying. Now I know why I wasn't getting it. It's too farfetched for me to have considered. The forms in *yu- are found throughout the wide gambit of IE (Germanic and Indo-Aryan) and of course *u- minus the initial *y- in enclitic forms are equally spread out. I fail to see how this consistent and persistent *y- arises from a **cw- exactly but I CAN understand how a Hittite can arise from a form with *yu- ...but then I often have difficulty understanding these things... :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 13 20:57:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 15:57:30 -0500 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990412014708.22182.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Watkins has *med- & *me- [< *me@], and one would guess that *med- is from *me- so the final -d- or -t- if that's the case, definitely seems to be some type of suffix [ moderator snip ] >Why does Pokorny write it *me-t- instead of *met- and why can't we >consider *-t- a verbal affix or possibly two different verbs? Why are >you considering a MEDIAL *H1 as example of your **-t > *H1?? Why does >*meH1not(s) occur instead of **metnot(s)? Why do I have so many >questions? :) >-------------------------------------------- >Glen Gordon >glengordon01 at hotmail.com >Kisses and Hugs >-------------------------------------------- From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Apr 13 21:26:43 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 14:26:43 PDT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MODERATOR: Why would a glottal stop "certainly not be" a distinct phoneme? I can think of several languages off the top of my head in which it is, so there is no reason other than _a priori_ bias to reject in for PIE. Are you speaking again? Think all you want about several languages. Have a linguist party and invite your multilingual friends. You seem to have no clue what "bias" means as your "biasedly" quick-to-respond comments would indicate. I'm strictly talking about IE itself and my "bias" is motivated purely by observations within IE itself. It is because of pairs like *tuH and *twe (and other phenomena) which lead me to believe that there were, on top of long vowels from loss of laryngeals, differing lengthes of vowels determined by stress accent and shape of syllable which cause some of the anomalies present WITHIN IE. Hence a more credible *tu:/*twe without "intrusive and inexplicable H" fully explainable by accent. I'm surprised someone who wishes to take the topic away from external focus should be talking about "several" outside languages. I'm not concerned whether Abkhaz for instance has medial glottal stops or not. I AM concerned about whether IE had medial *H1 and I find no indication so far that this necessarily has to be the case. If you do, speak or forever hold your peace and reserve words like "bias" for proper occasions. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- [ Moderator's response: >Message-ID: <19990412011754.39210.qmail at hotmail.com> >From: "Glen Gordon" >Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 18:17:52 PDT >Well, here's my current position. I accept *H2 and *H3 as being /h/ >and /h/ respectively (and thus parallel to the velars). *H1 on the >other hand is at most a glottal stop which, iff it occured at all, >certainly would not have been a distinct phoneme. Your original statement reads as an _a priori_ rejection of glottal stop as a possible phoneme in any language. That may not be what you meant, but it is assuredly what you wrote, and on that basis, I asked the question above. Further, I was not thinking of any of the Caucasian languages (some of which, as you note, have a glottal stop phoneme), but of the Polynesian languages. It is always permissible, in Indo-European studies as anywhere else in linguistics, to cite parallels from other languages; it is simply off-topic on this list to discuss other languages to the exclusion of Indo-European, more especially so when there exist fora in which to discuss them. --rma ] From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 13 23:22:10 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 01:22:10 +0200 Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive In-Reply-To: <373a2aad.411354214@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [...] > > The doubly thematic subjunctive is only Greek and Indo-Iranian, I > believe, and is in my opinion analogical. [...] You are right about analogical, but not about the geographic limitation. A form such as *bhereet(i), the subj. to go with ind. *bhereti or inj. *bheret must be of relatively late (if probably still pre-PIE) making, for the general rule that the "thematic vowel" becomes /o/ before anything voiced, including vowels, is not obeyed. If *deywe/o- + dative sg. *-ey, dual *-e, and nom.pl. *-es becomes *deywo:y (better *deywo::y?), *deywo: and *deywo:s, the o-timbre must have come from the thematic vowel, wherefore one expects *bhere/o- + e/o + t(i) to yield **bhero:ti, but the form is *bhereeti (yes, with disyllabic -ee- reflected by Gathic). The formation with *-ee- is also found in Latin (fut. lege:s) and perhaps Armenian, if Birgit Olsen's derivation of the morpheme -ich- from *-e:ty, based on the use of the 3sg *-eeti as a new stem, is correct. The same formation accounts for the fact that Albanian has no umlaut in the subjunctive, while the prs. indicative shows fronting umlaut in the 2.3.sg and 2pl, i.e. in the places that had a front thematic vowel in IE; since e: goes to o in Albanian (no doubt via a:), it is no wonder that this category as no umlaut. I would of course have liked to see the long-vowel subjunctive in more languages, but I think we have enough to accept it as PIE. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 13 23:39:34 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 01:39:34 +0200 Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive In-Reply-To: <373a2aad.411354214@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [...] > Unlikely. Meillet apparently suggested that -e^ax- derives from > the copula (j)es- cliticized to the verbal root (cf. the Latin > imperfect with *bhu-a:-). But in view of the association of the > optative with the imperfect in Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian and > maybe Celtic, I would favour a derivation from the optative > *-oih1- > e^, followed by -ax- < *-eh2-s-. In other words, a > "past optative". [...] You have overlooked that the Slavic imperfect caused first palatalization, not second as a derivation of the jat' from *-oi- would demand: tec^aaxU 'I was running' must have once begun with *tek-e:-. I take this to be the thematic present stem *tek-e- with renewed endings, 3sg *-et as also in the old root aorist where 3sg *H2nek^-t > *nes was embellished to nes-e. That enables the identification of the Sl. ipf. with the Lith. prt., e.g. Sl. vede^-axU, -as^e : Lith. vede. (second e dotted); the underlying circumflex of the Lith. -e.- will reflect the encounter of the two e's of the preform *vede-et. Jens From stevegus at aye.net Wed Apr 14 00:52:27 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 20:52:27 -0400 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >Too cautious, I think. My late mother, who had little education, was >keenly aware of some of the differences between her own speech and her >children's speech. A former girlfriend of mine, a native speaker of >Kacchi, was highly aware of the differences between her own speech and >her parents' speech, which in fact appeared to be rather substantial, >and were regarded by her as substantial. And there is a huge amount of >evidence showing that people are frequently aware of the same sorts of >differences, even if they sometimes choose to regard these as >"corruption" or "slovenliness" rather than as change. U.S. television watchers might find it amusing to figure out what exactly it is in the current batch of Tylenol commercials that make the narrator's voice sound distinctly old-fashioned. Not only does she fumble her r's, she uses the /aa/ vowel, close to the backwards 'c' of the IPA, a sound present in my grandmother's version of Swedish, but which is not a phoneme in current majority English --- and what astounds me is that she uses it in the name of the product, which she pleases to call /'tai l@ ,naal/. --- With wind we blowen; with wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen; with weopinge we passun. With steringe we beginnen; with steringe we enden; With drede we dwellen; with drede we wenden. ---- Anon, Lambeth Ms. no. 306 From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Apr 14 02:37:53 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 19:37:53 PDT Subject: -s. vs. (-)t- Message-ID: MIGUEL: I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally and -s- medially. What to make of them? JENS: You are right, and I have adjusted the "reading rule" in a separate mail. [...] Glen Gordon's generalization of -s- to intervocalic position (in a separate mail) does not explain its occurrence word-finally Well, it wasn't meant to. That's why I had _two_ rules going on at the same time, the **-t > *s to account for the final (I've had that one brewing in my head for some time) and a **-VtV- > *s rule to account for the medial ...but come to think of it, maybe it's not enough like you say. Maybe these two rules of mine are one and the same. Try this instead. As always, **-t > *-s but I'm wrong about the intervocalic medial **t which may not have changed after all. In fact, I'm wrong about the pre-history of IE's declension! Instead, the forms that have an alternative *s alongside *t might very well allude to a relatively recent (that is, IndoEtruscan) prehistory where the suffixes were seperate from the stem such as the ablative, genitive, etc where they were only postpositions like **ta, **se, etc. Thus, we could explain this *-s- as being reminiscent of a time when the root was complete as itself and when **t was in final position in the non-nomino-accusative, later becoming *-s, right on schedule. To account for the nominative and accusative forms, these case endings must be viewed as older than the rest of the declension that we now find in IE. Forms like *nemetos then would not be affected by such a rule because they are nothing but *nemeto-s with _medial_ *t. Likewise, forms with *-ter and other medial-*t-suffixes do not interfere with the rule. There is one case like *nekwt- that I can think of that apparently doesn't follow this rule of t/s alternation but then again *nekwt- ends in a consonant cluster that may have prevented this change from happening. So... Revised rule: Pre-IE **-Vt > IE *Vs but Pre-IE **-Ct > IE *Ct Does that explain everything now? Gettin' out the check list... 2nd person *-s? Check. Relationship of substantive/aorist? Check. The infamous *t/*s alternation. Check. Examples where final **t doesn't become *s? Maybe. Jens? Miguel? What do you say? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 02:57:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 22:57:24 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/13/99 7:40:58 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- no, it isn't. It's not become less precise, it's developing differences. Speakers of the same dialect will have no problem with it.>> Please be patient and hang with me and I think you'll see what I trying to get at. King Nestor's people have just settled two new provinces. Now he governs three provinces, in which his people all speak the same language and dialect. They all refer to cows, aurochs and yaks with the same sounds and written words. And they and his ministers understand his tax laws to refer to his exact expectations as far as taxes go. Years pass, ministers come and go. And Nestor notices in one province oddly low counts of cows and aurochs and no yaks at all. Upon investigation, he finds that a dialect has developed locally, where cows now mean cows and aurochs, aurochs mean yaks and yaks have a new name. And he finds that his law "you must pay taxes on all animals" in this new dialect means "you may pay taxes on animals." We may just see a "difference" between the dialects here. (A structural difference.) But Nestor sees this as a functional matter - the common language has become "imprecise." Words no longer refer to the same thing and do not have the same effect with this new dialect. I hope you will understand that the imprecision here is not between speakers of the new dialect. It is between speakers of the different dialects. And that would be a reason for Nestor to try to "standardize" the language across his provinces, despite languages natural tendency to splinter. I wrote: "precise sound, grapheme and reference." <<-- what exactly do you _mean_ by this?>> What Nestor would like his tax collectors to hear is everyone using (more or less) the same sounds to refer to cows; the same graphemes ("the smallest unit in writing capable of causing a change in meaning"); and that they both referred to the same thing (cows or more specifically cows that will yield the payment of taxes.) Ventris used this breakdown. I didn't invent it. I hope you will find this makes some small sense. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 03:55:02 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 23:55:02 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: <> In a message dated 4/13/99 8:24:41 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- however, English became the -native language- only in areas of the British Empire that were (a) settled by English emigrants (non-francophone Canada, New Zealand, Australia) to whom later emigrants had to conform, or....>> This may be a bit off. "Later emigrants" - "non-native speaking" - didn't necessarily "have to conform." Their children did however have to go to school (under compulsory education laws) where they would learn English and it would become their "native language." The best example is of course the US, where the majority of the population is not descended from "English emigrants." It was in no small part the government and compulsory education that transformed most of those foreign native speakers into native English speakers - very, very often in one generation. In 1960, the vast majority of children of emigrants considered English their native language, obviously not the native language of their parents. The survival of French in Canada on the other hand was strongly supported by the non-centralized government and now is a matter of law. While the Dutch majority in Old New York pretty much adopted English in a single generation as a practical matter when the government and shipping went English. And obviously the Pennsylvania Amish did not feel they "had to conform" and make English their native tongue - and there are cases going back to the 1850's that said this was their right. Another instance of non-totalitarian government action affecting the directions speakers will go over time. <> Or it simply requires people who are willing and who have very good reasons to change languages or encourage their children's to change languages. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 08:08:26 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 04:08:26 EDT Subject: Conservatism Message-ID: In a message dated 4/13/99 4:16:17 PM, roslynfrank at hotmail.com wrote: <> FROM The Sociolinguistics of Interlingual Communication by E. A. NIDA: <> Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 04:20:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 00:20:54 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: In a message dated 4/13/99 5:07:08 AM, you wrote: <> Evolutionary biology is not any more or any less explanatory than chemistry or physics. Evolutionary biology is a powerful tool in the lab and a highly predictive discipline in the field. The test of science is reproducible results. Which is what "predictability" in science means. (Not prognostication.) Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 14 09:03:24 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 05:03:24 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >rayhendon at worldnet.att.net writes: >One last question: do many people speak English in India today, i.e., >people outside the elites? -- about 70 million. >> From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 10:14:59 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 11:14:59 +0100 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] In-Reply-To: <005c01be85ab$10942a40$d90e4a0c@default> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Ray Hendon wrote: > One last question: do many people speak English in India today, i.e., > people outside the elites? Depends what you mean by "many". An estimated 4% of Indians speak English regularly. This doesn't look like a large figure, but it adds up to over 30 million speakers. This means India has more English-speakers than Canada or Australia -- more, indeed, than any other country in the world except for the USA and the UK. And this is India alone, not counting the other countries of the subcontinent. But, of course, it is true that a knowledge of English in India is almost entirely confined to educated people. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roborr at uottawa.ca Wed Apr 14 04:47:09 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 00:47:09 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: LARRY TRASK: >> And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said >> to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. >This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five >different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the >direct source. The stories are: >(1) of unknown origin; >(2) from , the wind god, because of the animal's speed; >(3) from some Italian development of a Latin * `wild horse; >(4) from an unspecified Congolese language; >(5) from Amharic `zebra'. >You pays your money... >(1) is undiscussable. >(2) looks fanciful to me. >(3) seems to have a phonological problem, unless there were Italian > dialects in which /kw/ was reduced to /k/ very early. >(4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese > language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in > the Congolese rain forests. >(5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word > get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese > were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) when you consider what you have to assume to get Tamil yaanai-kolra - "elephant killer" 1) borrowed into Portuguese 2) transferred all the way to South America 3) become establsihed enough in the language to refer to another giant snake, i.e., "anaconda" (the exact path taken by stages 2 and 3 is open to debate), (5) above doesn't really look like a problem at all. From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Apr 14 06:10:06 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 02:10:06 -0400 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" > with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English > & German Ernst Schwarz derives it from Sorbian 'Lindenort' (Russ. and Pol. 'linden'). Brian M. Scott From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 10:22:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 11:22:08 +0100 Subject: rate of language change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: [LT] > >Abraham Lincoln was born in Illinois. > -- Kentucky, actually. Whoops, sorry. I knew that looked wrong when I wrote it, but I didn't check. Stupid. If my high-school history teacher were here today, he'd probably box my ears. [LT] > >How successful do you think he'd be at understanding present-day > >Chicagoans? > -- quite successful; each would simply appear to have a strong > accent to the other. (Lincoln would sound rather like a hillbilly, > pronouncing words like "idea" as "idear"). I'm not so sure. Quite apart from language change in the narrowest sense, Lincoln would encounter such a vast number of words for objects and concepts unfamiliar to him that I think he'd be bewildered. He'd pick up a newspaper and read something like "Tribe blank Pale Hose" or "Ram raiders net ATM", and he'd wonder what planet he was on. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jpmaher at neiu.edu Wed Apr 14 06:05:55 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 01:05:55 -0500 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Rick Mc Callister wrote: > So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" > with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English > & German No. LEIPZIG < LIPSK < LIPA 'linden/lime/tilia'. Cf. LIPICA > LIPIZZA[NER], Slovene town, near Triest, location of the stud Also LEIBNIZ < LIPNICA... jpm. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 10:41:15 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 11:41:15 +0100 Subject: `stem' In-Reply-To: <004101be85b6$e0358ae0$75d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >>[ Moderator's comment: >> I think you might want to review what a stem is: The stem is whatever is >> left after the grammatical ending is removed. This may be a root form, or >> an extended root (which *in some traditions* is called a stem). I would >> reserve the term "root" for the CVC items described best by Benveniste in >> _Origines_. >> --rma ] > Well, I understand your position. I was relying on Trask's definition on > page 259 of his _ A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguitsics_: > "stem. . . In morphology, a bound form of a lexical item which typically > consists of a root to which one or more morphological formatives have been > added and which serves as the immediate base for the formation of some > further form or set of forms." But, for IE languages, my definition is largely equivalent to the one above. Generally speaking, in IE languages, things work like this: root (the minimal form of a lexical morpheme) root + formative = stem (to which inflectional endings are added) stem + inflectional ending = word-form Of course, even in IE languages, not every word-form is constructed in exactly this manner. For example, there may be more than one formative present. And, outside of IE, the facts may be rather different. All this has led to some variation in the use of terms like `root', `stem', `theme' and `base'. In my dictionary, I was not speaking specifically of the IE tradition, but rather I was trying to cater to a wider tradition, and not all linguists use the term `stem' in the rather strict IE sense. I myself would prefer it if we all did use these terms identically, but that's not the way things are. I agree, though, that my definition could have been a little more explicit in recognizing competing usages, and I'll try to attend to that in the second edition, when that happens. Thanks for drawing my attention to it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 06:35:51 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 02:35:51 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: <> In a message dated 4/13/99 10:47:31 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- moving between different languages, sociolects or dialects is not exactly the same thing as the general process of linguistic change.>> This is along the same vein. If "moving between languages" means anything, it means changing languages. And if it means bilingualism or changing languages between generations, it is one very important form of linguistic change. For Mallory, "moving between languages" was the crux of the whole Indo-European issue. (ISIE, p257) I read in D, Crystal that the loss of inflection in English has been closely connected with the bilingualism effected by the Danish invasions (CamEncyl Eng Lang p 32). It's often written that the disappearance of Gallic began with the adoption of bilingual Latin by the Gauls. These all represent major linguistic changes and they all have to do with "moving between languages." <> So only differences within Standard English constitute linguistic change and English dialects and convergence to SE are "not in itself a process of change within Standard English." I hope the moderator will ask you for a cite on this one. Here's part you edited out of LT's post: <> There's no mention of the daughter speaking a completely separate "sociolect" or dialect of Kacchi. And you have no way of knowing that this wasn't just change between generations, due to what language always does - change. And of course going back to the real point - which somehow typically got lost, she was aware of that change in her "natural first language" (taught to her by her mother) as it was happening. Steve Long From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 14 11:10:08 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 06:10:08 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Earlier I wrote: I like the example Steven used to explain how English became the dominate language among elites of India whereas Latin failed to become the same thing to the English. It well demonstrates the complexity of the make-up of the "exposure" and "susceptibility" variables in the epidemiological model. But, there is an important difference in the situation in India vis-a-vie the English, or at least I think there is. Wasn't the language spoken in pre-Roman Brittain more uniform than the language spoken in India. I did not consider that when Caesar Brought his legions into England, the year was about 56 ace and the language in the area was probably Celtic, not English. I don't know how uniform Celtic was at that time, but the Celts were primarily an agricultural population, not needing anything of a centralized nature in terms of administration or governmental entities. Please accept my appology for not being as careful as I should have been in assessing the situation at the time and for posting a question that makes no sense. Ray Hendon From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Wed Apr 14 06:55:25 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 08:55:25 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Glen Gordon schrieb: > In the 3rd person sing imperfective, the previously inanimate 3p *-t > (derived > from *-to) is favored over *-s because of the icky merger (At the same > time, **-e'n becomes **-e'n-t > *-e'r). In fact, -CnD# > -Cr(D)# (cf. http://members.pgv.at/homer/indoeuro/phonlaw.htm) as can be seen at -r/-n-neuters and 3rd pers. pl. secondary/perfect [abibharur vs. abharan < *e-bhi-bher-nt vs. *e-bher-ont; yakrt/yaknas < *yekwnt/*yekwnes]. Not -Cn# > -Cr# as maintained by some list members, so what about *h1newn "9" with final -n ? -- Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From jrader at m-w.com Wed Apr 14 09:21:11 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 09:21:11 +0000 Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages Message-ID: In response to Rick McCallister's post: I don't have the literature at hand, but I'm quite certain has an accepted Slavic etymology, based on Common Slavic <*lipa> "linden tree." Leipzig, Dresden, and a number of other toponyms in the basin of the middle and upper Elbe have Slavic etymologies. Note current Czech = Leipzig, (originally an ethnonym, I think) = Dresden, where the root-suffix boundaries are a little clearer. If anyone is really interested in the details I can look them up. Jim Rader > >Probably Germanic (or else Celtic or "Alteuropa"isch") *albi- > > >elbe (with Germanic i-umlaut), and Slav. olb- > *la:b- (with > >Slavic liquid metathesis). > So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" > with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English > & German From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 07:10:37 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 03:10:37 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: <> (My snip) In a message dated 4/9/99 11:38:19 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> -- as the moderator pointed out, these statements are not contradictory.>> Never said they were. In fact they are partially true. And that's the problem. They are the usual overstatements. Taken as a plain statement, "people change the way they speak all the time" can mean anything. And it therefore proves nothing. People also speak the same an awful lot or they wouldn't understand each other. I write posts about how language must have been kept from changing, given that language changes all the time. And you answer that language wasn't kept from changing because it's changing all the time. I write that well if Mycenaean didn't change in all those years, that's unusual. And you reply not really, "languages change, but generally so slowly that nobody's consious of it..." as if it mattered to why Mcycenaean didn't change in all those years. The fact is languages can change quickly, can change slowly, can change internally or due to external causes, can change consciously and unconsciously. What caused the difference in the changes covered in the history of IE languages seems very relevant to me. By offering rules like "people change the way they speak all the time" it should be burningly obvious that you're adding nothing. Steve Long From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 14 14:35:36 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 09:35:36 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: RAY HENDON: The exposure side (rate of contact between infecteds and susceptibles) of the equation is easily identified in the linguistic community: The relatively few Romans sent to govern England was not sufficient to generate a critical mass of exposure units for Latin to predominate. And the Romans left local courts and laws stand, lessening the need for everyone to know Latin in order to get along. Number might have something to do with it but what about languages or dialects that become viewed as prestigious? I'm sure it's more complicated than the above otherwise we would have had a secure model 100 years ago :) Glen Gordon -------------------------------------------- I think that prestige can be readily accommodated by the model. A language that is viewed as prestigious in a certain population would have a higher average susceptibility to learning the language. Thus the susceptibility rate for a prestige-seeking population would be higher than for a population of non-prestige-seekers. Also, the exposure rate between the non-speakers and speakers would be increased, as those wishing to learn the prestigious language would actively seek to out those "infected" with the language so they could learn it more quickly. An example I think of first of this type of snob-appeal in a language was exhibited by the elite Filipinos after Spain conquered them. In the late 1980s I talked with a young woman from the Philippines who said that her family spoke Spanish and was very proud of it. It was definitely a prestige factor in her family. Certainly a population of prestige-seeking people will exhibit a higher penetration rate of the prestigious language, and a higher level of saturation than other, non-prestige-seeking populations. Your second concern, that if mathematical modeling were applicable to the field of linguistics it would already have been done, is one of which I am quite skeptical. Mathematical modeling was not developed until World War II, and it was not being applied in civilian areas of research or universities until after the war (with the exception of physics, where modeling has been used for centuries--Newton, Einstein, e.g.). The development of multiple regression analysis, for instance, which was a great boon to the ability to actually test the mathematical model developed, did not occur until around 1955. The computers it took to make the incredibly complex calculations for multiple regression were not generally available until well after the 1950s. The first test of the medical model of the spread of infection was applied to heroin addiction in the late 1960's. This is still a relatively new field. Also, I do not know if the training for an academic linguist involves advanced mathematics and statistics. Are these subjects taken by Ph.D. candidates? If linguists are well trained in mathematics as another language, then I would be surprised that no quantitative work would have been done. But if they are not as a group well versed in these disciplines, I would be equally surprised if there had been much done. I can see a certain level of knowledge about statistics among some of the members of this interest group. All the scientific dating techniques of artifacts, for example, must involve the use of statistical probability, so you must be generally aware of the use of that tool. But, so far, at least, I haven't run into any work. If I don't see some soon, I may take a look at the journal literature in your field and see what I can find. I think this approach,while perhaps limited in its applicability to linguistics, may be of some help in forecasting the effects of invasions, migrations and general population movements. It may be an area that deserves looking into. Regards, Ray Hendon rayhendon at worldnet.att.net [ Moderator's comment: I think that in the typical program in linguistics, whether undergraduate or graduate, the only real exposure to statistics is in experimental phonetics, where simple statistics (Student's T, chi-square, analysis of variance, etc.) are needed to assure the validity of results. Few other subdisciplines use stats, since most of the work is done by individual introspection. --rma ] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 08:28:39 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 08:28:39 +0000 Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: Adam Hyllested writes: [on my remark about the placement of Norwegian] > Then take a glance at my tree (upside-down). > > NORDIC LANGUAGES > WEST NORDIC EAST NORDIC > Old Norse (+) *Old East Nordic (+) > Icelandic Swedish > Faroese Gutnish (+) > Norn (+) Danish > Norwegian Norwegian (Nynorsk) (Bokm?l) Well, I guess this cuts the Gordian knot, all right. ;-) [snip] [LT] >> So, to put it crudely but picturesquely, Norwegian has migrated from one >> branch of the tree to another. And this is not the kind of phenomenon >> that the family-tree model can accommodate at all well. >> Some decades ago, either Trubetzkoy or Jakobson -- I forget which -- >> suggested that English had ceased to be a Germanic language and become a >> Romance language. Much more recently, C.-J. N. Bailey has likewise >> asserted that English is no longer a Germanic language but may perhaps >> be a Romance language. > To me, that doesn't make sense. The genetic classification of languages is > based on origins, not on linguistic similarities caused by later foreign > influence. Exactly. So, based on origins, we'd expect Norwegian to form a branch with Icelandic. Yet all the published trees I've ever seen group Norwegian with Danish and Swedish, in defiance of the original state of affairs, but in line with modern realities. I'm not defending any particular analysis here, merely pointing to an inadequacy of our family-tree model. > A Germanic language stays Germanic forever, no matter how > unrecognizeable it may have become. The leaves of a family language tree > simply cannot move from one branch to another. According to the family-tree model, this is correct. But my point was that this model does not suffice to capture all aspects of language history: sometimes reality is more complicated than this model can allow for. I might add that the well-known Pennsylvania tree for the IE family sees the entire Germanic branch as having done something similar: this view sees Germanic as having started off as part of an eastern cluster of IE languages, but then as having "migrated" (linguistically, I mean) into a western cluster. The authors' final decision is to put Germanic into a western branch, but they explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of this decision. > Problems in family-tree > classification occur, however, in cases of some pidgin languages with > roots in two (or more) language groups, or in cases of "mixed languages" > where the antecedents, including the direction of influence, remain > unclear. Yes, and this too is something I had in mind. The assorted "mixed languages", "portmanteau languages", "metatypic languages" and what not that have been recognized or argued for just don't fit comfortably into any family tree. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 15:42:05 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 11:42:05 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/13/99 11:22:51 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- true, and you'll also find that the period of Slavic-Gothic contact leading to loan-word deposition is prior to the 5th century CE. The loans were into Proto-Slavic, not any of the later Slavic languages.>> How do you know that and why are you so sure of it? Particularly how do you date the various sound shifts and on what grounds? How do you get your 5th Century date? How do you know it was Proto-Slavic and not Common Slavic and is there a difference? What's wrong with a 6th c. date, for example? Jordanes is almost 7th Century and he is a cleric who says he speaks Gothic and he lives in Constantinople. Some of these sound shifts are described as *PIE>Slavic, why couldn't it happen that way? <> I would be very interested in those late isoglosses and how they were derived. I wrote: <> JS wrote: <<-- take a look at the map. The Greeks sailed to the Black Sea coast, which was inhabited by _Iranian_ speakers, the Scythians proper. Beyond the _Iranian_ speakers were the Slavs, and beyond them -- and therefore in contact with them -- were the Germanics.>> It just doesn't shell out like that. There are the remains of a number of other distinct cultural groups between the Agricultural Scythians and north central Europe in the middle of the 1st millenium bce. See Dolukhanov, The Early Slavs (pb 1996) the map on page 134, which shows the AgScyths stretching across the mid Ukraine from the Bug to the Donets, mostly below the 50th parallel and less than a 100 miles from most of the major Greek settlements. Greek artfacts in this area from this period are not uncommon. On the other hand, Jastrof does not reach the upper Oder River until 500 bce. There are distinct concentrations of cultural remains in between Jastrof and the Central Ukraine and as far as I know very little evidence of material contact between the two. There is however both material evidence and attestation of contact between the AgScyths and the Greeks right about 500bce. JS wrote: <> Again, I don't know how you can be so sure about these things. The AgScyths are of course a name from Herodotus attached to rather distinct archaeological finds - and they jive well. If the AgScyths were the ProtoSlavs, they do not go west of the Daco-Thracian and are clearly culturally different than the more northern Milogradians. Herodotus simply says the "Neuri" are north of the AgScyths. Dolukhanov posits that Proto-Slavic developed from the AgScyths as a lingua franca of trade along the Russian rivers and up into the Novogrod area. But even here the contact with Jastrof is minimal until the current era. Mallory discusses the positions of Przeworsk versus AgScyth and Priapet in ISIE, although he seems to have his dates a little out of whack - Przeworsk being later and appearing in the Liebersee grave fields near Dresden only about the ToC. But needless to say all these Proto-Slavs cover a huge amount of ground - from the Elbe to the Danube to the Donets to Lake Ladoga - about the size of western Europe. Which I think shows that nothing is quite as certain as you suggest. If - and only if, I do not know for sure - the Proto-Slavs were the AgScyths, then their contact with Greeks (especially through the "Graeco-Scythian" Callipidae) is much more probable than with the early Germans. I wrote: <> JS wrote: <<-- they probably also had words for "house" and "stable" and "loaf of bread", but all these words were replaced by loans from Germanic in the Proto-Slavic period.>> I think the word for house shows up as "dom, domu-" in WS, which looks pretty PIE to me. Just curious, do you know any Proto-Slavic words that were borrowed by Germanic or was it all one way? And how sure are you of all this? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 14 07:35:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 03:35:41 EDT Subject: Prediction Message-ID: In a message dated 4/14/99 12:57:35 AM, rayhendon at worldnet.att.net wrote: <> Unfortunately, the meanings of the word "prediction" are the problem here. In the strict sense of the scientific method, predictability refers to the need to test a hypothesis. What you predict depends on your hypothesis. So if you hypothesize that Cicero wrote in Latin, then you might predict that there is a text somewhere by Cicero in Latin or better yet a Latin text where Cicero wrote in his own hand, "I'm writing in Latin." By predicting such evidence, you are showing how you would test your hypothesis. You or someone else will know what evidence to look for, based on this prediction. This is basic scientific methodology. If your hypothesis is that French will lose all sounds but "en" in the next twenty years, you may predict in support of that hypothesis that there is evidence of it now. If you predict there is only en or on coming out of French speakers now, you are providing someone a way to test your hypothsis. If they find that it is true, the confirmation of your prediction supports your hypothesis. "Predictability" is not pronostication. It is the way we test hypothesis. Whether a scientific prediction is about the future, or just about what one will find if one looks or experiments, all depends on the hypothesis. Hope this clears this up some. Regards, Steve Long From Sunnet at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 14 16:08:52 1999 From: Sunnet at worldnet.att.net (Eugene Kalutsky) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 12:08:52 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: zaterdag 10 april 1999 10:51 >In a message dated 4/8/99 9:07:20 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk writes: >>What would constitute evidence for this, and for "brown" or "honey-eater" >>over the ursa/arktos/rakshasa root, being a taboo replacement, as opposed >>to a common-or-garden lexical innovation? My grandfather taught me when taking me to the taiga in Siberia that one should avoid saying the word "medved' " (Rus. 'bear', lit. 'he who knows honey' - already a taboo replacement) aloud while in the forest, because "he just might show up to see who's calling his name", i.e. to avoid a dangerous encounter with a bear while gathering berries or mushrooms. Instead he told me to use the words "xoz'ain" (master) or "kosolapyj" (the intoed). At the same time he instructed me to always put the first berry or mushroom found on top of a stump as a gift to the "khoz'ain lesa" ("master of the forest"). Doesn't this count as evidence for taboo replacement? >Exactly. After all, there was no taboo making the Romance languages shift >their work for "horse" from the Latin derivative of *ekwos to "caballus". >Aparently it was simply a shift, as if we'd stopped using "horse" and >substituted "nag" or "glue-bait" or "cayuse". In support of the above: In Modern Russian usage there are several words for "horse" - the most common - "loshad' " - is emotionally neutral, another commonly used term is "kon' " - which is more affectionate and can be used to describe a warhorse ("loshad' " just doesn't sound right when talking about a warhorse). The third most commonly used term is "kobyla" and it has a derogative sense - just one notch above "kl'acha" (nag). Gene Kalutsky From adahyl at cphling.dk Wed Apr 14 16:15:51 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 18:15:51 +0200 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Uh-oh. Nemesis made my Nordic family tree below look a bit surrealistic. What I meant was: WEST NORDIC: Old Norse (+) > Icelandic, Faroese, Norn (+), and Norwegian (Nynorsk) EAST NORDIC: *Old East Nordic (+) > Swedish, Gutnish (+), Danish, and Norwegian (Bokm?l) On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Adam Hyllested wrote: > Then take a glance at my tree (upside-down). > NORDIC LANGUAGES > WEST NORDIC EAST NORDIC > Old Norse (+) *Old East Nordic (+) > Icelandic Swedish > Faroese Gutnish (+) > Norn (+) Danish > Norwegian Norwegian (Nynorsk) (Bokm?l) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 14 16:54:05 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 17:54:05 +0100 Subject: gender assignment In-Reply-To: <19990412022833.20074.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [The moderator has pulled the plug on the purely historical discussion, but perhaps I might comment on the interesting linguistic point raised at the end of Roz's posting.] > And, on another note, certainly today many of those kids in Bilbao who > speak only Spanish but find it "hip" to talk about going home to > "hacer las lanas" have little or no idea what the word really means in > Euskara, for them its their "homework", a perfectly valid Spanish > word, a feminine noun regularly used in the plural. In Euskera, the > word is obviously not masculine or feminine (Euskera has no gender > marking in nouns), nor is used only in the plural to refer > exclusively to "homework." A Basque noun or adjective is most commonly used with the suffixed article <-a> attached, and hence Spanish-speakers would be more likely to hear rather than merely for `work'. When they borrowed the word, they had to assign it a gender, and it's not surprising that the word was made feminine, since final <-a> is the usual feminine marker in Spanish. But I can't guess why the word became plural in Spanish, or how it came to be restricted to `homework'. There are other such cases. A nice one is this. As is well known, the name of even the tiniest settlement gives rise in Spanish to a derived noun/adjective meaning `(person) from [that place]'. I've no idea what the traditional Spanish derivative for the Basque town of San Sebastian (Basque ) might be, or even if there is one. But, in recent years, the Basque word `(person) from SS' has been taken into Spanish, where it is assigned two forms: masculine and feminine . It is possible that the Basque word was borrowed without the article, and that Spanish then added its own typical feminine ending to get the feminine form. But I consider it more likely that the more frequent Basque definite form was borrowed, interpreted as feminine because of its final <-a>, and then given the obvious Spanish masculine counterpart. Anyway, this word is now used throughout Spain. Some others are confined to the local Spanish of the north, such as the feminine noun , taken from Basque , the definite form of the noun `a certain type of sausage'. Of course, many Basque words happen to end in <-a> or <-o> anyway, and, when these are borrowed into the local Spanish, they are usually assigned a Spanish gender matching the ending. So, `hood', `scoring token in the game of mus' and `stew' are masculine in Spanish, while `tug of war', `Basque-language school' and `turnip green' are feminine. An exception is `female teacher in a Basque-language school', which in spite of its form is feminine in Spanish, because of its meaning. Interestingly, the genderless Basque has started borrowing gender from Spanish. A number of Spanish adjectives, such as `nice' and `stupid, foolish', have been taken into Basque complete with their Spanish gender distinctions: hence Basque and , and , with the forms in <-a> applied to females and the forms in <-o> used in all other cases. This is fairly new. Previously Basque just borrowed a Romance adjective in its masculine form and used it invariantly. The new pattern has even spread to a few native words. For example, native `poor fellow', whose final <-o> is coincidental and has nothing to do with any sex-marking, has, for many speakers, acquired a counterpart , applied to women, in line with the Spanish system of marking gender. Basque may perhaps be in the early stages of acquiring from its neighbor a gender system which it formerly lacked absolutely. [moderator] > (Is there a Basque-L?) Yes, there is, and both Roz and I subscribe to it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Apr 14 19:58:54 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 20:58:54 +0100 Subject: Re Sanskrit t & d Message-ID: On final t and d in Sanskrit: If it's any help, even W S Allen ("Sandhi in Sanskrit") is little use. He reaffirms that there is absolutely no difference in practice between words ending in t and d. He says that this allows analysis either as -t# or as -d# (not his wording - and of course there are further possible analyses as well, such as -th or -dh). Then the significant bit: he seems to suggest that Panini analysed some forms as word final -d, but others as -t. Presumably then later writers simply followed Panini. But Allen doesn't help us see any basis for Panini's analysis. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 15 02:28:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 21:28:31 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Edward Heil Sent: Monday, April 12, 1999 3:52 PM >Hi. I just read Winifred Lehmann's _Theoretical Bases of Proto-Indo-European >Linguistics_ (I believe that's the name; don't have my copy next to me). >He refers to the theory set forth in his earlier _Proto-Indo-European >Phonology_ that there were no phonemic vowels in early PIE, that on the >contrary there was a non-segmental phonemic quality which he calls >"syllabicity" which would result in the phonetic manifestation of vowels in >certain positions. >Unfortunately, he doesn't give enough details for me to understand exactly >how >this process would have worked, and I don't have access to his earlier book. >I wonder if anyone familiar with this idea could give me a quick rundown on >the details? >[ Moderator's comment: > Lehmann's analysis is a monument to the structuralism of the 1940s. In any > reasonable phonological theory, this analysis could not be made. (If looked > at from the viewpoint of Stampe's natural phonology, Lehmann's "syllabicity" > is simply the vowel /a/, with allophonic variation becoming phonemicized > over time.) For another example of the same kind of analysis, one which has > been examined in the literature, see Aert Kuipers' monograph on Kabardian > from the 1960s. I forget the exact title, but it was published in the > _Janua Linguarum, Series Minor_ by Mouton; it should be available in a > university library. > --rma ] I have a very different opinion from our moderator. For me, Lehmann's concept of syllabicity is the sine qua non of any successful effort to link Indo-European and Semitic. Without it, no sense can be made of IE apophony or Semitic consonantal roots. Without it, all attempts to understand the structure of Nostratic as the ancestor of IE and Semitic will be doomed. Unfortunately, none of the Nostraticists have understood this. As a consequence, the work of Illich-Svitych and Bomhard and others is tragically flawed. Most interestingly, the relationship between IE and Semitic was not a desideratum for Lehmann when he made his analysis, which was made solely on the strength of the facts in IE. The basic scenario is so simple that I am amazed that most linguists have not understood and adopted Lehmann's basic theory. 1) we find in IE roots with short vowels exclusively of the basic form Ce/oC (where neither C is a 'laryngeal' [H]); 2) we have two choices for the reconstruction of the root vowel(s) for *any* earlier stage of IE or ancestor of IE: a) to assume that apophony was present in every earlier stage of IE and in every ancestor of IE, including Nostratic; and beyond or b) to assume that apophony was not present in every earlier stage of IE and in every ancestor of IE, including Nostratic; and beyond. 3) None of the Nostraticists have assumed a); in fact, I presently know of no one who would assert a). 4) Facts like palatized dorsals (g{^}, g{^}, k{^}) argue strongly for an ancestor of IE that had phonemic [e], i.e. suggests b). 5) Facts such as roots of identical phonetic shape, like *1. pe/ol-, 'flow'; *2a. pe/ol-, 'push'; *2b. pe/ol-, 'dust'; *3a. pe/ol-, 'fold'; *3b. pe/ol-, 'cover', *4. pe/ol-, 'plate'; *5. pe/ol-, 'sell'; *6. pe/ol-, 'gray'; etal., indicate that some device distinguished among these roots *prior* to the extensive use of root-extensions; any other explanation than originally phonemic vowels is unnecessarily speculative, and has no basis in the later facts of IE. 6) Personally, I believe that Lehmann's "syllabicity" can be phonetically identified as [a] however it is not necessary to assume this. A Lehmann root like *p_l (with [ _ ] indicating syllabicity), might have had multiple realizations of _ so long as the vocalic realizations were allophones of [ _ ], and did not provide semantic differentiation. Thus, the comparison with Kuipers' analysis of Kabardian is not necessarily appropriate. 7) Based on the fact that Semitic shows no signs whatsoever of phonemic vowels, we can presume that the parent of Semitic expressed semantic differences solely through the consonants. If Lehmann's syllabicity is acknowledged, then IE also expressed semantic differences *solely* through the consonants, and the Nostratic parent of them both, at least at a late stage, must have been monovocalic (as I believe) or indifferently vocalic. Although Lehmann addressed only IE facts, his theory of "syllabicity" is the only rational basis for constructing a Nostratic that can successfully unify IE and Semitic. It is one of the most significant results of analysis in linguistics of the 20th century. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Apr 15 04:22:07 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 21:22:07 PDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: RAY HENDON: [...] in this theoretical realm I see what I believe to be a propery analogous situation from medical research: their use of a mathematical probability modeling technique to predict the spread of infectious disease among a community. I'm not sure if that is a proper analogy. Consider this. A virus is fully definable, that is, by its genetic code. We can define and distinguish different strains unambiguously this way. There might be a cytosine instead of a guanine down the RNA sequence that shows a discrete difference between two strains of virus. In order to make this analogy between "spread of infectious disease" and "spread of language" stick, wouldn't you need to be able to just as accurately define and distinguish between different languages and dialects? Afterall, language is the subject of your model and without it properly being explained and understood, the results would be meaningless. However what defines a particular language as unambiguously unique from another? How do we define "English"? There are many dialects of English. Do we consider all the English dialects as part of a single language or consider them seperate? How many dialects should there be of English? At what point do the differences between one speech form and another become insignificant or significant in these definitions? Should Proto-Indo-European, Germanic or the descendant of English 500 years from now be considered "English"? What number of people need to speak a particular speech form before it is considered a seperate and statistically significant speech form. Is Eyak a real language? What about artificial languages like Esparanto (some million or so strong so I hear) or Klingon (you know how prevalent Trekkies are)? Etc.... RAY HENDON: What I failed to emphasize in my earlier suggestion is each variable is itself a function, dependent upon many things. But, all the miriad other things that influence what langage a given population is likely to speak are accounted for with the "exposure" and "susceptibility" variables. Well, after "language" is defined, you need to contrive a way of measuring "exposure" and "susceptibility". First off, what constitutes "exposure"? The measurement of such a thing is further complicated by recent technological advances in mass communications (TV, radio, internet, etc) that redefine "exposure" as a potentially ubiquitous thing that no longer has to arise from side-by-side contact of two cultures. Measuring the exposure rate of a language cannot be accurately done by simply counting how many people of one language group physically co-exist with another group. Lurking social variables (part of your "suspectibility" variable) always have something to do with this equation but how does one discover them and again how does one define these variables, especially when dealing with the remote past? One would think that by now, English strongly affects all languages more or less equally and its "exposure" rate is thus the same but Finnish is a type of language that resists foreign words by creating it's own like for "telephone". Same for Mandarin "railroad", "television". Or as a friend of mine enjoyed sharing, his example of the term "screaming broom" for the modern word "vaccuum" in his language, Low German. Yet, Japanese has been hard hit by English with items like "computer", "McDonald's" and during that highly publicized vomiting incident by President Bush, my personal favourite "to do a Bush". And what happens when one language is considered "lower-class" than another, like Yiddish or American Indian languages have been in this century. How could we possibly predict that these kinds of social circumstances would have occured or when and how they will occur in the future? RAY HENDON: Just as there are many reasons why some people are vulnerable to influenza, and there are many reasons why a person is exposed to the virus, in the end it doesn't matter. They have either been exposed to it or not, and if there is no exposure there will be no influenza. If they are exposed, they are either susceptible to the infection or they are not susceptible to the infection. The why's and wherefore's are a different matter. This is what makes the spread of infectious disease different from language. The medical community is blessed with discrete variables to measure. Linguists aren't so lucky. Language is a human and social process - the why's and wherefore's _do_ matter very much. Unfortunately, they can't be reasonably measured just as "love" and "hate" can't be measured. These are human variables and we can be very unpredictable little monkies. Perhaps a psychological model, although I'm still skeptical, would be better suited to this task. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Apr 15 14:46:43 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 17:46:43 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <40f27b6c.2442b201@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 11 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I wrote: > <> > In a message dated 4/10/99 8:47:47 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: > < indications that you are using a different Webster's than I am, > my Webster's says that a truism is "a self-evident, obvious > truth.">> > I wrote: > <> > whiting at cc.helsinki.fi replied: > < truths" can be contradicted...>> > FYI: > New Oxford Dictionary adds that, in Logic, truism is "a proposition that > states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms." I'm glad to see that you a learning how to use British dictionaries. This is a big step for an American. But it doesn't do any good if this is simply a means of extending your range of misunderstanding. "A proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms" is like "I don't like my tea too hot." I.e., "too hot" has no referent beyond what is liked and simply means "I don't like my tea any hotter than I like it" without ever saying how hot "too hot" is. It imparts no new information and is a "truism" in the trivial sense of the word. This, however, is fundamentally different from truisms like "the sky is blue" or "the sun rises in the east," which are simply self-evident obvious truths. Now when you label "linguistic change is unpredictable" as a truism, it is clearly of the "self-evident, obvious truth" type rather than of the "states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms" type. Therefore, by labelling it a "self-evident, obvious truth" you are pleading nolo contendere. No further proof is needed. > Without addressing ideas like >language changes except when it doesn't<, I > must admit that in the past I've been guilty of a few truisms myself. But > this is how you can declare a statement a truism and still contradict the > underlying proposition: > >From Uniform Rules for Debate, HDS/GUDS(1962) > "A debator who runs a truism will fail... by jumping to a conclusion made > necessary by virtue of his definition. A truism will also be irrelevant > because it will not be resolving one of the issues that could otherwise have > been debated." Since a truism simply restates the premise and is irrelevant, > "a pleading in the alternative ...allows the challenger to both assert an > objection to the truism and [at the same time] attack the underlying > proposition..." This is all very interesting, but irrelevant because this refers to a truism used as an argument. It does not have to do with the truth of the truism, but with its relevance. But in the case at hand, there is no underlying proposition. The truism is the proposition. "Linguistic change is unpredictable" was presented as an observation (much along the lines of "the sun rises in the east") that is so well documented that it fits into the self-evident and obvious category (see, e.g., H. H. Hock, _Principles of Historic Linguistics_ (Berlin - New York - Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991 [2nd ed.]), Section 20.5 "The Linguistic unpredictability of change"; if you don't have access to Hock, you can probably find a similar statement in most any other handbook on historical linguistics). But I'm glad that you brought up the question of the relevance of truisms used as arguments because a really great example of it is your often-used "walks like a duck..." Now this is your shorthand flag for the truism "if X and Y are indistinguishable, then X is the same as Y," which is of the "states nothing beyond what is implied by any of its terms" type (i.e., it translates into "if two things aren't different, they are the same," a simple pairing of one word with its negated antonym). I'm sure you see this as an incontestable argument (or else you just like the sound of the words), but those who have not only read the handbook but also understood it just see it as an irrelevant truism. > Functionally consistent with Merriam/Webster's a "truth...too obvious for > mention." Don't mention it. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Apr 15 15:22:12 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 10:22:12 -0500 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: Peter wrote: >Bob mentioned the German "Handschuh" as a light-hearted example of >compounding from language poverty. It's not, actually. My Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der deutschen Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), say the following (my translation of German original): Germanic *_andasko:haz_ 'countershoe' [Kluge glosses as _Gegenschuh_, the meaning of which is at least very obscure], also found in the Old English given name _Andsce:oh_, has been reinterpreted into Old High German _hantscuoh_ [hand-shoe]; the place name _Handschuhsheim_ is also related. Place names in -_heim_ often have a personal name as the first component. Kluge adds that there was at least one Germanic word word for glove, the form of which must have been approximately *_wand_-, referring to something knitted ("wound"), with a possible second one *_skinthaz_ 'hide' borrowed into Finnish to yield modern _kinnas_ (genitive _kintaan_) 'glove'. If Kluge is right, _Handschuh_ represents not compounding for lack of a proper word, but rather folk etymology. >Shifting from Neolithic to modern, many German explanatory compounds are due >to the lack of a standardised or central dialect at a time when wider >communication (e.g. for commercial purposes) was becoming necessary. You >could not advertise "semmel" in areas that used some other word for it, but >"broetchen" (= "little bread") could be understood readily anywhere. Really? Do you think German bakers shipped their wares cross-country in the sixteenth century? And even if they had, _Broetchen_ wouldn't help, since many areas didn't (and don't) use -_chen_ as a diminutive. And really finally, _Broetchen_ is *not* a compound, since -_chen_ is merely a suffix. >So some at least of these explanatory compounds derive not from poverty but >from excess. Compounding in German has gone on as long as the language is recorded. Since the Germanic compounding types are identical to those found in Greek and Sanskrit, compounding must be seen as an Indo-European process. But there's no denying that German has exploited it even more than English (recall that _white wine_ is a compound, not adjective + noun!). A very large source is the calquing of Latin compounds: _in-cipere_ < *_in-capere_ 'begin' was calqued as _an-fangen_. Though both literally say "catch on", both actually mean 'begin'. And sometimes there's more than one stage: Greek _sym-pathia_ ("feeling with') was calqued to yield Latin _com-passio_ (ditto), which the 14-century mystics converted to the equivalent of modern _Mit-leid_ -- still "feeling with", but meaning 'sympathy'. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Apr 15 16:09:25 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 11:09:25 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Ed wrote: >Hi. I just read Winifred Lehmann's _Theoretical Bases of Proto-Indo-European >Linguistics_ (I believe that's the name; don't have my copy next to me). >He refers to the theory set forth in his earlier _Proto-Indo-European >Phonology_ that there were no phonemic vowels in early PIE, that on the >contrary there was a non-segmental phonemic quality which he calls >"syllabicity" which would result in the phonetic manifestation of vowels in >certain positions. rma added: >[ Moderator's comment: > Lehmann's analysis is a monument to the structuralism of the 1940s. In any > reasonable phonological theory, this analysis could not be made. (If looked > at from the viewpoint of Stampe's natural phonology, Lehmann's "syllabicity" > is simply the vowel /a/, with allophonic variation becoming phonemicized > over time.) For another example of the same kind of analysis, one which has > been examined in the literature, see Aert Kuipers' monograph on Kabardian > from the 1960s. I forget the exact title, but it was published in the > _Janua Linguarum, Series Minor_ by Mouton; it should be available in a > university library. > --rma ] Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a mess. The Neogrammarians had realized that the vowels [i u] tend to alternate with [y w] under conditions which no one has ever been able to specify *exactly*; since this was apparently his dissertation, he felt obligated to say this within the framework dominant at the time: PIE [i u] were allophones of /y w/, not "true" vowels, just as PIE syllabic [M N L R] were allophones of /m n l r/. Furthermore, though the laryngeals were unambiguously consonants in PIE (his view and mine, though others differ), the attested IE languages often have vowels where there were once laryngeals. The Neogrammarians had posited PIE Schwa in just such places. While rejecting Neo-grammarian Schwa, Lehmann adopted Hermann Hirt's theory of PIE ablaut, which entailed a weak vowel ("schwa secundum") in addition to the more commonly accepted ablaut grades. He writes subscript e for this. Within HIrt's framework, Schwa secundum represented those cases in which full-grade PIE /e/ or /o/ did not vanish in an unstressed syllable, but rather remained as Schwa secundum -- in other words, a syllable was weakened but not lost. (Like the Neogrammarians, Lehmann saw PIE /e o e: o:/ as real vowels, always syllabic but subject to weakening or loss. He differed in claiming that [a a:] were allophones of /e e:/ next to a-coloring laryngeals, and in analyzing most apparent long vowels as sequences of short vowel + laryngeal.) Lehmann then claimed that the traditional PIE Schwa was actually a sequence of Schwa secundum + laryngeal: the weak vowel was affected enough by the laryngeal that it was phonetically different than in non-laryngeal environments. I have read Lehmann's book numerous times (though not recently) and have learned much from it (as well as recognizing numerous errors and contradictions). But I simply do not remember his ever making any use of "syllabicity" beyond the obvious ones: /m n l r y w/ had syllabic realizations between non-syllabic segments, and the "vocalization (as many call it) of the laryngeals was due to a preceding weak vowel, Schwa secundum. Nothing mysterious when all is said and done; the only question is whether one can accept any given part of this whole poorly-integrated theory. (Personally, I accept Schwa secundum, but virtually no one else does these days.) Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis [ Moderator's comment: The "syllabicity" in question is in the final chapter of the book, in the discussion of the stages of pre-IE vocalism leading up to the vowel system seen in PIE, by which I mean that reconstructible from the daughter languages in Neogrammarian fashion. The earliest stage which he posits is one in which there is *no* phonemic vowel at all. I was charmed by the notion for years as an undergraduate, but then I learned more phonology. --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 16 07:26:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 08:26:35 +0100 Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Glen said: >I AM concerned about whether IE had medial *H1 and I find no >indication so far that this necessarily has to be the case. There are examples of medial *h1 at least in: *yeh1g youth *meh1n-s month I'm sure others out there can find more. Peter From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 16 08:08:37 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 01:08:37 PDT Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Mr. Gordon has unsubscribed from the Indo-European mailing list. If you wish him to see any reply, please send a private copy to him as well as to the list. --rma ] MODERATOR: Why would a glottal stop "certainly not be" a distinct phoneme? I can think of several languages off the top of my head in which it is, so there is no reason other than _a priori_ bias to reject in for PIE. ME (GLEN): [...] It is because of pairs like *tuH and *twe (and other phenomena) which lead me to believe that there were, on top of long vowels from loss of laryngeals, differing lengthes of vowels determined by stress accent and shape of syllable which cause some of the anomalies present WITHIN IE. Hence a more credible *tu:/*twe without "intrusive and inexplicable H" fully explainable by accent. MODERATOR: >Message-ID: <19990412011754.39210.qmail at hotmail.com> >From: "Glen Gordon" >Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 18:17:52 PDT > >Well, here's my current position. I accept *H2 and *H3 as being >/h/ and /h/ respectively (and thus parallel to the velars). >*H1 on the other hand is at most a glottal stop which, iff it >occured at all, certainly would not have been a distinct phoneme. Your original statement reads as an _a priori_ rejection of glottal stop as a possible phoneme in any language. That may not be what you meant, but it is assuredly what you wrote, and on that basis, I asked the question above. It's not at all what I wrote unless you are to interpret *H1, *H2 and *H3 as being anything other than RECONSTRUCTED PHONEMES. I don't understand. What does the "*" symbol mean to you? Surely, anyone reading this would understand that I'm speaking only of a particular reconstructed language at the very least, if not IE itself to which *H2 and *H3 are often associated. Being the IE list, I figure unless I specify another proto-language, *H1-*H3 are purely IE entities and the statements that follow are statements solely concerning IE. Perhaps you aren't reading slow enough and striving to understand what you are reading before jumping off the trigger with irrelevant charges. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Apr 16 10:45:49 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 11:45:49 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >I might add that the well-known Pennsylvania tree for the IE family sees the >entire Germanic branch as having done something similar: this view sees >Germanic as having started off as part of an eastern cluster of IE languages, >but then as having "migrated" (linguistically, I mean) into a western >cluster. The authors' final decision is to put Germanic into a western >branch, but they explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of this decision. Well-known, but not to me, alas: could we have a reference? Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 16 11:44:41 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 13:44:41 +0200 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: vrijdag 16 april 1999 11:18 [snip] >For Mallory, "moving between languages" was the crux of the whole >Indo-European issue. (ISIE, p257) I read in D, Crystal that the loss of >inflection in English has been closely connected with the bilingualism >effected by the Danish invasions (CamEncyl Eng Lang p 32). >Steve Long [Ed Selleslagh] That may be right, but how do you explain the same, and simultaneous, phenomenon in Dutch, a closely (geographically and linguistically) related language, which underwent only a very minor influence from the Viking invasions? The rest of Low-German equally lost a major part of its inflection, in contrast with High-German - and a lot of the little that's left may be attributed to High-German influence, or even re-introduction by analogy (HG being the language of education). Could it be that this phenomenon is the dominant one in Germanic, and that High-German is the exception? (and why, or 'how come'?) BTW, I don't know the answer. Ed. From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Apr 16 13:06:26 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 14:06:26 +0100 Subject: gender assignment Message-ID: Interestingly, the genderless Basque has started borrowing gender from Spanish. [snip] The new pattern has even spread to a few native words. For example, native `poor fellow', whose final <-o> is coincidental and has nothing to do with any sex-marking, has, for many speakers, acquired a counterpart , applied to women, in line with the Spanish system of marking gender. Basque may perhaps be in the early stages of acquiring from its neighbor a gender system which it formerly lacked absolutely. Most interesting. Are there any cases of it happening on non-o/a stems, e.g. * 'old (man)' or * by reinterpretation of the native <-a>? Or is it a restricted lexical thing, the way we have in English with fiance/e and blond/e? Of course these are pronounced the same but being literate we have to decide how to write them, and do consistently mark gender. Words where there's a spoken difference are so rare that perhaps we don't have to decide. He is always nai"ve, as is she, but she is a... faux-nai"f? I would say 'a Filipino housemaid', because if I decide that maids are Filipin-a, what is the Filipin-o/a language, culture, etc... Rather than having to think "now what gender is ?" it's easier to force gender out, they way we have with employee, divorcee, naive. The influence of French is small enough that these will remain oddities like foreign plurals rather than influence the grammar. Nicholas Widdows From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Apr 16 13:22:38 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 07:22:38 -0600 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: > >This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five > >different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the > >direct source. The stories are: > >(4) from an unspecified Congolese language; > >You pays your money... > >(4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese > > language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in > > the Congolese rain forests. Not to mention the problem that there are over a hundred "Congolese" languages. Which one? John McLaughlin Utah State University From jrader at m-w.com Fri Apr 16 09:33:36 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 09:33:36 +0000 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: A few comments on the discussion below, though we are drifting rather far from Indo-European: as a source for , the Tamil compound translated as "elephant killer" is cited in Yule and Burnell's _Hobson-Jobson_, but retracted more or less in a parenthetical note in later editions in favor of a Sinhalese word . As far as I know, no one has ever seriously disputed the etymology. The Sinhalese word was borrowed into English, not Portuguese, and the misapplication to a South American snake was due to confusion among biologists. The Brazilian Portuguese word for the anaconda (Eunectes murinus) is , with many variants, borrowed from Tupi. If exists in current Portuguese, it is as a borrowing of an international zoological term. I don't think Robert poses a really valid objection to Larry's points. Jim Rader > LARRY TRASK: > >> And zebra is supposedly from Old Spanish ecebra, ezevra, etc. said > >> to be a derivative from equus plus some ending. > > >This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five > >different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the > >direct source. The stories are: > > >(1) of unknown origin; > >(2) from , the wind god, because of the animal's speed; > >(3) from some Italian development of a Latin * `wild horse; > >(4) from an unspecified Congolese language; > >(5) from Amharic `zebra'. > > >You pays your money... > > >(1) is undiscussable. > >(2) looks fanciful to me. > >(3) seems to have a phonological problem, unless there were Italian > > dialects in which /kw/ was reduced to /k/ very early. > >(4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese > > language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in > > the Congolese rain forests. > >(5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word > > get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese > > were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) ROBERT ORR: > when you consider what you have to assume to get Tamil yaanai-kolra > - "elephant killer" 1) borrowed into Portuguese 2) transferred all the way > to South America 3) become establsihed enough in the language to refer to > another giant snake, i.e., "anaconda" (the exact path taken by stages 2 and > 3 is open to debate), (5) above doesn't really look like a problem at all. From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Apr 16 14:17:08 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 16:17:08 +0200 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: EGO: > The genetic classification of languages is > based on origins, not on linguistic similarities caused by later foreign > influence. LARRY TRASK: > Exactly. So, based on origins, we'd expect Norwegian to form a branch > with Icelandic. There should be absolutely no doubt that one of the Norwegian standards, Nynorsk (lit. 'New Norwegian' or 'Modern Norwegian' - actually, the archaic variety) belongs to the West Nordic Group together with Icelandic and Faroese. Nynorsk is based on the original dialects of Norway, and these all share the typical West Nordic linguistic features. The problem arouses when one tries to include Bokm?l (lit. 'Book Language' or 'Written Language'), because this second standard has developed from written *Danish* with Norwegian as a substrate. LARRY TRASK: > Yet all the published trees I've ever seen group Norwegian with > Danish and Swedish, in defiance of the original state of affairs, but in > line with modern realities. Again, with one modification: this is only true of Bokm?l. EGO: > A Germanic language stays Germanic forever, no matter how > unrecognizeable it may have become. The leaves of a family language tree > simply cannot move from one branch to another. LARRY TRASK: > According to the family-tree model, this is correct. But my point was that > this model does not suffice to capture all aspects of language history Should it? To me, the family tree model is purely genetic. LARRY TRASK: > I might add that the well-known Pennsylvania tree for the IE family sees the > entire Germanic branch as having done something similar: this view sees > Germanic as having started off as part of an eastern cluster of IE languages, > but then as having "migrated" (linguistically, I mean) into a western > cluster. The authors' final decision is to put Germanic into a western > branch, but they explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of this decision. If Germanic started off as part of an eastern IE cluster, then even today I would group it into this cluster to show its Eastern IE heritage. Best regards, Adam Hyllested From jer at cphling.dk Fri Apr 16 15:00:41 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 17:00:41 +0200 Subject: -s. vs. (-)t- In-Reply-To: <19990414023755.96828.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > MIGUEL: [...] > To account for the nominative and accusative forms, these case endings > must be viewed as older than the rest of the declension that we now > find in IE. That's what I've been saying all along, so I cannot disagree. [...] > Revised rule: Pre-IE **-Vt > IE *Vs > but Pre-IE **-Ct > IE *Ct > > Does that explain everything now? Gettin' out the check list... > 2nd person *-s? Check. No: We also have 2sg *-s after consonants! > Relationship of substantive/aorist? Check. Incomprehensible to me; what are you talking about? > The > infamous *t/*s alternation. Check. That is correct in so far as the alternant /s/ (when there _is_ an alternation) is restricted to word-final position and to the position at the old boundary before the added "wak-case ending". However, we also have /s/ before some stem-elaborating suffixes, certainly the fem. ptc. in *-us-iH2. > Examples where final **t doesn't > become *s? Maybe. Impossible: We cannot dispense with an element /t/ that never becomes /s/. Jens From stevegus at aye.net Fri Apr 16 14:32:16 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 10:32:16 -0400 Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > Exactly. So, based on origins, we'd expect Norwegian to form a branch with > Icelandic. Yet all the published trees I've ever seen group Norwegian with > Danish and Swedish, in defiance of the original state of affairs, but in line > with modern realities. I'm not defending any particular analysis here, > merely pointing to an inadequacy of our family-tree model. Phonologically, the mainland Scandinavian languages all seem relatively conservative. There seems to have been, moreover, a common literary form of Scandinavian that was in use throughout the entire region during the "Old Norse" period; of course, this may be an artifact of the fact that most of the literature from this period that has been preserved for us, has been preserved in Iceland. AAR, it may have been that this Common Scandinavian may have kept some mutual understandability, at least at the "let's go in that house" level, with other Germanic tongues with which it was in contact, such as Old English in the north of England, and later, with North German in the Baltic area. This served as an anchor that kept the phonology relatively constant, and relatively close to the parent language --- even as it wore down the inflection system. Of course, English borrowed -pronouns- from Scandinavian; -they, them- and perhaps the long 'u' in -thou- were apparently taken; and basic words like -give- (instead of *yive) show profound Scandinavian influence. Of course, even now, (Bokmel) Norwegian and Swedish are for the most part mutually understood, and Danish is also understandable with some difficulty. Danish (and southern Swedish) have undergone some phonological innovations not shared by standard Swedish or Norwegian; on the other hand, the vocabulary of Danish is shared with Norwegian more than with Swedish. Interestingly, Icelandic and Ffroese, the "conservative" versions of Scandinavian, that keep most of the inflectional system and lack the Low German vocabulary shared by Common Scandinavian, are perhaps the most phonologically innovative. Ffroese, especially, being apparently the most isolated tongue of them all, shows some profound sound changes that are largely obscured by its archaizing spelling system. This would seem to bear out the hypothesis that the mainland Scandinavian languages were "anchored," not only to one another, but indeed to neighbouring Germanic speech that was even farther away on the family tree. It is of course an advantage to have your language understood by your neighbours, even if they speak a different variety of a related tongue. I suspect that this mutual intelligibility more or less anchored Scandinavian, not only to its neighbour North Germanic dialects whose divergence is largely a matter of political accident, but indeed to some extent to High German, English, and other West Germanic dialects. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Fri Apr 16 16:41:11 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 11:41:11 -0500 Subject: Prediction Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >"Predictability" is not pronostication. It is the way we test hypothesis. >Hope this clears this up some. >Regards, >Steve Long The test of an hypothesis is a test of the reliability of the prediction the hypothesis makes. If the predictive power of the hypothesis is good, i.e., if it is a reliable predictor, predicting again and again the actual events, then we generally accept the hypothesis as valid. If I am seeking out manuscripts that were written in and around Rome in the year AD 100, your hypothesis might be that I should expect to find these documents written in Latin. If I look at the documents and find they were indeed in Latin, and if most other scholars finds the same thing, your hypothesis will generally be accepted as true. It accurately and reliably accounts for the facts we find of that period at that place. To make any assertion of the past is a prediction as to what one would find if one went there and looked or listened. I cannot see, with all due respect, that an hypothesis is anything else at its core, than a prediction that two things are related in a cause-effect manner, and that the relationship is predictable. I could have used a less perjorative term like "expected," rather than "predicted, " although they are the same in a statistical sense. We are not saying something should happen, but is likely, or expected, to happen. But I intentionally used "predict" so as no to try and cover up this most fundamental nature of an hypothesis. If I had a recording of every word spoken during Cicero's life, and I counted the words he spoke and classified each word as belonging to certain linguistic group, I could then compute what percentage of his words were of one language and what of another. Using this kind of modal calculation I might then advance the hypotesis that I would expect Cicero would speak in Latin, since the overwhelming body of evidence I possess is of his speaking this tongue. Although there is a mystical, somewhat unacceptable connotation to the words"predict" or "forecast," mathematical modeling and non-mathematical modeling still have a predictive quality that I do not see can be avoided. I don't mean this in an argumentative way. I may be just dense on the matter and fail to see the obvious, but fail to see it ,I do. The word "expected" demystifies the statement of predictibility, and puts it in on more or less a scientific footing, but an hypothesis is still a prognostication. Sincerely, Ray Hendon From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Apr 16 17:32:54 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 12:32:54 -0500 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: So, are you saying that Bokm?l is pretty much Norwegianized Danish? [snip] >WEST NORDIC: >Old Norse (+) > Icelandic, Faroese, Norn (+), and Norwegian (Nynorsk) >EAST NORDIC: >*Old East Nordic (+) > Swedish, Gutnish (+), Danish, and Norwegian (Bokm?l) > [snip] Is Gutnish the same as Skanian? I've run into people from southern Sweden who claim Skanian as their native language. I've also run into people from Bornholm who claim that a distinctive Scandinavian language is spoken there. Are these dialects or transitional languages? From jer at cphling.dk Fri Apr 16 17:50:06 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 19:50:06 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990413204734.81479.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > ME (GLEN) IN RESPONSE TO JENS' SOUND RULE FOR *yu:s "you": > Still don't get it. How does *t- become *y-?? [...] Dear friends, I had not anticipated that the list would be discussing what I might possibly mean by a passing comment. Maybe I can save you some trouble by specifying what I had in mind. Twenty years ago I was giving a course in IE morphology and, just before we were to deal with the personal pronouns, there was a one-week vacation. I prepared a series of handouts containing all attested forms from the diverse branches together with their probable history. For each branch I tried to specify a intermediate proto-stage (like, Indo-Iranian or Proto- Germanic), and for the whole thing, of course, an IE stage. It then became obvious that the result lent itself to further analysis, and it was now my idea to get as far into that as I could. I was working on the assumption that there ought to be some connection between the pronominal forms and the personal markers of the verb. I also considered it probably, not to say evident, that the personal markers recur in neighbouring linguistic families like Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut (I knew too little of the other Nostratic branches). The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in Evid.f.Laryng. as *eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) *me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) I have some difficulty only with the 2du acc. for which the Skt. stem yuva- (with y- from the nom.) rather points to *uH3e, probably with dissimilatory loss of the *-w-. The other cases are formed from the acc. by the addition of postpostions, cf. Vedic dat. asma-bhyam 'to us', abl. ma-t, tva-t, asma-t, yuSma-t etc. The disyllabic acc.s have enclitic variats consisting in the first (underlying) syllable, *noH3, *woH3, *nos, *wos, for med a time when there was a vowel /o/ in that syllable. Possessive adjectives are formed from the acc. by vrddhi: *tew-o-s, *no:H3-o-s, *wo:H3-o-s, *no:s-o-s, *wo:s-o-s. The 1sg *me had to prefix the vrddhi vowel because there was only one consonant, *emo-s 'my'. The reason is that there is no variant *mwe parallel with *t(w)e and *s(w)e, but that is obviously due to simple sound change, *mwe > *me completed before the poss.adj. was derived. >From the poss.adj.s were formed substantivized uninflected forms used as genitives of the personal pronoun: *tewe 'of thee', *no:se 'of us' etc. In the 1sg, *eme was adjusted to *meme by adoption of the same beginning as the other cases, then dissimilated to PIE *mene (Av. mana, OCS mene). Now it appears that there are so many unexpected u- or w-elements that something just has to be included into the underlying forms to account for this. Note that, while *tu:, *yu:s are 2nd person, there is /w/ in the 1st person du./pl. *we:, *wey. That must be accounted for. I can suggest only the presence of a STEM consonant /w/ originally present in ALL forms and thus meaning something like "person" or "speech-act participant", because that's what all the forms have in common. It is plain that *nH3we : *nsme contain the number markers, /H3/ for dual, /s/ for plural, while the -me is the casemarker of the acc.; the -we occurring after the dual markers appears to represent a development of -me in that position (cf. the VERBAL 1du in -we as opposed to 1pl -me which were probably also originally accompanied by du. vs. pl. markers). As number markers we find *H3 (something like a voiced labiovelar spirant), not at all out of style with what is found in Eskimo-Aleut (a velar spirant) and Uralic (a velar spirant in Vogul). For the pl. we have in IE *-y and *-s, perhaps in complementary distribution, and not quite unlike Esk.-Al. /D/ (dental spirant), cf. also Finn. -j-/-t. A therefore calculate with /G/ (velar spirant) for the dual and /D/ dental spirant) for the plural. The vocalization appears to be simple: The nominatives have a vowel before the last consonant, while the acc. adds *-m to the full nom. form, this triggering the addition of *-e after the resulting final cluster. There is final accent throughout. We cannot explain *eg' 'I' as part of the original system, but all the rest can be relatively artlessly derived from a completely regular underlying inflection: 1. person 2. person nom. acc. nom. acc. Sg. (m-w) m-w-m t-w t-w-m Du. m-w-G m-w-G-m t-w-G t-w-G-m Pl. m-w-D m-w-D-m t-w-D t-w-D-t With vocalization - and suggested stages of the phonetic development: mew-me tew tew-me mweG mweG-me tweG tweG-me mweD mweD-me tweD tweD-me tuw nweGme twuG weD nweDme twuD mewe tewe weG neGme DwuG DweGme neDme DwuD DweDme DuG DuD tu neGwe DweGwe weGwe weDme juG wej nezme juz wezme mowe towe we' noG-we ju' woG-we noz-me woz-me mwe tu twe we nH3we yu wH3we wey nsme yus wsme > PIE me tu twe we nH3we yu uH3(w)e wey nsme yus usme with enclit. me te noH3 woH3 nos wos The changes are in part pure invention, but not unnatural and not without intrinsic coherence: 1. The vocalization is normally with /e/, only assimilated to /u/ in the nom.s of the 2nd person *tuw *twuG *twuD. No such assimilation took place in the forms beginning with *m- (1st person), which must be a dissmilatory brake on the rounding influence ("ma non troppo"). 2. *mw-Gm- and *mw-Dm- changed the initial to *n- (dissimilation). 3. wm > w, mw > w, nw > n, tw > Dw 4.5.6. wu > u, Gm > Gw, Dw > w 7. D > j- initially, -z- medially (before consonant?), but word-finally -z after high vowel (-uz in juz, cf. instr.pl. in -bhis), -j after non-high vowel (-ej in wej, cf. toy 'they'); -z (> -s) finally after consonant does not apply here. 8. On its way to zero, unaccented /e/ becomes /o/ as already known. Final G is lost (presumably through change into a feature on the preceding vowel, perhaps glottlization). After that time, the first-syllable stretches of the du. and pl. accusatives are singled out as enclitics, this giving *noH3 and *woH3 with retained spirants, pl. *nos, *wos. 9. Unstressed short vowels are completely lost, and the cluster mw thereby arising is reduced to m. 10 (not in the chart). Monosyllabic forms develop long-vowel (emphatic?) variants: *tu:, *t(w)e(:), etc. Viewed in this fashion, 'us' IS the acc.pl. of 'me', 'ye' the nom.pl of 'thou, thee', etc. The system may be fully regular, based on normal inflection. The use of dual and plural number is elliptic: the dual of 'me' means 'me and someone else', the plural 'me and some others', i.e. what is normally called 'us'; note that this is normal IE syntax. The sound-change postulates for the oldest periods cannot be verified because we can analyze nothing else that far back. But the second half or so of the chart consists of changes that are already known; therefore, teh suggestions at least integrate the forms of the personal pronouns into a general picture of IE language history. Until a few day ago, this analysis had only been published in the Copenhagen institute papers APILKU, vol. 6 from 1987, but now my old and hidden papers have been collected in two volumes of "Selected Papers in Indo-European Linguistics", published by Museum Tusculanum in Copenhagen (700 pp., $70, www.mtp.dk), and this one is among them. It may not be true, but no one shuld call it impossible. Jens From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 16 18:11:26 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 20:11:26 +0200 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Date: Friday, April 16, 1999 5:07 PM Leo A. Connolly wrote: [snip] >Kluge adds that there was at least one Germanic word word for glove, the form >of which must have been approximately *_wand_-, referring to something knitted >("wound"), with a possible second one *_skinthaz_ 'hide' borrowed into Finnish >to yield modern _kinnas_ (genitive _kintaan_) 'glove'. If Kluge is right, >_Handschuh_ represents not compounding for lack of a proper word, but rather >folk etymology. [Ed Selleslagh] Very interesting, I wasn't aware of that. Dutch still uses the word 'want' for 'mitten'. 'Glove' is 'handschoen', a similar formation as in German. BTW, the stem 'and-' is frequent in toponyms in German and Dutch speaking areas, usually to indicate a place opposite something, mostly on the other side of a river etc. (Antwerpen, Elst/Andelst, Baden/Ennetbaden... and also in Greece: Rion/Andirion) and of couse also in 'Antwort/antwoord', but that's common knowledge I guess. Note that the meaning of 'and-' is rather 'opposite, in front of, before ('gegenueber/tegenover') than 'counter-' ('gegen-/tegen-', 'anti-' in the modern sense), just like the preposition 'ante' in Latin (in its spatial meaning). Ed Selleslagh From alemko.gluhak at infocentar.tel.hr Fri Apr 16 18:57:29 1999 From: alemko.gluhak at infocentar.tel.hr (Alemko Gluhak) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 20:57:29 +0200 Subject: Leipzig (was: Re: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages) Message-ID: ---------- > Von: Rick Mc Callister > An: Indo-European at xkl.com > Betreff: Re: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages > Datum: 1999. travanj 13 17:20 > So then, does Leipzig amount to something like "White River Town" > with *la:b- > /laip/ with maybe the 2nd element related to English > & German It seems to me that Leipzig is of Slavic origin, *lip7sk7, with *lipa "linden". Alemko Gluhak From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 16 19:00:40 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 14:00:40 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM > Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to > Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis > for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE > consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd > developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a > mess. It is profoundly irresponsible to label anything written by Lehmann as a "mess". He is one of the preeminent IEists of the 20th century, and to cavalierly dismiss his work as "Neogrammarian", as if a label could discount his achievements and contributions, is tragically unjustified. > The Neogrammarians had realized that the vowels [i u] tend to alternate > with [y w] under conditions which no one has ever been able to specify > *exactly*; This is, in my opinion, totally misleading. The condition has been exactly specified, and in such simple terms, that hardly anyone, who does not have a predisposition to think that the latest fads in linguistics are the last word, could not understand them: initial ['Y/WVC] is ['y/wVC]; initial [Y/WV'C] is [i/u'C]; ['CVY/WC] is ['CVi/uC]; [CV'Y/WVC] is ['Cy/wVC]; [CVY/W'C] is [Ci/u'C]. Now, what was so difficult about that? > since this was apparently his dissertation, he felt obligated to say this > within the framework dominant at the time: PIE [i u] were allophones of /y > w/, not "true" vowels, I do not know if Beekes had such an argument in *his* dissertation but in a book published as late as 1995, he is still asserting what Lehmann's dissertation asserted. So, though you may disagree, many eminent IEists still maintain that IE [y/w] are primarily consonontal. And, as any Nostraticist can assure you, IE [y/w] reflects Semitic [y/w]. If Nostratic [i/u] -- presuming they actually existed -- showed up as Semitic [0], you might have a talking point but they do not. > just as PIE syllabic [M N L R] were allophones of /m n l r/. The syllabic status of [M/N/L/R] is a totally unrelated matter. These become syllabic when deprived of the stress-accent. > Furthermore, though the laryngeals were unambiguously consonants in PIE (his > view and mine, though others differ), the attested IE languages often have > vowels where there were once laryngeals. The Neogrammarians had posited PIE > Schwa in just such places. I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. > While rejecting Neo-grammarian Schwa, Lehmann adopted Hermann Hirt's theory > of PIE ablaut, which entailed a weak vowel ("schwa secundum") in addition to > the more commonly accepted ablaut grades. He writes subscript e for this. > Within Hirt's framework, Schwa secundum represented those cases in which > full-grade PIE /e/ or /o/ did not vanish in an unstressed syllable, but > rather remained as Schwa secundum -- in other words, a syllable was weakened > but not lost. (Like the Neogrammarians, Lehmann saw PIE /e o e: o:/ as real > vowels, always syllabic but subject to weakening or loss. He differed in > claiming that [a a:] were allophones of /e e:/ next to a-coloring > laryngeals, and in analyzing most apparent long vowels as sequences of short > vowel + laryngeal.) I differ with Lehmann here. I believe that IE [a:] is a retention of the vowel quality of the vowel which *followed* the 'laryngeal', having been lengthened at its disappearance by compensatory lengthening. So I would say - laryngeal + short vowel, with the *preceding* short vowel having been lost. > Lehmann then claimed that the traditional PIE Schwa was actually a sequence > of Schwa secundum + laryngeal: the weak vowel was affected enough by the > laryngeal that it was phonetically different than in non-laryngeal > environments. > I have read Lehmann's book numerous times (though not recently) and have > learned much from it (as well as recognizing numerous errors and > contradictions). But I simply do not remember his ever making any use of > "syllabicity" beyond the obvious ones: /m n l r y w/ had syllabic > realizations between non-syllabic segments, and the "vocalization (as many > call it) of the laryngeals was due to a preceding weak vowel, Schwa secundum. > Nothing mysterious when all is said and done; the only question is whether > one can accept any given part of this whole poorly-integrated theory. > (Personally, I accept Schwa secundum, but virtually no one else does these > days.) > [ Moderator's comment: > The "syllabicity" in question is in the final chapter of the book, in the > discussion of the stages of pre-IE vocalism leading up to the vowel system > seen in PIE, by which I mean that reconstructible from the daughter > languages in Neogrammarian fashion. The earliest stage which he posits is > one in which there is *no* phonemic vowel at all. I was charmed by the > notion for years as an undergraduate, but then I learned more phonology. > --rma ] Rich, I would be interested to know what phonological principles you believe Lehmann's "syllabism" violates? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Fri Apr 16 20:17:01 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 13:17:01 PDT Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Mr. Gordon has unsubscribed from the Nostratic mailing list. If you wish him to see any reply, please send a private copy to him as well as to the list. --rma ] GLEN (THAT'S ME!): In the 3rd person sing imperfective, the previously inanimate 3p *-t (derived from *-to) is favored over *-s because of the icky merger (At the same time, **-e'n becomes **-e'n-t > *-e'r). MAG.HANS-JOACHIM ALSCHER: In fact, -CnD# > -Cr(D)# [...] -r/-n-neuters and 3rd pers. pl. secondary/perfect [abibharur vs. abharan < *e-bhi-bher-nt vs. *e-bher-ont; yakrt/yaknas < *yekwnt/*yekwnes]. Not -Cn# -Cr# as maintained by some list members, so what about *h1newn "9" with final -n ? Actually I'm curious whether you find -C- to be a necessary part of this rule and whether it can simply suffice to say *-nD# > *-r(D)#. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 21:50:16 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 21:50:16 GMT Subject: gender assignment In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >A Basque noun or adjective is most commonly used with the suffixed >article <-a> attached, and hence Spanish-speakers would be more likely >to hear rather than merely for `work'. When they borrowed >the word, they had to assign it a gender, and it's not surprising that >the word was made feminine, since final <-a> is the usual feminine >marker in Spanish. But I can't guess why the word became plural in >Spanish, or how it came to be restricted to `homework'. 'Homework' in Spanish is 'deberes', which explains the plural. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:16:46 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:16:46 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: <2d8fac0f.2442349f@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >The hard part is the << kuning-, from *kun-ja "kin" (*gon-) and Germanic >suffix-ing/-ung>> because *gon- is already in Greek *gno-, possibly before >German was invented. Invented? >After all, if you follow Mallory or Dolukhanov the >proto-Slavs were the Agricultural Scythians in 500BCE and therefore had >contact with the Greeks before the Germans. (Unless you accept a BSG) And of >course if the P-slavs were IE they should have had a *gon/*gnu or *kon/*knu >and i-stems quite before they met the Goths. But anyway... Slavic hasn't preserved *gen(H)- except in the derivation ze~tI (*gen(@)tis) "son-in-law, sister's husband". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:19:34 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:19:34 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <19990412014708.22182.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >JENS RASMUSSEN: > Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with > stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; > *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome > *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. >MIGUEL: > I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an > inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; > and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) > etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally > and -s- medially. What to make of them? > >"-t word-finally"?? I'm shocked that you would utter those words. How >does this bode for **-t > *H1? This is *-ts. >MIGUEL: > As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- > (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, > me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced > there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. > >Why does Pokorny write it *me-t- instead of *met- and why can't we >consider *-t- a verbal affix or possibly two different verbs? We could consider it an affix if the alternation had been *me-, *met- (or *me:- ~ *me:t-). But it's *me:- ~ *met- ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:23:15 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:23:15 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <007801be85c1$274b9640$e703703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: [jij ~ gij:] >Supposing you are right (I have an open mind on this), why would it have >reverted to j (y) in Holland >Dutch in some rare cases, but not in most? I don't think it did. j- > g- in the South only. Irregular development (not unexpected in a personal pronoun). The accusative was clearly never *gu. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:30:37 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:30:37 GMT Subject: `stem' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: [ moderator snip ] >Of course, even in IE languages, not every word-form is constructed in >exactly this manner. For example, there may be more than one formative >present. Or none at all, in which case root == stem. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:40:36 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:40:36 GMT Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >(5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word > get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese > were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) Oh yes. The Portuguese were very interested in Ethiopia (which they thought was the land of the legendary Prester John), feeling they badly needed a Christian ally against the Muslims in East Africa. They dispatched an army of 400 musketeers to Ethiopia in 1541 to help against a Muslim army, and remained the main power in Ethiopia for a century [until they overplayed their hand by forcing Catholicism on the Ethiopian Christians]. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:43:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:43:52 GMT Subject: imperfect In-Reply-To: <003f01be843c$107bb700$983763c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Miguel asked about an inherited root "aorist": >>>Did it become an >>>imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) >>>like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless >>>narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked >>>"imperfects" like ? >The question only makes sense if there is a genuine distinction between >imperfect and aorist in Vedic. In fact, (despite some grammars too heavily >influenced by Greek), there is no clearly discernible difference in meaning >between the two. The labels are taken from Greek and refer to the >formation, not the function. If a root-stem past tense has a corresponding >present, it is called "imperfect" - otherwise it is called "aorist". Anadyatana ("not of today") and adyatana ("of today") in Panini's terms. Panini *does* distinguish between the two. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 23:44:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 23:44:55 GMT Subject: Slavonic imperfect; IE subjunctive In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >[...] >> Unlikely. Meillet apparently suggested that -e^ax- derives from >> the copula (j)es- cliticized to the verbal root (cf. the Latin >> imperfect with *bhu-a:-). But in view of the association of the >> optative with the imperfect in Tocharian, Armenian, Iranian and >> maybe Celtic, I would favour a derivation from the optative >> *-oih1- > e^, followed by -ax- < *-eh2-s-. In other words, a >> "past optative". [...] >You have overlooked that the Slavic imperfect caused first palatalization Sure. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 22:50:37 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 22:50:37 GMT Subject: Socilological vs natural selection (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: >On Thu, 8 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> This is not unlike biological change, where the mutations are >> brought about by various factors (both "internal" quirks in the >> way DNA is structured and is copied, and "external" factors like >> cosmic rays), and the mutations are then selected for by their >> effect on the "fitness" or sex-appeal of the phenotype. >On the other hand, I'm somewhat leery of drawing strong parallels >between linguistic change and biological change, because so many >people, particularly non-linguists, seem to take them literally >(i.e., assume that languages change the same way that biological >organisms do) or extend the analogy in ways that are not applicable. >For one thing, forms can be taken over for reasons like prestige >of the source language or dialect, or because the speakers find a >word with a sound or meaning that they just happen to like in another >language, and there is, as far as I know, no mechanism that duplicates >this in biological change. Sexual selection? >Secondly, sociological change does not >have to be survival-enhancing (people, especially as a group, don't >always know what is good for them, and even if they do, they don't >always do it), whereas biological change, because of natural selection, >will preserve survival-enhancing mutations by its very nature. True, although I think most biological changes are in fact survival-neutral. But there is indeed no "survival of the fittest" about language change. The emphasis of my analogy was on the side of genetic/linguistic drift, occurring for "no" reason (or at least not for reasons that have anything to do with their being selected). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 16 22:52:01 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 22:52:01 GMT Subject: OCS, Polish, and other Modern Slavic languages In-Reply-To: <72a87ee5.24400e6b@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >And mcv I think pointed out that >something about the way the krol and karol appear in Slavic seem to ask for >an earlier date of borrowing than Charles the Great. Nothing linguistical. It's just that we know that there was no Common Slavic anymore by the time of Charles the Great. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Apr 17 08:40:00 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 09:40:00 +0100 Subject: glottalic theory Message-ID: HI folks I've read recently that early Finnish borrowings from Germanic (e.g. aja- "drive") show that the traditional plain voiced stops (PIE *g & *d) were indeed voiced in proto-Germanic. This means they could not have been voiceless ejectives as the glottalicists suggest. (Voiced implosives would not explain the near absence of *b). The writer of the article suggested a process by which voiceless ejectives became voiced in Germanic, and then devoiced, which rather removes any advantage the glottalic theory has over the traditional theory in explaining the Germanic sound shift. Can anyone out there confirm the Finnish evidence, and if it is indeed accurate, can anyone show how we can continue to support the glottalic theory in the face of it? Peter From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Sat Apr 17 12:45:25 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 12:45:25 GMT Subject: Scribere / screiben / scrifan Message-ID: Latin {scri:bere} = "to write" German {schreiben} = "to write" Anglo-Saxon {scri:fan} = "to appoint" Was there an native Common Germanic word {skri:ban} = "to appoint"? Or did that word come from Latin when the Romans and the Germans came into contact, and the meaning "appoint" came via Roman edicts being sent round in writing? From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 17 16:15:58 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 19:15:58 +0300 Subject: : German compounds In-Reply-To: <01JA237B0OTU94L4NT@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Thu, 15 Apr 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >Peter wrote: >>Bob mentioned the German "Handschuh" as a light-hearted example >>of compounding from language poverty. >It's not, actually. My Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der >deutschen Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), say the following (my >translation of German original): > Germanic *_andasko:haz_ 'countershoe' [Kluge glosses as > _Gegenschuh_, the meaning of which is at least very > obscure], also found in the Old English given name > _Andsce:oh_, has been reinterpreted into Old High German > _hantscuoh_ [hand-shoe]; the place name _Handschuhsheim_ is > also related. >Place names in -_heim_ often have a personal name as the first >component. Kluge adds that there was at least one Germanic word >word for glove, the form of which must have been approximately >*_wand_-, referring to something knitted ("wound"), with a >possible second one *_skinthaz_ 'hide' borrowed into Finnish to >yield modern _kinnas_ (genitive _kintaan_) 'glove'. If Kluge is >right, _Handschuh_ represents not compounding for lack of a >proper word, but rather folk etymology. I find this all a bit difficult to accept uncritically. First, Buck, DSS, doesn't have any problem with a compound of 'hand' and 'shoe'. Although this is now 50 years old, here is what he has to say (p. 435, 6.58 glove): OHG hantscuoh, NHG handschuh (OE handscio: only a proper name; see now Bosworth-Toller, Suppl. s.v.), Du. handschoen, MLG hantsche (> late ON hanzki, Dan., Sw, handske), cpd. of words for 'hand' and 'shoe'. Falk-Torp 380. Of course the problem is that we don't have the word in Gothic so the developments become speculative. But if we consider that OHG hantscuoh is a folk etymology then either all the other forms are loans (or at least reconvergence) from OHG (not impossible, especially as Buck sees the Scandinavian word coming from MLG) or all the other branches used the same folk etymology (unlikely). Accepting 'hand' + 'shoe' just seems more likely all around. Second, I am curious about the discrepancy between the two forms (Andsce:oh in Kluge and handscio: in Buck (and presumably in Toller, although I can't check it), since Buck's seems to confirm *hand- rather than *anda-. Third, both 'hand' and 'shoe' are PIE words so there is no difficulty getting them into a much earlier stage of Germanic than OHG. *_andasko:haz should mean 'other shoe' so it is less specific than "handshoe." And if 'shoe' is correctly etymologized as coming from the PIE root 'to cover' (ultimately the same root that produced English 'sky') then the original meaning is "covering" and the compound "handcovering" sounds less risible than "handshoe" and less unlikely than "other covering." "Shoe"/"handshoe" would then just be unmarked/marked counterparts; "shoe" being the more common (all God's chillun got shoes), "handshoe" gets the marking (rather than the other way around "shoe"/"footshoe"). Fourth, words for 'glove/mitten' in IE languages often have the word for 'hand' in them [subconscious-level double entendre, discovered on proofreading], e.g., Gk. xeiris, Lat. manica, Russ. rukavic'a, etc., so there is nothing a priori implausible about "handshoe" as a coining for 'glove', especially if "shoe" still had the meaning 'covering'. All in all, I find less difficulty with an original 'hand' + 'shoe' than with a folk-etymologized word for 'glove' that did not already contain the word for 'hand'. I also think that the word was likely to have been older than OHG. I would even go so far as to suggest that there was originally a pair, "handshoe" and *"footshoe," meaning "hand covering" and "foot covering" respectively, and that *"footshoe," through frequent use, was shortened to "shoe" while "handshoe" remained. The change from *"footshoe" to "shoe" would have happened already in Proto-Germanic since all the Germanic languages (including Gothic) have only the "shoe" word. To me, Kluge's explanation sounds like an attempt to get rid of a form, Handschuh, that has often been a source of amusement. But in the final analysis I think that the form is a quite logical development that has just happened to leave a humorous relic. It is fortunate that the words for 'hat/cap' developed from a different IE root for 'cover, protect' else German might have ended up with "headshoe"* which would have been a perennial gag writer's delight. I will agree, however, that German "Handschuh" does not represent compounding for lack of a proper word; but, rather than folk etymology, it was simply a logical development. Please remember that the purpose of the original posting was to make fun of the idea that Proto-Germanic was linguistically "poor" or "primitive," not to prove that it was actually the case. The other Germanic words for 'glove/mitten' are interesting as well (ON vo,ttr ~ EFris. want/wante, "mitten"; ON glo:fi ~ OE glo:f, "glove"), but this is long enough already. I will only say that want/wante is more likely to refer to a 'winding' than to something knitted, and was apparently strips of cloth wrapped around the hand to protect it from sword-blows (cf. Buck. loc. cit.). This word went from Frankish (wanth) to OFrench as want/guant/gant and then from MFrench into English as gantelet (diminutive) to become modern English gauntlet. >And really finally, _Broetchen_ is *not* a compound, since >-_chen_ is merely a suffix. Don't be too quick to dismiss "mere suffixes" from compounds. The process by which separate words become suffixes or case endings through compounding or cliticization is called grammaticalization and is quite common. I don't know about -chen, but many forms that look like "mere suffixes" are originally separate words. In German drittel, viertel, etc., the -tel looks like a suffix, but it is actually a form of Teil, thus "third part," "fourth part," etc. English -hood (~ German -heit/-keit) was once a separate word (ha:d) meaning "state, rank, position" but now is only a noun-formative suffix. The list of examples is very long. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Apr 17 16:59:22 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1999 17:59:22 +0100 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Please bear with this long introduction if you're interested in the topic. These quotes from the discussion are needed for what follows. >>Bob mentioned the German "Handschuh" as a light-hearted example of >>compounding from language poverty. Leo said:> >It's not, actually. >_Handschuh_ represents not compounding for lack of a proper word, but rather >folk etymology. I (Peter) said: >>many German explanatory compounds are due to the lack of a standardised >>dialect at a time when wider communication (e.g. for commercial purposes) was >>becoming necessary. You could not advertise "semmel" in areas that used some >>other word for it, but "broetchen" (= "little bread") could be understood >>readily anywhere. Leo said: >Really? Do you think German bakers shipped their wares cross-country in the >sixteenth century? And even if they had, _Broetchen_ wouldn't help, since >many areas didn't (and don't) use -_chen_ as a diminutive. And really >finally, _Broetchen_ is *not* a compound, since -_chen_ is merely a suffix. The example makes the point well enough. Berlin has Schrippe, Stuttgart Wecken, Bern Weggi, not to mention Laabla and Kipfl in other parts. If you wish to refer to "a bread roll" and there is no standard term, a descriptive term is your best solution. Commerce is only one example of the many areas of discourse where wider communication was becoming necessary at that time, and the large lexical differences between dialects was a significant factor in the development of explanatory compounds. >Compounding in German has gone on as long as the language is recorded. Of course. You can't use resources a language doesn't have. You use the resources a language does have - hence explanatory compounds are a neat solution to a particularly German medieval problem. Oh, and you know perfectly well what I mean by calling "Broetchen" a compound. Furthermore, the diminutive -chen is not productive in some areas (in fact most of Germany!) but is thoroughly understood in all since Luther's Bible. I refer you to page 157 of Koenig's Atlas zur deutschen Sprache, where the text says (my translation): "Even today there are two forms side by side in the modern written language: in high prose the forms in -chen predominate, while -lein is stylistically more a sign of a popularist tone." Peter From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Sun Apr 18 06:07:58 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 01:07:58 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [Most of my long treatise on Lehmann 1955 omitted] >I have read Lehmann's book numerous times (though not recently) and have >learned much from it (as well as recognizing numerous errors and >contradictions). But I simply do not remember his ever making any use of >"syllabicity" beyond the obvious ones: /m n l r y w/ had syllabic realizations >between non-syllabic segments, and the "vocalization (as many call it) of the >laryngeals was due to a preceding weak vowel, Schwa secundum. rma added: >[Moderator's comment: > The "syllabicity" in question is in the final chapter of the book, in the > discussion of the stages of pre-IE vocalism leading up to the vowel system > seen in PIE, by which I mean that reconstructible from the daughter languages > in Neogrammarian fashion. The earliest stage which he posits is one in which > there is *no* phonemic vowel at all. I was charmed by the notion for years > as an undergraduate, but then I learned more phonology. > --rma ] I opened Lehmann and immediately put my finger on syllabicity in the last chapter. Embarrassing! But I know why I didn't recall it: that chapter (a) had no relevance to my actual interest, viz. Germanic reflexes of laryngeals, and (b) it struck me as utterly nonsensical. My gut feeling aside, there's an obvious problem with it even in terms of structuralist theory. On p. 112 Lehmann states: "If we find no phonemes in complemetary distribution at the peak of the syllable, we cannot assume a segmental phoneme for this position." Surely not "phonemes in complementary distribution" -- *contrasting* phonemes, or something of the sort. Whether complementary or contrastive, the supposed difficulty arises because Lehmann (against Brugmann & Co.) arbitrarily defines [i u] as syllabic allophones of resonant phonemes /y w/ -- Brugmann's notation, where [y w] are written with subscript half-moons, implicitly makes the vocalic /i u/ fundamental, whereas for /m n l r/ the non-syllabic realizations are (hence subscript circle beneath the syllabic realizations). With /i u/ there is contrast in position between non-syllabics, and Lehmann's justification for a prosodic feature of "syllabicity" vanishes. -- I should add that on p. 113, Lehmann incautiously says that at the next stage of PIE, with phonemic stress, syllabicity with minimum stress "remains non-segmental between obstruents..." "Between"? How so? Anything that can be between phonemes sounds segmental enough to me! Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From roborr at uottawa.ca Sun Apr 18 06:16:13 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 02:16:13 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: At 09:33 AM 4/16/99 +0000, you wrote: >A few comments on the discussion below, though we are drifting rather >far from Indo-European: as a source for , the Tamil >compound translated as "elephant killer" is cited in Yule and >Burnell's _Hobson-Jobson_, but retracted more or less in a >parenthetical note in later editions in favor of a Sinhalese word >. As far as I know, no one has ever seriously disputed >the etymology. The Sinhalese word was borrowed into >English, not Portuguese, and the misapplication to a South American >snake was due to confusion among biologists. The Brazilian >Portuguese word for the anaconda (Eunectes murinus) is , with >many variants, borrowed from Tupi. If exists in current >Portuguese, it is as a borrowing of an international zoological term. >I don't think Robert poses a really valid objection to Larry's >points. Not surprising, as the anaconda comment was meant to be in SUPPORT of point 5) (but thanks for the clarification of the "anaconda" etymology) Robert Orr >Jim Rader >> LARRY TRASK: [ moderator snip ] >> >(5) from Amharic `zebra'. [ moderator snip ] >> >(5) looks good, if the word is real, but how would an Amharic word >> > get into Spanish and Portuguese? (Of course, the Portuguese >> > were all over east Africa early on, but in Ethiopia?) >ROBERT ORR: >> when you consider what you have to assume to get Tamil yaanai-kolra >> - "elephant killer" 1) borrowed into Portuguese 2) transferred all the way >> to South America 3) become establsihed enough in the language to refer to >> another giant snake, i.e., "anaconda" (the exact path taken by stages 2 and >> 3 is open to debate), (5) above doesn't really look like a problem at all. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 18 06:57:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 02:57:57 EDT Subject: Prediction Message-ID: In a message dated 4/17/99 10:08:33 PM, rayhendon at worldnet.att.net wrote: <> "Predictability" as it applies to the scientific method is a "term of art." It's a matter of usage as much as anything else. Physicists for example will not only speak in terms of a hypothesis being confirmed by its predicting results but also judge a theory or "laws" based on "predictive power." Here are some excerpts from my e-files that illustrate how the term is used: (these are from abstracts): "Quantum mechanics does not predict when the individual nucleus will decay, although if many similar nuclei are surveyed, one can predict what fraction will decay in any time interval." "One hypothesis is that the human brain encourages the consumption of foods that contain valuable calories, while discouraging ingestion of life-threatening substances. This hypothesis leads to the prediction that sweet-tasting foods are edible and nutritious whereas extremely bitter-tasting materials are toxic, which is generally the case." "Terzaghi's work introduced scientific methods for predicting the behavior of soils and developed a basis for rational engineering design." And here's Victor J. Stenger, a physicist, writing about Newtonian physics: "The classical paradigm provides us with the means for predicting the motion of all material systems in the classical domain. Whether continuous or discrete, these systems of bodies are treated as composed of constituents that obey Newton's laws of particle motion and the various principles derived from them. Given the initial position and velocity of the constituent, and knowing the net force on it, you predict its future position and velocity." Other connotations may confuse the use of the word, but when it is used by scientists, "predictive" will very usually refer to the testability of a hypothesis or the confirmation of a theory. As you point out, the evidence can be in the form of experimental results or observations (Cicero's letters). "Expectations" seems like a fine word to me, but it is not what scientists generally use. Obviously this definition of "prediction" does not have to refer to anything as grand as where all language will go in the future. It can be as qualified as Grimm's Law. Where there was a *p, we can predict there was an f, under the right circumstances, more or less. Historical linguistics is a science that relies heavily upon this kind of methodological "predictability" both in following the history of a "word" and in reconstruction. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 18 08:14:11 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 08:14:11 GMT Subject: : German compounds In-Reply-To: <002a01be8834$ebdf27e0$3403703e@edsel> Message-ID: "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >Dutch still uses the word 'want' for 'mitten'. 'Glove' is 'handschoen', a >similar formation as in German. So Dutch both begins and ends with a non-etymological segment. [Final -n is a misanalyzed plural: pl. ==> , pl. ]. >BTW, the stem 'and-' is frequent in toponyms in German and Dutch speaking >areas, usually to indicate a place opposite something, mostly on the other >side of a river etc. (Antwerpen, I vaguely recall there being some folk etymology of Antwerpen involving the throwing of hands ("hand werpen") by a giant? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iglesias at axia.it Sun Apr 18 17:35:02 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 10:35:02 PDT Subject: Celtic substrate influence Message-ID: Recently, in another thread, I asked the following question, but no one answered and, as I am still curious, I would like to put the question again more specifically: Given that: 1) in North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, which are considered, rightly or wrongly, the most Celtic areas of Spain, the two forms of the past tense have been reduced in normal usage to one (the simple past) and 2) a similar phenomenon can be observed in Northern France, Northern Italy and SOUTH GERMANY, where in the Pre-Roman period the La Tene Iron Age culture and presumably dialects of the Gallic language were prevalent if not univarsal, although in this case it is the compound past that has replaced the simple past, Question: Could there be a parallel influence of the Celtic substrate in both areas, in the sense of a rejection of two forms for the past tense, i.e. either the simple or the compound past, but not both? What do the experts on Celtic languages think? In other words, are there any similar phenomena in the Celtic languages, ancient and modern? Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Apr 18 09:43:21 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 05:43:21 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/18/99 12:12:20 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Well, unless it does some damage I'm not aware of, I prefer the word. I have every reason to believe language is a human artifact and not something growing under plant light. Not that Germanic was invented by any particular person with the idea of getting a patent. But there is more common intention and common purpose behind any language than there is random noises, and therefore invented seems a better word than "first evolved." I wrote: <> mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Please be patient with me here. I'm trying. I'm not sure why the -(H)- is there, but let me get back to that. Do you mean: 1. that intial *gn- never passed directly into historic Slavic as an initial /kn/ or an initial /-n/? (By directly I mean not through a sister language but from *PIE to *p-Slavic to Slavic or a particular Slavic tongue.) I'm distinguishing here from the "first palatalization" which would have the *g- change before an original front vowel but I'm thinking not necessarily a *gn-. Here the analogy is to *glava (pSl)> glowa (pol), golova (rus w/tort). 2. I see *gen> gno- or something like that happen in Greek (and maybe German). If you accept that, does it mean that this transformation did not happen in PIE or that it could not have occurred or passed into proto-Slavic? 3. It seems the gen- and gno- coexisted in Homer. Both "genea" and "gnotos" refer to relatives. Obviously which form would have affected how the word passed from *PIE into the daughter languages or from, say, Greek into another IE language. (Oddly I have OCS "daughter-in-law" sn~xa (Pol c~rka /synowa) and I believe the Sanskrit also has as intial snu- for daughter-in-law. And znuots, Lett.) Does this "diglossia" (if this is the right word) allow the suggestion that the same process could have happened some time in the early Slavic? Or that both forms could not have appeared as they did in Greek? 4. You say that <>. I don't understand the -(H)-. How would you see that passing into Greek as both "genea" and "gnotos" or "gnosis"? Finally, isn't it peculiar that *gen- or *gen(H)- a root/stem with tremendous amount of extensions in Greek (even Homer) and German (and Sanskrit as far as I can tell) - shows up in Slavic in only one word? And just as peculiar that it reenters (e.g., ksiezyc) in so many meanings only through Germanic? Does that possibly cast doubt on the whole way this reconstruction has been approached? That sounds more confident than I am about these questions. But I am having I think a reasonable problem with how gno- (Greek or otherwise) is being left out of the *kuningaz equation. My best source on this (Stieber, translated for me out of Polish by a helper) is not helping me with this - especially how it fits chronologically. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Apr 18 10:37:22 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 11:37:22 +0100 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Pat said: >I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by >Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. There is some evidence in Sanskrit that requires them to be a consonant: (a) the failure to lengthen IE /o/ in the 1st person singular perfect, while lengthening did take place in the 3rd: 1 sing: cakara < ke-ker-He, as opposed to 3 sing caka:ra < ke-ker-e. This is usually explained by the presence of the now invisible consonant H in the 1 sing. [ Moderator's comment: *ke-kor-H_2e vs. *ke-kor-e (Brugmann's Law). --rma ] (b) A similar point - set roots fail to lengthen the vowel in causatives - again usually explained by the presence of a laryngeal consonant. A laryngeal must have been present, but a vowel would have allowed lengthening. (c) Reduplication of roots beginning with a laryngeal. We find an unexpected -i-: e.g. gan-igm-at < Hgen-Hgn-. If the H at the beginning of the root had vanished, the -i- would not appear (as it does not in roots without initial H-) and if it had become a vowel, it would appear at the beginning of the reduplicated syllable as well. The only explanation is a consonantal H, which then shares the later usual interconsonantal development to -i-. (d) If H has already become a vowel in (for example) the IE root *kerH "to proclaim", how do we explain the reflexes of an apparent long r in ppp ki:rta-? Why not *krVt-, as if from a CrV root? (e) The development of voiceless aspirates is impossible to explain if the H is a vowel, because they do not develop regularly before other vowels, but only occur only where we expect an H, e.g. a-khya < a-kH-ya, compared with cayati < keH-ya-ti. (f) In Skt H develops to -i- between consonants. If it were already a vowel, it would have caused palatalisation, but in fact it prevents palatalisation, when it comes between a consonant and a following front vowel - e.g. in the example above, a-kh-ya as opposed to the palatalised cayati. Outside Sanskrit there are also bits of evidence, for example: (a) Roots with initial H. In the form HReC, if H has already become a vowel, we will not find the pattern ReC, but VReC in Latin etc; if it is lost, we would not find the prothetic vowel in Greek & Armenian. Therefore it survives as a consonant. (b) Avestan patterns of consonants such as you find in the word for "path": nominative panta: < pent-oH, but genitive paTo: (interdental fricative) < pntH-os, and oblique pad-. These are not explicable if H were a vowel. So I need to see some good evidence for your position, Pat, before I am convinced! Peter From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Apr 18 10:52:56 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 10:52:56 GMT Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in >Evid.f.Laryng. as >*eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) >*me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) >I have some difficulty only with the 2du acc. for which the Skt. stem >yuva- (with y- from the nom.) rather points to *uH3e, probably with >dissimilatory loss of the *-w-. Why *H3 in the dual forms? Couldn't it be *H1(w) with o-Stufe? In principle, I'd go along with Beekes in reconstructing *-H1 for the dual of nouns (in view of Greek consonant stem -e < *-H1, and lengthened vowel elsewhere). I won't comment in detail on the postulated pre-proto-paradigm and all the intermediate stages leading to the PIE forms above, except to note that in the proposed *tw- > *Dw- > *w- (2nd.p. du./pl.) I miss a reference to the phoneme *c, as postulated earlier. My own vague thoughts about the prehistory of the PIE personal pronouns go in a different direction. I note an apparently ancient pattern -i-/-u- for sg. vs. pl., as found e.g. in Afro-Asiatic (Hausa sg. ni *ki si, pl. mu ku su), Basque (sg. ni hi, pl. gu zu) and Kartvelian (Georgian sg. me s^en pl. c^ven tkven). This would suggest that the pronouns for pre-PIE might have been sg. *mi *ti vs. pl. *mu *tu. Apparently, pl. *tu acquired singular meaning (modern day parallels are legion), and a new plural was created, maybe something like *s-tu or *t-s-u (JER's *cu ?), which went to *u- (but *su- in Anatolian?). So a tentative paradigm would be (I and U denote unstressed i and u): 1.sg. *mi' [replaced by *eg^-] acc. *mI-me' > *mene; *mme > *eme 1.du. *mu-e't > *weh1 acc. *mU-t-me' > *mtwe > *ntwe > *nh1we 1.pl. *mu-e's > *wes acc. *mU-s-me' > *msme > *nsme 2.sg. *tu' [emph. *tu:] acc. *tU-me' > *tUwe > *twe, *te 2.du. *cu'-et > *(y)u(:)h1 acc. *cU-t-me' > *utwe > *uh1we 2.pl. *cu'-es > *(y)u(:)s, Hitt. sumes (*suwes) acc. *cU-s-me' > *usme >Until a few day ago, this analysis had only been published in the >Copenhagen institute papers APILKU, vol. 6 from 1987, but now my old and >hidden papers have been collected in two volumes of "Selected Papers in >Indo-European Linguistics", published by Museum Tusculanum in Copenhagen >(700 pp., $70, www.mtp.dk), and this one is among them. Great! Consider one copy sold (as soon as I get some money, that is). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 18 12:19:44 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 15:19:44 +0300 Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: <68a05acc.24403eea@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 10 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 4/10/99 12:02:12 AM, you [JS] wrote: > <<-- you're confusing description with prediction. Language change > _in the > past_ can be described and rules deduced, which can then > be applied with reasonable confidence to historic languages we don't > have direct evidence for.>> > Probability is a tool can be used entirely to evaluate events that > occured in the past. Carbon dating for example provides a > predicatability in dating accompanying non-organic artifacts that has > been found to be very reliable. "Predictability" is a factor that > must be present before sampling validly can be used in analysis. Exactly backwards. Statistical analysis is the basis for probability. The probability obtained from statistical analysis is used to predict future events whose outcomes are unknown. It is statistical analysis that makes for "predictability," not "predictability" that makes statistical analysis possible. The limitation on this is that the statistical sample has to large enough to ensure that it is representative. "Predictability" is always present but it is not accurate until the sample size is statistically stabilized. > Believe me, I'm not confused. Oh, I believe you. In general, the less one knows, the less likely one is to be confused. If one has only one point of view, it is almost impossible to be confused. So I do believe that you are not confused. No more were the Church Fathers who forced Galileo to recant his heretical idea that the earth moved around the sun confused. Wrong, yes -- confused, no. There is a certainty that comes with single-mindedness that does not allow for confusion. > < _in the > future_.>> > A subject I don't think I've ever addressed. You address it when you use the terms predictability and probability, because both of these terms are specific to future events. Of course you don't realize that you are doing this because you don't know what predictability and probability mean. And this lack of knowledge happily keeps you from being confused, for as the poet says "... where ignorance is bliss; 'Tis folly to be wise." But what you see as a commendable lack of confusion others see as blissful ignorance. Technically speaking, probability does not refer to events that took place in the past. The term that applies to events that have already occurred is "likelihood." I present the definition of this term from the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics (available on the web at http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~eww6n/math/math.html Likelihood The hypothetical Probability that an event which has already occurred would yield a specific outcome. The concept differs from that of a probability in that a probability refers to the occurrence of future events, while a likelihood refers to past events with known outcomes. And, again, since there are still indications that you are using a different Webster's than I am, I offer you the following from Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary (1994): predict: v.t. 1. to tell in advance; prophesy. -- v.i. 2. to foretell the future; make a prediction. -- Syn. 1, 2. presage, divine, augur, project, prognosticate, portend. PREDICT, PROPHECY, FORESEE, FORECAST mean to know or tell (usually correctly) beforehand what will happen. ... predictive: adj. 1. of or pertaining to prediction. 2. used or useful for predicting or foretelling the future. 3. being an indication of the future or of future conditions. (NB: etymologies and examples deleted without indication) So, again, when you say that you don't think you've ever addressed the subject of changes in the future through your use of "predictability," I believe you. Doubtless you do think this, but if so, it is just further evidence (if any is needed) that what you think can't affect reality. On Wed, 7 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote > And they [truisms about the unpredictability of linguistic > change] are contradicted by the very fact that there is a > Grimm's law and there is an Indo-European language group and > there is a way the old sound laws can "predicatably" tell you > if one word is cognate with another even if they are centuries > apart. That's what predictability means. It means you can look > at some word on a clay tablet and make a good guess at whether > they are Greek or not. Because it follows from prior experience. > That's predictability. I have already responded to this once, but your subsequent postings (with one exception) indicate that you still do not comprehend the difference between definition and prediction, so I thought it best to come back here to try once more to make it clear. So let's take it step by step (all of you who already know the difference, please bear with us). First of all, as I said elsewhere, a truism can't be contradicted. It is true by definition (even if it is trivial). All one can do with a truism is point out that a trivial truism (one that simply restates the premise and adds no new information) is irrelevant as an argument. But when the premise is identified as a truism then the premise is true by definition. So saying that "a truism is contradicted" is an oxymoron. This being the case, it is obvious that Grimm's Law and the IE language group cannot contradict the truism that linguistic change is unpredictable. Now if someone says that "Grimm's Law predicts that a word that is inherited from PIE that has initial /p/ in Latin will have initial /f/ in English," this is a loose, figurative use of the word "predict" not a literal one. This is not a prediction based on Grimm's law; this *is* Grimm's Law (in part). The statement would be better construed as "Grimm's Law states ..." or "According to Grimm's Law, ...". Grimm's Law is a reconstruction of a (series of) sound shift(s) that took place in the Germanic language. In fact, far from being evidence that language change is predictable, it is confirmation that linguistic change is unpredictable. For if Grimm's Law was a predictable linguistic change then all IE languages should have ("predictably") undergone this change at some time or another, not just Germanic (and indeed, all languages everywhere that had these sounds should have shifted in the same way if this was a "predictable" linguistic change). So Grimm's Law is not a "predictable" linguistic change because it cannot be generalized to all languages. However, because it is not "predictable" it retains its predictive power in being able to identify Germanic languages in the overall scheme of IE. Now if one uses a set of data to create a reconstruction and then turns around and says that the reconstruction "predicts" the data, this is simply circularity. This is how linguists, both historical and descriptive, get the reputation of operating a discipline based on circular reasoning. If a historical linguist reconstructs a sound shift and then says that the sound shift is predictable because of the reconstruction, or if a descriptive linguist writes rules that describe sound changes and then says that the sounds changed because of the rules, this is circular reasoning and it is an easy trap to fall into. This is why historical reconstructions and descriptive rules do not predict anything. They are simply descriptions based on a data set. They cannot say anything about the data set without being circular. Of what value then are these hard-won reconstructions like Grimm's Law and Verner's Law? These reconstructions are descriptions (of events that took place long ago when no one was around to record them) based on observations, and descriptions can be used in definitions. So by reconstructing PIE we are defining it through description. By reconstructing the sound changes that took place in the various branches (e.g., Grimm's Law) we are describing the various branches in terms of PIE. But we are not "predicting" the various forms in the present languages because we already have those. They are the data on which the reconstructions are based. At best we may "predict" (reconstruct) some intermediate forms that are not attested, but this is a "prediction of the past" because that's what reconstruction is. As an example, if we observe that a horse has four legs (one on each corner) then we can use this observation as a description that makes up part of the definition of "horse." Aha, you will say based on your idea of predictability, that means that we can predict that a horse has four legs. No, I will say, this is not a prediction, this is simply part of the definition of "horse." Anything that is a "horse" will have four legs because that is part of the definition of "horse." If it doesn't have four legs it won't be called a "horse." And the definition stands because no one has ever seen a horse that didn't have four legs. This is a matter of consistency of observation and prior experience. But "a horse has four legs" is not a prediction, it is a definition. If someone finds a type of horse that doesn't have four legs, then the definition will have to be revised. Similarly, when we look at the words of a language like Mycenaean, we are not "predicting" what that language is, we are seeing how closely it matches our description / definition / reconstruction of various languages and classifying it according to which of these it resembles most. Analyzing these words is not a matter of "predicting" that they are Greek. It is a matter of seeing how closely these words match our definition of Greek as reconstructed for the appropriate time period. Matching them will be a function both of whether they are Greek or not and of how accurate our description / reconstruction is. If they match closely enough to be reasonably sure that they are Greek but not closely enough to confirm the reconstruction in detail, then the reconstruction / description / definition will have to be revised. So when you say: That's what predictability means. It means you can look at some word on a clay tablet and make a good guess at whether they are Greek or not. your use of "predictability" is completely idiosyncratic (and, based on prior experience with such terms as cognate and stem, why am I not surprised by this?). You are saying that "predictability" is the ability to form a hypothesis while everybody else is saying that "predictability" is the likelihood of a hypothesis being correct. To you, if you can form a hypothesis about something, that is "predictability" (particularly if the hypothesis has already been shown to be correct). But "predictable" means "capable of being determined in advance" and "predictability" means "the quality of being predictable." "Predictable" does not mean "capable of being hypothesized about (in retrospect)" as you seem to think. Prediction is something that happens a priori. So looking at some word on a clay tablet and deciding whether it is Greek or not is not a matter of predictability. It is a matter of how well one knows the definition of Greek. It is simply a matter of using the data set and the reconstruction. Now if one could make a good guess at whether the words were Greek or not *without* looking at the tablet (or without being able to read the tablet) *that* would be predictability. In a separate posting you said The shock of finding out Linear B was Greek (nobody was predicting it, not Evans or even Ventris) ..., so, obviously, at some point you *couldn't* look at some word on a clay tablet and guess whether it was Greek or not. Nobody was predicting it, therefore, there was a lack of predictability (although not a lack of hypotheses). Then as soon as the language is identified as Greek, you *can* look at some word on a clay tablet and guess whether it is Greek or not, and that's supposed to be "predictability." And this is the evidence upon which we are to accept your statement that you are not confused? But don't worry, I still believe that you are not confused. You are just using a different language from everybody else and thereby confusing them because they think you are trying to use the same language they are. So if everybody else will just substitute "describability" whenever you use "predictability" we will all be talking about the same thing. I did mention the one exception to your misunderstanding of the term "predictability," and I would also like to take up the few shreds of predictability that exist in historical linguistics, but this is too long already so I will save that for another posting. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From stevegus at aye.net Sun Apr 18 12:49:47 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 08:49:47 -0400 Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: Rick McCallister writes: >Is Gutnish the same as Skanian? I've run into people from southern >Sweden who claim Skanian as their native language. I've also run into >people from Bornholm who claim that a distinctive Scandinavian language is >spoken there. Are these dialects or transitional languages? Gutnish is (now) usually considered a Swedish dialect. It was (is) spoken on the island of Gvtland, on the east side of Sweden in the Baltic. Skanian is spoken in the Swedish province of Skene, in the south of Sweden, the area of Lund and Malmv. This province was formerly a part of Denmark. As such, Skanian is generally considered to be transitional with Danish. --- With wind we blowen; with wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen; with weopinge we passun. With steringe we beginnen; with steringe we enden; With drede we dwellen; with drede we wenden. ---- Anon, Lambeth Ms. no. 306 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Apr 18 12:59:10 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 13:59:10 +0100 Subject: Pennsylvania tree for IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Sheila Watts wrote: [on my reference to the Penn tree] > Well-known, but not to me, alas: could we have a reference? Sorry. It's this: Tandy Warnow, Donald Ringe and Ann Taylor. 1995. Reconstructing the evolutionary history of natural languages. Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, IRCS Report 95-16. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. The tree itself is reproduced on page 369 of my textbook: R. L. Trask. 1996. Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold. The tree was constructed by selecting a sizeable number of "characters" found in some but not all IE languages, and then asking a computer program to construct a "best tree". The authors report that most branches of the family fall pretty naturally into a tree, but that Germanic is rather perverse: morphologically, it clusters with Balto-Slavic, but, in its lexicon, it falls between Italic and Celtic. Their conclusion is that Germanic started off as an eastern branch of IE but that its speakers then migrated westward, adopting large numbers of western lexical items as a result. Incidentally, I was in error the other day when I reported that the published tree puts Germanic into the western group: it shows Germanic in the eastern group, though the authors acknowledge the awkwardness of this decision. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Apr 18 13:36:58 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 14:36:58 +0100 Subject: gender assignment In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Nicholas Widdows wrote: [on the introduction of sex-marking into Basque] > Most interesting. Are there any cases of it happening on non-o/a > stems, e.g. * 'old (man)' or * by reinterpretation > of the native <-a>? I am aware of no such case. Sex-marking of the o/a sort in native words (as opposed to borrowed ones) is still extremely rare, in my experience. Sex-marking in native words is not particularly prominent at all, and, where it does occur, it is usually expressed either by a lexical distinction or by a sex-marked suffix. > Or is it a restricted lexical thing, the way we have in English with > fiance/e and blond/e? So far, it is heavily lexically restricted. > Of course these are pronounced the same but being literate we have > to decide how to write them, and do consistently mark gender. Words > where there's a spoken difference are so rare that perhaps we don't > have to decide. He is always nai"ve, as is she, but she is a... > faux-nai"f? I would say 'a Filipino housemaid', because if I decide > that maids are Filipin-a, what is the Filipin-o/a language, culture, > etc... Rather than having to think "now what gender is ?" > it's easier to force gender out, they way we have with employee, > divorcee, naive. The influence of French is small enough that these > will remain oddities like foreign plurals rather than influence the > grammar. Yes, these things are unnatural and a nuisance. A couple of years ago, I used the word (as in "he's a poet manque'") with reference to a woman. I could find no mention of this in the usage handbooks, and all my English dictionaries give as the only possible form, so that's what I wrote, but my copy-editor changed it to anyway. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Apr 18 13:42:00 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 14:42:00 +0100 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: <3717399E.DC93FFC5@brigham.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton wrote: > Robert Orr wrote: (Actually, it was me -- LT.) > > >This is one story. The four dictionaries in my office give five > > >different stories, though all agree that Spanish or Portuguese is the > > >direct source. The stories are: > > >(4) from an unspecified Congolese language; > > >You pays your money... > > >(4) is hard to evaluate without specifics, but why a Congolese > > > language? Zebras are found on the eastern savannahs, not in > > > the Congolese rain forests. > Not to mention the problem that there are over a hundred "Congolese" > languages. Which one? No idea: the source here is the OED, which flatly declares "Congolese", without another word, to be the source. Since I'm an advisor to the OED, perhaps I'll ask them to reconsider that entry in the next edition. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Apr 18 19:20:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 14:20:12 -0500 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish and other similar groups, is more or less a "relic language" in that the vocabulary and not much else are from the original language [mainly a mix of German dialects of the Upper Rhine valley such as Swiss German, Swabian and Alsatian]. The syntax and the morphology are principally from American English. I taught for a while at a college in an Amish area and my colleague in German thought they were pulling his leg until he heard little kids speaking it. [snip] >LARRY TRASK: >> I might add that the well-known Pennsylvania tree for the IE family sees the >> entire Germanic branch as having done something similar: this view sees >> Germanic as having started off as part of an eastern cluster of IE >>languages, >> but then as having "migrated" (linguistically, I mean) into a western >> cluster. The authors' final decision is to put Germanic into a western >> branch, but they explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of this decision. >If Germanic started off as part of an eastern IE cluster, then even today >I would group it into this cluster to show its Eastern IE heritage. [snip] From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Apr 18 13:20:43 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 09:20:43 -0400 Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: > >Do you mean to imply that at some point in PIE to proto-Slavic, there was > >a point at which present and past always had different stems, so that when > >we see the same stem in present and aorist in Slavic, it must be an > >innovation? > No. All IE languages that distinguish a present stem from an > _aorist_ (not past) stem have I think some verbs where the > distinction is not made. If aorist is post-PIE, all inherited aorist forms must have been simple pasts in PIE, right? I think that I don't understand the relative chronology you have in mind. > Verbs like vesti (ved-) can make root-aorists, but also s-aorists > (two kinds of them): I think that the only question that matters is which are inherited and which are new in Slavic. We find old forms supplementing newer forms in many languages. Just because a form is found imbedded in a new paradigm does not mean that it is also new. > That's true, but there is more. You forget that imperfective > *presents* and perfective *pasts* also arose. I am not sure what you mean here. I understood that your theory was that at the point when Anatolian split off, the distinction was just present vs past, that is to say, past was not limited to perfective. Root, reduplicated, -neu and -ske/o and probably nasal presents existed at this point. So their pasts were not limited to imperfective. If a new imperfective present arose before Vedic, it can only have been bhereti type thematics. But other presents abound in RV. What do we do with them, especially their pasts which date back to the time before aspect? There is another peculiarity here: Outside Greek, the imperfective past is often formed not from the present stem but something else. To me it looks like a new imperfective past (not a new imperfective that formed both presents and pasts) arose, making pre-existing pasts into `perfectives', while old (''Indo-Hittite'') present continued to exist (though thematicization, either instead of or in addition to other formants kept gaining ground). >[deleted comments on -ske/o and -s etc.] > Forms like Skt. > gacchati / agacchat (*gwm-sk-e-ti, *e-gwm-sk-e-t), whatever their > synchronic syntactic function or meaning, are historically > iteratives, i.e. imperfective Aktionsart. What's the problem? The problem is that, to me, it is not obvious that gwmske/o- was an iterative only and not directed durative. [This was basically Meillet's suggestion]. I also object to ``iterative, i.e imperfective'' on general grounds: `imperfective' and `perfective' should be limited to languages with a binary contrast. If there are several different stem formations, but without binary contrasts of complete/total vs incomplete/partial, and with telic stems forming both true presents and simple pasts, the language does not have aspect. [It might be on its way, but not completely there yet.] [agacchat occurs once in Mandala 3, once in Mandala 8 and several times in Mandalas 1 and 10. There are a couple of instances in the family books where we have -Agacchat, where sandhi interferes.] > One problem is that root-presents and root-aorists, which are > both direct cousins of the Hittite simple past (mi-conjugation), > get classified in different categories. >(and, if I understand you correctly, Iranian) imperfect > from the optative, Past habitual in Old Persian and Avestan, not a general imperfective, and I don't know anything about Middle Iranian. [Mahabharata and to a lesser extent, Ramayana have optative endings used in past sense; but I have not seen any special meaning attributed to them.] > If what you're saying is that a Vedic/Skt. "imperfect" like > "he carried", without specific imperfective markers, > goes back to a simple past tense as in Hittite or indeed Germanic > [except for the augment, of course], I fully agree. But the > question is, what happened to the meaning of that form when > s-aorists like arose? Did it become an > imperfective/habitual past in pre-Vedic (e.g. proto-Indo-Iranian) > like the Greek imperfect, or did it remain a simple aspectless > narrative past? And if the latter, what about marked > "imperfects" like ? [avahat is marked (in contrast to root opt uhi:ta or imprv voLhvam), no? ] The first question is precisely what I asked. To me, it seems to be simpler to pick the latter rather than to assume an oscillation from past to imperfective to past. agacchat is no problem: it was a telic and so its past was not limited to imperfective. I see root extensions in -s as possible in pre-IE and slowly becoming grammaticized, leading to sigmatic aorists. Vedic sigmatic aorists (which continue to expand, becoming more common in Brahmanas than in RV, while root `aorists' becming less common) were perhaps ``completives'' (a la Bybee et al, The evolution of grammar). The other languages with sigmatic forms would have gone through such a stage, but the more clearly marked sigmatic forms ousted the other pasts, or like in Greek, expanded in frequency becoming perfective the same way that the prefixed verbs did in Slavic. A similar thing happened in Pali, where the sigmatic forms form the majority of the preterites, but with many more old ``imperfects'' mixed in than we see in Balto-Slavic. The problem with my argument is with *avahat. If *uegh'et started as a subjunctive, then *euegh'et must have had an conative meaning, with a root form *(e)weght (not *(e)weghst) being the past. If this was the case, then Greek expanded the imperfective meaning to all stems usable in the present from this starting point, while IA eroded the past subjunctive meaning in analogy with -sk-, -neu- and -n- stems which were limitd to telic functions (not general imperfective). Of course, if thematic present and the subjunctive developed from a common origin (Renou's ``thema eventualis'' (sp?) ) it would be easier to explain the Indic, while for Greek, we need to assume expansion of a `completive' to perfective. From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 19 03:13:01 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 23:13:01 EDT Subject: Socilological vs natural selection (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/18/99 6:27:42 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Although I think you are correct about many biological changes - which I take to mean inherited traits - "most" is probably too many. Some evolutionist would say not any that can arise with any significant frequency in a population. Possibly more relevant is the notion of vestigal traits - traits that once had a functional advantage in the environment, but no longer do. These traits can disappear quickly or slowly or find a new function, but they sometimes defy immediate explanation until the surrounding contingencies are found. (The large size of avocado pits for example has been explained as a seed distribution strategy taking advantages of the large digestive tracts of the giant mammals who inhabited the Americas more than ten millenia ago. This was obviously not the first explanation that came to mind.) <> Of course, "survival of the fittest" presumes a competition for limited resources that is not necessary in the development of differentiated traits. For example, out of a common predator ancestor who is a generalist, two different species might evolve along side of one another - one with mouse-catching traits and one with bird-catching traits. There is no competition between the two, and both sets of traits have survival value. As far as language goes, advantageous "traits" that do not conflict with one another can presumably differentiate and coexist. "Sweat" and "perspiration" don't need to eliminate one another, since they serve different functions in communication - like the two different predatory traits above. <> Although I am not saying this is wrong in anyway, I'd like to point out that any language feature or "trait" that has even a temporary value in communicating (a function of language) should have a better chance of coming into usage. But a temporary (communicative) advantage simply does not rule in language as it often does in biological evolution. A simple example is word length (in English if not in German). Obviously if every common English word were a "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," there might be an extreme hindrance to the communicative function. Words this long should not have a lot of "survival value." But it is important to understand that truly random trait generation would not favor short words over very long ones. If long ones show up randomly they should stick as well as short ones. But something inhibits the random generation of new very long words. That is why I've pointed out that truly random change generation is not the engine behind language as it is behind biological evolution. Language change is closer to animal husbandry or horticultural hybridization. The range of changes is controlled. Random forms unconnected with older forms do not suddenly displace those older forms on a daily basis. "Acceptance" requires more than just incidential or short term success in communication. Language change is more genetic engineering than random mutation. If it weren't, we should see little or no vestige of PIE in Indo-European languages. But language is much more conservative than that. While evolution is not. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 19 04:48:07 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 00:48:07 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: I wrote: << I read in D, Crystal that the loss of inflection in English has been closely connected with the bilingualism effected by the Danish invasions (CamEncyl Eng Lang p 32).>> In a message dated 4/17/99 7:26:13 PM, [Ed Selleslagh] replied: <> Did the Norse or Danes settle in Frisia (or the correct location for Dutch to be effected?) I'm only aware of raids, at least at the times of Charlesmagne and say Knut. The difference might be important, since the Danes did clearly settle in northern England. Perhaps that explains it. I was really doing no more than citing Crystal and he does say it is only a theory. But it would seem that you'd need a more permanent or constant level of interaction to need to "streamline" a language in this way. <> I don't know what explanations have been offered for this. I don't know that the bilingual accomodation Crystal offers applies to this situation. Though there were a lot of Danes to the north and Wends to the east that could have supplied the same kind of need for loss of complex inflections. <> Same here. Regards, Steve Long From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Mon Apr 19 05:19:03 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 00:19:03 -0500 Subject: Broetchen and Handschuh Message-ID: -chen in Broetchen and elsewhere must be analyzed as a suffix, for two reasons: 1. The meaning of a German compound is essentially that of the last element, the others being what naive speakers call "modifiers". E.g. _Bierhefe_ is 'brewer's yeast' (lit. "beer yeast"), not 'yeasty beer'. Though suffixes determine the syntactic category (and the gender of nouns), it is the root that expresses/determines the "meaning". -heit was once a noun, but no more: _Freiheit_ is an abstraction ('freedom'), not a kind of free anything. _Broetchen_ can be compared only to _Freiheit_, not to _Bierhefe_. 2. It causes umlaut of the preceding element: /bro:t/ + /-x at n/ ==> [bro":tc, at n], not *[bro:tc, at n]. This never happens in compounds. If _Handschuh_ is original (and logically and formally there could be no objection), why do we find the personal names in OE and (at least underlying Handschuhheim) German? Kluge can be spectacularly wrong, but this time I think he got it right. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Apr 19 13:21:14 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 09:21:14 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/13/99 3:02:01 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: <> I didn't catch this when it came on the list. And B-T-W that's not what I wrote. And I'm sure the writer is aware of that. Let's go to our [ironic] Ur friends to get back on track: Ur-Hans: UF, why is whiting at cc.helsinki.fi talking about handshoes when he should be talking about "archaisms" the way Miguel used the term in those earlier posts? Ur-Fritz: I don't know, Hans-to-be. Perhaps whiting at cc.helsinki.fi is avoiding the issue. Ur-Hans: Well, if we were cut off from the so-called "innovative core" does that explain why we would compound words? Ur-Fritz: The Greeks used compounds and recycled words all the time. No, it's probably just whiting at cc.helsinki.fi - that archaeological evidence was a bit too much. Honest dialogue might address whether the idea of a cut-off is valid in terms of history and linguistics. It's easier to just make us up than to actually address the evidence presented. Ur-Hans: What was it that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote? Oh, here it is... <> Although we will have to wait for re-contact with Greek culture to develop terms that have -ology in them, I'd bet my handshoe that is "pop sociology". Ur-Fritz: Or worse, Hans-someday. If I'm right, we may actually be Ur-Danes and we Danes will learn not to like that "ubergeist" kind of talk. But more importantly, Germanic is not conservative. Even we know the functional difference between archaic and conservative. Ur-Hans: And us being poor and cut-off by the Celts from the south, isn't that sociology? Ur-Fritz: No, it's called hard evidence about what happened in pre-history, proto-Hans. It may explain certain features (but not handshoe) in Germanic -that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi doesn't care to address - in terms of "mutual contact" or lack of it. Cultural anthropologists, historians, archaeologist and linguists use the term. Although sociology can use hard statistical evidence, you have to be rigorous or you'll end up saying very unscientific things like <>. That's pseudo-science. Ur-Hans: Sounds like that could cause some trouble in the days ahead. Ur-Fritz: Oh, it will, Hans. It will. That's the latest [irony] from Ur- Steve Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Apr 19 18:58:49 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 21:58:49 +0300 Subject: Socilological vs natural selection (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: <3719ba9e.6524072@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Robert Whiting wrote: > >For one thing, forms can be taken over for reasons like prestige > >of the source language or dialect, or because the speakers find a > >word with a sound or meaning that they just happen to like in another > >language, and there is, as far as I know, no mechanism that duplicates > >this in biological change. > Sexual selection? No, Lamarckian transmission. A language can take a form from a completely unrelated language just because it sounds good in its speakers mouths. A biological organism cannot imitate a feature that it sees in another species and expect it to be passed on to its offspring. The way that language is passed from generation to generation is simply different from the way that a biological organism replicates its genotype. > >Secondly, sociological change does not > >have to be survival-enhancing (people, especially as a group, don't > >always know what is good for them, and even if they do, they don't > >always do it), whereas biological change, because of natural selection, > >will preserve survival-enhancing mutations by its very nature. > True, although I think most biological changes are in fact > survival-neutral. But there is indeed no "survival of the > fittest" about language change. The emphasis of my analogy was > on the side of genetic/linguistic drift, occurring for "no" > reason (or at least not for reasons that have anything to do with > their being selected). Indeed, I expect that most biological changes are survival-neutral as well. And I don't say that linguistic/biological analogies are completely without value. What I say is that it is important to know where the analogies break down so that one does not get drawn into the trap of trying to explain linguistic change as the same mechanism as biological change. Languages just don't have DNA. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Apr 19 20:05:37 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 22:05:37 +0200 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > So, are you saying that Bokm?l is pretty much Norwegianized Danish? >From the middle of the 15th century till the liberation from Denmark in 1814, the written language of Norway was Danish, whereas the spoken language continued to be Norwegian. From this state of diglossia, two modern standard languages evolved: the somewhat artificial, but entirely West Nordic *Nynorsk*, a mixture of local dialects, and the increasingly Norwegianized *Bokm?l*, based on the written language (Danish). Nowadays, despite its obviously East Nordic character, Bokm?l contains some important West Nordic features such as (1) the three-gender distinction, (2) the postpositive possessive pronoun: Bokm?l ~ Danish 'my teacher', (3) some retained diphthongs ~ Danish 'island, stone'. But the similarities between Bokm?l and Nynorsk are far outnumbered by the features uniting Bokm?l and Danish in opposition to Nynorsk: Bokm?l ~ Danish ~ Nynorsk 'she, you (acc.pl.), who (interr.), comes, onion, (to) drive, loneliness, prolongation'. > Is Gutnish the same as Skanian? I've run into people from southern > Sweden who claim Skanian as their native language. I've also run into > people from Bornholm who claim that a distinctive Scandinavian language is > spoken there. Are these dialects or transitional languages? Gutnish is an extinct East Nordic language, spoken on the Swedish island of Gothland in the viking age and medieval times. Gutnish retained old diphthongs (already at that time monophthongized in Swedish and Danish) and sometimes even developed triphthongs as in ~ Danish 'wheel'. Some say that Gutnish features are reflected in the pronounciation of modern Gothland Swedish. Today, Scanian is a Swedish dialect (on an East Danish substratum), phonetically very distinct from its northern sisters. The Bornholm dialect is the last real representative of East Danish. It shares a lot of features with Swedish, and Swedes understand the dialects of Bornholm much more easily than they understand standard Danish. Adam Hyllested From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Apr 19 20:05:46 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 21:05:46 +0100 Subject: Sanskrit t & d Message-ID: Miguel's question (why some Sanskrit forms are quoted with an etymologically correct final -d when all occurrences of the word in Skt would neutralise the difference between final t and d) still intrigues me. Is it possible that it is a question of internal sandhi, rather than external? The rules are different, and at least one book says that the difference between voiced and voiceless consonants is maintained in internal sandhi. It then offers the unhelpful example of tad-apas "accustomed to that work". If compounds of a root such as vrt maintain the /t/ in that position, there would be the answer to the question. Unfortunately a quick troll through my Sanskrit literature yielded nothing - unsurprisingly. Nonetheless, the vrt root does not alter t to d when a voiced suffix is added - nivartitum "to turn back". Any reactions? And does someone have more detail than I could find in the library? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Apr 19 20:12:47 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 21:12:47 +0100 Subject: imperfect Message-ID: Miguerl said: >>imperfect and aorist in Vedic. >Anadyatana ("not of today") and adyatana ("of today") in Panini's >terms. Panini *does* distinguish between the two. Panini does. Vedic does not. Or more accurately, the texts do not really support the traditional meanings ascribed to the tenses. The aorist is strictly separate from the imperfect and perfect in the Brahmanas, but not regularly in the earlier vedas. A difference can sometimes be seen, but it is not as clear-cut, nor as consistent, as some traditional grammars say. My objection is that Sanskrit evidence is used to project aspect differences back into PIE, when in fact the evidence does not support the argument. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 20 01:28:35 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 20:28:35 -0500 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Friday, April 16, 1999 12:50 PM > The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in > Evid.f.Laryng. as > *eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) > *me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) > I have some difficulty only with the 2du acc. for which the Skt. stem > yuva- (with y- from the nom.) rather points to *uH3e, probably with > dissimilatory loss of the *-w-. > The other cases are formed from the acc. by the addition of postpostions, > cf. Vedic dat. asma-bhyam 'to us', abl. ma-t, tva-t, asma-t, yuSma-t etc. > The disyllabic acc.'s have enclitic variants consisting in the first > (underlying) syllable, *noH3, *woH3, *nos, *wos, for med a time when there > was a vowel /o/ in that syllable. > Possessive adjectives are formed from the acc. by vrddhi: *tew-o-s, > *no:H3-o-s, *wo:H3-o-s, *no:s-o-s, *wo:s-o-s. The 1sg *me had to prefix > the vrddhi vowel because there was only one consonant, *emo-s 'my'. The > reason is that there is no variant *mwe parallel with *t(w)e and *s(w)e, > but that is obviously due to simple sound change, *mwe > *me completed > before the poss.adj. was derived. One of the greatest problems in linguistic studies is the overeager facility with which anomalies are explained with an unjustified mechanism like that above: "simple sound change". There is not the slightest shred of evidence for *mwe in IE. And, in fact, suggesting its (*mwe) former presence obscures a better analysis of the existing facts. Is it not true that the majority of IEists would subscribe to the idea, which has been advanced by Beekes, that the IE nominal nominative developed out of an earlier ergative, in form derived from the genitive? And that, therefore, the nominal accusative, earlier an absolutive, represents the basal form? Now I know some will quibble over whether or not the same logic should apply to pronouns, and yes, I am aware of what seems to be a more conservative retention of older inflections in the pronouns, but, based on the experience we have we languages around the world, there is, IMHO, absolutely no justification for separating nominal and pronominal developments absolutely. On this basis, it is rather easy to see that the *basal* forms of the 1st and 2nd persons, in the singular and plural, are *me, *te, *ne, *ye. There is no necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. Apparently before this inflection (or particle), an alternative form for the first person, analyzable as *He (demonstrative) + *g{^}V (meaning unknown or disputed), suppleted *me for the ergative or later nominative, making a *mwe totally unnecessary as a nominative/ergative although we can surely see it in zero-grade as the Hittite enclitic -mu --- an additional reason for regarding a "simple sound change" (*mew -> *me) as unnecessary and ill-advised. It is also rather easy to see that the pronouns have retained an inflection of -w (or attachment of -w) of which only dubious traces remain in IE nouns. The 2nd person dual and plural are particularly indicative: these forms (*yu: / *yu:s [both built on *yew) I must confess I am completely at a loss to understand a reconstruction of the first and second person accusatives (formerly absolutives) of *nsme and *usme when *-sme is clearly nothing more that an asseverative particle particularly in view of *ne. How can we blithely accept *nsme in view of forms like Homeric no{^}i which is almost certainly simply derived from *ne/o + *wi:? These are not my only objections to the analysis Jens has provided but I will address the other issues later if it seems there is interest. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 20 08:35:05 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 09:35:05 +0100 Subject: Celtic substrate influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Frank Rossi wrote: > Given that: > 1) in North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, which are considered, > rightly or wrongly, the most Celtic areas of Spain, the two forms of > the past tense have been reduced in normal usage to one (the simple > past) and > 2) a similar phenomenon can be observed in Northern France, Northern > Italy and SOUTH GERMANY, where in the Pre-Roman period the La Tene > Iron Age culture and presumably dialects of the Gallic language were > prevalent if not univarsal, although in this case it is the compound > past that has replaced the simple past, > Question: > Could there be a parallel influence of the Celtic substrate in both > areas, in the sense of a rejection of two forms for the past tense, > i.e. either the simple or the compound past, but not both? What do > the experts on Celtic languages think? In other words, are there any > similar phenomena in the Celtic languages, ancient and modern? Well, I'm no Celticist, but I find it very hard to believe that Celtic speech lasted long enough in any region to have any effect upon the development of the Romance verbal system. The Romance preterite directly continues the Latin perfect, which had both preterite and perfect functions. The Romance periphrastic perfect did not exist in classical Latin, but seems to have become well established by the 5th or 6th century -- by which time Celtic speech had surely disappeared everywhere on the Continent. The question is when the contrast between the Romance preterite and perfect was lost, in the areas in which it has been lost. In Parisian French, the preterite seems to have disappeared from speech by about the 16th century, according to Price, but conclusions are difficult because the written language (which is all that is generally recorded) has retained the distinction down to the present day. For Iberia, I have no information. But I might add that the loss of the preterite/perfect contrast is far from rare generally. Even in those Romance languages that retain it today, like Castilian, the original force of the contrast has been significantly altered. And, of course, contemporary American English vernacular has lost the perfect in favor of the preterite in certain circumstances, such as `We did it!' for traditional `We've done it!' Further, in most varieties of American Spanish, the preterite has displaced the perfect to a greater or lesser extent. I don't think that the loss of this contrast is a surprising phenomenon requiring any external explanation. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Apr 20 09:42:54 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 11:42:54 +0200 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Since the derivation of 'zebra' ultimately from Amharic seems to have gained some popularity here recently (I apologise if I've not been following the discussion attentively; I cannot exclude that everyone mentioning it was in fact rejecting it), I might ask knowledgable readers to point me to an Amharic dictionary *with* /zebra/, /z?bra/, or /ze:bra/ in it. In exchange I could offer to name some *without* it. For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of the language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., if it exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. Maybe someone knows more about this. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 20 12:09:43 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 08:09:43 EDT Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/20/99 1:44:51 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: << "Predictable" does not mean "capable of being hypothesized about >> Lest any readers be confused about this: 'Predictability' and 'reproducible results' are the two 'traditional' requisites of scientific methodology. This is from Dewey and those fellows. The basic idea is that a hypothesis or premise ought to predict observable results. Otherwise it cannot be tested. "Reproducible results" means that the premise can also be tested by others. The predictions of course don't ordinarily confirm the premise in its entirety. They are usually designed to create an inference that the premise is true. Such inferences are generally subject to probability theory, sampling and statistical analysis or to logic or sometimes even to common sense. (In this way, as phenomenologists and such have often pointed out, the "laws of physics" and other scientific truths are never directly observed, but always inferred from limited sets of events. I.e., we don't really know "for sure" that the law of gravity will apply tomorrow. But we really have no evidence that the law of gravity has ever been suspended.) Regards, Steve Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Apr 20 12:44:14 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 15:44:14 +0300 Subject: Broetchen and Handschuh In-Reply-To: <01JA7450ZH2Q94OEWL@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: > -chen in Broetchen and elsewhere must be analyzed as a suffix, for two > reasons: > 1. The meaning of a German compound is essentially that of the last > element, the others being what naive speakers call "modifiers". E.g. > _Bierhefe_ is 'brewer's yeast' (lit. "beer yeast"), not 'yeasty beer'. > Though suffixes determine the syntactic category (and the gender of > nouns), it is the root that expresses/determines the "meaning". -heit > was once a noun, but no more: _Freiheit_ is an abstraction ('freedom'), > not a kind of free anything. _Broetchen_ can be compared only to > _Freiheit_, not to _Bierhefe_. > 2. It causes umlaut of the preceding element: /bro:t/ + /-x at n/ ==> > [bro":tc, at n], not *[bro:tc, at n]. This never happens in compounds. I will grant you that -chen is a clitic, not a compound and that there is no indication that it was ever a separate word in Germanic, but I think you are missing something when you say that Broetchen can only be compared with Freiheit, not with Bierhefe. Just as Bierhefe means 'yeast of the beer (= 'brewer's yeast") so Freiheit means 'state of being free', an old compound of 'free' and 'state', much as English motherhood means 'state of being a mother', etc. So these old compounds still have the genitive + noun format of compounds, it's just that one of the nouns that made up the compounds has been grammaticalized into a suffix and the noun has subsequently been lost from the language. > If _Handschuh_ is original (and logically and formally there could be no > objection), why do we find the personal names in OE and (at least > underlying Handschuhheim) German? Kluge can be spectacularly wrong, but > this time I think he got it right. Unfortunately, Kluge no longer seems to think he had it right. You originally referred to Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der deutschen Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), but when I went to the library to check, I found only the 23rd edition (1995) which has no mention of Germanic *_andasko:haz_, but says of Handschuh merely "durchsichtige Bildung." But in looking around, I found that a 1963 edition of Duden said "die oft vertretene Ansicht das Wort sei aus einem *antscuoh "Gegenschuh" umgedeutet, ist verfehlt." So while differences of opinion make for book reviews and horse races, there seems to be a consensus at the moment that Handschuh is simply 'hand' + 'shoe'. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 20 17:42:03 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 19:42:03 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? In-Reply-To: <003801be8acd$45786740$95d2fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Dear Jens and IEists: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen > Sent: Friday, April 16, 1999 12:50 PM > > > The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in > > Evid.f.Laryng. as > > *eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) > > *me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) [...] > One of the greatest problems in linguistic studies is the overeager facility > with which anomalies are explained with an unjustified mechanism like that > above: "simple sound change". There is not the slightest shred of evidence > for *mwe in IE. Except that one expects it in the light of the alternants *te/*twe and *se/*swe, and that *mwe could not continue to live if it ever has. > And, in fact, suggesting its (*mwe) former presence obscures a better > analysis of the existing facts. Not if the analysis is done my way, in which case the form is needed. > Is it not true that the majority of IEists would subscribe to the idea, > which has been advanced by Beekes, that the IE nominal nominative developed > out of an earlier ergative, in form derived from the genitive? And that, > therefore, the nominal accusative, earlier an absolutive, represents the > basal form? I don't know about opinion statics in the population of IE-ists, nor would I be rank them higher than arguments based on facts. IE itself combines the nom. *-s with the thematic vowel to form *-os, but that of the gen. to form *-es +-yo, which indicates that the two sibilants were not identical; in addition, the gen. morpheme had a vowel (*-os) and formed a weak case, while the nom.sg. ended in pure *-s (perhaps once voiced). Even so, however, we cannot exclude that they are _ultimately_ two different variants of the same original entity. - In the inflection of the IE pronouns the acc. plainly has a morpheme which is absent in the nom. - but all the weak cases are based on the accusative. In this, PIE has a system differing from all other PIE inflection and looking more like Modern Indic or Tocharian. This is not an ergative system, but there may or may not have been one elsewhere in the morphology beside it. > Now I know some will quibble over whether or not the same logic should apply > to pronouns, and yes, I am aware of what seems to be a more conservative > retention of older inflections in the pronouns, but, based on the experience > we have we languages around the world, there is, IMHO, absolutely no > justification for separating nominal and pronominal developments absolutely. In English you must: What's the "me-form" of _house_? What's the s-genitive of _I_? > On this basis, it is rather easy to see that the *basal* forms of the 1st > and 2nd persons, in the singular and plural, are *me, *te, *ne, *ye. There > is no necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. Then why are they there? Why does Old Germanic agree with Old Indic in this respect? By chance? > Apparently before this inflection (or particle), an alternative form for > the first person, analyzable as *He (demonstrative) + *g{^}V (meaning > unknown or disputed), suppleted *me for the ergative or later nominative, > making a *mwe totally unnecessary as a nominative/ergative although we can > surely see it in zero-grade as the Hittite enclitic -mu --- an additional > reason for regarding a "simple sound change" (*mew -> *me) as unnecessary > and ill-advised. Since -mu is the enclitic of ammuk 'me' it has every likelihood of having taken over the -u- from there; ammuk has it from the nom. /uk/, that in turn from *tu (variant of *tu: which gave Anat. *ti: > Hitt. zi-k with -k from 'I'). > It is also rather easy to see that the pronouns have retained an inflection > of -w (or attachment of -w) of which only dubious traces remain in IE nouns. > The 2nd person dual and plural are particularly indicative: these forms > (*yu: / *yu:s [both built on *yew) Yes, there is a /w/ in the inflection of the pronouns, thanks for the support, intended or not. > I must confess I am completely at a loss to understand a reconstruction of > the first and second person accusatives (formerly absolutives) of *nsme and > *usme when *-sme is clearly nothing more that an asseverative particle > particularly in view of *ne. How can we blithely accept *nsme in view of > forms like Homeric no{^}i which is almost certainly simply derived from > *ne/o + *wi:? Confession accepted. The Gk. form is dual, its oldest form is believed to be /no:e/ (Whatelet); that would match Av. /a:va/ as *nH3we. To strain your blood pressure, I take the Skt. sma(:) 'verily' to be parallel with *nsme *usme, only made form the reflexive plural, IE *sme from **sweD-me, through invented stages like *sfeDme > *sfezme > *sfozme > *sphozme > *sphzme > *sphme > acc. *sme 'the ones mentioned', of which it may be the instr. *sme-H1 "per se". > These are not my only objections to the analysis Jens has provided but I > will address the other issues later if it seems there is interest. Some of the objections actually express agreement if you look. > ... Jens From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Apr 20 19:12:12 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 20:12:12 +0100 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: Steve wrote: > It seems the gen- and gno- coexisted in Homer. Both "genea" and "gnotos" >refer to relatives. I have always taken "gnotos" to be from *g'nh3 (to know) and "genea" to be from *g'nh1 (to give birth etc). Are you suggesting the same origin for them both? Or that the "know" word had h1? Or have I missed something? Peter From edsel at glo.be Tue Apr 20 19:02:24 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 21:02:24 +0200 Subject: : German compounds Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Date: Tuesday, April 20, 1999 6:25 AM >"Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >>Dutch still uses the word 'want' for 'mitten'. 'Glove' is 'handschoen', a >>similar formation as in German. >So Dutch both begins and ends with a >non-etymological segment. [Final -n is a misanalyzed plural: > pl. ==> , pl. ]. >>BTW, the stem 'and-' is frequent in toponyms in German and Dutch speaking >>areas, usually to indicate a place opposite something, mostly on the other >>side of a river etc. (Antwerpen, >I vaguely recall there being some folk etymology of Antwerpen >involving the throwing of hands ("hand werpen") by a giant? >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal [E. Selleslagh] Yes, this is a well known folk etymology, but it has nothing to do with 'the opposite side'. It's a variant of David and Goliath: Brabo (David) freed the users of the waterway from the toll levied by the giant Antigon (Goliath) by hacking his hand off and throwing it in the river. The story seems no older than the Renaissance days of Rubens and Van Dyck. The amateur folklorist Canon Floris Prims (early 20th century) thought it meant 'opposite the wharf' ('werf') as the city is on the deep outer side of the meander. The actual etymology is as follows: in old Dutch texts the word 'antwerp' is used to describe a kind of defense against the water; the 'ant-' part refers to 'against', and 'werp' to the verb 'werpen' = 'to throw', like Fr. 'jeter' in 'jet?e' > Eng. 'jetty', so it means something like 'an earthen dam thrown up against the water'. The '-en' ending is still somewhat obscure, but my guess is that it is the Scandinavian suffixed definite article. As a matter of fact, it is generally accepted that the city was founded by the Vikings around the 9th century, as a military camp to control the access via the river. What's left of a wooden palisade around their first settlement on a little butte near the river Scheldt, was actually dug up. (The local (Frankish) dialectal pronunciation 'Antwa^rpen' (stress on first syllable) coincides pretty well with present-day Icelandic pronunciation of the correponding word for ' to cast' (like in 'sko?nwarp' (= TV) or something like that in Iceland, if I remember well. Specialists: please correct me). Throughout its history, the city has never really been integrated into its surroundings (the earstwhile Duchy of Brabant/ Holy Roman Empire), even today. And the opposite bank used to belong to another 'country', the County of Flanders (semi-independent of France), with a very different class of Dutch dialects (basically Ingvaeonic, later influenced by Frankish). It was a city-state (and Hanzestad) and now the second biggest port in Europe, after Rotterdam. Ed. Selleslagh From edsel at GLO.BE Tue Apr 20 19:41:34 1999 From: edsel at GLO.BE (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 21:41:34 +0200 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Tuesday, April 20, 1999 11:52 AM >I wrote: ><< I read in D, Crystal that the loss of inflection in English has been >closely connected with the bilingualism effected by the Danish invasions >(CamEncyl Eng Lang p 32).>> >In a message dated 4/17/99 7:26:13 PM, [Ed Selleslagh] replied: ><phenomenon in Dutch, a closely (geographically and linguistically) related >language, which underwent only a very minor influence from the Viking >invasions?>> >Did the Norse or Danes settle in Frisia (or the correct location for Dutch to >be effected?) I'm only aware of raids, at least at the times of Charlesmagne >and say Knut. [ES] So am I. >The difference might be important, since the Danes did clearly >settle in northern England. Perhaps that explains it. [ES] I don't understand that: If the difference is important, the difference in degree of loss of inflection should have been equally significant, quod non. >I was really doing no more than citing Crystal and he does say it is only a >theory. But it would seem that you'd need a more permanent or constant level >of interaction to need to "streamline" a language in this way. [ES] I fully agree, so I don't think Crystal was right about bilinguism being the cause. ><inflection, in contrast with High-German...>> >I don't know what explanations have been offered for this. I don't know that >the bilingual accomodation Crystal offers applies to this situation. Though >there were a lot of Danes to the north and Wends to the east that could have >supplied the same kind of need for loss of complex inflections. [ES] Maybe, but only sufficiently to the north and in Frisian regions. ><> >Same here. [ES] So, we're still stuck with the fact that only High German kept its complex inflection more or less intact. Maybe we should rather look for an explanation for THAT. Isolation in the Alpine region and then spread to the sub-Alpine regions, as opposed to the open space of NW Europe and the very mobile populations of N and NW Europe, at least in certain times, which might even coincide with the split of High and Low German? Maybe Crystal is right after all, albeit in some more complex way. Any ideas or knowledge (from anybody)? Ed. Selleslagh From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 20 23:03:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 18:03:31 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter &/or Graham Sent: Sunday, April 18, 1999 5:37 AM > Pat said: > >I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by > >Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. > There is some evidence in Sanskrit that requires them to be a consonant: > (a) the failure to lengthen IE /o/ in the 1st person singular perfect, while > lengthening did take place in the 3rd: 1 sing: cakara < ke-ker-He, as > opposed to 3 sing caka:ra < ke-ker-e. This is usually explained by the > presence of the now invisible consonant H in the 1 sing. > [ Moderator's comment: > *ke-kor-H_2e vs. *ke-kor-e (Brugmann's Law). > --rma ] I will attempt to address each of the phenomena you have kindly listed but, in turn, would be more helpful, I think. First, let me address the point raised by Rich. What he wrote suggests that this phenomenon is explained by Brugmann's Law but is it not truer to say that Brugmann proposed a vowel () which manifested itself as in Indo-Aryan in all open syllables and in closed syllables but as in Armenian, Hellenic, Italic and Slavic --- and as in Celtic, Germanic, and Baltic? With some emendations, Brugmann's Law "in the Kleinhans formulation (limiting the phenomenon to positions before a R; later expanded to Lehmann to 'before a semivowel'" lumbered along, half-heartedly endorsed, until Kurylowicz proposed the "laryngeal" explanation in 1927. By 1956, according to Szemerenyi, Kurylowicz had abandoned his emendation (that of a 'laryngeal' preventing the syllable from being open), and this is the formulation of the "Law" with which Rich is working: Kleinhans-Lehmann-Kurylowicz version of Brugmann's Law. Oddly, Kurylowicz' adherents maintained the position he had abandoned; and Gonda (1971) calls the Law "long disputed and now refuted". Frankly, when the Captain abandons ship, it is wise for the sailors to think about the lifeboats also. As some may know, Burrow (1975) came up with another explanation. Now, we *all* are guilty from time to time of citing those authors who support our ideas and rather cavalierly overlooking objections, and there do seem to be a great number of them, posed not by amateurs like myself but by trained IEists --- including the man who first proposed the 'laryngeal' explanation. In view of the unsettled status of consensus regarding the Law, I honestly do not feel that it can be used effectively as a refutation of the idea that, by IE times, 'laryngeals' had graduated into vowels. Now, ideally, I would, of course, be able to offer the "correct" answer to the variation of vowel length in the Sanskrit perfect but I do not claim to be an IEist, and so many IEists have tried and failed to explain this to the satisfaction of their peers that I would flatter myself overduly to think I could propose the final answer to this intriguing problem. I will offer only two thoughts in this connection: 1) I believe it is a mistake to reconstruct any *pre*-IE formant as simply V. 2) I suspect that the answer to the riddle is somewhat along the lines that a 1st person HV and 3rd person HV led to the same phonological result in Indo-Aryan, and that length, in the form of vrddhi differentiation, was introduced to distinguish the two inflected forms, possibly in conjunction with the stress-accent. However, I certainly will not insist that this is the final answer. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Apr 21 05:27:52 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 01:27:52 -0400 Subject: Pennsylvania tree for IE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:59 PM 4/18/99 +0100, you wrote: >On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Sheila Watts wrote: >[on my reference to the Penn tree] >> Well-known, but not to me, alas: could we have a reference? >Sorry. It's this: >Tandy Warnow, Donald Ringe and Ann Taylor. 1995. Reconstructing the >evolutionary history of natural languages. Institute for Research in >Cognitive Science, IRCS Report 95-16. Philadelphia: University of >Pennsylvania. I read this report when it came out. I would be very interested to hear what others think of their research model. Also, I would like to pose a question to the IEists and especially the Balto-Slavic specialists on the list. It is my understanding that Balto-Slavic is located opposite Tocharian on the AHD representation of our Tree. Could someone explain to me what the features are of Balto-Slavic which have gained it this prominant position in the model? I am most interested in learning precisely which syntactical and morphological features are at play. Some years ago I read Prof. Beard's book in which, as I recall, he speaks of certain aspects of Slavic lexical formations as being distinctive. Thanks, Roz Frank Department of Spanish and Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Wed Apr 21 05:42:52 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 01:42:52 -0400 Subject: gender assignment In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 02:36 PM 4/18/99 +0100, you wrote: >On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Nicholas Widdows wrote: >[on the introduction of sex-marking into Basque] >> Most interesting. Are there any cases of it happening on non-o/a >> stems, e.g. * 'old (man)' or * by reinterpretation >> of the native <-a>? Although not meeting the criteria you have set up, the following are three items cited by Iraide Ibarretxe in which the morph <-sa> is imported to set off a "feminine" form from a "masculine" one. Again, I emphasize that these examples don't correspond to what you are asking for and in that sense I agree with Larry's statements below. However, in the examples listed, the sex-marking is expressed by a non-Basque "sex-marked suffix" that parallels that of the Castilian and , the "mayor" and his "wife" even though today we have women serving as mayors so the could be the "mayor" herself. Examples: ad. alargun - alarguntsa "widower/widow" jaiko - jaikosa "god/goddess" aktore - aktoresa "actor/actress" Of these three only the second has much currency to my knowledge, although the pronunciation I've heard is . It is based on and that form on "the lord-on-high". The third is a calque of sorts from Castilian and, therefore, the term has already been "copied" in Euskera. The native word is totally different. [LT] >I am aware of no such case. Sex-marking of the o/a sort in native words >(as opposed to borrowed ones) is still extremely rare, in my experience. >Sex-marking in native words is not particularly prominent at all, and, >where it does occur, it is usually expressed either by a lexical >distinction or by a sex-marked suffix. Agur t'erdi, Roz Frank From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Apr 21 03:30:19 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 21:30:19 -0600 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Voegelin and Voegelin list 'Bunda' as a dialect of Hungu (all but one of its relatives is in Dem Rep of Congo, not Angola according to Ethnologue), Zone H of Guthrie. Curiously, it's not listed in Ethnologue (although it's mentioned in one of the sister language's articles), but Ruhlen has it listed in the Yaka subgroup of Zone H. The Comparative Bantu On-Line Dictionary is a bust right now, so I can't look anything up (the only Bantu dictionary I have at hand is Swahili (Zone G)). Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: [ moderator snip ] > For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique > sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from > Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been > unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of > the language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., > if it exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. Maybe > someone knows more about this. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 21 06:58:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 02:58:57 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/20/99 11:16:23 PM, Peter wrote: <> I'm not sure. I'm presuming that both are derivative of *gen- or *gen(-H-) (or the *gno- I see occasionally.) It seems relevant however that "gnotos" is used to refer both to knowledge and kinship by Homer. ("kin and ken".) If the difference between the two connotations was expressed earlier or later with h1 and h3, it doesn't seem to show up in Homer's "gnotos" (later "gnostos.") To make it worse, "gignomai" (later ginomai) will mean to be born - but can mean things like join up, but "gignosko" (later ginosko) usually means to know in a number of senses, including to be familiar with. (But also to know, fut. in Homer: "gnosomai".) But it seems "gignomai" in the passive reverts to "gegenemai." Hard to keep track of. And I don't know if any of these stems reflect the h1 and h3 difference. [ Moderator's comment: No. There are two different roots here, *gno:- = *gn{e/o}H_3 "know" and *genH_1 "beget, give birth". The verbal adjective collapses due to sound change in Greek, but the very data you provide show the difference. Compare Latin (g)no:sco: vs. genus, Skt. jn~a:-ta- "known" vs. ja:-ta- "born". --rma ] I brought up "genea"/"genos" because it appears to exist alongside of "gnotos" in Homer and both are used to refer to kin or relatives. (Alongside btw of things like "goneus"> father, parent.) I haven't had the time to see if all this is just the result of Homer's multiple dialects, but now I'm just trying to get an idea of the chronology of how /gno-/ travelled. [ Moderator's note: Compare the English phrase "kith and kin", originally "those known and those related", not "relatives" only. "kith" < *gnoH_3, "kin" < *genH_1. --rma ] Is h1 versus h3 supposed to be connected with the absence or presence of the gen-/gn- transposition? Where does the h1/h3 distinction come from in the *g'n- reconstruction? Is it from Hittite or Sanskrit? [ Moderator's response: It represents two difference consonants which explain the difference in vowel quality in the descendant forms. See Saussure, _Me'moire_. --rma ] Hope this makes sense. Regards, Steve Long From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Wed Apr 21 07:00:32 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 09:00:32 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Glen Gordon schrieb: [ moderator snip ] > MAG.HANS-JOACHIM ALSCHER: > In fact, -CnD# > -Cr(D)# [...] -r/-n-neuters and 3rd pers. pl. > secondary/perfect [abibharur vs. abharan < *e-bhi-bher-nt vs. > *e-bher-ont; yakrt/yaknas < *yekwnt/*yekwnes]. Not -Cn# > -Cr# as maintained by some list members, so what about *h1newn "9" > with final -n ? > Actually I'm curious whether you find -C- to be a necessary part of > this rule and whether it can simply suffice to say *-nD# > *-r(D)#. [ moderator snip ] C is the symbol for any consonant and # for the end of the word, so the law should be read "the cluster sonantic n + dental in final word position changes to sonantic r [+ dental which disappears normally] in final word position". Consonantic n + dental in final word position remains, as you can see by considering the pair a-bhar-an from *e-bher-ont vs. a-bi-bhar-ur from *e-bhi-bher-nt and so on. -- Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 21 07:13:31 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 03:13:31 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: In a message dated 4/20/99 11:54:07 PM, edsel at GLO.BE wrote: <> You're right. I got confused. I wrote: <> [ES] wrote: <> And I forgot to bring up, to the South, the Romance speakers, the ever-considered but often rejected Gauls and I guess at a certain point Franks becoming Romance speakers and of course speakers of medieval Latin. And Hungarian in the farther southeast. That rounds it up pretty good except for those in << Isolation in the Alpine region...>> Regards, Steve Long From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Wed Apr 21 07:21:04 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 09:21:04 +0200 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal schrieb: > "Glen Gordon" wrote: > >JENS RASMUSSEN: > > Now, it is also a fact that s-stems have alternants with > > stem-final /t/: *nem-os/-es- 'worship', *nem-eto-s 'holy'; > > *lewk-ot/-es- 'daylight', and the eternally troublesome > > *meH1-not-/*meH1-ns- 'month' and the ptc. in *-wot-/-us-. > >MIGUEL: > > I note that at least the last two examples seem to show an > > inverted "reading rule". We have meH1not(s), Gen. meH1n(e)sos; > > and Skt. nom/acc. n. sg. -vat (*-wot), vs. fem. -us.i: (*-wsiH2) > > etc. In other words, these look like cases of -t word-finally > > and -s- medially. What to make of them? > >"-t word-finally"?? I'm shocked that you would utter those words. How > >does this bode for **-t > *H1? > This is *-ts. > >MIGUEL: > > As to *meH1- itself, it is interesting to note the variant *met- > > (Pokorny 2. me:-, me-t- "mow" (*H2meH1-/*H2met-) and 3. me:-, > > me-t- "measure", forms with *met-, like Slav. meto~ referenced > > there). That looks like *metV ~ *meH1/*meH1C-. > > > >Why does Pokorny write it *me-t- instead of *met- and why can't we > >consider *-t- a verbal affix or possibly two different verbs? > We could consider it an affix if the alternation had been *me-, > *met- (or *me:- ~ *me:t-). But it's *me:- ~ *met- I believe that the enclitic forms of ancient Greek me / se / he (< * me, twe, swe) represent the original forms without any affixes. As you can read at http://members.pgv.at/homer/indoeuro/ I consider those forms as the original subject form of personal pronouns (the recent accusative originally had the function of an absolute case with the ending -e for non-gender-marked words as personal pronouns and the endings -m for animate / -D for inanimate [cf. Latin quem / quid; heteroclita in -Cr[D] / -Cn+ending from *-CnD / -Cn+ending]. I am assuming that the later perfect originally had the function of a [stativic] intransitive and showed concordance to the ending -e of the subject case of personal pronouns, therefore: *mE / *t[w]E / *s[w]E reduplication+E -verb- h2E / t[h2]E / 0E, cf. "primary" [transitive] reduplication+I -verb- mI / sI / tI / ntI with concordance to locative in -I [original ergative]... -- Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Wed Apr 21 07:29:53 1999 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag.Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 09:29:53 +0200 Subject: glottalic theory Message-ID: Peter &/or Graham schrieb: > I've read recently that early Finnish borrowings from Germanic (e.g. aja- > "drive") show that the traditional plain voiced stops (PIE *g & *d) were > indeed voiced in proto-Germanic. This means they could not have been > voiceless ejectives as the glottalicists suggest. (Voiced implosives would > not explain the near absence of *b). The writer of the article suggested a > process by which voiceless ejectives became voiced in Germanic, and then > devoiced, which rather removes any advantage the glottalic theory has over > the traditional theory in explaining the Germanic sound shift. > Can anyone out there confirm the Finnish evidence, and if it is indeed > accurate, can anyone show how we can continue to support the glottalic > theory in the face of it? Do you know the theory of Merlingen that *bh/*dh/*gh... represent original implosive b / d / g ...? [PIE system *p,t,k,kw,k?/*(b),d,g,gw,g?/*implosive b,d,g,gw,g? ~ 'b,'d,'g,'gw,'g?]. -- Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Yours sincerely Bibliotheksrat Mag.phil. Hans-Joachim Alscher Tel.: 0043/664/3553640 oder 0043/2742/200/2769 (Buero) e-mail: mailto:hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (dienstlich) e-mail: mailto:hans-joachim.alscher at pgv.at (privat) e-mail: mailto:alscher at web.de (privat) Homepage: http://members.pgv.at/homer/ Niederoesterreichische Landesbibliothek A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Landhausplatz 1 Tel.: 0043/2742/200/2847 (Fax: 3860) e-mail: mailto:post.k3 at noel.gv.at Homepage: http://www.noel.gv.at/service/k/k3/index.htm OPAC: http://www.noel.gv.at/ssi/k3.ssi OPAC: http://www.landesbibliotheken.at/ OPAC: http://www.dabis.at/dabis_w.htm Fachhochschulstudiengang Telekommunikation und Medien A-3109 Sankt Poelten, Herzogenburger Strasse 68 Tel.: 0043/2742/313228 (Fax: 313229) Homepage: http://www.fh-stpoelten.ac.at/ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 21 07:59:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 08:59:01 +0100 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: > Since the derivation of 'zebra' ultimately from Amharic seems to have > gained some popularity here recently (I apologise if I've not been > following the discussion attentively; I cannot exclude that everyone > mentioning it was in fact rejecting it), I might ask knowledgable readers > to point me to an Amharic dictionary *with* /zebra/, /z?bra/, or /ze:bra/ > in it. In exchange I could offer to name some *without* it. I was the one who first drew attention to the proposed Amharic origin, from a reported Amharic `zebra'. This is the etymology given as "probable" in Partridge's _Origins_; Partridge attributes this to Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. I did cover myself by saying something like "this looks good if the Amharic word is real." > For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique > sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from > Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been > unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of > the language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., > if it exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. Maybe > someone knows more about this. I've just checked the Ethnologue page on Angola, at http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/Ango.html This reports a Bantu language called Mbunda or Chimbunda, spoken in both Angola and Zambia. It also mentions a second and quite distinct language called Mbunda or Gimbunda, which is apparently spoken in Zaire and Zambia, but not in Angola. I note also that the site reports another Bantu language for Angola, called Luchazi, with an alternative name Ponda, and still another Bantu language, called Mbundu or Bondo, among many other things. The Africanists have my deepest sympathy in trying to cope with this dizzying blizzard of alternative names. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Apr 20 20:11:44 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 16:11:44 -0400 Subject: Celtic substrate influence Message-ID: Frank Rossi wrote > 1) in North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, which are considered, > rightly or wrongly, the most Celtic areas of Spain, the two forms of the > past tense have been reduced in normal usage to one (the simple past) > and > 2) a similar phenomenon can be observed in Northern France, Northern Italy > and SOUTH GERMANY Reduction of different ways of expressing past events is found elsewhere also. In IE languages, it happened twice in Indian: Imperfect and aorist coalace in Pali into a single past tense; the new preiphrastic resultative based on the PPP was created to replace the reduplicated perfect. The latter then supplanted the former in latter Prakrits. Latin Perfect contains forms that go back to the aorist or perfect in PIE. That too suggests a resultative => `present perfect' => past. Bybee et al ``The evolution of grammar'' give more likely examples of resultative/present perfect becoming either simple past or a perfective past. It seems that we do not need substratum explanations for this. -Nath From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Wed Apr 21 11:58:27 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:58:27 +1000 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:20 +0100." Message-ID: [ note to moderator snipped ] Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:20 +0100 (BST) From: Larry Trask On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > Larry, what is the phenomenom of Aquitanian that makes > unpronounceable. thanks The /dr/ cluster. Pre-Basque absolutely lacked plosive-liquid clusters, and, in all early borrowings from Latin and Romance, such clusters were invariably eliminated in one way or another. See sections 18.4-18.5 of Michelena's Fonetica Historica Vasca for a list of examples, including such familiar ones as these: Lat --> Bq `book' Lat --> Bq `glory' Lat --> Bq * --> , `grain' Lat --> Bq `interest, usury' Rom --> Bq * --> `rustic gate' Lat --> Bq `pale yellow' Lat --> Bq `feather' Rom --> old Bq `rule' Rom --> old Bq `cruel' Further to Larry's assertion that the plosive-liquid cluster was not available in early euksara and have been elimenated I have found the following entries made by Azkue that he asserts are native words. Larry would you say that there is not one word in this list that is not problematic for your thesis, that is you can source every single one of these words from outside euskara. I would be certainly grateful for the source of each of them. cheers jon patrick -BR- abra abrasta abrastasun abre abrigu abruzko allibre bragaro brager brai braiel brama branda branga brantza brasa brast bratz bratzen brau brazen brazeri brazilia breiel breka breska bri brial brianda brida brila brina brinbel bringa brintza brintzal briskoka brist britxi briu broga broju broka brokal broketa brokil broska brosta brozel brrrrra brrrrtxo brukul brus bruxka debru diabru dulabre ebri golanbre hebro inobre kalanbria kobru kolobru lanbri lanbro lanbrots lebra lenbreina pebre salobre zabrandila zanbro -GL- danglo garrangla glask glope ingla sengle txingla zingle -GR- binagrera engreinatu engrenatu graba grainoe grangina grango granpoi grantzu grask graspa gredale greinu greste greu grilo grima grimu grina gripa grisela grisola grosain ingresti -KR- azukre kankredo krak kraka krakada krako kramela kranka krask kresal krial krik krika kriket krima krinka krisela krisk krisket krisketa kriskitin krisma krispi kristegi krizkina kroka krokaildu kroska krosko kroskoil krozka krozta kruselu kruspet kruxenta lakrikun -KL- atxiklandara beklaire istaklok karrankla kilimiliklik klak klaka klaska klasketa klausk klink kliska kloka kloska kluk kluka klunka klunklun maxkla -BL- ablieste arranblatu blanka blau bleta blink bloka blunda ebli enblai kobla txibli -PR- anproi april apriti eskalaproi eskopre kepra kuprits lapran litxiprin prei presa primal printz prizt progu txipristin -PL- enpla kanplengo kopla kupla mazapla pla plabux plai plaiut plapa plast plau plaust plausta plautiri plaxu ple plen pleta plox ploxa plunp plust sipla txanplet txapla txaplata txiplita txiploi txirriplot zapla zarraplaka zipla ziplo -TR- aaztru astru atraka atralaka atrapa atrapario atreka atruiz azitrai aztru balestra balotra butroe buztre entrabalo erretrain estrabia estramina estrazia estrongo estroxa iztrepu jikotria kalamastra kaletra kalostra kamastra katramila kontra kotra kulastra kutrilo lantro lantrotxa lantru laratro laustro letranta mastra matraka matran matraza matrazu maztranga mostratxa motrotx muskentra mustratxa ostro patraka petraile petral petreska pitrika potro potroska putrus sastra sestra sostra sostroko traba trabaila trabela trabes trafa tragas tragatz tragu traila traka trakel trakulo tramada tramakulu traman tramu tranbalaldi tranbil tranbuila tranga trangala trankart trantxela traol trapal trapala trapasa trapata trapika trapil traska traskil trasko trasmail trata trauski traust trebe trebes treheil treina tremes trenkada trenta trentin trentxairu trepel tresabi tresen treska tresna tretxu tretza triaga triba trigun trikimaka trikimako trikote triku trila trimin trimulu tringa tringit tringitz tringu trinka tripikio tripili tripot triska trisku trispi triza troba troil troka troko trokol trokot trokota tronpoilo tropita trozal trozel truin truisu truk truka trukut trumil trunbil truntxu trupita zalatrako zitraino zintrino ziztraka ziztrin -TL- none -DR- adrailu almadraka andra andrapo andre andreina baladre bildri boldrio draga dragatz drak drangal drank draul draun drausk dretxu drin dritxo drola dronda drosel drunda drungulu eldro endratxa endrezera endrezu faldra foldra ijendro ildroski indriska indrizilu izendru kolondrin landrila lodrot mandran mendrezka mindrin olandriko pindrua podra txandria txandrio txildrin txilindron zalandra zendrailu zilindroin zoldra -DL- none Jon ---------------------------------------------------------- Prof. Jon Patrick BH +61-2-9351 3524 Sybase Chair of Information Systems FX +61-2-9351 3838 Basser Dept. of Computer Science University of Sydney Sydney, 2006 NSW Australia WEB: http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~jonpat ----------------------------------------------------------- From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Apr 21 13:12:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 14:12:08 +0100 Subject: Pennsylvania tree for IE In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990420193230.30af1844@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Roslyn M. Frank wrote: [on the Pennsylvania tree for IE] > I read this report when it came out. I would be very interested to > hear what others think of their research model. So would I. I have seen virtually no commentary, but then I don't see the IEist journals. A potential difficulty, of course, is that the authors have arbitrarily, if carefully, selected the particular characters to be fed into their tree-drawing program. It is always possible that a different set of characters might yield a different tree. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Apr 21 15:09:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 10:09:19 -0500 Subject: H1 and t?? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 1999 12:42 PM >On Mon, 19 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>>The IE system has been basically correctly reconstructed by Cowgill in >>>Evid.f.Laryng. as >>>*eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) >>>*me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) >>One of the greatest problems in linguistic studies is the overeager facility >>with which anomalies are explained with an unjustified mechanism like that >>above: "simple sound change". There is not the slightest shred of evidence >>for *mwe in IE. >Except that one expects it in the light of the alternants *te/*twe and >*se/*swe, and that *mwe could not continue to live if it ever has. That is only if you assume that *te and *se developed from *twe and *swe, which I specifically deny. And, *te/*twe are not, IMHO, true "alternants"; rather, they are the absolutive (*te) and w-inflection (*twe) of a pronominal root *te. >>And, in fact, suggesting its (*mwe) former presence obscures a better >>analysis of the existing facts. >Not if the analysis is done my way, in which case the form is needed. I specifically deny that. And doing the analysis your way is what I am, of course, questioning. >>Is it not true that the majority of IEists would subscribe to the idea, which >>has been advanced by Beekes, that the IE nominal nominative developed out of >>an earlier ergative, in form derived from the genitive? And that, therefore, >>the nominal accusative, earlier an absolutive, represents the basal form? >I don't know about opinion statistics in the population of IE-ists, nor would >I be rank them higher than arguments based on facts. IE itself combines the >nom. *-s with the thematic vowel to form *-os, but that of the gen. to form >*-es +-yo, which indicates that the two sibilants were not identical; I would be very interested to hear how you justify concluding that the "two sibilants were not identical". I find that surprising since we know only of one sibilant for IE. But if you believe IE had both and , why not say so? As far as nominative -o-s and genitive -es is concerned, Beekes and I would consider the formulation genitive/ergative -e/os. Now we also know of "genitives" in -y in some branches; I consider this inflection to simply be a specialized use of adjectival -y. As for the "form *-es +-yo", which you correctly segment, it seems very likely that adding -yV to the genitive is an attempt to differentiate the genitive-ergative -e/os into genitive -e/os+yV and ergative -e/os. >in addition, the gen. morpheme had a vowel (*-os) and formed a weak case, >while the nom.sg. ended in pure *-s (perhaps once voiced). I am suspicious of all "pure" items. It seems to me that reality is always slightly adulterated. >Even so, however, we cannot exclude that they are _ultimately_ two different >variants of the same original entity. Yes, here we are in agreement. But for "cannot", I would subsititute "may not". > - In the inflection of the IE pronouns the acc. plainly has a morpheme which >is absent in the nom. - And what plain morpheme is that if I may ask for clarification? >but all the weak cases are based on the accusative. In this, PIE has a system >differing from all other PIE inflection and looking more like Modern Indic or >Tocharian. Do not see this at all. >This is not an ergative system, but there may or may not have been one >elsewhere in the morphology beside it. A quick look at Lehmann's _Syntactic Typology_, one of his finest works, will inform you that there is no "magic bullet" for ergative systems, no universal pattern for marking. <0>for the absolutive is common but not diagnostic. >>Now I know some will quibble over whether or not the same logic should apply >>to pronouns, and yes, I am aware of what seems to be a more conservative >>retention of older inflections in the pronouns, but, based on the experience >>we have we languages around the world, there is, IMHO, absolutely no >>justification for separating nominal and pronominal developments absolutely. >In English you must: What's the "me-form" of _house_? What's the s-genitive of >_I_? I normally expand my view over more than English. >>On this basis, it is rather easy to see that the *basal* forms of the 1st and >>2nd persons, in the singular and plural, are *me, *te, *ne, *ye. There is no >>necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. >Then why are they there? You tell me. >Why does Old Germanic agree with Old Indic in this respect? By chance? You are conflating two issues. I maintain, with most IEists I presume, that dual inflection is later in time than singular and plural inflections, and *is built on them*. >>Apparently before this inflection (or particle), an alternative form for the >>first person, analyzable as *He (demonstrative) + *g{^}V (meaning unknown or >>disputed), suppleted *me for the ergative or later nominative, making a *mwe >>totally unnecessary as a nominative/ergative although we can surely see it in >>zero-grade as the Hittite enclitic -mu --- an additional reason for regarding >>a "simple sound change" (*mew ->*me) as unnecessary and ill-advised. >Since -mu is the enclitic of ammuk 'me' it has every likelihood of having >taken over the -u- from there; ammuk has it from the nom. /uk/, that in turn >from *tu (variant of *tu: which gave Anat. *ti: >Hitt. zi-k with -k from 'I'). This is hopelessly muddled as far as I am concerned. Hittite ammuk is a stressed form for 'me' fairly certainly combining IE *e-, demonstrative + *me, 1st person + *-w, inflection (I believe its signficance is to mark topicality) + *g^-, pronominal marker (I believe its original significance is to mark maleness). It is backassward to suggest that -mu has "taken over the -u- from" ammuk. Rather, ammuk has incorporated mu into a fuller form expanded by a- and -k. >>It is also rather easy to see that the pronouns have retained an inflection >>of -w (or attachment of -w) of which only dubious traces remain in IE nouns. >>The 2nd person dual and plural are particularly indicative: these forms (*yu: >>/ *yu:s [both built on *yew) >Yes, there is a /w/ in the inflection of the pronouns, thanks for the support, >intended or not. I am always willing to support what seems to be the best answer of the moment. >>I must confess I am completely at a loss to understand a reconstruction of >>the first and second person accusatives (formerly absolutives) of *nsme and >>*usme when *-sme is clearly nothing more that an asseverative particle >>particularly in view of *ne. How can we blithely accept *nsme in view of >>forms like Homeric no{^}i which is almost certainly simply derived from *ne/o >>+ *wi:? >Confession accepted. The Gk. form is dual, its oldest form is believed to be >/no:e/ (Whatelet); that would match Av. /a:va/ as *nH3we. To strain your blood >pressure, I take the Skt. sma(:) 'verily' to be parallel with *nsme *usme, >only made form the reflexive plural, IE *sme from **sweD-me, through invented >stages like *sfeDme > *sfezme > *sfozme > *sphozme > *sphzme > *sphme > acc. >*sme 'the ones mentioned', of which it may be the instr. *sme-H1 "per se". Invention is the mother of comedy. >>These are not my only objections to the analysis Jens has provided but I >>will address the other issues later if it seems there is interest. >Some of the objections actually express agreement if you look. Yes, I have looked, and we do agree on a -w inflection for IE pronouns. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Apr 21 16:51:00 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 11:51:00 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Sunday, April 18, 1999 1:07 AM [ moderator snip ] > I opened Lehmann and immediately put my finger on syllabicity in the last > chapter. Embarrassing! But I know why I didn't recall it: that chapter (a) > had no relevance to my actual interest, viz. Germanic reflexes of laryngeals, > and (b) it struck me as utterly nonsensical. Why do you not explain why you consider it "nonsensical". > My gut feeling aside, there's an obvious problem with it even in terms of > structuralist theory. On p. 112 Lehmann states: "If we find no phonemes in > complemetary distribution at the peak of the syllable, we cannot assume a > segmental phoneme for this position." My own gut feeling is that there is no problem whatsoever. I will quote what Lehmann says before this quotation: "We can construct one more stage of pre-IE, a pre-stress period. If stress gave rise to conditioned variants [e e{sub} e:], an an earlier periodsuch stress must have been non-distinctive. In accordance with its most common reflex the most open segment of the pre-IE syllable, the syllabic peak, is usually written e, as in Benveniste's reconstruction of the IE root. The syllabic peak does not, however, contrast *directly* with any vowel. Consequently an analysis of the pre-stress stage of pre-IE with a vowel phoneme e is misleading. If we find no phonemes in complementary distribution at the peak of a syllable, we cannot assume a segmental phoneme for this position. The peak of the syllable, syllabicity, must have been a prosodic feature." All Lehmann is saying is that since no specific vowel can be specified at the syllabic peak, one that becomes phonemic by contrast with other phonemic vowels (where "phonemic" is defined as providing a semantic differentiation: CVC is a different word than CV{1}C), we cannot assume *one* specific vowel (e or anything else) at the syllabic peak in stressed positions. "Syllabicity" is just a innovative way of describing V{?}. > Surely not "phonemes in complementary distribution" -- *contrasting* > phonemes, or something of the sort. "Complementary distribution" in Trask's dictionary means "The relation which holds in a given speech variety between two phones which never occur in the same environment." With the exception of the qualification "two", this describes the situation that Lehmann has supposed for the stress-period of IE (e e{sub} e:). You may question his analysis but his terminology seems perfectly in accordance with standard usage. > Whether complementary or contrastive, the supposed difficulty arises because > Lehmann (against Brugmann & Co.) arbitrarily defines [i u] as syllabic > allophones of resonant phonemes /y w/ -- There is nothing arbitrary about this at all. If we assume that IE and AA are related through Nostratic (which you may not prefer to do), the decision is mandatory. IE CiC does not show up in AA as normal C-C but rather always as C-y-C. > Brugmann's notation, where [y w] are written with subscript half-moons, > implicitly makes the vocalic /i u/ fundamental, That is reading a lot into a simple notational device. And what if Brugmann didbelieve this. IE studies have moved along a little bit in the last hundred years. Whatever Brugmann's assumptions may or may not have been, not inconsiderable IEists like Beekes consider as vocalic realizations of consonantal . If you wish to dispute that, the question is currently being discussed on the Nostratic list. So far, the only information there we have to support your position is Bomhard's *mention* of a paper by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov *with no details*. Do you have any arguments for your position? > whereas for /m n l r/ the non-syllabic realizations are (hence subscript > circle beneath the syllabic realizations). A subscript circle does not work very well under a . > With /i u/ there is contrast in position between non-syllabics, I have no idea what this means. Could you explain it? > and Lehmann's justification for a prosodic feature of "syllabicity" vanishes. > -- I should add that on p. 113, Lehmann incautiously says that at the next > stage of PIE, with phonemic stress, syllabicity with minimum stress "remains > non-segmental between obstruents..." "Between"? How so? Anything that can > be between phonemes sounds segmental enough to me! How about zero-grade "vowels"? Perhaps you would prefer another way to describe it but Lehmann's meaning is rather clear to me. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From edsel at glo.be Wed Apr 21 18:20:00 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 20:20:00 +0200 Subject: Suffix -ar in IE and Vennemann's Vasconic Message-ID: Not being an IE-ist myself, I would like to ask the knowledgeable people on this list for more (IE) information about the suffixes '-(t)ar' and '-ar' which exist in both IE and in Basque, apparently with roughly the same function and meaning: the former is an ethnonymic-forming device (with 't' after final vowel), while the latter can have a series of meanings, often expressing occupational relationship with something, or something more difficult to describe in a general way (e.g. collectivity, multiplicity). Apart from the non-IE Basque, the languages that use '-ar' frequently and productively I am aware of, are Slavic (e.g. Serbo-Croat 'put/putar' = 'road/road worker'), Albanian (e.g. 'Shqiperia/Shqip(e)tar', 'Albania/ (an) Albanian'), (I'm not sure about other satem lgs.like Indo-Iranian) and maybe Latin (ending -arius and -or(?)). In Germanic there are various suffixes like '-er', at least in some usages (e.g. Londoner, painter(?)), that might qualify. For those who believe in Vennemann's 'Vasconic' substrate theory, this cannot be a coincidence, but my questions are not really about that: 1. What is the Proto-Slavic form, or forms if the -ar suffixes in various usages are not the same? 2. What is their reconstructed PIE form? 3. What about the Germanic -er (one or more)? 4. What about Latin -or (actor) and -arius (and -alis, -aris, etc.)? Ed. Selleslagh [ Moderator's comment: Latin -tor is cognate with Skt. -tar "agent, actor", Hittite -tar "idem"; the suffix is not "-or". --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Apr 21 20:16:30 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:16:30 +0100 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Sanskrit : 1 sing: cakara as >> opposed to 3 sing caka:ra >> [ Moderator's comment: >> *ke-kor-H_2e vs. *ke-kor-e (Brugmann's Law). >> --rma ] [Thanks for the correction, Rich - it was a silly mistake of mine.] Pat then offers material, which I suspect is from Collinge, offering criticisms of Bruggmann's Law, which I accept as valid (though not decisive). He then goes on: >As some may know, Burrow (1975) came up with another explanation. And as you know, Pat, Burrow's explanation doesn't work either. It appears to work because as Collinge puts it (page 18 in my edition) "Burrow allows analogies of his own choosing, but not of others'" Pat then sugggests: >I suspect that the answer to the riddle is somewhat along the lines that >a 1st person HV and 3rd person HV led to the same phonological result in >Indo-Aryan, and that length, in the form of vrddhi differentiation, was >introduced to distinguish the two inflected forms, possibly in conjunction >with the stress-accent. In fact the process seems to have been the other way: Vedic (I believe) distinguishes 1 sing and 3 sing fairly regularly, but in Classical Sanskrit the 1 sing could take vrddhi grade just like the 3 sing., so analogy (or whatever) worked to make the two forms identical, rather than to disambiguate them. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Apr 21 20:00:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 21:00:51 +0100 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >><>inflection, in contrast with High-German...>> >So, we're still stuck with the fact that only High German kept its complex >inflection more or less intact. Maybe we should rather look for an >explanation for THAT. Isolation in the Alpine region ... Hardly. The High German dialects covered perhaps two thirds of the modern Germany-speaking area. The standard language is most closely allied to the dialect around Meissen, precisely because that was the dialect most widely known. Nowhere near the Alps. We might however look at the timing. Luther's Bible fixes High German to some extent (e.g. the -e endings in ich mache etc, for which he was laughed at even in his own time). Without a literary standard the Low German dialects could change more rapidly. So just when did their loss of inflection occur? Peter From dalazal at hotmail.com Thu Apr 22 05:06:25 1999 From: dalazal at hotmail.com (Diogo Almeida) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 22:06:25 PDT Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: >For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique >sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from >Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been >unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of the >language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., if it >exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. As a Brazilian, I'm familiar with the word /Bunda/. In Brazilian Portuguese, this is the common word for "buttock". The dictionary gives /mbunda/, from the "Quimbundo" language as the etymology for it. There is a great amount of words in Brazilian Portuguese that comes from Bantu languages, due to the slaves that were brought from Angola and Mozambique. A /Bundo/ in Brazilian Portuguese is a member of the Bundo tribe of Angola. The Bundo are a Bantu people. Their language is, according to the dictionary, "Bundo", "Ambundo" or "Quimbundo". In Comrie's "The World's Major Languages", there is a map on page 992, showing the Bantu-speaking area, in which we see "Kimbundu", "Lunda" and "Umbundu", together with "Kongo", as four Bantu languages geographicaly close to each other, on the region of Angola. Angola's capital is Luanda (maybe there is something to do with, I don't know). Historically, the Portuguese were already in close contact with Swahili-speaking people in the middle of the sixteenth century, when they already had conquered Malindi (around 1505), which is in today's Kenya, I think. There are borrowings from Portuguese in Swahili that dates from that time (Comrie's "World Major Lgs" pg.1013). There was a portuguese attack to the city of Aden in 1513 (Aden is in the extreme south-west of the Arabic Peninsula, facing today's Somalia), because they were trying to monopolize the commerce of the Red Sea. It does not seem impossible that a borrowing from Amharic (if "zebra" really comes from Amharic) could have happened at that time or even before, maybe directly from Ahmaric, maybe via Swahili or Arabic. Or even from one of the Bantu languages mentioned before, who would have already borrowed it from Amharic via Swahili. If "zebra" really comes from a Congolese language, be it one of the mentioned above or be it one closely related to those, the explanation is easier, since the Portuguese were already in contact with people speaking those languages in the second half of the fifteenth century (discovery of Congo's and Angola's coast between 1474-1485 by Diogo Cco; expedition on the Congo River in 1484). Well, that's all the information I can give. I hope it helps. Kind Regards, Diogo Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida From edsel at glo.be Thu Apr 22 11:08:09 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 13:08:09 +0200 Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Peter &/or Graham Date: Thursday, April 22, 1999 10:16 AM [ moderator snip ] >Hardly. The High German dialects covered perhaps two thirds of the modern >German-speaking area. The standard language is most closely allied to the >dialect around Meissen, precisely because that was the dialect most widely >known. Nowhere near the Alps. We might however look at the timing. >Luther's Bible fixes High German to some extent (e.g. the -e endings in ich >mache etc, for which he was laughed at even in his own time). Without a >literary standard the Low German dialects could change more rapidly. So >just when did their loss of inflection occur? [Ed. Selleslagh] Aren't you speaking about a relatively late period, when High German had already spread to more northern regions, maybe, inter alia, under the centralizing (but generally opposed) influence of the Holy Roman Empire e.g. ? Do you - or anybody else - have any data about the 'advancement' of HG, let's say from the large-scale migrations onward? I'm not sure, but dialects like that from the N Rhineland seem to indicate a progressing encroachment by HG. The lack of a litterary standard for Low German is not entirely true: Dutch is just that for a subset of Low German dialects. Even though there are virtually no Dutch texts from before the 10th century, all available evidence points to an early loss of most of its inflection, only slightly less than in English. The choice of Luther for High German instead of Low German is probably due to 'marketing opportunism' brought about by the linguistic situation in his time, as described in your posting. Anyway, his choice paved the road for HG to become the standard for the whole of the High and Low German speaking regions, except the Low Countries by the sea. (The isolated, basically HG, Schwyzertuetsch resisted for a long time, but is caving in except for informal conversation - but that is also true for Hamburg Low German, which, BTW, sounds a lot like Antwerp Flemish dialect and is mutually quite intelligible). Best regards, Ed. Selleslagh From jrader at m-w.com Thu Apr 22 10:14:21 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 10:14:21 +0000 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: The supposed Bantu origin of is discussed in an article by R. Loewe in _Zeitschrift fu"r vergleichende Sprachforschung_, v. 61 (1933-34). Loewe refutes a conjectured Amharic origin. Castro and Menendez Pidal completely demolished the African speculations in the '30's, though, by pointing out that , , , , etc., were attested as Iberian Romance names for the wild ass in the Middle Ages (1207 for Castilian, 13th cent. in the Galician version of Alfonso X's _General Historia_ ; see Corominas s.v. for the details and bibliography). I do not have immediate access to Machado's Portuguese etymological dictionary, which might document when the name was transferred from the wild ass to one or more species of zebra. That such a transfer took place seems pretty indisputable--whatever the ulterior origin of the Iberian Romance word. English dictionaries are very slow to update information. _The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology_ (1966) and _The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology_ (1986) continue the long discredited "Congolese" origin. By 1993 Oxford finally saw the light and plumped for the Romance origin the _New Shorter Oxford_. Jim Rader [ moderator snip ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 22 14:32:05 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 09:32:05 -0500 Subject: Suffix -ar in IE and Vennemann's Vasconic Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 1999 1:20 PM > [ Moderator's comment: > Latin -tor is cognate with Skt. -tar "agent, actor", Hittite -tar "idem"; > the suffix is not "-or". > --rma ] For whatever it may be worth, I believe that IE -*te/or is a combination of the simpler elements -*te/o (collective/iterative) and -*(He/o)r(e/o), 'man'. Both elements occur in AA so that there seems to be no need to assume a substrate influence to account for them in IE. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 22 14:40:06 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 09:40:06 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter &/or Graham Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 1999 3:16 PM > Pat then offers material, which I suspect is from Collinge Quite correct. >, offering > criticisms of Bruggmann's Law, which I accept as valid (though not > decisive). He then goes on: > >As some may know, Burrow (1975) came up with another explanation. > And as you know, Pat, Burrow's explanation doesn't work either. It appears > to work because as Collinge puts it (page 18 in my edition) "Burrow allows > analogies of his own choosing, but not of others'" Yes, I was trying implicitly (but should have been explicit) to indicate the the question has not really been satisfactorily answered, and *so* cannot be very decisive for the question of using consonantal 'laryngeals' to explain these interesting long and short vowel phenomena. > Pat then sugggests: > >I suspect that the answer to the riddle is somewhat along the lines that > >a 1st person HV and 3rd person HV led to the same phonological result in > >Indo-Aryan, and that length, in the form of vrddhi differentiation, was > >introduced to distinguish the two inflected forms, possibly in conjunction > >with the stress-accent. > In fact the process seems to have been the other way: Vedic (I believe) > distinguishes 1 sing and 3 sing fairly regularly, but in Classical Sanskrit > the 1 sing could take vrddhi grade just like the 3 sing., so analogy (or > whatever) worked to make the two forms identical, rather than to > disambiguate them. I bow to your better knowledge of Indic. But, the question is: do you still believe that "Brugmann's Law" is a serious argument for the consonantal nature of 'laryngeals' in IE? If you agree with me that it *might* be of significance but not necessarily so, wecan move on to another point if you want. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From DFOKeefe at aol.com Thu Apr 22 17:55:08 1999 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 13:55:08 EDT Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: [ Moderator's comment: To say "Posted without comment" is to comment... --rma ] Hello I-E Listmembers, We have placed a paper we have written entitled 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH AND FINNISH WORDS WITH AN IRISH TIE-IN TO URALIC in section 1. (A.) of our Web page, http://members.aol.com/IrishWord/page/index.htm. We believe that Finnish is related to Indo-European. We suspect that Finnish/Estonian consonantal gradation and Hungarian consonantal alteration are the same phenomenon as Celtic initial mutation and this similarity suggests that Celtic initial mutation is much older than 650 AD, which is the time frame some experts believe it started. Best regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Apr 22 18:51:43 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 13:51:43 -0500 Subject: Broetchen and Handschuh Message-ID: >From: IN%"Indo-European at xkl.com" 20-APR-1999 22:48:05.09 >Subj: RE: Broetchen and Handschuh >On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >> -chen in Broetchen and elsewhere must be analyzed as a suffix, for two >> reasons: >> 1. The meaning of a German compound is essentially that of the last >> element, the others being what naive speakers call "modifiers". E.g. >> _Bierhefe_ is 'brewer's yeast' (lit. "beer yeast"), not 'yeasty beer'. >> Though suffixes determine the syntactic category (and the gender of >> nouns), it is the root that expresses/determines the "meaning". -heit >> was once a noun, but no more: _Freiheit_ is an abstraction ('freedom'), >> not a kind of free anything. _Broetchen_ can be compared only to >> _Freiheit_, not to _Bierhefe_. >> 2. It causes umlaut of the preceding element: /bro:t/ + /-x at n/ ==> >> [bro":tc, at n], not *[bro:tc, at n]. This never happens in compounds. >I will grant you that -chen is a clitic, not a compound and that there >is no indication that it was ever a separate word in Germanic, but I >think you are missing something when you say that Broetchen can only be >compared with Freiheit, not with Bierhefe. Just as Bierhefe means >'yeast of the beer (= 'brewer's yeast") so Freiheit means 'state of >being free', an old compound of 'free' and 'state', much as English >motherhood means 'state of being a mother', etc. So these old >compounds still have the genitive + noun format of compounds, it's >just that one of the nouns that made up the compounds has been >grammaticalized into a suffix and the noun has subsequently been lost >from the language. My choice of _Freiheit_ as an example was not good, for many of the reasons you pointed out. Semantics aside, I still believe that _Freiheit_ and _freedom_ are not compounds, if only because they do not have the stress and intonation pattern of compounds. (This is more obvious in the English example.) That they once *were* compounds is, of course, undeniable. But I should point out that compounds do not normally have a "genitive + noun" format, as you said. Synchronically, genitive-like -s- is very rare in English, while in German it is particularly common on *feminine* first elements, which precisely do *not* have -s in the genitive case: formations such as _Universitaet-s-praesident_ do not contain a genitive formant. No a surprise, really; the PIE type used the *stem* of the first element, with no case ending. >> If _Handschuh_ is original (and logically and formally there could be no >> objection), why do we find the personal names in OE and (at least >> underlying Handschuhheim) German? Kluge can be spectacularly wrong, but >> this time I think he got it right. >Unfortunately, Kluge no longer seems to think he had it right. You >originally referred to Kluge, _Etymologisches Woerterbuch der deutschen >Sprache_, 21st edition (1975), but when I went to the library to check, >I found only the 23rd edition (1995) which has no mention of Germanic >*_andasko:haz_, but says of Handschuh merely "durchsichtige Bildung." >But in looking around, I found that a 1963 edition of Duden said "die >oft vertretene Ansicht das Wort sei aus einem *antscuoh "Gegenschuh" >umgedeutet, ist verfehlt." So while differences of opinion make for >book reviews and horse races, there seems to be a consensus at the >moment that Handschuh is simply 'hand' + 'shoe'. The latest edition of Kluge has changed much, mainly for the best, it seems. But then the personal names must be mere coincidence, and _Handschuhheim_ folk etymology? >Bob Whiting >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Apr 22 20:58:28 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 21:58:28 +0100 Subject: glottalic theory Message-ID: Hans-Joachim Alscher said: >Do you know the theory of Merlingen that *bh/*dh/*gh... represent original >implosive b / d / g ...? [PIE system *p,t,k,kw,k4/*(b),d,g,gw,g4/*implosive >b,d,g,gw,g4 ~ 'b,'d,'g,'gw,'g4]. Yes, I do. The main advantage I can see is that it explains the extraordinary number of occurrences of voiced aspirates at the beginning of words, as opposed to medial or final (about 6 times as many; while for both "plain voiced" and voiceless, it is only about 3 times as many). As is well known, implosives are commoner at the beginnings of words - for example Sindhi implosives only occur word-initially. Unfortunately a velar implosive, although not impossible, is rather rare. J C Salmons "The Glottalic Theory" is a useful resource for this kind of information. Peer From jer at cphling.dk Thu Apr 22 22:16:32 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 00:16:32 +0200 Subject: Pers.pron. In-Reply-To: <001401be8c09$0f725ce0$0d9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [Personal pronouns in PIE; snip of a lot] >>[... O]ne expects [*mwe beside *me] >>in the light of the alternants *te/*twe and >>*se/*swe, and that *mwe could not continue to live if it ever has. > That is only if you assume that *te and *se developed from *twe and *swe, > which I specifically deny. And, *te/*twe are not, IMHO, true "alternants"; > rather, they are the absolutive (*te) and w-inflection (*twe) of a > pronominal root *te. Where is the evidence for their differentiated use? Does YOUR system not force YOU to assume that the "w-inflection" of *me changed from *mwe to *me by the rule you won't have? That also answers the following remark of yours: > I specifically deny that [viz., that earlier *mwe is need under "my > system"]. And doing the analysis your way is what I am, of > course, questioning. Everything should be questioned. >>[...] IE itself combines the >>nom. *-s with the thematic vowel to form *-os, but that of the gen. to form >>*-es +-yo, which indicates that the two sibilants were not identical; > I would be very interested to hear how you justify concluding that the "two > sibilants were not identical". I find that surprising since we know only of > one sibilant for IE. But if you believe IE had both and , why not say > so? I do say so, only in the variant, "IE had had both and ", i.e. the opposition belong to the prehistory of the protolanguage in which they constitute two different morphophonemes for analyses of some depth. The sibilant marking the nominative in IE had two properties not shared by (most) other s's: (1) It causes lengthening of V in the environment VC(C)s#, e.g. nom. *dye:w-s as opposed to 2sg *k^lew-s; (2) it causes a preceding thematic vowel to take on the form /o/, while other s's take /e/: nom. *yo-s 'he who' vs. 2sg *bhere-s (but *yo-m like 1sg inj. *bhero-m and nom.pl. *to-y 'they' like opt. *bhero-yH1-t, etc.). The lengthening is also exhibited by some s's that just happened to occur root-finally (as all consonants could): *ters 'dryness' > *te:rs, reshaped to *te:r-os (like *men-s -> *men-os 'thought'), whence Celtic *ti:ros > OIr. ti:r 'land' (ntr. s-stem); also Ved. ma:s 'flesh' from *me:ms has undergone the further lengthening leading to a form rhyming with m-stem nominatives like Ved. ksa:s 'earth', Av. zii 'winter' - this must have been different from the form of the acc.pl. which once must have ended in stem + -m-s, in the o-stems *-o:ns, which therefore probably once had a different sibilant from the one marking the nominative. Lengthening is also seen in the s-aorist which then apparently had the lengthening s. Now, the derivative present to go with the s-aorist appears too often to be the type in -sk^e/o- for this to be fortuitous (the arrangement of Ved. prcchati : aor. apra:ksam). Other derivative presents are formed with the suffix *-ye/o- (*-e-H2-[ye/o-], stative aor. *-eH1- vs. stative prs. *-H1-ye/o-, denom. in zero as opposed to denom. in *-ye/o- presumably reflecting the two aspect stems, desid. or "future" in *-H1s- vs. *-H1s-ye/o-, etc.), therefore one would like to derive *-sk^e/o- from older *-s-ye/o-. A change of "lengthening s + /y/" to -sk^- may (by only just MAY) be seen in the suffix *-isko-s "belonging to" which may simply be an old izafet-like construction in *-is + *yos with the relative pronoun tagged on to an old nom. in *-is (itself manifestly a reduced variant of *-os): Thus a word like Danish would have meant "Dane who (is", as indeed it does in "a Dane who is king" = "a Danish king". The (non- lengthening) s of the desiderative (future) does not change a follwoing /y/ into -k^-, cf. the cited desid. durative (Skt. future) in *-H1s-ye/o-. It seems rather plain that IE /s/ has more than one source to it. [...] >>in addition, the gen. morpheme had a vowel (*-os) and formed a weak case, >>while the nom.sg. ended in pure *-s (perhaps once voiced). > I am suspicious of all "pure" items. It seems to me that reality is always > slightly adulterated. If so, they are adulterated in two different ways under the same circumstances, and that spells opposition to an unbiased analyst, doesn't it? If you say no to that, investigation stops, and discussion becomes impossible. There is the open backdoor of "vanished variables". But one should not refrain from saying out loud what one observes in places where observations CAN be made, and that's all I'm doing. >>Even so, however, we cannot exclude that they are _ultimately_ two different >>variants of the same original entity. > Yes, here we are in agreement. But for "cannot", I would subsititute "may > not". If you would state a reason for this will of yours I just might take it seriously. BTW, the exact modality of "may not" escapes me in this context. >> - In the inflection of the IE pronouns the acc. plainly has a morpheme which >>is absent in the nom. - > And what plain morpheme is that if I may ask for clarification? The accusative-forming segment *-me (dual variant *-we). >>but all the weak cases are based on the accusative. In this, PIE has a system >>differing from all other PIE inflection and looking more like Modern Indic or >>Tocharian. > Do not see this at all. Then look at the inflection of the Vedic pers.prons. in your Grassmann. They all go the same, and the simply add endings to the accusative - as it is, or as you can esaily unravel it if you're willing. >>This is not an ergative system, but there may or may not have been one >>elsewhere in the morphology beside it. > A quick look at Lehmann's _Syntactic Typology_, one of his finest works, > will inform you that there is no "magic bullet" for ergative systems, no > universal pattern for marking. <0>for the absolutive is common but not > diagnostic. >>>Now I know some will quibble over whether or not the same logic should apply >>>to pronouns, and yes, I am aware of what seems to be a more conservative >>>retention of older inflections in the pronouns, but, based on the experience >>>we have we languages around the world, there is, IMHO, absolutely no >>>justification for separating nominal and pronominal developments absolutely. >>In English you must: What's the "me-form" of _house_? What's the s-genitive >>of _I_? > I normally expand my view over more than English. Then I misunderstood you - as you me: This was restricted to IE, and that goes like English in the respect concerned. >>> There is no necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. >>Then why are they there? > You tell me. What about this: To express dual number? Can't we accept the dual when we SEE it? >>Why does Old Germanic agree with Old Indic in this respect? By chance? > You are conflating two issues. I maintain, with most IEists I presume, that > dual inflection is later in time than singular and plural inflections, and > *is built on them*. That's not the way anything I know looks. On the contrary, the dual is everywhere in the process of being eliminated, and it just beats me why some scholars want that to reflect a stage of uncompleted creation. In addition, the dual has some morphemes all its own, that's not at all the way analogy works, but it IS the way archaisms look. You might as well explain the irregular inflections of the verb "to be" in most IE branches as due to new morphological trends that got cut off. That is very definitely the wrong track, and I would not accept it even if there were unanimity about it. [...] >>Since -mu is the enclitic of ammuk 'me' it has every likelihood of having >>taken over the -u- from there; ammuk has it from the nom. /uk/, that in turn >>from *tu (variant of *tu: which gave Anat. *ti: >Hitt. zi-k with -k from >>'I'). > This is hopelessly muddled as far as I am concerned. Hittite ammuk is a > stressed form for 'me' fairly certainly combining IE *e-, demonstrative + > *me, 1st person + *-w, inflection (I believe its signficance is to mark > topicality) + *g^-, pronominal marker (I believe its original significance > is to mark maleness). It is backassward to suggest that -mu has "taken over > the -u- from" ammuk. Rather, ammuk has incorporated mu into a fuller form > expanded by a- and -k. Nobody can _guess_ these things. But IF (1) Hittite is an IE language and so prone to contain elements corresponding to those found in other IE languages, (2) the vocalism /u/ is not found in these pronouns elsewhere except in the nom.sg. 'thou', and (3) enclitic and orthotone forms are sometimes found to influence each other, also in the direction I propose (a well-known case among many is Germanic *mi:na-z 'my' from *meyn-o-s, a reshaping of *emo-s based on the orthotone gen. *mene influenced by the enclitic gen. *moy; also Lat. meu-s from *meyo-s has taken the /y/ from the enclit. *moy), THEN you can link Hitt. to the rest of IE in a smooth and unforced way if you assume that the /u/ has propagated from 'thou' to 'I' and from 'I' to 'me', and finally from orthotone 'me' to enclit. 'me'. All these steps of spread then occur between closely associate forms. Is that more "backassward" than an explanation based on a morphology the language does not otherwise have? BTW, what is the basis for taking the *-g^ to express topicality? [...] >>To strain your blood >>pressure, I take the Skt. sma(:) 'verily' to be parallel with *nsme *usme, >>only made from the reflexive plural, IE *sme from **sweD-me, through >>invented stages like *sfeDme > *sfezme > *sfozme > *sphozme > *sphzme > >>*sphme > acc. *sme 'the ones mentioned', of which it may be the instr. >>*sme-H1 "per se". > Invention is the mother of comedy. Maybe so, but it is less amusing that some scholars - in this case not you - claim that there is no way from A to B just because they have not even tried to find one. I have shown how the IE system of pers.prons. MAY be seen as underlyingly regular, you may have a different way of achieving the same; but NOBODY should claim that there is NO conceivable way this system could be originally regular. My system, which was only a suggestion, may have its flaws, so don't stop criticizing it, just because I have ready answers to the things I have heard said about it over the years. This IS a dialectic business. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Thu Apr 22 23:11:15 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 01:11:15 +0200 Subject: IE pers.pron. In-Reply-To: <371da06d.79573377@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > [On my IE rec. of pers.pron. - mainly after Cowgill in > >Evid.f.Laryng., viz.:] > >*eg' *tu *we: *yu: *wey *yu:s (nom.) > >*me *t(w)e *nH3we *uH3we *nsme *usme (acc.) > Why *H3 in the dual forms? Couldn't it be *H1(w) with o-Stufe? > In principle, I'd go along with Beekes in reconstructing *-H1 for > the dual of nouns (in view of Greek consonant stem -e < *-H1, and > lengthened vowel elsewhere). The Gk. /-e/ cannot be a syllabic *-H1 if it is to match OLith. augus-e 'the two grown ones' or OIr. di: pherid 'two heels', only IE *-e will do here. However, as the vowel must be a secondary prop-vowel since it has not caused accent/ablaut to move, this is neutral as to whether the consonant ultimately at work was *-H3 or *-H1. Certainly *-H2 is excluded since its well-known effect of lengthening is not caused in the nom.-acc. dual. If there is a long vowel in the 1st dual ending of thematic verbs, Skt. -a:vas, Goth. -o:s, then it cannot be *-oH1-wos if the choice of -e- and -o- as the form of the "thematic vowel" depends on the voicing of the following segment, and of course the Goth. form cannot come from *-eH1wos, so only *-oH3wos would then do. But can we really exclude *-o-wos with no laryngeal? That depends on the rules of Germanic. If Gk. no:^e is identical with Avest. /a:va/ (Skt. a:va:m with added -am), then the etymon can only be *nH3we - but the Gk. omega could have been taken from the enclitic which would be *noH with any laryngeal. Even so there is nothing that directly points to -H1- as the dual marker - unless somebody can dissect the neuter dual in *-yH1 so as to make /H1/ a common dual marker; what would be the morphological principle of that? [...] You say you miss a reference to the (morpho)phoneme /c/ in my assumption of a development of *tw- via *Dw- to *y-/*w- in 'you'. It IS that element I have in mind, only the two problems do not overlap so that I can decide if the stage /c/ has bee reached by the time relevant here. [...] Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Apr 23 03:54:44 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 23:54:44 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: In a message dated 4/22/99 9:37:53 PM, edsel at glo.be wrote: <> The early fragmentation of German dialects has been divided into Low, Central and Upper, but obviously a larger number of dialects were involved. Before the 1400's and the beginning of modern standardization (coeval with the use of German instead of Latin in legal records, the printing press, and Luther's Bible), there were apparently prior tendencies towards standardizing. John Hawkins mentions that "in the north, Low German enjoyed a privileged status until the seventeenth century as the commercial language of the Hanseatic League and was even used as a lingua franca throughout northern Europe." TWML p. 114. (He also mentions "das gemeyne Deutsch" and states that "the basis for the emerging standard language, however, was East Central German.") As a lingua franca (again shared with Franks, Danes, Wends, English, etc.) existing pre-Hanseatic but already with strong foreign exposure, Low German may faced similar conditions to those described in English. This could accomodate the early dates you find for inflection loss. The term High German apparently is used to distinguish upper and central German (both having undergone to some extent the Second Sound Shift) from Low German. Hawkins suggests that High German was in fact a second language to outlying Low German speakers in for example Prussia. This might also suggest some earlier need for inflectional simplification in Low regional dialects before New High German provided an alternative approach to standardization. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Apr 23 06:38:10 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 01:38:10 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Thursday, April 22, 1999 5:16 PM > On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [ moderator snip ] >> That is only if you assume that *te and *se developed from *twe and *swe, >> which I specifically deny. And, *te/*twe are not, IMHO, true "alternants"; >> rather, they are the absolutive (*te) and w-inflection (*twe) of a >> pronominal root *te. > Where is the evidence for their differentiated use? What kind of evidence would you accept? > Does YOUR system not force YOU to assume that the "w-inflection" of *me > changed from *mwe to *me by the rule you won't have? That also answers the > following remark of yours: No, actually it does not. My strong suspicion is that *mwe, *twe, *swe designated topicality, and their use in other cases is transference of function. I believe that *me, *te, and *se are original absolutive/accusative forms, and there is no need to derive them from any other form. Secondly, for your idea to be even vaguely plausible, you should be able to show Cwe -> Ce in non-pronominal words, and, as far as I know, this is not recognized in IE studies are as normal phonological developement. >> I specifically deny that [viz., that earlier *mwe is need under "my >> system"]. And doing the analysis your way is what I am, of >> course, questioning. > Everything should be questioned. That is fair-minded of you, and no sarcasm is intended or implied. [ moderator snip ] >> I would be very interested to hear how you justify concluding that the >> "two sibilants were not identical". I find that surprising since we know >> only of one sibilant for IE. But if you believe IE had both and , >> why not say so? > I do say so, only in the variant, "IE had had both and ", i.e. the > opposition belong to the prehistory of the protolanguage in which they > constitute two different morphophonemes for analyses of some depth. The > sibilant marking the nominative in IE had two properties not shared by > (most) other s's: (1) It causes lengthening of V in the environment > VC(C)s#, e.g. nom. *dye:w-s as opposed to 2sg *k^lew-s; I do not believe that I have ever seen this kind of lengthening mechanism asserted. What is wrong with simply *dyVHw- for a lengthening mechanism? [ Moderator's comment: There is no evidence for a laryngeal in this stem; the length is due to Ablaut ("apophony"), unexplained as yet. --rma ] > (2) it causes a preceding thematic vowel to take on the form /o/, while > other s's take /e/: nom. *yo-s 'he who' vs. 2sg *bhere-s (but *yo-m like > 1sg inj. *bhero-m and nom.pl. *to-y 'they' like opt. *bhero-yH1-t, etc.). I am also not aware of any IE who has successfully asserted that apophony is governed by specific consonants. [ Moderator's comment: It appears to be current in some European schools, that *e/o is [e] before voiceless obstruents and [o] before voiced. I find that there are too many exceptions to accept this. --rma ] Frankly, I wish you could identify a for IE; it would simplify my AA-IE comparisons since, from all I can see, AA and correspond to IE with no indication of apophonic influence. > The lengthening is also exhibited by some s's that just happened to occur > root-finally (as all consonants could): *ters 'dryness' > *te:rs, reshaped > to *te:r-os (like *men-s -> *men-os 'thought'), whence Celtic *ti:ros > > OIr. ti:r 'land' (ntr. s-stem); also Ved. ma:s 'flesh' from *me:ms has > undergone the further lengthening leading to a form rhyming with m-stem > nominatives like Ved. ksa:s 'earth', Av. zii 'winter' - this must have > been different from the form of the acc.pl. which once must have ended in > stem + -m-s, in the o-stems *-o:ns, which therefore probably once had a > different sibilant from the one marking the nominative. I think the more likely explanation of these lengthenings is the presence of a resonant; also, I am rather sceptical of IE <*z> exercising its lengthening across an intervening consonant (if only a resonant). > Lengthening is also seen in the s-aorist which then apparently had the > lengthening s. Now, the derivative present to go with the s-aorist appears > too often to be the type in -sk^e/o- for this to be fortuitous (the > arrangement of Ved. prcchati : aor. apra:ksam). I agree that this is an interesting congruity. > Other derivative presents are formed with the suffix *-ye/o- (*-e-H2-[ye/o-], > stative aor. *-eH1- vs. stative prs. *-H1-ye/o-, denom. in zero as opposed > to denom. in *-ye/o- presumably reflecting the two aspect stems, desid. or > "future" in *-H1s- vs. *-H1s-ye/o-, etc.), therefore one would like to > derive *-sk^e/o- from older *-s-ye/o-. I think that is playing rather loosely with normal phonological developments. > A change of "lengthening s + /y/" to -sk^- may (by only just MAY) be seen in > the suffix *-isko-s "belonging to" which may simply be an old izafet-like > construction in *-is + *yos with the relative pronoun tagged on to an old > nom. in *-is (itself manifestly a reduced variant of *-os): Thus a word like > Danish would have meant "Dane who (is", as indeed it does in "a Dane who is > king" = "a Danish king". *-ko by itself means 'belonging to'; the *-s is simply a plural formant. > The (non- lengthening) s of the desiderative (future) does not change a > follwoing /y/ into -k^-, cf. the cited desid. durative (Skt. future) in > *-H1s-ye/o-. It seems rather plain that IE /s/ has more than one source to > it. If your proposal of lengthening foregoing vowels is based on such unusual phonological developments (at least for IE), I can hardly put much trust in it. >>> in addition, the gen. morpheme had a vowel (*-os) and formed a weak case, >>> while the nom.sg. ended in pure *-s (perhaps once voiced). >> I am suspicious of all "pure" items. It seems to me that reality is >> always slightly adulterated. > If so, they are adulterated in two different ways under the same > circumstances, and that spells opposition to an unbiased analyst, doesn't > it? I do not doubt that different results indicate different conditioning factors but I see no major objection to supposing that the conditioning factor is probably stress-accent if not simply a desire to differentiate phonologically identical forms fulfilling gradually differentiated functions. > If you say no to that, investigation stops, and discussion becomes > impossible. I have not said "no". > There is the open backdoor of "vanished variables". But one should not > refrain from saying out loud what one observes in places where observations > CAN be made, and that's all I'm doing. I agree 100%. >>> Even so, however, we cannot exclude that they are _ultimately_ two >>> different variants of the same original entity. >> Yes, here we are in agreement. But for "cannot", I would subsititute >> "may not". > If you would state a reason for this will of yours I just might take it > seriously. BTW, the exact modality of "may not" escapes me in this > context. -may not- implies that we are not permitted to exclude --- even though we might be able to. You must know that I am merely accepting Beekes on this point. I also once toyed with two different s'es but I am convinced that the explanation offered by Beekes is the stronger and more economical explanation. >>> - In the inflection of the IE pronouns the acc. plainly has a morpheme >>> which is absent in the nom. - >> And what plain morpheme is that if I may ask for clarification? > The accusative-forming segment *-me (dual variant *-we). You certainly seem to like "variants". A look at AA may convince you (e.g. Egyptian -wj, dual) that, most likely, the dual -w has a separate origin. After all, although a variation is attested is some IE languages like Hittite, it is not, so far as I know, established for IE. >>> but all the weak cases are based on the accusative. In this, PIE has a >>> system differing from all other PIE inflection and looking more like >>> Modern Indic or Tocharian. >> Do not see this at all. > Then look at the inflection of the Vedic pers.prons. in your Grassmann. > They all go the same, and the simply add endings to the accusative - as it > is, or as you can esaily unravel it if you're willing. Not trying to be obtuse but I do not really understand your point here. [ moderator snip ] >>> In English you must: What's the "me-form" of _house_? What's the >>> s-genitive of _I_? >> I normally expand my view over more than English. > Then I misunderstood you - as you me: This was restricted to IE, and that > goes like English in the respect concerned. English has been so buffeted by the winds of linguistic chance that I would not feel comfortable asserting anything about IE from English patterns. And this is to be expected. Apparently nearly every identifiable ethnic identity in Western European has invaded the island at one time or another; and all have left their marks. >>>> There is no necessity of reconstructing dual forms for earliest IE. >>> Then why are they there? >> You tell me. > What about this: To express dual number? Can't we accept the dual when we > SEE it? All I was saying is that most IEists do not believe (and I agree) that the dual is as old as the singular and plural in IE. A dual is certainly not necessary in any language to express "two of" something. >>> Why does Old Germanic agree with Old Indic in this respect? By chance? >> You are conflating two issues. I maintain, with most IEists I presume, that >> dual inflection is later in time than singular and plural inflections, and >> *is built on them*. > That's not the way anything I know looks. On the contrary, the dual is > everywhere in the process of being eliminated, and it just beats me why > some scholars want that to reflect a stage of uncompleted creation. Well, as we all know, the pendulum swings both ways. > In addition, the dual has some morphemes all its own, that's not at all the > way analogy works, but it IS the way archaisms look. Obviously, after the dual *was* developed, its rather specialized (and less frequent) use would tend to preserve its forms in an archaic state. > You might as well explain the irregular inflections of the verb "to be" in > most IE branches as due to new morphological trends that got cut off. I would rather say generally that IE probably be not have a verb for "to be", and that a verb "to sit" (be at) was introduced in some dialects to fill the need while others borrowing a root for "to grow" (come to be at) and yet others liked "to stay" (persistently be at"). If "to be" existed in earliest IE, the need for suppletion would be unmotivated. > That is very definitely the wrong track, and I would not accept it even if > there were unanimity about it. Well, I have a few of those myself. [ moderator snip ] >> This is hopelessly muddled as far as I am concerned. Hittite ammuk is a >> stressed form for 'me' fairly certainly combining IE *e-, demonstrative + >> *me, 1st person + *-w, inflection (I believe its signficance is to mark >> topicality) + *g^-, pronominal marker (I believe its original significance >> is to mark maleness). It is backassward to suggest that -mu has "taken over >> the -u- from" ammuk. Rather, ammuk has incorporated mu into a fuller form >> expanded by a- and -k. > Nobody can _guess_ these things. Correct. All we can do is offer explanations that are in concordance with observed phenomena and common sense but, you are right, no absolute proof is possible. > But IF (1) Hittite is an IE language and so prone to contain elements > corresponding to those found in other IE languages, (2) the vocalism /u/ is > not found in these pronouns elsewhere except in the nom.sg. 'thou', and (3) > enclitic and orthotone forms are sometimes found to influence each other, > also in the direction I propose (a well-known case among many is Germanic > *mi:na-z 'my' from *meyn-o-s, a reshaping of *emo-s based on the orthotone > gen. *mene influenced by the enclitic gen. *moy; also Lat. meu-s from *meyo-s > has taken the /y/ from the enclit. *moy), This is, IMHO, a completely erroneous analysis. Germanic *mi:na-z is composed of IE *me + -y, adjectival/genitive + -nV, nominalizer + -s (case marker). *e-mo-s is an emphatic expansion of *me by *e-, in keeping with a general tendency to expand monosyllables to disyllables + -s, case marking. It has only the last two elements in common with *meynos. > THEN you can link Hitt. to the rest of IE in a smooth and unforced way if you > assume that the /u/ has propagated from 'thou' to 'I' and from 'I' to 'me', > and finally from orthotone 'me' to enclit. 'me'. I do not assume that the basal form is *tu(:), and so cannot justify migrating 's. > All these steps of spread then occur between closely associate forms. Is > that more "backassward" than an explanation based on a morphology the > language does not otherwise have? The basis for suspecting "topicality" for -w is not present in IE nouns. It is necessary to reach beyond IE to "justify" it. > BTW, what is the basis for taking the *-g^ to express topicality? I do not take it so. I believe it expresses 'maleness', based on analysis of IE roots containing and extra-IE morphemes. [ moderator snip ] >> Invention is the mother of comedy. > Maybe so, but it is less amusing that some scholars - in this case > not you - claim that there is no way from A to B just because they have > not even tried to find one. I have shown how the IE system of pers.prons. > MAY be seen as underlyingly regular, you may have a different way of > achieving the same; but NOBODY should claim that there is NO conceivable > way this system could be originally regular. Again, I cannot help but willingly agree. The original system should have been overwhelmingly "regular" but the pattern is difficult to see now --- even in our reconstructions for earliest IE. > My system, which was only a suggestion, may have its flaws, so don't stop > criticizing it, just because I have ready answers to the things I have > heard said about it over the years. This IS a dialectic business. My! We agree more in this post than we ever have. I only hope that is an omen for the future. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From edsel at glo.be Fri Apr 23 11:21:06 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 13:21:06 +0200 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Even though I cannot contribute to the etymology of 'zebra', I can help to clarify the confusion around the various names of the Bantu languages cited. In fact, many of the names containing e.g. 'mbunda' are actually the same. The cause of this is that most Congo-Kordofanian lgs. and Bantu in particular, use mainly PREfixes as grammatical and other devices. Just a choice (the actual set of prefixes varies according to the 'class' of the root): 1.-mbunda : root, or 'a' mbunda tribe member. Note that the mb is one phoneme (also Ba-ntu!). 2.ba/wa-mbunda : plural (like Wa-tutsi and Ba-hutu) (but : mtoto/vitoto = child/children) 3.ki/gi/tshi-mbunda : the 'Mbundese' language (ki- is the basic form, the voiced or palatalized forms are secondary), actually 'something of the Mbundese kind'. (Wa-tutsi and Ba-hutu speak Ki-rundi, also called Ki-rwanda). 4.u-mbunda . the land of the Mbunda etc.. 5. etc.... [I'm not sure all these prefixed forms actually exist in the case of Mbunda, but for the Ganda , Kongo and the Luba tribes e.g., at least two or three of them do] Conclusions: a) always look for the root b) looking things up in IE-styled dictionary is not straightforward at all. Sorry for informing those that already knew. Ed. Selleslagh P.S. I have this information from an africanologist, a colleague of mine. From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 23 15:00:41 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 16:00:41 +0100 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: <14080059213363@m-w.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, Jim Rader wrote: > English dictionaries are very slow to update information. _The > Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology_ (1966) and _The Concise > Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology_ (1986) continue the long > discredited "Congolese" origin. By 1993 Oxford finally saw the light > and plumped for the Romance origin the _New Shorter Oxford_. I note that Collins English Dictionary (1979) s.v. zebra says [C16: via Ita;ian from Old Spanish: wild ass, probably from Vulgar Latin * wild horse, from Latin from horse + wild] which is no doubt the Romance etymology mentioned before. is attested in Pliny (2 passages) according to Lewis & Short, but I've a hunch it's a pretty odd kind of compound. Are [N+A]N compounds normal in Latin? How secure is this word in Latin? Might we have some folk etymology here? Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Apr 23 16:12:32 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 17:12:32 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: [on my claim that Pre-Basque did not permit plosive-liquid clusters] [A plosive is any one of /p t k b d g/; a liquid is any one of /l ll r rr/.] > Further to Larry's assertion that the plosive-liquid cluster was not > available in early euksara and have been elimenated I have found the > following entries made by Azkue that he asserts are native words. > Larry would you say that there is not one word in this list that is > not problematic for your thesis, that is you can source every single > one of these words from outside euskara. I would be certainly > grateful for the source of each of them. Let's start with a couple of clarifications. First, I claim only that Pre-Basque did not permit such clusters. In fact, these clusters apparently remained impossible in Basque for quite a few centuries after the Roman period, but eventually, under Romance influence, they became acceptable in Basque. Today they are moderately frequent. Second, there is a big difference between a word which is *native* and a word which is *ancient*. These two are independent. For example: `man' native and ancient `woman' native but not ancient `book' ancient but not native `airplane' neither native nor ancient Now, the claim is that plosive-liquid clusters do not occur in words which are ancient, whether or not the words are native. Native and ancient words never contained such clusters. Foreign words containing such clusters, when borrowed into early Basque, were re-shaped so as to eliminate these clusters. In comparatively modern times, Basque has accepted such clusters. So, Basque can borrow Spanish `globe' as with no problem. Native words can acquire such clusters by phonological change, so that, for example, `lady' has become or in many varieties. And, most importantly, *new* native words can be coined within Basque which possess these clusters, such as the word , which occurs in the expression `drenched in sweat' (this word is nowhere recorded before the 1880s). Third, Azkue does not claim that the words entered in his dictionary are native. On the contrary, he declares explicitly, in section IX of his prologue, that he is entering words of foreign origin which are well established in Basque -- and a very sensible policy this is, too. It would have absurd to produce a dictionary of Basque which excluded such everyday words as `book', `law', `beech', `money' and `church', merely because these are of foreign origin. That said, I cannot possibly comment on every word in Jon's long list. But I will pick a few words as examples. > abrastasun This is merely a secondary form of `wealth', a derivative of `domesticated animal', which itself is borrowed from Romance. > brazilia This is transparently borrowed from a Romance word related to French `basilica'. The curious extra /r/ illustrates a sporadic but moderately common phenomenon in Basque: note, for example, how Spanish `Dutch' appears in many varieties of Basque as . > brrrrra This is not even a lexical item, but only a representation of a noise used by shepherds to call their sheep. It's on a par with English noises like `brrr', `tsk-tsk' and `psst'. > debru > diabru I hardly need to point out the Romance origin of this word for `devil'. > ebri This is merely a secondary form of common `rain', illustrating a process similar to the one which turns `the night' into in some varieties. > lanbro This word for `fog' is first recorded as in 1627, but from the 17th century it appears as . Apparently the same process as in above. > glask This is strictly an imitative word, on a par with for a gunshot. > grina This word is a famous problem, but it is probably nothing more than a borrowing from Bearnais. > azukre I don't think I need to say much about this word for `sugar', though its form is somewhat unexpected. > krak Another imitative word. > kresal Another instance of /r/-insertion: compare the variant form . > klunklun This word for `toad', more familiar to me as (not in Azkue), is an expressive formation of reduplicated nature. > ebli Another secondary form, this time for common `fly'. > kobla > kopla This word for `couplet' is of obvious Romance origin (Spanish ). > kontra The Romance origin is plain. > potro A very interesting word, and one of a vast cluster of words in both Basque and Romance with meanings centered on `small animal', `chubby', `cute little thing' and `sex organ'. This word is recorded from 1657 in the sense of `foal', but only from 1905 in the sense of `testicle' -- though the domination of Basque writing by priests probably has something to do with its late attestation. > traska Even Azkue describes this as "onomatpoeic". But I note that, in Roncalese, the word means `layabout, good-for-nothing'. I love it! It's bad enough being called in Basque; if I had to go to Roncal and introduce myself as , the locals would be falling about laughing. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Apr 23 19:32:01 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 20:32:01 +0100 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: >But, the question is: do you still believe that "Brugmann's Law" is a >serious argument for the consonantal nature of 'laryngeals' in IE? >If you agree with me that it *might* be of significance but not necessarily >so, wecan move on to another point if you want. I believe it is a serious argument, though not without flaws. Your objections to it are soundly based. Your position seems reasoned and moderate and I am happy to move on. Peter From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Sat Apr 24 03:30:07 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 23:30:07 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:31:20 +0100 (BST) From: Larry Trask On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > Larry, what is the phenomenon of Aquitanian that makes > unpronounceable. thanks [LT] The /dr/ cluster. Pre-Basque absolutely lacked plosive-liquid clusters, and, in all early borrowings from Latin and Romance, such clusters were invariably eliminated in one way or another. See sections 18.4-18.5 of Michelena's Fonetica Historica Vasca for a list of examples, including such familiar ones as these: Lat --> Bq `book' Lat --> Bq `glory' [snip] It seems to me that perhaps we are perhaps talking at cross purposes here. Let me cite an example. In Euskera we find a root stem such as whose phonological structure is native. However, in actual speech practice we find that accent in Euskera is not precisely "word specific". I don't know the proper linguistic term for this phenomenon. Rather where the accent will fall depends on to a great degree on the suffixing elements added to the root stem as well as the overall placement of that lexical chain in the utterance. Furthermore, somewhat as what occurs in English, unstressed vowels often become schwa and/or essentially disappear in actual speech. Often there is a "ghost" or "shadow" left over from the template of the intervening vowel, just enough for the interlocutor to "disambiguate" the morphological elements in the utterance. Sorry, but I don't know what you all call these kinds of highly reduced sounds. For example, "of the head" (sometimes with a referential field comprising "scarf; pillow") is, depending on its placement, sometimes heard as and at others as . The speaker is fully aware that the form is but that is not what s/he is actually "saying." In the case of it strikes me that the same thing happens with the result being or when the definite article is attached. In other words, I would agree with Larry that the cluster did not exist, in principle, but I am less certain whether it wasn't present in actual speech practice, for example, in Aquitainian/Euskera. Certainly other languages have similar phenomena: one phonological set of features characterizes the language at one level but a significantly different one is found operating at another, e.g., when one sits down to listen to actual speech samples, especially from non-literate informants. Furthermore, I would argue that one of the most difficult things for a non-native speaker to acquire is an intuitive knowledge of these subtleties in the second language. this is especially true when the second language is studied and consequently learnt in an instructional/school setting. Indeed, we are talking of extremely complex rules that govern such changes. These are far too complex for the foreign language teacher to teach explicitly or for a student to acquire "rationally". Yet the changes are "known" intuitively by a native-speaker. The latter will pick up immediately on the fact that the person is a non-native speaker when that person attempts to "mis-pronounce" a word, e.g., change speech registers, for example. Comments? Best regards, Roz Frank Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Fri Apr 23 21:17:02 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 17:17:02 -0400 Subject: Celtic substrate influence Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > In Parisian French, the preterite seems to have disappeared from > speech by about the 16th century, according to Price, I have seen the statement made that in the 17th c., the distinction was that perfect = past of today and attributed to something called Port Royale Grammar. [Comrie's book on Tense might have been the source.] I don't know if this refers to the written language, but that seems a bit odd. -Nath From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Fri Apr 23 21:26:50 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 17:26:50 -0400 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: [ Moderator's comment: > No. There are two different roots here, *gno:- = *gn{e/o}H_3 "know" and > *genH_1 "beget, give birth". The verbal adjective collapses due to sound > change in Greek, but the very data you provide show the difference. Compare > Latin (g)no:sco: vs. genus, Skt. jn~a:-ta- "known" vs. ja:-ta- "born". > --rma ] We can't tell gneH1 from gneH3 in Sanskrit, but jn~a:ti ``relative'' occurs in RV 7.55.5 (AV-like charm) and three times in Mandala 10. [Otherwise, all erivatives of jan- are jan(i)- < genH or ja: < gnH.] I also find the semantics of gneH3/gno: curious. It is presumably an eventive and not a stative like ``know'' (which is the function of woide). Sanskrit has a nasal present which is generally said to reflect a process, Latin uses -ske/o and Greek reduplication + -ske/o which are generally taken to represent iteration/duration. What was the original meaning? -Nath [ Moderator's response: The Greek and Latin reflexes seem to mean "come to know, learn"; a durative would then mean "know by having learned", an iterative "get to know". In Latin, -sco- is an inchoative as often as an iterative, so "begin to learn, start to know". And I should have checked Grassmann for _jn~a:-_ forms from *genH_1, but it's packed for a few weeks until we move into the new house. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Apr 23 22:22:26 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 22:22:26 GMT Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: >For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique >sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from >Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been >unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of >the language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., >if it exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists. Maybe >someone knows more about this. Well if it's Angola, it's probably either Kimbundu (the lingua franca of Luanda) or Umbundu (the language of the largest ethnic group, the Ovimbundu). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Sat Apr 24 05:39:47 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 00:39:47 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Some responses to Pat's critique of my remarks re. Lehmann's "syllabicity": >>I opened Lehmann and immediately put my finger on syllabicity in the last >>chapter. Embarrassing! But I know why I didn't recall it: that chapter (a) >>had no relevance to my actual interest, viz. Germanic reflexes of laryngeals, >>and (b) it struck me as utterly nonsensical. >Why do you not explain why you consider it "nonsensical". No need to, since I was not claiming that it was, but only that it *struck* me as such some years ago. If you want reasons, the ambiguity of his formulations, and his insistance that syllabicity was a "prosodic feature" rather than a segmental phone would be reason enough. >>My gut feeling aside, there's an obvious problem with it even in terms of >>structuralist theory. On p. 112 Lehmann states: "If we find no phonemes in >>complemetary distribution at the peak of the syllable, we cannot assume a >>segmental phoneme for this position." >My own gut feeling is that there is no problem whatsoever. [Lehmann quote omitted] >All Lehmann is saying is that since no specific vowel can be specified at >the syllabic peak, one that becomes phonemic by contrast with other phonemic >vowels (where "phonemic" is defined as providing a semantic differentiation: >CVC is a different word than CV{1}C), we cannot assume *one* specific vowel >(e or anything else) at the syllabic peak in stressed positions. >"Syllabicity" is just a innovative way of describing V{?}. Innovative to the point that a vowel is somehow not a vowel. But let it pass. You're missing the meaning of what I wrote next: >>Surely not "phonemes in complementary distribution" -- *contrasting* >>phonemes, or something of the sort. >"Complementary distribution" in Trask's dictionary means "The relation which >holds in a given speech variety between two phones which never occur in the >same environment." Right! "Phones." That is, raw sounds. Allophones of a single phoneme. But Lehmann wrote "phonemes", which makes no sense in that context. That's why I suggested "contrasting phonemes". >With the exception of the qualification "two", this describes the situation >that Lehmann has supposed for the stress-period of IE (e e{sub} e:). You >may question his analysis but his terminology seems perfectly in accordance >with standard usage. No way. >>Whether complementary or contrastive, the supposed difficulty arises because >>Lehmann (against Brugmann & Co.) arbitrarily defines [i u] as syllabic >>allophones of resonant phonemes /y w/ -- >There is nothing arbitrary about this at all. If we assume that IE and AA >are related through Nostratic (which you may not prefer to do), the decision >is mandatory. IE CiC does not show up in AA as normal C-C but rather always >as C-y-C. Even if your Nostratic correspondence is correct, it would still tell us nothing about the phonemic situation of any stage of PIE, since the phonemes of any stage of any language must be defined in terms of that stage alone. We need reasons within PIE itself why [i u] must be analyzed as /y w/ rather than /i u/. And while I realize that the matter is debated, Lehmann's notion of syllabicity seems to entail the consonantal analysis, else [e] etc. *must* be analyzed as one or more segmental vowel phonemes. But let's be real: regardless of what has been done in the past, would any competent phonologist now analyze a language with at least contrasting [i u e] as having *no* vowel phonemes? [stuff omitted] >So far, the only information there we have to support your position is >Bomhard's *mention* of a paper by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov *with no details*. >Do you have any arguments for your position? huh? I don't make the connection here to anything your or I have said. [more omitted] >>With /i u/ there is contrast in position between non-syllabics, >I have no idea what this means. Could you explain it? I just did, but in case I wasn't clear: Lehmann's analysis of [e e: e{sub}] as something other than a vowel phoneme is possible only because he posits no other vowel phonemes. With [i u] analyzed as /y w/, this is weird and forced, but perhaps not wholly impossible: the language would have had no other vowel phonemes between two consonants, hence [e] etc. need not be analyzed as a segmental phoneme, since it would not be *contrasting* with any vowel phonemes. But if [i u] are analyzed as vowel phonemes /i u/, then *contrasting vowels* between consonants are possible, and any justification for treating [e] etc. as something other than a vowel phoneme falls by the wayside. Remember that phonemes are *contrasting* sounds; they are not in complementary distribution, though the allophones (realizations) of any given phoneme may be (and usually are). >>-- I should add that on p. 113, Lehmann incautiously says that at the next >>stage of PIE, with phonemic stress, syllabicity with minimum stress "remains >>non-segmental between obstruents..." "Between"? How so? Anything that can >>be between phonemes sounds segmental enough to me! >How about zero-grade "vowels"? That puzzles me for a variety of reasons, but leads to a question. I don't mean to be snide, and I hope you won't be offended; but how familiar are you with phonemic theory (any version will do)? "Prosodic features" and "non-segmental" items are generally called "suprasegmentals", because they apply on top of some segmental phoneme or sequence of phonemes. Pitch and stress have a domain of at least one syllable. It makes no sense to say that they occur between segmental phonemes, and no one claims they do. Yet Lehmann claims here that one such suprasegmental does exactly that. -- A more modern version could analyze the zero grade more neatly: a sequence /CVC/ might be realized in various ways, depending on stress: [CVC] or even [CV:C] under stress, [C at C] or even [CC] when not stressed. This last is zero grade (but not a "zero-grade 'vowel'"). But this works only if /V/ is a real vowel phoneme, which Lehmann did not want to concede. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 24 08:57:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 03:57:31 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter &/or Graham Sent: Sunday, April 18, 1999 5:37 AM > Pat said: > >I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by > >Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. We have discussed the first point [a)]. > (b) to be discussed later > (c) Reduplication of roots beginning with a laryngeal. We find an > unexpected -i-: e.g. gan-igm-at < Hgen-Hgn-. I am not really sure why this is unexpected. We are all familiar with *p6te{'}:r (which is probably built on the root *pe/oH{2}), which yields Sanskrit ; this shows that a zero-grade of the second segment regular shows up as in Sanskrit. > If the H at the beginning of > the root had vanished, the -i- would not appear (as it does not in roots > without initial H-) I cannot see that this is really argued, only asserted. After all, the conditioning environments are different. If the IE form had been *H(e/o)gen-, there is no reason I know of to suppose that it could not have occurred in Sanskrit (e.g. cf. from IE *He/onos) at some point as *a(:)gan-. If we now give it a full reduplication, *a{:}"ganagan-, I see no great hurdle in supposing that the stress-unaccented initial of the second syllable became Sanskrit (*a{:}"ganigan-) and that the second stress-unaccented became zero-grade (*a{:}"ganig-n-), and that the first vowel, if previously long, became first (*a"ganig-n-) then <0> (*[0]"ganig-n-) > and if it had become a vowel, it would appear at the > beginning of the reduplicated syllable as well. Certainly, if stress-accented; and are you so sure it would show up if stress-unaccented? Now, it is certainly appropriate to ask why initial stress-unaccented *and* the final stress-unaccented show up as <0> when the stress-unaccented of the reduplicated root shows up as . If it were <0> also, we would have (*[0]"gan-g-n-), something a little difficult to pronounce, and which, without a euphonic vowel, would obscure the reduplicated nature of the root. > The only explanation is a > consonantal H, which then shares the later usual interconsonantal > development to -i-. Well, here is an attempt at a possible explanation in addition to the "only" explanation. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 24 09:49:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 09:49:29 GMT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><(*gen(@)tis) "son-in-law, sister's husband".>> >Please be patient with me here. I'm trying. I'm not sure why the -(H)- is >there, but let me get back to that. >Do you mean: >1. that intial *gn- never passed directly into historic Slavic as an initial >/kn/ or an initial /-n/? (By directly I mean not through a sister language >but from *PIE to *p-Slavic to Slavic or a particular Slavic tongue.) I'm >distinguishing here from the "first palatalization" which would have the *g- >change before an original front vowel but I'm thinking not necessarily a >*gn-. Here the analogy is to *glava (pSl)> glowa (pol), golova (rus w/tort). The Slavic palatalizations are not applicable here, only the satem palatalization *g^ > z. Cf. znaju "I know" from *g^en(H3)- "to know". >2. I see *gen> gno- or something like that happen in Greek (and maybe >German). If you accept that, does it mean that this transformation did not >happen in PIE or that it could not have occurred or passed into proto-Slavic? Not sure what you mean. The zero grade variant is PIE. >3. It seems the gen- and gno- coexisted in Homer. Both "genea" and "gnotos" >refer to relatives. Obviously which form would have affected how the word >passed from *PIE into the daughter languages or from, say, Greek into another >IE language. (Oddly I have OCS "daughter-in-law" sn~xa (Pol c~rka /synowa) >and I believe the Sanskrit also has as intial snu- for daughter-in-law. Wholly different root: *snusos (Lat. nurus, Arm. nu, Grk. nuos, Skt. snus.a:). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Apr 24 10:18:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 10:18:29 GMT Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >> traska >Even Azkue describes this as "onomatpoeic". But I note that, in >Roncalese, the word means `layabout, good-for-nothing'. I love it! >It's bad enough being called in Basque; if I had to go to Roncal >and introduce myself as , the locals would be falling >about laughing. Where can mean, among other things, "sad, bitter; vomit; sick, dizzy, anxious, nervous; big, fat, pregnant"... On the subject of "layabout, good-for-nothing": that seems to be, as I've discovered, the basic meaning of Aragonese/Navarrese "chandro" [chandro: gandul, haragan, holgazan], discussed here recently. Aragonese initial ch- points to *sandro or *jandro (personal name Sandro, Alejandro?), unless the word is somehow derived from Provencal (Limousin) chantor/chantre (> Cat. xantre, xandre) "singer, minstrel". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Apr 24 10:51:15 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 12:51:15 +0200 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: <372ef200.559083362@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: We may be getting somewhere with those zebras and those obscure African languages. First of all, thanks to Jim Rader for mentioning Loewe's article in KZ 61, which I've started reading yesterday, obviously simultaneously with him (""Uber einige europ"aische W"orter exotischer Herkunft", 37-136). This is a very interesting article, and its author was much at pains to dig out the most oblique sources needed to find out how certain words came first to european languages (i.a. cannibal, tobacco, chocolate, banana, gnu etc.). Sometimes, their "exotic" pedigree is confirmed, sometimes rejected. For /zebra/, we can learn from Loewe that Amharic is definitely out, since the original locus for this allegation (Hiob Ludolf - the pioneer of Ethiopic studies - "Historia Aethiopica" 1681) doesn't even talk about such an Amharic word. It mentions /zecora/, which, however, I again can't find in my Amharic dictionaries. This doesn't mean much, they could be inadequate, the word could long be obsolete, or I could be too stupid to find it. Now, Ludolf adds that the animal in question is called /Zebra/ "congensibus", without getting precise. Loewe tried to secure its source, without, however, reaching a definite solution. He finds the form /zerba/ in Girolamo Merolla's 1692 "Relazione del viaggio nel Regno di Congo". Since Merolla *was* in the congolese empire, and Ludolf wasn't, the latter form may be closer to the actual source, than our /Zebra/. Loewe, for reasons I'm not repeating here, narrows the search down to Bunda, i.e that language, which was described inter alia by Cannecattim. Chatelain 1888-89 calls this same language /Kimbunda/ ("Grammatica Elementar du Kimbunda ou Lingua de Angola"). This should be enough to determine, among all those mindboggling similar names, which language is spoken about (I have another tiny thing here, rather a phrase-book than a grammar, by Schatteburg "Sprachschatz des 'Umbundu'",1931, which is about a similar language (I'm aware of role of prefixes in Bantu grammar and the fact that even in the specialist literature sometimes language names get confused with ethnonyms or place-names; look for the root, with credits to Eduard Selleslagh), from much the same region (it is called the "Eingeborenen-Hauptverkehrssprache in portugiesisch Angola"), however a superficial inspection of both booklets with my untrained eye shows me clearly closely related, but not identical languages (e.g. I find rather different numerals aso.). Now, why Kimbunda in the first place ? Loewe was unable to find /zerba/ or anything close to it in the sources of these languages, his assigning the word to "Bunda" is largely based on - educated and sophisticated - conjecture (btw, the "Umbundu"-phrasebook gives for "zebra" /ongollo/). So, after all this, we don't really have an African source for /zebra/, Amharic was a misunderstanding, and the "congolese" source can not be verified, and was based on conjecture in the first place. All this brings us back to Europe, and I think the fact, brought to our attention again by May Wheeler, but mentioned before, that actually we have forms like (en)zebro, (en)zebra, ezebra, azebra, cebrario, ezebrario for the "wild ass" in Old Spanish and Old Portuguese. This is usually taken as going back to Latin /equifer/. Someone (I forgot who) objectioned that this etymology requires an intermediary state *ecifer- and found no motivation for the -qu- > -c- development. While this may be important and indeed problematical, it does not remove the existence of those Old Iberoromance words, which are still with us, regardless whether there Latin > Romance derivation is problem-free or not. So, foraging into Africa was, I'd say, a wrong move in the first place. The wild ass, called by the words mentioned, died out on the peninsula towards the 16th century, its name being transferred to an interesting animal found (somewhere)in Africa by Portuguese seamen. Whether any native African word resembling it incidentally played a role in keeping this old word with the new (but related) meaning, remains open, until the Bunda-word will actually be found, which may be never. I find Latin /equifer, -i: m; -us is late/ well attested, but, as Max Wheeler observes it maybe an odd compound (though I'd use the formula N+A here < equus + ferus); some explain this as a loan-translation from Greek /hipp-agros/ (cf. caprifer). This type of compounds is labelled "post-classical" in my sources (e.g. Debrunner "Griechische Wortbildungslehre"). The problem of the Latin > Romance derivation seems to remain, since Latin -kwi- should have yielded -gi- in Spanish (). The pre-iberoromance form *ecifer- seems indeed hard to motivate, but I think we go to far if we simply rule it out, and, especially, by preferring an African etymology for /Zebra/, as if the Old Spanish words never existed. Instead of a hitherto unknown sound-law, which we will never find, we should think about some analogy here (especially common in zoological terminology all over the world). In this respect, some attention should be due to Latin /cervus/ "deer" and its reflexes (kat. cervo, sp. ciervo, pg. cervo); this is not the same, and it contains /r/ and /v/ in the opposite order, but to think of some analogical influence here, it is sufficient to concentrate on the initial consonant. In fact, I do think this is, by and large, the story of /zebra/. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Apr 24 13:11:22 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 16:11:22 +0300 Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) In-Reply-To: <655461bd.244dc887@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 20 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 4/20/99 1:44:51 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: > << "Predictable" does not mean "capable of being > hypothesized about >> > Lest any readers be confused about this: > 'Predictability' and 'reproducible results' are the two 'traditional' > requisites of scientific methodology. This is from Dewey and those > fellows. And this is absolutely correct so long as "predictability" means knowing what will happen in advance and "reproducible results" means that the same thing (within the limits of experimental error) will happen every time. > The basic idea is that a hypothesis or premise ought to predict > observable results. No, this is not the basic idea of hypothesis. It is just your idea of what a hypothesis should be; it is "fuzzy-think" based on inaccurate definitions and incomplete reasoning. The following is what a hypothesis is according to the definition at http://www.writedesignonline.com/organizers/hypothesize.html hypothesis - 1. a proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigating (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts. 2. a proposition assumed as a premise in an argument. 3. the antecedent of a conditional proposition. 4. a mere assumption or guess. You will notice that none of this says anything about predictions. Prediction is not part of the definition of hypothesis. A hypothesis may make predictions, but it does not have to. A hypothesis (in the scientific sense, i.e., definition 1 above) is simply an explanation put forth to account for observed facts. But the hypothesis cannot make predictions about these observed facts without being circular. If the hypothesis is created to explain the observed facts one cannot say that the observed facts are "predicted" by the hypothesis. The only prediction that is implied by the hypothesis is that the hypothesis is true, which is trivial ("the universe works the way it does because that's the way the universe works"; "this hypothesis is true because it explains the observed data"). Now for any set of observed data there are an infinite number of explanations of how that data came to be. But while anything is possible, not everything is probable. Some explanations will just be more plausible than others. Predictions often come from an attempt to generalize the hypothesis so that it accounts not only for the observed facts, but also for other facts not yet observed. This reasoning from the specific to the general is called induction. But the problem with induction is deciding which of the competing hypotheses is the one that should be generalized, because it is often not at all obvious which hypothesis is more plausible than the others. This is summed up neatly by Conan Doyle when he has Holmes say: "Ah! my dear Watson, there we come into those realms of conjecture, where the most logical mind may be at fault. Each may form his own hypothesis upon the present evidence, and yours is as likely to be correct as mine." Another way that predictions arise from hypotheses is by assuming the truth of the hypothesis and using it as a major premise to deduce some consequence that would follow from the truth of the hypothesis. This logical consequent seems to be what you are considering to be the "prediction" that the hypothesis makes. This process is called deductive reasoning. One of the problems with this is that it is full of pitfalls, especially for those not trained in it. Although a true major premise and a true minor premise connected by a valid argument must produce a true conclusion, any other combination of true and/or false premises and/or valid and/or invalid arguments can produce either a true or false conclusion. Furthermore, using a different hypothesis as the major premise in conjunction with a different minor premise and/or a different argument might very well result in the same conclusion (logical consequent). Some people reserve "theory" for a hypothesis that satisfactorily explains new observations, but I don't know that this is standardized. My Webster's says that the shared meaning element of 'hypothesis', 'theory' and 'law' is "a formulation of a natural principle based on inference from observed data." Some people have a strict hierarchical ranking of these, with hypothesis referring only to explanations of observed data, theory referring to satisfactory explanation of new observations, and law referring to a time-tested theory that has never failed to explain any observation (thus the law of gravity, the theory of relativity, and the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change). On the other hand, many people use some (or all) of these terms interchangeably. > Otherwise it cannot be tested. Many hypotheses make predictions but still can't be tested. Many hypotheses do not make predictions but still can be rejected. The scientific method is extremely simple: 1) a problem is identified, 2) relevant data is collected, 3) a hypothesis is formulated to account for the data, 4) the hypothesis is empirically tested. Steps 1 and 2 do not have to occur in this order. The problem may emerge during the collecting of data or may become apparent only after data has been collected for some other reason. But step 3 should be preceded by 1 and 2 in whatever order they may come. Formulating a hypothesis and then collecting data to support it is not part of the scientific method. It is known as "speculating in advance of the evidence" or "counting chickens before they hatch"; or as the famous recipe for hassenpfeffer begins: "First, catch your hare..." But your claim that only a hypothesis that makes predictions can be tested is false for a number of reasons. First let me quote to you from S. F. Barker, _Induction and Hypothesis: A Study in the Logic of Confirmation_ (Ithaca, 1957), 157: ... the uncritical proponent of the method of hypothesis is claiming that any hypothesis is confirmed if and only if consequents deducible ["predictions"] from it are verified; but this would entail that many hypotheses which we set store by cannot be confirmed at all in a direct and natural way. Hypotheses universal in form would fall under this ban for instance. Only observational statements are verifiable and an observational statement needs to be existential in form; but from a universal statement no existential statement can be deduced. Thus no universal statement (considered in isolation) can have any verifiable consequent, and thus no universal statement can be directly confirmed. This would be a serious defect in the method of hypothesis. Second, verifying "predictions" (logical consequents) of a hypothesis does not necessarily confirm a hypothesis, because competing hypotheses might have the same or similar "predictions" and confirming the one could just as easily be considered as confirming the others. It is a test that is a non-test. The testing of hypotheses, then, is not based on confirming the "predictions" of the hypothesis, but rather on confirming some rival hypothesis, or, as it is often stated, "falsifying" the original hypothesis. If a hypothesis that conflicts with the original hypothesis can be confirmed, then the original hypothesis is falsified and must be either rejected or reformulated. This concept of "falsification" was put forth by Karl Popper in the mid-1930's and has since become the standard on which modern theories of hypothesis testing are based. If a hypothesis has no test for falsification (i.e., there exists no hypothesis that would contradict the original hypothesis that is capable of being confirmed) then the hypothesis is labelled "non-falsifiable" and considered to lie outside the scientific method. Thus it is not "making predictions," but rather "falsifiability" that is the principal criterion of a well-formulated hypothesis. Many quite valuable hypotheses do not make predictions that have any observable results, but this does not mean that they are not scientific or must be considered poor hypotheses. Rather it is the "non-falsifiable" hypothesis that should be considered unscientific, regardless of whether it makes predictions or not. So either a hypothesis will be falsified and rejected (a hypothesis that has a test for falsification but is not falsified is not "proved", it simply gains credibility), or no new observations will be possible and it will simply remain one hypothesis among many, or it will be confirmed by more and more observations and confidence in it will increase. But even when it has been confirmed repeatedly, it still can't be proved. It always remains provisional even though as confidence in it increases it may be upgraded from hypothesis to theory to law. But no matter how many times the results of experiments agree with a theory, one can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict it. > "Reproducible results" means that the premise can also be > tested by others. No, this is not what it means. It implies this, but what it means is that every time an event that is accounted for by a theory with reproducible results is repeated (by whomever), the result will be the same. Predictability and repeatability are indeed the hallmarks of a sound scientific theory. But they are the results of hypothesis testing, not the basis for hypothesis formulation and testing. What they imply is that it is possible to use Newton's laws of motion and gravity (his "Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis") to design a lunar lander that, despite severe limitations on size and weight, will be able to generate the required amount of thrust to lift it and its specified payload off the moon's surface and put it in orbit around the moon *without ever having been to the moon*, and that it will work every time. Now *that's* predictability and repeatability. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Sat Apr 24 14:54:56 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 15:54:56 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick McAllister wrote: > Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish and other similar groups, >is more or less a "relic language" in that the vocabulary and not much else >are from the original language [mainly a mix of German dialects of the >Upper Rhine valley such as Swiss German, Swabian and Alsatian]. The syntax >and the morphology are principally from American English. 'Principally' is one of those words that can mean whatever you like, BUT written PennDu, at least, has 3 genders, 3 cases, personal rendings on verbs in the present tense separable verbs and rules for verb second and verb last which look pretty like those of standard German - to mention just a selection of features not terribly like US English. I'm willing to admit to not haveing met any real live speakers myself, but I'd be surprised if my large selection of textbooks on the subject is entirely misleading. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From dalazal at hotmail.com Sat Apr 24 15:37:38 1999 From: dalazal at hotmail.com (Diogo Almeida) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 08:37:38 PDT Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: >I note that Collins English Dictionary (1979) s.v. zebra says [C16: via >Ita;ian from Old Spanish: wild ass, probably from Vulgar Latin >* wild horse, from Latin from horse + > wild] which is no doubt the Romance etymology mentioned before. > is attested in Pliny (2 passages) according to Lewis & >Short, but I've a hunch it's a pretty odd kind of compound. Are [N+A] N >compounds normal in Latin? How secure is this word in Latin? Might we >have some folk etymology here? I've looked it up in the "Dicionario Etimolsgico Nova Fronteira da Lmngua Portuguesa" by Anttnio Geraldo da Cunha, and it is said there that "zebra" is from unknown etymology, maybe from Vulgar Latin <*eciferus> (Classical Latin ). In Old Portuguese there is an attested in the XIII century, as a feminine form of or , also from the XIII century, which meant "wild horse" (cavalo selvagem). There is also , that dates from the XVI century (with the same meaning, I believe). Kind Regards, Diogo A. de A. e Almeida From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 24 16:43:53 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 11:43:53 -0500 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A Latin derivation seems to the most likely --of those presented-- but the road seems pretty rocky. This word must have bounced around among different languages to get the form it has. Given that the initial vowel was dropped from ecebra with = /c/. I'm wondering if the word was perceived by Spanish speakers as an Arabic word or if indeed it did pass through Andalusian Arabic as something like S-b-r, th-b-r, dh-b-r, DH-b-r, z-b-r, although I suppose the latter would only apply to a certain attribute. [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Apr 24 17:03:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 12:03:12 -0500 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Could these be "hypercorrections" based on the speaker's knowledge of Spanish, where labial stop + another consonant often [or usually] results in /uC, wC, Cu, Cw/ [or mutation to another stop] in the spoken language, so then where /uC/ or intervocal /u/ does occur as a standard spelling and pronunciation [or semi-standard pronunciation], /B/ [or /p/] is inserted as a hypercorrection e.g. abstinencia > *austinencia /awstinensya/ acepto > *aceuto /asewto/ garuar > *garubar ausencia > *apsencia /apsensya/ Or, conversely, could Spanish be influenced by Basque [snip] >> ebri >This is merely a secondary form of common `rain', illustrating a >process similar to the one which turns `the night' into in >some varieties. [snip] >> kresal [snip]> >> ebli >Another secondary form, this time for common `fly'. [snip] From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Apr 24 18:23:42 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 13:23:42 -0500 Subject: IE pers.pron. (dual forms) Message-ID: Dear Jebs and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Thursday, April 22, 1999 6:11 PM > On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > [On my IE rec. of pers.pron. - mainly after Cowgill in > > >Evid.f.Laryng., viz.:] > > >*we: *yu: (nom.) > > >*nH3we *uH3we (acc.) > > Why *H3 in the dual forms? Couldn't it be *H1(w) with o-Stufe? > > In principle, I'd go along with Beekes in reconstructing *-H1 for > > the dual of nouns (in view of Greek consonant stem -e < *-H1, and > > lengthened vowel elsewhere). I, also, would question the need for a reconstruction of H{3} in the dual. > The Gk. /-e/ cannot be a syllabic *-H1 if it is to match OLith. augus-e > 'the two grown ones' or OIr. di: pherid 'two heels', only IE *-e will do > here. The main problem, however, is one that I think we run into far more often than we generally recognize, and that is that some linguists *contrive* very complicated rules to be able to ascribe a common origin to forms that are simply not commensurable. Beekes, I feel, does just this when he attempts to link the Sanskrit masculine and feminine dual forms (-a:[u], -u:, -a:[u], -e) with those of other IE languages like Greek: -e, -ei, -o:, [-a:]). It is as if Beekes had never heard the word "Nostratic"! Egyptian, for example, has a simple mechanism for forming masculine duals: -wj, with a plural in -w. Also, nearly every cardinal number has a -w suffix; and AA plurals (collectives in origin) in -u{:} are well-known. I interpret these facts (and others) to indicate that Nostratic had a collective suffix -w(V), and that these suffix was one of those employed to form a dual in IE. I would analyze Sanskrit -a:(u) as (C)wa in opposition to Beekes' -H{1}e. [ Moderator's comment: The final -u in the Sanskrit dual is not Indo-European, but an Indic develop- ment that is not present even in Iranian. --rma ] But, another method of indicating the dual was almost certainly the suffix -y, here, not an adjective formant but just a suufix of differentiation. This will be the source of those dual endings like Greek -e, and Beekes recognizes the phonological process when he suggests on p. 195, that "Gr. o{'}sse, 'eyes' comes from *ok{w}-ye" but then goes on to derive *ok{w}-ye, IMHO incorrectly, from earlier *ok{w}-iH{1}, in a misguided attempt to unify -e and -a:(u). Of course, there are sporadic forms like Greek no{'}: from *no:wi, combining *ne/o + *wi:, 'two', and a 'laryngeal' is not necessary to explain the in a stress-accented open syllable; a mechanism as simple as transference of length back to the stress-accented syllable from *-wi: could explain it. >However, as the vowel must be a secondary prop-vowel since it > has not caused accent/ablaut to move, this is neutral as to whether the > consonant ultimately at work was *-H3 or *-H1. Certainly *-H2 is excluded > since its well-known effect of lengthening is not caused in the nom.-acc. > dual. If there is a long vowel in the 1st dual ending of thematic verbs, > Skt. -a:vas, Goth. -o:s, then it cannot be *-oH1-wos if the choice of -e- > and -o- as the form of the "thematic vowel" depends on the voicing of the > following segment, and of course the Goth. form cannot come from *-eH1wos, > so only *-oH3wos would then do. But can we really exclude *-o-wos with no > laryngeal? That depends on the rules of Germanic. If Gk. no:^e is > identical with Avest. /a:va/ (Skt. a:va:m with added -am), then the etymon > can only be *nH3we - but the Gk. omega could have been taken from the > enclitic which would be *noH with any laryngeal. Even so there is nothing > that directly points to -H1- as the dual marker - unless somebody can > dissect the neuter dual in *-yH1 so as to make /H1/ a common dual marker; > what would be the morphological principle of that? > [...] Yes, I generally agree. But would go the further step of suggesting that a 'laryngeal' is not required to be reconstructed at all. > You say you miss a reference to the (morpho)phoneme /c/ in my assumption > of a development of *tw- via *Dw- to *y-/*w- in 'you'. It IS that element > I have in mind, only the two problems do not overlap so that I can decide > if the stage /c/ has bee reached by the time relevant here. > [...] As an aside, I am correct in presuming that indicates /ts/ and /dz/? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Apr 25 08:06:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 09:06:51 +0100 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: Nath said: >We can't tell gneH1 from gneH3 in Sanskrit, but jn~a:ti ``relative'' occurs I don't know what your Sanskrit is like, but I have no difficulty whatever, when reading Sanskrit, in telling the two roots apart. Perhaps this reflects the fact that my Sanskrit is not all that good! PIE *gneh3 gives ja:na:ti ( a ninth class present, revealing the laryngeal); and the causative jn~a:payati, and various forms in jn~a: e.g. jn~a:tr (someone who knows). So jn~a:ti is clearly cognate with the Greek gno:tos, and is from the knowing root. PIE *genH1 (note the different ablaut form from *gneh3, attested in a number of IE languages) gives the Sanskrit root jan, present class four (ja:yate) causative janayati (lack of lengthening in the first syllable reveals the laryngeal) and various forms in ja:- or jan- e.g. janman (birth) and janayitr (begetter); and past participle ja:ta, whence noun ja:ti ("birth"). >Sanskrit has a nasal present ... >which is generally said to reflect a process, >Latin uses -ske/o and Greek reduplication + -ske/o which are generally taken >to represent iteration/duration. What was the original meaning? In addition to the moderator's comments on Latin & Greek, a further objection to this approach is that it is very difficult to ascribe clear distinctions to the various present formations we find in PIE. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Apr 25 08:12:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 09:12:14 +0100 Subject: knowing Message-ID: Further to the discussion on the gneh3 root ("to know"), I have a daft question: The formation *gneh3-mn would mean, if it existed, that by which we know something - i.e. its name. But in fact we find *h3neh3-mn. Does anyone have any bright ideas for connecting the attested word for "name" with the root "to know"? Peter From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Apr 25 18:17:34 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 21:17:34 +0300 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) In-Reply-To: <4a16b459.244c87ca@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 4/13/99 3:02:01 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: ><words and too primitive to think up their own so they were just >stuck with what they had. I can see it all now:>> >I didn't catch this when it came on the list. Not surprising; you seem to have missed a lot (including an epistemology course in college). >And B-T-W that's not what I wrote. And I'm sure the writer is >aware of that. Okay, so you don't know what "irony" means either, which is shown both by your misunderstanding of my use of the term and your own misuse of it. Yes, that is not what you wrote, it is what I wrote with a large "irony" label in front of it. Again, for the lexically challenged, irony is "1. a figure of speech in which the literal meaning of a locution is the opposite of that intended" or "2. an utterance or the use of words to express a meaning which is different from, and often the direct opposite of, the literal meaning." Now the purpose of the "irony" label was to alert readers to the fact that what was said was not what was meant. But one cannot expect anyone who doesn't know what "irony" means to understand that. So to make it clear at last, the purpose of the "ironic" dialogue was to ridicule the idea that "poor" and "primitive" cultures use "poor" and "primitive" languages, which you have advanced as an explanation for the archaisms in Germanic languages. >Let's go to our [ironic] Ur friends to get back on track: I'm afraid that your Ur-friends are not ironic, but merely sarcastic. And since you seem to think that irony and sarcasm are the same thing, for those who don't understand the difference my Webster's says "Irony differs from sarcasm in greater subtlety and wit. In sarcasm ridicule or mockery is used harshly, often crudely and contemptuously, for destructive purposes." So as long as you are using your Ur-friends to say what you actually think, you are not being ironic, but just sarcastic. >Ur-Hans: UF, why is whiting at cc.helsinki.fi talking about >handshoes when he should be talking about "archaisms" the way >Miguel used the term in those earlier posts? >Ur-Fritz: I don't know, Hans-to-be. Perhaps >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi is avoiding the issue. Ersatz Ur-Fritz should have continued: Or perhaps the man behind the curtain who is operating our switches and levers doesn't realize that 'handshoe' is an archaism or understand what irony is. It's a pity he didn't catch Miguel's answer to his earlier question when it came on the list or he might not be making us say such ridiculous things as if we really believed them. And Ersatz Ur-Hans should have replied: Yes, he does seem to miss a lot, and I find it embarrassing saying such silly things when they aren't ironic, but do you mean Miguel's answer when the man behind the curtain said: And what about "peripheral conservatism?" Isn't that really a matter of distance or what is peripheral about? and Miguel replied on Mon, 29 Mar 1999: It's about location. There are indeed cases where location (geography) matters. We expect "archaisms" to turn up in peripheral, or mountainous areas, where isogloss waves do not travel so fast or so often. But that doesn't mean that "peripheral" languages don't change: they do, and the changes often look very striking (odd, bizarre), precisely because they are shared by no-one else. And it doesn't mean that archaisms cannot survive in central areas. They do. And Ersatz Ur-Fritz would have replied: Yes, that's what I mean. If he had seen that he would have realized that "archaisms" don't necessarily have to be connected with isolation. He would have realized that different areas that are not in direct and regular contact don't necessarily have more archaisms than the other area, they just have different ones because the languages aren't necessarily developing in the same direction and that peripheral areas may be affected by different factors such as language loyalty in the face of pressure from neighboring areas of distinctly different languages that core areas don't have. And I think it is funny that he seems to see a connection between "peripheral conservatism" and "archaism" but can't make a connection between "conservatism" and "archaism." >Ur-Hans: Well, if we were cut off from the so-called "innovative >core" does that explain why we would compound words? >Ur-Fritz: The Greeks used compounds and recycled words all the >time. No, it's probably just whiting at cc.helsinki.fi - that >archaeological evidence was a bit too much. Honest dialogue >might address whether the idea of a cut-off is valid in terms of >history and linguistics. It's easier to just make us up than to >actually address the evidence presented. I'm sure Ur-Hans and Ur-Fritz are smart enough to realize that compounding words is an archaic feature of IE and the fact that it appears in so many IE languages is just a shared archaism. And I'm sure they are also smart enough to realize that compounding words is not the issue. But I doubt that they are smart enough to realize that the archaeological evidence is simply irrelevant to language classification. I have said this before, but it seems to be among the things that you didn't catch, so I will say it again: there is no cultural artifact that is diagnostic of language except writing. Without written records (that can be read) there is nothing that can be said about the nature of a culture's language (or languages) no matter how rich or poor the archaeological record may be. The most that you can say is that if there is archaeological evidence for something then there was probably a word for that something in the culture's language. But without inscriptional evidence, there is no way of telling what that word might have been and thereby gaining a clue to the nature of the language. The fact that archaeology shows that a culture was "poor" or "primitive" says absolutely nothing about the nature of the language that it spoke. "Poor" cultures do not speak "poor" languages and "primitive" cultures do not speak "primitive" languages. In fact, there is no such thing as a "primitive" language, at least not as far back as historical linguistics has so far been able to reconstruct language. To the extent that every language fulfills the needs of the speech community that uses it, all languages are equal. If a linguistic community finds a need to express something that the language has no mechanism for expressing, a means of expressing it will be developed. Germanic is a branch of PIE. PIE was not a "primitive" language. Therefore Germanic is no more primitive than PIE was. What Germanic has is a number of archaisms that are not found in other branches of IE. The retention of archaisms does not mean that the language is "primitive," it merely means that older forms have been preserved. Germanic also has a number of innovations that other branches of IE do not have (e.g., Grimm's Law). And this is indeed an indication of isolation from other branches of IE where these innovations did not occur. But it is not an indication of a "primitive" language. Knowing a language can tell us a great deal about the culture that used or uses it. But no amount of archaeological evidence of a culture that lacks inscriptional material can tell us anything about the nature of the language(s) that the culture used. So there is no such thing as "honest dialogue" about what archaeological evidence tells us about the nature of language. The dialogue consists of only one word: NOTHING. What then of the various theories of Gimbutas, Renfrew, Mallory, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, et cetera, et cetera, that try to locate the IE homeland and to connect the various branches of IE with specific archaeologically identified cultures? They are just that, theories (or hypotheses) that attempt to identify various archaeologically reconstructed cultures with various linguistically reconstructed languages or language stages. By now you should know that a hypothesis is an explanation put forth to account for some group of observed phenomena. These hypotheses attempt to connect two sets of observed data that have no observable connection. That is, they try to link the observed (reconstructed through observations) prehistoric stages of languages with the observed prehistoric cultural assemblages on the ground. To do this, they must account for such things as the time-depth that the linguistic reconstructions indicate, the other (reconstructed) language groups that each of these languages or language stages must have been in contact with during their prehistory, and the geographic locations that the languages must have been in for these contacts to have taken place at the proper times. Since these are hypotheses, they can never be "proved." "Proof" could only come from the discovery of readable inscriptional material, in which case these cultures would no longer be "prehistoric." They can only be confirmed to a level that invites confidence that any particular hypothesis is more likely than its rivals. Ultimately the most acceptable hypothesis will be the one that accounts for the greatest number of observations in the most concise or parsimonious fashion. But no hypothesis is likely to be generally accepted unless it accounts for all the observed data in a consistent and coherent way. But the very reason for this proliferation of hypotheses about the identity of prehistoric languages with prehistoric cultures stems from the fact that archaeological remains without inscriptional material tell us absolutely nothing about the nature of the language(s) involved. If they did, there would be no need for this mass of competing theories. So advancing archaeological evidence as an explanation for the nature of any prehistoric (reconstructed) language is not even pseudo-science. It is just drivel. >Ur-Hans: What was it that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote? Oh, >here it is... <conservative by nature, resisting change with a fervor...>> >Although we will have to wait for re-contact with Greek culture >to develop terms that have -ology in them, I'd bet my handshoe >that is "pop sociology". Generally speaking, conservatism is not a sociological phenomenon, but a psychological one. It refers to a certain type of mindset that resists change. If an entire culture is conservative, it can become a sociological factor, but by and large cultures are made up of conservative and non-conservative elements in varying proportions (there are notable exceptions). Some segments of a society tend to be more conservative than others. For instance religions and the legal profession are usually conservative (particularly in language usage, but frequently in other areas as well), while merchants often are not (always looking for something new to buy or sell and someone new to buy it from or sell it to). Those with a vested interest in the status quo (e.g., hereditary nobility) tend to be conservative. The "haves" are almost always conservative; the "have-nots" are usually not. Politicians are either conservative or ready for change depending on whether they are in office at the moment or not. Conservatism is almost always a conscious choice -- a refusal to accept change (although it often also arises from simple inertia if change requires action and no change doesn't). Linguistic change is almost always unconscious. That is, the users of a language usually do not realize that a change is taking place. If a language retains a disproportionate number of archaisms, it indicates that something in the speech community is acting to block change. Now it doesn't matter what it is that is blocking change, because if conservatism is resistance to change then a language that does not innovate is conservative by definition. But since language change is for the most part unconscious and conservatism is a conscious choice, a conservative language must be so by the conscious choice of its users (simple inertia would allow the change to go through). Therefore an archaic language implies a conservative speech community. >Ur-Fritz: Or worse, Hans-someday. If I'm right, we may actually >be Ur-Danes and we Danes will learn not to like that "ubergeist" >kind of talk. But more importantly, Germanic is not >conservative. If Proto-Germanic has more than its share of archaisms then Germanic is conservative by definition. But some elements of Germanic are more conservative than others. It has been noted elsewhere on the list that High German preserves the old case system almost intact while all the other branches have innovated it away in varying degrees. That makes High German conservative by definition. It was also noted, quite correctly, that "the Pennsylvania Amish did not feel they 'had to conform' and make English their native tongue." Again, resistance to change is conservatism, and while this is not the only example to be had of a small language community that has refused to adopt the language of a larger language community by which it is surrounded, it is an example of what is possibly the most conservative type of society one could imagine. So while it may be true that Germanic is not conservative in all its present-day branches, there is clearly a conservative element in Germanic that has been observable from prehistoric times down to the present day. >Even we know the functional difference between archaic and >conservative. It will save a lot of time if you will never claim that you know what a word means or that you know the difference between the meanings of words. As a hypothesis, this simply does not account for the observed facts. Just use the words in a sentence that has context and then we can tell if you know what they mean or not. But even if you know the difference between archaic and conservative, you obviously don't know what the connection between them is. So again to the Webster's: conservative: tending to prefer an existing situation to change. archaic: surviving from an earlier period. So, again, conservatism leads to archaism. Being archaic and conservative basically means being old-fashioned and liking it that way. Now "archaic" also has a meaning "of, relating to, or characteristic of an earlier or more primitive time," so I can see how you can come to the conclusion that "archaic" equates to "primitive" and archaeological evidence of a "primitive" culture accounts for the "archaic" nature of Germanic because "primitive" cultures have "primitive" (= "archaic") languages. And this conclusion would have been right in the mainstream in the 18th or 19th century when nationalistic fervor had more to say about language and culture than linguistic evidence did. But it really won't make it at the end of the 20th century. >Ur-Hans: And us being poor and cut-off by the Celts from the >south, isn't that sociology? >Ur-Fritz: No, it's called hard evidence about what happened in >pre-history, proto-Hans. It may explain certain features (but >not handshoe) in Germanic -that whiting at cc.helsinki.fi doesn't >care to address - in terms of "mutual contact" or lack of it. >Cultural anthropologists, historians, archaeologist and linguists >use the term. Although sociology can use hard statistical >evidence, you have to be rigorous or you'll end up saying very >unscientific things like <conservative by nature, resisting change with a fervor...>>. >That's pseudo-science. I rather like your opposition of sociology and hard evidence, but even the existence of hard evidence doesn't prove that something is not sociological. But then again, conservatism is not really a sociological phenomenon unless it is a characteristic of a society as a whole. On the other hand, there is certainly no shortage of examples of conservative societies. >Ur-Hans: Sounds like that could cause some trouble in the days ahead. >Ur-Fritz: Oh, it will, Hans. It will. >That's the latest [irony] from Ur-Steve Long Unless you actually meant the opposite of what you said, it is not irony. But, sadly, I get the impression that you actually did mean it, so it is just sarcasm. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From jer at cphling.dk Mon Apr 26 00:10:20 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 02:10:20 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns In-Reply-To: <005101be8d53$dc4a2040$f9d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, I found: > [ Moderator's comment: > There is no evidence for a laryngeal in this stem; the length is due to > Ablaut ("apophony"), unexplained as yet. > --rma ] It seems to be part of the _definition_ of ablaut that it is unexplained. Well, I am at least trying to explain the ablaut. The whole matter is simply one of internal reconstruction. There is no more ablaut in IE than there is umlaut and breaking in Old Norse or Old English. Though that _is_ quite a lot, it has not kept scholars from successfully pointing out the rules of co-variation which can often be detected by comparing different parts of the language itself. In PIE there is a lot of such co-variation, in that the vocalism manifestly varies with the accent and - to a more limited, but specifiable, extent - with reduplication and special morphemes. A stem-final vowel ("thematic vowel") is not lost, but varies e/o according to rules of its own (see on next comment). If we find that the nom.sg. in *-s is restricted to certain stem classes, while others have zero, but they all have lengthening when the stem ends in a consonant, an obvious _possibility_ is that this reflects pure phonetic chnge. And if, on top of this, we find that some neuter stems ending in consonant + s behave just as if their s were the nominative marker, which of course it cannot be in a neuter noun, our guess is confirmed: Then there is little room for any understanding except by simple phonetic change. If that demystifies ablaut, so be it. I also found: > [ Moderator's comment: > It appears to be current in some European schools, that *e/o is [e] before > voiceless obstruents and [o] before voiced. I find that there are too many > exceptions to accept this. > --rma ] Oh yeah? That's nice, tell me where - for I have been preaching this sermon since the mid seventies, encountering nothing but scorn and disbelief, except with a few unbiased colleagues who bothered to get informed and, it seems, now some very young Germans who want to look at the facts for themselves with an open mind and are now finding the same thing, plus own students who have heard enough about the matter. I have later seen that Saussure actually formulated what I believe is the correct rule, but only to give it up for a wrong and narrower formulation; he believed the active feature to be rounding, deriving the 3pl *-nt from earlier *-mt which is not possible (West Germanic specifically demands *-nth, not *-mft which would have been the outcome of *-mth; and if the rule is also to explain the active participle in *-ont-, Lithuanian /-ant-/ proves n, not m) and of course contrary to forms like *-od and *-oy which do not have rounding, but do have voice. - There ARE many exceptions, but they are principled and harmless: This particular rule applies only to the "thematic vowel", i.e. pure vowels in stem-final position. It explains the interchange e/o in the stem final of thematic verbs, where there are no sure exceptions at all, and in pronouns where inflections retaining maximum alternation show the very same distribution as the verbs. It explains only a few, but precious, forms of the nouns where the alternation hardly occurs, presumably because of a simple standardization of the variant *-o-. Even in the noun, however, we do have *-e in the vocative (before zero, just as the verb has *-e in the imperative), and the fem.-ntr.pl. in PIE *-aH2 must be from *-e-H2 since *-o- can be proved not to get coloured by /H2/ (the verb plays along in the 1sg.mid. *bher-e-H2-i > *bheraH2i, the necessary common point of departure of Skt. bhare and Gk. pheromai). - Note that the rule also works for a stem-final vowel ("thematic vowel") before another suffix, i.e. not only before desinences: ptc. *-o-nt-, *-o-mH1no-, opt. *-o-yH1-, stative *-e-H1-, factitive *-e-H2- (> *-aH2-), adjectival abstract *-e-taH2- (Goth. diupitha which cannot be analogical; Gk. neo'te:s can). The rule no longer applies to new coinings, thus the compositional vowel is a standardized *-o-, just as there is *-o- in the hypochoristic suffixal array *-o-ko-. It is like /s/ in Greek: Anybody can see that /s/ is lost intervocalically in old forms (kre'as, gen. kre'a-os), but often restored in younger forms (lu:'so:, e'lu:sa on the pattern of kle'pso:, e'klepsa). Just as the Greek "s rule" may appear to be disproved by reference to cases of actually occurring intervocalic /s/, thus the IE "thematic vowel rule" could be seemingly disproved by its exceptions. Such counterevidence only disproves the productivity of the rule, not its earlier existence and its explanatory adequacy for a great many forms lying around in the morphology and the lexicon. - But thanks for the comments; this is the way to make progress. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Mon Apr 26 02:15:30 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 04:15:30 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns In-Reply-To: <005101be8d53$dc4a2040$f9d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [...] My strong suspicion is that *mwe, *twe, *swe > designated topicality, and their use in other cases is transference of > function. I believe that *me, *te, and *se are original > absolutive/accusative forms, and there is no need to derive them from any > other form. Even so, the non-occurrence of the very FORM *mwe (in any function) does look as strong evidence for a rule *mw- > *m-. The rule, however, has a broader foundation, cf., e.g., Gk. mo:^mar 'blemished' vs. amu:'mo:n 'unblemished' where /mo:-/ : /mu:-/ can only be seen as a regular alternation if derived from *mwoH-/*muH-. > Secondly, for your idea to be even vaguely plausible, you should be able to > show Cwe -> Ce in non-pronominal words, and, as far as I know, this is not > recognized in IE studies are as normal phonological developement. We do have *swe'so:r and *swe'k^s without the *-w- in some languages. [On the "nominative lengthening":] > I do not believe that I have ever seen this kind of lengthening > mechanism asserted. [...] You have now. It goes back a long way in the literature, over a century actually. I have given it a twist of my own, but only a little. [...] > I am also not aware of any IE who has successfully asserted that apophony is > governed by specific consonants. This part of it is, whether assertion to this effect proves successful or not. [...] > Frankly, I wish you could identify a for IE; it would simplify my AA-IE > comparisons since, from all I can see, AA and correspond to IE > with no indication of apophonic influence. I'd like to, of course, and I have let you in on the indications I know. But all indications are to the effect that the two - if ever opposed - have merged in PIE. It may be like *o and *a in Germanic which used to be different, but have merged. Nostratic, though definitely on a productive track, is in its infancy, and the time may not have come for giving Nostr. evidence priority over the testimony of IE itself. I admit, however, that I would probably have welcomed external evidence, had it been postitive. [... Further on the length of nominatives:] > I think the more likely explanation of these lengthenings is the presence of > a resonant; also, I am rather sceptical of IE <*z> exercising its > lengthening across an intervening consonant (if only a resonant). The nominative lengthening also works on stops: *ne'po:t-s, *wo:'{kw}-s. It never works on an immediately preceding vowel: *-os. I do not see how its lengthening effect can be used to decide against its being earlier voiced. Strictly, we can only say - and that's all I claim - that the nominative marker appears to have been voiced in word-final position when preceded by a vowel. That could be an effect exerted upon it by the environment, but then it is an effect to which the *-s marking the 2sg was immune, so even then we would need two different s's. What is so bad about that - Hindi /s/ has _three_ known sources. > > Lengthening is also seen in the s-aorist which then apparently had the > > lengthening s. [...] > I agree that this is an interesting congruity. That's a pleasant reaction. [...] > I do not doubt that different results indicate different conditioning > factors but I see no major objection to supposing that the conditioning > factor is probably stress-accent if not simply a desire to differentiate > phonologically identical forms fulfilling gradually differentiated > functions. But what is the probability that morphological differentiation not based in phonetic change gets to LOOK so much like the result of phonetic change that its variation can be stated in terms of consistent phonetic rules? [...] > You must know that I am merely accepting Beekes on this point. I also once > toyed with two different s'es but I am convinced that the explanation > offered by Beekes is the stronger and more economical explanation. It would be if it explained the facts as they are. The trouble with Leiden-style IE morphology is that so much of the material has to be explained as secondary. I want to respect the material - or at least the parts of it that I cannot explain away. [...] > You certainly seem to like "variants". Yes, that's all there is to work on in internal reconstruction. Without morphophonemic alternation, there is no clue to the prehistory of the forms. > A look at AA may convince you (e.g. > Egyptian -wj, dual) that, most likely, the dual -w has a separate origin. > After all, although a variation is attested is some IE languages like > Hittite, it is not, so far as I know, established for IE. I would of course change my mind if I got to know external evidence well enough to be able to control it and to see its relevance, and then found it to be in conflict with my present views. Such events would consitute quite big surprises, for the IE amount of co-variation is not exactly negligeable, but some of it could of course still be illusory. - That an m/w alternation is not established for IE is precisely the reason why I write about it, for it seems to be there. - BTW, I find it difficult to see that -w- expresses the dual in Egyptian, if the plural ends in -w and the dual in -wy - and the dual personal suffixes simply add -y to the plural forms where (outside of the 3rd person) there is no -w-. [..] > Not trying to be obtuse but I do not really understand your point here. I was saying that, in the personal pronouns, the oblique cases are all built on the acc.: Skt. dat. asma-bhyam, abl. asma-t, loc. asme /asma-y/ parallel to ma-hyam, ma-t tva-t, tve /tva-y/, even instr. tva: and yuSma:-datta- 'given by you', the underlying acc. being found in Skt. in the extended form ma:m /ma + -am/, tva:m /tva + -am/ and the normalized acc.pls. asma:n, yuSma:n - unextended forms seen in Avestan ma, thwa, ahma. That IS a system like that of Modern Indic where case-forming postposition are added to the old accusative. [...] > All I was saying is that most IEists do not believe (and I agree) that the > dual is as old as the singular and plural in IE. A dual is certainly not > necessary in any language to express "two of" something. That is no valid reason for considering the IE dual forms as we find them younger than the sg. and pl. forms we find. The real weight of the actual evidence rather tips the balance the other way: If a dual category is superfluous, and the IE dual forms are not characterized by productive elements, the dual looks like a cumbersome luxury present only because the older generations had it, and not for any important purpose of its own. That spells archaism if anything does. [...] > Obviously, after the dual *was* developed, its rather specialized (and less > frequent) use would tend to preserve its forms in an archaic state. If its forms could be in an archaic state, it must have been old enough to allow me to take it seriously in my analysis of the IE personal pronouns. That was all it was mentioned for. [...On 'me' and 'my':] > This is, IMHO, a completely erroneous analysis. Germanic *mi:na-z is > composed of IE *me + -y, adjectival/genitive + -nV, nominalizer + -s (case > marker). *e-mo-s is an emphatic expansion of *me by *e-, in keeping with a > general tendency to expand monosyllables to disyllables + -s, case marking. > It has only the last two elements in common with *meynos. If that is so, you cannot use the same system to account for the occurrence of /w/ in *tewe 'of thee' (Skt. tava, Lith. poss.adj. tava-) and /n/ in *mene 'of me' (Av. mana, OCS mene, Lith. poss.adj. mana-). > > THEN you can link Hitt. to the rest of IE in a smooth and unforced way > > if you assume that the /u/ has propagated from 'thou' to 'I' and from 'I' > > to 'me', and finally from orthotone 'me' to enclit. 'me'. > I do not assume that the basal form is *tu(:), and so cannot justify > migrating 's. Then why not change your assumption about 'thou' and get the benefits? [...] > The basis for suspecting "topicality" for -w is not present in IE nouns. It > is necessary to reach beyond IE to "justify" it. Fine with me, that makes it even older and more deeply rooted when we find it in the pronouns, where it is then definitely a component to be accounted for in the underlying forms. > > BTW, what is the basis for taking the *-g^ to express topicality? > I do not take it so. I believe it expresses 'maleness', based on analysis of > IE roots containing and extra-IE morphemes. Sorry, I misread you. But why "maleness"? Did women not say *eg^? [...] Thank you for your trouble with rethinking this intricate question. We cannot expect full agreement to be right around the corner. Jens From Anthony.Appleyard at umist.ac.uk Mon Apr 26 07:09:29 1999 From: Anthony.Appleyard at umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 08:09:29 +0100 Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: DFOKeefe at aol.com wrote:- > Hello I-E Listmembers, We have placed a paper we have written entitled > 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH AND FINNISH WORDS WITH AN IRISH TIE-IN TO URALIC in > section 1. (A.) of our Web page, > http://members.aol.com/IrishWord/page/index.htm.... (1) Finnish has picked a lot of loanwords from IE languages down the ages. (2) What work has been done on the statistics of the likely proportion of accidental resemblances between words in any two completely unrelated languages? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Apr 26 07:39:49 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 08:39:49 +0100 Subject: Suffix -ar in IE and Vennemann's Vasconic In-Reply-To: <003e01be8c23$a36fa6e0$da06703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > Not being an IE-ist myself, I would like to ask the knowledgeable > people on this list for more (IE) information about the suffixes > '-(t)ar' and '-ar' which exist in both IE and in Basque, apparently > with roughly the same function and meaning: the former is an > ethnonymic-forming device (with 't' after final vowel), while the > latter can have a series of meanings, often expressing occupational > relationship with something, or something more difficult to describe > in a general way (e.g. collectivity, multiplicity). The Basque suffix <-(t)ar> is indeed an ethnonymic. In older formations, it appears as <-tar> after a consonant and as <-ar> after a vowel, a common type of alternation in Basque, though newer formations do not always respect this distribution. But I'm not sure what other suffix is intended here. It is true that a number of nouns end in a morph <-ar> and that many of these denote things which are commonly encountered in bunches, like `pea', `star', `sand', `branch', and so on, but nobody knows if this ending represents a fossilized suffix or not. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Anthony.Appleyard at umist.ac.uk Mon Apr 26 07:30:13 1999 From: Anthony.Appleyard at umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 08:30:13 +0100 Subject: -t versus no consomant in 3p sg verb forms in common IE Message-ID: It is usually said that the 3rd person singular in IE ended in -ti (primary) or -t (secondary). But Greek has the forms {luei} = "(he) releases)", {elue} = "(he) was releasing". {elue} may well < I.E. {eluet} : notice that in Greek it adds an "n ephelkoustikon" if the next word starts with a vowel, which doesn't happen in the similar imperative form {lue) = "release!" which didn't lose a final consonant; as if the n-ephelkoustikon replaces an earlier etymological t-ephelkoustikon. But re Greek present {luei}: did this form come from *{lueit}?; or perhaps it never ended in a {-t} in the first place. IE *{lueti} would > Attic Greek **{luesi}. Perhaps in early IE times the final -t was only present when the verb had no noun subject, and ultimately derives from an adhering postposited pre-IE subject pronoun. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Apr 26 07:52:12 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 08:52:12 +0100 Subject: Celtic substrate influence In-Reply-To: <004c01be8dd0$1c1b0780$b270fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: > Larry Trask wrote: > > In Parisian French, the preterite seems to have disappeared from > > speech by about the 16th century, according to Price, > I have seen the statement made that in the 17th c., the distinction > was that perfect = past of today and attributed to something called > Port Royale Grammar. [Comrie's book on Tense might have been the > source.] I don't know if this refers to the written language, but > that seems a bit odd. This is precisely the state of affairs in Castilian Spanish today: the perfect is used as a past tense to denote events occurring earlier on the same day. Such a form has been dubbed a `hodiernal past'. The perfect was indeed used likewise as a hodiernal past in the kind of French described in the Port Royal grammar. That grammar, I think, describes the formal literary French of the day, rather than vernacular speech, so it need not be inconsistent with Price's conclusion. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From inaki.agirre at si.unirioja.es Mon Apr 26 10:01:58 1999 From: inaki.agirre at si.unirioja.es (Inaki Agirre Perez) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 11:01:58 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: A couple of objections to LT's points: > Third, Azkue does not claim that the words entered in his dictionary are > native. On the contrary, he declares explicitly, in section IX of his > prologue, that he is entering words of foreign origin which are well > established in Basque Azkue remarked the words he thought native with a different typeset in his dictionary. > > brrrrra > This is not even a lexical item, but only a representation of a noise > used by shepherds to call their sheep. It's on a par with English > noises like `brrr', `tsk-tsk' and `psst'. > > glask > This is strictly an imitative word, on a par with for a > gunshot. I wonder how is it that a language which rejects clusters and plosive initial words is so kind to produce imitative or expresive words within these parameters. Not to say the 'm' problem. I would bet that less of 10% of imitative/nursery/expresive words commit the well-established phonotactics of Pre-Basque. Is this normal? Or Basque got its quite rich expresiveness just in modern times? Inaki Agirre (not a zoologist, but ye an elephant!) From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Apr 26 14:33:00 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 15:33:00 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: [snip...] sometimes heard as and at others as . The speaker is fully aware that the form is but that is not what s/he is actually "saying." In the case of it strikes me that the same thing happens with the result being or when the definite article is attached. The speaker knows (perhaps only unconsciously) that the phoneme sequence is /buruko/, even if the phone sequence may be [bruko] or [burko]. But (except in scribe-influenced languages like English or French) the modern reflex is always a descendant of actual spoken forms. If historical linguists can state that Old Basque didn't have plosive + liquid clusters then it's because such occasional phone clusters were never psychologically elevated to phoneme clusters, and no change of the co-occurrence rule can be reconstructed from the historical data. Although, as you say, there are microdifferences in pronounciation that distinguish native from non-native on what should be almost identical sounds, these differences are probably held at a broader phonological level. For example, in my own speech and may differ only in that the [tr] of is an affricate (cf. ~ ), at least in quick speech. Or although I normally say both and as [dZu:n], they're not precisely identical, because feels the influence of its phonemic form /dju:n/ and can fluctuate in degree of affrication. The psychological difference is still large. I would suggest (and I freely admit I have no idea whether this is true, but I suggest) that to be carried along diachronically a sound reduction of the kind or or would have to go through a reinterpretation of its abstract phonemic form. In Old Basque * broke a firm rule and would not survive. In modern Basque, does [burko] have the tap of /buruko/ or the roll of */burko/? In my English initial [tr] can come from both /tr/ and /t at r/. Once they lose the possibility of reversion to the old phonology, the vowel can be considered gone. The non-standard pronunciations can be very divergent. For I catch myself saying all sorts of things, [aINg at nt@] and [aNgan@] and [QNg at n@] and [aNn@], none of which I would want to dignify with a phonemic form. When they settle down to any one or more forms as stable as and then they can be entered in my idiolect dictionary. That said, forms like and and have acquired a stable written form and can then be enunciated without being the actual slurred forms that gave rise to them. So this is not to deny that saltations like could have occurred; I just suspect that the ordinary lability of speech is not ordinarily enough to generate them. Nicholas Widdows From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Mon Apr 26 15:10:49 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 10:10:49 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Earlier, Glen Gordon wrote: "However what defines a particular language as unambiguously unique from another? How do we define "English"? There are many dialects of English. Do we consider all the English dialects as part of a single language or consider them seperate? How many dialects should there be of English? At what point do the differences between one speech form and another become insignificant or significant in these definitions? Should Proto-Indo-European, Germanic or the descendant of English 500 years from now be considered "English"? What number of people need to speak a particular speech form before it is considered a seperate and statistically significant speech form. Is Eyak a real language? What about artificial languages like Esparanto (some million or so strong so I hear) or Klingon (you know how prevalent Trekkies are)? Etc...." The definition of a language can be as simple or as complex as you wish. Since you work in the field of linguistics, don't you have a definition that is workable for you professionally? The same can be done for mathematical uses. Dictionaries are compiled, limited and incomplete as they are. But, larger and more comprehensive dictionaries can be compiled when needed. My first guess about the nature of a linguistic dictionary would be a simple data base of words-the most elemental unit that I can think of for a language. If I compiled a dictionary of spoken and written words, I could then record a conversation between people and compare each word used in the conversation with the data base of words. Using a simple "hit"--"no-hit" measuring device, I could then measure the percentage of the words used in the conversation with words in the data base. I could measure the compliance of south Australian with Bristol English or Brooklyn, NY English. Other measure like this "compliance ratio" could also be developed, according to the needs of the researcher. Thess types of statistics could be used as a consistent measureing device for the degree of compliance and of dispersion of a given population to a given linguistic dictionary. For example: if I recorded 1500 random conversations in English in San Antonio, Texas and did the same in London, England on the same date, I could then use these conversations to complie a spoken dictionary for each location and time. I would have a vocabulary list of words likely to be spoken in south Texas and in London. These two data bases could then be compared in an almost infinite number of ways, depending on what you were looking for. Admittedly, a simple word list leaves out all the rules of usage, non-verbal clues, etc. It is certainly not a perfect measurement of what constitutes a language, but is could be valuable as a tool for measuring differences-which it seems to me is an important issue in linguistics. It would be a workable starting point from which a more thorough or specialized definition may be worked out as experience is gained. What I am suggesting, at bottom, is the application of mathematical techniques to the problems of linguistic analysis. I guess such a field of study would be called linguistimetrics, similar to econometrics as the application of quantitative techniques to economic problems. I haven't found this word in any of my dictionaries, but I would place a bet that it, or some other word meaning the same thing, will eventually be part of your vocabulary. The reason I am so confident about this prediction is because I know how much the use of quantitative techniques has meant to other fields of study, and I have not seen anything yet that convinces me that some of the same techniques could not be used by linguists. I am posting soon another note that addresses other questions that have been raised about the efficacy of a medical model to linguistic change. I wish I could give more concise responses, but I am mushing around in a field whose vocabulary is alien to me. But, I am confident that I know the scientific method, and it is this vocabulary that unites us. To confess my meager credentials in the lingusitic field, I have studied only two languages other than English-Russian and French. And to call them studies is an insult to anyone who has undertaken a serious study of a foreign language. My study of these languages was superficial at best. A slight bolstering of my case rests on other, non-spoken languages I have experiences with: mathematics-algebra, calculus, statistics and geometry, and computer languages-FORTRAN, BASIC, C and COBOL, plus a few data base manipulation languages, again, on a generally superficial level. If the field of linguistimterics does develop, these are some of the tools that would probably be needed by a budding linguistimetrician. Best Regards, Ray Hendon From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Tue Apr 27 04:12:29 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:12:29 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: <373695c6.600980876@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: At 10:18 AM 4/24/99 GMT, Miguel Carraquer Vidal wrote: [snip] >On the subject of "layabout, good-for-nothing": that seems to be, >as I've discovered, the basic meaning of Aragonese/Navarrese >"chandro" [chandro: gandul, haragan, holgazan], discussed here >recently. Aragonese initial ch- points to *sandro or *jandro >(personal name Sandro, Alejandro?), unless the word is somehow >derived from Provencal (Limousin) chantor/chantre (> Cat. xantre, >xandre) "singer, minstrel". Or derived from a pre-Romance language spoken in the same zone, e.g., from _etxekoanderea_ > etxe(ko)and(e)r(e)a > *echandra > *chandra > chandro where the ending of _*chandra_ originally referring to a female householder was "masculinized", i.e., the /a/ was changed to /o/. As I recall, in the legal text there is no negative connotation to the word. Here it would seem that we might be dealing with some sort of development analogous in some sense to _puta/puto_ where _puta_ refers to a "whore" and was/is the original form (???). In any case the plot thickens with the addition of Miguel's evidence. Izan untsa Roz Frank From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Apr 26 21:55:58 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 16:55:58 -0500 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The Amish conduct religious services in High German [or an archaic version of it] and are literate in the language but they don't speak it at home. >Rick McCallister wrote: >> Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish and other similar groups, >>is more or less a "relic language" in that the vocabulary and not much else >>are from the original language [mainly a mix of German dialects of the >>Upper Rhine valley such as Swiss German, Swabian and Alsatian]. The syntax >>and the morphology are principally from American English. >'Principally' is one of those words that can mean whatever you like, BUT >written PennDu, at least, has 3 genders, 3 cases, personal rendings on >verbs in the present tense separable verbs and rules for verb second and >verb last which look pretty like those of standard German - to mention just >a selection of features not terribly like US English. I'm willing to admit >to not haveing met any real live speakers myself, but I'd be surprised if >my large selection of textbooks on the subject is entirely misleading. >Sheila Watts [ moderator snip ] From stevegus at aye.net Tue Apr 27 00:17:11 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 20:17:11 -0400 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >All this brings us back to Europe, and I think the fact, brought to our >attention again by May Wheeler, but mentioned before, that actually we have >forms like (en)zebro, (en)zebra, ezebra, azebra, cebrario, ezebrario for the >"wild ass" in Old Spanish and Old Portuguese. This is usually taken as going >back to Latin /equifer/. Someone (I forgot who) objectioned that this >etymology requires an intermediary state *ecifer- and found no motivation for >the -qu- > -c- development. Some of these look like they might be more plausibly derived from, or at least contaminated by, Latin -asinu(m)-, the ass. I am not that familiar with Ibero-Romance philology to know exactly what the circumstances are that changed proto-Romance -inV to -brV, but the examples of homine(m) > hombre femina(m) > hembre might go further in explaining how -asinu(m)- ?> -ezebra-. In this case the problematic compound *equifera would no longer be needful. --- With wind we blowen; with wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen; with weopinge we passun. With steringe we beginnen; with steringe we enden; With drede we dwellen; with drede we wenden. ---- Anon, Lambeth Ms. no. 306 [ moderator snip ] From ALDERSON at netcom.com Tue Apr 27 01:53:58 1999 From: ALDERSON at netcom.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 18:53:58 -0700 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >From: >Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM >> Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to >> Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis >> for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE >> consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd >> developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a >> mess. >It is profoundly irresponsible to label anything written by Lehmann as a >"mess". He is one of the preeminent IEists of the 20th century, and to >cavalierly dismiss his work as "Neogrammarian", as if a label could discount >his achievements and contributions, is tragically unjustified. Lehmann is no more a god than is Szemere'nyi, Brugmann, Beekes, Watkins, or Cowgill. He falls down on certain issues, as do all the others, and gets some things right, as do all the others. But much of what he wrote 50 years ago-- and that is about how long ago it was written--is a mess. However, Leo Connolly's use of "Neo-Grammarian" to describe his work is no more dismissive than to so label the work of Carl Brugmann. It assumes the system reconstructed in Brugmann & Delbrueck, and attempts to explain exceptions in a way which the _Grundriss_, Hirt, or Meillet would have approved (whether or not they would have agreed with them). Unfortunately, the _Junggrammatiker_ system needed to be re-examined, and by not doing so Lehmann causes himself problems. >> The Neogrammarians had realized that the vowels [i u] tend to alternate >> with [y w] under conditions which no one has ever been able to specify >> *exactly*; >This is, in my opinion, totally misleading. The condition has been exactly >specified, and in such simple terms, that hardly anyone, who does not have a >predisposition to think that the latest fads in linguistics are the last >word, could not understand them: initial ['Y/WVC] is ['y/wVC]; initial >[Y/WV'C] is [i/u'C]; ['CVY/WC] is ['CVi/uC]; [CV'Y/WVC] is ['Cy/wVC]; >[CVY/W'C] is [Ci/u'C]. Now, what was so difficult about that? It's extremely simple. However, what evidence do you have to back it up? It certainly does not appear in _Grundriss_ or Meillet. >> since this was apparently his dissertation, he felt obligated to say this >> within the framework dominant at the time: PIE [i u] were allophones of /y >> w/, not "true" vowels, >I do not know if Beekes had such an argument in *his* dissertation but in a >book published as late as 1995, he is still asserting what Lehmann's >dissertation asserted. So, though you may disagree, many eminent IEists >still maintain that IE [y/w] are primarily consonontal. And, as any >Nostraticist can assure you, IE [y/w] reflects Semitic [y/w]. If Nostratic >[i/u] -- presuming they actually existed -- showed up as Semitic [0], you >might have a talking point but they do not. Read very carefully what Leo Connolly wrote: Not that *y *w were not consonan- tal, but that in the structuralist framework (alive and well in the 1940s) made Lehmann choose one way or the other, and he chose to see *y *w as primary, and *i *u as secondary. That's a problem with structuralism, not with whether *y and *w were or were not consonantal. In structuralist terms, two phones in complementary distribution *must* be, cannot *not* be, allophones of a single phoneme. (Although a lemma requiring something called "phonetic similarity" was inserted into the theory when it was pointed out that in a pure framework, the English phones [h] and [N], as in _hang_ [h&N], must be allophones of a single phoneme...) Therefore, in the prevailing structuralist framework of the 1940s, Lehmann *had* to define *i and *u as allophones respectively of *y and *w. >> just as PIE syllabic [M N L R] were allophones of /m n l r/. >The syllabic status of [M/N/L/R] is a totally unrelated matter. These become >syllabic when deprived of the stress-accent. So the fact that all *six* resonants pattern the same is irrelevant? That *ey/oy/i parallels *en/on/.n by accident? Then you disagree with Lehmann? What of his god-like status? Never mind, rhetorical questions. In a structuralist framework, if two processes appear to be the same, they must *be* the same, and you cannot separate *y *w from *n *m *r *l in this way. >> Furthermore, though the laryngeals were unambiguously consonants in PIE (his >> view and mine, though others differ), the attested IE languages often have >> vowels where there were once laryngeals. The Neogrammarians had posited PIE >> Schwa in just such places. >I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by >Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. Your belief has nothing to do with the evidence. As pointed out elsewhere by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, there is evidence for *consonantal* reflexes of one or more laryngeals in non-Anatolian languages; Germanicists have long argued for the presence of consonantal laryngeals in Germanic (and Lehmann is included in this group). All Indo-Europeanists who accept laryngeals (and this is very nearly all of them by now) accept that they were consonantal in PIE. [ snip ] >> But I simply do not remember his ever making any use of "syllabicity" beyond >> the obvious ones: /m n l r y w/ had syllabic realizations between >> non-syllabic segments >> [ Moderator's comment: >> The "syllabicity" in question is in the final chapter of the book, in the >> discussion of the stages of pre-IE vocalism leading up to the vowel system >> seen in PIE, by which I mean that reconstructible from the daughter >> languages in Neogrammarian fashion. The earliest stage which he posits is >> one in which there is *no* phonemic vowel at all. I was charmed by the >> notion for years as an undergraduate, but then I learned more phonology. >> --rma ] >Rich, I would be interested to know what phonological principles you believe >Lehmann's "syllabism" violates? This is the reason it has taken me a week to get around to responding to this posting, and not wearing my moderator hat to do so. It's a very large question with an answer unlikely to satisfy the questioner. First, you must understand that I follow David Stampe's "Natural Phonology", as outlined in his dissertation and other works, and in the works of his students. Most important in this context is the work by Patricia (Donegan) Stampe on the phonology of vowel systems. Natural Phonology is process-oriented and requires that both lexical representations and derivations always be pronounceable; it is thus distinguished from Chomsky & Halle's _Sound Pattern of English_-style generative phonology, in which underlying (lexical) representations of English reproduce the Great English Vowel Shift. (See, for example, her dissertation, _The Natural Phonology of Vowels_, available as an Ohio State Working Paper in Linguistics, No. 27 I think.) On this basis, as an undergraduate I began an examination of the monovocalic analysis of Indo-European 25 years ago. I started out with what I considered the most interesting analysis of IE vowels, that of W. P. Lehmann, and looked for parallels in other languages (as the only way to demonstrate that an analy- sis is valid is for it to explain not only historical but synchronic phenomena in more than one language). This led me to look at Abkhaz, Abaza, Ubykh, and Kabardian, all of which have very large obstruent systems and very small vowel systems. Natural Phonology is, as well as process-oriented, constraint-oriented and hierarchical: The presence of certain phonological entities entails the presence of others. Thus, vowel systems are constrained: Certain kinds of vowel system are more stable than others, and unstable vowel systems rapidly turn into stable systems by either eliminating contrast or by adding contrast. In addition, processes which are not repressed may increase distinctions between vowels in the system (long vowels may become tense, for example, or a distinction in palatality vs. labiality may arise as in Arabic short /a/ vs. long /a:/ = [&] vs. [O:]). There is no such thing, in the world's languages, as a system with only one phonemic vowel (and _a fortiori_ no such thing as a language with none). The smallest phonemic vowel inventories yet found are in the languages I named above--and the analyses which shrink them to two vowels may violate one or more of the axioms of natural phonology. Thus, Lehmann violates a major principle when he asserts that any stage of Indo-European lacked a phonemic vowel: If a phone is present in a language, it has a psychological status in the lexicon, and while it may alternate with other sounds in the language because of morphological rules or unconstrained processes, it cannot be denied phonemic status. Rich Alderson From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Apr 28 02:12:59 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 21:12:59 -0500 Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard wrote: [ moderator snip ] > (2) What work has been done on the statistics of the likely proportion > of accidental resemblances between words in any two completely unrelated > languages? Try the following link which discusses just that: ======================================================= Tom Wier ICQ#: 4315704 AIM: Deuterotom Website: "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. - Thomas Jefferson ======================================================== From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 03:00:45 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 22:00:45 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, April 24, 1999 12:39 AM >Some responses to Pat's critique of my remarks re. Lehmann's "syllabicity": >>Why do you not explain why you consider it "nonsensical". >No need to, since I was not claiming that it was, but only that it *struck* >me as such some years ago. If you want reasons, the ambiguity of his >formulations, W. P. Lehmann is one of the finest IEists of this century; and his writing has been considered by most IEists lucid and cogent. If by "ambiguity" you mean "uncertainness" or "doubtfulness", you are certainly entitled to your opinion, unshared as it will be. If by "ambiguity" you mean "susceptibility of multiple interpretations", then most readers of Lehmann will not share your opinion. His writing is unusually concise and exacting. >and his insistance that syllabicity was a "prosodic feature" rather than a >segmental phone would be reason enough. You are betraying your age. In the 1950's, J. R. Firth defined "prosody" somewhat differently you you seem to think is appropriate *now* *for you*. Obviously, you are unfamiliar with this concept of "prosody" which had a certain popularity at the time. In keeping with Firth's idea of "prosody" ("a wide range of [other] phonetic and phonological characteristics"; Larry's dictionary of Phonetics, p. 293). Now whether you personally subscribe to Firth or not, to judge Lehmann's writing of 1955 in terms of *your* present preference for usage of the word is nonsensical. Lehmann was not required to tailor his vocabulary to your ability to understand its terms of reference 45 years later. >>>My gut feeling aside, there's an obvious problem with it even in terms of >>>structuralist theory. On p. 112 Lehmann states: "If we find no phonemes in >>>complemetary distribution at the peak of the syllable, we cannot assume a >>>segmental phoneme for this position." >>My own gut feeling is that there is no problem whatsoever. >[Lehmann quote omitted] >>All Lehmann is saying is that since no specific vowel can be specified at >>the syllabic peak, one that becomes phonemic by contrast with other phonemic >>vowels (where "phonemic" is defined as providing a semantic differentiation: >>CVC is a different word than CV{1}C), we cannot assume *one* specific vowel >>(e or anything else) at the syllabic peak in stressed positions. >>"Syllabicity" is just a innovative way of describing V{?}. >Innovative to the point that a vowel is somehow not a vowel. But let it >pass. You're missing the meaning of what I wrote next: Sorry you insist on understanding it only in your own terms. Can you not grasp the concept of "undefined vowel", you know, what we mean we we write today? >>>Surely not "phonemes in complementary distribution" -- *contrasting* >>>phonemes, or something of the sort. >>"Complementary distribution" in Trask's dictionary means "The relation which >>holds in a given speech variety between two phones which never occur in the >>same environment." >Right! "Phones." That is, raw sounds. Allophones of a single phoneme. But >Lehmann wrote "phonemes", which makes no sense in that context. That's why >I suggested "contrasting phonemes". I almost feel you have some personal axe to grind here since you insist on being, what to me, appears to be obtuse. May I suggest that you obtain some good dictionary of phonetics (like Larry's)? -- where you can read on p. 265: "Both the British school and the American Structuralists regard the phoneme as indivisible and as minimally abstract, a conception often labelled the autonomous (or classical) phoneme. In this view, the phoneme is essentially a structureless object which none the less has identifiable phonetic characteristics; it may be realized in speech by phonetically different phones in different environments." Again, it appears to mean that Lehmann's use of the terminology is perhaps not yours but was shared with a number of other linguists 45 years ago. >>With the exception of the qualification "two", this describes the situation >>that Lehmann has supposed for the stress-period of IE (e e{sub} e:). You >>may question his analysis but his terminology seems perfectly in accordance >>with standard usage. >No way. What do you not expand on that a bit? >>>Whether complementary or contrastive, the supposed difficulty arises >>>because Lehmann (against Brugmann & Co.) arbitrarily defines [i u] as >>>syllabic allophones of resonant phonemes /y w/ -- A totally separate question. >>There is nothing arbitrary about this at all. If we assume that IE and AA >>are related through Nostratic (which you may not prefer to do), the decision >>is mandatory. IE CiC does not show up in AA as normal C-C but rather always >>as C-y-C. >Even if your Nostratic correspondence is correct, it would still tell us >nothing about the phonemic situation of any stage of PIE, since the phonemes >of any stage of any language must be defined in terms of that stage alone. If you do not think that a phoneme which is in some positions, which can become a in other positions, is different, from say an , then all I can say is that your are entitled to your opinion but I consider it illogical. >We need reasons within PIE itself why [i u] must be analyzed as /y w/ rather >than /i u/. And Beekes has obviously found them. >And while I realize that the matter is debated, Lehmann's notion of >syllabicity seems to entail the consonantal analysis, It does entail. And, on the basis of AA cognates (among other indications), that is certainly the correct view. >else [e] etc. *must* be analyzed as one or more segmental vowel phonemes. No idea what this is supposed to mean: too ambiguous. >But let's be real: regardless of what has been done in the past, would any >competent phonologist now analyze a language with at least contrasting [i u >e] as having *no* vowel phonemes? You insist on misunderstanding Lehmann. While the contrast [e {sub}e e:] may be minimal, it is still a contrast; and you are missing the obvious point: that the actual phonetic quality of the vowel is immaterial because not differentiating. >[stuff omitted] >>So far, the only information there we have to support your position is >>Bomhard's *mention* of a paper by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov *with no details*. >>Do you have any arguments for your position? >huh? I don't make the connection here to anything your or I have said. Bomhard cited a paper by G&I as "proving" the existence of "pure" and for IE, which is, I assume, your as yet unsupported position. >[more omitted] >>>With /i u/ there is contrast in position between non-syllabics, >>I have no idea what this means. Could you explain it? >I just did, but in case I wasn't clear: Lehmann's analysis of [e e: e{sub}] as >something other than a vowel phoneme is possible only because he posits no >other vowel phonemes. I think you might want to review Lehmann again, and try to understand the distinction between the pre-stress and stress periods. >With [i u] analyzed as /y w/, this is weird and forced, but perhaps not >wholly impossible: the language would have had no other vowel phonemes >between two consonants, hence [e] etc. need not be analyzed as a segmental >phoneme, since it would not be *contrasting* with any vowel phonemes. Now you are getting closer to Lehmann's meaning whether you agree with it or not. >But if [i u] are analyzed as vowel phonemes /i u/, then *contrasting vowels* >between consonants are possible, and any justification for treating [e] etc. >as something other than a vowel phoneme falls by the wayside. Remember that >phonemes are *contrasting* sounds; they are not in complementary >distribution, though the allophones (realizations) of any given phoneme may >be (and usually are). Again, I suggest you attempt to distinguish between the stress and pre-stress periods. >>>-- I should add that on p. 113, Lehmann incautiously says that at the next >>>stage of PIE, with phonemic stress, syllabicity with minimum stress >>>"remains non-segmental between obstruents..." "Between"? How so? >>>Anything that can be between phonemes sounds segmental enough to me! >>How about zero-grade "vowels"? >That puzzles me for a variety of reasons, but leads to a question. I don't >mean to be snide, and I hope you won't be offended; but how familiar are you >with phonemic theory (any version will do)? "Prosodic features" and >"non-segmental" items are generally called "suprasegmentals", because they >apply on top of some segmental phoneme or sequence of phonemes. Pitch and >stress have a domain of at least one syllable. It makes no sense to say that >they occur between segmental phonemes, and no one claims they do. Yet >Lehmann claims here that one such suprasegmental does exactly that. -- A more >modern version could analyze the zero grade more neatly: a sequence /CVC/ >might be realized in various ways, depending on stress: [CVC] or even [CV:C] >under stress, [C at C] or even [CC] when not stressed. This last is zero grade >(but not a "zero-grade 'vowel'"). But this works only if /V/ is a real vowel >phoneme, which Lehmann did not want to concede. I am familiar with the way in which you would like to define these words. But you may not insist that Lehmann, writing 45 years ago, defines them in exactly the same way you choose to do now. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Apr 27 04:29:49 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:29:49 EDT Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) Message-ID: In a message dated 4/26/99 3:32:41 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote: <> I'm happy we agree about something, more or less. <> Scientifically valid hypotheses (be they right or wrong) "predict" results and this is the basis of experimentation. The term "predictability" may be somewhat arbitrary, but once again it is the common term of art. E.g., Bayes' Theorem extends that predictability to a measure of probability: "Bayes' Theorem provides a way to apply quantitative reasoning to what we normally think of as 'the scientific method'. When several alternative hypotheses are competing for our belief, we test them by deducing consequences of each one, then conducting experimental tests to observe whether or not those consequences actually occur. If an hypothesis predicts that something should occur, and that thing does occur, it strengthens our belief in the truthfulness of the hypothesis. Conversely, an observation that contradicts the prediction would weaken (or destroy) our confidence in the hypothesis. "In many situations, the predictions involve probabilities-- one hypothesis might predict that a certain outcome has a 30% chance of occurring, while a competing hypothesis might predict a 50% chance of the same outcome. In these situations, the occurrence or non-occurrence of the outcome would shift our relative degree of belief from one hypothesis toward another." See the neat Bayes' Theorem Calculator at http://m2.aol.com/johnp71/bayes.html With regard to the coexistence of two contrary hypotheses, the obvious objective for the experimenter is to generate a test which resolves the situation. From the abstract to P.Adorj?n, J.B. Levitt, J.S. Lund, and K.Obermayer. A model for the intracortical origin of orientation preference and tuning in macaque striate cortex., Visual Neuroscience, 16:1-16, 1999:"...In contrast to models based on an afferent orientation bias, however, the intracortical hypothesis predicts that orientation tuning gradually evolves from an initially nonoriented response and a complete loss of orientation tuning when the recurrent excitation is blocked, but new experiments must be designed to unambiguously decide between both hypotheses." A hypothesis must predict before it can be proven false by experimentation. E.g.: "Our results are inconsistent with the detoxification hypothesis that predicts that a large proportion of the heavy metals passing through the gut are absorbed and stored permanently. We found for both zinc and copper that the quantity in the abdomen was not proportional to the concentration of these metals in the consumed food but was, instead, relatively invariant. For these reasons, we suggest that regulated biological availability, not detoxification, may be the primary benefit of zinc and copper storage." - Abstract,?MeV-ion microprobe analyses of whole Drosophila suggest that zinc and copper accumulation is regulated storage not deposit excretion. Robert M. S. Schofield, John H. Postlethwait and Harlan W. Lefevre; Journal of Experimental Biology v.200(24)1997 What is most relevant about the three quotes above (as well as thousands of others) is that they all include the phrase "hypothesis predicts." As a matter of language the two terms very often come together in this way in scientific usage. And this reflects clearly an understanding that the "predictions" of the hypothesis are what is being tested. Whether that is philosophically right or wrong is another matter. Regards, Steve Long From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Apr 27 04:55:00 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:55:00 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: Inaki Agirre Perez wrote: > I wonder how is it that a language which rejects clusters and plosive > initial words is so kind to produce imitative or expresive words within > these parameters. Not to say the 'm' problem. I would bet that less of > 10% of imitative/nursery/expresive words commit the well-established > phonotactics of Pre-Basque. Is this normal? Or Basque got its quite rich > expresiveness just in modern times? Well, I can think of a number of onomotopoeic (sp?) words in English which violate normal phonotactics, such as "pshaw" /pSa/, "tsk tsk" which normally indicates the dentalveolar click, "baa", /b&/, where /&/ is normally not allowed in open syllables. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 05:21:29 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:21:29 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Sunday, April 25, 1999 9:15 PM First, please let me apologize for misspelling your first name in an earlier posting. It was entirely unintentional. >On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >>[...] My strong suspicion is that *mwe, *twe, *swe designated topicality, >>and their use in other cases is transference of function. I believe that >>*me, *te, and *se are original absolutive/accusative forms, and there is >>no need to derive them from any other form. >Even so, the non-occurrence of the very FORM *mwe (in any function) does >look as strong evidence for a rule *mw- > *m-. Not strong! Not evidence! This seems completely illogical to me. >The rule, however, has a broader foundation, cf., e.g., Gk. mo:^mar >'blemished' vs. amu:'mo:n 'unblemished' where /mo:-/ : /mu:-/ can only be >seen as a regular alternation if derived from *mwoH-/*muH-. Irrelevant to the question of the pronominal form *mwe but, in any case, why not *mouH-/*muH? >>Secondly, for your idea to be even vaguely plausible, you should be able >>to show Cwe -> Ce in non-pronominal words, and, as far as I know, this is >>not recognized in IE studies are as normal phonological developement. >We do have *swe'so:r and *swe'k^s without the *-w- in some languages. One sallow does not a swallow make. >[On the "nominative lengthening":] >>I do not believe that I have ever seen this kind of lengthening mechanism >>asserted. [...] >You have now. It goes back a long way in the literature, over a century >actually. I have given it a twist of my own, but only a little. The twist makes it very difficult to recognize. >>I am also not aware of any IE who has successfully asserted that apophony >>is governed by specific consonants. >This part of it is, whether assertion to this effect proves successful or >not. Unless "assertion to this effect (does) proves successful", I feel comfortable in not considering it a viable factor. >[...] >>Frankly, I wish you could identify a for IE; it would simplify my >>AA-IE comparisons since, from all I can see, AA and correspond to >>IE with no indication of apophonic influence. >I'd like to, of course, and I have let you in on the indications I know. >But all indications are to the effect that the two - if ever opposed - >have merged in PIE. It may be like *o and *a in Germanic which used to be >different, but have merged. Nostratic, though definitely on a productive >track, is in its infancy, and the time may not have come for giving >Nostr. evidence priority over the testimony of IE itself. I admit, >however, that I would probably have welcomed external evidence, had it >been postitive. Well, if you are maintaining that pre-IE had both and then it would seem to me that that Nostratic evidence through, e.g. Arabic, where and have been maintained, would be crucial. But I can give you a little nudge: I am sure that the of the IE genitive could *not* have been . >[... Further on the length of nominatives:] >>I think the more likely explanation of these lengthenings is the presence >>of a resonant; also, I am rather sceptical of IE <*z> exercising its >>lengthening across an intervening consonant (if only a resonant). >The nominative lengthening also works on stops: *ne'po:t-s, *wo:'{kw}-s. Why can you not accept that *ne'po:t-s is the result of *nepoH-t-s? >But what is the probability that morphological differentiation not based >in phonetic change gets to LOOK so much like the result of phonetic change >that its variation can be stated in terms of consistent phonetic rules? That is a tough one. I have not ready answer. >>You must know that I am merely accepting Beekes on this point. I also once >>toyed with two different s'es but I am convinced that the explanation >>offered by Beekes is the stronger and more economical explanation. >It would be if it explained the facts as they are. The trouble with >Leiden-style IE morphology is that so much of the material has to be >explained as secondary. I want to respect the material - or at least the >parts of it that I cannot explain away. No one can be faulted for that. >>A look at AA may convince you (e.g. Egyptian -wj, dual) that, most likely, >>the dual -w has a separate origin. After all, although a variation >>is attested is some IE languages like Hittite, it is not, so far as I >>know, established for IE. >I would of course change my mind if I got to know external evidence well >enough to be able to control it and to see its relevance, and then found >it to be in conflict with my present views. Such events would consitute >quite big surprises, for the IE amount of co-variation is not exactly >negligeable, but some of it could of course still be illusory. - That an >m/w alternation is not established for IE is precisely the reason why I >write about it, for it seems to be there. Well, let us chew on a smaller bite. Why do you not give us your best arguments for proposing a non-Hittite alternation *outside of the pronoun series*? >- BTW, I find it difficult to see that -w- expresses the dual in Egyptian, >if the plural ends in -w and the dual in -wy - and the dual personal >suffixes simply add -y to the plural forms where (outside of the 3rd person) >there is no -w-. Before we go to far afield on the IE list, let us restrict our view to the simplest and most transparent case: the nominal dual and plural in Egyptian. Here, we find -w as the regular masculine plural ending. I consider that a collective suffix. When the need for a dual came to be felt, the plural (from collective) suffix was simply differentiated by -j. I propose an analogous process of differentiation and suffixation provides an economical explanation for the main thrust of dual formation in IE. By the way, it is customary to distinguish between (one reed leaf) and (two reed leaves) in Egyptian transcriptions. [ moderator snip ] >I was saying that, in the personal pronouns, the oblique cases are all >built on the acc.: Skt. dat. asma-bhyam, abl. asma-t, loc. asme /asma-y/ >parallel to ma-hyam, ma-t tva-t, tve /tva-y/, even instr. tva: and >yuSma:-datta- 'given by you', the underlying acc. being found in Skt. in >the extended form ma:m /ma + -am/, tva:m /tva + -am/ and the normalized >acc.pls. asma:n, yuSma:n - unextended forms seen in Avestan ma, thwa, >ahma. That IS a system like that of Modern Indic where case-forming >postposition are added to the old accusative. Well, does this not suggest the primacy of the accusative? before the addition of -m to designate animate accusatives? >>All I was saying is that most IEists do not believe (and I agree) that the >>dual is as old as the singular and plural in IE. A dual is certainly not >>necessary in any language to express "two of" something. >That is no valid reason for considering the IE dual forms as we find them >younger than the sg. and pl. forms we find. I have tried to show that that is exactly the case: that the dual forms incorporate -y, which is not specifically dual but only differentiating. And, we may even be getting a glimpse of the collective -w I propose in the locative plural ending -su. >The real weight of the actual evidence rather tips the balance the other >way: If a dual category is superfluous, and the IE dual forms are not >characterized by productive elements, the dual looks like a cumbersome >luxury present only because the older generations had it, and not for any >important purpose of its own. That spells archaism if anything does. Yes, but there is different archaic horizons --- some earlier than others. >>Obviously, after the dual *was* developed, its rather specialized (and >>less frequent) use would tend to preserve its forms in an archaic state. >If its forms could be in an archaic state, it must have been old enough to >allow me to take it seriously in my analysis of the IE personal pronouns. >That was all it was mentioned for. Perhaps it is just a question of emphasis? >[...On 'me' and 'my':] >>This is, IMHO, a completely erroneous analysis. Germanic *mi:na-z is >>composed of IE *me + -y, adjectival/genitive + -nV, nominalizer + -s (case >>marker). *e-mo-s is an emphatic expansion of *me by *e-, in keeping with a >>general tendency to expand monosyllables to disyllables + -s, case >>marking. It has only the last two elements in common with *meynos. >If that is so, you cannot use the same system to account for the >occurrence of /w/ in *tewe 'of thee' (Skt. tava, Lith. poss.adj. tava-) >and /n/ in *mene 'of me' (Av. mana, OCS mene, Lith. poss.adj. mana-). I do not see why I cannot. Some uses of the genitive are very close to being topical: "of thee let me say that . . ." The forms for "of me" are simply an alternative method of composition: *me- + *-nV, nominalizer. Or would you not agree that there was some variation of formation in IE --- even at its earliest. The Acade{'}mie Indo-Europe{'}enne was not around in those days. >>>THEN you can link Hitt. to the rest of IE in a smooth and unforced way if >>>you assume that the /u/ has propagated from 'thou' to 'I' and from 'I' to >>>'me', and finally from orthotone 'me' to enclit. 'me'. >>I do not assume that the basal form is *tu(:), and so cannot justify >>migrating 's. >Then why not change your assumption about 'thou' and get the benefits? If this were a friendly drinking bout, I would be accomodating and agree. But are we not both trying to approximate the truth as closely as we are able? >>The basis for suspecting "topicality" for -w is not present in IE nouns. It >>is necessary to reach beyond IE to "justify" it. >Fine with me, that makes it even older and more deeply rooted when we >find it in the pronouns, where it is then definitely a component to be >accounted for in the underlying forms. >>> BTW, what is the basis for taking the *-g^ to express topicality? >>I do not take it so. I believe it expresses 'maleness', based on analysis of >>IE roots containing and extra-IE morphemes. >Sorry, I misread you. But why "maleness"? Did women not say *eg^? Only Valkyries. Other women, probably *em-. >Thank you for your trouble with rethinking this intricate question. We >cannot expect full agreement to be right around the corner. I am always interested in new ideas, and while I may not accept them, they stimulate all of us to rethink our reason for accepting other assumptions so, IMHO, they are always welcome as long as they are not purely frivolous, and I do not believe your ideas are. Actually, this discussion has benefited my thinking because I have always wanted to connect Arabic -t with IE -t (which, on the basis of a plentitude of other cognates, is impossible), but, on the basis on the neuter personal pronouns in -d, and the possibility that neuter and feminine were once a combined non-male classification, the smoke is starting to clear a little. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Apr 27 05:20:00 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 01:20:00 -0400 Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard wrote: > (2) What work has been done on the statistics of the likely proportion > of accidental resemblances between words in any two completely unrelated > languages? Go to http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 05:27:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:27:31 -0500 Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: Dear Anthony and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Anthony Appleyard Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 2:09 AM [ moderator snip ] > (2) What work has been done on the statistics of the likely proportion > of accidental resemblances between words in any two completely unrelated > languages? Those who are interested in this aspect of Nostratic might enjoy reading: _Nostratic - Sifting the Evidence_, ed. Joseph C. Salmons andd Brian D, Joseph, 1998, John Benjamins (so you know it will be overpriced), in which Donald Ringe has _A Probabilistic Evaluation of Indo-Euralic, and especially, Response to Oswalt and Ringe by William H. Baxter. Our friend Alexis Manaster-Ramer has a nice co-authored article on Exploring the Nostratic Hypothesis in it also. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 05:42:20 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:42:20 -0500 Subject: Suffix -ar in IE and Vennemann's Vasconic Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 2:39 AM [ moderator snip ] > The Basque suffix <-(t)ar> is indeed an ethnonymic. In older > formations, it appears as <-tar> after a consonant and as <-ar> after a > vowel, a common type of alternation in Basque, though newer formations > do not always respect this distribution. > But I'm not sure what other suffix is intended here. It is true that a > number of nouns end in a morph <-ar> and that many of these denote > things which are commonly encountered in bunches, like `pea', > `star', `sand', `branch', and so on, but nobody > knows if this ending represents a fossilized suffix or not. Larry, no need to tell me that you do not accept any connection of this last Basque <-ar> with anything outside of Basque but some readers might be interested in the idea that this termination, rather than denoting "things ... in bunches" is more narrowly defined as an 'indefinite amount', which I take to be a motivating factor of IE r/n-declension. I explain this at: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison-AFRASIAN-3-r-N-declens ion.htm Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Apr 27 05:41:39 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 01:41:39 -0400 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: Ray Hendon wrote: > Earlier, Glen Gordon wrote: > "However what defines a particular language as unambiguously unique from > another? How do we define "English"? There are many dialects of English. Do > we consider all the English dialects as part of a single > language or consider them seperate? How many dialects should there be > of English? At what point do the differences between one speech form > and another become insignificant or significant in these definitions? > Should Proto-Indo-European, Germanic or the descendant of English > 500 years from now be considered "English"? What number of people need > to speak a particular speech form before it is considered a seperate > and statistically significant speech form. Is Eyak a real language? > What about artificial languages like Esparanto (some million or so > strong so I hear) or Klingon (you know how prevalent Trekkies are)? > Etc...." This has an analog with other fields like biology. In most cases, something like 99% of cases, there's no difficulty in determining *synchronic* species. Chimps and gorillas cannot mate, therefore, they are seperate species. Analagously, without learning each other's languages, a Spanish-speaker and an English-speaker cannot understand each other. Therefore, they are seperate languages. There are complications like dialect chains, where dialects A and D are mutually unintelligible, distinct languages, but A & B, B & C, and C & D are all mutually intelligible pairs. This occurs in biology as well, subspecies A & B can mate, as can B &C and C & D, but A & D cannot. Perhaps a good example might be dogs, a chihuahua and a St. Bernard probably couldn't mate (altho artificial methods might make a hybrid, provided the mother is the St. Bernard), but they're considered the same species. Diachronic, on the other hand, is purely arbitrary. H. Erectus and H. Sapiens are considered seperate species. In all liklihood, we could not mate with them, were some to be brought forward in time. Yet, where you draw the line is entirely arbitrary. In the same way, Old English is often said to have begun in 450 AD, when the Anglo-Saxons invaded England. Is that English? We couldn't understand them if they came forward in time. English's descendant 20 years from now will be very much the same as now, the differences will be minor. 200 years from now is a bit larger, but probably still intelligible to us. 2000 years from now will be a totally distinct language. When did it "become" this language? That'll be an arbitrary decision for linguist in 3999. Or maybe they'll continue to call their language "English", and just make more divisions, just as "Greek" goes back thousands of years to Ancient Greek. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Apr 27 06:00:23 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 02:00:23 -0400 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Steve Gustafson wrote: > I am not that familiar with Ibero-Romance philology to know exactly > what the circumstances are that changed proto-Romance -inV to -brV, > but the examples of > homine(m) > hombre > femina(m) > hembre What happened here, as I understand it, is that _homine_ became _homne_ (> French _homme_), then dissimilation occured, creating _homre_, and an epinthetic /b/ was added to make _hombre_ > might go further in explaining how > -asinu(m)- ?> -ezebra-. However, it wasn't in --> br, it was min --> mn --> mr --> mbr. in --> br has no phonological motivation. It's a very unlikely change. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Tue Apr 27 08:08:49 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:08:49 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: If this is meant to be Rick McAllister's response to my mail then sorry, everyone, I must have been completely incomprehensible. I am not talking about High German. Indeed, the Amish do use it in religious services - Lutheran German, which is not really 'archaic', just a little old-fashioned, like the English of the (King James) bible. It's still used in German-speaking countries, so it's not certainly not archaic in the religious context. What I was talking about were written texts in 'Pensilfaanisch', Pennsylvania Dutch, or whatever we want to call it, in which there is a substantial body of literature. These texts show Pennsilfaanisch as having a morphology and syntax which are like those of other German dialects and pretty like those of modern standard German. Not, therefore, at all like US English, as RMcA claimed in his original posting. The main English influence in Pennsilfaanisch is in the vocabulary. >>Rick McCallister wrote: >>> Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish and other similar groups, >>>is more or less a "relic language" in that the vocabulary and not much else >>>are from the original language [mainly a mix of German dialects of the >>>Upper Rhine valley such as Swiss German, Swabian and Alsatian]. The syntax >>>and the morphology are principally from American English. Sheila Watts wrote: >>'Principally' is one of those words that can mean whatever you like, BUT >>written PennDu, at least, has 3 genders, 3 cases, personal rendings on >>verbs in the present tense separable verbs and rules for verb second and >>verb last which look pretty like those of standard German - to mention just >>a selection of features not terribly like US English. I'm willing to admit >>to not haveing met any real live speakers myself, but I'd be surprised if >>my large selection of textbooks on the subject is entirely misleading. > Rick McAllister replied: > The Amish conduct religious services in High German [or an archaic >version of it] and are literate in the language but they don't speak it at >home. _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 27 09:10:52 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 10:10:52 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: <37243996.B393841C@si.unirioja.es> Message-ID: On Mon, 26 Apr 1999, Inaki Agirre Perez wrote: > A couple of objections to LT's points: [LT] > > Third, Azkue does not claim that the words entered in his dictionary are > > native. On the contrary, he declares explicitly, in section IX of his > > prologue, that he is entering words of foreign origin which are well > > established in Basque > Azkue remarked the words he thought native with a different typeset in > his dictionary. Not exactly. He explains in section XXIV.5 of his prologue that he uses a distinctive typeface (capital letters) for headwords which he regards as "primitive" (that is, monomorphemic), such as `arm'. He also uses capitals for words which he regards as bimorphemic but for which he believes he can identify only one of the two morphemes, such as `lose', for which <-du> is obvious but is not, and `ax', which he believes (wrongly, in my view) to be a derivative of `stone, crag'. > > > brrrrra > > This is not even a lexical item, but only a representation of a noise > > used by shepherds to call their sheep. It's on a par with English > > noises like `brrr', `tsk-tsk' and `psst'. > > > glask > > This is strictly an imitative word, on a par with for a > > gunshot. > I wonder how is it that a language which rejects clusters and plosive > initial words is so kind to produce imitative or expresive words within > these parameters. Not to say the 'm' problem. I would bet that less of > 10% of imitative/nursery/expresive words commit the well-established > phonotactics of Pre-Basque. Is this normal? Or Basque got its quite rich > expresiveness just in modern times? I wish I knew the answer to that last question. Unfortunately, we lack the data to say anything very substantial about the historical development of expressive formations in Basque. But it is essential, in any case, to distinguish lexical items from noises. In English, we have expressive formations which are lexical items -- that is, real words of the language. Examples include things like `glop', `teensy-weensy', `zap', `icky' and `pizzazz'. But we also have noises which are not real words of the language, like `tsk-tsk', `shhh', `pssst', and `brrr'. Basque is much the same. Things like `bang!' are lexical items, while things like the shepherds' call are noises. In all likelihood, Basque, like any other language, has had both expressive lexical items and noises for as long as it has existed. But it has surely had different ones at different times. Now, it is perfectly possible for a language to have expressive lexical items which violate the ordinary phonological structure of the language. English doesn't do this much, but some other languages do quite a lot of it. It is *possible*, therefore, that ancient or medieval Basque permitted expressive words with "illegal" forms, but we have no evidence to support such a suggestion. What we do know is that the patterns for constructing expressive words have changed over the centuries, and that the patterns used have not been everywhere the same. For example, the Lapurdian dialect is very fond of expressive words beginning with or , and it has quite a few of these, while the other dialects do not appear to use words of this type at all. On the other hand, almost all dialects have long been fond of coining expressive adjectives beginning with or to denote physical or moral defects. Every dialect seems to have some of these things, but different dialects have different ones. Examples: `deformed', `drunk', `obese', `washed out, colorless', `bent, curved', `rough, crude', `feeble, insipid', `insubstantial, feather-headed', `sterile, barren', `fragile', `chubby, mushy', `tricky, deceitful', and so on, and so on, all these examples coming from different dialects. So, the *pattern* is widespread, but the actual *words* used are different in different places. Another popular expressive device is /m/-reduplication, as in expressive words like `drizzle', `murmur, rumor, gossip', `pretext, excuse', and `trash, rubbish'. Most dialects seem to have some of these, but different dialects have different ones. It seems clear, then, that the Basques have felt free to coin these things for a long time, and that some patterns of formation have been popular throughout the language, while others have gained a foothold only in particular regions. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From DFOKeefe at aol.com Tue Apr 27 10:17:53 1999 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 06:17:53 EDT Subject: 2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page Message-ID: Good Morning Anthony, Bjorn Collinder's book FENNO-UGRIC VOCABULARY (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1955) helps to answer your question about IE words in Finnish. There are about 502 Fenno-Ugric etymologies, 479 Uralic etymologies and (pp. 129-131) about 13 IE etymologies. In our judgmental selection of 2,650+ Finnish words, we saw numerous borrowings from the Scandinavian and Slavic languages which were obvious, we didn't select them. Still, even if a few got through, it would have little effect on the validity of the overall sample. I don't know about the statistical cutoff point where chance resemblances between words of two languages turns into non-chance resemblance between words of two languages. A priori, it must be well over 50%. In order to eliminate the possibility of chance, we compared 502 Fenno-Ugric etymologies and 479 Uralic etymologies (from Collinder's book) to IE roots and found that most can be reasonably explained by IE roots. You may check this out in our paper SIMILAR URALIC, FENNO-UGRIC AND INDO-EUROPEAN ROOTS at our Web page (http://members.aol.com/IrishWord/page/index.htm in section 1. (B.).). If most of these Fenno-Ugric and Uralic etymologies can be reasonably explained by IE roots, then chance cannot be a factor. Hope this helps. Thanks for your interest. Best regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Apr 27 11:19:39 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:19:39 +0100 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 24 Apr 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > A Latin derivation seems to the most likely --of those presented-- > but the road seems pretty rocky. This word must have bounced around among > different languages to get the form it has. Given that the initial vowel > was dropped from ecebra with = /c/. I'm wondering if the word was > perceived by Spanish speakers as an Arabic word or if indeed it did pass > through Andalusian Arabic as something like S-b-r, th-b-r, dh-b-r, DH-b-r, > z-b-r, although I suppose the latter would only apply to a certain > attribute. But this pass via (Andalusian) Arabic is unnecessary if what we want to account for is the form OSp /dzebro/. In *eciferum would palatalize/affricate before a front vowel > [ts] and would lenite to [dz] intervocalically, as would /f/ > [v]. The second would be lost by syncope in a post-stressed non-final open syllable. <-um> > /-o/ is entirely regular, as is short > /e/. That gives us /dzevro/. Now we sometimes find, without it being exactly regular, /br/ or /rb/ for expected */vr/ or */rv/. A case in point would be > Ebro (intervocalic normally lenited to /v/ in OSp). The aphaeresis of is the most irregular feature, but not all that surprising, and not assisted by the Andalusian Arabic story. The above is precisely why Romance philologists proposed *eciferus. The > *eci- remains ad hoc. Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From henryh at ling.upenn.edu Tue Apr 27 14:36:56 1999 From: henryh at ling.upenn.edu (Henry M. Hoenigswald) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:36:56 -0500 Subject: -t versus no consomant in 3p sg verb forms in common IE In-Reply-To: <37241605.AF852043@umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: > It is usually said that the 3rd person singular in IE ended in -ti >(primary) or -t (secondary). But Greek has the forms {luei} = "(he) >releases)", {elue} = "(he) was releasing". > {elue} may well < I.E. {eluet} : notice that in Greek it adds an "n >ephelkoustikon" if the next word starts with a vowel, which doesn't >happen in the similar imperative form {lue) = "release!" which didn't >lose a final consonant; as if the n-ephelkoustikon replaces an earlier >etymological t-ephelkoustikon. > But re Greek present {luei}: did this form come from *{lueit}?; or >perhaps it never ended in a {-t} in the first place. IE *{lueti} would > >Attic Greek **{luesi}. > Perhaps in early IE times the final -t was only present when the verb >had no noun subject, and ultimately derives from an adhering postposited >pre-IE subject pronoun. For a try, see HMHoenigswald, 'Some considerations of relative chronology: The Greek thematic present', in A.Etter (ed.), _o-o-pe-ro-si? Risch_ , pp. 372-5. Berlin, de Gruyter (1986). Henry M. Hoenigswald 908 Westdale Avenue Swarthmore PA 19081-1804 Tel: 1-610 543-8086 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 27 14:03:00 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:03:00 -0500 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: <009201be9043$8934cca0$884435cf@oemcomputer> Message-ID: What happened was that -minV > -mnV > -mrV > -mbrV so hominem > homine > homne > homre > hombre /ombre/ feminam > femina > hemna > hemra > hembra /embra/ Asinus become asno [snip] >I am not that familiar with Ibero-Romance philology to know exactly >what the circumstances are that changed proto-Romance -inV to -brV, >but the examples of >homine(m) > hombre >femina(m) > hembre >might go further in explaining how >-asinu(m)- ?> -ezebra-. >In this case the problematic compound *equifera would no longer be >needful. From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Apr 27 14:13:18 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 17:13:18 +0300 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: <000c01be85a5$2a741020$5d5673ce@oemcomputer> Message-ID: On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Steve Gustafson wrote: >Robert Whiting wrote: >>The classic example of this (hunting-taboo replacement by a more >>general word) is often taken from English "deer", originally the >>general Germanic word for 'wild animal' (cf. Ger. "Tier") which >>by being used as a euphemism for the hunted animal has come to be >>specialized in that meaning, with the original meaning being >>taken up by loanwords ("animal, beast"). >I suppose the question is, what justifies calling any of these >processes a 'taboo?' First, they are based on superstition; that is, the belief, not based on reason or knowledge, in the ominous significance in the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like. So the question becomes whether a superstitious prohibition is a taboo or not. There are numerous taboos that are based on reason or knowledge (at least empirical knowledge), so a taboo does not have to be superstitious. But I think hunting taboos by and large are. Hunters tend to be a superstitious lot -- apparently always have been and still are. The superstition here is that if you mention the "true" name of an animal when hunting (or even if you are in the wild for some other purpose) something bad will happen. There are two opposing superstitions: If you mention the "true" name of a ferocious animal, you are likely to call it forth when you are not prepared for it. If you mention the "true" name of an animal that you are hunting, it is likely to hear its name and be warned. This has already been stated in print by J. Knobloch, "Der Mensch -- und die indogermanische Jaegersprache," _Studia Etymologica Indoeuropaea_ (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 45, Louvain: Peeters Press, 1991), 155: In der Jaegersprache erfolgen solche Umschreibungen einerseits aus der Furcht, der wahre Name des Tiers koennte dieses anlocken, aber auch aus dem primitiven Glauben heraus, die Jagdtiere verstuenden die Menschensprache und waeren durch die Nennun ihrer Namen gewarnt. I think of the first of these as the "Speak of the Devil" syndrome. The very mention of something calls it forth. In Arabic one does not mention something unpleasant lest it actually come to pass. If one has to mention something unpleasant one adds ma:sha:'alla:h "what(ever) God (wills)." In English one generally adds "God forbid" to ward off the danger. This danger of inadvertent calling forth is complemented by the belief that knowledge of the "true" name of something gives you power over it; power to call it forth and make it do your bidding. I think of this as the "Rumpelstiltskin" syndrome. This power creates a taboo against using the "true" name in vain, both through fear of calling the spirit of the named thing accidentally and through fear of losing the power by using it frivolously. Paleolithic cave art would seem to indicate that this communication with the spirit of the hunted animal through solemn ritual was part of the preparation for a successful hunt. It was only during such solemn rituals that the "true" name of the hunted animal would be used. If this, admittedly speculative, reconstruction is correct, then hunting taboos of this type were originally religious or ritual taboos and would have had a very long history (or prehistory). >I can think of few literary or historical sources suggesting that >the "hart" --- a word which, of course, was still current in >Shakespeare's and King James' English, and thanks to literary >preservation, remains understood today --- was an object of >particular reverence, awe, terror, or disgust, so that the -vox >propria- became somehow too hallowed for everyday use, or too >indecent. This would be an excellent test for the hypothesis, in >that it took place during recorded history, among literate >people, whose religious and social customs are set forth in many >sources. With the second type of prohibition against mentioning the hunted animal's name, in which it is believed that the animal will hear its name and be warned, there is less of a ritual element and hence less reason for calling it a taboo. But it is still a superstitious prohibition. It is not a matter of reverence, awe, terror, or disgust. It is a simple prohibition against the possibility that the quarry may hear its "true" name and thereby know that it is being hunted. Again, in Arabic one does not ask after the health of member's of a friend's family by name, lest the evil spirits hear the names and decide to take an interest in them. Buck, DSS, has some thoughts on whether these shifts in animal names are a result of taboo or not. On pp. 135-36 he has this to say: The loss of certain inherited animal names, like that of the 'bear' in Slavic and Germanic and those for 'wolf', 'serpent', 'hare', and 'mouse' here and there is attributed to taboo (cf. esp. Meillet, Ling. hist. 281 ff.). This has doubtless played a part in individual cases. But one hesitates to make too much of this factor when one observes that virtually every inherited animal name (and for that matter nearly every inherited word in other classes, as in the words of relationship, etc.) has been displaced in one or another of the IE languages. The IE word for 'horse' attested in most IE languages in the early period (Grk. hippos, Lat. equus, etc. 3.41) has been displaced in every modern European language (only the fem. Sp. yegua, Rum. iapa\ 'mare' surviving), and no one will ascribe this to taboo. [This last has already been discussed on the list.] But while Buck advises caution in ascribing shifts of animal names to taboo replacement, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) have jumped back on the taboo replacement bandwagon with a vengeance. According to G & I (pp. 437-38) "hart" (and cognates in other Germanic languages, Latin, and Celtic) is already a taboo replacement for the PIE words for 'deer' based on a root *el-, *ol- with various suffixes, and point out that Iranian and Slavic made the same semantic shift from 'deer' to 'horned/antlered animal' (although using different roots). But if G & I are right (ibid.) that the PIE words are based on a root meaning 'brown, red', then this looks like it too is already a replacement of yet another word for 'deer'. Bomhard and Kearns reconstruct a Proto-Nostratic root *?il-/*?el- for 'hoofed, cud-chewing animal' (this is a description of its use, not a meaning) (p. 582, no. 452.). PAA cognates include words for 'ram' and 'sheep', but this is not unexpected, as in IE "horned animal" is used not only for hart, 'stag' but for other horned animals as well (cf. Lith. karve' 'cow' vs. Lat cervus 'stag'; ON hru:tr 'ram' vs. ON hjo,rtr 'stag', etc.). One could propose for English 'stag/deer' the following history: The "true" name of the 'stag/deer' --> ... --> "the brown/red one" (PN ~ PIE *el-/*ol-) --> "the horned one" (late PIE dialectal from PIE k^er-) --> "the animal" (beginning in OE, complete by Modern English with "hart" marginalized and archaic). The ... stands for an indefinite number of shifts (which might be zero) prior to those that can be reconstructed. >-Taboo- has a relatively specific meaning in cultural >anthropology; does this linguistic process fit that definition? The linguistic process is just a prohibition against using a certain word. It may be from reverence (the name of God), superstition (hunting, gambling), or disgusting or embarrassing (bodily functions) or distressing (death, etc.) connotations. Whether these would match the cultural anthropological definitions in all cases, I don't know (but I doubt it). Linguistic taboo is often a matter of good manners and manners change like everything else. One of the things that makes taboo a likely factor in the replacement of some animal names is the repeated shifts. This is characteristic of linguistic taboo replacement. The connection between the euphemism and the taboo term becomes so well established that a euphemism for the euphemism has to be found and so on ad infinitum. I doubt that this is paralleled by cultural anthropological taboo. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Apr 27 14:40:45 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:40:45 -0500 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990426172457.2c173cdc@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> Message-ID: is definitely the most common and stable form but goes back a long ways. I don't have access to Corominas, so I can't check it but the common explanations of are that 1) it's an abbreviation of or 2) that it's related to "butt" "piece of ass" seems to have a different meaning just about everywhere you go. In Costa Rica, it refers to either a male who has a lot of women or to one who visits whorehouses. In Mexico it either refers to a male prostitute or is a derogatory word for gays On other places, it can mean "pimp," someone obsessed with pornography or just an all-purpose word of abuse, etc. As an adjective, it means something like "damned"; e.g. "No tengo puta idea donde deje/ las llaves" or "Voy a botar ese puto televisor que no sirve" This last usage is pretty universal from what I've seen [snip] >Here it would seem >that we might be dealing with some sort of development analogous in some >sense to _puta/puto_ where _puta_ refers to a "whore" and was/is the >original form (???). From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 27 14:52:25 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 09:52:25 -0500 Subject: Grimm's Law and Predictability (ex Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis) Message-ID: Cited from NY Times editorial page: "Opinion polls have shown that Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who mostly live in the eastern part of the country where there is nostalgia for the Soviet Union, are twice as likely to side with their Slavic brothers as they are with NATO. But the same polls show that Ukrainian speakers, many of whom live in the western part of the country and have historical ties to the West dating from the Hapsburg Empire, are twice as likely to support NATO. " If any of you are ever called upon to discuss the role of language in our civil lives, the above quote from the NY Times editorial may provide a specific instance that can be endlessly discussed. It seems in Ukrane that the combined effects of culture, politics, economics and history can be reduced to a simple linguistic definition. If you know the childhood language spoken to a Ukaranian citizen by its mother, you can predict with good precision what that person's attitude toward NATO will be today. The primary language one speaks thus appears to subsume all the cultural, political, economic and historical effects into a single substitute varialble, so to speak. This simple observation, with which, I presume, no too many will disagree, provides me with a straightforward way of answering many of the questions that have been asked about the efficacy of adopting the medical model of the spread of infectious disease to the process of language adoption. The unique history of Ukrane provides us with an excellent way of testing the hypothesis that exposure and susceptibility to a language explains the adoption of the language. For those who are interested in this topic, I am posting a second note that contains the core of my argument and answers to many of your points and questions about this hypothesis. Best regards, Ray Hendon From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:22:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:22:08 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >And Nestor notices in one province oddly low counts of cows and aurochs and >no yaks at all. Upon investigation, he finds that a dialect has developed >locally, where cows now mean cows and aurochs, aurochs mean yaks and yaks >have a new name. -- this is, to put it mildly, not a real problem. You're confusing historic time with the everyday, ordinary-priorities variety. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:31:04 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:31:04 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This may be a bit off. "Later emigrants" - "non-native speaking" - didn't >necessarily "have to conform." -- they did if they wanted to communicate usefully. See "founder effect". The population of the US is mostly descended from non-anglophone immigrants, but each group of newcomers found themselves in an English-speaking environment. The usual result, whether with German-speakers in 1750 or Italian-speakers in 1900 or Spanish-speakers in 1990, is for a three-generation process of linguistic succession which starts with monoglot non-English speakers in the first generation and ends up with monoglot English-speakers in the third. The same thing happened with Hugenots in England or Prussia in the 18th century. It's the natural course of events, in the absence of some very unusual sociopolitical factor. >While the Dutch majority in Old New York pretty much adopted English in a >single generation -- Dutch was still spoken in Dutch-settled rural areas of the Hudson Valley into the late 18th century, over 120 years after the English conquest. Language succession was slow, and generally involved close social interaction with native speakers of English. >And obviously the Pennsylvania Amish did not feel they "had to conform" -- most of the German immigrants to Pennsylvania did. The Amish are a special case, rather like the East European Jews and Yiddish. Note that as social segregation broke down in this century, the surviving Jews of the area stopped using Yiddish. Which was itself a German dialect, of course. >Language replacement usually requires something more drastic; settlement of >native speakers, combined with widespread social and demographic >disorganization of the native community.>> >Or it simply requires people who are willing and who have very good reasons >to change languages or encourage their children's to change languages. -- that's what I said. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:37:40 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:37:40 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This is along the same vein. If "moving between languages" means anything, >it means changing languages. And if it means bilingualism or changing >languages between generations, it is one very important form of linguistic >change. -- you're being a little obtuse here. "Changing languages" -- as in linguistic succession, people abandoning, say, Celtiberian for Latin -- is a different phenomenon from "linguistic change", say Marcus ==> Marco. If someone who originally spoke Standard Italian learns to speak Standard English and then speaks that around their children, who then grow up as Standard English speakers, we have people who've changed languages. Neither English nor Italian has changed in the process, however. Substratum influence is another factor, of course. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:40:23 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:40:23 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: >rayhendon at worldnet.att.net writes: >I like the example Steven used to explain how English became the dominate >language among elites of India whereas Latin failed to become the same thing >to the English. -- Latin _did_ become the language of the Romano-British elite and of a substantial proportion of the urban population there, at least. It vanished (along with Brythonic Celtic) during the Saxon conquest. The Saxons (and Frisians and Jutes and whatnot) came from outside the Empire. >Wasn't the language spoken in pre-Roman Brittain more uniform than the >language spoken in India. -- India contains dozens of distinct languages. Britain probably had mutually-intelligible dialects of a single Celtic language. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:42:15 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:42:15 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I write that well if Mycenaean didn't change in all those years -- all what years? Virtually all our Mycenaean documents date from the same period. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 16:55:44 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 12:55:44 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >How do you know that and why are you so sure of it? -- sort of a mixture of "it's in the textbooks" and "basic logic". >I would be very interested in those late isoglosses and how they were derived. -- right there in the texts. >There are the remains of a number of other distinct cultural groups between >the Agricultural Scythians and north central Europe in the middle of the >1st millenium bce. -- you have inscriptions, or other linguistic data? Pots are not people. >Proto-Slavic developed from the AgScyths as a lingua franca of trade along >the Russian rivers and up into the Novogrod area. -- this is news. (glyph of irony). Slavic developed from PIE in the same areas of E. Europe in which Slavs are found in the earliest historical sources, in what's now eastern Poland and parts of White Russia and the Ukraine. Early loanwords from both Iranian and Germanic show that the proto-Slavs were in contact with both. And, of course, the Baltic and Slavic show common innovations with Indo-Iranian at a very early date, long before their division into separate languages. They (or Balto-Slavic) were on the extreme northwestern fringe of the kmtom-satem phenomenon, for instance. >But needless to say all these Proto-Slavs cover a huge amount of ground -- yup. They're the "original" IE-speaking population of the area east of the Germanics and south of the Balts, as far east as the Iranian-speakers who predominated in the steppe zone of the Ukraine from at least the Bronze Age onwards. >And how sure are you of all this? -- these are commonplaces. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Apr 27 17:15:25 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 13:15:25 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >and therefore invented seems a better word than "first evolved." -- it's actively misleading. Nobody says: "OK, we used to speak Latin, but let's change it into French". It "just happens". Linguistic change is generally unconscious. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Apr 27 18:00:52 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 14:00:52 -0400 Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: Peter wrote: > > (me) We can't tell gneH1 from gneH3 in Sanskrit, > I don't know what your Sanskrit is like, but I have no difficulty whatever, > when reading Sanskrit, in telling the two roots apart. ... > PIE *gneh3 gives ja:na:ti ... > PIE *genH1 (note the different ablaut form from *gneh3 ... I don't have any trouble telling genH1 from gneH3, but my PIE is not good enough to say that gneH1 did not exist. There are two roots, mna: and dhma: that use these generally except in the present stem which are mana- and dhama-, [dhamita occurs once in RV] suggesting an alternation of menH/mneH and dhemH/dhmeH. I was hesitant to deny that something like that could not occur in case of genH1. > In addition to the moderator's comments on Latin & Greek, a further > objection to this approach is that it is very difficult to ascribe clear > distinctions to the various present formations we find in PIE. But the idea that present/aorist were eventive seems to be generally accepted. -Nath From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Tue Apr 27 21:16:25 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 16:16:25 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis]-Second post Message-ID: Before I read the article on Ukrane I was attempting to phrase my answer to several questions that had been raised as to the appropriateness of using the medical model of disease spread to describe the spread of a language. As you may recall, the medical model postulates two primary variables that are to be used in predicting the spread of a disease: the number or people who are susceptible to the infections and the exposure they receive from those that are already infected. Knowing these two values allows the modelr to predict how the disease spreads amoung a population. Transfering this approach to the study of languages I had thought that each variable must be viewed within certain age-groups of the population. So, for example, the exposure variable would be quite different for an infant as opposed to a school-aged child, and that of a school-aged child would be different from that of an adult. It doesn't take much explanation to see why this variable must be defined to accommodate different ages. An infant spends its time hearing its mother and father and possibly other close relatives speak. Since its exposure to language speakers is not a matter of decision for the child, it is entirely passive in this regard. Thus the exposure could be measured by defining how many words per day of a specific language the child eexperienced. This is probably not much of a variable in an aggregate sense, i.e., it is probably fairly stable over all populations and all languages, since the requirements of motherhood and parenting are universal. A Korean child being raised by Korean-speaking parents would, I presume, have the same probability of learning Korean as a Russian child would of learning Russian from his family. But, once the child is of age to go to school, its exposure to languages may change. In my area, for example, while probably half of the children hear Spanish all the time while at home, when they come to school their exposure to English increases by seven or eight hours a day. Therefore, children of school age may change their exposure to a certain language. The variable, the number of words heard per day of English, will substantially change from their lives as infants if they live in a bi-lingual community. Finally, the exposure of an adult to a given language would be subject to another set of forces, such as the language spoken in the workplace and on the streets. Taking these three levels of exposure, computing them for each age-group and then weighting the average of all three age-groups would give us an average level of exposure for the society at a specific time to a certain language. An average value, the expected value in an arithematic sense, could be used to describe the average level of exposure to all citizens. On the susceptibility side of the equation, the same three age-groups could be used. An infant, given that there is no choice in the matter, would have a susceptibility dependent entirely on its ability to hear and comprehend the sounds it hears. There would be some fixed distribution of linguistic abilities in any population: deafness, intelectual adequacy and other envirnomental variables would yield a fairly constant value of susceptibility for infants and school-aged children. There would probably be some variation in the general interest-level of a school-aged child to learning a language, but I suspect the distribution of interest in other languages would be stable for children of any culture. But for adults the susceptibility variable changes considerably. Requirements of work, business, politics, and other economic effects would come into play, causing the susceptibility level to change from that of childhood. Most of the merchants and salespeople I encounter in the Mexican border towns have learned to speak English, presumably because it is in their economic interest to do so, given their exposure to tourists and the dollars they might spend while visiting. They probably do not speak it at home, but they do learn it voluntarily and use it in the workplace. Their exposure and susceptibility is thus enhanced by economic and possibly political reasons. The same is true on the other side of the border, where bilingualism is observed among many business personnel, clerks, recptionists, etc. It is in the interest of the business people on the American side of the border just as it is on the other side, depending on what language they are likely to encounter while conducting business. To capture these variables, some means of measuring them must be devised. And I believe they can be measured, in any number of ways, some of which I just mentioned. The number of words of a specific language spoken per day in the life of a child, for example, is a number that could be observed, and the same could be done in school and in the workplace. Economic and political motives could be measured with dollar values. Sales or shipments of goods to parties of other linguistic groups, for example, is a value that could be calculated. And, I suspect it would have a significant effect on the susceptibility of a given population to learning a given language. Prestigue, and other psychological variables that are thought to influence susceptibility could also be accounted for and measured or at least estimated. If I knew these values and the population mix in time period one, it would be possible to predict the penetration of a specific language within a given population in time period two, time period three, etc. The Ukarainain situation gives the linguistimetrician a somewhat unique opportunity to measure these variables because of the fairly discrete times that critical variables changed. The Russian language was probably introduced into Ukrainian schools at some specific time in their history. If so measurements of Russian penetration of Ukrainian could be made on both time-sides of this change and the school-exposure values could be estimated. The same is true for migrations of Russian-speaking people into Ukrane. Plus, many Ukrainians are alive today that lived there before these migrations and school-related changes took place. Their memories of linguistic changes at specific times could be invaluable in estimating the precise effects of the influence these variables have on language adoption. Ther are many other issues related to this case. Longitudinal and horizontal studies of linguistic changes could be accomplished, and with the end of Russian domination, the reverse effects could be estimated. The incidence of loan-words, changes in the Russian spoken by those living in Ulkrane, and on Ukrinain by the Russian speakers could be measured. Perhaps this kind of effort would be worthwile in helping us understand the dynamics of this complicated process and make predictions about the future more useful. Best wishes, Ray Hendon From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 27 21:44:07 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 23:44:07 +0200 Subject: IE pers.pron. (dual forms) In-Reply-To: <000c01be8e7f$96520120$83d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Sat, 24 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Dear Jebs and IEists: [ moderator snip ] > > The Gk. /-e/ cannot be a syllabic *-H1 if it is to match OLith. augus-e > > 'the two grown ones' or OIr. di: pherid 'two heels', only IE *-e will do > > here. > The main problem, however, is one that I think we run into far more often > than we generally recognize, and that is that some linguists *contrive* very > complicated rules to be able to ascribe a common origin to forms that are > simply not commensurable. It only makes things worse if you reconstruct _against_ the rules: The dual forms mentioned can all derived from *-e, the Greek one alone also from *-H1, but then the forms indeed are not commensurable. BTW, I fail to see the serious objection (if it is meant to be one): What is complicated by deriving /-e/ of one language and /-e/ of another from a common protoform *-e ? > Beekes, I feel, does just this when he attempts to link the Sanskrit > masculine and feminine dual forms (-a:[u], -u:, -a:[u], -e) with those of > other IE languages like Greek: -e, -ei, -o:, [-a:]). > It is as if Beekes had never heard the word "Nostratic"! Egyptian, for > example, has a simple mechanism for forming masculine duals: -wj, with a > plural in -w. Also, nearly every cardinal number has a -w suffix; and AA > plurals (collectives in origin) in -u{:} are well-known. It even looks as if Beekes considers the IE languages more closely related to each other than to Egyptian. > I interpret these facts (and others) to indicate that Nostratic had a > collective suffix -w(V), and that this suffix was one of those employed > to form a dual in IE. I fail to see that such a morpheme has left any palpable imprint on IE. But show us where! > I would analyze Sanskrit -a:(u) as (C)wa in opposition to Beekes' -H{1}e. > [ Moderator's comment: > The final -u in the Sanskrit dual is not Indo-European, but an Indic > development that is not present even in Iranian. > --rma ] It is present in Goth. ahtau, Skt. aSta:/-au, Av. ashta. It appears to be a special Indic _choice_ out of an Indo-Iranian pair of sandhi variants which proceed from an IE pair of variants. > But, another method of indicating the dual was almost certainly the > suffix -y, here, not an adjective formant but just a suufix of > differentiation. This will be the source of those dual endings like > Greek -e, and Beekes recognizes the phonological process when he suggests on > p. 195, that "Gr. o{'}sse, 'eyes' comes from *ok{w}-ye" but then goes on to > derive *ok{w}-ye, IMHO incorrectly, from earlier *ok{w}-iH{1}, in a > misguided attempt to unify -e and -a:(u). I think Beekes is basically right here. The neuter dual did end in *-iH in IE, and judging by Greek the laryngeal was H1, so *H3(o)k{w}-iH1 is correct. Note that the laryngeal is even proved by the Skt. thematic ntr.du. in -e which is sandhi resistent ("pragrhya"). As for the connection of -e and -a:(u), the Skt. ending is of course that of the thematic stems, i.e. identical with Gk. -o: ; -e is the original ending of non-neuter dual of consonant stems, so the thematic *-o:(w) quite obviously represents the combination of thematic stem *-o- + ending *-e. Note that you get exactly the same result in the perfect of "long-vowel" verbs like dha:-, viz. dadhau from *dhe-dhoH1-e (Avest. dada here too without the diphthongization), i.e. IE *-o- + *-e with or without intervening laryngeal gives Indo-Ir. *-a:(u). > Of course, there are sporadic forms like Greek no{'}: from *no:wi, combining > *ne/o + *wi:, 'two', and a 'laryngeal' is not necessary to explain the > in a stress-accented open syllable; a mechanism as simple as transference of > length back to the stress-accented syllable from *-wi: could explain it. Are you talking about a metathesis of quantity, *nowi: > *no:wi? If so, what makes you think that was a rule? Or is it an invention - mother of comedy, huh - like some of my early stages? [... On the 1st person dual pronoun:] >I [...] would go the further step of suggesting that a > 'laryngeal' is not required to be reconstructed at all. Then what would be the enclitic form meaning "us two" in IE? */no:/ ending in a long vowel? [... On my notation:] > As an aside, am I correct in presuming that indicates /ts/ and > /dz/? No, I meant to be a spirant d ("edh"), but the ts is right. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Tue Apr 27 22:04:12 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 00:04:12 +0200 Subject: Greek 3sg prs. In-Reply-To: <37241605.AF852043@umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Mon, 26 Apr 1999, Anthony Appleyard wrote: >[... On Gk. 3sg prs. -ei vs. other IE *-eti] > Perhaps in early IE times the final -t was only present when the verb > had no noun subject [...]. That song has been popular before, but it takes more to constitute a new morphological parameter of the IE verb. Most importantly, it would be very odd that, out of such a duplicity, the unmarked form should be consistently chosen by thematic verbs, and the marked one by athematic verbs - and the marked one by ALL verbs in all other IE languages. The form was explained by Cowgill at the VI.Fachtagung as the phonetically regular outcome of IE *-eti in Greek unaccented position. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Apr 27 22:49:02 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 17:49:02 -0500 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Rich Alderson Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 8:53 PM > On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >>From: >>Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM First, let me tell you that I appreciate your taking the time to write a magisterial summary of the questions involved. Leo writes: >>> Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to >>> Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis >>> for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE >>> consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd >>> developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a >>> mess. Rich writes: > Lehmann is no more a god than is Szemere'nyi, Brugmann, Beekes, Watkins, or > Cowgill. He falls down on certain issues, as do all the others, and gets > some things right, as do all the others. But much of what he wrote 50 years > ago-- and that is about how long ago it was written--is a mess. I am sorry but I cannot agree with the terminology "mess". What Lehmann wrote may or may not have been superseded by better formulations but what he wrote then was thought-provoking and ground-breaking, and quite of important at the time. > However, Leo Connolly's use of "Neo-Grammarian" to describe his work is no > more dismissive Pat writes: It was specifically the word "mess" to which I object in both Leo's and your characterization. And I agree: we have no gods on earth but some men outperform their fellows so brilliantly that they deserve a little consideration and *tact*. Rich writes: > than to so label the work of Carl Brugmann. It assumes the system > reconstructed in Brugmann & Delbrueck, and attempts to explain exceptions in > a way which the _Grundriss_, Hirt, or Meillet would have approved (whether > or not they would have agreed with them). Unfortunately, the > _Junggrammatiker_ system needed to be re-examined, and by not doing so > Lehmann causes himself problems. Leo writes: >>> The Neogrammarians had realized that the vowels [i u] tend to alternate >>> with [y w] under conditions which no one has ever been able to specify >>> *exactly*; Pat writes: >>This is, in my opinion, totally misleading. The condition has been exactly >>specified, and in such simple terms, that hardly anyone, who does not have a >>predisposition to think that the latest fads in linguistics are the last >>word, could not understand them: initial ['Y/WVC] is ['y/wVC]; initial >>[Y/WV'C] is [i/u'C]; ['CVY/WC] is ['CVi/uC]; [CV'Y/WVC] is ['Cy/wVC]; >>[CVY/W'C] is [Ci/u'C]. Now, what was so difficult about that? Rich writes: > It's extremely simple. However, what evidence do you have to back it up? > It certainly does not appear in _Grundriss_ or Meillet. Pat writes: Do you dispute it? Leo writes: >>> since this was apparently his dissertation, he felt obligated to say this >>> within the framework dominant at the time: PIE [i u] were allophones of /y >>> w/, not "true" vowels, Pat writes: >>I do not know if Beekes had such an argument in *his* dissertation but in >>a book published as late as 1995, he is still asserting what Lehmann's >>dissertation asserted. So, though you may disagree, many eminent IEists >>still maintain that IE [y/w] are primarily consonontal. And, as any >>Nostraticist can assure you, IE [y/w] reflects Semitic [y/w]. If Nostratic >>[i/u] -- presuming they actually existed -- showed up as Semitic [0], you >>might have a talking point but they do not. Rich writes: > Read very carefully what Leo Connolly wrote: Not that *y *w were not > consonantal, but that in the structuralist framework (alive and well in the > 1940s) made Lehmann choose one way or the other, and he chose to see *y *w > as primary, and *i *u as secondary. That's a problem with structuralism, > not with whether *y and *w were or were not consonantal. Pat writes: In whatever framework one wishes to operate, the idea that consonantal are primary is the only idea that makes sense. Would you call Beekes a Junggrammatiker? Rich writes: > In structuralist terms, two phones in complementary distribution *must* be, > cannot *not* be, allophones of a single phoneme. (Although a lemma > requiring something called "phonetic similarity" was inserted into the > theory when it was pointed out that in a pure framework, the English phones > [h] and [N], as in _hang_ [h&N], must be allophones of a single phoneme...) > Therefore, in the prevailing structuralist framework of the 1940s, Lehmann > *had* to define *i and *u as allophones respectively of *y and *w. Pat writes: Lehmann was under no obligation to be consistently structuralist, and your assumption that he was is pure conjecture. By "syllabicity", Lehmann indicated that he was quite willing to strike out on uncharted paths. If the evidence had indicated anything different, I am positive Lehmann would have embraced the position it made mandatory. Leo writes: >>> just as PIE syllabic [M N L R] were allophones of /m n l r/. Pat writes: >>The syllabic status of [M/N/L/R] is a totally unrelated matter. These become >>syllabic when deprived of the stress-accent. Rich writes: > So the fact that all *six* resonants pattern the same is irrelevant? Pat writes: In my opinion, it is a mistake to include [Y/W] among the resonants. Phonologically, [j] is the voiced palato-dorsal fricative; [w] is the voiced bilabial fricative. *And they do not pattern the same*. Rich writes: > That *ey/oy/i parallels *en/on/.n by accident? Then you disagree with > Lehmann? What of his god-like status? Never mind, rhetorical questions. Pat writes: I do not consider Lehmann god-like although I do believe that most people on their best days will not equal what has has written on his worst. I also do not shrink from disagreeing with his written opinions but, in view of his sagacity, I do so with great caution. And I reject the idea totally that *ey/oy/i and *ew/ow/u parallel *en/on/n{.}. Rich writes: > In a structuralist framework, if two processes appear to be the same, they > must *be* the same, and you cannot separate *y *w from *n *m *r *l in this > way. Leo writes: >>> Furthermore, though the laryngeals were unambiguously consonants in PIE >>> (his view and mine, though others differ), the attested IE languages often >>> have vowels where there were once laryngeals. The Neogrammarians had >>> posited PIE Schwa in just such places. Pat writes: >>I do not dispute that 'laryngeals' were consonantal in Nostratic but by >>Indo-European, I believe their consonantal had been lost except for Hittite. Rich writes: > Your belief has nothing to do with the evidence. As pointed out elsewhere > by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, there is evidence for *consonantal* reflexes of > one or more laryngeals in non-Anatolian languages; Germanicists have long > argued for the presence of consonantal laryngeals in Germanic (and Lehmann > is included in this group). All Indo-Europeanists who accept laryngeals > (and this is very nearly all of them by now) accept that they were > consonantal in PIE. Pat writes: We have been investigating the "evidence" on which you ( and others) bas their belief, and so far, I have not seen a compelling argument. Would you like to take over for Peter? Pat writes: >>Rich, I would be interested to know what phonological principles you believe >>Lehmann's "syllabism" violates? > This is the reason it has taken me a week to get around to responding to > this posting, and not wearing my moderator hat to do so. It's a very large > question with an answer unlikely to satisfy the questioner. > First, you must understand that I follow David Stampe's "Natural Phonology", > as outlined in his dissertation and other works, and in the works of his > students. Most important in this context is the work by Patricia (Donegan) > Stampe on the phonology of vowel systems. Natural Phonology is process- > oriented and requires that both lexical representations and derivations > always be pronounceable; Pat writes: I subscribe to this idea without reservation. Rich continues: > it is thus distinguished from Chomsky & Halle's _Sound Pattern of English_- > style generative phonology, in which underlying (lexical) representations of > English reproduce the Great English Vowel Shift. (See, for example, her > dissertation, _The Natural Phonology of Vowels_, available as an Ohio State > Working Paper in Linguistics, No. 27 I think.) > On this basis, as an undergraduate I began an examination of the monovocalic > analysis of Indo-European 25 years ago. I started out with what I > considered the most interesting analysis of IE vowels, that of W. P. > Lehmann, and looked for parallels in other languages (as the only way to > demonstrate that an analysis is valid is for it to explain not only > historical but synchronic phenomena in more than one language). Pat writes: You surely would include diachronic phenomena, would you not? Rich continues: > This led me to look at Abkhaz, Abaza, Ubykh, and Kabardian, all of which > have very large obstruent systems and very small vowel systems. > Natural Phonology is, as well as process-oriented, constraint-oriented and > hierarchical: The presence of certain phonological entities entails the > presence of others. Thus, vowel systems are constrained: Certain kinds of > vowel system are more stable than others, and unstable vowel systems rapidly > turn into stable systems by either eliminating contrast or by adding > contrast. In addition, processes which are not repressed may increase > distinctions between vowels in the system (long vowels may become tense, for > example, or a distinction in palatality vs. labiality may arise as in Arabic > short /a/ vs. long /a:/ = [&] vs. [O:]). Pat writes: Although this is not really an argument against the point you are making, Arabic long /a:/ does not become [o:]; this is reserved for reductions of /aw/. Rich continues: > There is no such thing, in the world's languages, as a system with only one > phonemic vowel (and _a fortiori_ no such thing as a language with none). > The smallest phonemic vowel inventories yet found are in the languages I > named above--and the analyses which shrink them to two vowels may violate > one or more of the axioms of natural phonology. Pat writes: A very interesting qualification. Rich continues: > Thus, Lehmann violates a major principle when he asserts that any stage of > Indo-European lacked a phonemic vowel: If a phone is present in a language, > it has a psychological status in the lexicon, and while it may alternate > with other sounds in the language because of morphological rules or > unconstrained processes, it cannot be denied phonemic status. Pat writes: IMHO, this is incorrect. If we accept Trask's definition of a phoneme as "the smallest unit which can make a difference in meaning" and restrict "meaning" to "semantic difference" vs. grammatical difference, then a language in which CaC, CeC, CiC, CoC, CuC, etc. represent different grammatical stems of a root CVC, which has *one*, meaning, then the "syllabicity" in the root makes no difference, and hence cannot be considered "phonemic". But, why all the fuss about monosyllabicity when Sanskrit provides us with the next logical outcome of a language that, at an earlier stage, was monovocalic (at least, phonemically). Anything other than in Sanskrit is a result of + , , or , or a combination thereof. That is why Sanskrit does not bother to indicate an in its writing system (only ). Only combinations of + *need* to be indicated. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com Wed Apr 28 17:22:06 1999 From: ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:22:06 -0700 Subject: Moderator absence Message-ID: The Indo-European and Nostratic lists will not be available from late Thursday, 29 April 1999, until late Thursday, 6 May 1999. I will send out anything received before 17:00 PDT on the 29th, (= 30 April 0:00 GMT), then resume sending out the list after 17:00 on the 6th. This may engender a small backlog, but that will clear up over the following weekend. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator ------- From roz-frank at uiowa.edu Thu Apr 29 02:40:50 1999 From: roz-frank at uiowa.edu (Roslyn M. Frank) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 22:40:50 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:33 PM 4/26/99 +0100, Nicholas Widdow wrote: > >[snip...] sometimes heard >as and at others as . The speaker is fully aware that >the form is but that is not what s/he is actually "saying." In the >case of it strikes me that the same thing happens with the result >being or when the definite article is attached. [RF] First, thanks very much for your detailed reply. It helps to see how these phenomena can be expressed clearly. [snip] [NW] >I would suggest (and I freely admit I have no idea whether this is true, but >I suggest) that to be carried along diachronically a sound reduction of the >kind or or would have to go through a >reinterpretation of its abstract phonemic form. In Old Basque * broke >a firm rule and would not survive. [RF] Perhaps I could describe what I envision to be the situation in the following way: while * was a spoken alternative to and, indeed, considered within the range of "standard (reduced) native pronunciations" at the time (whenever that was) of the root-stem in question, that variant did not affect the phonological shape of the root-stem itself in Euskera at that stage. Such a shift from to * (as a root-stem) would not have taken place in Euskera because the native-speakers of that language were cognizant at some level, that the formation * did not reflect the actual shape of the root-stem. Even today I would wager that many if not most native speakers would argue that they tend to use as a root-stem in composition, but they would also recognize as the older or "authentic" free-standing root-stem. However, in my much earlier remarks I was actually speaking of what happens when an expression passes from the lexicon of the speakers of one language to the lexicon of speakers of another language, i.e, horizontal (?) transmissions. In such cases it is often not possible or even likely that all speakers of the second contact language would be familiar with the subtleties of the phonotactic system of the first language (unless of course we are talking of a sociolinguistic situation of absolute/balanced bilingualism). For this reason they would "copy" the word as they believed they heard it. The case in point was that of and a simulation in which when the term was "copied" into Navarrese and/or Aragonese, the latter speakers copied what they heard, i.e., a phonologically reduced/slurred version of the lexical chain in questions, *<(e)chandra>, for which they then extrapolated a masculine counterpart. In other words, my argument was not that Larry is mis-stating the phonotactic rules of pre-Basque (or Proto-Basque), but rather that when one is speaking about the transmission of expressions from one language to another in a situation of orality, the speakers of the second language tend to imitate what they actually *hear* and in this scenario they would have been incapable of reconstructing from what they thought they heard people saying. Furthermore, we could be talking about the way in which speakers of Navarrese and/or Aragonese may have attempted to mimic what they were hearing, based on the repertoire of phonotactic rules in their own language at that time. In other words, in the case of I am not arguing that this form itself nor * were ever commonplace in Euskera, but rather that * was the "transitional" form, the one that the second group of speakers "thought" they were hearing. As a result it was the form that they ended up pronouncing and hence stabilizing in their own lexicon. We could also consider the effect of cases of vertical transmissions in situations in which knowledge of the first language was being lost. I could imagine the following scenario in which the grandparents still were speaking Euskera, the parents being more or less bilingual however chosing to speak with their own children in Navarrese. In this case the grandparents would have been the ones that their grandchildren would have spoken to the most in Euskera and it would have been these interactions in which standard "mis-pronunciations" would have been understood to be authentic renditions of the terms in question. It would seem to me that such confusions arise in sociolinguistic settings in which knowledge and/or intuitive understandings of the phonotactic rules of the first language, the donor language, are limited. Again this observation is based on many years as a language teacher as well as field work in Euskal Herria. Stated in another way, the fact that the phonotactic rules of pre-Euskera did not "permit" a liquid cluster in no way interferes with the possibility that an expression such as * (namely, originally ) was heard and copied over into their lexicon by speakers of Navarrese and/or Aragonese where it later gained a masculine counterpart . I'm not arguing that in reality this is what happened. Rather we are dealing with problems related to creating plausible scenarios or simulations of the data and the premises undergirding such models. On that note, I'm curious. Miguel, did you come across any reference to a feminine form for as "gandul, etc." in the dictionary you are using. What exactly was the source you were using? (Thanks in advance for the bibliographic reference). [NW] In modern Basque, does [burko] have the >tap of /buruko/ or the roll of */burko/? [RF] I'll leave this one for Larry or Miguel to answer. They're much better at explaining these finer points. Or perhaps if there are native-speakers on the list they could comment. [NW] In my English initial [tr] can come >from both /tr/ and /t at r/. Once they lose the possibility of reversion to the >old phonology, the vowel can be considered gone. [RF] In Euskera the case is somewhat different from that of English since the loss of the possibility of reversion to the old phonology requires that one or more of the following conditions be met (there are probably other conditions, too, that could be cited): 1) the loss of awareness of the phonological structure of the free-standing root-stem upon which the "word" or lexical chain in question is initially based. That means that the free-standing root-stem would no longer be available in its free-standing form or recognizable as such. And linked to 1) is 2) the loss of awareness of the semantic and hence cultural logic of the lexical chain itself, i.e., the reasons that led to a given root-stem being suffixed in the way that it was. In other words, there are situations in which changes in the cultural norms of a society end up leaving an expression high and dry, so to speak. Sometimes the expression takes on an entirely new, but analogous meaning. However, in Euskera in such cases the expression's field of referentiality tends to be projected, not by the original set of meanings generated by the root-stem and the rest of morphemes of the lexical chain, but by qualities associated with the "object/thing" in question that was projected as being within the domain or field. At that point, the speaker is no longer able to deconstruct the lexical chain and identify the root-stem and its meaning-giving suffixes, or morphemes. 3) this situation could create a situation in which the reduced form results in a reinterpretation of its (original) abstract phonemic form. However, again I would emphasize, in Euskera the native speaker looks to the meaning of the root-stem and such a speaker usually has a fairly clear notion of free-standing root-stems available. When s/he comes across a lexical chain composed of three or four syllables that can't be analyzed, either it is assumed to be a loan word or that it's been misheard. This does not mean that there aren't unanalyzable lexical chains or "words" in Euskera that are three or more syllables long. Indeed, there is a small number of opaque expressions whose root-stems are no longer free-standing, i.e., cannot be utilized productively and whose original meaning is obscure. Stated differently, in the case of Euskera discussions of these problems are complicated by assumptions concerning what a "word" is, i.e., by transferring terminology that works perfectly well to describe features of IE languages, but which becomes very clumsy when brought to bear as tools to describe Euskera. Indeed, with respect to the way that its lexical chains are constructed, I would argue that Euskera has far more in common with Slavic languages than it does with a language like English. Jon Patrick and Larry might be able to add more about the percentage of unanalyzable chains in Euskera in the case of items with three or four syllables. Also, please keep in mind that my comments above simplify a somewhat more complex situation. In reference to the phonology of /buruko/ and /burko/ I would close with the following brief commentary. Among the names commonly used to refer to the location of baserriak (farmsteads/Stammbaum houses) in Euskera, are those that incorporate the term in a geometric sense and in reference to the other houses of the community. The expression seems to refer to in terms of being an anchoring point of a geometric figure composed of all of the baserriak in the auzoa. Thus there are names like , the "first end/head/extreme...house", etc. In one case that I know of, this housename ended up becoming in which the loss of the vowel provoked the voicing of the /k/. However, there is good reason to believe that the underlying form is the commonplace . Again, thanks for your comments, Nicholas. They have been very helpful. Ondo ibili, Roz Frank From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 28 03:38:28 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 23:38:28 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Germanic) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/26/99 6:11:33 PM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi replied: <> Nobody said "necessarily." But isolation is a plausible explanation for the archaisms mcv has mentioned in previous posts. My bringing up the archaeological evidence of an isolation of Germanic specifically related to the archaisms referred to in those previous posts, that mainly begin in a thread called "How weird is Hittite?" E.g.: In a message dated 1/26/99 8:32:31 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> In a message dated 2/7/99 4:10:50 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> To the best of my recollection, mcv did not mention compounding. My reference to northern European speakers being poor, primitive and cut-off was not meant to be derogatory. (Others IE speakers were in the same circumstance at the same time.) They were specifically in reference to a series of statements regarding cultural continuity and that proto-Germanic could not have been affected by outside factors. E.g.,: (message dated 2/2/99 12:26:15 AM) <> The evidence appears to be otherwise. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 28 05:08:31 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 01:08:31 EDT Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >I note also that the site reports another Bantu language for Angola, called >Luchazi, with an alternative name Ponda, and still another Bantu language, >called Mbundu or Bondo -- the number of Bantu "languages" varies in a colorful and rather arbitrary manner, due to differing opinions on what constitutes a language and what a dialect. The Bantu migration is so recent, and the number of standardized (still less written) Bantu languages until recently so small, that the situation is rather chaotic. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Apr 28 05:10:53 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 01:10:53 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Without a literary standard the Low German dialects could change more >rapidly. -- loss of inflection appears to have been most pronounced in English, next in Frisian, and then in Low German. Hmmm. Possibly a northwestern locus for the original changes? From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 28 08:00:58 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 04:00:58 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/23/99 11:03:38 PM, vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu wrote: <> In a message dated 4/26/99 5:36:56 PM, petegray at btinternet.com wrote: << So jn~a:ti is clearly cognate with the Greek gno:tos, and is from the knowing root.>> But note what happens here. Here is some small evidence of *genH3 sometimes showing up as "relative" in Sanskrit. And in Homer 'gnotos' not only means a thing known or perceived, it also can mean a 'relative' (gnotoi te gnotai te, Illiad 15.350, 'brothers", "sisters"). Note that this gives the form a meaning that crosses with such words as "kin" which are supposed to come from *genH1. Whether or not this comes from vowel changes or incorrect usage or some earlier common root, it could mean that borrowings (applied to new senses or referents) in other languages may have experienced the same kind of crossover. And although Sanskrit is relevant, the usages in Greek are particularly meaningful, because of the way they may have influenced other IE languages. Words like gnostic and gonus reentered other IE languages and may have done so before our earliest direct evidence of those languages. I'm interested in how one discriminates between a form that entered an IE language from very early Greek for example as opposed to directly from PIE. vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu wrote: <> Actually, I may be wrong, but I don't think our moderator is 'objecting' to this approach. And the distinction between the two kinds of "know" - if they are reflected in the verb forms - may give a better sense of not only the meaning but also of how they evolved. What is the difficulty with the non-stative possibility described above? <> Does 'jn~a:tr' actually occur in the texts? <> Is that the basis of the ablaut difference, that it is attested in for example Greek? Is that difference accounted for in Gothic and Latin? I believe earlier someone pointed to *genH3. Is the vowel grade supposed to be in some way caused by the presence of H3 versus H1? What is one to make of the ablaut analysis with regard to 'gignomai' and 'gnotos'? Regards, Steve Long From rayhendon at worldnet.att.net Wed Apr 28 11:56:25 1999 From: rayhendon at worldnet.att.net (Ray Hendon) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 06:56:25 -0500 Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis] Message-ID: There are many analogies between language and biological processes, as you pointed out. Defining anything is a matter of some arbitrariness. And, contrary to what one's belief might be, a definition is itselt an hypothesis. If I hand you a list of words and rules for their usage, I have defined a language, but I have also put forward a hypothesis that the definition proffered is adequate to the task and that the important things that make up a language are contained in my definition. I think it was Isaiah Berlin that said, every sentence is an hypothesis. Ray Hendon From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Apr 28 14:14:55 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 09:14:55 -0500 Subject: `zebra' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'm wondering if the word was PERCEIVED by Spanish speakers as an Arabic word, thus the initial vowel as dropped as an "article" or whether indeed the word may have passed from Romance to Arabic to Spanish as some words did [snip] >But this pass via (Andalusian) Arabic is unnecessary if what we want to >account for is the form OSp /dzebro/. In *eciferum would >palatalize/affricate before a front vowel > [ts] and would lenite to >[dz] intervocalically, as would /f/ > [v]. The second would be lost >by syncope in a post-stressed non-final open syllable. <-um> > /-o/ is >entirely regular, as is short > /e/. That gives us /dzevro/. Now we >sometimes find, without it being exactly regular, /br/ or /rb/ for >expected */vr/ or */rv/. A case in point would be > Ebro >(intervocalic normally lenited to /v/ in OSp). The aphaeresis of > is the most irregular feature, but not all that surprising, and not >assisted by the Andalusian Arabic story. > The above is precisely why Romance philologists proposed >*eciferus. The > *eci- remains ad hoc. [snip] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Apr 28 14:34:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 09:34:47 -0500 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I lived in New Wilmington PA for 3 years, which is about half Amish. The language the Amish used there was essentially English with German dialect vocabulary. They spoke this with Amish who visited from other areas, including Lancaster Co PA. My colleague in German, who was German, as well as the German tutors from Germany all stated that a German who did not know English would not be able to understand them because they used English syntax and English idioms in their language. The Amish themselves agreed with this assessment and said that was why they taught High German in their schools. They said that they did not write in their spoken language but rather in High German. It's possible that their High German may be strongly influenced by the spoken language. This at least is the situation now. In the past, it was certainly different. The local variety of English is said to have some German influence and some people did say things like "He's there yet" for "He's still there" but just as many people spoke something similar to "Burghese" --the working class dialect of Pittsburgh. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Apr 28 14:53:44 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 09:53:44 -0500 Subject: Taboo replacements In-Reply-To: Message-ID: You're right that taboo replacement goes far beyond superstition and reverence." Otherwise, we wouldn't expect taboo words in modern societies e.g. "cock" is taboo in American English and male chicken are known as "roosters" On the Columbia River east of Portland there is a tall erect pinnacle known as "Rooster Rock" which was bowdlerized from the original "Cock Rock" Yet we also see "resurrected taboo words" such as "jock," which formerly meant "penis" and now means "athlete" [at least in America] and even "jockette" for a female athlete [snip] >The linguistic process is just a prohibition against using a >certain word. It may be from reverence (the name of God), >superstition (hunting, gambling), or disgusting or embarrassing >(bodily functions) or distressing (death, etc.) connotations. >Whether these would match the cultural anthropological >definitions in all cases, I don't know (but I doubt it). >Linguistic taboo is often a matter of good manners and manners >change like everything else. >One of the things that makes taboo a likely factor in the >replacement of some animal names is the repeated shifts. This is >characteristic of linguistic taboo replacement. The connection >between the euphemism and the taboo term becomes so well >established that a euphemism for the euphemism has to be found >and so on ad infinitum. I doubt that this is paralleled by >cultural anthropological taboo. >Bob Whiting >whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From stevegus at aye.net Wed Apr 28 15:22:59 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 11:22:59 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > >-Taboo- has a relatively specific meaning in cultural > >anthropology; does this linguistic process fit that definition? > The linguistic process is just a prohibition against using a > certain word. It may be from reverence (the name of God), > superstition (hunting, gambling), or disgusting or embarrassing > (bodily functions) or distressing (death, etc.) connotations. > Whether these would match the cultural anthropological > definitions in all cases, I don't know (but I doubt it). > Linguistic taboo is often a matter of good manners and manners > change like everything else. A taboo, generally speaking, reserves or sets aside something for sacred or special use. For some taboos, the tabooed item is always forbidden; in others, it can be made use of at special times or places, but is forbidden otherwise. People who obey taboos, obviously, know what they are; they can give an account of what is forbidden, and usually can tell you why. Taboos are necessarily -conscious- processes. This is why I think invoking taboo to explain changes in a lexicon is problematic. Of course, there are plenty of linguistic taboos in modern English. For example, we still know what coffins are, even if folks in the coffin trade use some other word to refer to their wares. We all know they're coffins, though, and are not fooled. A live taboo does not remove a tabooed word from the lexicon, or render it obsolete. People need to know what words they are forbidden to use if they hope to avoid using them. Moreover, they will deliberately continue to use the forbidden words in various social contexts, from formal ritual to the heat of anger; and the forbidden words will be understood by their hearers. If actual replacement has occurred, and the former word is forgotten, the taboo cannot still be in effect. There is no problem in applying the anthropological category 'taboo' to certain rules a language's users make about the appropriate use of its lexicon. Those factors may ultimately result in lexical change. But, when that change is actually happening, the word 'taboo' seems an imprecise fit. Words cannot be removed from the lexicon by taboos, only by the ghosts of forgotten taboos. (This is also why I have difficulty explaining the loss of the word, 'hart,' by taboo. In certain circles it may be considered daring to call a coffin a coffin. No such cachet seems to surround the word 'hart,' even if it is a word that gets spoken only in church if it is spoken at all.) -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From stevegus at aye.net Wed Apr 28 15:31:59 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 11:31:59 -0400 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister (I think) wrote: > is definitely the most common and stable form > but goes back a long ways. > I don't have access to Corominas, so I can't check it > but the common explanations of are that > 1) it's an abbreviation of or > 2) that it's related to "butt" "piece of ass" I think the most plausible explanation for -puta-, Fr. -putain- &c., is to trace them back to Latin -puteo, putere-, "stink." I suspect this is one of those roots that comes originally from an interjection, and will tend to be re-introduced despite the phonetic vicissitudes of any more elaborate words compounded from it. /pu/ is not unknown in modern English as a reaction to a bad smell. };-) -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From stevegus at aye.net Wed Apr 28 14:46:41 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:46:41 -0400 Subject: `zebra' Message-ID: Nik Taylor wrote: > > -asinu(m)- ?> -ezebra-. > However, it wasn't in --> br, it was min --> mn --> mr --> mbr. in --> > br has no phonological motivation. It's a very unlikely change. Actually it seemed to me to be somewhat unlikely as well; just a thought, really. There does seem be a Latin noun-making suffix -ber, found in the names of the months, and words like -tuber- (tu[mescere] + ber) and -uber- (related to Gk. -outhar- and E. -udder-). This suffix was apparently still productive in late Latin, being added to late borrowed words like -zingiber- (ginger) and used to form -coluber- (viper). The 'e' here was usually weak, at least in words of three or more syllables. -Coluber- has the attested alternative and feminine form -colubra-, and the months, of course, decline "September, Septembris. . ." This alternation is also found in early modern English, or at least early modern American, where, especially after a long vowel, -CrV frequently alternated with -CR, with a syllabic 'R,' and often with the preceding vowel shortened. Noah Webster proposed "zeber" as a spelling pronunciation of 'zebra,' though whether he intended 'zeeber,' 'zebber,' or 'zibber' is a tad unclear to me, the pronunciation being obsolete. This alternation is of course also attested in an infamous letter by John Rolfe. AAR, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the original might have had -ber instead of -bra. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Sports only build character if you are the kid nobody wants on their team. From jer at cphling.dk Wed Apr 28 15:42:49 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 17:42:49 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns In-Reply-To: <007b01be906d$cf883dc0$b69ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [...] > (JER:) > >Even so, the non-occurrence of the very FORM *mwe (in any > >function) does look as strong evidence for a rule *mw- > *m-. > Not strong! Not evidence! This seems completely illogical to me. But you can't deny the existence of *te and *se along with *twe and *swe, a variation for which there seems to be no tangible reason. Nor can one deny that *me *te *se look parallel (and inflect in very parallel fashion). Is the non-occurrence of a **mwe to join the w-forms *two *swe then not a thing to be noted and explained? What if we do have rules to explain it - isn't it then worth talking about? [On Gk. mo:^mar : amu:'mo:n as reflecting *mwoH-/*muH-:] > Irrelevant to the question of the pronominal form *mwe but, in any case, why > not *mouH-/*muH? Because the Gk. full-grade form is not **mow(V)-, bot /mo:-/. [On the "thematic vowel" e/o:] > >>I am also not aware of any IE who has successfully asserted that apophony > >>is governed by specific consonants. > >This part of it is, whether assertion to this effect proves successful or > >not. > Unless "assertion to this effect (does) proves successful", I feel > comfortable in not considering it a viable factor. It belongs to the generally accepted descriptive facts of IE that the "thematic vowel" alternations in its own fashion. Saussure recognized it and suggested a rule, Hirt spent half a lifetime working on it, Kurylowicz suggested several explanations. At least in the verb, if a stem-final vowel is followed by /m, nt, y, r, w/, it has the shape /o/, whereas if /t, s, H2/ or zero follows, it turns up as /e/. In pronouns we find the same: *to-m, *to-y, *to-r 'there', likewise before /d/ in *to-d 'that' and before a vowel in *to-e > *to: 'those two', but /e/ before /s/ in *te-syo, *te-smo:y and before /H2/ in *te-H2 > *ta-H2 'those things'. In the noun we mostly find *-o- generalized, but here too we have remains of regular /e/ before zero in voc. *-e and fem./coll. *-e-H2 > *-a-H2. - It is often claimed that the "thematic vowel" is a latecomer to IE wordforms, since thematiuc forms show more than one full vowel in a word, but that simply cannot be the reason, for, if it were, OLD vowels would also have been hit by the alternation rules that plainly work _only_ in the thematic vowels. Therefore, despite the immense productivity of thematic stems, their original form must go very far back in the prehistory of PIE - back to a time when the "thematic vowel" had a phonetic shape that could exempt it from the usual havoc played by the accent and instead make it susceptible to influence from the following segment which other vowels are not. - BTW, if it matter to you if such an assertion were successful, you can MAKE it successful by taking it seriously - I trust you will once you really check with the facts. Look at Greek, Germanic and Celtic, then you can't miss the rule - and from the basis you thus define you can then derive any of the lesser clear languages with no force at all. > >[... Further on the length of nominatives:] > >The nominative lengthening also works on stops: *ne'po:t-s, > *wo:'{kw}-s. > Why can you not accept that *ne'po:t-s is the result of *nepoH-t-s? Because other forms, esp. derivatives, show that the suffix was -Vt-, not -VHt-, e.g. the fem. Skt. napti:-, Lat. neptis. And even if it were *-oHt-s, then other words behaving just the same certainly had no laryngeal; what about 'foot'? > >But what is the probability that morphological differentiation not based > >in phonetic change gets to LOOK so much like the result of phonetic change > >that its variation can be stated in terms of consistent phonetic rules? > That is a tough one. I have not ready answer. I'd say that is decisive, for such is the situation at hand. And pointing out such case of morphological variation LOOKING exactly like the results of consistent phonetic change by specifiable rules is ALL we can do in internal reconstruction. Our task is here to specify how the rules ought to look in case they constitute the reason for the variation - for then we have something to check next time we find a relevant piece of the puzzle. May I add that most, if not all of my pre-PIE rules were originally formulated on the basis of only a subset of the observations for which I have later found them to supply regularity. > Why do you not give us your best > arguments for proposing a non-Hittite alternation *outside of the > pronoun series*? I am not sure there was such an alternation elsewhere. I have found two cases where in-depth analysis leads me to postulate *-G-m- (G being the dual marker, I suggest a voiced velar fricative, but do not insist on it) as an older form of what I find surfacing as *-w- or *-H3w-. In one case the *-m- is the 1st person marker, in the other it is the marker of the accusative. Since I cannot believe that the 1st person and the accusative was one semantic entity, the homonymy must be accidental, so that the covariation can only be due to real phonetic change, i.e. a sound law *-Gm- > *-Gw- (~ *-w-). Both of these involve pronouns where we get to look into some very distant older periods of the language. Of course one would then have liked to find the same change of m to w when a suffix-initial /m/ is added to a root-final /H3/, but we find no such thing, e.g. Lat. no:men. I suspect the answer to this lies in the chronology: the two sets of observations are ages apart. [...JER:] > >I was saying that, in the personal pronouns, the oblique cases are all > >built on the acc.: Skt. dat. asma-bhyam, abl. asma-t, loc. asme /asma-y/ > >[...] > Well, does this not suggest the primacy of the accusative? before the > addition of -m to designate animate accusatives? It spells primacy of the acc. over other non-nominative cases in the system implemented by IE for the personal pronouns. > >>All I was saying is that most IEists do not believe (and I agree) that the > >>dual is as old as the singular and plural in IE. > >[JER: but it is not formed by productive components] > [PCR: ...]the dual forms > incorporate -y, which is not specifically dual but only differentiating. > [...] Your task is to demonstrate the youth of the dual. You could do this by showing us that its forms are derived according to rules of younger periods than those of the plural. In that case the dual should be more directly transparent than the plural. If anything, the dual is more _opaque_ than the plural. If the y's of some dual forms are there to differentiate, then demonstrate that such is their business elsewhere and that they have been implemented by the pertinent rules. [...] > >>I do not assume that the basal form is *tu(:), and so cannot justify > >>migrating 's. > >Then why not change your assumption about 'thou' and get the benefits? > If this were a friendly drinking bout, I would be accomodating and agree. > But are we not both trying to approximate the truth as closely as we are > able? I would be serious even over a beer. The "benefits" I'm talking about comprise the possibility to explain more in a coherent and principled way, in general experience no bad measure for closeness to the truth, if not without its pitfalls. [...] Jens From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Apr 28 16:31:27 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 12:31:27 -0400 Subject: Scandinavian languages Message-ID: Sheila Watts wrote: > The main English influence in Pennsilfaanisch is in the vocabulary. But this is a pretty extensive influence, yes? -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Apr 28 17:07:35 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 13:07:35 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > One of the things that makes taboo a likely factor in the > replacement of some animal names is the repeated shifts. Question: Could at least a few of these "replacements" merely be dialectal variations within PIE? Perhaps when the Indo-Europeans encountered the horse, the dialect which eventually became Latin adopted something that became equus, and the proto-Greek dialect adopted the ancestor of _hippos_ and so on. For that matter, could some also just be a substrate influence from the pre-IE peoples? [ Moderator's note: Greek _hippos_ is usually taken to be a development of *ek'wos. This is one of the animal names that extends across the family. --rma ] -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Apr 28 18:58:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 14:58:24 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/13/99 7:40:58 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- no, it isn't. It's not become less precise, it's developing differences. Speakers of the same dialect will have no problem with it.>> I wrote << And Nestor notices in one province oddly low counts of cows and aurochs.... Upon investigation, he finds that a dialect has developed locally, where cows now mean cows and aurochs,... And he finds that his law "you must pay taxes on all animals" in this new dialect means "you may pay taxes on animals." We may just see a "difference" between the dialects here. (A structural difference.) But Nestor sees this as a functional matter - the common language has become "imprecise." Words no longer refer to the same thing and do not have the same effect with this new dialect.">> In a message dated 4/28/99 6:36:26 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<-- this is, to put it mildly, not a real problem. You're confusing historic time with the everyday, ordinary-priorities variety.>> Doesn't "everyday" time become "historic time?" To put it just as mildly, you don't know what you are talking about. You're confusing blarney with saying something. For anyone else on the list who might have even a little serious interest in the subject, there is large volume of legal and some linguistic scholarship on how the dialectical differences or new dialects can affect the precision of old terms of custom and law and how those imprecisions have been corrected. A very relevant example: English encountered this with the word "cattle" where dialect came to use it to refer to only to livestock, while in its earliest sense it originally referred to any form of personal (versus real) property. Cognate with "capital", the form travelled into English with the Conquest as Anglo-Norman "catel" and then "chatel." By the 15th century, "cattel" (in various spellings w/o /ch/) was being used in the West Country only to refer to livestock, but in London, in Parliament and the common law courts, it continued to be used interchangaeably with "chattel" to mean all goods and personal property. The eventual distinction between cattle and chattel took some time to happen. In the Taming of the Shrew, we read, "Shee is my goodes, my chattels, she is my house." In the Trial of the Regicides, eg, the instruction is to determine "what Goods, and Chattels" the convicted might have, specifying livestock was separate. Drayton and de la Pryme use "chattel" to refer to livestock in the 1600's. By this time, however, this split meaning was creating problems in terms of census, taxes, rents and inheritance. In 1741, Parliament specifically narrowly defined "cattle": "By cattle in this act, it is understood any bull, cow, ox, steer, bullock, heifer, calf, sheep and lamb, and no other cattle whatever." Act 15 & 16 Geo II 34, excluding chickens and bees and personal property. This followed the common law courts in converting from "cattle" to "chattel." Cattle continued however to refer to horses and other domesticated quadrupeds into the 19th Century. See Ash Sheep Co. v. US, 252 US 159. Finally in the US, based on "the sense in which the term is used in the western states," the term cattle was recognized to refer only to members of "bovine genus" in various western state courts. State v. Dist Ct Nye County, 42 Nev 218. It would be some time however before this primary sense came into popular usage in the eastern US and was included in legislative definitions. See Bell v Erie R Co, 171 NYS 341, 343. But still today "chattel" in contracts and in the speech of lawyers and bankers means any personal property. >From all this, when we picture such culturally vivid things as cattlemen, cattle drive, cattle town or cattlecatcher, we do not include either sheep, bees or objects obtained at a neighbor's yard sale - although they were all once 'cattle.' This is a pretty good example of how ambiguoty created by dialectical usage caused an unacceptible imprecision from the official perspective and resulted in effective official standardization to cancel the ambiguoty. There are hundreds of examples like this in English that materially changed the course and the history of the language and the culture. One of my favorites is the path of change in meaning, morphology and phonetics that the word "saloon" went through thanks to officialdom. And of course - to get back on track - it might have been so with the Mycenenaeans. Hope this was of use, Steve Long From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Apr 28 20:46:36 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 15:46:36 -0500 Subject: On Lehmann and Neogrammarians Message-ID: I don't know how I missed this one when it was first circulated, but I did. I think I ought to reply and clarify things now, even though our moderator has already done so. So here goes: On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >From: >Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM >> Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to >> Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis >> for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE >> consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd >> developments in the Germanic languages. Not surprisingly, the book is a >> mess. >It is profoundly irresponsible to label anything written by Lehmann as a >"mess". He is one of the preeminent IEists of the 20th century, and to >cavalierly dismiss his work as "Neogrammarian", as if a label could discount >his achievements and contributions, is tragically unjustified. I agree completely that Lehmann is one of the preeminent Indoeuropeanists of the century. But even the best of us make mistakes ("Et dormitat Homerus", as one of my old Latin teachers used to say), and the eminent get to be eminent by being bold, which *always* entails the possibility of being spectacularly wrong in one thing or another. We respect him because he is right more often than he is wrong. But that's not the problem. I should add that I do not use "Neogrammarian" as a put-down. Nor "structuralist". Nor "laryngealist", or even "Nostraticist"! Without the Neogrammarians, we wouldn't even have the traditional IE framework that some of us love to fulminate against. Their contribution is enormous, far more than yours or mine. They, and later the structuralists, produced almost coherent systems which accounted for a great many facts -- of IE, of synchronic theory, etc. Lehmann attempted to combine the two, while adding Sturtevant's version of laryngeals to the stew, and then used this to try to explain some very odd features of Germanic languages. But if one studies his explanations critically, it turns out that most of them are either wrong or else no better than other available explanations which do not involve laryngeals. I'll spare you the details, but I've reconsidered and corrected several of his proposals in some articles published between 1977 and 1983. (I also accepted some of his proposals about which I now have grave doubts.) The book is, I'm afraid, a mess -- but an original, valuable, and highly stimulating mess. Kind of like Chomsky's _Syntactic Structures_. (I wonder if there's even one word in that book that Chomsky would now accept? No matter; he stimulated us, and sometimes that's the only thing that matters. So too with Lehmann's work.) Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From jer at cphling.dk Wed Apr 28 23:36:20 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 01:36:20 +0200 Subject: "syllabicity" In-Reply-To: <000801be9100$8b723da0$c19ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [...] > Rich continues: >> Thus, Lehmann violates a major principle when he asserts that any stage of >> Indo-European lacked a phonemic vowel: If a phone is present in a language, >> it has a psychological status in the lexicon, and while it may alternate >> with other sounds in the language because of morphological rules or >> unconstrained processes, it cannot be denied phonemic status. I think he violates an even more fundamental rule: If a segment is opposed to zero, it exists! Thus, since even an extremist monovocalic IE phonology would oppose a 3sg in *-t to a 2pl in *-te, it must have a phoneme /e/. This of course does not detract from the stimulating effect of the book - just look at us! [... PCR:] > But, why all the fuss about monosyllabicity when Sanskrit provides us with > the next logical outcome of a language that, at an earlier stage, was > monovocalic (at least, phonemically). I believe this is right even synchronically, barring words of marginal phonological integration: In Sanskrit, [a:] is identical with /a/ +/a/ [i] is a realization of /y/ [u] is a realization of /v/ [i:] is identical with [i] + [i], thus a realization of /yy/ [u:] is identical with [u] + [u], thus a realization of /vv/ [r.] is a realization of /r/ [r.:] is identical with [r.] + [r.], thus a realization of /rr/ [l.] is a realization of /l/ [e:] is a realization of /ay/ [o:] is a realization of /av/ [a:u] is a realization of /aav/ [a:i] is a realization of /aay/ Thus, in Sanskrit, short /a/ is the only true vowel demanded to allow an unambiguous notation of all (normal) words. This is a one-vowel system of the kind dismissed as a typological impossibility for PIE. - I rush to add that the acceptability of this analysis for Sanskrit does not make it correct for PIE which, for completely independent reasons, appears to need at least the vowels /a, e, o/ on the phonemic level - and even long /a:, e:, o:/ and underlying /i, u/ (opposed to /y, w/!) on an abstract morphophonemic level. In Sanskrit, as in PIE, the rules stipulating a given sonant/semivowel to appear syllabic or nonsyllabic are relatively clear. Such an element is nonsyllabic when contiguous with a vowel, otherwise it is syllabic. Only Sievers and a touch of analogy compromise predictability. Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 04:15:31 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 00:15:31 EDT Subject: rate of language change Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/28/99 7:23:04 AM, you wrote: <<-- you're being a little obtuse here. "Changing languages" -- as in linguistic succession, people abandoning, say, Celtiberian for Latin -- is a different phenomenon from "linguistic change", say Marcus ==> Marco.>> Nobody said they were the same thing. But "changing languages" is an established and important way in which linguistic change happens. Remember the cite I gave you for Mallory, IE and bilingualism? Get a chance to read it? Didn't think so. "Changing dialects" is of course a more common way in which language changes, but the difference is quantitative not qualitative. Early English speakers (including Johnson) who recognized the GVS described it simply as "a change in dialect." "Acceptance" of innovations has often meant acceptance and often individual awareness that one is speaking in a new way. Even where speakers are not aware of the changes they are adopting, "acceptance" requires a change not in one speaker but in many. And in the interim the new and old must exist alongside one another. And the contrast is often obvious. And of course it takes a certain obtuseness to talk as if "changing languages" had no connection at all with "linguistic change." Obviously a group of people changing languages or dialects are undergoing linguistic change. In fact, in between the new and the old language or dialect, there is the potential for the most extreme and permanent kind of linguistic change. See e.g., Katsue Akiba-Reynolds, cited in Lehmann's HL p. 314, for solid evidence that Japanese had its origins as a hybrid of two languages. And - going back to the original topic - whether speakers are aware or unaware that they are accepting changes in their language may be quite irrelevant to the fact of that change. S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 04:22:20 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 00:22:20 EDT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 4/28/99 8:11:15 AM, you wrote: <<-- all what years? Virtually all our Mycenaean documents date from the same period.>> What are you talking about? Is a "period" supposed to be shorter than "all those years"? The Jurassic Period was a few million years. Is that enough for you? Do you specialize in meaningless objections? S. Long [ Moderator's comment: The Mycenaean documents span roughly 200 years, very little time speaking in historical linguistic terms. The objection is warranted and hardly without meaning. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 05:01:12 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 01:01:12 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/28/99 8:36:39 AM, you wrote: << -- this is news. (glyph of irony).>> Please quote me accurately. What I wrote was: <> And this is not news. The Early Slavs was published in the 80's and it is just about one of the few modern sources in English on the archaeological record. If you are not aware of it, you shouldn't mislead other readers. <<-- you have inscriptions, or other linguistic data? Pots are not people.>> Does this seem disingenuous to you in any way based on the innumerable posts mentioning Corded Ware and how it proves all kinds of things? <> I can't disagree with this. But as early as @600 ace Fredegar has the Frank king Dagobert remitting a 500 hide tribute owed by the Saxons in exchange for their defending the border against the Wends, who are already on the eastern bank of the Elbe. Its the pots - not the historical records - that tell us that they were not always there. <> But the question is when. In the first half of the first millenium bce the nature of those contacts is not clear. I repeat: <> S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 05:23:18 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 01:23:18 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/28/99 9:13:05 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> What does this mean? That it happens while people are knocked out or sleeping? If you mean that people are not always aware that the structure of their language has changed, I don't disagree. But language itself is filled with purpose, intentionality and function. And if the structure of a language does not serve those purposes and functions, it will change, sooner or later. People don't pay attention to the structure of their language, but they are very aware of how it functions. Here, as everywhere else, form ultimately follows function - with or without awareness. I wrote: <> Its far more misleading to pretend that language is something that grows on the side of a hill. I'm trying to recover a computer generated "family tree" of automobiles and their designs that I saw back in the 80's. It looked exactly like one of Larry Trask's IE family trees, only a little more "unconscious" and complex. Human invention - whether it is language or cars - developes in ways that are in striking contrast to random growth. Intentionality is the difference. S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Apr 29 05:59:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 01:59:27 EDT Subject: The Indo-European Hypothesis [was Re: The Neolithic Hypothesis]-Second post Message-ID: In a message dated 4/28/99 10:13:03 AM, rayhendon at worldnet.att.net wrote: <> In a message dated 4/29/99 12:19:14 AM, you wrote: <> Let me suggest a directional problem that you might want to consider. What drives the spread of microbial infection in a medical model is the interest of the microbe. But we know that language serves other functions besides the survival of the language itself. Communication, cultural survival and basic self-orientation are all human objectives in language. This may mean that the analogy is more to the spread of sources of nutrition or medical treatment than it is to disease. Also, the traits of a particular microbe do not transfer to other unrelated strains. If common traits, they develop independently. In language, effective traits can be borrowed in their full maturity. And finally using addiction as the infection form for your medical model adds another factor that may not be analogous - the physiological need that is counterfunctional to individual survival, which (hopefully) language does not share. Regards, Steve Long From fortytwo at ufl.edu Thu Apr 29 11:08:21 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 07:08:21 -0400 Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: "Steven A. Gustafson" wrote: > A live taboo does not remove a tabooed word from the lexicon, or render > it obsolete. People need to know what words they are forbidden to use > if they hope to avoid using them. Perhaps. However, consider this: how did you first learn the word "shit"? From hearing someone violating the taboo. No one told you "Don't say shit". You probably learned not to use it when you got in trouble for using it. If a taboo is thorough enough, it may be that the word *will* be forgotten, or at least restricted. Of course, as you pointed out, it would no longer be taboo, being non-existent! > (This is also why I have difficulty explaining the loss of the word, > 'hart,' by taboo. In certain circles it may be considered daring to > call a coffin a coffin. No such cachet seems to surround the word > 'hart,' even if it is a word that gets spoken only in church if it is > spoken at all.) Perhaps. Indeed, in that case, I doubt that the word "hart" would've been used in the KJV translations if it were taboo. Altho, the taboo could've arisen later. Reminds me of the use of "ass" in older Biblical translations: "Thou shalt not covet they neighbor's ... ass". :-) -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Apr 29 13:41:45 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 08:41:45 -0500 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: <372729EF.AAEFC0F8@aye.net> Message-ID: sure, it makes sense --perhaps also as a root for poto In modern Spanish & [occasionally] are the common interjections for stench >Rick Mc Callister (I think) wrote: >> is definitely the most common and stable form >> but goes back a long ways. >> I don't have access to Corominas, so I can't check it >> but the common explanations of are that >> 1) it's an abbreviation of or >> 2) that it's related to "butt" "piece of ass" >I think the most plausible explanation for -puta-, Fr. -putain- &c., is >to trace them back to Latin -puteo, putere-, "stink." I suspect this is >one of those roots that comes originally from an interjection, and will >tend to be re-introduced despite the phonetic vicissitudes of any more >elaborate words compounded from it. /pu/ is not unknown in modern >English as a reaction to a bad smell. };-) > [snip] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Apr 29 14:44:53 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 09:44:53 -0500 Subject: On Lehmann and Neogrammarians Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 1999 3:46 PM > But if one studies his explanations critically, it turns out that most of > them are either wrong or else no better than other available explanations > which do not involve laryngeals. I'll spare you the details, but I've > reconsidered and corrected several of his proposals in some articles > published between 1977 and 1983. (I also accepted some of his proposals > about which I now have grave doubts.) The book is, I'm afraid, a mess -- but > an original, valuable, and highly stimulating mess. Kind of like Chomsky's > _Syntactic Structures_. (I wonder if there's even one word in that book that > Chomsky would now accept? No matter; he stimulated us, and sometimes that's > the only thing that matters. So too with Lehmann's work.) "An original, valuable, and highly stimulating mess"? I think even Lehmann would be delighted with such a characterization. But, stubborn as I am, I would prefer "olio". Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 29 16:16:49 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 12:16:49 EDT Subject: Taboo replacements Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >Yet we also see "resurrected taboo words" such as "jock," which formerly >meant "penis" and now means "athlete" [at least in America] and even >"jockette" for a female athlete -- if a word stays out of circulation long enough, it loses its 'ooomph' as a forbidden term and can be reused, if it hasn't been altogether forgotten. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 29 16:33:59 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 12:33:59 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Doesn't "everyday" time become "historic time?" -- not in the frame we're discussing. Almost all our Mycenaean documents come from the end of the Mycenaean period, literally -- from the destruction level of the great palaces, clay tablets preserved by the fires that burned them down. In fact, they're monthly tallies. Evidently the Mycenaeans used clay for running totals and then transfered the information to some other medium, one that hasn't survived. (We know this because while the extant tablets concern only a short period, there are references to the previous year's records on them.) And the entire period of Mycenaean literacy was barely 200-250 years, by the way. Possibly less. >English encountered this with the word "cattle" where dialect came to use it >to refer to only to livestock -- ah... you are aware that most early IE languages used the same word for "cattle" and "wealth in general"? Eg., the origins of "pecunium"? Herds = wealth. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Apr 29 16:41:04 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 12:41:04 EDT Subject: Mycenaean (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >In 1741, Parliament specifically narrowly defined "cattle": >> -- in other words, the official, written language was changed to bring it more into line with popular spoken useage. Selah. My point is proved. From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Apr 30 03:50:34 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 23:50:34 EDT Subject: Latin and Slavonic for `moon' Message-ID: In a message dated 4/26/99 1:43:38 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: < z. Cf. znaju "I know" from *g^en(H3)- "to know".>> I got surprised here. Doesn't satemization result in an 's'? With, e.g., 'sto' (hundred), 'dziesiec' (ten) in Polish, it seems definitely an /s/. [ Moderator's reply: No. (There really is no such process as "satemization", by the way, not in the way you apparently intend it.) Several sub-families of Indo-European all share a common development of the palatals, from stops to fricatives. This occurs in *all* *three* series (voiceless, voiced, voiced aspirate), not just the voiceless series; the different series develop differently, rather than all turning to voiceless fricatives. --rma ] Where I do find *g > z is the first SL palatization - before original front vowels. (I have here as example, OCS ziv~, cf. Lith gyvas.) The second also yielded g > z, but where the front vowel has occured because of monophthongisation (example OCS cena, cf Lith kaina.) Also, if this *g behaved like a /k/ in satemization, wouldn't we see it also in 'gniazd-o' (Pol. nest), 'gno-ic' (Pol. fertilize, use manure on a field) and 'gniesc' (bring close together, press together, squeeze together)? - All these seem to reflect very basic meanings and are documented early lexical features that would suggest that they may not have been borrowed. And if *g did yield /s/ and not /z/, wouldn't that point to other forms - e.g., 'siedczy' (Pol, investigate, find out, judge), 'snac' (Pol, adv, apparently, from what we know), 'snowac' (Pol, unfold, develope, muse) - as older forms. (I'm using Polish here as presumably one of the least Greekified SL languages.) [ Moderator's comment: *g does not > **s in Slavic, but to *z. --rma ] Might this suggest that 'znac' and similar forms might be borrowings coming after satem? [ Moderator's reply: No. --rma ] Regards, Steve Long From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Apr 30 07:55:43 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 08:55:43 +0100 Subject: Scandinavian languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick McAllister wrote: > I lived in New Wilmington PA for 3 years, which is about half >Amish. The language the Amish used there was essentially English with >German dialect vocabulary. They spoke this with Amish who visited from >other areas, including Lancaster Co PA. My colleague in German, who was >German, as well as the German tutors from Germany all stated that a German >who did not know English would not be able to understand them because they >used English syntax and English idioms in their language. The Amish >themselves agreed with this assessment and said that was why they taught >High German in their schools. They said that they did not write in their >spoken language but rather in High German. It's possible that their High >German may be strongly influenced by the spoken language. > This at least is the situation now. In the past, it was certainly >different. It's always nice to meet native speakers and get their view of their language - but they aren't always right, and what they describe for themselves doesn't necessarily apply to their whole speech community. There are speakers of Pennsilfaanisch who write in dialect, and I have texts written in dialect by such native speakers. I know, Rick, you were there and all that, but that doesn't make other people's experiences or knowledge invalid. I used to subscribe to a paper called 'The Budget' which had a weekly dialect column which was written by DIFFERENT native speakers, not the ones you met. Yes, they did write in dialect, not in High German, and yes, it did have High German-like syntax and morphology. (I do actually know what I'm talking about, and, having taught both NHG and German dialects for over 10 years, I can tell the difference). And I subscribed in the late 1980s. At that time a paper called the 'Allentown Morning Call' also had a dialect column. Whether either paper still does, I don't know. But I'm not talking about the distant past. 'Germans from Germany' aren't the most wonderful authority either, since comprehension of regional German dialects by people from other regions is not great. Lots of Germans from Germany don't understand Swiss, or Low German, or Bavarian, or.... However, there really isn't any need for anyone to insist on the exclusive right to be right. I imagine we both are: Amish schoolkids probably do use a very anglicised form of the dialect, and don't write it down. At the same time, I imagine that older rural speakers use something closer to the original dialect, and some enthusiasts do write it down, probably in a slightly archaising form, as this is the tradition in dialect writing. By the way - and I have no way of testing this - the former president of the Pennsylvania German Society, the Reverend Druckenbrod, once wrote to me that he was tired of people saying that the Amish spoke the best Pennsylvania German, since in his view, this was far from being the case (he was, I think, a Baptist, which of course, _may_ have influenced his views). At least he was living proof that some non-Amish speak Pennsilfaanisch too. best wishes, Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From peter at petegray.freeserve.co.uk Fri Apr 30 19:59:31 1999 From: peter at petegray.freeserve.co.uk (Peter Whale) Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 20:59:31 +0100 Subject: "syllabicity" Message-ID: SOmeone (depedning how many arrows there were before the quote) said: >. IE CiC does not show up in AA as normal C-C but rather always >>as C-y-C. Perhaps this is because only words with AA C-y-C were suggested as cognates. Nostratic is still very young - so is this a case of theory coming before evidence? Peter