From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Aug 1 12:25:27 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1999 13:25:27 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <006101bed1a5$98f8be00$319ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [on my list of typical subject properties in Basque] > Why do you not give us an example of these so-called subject > properties in some ergative language besides Basque? I've chosen Basque because it is the ergative language I know the best, and I can speak with some authority here. But most other ergative languages I've read about do not appear to be significantly different -- though a few certainly are. > And how were these properties selected? Empirically. See Ed Keenan's famous article in C. N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic. [on my examples of reflexives and reciprocals] > Since '*Each other was talking to Susie and Mike' is equally > ridiculous, I fail to see any valuable point made. I'm afraid you have failed to understand the point of my examples. If transitive sentences in ergative languages were "really" passives, then the absolutive NP should be the subject, and it should exhibit typical subject properties, such as an inability to be reflexive or reciprocal. In Basque, however, absolutive NPs in transitive sentences can freely be reflexive or reciprocal, whereas ergative NPs cannot. It is only in intransitive sentences that absolutive NPs cannot be reflexive or reciprocal. So, ergative NPs in transitive sentences -- but not absolutive NPs in transitive sentences -- share the subject properties of absolutive NPs in intransitive sentences. This is exactly the opposite of what is predicted by the "passive" theory, and it constitutes a nail in the coffin of that theory. > Frankly, I am amazed. A reflexive requires an agent and a patient, Sorry; not so. Consider these examples: Susie saw herself in the mirror. Susie is annoyed with herself. Susie excelled herself. The first two certainly, and the third arguably, contain no agent, and the third one certainly, and the first two arguably, contain no patient. Yet all are overtly reflexive. > and a reciprocal requires two agents and two patients. No; same problem: Susie and Mike collided with each other. Susie and Mike fancy each other. Susie and Mike resemble each other. Not an agent in sight, and not many patients, either. Reflexives and reciprocals are *grammatical* constructions, not semantic states of affairs. > An intransitive verb, by definition, has only one NP element Also wrong: Susie is sleeping with Mike. Susie smiled at Mike. Susie got ready for Mike. All intransitive, but all with multiple NPs. > so any two(or four)-NP-element construction obviously is a > contradiction in terms. Not remotely true, I'm afraid. [in the same vein] > More nonsense! 'Each other' cannot function as an ergative or > nominative subject. So what? That is semantic not grammatical. Completely false. Suppose Susie slapped Mike, and Mike slapped Susie. The semantics is straightforward: Slap(Susie, Mike) And Slap(Mike, Susie) This semantics remains invariant however a language may choose to express it grammatically. Grammatically, a language is free in principle to express this as `Susie and Mike slapped each other', or as `Each other slapped Susie and Mike', or in any other way it chooses. In Dyirbal, for example, a transitive verb is made reciprocal by adding to it an affix which renders it strictly intransitive, and there is no overt object. (And reflexives are made in the same way, with a different affix.) Turkish is rather similar. The semantics is constant, but the grammatical expression varies widely. > That it can be used in some languages in an oblique case (as in > English above) is to be expected. Possibly so, but the crucial observation is that, in the vast majority of known languages, a reflexive or a reciprocal cannot stand in subject position. The possible placement of reflexive and reciprocal NPs therefore provides us with valuable evidence in identifying subjects -- and, as it happens, with powerful evidence against the "passive" view of ergative languages, which makes all the wrong predictions. > Of all the languages I have ever seen, Basque is, by a mile, far the > most "unusual" language. Nope. Except that its morphological ergativity is unusually thoroughgoing, Basque is not unusual in any respect I can think of. Basque is syntactically unremarkable and morphologically highly regular. Basque only becomes "unusual" if you insist on applying to it demonstrably fallacious views like the "passive" theory of ergatives. Only then does it start to appear bizarre. [LT] >> The "passive" view of ergative languages in general is indefensible. > Obviously, I do not think so. And Estival and Myhill (and probably > Shibatani) do not either --- not to mention the majority of > linguists of the past. Estival and Myhill, in Dixon's account of them, emphatically do *not* embrace the passive theory of ergatives: they only endorse the view that ergatives invariably *originate* from passives. To my knowledge, Shibatani has never offered the slightest endorsement of the passive theory. As for the linguists of the past, well, they didn't know much syntax, and they got it badly wrong -- as we now realize. The linguists of the past frequently believed in all sorts of crazy things which we have long since laid to rest: stadialism, linguistic Darwinism, primitive languages, all sorts of things. Even the great Otto Jespersen, to cite just one name, believed in primitive languages and in absolute progress in grammatical systems. But nobody believes in this stuff today. Linguistics has moved on in the last few decades, and in our understanding of syntax as much as in any other area. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Tue Aug 3 22:03:18 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 18:03:18 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <001301bed1dd$067597a0$345673ce@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 07:51 19/07/99 -0400, you wrote: >Ed Selleslagh writes: ><> >-Cornu- is "horn." -Cornus- is the dogwood tree. [Ed Seleslagh] I'm sorry, I got confused. ><like po:pulus) are feminine.>> >I had ever understood that all trees were feminine for essentially >mythological reasons; they were thought to be the dwelling places of female >spirits. [Ed] No problem with that. 'extremities, branches...'. That would also account for manus, acus, cornu >and >tribus being feminine, but not for domus nor idus. 'Foot, pes...' are >probably >not viewed as extremities, but as 'base' to stand on.>> >Now, my understanding is that the root idea of -idus- is of a division by >halves. When the months used to be lunar, the kalends marked the first >appearance of the slip of the new moon, and the ides were the date of the >full moon. Perhaps this could be worked into your hypothesis as well. [Ed] Maybe, but I have no idea how. Have you? Domus can be fitted in your 'dwelling' remark. Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Tue Aug 3 23:57:43 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 19:57:43 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <379F5678.2D4504CB@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: At 21:14 28/07/99 +0200, you wrote: [ moderator snip ] >[Damien Erwan Perrotin] >The idea is interesting, but probably inexact as am- is not present only >in Latin but also in Lydian (ama : to love) and in Breton (afan : to >kiss from an older Brythonnic *ama). It is still possible that the >Lydian form was a borrowing from an Etruscan-like tongue of the Aegean, >but that is quite unlikely for Breton. So there can be only three >explainations for the ressemblance you point out : >a: chance ressemblance (always possible) >b: Etruscan borrowed the word from Latin or from Celtic >c: Etruscan is remotely linked to IE and this root is a remnant of this >old relationship. >Personnally, I favor the third thesis, but there is still work to do >before proving it. >Damien Erwan Perrotin [Ed] Has it been proven that the Breton afan was derived from an originally Brythonic *ama? (I have no problem with the reconstruction itself, I even mentioned it in a different way). Brythonic languages like Welsh contain large numbers of words that are most likely loans from Latin. It's all a matter of timing, of course. It could very well be that b.(from some early Celtic or Italic, later: Latin), maybe even back and forth, and c. were involved. According to M. Carrasquer's Stammbaum, which I subcribe to, IE and Etruscan (and the like) are cousins. (I can send you the GIF file, but not via this list). The only thing I'm pretty convinced of is that the Etr. and Lat. am- and the Lat. amb- (IE m.b-) roots are related, the problem is 'how?'. The scarcity of data about the direct relatives of Etruscan are a major obstacle. Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 4 00:14:06 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:14:06 -0400 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin In-Reply-To: <001701bed474$c95a8480$fd4a0d97@api-b0d3l6> Message-ID: At 20:59 22/07/99 +0200, you wrote: >I was wondering about the origins of the Latin adjectival >suffix -n-us, -n-a, -n-um appearing in words like _mater-nus_ "maternal; >motherly; belonging/pertaining to the mother", _pater-nus_ "paternal; >fatherly; belonging/pertaining to the father", _feli-nus_ "feline; >belonging/pertaining to the cat; belonging/pertaining to the family/genus >of the cats/felidae" and the like. Can it be traced back to IE? Does the >morpheme exist in other IE or non-IE languages? Any idea abt its etymology >and/or development? >Thanks in advance for your answers. >Cheers >Paolo Agostini [Ed Selleslagh] I'm equally intrigued by this. This -n- or -en also pops up in a variety of non-IE languages, most notably in Etruscan ( -na, which may be the origin, or the enhancing factor in Latin) where it indicates origin or ascendance, in Uralic and in Basque (Vasconic?) where it denotes the genitive. (In Basque, -en-a means: 'that, him, her of...') It also occurs in the oldest form of genitive in living Germanic ( Ger. der Mensch, des Menschen; Du. de mens, des mensen), but that has been attributed to old -n stems - a theory that looks a bit odd to me. In all those languages it represents some form of 'genitive notion'. Intriguing, to say the least. Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 4 00:30:20 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:30:20 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <791745c8.24c543da@aol.com> Message-ID: At 23:15 19/07/99 EDT, you wrote: >In a message dated 7/19/99 12:15:24 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><"(c)h" in the Germanic loanword which was dropped in the modern >Germanic languages (OE wealh, OHG walh).>> >That would explain a lot of the way the variances seem to go. But what >happens in MHG? I have 'Walch' (n), 'walsch', 'walche' (adj). It seems >like there's some back and forth. I guess that makes sense in that 'vlach' >itself is a form borrowed back from Slavic. >In Old Norse, where the reference to anything Rumanian is least likely, >'valskr' is typically reconstructed from '*valr' (which would put it before >800 AD.) I wonder if that reconstruction isn't questionable. >Regards, >Steve Long [Ed Selleslagh] I agree with you. In Dutch we have Waal (French speaking Belgian) and the adjective Waals (older form, still in use in West-Flemish dialect: Waalsch. The -sch is s+ach-laut, which corresponds to Scand. -sk and Eng. -sh). There is no trace of -lch in MDu or ODu. My hypothesis for the origin of the East-European -ch in Walach and the like: a derivative ending, often depreciative, still productive as -ak in Slavic (but also as an adjective forming suffix in Greek -ako's and in various forms in other IE lgs, and even in Etruscan -ach and in Sumerian -age). Ed Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 06:42:28 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 01:42:28 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Thursday, July 29, 1999 1:14 PM >> Pat responds: >> There is no *tangible* way for us to ever know whether languages arose >> monogenetically or polygenetically however most linguists, even when they >> deny its recoverability, have correctly weighed the odds of mono- vs. >> polygenesis, and subscribe to monogenesis. If a probablistically calculated >> hypothesis is "ideology", then everything done in historical linguistics is >> "ideology". > "most linguists" ??????????????? > I'm flabbergasted. I would like to know *one* of those, who did/does what > you claim "most linguists" do. Of course, I have no real way of knowing but I presume this writer might: "The hypothesis of the monogenesis of language is one that most linguists believe to be plausible. Indeed, the appearance of language may define modern Homo sapiens." Philip E. Ross (Staff writer) in "Hard Words", pp. 138-147, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 1991. By the way, Larry is on record as favoring monogenesis. Pat [ Moderator's comment: Larry Trask is on record as favouring monogenesis as the more parsimonious position; he is also on record as believing the argument either way is too weak to defend against the other. Since Mr. Ross is unlikely to have conducted a statistically valid survey of linguists before writing the quoted material, I would be extremely hesitant myself to base any argument thereon. Let us agree to disagree, silently, on this question and move on. It is irrelevant to Indo-European studies, and has taken enough of our time. --rma ] 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 Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Aug 3 08:16:47 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 10:16:47 +0200 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Unless you're saying that language arose in the last 100,000 years >[i.e. before humans left Africa], then I don't think you can make a serious >claim that there are any true isolates. Basque and Burushaski are surely >related to other languages but the lumpers are going to have to work a lot >harder to prove it. Some of them I know are satisfied with declaring it, so why waste time on "proof" ? ;-) > My understanding is that language arose before humans left Africa, >so any claims of polygenesis would have to be examined among African >languages. Given that the only existing language families in Africa are >Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic and the Khoisan languages >[which may be between 1and 5 families], it seems that the onus of proof is >on the polygenesists. I fail to see the logic in this (which is certainly my fault): out of Africa, OK, maybe. But what does this have to do with African languages ? Or, why should a "claim of polygenesis" only be testable against them ? As I said, there is no real reason to believe that "language arose" only once, consequently all the human groups which went "out of Africa" at some time in history could have been speakers of seperate, independently "arisen" languages in the first place. So "claims of polygenesis" could be tested against whatever evidence there may be available on a global scale. I use the quotes around "claims of p." because for me this is no claim at all but simply the default assumption. Relatedness is a positive fact, testable against hard evidence. Lack of this evidence, the nature of which is and always was controversial, leads to the default assumption of non-relatedness. And, speaking about Africa: not everyone in the field accepts the genetic status of Nilo-Saharan. Even Niger-Kordofanian is not accepted by everyone, though the critics seem to be in a minority position (which does of course not mean that they are wrong !). I, for one, do think that at least Niger-Congo is OK (from my limited experience with it; there are striking morphological patterns recurring in, say, Kwa and Bantu), but noone really knows how this huge language family came to dominate most of Africa. One scenario is, of course, spread, no, not over previously uninhabitated territory, but spread over territory dominated by different languages which either became "niger-congoized" by intensive language contact or, if you don't like this scenario, by language shift to Niger-Congo with all kinds of substratum items surviving into the languages we can observe today, resp. classify as N-C. So even the alleged "fact" that Africa has now no more than 5 language families has any bearing on the question of poly- vs. monogenesis. Europe has only two language families, if you are in that mood (Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian ;-), which I'm not, but pre-Indoeuropean groups have been identified before the spread of IE (or N.) on the continent. I guess the familiar family-tree model with ideally one language at its beginning and several to many ones at its contemporary bottom (to which I wholeheartedly subscribe in those cases where such a thing has been established !) leads to a somewhat slanted picture. It is true that, where we look at language families, the present may be variegated and the past look quite uniform. But if we look at *territories* on Earth which are dominated by one language and investigate its past, in strikingly many cases we find that what looks like a linguistically homogeneous area, was not so in earlier times. Most languages which spread ofer a considerable territory did so at the expense of other ones spoken by pre-spread population groups in that area. We don't have sufficient information for every single case in the world where this may have happened, but where we do the picture is quite clearly this: modern uniformity of language most often replaced former diversity. See yourself ! One more thing: even the "out of Africa"-theory is not accepted (or acceptable) in every detail. While it is true that East Africa seems to be the home of *anatomically* modern Man, it does not follow that *homo loquens* originated in the same place. I don't see how this should follow. Humans as bearers of cultural traditions, artificial skills and articulate language may have "arisen" independently in several places of the Old World. I pondered about this in a previous post. No, the onus of "proof" is on the shoulders of the monogeneticists, and even on that of the oligogeneticists. There simply is no analogy between the development of a biological species and that of cultural traditions and artefacts. One of them is language. We use our brains to handle it, but it hasn't come to us readymade with those brains. This could be a fascinating discussion to pursue further, but I use the opportunity to say that I'll be away for the next two months, starting this week, to do some fieldwork on the Lower Yenissey (on Dene-Caucasian ;-). Anything said on this list about this matter in the meantime is, due to my absence, irrelevant, meaningless and most probably seriously misguided ;-) ;-) ;-) Stefan Georg PS: You did see the emoticons, did you ? Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 3 08:14:03 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 09:14:03 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Unless you're saying that language arose in the last 100,000 > years [i.e. before humans left Africa], then I don't think you can > make a serious claim that there are any true isolates. Er -- what is a "true isolate"? A language which arose independently of all other languages? If so, I'm afraid I can't see that as a useful construct. Since we have no way of investigatng the ultimate origins of languages, we have no way of determining whether any language has such an independent origin. I prefer to use `isolate' in its ordinary sense of a language which cannot be shown to be related to any other known language. > Basque and Burushaski are surely related to other languages but the > lumpers are going to have to work a lot harder to prove it. Quite possibly Basque and Burushaski really are very remotely related to other known languages, but no one has ever succeeded in finding any persuasive evidence that either is related to anything else at all. At least for Basque, which I know better, I believe that the chances are now vanishingly small that any relatives will *ever* be discovered. There's almost nothing left to look at. > My understanding is that language arose before humans left Africa, > so any claims of polygenesis would have to be examined among African > languages. Given that the only existing language families in Africa are > Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic and the Khoisan languages > [which may be between 1and 5 families], Well. Niger-Kordofanian and Afro-Asiatic are widely accepted as valid, even though the published evidence in support of each is sparse. However, not only Khoisan but also Nilo-Saharan are at present little more than hopeful areal groupings. Neither is supported by any significant body of evidence, and both are doubted by some specialists. > it seems that the onus of proof is on the polygenesists. Why? In comparative linguistics, the null hypothesis is always this: No languages are related. This is the hypothesis we seek to falsify when we try to show that some languages really are related -- as we have managed to do in many cases, of course. But putting the burden of proof onto the polygeneticists strikes me as a serious methodological error: it is equivalent to changing the null hypothesis to this: All languages are related. And I cannot see that this is a wise move, or even a possible move. Doing so would render demonstrations of relatedness otiose, and require instead demonstrations of *unrelatedness*. And it is a logical impossibility to demonstrate that two languages are unrelated. The best we can ever hope for in this direction is to show that there exists no evidence to relate two languages -- but such an outcome clearly does not prove that those languages are unrelated. If we had no IE languages but Welsh and Albanian, I very much doubt that we could make a persuasive case that they were related, and we would have to conclude that there was no evidence to relate them, yet this would clearly not prove unrelatedness. I'm afraid that the burden of proof is *always* on the shoulders of those who wish to argue for relatedness, not of those who want to argue for unrelatedness. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 14:27:17 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 09:27:17 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, July 30, 1999 3:38 PM >>> -- with minor exceptions (such as "kuku"), words _are_ arbitrary sound >>> assemblages. >> Pat writes: >> Why do you not explain to us all why that is true? I am firmly convinced >> that it is unequivocally incorrect. > -- because any sound within the human range will do as well as any other for > any given referent. A rose may be a znfargle. Martin A. Nowak and David C. Krakauer have recently published an article entitled "The Evolution of Language" in PNAS: Vol. 96, July 1999, pp. 8028-8033, which might be of interest to you in this context. [ moderator snip ] 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 Aug 3 17:43:48 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 12:43:48 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: <001201bedcd2$f08bf6e0$6f18063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Rick said: >>. DNA studies obtensibly show that non-African >> humans seem to go back a single population distinct from Africans. >"Distinct" from Africans? Not in my reading of the texts. I don't wish to >raise a non-linguistic topic, but your implication - that languages split >into African and non-African - is a language topic, and we need some >scientist out there to give us the DNA truth. >Peter Distinct in the sense that, according to what I read in New Scientist, Scientific American, etc., non-African [modern human] populations began leaving Africa about 100,000 BP. If language was developed before 100,000 BP --and my understanding is that this is the consensus, then these languages would seem to have a common origin in Africa. How they are related to existing African families is another question. I believe they probably are. But given that the origin of language in Africa has not been dated, this is the most difficult aspect to account for in any scenario of monogenesis. But given that, if one includes AA, there are 3 African language families plus the Khoisan languages, this narrows things down quite a bit. Any division between African and non-African languages would be clouded by the question of Afro-Asiatic and the possibility of other languages coming out of Africa and non-African languages going back into Africa. On the face of it, non-African languages would seem to have entered Asia from the relative small Red Sea area I'm not claiming that there wasn't any genetic flow between Africa and the rest of the world. There obviously was. Another consideration is that it is indeed possible that language was invented BEFORE modern humans arose, in which case, monogenesis would be the only obvious conclusion. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 3 13:13:57 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 14:13:57 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <003001bed9c8$273abcc0$869ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Well, 'anaphora' is primarily a rhetorical device; No. It's a grammatical phenomenon, or, at most, a semantico-grammatical phenomenon. Like most linguistic features, it can probably be used rhetorically, but it is not essentially rhetorical in nature. In fact, probably no linguistic object, structure or relationship is intrinsically rhetorical in nature. `Rhetoric' is a functional concept, not a structural one. > my dictionary, however, does acknowledge the use of 'anaphora' in a > grammatical sense although Larry seems to prefer "anaphor" in the > grammatical and, I presume (but do not know), 'anaphora' in the > rhetorical sense. No. My dictionary cites `anaphora' only as the abstract noun derived from `anaphor'. Anaphora is the relation between an anaphor and its antecedent, or, more generally, the use of anaphors. > Since "discourse cohesion strategy" is not defined in Larry's dictionary, That's because it's not a grammatical term, and mine is a dictionary of grammatical terms. > I have no idea exactly how one will want to define it. Perhaps > 'anaphors' are excluded; perhaps not. I think anybody who works on cohesion would include anaphora as a major cohesive device. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 3 14:37:27 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 15:37:27 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <001d01bed9df$87785fe0$f4d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [on cases like this one:] >> `John hit me and went away' *must* mean `John went away'. > Another word for a "rule" is a "convention". Again, we appear to be > chasing our tails (definitions). There is nothing conventional about it. We are looking at a rule of English syntax. If anything is a rule of English syntax, this is. A convention, by definition, can be changed by agreement. We do not have that option here. [on this one:] >> `John hit Bill and went away'. >> Now, in English, it is John who went away, not Bill. However, according >> to my understanding of Dixon, if you say what looks like the literal >> equivalent of this in Dyirbal, it is *Bill* who went away, not John. >> This is one of the ways in which syntactic ergativity manifests itself >> in Dyirbal. > Is it really that simple? Yes. > Would we not be coming close to describing both 'nominative' and > 'ergative' phenomena if we said that "a null-NP frequently refers to > the foregoing NP with which it agrees in case"? No, not at all. Quite apart from that slippery `frequently', this doesn't remotely work. First, the English example has no case-marking -- yet the facts are clear. Second, in Basque and in other ergative languages, the null NP in such a construction co-refers to the NP with which it DISagrees in case -- or, rather, with the NP with which it would disagree in case if the null NP were overtly present and bore the required case-marking. Much of the point here is that, in a morphologically ergative language, the morphology -- including the case-marking -- is at odds with the syntax. And `subject' is a syntactic notion, not a morphological one. [on ergative languages] > First, as you know, I have questioned whether Dyirbal is, in fact, > "split", and have proposed a different explanation for the data. Dyirbal is about as thoroughly ergative as any language I have ever seen, but, even so, Dixon makes it quite clear that a split exists. > Second, the point that Leo is making about distinguishing syntactic > from morphological subjects needs to be addressed by you in terms of > "subject" properties. I have already discussed this at length. In a Basque transitive sentence, it is the ergative NP, and not the absolutive NP, which shares the subject properties of the absolutive NP in an intransitive sentence. As far as I am concerned, that is the end of the matter. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Aug 3 15:00:28 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:00:28 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <003001bed9c8$273abcc0$869ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >Pat writes: >Well, 'anaphora' is primarily a rhetorical device; my dictionary, however, >does acknowledge the use of 'anaphora' in a grammatical sense although Larry >seems to prefer "anaphor" in the grammatical and, I presume (but do not >know), 'anaphora' in the rhetorical sense. 'Anaphora' is Greek. 'Anaphor' is nativized English. Why picking on this ? >Since "discourse cohesion strategy" is not defined in Larry's dictionary, I >have no idea exactly how one will want to define it. Perhaps 'anaphors' are >excluded; perhaps not. This was your term. I'd define it as any "strategy used to maintain the cohesion of discourse". St. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 15:03:06 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 10:03:06 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Thursday, July 29, 1999 5:47 AM >> Pat responded: >> I suggest you read it. "But we do still encounter scholars who insist that >> there is a necessary diachronic connection, e.g. Estival and Myhill >> (1988:445): 'we propose here the hypothesis that in fact all ergative >> constructions have developed from passives'." Are you suggesting that >> Estival and Myhill are not "linguists", or that Shibatani, in whose book >> this essay appeared, is not a "linguist"? The quotation above is from p. >> 189 of Dixon's 1994 book. What are you playing at? R-S responded: > Linguists can do wrong. Pat responds: I can do wrong. You can do wrong. Anyone can do wrong. And perhaps they are wrong but it refutes the idea that only non-PhD "linguists" like myself can hold such a view, does it not? That was the point, was it not? >> Pat responds (on L.T's catalogue of subject properties): >> If you are referring to the "tests" above, you have proved nothing. R-S responded: > This is much in line with what I said in today's other post of mine. You > see, you read, you understand (or don't), but you reject nevertheless. > Always. > The subject-property-test *is* sufficient to discriminate between ergative > and passive constructions. Pat resonded: There is one mistake that you consistently make, Ralf-Stefan, and that is you frame every discussion as if it were a *personal* contest between you and your "antagonist". I am not interested in "beating" you, I am only interested in hearing the best arguments on the other side of any issue on which I have a position. The value of such discussions will not be that I persuade you or you persuade me but rather that other readers, hopefully more objective than either one of us, will weigh our respective "Informationen" and reach an opinion of their own. As far as the "subject-property test", it is not a "test" per se but a definition. And the relationship it may be identifying does not, as another poster mentioned, necessarily have to be "subjectiveness". R-S continued: > Again: > Take an intransitive sentence in an exclusively accusative language. S-V > S is, by convention, called "subject" (just a convention). It's semantic > role can be one of the following: Agent, Experiencer aso. (some people > insist on Agent being restricted to agents of transitive constructions, bog > s nimi). > Now, take a transitive one. A-V-O > What accusative languages do is to treat S *and* A alike under all > circumstances (there are such languages, i.e. split-free accusative-lgs.). Pat interjects: Oh, so "our" type of languages, accusative-type, can be *split-free* but "their" type of languages, ergative-type, cannot be. Akkusativ ueber alles! R-S continued: > This leads to the notion that these languages know a macro-category > comprising S and A, which most conventionally is called "subject" also, in > compliance with western grammatical tradition. > Now subjects have properties of various sorts, part of which have been > enumerated by Larry Trask. The real list is longer, and you can expand it > yourself. It is nothing more than a list of things which are generally true > for "subjects" in these languages. > Now, part of the things a passive formation does to a sentence is that the > *subject* is now what was semantically the undergoer/patient (choose your > favourite term) of the corresponding active sentence, an example: > active: Stefan proves Pat wrong (active, A-V-O) > Pat is proven wrong by Stefan (passive, S-V[pass]-Agent-periphrasis) > "Pat", in this passive sentence, has been moved to a position (not only in > terms of word order), where it assumes all the functions commonly found > with S. It has become the "subject" of the sentence, according to > traditional terminolgy. The syntactic properties (partly enumerated by > Larry, but the list is longer) found with "Stefan" in the active sentence > are now found with "Pat" in its passive equivalent. > Now let's look at ergative constructions: > Again, we find intransitive sentences there: S-V (gosh, I'm starting from > scratch, but I think I have to) > And transitive sentences as well: A-V-O. What makes the construction > ergative is, of course, nothing but the fact that S and O are treated alike > in this language (or in some subsystems of this language). > Now, in a morphologically ergative language, such a sentence may look like: > A-erg V O-abs > a passive sentence, we recall, looks like (word order irrelevant): S V > Agent-periphrasis (P. is proven wrong by S., to take a random example with > positive truth-value, however;-). > Of course, ergative constructions and passives bear some resemblance: in > both the (semantic !) Agent is morphologically marked, in both the semantic > patient may be morphologically unmarked (this does not work when there is > an overt accusative marker in the language, of course). However, this is > where the resemblance ends. In an ergative sentence like: > Stefan-Erg proves Pat-Abs wrong we should expect, under the > ergative-as-passive scenario, that subject properties remain with Pat (as > in the "true" passive above); however, they rest with "Stefan". Pat responds: What you seem not to be able to grasp because of your unfamiliarity with languages like Sumerian is that the ergative "subject" is frequently NOT EXPRESSED. And, I am not even sure that "subject" is a useful term to apply to relationships between ergative and nominative languages. R-S wrote: > This is the general picture only, and the test has to be carried out with > real "ergative languages" of course, but this is what you will find. It is > nothing less that the watershed between ergative constructions and passive > constructions. It does not matter whether you accept the full list of > "subject properties" enumerated. You may accept some and dislike others. > With those you do accept, though, you will find this picture. The more > subject properties you can bring yourself to accept, the more instances of > the difference between ergative and passive constructions you will find. > It's that easy. But you do have to look at complex constructions, not only > at the minimal sentence. > This does *not* mean that ergativity in some given language may not have > come about via a passive transformation. It may. In order to claim the > right of being accepted as a "real" ergative construction (and not the > passive it may have been in an earlier life), the shift of subject > properties to the Agent-phrase (the ERG-NP) from the Patient-phrase is > crucial. Pat responds: Ralf-Stefan is going in a circle. R-S continued: > For a succinct demonstration that, what looked to some people like an > ergative construction, but is rather to interpreted as passive, see my (and > A.P. Volodin's) "Die itelmenische Sprache", Wiesbaden 1999, though I admit > that we could have been a bit clearer on the issue. If anything, this > thread has prompted me to write a clearer exposition of the relevant > chapter in this book. >> Pat responded: >> Obviously, I do not think so. And Estival and Myhill (and probably >> Shibatani) do not either --- not to mention the majority of linguists of the >> past. R-S continued: > Estivall/Myhill/Shibatani should speak up for themselves. As for the > linguists of the past, well, they are linguists of the past, if they had > got everything straight already in 1890, what the hell are we doing here (I > assume, that's what you ask anyway reading all this ;-). Pat writes: They have. And they wrote it so they would not be misinterpreted. As a general observation, we often find that we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater; and that is not modernity --- it is faddism. 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 W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Tue Aug 3 15:36:42 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:36:42 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Pat and IEists, > Pat writes: > Since "discourse cohesion strategy" is not defined in Larry's dictionary, I > have no idea exactly how one will want to define it. Perhaps 'anaphors' are > excluded; perhaps not. This really is funny! Do you mean that linguistic categories, paradigmatic or syntactic strategies, or other structural items terms of which are not defined in Larry's dictionary do not exist? Stefan's 'discourse cohesion strategies' (better known as 'discourse cohesion devices' (DCD)) represent a well-established label in typology (as well as in CA, by the way). DCDs are those linguistic structures (suprasegmental startegies, morphemes, syntatic conventions) or emergent 'activities' of related structures that allow the coupling of phrasal information and its co/context (you probably know the difference - you can also say 'endophoric' = cotext, 'exophoric' = context). The main point is that besides the grammaticalization of elements in terms of a DCD (for instance, topic marker, co- vs. switch reference markers, etc.) sentence internal strategies may be used to generate discourse cohesion. The most prominent one is the notion of 'pivot' which in some respects shares properties with 'subjectivization'. How sensitive actance marking is with respect to discourse cohesion can be easily shown, let me quote an well-known example from Hua (Papua): (1) d-go' ro-0-da Kori-ue ISg:O-scare feel-3Sg:A-1Sg:SS run=away-1Sg:S 'I felt scared and ran away.' (2) Korihu-ga-na d-auia-h-ie run=away-1Sg:DS-3Sg 1Sg:O-shame-feel-3Sg:A (Haiman 1980:360) 'I ran away, and I am ashamed.' [SS = same 'subject', DS = different 'subject', A = agentive, O = objective, S = subjective] There is a kind of 'impersonal' cionstruction in Hua (often related to verba sentiendi or uncontrolled verbs) that has an 'un-accusative' reading (objective + verb). In (1) this structures precedes the intransitive sentence 'I ran away'. The expected switch from SS (conditioned by S=A) to DS (here O followed by S) does not take place. In (2), however, just this switch happens. Here, S precedes O, and we have DS! SS/DS serve as a DCD here, their sentence internal distribution, however, is conditioned by aspects of the information flow within the co(!)text. The same is often true for accusative or ergative strategies (cf. German 'ich schlug den Hund und wurde von ihm gebissen' ('subject' as a DCD) vs. 'ich schlug den Hund [und] der [Hund] biß mich' (switch reference, which generates a totally different pragmatic or discoursive strategy... Another nice example in from Khalka-Mongolian (Stefan could tell you much more about that, he's the expert in Mongolian, not me! and sorry for the very rough transcription/transliteration), cf. (3) cecg-iyg gertee xare/zh yav-ax-ad ne/ genet Baatar dayralda-zhee Zezeg-ACC at=home back go-VN-LOC 3Sg:TOP suddenly Baatar meet-PAST:IMPERF 'As Ceceg was going home, Baatar suddenly meet him.' (4) Bi dund surguule/ tögs-ööd end ir-sen 1Sg:NOM middle schol:ACC:indef finish-CV:PERF PROX come-VN:PRET 'After having fished the middle school, I came here.' Here, DS conditions the switch from S=A encoded by the nominative (as in (4)) to S=A encoded by the (definite) accusative (cecg-iyg) in (4). You see that sentence internal coding strategies (incl. ACC/PASS and ERG/AP strategies) may be very well dominated by the 'discourse', or, in other words, funtion as a DCD. We cannot explain ACC and ERG behavior, if we do not refer to such possible strategies which sometimes are even primary as opposed to secondary sentence internal reasons emerging from discourse cohesion.... We must not rule them out just because they are not mentioned in a teminological dictionary... In another posting, Pat says: > I suspect the (original [?]) real function of an > anti-passive is suggesting lessened effective agency. What do you think? It's the same story as with passives: foregrounding or backgrounding (often intertwined)? As I said: Antipassives reflect nothing but a morphosyntactic (and somtimes discoursive) behavior. They effect the relationsship of A and O just as pssaives do. The formal 'demotion' of A=ERG to A(>S)=ABS and that of O=ABS to O(>PERIPH)=OBL (OBL serves as a dummy here) may be caused by the semantics of A as well as that of O. If we have an A-motivited antipassive than aspects like 'lessened agentivity' MAY enter the game (remeber that this presupposes that A has a semantic reading here. We all know that A is structural term, which MAY be spelled out semantically, but which also may serve as a syntactic, and/or pragmatic strategy of grounding and/or discourse cohesion, see above). If we have an O-dominated antipassive, then parameters such as mass nouns and non-countability, lessening of referentiality (for instance in Yupik) etc. may become relevant (the general tendency is that A is more likely to react on semantic settings, and O to react on pragmatic settings (both can be metaphorized SEM>PRA for A and PRA>SEM for O). Finally, the verbal relation itself may condition antipassives, for instance durative, habitual, imperfective, etc. All depends on the individual language system in question. The functions/semantics of an antipassive are nearly always *emergent* properties which means that they cannot be identified by a single 'linguistic category' or so, but only by monitoring the complex behavior of ALL (co-paradigmatisized) strategies, structures, and paradigms involved in the process of forming antipassives (as well as in the formation of the 'underlying' 'active' structure (i.e., ERG). The same holds for passives, which as you surely know can occur in co-existence with antipassives in a language system.... Finally, Pat says (in the same posting): > Sorry, Wolfgang, after so much with which I can agree, I am unconvinced. I > do not believe the essence of accusativity is in word-order. I don't think that this is a matter of belief! It's just the question how we are used to define ACC and ERG. If we claim that ACC and ERG represent some kind of paradigmatic *behavior* that is scaled along the Accusative Ergative Continuum then we should expect the AEC and its instantiation(s) to present in ANY language, even in isolating ones. If you look at English (not my best language, as all of you will know), we HAVE to decide whether the pair (5) The woman saw the dog. (6) The woman went downtown. follow an ACC or an ERG strategy. Because A in (5) ('the woman') *behaves* like S in (6) ('the woman'), we can say that there is soem kind of S=A behavior. If you look at other language systems with a more or less fixed word order you will easily see that word order is crucial for the AEC. The same naturally holds for languages that have OTHER (morphosyntactic) means to react on the prerogatives of the AEC.... Wolfgang [Note: My email address has been modified: Please use W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de!] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ [ Moderator's transcription for those who have problems with 8-bit text: ] (4) Bi dund surguule/ t{\"o}gs-{\"o}{\"o}d end ir-sen 1Sg:NOM middle schol:ACC:indef finish-CV:PERF PROX come-VN:PRET 'After having fished the middle school, I came here.' From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Aug 3 13:54:32 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 14:54:32 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Vidhyanath said: > The ta-adjective is resultative in Vedic ... it patterns ergatively as > resultative participles often do. ... the great majority have a passive > meaning, ... some others are ... intransitives, ... Some again may even be > transitive actives, This is true also in Latin and partly in Greek. Intransitive: gata- in Skt, so ventus in Latin and -batos in Greek. Active: deponent verbs in Latin, e.g. locutus, ratus, vectus, etc. The Greek forms in -tos are almost all passive in meaning, often with the idea of "able to be ...", but it is worth noting the artificial literary device in Latin, whereby a passive past participle is given an active meaning, after the model of the Greek middle, e.g. laevo suspensi loculos tabulamque lacerto (Horace, Satire 1:6:74) "hanging their satchels and tablets from their left arm" > (2) ra:men.a+as'vam a:ruhyate > [A] horse is being mounted by R. Should that be as'vas (nominative)? If not, is the verb impersonal? Peter From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Aug 3 18:45:23 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 18:45:23 GMT Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >Even the great >Otto Jespersen, to cite just one name, believed in primitive languages >and in absolute progress in grammatical systems. But nobody believes in >this stuff today. Except, apparently, Bernard H. Bichakjian. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 21:37:50 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 16:37:50 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Friday, July 30, 1999 3:40 AM [ moderator snip ] > Your original assertion was that the passive interpretation of ergative > languages was not only defensible but, in your view, correct. By this > you clearly meant that ergative constructions, in general, *are* > passives. This is the view which was once popular among European > linguists, which has been effectively demolished, and which is correctly > dismissed by Dixon elsewhere on that same page as without support among > linguists today. Pat responds: Well, maybe you think it has been demolished but obviously other practicing linguists do not. [LT] > The point in your cited passage is an entirely different one: do all > ergatives derive historically from passives? Dixon notes that a few > people have argued that the answer is `yes', but then goes on to provide > what, in his view, is good evidence that the correct answer is `no'. Pat responds: Well, Dixon is wrong and so are you. [LR] > Whatever view one might adopt on this second point, it is clearly > distinct from the first point. Claiming that "all ergatives *descend* > from passives" is the same proposition as "all ergatives *are* passives" > is rather like claiming that "all humans descend from their > grandparents" is the same proposition as "all humans *are* their > grandparents. Pat responds: I am not interested in your rhetorical flourishes. Stick to the point if you want to discuss it. [ Moderator's comment: I think that effectively ends this debate: If Mr. Ryan believes that pointing out such a change in argument is a "rhetorical flourish", there is little left to be said, on either side. --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 proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 22:25:40 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:25:40 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Sunday, August 01, 1999 7:25 AM > On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [on my list of typical subject properties in Basque] >> Why do you not give us an example of these so-called subject >> properties in some ergative language besides Basque? Larry responded: > I've chosen Basque because it is the ergative language I know the best, > and I can speak with some authority here. But most other ergative > languages I've read about do not appear to be significantly different -- > though a few certainly are. >> And how were these properties selected? > Empirically. See Ed Keenan's famous article in C. N. Li (ed.), Subject > and Topic. > [on my examples of reflexives and reciprocals] >> Since '*Each other was talking to Susie and Mike' is equally >> ridiculous, I fail to see any valuable point made. > I'm afraid you have failed to understand the point of my examples. > If transitive sentences in ergative languages were "really" passives, > then the absolutive NP should be the subject, and it should exhibit > typical subject properties, such as an inability to be reflexive or > reciprocal. Pat responds: It is you who are missing the point. The absolutive NP in an ergative language is the patient. Lacking an agent (which would be the ergative), there is no possibility of a reflexive or reciprocal. It takes an agent and a patient to tango the Reflexive or Reciprocal. Sumerian regularly expresses reflexives: how? by putting the agent in the ergative and the patient (which is the same) in the absolutive. Larry continued: > In Basque, however, absolutive NPs in transitive sentences > can freely be reflexive or reciprocal, whereas ergative NPs cannot. > It is only in intransitive sentences that absolutive NPs cannot be > reflexive or reciprocal. So, ergative NPs in transitive sentences -- > but not absolutive NPs in transitive sentences -- share the subject > properties of absolutive NPs in intransitive sentences. This is exactly > the opposite of what is predicted by the "passive" theory, and it > constitutes a nail in the coffin of that theory. Pat responds: I am unconvinced. Of course an absolutive NP in a transitive sentence in Basque can be the patient half of a reflexive or reciprocal. The ergative would be the agent half. So what's the big deal? Pat wrote previously: >> Frankly, I am amazed. A reflexive requires an agent and a patient, Larry responded: > Sorry; not so. Consider these examples: > Susie saw herself in the mirror. > Susie is annoyed with herself. > Susie excelled herself. > The first two certainly, and the third arguably, contain no agent, and > the third one certainly, and the first two arguably, contain no patient. > Yet all are overtly reflexive. Pat responds: Larry, this is patent nonsense. In the sentence: "Susie saw the room behind her in the mirror", "Susie" is certainly an agent and "room" is certainly a patient. Your sentence is exactly analogous. "herself" is the patient (a paraphrase for "Susie"), and "Susie" is the agent. In your second sentence, it is equivalent to "Susie[1] annoyed Susie[2]". "annoy" is construed in English as a two-element verb (usually), of which the first element is the agent ("Susie[1]") and the second element is the patient ("Susie[2]'). It is incredible to find anyone, let alone a linguist, denying that any true reflexive construction does not mandatorily contain an agent, which is coterminous with its patient. Pat wrote previously: >> and a reciprocal requires two agents and two patients. Larry responded: > No; same problem: > Susie and Mike collided with each other. > Susie and Mike fancy each other. > Susie and Mike resemble each other. > Not an agent in sight, and not many patients, either. Pat responds: Agent: Susie; patient: Mike; second agent: Mike; second agent: Susie. Larry continued: > Reflexives and reciprocals are *grammatical* constructions, not semantic > states of affairs. Pat responds: I suppose we could dance around the definitions of "grammatical" and "semantic" but the fact is that, e.g. "reflexive" means simply: "a verb having an identical subject and direct object". The fact that you want to extend "reflexive" into areas in which it does not belong based on pseudo-reflexive constructions in some languages does not alter one iota what a true reflexive is. Pat wrote previously: >> An intransitive verb, by definition, has only one NP element Larry responded: > Also wrong: > Susie is sleeping with Mike. > Susie smiled at Mike. > Susie got ready for Mike. > All intransitive, but all with multiple NPs. Pat responds: Well, it is my fault for leaving out the qualification "essential" or "core". Actually, I thought you might grasp that without the qualifiation. Do you think there is a difference between: "Joe is hitting" and "Joe is sleeping"? Or is it just a peculiarity of my personality that would make me ask: "Hitting whom?" but NOT ask "Sleeping with whom?" ? Pat wrote: >> Of all the languages I have ever seen, Basque is, by a mile, far the >> most "unusual" language. Larry responded: > Nope. Pat writes: Larry, I do not need nor want you to assume the prerogative of correcting my expressed impressionistic opinions. Larry continued: > Except that its morphological ergativity is unusually > thoroughgoing, Basque is not unusual in any respect I can think of. > Basque is syntactically unremarkable and morphologically highly regular. > Basque only becomes "unusual" if you insist on applying to it > demonstrably fallacious views like the "passive" theory of ergatives. > Only then does it start to appear bizarre. Pat responds: It is bizarre, in my opinion, because of its weird phonology, and the habit it has of borrowing (according to you and Michelena) vocabulary from everywhere for just about everything so that one is hard put to find originally Basque words for anything. > [LT] >>> The "passive" view of ergative languages in general is indefensible. Pat wrote previously: >> Obviously, I do not think so. And Estival and Myhill (and probably >> Shibatani) do not either --- not to mention the majority of >> linguists of the past. Larry responded: > Estival and Myhill, in Dixon's account of them, emphatically do *not* > embrace the passive theory of ergatives: they only endorse the view that > ergatives invariably *originate* from passives. To my knowledge, > Shibatani has never offered the slightest endorsement of the passive > theory. Pat responds: Shibatni's endorsement is implied by his allowing Estival and Myhill to publish under his aegis. Are you not the one who is forever complaining about wrong-minded ideas being allowed to see the light of a printing press? Would Estival and Myhill be published in a book under your editorship? Fat chance! Larry continued: > As for the linguists of the past, well, they didn't know much syntax, > and they got it badly wrong -- as we now realize. > The linguists of the past frequently believed in all sorts of crazy > things which we have long since laid to rest: stadialism, linguistic > Darwinism, primitive languages, all sorts of things. Even the great > Otto Jespersen, to cite just one name, believed in primitive languages > and in absolute progress in grammatical systems. But nobody believes in > this stuff today. > Linguistics has moved on in the last few decades, and in our > understanding of syntax as much as in any other area. Pat responds: And will continue to move on, past you and many who preside 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 petegray at btinternet.com Wed Aug 4 19:35:32 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 20:35:32 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Let me stress that this is a question, not a claim, since I have not the slightest knowledge of any actual ergative languages. On these topics: (a) `John hit me and went away' & `I hit John and went away' (b) The distinction between passives and ergativity. Consider a co-ordinate sentence with suppressed second subject: (a) In an accusative language, or a language with a passive construction, it appears as: A(agent) verb(passive) B(grammatical subject; logical object) and verb If the second verb is passive, this should mean that B suffers both actions (and presumably A is the agent of both). But if the second verb is active, it means that B suffers the first action, then performs the second. For example, Latin: a Paula pulsatur Marcus et necatur (odd word order, but you get the point) by Paula is-beaten Marcus(subject) and is-being-killed. and a Paula pulsatur Marcus et ridet by Paula is-beaten Marcus(subject) and he laughs. (b) What happens in a truly ergative language? A(ergative) verb(of action) B(absolute) and verb Am I right in thinking that if the second verb can take an ergative subject, A is the agent of both (and B is presumably the object); whereas if the verb cannot take an ergative subject (i.e. it is a description rather than an action), then either B must be the subject (as Dixon claims for Dyirbal?), or the sentence is meaningless or ungrammatical (Is this the case in Basque, Larry?) I guess that different ergative languages will interpret this in different ways, but is there any mileage in pursuing co-ordinate sentences in order to reveal a difference between passive languages and ergative languages? It seems to me that there are two differences: (a) where A affects B for both verbs, the rules are different in passive and ergative languages: in one the second verb must be passive, and in the other it must be able to take an ergative subject. (b) where A does not affect B for both verbs, we get totally different meanings and structures. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Aug 3 22:02:10 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:02:10 -0500 Subject: Ergative & Basque In-Reply-To: <37A184ED.A097DEC8@si.unirioja.es> Message-ID: >About and auxiliary verbs: >> This western usage is clearly calqued on the famous Castilian >> distinction between `be' (unmarked) and `be' (in a place >> or in a state). I'm curious about your usage of marked vs. unmarked vis-a-vis ser and estar. English speakers probably see this dichotomy as marked vs. unmarked but I don't know if Spanish speakers would. I'm wondering if the average person wouldn't see them as completely different verbs. I'd like to hear from native speakers, and Italian speakers re essere vs. stare. [snip] >AFAIK, in English 'He's dead' is both Spanish and . [snip] But they do mean different things. Esta' muerto is a resultant condition while ha muerto is present perfect "s/he's died" Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 22:31:45 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:31:45 -0500 Subject: Ergative & Basque Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Saturday, July 31, 1999 2:04 PM > I could much better understand > things if the search is continued back to an origin of the opposition in a > difference between "is" and "there is to" (= "has"). That would make the > ergative just a roundabout use of the same general case categories as > used by the "accusative" syntax. That the search cannot be pushed that far > back for many languages does not change the possibility of such a > prehistory: you can draw no conclusions from inconclusive evidence. Pat interjects: There may be some evidence still around; what is the *-s of the nominative is, in fact, derived from a comitative *-s (related to Russian s[o])? 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 Wed Aug 4 08:39:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:39:01 +0100 Subject: Ergative & Basque In-Reply-To: <37A184ED.A097DEC8@si.unirioja.es> Message-ID: On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Inaki Agirre Perez wrote: > AFAIK, in English 'He's dead' is both Spanish and muerto>. Yes, although the second is more literally equivalent to English `He has died'. > The translation in Basque would be , with verb. > A momentary sense could be achieved by , as if you have just > discovered the fact that he's dead, but is ungrammatical in > my Basque (western). Very interesting. In the Lapurdian Basque which I learned first, `He's dead' is usually , with as a possible alternative. In the Bizkaian Basque which I learned later, `He's dead' is usually or , and is strictly `He has died'. Perhaps this example is unfortunate. First, in Basque is both an adjective meaning `dead' and a verb meaning `die', something which is rather unusual in Basque. Moreover, there is a pragmatic overlap between `He has died' and `He's dead', which further clouds the issue. I'm a little surprised that you don't accept at all, since the form is very familiar to me, and I've even seen it in writing. But I guess that's the way things work in languages. In my own NE American English, `That's a lousy show any more' is perfectly normal, while people not so many miles away from me find it hopelessly ungrammatical, and perhaps even incomprehensible. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jrader at m-w.com Tue Aug 3 16:01:17 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 16:01:17 +0000 Subject: Passivity as a transition Message-ID: I think you've lumped together two unrelated etyma here. See the articles on , , and in Chantraine, _Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque_ (or any other Greek etymological dictionary, for that matter). Jim Rader > So "enkoneo" will later come to mean in haste. "Akoniti" will mean after > Homer, without effort. And "diakonia" will become a common name for a > servant or service in general - literally "through dust" but actually > "through raising dust" making haste or effort. > Regards, > Steve Long From prida at artnet.com.br Sun Aug 1 02:08:47 1999 From: prida at artnet.com.br (Priscilla de Paula) Date: Sat, 31 Jul 1999 23:08:47 -0300 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: [ Moderator's comment: This apparently private note was sent to the Indo-European list, and was forwarded to Mr. Gustafson. Since he has responded to the note with comments relevant to this list, I am posting the original query as well. --rma ] [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Sir : I saw in the end of the text a century of Nostradamus in the languedoc langague of the Midle Age in France. This supose that nearly in the end of this century will be restared a Kingdom of Angleterre or may be also a alegory sense of the presence of a angel manifestation in the earth. The profecy brought to the present can say about the appearance of some celestial phenomenon that can interfere in the evolution of normal facts. Can you comment something about your interpretation ? Thanks. Adelgicius paulae Steve Gustafson wrote: [ moderator snip ] > L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois > Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur > Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois > Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. > --- M. de Notre-Dame From stevegus at aye.net Tue Aug 3 14:46:14 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 10:46:14 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Priscilla de Paula wrote: L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame > Dear Sir : I saw in the end of the text a century of Nostradamus in the > languedoc langague of the Midle Age in France. This supose that nearly in the > end of this century will be restared a Kingdom of Angleterre or may be also a > alegory sense of the presence of a angel manifestation in the earth. The > profecy brought to the present can say about the appearance of some celestial > phenomenon that can interfere in the evolution of normal facts. Can you > comment something about your interpretation ? Thanks. Adelgicius paulae To risk being severely off-topic --- My translation would be (this being Nostradamus, there are a number of obscurities in the text, of course): In the year one thousand nine hundred ninety nine, seven months, >From the sky will come the great King of Terror To revive the great King of Angolmois Before and after, Mars to rule playfully. I believe that this text is in relatively standard Middle French, and not Langue d'Oc. I am going to have to change that signature, since it seems not to have come to pass . At any rate, most Nostradamus buffs seem to believe that it refers to Armageddon and the Judgment Day occurring in July 1999. (Unless, of course, these prophesies run on the Old Style calendar, in which case there is still a week or so for Armageddon to start.) The King of Angolmois is usually claimed to be a distorted version of -Mongolois-, referring to a revived Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, and perhaps the prophesied Antichrist. (It might be likelier to mean a king from Angoule^me, but that hardly seems as dramatic.) To get back slightly on topic, from a linguistic viewpoint, one of the interesting things about Nostradamus' text is how it came to pass that the perfectly sensible word he used for "ninety" (nonante) got replaced in Academy French by "quatre-vingt-dix." I've seen the explanation mooted that the quatre-vingt numbers are a holdover from ancient Gaulish, and didn't know that we knew enough Gaulish to tell. But perhaps so long as the French Academy staves off the moral horrors of creeping decimalism, the Antichrist will be kept at bay. Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Ecce domina quae fidet omnia micantia aurea esse, et scalam in caelos emit. Adveniente novit ipsa, etiamsi clausae sint portae cauponum, propositum assequitur verbo. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Aug 3 22:47:33 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:47:33 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990730185209.24c75d06@online.be> Message-ID: Various researchers link ides/-idus to Etruscan see below *itu- "Ides" < "to divide" [az96: 25; g/lb83, pa, dep] see Latin gloss idus, itus, ituare [az96: 25; g/lb83] see ituna [mp68] itus "middle" [g/lb83, lb 90, mp 75] see Latin ides [g/lb83, lb 90, mp 75] re: ituna ital "fondato, fisso?" [az96] < *sed- "seat, base" [az96] itani "statue" [az96] itesale "foundation, firmament" [az96] itha "base, seat" [az96] itiia "fondatezza" [az96] itir "bases" [az96] itli "base" [az96] itna < ituna "to found, base" [az96] [snip] >>Now, my understanding is that the root idea of -idus- is of a division by >>halves. When the months used to be lunar, the kalends marked the first >>appearance of the slip of the new moon, and the ides were the date of the >>full moon. Perhaps this could be worked into your hypothesis as well. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Aug 3 14:46:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 15:46:35 +0100 Subject: nasal pres / root aor Message-ID: On Strunk ... nasal presents & root aorists, I have now read Strunk. His primary argument is that the patterns of stem alteration observable in Skt within the nasal infix present tenses are not an "Abstufung" (gradation) in the present, but are simply due to the corresponding ablaut in the root. He says full grade II underlies the strong stem of the root, not an infix *-ne-. He explains classes 5 & 9 (roots ending in -u and -H respectively) easily this way, but has trouble with class 7 (roots ending in -C). He says (p31) "A relationship between nasal present and root aorist ... (which in a number of ["mehreren"] verbs of the -n@ and -nu class is clear) can here not be proved." We note that Rix (lexicon I-G Verbs) partially demurs, saying that the distinction of full grades I and II in nasal presents is "not sufficiently proved". Either way, the basic tenet of Strunk's argument at this point is now standard stuff. The point of our discussion arises in his next argument. He says that nasal infix presents are built from the zero and full grades of the root, and that therefore, if we have a nasal infix present, we should expect to find root forms as well, wherever zero grades are found, particular in the aorist. He also mentions the -tos forms. He says (my trans.) "There *must* be a strong affinity between nasal present and root aorist." This is where my problems begin. What does he mean by "affinity"? And when you mention, Jens, a "paradigmatic companionship", what do you mean? Naively, but understandably, I thought you and Strunk meant within a language, but you say: > It was never claimed for the individual languages, only for the common > reconstructed protolanguage. which is a good reflection of what Strunk says. That means you are arguing only that if a PIE language has a nasal present, there is likely to be a root aorist somewhere else in PIE. Strunk gives 8 major examples in his book - and in two of them he has to find the root aorist in a different language from the nasal present. Now my argument is that this is not really "paradigmatic companionship". I do not believe it is anything more than a restatement of what a nasal present is. It seems to me that you and Strunk are merely saying: A PIE root can form: (a) presents of varying kinds in various LL, incl. perhaps a nasal present somewhere; (b) aorists of various kinds in various LL, incl often a root aorist somewhere. So we are not surprised that a good number of roots which show a nasal present somewhere also show a root aorist somewhere else. The "paradigmatic companionship" is only a significant claim if it occurs within the same language, which - at least here - you deny. To be fair, we should look to see if there is a strong PIE correlation, and if there is a correlation within individual languages. This posting is long enough, so I'll do that in part two. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Aug 3 16:22:40 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:22:40 +0100 Subject: nasal pres / root aorist II Message-ID: Do nasal presents very regularly show root aorists, either in the same language or others? To save bored readers from wading through the details, here's the conclusion I reach at the end: So for PIE we need to crunch numbers and get a proper statistical analysis, and for individual languages only Greek and Sanksrit have a hope of showing a genuine correlation, but for both it is, if anything, nothing more than a general tendency. It certainly can't support the original claim that since Sanskrit shows the form tundate, it must once have had a root aorist to go with it. Here's the details: ****A: in PIE I was pleased to have a good look through Rix's Lexicon (thank you for the reference, Jens). A proper study needs to be done - as I have said before - to see which present formations statistically go with which aorists. Neither Strunk nor Rix provide this. Some clue comes, however from the variety available. Rix suggests that there were three original aorist forms, root, sigmatic, and reduplicated. He says that in PIE there are 265 certain examples of root aorists, 79 sigmatic, and 5 reduplicated (or of total suggested forms, 392 root, 174 sigmatic, 14 reduplicated). So of the 349 aorist forms he thinks certain, 76% are root aorists; of the total 580 aorists suggested, 68% are root aorists. Therefore in PIE 68-76% of verbs which have an aorist, show a root aorist somewhere. We should therefore not be surprised if in PIE 68-76% of the verbs with any given present formation, which have an aorist, show a root aorist somewhere. This would be a meaningless random result. Now not all verbs show an aorist, but the claim is that verbs with a nasal infix present go with a root aorist. (Does this mean all nasal infix verbs, or only those that have an aorist?) I checked a random sample of 16 verbs with nasal presents. Nine of them had no aorist; the other 7 all had root aorists somewhere in PIE. A miniscule sample, but suggestive. I'm sure you will be pleased by it, Jens. In any case, it is clear that there is a need for Strunk's claim to be based on a proper statistical analysis, not just on a theoretical assertion supported by his ridiculously small group of 8 selected examples. ****B: in an individual languages Strunk and Jens do not make the claim that nasal presents are associated with root aorists within a particular langauge (which would be a much more significant claim), but it is worth testing nonetheless. Strunk says (p128) "[This system] appears precisely in Indo-Iranian and Greek" He says that this proves the archaic character of these two languages. I said: >> (a) In Greek it is largely true, but there are exceptions; so a bald >> statement would need qualification. >> (b) In Latin it is largely untrue, since the aorists are either sigmatic or >> the rare reduplicative aorist (tango tetigi, claimed by some as an aorist >> on the basis of Homer tetago:n, or the lengthened vowel: pango pe:gi (~ >> perfect pepigi). I can only find cumbo cubui which supports the claim in >> Latin. Jens said: > You might also have thought of cerno:/cre:vi:, fundo:/fu:di:, > linquo:/li:qui:, rumpo:/ru:pi:, sino:/si:vi:, sperno:/spre:vi:, > sterno:/stra:vi:, vinco:/vi:ci:. li:qui and vi:ci probably have the same origin as vi:di (which you significantly did not include, because its origin is known), that is to say in an -o- grade perfect. (*-oi- > *-ei- after v, or between /l/ and labial or labiovelar, then *-ei- > i: as normal) fu:di and ru:pi could equally be from o grade perfects (we know that iu:vi is). In any case, If they are aorists, they would have to be full grade, and I excluded them because I thought that "root" meant "root", not full grade - though I see the Strunk uses "root" to mean full grade, too. cre:vi, spre:vi, si:ve, stra:vi are clearly -vi formation (Latin) perfects, on a laryngeal base. The origin of these -v-forms is still unknown. In what sense do you make them either a root form, or an aorist? I note that elsewhere in your posting you claim that the Greek sigmatic aorists can be counted as root forms. This means you count zero grade, full grade, Greek sigmatic, and Latin -vi formations all as root aorists for the purposes of your claim. (a) The wider the definition of "root aorist" the less meaningful your claim becomes. (b) You would need to show that there is indeed a proper root aorist underlying these forms. But (i) this cannot be done in Latin - the best we can do is show a zero grade form (as in many Latin perfects); (ii) how would you distinguish a sigmatic aorist in Greek from a root aorist? For Sanskrit, I gave examples which contradicted the claim, and Jens gave some which supported it. Neither of us had (or has ?) complete accurate figures. In my sample I took random instances, so I restricted myself to just one Skt class. Jens said: >why ignore those of class nine (too good?) - ? That was a petty jibe, Jens, and unworthy of you. In fact the figures for class nine are not good. Of those Whitney lists as "older", 7 show no aorist, 10 do not show a root aorist, and 13 do. You get 13 / 30, about 43% - not bad, but not totally convincing, either. So for PIE we need someone to crunch numbers and get a proper statistical analysis, and for individual languages only Greek and Sanskrit have a hope of showing a genuine correlation, but for both it is, if anything, nothing more than a general tendency. It certainly can't support the original claim that since Sanskrit shows the form tundate, it must once have had a root aorist to go with it. Peter From vjpaniego at worldonline.es Tue Aug 3 21:53:15 1999 From: vjpaniego at worldonline.es (Victor y Rosario) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 23:53:15 +0200 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin Message-ID: Re: where the -n- comes from (in adjectives such as Latin _mater-nus_ etc) a hint may be found in the opposition r/n. According to Francisco Rodriguez Adrados and his Indoeuropean Linguistics, 1. A declension was born in PIE which used -r in nominative and -n- in the rest of cases. Cf Hittite uttar/uddanas (*thing*), Old Iranian ahar/ahnas (*day*) or Latin femur/feminis. 2. Adjectives were generally created from genitives. For example, in Hittite *kurur* meant *hostility*. The phrase *anthusas kururas*, *man of hostility*, formally genitive, was eventually interpreted as *hostile man*. 3. As the r/n declension was little productive, the genitive -nos was recycled in Latin into an adjectival suffix. Si non e4 vero, e4 ben trovato. ======================== Victor J. Paniego Siles, Spain From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 4 14:40:08 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:40:08 -0500 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990730182619.24c74102@online.be> Message-ID: In Toponimia [or Toponomastica?] della Toscana Meridionale this morpheme seems to pop up a bit more in Latin/early Romance versions of name than in the Etruscan form although this may be a case of lack of evidence Another curiousity is that the Romance form is often feminine while the Latin form ends in -ennius, -enus, etc. [snip] >>I was wondering about the origins of the Latin adjectival >>suffix -n-us, -n-a, -n-um [snip] >>Paolo Agostini >[Ed Selleslagh] >I'm equally intrigued by this. This -n- or -en also pops up in a variety of >non-IE languages, most notably in Etruscan ( -na, which may be the origin, >or the enhancing factor in Latin) where it indicates origin or ascendance, >in Uralic and in Basque (Vasconic?) where it denotes the genitive. (In >Basque, -en-a means: 'that, him, her of...') It also occurs in the oldest >form of genitive in living Germanic ( Ger. der Mensch, des Menschen; Du. de >mens, des mensen), but that has been attributed to old -n stems - a theory >that looks a bit odd to me. >In all those languages it represents some form of 'genitive notion'. >Intriguing, to say the least. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From vjpaniego at worldonline.es Tue Aug 3 21:55:12 1999 From: vjpaniego at worldonline.es (Victor y Rosario) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 23:55:12 +0200 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: Re: the name Vlach and its likely origin, a brilliant paper was written by the Romanian linguist Mihai Isbasescu on *altnordischen Quellen u(ber Vlah*. Some evidence is given as to identify the germanic word *blakumen* with *Vlachs*: 1. A c.1050 grave inscription in Gotland refers to two nobles killed when battling against *blakumen*. 2. The Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringle illustrates a campaign by Alexios Comnenos (early 12th century) in *Blokumannaland*, translated into Latin as *in Blachorum terram*. 3. In the 13th century a reference is made in the Flatenyjarbok about a raid against *Blo(kumenn*. 4. Another saga (Fornaldar Sogur Nordrlanda) gives *Blo(kumannaland*. After calling again our attention on the many sources that use b- and -k- for the name of this people (e.g. *Balak* in the Armenian Geography by Chorenatzi, 9th century), Isbasescu concludes that either a. These items represent more or less the word *Vlach* as heard by other ethnic groups (access to written sources, especially in the case of the Scandinavian inscriptions, is considered unlikely), or b. The word was coined by Germanic tribes, with the meaning of *the black-haired or -skinned ones*. This suggestive hypothesis, as far as I know well founded on linguistic and historical data, is worth reading it. ======================== Victor J. Paniego Siles, Spain From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 4 06:24:36 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 01:24:36 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Sent: Friday, July 30, 1999 6:42 PM > At 23:15 19/07/99 EDT, you wrote: > My hypothesis for the origin of the East-European -ch in Walach and the > like: a derivative ending, often depreciative, still productive as -ak in > Slavic (but also as an adjective forming suffix in Greek -ako's and in > various forms in other IE lgs, and even in Etruscan -ach and in Sumerian > -age). Pat asks: Sumerian -age? Do you have a reference for that "suffix"? 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 Thu Aug 5 16:56:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 12:56:27 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/3/99 7:33:26 PM, edsel at glo.be wrote: <> It does make sense. One wouldn't need to look to a borrowing from Germanic to account for "Slovaki" or "Polaki." As a derivative (from a place, region or group name) of course it would naturally take on a corona of additional meanings. As far as the Greek goes, I have this from I don't know where: "A suffix of Greek origin for forming of names is known in Rumanian: -ache, from Greek -achV: Michalache, Vasilache, etc." This puts a slightly different twist on it. So could "Vlacki" have even been from a self-name that traveled into other tongues. In some early more western records it even appears as "Blacki" and "Blaki" and that is why I would ask what "Balkan" is from. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 4 05:46:15 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 01:46:15 EDT Subject: Semantic change Message-ID: In a message dated 8/3/99 5:29:56 PM, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: <> In some cases, we might go even farther and suggest that over thousands of years <<"identity" of meanings or even "near-identity" of meanings>> is itself implausible. This would be especially true where major changes separate what the cognates refer to as opposed to what the common ancestor referred to. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 4 06:09:52 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 02:09:52 EDT Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? Message-ID: In a message dated 7/30/99 12:32:35 AM, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: <> I can't supply what you are asking for here, but I can offer some observations that may be pertinent, at least as far as the Balkan groups you mention. And although I'm not sure this reflects the "new way of looking at things," I think it's fairly current. In general, the archaeological evidence seems at best ambiguous about the <> But it is a little difficult to see how these could be <> Thracians, Dacians and Illyrians - as far as their remains have been correctly identified - each left evidence of fairly distinct material cultures behind them. This may be attributed to some degree to when and from where these material influences came from. The culture that we would identify as "Thracian", for example, was involved in Iron Age metalurgy far earlier than anything we find north of the Danube that we might call Dacian. Illyrians' sites on the other hand show strong affinities with cultures of the Italian Peninsula in terms of material goods. Beyond mere influence, north of the Danube, in areas commonly designated as "Dacia" on historical maps, there is significant evidence of the presence of cultures other than "Dacian." Dating before about 100BC, over 140 Celtic settlements or cemetaries have been found in Transylvania and the Banat - perhaps more than "Dacian" remains. (Germanic metalwork and much Scythian-Sarnmatian material have also been found in the area from about this time.) And this Celtic presence did not represent merely local settlements - brooch types found in Romania are "almost identical" to the LaTene B types found in central Europe. This seems rather important when one sees statements like the following: "...the Dacian pottery of the 2nd to the 4th centuries [AD] preserved everywhere – both within the province and outside of it – [display] the powerful traditions from the late La Tene, from which it developed relatively uniformly." Pottery is of course a basic yard marker of material cultural identification, and this statement cannot be made regarding Thracian or even Illyrian pottery. Certain burial practices also suggest a deeper cultural difference between the groups. For example, we hear that rituals "such as placing the inventary over the cavity, assembling of fragments of earthenware together with stones, animal bones, and other objects, are old Dacian customs." On the other hand, "the ritual of burning of the cavities.. dates from the period before the occupation of Dacia by the Romans. The funeral ritual of burned cavities is not Dacian and does not appear in significant numbers [in Dacia] before the Roman conquest. It is found in Pannonia, Moesia, and Illyricum. Garasanin (quoted by Bârzu Cemet. 1973, p. 92), assumed that it is of Illyrian origin; it was, in any case, widedspread in Illyria." The contrast with the burial tombs and necropolises (with almost Mycenaean-like "honeycombs") of the 3-5th Century BC Thracians and their later Greek inspired practices is quite dramatic. There are quite a few other examples that are not exactly suggestive of a "one people with different names" premise. One does not find the continuity in discoverable material culture that one finds in connection with, e.g., the Celts, Germans or Slavs. But the truth is that the correlations in the geographic area of the upper Danube is quite muddled. (For example, I just saw in one article "Daco-Roman" sites identified as "Cherniakhov", which is much more often associated with the coming of the Goths and which extended well into the Ukraine. But this subject matter seems to generate these kinds of surprises.) In terms of the writers: Homer identifies the Thracians (and Mysians) and puts them on the side of the Trojans. Herodotus (say 450BC) identifies both Thracians and Getae, saying that the Getae are different from all other Thracians. This is in the course of describing Darius' invasion of Europe in his attempt to attack the Scythians from the west. Perhaps important here is that Darius subdues the Getae before his army ever crosses north of the Danube. Herodotus also describes the more northwestern neighbors of the Scythians as the 'Agythoni" - 550 years later, Ptolemy will place the Gythoni south of the Venedi and just north of Dacia - about the same place. A number of historians described Alexander's march to the Danube. He is first attacked in a northern mountain pass by Thracian "traders" who roll wagons down the slopes at his army. He chases other Thracians to the Danube, then crosses it to attack Getae on the other side who run off into the "uninhabited country" to the north. "All the independent tribes" along the Danube - mainly Celts - along with Celts from Illyria send emissaries to make peace. Later the Cimbri attack "Dacians" near Italy before invading in the 2d cent. BC. The "Getae" consolidate and invade east, west and south into the Balkans in 80BC under Burebista. Then they fall back. Strabo the Greek (around the time of Christ) says that the Greeks once confused the Thracians with the Getae; that the Getae speak Thracian: that for some time the Getae had been moved or escaped to Thrace because of the attacks of the Scythians, Sarmatians and Bastarnae/Peucini (who both Strabo and Tacitus describe as Germanic types). Strabo also says that the Getae and the Dacians are of the same people, but that the Dacians live in the west on the borders of Germania (where Caesar also places them) far from Greece. Strabo also correctly notes that the Thracian word for 'town' used in compound is -bria. Getea/Dacia rises again in the 2d Century AD under Decaballus (sp?) is conquered by Trajan and becomes a buffer province (under the name 'Dacia") for 160 years until the part north of the Danube is abandoned because of barbarian incursions. The Romans however continually also used "Getae," often to refer to Thracians, Boeotians and even as a surname or a slave name. Linguistically, the most seemingly complete assessment I've gotten my hands on is by Duridanov from the 1980's I believe. He compares Thracian and Dacian and concludes they were "two different Indo-European languages", based on such phonetic differences as Dacian 'b,d,g' vs. Thracian 'p,t,k'; Dacian 'p,t,k' vs. Thracian 'ph, th, kh'; Dacian 's' vs. Thracian 'st'; etc. It should be noted however that there are almost no Dacian inscriptions and (by far) the longest Thracian one (the Ezero gold ring- 4th Cent BC?) is 61 Greek characters long and appears indecipherable (Duridanov mentions more than 20 different translations; on a museum tour in the US in 1998 no translation was even offered.) The main source of data is personal and place names. Given the form of the evidence, maybe the most certain element in the whole mess, the suffix for 'town', goes against Dacian=Thracian. As JP Mallory put it in 'In Search of the IEs': "Certainly it is odd that the standard suffix in Dacian indicating a town '-dava', is not reflected in any of the three Thracian words for town, villiage or fort (-bria, -para and -diza.)" The Illyrian, Moesian, etc., questions are just about as complex. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 4 14:53:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:53:12 -0500 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, Macedonian, Albanian and Greek? Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with Indo-Iranian? Is Albanian considered more likely to be Illyrian than Thracian? Is Phrygian still considered as a possible ancestor or close relative of Armenian? Is Macedonian considered closer to Greek or Thracian? [snip] >-- Hittite and Phrygian are distinct. They're both IE, of course, but >Phrygian is not a member of the Anatolian subgroup of IE. Like Armenian, >it's intrusive in Anatolia and is post-Hittite. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 4 10:46:31 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 06:46:31 EDT Subject: Hittite & Celtic dative in /k/ ? Message-ID: In a message dated 8/3/99 6:49:38 PM, 114064.1241 at compuserve.com writes: >the comparison is unlikely, as the Hittite form is also used for the >accusative, an use for which it has cognates in Germanic (gotic mik) and >perhaps in Slavic (russian ko - to with only an allative meaning). The >primary meaning was probably allative, as for most accusative in IE. This kind of information in no way lessens the probability of connection, since (as stated just above) the accusative may derive from an older dative (or allative or etc.). This kind of information CAN suggest that a connection may have great(er) time depth, to allow time (how much?) for a common change to occur in one or another language. (I assume it is not being proposed that the ORIGINAL meaning was accusative, and that the accusative developed into a dative or allative? That would be a case of a more grammatical or "bleached" meaning changing into a more concrete meaning, possible of course but less likely.) As a modern example, consider the use of the "dative" preposition "a" (if one wishes to call it that, where we do not have inflectional cases) with Spanish animate direct objects. >the Goidelic form is assumed to derive from *angh "near" >which is found in Latin angustus. >Its closest cognates, assuming to Stokes, is Breton hag >(and) and Welsh ac (same meaning) I am not as familiar with typological tendencies for an adessive (being "at" or "near") to develop either into a dative or into an accusative. Whether the speculated connection is valid or not is quite another question. I just do not see how the offered information (except the *angh part) has a bearing other than to strengthen the plausibility. Until someone finds another example of a postposition "near" turning into a dative/accusative etc., in some language of the world, I am doubtful of this etymology on typological grounds. I would love to have my typological horizons expanded if this is really a clear case, with intermediate stages actually attested. Lloyd Anderson From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Wed Aug 4 20:35:43 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 21:35:43 +0100 Subject: Hittite & Celtic dative in /k/ ? Message-ID: I do not have anything to hand to cover the provenance of 'aig', or the likely date by which the conjugated prepositions arose in Insular Celtic, but it is worth noting that Rhys and Morris found links not with Hittite but with (?ur)Berber. Note also that there is an semantic overlap between 'have' and 'own', and a dialectal variation between forms based on 'aig' ('at' among other senses) and 'le' ('with' do.). I would instinctively doubt a link between the Gadelic and Hittite forms, if only on the assumption that 'agam/agad/aici/aige/againn/agaibh/acu' (and orthographic variations) are themselves insular innovations, but that does not address the source of 'aig', of course. Dennis King might have something more specific to add. Gordon Selway At 11:12 am 26/7/99, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >In the light of the discussions on Hittites and other early Indo-European >peoples of Anatolia and the Balkans, going on on IE and ANE lists, it may >be relevant to consider whether even Celts and Hittites may have shared >any things linguistically or culturally, as areal manifestations. > >Here it is one small item for your consideration. >Here is a tidbit linking Celtic and Hittite which I found many years ago, >when compiling typological comparisons of the semantic domains of "be" >and "have". >I wondered at the time whether it is a relic Dative case preposition / >postposition which Hittite and Celtic shared, presumably as a retention, >but conceivably as an areal phenomenon, or both of the above. Does >Tocharian have it too? (I have no idea whether the later Indic Dative >postposition with /k/ is related or a chance lookalike.) >The forms being discussed, the dative case of the 1st singular pronoun, >are statistically likely to be highly conservative, both because they are >pronouns and also as oblique cases rather than the more often innovating >nominative etc. > >********** >Celtic preposition ag- where Hittite had postposition -uk above: >Irish >ta' ... aige "he has", with the preposition /ag-/ (Watkins) >ni fhuil fear agam "not husband to-me" or rather "I have no husband" >ag-am "to-me" >Gaelic >tha airgiod agam "is money to-me", or rather "I have money" >*** >Lloyd Anderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 4 14:25:20 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:25:20 -0500 Subject: Principled Comparative Method In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This may be because, as a whole --among white speakers, Southern accents seem to be in the process of being replaced by something resembling general American English with a slight Southern intonation. After living in the South for most of the last 20 years I generally find that only aout 5% or 10% of white students speak with a Southern accent but I don'tThose that do tend to be religious fundalmentalists from rural or small town working class backgrounds. Among my relatives in Appalachia, most do not have the traditional accent. I lived for a while in Spartanburg, South Carolina where about 5 or 10% of my students (mainly from just north of there) said /U/ > /u/ (that is "bush" pronounced as "boosh") but only about half said /I/ > /i/ ("fit" pronounced as "feet"). The lack of symmetry may be due to instability of the local accent. [snip] > In any case, I'd be really careful in assuming that phonological >rules always apply across entire classes of categories. It's true that >things often do work this way, but they don't always. > Around 12 years ago, I was interviewing a speaker of the South >Midlands dialect area of American English. In this dialect, /I/ > /i/ for >some speakers, and /U/ > /u/ for some speakers. I assumed that if the >speaker had one rule, she'd have the other as well; I figured that the >general rule was "high lax vowels become tense". To my great surprise, >she had the second rule but not the first. There was no denying what I >was hearing; my assumptions about the expected symmetry within the system >were just plain wrong. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 4 17:13:26 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 13:13:26 EDT Subject: Comparative AND Reconstructive Method Message-ID: In a message dated 8/3/99 7:27:07 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes: > As a matter of terminology, the kind of argumentation you propose >here falls outside the Comparative Method. It's true that we do sometimes >fall back on this kind of external guesswork, but it's the sort of special >pleading you make to bolster some assumption which you need for your >argument. It is more common than such a statement would lead us to think. > In any case, I'd be really careful in assuming that phonological >rules always apply across entire classes of categories. It's true that >things often do work this way, but they don't always. Completely agree. If they often do work this way, then the presence of some parts of such a pattern makes the occurrence of other parts of the same pattern more probable, to some marginal degree. That is all I intended, and all I would claim. No set of evidence is ever completely conclusive in any absolute sense. Of course not. But... We do use "circumstantial evidence" in all aspects of life. > Around 12 years ago, I was interviewing a speaker of the South >Midlands dialect area of American English. In this dialect, /I/ > /i/ for >some speakers, and /U/ > /u/ for some speakers. I assumed that if the >speaker had one rule, she'd have the other as well; I figured that the >general rule was "high lax vowels become tense". To my great surprise, >she had the second rule but not the first. There was no denying what I >was hearing; my assumptions about the expected symmetry within the system >were just plain wrong. > I've fallen into this same kind of trap plenty of other times. >There are so many cases of beautiful symmetry and parallelism in >phonological systems that it's an ongoing challenge to remember that >things don't always work out so neatly. Even in the Japanese case that >you give, there are recent loan words (e.g. tiishatsu "T-shirt") to mess >up the nice symmetry of the system. There are actually many older Sino-Japanese loans too "sha sho shu she" all exist in such loans. (Actually, I did NOT make the claim implied here, I was not claiming that "shi" MUST derive historically only from *si, merely that there is an asymmetrical sub-system, which happens to be native not in loan words, in which it does.) >> One of them I am quite certain is to develop both articulatory and >> acoustic "spaces", relative "distances" between different articulations >> and different acoustic effects, so that when attempting to judge >> likelihood of cognacy of pairs of words, we can judge similarity >> by degrees, not by yes/no dichotomies. (These will partly depend >> on the general typology of the sound systems of the languages >> concerned, they will not be completely universal, but they will >> also not be completely idiosyncratic.) >The Comparative Method is concerned with the reconstruction of categories, >_not_ the phonetic values which might have been the realization of those >categories. This is a very important point. When we talk about >Proto-Indo-European */a/, we don't mean "the phonological category in >Proto-Indo-European which had the phonetic realization [a]"; we mean "the >hypothetical PIE category which gave rise to the Sanskrit category /a/, >the Latin category /a/, etc." Agreed in part, in part not. We DO and MUST mean not merely something which represents a set of correspondences, we DO and MUST mean something WHOSE PHONETIC SUBSTANCE could have given rise to the observed attestation. (We can easily make errors, as reconstructing c-hachek (English "ch") because it occurs in a wide range of descendant languages, where it might have gotten there by drift in each descendant separately, and the actual form of the proto-language had *ky for all of these.) Therefore the following is not valid: >As far as the Comparative Method is concerned, we could designate that >PIE >category with an integer, e.g. "Category 27". */a/ is just a convenient >label or nickname for it. Re the following, the hypothesized proto-form should be much more than merely a guess, it should be a highly-educated hypothesis or estimate, resting not on "intuition" but on educated reasoning and experience. >Along with that label comes a built-in guess >about what the prehistoric phonetic value for that category might have >been, but this is _just_ a guess; the actual phonetic value is beyond the >reach of the Comparative Method. Whether one calls it "Comparative Method" or not, Calvert Watkins is absolutely correct, that the RESULTS of the valid application of the method must in general aim at a reconstructed language FROM WHICH one can derive the hypothesized descendants, (of course preferably by mechanisms of language change which are known to occur, though we must allow for discovering new ones). The substance of the reconstructions DOES matter. If some wish to call this "Reconstructive Method", and distinguish it from a very narrow sense of the "Comparative Method", then they will logically be forced to CEASE applying the term "comparative method" to much of what we traditionally have called that. The "comparative method" includes, ideally, the "reconstructive" aspects also. There is no point in trying to define it to exclude those, because they are part and parcel of the best comparative practice. Quite the contrary, making EXPLICIT that comparative method includes reconstructive method, and is NOT mere superficial comparison, is quite consistent with what many traditionalists maintain. Making this explicit allows us to IMPROVE AND EXTEND the totality of our comparative & reconstructive methods. Hiding it under the rug blocks progress, and misrepresents to students what we think know and how we know it. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 4 14:27:35 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:27:35 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <000001beda9e$456e5860$4ad3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: What is the AA root for jm-3? Or what are its cognates in other AA languages? [ moderator snip ] >Pat comments: >Some might be interested in Egyptian jm-3, 'kind, gentle, well-disposed, >pleasining, gracious, be delighted, charmed', which I believe is likely to >represent an AA example of the same root. [snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Wed Aug 4 20:25:31 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 22:25:31 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- >From PATRICK C. RYAN Sent : Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:33:30 >Pat comments: >Some might be interested in Egyptian jm-3, 'kind, gentle, well-disposed, >pleasining, gracious, be delighted, charmed', which I believe is likely to >represent an AA example of the same root. I am quite sceptical about the relationship. If am- is indeed related to amb, then the Proto-IE prototype should have been, according to Martinet something like H2e-mbhi, or H2-mbhi, with an initial laryngeal. If it is not, the prototype should have been H2em, then too with a laryngeal, as there is no recorded VC root in IE and that /j/ is conserved in most IE dialects. So unless you supose that the IE laryngeal is the reflex of an AA /j/, I will going on finding the link you draw quite doubtfull. It is still however possible that this similarity you supose is the result of a early borrowing, much like prn for house. Don't forget that if Renfrew's theory (or Sherrat"s) is true, IE originated in the middle east at the contact of some AA tongues and that some borrowings must have taken place. An instance of this is Sumerian tapiru (metal-worker), probably borrowed to an otherwise unknown IE-like tongue. Damien Erwan Perrotin From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Wed Aug 4 21:12:10 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 23:12:10 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: >From Eduard Selleslagh Sent : Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:35 >Ed wrote >Has it been proven that the Breton afan was derived from an originally >Brythonic *ama? (I have no problem with the reconstruction itself, I even >mentioned it in a different way). Brythonic languages like Welsh contain >large numbers of words that are most likely loans from Latin. It's all a >matter of timing, of course. It is difficult to be sure in that matters (the result would have been the same), but if Brythonnic had borrowed Latin Amare, it would be with its first meaning (to love), and would have replaced the indigenous term (*car) still in use in Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Moreover, the Breton term suggests that the original word was not a verb but the noun af (kiss), wich does descent from an older *av, itself from *am (albeit *ab is not phonetically impossible), all of this fairly regular in Breton (if the verb had been first, and not derivated from the noun, it would have been, regularly *avan). This noun cannot be a Latin loanword, as there is nor corresponding word in Latin (the equivalent is amor, which would have yielded *aver, or *avor). >According to M.Carrasquer's Stammbaum, which I subcribe to, IE and Etruscan >(and the like)are cousins. I definitely aggree, this the thesis of my new published book (in French, sorry), and the basis of the handbook I am working on. >The only thing I'm pretty convinced of is that the Etr. and Lat. am- and >the Lat. amb- (IE m.b-) roots are related, the problem is 'how?' There I am quite dubious. If we assume that the oldest form of Latin amb- and the like is H2e-mbhe or H2-mbhe, the second member of which is a particle meaning beside, and which is at the origin of English by and of the Sanskrit dative plural in -bh- (Martinet, 1986), what seems quite acceptable. If we suppose this root began with a prenasalized *mbh (Martinet too), which is still the best hypothesis to explain such alternations as Greek nephos (cloud), Welsh nef (from *nemos, sky) or Breton env (he, from Celtic *emo) and Hittite abas (this). The we could draw possible hypothesis. When stressed the prenasalized becomes am- in Etruscan at the initial : thus am(u) (to be) from *mbheu (to be, to become). ame (with) from *mbhe (beside) (Old English be) amake (wife) from *mbhendhto- (bound) When unstressed,at the initial it remains unchanged or become a /m/ mulch (beautiful) from *mbhleg- (to shine) : the Etruscan word was written with a m but was borrowed by Latin as pulcher, hence the possibility of mutu (thyme) from *mbhent- (mint) (Breton bent). At the interior of a word, it seems that it become a p (which in turn can become a spirant, but the value of "aspirated" consonnants in Etruscan is not clear). snuiaph (probably heavenly, as it is associated with pulumchva - stars - in the Tablets of Pyrgi) from (s)nembh- (cloud, sky) : Greek nephos, Breton nenv. ipa (which, this) from *embho- (this) : Hittite apas, Breton env, Celtic *emo In that view the reflex of *H2e-mbhe would be something like *ep or *ap. It is however possible that Etruscan am (which is known through the very Indo-European looking proper name aminth (eros)) is the result of an Anatolian adstrat, perhaps the famous Twrs of the Egyptian inscription. As we are sure that the root is present in Anatolian (c.f Lydian) that is even relatively likely. Of course, all my analysis of Etruscan does only reflect my personnal - an much in working - opinion an theory. c.f Geocities/Athens/Crete/4060 for very provisionnal details. Damien Erwan Perrotin From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Aug 5 20:19:11 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 21:19:11 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Thank you for your detailed reply, Jens - and for taking the time to give such a full answer. The evidence from Vedic root presents and -s- aorists is especially helpful. Incidentally, how does this fit with your suggestion that -s- aorists and -sk presents go together? Peter From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Aug 8 02:38:38 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 22:38:38 EDT Subject: ? "Vocabulary Density" Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: In general, I do not allow cross-posting between these two lists, because those who subscribe to both receive two copies, which in turn makes it difficult for those who read both to keep straight where a reply will be seen. However, since in my opinion this is a very important query, I will cross-post to both groups any responses that come from either group, and ask that those who read both bear with this departure. If there is very much discussion--more than a half-dozen responses or so--I will find a different way to deal with it that avoids needless duplication. --rma ] A query to those of you interested in language evolution and deep language relations... Has anyone analyzed in a careful technical way a question whether modern languages have IN NORMAL USE a greater density of vocabularies across the same size meaning space than reconstructed languages? Is there any conceivable way to separate that question from the influence of what is reconstructible vs. what is lost? The result is not at all a foregone conclusion, as much vocabulary having to do with practical traditional activities, such as shipbuilding, fishing, agriculture, animal husbandry, is going out of use among those raised in cities who have no experience with such activities, and no reason to discuss them, even to hear discussions of them. And it is not a foregone conclusion, because one might wish to argue that the semantic space of modern life is itself larger than the semantic space of hundreds or thousands of years ago. More concepts, more words to refer to them. The density could thus remain constant. But does it in fact? Would we not have to make matters comparable by studying density (saturation?) of vocabulary across traditional semantic spaces which may remain constant? Or is it circular, that the amount of vocabulary available and in ordinary use is the DEFINITION of how "large" the semantic space is, so that distinct terms retain a constant "semantic distance" from each other? I would think that is a purely circular way of reasoning, and cannot be valid. I'm not sure this question can be addressed in any useful way, given the biases of how we get access to the facts. And I will be happy if I am proven ignorant by someone citing some good references. The reason it seems important to me is that the density of vocabulary across semantic space may be an important factor involved in causalities of language change. If Livermore Labs can use its nuclear engineering skills to analyze traffic flow dynamics using concepts of physics (metaphorically gases, liquids, solids; state-transitions etc.), why cannot linguistics develop some similar more technical concepts and analyses. Even the field of Voting (Electoral) systems is now becoming quantified and structured with causally (?) related variables. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Aug 8 02:38:40 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 22:38:40 EDT Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? Message-ID: I respectfully disagree with the person who recently argued between the following two alternatives that either could be an appropriate "null hypothesis" (though I am greatly appreciative of that same person's many other contributions!) > No languages are related. > > All languages are related. Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like "We do not know whether all languages are related (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) Any attempt to force anyone else to accept something that embodies a CLAIM (as both of the first two alternatives above do), is MANIPULATING the discourse, instead of dealing with facts. If we don't know, then we don't know, it's as simple as that. I personally don't give a hoot what anyone wants to "assume", or tell me to assume, in the absence of data justifying such an assumption. Using a "burden of proof" argument is merely a way of trying to get someone to accept a conclusion in the absence of evidence. Only facts are relevant, facts which could make one conclusion more probable than another, (facts which DO NOT have anything to do with our own mental convenience, not EVEN with assumptions that nature is simple in some way we mentally want her to be, when she may in this particular respect NOT be simple). I would love it if we could get back to improving our tools, and to improving our databases so we can more easily find relevant data, and other such useful endeavors. I do not presume to have yet seen all of the useful procedures, not by any means. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Aug 8 03:30:27 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 22:30:27 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The reason I'm harping on non-African languages is that non-Africans supposedly have common ancestors who split off from Africans no earlier than around 100,000 BP, at least according to my understanding of what I've seen recently. Unless language arose after that point, then non-African languages [and perhaps some African languages] developed from whatever language they spoke. These groups did not leave Africa at the same time but evidently split off from the same group in North East Africa. Although it's possible that there were later outliers who arrived from other parts of Africa, these would have most likely been swamped by the expansion of existing families. In any case, the existing outliers all seem to have arrived before surrounding languages. Basque is possible the only candidate for a non-congener among non-African languages, in the sense that it's only existing unclassified language near Africa. It may well have entered Europe via the Maghreb. Even if they did, they may well have descended from the same population that gave rise to non-Africans and supposedly the bulk of North Africans. In any case, I'm certain that Stefan will come back from Siberia with proof linking Yeniseian to other Asian languages :> [snip] [snip] >Well. Niger-Kordofanian and Afro-Asiatic are widely accepted as valid, >even though the published evidence in support of each is sparse. >However, not only Khoisan but also Nilo-Saharan are at present little >more than hopeful areal groupings. Neither is supported by any >significant body of evidence, and both are doubted by some specialists. My understanding is that Nilo-Saharan is accepted by most, but that there are problems in fine details and possibly with the inclusion of Songhai. Khoisan, as I said, seems to be somewhere between one and five families with shared aspects of phonology and lexicon. The grammatical features, as described by Encyclopedia Britannica, seem to divide it into 2 or 3 groups with 2 very divergent grammatical systems. >> it seems that the onus of proof is on the polygenesists. >Why? Because bottlenecks and rapid expansions by given families very likely wiped out any possible non-congeners. >In comparative linguistics, the null hypothesis is always this: > No languages are related. I see what you're saying but I'm speaking from a pragmatic perspective, taking into account only existing languages, Given that Sumerian, Etruscan, Minoan, Pictish, et al. aren't around I don't take them into account any more than I'd take into account Neandertals and Australopithicines in an argument of mono- vs. poly-genesis of human evolution. [snip] >And I cannot see that this is a wise move, or even a possible move. >Doing so would render demonstrations of relatedness otiose, and require >instead demonstrations of *unrelatedness*. And it is a logical >impossibility to demonstrate that two languages are unrelated. The best >we can ever hope for in this direction is to show that there exists no >evidence to relate two languages -- but such an outcome clearly does not >prove that those languages are unrelated. >If we had no IE languages but Welsh and Albanian, I very much doubt that >we could make a persuasive case that they were related, and we would >have to conclude that there was no evidence to relate them, yet this >would clearly not prove unrelatedness. I couldn't but you could :> [snip] Unfortunately, I fear that monogenesis will be proven by mass extinction of possible non-congeners within the next 50 years or so. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Aug 8 15:29:40 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 11:29:40 EDT Subject: Maps of Semantic space & change Message-ID: For very distant language comparisons: If we create "maps" of nearest-neighbors in semantic space, or rather of PATHS of known change possibilities, and if what we map are "USES" rather than "GESAMTBEDEUTUNGEN" (since the latter is usually an attempt to simplify our thinking by positing some common element even if it is not in the heads of the users, although a cluster of neighboring USES can reinforce each other) Then, comparing any proto-language to its descendant language, we should be able to do both statistics and detailed studies on HOW MANY STEPS of CHANGE-OF-USE have occurred along paths of semantic change (on average, or a histogram of frequencies, or in particular cases), and then if we take many such studies and compare the results VERSUS THE TIME DIFFERENCE between ancestral and descendant language, this would be one way of quantifying the issues which are important to very deep language comparisons, and estimating how the data changes as we gradually move to greater time depths. *** We could do similar studies using two cousin languages, rather than one descendant and a proto language, to get estimates on the kind of situation we normally face with two languages or families which are NOT YET KNOWN to be genetically related. This would involve extrapolation from cases where the cousin languages are known to be related, but are increasingly distant, to what the data would look like with even greater distance. *** Although we can begin measuring time as a substitute for distance in linguistic change, we might (in the recent past at least) be able to correlate with other sense of distance, since different social conditions may lead to different rates of change per unit of time. *** I happen to be aware of my own work on maps of semantic spaces, which I intended as tools of this sort. I would love it if others can add more examples from other authors. I am sure such exist. Papers by Lloyd Anderson on Maps of Semantic Space & Change "Evidentials, Paths of Change, and Mental Maps: Typologically Regular Assymetries" 1982 pp.273-312 in Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols (eds.): Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation "The "Perfect" as a Universal and as a Language-Specific Category" pp.227-264 in Paul J. Hopper (ed.): Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics & Pragmatics Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1982 "Adjectival Morphology and Semantic Space" CLS-23, 1987 Papers from the 23rd Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society *** Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmcmahon at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk Sun Aug 8 16:53:50 1999 From: rmcmahon at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk (Dr. R. McMahon) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 17:53:50 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) (fwd) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Dr. McMahon is not a subscriber to the list, so CC: to his address if you wish him to see your response. --rma ] Rob McMahon (PhD) Clinical Scientist Box 158, Level 1 Addenbrooke's Hospital Cambridge. > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Sat, 31 Jul 1999 11:00:11 +0100 > From: petegray > Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com > To: Indo-European at xkl.com > Subject: Re: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Hi, The message above was passed to me for interest, and I hope no-one minds me posting a few comments. Although I'm not working on this stuff myself, I'm a molecular geneticist with a background in population genetics and a long standing interest in human diversity. So the comments that follow are my own interpretations of a rather diverse database of information. Firstly, the study of the genetic patterns underlying human population and individual diversity is really just in its infancy and there are more issues of debate in the genetics community than can be easily covered in a few lines (it really needs someone to sit down and do a full scale review article, but.....). Having said that, here are a few points that might be relevant. 1. There are several different sets of genetic data that could be used to make statements about the relation between human groups, and by inference the languages spoken by those groups; these split into two types. a. the frequency of rare, and not so rare, variants in proteins and cell surface antigens in different populations, eg the ABO and other blood group data. b. Molecular data tracing the history of individual stretches of the DNA that carries the genetic information. The molecular data is what people have been focusing on in the past few years as it has the potential to be least affected by very recent changes in population demographics and interpopulation marriage, and, perhaps most importantly, can be analysed without reference to a superimposed data structure. To make that a bit clearer, if one wants to say anything about population frequency data (data type'a') one first defines the populations to be sampled, a process that usually means selecting human samples from a geographically defined, isolated population or using some marker of 'tribal affinity' (usually language) which could confound the subsequent analysis and make any conclusions drawn suspect. Any stretch of DNA studied at the molecular level will retain a 'memory' of its own history independent of the population that the current carrier finds himself in. The question is then merely one of how closely the history of individual parts of the genome (molecules) reflect the histories of current human groups. And obviously, different parts of the genome, eg the Y-chromosome (determines male sex and is only inherited from father to son), the mitochondrial DNA ( a small DNA ring passed only from mothers to their children) and the rest of the chromosomes (which exist as pairs, one from father and one from mother), could give completely different stories about the individuals in a population. It's perhaps encouraging then, that in a broad sense at least, the three types of molecular data are beginning to give similar patterns, that don't conflict too badly with those previously obtained from data type a. 2. The mitochondrial picture, a thumbnail sketch. To keep things simple I'll just tell a just-so story without dwelling on the potential problems, error bars or areas of uncertainty--but remember THIS IS A GROSS SIMPLIFICATION. Take a group of individuals from around the World and type their mitochondrial DNA by sequencing short stretches that are known to undergo rapid rates of change. Arranging these into a set of aligned sequences it can be seen that some changes occured before others. You can then draw a 'tree' relating the individual molecules, gradually the groups will become bigger and start to link up at deeper and deeper nodes. At some point all of the groups will join up (coalesce) at the 'root' of the tree, that is all the sequences can be seen to share a common ancestor. The age of this common ancestor can then be estimated by counting the average number of changes down the divergent 'branches' and scaling that by estimates of the rates at which new variation is accumulating per year. Similar estimates can be made for each higher order node in the tree and then one can look at the tips and see if any of the groups correlate with other factors, such as language and geography. For example, a particular node might connect 15 samples and be dated at 12,000 years; if all of these individuals came from North America one might suggest that North American had been isolated from other groups for at least that long..... Using a bit of hand waving and some pretty good guesstimates, the pattern that then emerges is as follows. a. All human mt Variation originated from a single molecule present in Africa at about 250-150 thousand years ago. This was NOT the only molecule present in the human species at that time, just the lucky one whose descendants always managed to leave female offspring. b. There are 7-8 old coalescent groups with ages estimated to be around 80 thousand years ago, and of these only one is represented in significant numbers outside Africa, MEMBERS OF THIS GROUP ARE ALSO WIDELY DISPERSED WITHIN AFRICA. c. There are many later signatures of expansion both within and outside Africa, some of which could indicate later expansions from a similar group of African populations to the initial 'big bang' group, and or other groups. While others indicate recent events such as agriculture. Most indigenous human 'Tribes' seem to have coalescent dates that are relatively recent being in the order of 10-40 thousand years. So one might be tempted to say that Humans arose and divesified within Africa. These population underwent a dramatic expansion about 80 thousand years ago and representatives from a limited number of these diversified groups then subsequently moved out from Africa colonising the rest of the World. Subsequently, other African groups may also have moved out with later expansions, while on the other hand there is some indication that some of the original Asian colonists may have expanded in later periods back towards Europe and North Africa, particulary around 50-30 thousand years ago. However, in purely quantitative terms more genetic variation exists within Africa, despite this being perhaps the least well studied genetically of the major continental masses (excepting Australia), than in the rest of the World. I hope that this little summary is useful to the ongoing debate, but if anything requires clarification, I'd be happy to try. Rob McMahon > Rick said: > >. DNA studies obtensibly show that non-African > > humans seem to go back a single population distinct from Africans. > "Distinct" from Africans? Not in my reading of the texts. I don't wish to > raise a non-linguistic topic, but your implication - that languages split > into African and non-African - is a language topic, and we need some > scientist out there to give us the DNA truth. > Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 8 17:16:45 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 13:16:45 EDT Subject: Passivity as a transition (raising dust) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 8/8/99 1:22:04 AM, jrader at m-w.com wrote: <, , and in Chantraine, _Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque_ (or any other Greek etymological dictionary, for that matter).>> I don't have Chantraine, but I see in my notes: koneo^, (konis) raise dust: hence, hasten, ...EM 268.29: elsewh. only in compd. enkoneo^. enkon-eo^, to be quick and active, esp.in service,... akoni_ti or akon-ei (SIG36ti=SIG B (Olympia, V. B.C.), Dem. 19.77), Adv. of akonitos , without the dust of the arena, i.e.without struggle,without effort, usualy of the conqueror, Thuc. 4.73, Xen. Ages. 6.3... All of the above are from Lidell-Scott and are cited in Palmer, The Greek Language (1980) and Thomson The Greek Language (1964). The development is actually quite clear in the texts. In Homer, making dust and making haste start being interchangeable adverbially. The word is not compounded yet in some instances. By the time of Aeschylus, Prom. Unbound, (su se keleuthon hen^per e^lthes enkonei palin - go hasten back to from where you came) the compounding is clear, but the verb still doesn't stand by itself. (Another possible source is mentioned for the metaphor. One of these authorities however points out that the allusion to the ceremonial dust (konia) used by wrestlers doesn't work because this is applied before the match (for grip) and winning without applying the dust would be cheating - not triumph.) Trickier is diakoneo^. One of the earliest appearances - perhaps the earliest we have - of the word is in Herodotus (4.154), where the task referrred to is not mundane service but kidnapping and murder (men hoi die^kone^sein ho ti an dee^thei) - the kind that raises some dust and takes some effort. Only later is diakoneo^ specific to household type service (but not slavery.) Homer however uses enkoneo^ (not diakoneo^) adverbially (aipsa d' ara storesan doio^ leche' enkoneousai - pres part.) specifically with regard to servants doing a specific action. Only later (about the time of Xenophon) does diakoneo^ become a stand-alone verb and then a noun. The compounded form of dia/koneo^ looks pretty obvious to me, but no one else seemed to commit to it, so you may have me there - though I'd really like to see some textually based alternative explanation for the word. I don't know what Chantraine's logic is (I understand he/she takes a diachronic approach) - if multiple etyma are reconstructed from non-Greek sources I'd love to know what those sources are. This all seems to be pretty much just another Greek innovation - just as L-S have it - and we can pretty much see it happening. But since you seem to have access to ALL the other Greek etymological dictionaries, perhaps you can give us a survey? Regards, Steve Long From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sun Aug 8 17:18:47 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 13:18:47 -0400 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, > Macedonian, Albanian and Greek? > Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with > Indo-Iranian? > Is Albanian considered more likely to be Illyrian than Thracian? > Is Phrygian still considered as a possible ancestor or close > relative of Armenian? > Is Macedonian considered closer to Greek or Thracian? Here is a partial answer; I'll explain below why it can only be partial. In the last few years, Don Ringe, Tandy Warnow, and Ann Taylor collaborated to produce a phylogeny of the Indo-European languages. Don and Ann are historical linguists specializing in Indo-European, and Tandy is a computer scientist who works on computational biology. They used an algorithm developed to produce optimal phylogenies of biological species (e.g. you might code "vertebrate" as "1" and "non-vertebrate" as "2", etc. The computational problem, which is quite difficult, is to compute the correct phylogeny, or family tree, for the species being considered). What was new in their approach was to use this methodology to produce a phylogeny of a family of languages (e.g. perhaps you would code Indo-Iranian with a "1" to mean "undergoes the RUKI rule", and Italic with a "2" to mean "doesn't undergo RUKI"). The phylogeny they produced is as follows (at least, this is a version of their phylogeny which comes from a fairly mature stage of their work, and it's the one that Don was assuming in his classes in the 1997-1998 academic year; but there may be some slight adjustments in their forthcoming monograph): PIE / \ / Anatolian /\ / \ / Tocharian /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Celtic Italic /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Greek Armenian /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / / \ / / \ Indo- Balto- Germanic Iranian Slavic A few notes: -The position of Germanic in the tree is somewhat indeterminate. If you run the analysis strictly on the basis of _morphological_ characters, Germanic appears as in the tree above above. If you run it on the basis of _lexical_ characters, it groups with Italo-Celtic. The team hypothesize that Germanic started out in life as a sister of Balto-Slavic, but that the pre-Germanic speakers came into the political orbit of the prehistoric Italo-Celtic peoples and absorbed loan words from them at some date prior to Grimm's Law. Also, the whole part of the tree including Germanic, BS, and IIr is somewhat indeterminate; some innovations, such as the satem consonant change, are shared by IIr and BS but not Germanic. Probably, these three branches originally formed a dialect continuum which cannot be perfectly modelled in a Stammbaum. -The team originally included Albanian in the analysis, but its position in the tree is wildly indeterminate, which is not surprising considering the very late attestation of Albanian. Albanian has undergone such a great amount of innovation that it's hard to group it with anything. -The team did not include Phrygian, Illyrian, Venetic, etc., because these languages are so poorly attested that in many cases, we don't have even a single token of a particular character to be able to code it for analysis. So, to return to your questions: > What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, > Macedonian, Albanian and Greek? > Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with > Indo-Iranian? You're correct that Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian are in a single sub-branch of the IE family together, but Balto-Slavic and Germanic are in this branch as well. We can't say anything about Phrygian, Thracian, and Albanian on the basis of this kind of analysis; there are not enough data to do so. > Is Albanian considered more likely to be Illyrian than Thracian? We can't tell. Illyrian and Thracian are so poorly attested that we just can't tell. > Is Phrygian still considered as a possible ancestor or close > relative of Armenian? Once again, we can't tell. Who knows; maybe someday we'll find a huge cave full of Illyrian, Thracian, and Phrygian writings which will clear up much for us. It's not altogether hopeless; after all, Hittite and the two Tocharian languages were discovered in this century. Until then, we have to say that we don't know. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Aug 8 17:45:30 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 17:45:30 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <004901beddfb$a6462fe0$4a2907d4@paniegotinn> Message-ID: "Victor y Rosario" wrote: >After calling again our attention on the many sources that use b- and -k- >for the name of this people (e.g. *Balak* in the Armenian Geography by >Chorenatzi, 9th century), Isbasescu concludes that either >a. These items represent more or less the word *Vlach* as heard by other >ethnic groups (access to written sources, especially in the case of the >Scandinavian inscriptions, is considered unlikely), Yes. >or >b. The word was coined by Germanic tribes, with the meaning of *the >black-haired or -skinned ones*. I don't think so. As far as I know, there was no *blak(u)- in the sense of "black" in early Scandinavian. It's only in English and OHG (blah). Despite the objections made here, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the traditional account: Vlach, "Roman", name given to the Balkan Romanians by their Slavic neighbours. vlax, vlox, volox "Roman", borrowed by the Slavs from Germanic walh. walh, "Roman, foreigner", applied by the Germanic tribes to their neighbours, especially those to to the south. Formerly "Celt, foreigner", from the name of a Celtic tribe to the south of Germania (called Volcae by the Romans). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Sun Aug 8 17:57:05 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 19:57:05 +0200 Subject: Hittite & Celtic dative in /k/ ? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson wrote Sun, 8 Aug 1999 >I am not as familiar with typological tendencies for an >adessive (being "at" or "near") to develop either into a dative Whether the speculated connection is valid or not is quite another question. >I just do not see how the offered information (except the *angh part) >has a bearing other than to strengthen the plausibility. >Until someone finds another example of a postposition "near" >turning into a dative/accusative etc., in some language of the world, >I am doubtful of this etymology >on typological grounds. >I would love to have my typological horizons expanded if this is really a >clear case, >with intermediate stages actually attested. Irish is such a case, as the preposition ag has a dative meaning only in possessive construction of the kind "this is to me", a common feature in Modern Celtic. In all other case it is adessive. It is also used to form the continous present in a "I am at his seing" construction, where it cannot be considered as a dative. The use of adessive to express the verb "to have" is a common feature in Celtic. We have so Breton "Se a zo ganin" (I have this), using the preposition gan (with) and not da (to). Another exemple is Russian /u/ (at, near to) which is used to form the equivalent of I have : /u minja jest'/ litterally : by me there is. The transition from adessive to dative is also attested in Welsh "i" derivated from *in, but with a strict dative meaning. There is also the faroese preposition "hjà" whose classical meaning is "by; with" (meaning retained in Icelandic), but is used in colloquial speech with the meaning "for" or "of". Anyway, I am quite sceptical about the use of typology in the study of Celtic tongues (at least modern ones). These languages have so much "curiosities" in them - at least from an IE point of view, that typology is often hazardous. Examples are relative form of the verb, verb centered syntax, non-redundant conjugation. Damien Erwan Perrotin From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Aug 8 17:58:12 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 17:58:12 GMT Subject: Hittite & Celtic dative in /k/ ? In-Reply-To: <27c64704.24d97407@aol.com> Message-ID: ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 8/3/99 6:49:38 PM, 114064.1241 at compuserve.com writes: >>the comparison is unlikely, as the Hittite form is also used for the >>accusative, an use for which it has cognates in Germanic (gotic mik) and >>perhaps in Slavic (russian ko - to with only an allative meaning). The >>primary meaning was probably allative, as for most accusative in IE. >This kind of information in no way lessens the probability of connection, >since (as stated just above) the accusative may derive from an older >dative (or allative or etc.). This kind of information CAN suggest that >a connection may have great(er) time depth, to allow time (how much?) for >a common change to occur in one or another language. >(I assume it is not being proposed that the ORIGINAL meaning was >accusative, and that the accusative developed into a dative or allative? Neither dative nor allative. Simply an emphatic particle (cf. Greek -ge) added to what would otherwise have been endingless pronominal forms: Nom. u-k, ammu-k zi-k we-es, anz-as sum-es Gen amm-el tu-el anz-el sum-el DL ammu-k tu-k anz-as sum-as Acc ammu-k tu-k anz-as sum-as Abl amm-eda-z tu-eda-z anz-eda-z sum-eda-z Luwian has amu, Palaic ti/tu. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Aug 8 18:15:24 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 18:15:24 GMT Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: >What is the AA root for jm-3? >Or what are its cognates in other AA languages? No idea. Conceivably, Arabic ?mr (root of emir), which has something to do with "order". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Aug 8 18:16:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 18:16:32 GMT Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37A8A1B8.791764C0@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: Damien Erwan Perrotin <114064.1241 at Compuserve.com> wrote: >An instance of this is Sumerian tapiru (metal-worker), >probably borrowed to an otherwise unknown IE-like tongue. Could you expand? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sun Aug 8 18:33:19 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 14:33:19 -0400 Subject: Comparative AND Reconstructive Method In-Reply-To: <5f675b6.24d9ceb6@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Wed, 4 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >> The Comparative Method is concerned with the reconstruction of categories, >> _not_ the phonetic values which might have been the realization of those >> categories. This is a very important point. When we talk about >> Proto-Indo-European */a/, we don't mean "the phonological category in >> Proto-Indo-European which had the phonetic realization [a]"; we mean "the >> hypothetical PIE category which gave rise to the Sanskrit category /a/, the >> Latin category /a/, etc." > Agreed in part, in part not. > We DO and MUST mean not merely something which represents a set of > correspondences, we DO and MUST mean something WHOSE PHONETIC SUBSTANCE could > have given rise to the observed attestation. We assume that the speakers of the languages we reconstruct had phonetics. What I am saying is this: the Comparative Method (strictly defined) does not tell us what the phonetic values of the reconstructed categories were. This is simply a statement about what the Comparative Method is, and what it can and cannot do. > Therefore the following is not valid: >> As far as the Comparative Method is concerned, we could designate that PIE >> category with an integer, e.g. "Category 27". */a/ is just a convenient >> label or nickname for it. > Re the following, the hypothesized proto-form should be much more than > merely a guess, it should be a highly-educated hypothesis or estimate, > resting not on "intuition" but on educated reasoning and experience. I'll agree this far: if I were betting on the phonetic value of PIE */a/, I'd put my money on the pronunciation [a], much in the same way that I'd bet e.g. that the human skeletons we excavate from 1000 BCE in Denmark probably belonged to individuals who had white skin. There is, however, no direct evidence which allows us to confidently state the skin color of those individuals. We assume that they had skin, and we can make educated guesses about their skin color, but we're not entitled to state their skin color as a fact. When it comes to the prehistoric mergers of phonological _categories_, however, we _do_ have evidence of what happened. The evidence is the correspondence sets among related, historically attested languages. > Whether one calls it "Comparative Method" or not, Calvert Watkins is > absolutely correct, that the RESULTS of the valid application of the method > must in general aim at a reconstructed language FROM WHICH one can derive the > hypothesized descendants, I agree totally (other than the fussy point of switching "hypothesized" to "attested", which is probably what you meant). I'd be surprised if Watkins would disagree with what I'm saying, however; it is not at odds with your paragraph. > If some wish to call this "Reconstructive Method", and distinguish it from a > very narrow sense of the "Comparative Method", then they will logically be > forced to CEASE applying the term "comparative method" to much of what we > traditionally have called that. The "comparative method" includes, ideally, > the "reconstructive" aspects also. There is no point in trying to define it > to exclude those, because they are part and parcel of the best comparative > practice. > Making this explicit allows us to IMPROVE AND EXTEND the totality of our > comparative & reconstructive methods. > Hiding it under the rug blocks progress, and misrepresents to students what > we think know and how we know it. I'm going with the definition of the Comparative Method in the strict technical sense of the term, as discussed in Hoenigswald 1973. I guess it depends on what you mean by 'know'. Conclusions drawn from the mechanical application of an investigative method are one thing; educated speculation is another. When we reconstruct PIE laryngeals, we do so on the basis of a strict application of the Comparative Method; when we speculate about the phonetic values of those categories, we're doing just that: speculating. The most important point, I think, is this: while the question of the phonetic values of e.g. the PIE laryngeals is interesting, it _doesn't matter_ from the standpoint of the Comparative Method. You don't have to know the phonetic values of those categories to be able to do the Comparative Method. > Lloyd Anderson > Ecological Linguistics What is Ecological Linguistics, BTW? \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Aug 8 18:44:31 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 14:44:31 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: As far as African language families go, most of the area below the Sahara has seen rather drastic shifts over the last few millenia. The enormous expansion of Bantu languages from a small area of the Cameroons to more than half the continent is the most obvious; more recently, Fulani/Peul has spread from the Senegal region in pockets as far east as Lake Chad, and the Nguni sub-group of Bantu reshuffled much of southern Africa. Or on a smaller scale, Maa (Masaai) has spread down the Rift Valley, and Galla/Oromo into the Ethiopian highlands, or Somali in all directions, since the medieval period. There's no reason to believe all this mobility started just as we came into position to observe it, so extrapolating from the present linguistic situation back beyond the last couple of thousand years is, to put it mildly, very speculative. From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 11 07:48:03 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 03:48:03 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <37A700B6.A195B8DC@aye.net> Message-ID: >To risk being severely off-topic --- >My translation would be (this being Nostradamus, there are a number of >obscurities in the text, of course): >In the year one thousand nine hundred ninety nine, seven months, >>>From the sky will come the great King of Terror >To revive the great King of Angolmois >Before and after, Mars to rule playfully. >I believe that this text is in relatively standard Middle French, and >not Langue d'Oc. I am going to have to change that signature, since it >seems not to have come to pass . At any rate, most Nostradamus buffs >seem to believe that it refers to Armageddon and the Judgment Day >occurring in July 1999. >(Unless, of course, these prophesies run on the Old Style calendar, in >which case there is still a week or so for Armageddon to start.) >The King of Angolmois is usually claimed to be a distorted version of >-Mongolois-, referring to a revived Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, and >perhaps the prophesied Antichrist. (It might be likelier to mean a king >from Angoule^me, but that hardly seems as dramatic.) >To get back slightly on topic, from a linguistic viewpoint, one of the >interesting things about Nostradamus' text is how it came to pass that >the perfectly sensible word he used for "ninety" (nonante) got replaced >in Academy French by "quatre-vingt-dix." I've seen the explanation >mooted that the quatre-vingt numbers are a holdover from ancient >Gaulish, and didn't know that we knew enough Gaulish to tell. But >perhaps so long as the French Academy staves off the moral horrors of >creeping decimalism, the Antichrist will be kept at bay. >Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law [Ed Selleslagh] I would rather say 'luckily' instead of 'playfully'. 'Nonante' is still standard Belgian and Swiss French. The Swiss even use 'octante' instead of 'quatre-vingts'. By the way, the French don't use 'septante' either, but 'soixante-dix'. What about the Quebecois? They usually speak rather old-fashioned French (to European ears) (I've been there twice, but didn't pay attention, probably because I already had enough trouble with 'cent' and 'sans', which sound the same to all but to the Quebecois). I don't know about Gaulish having had a twenty-based number system (nothing unusual in the world, cf. Mayas), but Basque (and presumably Aquitanian, spoken in SW France 2000 years ago) certainly has one, and in a very consistent way, up to eighty-nineteen. It is of course possible that Gaulish inherited some of this when the Celts conquered most of present-day France. Note that Welsh (p-Celtic, probably like that of the Belgae, probably self-named 'balchai' in their language) shows some traces of (former?) ergativity, which might have a similar origin. Until we know more about the pre-Celtic linguistic situation in territories that became Celtic, the Vasconic component, substrate, or whatever it might be called, should not be written off out of hand, IMHO. I find it difficult to believe that 'quatre-vingts' is an Academy invention: more probably a carefully preserved (regional? Parisian?) archaeism made fashionable again. Note: the French Revolution is at the origins of the extreme decimalism in non-British Europe (metric system, decimal currency, they even decimalized the week - something that wasn't popular and hence didn't last: imagine a sunday every ten days...). The English must feel very sad the French - of all people - and not they themselves have a non-decimal number system ;-) Finally, if the Old Style (Julian) calender still applied, Nostradamus might have been referring to the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999. I guess it could have been predicted by calculus in his days, at least by some astronomer. Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 11 08:09:37 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 04:09:37 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <002801bede42$25a60e40$909ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: At 01:24 4/08/99 -0500, you wrote: >Dear Ed and IEists: [ moderator snip ] >Pat asks: >Sumerian -age? Do you have a reference for that "suffix"? >Pat >PATRICK C. RYAN [Ed] I am still in my vacation home in Spain, so I don't have my references here. Maybe I should have said 'ending'. I have seen '-age' mentioned as a variant of '-ak'. I'll have to look it up after Aug. 20. May be I was confused. Can you clarify for the time being? Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 11 08:28:52 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 04:28:52 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37A8ACA6.503B6FE0@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: At 23:12 4/08/99 +0200, you wrote: >>>From Eduard Selleslagh >Sent : Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:35 >>Ed wrote >>Has it been proven that the Breton afan was derived from an originally >>Brythonic *ama? (I have no problem with the reconstruction itself, I even >>mentioned it in a different way). Brythonic languages like Welsh contain >>large numbers of words that are most likely loans from Latin. It's all a >>matter of timing, of course. >It is difficult to be sure in that matters (the result would have been >the same), but if Brythonnic had borrowed Latin Amare, it would be with >its first meaning (to love), and would have replaced the indigenous term >(*car) still in use in Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Moreover, the Breton >term suggests that the original word was not a verb but the noun af >(kiss), wich does descent from an older *av, itself from *am (albeit *ab >is not phonetically impossible), all of this fairly regular in Breton >(if the verb had been first, and not derivated from the noun, it would >have been, regularly *avan). This noun cannot be a Latin loanword, as >there is nor corresponding word in Latin (the equivalent is amor, which >would have yielded *aver, or *avor). >>According to M.Carrasquer's Stammbaum, which I subcribe to, IE and Etruscan >>(and the like)are cousins. >I definitely aggree, this the thesis of my new published book (in >French, sorry), and the basis of the handbook I am working on. >>The only thing I'm pretty convinced of is that the Etr. and Lat. am- and >>the Lat. amb- (IE m.b-) roots are related, the problem is 'how?' >There I am quite dubious. If we assume that the oldest form of Latin >amb- and the like is H2e-mbhe or H2-mbhe, the second member of which is >a particle meaning beside, and which is at the origin of English by and >of the Sanskrit dative plural in -bh- (Martinet, 1986), what seems quite >acceptable. If we suppose this root began with a prenasalized *mbh >(Martinet too), which is still the best hypothesis to explain such >alternations as Greek nephos (cloud), Welsh nef (from *nemos, sky) or >Breton env (he, from Celtic *emo) and Hittite abas (this). The we could >draw possible hypothesis. >When stressed the prenasalized becomes am- in Etruscan at the initial : >thus >am(u) (to be) from *mbheu (to be, to become). >ame (with) from *mbhe (beside) (Old English be) >amake (wife) from *mbhendhto- (bound) >When unstressed,at the initial it remains unchanged or become a /m/ >mulch (beautiful) from *mbhleg- (to shine) : the Etruscan word was >written with a m but was borrowed by Latin as pulcher, hence the >possibility of >mutu (thyme) from *mbhent- (mint) (Breton bent). >At the interior of a word, it seems that it become a p (which in turn >can become a spirant, but the value of "aspirated" consonnants in >Etruscan is not clear). >snuiaph (probably heavenly, as it is associated with pulumchva - stars - >in the Tablets of Pyrgi) from (s)nembh- (cloud, sky) : Greek nephos, >Breton nenv. >ipa (which, this) from *embho- (this) : Hittite apas, Breton env, Celtic >*emo >In that view the reflex of *H2e-mbhe would be something like *ep or *ap. >It is however possible that Etruscan am (which is known through the very >Indo-European looking proper name aminth (eros)) is the result of an >Anatolian adstrat, perhaps the famous Twrs of the Egyptian inscription. >As we are sure that the root is present in Anatolian (c.f Lydian) that >is even relatively likely. >Of course, all my analysis of Etruscan does only reflect my personnal - >an much in working - opinion an theory. c.f Geocities/Athens/Crete/4060 >for very provisionnal details. >Damien Erwan Perrotin [Ed Selleslagh] Thank you for the interesting and informative contribution. Here are a few side remarks. 1. I got confused by Breton 'afan': I had interpreted the f as /v/, like in Welsh. 2. It seems that your reasoning brings Catalan 'amb' ('with', from Latin 'apud') and Latin 'apud' back into the picture. 3. Not only the Sanskrit dative plura in -bh-, but also the Latin one -ibus. 4. Note that Breton/Welsh 'aber' corresponds to the Dutch/Flemish (Belgae!) river names 'Amel' and 'Amer' (the latter is also used to refer to the neighboring flood plain or 'polder' ('vega' in Spanish). So the sound change m/b works both ways exchanges among the languages we were discussing. 5. Maybe the (Etruscan, Lydian,.. later Latin) am- and the IE-Latin amb- roots just share a common ancestry like the languages themselves (one or two steps before PIE) , then developed more or less separately but got exchanged among parallel branches of the Stammbaum at several moments and in several places (Anatolia, Italy,...). Ed. P.S. 1. Are you Breton? 2. My second language is French. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From pagos at bigfoot.com Sun Aug 8 19:46:37 1999 From: pagos at bigfoot.com (Paolo Agostini) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 21:46:37 +0200 Subject: R: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: On 08 August 1999 09:54 Rick Mc Callister wrote: >Various researchers link ides/-idus to Etruscan >*itu- "Ides" < "to divide" [az96: 25; g/lb83, pa, dep] >see Latin gloss idus, itus, ituare [az96: 25; g/lb83] >see ituna [mp68] >itus "middle" [g/lb83, lb 90, mp 75] >see Latin ides [g/lb83, lb 90, mp 75] The Romans called _idus_ (from a former _*eidus_) the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October and the 13th day of the other months. If memory serves me well, it was the lexicographer Hesychius of Alexandria who wrote in the 5th century "the verb _iduo_ originates from the language of the Etruscans, from whom the Romans learned many religious rites and customs, and it means _to divide_ because the _ides_ divide the months in two halves". In the 5th century though Etruscan was a dead language since three centuries at least. At the end of last century there were some scholars who maintained that the word originated from IE _*idh_ "to be bright" (of the moon), yet the idea was soon abandoned. Among the IE languages, the base occurs in Latin only. The word is very likely a Semitic borrowing, from the base `WD ('ayin-waw-daleth) the meaning of which is "to return (every year or periodically); to repeat (cycle, period); to count, reckon", cfr. Aramaic _'yidb'_ "festival"; Syriac _'eyda'_ and _'eyada'_ "ceremony, usage"; Hebrew _'yid_ "Idolatrous festival" and _'ed_ "monthly courses, menstruation"; Arabic _'id_ "festival" and _'iddah_ "period of time", _'adda_ "he counted/reckoned", _'adad, 'idad, 'idda_ "number", _`a:da_ "custom, tradition". There is also a secondary form of the same verb, i.e. 'TD ('ayin-thaw-daleth) "he counted/reckoned" from which Latin forms like _ituo_ might derive. According to the meaning of the Semitic base, the Latin word _*eidus_ simply meant "a period of time; a counted number of days; a day that returns every month". Latin has a number of Semitic loan-words which are due to areal contacts, cfr. _cornu_ "horn" from Semitic _qarnu_ "horn"; _taurus_ (and Greek _tauros_) "bull" from Semitic _tawr_ of s.m.; _vacca_ "cow" from Semitic _*baqa_ of s.m. etc. It also has a number of words of Egyptian origin, cfr. Latin _iris_ (and Greek _iris_ "iris; rainbow") from Egyptian _iri_ "eye", etc. What I mean is that not every Latin word of obscure origin goes back to Etruscan ;-) Cheers Paolo Agostini From jer at cphling.dk Mon Aug 9 00:41:43 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 02:41:43 +0200 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin In-Reply-To: <001701bed474$c95a8480$fd4a0d97@api-b0d3l6> Message-ID: On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Paolo Agostini wrote: > [Can ...] the Latin adjectival > suffix -n-us, -n-a, -n-um appearing in words like _mater-nus_ > [...], _pater-nus_ [...], _feli-nus_ [...] be traced back to IE? Does the > morpheme exist in other IE or non-IE languages? Any idea abt its etymology > and/or development? This thread has already provoked replies from Damien Perrotin and Eduard Selleslagh involving Etruscan and some more promising nasal suffixes of diverse IE languages. The suffix involved must be *-ino-, a common suffix of appurtenance, particularly well attested in derivatives from names of seasons and other time spans, as Gk. earino's, OCS vesnInU 'of spring'. It was plausibly derived by Chantraine from the locative of the season name, which was typically an r/n-stem, as *we's-n-i 'in spring', adding the "thematic vowel" *-o- (the real seat of the expresion of appurtenance), with a histus-filling ("ephelcystic") *-n- in between, and dissimilation of the product *-ni-n-o- to *-ri-n-o-. The r/n stem seems to have been generalized for all seasons, cf. the beautiful pair Lat. hi:bernus = Gk. kheimerino's equated by Szemere'nyi as IE *g'heimerinos (with dissim. in Lat.). The part -rnus was repeated with other designations of time in Lat., as diurnus (from the loc. diu:, the "endingless" variant of Skt. dya'v-i) and from there noct-urnus (if not from noctu:, itself copied on diu: at a time when this still meant 'throughout the day, all day long' and not just 'long'). The special meaning of the old derivatives in *-ino- makes it sensible to derive them from the locative: *wesr-ino-s is 'what is _in_ spring'. This distinguishes *-ino- from the suffix *-io- which has no such obvious connection with the locative (although it has been argued to have precisely that origin). A derivative like *ek'wi-o-s 'pertaining to a horse' does not signify thing on or inside a horse with any preference over things connected with a horse in a non-local fashion, so the suffix form *-i-o- is simply the product of the addition of a "thematic vowel" *-o- to the bare stem normally posited as *ek'wo-, in which we observe the transformation of two thematic vowels to *-i-o-. I see this as a simple consequence of the reduction rule of an unaccented thematic vowel to *-i- applying in very old lexicalizations; since _both_ thematic vowels could not be accented, the product *-i-o- may simply be from *-o- + *-o-. It seems that the addition of a syllabic morpheme shifted the accent towards the end, so that *-o'- yielded *-o-o'- whence *-i-o'-. It should not be held against the analysis that examples with an independent accent show *-i'-o- with accent of the -i- part, for that would be the further development anyway if the form is older than the introduction of initial accent I claim to have discovered for a prestage of PIE. This analysis provides an answer to the question why there is no *-n- in *-i-o-: there was no word boundary here, while in the hypostatic derivatives based on locatives in *-i as *-ri-n-o- there was. A preform like *p at 2teri-n-o-s may indeed have existed in IE, but then with the specific meaning 'which is at the father'; but it may just as well reflect a simple Latin (Italic) analogy with the season-based adjectives. In Balto-Slavic *-ino- enjoyed an enormous productivity (Russ. vostok 'east', vosto{cv}nyj 'eastern' from *-k-ino-s). This has nothing to do with the -n- of Germanic n-stems which turns up wherever the stem final is allowed to surface, not only in the genitive. For 'pertaining to a father', the conglomerate *-io- of thematic stems was generalized and had created *p at 2tr-i'o-s in PIE already. Thus, the -n- is not in origin a morpheme of appurtenance or of a genitival relation, and so there is no point in equating it with something outside of IE which is. Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Aug 9 07:25:29 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 03:25:29 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/8/99 8:31:22 AM, vjpaniego at worldonline.es wrote: <<1. A c.1050 grave inscription in Gotland refers to two nobles killed when battling against *blakumen*. 2. The Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringle illustrates a campaign by Alexios Comnenos (early 12th century) in *Blokumannaland*, translated into Latin as *in Blachorum terram*. 3. In the 13th century a reference is made in the Flatenyjarbok about a raid against *Blo(kumenn*.>> Just to straighten the chronology out a bit: The first referenece commonly given for "vlachs" is generally a note about their whereabouts written in a monastery on Mt. Athos in the 8th Century AD. Given that this piece was probably written in Greek, it would not be a surprise that the initial letter would have been a "B" rather than a "V". ("V"'s not being extra popular in Greek.) The would be one good way to explain why the word occasionally appears as Blahi, Blaki or Blacki, especially in records coming from eastern clerics. It would also explain why the pope would name Kaloian "rex Bulgari and Blachorum" in 1206 AD - Latin having lost its canonical hold in that region some centuries before, the name coming from the Greek. And such an momentous event could probably explain why an educated Scandinavian like Snorri would afterwards use the B form. And of course these citations don't exactly cancel out the references to Blacki or Vlachi (or Valah or Wallahs) in earlier or contemporary documents, ranging from Nestor to Gestae Hungarorum to Serb court records. The eleventh century inscription might as well refer to the "Blakmann" whose fleet does battle with Alvild among icebergs in Saxo. We have no evidence that Vlachs ever made much of an appearance in the Baltic. By the way, in connection with this name, it has been pointed out that the meaning might well be from the OE 'blak', ON 'bleiko-", OSl 'blec', reconstructed as OTeutonic *blaiko-. meaning shining or white. But, who's to say - the early Vlachs may have had white or at least shiny hair. "Vlach" is probably indeed ultimately from the German, but I suspect not from the Swedes giving hair color based group names out in the Balkans. <> I've re-read this a number of times and get the distinct feeling that there is only one choice among the two choices? Am I right? Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 9 09:11:25 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 10:11:25 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <37c13806.208933172@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [LT] >> Even the great >> Otto Jespersen, to cite just one name, believed in primitive languages >> and in absolute progress in grammatical systems. But nobody believes in >> this stuff today. > Except, apparently, Bernard H. Bichakjian. Indeed. I was forgetting about Bichakjian. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 9 11:42:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 12:42:01 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002d01beddff$26542400$eb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: Well, I have visions of the moderator reaching for the plug, but here goes. > It is you who are missing the point. The absolutive NP in an ergative > language is the patient. Sorry; not so. In Basque, and in most ergative languages, it is perfectly possible for an agent to stand in the absolutive case, and it commonly does so when the sentence contains an agent but no patient -- that is, with intransitive verbs which take agent subjects, like `speak', `eat dinner', `dance' and `go'. An ergative language, by definition, does *not* distinguish agents from patients. Rather, it distinguishes transitive subjects on the one hand from intransitive subjects and direct objects on the other. It makes no difference whether a given NP is an agent, a patient, or neither. A language that systematically marks the difference between agents and non-agents is an *active* language, not an ergative language, and active languages exist. Among the ones I have seen reported are Crow, Eastern Pomo, 19th-century Batsbi (I'm told that contemporary Batsbi is different), and, according to some accounts, Sumerian. > Lacking an agent (which would be the ergative), there is no > possibility of a reflexive or reciprocal. It takes an agent and a > patient to tango the Reflexive or Reciprocal. Also quite false. In Basque, just as in English, both reflexives and reciprocals can occur freely in sentences which lack an agent or a patient or even both. In Basque, reflexives and reciprocals can occur freely in sentences lacking an ergative NP. Basque has a set of dedicated reflexive NPs, of which `himself/herself' is the third-singular one, and it has a dedicated reciprocal NP `each other, one another', which has no other existence in the language. But look at these examples: Jon bere buruari mintzatzen zaio. `John is talking to himself.' Jon eta Miren elkarrekin joan ziren. `John and Mary went together.' (literally, `with each other') The verbs `talk, speak' and `go' are strictly intransitive, and neither can occur with an ergative NP. Yet both can happily take reflexive and reciprocal NPs. > Sumerian regularly expresses reflexives: how? by putting the agent > in the ergative and the patient (which is the same) in the > absolutive. Very interesting, and a strategy which I have not often seen. But this is only one strategy among many, and no universals follow from it. [on my examples of reflexives lacking agents or patients or both] >> Susie saw herself in the mirror. >> Susie is annoyed with herself. >> Susie excelled herself. > Larry, this is patent nonsense. > In the sentence: "Susie saw the room behind her in the mirror", > "Susie" is certainly an agent and "room" is certainly a patient. Certainly not. Try reading the definitions of `agent' and `patient' in my dictionary. In general, the subject of `see' is not an agent, and its object is not a patient: the referent of the subject NP isn't instigating anything, and the referent of the object NP isn't undergoing anything. > Your sentence is exactly analogous. "herself" is the patient (a > paraphrase for "Susie"), and "Susie" is the agent. 'Fraid not. > In your second sentence, it is equivalent to "Susie[1] annoyed > Susie[2]". "annoy" is construed in English as a two-element verb > (usually), of which the first element is the agent ("Susie[1]") and > the second element is the patient ("Susie[2]'). No. First, the rather unnatural `Susie annoyed herself' does not at all mean the same thing as `Susie is annoyed with herself'. Second, it is most unlikely that `Susie' is an agent even in `Susie annoyed herself'. People do not commonly set out deliberately to annoy themselves, as required here by the agentive reading. > It is incredible to find anyone, let alone a linguist, denying that > any true reflexive construction does not mandatorily contain an > agent, which is coterminous with its patient. Well, it may astound you, but it's the plain truth, or rather it would be the plain truth if you replaced `denying' by `asserting', which I presume is what you meant. [on my further examples] >> Susie and Mike collided with each other. >> Susie and Mike fancy each other. >> Susie and Mike resemble each other. >> Not an agent in sight, and not many patients, either. > Agent: Susie; patient: Mike; second agent: Mike; second agent: Susie. Nope. `Susie' and `Mike' would be agents only if they consciously and deliberately instigated the action, which is hardly likely to be the case in any of my examples. People do not deliberately set out to collide with each other, to fancy each other, or to resemble each other: all of these are things that happen to us, not things that we do. Are you sure you understand the meaning of the term `agent'? > I suppose we could dance around the definitions of "grammatical" and > "semantic" but the fact is that, e.g. "reflexive" means simply: "a > verb having an identical subject and direct object". No, not remotely true. To begin with, a reflexive is not a verb at all. An NP can be a reflexive, and a clause can be reflexive. But a verb can't be reflexive, at least not in English. (The Romance languages, of course, have verb-forms which are commonly called `reflexive verbs', but the term is used here in a rather special sense: the Romance reflexive verbs are not, in general, strictly reflexive.) Moreover, the two coreferential NPs need not be the subject and the direct object. See the examples above. > The fact that you want to extend "reflexive" into areas in which it > does not belong based on pseudo-reflexive constructions in some > languages does not alter one iota what a true reflexive is. I've no idea what you mean by a `true reflexive', but it doesn't appear to bear much resemblance to what everybody else calls a reflexive. And I certainly can't guess what you mean by `pseudo-reflexive'. [on Pat's claim] >>> An intransitive verb, by definition, has only one NP element [and my response] >> Susie is sleeping with Mike. >> Susie smiled at Mike. >> Susie got ready for Mike. >> All intransitive, but all with multiple NPs. > Well, it is my fault for leaving out the qualification "essential" or > "core". > Actually, I thought you might grasp that without the qualifiation. > Do you think there is a difference between: > "Joe is hitting" and > "Joe is sleeping"? > Or is it just a peculiarity of my personality that would make me ask: > "Hitting whom?" but NOT ask "Sleeping with whom?" ? Well, I am astonished. In my experience, `sleeping with' is not something you can do by yourself, and `sleeping' is not at all the same activity as `sleeping with'. Of course, things may be different in Arkansas, but, given what I've been reading about Bill Clinton, I doubt it. ;-) >>> Of all the languages I have ever seen, Basque is, by a mile, far the >>> most "unusual" language. [LT] >> Nope. > Larry, I do not need nor want you to assume the prerogative of > correcting my expressed impressionistic opinions. Well, perhaps you'd like to lay out your reasons for seeing Basque as highly unusual. I've been studying the language for 28 years, and I haven't noticed many peculiarities. > It is bizarre, in my opinion, because of its weird phonology, "Weird"? Why "weird"? Basque has an exceptionally simple segmental phonology, comparable in many respects to that of Castilian Spanish. It has a small set of phonemes, very simple phonotactics, and few alternations. Phonologically, it is *much* simpler than English, and simpler than almost any other European language I can think of. It lacks the mutations of Celtic, the consonant gradations of Finnish, and the elaborate stem-alternations of most IE languages. > and the habit it has of borrowing (according to you and Michelena) > vocabulary from everywhere for just about everything so that one is > hard put to find originally Basque words for anything. A grave overstatement. Basque has indeed borrowed extensively, but in this it is hardly alone, especially among minority languages. And it is trivial to list hundreds of Basque words and morphemes which are clearly native and probably ancient. Where are you getting this stuff from? > Shibatni's endorsement is implied by his allowing Estival and Myhill > to publish under his aegis. No. An editor does not, in general, endorse all the views expressed by those contributing to the book he edits. I have edited some books myself, and am about to edit another. Like any editor, I do not prevent contributors from publishing views I disagree with. > Are you not the one who is forever complaining about wrong-minded > ideas being allowed to see the light of a printing press? To be precise, I have often complained about transparently shoddy work being accepted for publication, even in refereed books and journals. It is an editor's responsibility to prevent crappy work from appearing in his books and journals, but not to suppress conclusions he doesn't like. > Would Estival and Myhill be published in a book under your > editorship? Fat chance! You do me an injustice. When editing or refereeing, I have frequently accepted or approved work with whose conclusions I do not agree. I content myself with correcting obvious errors, pointing out flaws in argumentation, and cleaning up the English. You seem to have a jaundiced view of the academic world. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 9 15:25:43 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 16:25:43 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <005501beddc1$6c5837e0$f0d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Oh, so "our" type of languages, accusative-type, can be *split-free* > but "their" type of languages, ergative-type, cannot be. Akkusativ > ueber alles! No need for the rhetorical flourishes -- and this really is rhetoric. There are lots of accusative languages which show no trace of ergativity. But it's very hard -- perhaps even impossible -- to find an ergative language which shows no trace of accusativity. Possibly without exception, a language which exhibits ergativity at all is ergative only in certain respects and accusative in other respects. That's just the way it is. This is an empirical result, not an ideological position. If you know of even a single language which is 100% ergative and 0% accusative, let's hear about it. Nobody else seems to have located one. > What you seem not to be able to grasp because of your unfamiliarity > with languages like Sumerian is that the ergative "subject" is > frequently NOT EXPRESSED. Perhaps, but so what? Lots of languages frequently don't bother to express subjects overtly -- Spanish, Italian, Japanese, hundreds of them. Why is it significant that Sumerian is another one? In Basque, not only ergative subjects, but also absolutive subjects, direct objects and indirect objects are commonly omitted when they would otherwise be pronominal. Is this significant? Even in English, in which a well-formed sentence normally requires an overt subject, it is common in ordinary speech to omit the subject. Look at my very first sentence above for an example, and consider other common locutions like these: Beats me. Don't know what you mean by that. Can't say. Looks like rain. Seems we have a problem. Been drinking? Why is the omissibility of subjects of any interest at all? > And, I am not even sure that "subject" is a useful term to apply > to relationships between ergative and nominative languages. Oh, `subject' is a *very* useful term, even though there appear to be languages in which grammatical subjects are poorly developed or maybe even absent altogether. Anyway, the concept of `subject' is not even essential to demolish the "passive" view of ergative languages. All ya gotta do is to list the syntactic properties of the three major NP-types -- S, A and P in Dixon's notation -- and see which two pattern together. It's almost always S and A, which therefore constitute a single syntactic category, whether or not we choose to call this the class of subjects. And it's hardly ever S and P, as required by any version of the "passive" interpretation. Facts are facts. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Aug 8 15:05:23 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 16:05:23 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: Rick said: > non-African [modern human] > populations began leaving Africa about 100,000 BP. If language was > developed before 100,000 BP --and my understanding is that this is the > consensus, then these languages would seem to have a common origin in > Africa. I'm happy with "origin in Africa". It may or may not have been "common". > How they are related to existing African families is another > question. I do hope I misunderstand you - and I'm sure I must. You are not seriously suggesting that the people of African are not "modern humans"? [ Moderator's comment: I'm certain you have misunderstood, although the phrasing could have been better. I think the distinction was between an emigration of "modern humans" and a prior emigration of older hominids. --rma ] If you agree that they are just as much "modern humans" as everyone else, then on your argument you either have common contact before departure, or you have a flow of people back into Africa, either of which rather destroys your theory of African languages being grand relics of some pre-modern speech. If you do not believe that the peoples of Africa are "modern humans", then I need to cease the discussion before I say something rude. Peter [ Moderator's comment: I think what was meant is that the language families found outside Africa may relate to those within Africa in several ways: 1. All the language families may be grouped into a single super-family. 2. All the language families outside of Africa may be grouped with one or more, but *not* all, those within Africa. 3. Some language families found outside Africa may be grouped with one or more of those within Africa, and others with others. --rma ] From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Mon Aug 9 18:51:52 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 14:51:52 -0400 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > Is this anything other than the accusative of goal? If you take a:+ruh = climb onto. > [...] I cannot see the relevance of this for a discussion > of the question whether the ta-participle is passive or > resultative: with transitive verbs it plainly is both, we > are not that much is disagreement. - By the Modern Indic > rules of agreement it does seem to me to be the passive > (of transitive verbs, of course) that formed the pattern. > Where am I wrong? If a certain form, as far back as we can trace it, referred to the object of transitive verbs, and the subject of intransitive verbs, are we obliged to call it a passive, Especially when a different formation was used to form a more conventional passive? Anoterh question is why another passive, using the suffix ya (<*ye/o) was created if the to-adjective was already being used for the passive? From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Mon Aug 9 18:51:56 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 14:51:56 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: First, some methodological issues. As I understand it, a cornerstone of historic linguistics, or any historical science, is that we should try to explain as much as possible by processes that we can and have observed. This should go for syntactic change as much as for phonological or morphological. Secondly, some changes seem to be much more common than their reversals. In such cases, requiring the reverse change must be supported by proportionately stronger evidence than we would want for the more common kind. In particular, the tendency is for new formations to arise to denote ``core'' notions and expand outward to denote allied notions as well. Correspondingly, older formations tend to become restricted away from one or more core notions, depending on the new formations. This means that we need to be careful in distinguishing specilized and general notions in diachronic syntax. For example, progressive is a special case of imperfective. But we do not confuse the two, nor see progressive as a natural outgrowth of imperfective. We need to be just as careful with less familiar categories such as completives. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > On Mon, 26 Jul 1999, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: >>> [Jens:] >>> If my observation that there is an alliance between the sk^-present >>> type and the s-aorist is correct ... then the s-aorist was originally >>> inchoative in function. [...] >> [Nath:] >> This makes it harder for me to understand how the aorist became the >> perfective. `Started driving', in contrast to `drove', suggests >> incomplete action. > The aorist reports a turn of event that caused a new situation: is that > not the perfect thing to express a beginning? Aorist of `start/begin' would be the thing to express a beginning. But why is the thing to express the whole event? While there are several examples where an auxillary meaning `finish' generalizes to become a `perfect', and in a few cases to a perfective, there seem to be none in which `begin' does so. > [Jens:] > The PIE function of the different derivative categories must be at least > compatible with that of their later reflexes, and the simplest solution is > that wherever we find non-trivial correspondences between the daughter > languages we have a relatively direct reflexion of the protolanguage. The perfect was rolled into the (perfective) past in Germanic, Italic, Tocharian and possibly Celtic. Does that mean that the Perfect was originally a past, and Indic and Greek innovated that into a resultative/perfect? Or should be pay attention to the fact that the development is typically the other way? > Why would a morpheme with lengthening and -s- turn up as the > expression of non-durative past in Italo-Celtic, Slavic, Armenian, > Greek and Tocharian if that were not its function in PIE already? Now the (sigmatic) aorist is non-durative. But, > [Nath:] >> How do you classify ``I learned that chapter in one month?'' > [Jens:] I believe as a job for the aorist. the aorist is compatible with duration, > [Nath:] >> Could the imperfect report `action pure et simple', or was that reserved >> for the aorist? How did PIE speakers report a durative action that was >> done, like ``I walked home''? How did they say ``I made pots >> yesterday''? > [Jens:] > I guess they walked home in the aorist, made pots (generically) in the > ipf., but made a specific pot or set of pots in the aorist. but not with unbounded but whole events. [I am assuming that `generically' includes ``I made pots yesterday'', rather than just ``I used to make pots''.] This looks remarkably like Modern Russian, but unlike perfectum-imperfectum distinction of Latin, or the aorist-imperfect distinction of Slavic (even in Modern Bulgarian, the imperfective aorist is regularly used in this case) etc. The difference between the two, and the historical reasons for such differences are amply discussed in the references I gave. It seems to me that Szeremenyi was correct to charge that the syntax of the Modern Slavic languages (that have lost the aorist-imperfect distinction) was unjustifiably transferred to other IE languages and thence to PIE. If the situation in the oldest known stages of languages with a distinct imperfect were really the guide, we would not assign ``I made pots yesterday'' to the domain of the imperfect. However, > But who am I to know? Please don't demand that I write a fable. So we don't really know. We are left with having to extrapolate back. That means that we need to weigh the liklihood of the different possibilites. In particular, we need to cross-check the traditional view of PIE syntax with the evidence coming from the studies of grammatization. Perhaps my Uniformatarian bias is showing, but I refuse to believe that IE evolution was subject to processes unkown in other languages. >[Nath:] >> The point is that an alternate explanation is possible: Completives have >> a ``hot news'' value, which makes it plausible to see them develop into >> recent past. They also can develop into perfectives, Slavic being a >> usable example There are gaps in the examples, but I find this more >> plausible than deriving the Vedic usage out of perfecitve-imperfective >> opposition. > [Jens:] But Vedic _is_ an IE language. So IE languages evolve in a manner completely different from other languages? I suspect that what you want to say is something else, namely aspect for PIE is so well established that we must believe the less probable. That brings us to > [Jens:] With reference to PIE they must [ie, verbs such as *ghenti, (Vedic) ta:s.t.i etc must be imperfect (NR)] > in case such was the system - and that it was is very well established. Could please point to me some sources where Szeremenyi's criticisms are answered. In particular, they must take in account the differences between aorist-imperfect distinction and the perfective-imperfective distinction of Russian etc, and explain why the latter is so well established for PIE when aorist-imperfect distinction worked the other way even in Slavic. I cannot take seriously any argument that ignores such a basic point. To be blunt, it is not even clear that those arguing for aspect in PIE are even aware of the difference, even though it has been pointed out repeatedly, starting from Jespersen at least. > [Nath:] >> How do you explain that it is the so-called imperfect that is the tense >> of narration in Vedic? > [Jens:] > Sorry to take so long in coming to the point, this _is_ a very important > question which deserves more attention than is perhaps mostly accorded to > it. Now, under no circumstances can we completely divorce the imperfect > from the present, for they are formed from the same stem - that must mean > _something_. And I do not think we can disregard the situation- changing > effect of the aorist stem which turns up in all corners of IE. First the point that the imperfect and present are formed from the same stem: This means nothing in those languages which lack aspect, or what seems to be the more common situation, languages that have only a progressive-present/nonpast-past system, especially those in which the present is denoted by zero. An example in the sample used by Bybee et al is Bari. In such cases, the present is imperfective if anything, covering habitual and generic. But the past is formed by adding a prefix ( in some other languages, a particle). Is this so different from PIE? I am not sure if `situation changing' is same as `moving the narrative forward' or not. If they are not the same, then we are in partial agreement. The so-called imperfect can still narrate while the aorist signals an high-lighted action or a juncture. This is not too different from past/perfective vs completive. Completives can be situation changing, and when they become generalized halfway (ie, with the older past/perfective still being in majority in narration), they come to be seen as providing sutiable end points for segments of narration. But the older past/perfective still drives narratives forward. Panjabi uses the older construction based on the PPP often enough to be classified with the perfectives in Dahl's study. Yet it uses the compounded verbs (ie, used with a ``vector verb'') in the most protptypical perfective situations (especially from the Slavic viewpoint). Which has situation changing effect, both or just the latter? > So, if the present stem is situation-preserving, and the aorist stem > situation-changing, how do we explain the Vedic facts? They do not look so > odd to me: The present is also a narrative form, namely to report what is > going on: "The horse is turning at the corner, it's emerging in full > sunlight, and is now approaching the finish line" - this would all be in > the present indicative in Vedic I guess. If the corresponding past > narrative is the imperfect, that could simply be due to the status of this > category as the past of the present stem. But languages with a perfective do not do that. As soon as the narrative is in the past, they use the perfective. > [Jens:] > If instead of perfective past you read concluding past which is just a > natural further development, If it is so natural, we should be able to find several such examples, at least as often as the reverse. What we generally find is that forms start from a restricted ``core'' category to more generalized situations. When older forms lose ground, they become restricted to the ``periphery'' which can cover varied ground. In particular, there are several examples of an auxillary meaning finish becoming the marker of `perfect' or perfective. [They are not the same: ``I read War and Peace yesterday'' is not the same as ``I finished reading War and Peace yesterday''.] How many examples are there of the development you are proposing, of perfectives becoming restricted to the function of emphasizing the attainment of result? > [Jens:] > The IE imperfect is not just Greek. The Slavic imperfect, which mostly > translates the Gk. ipf. in OCS, is an almost direct continuation of the IE > ipf. (in Baltic it has become a preterite pure and simple due to the loss > of the aorist). The Armenian ipf. has endings in -i- from *-e:- stemming > from the verb 'be' (all thematic verbs rhyme with 'be' in Arm.) which > formed *e:st from *e-H1es-t with the augment. The Toch. ipf. is basically > the optative, but there are some long-vowel imperfects which in my view > simply copy the old relation *es-/*e:s- of 'be'. Old Irish no-bered 'was > carrying' is from the middle-voice ipf. *bhereto, notably always > compounded (if only by the default preverb no-) and so rather obviously > continuing an augmented form. No matter what one thinks of Lat. ama:bam it > does contain the same span as Oscan fufans and so adds the same preterital > marker to the present stem as the latter had added to the perfect stem; > and ama:ver-a:-s has preteritalized the perfect stem just as er-a:-s has > the present stem, so here, too, the ipf. is the preterite of the present > stem. Even Albanian ish or ishte (the C,amian forms) may artlessly reflect > *est (in part with productive superimposed ending, probably borrowed from > the aor. qe), i.e. the present stem with secondary ending. Armenian contains extra material and it is not clear that this was functionless; the imperfectivity can come from the stative auxillary (< *eHes-). Synchronically Latin proves nothing because the perfect is the past, so the imperfect is not present stem plus the past. Diachronically, era:- contains an auxillary (a stative one at that) and it seems that -ba:- does as well. Again it is not obvious that the auxillaries were functionless from the beginning, that is that they were added only at the stage where other ways of referring to the past [and there must have been since the perfect and pluperfect originally denoted states] had been eliminated. Without that, we don't know that the imperfectivity is due to the present stem and not due to the use of auxillaries. That leaves Tocharian and Celtic. These do deserve a closer look. But their typical imperfectives are formed differently We need to weigh this against the fact that Vedic has several root presents for which imperfectivity of the past is problematic, and of which you said > I find no problem with the existence of individual verbs that act in > individual ways that have to be entered in the lexicon. That sound fairly > normal. Note also that this is the mirror image of the problem of eber in Armenian, and some aorists in Slavic that look like they are from PIE ``imperfect'' (according to Szemernyi). Given that Tocharian and Irish texts are from a much latter time from Vedic or Hittie, how do we know that the former preserve the archaic state and not the latter. Please don't say that ``we know that is how it was'' because that is what requires proof. There is also the long vowel of the Tocharian imperfect: If it is analogical as you seem to be suggesting, or was based on some verbal noun (Kortlandt), we cannot directly compare it to the Greek-Indo-Iranian imperfect. >> Do we really understand the variety of syntactic structures and their >> diachrony that well? I have mentioned the Tamil -vidu construction a few >> times. You will find some linguists call that a perfective and the Tamil >> simple past an imperfective. This is simply wrong as the simple past is >> and has been the tense of narration for the 2000+ year recorded >> history, and this distinction is nothing like the >> perfective-imperfective distintion in Russian or Arabic [...]. > [Jens:] > Maybe we have something as important as the explanation of the Indic > development here. Perhaps Anatolian and Iranian have been influenced by > some common source which could not distinguish different types of > synthetic preterites? Good old substratum explanation to the rescue. But what substratum? Semitic, a natural candidate if you really menat Iranian, had aspect by 1700 BCE. If you meant Indian here, it should be noted that the use of auxillaries in Tamil is post 2nd c. CE. There are reasons to suspect that at an earlier stage, which had just two forms, the opposition was aspectual and not based on tense. Since the only forms common to all Dravidian languages are these two forms, we are in the same situation. > [Jens:] > As long as our mistakes are comparable to calling the expression of > imperfective action "imperfect" and the expresiion of perfective action > "perfect" in a language that really has a perfective-imperfective > distinction, I see little cause for alarm. BTW, emperical approaches (based on `prototypical' uses) have little difficulty distinguishing between perfect and perfective. This could be considered harmless till someone uses the names alone to decide what the syntax should be. In particular, we really don't know how the ``imperfect'' was used in PIE. All we can do is use grammatization studies to evaluate probabilities of different developments that can give what we observe in the extant texts. This is of course what we do for phonology and morphology and all I am saying that the same goes for syntax. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Aug 10 03:01:48 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 23:01:48 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: << At 23:15 19/07/99 EDT, wrote: My hypothesis for the origin of the East-European -ch in Walach and the like: a derivative ending,... still productive as -ak in Slavic (but also as an adjective forming suffix in Greek -ako's...>> >From a post sent to me: <> I suppose this might be a case of -achi being attached to a place name. S. Long From jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 10 16:25:08 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 18:25:08 +0200 Subject: nasal pres / root aorist II In-Reply-To: <003701beddcc$8a808d20$7302063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: [...] > ****A: in PIE [...] > Now not all verbs show an aorist, but the claim is that verbs with a nasal > infix present go with a root aorist. (Does this mean all nasal infix > verbs, or only those that have an aorist?) J: Not everything present in PIE need have been retained down to an attested language millennia later, so the question makes little sense. P: > I checked a random sample of 16 verbs with nasal presents. Nine of them > had no aorist; the other 7 all had root aorists somewhere in PIE. A > miniscule sample, but suggestive. I'm sure you will be pleased by it, > Jens. In any case, it is clear that there is a need for Strunk's claim to > be based on a proper statistical analysis, not just on a theoretical > assertion supported by his ridiculously small group of 8 selected examples. J: Statistics may be totally misleading, if one type runs crazy and become productive. It seems the s-aorist has done that (luckily then often forgetting some of its old characteristics so that we can still spot it as secondary). P: > ****B: in an individual languages > Strunk and Jens do not make the claim that nasal presents are associated > with root aorists within a particular langauge (which would be a much more > significant claim), but it is worth testing nonetheless. J: The "same-language" ideal is indeed met here and there, see the other posting, simultaneous with this one. P: > Strunk says (p128) "[This system] appears precisely in Indo-Iranian and > Greek" He says that this proves the archaic character of these two > languages. J: I believe you have a word of criticism hanging in the air. To me (too?), the inference is no quite logical. Others would say that it proved the archaic character of the system, since it is retained in precisely Greek and Indo-Ir. which are by widespread consent the most archaic branches of IE. But even that is of course open to question. > I [petegray] said: >>> (a) In Greek it is largely true, but there are exceptions; so a bald >>> statement would need qualification. >>> (b) In Latin it is largely untrue, since the aorists are either sigmatic or >>> the rare reduplicative aorist (tango tetigi, claimed by some as an aorist >>> on the basis of Homer tetago:n, or the lengthened vowel: pango pe:gi (~ >>> perfect pepigi). I can only find cumbo cubui which supports the claim in >>> Latin. > Jens said: >> You might also have thought of cerno:/cre:vi:, fundo:/fu:di:, >> linquo:/li:qui:, rumpo:/ru:pi:, sino:/si:vi:, sperno:/spre:vi:, >> sterno:/stra:vi:, vinco:/vi:ci:. > li:qui and vi:ci probably have the same origin as vi:di (which you > significantly did not include, because its origin is known), that is to say > in an -o- grade perfect. (*-oi- > *-ei- after v, or between /l/ and labial > or labiovelar, then *-ei- > i: as normal) Jens now says: vi:di cannot be the perfect which with this verb means 'know': vi:di: means 'I saw' which is the meaning of the aorist (I have, however, seen vi:di: _quoted_ to mean 'I know', but I know of no textual basis for it; in case I have overlooked something, it is in reference to the meaning 'I saw, I have seen' I insist that it reflects an aorist). I grant you that li:qui: and vi:ci: could be perfects (the "li:ber" rule might work in li:qui:, good point; and vi:c- could even be *wi-wik-, aor. or pf.). However, in that case it is a _very_ odd principle that the o-grade perfect is never retained de- (or un-) reduplicated when the vowel would be retained as /o/ into Latin times. P: > fu:di and ru:pi could equally be from o grade perfects (we know that > iu:vi is). J: Nothing excludes that iu:vi: has IE *-ew- (Italic cannot distinguish eu and ou, cf. also novus : Gk. ne'os), but the example is useless in this context, sure. P: > In any case, If they are aorists, they would have to be full grade, > and I excluded them because I thought that "root" meant "root", not full > grade - though I see the Strunk uses "root" to mean full grade, too. J: A root may alternate between any of its ablaut grades. Root presents and root aorist often have full grade in the daughter languages, originally the alternated, as *{gw}em-t, 3pl *{gw}m-ent 'came' (still Vedic a'gan, a'gman) P: > cre:vi, spre:vi, si:vi, stra:vi are clearly -vi formation (Latin) perfects, > on a laryngeal base. The origin of these -v-forms is still unknown. > In what sense do you make them either a root form, or an aorist? J: The Latin v-"perfect" is obviously an innovation, but that does not make the verbs forming it innovations themselves - they must have had _some_form in the protolanguage. And the locus of diffusion of the Latin -v- is not ard to find: in /fu[v]i:/ there was an automatic glide which could be regarded as phonemic or subphonemic, sincefui:/ and /fuvi:/ would be pronounced the same. Thus, if fu- formed fu-vi:, what would other verbs in vowels like ama:- form if not ama:-vi: and the like? A comparable extra -v- is seen in Sanskrit in 3pl aor. abhu:van, pf. 1/3sg babhu:va, 3pl babhu:vur., only in Sanskrit the additional -v- was not utilized as a pattern for other verbs, while in Latin it was. I guess the Old English verba pura in -wan have a comparable origin: since bu:wan 'dwell' is simply bu:- + -an (possibly from *bu:-j-an with loss of intervocalic *-j- by phonetic rule, itself a back-formation based on the aorist *bhuH-t, Ved. a'-bhu:-t), the root form *kne:- (whence North/West-Gmc. *kna:-) 'know' formed cna:wan; and *se:- formed sa:wan 'to sow' etc. Therefore there ought to be no reservations against the right of an expected root aorist with 3sg *kreH1-t to turn up as cre:-v-i:. The form *kreH1-t itself is from *kreH1y-t which corresponds to a nasal present of the shape *kri-ne'-H1-ti/*kri-n-H1-e'nti by the rules I have been able to work out; therefore, cerno:, cre:vi: looks very good. The same goes for se:vi: 'sowed' and, with bigger or smaller footnotes, for the others as well. P: > I note that > elsewhere in your posting you claim that the Greek sigmatic aorists can be > counted as root forms. This means you count zero grade, full grade, Greek > sigmatic, and Latin -vi formations all as root aorists for the purposes of > your claim. J: That's right, I've got no inhibitions at all. A Gk. aorist like epe'ras(s)a from pe'rne:mi (Dor. -a:-) 'sell' cannot be an old s-aorist, for they have lengthened grade. Instead it must represent a reformation of *e-pera from *e-per at 2-t with commonplace addition of productive morphemes, this giving 3sg e-pe'ra-s(s)-e just as lu'o: forms e'-lu:-s-e. By the same token, a Vedic aor. like a-s'ami:t 'laboured, fatigued' cannot be an s-aor., but only a set.-root's root aorist from *e-k^em at 2-t, and this is not overthrown by the existence of a 1sg a'-s'ami-s.-am which is simply due to backformation from a wrong analysis of the for in -i:-t as being sigmatic. Thus, the old aor. to go with s'amna:ti was 1sg *as'amam, 2sg a's'ami:s, 3sg a's'ami:t, just as gr.bhna:'ti formed aor 1sg a'grabham (from *e-grebH2-m.), a'grabhi:s, -i:t. The true s-aorists from set.-root do have lengthened grade, cf. a'-ka:ri-s.-am. -ka:ri:-t 'commemorated'. This stratification has been worked out very clearly by Johanna Narten in a solid monograph of lasting value and seems now disputed by nobody informed. - Note that the Gk. prs. pe'rne:mi already reveals the paradigmatic companionship of the nasal present with something having non-lengthened full grade and so rather obviously points to an IE set of n-prs. and root-aor. P: > (a) The wider the definition of "root aorist" the less meaningful your > claim becomes. J: Not if the re-definitions apply to reformations that have kept their diagnostic value as these have. P: > (b) You would need to show that there is indeed a proper root aorist > underlying these forms. But (i) this cannot be done in Latin - the best we > can do is show a zero grade form (as in many Latin perfects); J: There is no way cre:vi: or se:vi: could be based on IE perfects. P: > (ii) how would > you distinguish a sigmatic aorist in Greek from a root aorist? J: If the forms has no /s/ (or its reflex), there is no problem. Thus e'kamon can only be a root aorist vis-a-vis the n-prs. ka'mno: 'fatigue, wear out' (the same paradigm as in Sanskrit). If there is -s-, significant (i.e. not Osthoff-triggered) short vocalism points to root aor. A well-establised s-aorists like *de:'ik^-s-m. (Lat. di:xi:, Avest. da:is^-) is thus opaque in Gk. e'-deik-s-a because of Osthoff's shortening. I know of only Barton's brilliant analysis of ege:'ra: 'I grew old' as a provable s-aor. in Gk.: Proto-Greek *e-ge:ra-h-a from IE *g^e:'r at 2-s-m. - an analysis I would have wished I had made myself. P: > For Sanskrit, I gave examples which contradicted the claim, and Jens gave > some which supported it. Neither of us had (or has ?) complete accurate > figures. In my sample I took random instances, so I restricted myself to > just one Skt class. Jens said: > [J:] >>why ignore those of class nine (too good?) - ? > [P:] > That was a petty jibe, Jens, and unworthy of you. In fact the figures for > class nine are not good. Of those Whitney lists as "older", 7 show no > aorist, 10 do not show a root aorist, and 13 do. You get 13 / 30, about > 43% - not bad, but not totally convincing, either. P: I looked through Macdonell's lists for class nine, finding: 11 work fine: as'na:'ti as'i:t gr.bhn.a:'ti a'grabhi:t ja:na:'ti jn~eya:'s pr.n.a:'ti a'pra:t vr.n.i:te' sbj. va'rat s'r.n.a:'t as'ari:t s'rathni:te' as'ranthi:t sina:'ti a'sa:t skabhna:'ti askambhi:t stabhna:mi a'stambhi:t str.n.a:'mi a'stari:s 3 have thematic prs. based on the sbj. of the root aor. thus recovered: jina:'ti ja'yate juna:ti ja'vate puna:ti pavate 2 have this in the other languages: badhna:ti Gmc. *binda- ubhna:ti Gmc. *weba- 2 won't behave: mina:ti forms mes.t.a, while hrun.a:ti has red. and s-aor. forms I have left nothing out on purpose, but I have not made _very_ thorough inquiries into the accuracy of Macdonell's data. This ought to mean tat corrections may be expected to go both ways and outweight each other. The picture this gives is not bad: Out of 18, 11 still behave as they should, 3 have clear traces of having done so earlier, 2 do so elsewhere, only 2 don't fit. Again, it looks like the opposite of random distribution. P: > So for PIE we need someone to crunch numbers and get a proper statistical > analysis, and for individual languages only Greek and Sanskrit have a hope > of showing a genuine correlation, but for both it is, if anything, nothing > more than a general tendency. It certainly can't support the original > claim that since Sanskrit shows the form tundate, it must once have had a > root aorist to go with it. J: But it does do that, for tund- recurs in Lat. tundo:, and in neither language is the infixing of nasals productive, ergo this stems from PIE, and in the very same root at that. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 10 18:37:52 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 20:37:52 +0200 Subject: nasal pres / root aor In-Reply-To: <003601beddcc$8660a4a0$7302063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: > On Strunk ... nasal presents & root aorists, > I have now read Strunk. [...] > We note that Rix (lexicon I-G Verbs) partially demurs, saying that the > distinction of full grades I and II in nasal presents is "not sufficiently > proved". > Either way, the basic tenet of Strunk's argument at this point is now > standard stuff. The point of our discussion arises in his next argument. > [..] He says (my > trans.) "There *must* be a strong affinity between nasal present and root > aorist." > This is where my problems begin. What does he mean by "affinity"? And > when you mention, Jens, a "paradigmatic companionship", what do you mean? > Naively, but understandably, I thought you and Strunk meant within a > language, but you say: >> It was never claimed for the individual languages, only for the common >> reconstructed protolanguage. > which is a good reflection of what Strunk says. > That means you are arguing only that if a PIE language has a nasal present, > there is likely to be a root aorist somewhere else in PIE. Strunk gives 8 > major examples in his book - and in two of them he has to find the root > aorist in a different language from the nasal present. (J aside: Delete the P in PIE, the attested languages are not _P_IE.) > Now my argument is that this is not really "paradigmatic companionship". > I do not believe it is anything more than a restatement of what a nasal > present is. It seems to me that you and Strunk are merely saying: > A PIE root can form: > (a) presents of varying kinds in various LL, incl. perhaps a nasal present > somewhere; > (b) aorists of various kinds in various LL, incl often a root aorist > somewhere. > So we are not surprised that a good number of roots which show a nasal > present somewhere also show a root aorist somewhere else. The > "paradigmatic companionship" is only a significant claim if it occurs within > the same language, which - at least here - you deny. > To be fair, we should look to see if there is a strong PIE correlation, and > if there is a correlation within individual languages. [Reference to next posting.] I hope I'm allowed such extensive a quote from Peter's posting, seeing that it makes the context very clear. I do indeed believe that the existence of a nasal present in the IE protolanguage _normally_ implied the existence of a root aorist in the same protolanguage. But that does not necessary repeat itself in the daughter languages because of the many changes that have occurred between PIE and any attested IE language. Still, the impression is so clear that one is justified to believe that, in PIE, it was clearer still. It may be like the strong verbs of Germanic: you don't find many well-structured strong verbs in present-day Gmc. lgg., but you do find enough to put you on the track of something that seems to have had more of a system to it once than it has now. I have made some checkings into the tenacity of this companionship, and it does actually look quite good. I think it is a fair statement that, wherever the nasal is present-forming, there is a non-present form differing only by lack of the nasal. Now, that is a root aorist (where it is not the perfect). There are at least three cases of strong support what were not used by Strunk: 1. Tocharian: "Zu Ps. VI geho"ren (...) Ko. V und Pt. I", "Neben Ps. B VII steht regelma"ssig Ko. V und Pt. I." (Krause & Thomas, Tocharisches Elementarbuch I, 204 and 205). By P(r)s. VI is meant the formation with -na:- (from -n at -, the weak form of the Indic class IX), while Prs. VII of the B dialect refers to the nasal-infix structure matching Lat. vinco:, Ved. yunakti etc. These both regularly take "Preterite I" which is the IE root aorist. Here we have a language that synchronically presents the paradigmatic companionship assumed by Strunk for PIE. Note that this is not the IE perfect which is continued in two other Toch. categories, viz. (i) in the subjunctive (!), (ii) in the Preterite III which also reflects the s-aorist (due to the special Tocharian merger of the vowels *-o- of the perfect and *-e:- of the s-aorist. 2. Baltic: Lithuanian (3rd person) prs. bunda, prt. budo (busti 'wake up'), rinka riko (rikti 'make a mistake'), minga migo (migti 'fall asleep'), tinka tiko (tikti 'touch, fit') and many others have an -n- inserted in the present, while the prt. lacks it. The meaning is practically always situation-changing, i.e. the natural domain of an aorist, so we expect a root aorist to be formed without further ado. And what could the preterite stems bud-, rik-, mig-, tik- etc. be if not the weak form of root aorists? The meaning is mostly intransitive-reflexive which makes it even better, for the added preterite morpheme *-a:- (whence Lith. -o-) is opposed to a different preterite morpheme *-e:- (Lith. -e:-, spelled with the dotted e) which is typically active and transitive. Now, it is a widespread doctrine that thematic verbs had *-e-/-o- in the active, but constant *-o- in the middle voice. Therefore, if the basis is the 3sg in act. *-e-t, mid. *-o (or *-o-t), these would come out as Balt. *-e and *-a resp.; and when _they_ go inflected by the addition of thematic endings, the result would be act. *-e-e and mid. *-a-a which would yield exactly Lith. -e: and -o as we find them to be. For the addition of thematic "endings" cf. the fate of the root aorist in Slavic 3sg nes-e (Ved. a:nat. /-:nas'/ from *Hnek^-t 'reached'). This means that the constant weak-grade form of the Baltic nasal infix presents simply reflects the IE middle-voice stem which of course had weak form all through. This is decisively supported by the semantics of nasal verbs derived from adjectives which are, not factitive as in Hittite, but ingressive: bukas 'blunt' forms bunka buko (bukti 'become blunt'), dubus 'deep' forms dumba dubo (dubti 'become hollow, concave'), pigus/-as 'cheap' forms pinga pigo (pigti 'get cheaper'). This can only be the middle voice of a factitive: "be made cheaper" = "become cheaper". 3. Hittite. Though Anatolian does not distinguish different stems within a given verbal lexeme, the nasal-infix stems are opposed to structures without the nasal. And in Hittite there is a clearcut opposition of function, the nasal structure being causative: hark-zi 'vanishes' : hanik-zi 'destroys'. This is of course not the function of the Lith. intransitives like minga 'falls asleep', but if we remember and respect the probable origin of the Lith. structure in the middle voice, it's okay again: then the middle voice of a causative "makes oneself fall asleep" or "is being caused to fall asleep" will come full circle and end up meaning 'fall asleep' just as the base verb did in the first place. And, with an adjectival basis, Hitt. tepu-s 'small, inferior' forms tep-n-u-zzi 'makes inferior, humiliates' (which was a PIE lexeme, cf. Ved. dabhno'ti 'damages'). A corresponding Baltic verb would have been based on the midle voice and have meant 'become inferior', as the midle voice presumably meant already in PIE (or even earlier). The productive derivative status of the nasal structure in Hittite is not the whole story, however: There are also remains of lexemes that had passed through the whole history reflected by th other languages, thus notably tamekzi, tamenkanzi 'adhere, stick (vel.sim.)' from *tm.-ne-k-ti = Skt. tana'kti 'run thick, coagulate' (root *temk- of Eng. tight) and hamekzi, hamenkanzi/hamankanzi 'bind' from *H2m.-ne-g^h-ti (root of Lat. ango:, Gk. a'nkho: 'tighten, narrow'). The full story of the nasal present must be something like this: The formation was in origin _factitive_ "make (into) -", "cause to be -". But since the verbal root was also an agent noun (vr.tra-ha'n- is a 'killer of Vr.tra-', Lat. re:g- is a 'ruler'), the nasal structure made from root nouns of agent-noun semantic created simple causatives: 'make a binder' = 'make bind'. Then, the middle voice of that 'be made a binder, be made bind, be caused to bind' was simply an elaborate way of saying 'bind'. Thereby the structure widely lost its specifically middle-voice semantics, and so it is no great wonder if it turns up with active endings. The whole scenario must - at least in large part - have been completed before the working of the ablaut, for the new active forms have escaped the accent shifts seen in the middle voice: *(H)yew-ne'-g-e 'is made join' replaced the middle endings by active ones, 3sg inj. *(H)yew-ne'-g-t, while the middle was restructured to *(H)yew-ne-g-to' with accent shift onto the syllabic ending, and only then did the ablaut reductions make act. *(H)yune'g-t, mid. *(H)yung-to' out of these forms. - Note that the presumed earlier middle-voice preform of a nasal prs. like Vedic s'r.n.o'ti 'hears' is indeed found in Old Irish ro-cluinethar 'hears' which is a deponent verb. Despite the retention of productivity in Hittite, the nasal present type has plainly become grammaticalized as "just a present" with individual verbs in PIE, and it is hard to escape the impression that the corresponding aorist (when there was one) was the root-aorist type. Jens From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Aug 9 18:42:24 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 19:42:24 +0100 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? Message-ID: >From Rick: > What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, > Macedonian, Albanian and Greek? > Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with > Indo-Iranian? For the well attested languages we can say that there are too many differences, not least the centum/satem, and the RUKI palatalisation, both of which Albanian & Armenian show, but Greek does not. There are close connections between Greek and Indo-Iranian, and many points of contact with Armenian, but they must be kept in perspective. There are many differences as well. To talk of a sub-family is a bit too extreme. As for the less well attested languages, I think the evidence is so slim that opinions differ! Peter From jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 10 19:19:13 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 21:19:13 +0200 Subject: S-aorist meaning In-Reply-To: <009f01bedf85$036a5fe0$40038cd4@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: > [...] > The evidence from Vedic root presents and -s- aorists > is especially helpful. Incidentally, how does this fit with your > suggestion that -s- aorists and -sk presents go together? Well, the language could have been nicer: The productivity of the s-aorist of course bleeds the old pattern with some of its persuasive power. Still, the link between -s- and -sk^e/o- seems inescapable in the derivative verbs: If Hittite forms ingressive de-adjectival verbs in -es- meaning 'become' (idalaw-es- 'become evil'), and Lat. sene:sco: 'is growing old' has the same semantic shade, the connection is established. And, since the stative ("be") is expressed by the *-eH1- (of "e:-verbs"), while -s- is a known aorist marker, and *-sk^e/o- is a known present-stem morpheme, the mathematical result is that *-s- and *-sk^e/o- are both inchoative morphemes. The longer, present, form is of course durative, situation-elaborating, which, with an inchoative, would mean something like an uncompleted change of situation: "be in the process of beginning to be -", i.e. "be developing into -, become more and more -". And on that background it is nice to find that a handful or more sk-presents do have s-aorists beside them (as Ved. pr.ccha'ti : aor. a'pra:ks.am, a'pra:t.). Need I mention that Tocharian examples (B -sk-, A -s- by phonetic development) has a strong predilection for the s-preterite (pre. III), in Toch. A without exceptions? Jens From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Aug 10 19:52:07 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 14:52:07 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear IE Gentlefolk: In arguing with Larry, Pat wrote: >> Second, the point that Leo is making about distinguishing syntactic >> from morphological subjects needs to be addressed by you in terms of >> "subject" properties. Larry replied: >I have already discussed this at length. In a Basque transitive >sentence, it is the ergative NP, and not the absolutive NP, which shares >the subject properties of the absolutive NP in an intransitive sentence. >As far as I am concerned, that is the end of the matter. If Basque and Dyirbal were the whole story, that might be the case; my question as to whether these syntactic properties are actually *subject* properties would then be merely a matter of nomenclature. But the reality is more complicated, since in many languages, some of these properties belong to the morphological subject, others to what I have called (in my Case Grammar framework) the Highest Ranking NP (HRNP). Consider German for a moment. Reflexivization and many other syntactic properties are controlled by the morphological subject, regardless of its "rank" in the Case Hierarchy. But word order in the "Mittelfeld" is, to a considerable extent, hierarchical, with the HRNP leftmost. Since German seems also to have a rule permitting the morphological subject to be relocated to the start of the Mittelfeld, the differences are not always apparent; but the following contrast may be instructive: 1. Hat ein Professor dem Studenten geholfen? 'Did a professor help the student?' 2. ??Hat dem Studenten ein Professor geholfen? 3. ?*Hat ein Professor dem Studenten gefehlt? 'Was a Professor lacking for the student?' 4. Hat dem Studenten ein Professor gefehlt? _Helfen_ in (1) and (2) is agentive; the object is Beneficiary rather than patient (hence the dative casemarking). The higher ranking Agent is naturally placed before the Beneficiary, even though it is indefinite. _Fehlen_ 'to be lacking' has a Patient as subject; I analyze the surface dative as Beneficiary (Experiencer in sentences where _fehlen_ means rather 'feel the absence of; miss'). Both Beneficiary and Experiencer rank higher than Patient; I believe this is why (4) is acceptable (surface order follows ranking), while (3) is very poor (indefinite morphological subjects should not be so relocated; (5), with a definite morphological subject, is, however, acceptable). 5. Hat der Professor dem Studenten gefehlt? It is very interesting to examine "subject" properties in languages of the Philippines. I'm working from memory, but if I remember correctly, about half of the "subject" properties belong to the noun marked with _ang_ (a morphological subject, though often called "topic"), and half belong to the HRNP. Since the two tend not to coincide, Tagalog syntax is interesting... If I haven't fouled up the facts here, one must conclude that while one might speak of a "syntactic subject" in German (even though some word order matters work differently), there would be no point whatsoever in searching for a syntactic subject in Tagalog, since the properties are evenly split. If so, then the term "syntactic subject" might best be abandoned for *all* languages, since the terms "morphological subject" and "HRNP" appear to cover all cases in all language types. None of above is meant in any way to endorse Pat's view of ergativity, which is indeed indefensible. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 11 06:09:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 02:09:27 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) (fwd) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/10/99 11:35:34 PM, Rob McMahon (PhD) wrote: <> Dr. McMahon is expressing the "Out of Africa" hypothesis of modern human origins here. The main opposing theory is commonly called "Multiregionalism" which dates modern humanity significantly earlier (as far back as 2 million years) and offers a much more complex picture of interaction among human groups. For the sake of balance, list members should be aware that the matter is not settled and a summary of the issues (once again) can be found in the most recent Scientific American (Aug 1999 p.13), 'IN FOCUS: IS OUT OF AFRICA GOING OUT THE DOOR? - New doubts on a popular theory of human origins" Aside from question regarding calibration and mutation rates, fossil evidence may be seen as conflicting with the "Out of Africa" theory. In any case, under the category "Back Down to Earth", it is worthwhile considering what is involved in correlating any language - documented or reconstructed - with events occurring 100-50 thousands years ago. A simple reality check reminds us that we have just previously been arguing whether it is even justified to date the origin of the entire IE family of languages before 5500BC. There is nothing wrong with speculation, but there is a credibilty issue for serious scholarship in holding out that such speculation can be in some way be confirmed by unsettled findings in other fields, whose subject matter is not connected with language except in a very loose sense. Regards, Steve Long cc: rmcmahon at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 11 08:47:11 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 09:47:11 +0100 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? In-Reply-To: <448104ea.24de47b0@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I respectfully disagree with the person who > recently argued between the following two > alternatives that either could be an appropriate "null hypothesis" > (though I am greatly appreciative of that same person's > many other contributions!) It was me. >> No languages are related. >> >> All languages are related. > Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like > "We do not know whether all languages are related > (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) No, I'm afraid not. This last statement is not a hypothesis, but merely an observation of the present state of our knowledge. As such, it is not subject to test. A null hypothesis must be something we can test. A null hypothesis is not a statement of anyone's belief. It is an analytical tool set up to permit investigation. Having set it up, we then attempt to find sufficient evidence to disconfirm it. If we can do that, we have made progress: we know that the null hypothesis is false, at least in certain cases, and that its contradictory is therefore true in those cases. Here's an example from a book I've been reading. The author, a statistician and a baseball fan, is interested in finding out whether the performance of baseball players is affected by the nature of the ballparks in which they play -- that is, he's interested in what baseball historians call the `park effect'. Accordingly, he sets up his null hypothesis as follows: A baseball player's performance is unaffected by the parks he plays in. Now, this is *not* the author's belief. Quite the contrary: he makes it clear that he personally believes this hypothesis to be false. But he can't achieve anything merely by declaring it to be false. So, naturally, what he does is to state it, and then to go on to assemble evidence against it. As it happens, he is able to assemble so much evidence against it that he feels safe in concluding that it is false, and that its contradictory must be true. That's how things work. Same in comparative linguistics. If we want or hope to establish that certain languages are related, we must take as our null hypothesis the statement I set out earlier: No languages are related. By assembling persuasive evidence against this hypothesis in particular cases, we succeed in disconfirming it for those cases, and therefore in establishing that certain languages *are* related. For example, in the case of the languages we call the Germanic languages, so much evidence can be adduced against the null hypothesis that it becomes untenable for those languages, and its contradictory must be accepted: the Germanic languages really are related. In general, the appropriate null hypothesis is the hypothesis you hope to disconfirm, not the one you hope to confirm. Suppose we adopted instead the opposite null hypothesis: All languages are related. To investigate this, we would have to seek to disconfirm it by assembling persuasive evidence against it, at least in some cases. And that, as I pointed out earlier, is an impossibility: we cannot prove that *any* languages are absolutely unrelated. Hence no progress is possible. To reiterate: a null hypothesis is not a statement of belief. In fact, the null hypothesis is usually the very opposite of what we hope or suspect is the truth, the conclusion we would like to establish. As both my baseball example and my linguistic example suggest, a suitable null hypothesis is normally stated in the negative: it declares that there is *no* relation between the objects of inquiry. This is so because we are normally interested in showing that these things *are* related. Even when we really do want to show that things are unrelated, the null hypothesis is still stated in the negative. Suppose I want to show that there is no correlation between star-signs and personality. The appropriate null hypothesis is the negative: Star-signs are unrelated to personality. I will then go on to show -- I hope -- that no evidence can be assembled that disconfirms the null hypothesis, and hence that there is no reason to reject the null hypothesis this time. > Any attempt to force anyone else to accept something > that embodies a CLAIM (as both of the first two alternatives > above do), is MANIPULATING the discourse, > instead of dealing with facts. No, not at all. Stating a null hypothesis is *not* an attempt to force anyone to believe it. > If we don't know, then we don't know, it's as simple as that. Well, yes, but, if we want to escape from our ignorance, we must go about our investigations in an orderly way. > I personally don't give a hoot what anyone wants > to "assume", or tell me to assume, in the absence of > data justifying such an assumption. Again: a null hypothesis is neither a statement of belief nor an attempt at intellectual intimidation. It is merely an analytical tool. > Using a "burden of proof" argument is merely > a way of trying to get someone to accept a conclusion > in the absence of evidence. Hardly. The burden of proof is always on the person who wants to defend the contradictory of the appropriate null hypothesis. If I hope to persuade my colleagues that Basque and Burushaski are related, then the null hypothesis is that they are *not* related, and it is up to me to assemble enough evidence to disconfirm the null hypothesis in the eyes of my colleagues. That's how comparative linguistics works. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 11 13:47:41 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 08:47:41 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Sent: Sunday, August 08, 1999 9:10 PM > [Ed] > I am still in my vacation home in Spain, so I don't have my references here. > Maybe I should have said 'ending'. I have seen '-age' mentioned as a > variant of '-ak'. I'll have to look it up after Aug. 20. May be I was > confused. Can you clarify for the time being? Pat responds: To the best of my knowledge, there is, per se, no ending or suffix -age. There is a suffix -ak which indicates the genitive (derived, IMHO, from ak(a), 'make, do', which I believe is better translated as '*have, *possess'[related to IE *e:ik-]). According to current Sumerological opinion, -ak appears simply as -a when it is *not* followed by a vocalic suffix. But, for example, if a genitive phrase is in a syntactic position which requires a vocalic suffix, such as lug~al kalam-a (king of the land) + -e (ergative), the final consonant reappears: lug~al kalam(m)ak-e. The final syllable is frequently written -ke{4}, a sign for which another reading is ge{2}. There is no serious suggestion of which I am aware that -k- is voiced (or de-aspirated) to -g- intervocalically so that the likeliest reading of the compound suffix is -ak-e (though usually written Ca-ke{4}. 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 jrader at m-w.com Wed Aug 11 10:04:32 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 10:04:32 +0000 Subject: Passivity as a transition (raising dust) Message-ID: Well, my "any other Greek etymological dictionary" may have been unwarranted sarcasm, but my point is that guessing about derivational and etymological relationships without acknowledging the literature is going to be a waste of your own time in a field like Greek, where a long tradition of scholarship exists. I'm sorry if you don't have access to a library, but I'm afraid there's not much I can do about that. At any rate, I've looked at Boisacq, Hoffman, Frisk, and Chantraine, as well as Pokorny, and the thinking is uniform. Greek is compared with Latin , from both of which a base <*kenis-> on an Indo-European level may be reconstructable. Pokorny glosses <*ken-> with "sich muehen, eifrig streben, sich sputen," and Latin is compared. Jim Rader > In a message dated 8/8/99 1:22:04 AM, jrader at m-w.com wrote: > < articles on , , and in Chantraine, > _Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque_ (or any other Greek > etymological dictionary, for that matter).>> > I don't have Chantraine, but I see in my notes: [ moderator snip ] > But since you seem to have access to ALL the other Greek etymological > dictionaries, perhaps you can give us a survey? > Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 11 14:35:37 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:35:37 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Aug 1999 Jon Patrick wrote: [LT] >> One day I hope to compile a list of the >> Basque words that can reasonably be regarded as monomorphemic, as native >> and as having been in the language for at least 2000 years. I don't >> expect that list to contain more than several hundred words. > We are working on this problem here at the moment. Myself and two > Doctoral Philology students from the Basque Country. We are working > on monosyllables first and think that in total it is likely to be a > few thousand. Well, this sounds optimistically high to me, I confess. My admittedly unsystematic experiments lead me to believe that the number of monomorphemic items which are good candidates for native and ancient status is unlikely to be more than a few hundred. Of course, I exclude verbs, since native verbal roots are never free forms. If we agree to include verbal roots, that will add several hundred more. I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even 1500 strong candidates. But I'll wait and see. [on Azkue's preface] > So you would seem to agree then that the Azkue list contains all the > words Azkue thought were native euskara ( as well as others of > course). Yes, though that is not the point we were discussing earlier. > I assume we are using the term "native" to mean words not > derived from any other language at least in the last 2000 years. More or less. [LT] >> Sorry; this does not follow. The mere existence of a word in modern >> Basque is no guarantee that it is either native or ancient. > I'm quite confused by this response. If they can't be identified as > loans (my comment) you say there is no guarantee they are native or > ancient. I guess I have to say, true. OK; we agree. > But surely your statement kills all work dead in the water. No; not at all. There's a lot of room between `certainly borrowed' and `certainly native', and nothing is guaranteed in advance to be native and ancient. > It seems you are saying we need "guarantees" that words are of some > class/type/characterisitic to persue any analysis. Note my statement > doesn't assert such words are "guaranteed" to be native or ancient, > but that they do represent evidence worthy of pursuing. No, I don't require advance guarantees: none are available in any case. I propose the following. Let's compile a list of the Basque words each of which meets the following minimal requirements. (1) There is no reason to suppose it is polymorphemic. [The great bulk of the words in any Basque dictionary are *transparently* polymorphemic, and can be excluded at once.] (2) It is found throughout the language, or nearly so. [Since the better dictionaries assign words to the conventional dialects, it is easy to formalize this requirement as we see fit.] (3) It is attested early. [Let's say before 1600, which is `early' for Basque.] (4) There is no reason to believe that it is shared with languages known to have been in contact with Basque. [Subjective, and hard to formalize, but I believe that doubtful cases are few enough to constitute only a minor problem.] To these I would like to add two more, though these are not essential: (5) It does not appear to be a nursery word. (6) It does not appear to be of imitative origin. Now, (5) would exclude only a very few words not excluded by the other criteria, notably `mother' and `father', while (6) would exclude a much larger number of items which would be automatically excluded in any serious comparative work, like `meow', `moo', `baa', `ding-dong', `spit', and probably also `sneeze'. This last sounds roughly like oo-SHEEN, and, in my view, is too likely to be imitative to be included in any list. Having compiled the list, let us then examine it and determine the phonological characteristics of the words on the list. I am fairly confident that I can guess what the results will be, at least in their main lines, though there will doubtless be a few surprises in the details. [on my English examples] > I wonder if we are talking at crossed purposes here. I'm not saying > the known history of a word should be ignored. If we have such > information then it should be used. Agreed. > But I am saying that words we have today that are not identified as > having any alternative history could be fairly considered for > informing about early euskara. Here I can't agree. I have the gravest reservations about including words not recorded before 1871, or before 1935; about including words found nowhere but in Larramendi's dictionary or in Hiribarren's dictionary; about including words recorded only in one small area; about including words reported only by the Dutch linguist van Eys or only by the Spanish polymath Hervas y Panduro; about including all sorts of things which, in my view, are deeply suspect for one reason or another. I believe it is not enough merely to exclude obvious loan words: we must be *far* more discriminating, or we are going to wind up with a list containing more junk than genuine native and ancient words. *Once* we have a list of the most plausible candidates for native and ancient status, *then* we can consider judiciously whether further words might plausibly be added to it. But we have to start by being as rigorous as possible, not by tossing in everything that isn't obviously borrowed. > Let's take the opposite scenario. In the Azkue list there are 9854 > words of which 1436 have modern orthography that can't be mapped > into the orthogrpahy you use for describing early euskara. Not sure I understand this. > Of the 8318 words that do fit your orthography, 5022 can be found in > one of the modern lexicons/dictionaries of Aulestia, Kintana, Morris > or XUXEN. if we analyse these words and show that they strongly > conform to the Michelena description of early euskara and/or your > restating of it, will you consider that result irrelevant to > determining the merit of that description, especially given the > phonological conservatism of euskara? Yes, I would. Let me cite just a few Basque words from Aulestia's dictionary: `greyhound' `if' `word' `turnip' `toad' `courage' `skirt' `plaster' `strong' `write' `ax' `field' `honor' `hen' `sky' And so on, and so on, for god knows how many more. Now, every single one of these words conforms *perfectly* to our ideas of what native and ancient Basque words can look like, without the slightest complication. And yet, in every case, I can adduce overwhelming evidence that the word is not native, or is not ancient, or is not monomorphemic. Conformity to pre-existing ideas about possible phonological forms is not nearly good enough: such an approach must inevitably sweep up huge numbers of words which demonstrably should not be there, and, by implication, very many more which really (if not demonstrably) should not be there. > I would also like to point out there could be a further difference > in our perspectives due to different but unspoken methodologies and > goals. I am interested in describing the stochastic or probabilistic > characteristics of word formation in euskara. By `word formation', I suppose you mean what I would call `morpheme-structure constraints'? Well, fine if you're only interested in modern Basque, but I myself am interested in the morpheme-structure constraints of Pre-Basque, and therefore I don't want to count as evidence anything that doesn't appear to be a strong candidate for a Pre-Basque word, in its earliest reconstructible form. > Whilst getting a legitimate set of words to anlayse is important the > presence of a few doubtful words does not necessarily destroy such a > description as a legitimate probabilistic statement. Agreed, but I worry about that phrasing `a few words'. If we are not maximally rigorous, I fear that what we'll get is a whole mountain of words that shouldn't be there -- more improper words, in fact, than proper ones, which will surely ruin any stochastic approach. > I do not wish to deny the importance of systematic study of each > word but noisy data doesn't invalidate a probabilisitic study nor > necessarily pre-determine it to being unable to say something useful > about the structure of the data. Production of a putative core word > list of early euskara will be a spin-off of this work. Excellent, but I'd be very cautious about including modern words. [LT] >> I don't see why. A dictionary of modern English is of no direct >> relevance to ascertaining the nature of Old English, and a dictionary of >> modern Basque is of no direct relevance to ascertaining the nature of >> Pre-Basque. You might as well try to find out what Latin was like by >> reading a dictionary of modern French. > This of course assumes there is little relatedness between the two > and there is not a systematic development from one to the other. The > already phonological conservatism of euskara suggests that the words > in Azkue have greater validity for studying early euskara than > modern english for studying middle english. Not necessarily. Phonological conservatism is only one factor among several. It matters little that Basque phonology has been conservative if not much of the Pre-Basque lexicon still survives. > and Michelena's work as meritorious as it is, is not the last of the > story and the Azkue list can help us add to that, I'm sure. Well, I'll look forward to seeing what you come up with. [on my distinction between `native' and `ancient'] > I'm a little mystified with this in the context of euskara. As far > as I have heard the dominant ancient external influence has come > from Latin with suggestions of a small number of items from Celtic > and a few others. Once these are identified then is not everything > ancient also native because there is nothing else left but ancient > native words, or am I missing something? Once ancient loans are identified -- if they can be -- then everything ancient remaining is also native, in some sense. But there remains the *big* problem of determining what is ancient to begin with. The great bulk of the Basque vocabulary is not ancient, just as the great bulk of the modern English vocabulary is not ancient. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 11 15:06:21 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 11:06:21 EDT Subject: Unwarranted certainty Message-ID: In a message dated 8/11/99 3:17:42 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes: >I guess it depends on what you mean by 'know'. Conclusions drawn from the >mechanical application of an investigative method are one thing; educated >speculation is another. When we reconstruct PIE laryngeals, we do so on >the basis of a strict application of the Comparative Method; when we >speculate about the phonetic values of those categories, we're doing just >that: speculating. There is another distinction being made here which I wish to challenge. Even when there is no hypothesis included about the phonetic nature of the recontructed phoneme based on sound correspondences, IT IS SIMPLY NOT THE CASE that use the narrow-sense comparative method yields conclusions which are certain beyond reasonable doubt, while use of what I have called reconstructive method is educated speculation. The plausibility of the hypothesized original sound values and of the changes necessary under hypothesis to get from them to attested presumed descendants can actually have a bearing on whether we believe the reconstruction of the phonemic categories (without regard to their sound value) had been done correctly. The "comparative method" is a tool like other tools, applied blindly it can yield wrong results. There are known cases of this. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From stevegus at aye.net Wed Aug 11 14:41:35 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 10:41:35 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > I don't know about Gaulish having had a twenty-based number system (nothing > unusual in the world, cf. Mayas), but Basque (and presumably Aquitanian, > spoken in SW France 2000 years ago) certainly has one, and in a very > consistent way, up to eighty-nineteen. It is of course possible that > Gaulish inherited some of this when the Celts conquered most of present-day > France. It is my understanding that a 20-based number system was preserved in part in Irish, but that it has fallen by the wayside in the current standardized language. I will need to confirm this by checking Thurneysen next time I pass by there. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Ecce domina quae fidet omnia micantia aurea esse, et scalam in caelos emit. Adveniente novit ipsa, etiamsi clausae sint portae cauponum, propositum assequitur verbo. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Wed Aug 11 15:30:13 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 11:30:13 -0400 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? In-Reply-To: <448104ea.24de47b0@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I respectfully disagree with the person who > recently argued between the following two > alternatives that either could be an appropriate "null hypothesis" > (though I am greatly appreciative of that same person's > many other contributions!) >> No languages are related. >> >> All languages are related. > Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like > "We do not know whether all languages are related > (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) "We don't know" isn't a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a proposition about how things are. Science proceeds by rejecting hypotheses. To start the process, you have to have some initial hypothesis. The null hypothesis is some statement of the form "There is no connection between A and B". If you find evidence that the null hypothesis is wrong, then you reject the null hypothesis. As Larry Trask has already pointed out, there are good epistemological reasons for taking "there is no connection" as our initial hypothesis, rather than "there is a connection"; and I won't belabor that point. What's important is that you start with some hypothesis or other and work on finding grounds to reject it. "We don't know" won't suit for those purposes, because it is not a hypothesis. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Wed Aug 11 16:37:34 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 18:37:34 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote >An instance of this is Sumerian tapiru (metal-worker), >probably borrowed to an otherwise unknown IE-like tongue. >Could you expand? Tapiru is a Sumerian word whose precise meaning is "craftman working copper by hammering it". It is very likely to be a loanword since Sumerian does not have pollysyllabic roots and tapiru can not be analyzed as a compound. It is very similar to an IE root with a very similar meaning *dhebhros (craftman) found in Latin faber and Armenian darbin (smith). As the Sumerian word does not fit into the general system of the language it is unlikely we have there a chance ressemblance. This could be a loanword from Guti, the language of a Zagros tribe some suspect to have been Indo-European, but as we know only their name, this cannot be proven. Another hypothesis was to suppose this word was borrowed along with the copper-working thechnics. This technic was brought in Mesopotamia by the Halaf culture, whose center was in Northern Iraq, but originated (the thechnic) in Eastern Anatolia, around Catal Hüyük and Arslantepe. Anatolia has been seriously proponed as the homeland of the Indo-European tongues (Renfrew, Gamkrelidze) or of their ancestors (Sheratt). It is possible that the first metal-workers of Anatolia were speaking something close to IE, hence the curious look of the Sumerian word for this kind of craftman. It could also have gone down from the Steppe through the Caucasus, but this is unlikely as copper metalurgy was rather late in the Pontic Region (around -3000 against -6000 in Anatolia). Of course, all this is highly hypothetical. Damien Erwan Perrotin [ Moderator re-transcription: Anatolia, around Catal H{\"u}y{\"u}k and Arslantepe. --rma ] From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Wed Aug 11 17:03:23 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 12:03:23 -0500 Subject: nasal pres / root aor Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I'm sorry to take this our of context, but point concerns Jens' Hittite data: Jens wrote: ... >3. Hittite. Though Anatolian does not distinguish different stems within a >given verbal lexeme, the nasal-infix stems are opposed to structures >without the nasal. And in Hittite there is a clearcut opposition of >function, the nasal structure being causative: hark-zi 'vanishes' : >hanik-zi 'destroys'. This is of course not the function of the Lith. >intransitives like minga 'falls asleep', but if we remember and respect >the probable origin of the Lith. structure in the middle voice, it's okay >again: then the middle voice of a causative "makes oneself fall asleep" or >"is being caused to fall asleep" will come full circle and end up meaning >'fall asleep' just as the base verb did in the first place. And, with an >adjectival basis, Hitt. tepu-s 'small, inferior' forms tep-n-u-zzi 'makes >inferior, humiliates' (which was a PIE lexeme, cf. Ved. dabhno'ti >'damages'). A corresponding Baltic verb would have been based on the >midle voice and have meant 'become inferior', as the midle voice >presumably meant already in PIE (or even earlier). >The productive derivative status of the nasal structure in Hittite is not >the whole story, however: There are also remains of lexemes that had >passed through the whole history reflected by th other languages, thus >notably tamekzi, tamenkanzi 'adhere, stick (vel.sim.)' from *tm.-ne-k-ti = >Skt. tana'kti 'run thick, coagulate' (root *temk- of Eng. tight) and >hamekzi, hamenkanzi/hamankanzi 'bind' from *H2m.-ne-g^h-ti (root of Lat. >ango:, Gk. a'nkho: 'tighten, narrow'). >The full story of the nasal present must be something like this: The >formation was in origin _factitive_ "make (into) -", "cause to be -". But >since the verbal root was also an agent noun (vr.tra-ha'n- is a 'killer of >Vr.tra-', Lat. re:g- is a 'ruler'), the nasal structure made from root >nouns of agent-noun semantic created simple causatives: 'make a binder' = >'make bind'. Then, the middle voice of that 'be made a binder, be made >bind, be caused to bind' was simply an elaborate way of saying 'bind'. >Thereby the structure widely lost its specifically middle-voice semantics, >and so it is no great wonder if it turns up with active endings. The whole >scenario must - at least in large part - have been completed before the >working of the ablaut, for the new active forms have escaped the accent >shifts seen in the middle voice: *(H)yew-ne'-g-e 'is made join' replaced >the middle endings by active ones, 3sg inj. *(H)yew-ne'-g-t, while the >middle was restructured to *(H)yew-ne-g-to' with accent shift onto the >syllabic ending, and only then did the ablaut reductions make act. >*(H)yune'g-t, mid. *(H)yung-to' out of these forms. - Note that the >presumed earlier middle-voice preform of a nasal prs. like Vedic >s'r.n.o'ti 'hears' is indeed found in Old Irish ro-cluinethar 'hears' >which is a deponent verb. >Despite the retention of productivity in Hittite, the nasal present type >has plainly become grammaticalized as "just a present" with individual >verbs in PIE, and it is hard to escape the impression that the >corresponding aorist (when there was one) was the root-aorist type. CFJ: The first Hittite forms have a bit of a typo. The alternation is between harak(z)i 'perish(es)' and har-nin-k- 'destroy' where the nasal is an infix. This differs from the tepu- 'small', tep-nu- 'make small, humiliate' where the more productive nasal is the suffix -nu- (cf. also ar-hi 'I reach, arrive', ar-nu-mi 'I bring'). The Greek present deik-nu-mi 'I show' versus -s- aorist edeik-sa 'I showed' has a formally comparable present, but the aorist still has the causative meaning without the causative suffix, while Latin nasal of present pa-n-go 'I fasten' beside perfect pe-pe:gi: 'I have fastened' also doesn't lose its transitive active character without the nasal. Kronasser's Etymologie der hethitischen Sprache (with Neu's later index) lists forms. In Hittite we have two nasal affixes, an infix and a suffix. The Hittite suffix is productive, the infix not. While there are cognate nasal affixes elsewhere in IE languages, the individual systems in which we catch them functioning would seem to have been sufficiently re-worked to call for explanations as to the nature of the language-specific innovations. The fact that Hittite -nu- is productive would seem to point to its being an innovation. Historically, many consider the Wilusa-Alaksandu-Ahhijawa evidence of the Hittite treaties to argue for a contact with Mycenaean Achaeans around (W?)Ilium in the early second half of the second millennium BC. If so, not only are Greek -nu- and Hittite -nu- distinct from the nasal infix, but also one of many innovations taking place dialectally in post-PIE times, in this instance probably the Greek form as a result of contact with Hittite, as the Hittite form is productive in its meaning, the Greek form less so. Since we have the data studies of Strunk and others, we would seem to be in a position now to go on to peal off the layers, distinguishing between older and more recent features, also features that may be shared between languages as a result of later contact. The Hittite infixed nasal and suffixed nasal would seem to be cases in point. These nasals would certainly not function like the Gothic Weak Class IV and I verbs such as full-na-n 'fill' (intrs.) and full-ja-n 'fill' (trs.) from fulls 'full', which show a new system of transitivity alternation. Even if someone wants to identify Gothic -ja- with an old IE causative form, the Gothic nasal does not function like an old IE causative, nor is the paradigmatic alternation inherited. Carol From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 11 17:16:46 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 12:16:46 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: <000201bee295$256a98e0$7418063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: Pete: You misunderstood. "Non-African [modern human]" means as opposed to non-African pre-modern Neandertal, etc. The "not limited to Africa" mitochondrial gene pool obviously arose in Africa along with other modern humans. [snip] >[ Moderator's comment: > I think what was meant is that the language families found outside > Africa may > relate to those within Africa in several ways: > 1. All the language families may be grouped into a single super-family. > 2. All the language families outside of Africa may be grouped with one or > more, but *not* all, those within Africa. > 3. Some language families found outside Africa may be grouped with one or > more of those within Africa, and others with others. > --rma ] That's pretty much it. I'd modify statement 2 to "All the language families outside of Africa may be grouped with one or more, but *not necessarily* all, those within Africa." As in the following diagram: Modern Humans: arose c. 250-150KBP I. Mitochondrial pools limited to Africa II. Mitochondrial pool not limited to Africa: arose after 100KBP Again, my point is that non-African languages probably arose from the language used by the first speakers of this group. Some African languages [in the geographical sense] may or may not have originated from that language: e.g. Afro-Asiatic is postulated to have originated somewhere between Ethipia and Palestine, which is within the area populated by this mitochondrial group. Cavalli-Sforza claims it arose from that group. Niger-Kordofanian, IF it arose in the Sudan MAY have been originally spoken by members of this mitochondrial pool. The may be said of Nilo-Saharan. Cavalli-Sforza syggests that the Khoisan [as opposed to all the speakers of those languages] may have arisen in Ethiopia and may be more closely related to the "not limited to Africa mitochondrial pool." In any case, because IE and AA seem to have wiped out almost all possible candidates for languages outside of Africa that possibly may have had a different origin, my argument for mono-genesis of "non-African" languages [with the possible exception of AA] is based currently existing languages. Although it's possible, I doubt that any languages from the "not-limited-to-Africa" pool leap-frogged IE and AA. If you factor in [the possibility of] Nostratic, the odds are even slimmer. I'm not saying that there wasn't any population movement between Africa and the rest of the world afterwards. Just that it probably didn't result in introducing new language families that survived to the present. Except for linguistic pioneers moving into areas unhabited by modern humans, the opportunities for linguistic expansion would have been extremely limited until the rise of agriculture and sedentary life. The great linguistic expansions in Africa occured in recent history due to agriculture and metallurgy and did not affect areas outside of Africa. I want to stress that this opinion is based on what I've read regarding the current state of analysis published in widely read magazines. Mitochondrial and other studies obviously need to be refined and carried out with larger samples. Because of worldwide travel over the last few centuries, I'm sure it's very possible to come up with misleading results. Given that my own maternal grandmother was Melungeon [a local Appalachian name for people descended from American Indians, runaway African slaves and European indentured servants], my own mitochondria may well be from any of the 7 or 8 pools. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Wed Aug 11 17:16:52 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 19:16:52 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: >Eduard Selleslagh wrote >Thank you for the interesting and informative contribution. Here are a few >side remarks. >1. I got confused by Breton 'afan': I had interpreted the f as /v/, like in >Welsh. Yes, I should hace precised this. Breton spelling is derivated from French >2. It seems that your reasoning brings Catalan 'amb' ('with', from Latin >'apud') and Latin 'apud' back into the picture. that is possible, but we must remain prudent, as there is no ettested equivalent in Etruscan. >3. Not only the Sanskrit dative plura in -bh-, but also the Latin one -ibus. Yes, and probably the -m ending of the slavic and germanic tongues (from *mbh). I was giving Sanskrit as an exemple (Irish -aibh should work too). >4. Note that Breton/Welsh 'aber' corresponds to the Dutch/Flemish (Belgae!) >river names 'Amel' and 'Amer' (the latter is also used to refer to the >neighboring flood plain or 'polder' ('vega' in Spanish). So the sound >change m/b works both ways exchanges among the languages we were discussing. We know almost nothing about the Belgian tongue, not even if it was celtic, or member of some "north-western block", so that a relationship is possible. The standart etymology for aber (old Welsh aper, Pictish place-manes abar) is ad-bero "to out flow", where the second member is the IE verb *bher (probably not *mbher as the possible Etruscan counterpart would be farth- (to bring, to offer), not *mart or *amart) this etymology is co,firmed by Breton Kemper (the confluence) which can be analyzed as ken-bero (the place wher it flows together). Still it is possible that Belgian, or the peri-indo-european neolithic tongue which could have preceded it changed its bh to m or that the first member of the name of these river was *H2embh (around), yielding something as *H2embh-bher (the one which is flowing around) later simplified in Amer. But this is hypothetical. >5. Maybe the (Etruscan, Lydian,.. later Latin) am- and the IE-Latin amb- >roots just share a common ancestry like the languages themselves (one or >two steps before PIE) , then developed more or less separately but got >exchanged among parallel branches of the Stammbaum at several moments and >in several places (Anatolia, Italy,...). Possible but the phonetics seems to me rather uncertain. Another gypothesis is that Etruscan Am was not Etruscan in the first place but was borrowed from the (Anatolian ?) tongue of the Teresh, a sea people which is said to have landed there after having been housted fro Egypt. The change would have been done in the Egean region and would have been specific to the Anatolian tongues of the place (hence the Lydian). Still remains the Breton form (a borrowing to Rhaetic in the Alpine region, or brought in by Etruscan traders ??? Highly hypothetical anyway). I would not bet my wages on this however. >Ed. >P.S. >1. Are you Breton? Yes, but from the French speaking eastern part of the country. I learned the language during my teens. Damien Erwan Perrotin From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 11 17:52:58 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 12:52:58 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990808204318.0a6fe1fa@online.be> Message-ID: When I was in Montreal I heard /kaetr at -vae~-dzIs/ on the radio and something like /kaet-vay~dzIs/ in the stores [ae = sound similar to vowel of American English at] [snip] What about the Quebecois? They >usually speak rather old-fashioned French (to European ears) (I've been >there twice, but didn't pay attention, probably because I already had >enough trouble with 'cent' and 'sans', which sound the same to all but to >the Quebecois). [snip] What's the scoop on 'cent' and 'sans'. I thought both were /sa~/ Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 11 18:02:25 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 13:02:25 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <37afbde7.2736619@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: I seem to remember that the Vikings used a term translated as "Bluemen" to refer to Moors. I think it was something like blaamen, blagmen, blahmen. The term was supposedly calqued in Gaelic and later in English, hence the use of "Blue men, Blue People" in referring to the Melungeons of Appalachia. Dennis King might know a bit more about this. [snip] >I don't think so. As far as I know, there was no *blak(u)- in >the sense of "black" in early Scandinavian. It's only in English >and OHG (blah). [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 11 18:06:43 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 13:06:43 -0500 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Vidhyanath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 1:51 PM I hope you and Jens will not mind a statement or two from an interested reader of your exchange. > For example, progressive is a special case of imperfective. But we > do not confuse the two, nor see progressive as a natural outgrowth of > imperfective. We need to be just as careful with less familiar categories > such as completives. Keeping aspects and tenses clearly separated is a very tricky mental exercise even when the language under discussion is fairly consistent in matching form to actual usage but I believe you may be mixing apples and oranges to call the "progressive a special case of the imperfective" (aspect). If one says in English: "He is eating up the food," we have a present progressive perfective. "He was eating up the food, " past progressive perfective; "He is eating the food, " present progressive imperfective; "He was eating the food, " past progressive imperfective. In fact, IMHO, the major original employment of IE -*i, which, added to "secondary" personal endings yields the "primary" set, was to create a "progressive" form, with "progressive" understood as designating a verbal action regarded as a period of time during which something else happened or was happening. Thus, I believe its original employment was to mark a temporal subordinate clause in the early absence of subordinating conjunctions. While he ate the up food, I drank. = He was eating up the food (and) I drank. I believe we can regard the forms with primary endings as virtual personalized progressive participles. >>> [Nath:] >>> This makes it harder for me to understand how the aorist became the >>> perfective. `Started driving', in contrast to `drove', suggests >>> incomplete action. Pat comments: Again, I believe you are mixing fruits. An aorist, e.g. IE *wid-e't, is already perfective. It is also momentary. The ingressive is a sub-category of *momentary action*, through which the moment of onset of an action is highlighted. >> [Nath:] >>> How do you classify ``I learned that chapter in one month?'' >> [Jens:] I believe as a job for the aorist. > the aorist is compatible with duration, Pat again: According to Lehmann, the aorist is +momentary, hence -durational. Nath continued: > But languages with a perfective do not do that. As soon as the narrative is > in the past, they use the perfective. Pat interjects: That does not seem to be true of Russian: pisal (impf. past); napisal (pf. past). 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 Wed Aug 11 18:48:04 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 19:48:04 +0100 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? Message-ID: >an > algorithm developed to produce ... > the correct phylogeny, or family tree, Applied to languages, this is no better than the isoglosses you choose, and this takes us back to an earlier debate where it became clear that an isoglossic approach fails to consider: (i) wave theory (which may underlie the satem/centum and RUKI isoglosses) (ii) language continua (iii) language convergence and Sprachbuende (is that word sufficiently anglicised yet for an English plural to be accepted? If not, which German plural is the correct one - is it a language bunch (-bunde) or a language alliance (-buende)?) (iv) time of attestation. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 11 19:45:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:45:57 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) Message-ID: [To the Moderator: I wrote this message earlier but did not send it. In light of some recent posts on this list, perhaps it has some use.] In a message dated 8/7/99 8:50:50 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> One might see some direct relevance to IE in all this. After all, whatever yardstick separates say Albanian from say English - either in terms of comparative linguistics or historical time - is nothing compared to 100,000 years. If we extrapolate the degree of dissimilarity between IE languages after say 9000 years (some would say 5500 years), how much dissimilarity would there be between languages separated by 10 or 20 times that time frame. Should we expect any commonality at all? in terms of Glottochronology, what should we expect - when languages separated by a few thousand years can yield 'kaput', 'penn', 'sarah-' and 'golova' for an item as basic as a head? In terms of morphology, can we really expect that inflective forms could survive, distinguishing inanimate versus animate or even present versus past, when the common human memory offers no clear remembrance of a something as big as an ice age? Some stuff re the science on this matter: 1. Scientific American Aug 1999 p 13 "IS OUT OF AFRICA OUT THE DOOR?" summarizes the growing evidence that the premise is not in sync with the bones (especially in the Far East.) Remember also that the original theory based on mtDNA backdating the African 'Eve" is now considered flawed and too recent - and that she was even then dated to 200,000BP - so that language separations set at 100,000 might as well arbitrarily start back with her or her children. Then, like an exodus out of New Guinea, we could have a 500 languages leaving Africa at one time. 2. Scientific American March 1998 Review of Ian Tattersall's 'Evolution and Human uniqueness' summarizes some of the arguments that Neanderthals had language. This would significantly backdate the appearance of human language by 100's of 1000's of years. And there's nothing to say that modern humans could not have learned language from Neanderthals. 3. From an AP story (2/15/99) quoting a paper appearing in the same week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team at Berkeley challenging a Duke study positing Neanderthal speech capabilities based on the size of the hypoglossal canal (jaw nerves): "Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human speech sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." (This I believe revolved around the time of the appearance of Cro-Magnon.) Finally, I suspect the big problem here is in the use of the word "language". All of this goes to the distinction I think Sassure originally made between "the act of speaking" and a "language system." Birds and apes and prairie dogs "signal" each other with sounds that will follow regular and complex conventions - some of them quite local and apparently group-learned. And apes, though not physically equipped for human speech, have acquired non-oral vocabularies of 100's of words - nouns and verbs. This is 'language' in the broad sense, the way paleonthologists and biologists use the word. On this list, one becomes accustomed to thinking of language in a stricter sense. Language systems are much more intricate things than the ability to communicate by making sounds. Coming out of Africa, humans may have made common noises that were very effective signals within respective groups. But did any of those "local" signaling systems equate to a "language system?" And given the distance (in form or time) between *PIE and modern English, what would be the distance in time between *PIE and one of those simple signaling systems? <> Don't think that follows anymore than that the use of clothing or boats had to be monogenetic - they apparently were not. The wonderful concept of "Zeit Geist" should not be forgotten here. Unless monopolized - kept a secret or otherwise controlled - human capabilities tend to spread and create the medium for new capabilities. Spoken language (unlike written language) is very hard to monopolize and easy to imitate. Once the capability arrived, languages may have been a product of the Zeit Geist. I recall reading - at first with shock - Stephen J. Gould suggest that life may have originated more than once. Now it seems to make some sense. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 11 20:25:16 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:25:16 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Mc Callister Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 1999 9:27 AM Rick asked: > What is the AA root for jm-3? > Or what are its cognates in other AA languages? [ moderator snip ] Rick, I do not have Orel and Stobova so I cannot say if the root is mentioned there. In Ehret's sadly unsatisfactory work, it is not mentioned. The -3, I consider to be a factitive suffix, used rather frequently in Egyptian, so the AA root would be that from which jm- derived. The underlying root might be simply *?ama so that the underlying meaning might be simply 'to treat as a mother would=to mother'. In another post on this subject, a tentative relationship with Arabic ?-m-r was proposed. I believe the likelier IE cognate of ?-m-r is *me:-ro (from *H{2}emer-), with a basal meaning of 'put a value on, rank'. However, it is interesting to note Sumerian ZUR, which also has the reading amar, one of the meanings of which is 'take care of, care for'. 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 Aug 11 20:34:57 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:34:57 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Damien and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Damien Erwan Perrotin <114064.1241 at Compuserve.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 1999 3:25 PM > ----- Original Message ----- > From PATRICK C. RYAN > Sent : Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:33:30 >> Pat commented: >> Some might be interested in Egyptian jm-3, 'kind, gentle, well-disposed, >> pleasining, gracious, be delighted, charmed', which I believe is likely to >> represent an AA example of the same root. Damien responded: > I am quite sceptical about the relationship. If am- is indeed related to > amb, then the Proto-IE prototype should have been, according to Martinet > something like H2e-mbhi, or H2-mbhi, with an initial laryngeal. If it is > not, the prototype should have been H2em, then too with a laryngeal, as > there is no recorded VC root in IE Pat comments: There is a *H{2}am- in Pokorny meaning 'grasp'. But, like Pokorny, I believe this is probably the basis for the entries under *me:-. Damien continued: > and that /j/ is conserved in most IE > dialects. So unless you supose that the IE laryngeal is the reflex of an > AA /j/, Pat responds: No, I propose that IE *H and AA *? are the results of Nostratic *? but that AA *?(i/a) produced Egyptian j. 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 Aug 11 23:01:06 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 18:01:06 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Dear Paolo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Paolo Agostini Sent: Sunday, August 08, 1999 2:46 PM Paolo wrote: > The Romans called _idus_ (from a former _*eidus_) the 15th day of the > months of March, May, July, and October and the 13th day of the other > months. If memory serves me well, it was the lexicographer Hesychius of > Alexandria who wrote in the 5th century "the verb _iduo_ originates from the > language of the Etruscans, from whom the Romans learned many religious rites > and customs, and it means _to divide_ because the _ides_ divide the months > in two halves". In the 5th century though Etruscan was a dead language since > three centuries at least. > At the end of last century there were some scholars who maintained that the > word originated from IE _*idh_ "to be bright" (of the moon), yet the idea > was soon abandoned. Among the IE languages, the base occurs in Latin only. Pat comments: Paolo, you may have another root in mind but IE *(a)i-dh- occurs in several IE languages: Old Indian inddhe'; Greek ai'tho:; OHG eit, etal. Paolo continued: > The word is very likely a Semitic borrowing, from the base `WD > ('ayin-waw-daleth) the meaning of which is "to return (every year or > periodically); to repeat (cycle, period); to count, reckon", cfr. Aramaic > _'yidb'_ "festival"; Syriac _'eyda'_ and _'eyada'_ "ceremony, usage"; > Hebrew _'yid_ "Idolatrous festival" and _'ed_ "monthly courses, > menstruation"; Arabic _'id_ "festival" and _'iddah_ "period of time", > _'adda_ "he counted/reckoned", _'adad, 'idad, 'idda_ "number", _`a:da_ > "custom, tradition". There is also a secondary form of the same verb, i.e. > 'TD ('ayin-thaw-daleth) "he counted/reckoned" from which Latin forms like > _ituo_ might derive. Pat comments: Yes, $-w-d is a little strange in producing so many derivatives with -i/y-; and probably $(a)id- would have been heard by Romans as id- but is it not a little complicated to assume that the medial -w-, which shows up in few of the Arabic derivatives, somehow gets metathesized to final position to produce I:du:s rather than *I:dus? Paolo continued: > According to the meaning of the Semitic base, the Latin word _*eidus_ simply > meant "a period of time; a counted number of days; a day that returns every > month". Pat comments: But what are the characteristics of this particular day/night: presumably, it was the time of the full moon. Therefore, I believe it is probably a denominative -wo' stem of *oid-, 'swell', producing the zero-grade *id- = *idwo'-, 'swollen'. Idus is a particular day first, and the period between full moons seems a secondary usage. As for Etruscan *itu-, 'divide', I believe it is only attested in a Latin gloss; and we know these were not always reliable. For a Latin *ituare (does it exist? my dictionary is not large {?} enough to include it), it would seem to me that IE *ai-to-, 'portion', would provide a simpler source. 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 Wed Aug 11 18:17:48 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 19:17:48 +0100 Subject: ? "Vocabulary Density" Message-ID: Some initial thoughts: (a) languages differ enormously from one another in their vocabulary density and in the distribution of their vocabulary across the total "semantic space", as you put it. If we are going to compare them with reconstructed languages, don't we need to establish some kind of benchmark for existent languages first? (b) I can only speak for PIE amongst the reconstructed languages. Its reconstructed vocabulary is certainly odd. Not including obvious root extensions: (i) There are 18 roots for glisten/glitter, and 12 for shine (total 30) (ii) There are 8 for goat (iii) there are 8 or 9 for grow (iv) There are 23 for hit (v) There are 10 for jump (vi) There are 11 for weave/plait (vii) There are 12 for pull (viii) There are 11 for press (ix) There are 24 for turn (x) There 17 for swell There are a large number of roots with similar semantic connotations, (over half the semantic concepts have at least two reconstructed independent roots). Some of these have large numbers of these "pseudo-synonyms". Given the patchy and limited nature of what we can reconstruct, it certainly seems that reconstructed PIE has its words clustered around some concepts at the expense of others. So this gives two questions: (A) Is this pattern anything like natural languages? (B)Is the overall average anything like the overall average in natural languages? Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 11 23:46:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 18:46:31 -0500 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Sunday, August 08, 1999 7:41 PM >The suffix involved must be *-ino-, a common suffix > of appurtenance, particularly well attested in derivatives from names of > seasons and other time spans, as Gk. earino's, OCS vesnInU 'of spring'. It > was plausibly derived by Chantraine from the locative of the season name, > which was typically an r/n-stem, as *we's-n-i 'in spring', adding the > "thematic vowel" *-o- (the real seat of the expression of appurtenance), > with a histus-filling ("ephelcystic") *-n- in between, and dissimilation > of the product *-ni-n-o- to *-ri-n-o-. Pat comments: Sorry. If this seems "plausible" to you and Chantraine, it seems absolutely unlikely to me. And since when is -*o a suffix expressing "appurtenance"? And what about Avestan vangri, 'in spring' (probably better 'of the spring, springlike')? Jens continued: > The r/n stem seems to have been > generalized for all seasons, cf. the beautiful pair Lat. hi:bernus = Gk. > kheimerino's equated by Szemere'nyi as IE *g'heimerinos (with dissim. in > Lat.). The part -rnus was repeated with other designations of time in > Lat., as diurnus (from the loc. diu:, the "endingless" variant of Skt. > dya'v-i) and from there noct-urnus (if not from noctu:, itself copied on > diu: at a time when this still meant 'throughout the day, all day long' > and not just 'long'). Pat comments: It seems to me you are just making a muddle of two separate items; 1) -n in -r/n stems, and a totally separate -i-no (from -i + -no). Jens continued: > The special meaning of the old derivatives in *-ino- makes it sensible > to derive them from the locative: *wesr-ino-s is 'what is _in_ spring'. Pat comments: I disagree. The oldest locative (and locative properly means 'at' not 'in') for IE is, as Beekes indicates, -0 or -:. Locative -i is properly the adjective formant which shows up in e.g. Latin genitives. Jens continued: > This distinguishes *-ino- from the suffix *-io- which has no such obvious > connection with the locative (although it has been argued to have > precisely that origin). A derivative like *ek'wi-o-s 'pertaining to a > horse' does not signify thing on or inside a horse with any preference > over things connected with a horse in a non-local fashion, so the suffix > form *-i-o- is simply the product of the addition of a "thematic vowel" > *-o- to the bare stem normally posited as *ek'wo-, in which we observe the > transformation of two thematic vowels to *-i-o-. Pat comments: Ah, a transubstantiation! If a theoretical *ek^wo- + -o formalized a glide, it would not doubt have been -w- not -y-. This is, IMHO, the most unlikely proposal you have yet made on this list. Jens continued: > I see this as a simple > consequence of the reduction rule of an unaccented thematic vowel to *-i- > applying in very old lexicalizations; Pat interjects: There is no such rduction rule! Jens continued: > since _both_ thematic vowels could > not be accented, the product *-i-o- may simply be from *-o- + *-o-. It > seems that the addition of a syllabic morpheme shifted the accent towards > the end, so that *-o'- yielded *-o-o'- whence *-i-o'-. It should not be > held against the analysis that examples with an independent accent show > *-i'-o- with accent of the -i- part, for that would be the further > development anyway if the form is older than the introduction of initial > accent I claim to have discovered for a prestage of PIE. This analysis > provides an answer to the question why there is no *-n- in *-i-o-: there > was no word boundary here, while in the hypostatic derivatives based on > locatives in *-i as *-ri-n-o- there was. > A preform like *p at 2teri-n-o-s may indeed have existed in IE, but then > with the specific meaning 'which is at the father'; but it may just as > well reflect a simple Latin (Italic) analogy with the season-based > adjectives. Pat interjects: "Father" --- a man for all seasons! Jens continued: > In Balto-Slavic *-ino- enjoyed an enormous productivity (Russ. > vostok 'east', vosto{cv}nyj 'eastern' from *-k-ino-s). This has nothing to > do with the -n- of Germanic n-stems which turns up wherever the stem final > is allowed to surface, not only in the genitive. For 'pertaining to a > father', the conglomerate *-io- of thematic stems was generalized and had > created *p at 2tr-i'o-s in PIE already. > Thus, the -n- is not in origin a morpheme of appurtenance or of a > genitival relation, and so there is no point in equating it with something > outside of IE which is. Pat comments: Strongly disagree. n-formants are very common outside of IE as individulizers; the simple application of *na, 'one'. 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 Thu Aug 12 02:09:17 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 22:09:17 EDT Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? Message-ID: In a message dated 8/10/99 10:03:06 PM, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: <> Just a note that the null hypothesis is a technical term. It is taken as a requirement of scientific testing. In a basic sense, it simply means that you cannot prove something true if you cannot also prove it false. The classic example is the postulate: everything in the universe is expanding at a constant rate. (Not just cosmology, but also lightwaves and rulers and anything that we would use to measure this expansion with.) We can't think of a way of disproving this statement, because all the means of disproving it have been eliminated. Since it can't be scientifically disproved, it can't be scientifically proved. Now the same problem exists with the statement that all languages are related. Short of going back in time, how we can we prove the negative? If we prove that two languages are totally dissimilar, it still does not prove they are unrelated. No way to test the null hypothesis. No way to prove the hypothesis. <<"We do not know whether all languages are related (or whether there was polygenesis)...">> Short of hard scientific proof, we do have some evidence pointing us in one direction or the other. First off, we can imagine a world where everyone speaks the same language, like on StarTrek. Absent other evidence, that would strongly suggest monogenesis. If everyone spoke an IE language, you'd have a pretty good case for monogenesis, even if Albanian isn't that close to English. But the world we live in is not monolingual or even close. And, historically, we can't even be sure if humans had language before they dispersed to their respective corners. Finally, consider how things would be different than they are now if 'polygenesis' were the case? Would we have even more languages? Would they be even more different than they are now? Would we have any stronger comparative proof of polygenesis than we have now? What would that proof be like? Wouldn't a 'polygenetic' world pretty much look the way things look now? Given the historical and modern situation, it does feel like polygenesis might be more likely - though that's not provable either. Regards, Steve Long From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 12 03:03:13 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 23:03:13 EDT Subject: Odd reconstructed "Vocabulary Density" Message-ID: Pete Gray wrote as quoted at the end of this message. I think the conclusion is that reconstruction (or the comparative method or whatever one wishes to call it) should try to do a much better job of attributing small differences in sense to reconstructed items. It is NOT the case that the meaning "grow" is somehow more neutral or less specific than the other meanings which are nearby in its semantic field. Rather, our current methods, by convention, artificially push the reconstructed meanings towards the crude set of pigeon-holes we work with. Just as in sociolinguistics, where it is known that meta-talk ABOUT our own speech is much less accurate than the observable behavior we exhibit when actually speaking. We need to have self-conscious correctives against this recurring error endemic to the conscious analysis process. The comparative / reconstructive methods, in the guise of claiming not to be more precise than the limited data warrant, are actually throwing away information on details of meaning. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics Following quoted from Pete Gray: *** (b) I can only speak for PIE amongst the reconstructed languages. Its reconstructed vocabulary is certainly odd. Not including obvious root extensions: (i) There are 18 roots for glisten/glitter, and 12 for shine (total 30) (ii) There are 8 for goat (iii) there are 8 or 9 for grow (iv) There are 23 for hit (v) There are 10 for jump (vi) There are 11 for weave/plait (vii) There are 12 for pull (viii) There are 11 for press (ix) There are 24 for turn (x) There 17 for swell There are a large number of roots with similar semantic connotations, (over half the semantic concepts have at least two reconstructed independent roots). Some of these have large numbers of these "pseudo-synonyms". Given the patchy and limited nature of what we can reconstruct, it certainly seems that reconstructed PIE has its words clustered around some concepts at the expense of others. So this gives two questions: (A) Is this pattern anything like natural languages? (B)Is the overall average anything like the overall average in natural languages? From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Thu Aug 12 04:27:07 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 14:27:07 +1000 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 19 Jul 1999 11:08:41 EDT." Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson said The real task of extending the Comparative Method to deeper time depths is to make explicit more of these sophisticated tools, and to CREATE more such tools by discovering what ways of handling the data are robust across what kinds of intervening changes. I would like to present to the list the description of a tool I developed with a doctoral student to address the issue of measuring the phonological relatedness of languages. It seems to address in part some of the issues introduced by LA. We applied it to measuring the distance between modern Beijing and Modern Cantonese. We initially wanted to use it on the basque dialects but couldn't get sufficient data. The idea is that the distance between languages is represented by the series of changes that occur to a large set of words in moving from their parent form to their daughter forms, so that distance apart is not measured between the daughter languages but rather by their distance from their parent. We feel this better represents the real world process. Our data has to be the word set in the parent form (reconstructed words or real words) and then one word set for the each daughter language and the set of phonological transformation rules between each parent and daughter for each word in their chronological sequence. Hence we are modelling the rules and their sequence of application for each word. The extent to which any of this information is hypothetical merely defines the hypotheses one is comparing, but importantly it does not effect the computational method we apply to this data. The computational method is in part new and in part old. The old part is that for the sequence of phonological rules for the first word of a parent-daughter couple we construct a finite state automata. For the second and subsequent rule sequences we overlay the rule sequence on the original automata creating new transitions were needed for new rules as yet unrepresented in the automata. By counting the transitions along each pathway as we build up the automata we are creating frequency counts of rules in their sequence of application. Such an automata is a Probabilistic Finite State Automata (PFSA). Once all words are placed on the Automata it is the Canonical PFSA that describes the total diachronic rule set and structure for that parent-daughter pair and nothing else. This description then captures the characteristics of the total data set (of this class of data). The newish part of the method is to apply the principle of minimum message length (MML) encoding to calculate the cost of the message to describe this PFSA. This is an information theory principle which of itself dates back to the 1940's but our development of it for PFSAs is new. If we have the cost of the messages for two parent-daughter pairs then the shorter cost represents the daughter that is closer to the parent. In the case of modern Cantonese and Beijing we got 35,243.58 bits and 36790.93 bits respectively, indicating Cantonese is closer to the common parent, Middle Chinese, than Beijing. The difference between these 2 numbers can viewed as an approximate odds ratio 1:2^diff (that is meant to be "two to the power of the difference"). However a further analysis can be performed. The canonical PFSA can be reduced , by merging states, to some form that yields a minimised MML. Such a minimised PFSA strikes a balance between the number of states and the frequencies of the transitions out of each states. essentially it merges together paths through the PFSA that have relatively similar rules and frequencies of rules and also places very rare transitions in places that lessens their cost, e.g. transitioning them back to their originating state. A minimum PFSA does exist although you can't guarantee that you can find it. Note that no data is thrown away. Everything is always kept in the PFSA. The minimised PFSA give the following results for Cantonese and Beijing as 30379.01 bits and 30366.55 bits respectively. In each language pairing the number of states is reduced by about 80% and the number of arcs by 50%. The most interesting part of this result is that reversal of the results as to which is closest to its parent. In the first case being Cantonese, and the second Beijing. This distinction is more pronounced when Allophonic features are also included in the analysis. One appraisal of these results is that the generalisation process(=PFSA minimisation) has discerned more structure in Beijing than Cantonese. The analysis of the generalised Automata revealed hitherto unsuspected relationships between diachronic rules. Our method should be useful to appraise competing reconstructions of earlier languages,say Indoeuropean, however to date we have not been able to find the necessary data compiled in one place to easily apply it. Should anyone have a good database of appropriate data we would be happy to submit it to our methods. Jon Patrick From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Aug 12 06:32:06 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 02:32:06 EDT Subject: Passivity as a transition (raising dust) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/11/99 8:52:09 PM, jrader at m-w.com wrote: << I'm sorry if you don't have access to a library, but I'm afraid there's not much I can do about that. >> What can I say? I not only cited scholarship to you, but the texts themselves. Perhaps I'm wrong, but you really won't be able to tell whether what I'm saying makes any sense until you take a pause from being so vituperative. You just wrote: < is compared with Latin , from both of which a base <*kenis-> on an Indo-European level may be reconstructable.>> What I wrote was that there was a 'semantic' innovation (dust>effort>service) in Greek. My point was that this change of meaning caused a verb (koneo) to be participalized in usage during a interim period before it became morphologically stabilized as a noun (e.g., diakonia) with the new meaning. I had mentioned konis, koneo^, enkoneo^, akonei, diakoneo^, etc., as representing the transition in meaning by metaphor from 'dust' to 'effort' to 'service.' You however responded that I was "confusing two unrelated etyma". I responded that I'd love to know what the other one was. Your response is 'konis' = dust, ashes, related to Latin 'cinis' = dust, ashes, and reconstructed as IE *kenis-, which I suppose may have meant dust, ashes. That's where I started. It doesn't contradict what I said. Then you add: < with "sich muehen, eifrig streben, sich sputen," and Latin is compared.>> Now I take that to be the other "etymon." I was expecting some Sanskrit or Hittite. I think Pokorny may have simply been translating the Latin. Of course, the gloss would be unnecessary if the connection between dust and "striving" is Greek and not PIE. As for 'co^n-or, co^n-atus', (subst, 'conata, conatarum') I'd suspect it might be in some way from the Greek. The obvious connection is to such forms as "akoniti"(adv), found in an early record as 'akonitos' derived in Lidell-Scott form 'konio' - without dust. Also Homer (Illiad 21.541) - "kekonimenoi pheugon" - fleeing getting dusty (passive verb form.) Compare Ovid Meta 3.60 - "magna conamine". ('conamen, -inis' = an effort) There is also 'koniortos' - recorded beginning with Herodotus and often as 'raised dust', 'a cloud of dust.' Which follows the same transition in meaning that can be seen in the Greek 'konistra' - literally a place of dust, a place where animals roll in the dust - but later the famous wrestling arena. Hence, 'konia' = dust of the arena as "a metaphor for toil (striving?) in Aristotle IA709a." (The old ritual sprinkling of dust upon themselves by wrestlers, in the form 'konio^ntai', was mentioned by Palmer I think as a possible source for dia-koneo^ - ie, an undertaking, task) I'm obviously on shaky ground on how should appear if it were borrowed from the Greek before about 100BC. But there doesn't seem to be any connection between 'cinis' and 'conor' in Latin. My guess is that the link between raising dust and making an effort did not pass into Latin because it is not from PIE. And that Latin received 'cinis' from PIE and 'co^nor' from the Greek, who innovated it. So I'm suggesting that Pokorny may be wrong in looking for a PIE origin for a meaning that originated as a metaphor in early Greek. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Aug 12 09:07:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 10:07:19 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [somebody else] > What about the Quebecois? They > >usually speak rather old-fashioned French (to European ears) (I've been > >there twice, but didn't pay attention, probably because I already had > >enough trouble with 'cent' and 'sans', which sound the same to all but to > >the Quebecois). > What's the scoop on 'cent' and 'sans'. I thought both were /sa~/ In standard European French, yes. But the nasalized counterparts of /e/ and /a/ were once distinguished in French. Over the centuries, they have tended to fall together, but the merger has not so far applied in some varieties. According to Glanville Price's history of French, the Chanson de Roland shows evidence of the merger by the 12th century. However, Henriette Walter, in her book on contemporary French, reports that the two vowels are still distinguished today by speakers in a sizeable region southwest of Paris. I know nothing about Quebecois, but I surmise that the merger has not applied there either. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From W.Behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de Thu Aug 12 13:08:10 1999 From: W.Behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de (W.Behr (in Bochum today)) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 13:08:10 +0000 Subject: (was: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days!) re: Sum. t In-Reply-To: <37B1A6C9.73B37AF3@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: Dear Miguel & Damien, if it is _tibira_ (later also_tabira_) 'metal-worker' you are talking about here, I think that Gernot Wilhelm has conclusively shown that we are dealing with a loan from Hurritic, i.e. an "agent-orientated resultative _-iri/e_ participle" (Wilhelm), or "antipassive-participle", derived from the Hurr. root _tab/taw_ [w = u+subscript arch) 'to cast (metal)'. In Hurr., this root has the derivations _tabali_ 'copper-founder' and _tabiri_ 'he, who has cast' (Otten). For details see G. Wilhelm, "Gedanken zur Fruehgeschichte der Hurriter und zum hurritisch-urartaeischen Sprachvergleich", in: V. Haas ed., _Hurriter und Hurritisch (Konstanzer Altorientalische Symosien; II, Xenia --- Konstanzer Althistorische Forschungen und Symposien; 21): 43-68, Lonstanz : Universitaetsverlag 1988. Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 18:37:34 +0200 From: Damien Erwan Perrotin <114064.1241 at Compuserve.com> [ moderator snip ] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Wolfgang Behr, Lecturer in Chinese History and Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies, University of Bochum, Germany ~ http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/oaw/gc/personal/Behr/WOLFGANG.HTM ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From edsel at glo.be Fri Aug 13 06:24:20 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 02:24:20 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:52 11/08/99 -0500, you wrote: [ moderator snip ] > What's the scoop on 'cent' and 'sans'. I thought both were /sa~/ >Rick Mc Callister [Ed] 'cent' sounds more or less like /si~ng/ and 'sans' like /sa~/ in Quebecois. Using the standard French pronunciation for 'cent' can cause hilarious confusion, as happened to me. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Aug 12 12:55:24 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 07:55:24 -0500 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? Message-ID: Dear Seam and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sean Crist Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 1999 10:30 AM Sean wrote: > As Larry Trask has already pointed out, there are good epistemological > reasons for taking "there is no connection" as our initial hypothesis, > rather than "there is a connection"; and I won't belabor that point. > What's important is that you start with some hypothesis or other and work > on finding grounds to reject it. "We don't know" won't suit for those > purposes, because it is not a hypothesis. Pat asks: But surely taking as a null hypothesis a formulation like: "No languages are related", which has been disconfirmed --- *repeatedly*, is useless? 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 stevegus at aye.net Thu Aug 12 14:01:29 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 10:01:29 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > As for Etruscan *itu-, 'divide', I believe it is only attested in a Latin > gloss; and we know these were not always reliable. For a Latin *ituare (does > it exist? my dictionary is not large {?} enough to include it), it would > seem to me that IE *ai-to-, 'portion', would provide a simpler source. I don't believe there is an *ituare or *ituere attested in Latin. Traditionally, according to Pliny the Elder, -idus- is related to the root of -divido-, 'divide,' which is obviously di- added to *vido; and that would also relate it to -vidua-, 'widow;' apparently the root meaning, still present in Latin in the verb -viduo- was -separated-; and this sense carried into French -vide-, 'empty'. The loss of the v- in -idus- would seem to me to present a problem with this traditional explanation. [On another topic; I checked Thurneysen's Old Irish grammar, and apparently Old Irish did -not- count by scores; they formed the ordinal eighties, nineties, and all the rest with a suffix -mogo, e.g. -seachtmogo-, -ochtmogo-. The Welsh dictionary -Y Geiriaddwr Mawr- (sp?) gives eighty and ninety both ways; they seem somewhat simplified, since they are not suffixed forms, but simply descriptive analytical statements; ninety is merely -nau deg- or -pedwar ugain a deg-.] -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Ecce domina quae fidet omnia micantia aurea esse, et scalam in caelos emit. Adveniente novit ipsa, etiamsi clausae sint portae cauponum, propositum assequitur verbo. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Thu Aug 12 13:52:59 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:52:59 -0400 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? In-Reply-To: <004a01bee42b$2f385460$461a063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: >> an >> algorithm developed to produce ... >> the correct phylogeny, or family tree, > Applied to languages, this is no better than the isoglosses you choose, True. The same is true when this methodology is applied to biological species; the results are no better than the biological traits you choose. In both cases, the characters you choose are a matter of professional judgment. > and > this takes us back to an earlier debate where it became clear that an > isoglossic approach fails to consider: > (i) wave theory (which may underlie the satem/centum and RUKI isoglosses) > (ii) language continua > (iii) language convergence and Sprachbuende (is that word sufficiently > anglicised yet for an English plural to be accepted? If not, which German > plural is the correct one - is it a language bunch (-bunde) or a language > alliance (-buende)?) These three are really one and the same. To quote something that Don Ringe once said when presenting this work, "Why do we make trees? Because we can." Ringe et. al. are quite conscious of the problem you describe. For example, when they attempted to apply this methodology to the West Germanic languages, the attempt "failed spectacularly". Apparently, the reason is that these languages/dialects developed in close contact with each other, and innovations were shared in ways which cannot be modelled in a Stammbaum. In the case of the Indo-European tree that I gave, however, there wasn't this kind of failure, with a few points of messiness such as the placement of Germanic and of shared innovations between IIr and BS. Mathematically speaking, the set of possible trees is a fairly small subset of the set of possible wave diagrams. If we can produce a tree which is a fairly near perfect phylogeny, we should do so, since the Stammbaum model is the more constrained one. > (iv) time of attestation. I don't understand the problem here; could you say more? \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 12 15:08:24 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 11:08:24 EDT Subject: Basque statistics Message-ID: We have far too little study of the biases and distortions imposed by our tools of analysis, at the same time as the tools are valuable. Thanks to Larry Trask for a clear statement of ways of purifying vocabulary lists, in attempting to identify native ancient Basque vocabulary. If we do not believe any list is TOTALLY "pure", then we are rather concerned with degrees of "purity", relatively more pure and less pure. Rather than using particular cutoff criteria, it can be more sophisticated (though also much more work) to study the DIFFERENCE between vocabulary sets selected by a particular criterion from vocabulary sets which were not limited by that particular criterion. While early attestation is obviously a valuable cutoff (3), if the aim is to achieve the absolutely purest vocabulary set possible, it may run the error of excluding much authentic native Basque vocabulary which simply happened not to be recorded "early". Can we rather have several "degrees of earliness", or distinctions of WHICH sources of attestation? Trask does some of the latter, suggesting to exclude some sources which he believes are particularly unreliable. > (3) It is attested early. > > [Let's say before 1600, which is `early' for Basque.] *** The following (4) is also perfectly reasonable, if intended merely to achieve the "purest" possible vocabulary set, but it also can exclude legitimate native ancient Basque vocabulary, especially if, for example, some of that vocabulary has been borrowed FROM Basque INTO another language or languages. > (4) There is no reason to believe that it is shared with > languages known to have been in contact with Basque. > [Subjective, and hard to formalize, but I believe that doubtful > cases are few enough to constitute only a minor problem.] Nursery words may be among the most persistent in many cultures, so I do not see a reason to flatly exclude these. Label them as nursery words, perhaps (though the category is actually much broader than the two examples)... *** > (5) It does not appear to be a nursery word. >... >Now, (5) would exclude only a very few words not excluded by the other >criteria, notably `mother' and `father', And even sound-imitative words may sometimes be of use, they can undergo regular sound changes (as for laughter "ha-ha" becoming Russian "xoxotat' " with a>o shift). Or more borderline, "teeny" becoming "tiny" in the English Great Vowel Shift, regenerated (or borrowed from other dialects?) as "teeny" again. So again, not absolutely excluding them, but studying what difference it makes to patterning if they are included vs. excluded. > (6) It does not appear to be of imitative origin. >while (6) would >exclude a much larger number of items which would be automatically >excluded in any serious comparative work, like `meow', >`moo', `baa', `ding-dong', `spit', and probably also > `sneeze'. This last sounds roughly like oo-SHEEN, and, in my >view, is too likely to be imitative to be included in any list. *** Even asking that a word be found in all or many dialects is not a simple criterion: > (2) It is found throughout the language, or nearly so. > > [Since the better dictionaries assign words to the conventional > dialects, it is easy to formalize this requirement as we > see fit.] There are other subsidiary criteria which can reinforce or undermine the probabilities that a word was ancient Basque, which can be combined with information about WHICH dialects it is attested in, not just how many of them or which branches of the dialect family tree. *** My point in all of the above is that using simple cutoffs is a kind of rush-to-judgement, the opposite of the ability to delay judgements which is the hallmark of many good research personalities. The reason to avoid simple cutoffs is because it throws away potentially important data. But there is every reason to USE every one of the criteria (those which Larry Trask expressed as cutoffs), to use them as LABELS on the vocabulary items, which in a computer database can be taken into consideration whenever any question is asked of the database. In most studies of canonical forms, ones which do attempt to purify vocabulary lists, I would expect there is a statistical tendency known as regression towards the mean, that is, some reinforcement of universally typologically dominant patterns, such as CV-CV(-CV) syllable structure. It would be where we find that deviations from such universal patterns are reinforced statistically by steps of "purifying" a vocabulary set that we would have the most interesting characteristics perhaps attributable to an early or proto-language. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 12 16:36:57 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 11:36:57 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >If we extrapolate the degree of dissimilarity between IE languages after say >9000 years (some would say 5500 years), how much dissimilarity would there be >between languages separated by 10 or 20 times that time frame. Should we >expect any commonality at all? Maybe, maybe not. But that's no excuse for not looking. You may not be able to get back to an ur-sprache but you would certainly make some interesting discoveries. In fact, I'm sure that after Stefan gets back from Siberia he's going to get together with Larry to formulate a Basque-Yeniseian language family :> >in terms of Glottochronology, what should we expect - when languages >separated by a few thousand years can yield 'kaput', 'penn', 'sarah-' and >'golova' for an item as basic as a head? [snip] >Some stuff re the science on this matter: >1. Scientific American Aug 1999 p 13 "IS OUT OF AFRICA OUT THE DOOR?" >summarizes the growing evidence that the premise is not in sync with the >bones (especially in the Far East.) Remember also that the original theory >based on mtDNA backdating the African 'Eve" is now considered flawed and too >recent - and that she was even then dated to 200,000BP - so that language >separations set at 100,000 might as well arbitrarily start back with her or >her children. Then, like an exodus out of New Guinea, we could have a 500 >languages leaving Africa at one time. It is true that the date for Eve has been questioned but remember that all non-Africans (as well as some Africans) are in the same mitochondrial pool. The point is that the mitochondrial separation date for this group is still a determined fraction of the date for Eve. As I remember the multi-genesis theory is based on skull similarities that are rejected by the overwhelming majority of anthropologists. >2. Scientific American March 1998 Review of Ian Tattersall's 'Evolution and >Human uniqueness' summarizes some of the arguments that Neanderthals had >language. This would significantly backdate the appearance of human language >by 100's of 1000's of years. True, but speech and language are two different things. The ability to speak obviously does not presuppose modern language abilities. I don't propose a date for language evolution. >And there's nothing to say that modern humans >could not have learned language from Neanderthals. I don't see how. There are no indications of an "out of Europe" scenario. If you mean that modern humans inherited language from their ancestors, this obviously presupposes monogenesis >3. From an AP story (2/15/99) quoting a paper appearing in the same week in >the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team at Berkeley >challenging a Duke study positing Neanderthal speech capabilities based on >the size of the hypoglossal canal (jaw nerves): >"Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human speech >sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." (This I believe >revolved around the time of the appearance of Cro-Magnon.) Given that the Australians had already reached Australia about 60,000 BP, that date would seem to be very wrong >Finally, I suspect the big problem here is in the use of the word "language". Agreed but I suspect that language was the key to modern human expansion from Africa throughout the rest of the world. [snip] >Coming out of Africa, humans may have made common noises that were very >effective signals within respective groups. But did any of those "local" >signaling systems equate to a "language system?" And given the distance (in >form or time) between *PIE and modern English, what would be the distance in >time between *PIE and one of those simple signaling systems? If this scenario is true, it still presupposes monogenesis [snip] >The wonderful concept of "Zeit Geist" should not be forgotten here. Unless >monopolized - kept a secret or otherwise controlled - human capabilities tend >to spread and create the medium for new capabilities. Spoken language >(unlike written language) is very hard to monopolize and easy to imitate. >Once the capability arrived, languages may have been a product of the Zeit >Geist. If you don't possess genetic language ability, you're not going to be able to learn to speak by imitation. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 12 16:20:48 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 12:20:48 EDT Subject: Burden of Proof out of place Message-ID: There may be more agreement than seems to be the case in this matter. In particular I would agree with the following: >"We don't know" won't suit for those >purposes, because it is not a hypothesis. is very similar to my position, that "We cannot currently know" is the null hypothesis, and "We can currently know" is the hypothesis to be tested. And, quite obviously, no one can succeed in establishing that "we do know" is valid, with current data and tools, applied to the question whether all languages are ULTIMATELY related. So we know the answer to THAT test, for now and for a long time to come. No Burden of Proof is appropriate on the content of the question whether all languages are ultimately related, simply because we cannot test that question currently. That is my summary. Going back to the earlier discussion in more detail... >>> No languages are related. >>> >>> All languages are related. > >> Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like > >> "We do not know whether all languages are related >> (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) > >No, I'm afraid not. This last statement is not a hypothesis, but merely >an observation of the present state of our knowledge. As such, it is >not subject to test. A null hypothesis must be something we can test. Exactly my point. To put it another way, because we cannot test whether all languages are (ultimately) related, there is no appropriate null hypothesis. The "ultimately" makes this a very different kind of question from the kinds for which null hypothesis and testing are appropriate. Incidentally, a statement that no language families are related other than those currently known to be related (a more reasonable alternative to "No languages are related") is also not yet subject to any immediate kind of test using our current tools, sort of by definition of "immediate" and "currently known". Trask gives an example an investigation of whether baseball parks affect the performance of baseball players. The null hypothesis is that they do not. Trask states: >Now, this is *not* the author's belief. Quite the contrary: he makes it >clear that he personally believes this hypothesis to be false. But he >can't achieve anything merely by declaring it to be false. So, >naturally, what he does is to state it, and then to go on to assemble >evidence against it. As it happens, he is able to assemble so much >evidence against it that he feels safe in concluding that it is false, >and that its contradictory must be true. That's how things work. Actually, how they work most often is that the investigator has plausible evidence for a conclusion, and then AFTER THAT sets up a null hypothesis which the investigator already has some reason to think is false and can be defeated, and then proceeds to lay out the evidence to defeat it. Notice how potentially circular this is, in the way the question asked is designed precisely to bolster a previously drawn conclusion! (Not in all cases: when a previously unknown or unused, and independent, data set is examined in a test, there is no circularity.) In questions which are NOT testable... >> Using a "burden of proof" argument is merely >> a way of trying to get someone to accept a conclusion >> in the absence of evidence. When we are dealing with something we cannot test, I staunchly maintain that the above statement is still true, despite Larry Trask's disagreement: >Hardly. The burden of proof is always on the person who wants to defend >the contradictory of the appropriate null hypothesis. Since the "null hypothesis" can be manipulated, and must be subject to test, and since the kind of hypothesis under consideration is not currently subject to test, this reasoning simply does not apply. In the following case, by contrast, a null hypothesis is appropriate. >If I hope to >persuade my colleagues that Basque and Burushaski are related, then the >null hypothesis is that they are *not* related, and it is up to me to >assemble enough evidence to disconfirm the null hypothesis in the eyes >of my colleagues. That's how comparative linguistics works. Of course, in the above case, people tend to conclude that the two language families are not related. The appropriate conclusion is that they cannot currently be proven to be related, using currently available data and tools. I am NOT arguing that all languages are ultimately related. Just that our conclusions should be based on actual evidence, not on elaborate structures involving manipulable claims of "burden of proof" which often involves much more politics than fact. By declaration of almost all comparative linguists, comparative linguistics cannot establish such ultimate common origins, certainly not with tools currently used. Perhaps evidence from mitochondrial DNA, inherited viruses, and other evidence of human paleontology will eventually lead people to a conclusion on this question quite independent of the vocabularies and grammars of spoken languages. Perhaps it never will. But in a domain where we cannot test hypotheses, null hypotheses and burden-of-proof have no place. So stated, at least much of that seems to be in agreement with the other comments on this list. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 12 16:55:49 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 11:55:49 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <015101bee44d$683e9860$d89ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: According to my notes I got this from Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante 1983, and from Adolfo Zavarone 1996. The Bonfantes are about as reliable as they come and Zavarone's book is well documented. I got the form from his glossary but I haven't finished picking through all the chapters yet because they're so detailed. > >For a Latin *ituare (does >it exist? my dictionary is not large {?} enough to include it), it would >seem to me that IE *ai-to-, 'portion', would provide a simpler source. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From BMScott at stratos.net Thu Aug 12 17:58:05 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 13:58:05 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I seem to remember that the Vikings used a term translated as > "Bluemen" to refer to Moors. I think it was something like blaamen, > blagmen, blahmen. Cleasby & Vigfusson gloss () 'a black man, negro, i.e., an Ethiopian'; it is distinguished from the Saracens and Arabians. In romances it apparently refers to a kind of berserker. The adjective () is 'dark blue, livid', with uses ranging into 'black'. > The term was supposedly calqued in Gaelic and later in > English, hence the use of "Blue men, Blue People" in referring to the > Melungeons of Appalachia. Dennis King might know a bit more about this. The Dictionary of the Irish Language does show used in the sense 'Negro'. ( is 'blue, esp. deep blue; green (as of vegetation); dark, swarthy, black'.) I've no idea whether it was a calque; 'plunder of the swarthy Northmen' is also noted. Brian M. Scott From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Aug 12 17:57:34 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 17:57:34 GMT Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37B1A6C9.73B37AF3@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: Damien Erwan Perrotin <114064.1241 at Compuserve.com> wrote: >Tapiru is a Sumerian word whose precise meaning is "craftman working >copper by hammering it". It is very likely to be a loanword since >Sumerian does not have pollysyllabic roots and tapiru can not be >analyzed as a compound. It is very similar to an IE root with a very >similar meaning *dhebhros (craftman) found in Latin faber and Armenian >darbin (smith). Of course. I only realized the connection must be *dhebhros after sending the message. >Another hypothesis was to >suppose this word was borrowed along with the copper-working thechnics. >This technic was brought in Mesopotamia by the Halaf culture, whose >center was in Northern Iraq, but originated (the thechnic) in Eastern >Anatolia, around Catal Hu"yu"k and Arslantepe. Or the Balkans. The Sumerian for "copper" is of course (another word that's too long to be native Sumerian). PIE *Hreudh- >Anatolia has been seriously proponed as the homeland of the >Indo-European tongues (Renfrew, Gamkrelidze) or of their ancestors >(Sheratt). Their ancestors. I didn't know Sherrat agreed with me :-) ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Aug 12 18:15:27 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 18:15:27 GMT Subject: R: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <000301bee1da$603a34a0$a54a0d97@api-b0d3l6> Message-ID: "Paolo Agostini" wrote: >The Romans called _idus_ (from a former _*eidus_) the 15th day of the >months of March, May, July, and October and the 13th day of the other >months. If memory serves me well, it was the lexicographer Hesychius of >Alexandria who wrote in the 5th century "the verb _iduo_ originates from the >language of the Etruscans, from whom the Romans learned many religious rites >and customs, and it means _to divide_ because the _ides_ divide the months >in two halves". In the 5th century though Etruscan was a dead language since >three centuries at least. Beekes and van der Meer tentatively link Etruscan in the Pyrgi bilingual to ("nac thefarie veliiunas thamuce cleva etanal masan tiur unias $elace vacal etc."), where it occurs next to "masan" (the name of a month) and "tiur" (moon, month). >At the end of last century there were some scholars who maintained that the >word originated from IE _*idh_ "to be bright" (of the moon), yet the idea >was soon abandoned. Among the IE languages, the base occurs in Latin only. C.D. Buck suggests that OIr. "moon" is related to Latin , Oscan . >The word is very likely a Semitic borrowing, from the base `WD >('ayin-waw-daleth) the meaning of which is "to return (every year or >periodically); to repeat (cycle, period); to count, reckon", cfr. Aramaic >_'yidb'_ "festival"; Syriac _'eyda'_ and _'eyada'_ "ceremony, usage"; >Hebrew _'yid_ "Idolatrous festival" and _'ed_ "monthly courses, >menstruation"; Arabic _'id_ "festival" and _'iddah_ "period of time", >_'adda_ "he counted/reckoned", _'adad, 'idad, 'idda_ "number", _`a:da_ >"custom, tradition". There is also a secondary form of the same verb, i.e. >'TD ('ayin-thaw-daleth) "he counted/reckoned" from which Latin forms like >_ituo_ might derive. >According to the meaning of the Semitic base, the Latin word _*eidus_ simply >meant "a period of time; a counted number of days; a day that returns every >month". There is also Sumerian iti ~ itu, id4 "moon". Akkadian? >Latin has a number of Semitic loan-words which are due to areal contacts, >cfr. _cornu_ "horn" from Semitic _qarnu_ "horn"; _taurus_ (and Greek >_tauros_) "bull" from Semitic _tawr_ of s.m.; Well, these words are not only Latin. *k^er-n- "horn" is general IE, and *tauro- occurs in Greek, Albanian, Balto-Slavic and Germanic (Iranian too, if you count Av. staora- together with Germanic *stiur-). >_vacca_ "cow" from Semitic _*baqa_ of s.m. etc. Doubtful. Why v-? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Thu Aug 12 20:29:02 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 16:29:02 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > If one says in English: "He is eating up the food," we have a present > progressive perfective. > "He was eating up the food, " past progressive perfective; What is your definition of ``perfective''? In particular, do you think that, say Stadnard Arabic has perfective vs imperfective distinction? It looks to me like your ``perfective vs imperfective'' is my ``non-atelic vs telic'' or, ``having an overt bounder vs not so''. I base my definition on the data collected in Dahl, Tense and Aspect Systems, 1985. Perfective is the form used to refer to events considered as a whole and having a definite end point; it must be opposed to an imperfective which is seen as either neutral with regard to result/termination or explicitely denying it [which makes it unsuitable to be the narrative form.] > In fact, IMHO, the major original employment of IE -*i, which, added to > "secondary" personal endings yields the "primary" set, was to create a > "progressive" form, with "progressive" understood as designating a verbal > action regarded as a period of time during which something else happened or > was happening. The focal use of progressive is to state that a dynamic action extends across a reference moment. It does not seem to be common when duration is to be indicated. See Dahl, p.91. > While he ate the up food, I drank. = He was eating up the food (and) I > drank. English uses the progressive in more contexts than many other languages. So we need to be careful.[But even then, it seems to me that ``John was singing for ten minutes'' makes the listener think that something else is coming, unlike ``John sang for ten minutes.'' which stands by itself.] >> But languages with a perfective do not do that. As soon as the narrative is >> in the past, they use the perfective. > Pat interjects: > That does not seem to be true of Russian: pisal (impf. past); napisal (pf. > past). What is the frequency of imperfectives among the past forms in stories narrated using past forms? From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Aug 12 23:49:17 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 17:49:17 -0600 Subject: ? "Vocabulary Density" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Concerning semantic space in reconstructed languages, there is a fundamental problem. Just as we cannot reconstruct the exact phonetic nature of any segment in a proto-language, we cannot possibly reconstruct the exact semantic range of any given form in a proto-language. Given the modern phonetic correspondence set of [e], [i], [e], [e], [i], [I], and [ae], we might conclude that the proto-segment was probably a mid-front vowel, but be couldn't get any more precise than that. Now let's look at a typical Indo-European type of semantic set (I'm making this set up, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility based on what I've seen in Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uto-Aztecan, Proto-Utian, or any one of a dozen other reconstructions I've looked at). "run, escape"; "go, run away"; "go away"; "run (of a horse)"; "river flows"; etc. Now, given prior knowledge that the sound correspondences match what we already know about the proto-language, what is the exact semantic range of the proto-form? It could be a very broad form entailing all these meanings from which the daughters narrowed the meaning after adding other forms from elsewhere for the broad form (e.g., 'pig' in OE meant both the live and the dead animal, but now just means the dead one after the introduction of 'pork'). It could also be that the proto-form was restricted in meaning to, say, "river flows" and that the other daughters have broadened the meaning to include other notions of rapid movement away from the speaker (e.g., "ship" expanding from just a noun for a vessel on the sea to now meaning either a vessel on the sea or in space as well as the act of moving goods either by sea, truck or train). I agree with Lloyd's assertion that a strict one-to-one semantic match doesn't necessarily reflect reality, but the problem in establishing a genetic relationship between two languages is that once a little semantic leeway is allowed, it becomes far too easy for that semantic leeway to allow us to match anything to anything. Last year sometime I spent an hour in the k section of my Shoshoni dictionaries and matched about a dozen words between Shoshoni /k/ and English /k/ with plausible semantic leeway. Two or three of those words even had a two-consonant match (like kaan 'rat' and con 'deceptive criminal'). With the possibility of chance resemblances high enough as it is (especially when matching t, p, k, s, m, and n), we can't let our imaginations get carried away by allowing semantic leeway as well. Once firm phonological correspondences have been established with regular shift identified, then we have a scientific check on the plausibility of any given semantic match. Without the prior establishment of a genetic relationship with firm sound correspondences, however, semantic leeway must be avoided. -- John E. McLaughlin Assistant Professor Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From dwanders at pacbell.net Thu Aug 12 17:17:18 1999 From: dwanders at pacbell.net (dwanders at pacbell.net) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 17:17:18 -0000 Subject: "UCLA IE Studies, vol. 1" Message-ID: Announcing a collection of papers in Indo-European studies by faculty and students of the UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies: UCLA INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES, Volume 1 (July, 1999) edited by Vyacheslav V. Ivanov and Brent Vine 331 pages / $12 (including postage) [order form below] - CONTENTS: PHONOLOGY Greek rhiza 'root' and 'Schwa Secundum' Brent Vine MORPHOLOGY A Lexical Analysis of Simple *-r/n- Heteroclisis in Proto-Indo- European Jay Friedman Latin -inare/-inari Brent Vine (MORPHO)SYNTAX Word Order Change in Umbrian: From Postpositions to Prepositions Christopher Wilhelm Indo-European Syntactic Rules and Gothic Morphology Vyacheslav V. Ivanov WURZELN, WORTER UND SACHEN Aggression and Sustenance: Driving (*ag'-) and Beating (*gwhen-) Symbiosis in (Proto-)Indo-European Raimo Anttila Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European Vyacheslav V. Ivanov An Ancient Name for the Lyre Vyacheslav V. Ivanov Old Novgorodian Nevide, Russian nevidal' : Greek aide:los Vyacheslav V. Ivanov A Note on the Duenos Inscription Brent Vine BOOK REVIEWS Remarks on a So-Called Encyclopedia of Language (review of David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd ed., 1997) Bengt Lofstedt Recent Work from St. Petersburg, I (Classical and Indo-European Linguistics, Celtic Studies) Brent Vine Recent Work from St. Petersburg, II (Balkan Studies, Slavic Linguistics and Ethnolinguistics) Vyacheslav V. Ivanov ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ORDER FORM (please print out, or produce something similar) Name _________________________________ Mailing address ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ No. of copies ordered (@ $12 ea. [or equivalent in foreign currency], incl. postage): _______ I enclose a check (payable to "UCLA FOUNDATION") in the amount of: $ ________ mail orders to: Brent Vine Program in IE Studies, UCLA 100 Dodd Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417 / USA (questions: vine at humnet.ucla.edu) From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 18 04:31:21 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 23:31:21 -0500 Subject: Oops! Message-ID: Dear IEists: Through a series of computer problems, I have lost my INBOX and SENT folders. For those of you with whom I was discussing this or that, would you kindly send me a copy of your last response to proto-language at email.msn.com if you feel it might be of interest to continue the discussion. Thank you. Pat Ryan From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Aug 14 04:54:03 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 00:54:03 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Wednesday, August 11, 1999 10:38 AM ><< At 23:15 19/07/99 EDT, wrote: >My hypothesis for the origin of the East-European -ch in Walach and the like: >a derivative ending,... still productive as -ak in Slavic (but also as an >adjective forming suffix in Greek -ako's...>> >>>From a post sent to me: <or was a place called Kastrorachi.>> I suppose this might be a case of -achi >being attached to a place name. >S. Long "Wallach" is clearly a sort of Latinisation of East Slavic volox- < Common Slavic *volx- (cf. Polish Wloch, Czech vlach, etc.). The -ach in Wallach is NOT/NICHT/NE/NEM/IKKI/DDIM, etc.etc. related to Slavic -ak . Common Slavic *volx may be seen as a borrowing from germanic cf. Old English wealh pl. wealas, Robert Orr From pagos at bigfoot.com Fri Aug 13 05:06:01 1999 From: pagos at bigfoot.com (Paolo Agostini) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 07:06:01 +0200 Subject: R: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On 12 August 1999 10:04 Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> The word is very likely a Semitic borrowing, from the base `WD >> ('ayin-waw-daleth) the meaning of which is "to return (every year or >> periodically); to repeat (cycle, period); to count, reckon Pat comments: >Yes, $-w-d is a little strange in producing so many derivatives with -i/y-; >and probably $(a)id- would have been heard by Romans as id- but is it not a >little complicated to assume that the medial -w-, which shows up in few of >the Arabic derivatives, somehow gets metathesized to final position to >produce I:du:s rather than *I:dus? There's no metathesis, Pat. The verb is a so-called "verbum mediae infirmae", (I think we could translate this expression in English as "verb having an unstable second radical"). You might wish to learn abt the behaviour of this and similar verbs as occurring in the oldest Semitic language we know by checking Von Soden, W.: _Grundriss der Akkadischen Grammatik_. Rome, 1995 (3), p. 179-180. Cheers Paolo Agostini From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Aug 13 07:05:34 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 08:05:34 +0100 Subject: nasal pres / root aor Message-ID: Thanks for your full reply, Jens. It deserves good thought - but I want to ask a quick question. You give examples of nasal present + root aorist from Tocharian, Baltic, and Hittite. The options for PIE aorists appear to have been root, -s- or the rare reduplicated aorist. Leaving aside the reduplicated aorist, because it scarcely counts, that leaves root or -s- for most verbs. Now Baltic has no -s- aorist, and I believe that Hittite doesn't either. Doesn't this mean the evidence from those languages is meaningless? Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 08:46:50 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 09:46:50 +0100 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? In-Reply-To: <003c01bee4c2$115abc20$479ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > But surely taking as a null hypothesis a formulation like: "No > languages are related", which has been disconfirmed --- > *repeatedly*, is useless? No. It's merely that, in seeking a relation between some *particular* languages, the null hypothesis is "These *particular* languages are not related." Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 08:58:32 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 09:58:32 +0100 Subject: Basque-Yeniseian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > In fact, I'm sure that after Stefan gets back from > Siberia he's going to get together with Larry to formulate a > Basque-Yeniseian language family :> Oh, this has already been done, by John Bengtson in a series of publications and by Merritt Ruhlen in chapter 4 of his 1994 book On the Origin of Languages (the Stanford book, not the Wiley one). The comparisons, in my view, are woeful, and I have criticized them severely. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Aug 13 09:44:00 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 05:44:00 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/13/99 3:07:50 AM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> But even if Out of Africa is correct you've never established the point where it corresponds to a language or languages. So that separation date is an arbitrary correlation as far as what left Africa - e.g., the evacuation of New Guinea and 500 languages leave. <> Please check out the August SciAm. This is a front-of-issue news story. Also paleobiologists have never confirmed Out of Africa. I believe it is almost entirely a statistical concept based on present populations. And as pointed out in the article, Out of Africa data is not inconsistent with Multiregionalism. <<>> <> Neanderthals and moderns coexisted. No O of A needed. And why is monogenesis needed to explain language capacity 300,000 years ago or 35,000 years ago? None of these scenarios demand language monogenesis. <<<"Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human speech sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." >>> <> Why? Who says those Australians had language at the time? The two events have no necessary connection. <<...speech and language are two different things. The ability to speak obviously does not presuppose modern language abilities. I don't propose a date for language evolution.>> Which means you are saying that modern language could have only started 40,000 years ago. <<...I suspect that language was the key to modern human expansion from Africa throughout the rest of the world.>> I like that, but it's hard to buy. What you actually need is a raft or about 70,000 years to find a Bering Strait landbridge to the new world. The latter has archaelogical support. <> This is the loop of logic that defeats analysis by genetic skills. The main way you know if you have the genetic ability to speak is if you speak. But if you don't speak, it doesn't mean you don't have the genetic ability. So yes by definition you can't speak if you don't have the ability to speak. We're still at square one. Speech (hypoglossal canal-wise) may be a lot older than Out of Africa. Language (as modern speech capacity or language system) could be a lot younger. And Out of Africa could be just flat out dead wrong. So where does that leave us? Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 10:38:11 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 11:38:11 +0100 Subject: Burden of Proof out of place In-Reply-To: <80d274f9.24e44e60@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > No Burden of Proof is appropriate on the content of the question > whether all languages are ultimately related, > simply because we cannot test that question currently. I fully agree that the question `Are all languages related?' cannot be answered at present. I further believe that we will never be able to answer this question by purely linguistic means. However, there are people who disagree, one of the most prominent being Merritt Ruhlen. Ruhlen wishes to embrace the conclusion `All languages are related.' Now, in order to go about this, I maintain, he should start with the negation of this statement as his null hypothesis, and then go on to show that there is so much evidence against this null hypothesis that it is untenable and must be rejected. But that's not what he does. Instead, he *starts* with the hypothesis `All languages are related', and then proceeds to assemble what he sees as evidence in support of this last hypothesis. Amazingly enough [;-)]. he is able to find such evidence. He therefore declares that, because he has found evidence in support of his desired conclusion, it must be true. But this is completely wrongheaded. What Ruhlen *must* do, if he wants to persuade anybody, is not to try to demonstrate that his favored conclusion is supported by evidence, but rather that its contradictory -- the appropriate null hypothesis -- is so strongly disconfirmed that it cannot be maintained. To draw a crude analogy, suppose I am interested in persuading you of the truth of the proposition `All swans are white.' In this undertaking, it will be wholly inadequate for me merely to show you a whole bunch of white swans. Instead, I must undertake the more difficult task of disconfirming the contradictory, `Some swans are not white.' That is, I must adduce powerful evidence that no non-white swan is to be found anywhere. What Ruhlen does is effectively to produce a number of white swans. He has entirely failed to understand the need to disconfirm the required null hypothesis -- the contradictory of the conclusion he wants to reach -- and he has contented himself with merely assembling scraps of evidence -- or what he sees as evidence -- in support of his desired conclusion. As a result, he has completely failed to produce any grounds at all for rejecting the true null hypothesis: `Some languages are not related'. This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is enough to render Ruhlen's work vacuous, quite apart from the vast number of egregious errors in the material he cites as evidence, and quite apart from his failure to realize that lookalikes do not constitute evidence of any kind. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 11:25:38 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 12:25:38 +0100 Subject: circularity In-Reply-To: <80d274f9.24e44e60@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: [on my baseball `park effects' example] > Actually, how they work most often is that the investigator has > plausible evidence for a conclusion, and then AFTER THAT sets up a > null hypothesis which the investigator already has some reason to > think is false and can be defeated, and then proceeds to lay out the > evidence to defeat it. Oh, sure. In practice, we are hardly ever able to work through an issue in the optimal manner I have described. Real life is inevitably messier. We make mistakes and eventually correct them; new evidence becomes available; new tools become available; all sorts of things happen along the way. But how we do the work is one thing, while how we present our results in order to persuade our colleagues is another. Obviously the linguists who established the validity of the IE family did not overtly begin with the null hypothesis `These languages are not related'. But, once a sufficient amount of work had been done, the results were laid out in the handbooks, in the form of phonological and morphological correspondences which are so pervasive and so systematic that the null hypothesis is untenable. We accept IE today, not because Bopp and Grimm thought it was a neat idea, and not because the IEists have cunningly manipulated the issue, but because the evidence assembled in the handbooks against unrelatedness is overwhelming. > Notice how potentially circular this is, in the way the question > asked is designed precisely to bolster a previously drawn > conclusion! No, I can see no circularity at all. If we want to show that two or more things are related, then the only possible null hypothesis is that they are not related, and the disconfirmation of this null hypothesis is the only way of establishing the proposed relationship. There is no choice of null hypothesis; there is no scope for intellectual intimidation; and there is no circularity. The null hypothesis of unrelatedness among the IE languages is massively disconfirmed by the evidence. The null hypothesis of no park effects in baseball is likewise massively disconfirmed. But the null hypothesis of unrelatedness among the families assigned to Nostratic is at present *not* disconfirmed, and that is why few linguists accept Nostratic. It doesn't matter that there is evidence in support of Nostratic: what matters is that there is insufficient evidence to reject unrelatedness. Let me return to my baseball example. Now, thoughtful baseball fans have believed for years that park effects were real, and probably anybody who's ever watched a few games at that pitchers' graveyard called Coors Field believes in park effects. However, there exist baseball fans who do not believe in the reality of park effects. Even if there were none, it wouldn't matter, since a universally held belief does not necessarily constitute a truth. But, until recently, real evidence in favor of park effects has been sketchy and informal -- not much better than anecdotal: "Batting averages at Oakland-Alameda County Stadium have been lower than at other parks in the last few years." Observations like this one are interesting, but they don't suffice to disconfirm the null hypothesis of no park effects. Maybe OAC Stadium has just happened to see a lot of pitchers' duels recently, entirely by chance, or maybe the A's have had great pitchers. So, what that statistician did was to state the null hypothesis and then to test it statistically, with one test after another. The results are clear: the null hypothesis is massively disconfirmed by the statistical evidence to a very high level of confidence. That is, the absence of park effects could be consistent with the data only in something like one case in a trillion (I forget the precise number, but it was big). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Fri Aug 13 13:58:47 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 09:58:47 -0400 Subject: French and Gaulish numbers (was: indoeuropean/hand) Message-ID: . . . And, reading further, like I didn't have time to yesterday, it turns out that Thurneysen goes on to review the evidence of Gaulish numerals in some details; but the highest number in the evidence he cites is 'forty,' and that is formed on the petru- root. If higher Gaulish numbers have been discovered since then, I don't know. The irregularities in the eighties and nineties in French numbers would seem not to be survivals of a -consistent- Gaulish system. Of course, six score and sixteen years ago, Abraham Lincoln suggested that this kind of count was not wholly dead in English, at least as a rhetorical flourish. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Ecce domina quae fidet omnia micantia aurea esse, et scalam in caelos emit. Adveniente novit ipsa, etiamsi clausae sint portae cauponum, propositum assequitur verbo. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 15:14:38 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:14:38 +0100 Subject: Basque statistics In-Reply-To: <799937ef.24e43d68@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > While early attestation is obviously a valuable cutoff (3), > if the aim is to achieve the absolutely purest vocabulary set possible, > it may run the error of excluding much authentic native Basque > vocabulary which simply happened not to be recorded "early". > Can we rather have several "degrees of earliness", or distinctions > of WHICH sources of attestation? Trask does some of the latter, > suggesting to exclude some sources which he believes are > particularly unreliable. Of course, any cutoff criterion is likely to exclude a few genuinely native and ancient Basque words, but it will certainly also exclude a much larger number of words which are not native and ancient. And the primary object is to exclude the words which should be excluded, not to include every single word which should be included. The objective is to construct a list of those words which have the strongest claim to being native and ancient. It is therefore far more important to exclude every word which does not have a good claim to native and ancient status than it is to sweep up every word which *might* be native and ancient. First things first. > The following (4) is also perfectly reasonable, > if intended merely to achieve the "purest" possible vocabulary set, > but it also can exclude legitimate native ancient Basque vocabulary, > especially if, for example, some of that vocabulary has been borrowed > FROM Basque INTO another language or languages. [LT] >> (4) There is no reason to believe that it is shared with >> languages known to have been in contact with Basque. Well, we know for certain that Basque has taken thousands of words from Latin and Romance, while loans in the other direction are very rare and almost entirely confined to those local Romance varieties in direct contact with Basque. In fact, Basque `left (hand)', which has been widely borrowed into Ibero-Romance, is perhaps the *only* Basque word borrowed widely into Romance, apart from those borrowed in the last few years. That being so, it seems clear that words shared between Basque and its neighbors should be systematically excluded from our list, because, for any given word of this type, the probability is overwhelming that Basque has borrowed it. If Basque loans into Romance were numerous, then the existence or not of shared vocabulary would probably have to be rejected altogether as a criterion. However, such is not the case. > Nursery words may be among the most persistent in many cultures, so > I do not see a reason to flatly exclude these. Label them as > nursery words, perhaps (though the category is actually much broader > than the two examples)... I'm afraid I can't agree. Nursery words are routinely excluded from the initial stages of any comparison because they are so treacherous: they are frequently invented independently in different languages. *Once* a genetic link has been established, it is legitimate to see if any nursery words can be reconstructed for the ancestral language. But you can't use words like `mother' as evidence for a link in the first place. > And even sound-imitative words may sometimes be of use, > they can undergo regular sound changes (as for laughter > "ha-ha" becoming Russian "xoxotat' " with a>o shift). > Or more borderline, "teeny" becoming "tiny" in the English > Great Vowel Shift, regenerated (or borrowed from other dialects?) > as "teeny" again. So again, not absolutely excluding them, > but studying what difference it makes to patterning if they > are included vs. excluded. Much the same comment as with nursery words. Anyway, words like `teeny' are not so much imitative as expressive or sound-symbolic. Basque has a huge number of such words, but I am deliberately choosing not to exclude them expressly from the initial list. Why? First, because the hopeful long-rangers seeking improbable relatives for Basque have frequently cited such words as comparanda and have complained bitterly that I am being circular when I reject these words as suitable comparanda because of their expressive formation. Therefore, *demonstrating* that these words do not look like native and ancient Basque words is precisely one of the goals I hope to achieve. Second, because I am confident that these words will be ruled out by the criteria I have already listed -- notably by the requirement that a word should be found throughout the language. With only a few exceptions, expressive and sound-symbolic formations in Basque are severely restricted in distribution, being confined in each case to a small area. One of the few exceptions is ~ 'small', which satisfies all six of my criteria and will have to go into the initial list. But, in that list, it will stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, because of its utterly anomalous phonological form: (a) it has an initial voiceless plosive; (b) it has an initial coronal plosive; (c) it has the form CVCV with plosives in both C positions and a voiceless plosive in the second C position; (d) it exhibits a unique regional variation in form. In my view, this will be more than enough to remove the word from the second version of the list, or at least to earn it a flag as an anomalous item. Even though it exists everywhere, and even though it is recorded exceptionally early (about 1400), it looks as much like a native and ancient Basque lexical item as `pizza' looks like a native and ancient English word. > Even asking that a word be found in all or many dialects is not a simple > criterion: > There are other subsidiary criteria which can reinforce or undermine > the probabilities that a word was ancient Basque, which can be > combined with information about WHICH dialects it is attested in, > not just how many of them or which branches of the dialect family tree. Agreed, but. There exist words which are shared between the eastern and western dialects of Basque but which are unattested in the central dialects. By the peripherality criterion, these words are good candidates for ancient status: they look like words which were once universal in the language but which have been lost from central dialects. But I still prefer to exclude such words from our initial list. Once that initial list is set up, then these east-west words are the next group to look at, to see if they too have the phonological shapes of native and ancient words. But I don't think they ought to be included at the first stage. There are hundreds of words found in all dialects: let's look at those first. > My point in all of the above is that using simple cutoffs is a kind of > rush-to-judgement, the opposite of the ability to delay judgements > which is the hallmark of many good research personalities. > The reason to avoid simple cutoffs is because it throws away potentially > important data. Again I can't agree. First, cutoffs are not a rush to judgement: they are merely common prudence, a desire to advance as slowly and as carefully as possible. Second, nothing is thrown away. All data remain available for later consideration, after an initial list is obtained. As I stressed above, the first goal is to exclude questionable words, not to avoid excluding genuine ones. > But there is every reason to USE every one of the criteria > (those which Larry Trask expressed as cutoffs), > to use them as LABELS on the vocabulary items, > which in a computer database can be taken into consideration > whenever any question is asked of the database. Sure, but that's a different exercise. > In most studies of canonical forms, ones which do attempt to purify > vocabulary lists, I would expect there is a statistical tendency > known as regression towards the mean, that is, some reinforcement of > universally typologically dominant patterns, such as CV-CV(-CV) > syllable structure. It would be where we find that deviations from > such universal patterns are reinforced statistically by steps of > "purifying" a vocabulary set that we would have the most interesting > characteristics perhaps attributable to an early or proto-language. Well, I am unwilling to assume in advance that CV syllable structures must have been typical of Pre-Basque. In fact, my preliminary work suggests strongly that Pre-Basque had an enormous proportion of vowel-initial words, probably totaling at least 50% of the recoverable lexicon, and possibly more. This I consider unusual, though a query last year on the LINGUIST List turned up a few other languages with the same property. Romance languages generally have a much lower proportion of vowel-initial words -- for example, a quick trawl of my biggest Spanish dictionary suggests that about 25% of Spanish words are vowel-initial. So, if we assume that we should automatically be preferring C-initials, we are likely to start preferring Romance words to native Basque words. Advance assumptions about what we `ought' to find are dangerous. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Aug 13 16:11:21 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:11:21 GMT Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <000201bee502$1b336180$c070fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >What is the frequency of imperfectives among the past forms in stories >narrated using past forms? Lower than the perfective of course, unless the author is being very negative (negative sentences tend to have imperfective: if it didn't happen, the action wasn't completed). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 13 16:32:46 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 12:32:46 EDT Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance Message-ID: Jon Patrick writes: >The idea is that the distance between languages is represented by the >series of changes that occur to a large set of words in moving from their >parent form to their daughter forms, so that distance apart is not measured >between the daughter languages but rather by their distance from their >parent. We feel this better represents the real world process. This is a crucial conceptual change, that can lead to much progress in Comparative / Reconstructive linguistics. I certainly hope that various data sets can be used with the methods Patrick describes, to observe what the results are. But as in any creation of any proposed tool, we must at the same time be evaluating the tool itself, not taking it for granted. Patrick quoted me including this: > and to CREATE more such tools by discovering what ways of > handling the data are robust across what kinds of intervening changes. How do we know whether the proposed tool is robust across different kinds of changes and different real-world situations? We must evaluate the tool against cases where we think we know what answers it should give, and try to see what parameters do limit or might limit its extrapolation to cases where we have no independent basis for drawing a conclusion. A study of the work of Ringe and company on the family tree of Indo-European, in comparison with the method proposed by Jon Patrick, could be interesting. I would think, from the brief description Patrick supplied, and from what I have read of Ringe's work, that Patrick would want a larger quantity of computerized data than was put into the data set used by Ringe? We now have an international standard computer Code, Unicode, which contains most of the characters needed for transliteration (Latin-standard-based letters) and for phonetic transcription (IPA). It would be useful to try to establish a standard for Comparative Data sets, into which all existing computer data sets can be translated, so that the massive sets of data can be made available for studies such as this. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Fri Aug 13 17:27:16 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 19:27:16 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: PATRICK C. RYAN wrote >There is a *H{2}am- in Pokorny meaning 'grasp'. But, like Pokorny, I believe >this is probably the basis for the entries under *me:-. true, but Pokorny's work is from 1959, when Lydian was not fully known and its IE character was not recognized by everyone. Breton is not very much known outside Celtic countries and most scholars use Welsh instead (where Afan is not recorded). And a true Breton Etymological Dictionnary has still to be written. So that *am was mostly known through Latin, what restricted comparative study. As for me, I would favor an H2em etymology. An evolution from grasp to kiss is well recorded in French and the evolution from "love" to "kiss" well recorded in Slavic tongues. >(...) I propose that IE *H and AA *? are the results of Nostratic *? but that >AA *?(i/a) produced Egyptian j. That is possible,( I am not a specialist of AA) but I would like to see cognates from other AA tongues which would have never been in contact with IE tongues. Egyptian has come into contact with Anatolian tongues (which did have the root), Indian tongues (in Mitanni and, shortly, in Syria), and some tongues of the Egean which could be related to IE (philistine, Cretan), this to avoid borrowing from either side, or from another source Damien Erwan Perrotin From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Fri Aug 13 17:42:13 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 19:42:13 +0200 Subject: Latin tapiru Message-ID: Wolfgang Behr wrote >if it is _tibira_ (later also_tabira_) 'metal-worker' you are >talking about here yes, it is, but the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonnants is not easy to do in Sumerian, due to the nature of the script and (overall) its use by Akkadian speakers. I think that Gernot Wilhelm has conclusively shown that we are dealing with a loan from Hurritic, i.e. an "agent-orientated resultative _-iri/e_ participle" (Wilhelm), or "antipassive-participle", derived from the Hurr. root _tab/taw_ [w = u+subscript arch) 'to cast (metal)'. In Hurr., this root has the derivations _tabali_ 'copper-founder' and _tabiri_ 'he, who has cast' (Otten). Possible, even if it is hard to be conclusive about such a badly known tongue as Hurrian (whose earliest records are posterior to the death of Sumerian, so that we do not know how it was like by 3000 B.C). Moreover, we know that Hurrian has been submitted to Indo-Aryan influences, and the Hurrian speaking area seems to be outside the region of the development of Copper metalurgy, which is closer from Hattian speakings areas Even if we accept the relationship, we have still to explain why three unrelated tongues share the same word for the same relatively recent activity. Note also that it is not the only IE looking word in Sumerian. We have also temen (foundations of a temple) urudu (ore) sah (pig), more doubtfull however Damien Erwan Perrotin From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Fri Aug 13 18:06:18 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:06:18 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote >Or the Balkans. The Sumerian for "copper" is of course >(another word that's too long to be native Sumerian). PIE >*Hreudh- the link seems tentative, but I am skeptical about a Balkanic origin. Relationships between Balkans and Mesopotamia are quite scarce at such an early date. Moreover Copper metalurgy in Mesopotamia originated in Catal Huyuk around 6000 B.C and then spreadt eastwards. In Balkans, we have to wait until 4000 - 3000 B.C. So that an Anatolian origin is more likely. >Their ancestors. I didn't know Sherrat agreed with me :-) He did postulate that IE was a kind of koine, or trade language wich developed on the european coast of the black sea, around 4000 B.C.The basis of this tongue would have been the language of the agarian cultures of Anatolia which colonized Europe around 6000 B.C. (quoted inthe postface of Mallory's In search of the Indo-Europeans). That is the thesis I personnaly favor, albeit I would rather place IE in the mixt cultures of the steppe-agrarian cultures inteface, as Usatovo or Cernavoda, in a context of drastic social, technological and political change. A kind of Copper Age Swahili :-) By the way, that is the only way to explain the likely (according to me) relationship between Etruscan and IE, as it would be an archeological non-sense to place the ancestors of Etruscans in Crimea. Damien Erwan Perrotin From pagos at bigfoot.com Fri Aug 13 18:56:54 1999 From: pagos at bigfoot.com (Paolo Agostini) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:56:54 +0200 Subject: R: R: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: On 13 August 1999 12:26 Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Beekes and van der Meer tentatively link Etruscan in the >Pyrgi bilingual to ("nac thefarie veliiunas thamuce cleva >etanal masan tiur unias $elace vacal etc."), where it occurs next >to "masan" (the name of a month) and "tiur" (moon, month). They might be right. Nonetheless, the fact that the word occurs in the bilingual (that is Phoenician and Etruscan) Laminae of Pyrgi supplies further support to the Semitic origin of the word. The Phoenician/Punic influx in Caere/Pyrgi was very strong. An archaeological finding in Pyrgi showed the presence, near the temple of Ishtar, of a peculiar building with seventeen small cells (the total number of cells was very likely 20) with a large scope and several altars in front of them: Archaeologists assume that this might have been the sacrarium (sanctuary) where the priestesses of the Phoenician goddess Ishtar practized the sacred prostitution. A mention of this custom is possibly to be found in Plautus where he accuses the Etruscan girls of prostituting themselves _tusco more_ ("the Etruscan way") in order to raise their dowry. Another peculiarity of some tombs found in the area of Pyrgi / Caere (Cerveteri) is the inscription _mutna, mutana_ meaning "sepulchre" or "tomb". The word does not occur elsewhere in Etruria. It is very likely a compound word from mut- + -na, and I am prone to link the first part of it to Phoenician MWT "death, dead". >There is also Sumerian iti ~ itu, id4 "moon". This might be the ultimate origin of _idus_, yet the word arrived in the Italic / Latin world much later. Akkadian, Aramaic or Phoenicio-Punic might have played an important role in the transmission of particular Kulturwoerter. For example, Sabatino Moscati in his book "Italia Punica" (Rusconi. Milano, 1995) maintains that the Phoenicio-Punic influence in Italy has been largely underestimated. And let's not forget that Caere / Pyrgi are only 50 km away from Rome. [BTW, if you listen to an Arab when he pronounces the word _'id al fitr_ or _'id al kabir_ "the great festival" (that is the last day of the month of Ramadhan) you will easily realize why the 'ayin was vocalized as an /e/ in _*eidus_] >>Latin has a number of Semitic loan-words which are due to areal contacts, >>cfr. _cornu_ "horn" from Semitic _qarnu_ "horn"; _taurus_ (and Greek >>_tauros_) "bull" from Semitic _tawr_ of s.m.; >Well, these words are not only Latin. *k^er-n- "horn" is general >IE, and *tauro- occurs in Greek, Albanian, Balto-Slavic and >Germanic (Iranian too, if you count Av. staora- together with >Germanic *stiur-). Possibly, Bovidae were first domesticated and used for agriculture in the Near East, and it seems that the Semitic Kulturwoerter related thereto spread very far. >>_vacca_ "cow" from Semitic _*baqa_ of s.m. etc. >Doubtful. Why v-? You are right. I should have written _*baqa'_ and/or _*bhaqa'_. Cfr. also Turkic _byq_, _buqa_ and _byqa_, Russian _byq_, Bulgarian _bik_, Hungarian _bika_ "bull" &tc.. All these words are likely to originate from the Semitic root BQ' (beth-qoph-'ayin) "to cleave, split, break open" (i.e. the ground) -- cfr. the forms having an _R_ as the third radical as in Hebrew _baqar_ "cattle, herd, oxen" and Aramaic_Syriac _baqara_ "cattle, herd". I'm afraid this answer of mine is severely off-topic for the IE-list, and I apologize for this. Cheers Paolo Agostini From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca Fri Aug 13 20:41:27 1999 From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (Stephane Goyette) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:41:27 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Cent" and "sans" are homophonous in Quebec French (as indeed in all overseas varieties of French), so that there is no need on the part of Rick Mc Callister to assume us to have better auditory perception than the rest of humanity, flattering though the idea might be to some of us. Stephane Goyette University of Ottawa [ moderator snip ] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Aug 13 21:54:28 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 17:54:28 -0400 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? In-Reply-To: <003c01bee4c2$115abc20$479ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > But surely taking as a null hypothesis a formulation like: "No languages are > related", which has been disconfirmed --- *repeatedly*, is useless? For any two languages, the null hypothesis is that those languages aren't related. This is not the same as what you just said. The hypothesis as you've phrased it would be the null hypothesis for the question, "Are any languages related?" That question was answered two centuries ago. In that sense, yes, the hypothesis as you've phrased it is of little use. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Aug 13 18:55:58 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 19:55:58 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: In reply to Rick: Granted, and I apologise for misunderstanding your contrast between Africans and modern humans. Incidentally, where do Australian Aborigines fit into this? Wasn't there some evidence (or suggestion) in the news about 18 months ago, that the Aborigines were very much older than had been previously thought? How do the time scales fit together? Pete From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Aug 13 19:52:22 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:52:22 +0100 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? Message-ID: >> (iv) time of attestation. > I don't understand the problem here; could you say more? I mean nothing spectacular - only the obvious stuff that much information is lost, so classification becomes less clear. Imagine a world in which Latin was attested poorly and only at a late stage. A researcher finds the word for "a hundred" and one or two other such words, and so classifies it as a satem language. Or a world in which Baltic once had -s- aorists, but lost them before the time of our first texts. Or a world in which Albanian originally had reflexes of the Baltic-Germanic -m- dative plurals, but no trace is left. There is still a strong tendency to read back into PIE as a whole, the structures we find in those IE languages which are found very early, especially Greek and Sanskrit. If we had Germanic from the same date, our reconstruction might look rather different. If we did not have Hittite, the Greek-Sanskrit model would seem more certain. So I guess I'm only saying that we need to remember how widely separated chronologically the IE languages are - which I'm sure you don't anyone to remind you of! Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Aug 13 19:17:38 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:17:38 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: > Pat said: > According to Lehmann, the aorist is +momentary, hence -durational. It can still be applied to an action which continued over a long period. For example, ebasileuse in Greek. This would be used when the length of duration was not the focus. At the risk of teaching my grandmothers to suck eggs, let's remember that in Classical Greek, although there are several uses for the present and aorist stems, two contrasts stand out as very common, if not normative, and neither really has the aorist as "+momentary": (i) past tense: imperfect vs aorist with augment. Here the distinction (IMHO) is not duration / momentary but rather background event / main event. The imperfect tells us that something was going on before, during and/or after the main event. If you like, the distinction is between description and narrative. The same usage is found strongly in Latin. (ii) non-indicative (leaving aside the aorist participle, which retains a past flavour): here the aorist is neutral, so the use of the present stem puts a marked stress on continuity. So the distinction is not between two members, both of them marked, but between continuous and neutral. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Aug 16 05:33:49 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 01:33:49 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/13/99 4:16:39 AM, BMScott at stratos.net wrote: < () 'a black man, negro, i.e., an Ethiopian';... The adjective () is 'dark blue, livid', with uses ranging into 'black'.>> Well of course -madr, -madhr are very recognizable as not referring to men or madness but to a red/brown dye, for a long time quite popular among the Scandinavians - (from Rubia tinctorium or Gallium boreale) and of course bla'- might as well be black or white as blue. One would otherwise think perhaps of "Blackmoor." The basic problem with colors in the old tongues is that they often don't make any sense in our world. A very good example of semantics that just won't stay put long enough to be semantical. To help confuse things more, here's two entries from the original OED: "1225 Ancr. R. 234 - Blac as a bloamon." "1152 Erfurt Glossary "blata , pigmentum: haui-b:auum"... blo(')wa,... perhaps cognate with L. flavus - yellow" And from the Old Norse list last year: <> One explanation for all of this is that ancient peoples would use the color names for pigments irrespective of "color" or even contrary to how these matched with other pigments or natural colors - which often end up being not what we think of as colors at all. Here's a part of a post on Celtic colors from before this list had archives: <> Dennis King In a message dated 11/22/98 3:07:37 PM... In the same thread I recall one post which insisted that we can certainly identify some ancient colors just from common expertise, e.g., blood is always red. To which the next post replied, 'except in Homer, where blood is always black." My suspicion is that in the old days, people did not match colors but things - among which natural color or dyes might or might not be the common element. How else could we explain the form 'blake' turning up in the old text to mean both black and white? Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 16 13:56:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:56:14 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <001201bedf78$07930de0$69078cd4@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: > Consider a co-ordinate sentence with suppressed second subject: > (a) In an accusative language, or a language with a passive construction, it > appears as: > A(agent) verb(passive) B(grammatical subject; logical object) and > verb > If the second verb is passive, this should mean that B suffers both actions > (and presumably A is the agent of both). Not necessarily: `Thomas a Becket was criticized by the King and was murdered.' > But if the second verb is active, > it means that B suffers the first action, then performs the second. For > example, Latin: > a Paula pulsatur Marcus et necatur (odd word order, but you get the point) > by Paula is-beaten Marcus(subject) and is-being-killed. > and > a Paula pulsatur Marcus et ridet > by Paula is-beaten Marcus(subject) and he laughs. But, assuming these are grammatical in Latin, surely `Marcus' is the subject of all the verbs, since it alone stands in the subject case. > (b) What happens in a truly ergative language? Don't know what is meant by `a truly ergative language', I'm afraid. > A(ergative) verb(of action) B(absolute) and verb > Am I right in thinking that if the second verb can take an ergative subject, > A is the agent of both (and B is presumably the object); whereas if the > verb cannot take an ergative subject (i.e. it is a description rather than > an action), then either B must be the subject (as Dixon claims for > Dyirbal?), or the sentence is meaningless or ungrammatical (Is this the > case in Basque, Larry?) Not all ergative languages have passives. Basque has one, but the passive does not permit the overt expression of an agent, so the examples above cannot be expressed literally in Basque. In general, when two verb phrases are coordinated in Basque, the subject of the first is also the subject of the second. This is so regardless of case-marking. If the two VPs differ in transitivity, then the overt NP subject takes the case-marking appropriate to the closer verb, but that doesn't interfere with its being the logical subject of the other verb. > I guess that different ergative languages will interpret this in > different ways, but is there any mileage in pursuing co-ordinate sentences > in order to reveal a difference between passive languages and ergative > languages? Coordination is, in generally, a potentially useful test for establishing shared syntactic properties, but it doesn't always give useful results. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Aug 13 02:52:49 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 22:52:49 EDT Subject: The UPenn IE Tree Message-ID: In a message dated 8/11/99 12:29:18 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote: << PIE / \ / Anatolian /\ / \ / Tocharian /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Celtic Italic /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Greek Armenian /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / / \ / / \ Indo- Balto- Germanic Iranian Slavic >> I simply must ask some questions about what this means. 1. I assume the branching off in this 'Stammbaum' carries the inference of being chronological in the sense of earlier or later separations. (Rather than for example the degree of linguistic difference between languages.) This may go without saying, but I'm just checking. So here at this first juncture: PIE / \ / Anatolian Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian? It would have to wouldn't it? Then where along that left side diagonal does PIE cease to exist? I've addressed this issue in exchanges with Miguel Carrasquer Vidal awhile ago and I don't know where they ended up. (I think I lost hold of it when I asked whether PIE could have been a lingua franca of sorts or a Latin.) This question of when PIE ends strikes me as an important question, for a number of reasons. First, reconstruction always seems to proceed as if *PIE were a static language - but coexistence could have meant centuries of potential change within PIE itself. Second, it means that languages coexisting with PIE could have been influenced by or influenced PIE after splitting off. And third it would mean that PIE could have been influenced by non-PIE influences between splittings. And logically either PIE either coexisted with some of these branch-offs. Or they all branched off at one time and PIE evaporated. OR PIE never diappeared but turned directly into one or a few of these languages, which would be direct rather than indirect descendents. I think those are all the choices. There are no others, but each one should result in completely different reconstructions of *PIE. 2. You wrote: <<... Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian are in a single sub-branch of the IE family together, but Balto-Slavic and Germanic are in this branch as well.>> If that's the case, then what did that whole subbranch split off from? At the point of the split of Greek Armenian, the left line is still there. Above are the Italo-Celtic, Tocharian, Anatolian branches. Presumably they are distinguishable from whatever it is that is out there that might be called Proto-BS-Germanic-Indo-Iranian. What does this mean for reconstruction of *PIE? What if it was Proto-GrAr-BSGer-IIr that was the branch off and Italo-Celtic was the true remainder of the PIE 'trunk'? (I don't think you can favor one or the other branch - why should one be seen as more lineal to PIE than the other?) In that case, Italo-Celtic would preserve PIE best and the other branch would be the split-off, innovating away from the core. And misleading us as to what PIE was like. 3. <> How does the team view the new reconstruction of the obstruent system (Hopper/Gamkrelidze/etc.) that suggests that Grimm's Law actually reflects archaism rather than innovation? With that view, would Balto-Slavic become a sister to Germanic that came under the influence of IIr, ditching that archaism like IIr? 4. Just hypothetically, if we were to assume that PIE was nothing but very early Greek, how would this diagram and the findings behind it change? Would the tree look all that different? Would it have Greek-Armenian at the bottom of the main stem? Or would it? Does this diagram seem to put IIr in that last position (or IIr-BS-Gr) - does that possibly reflect a sampling artifact favoring Sanskrit, Germanic and Lithuanian/Slavic - the favored sources in many *PIE reconstructions? Regards, Steve Long From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Aug 13 05:24:56 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 01:24:56 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: <7ba2e233.24e4e281@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I simply must ask some questions about what this means. > 1. I assume the branching off in this 'Stammbaum' carries the inference of > being chronological in the sense of earlier or later separations. (Rather > than for example the degree of linguistic difference between languages.) > This may go without saying, but I'm just checking. Yes, that is correct. Note that this rooted phylogeny includes no intrinsic claim about the _absolute_ dating of the branchings; it is only a set of claims about the relative dating. However, given that the latest possible date for the PIE unity is c. 4000 B.C.E. (pace Renfrew), and that Hittite and Sanskrit are both attested by the middle of the second millenium B.C.E., then all of this branching must have happened in the space of around two or three millenia. > So here at this first juncture: > PIE > / \ > / Anatolian > Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian? It would have to wouldn't > it? This is a question of terminology. In strict terms, we could call this something like proto-Tocharo-Italo-Celtico-Greco-Armenian-Balto-Slavic- Germanic-Indo-Iranian. When we're talking about this many undifferentiated branches, such terminology is obviously unwieldy. In more usable terms, we would talk about "the innovations shared by all the IE branches except Anatolian", etc. Ringe does, however, frequently use such terms as "Proto-Italo-Celtic" or "Proto-Greco-Armenian". He sometimes uses the term "core languages" to mean Greco-Armenian plus Indo-Balto-Germanic. > Then where along that left side diagonal does PIE cease to exist? > I've addressed this issue in exchanges with Miguel Carrasquer Vidal awhile > ago and I don't know where they ended up. (I think I lost hold of it when I > asked whether PIE could have been a lingua franca of sorts or a Latin.) > This question of when PIE ends strikes me as an important question, for a > number of reasons. First, reconstruction always seems to proceed as if *PIE > were a static language - but coexistence could have meant centuries of > potential change within PIE itself. Second, it means that languages > coexisting with PIE could have been influenced by or influenced PIE after > splitting off. And third it would mean that PIE could have been influenced > by non-PIE influences between splittings. Yes; I think Ringe would agree with everything you've just said (altho I think that he would reject particular explanations in terms of influence by unattested non-IE languages as unsupported by evidence; but otherwise, I think he'd agree). In particular, I've heard Ringe say things like, "such-and-such verbal system was just starting to get off the ground when Tocharian branched off", and discuss how that verbal system further developed along the left spine of the tree. I'd have to go back to my class notes to get the details; I'm in over my head at this point (Germanic phonology is my main area; IE is a background interest). > And logically either PIE either coexisted with some of these branch-offs. Or > they all branched off at one time and PIE evaporated. OR PIE never > diappeared but turned directly into one or a few of these languages, which > would be direct rather than indirect descendents. That's just a question of terminology. PIE ultimately gave rise to all of the attested PIE languages. We can quibble over what the labels should be for the intermediate nodes in the tree, but that's just a matter of nomenclature. What the branchings _mean_, however, are that there were innovations in each branch not shared with the other. > I think those are all the choices. There are no others, but each one should > result in completely different reconstructions of *PIE. No, it wouldn't; no. > 2. You wrote: <<... Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian are in a single > sub-branch of the IE family together, but Balto-Slavic and Germanic are in > this branch as well.>> > If that's the case, then what did that whole subbranch split off from? At > the point of the split of Greek Armenian, the left line is still there. > Above are the Italo-Celtic, Tocharian, Anatolian branches. Presumably they > are distinguishable from whatever it is that is out there that might be > called Proto-BS-Germanic-Indo-Iranian. > What does this mean for reconstruction of *PIE? What if it was > Proto-GrAr-BSGer-IIr that was the branch off and Italo-Celtic was the true > remainder of the PIE 'trunk'? (I don't think you can favor one or the other > branch - why should one be seen as more lineal to PIE than the other?) In > that case, Italo-Celtic would preserve PIE best and the other branch would be > the split-off, innovating away from the core. And misleading us as to what > PIE was like. Once again, this is merely a matter of terminology. There is no sense in which one branch is the "main" branch, unless it means that there is a greater number of later branchings within that branch. > 3. < Balto-Slavic, but that the pre-Germanic speakers came into the political > orbit of the prehistoric Italo-Celtic peoples and absorbed loan words from > them at some date prior to Grimm's Law.>> > How does the team view the new reconstruction of the obstruent system > (Hopper/Gamkrelidze/etc.) that suggests that Grimm's Law actually reflects > archaism rather than innovation? Ringe rejects that hypothesis in no uncertain terms. He discusses this in his monograph on the relative chronology of the Tocharian sound changes. Here are the arguments in favor of the glottalic hypothesis, and the counterarguments. Pro-glottalic: 1. The phonological inventory of PIE as it is traditionally reconstructed is not attested among the modern languages of the world, and therefore is not a possible phonological inventory; the reconstruction must be wrong. 2. Under the glottalic hypothesis, you can dispense with Grimm's Law; Germanic and Armenian simply preserve a more archaic state of affairs. Thus, the glottalic hypothesis is more economical. 3. One dialect of Armenian "preserves" the glottalic system unchanged. 4. Under the traditional reconstruction, the rarity of initial *b is somewhat odd. A constraint against *p' is pretty normal among attested phonological systems similar to the proposed glottalic PIE system. 5. The glottalic hypothesis gives a more natural account of the constraints on what consonants can co-occur in a root. (I'm not going to go into this since I'd have to type two whole pages of my class notes, but I'll just note that the argument has been made.) Ringe gives half a point for #5. For the others: 4. *b is statistically uncommon in PIE, but not entirely prohibited. An inviolable constraint against *b might be odd, but the constraint (if any) isn't inviolable. 3. The dialect of Armenian in question is spoken smack up against Georgian, which has a system like that of Armenian; it looks like a case of a Sprachbund among apparently unrelated languages, which has happened before elsewhere. 2. It's true that the glottalic hypothesis doesn't need Grimm's Law for Gmc and Armenian, but it _does_ need an anti-Grimm's Law for all the other branches of PIE. So the economy argument fails. 1. Most importantly, the typological argument is wrong. It's just plain wrong. There are attested languages in Indonesia with a consonant inventory similar to that of traditionally reconstructed PIE. It's perhaps the most spectacular case ever of the field being led astray by a typological argument. There is at least one more subtle argument which I'm not going to try to reproduce here; it is discussed in Ringe's monograph. > With that view, would Balto-Slavic become a sister to Germanic that came > under the influence of IIr, ditching that archaism like IIr? > 4. Just hypothetically, if we were to assume that PIE was nothing but very > early Greek, how would this diagram and the findings behind it change? Would > the tree look all that different? Would it have Greek-Armenian at the bottom > of the main stem? Or would it? The algorithm which the team used produces an unrooted phylogeny, i.e. it does not compute what point in the phylogeny is the root. If you picture this flat phylogeny as a web made of string lying on a table, you could pick the tree up at any node (including a leaf node) or at any point between two nodes, and assign that point in the tree as the root. I'd have to go back to the articles to give the exact arguments for rooting the tree as the team have it; I'd rather say nothing than give a misremembered argument. > Does this diagram seem to put IIr in that last position (or IIr-BS-Gr) - does > that possibly reflect a sampling artifact favoring Sanskrit, Germanic and > Lithuanian/Slavic - the favored sources in many *PIE reconstructions? It's simply a statement about characteristics which are shared by these languages and not the others. It doesn't mean that we like these languages more than the others. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 18 15:56:48 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 11:56:48 EDT Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool Message-ID: In a message dated 8/12/99 11:43:21 PM, jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au quoted: <> Perhaps what the discipline really needs here are better ways to reconstruct, rather than better ways to use reconstructions. And the answer may be - as it was in geology and paleobiology - to find ways to better correlate the data to time and place. After all, this is history. And if the evidence sometimes confuses us about what happened, it is first of a matter of history. - then language. And history at first glance can mislead us. Consider the process that geologic science went through to explain seashells found on mountains. Was it the water that rose or was it the mountains? Or was it that these were not seashells at all, but some other phenomenon that bore an accidental resemblance to seashells? All three possibilties were considered. And we should understand with some humility that the answer was then not obvious and neither was the proof. (Even Leonardo got it wrong about the seashells, but his reasoning was both contemporary and ingenious.) In ancient languages, it is not impossible that parent languages could be daughters and daughters could be parents, depending on where we place them in time. Is the first recorded language the oldest? Or is that assumption another case of history misleading us - leaving seashells on mountains? The tools needed first should get the history right, so that the apparent relationship between langauges are not merely artifacts. jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au wrote further: <> I'm wondering if there isn't a possible flaw here in using <>. Reconstructed words have already made assumptions about the relationship between the parent and the daughter languages. In fact they are nothing but a presumed relationship between the daughter languages. <> Depending on how much reconstruction of the parent you used, could this not be an artifact of the reconstructions? In *PIE, certain aspects are considered the innovations of a particular daughter language because they do not appear in the other daughter languages, and are therefore factored out of the reconstruction. If you only have two daughter languages - as you did above - how do you identify the innovation versus the original form in reconstruction? And if you decide in favor of one or the other in reconstruction, it will show up in any further use of that reconstruction. In effect, you may to some degree be measuring how the relationship between the daughters has been perceived in the reconstructions that you use, as much as anything else. I would think that the method you describe would be much more functional if it at least triangulated daughter languages. And avoided using prior reconstructions - proving itself on its own, so to speak. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 18 16:43:38 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 12:43:38 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/13/99 4:16:39 AM, Brian M. Scott wrote: << 'plunder of the swarthy Northmen' is also noted.>> And what madness is this? The Celts calling Northmen 'Galls?' A Northman (like Knut) who knew Latin could call them "Galls" right back! The standard explanation is that in Old Irish, etc., "Gall" meant foreigner because 'Gauls' were the only foreigners the Insulars knew. But it seems a bit untidy for Gaels using the names of their continental 'gaol' (relatives) to describe foreigners. Especially with the Romans around. But what if Gaelic borrowed the Germanic (e.g., Saxon) "walh" (presumably meaning foreigner)? There was apparently no initial /v/ or /w/ in Goidelic Celtic. But in medieval times, it was not uncommon for the /g/ in Gaelic to stand-in for the /w/ in English. (So that we have , e.g., "galc" - thicken cloth, fulling; from the English walk, waulk.) So we can in this manner see Germanics calling Celts (whom the Romans called Gallic), 'Walh', and Gaelic Celts picking it up, going back to the initial /g/ and calling Germanics 'Gall' - which is what the Romans called the Gallic Celts! And although there is no clear connection between Gaelic and Gallic, there is irony enough in this. Regards, Steve Long From sarant at village.uunet.lu Thu Aug 19 05:54:37 1999 From: sarant at village.uunet.lu (Nikos Sarantakos) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 07:54:37 +0200 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <004c01bee611$08cc6cc0$eb8e6395@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Well, this is my first message to this list... I read this: >-----Original Message----- >From: X99Lynx at aol.com >Date: Wednesday, August 11, 1999 10:38 AM [ moderator snip ] >>>From a post sent to me: <>or was a place called Kastrorachi.>> I suppose this might be a case of -achi >>being attached to a place name. No, the place name Kastrorachi is a compound word consisting of kastro (castle) and 'rachi' (slope in the case of mountains). Rachi is a normal Greek word, no suffix. Nikos Sarantakos From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Aug 19 07:11:02 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 03:11:02 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/18/99 7:36:25 PM, colkitto at sprint.ca wrote: <<"Wallach" is clearly a sort of Latinisation of East Slavic volox- < Common Slavic *volx- (cf. Polish Wloch, Czech vlach, etc.).>> But does this clarify things? 'Wallachia' seems to first appear in German texts. So why in the world would German writers latinize an East Slavic version of a familiar German word that presumably has already been accepted into Western and Southern Slavic? (Doesn't Wallachia looks like it could also be just plain Latinized MHGerman?) If you buy Hall, duNay, et al., then the point of first Slavic contact with the eastern European "Vlachs" is among the Southern Slavs. And place names and early records (according to duNay) suggest that the original form was 'vlahi' in Bulgarian and Serbian. The alternate form 'vlasi' is understood to be a borrowing from Avar or Hungarian 'olasi' (originally borrowed from Slavic), and 'vlasi-" is how 'vlach' occurs in modern Bulgarian and Rumanian. "Vlachi' would seem to be the way the word traveled back north and west. A different issue is when and where the Germanic 'walh' meaning Celtic or Romance speakers or perhaps even Franks, etc., first appeared in Slavic. It would appear pretty unlikely that it would be in East Slavic. It would likely have been as early as the first written appearances of the word, in Anglo-Saxon. In the 700's, Frankish annals were already mentioning Western Slavs as 'ancient allies', and Southern Slavs had already been serving in the Byzantine army for 200 years. One would presume that the word - not referring to Vlachs but to Celts or Romance-speakers - was already established in Slavic by that time. And presumably it was from the form found in AS (walh-) or in OHG (circa 800AD - /uualha/). Under these circumstances, the difference between the early Western and Southern forms (assumedly "valaki" or "volochi" versus "vlahi") may be relevant. But the East Slavic form would seem historically to appear to be later, borrowed from the south or west and somewhat irrelevant to those origins. As far as speaking of a "Common Slavic" form for a word borrowed from Germanic that supposedly was inputed uniformly across 3/4's of a continent of Slavic speakers - from the Elbe to the Ukraine - that seems terribly unlikely, doesn't it? It also seems 'Walh' is unattested in Gothic in the 4th century. Its supposed point of origin is around the Alps and the preponderance of Germanic occurences are in the west. On the face of it, it would look like Western Slavic along the Elbe or in Bohemia would have borrowed the word first and with an earlier meaning and then did apply it to Franks as Romance speakers and perhaps inhabitants of Gaul. In Balkan Slavic, it apparently didn't apply to Latin-speaking Byzantines or Franks, but to a rural Romance speaking population. On first impression, this would suggest that it came there later - after clerical and administrative Latin had pretty much left the Balkans. And that later the specific form /vlah-/ or /vlas-/ bounced back to the west to become 'Vlachi'. The original meaning of 'walh' has of course disappeared from Czech and Polish (as it has for example from Swedish) with national names taking its place, so that the Balkan form referring to "Vlachs" is all that remains. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Thu Aug 19 10:06:23 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 12:06:23 +0200 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca Date: Thursday, August 19, 1999 8:35 AM >"Cent" and "sans" are homophonous in Quebec French (as indeed in all >overseas varieties of French), so that there is no need on the part of >Rick Mc Callister to assume us to have better auditory perception than the >rest of humanity, flattering though the idea might be to some of us. >Stephane Goyette >University of Ottawa [Ed Selleslagh] As the original culprit I'm responding to this. With all due respect, I can testify from my repeated experience that people in shops in Quebec (and I heard the same pronunciation in TV messages) clearly distinguish the nasalized e and a in words like 'cent' and 'sans', both when speaking and when listening. When I asked a shop attendant for a film of 100 ASA ('cent ASA', pronounced /sa~/), she thought I said 'sans ASA' and replied : 'c'est toujours avec'; when I pointed to the 100 on the package, she said: 'Oh, vous voulez dire /se~ng/!' [or something like Fr. 'saint' with a vaguely English -ng sounding ending]. I heard these pronunciations over and over again. I don't know if this is uneducated speech, or whether the Quebecois actually think they pronounce it the same way even if they actually pronounce it differently. To my European ears, Quebec French 'cent' and 'sans' (and similar words) sound differently, and apparently to the Quebecois themselves too, otherwise the type of misunderstandings I mentioned couldn't have happened. In France they wouldn't. As Larry Trask mentioned, this is original and authentic (but archaeic) French pronunciation that got lost by convergence elsewhere. Sometimes people make distinctions they don't perceive consciously, often as a consequence of school indoctrination. In Spanish Castilian, e.g., I often hear people insert very short vowels in consonant clusters, but they all deny doing so, because of the written image they learned at school. E.g. I recently heard 'equilipse' for 'eclipse'. All Spanish speakers (like the 'Afrae aures') think all vowels, and in all positions, have the same length, but in actual speech this manifestly not so; on the other hand, they find it very hard to hear vowel length differences in other languages (shit/sheet!). Ed From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 19 13:24:12 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 09:24:12 EDT Subject: Hypothesis formation vs. testing Message-ID: There is a great confusion in the advanced sciences, or even in those which like to believe themselves advanced, between Hypothesis Testing and Hypothesis Formation. When we cannot conclusively test certain hypotheses, it is still legitimate to try to accumulate evidence that the hypotheses are plausible and worth exploring further. In a message dated 8/18/99 11:32:41 PM, Larry Trask writes: >On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >> No Burden of Proof is appropriate on the content of the question >> whether all languages are ultimately related, >> simply because we cannot test that question currently. >I fully agree that the question `Are all languages related?' cannot be >answered at present. I further believe that we will never be able to >answer this question by purely linguistic means. >However, there are people who disagree, one of the most prominent being >Merritt Ruhlen. Ruhlen wishes to embrace the conclusion `All languages >are related.' As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). Greenberg's method of comparison serves to find the CLOSEST resemblances (merely that, CLOSEST). In the Americas, his method leads him to the conclusion (no surprise) that Eskimo-Aliut is not closely related to any other Amerindian languages, and that Athabaskan / Na-Dene (with outliers) is not closely related to any other Amerindian languages, (though conceivably not as distant from them as Eskimo-Aliut ?). His actual conclusions are about relative UNRELATEDNESS of language families (notice, not about absolute unrelatedness, which he does not claim his method has the power to evaluate). Beyond that, Greenberg's methods do NOT enable him to establish any similar degree of unrelatedness among the remaining languages of the Americas. I hope I have stated that carefully enough, to make obvious that it is a matter of degree, not absolutes, and that Greenberg's method actually demonstrates the points of SEPARATION rather than the points of UNION. Greenberg's method is potentially useful in that it is likely to reveal some deep language family relationships which were not previously suspected, AS LONG AS we do not introduce systematic biases which overpower whatever residual similarities still exist despite all of the changes which obscure those deep relationships. In other words, mere noise in the data, or dirty data, if the noise or dirt are random, should not be expected to selectively bias our judgements of closeness of resemblance... [and we can study how we make such judgements to try to strengthen this component of Greenberg's method, to strengthen their robustness against noisy data and our mental failings of judgement] Back to Trask: >Now, in order to go about this, I maintain, [Ruhlen] should start with the >negation of this statement as his null hypothesis, and then go on to >show that there is so much evidence against this null hypothesis that it >is untenable and must be rejected. But that's not what he does. The last paragraph above is in complete contradiction to what Larry Trask says he agrees with ("I fully agree"...). If one believes it is not possible to test a proposition, then it is NOT REASONABLE to ask anyone else to test it. One cannot have this both ways. >Instead, he *starts* with the hypothesis `All languages are related', >and then proceeds to assemble what he sees as evidence in support of >this last hypothesis. Amazingly enough [;-)]. he is able to find such >evidence. So far, this is legitimate in principle [but on practice, see below] IF the purpose is to establish the plausibility of a hypothesis (as distinct from testing it, NOTICE!). This is how almost all hypotheses are first established as hypotheses, simply by accumulating suggestive, anecdotal, case-study evidence, in contexts in which we do not even know how to estimate chance very well. >He therefore declares that, because he has found evidence in >support of his desired conclusion, it must be true. But this is >completely wrongheaded. Here I agree with Trask, to the extent Ruhlen says something like this. (I am much less familiar with Ruhlen than with Greenberg.) >What Ruhlen *must* do, if he wants to persuade anybody, is not to try to >demonstrate that his favored conclusion is supported by evidence, but >rather that its contradictory -- the appropriate null hypothesis -- is >so strongly disconfirmed that it cannot be maintained. The contradictory of the strong claim (all related) is that there are at least two languages which are not related to each other genetically. I would doubt that Ruhlen had evidence to exclude this possibility, or that if asked clearly, he would say so. After all (trivially) there are languages for which there are only one or two words attested, and one can go on from there with very little work to find other cases where I think Ruhlen would grant there is not even a loose probability based on the data itself to establish any relationship. [Trask's example All Swans are White not repeated here, but ...] >This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is enough to >render Ruhlen's work vacuous, Not so, since Ruhlen can be treated as involved in hypothesis FORMATION not hypothesis testing. >quite apart from the vast number of >egregious errors in the material he cites as evidence, Now THAT is quite another matter, and when present in very large quantity, not merely slight differences from the analysis an expert in a particular language would offer but more serious, complete misunderstandings vitiating completely any use of particular data... it does discredit the work as a whole, and can quite legitimately, even without absolute proof of its wrong-headedness, lead reasonable people to pay no more attention to it. But note carefully the caveat above. It is NOT sufficient merely to provide minor improvements of detail to the presentation, to discredit the work. An expert can ALWAYS provide minor improvements. That itself shows nothing at all. >and quite apart >from his failure to realize that lookalikes do not constitute evidence >of any kind. Disagree flatly, unless defined circularly so that "lookalikes" means more than it says, namely so that it means "lookalikes which are known to be unrelated as cognates". If it actually means "items which look alike in sound and meaning", then of course such comparisons DO constitute PRELIMINARY evidence. Any such preliminary evidence can be discounted by showing that the resemblances are secondary and late, or that they manifest a type of sound symbolism, or in other ways. It was lookalikes in grammar and vocabulary which led to the original hypothesis of the relatedness of the Indo-European languages. Some of these turned out to be true cognates, some turned out not to be cognates, merely chance lookalikes. But the IE hypothesis thus preliminarily established withstood the discounting of some of the lookalikes as non-cognates and the reaffirmation of others a true cognates (whatever the terminology used at the time). Once again, I wish to urge us back to the FACTS. And those FACTS include whatever we can establish about how each of our tools works, where it works well and where it fails, how deep historically each tool can push us with languages of certain types or with language changes of certain types, and whatever we can establish about new tools we have not yet systematically used (such as explicit paths of historical change in sound systems and in semantic spaces, and metrics of distances along such paths of change...). We get nowhere by repeating the discrediting of STRAW MAN claims, by holding hypothesis formation to standards of absolute hypothesis testing, by counting minor corrections and improvements to data as completely discrediting use of the data when they do not, etc. etc. and so forth. The field is at an impasse in these discussions, until we return the discussion to an empirical basis. Pure philosophy will not get us much progress. Sincere best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 19 13:43:15 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 09:43:15 EDT Subject: Premature final judgements Message-ID: In a message dated 8/18/99 11:50:18 PM, Larry Trask writes: >But the null hypothesis of >unrelatedness among the families assigned to Nostratic is at present >*not* disconfirmed, and that is why few linguists accept Nostratic. Agreed. I don't accept it either. (Nor do I reject it certainly!) >It doesn't matter that there is evidence in support of Nostratic: what >matters is that there is insufficient evidence to reject unrelatedness. Wrong here. It DOES matter. Very much so. It makes the question worth investigating with better data and better tools. The major dilemma in modern comparative linguistics is how to make both the data and the tools available in such a way that new hypotheses can be reasonably considered and looked at, NECESSARILY not by people who are the primary experts all at once in ALL of the language families being considered, since no one can be such an expert in so much information. The problem with the strict absolutists (which Larry Trask is behaving as in these discussions) is that they think we have to render FINAL JUDGEMENTS on whether a hypothesis is proven or not at every step along the way. They have little room for the long withholding or deferring of judgement. If we had to render final judgement on Nostratic right now, we would have to say, of course "unproven" (to some level of certainty which is of no concern to me here). BUT WE DON'T HAVE TO RENDER FINAL JUDGEMENT NOW. If we did always have to render final judgement immediately, then (circularly) new ideas could never be investigated, because the very fact that they were new would mean that at the beginning they could not already be provable. A propos of my comments on normal reality here: >> Actually, how they work most often is that the investigator has >> plausible evidence for a conclusion, and then AFTER THAT sets up a >> null hypothesis which the investigator already has some reason to >> think is false and can be defeated, and then proceeds to lay out the >> evidence to defeat it. Trask says: >Oh, sure. In practice, we are hardly ever able to work through an issue >in the optimal manner I have described. Real life is inevitably >messier. We make mistakes and eventually correct them; new evidence >becomes available; new tools become available; all sorts of things >happen along the way. But how we do the work is one thing, while how we >present our results in order to persuade our colleagues is another. The same leeway needs to be granted to the proposers of new hypotheses today as was granted to those in the past, namely, that they cannot prove their hypotheses when they start out with them. *** To solve these unprofitable discussions, we need more and more tools AND to give people easy access to those tools. Is there for each recognized language family a web site listing the most up-to-date resources, not excluding some of the older ones which may preserve useful information which modern investigators did not choose to include in compilations? Larry Trask has created some of those tools for Basque. His views of what are the best dictionaries and other sources should be part of such a web site for Basque. For Indo-European there is now a nearly complete dictionary of verbs with their attested stems in each Indo-European language family (Rix: Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben), something which is not available for most or any other language family. My purpose in mentioning these things is that it should be possible to REFER someone with a new hypothesis to the best existing literature, not merely what is in the head of some expert who may not be interested in the the new hypothesis or even opposed to it. Only if we can refer someone in that way is it reasonable to ask that they take account of existing scholarship. And when existing scholarship is not available in an easily accessible form, it is NOT reasonable to criticize anyone for not making use of it, as too often happens. What is involved here MAY be the democratization of all academic learning. Those of us who wish to maintain high quality and reliability MUST be concerned with how to make the high quality information sources MORE easily available than the low quality ones. And to do so without engaging in censorship of unpopular hypotheses. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 19 14:22:57 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 10:22:57 EDT Subject: Excluding data Message-ID: Larry Trask today defended his criteria for what to exclude from an initial list of potential proto-Basque vocabulary. Let me start by quoting his point that he is not excluding data: >Second, nothing is thrown away. All data remain available for later >consideration, after an initial list is obtained. Of course, but the "initial" list can bias things mightily. Trask quite misunderstands my point about excessive reliance on canonical forms (CVCV vs. VCVCV etc. etc.). The criteria for selecting an "initial" list can bias us in many ways. Excluding sound-symbolic words can artificially and circularly lead us to expect a much greater conformance to hypothetical canonical forms that is in fact the case in most languages. Or the reverse, assuming a simpler set of canonical forms can promote the exclusion of sound-symbolic words. Here is Trask's discussion of this, which I hope is evidently circular in form, whether or not his /tipi/ ~ /tiki/ is in fact descended from Proto-Basque. That is, because this sound-expressive word does not conform to the canonical form hypothesized for much of the less concrete Basque vocabulary, therefore we have an extra argument in favor of excluding it (though he does include this one). But what if there are several canonical forms, as in most real-world languages, some forms occurring more often in sound-expressive vocabulary? >Anyway, words like `teeny' are not so much imitative as expressive or >sound-symbolic. Basque has a huge number of such words, but I am >deliberately choosing not to exclude them expressly from the initial >list. Why? First, because the hopeful long-rangers seeking improbable >relatives for Basque have frequently cited such words as comparanda and >have complained bitterly that I am being circular when I reject these >words as suitable comparanda because of their expressive formation. >Therefore, *demonstrating* that these words do not look like native and >ancient Basque words is precisely one of the goals I hope to achieve. [Demonstrating that sound-symbolic words have a different canonical form has little value in arguing that they were not proto-Basque, precisely because such differences of canonical form do occur in many real languages, so why not also in (proto-)Basque?] >Second, because I am confident that these words will be ruled out by the >criteria I have already listed -- notably by the requirement that a word >should be found throughout the language. With only a few exceptions, >expressive and sound-symbolic formations in Basque are severely >restricted in distribution, being confined in each case to a small area. [Expressive and sound-symbolic words are also very much under-recorded for many languages and language families. Many of them are not known to learned scholars who are not native users of the languages, because they are used in language registers which are never the domain of activity of those scholars. So this criterion is PARTLY defective or circular. There is a partly definitional relation between sound-symbolic and narrowness of attestation in recordings.] >One of the few exceptions is ~ 'small', which satisfies >all six of my criteria and will have to go into the initial list. But, >in that list, it will stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, because >of its utterly anomalous phonological form: > (a) it has an initial voiceless plosive; > (b) it has an initial coronal plosive; > (c) it has the form CVCV with plosives in both C positions > and a voiceless plosive in the second C position; > (d) it exhibits a unique regional variation in form. >In my view, this will be more than enough to remove the word from the >second version of the list, or at least to earn it a flag as an >anomalous item. Even though it exists everywhere, and even though it is >recorded exceptionally early (about 1400), it looks as much like a >native and ancient Basque lexical item as `pizza' looks like a native >and ancient English word. [pizza is not sound-symbolic, and uses odd (for English) spelling, but never mind...] To me, this is a clear indication not of something wrong with including the word /tipi/ ~ /tiki/ as potentially proto-Basque, but something inconsistent in the total set of criteria, UNDER THE CONDITIONS that we are trying to force a consistent canonical form onto our hypothesized "initial list" of potential proto-Basque vocabulary. That goal may be wrong-headed. The criteria, and how they are used, are themselves JUST A SET OF TOOLS, and those tools, and how they are in fact used, need themselves to be evaluated to see whether they lead to errors. The exclusion of a sound-symbolic word on the grounds that it has a different canonical form from other vocabulary is a clear error, given the factual knowledge that such sound-symbolic forms do often (world-wide) have different limitations on their phonological forms. More generally, Trask introduces his message today with the following response to my comment: >> While early attestation is obviously a valuable cutoff (3), >> if the aim is to achieve the absolutely purest vocabulary set possible, >> it may run the error of excluding much authentic native Basque >> vocabulary which simply happened not to be recorded "early". >> Can we rather have several "degrees of earliness", or distinctions >> of WHICH sources of attestation? Trask does some of the latter, >> suggesting to exclude some sources which he believes are >> particularly unreliable. [Trask:] >Of course, any cutoff criterion is likely to exclude a few genuinely >native and ancient Basque words, but it will certainly also exclude a >much larger number of words which are not native and ancient. Agreed, usually so. But I must flatly disagree with the following quote. A primary object can legitimately be to attempt to distinguish proto-Basque words from words now used in Basque which do not descend from proto-Basque. But that is not at all the same as this: >And the primary object is >to exclude the words which should be excluded, not to >include every single word which should be included. It is not one or the other, it is both. Any tool for achieving this can make either sort of error, errors of inclusion or errors of exclusion. It is not simple. The mistake here, in my view, is very much akin to the mistake of rushing to judgement discussed in another message today, when we are dealing with more complex situations of provisional hypotheses. The various criteria for what is a proto-Basque word interact in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. There is no point in hiding these difficulties to render a "final" decision, even if it is claimed to be only an "initial" list. Rather, simply add to our knowledge of the data set, so anyone can at any time reconsider the interedependence of any of our criteria (tools). On distribution: >> Even asking that a word be found in all or many dialects is not a simple >> criterion: >> There are other subsidiary criteria which can reinforce or undermine >> the probabilities that a word was ancient Basque, which can be >> combined with information about WHICH dialects it is attested in, >> not just how many of them or which branches of the dialect family tree. >Agreed, but. There exist words which are shared between the eastern and >western dialects of Basque but which are unattested in the central >dialects. By the peripherality criterion, these words are good >candidates for ancient status: they look like words which were once >universal in the language but which have been lost from central >dialects. But I still prefer to exclude such words from our initial >list. Once that initial list is set up, then these east-west words are >the next group to look at, to see if they too have the phonological >shapes of native and ancient words. But I don't think they ought to be >included at the first stage. There are hundreds of words found in all >dialects: let's look at those first. I think Trask's procedure here is rather unlike that of most comparativists, in that they usually LABEL which languages or dialects a form occurs in, and if it occurs in certain combinations of descendants, it is treated as probably descended from the proto-language. [For Basque, there might be a special case, if one hypothesized borrowings from RELATED (Romance) languages separately into different peripheral Basque dialects.] >> But there is every reason to USE every one of the criteria >> (those which Larry Trask expressed as cutoffs), >> to use them as LABELS on the vocabulary items, >> which in a computer database can be taken into consideration >> whenever any question is asked of the database. >Sure, but that's a different exercise. Not a different exercise at all, the same one, simply not throwing away data or making it hard to access or reconsider. The ability to have all of the data available in a database, tagged and labeled according to all of the criteria Trask mentions, differs from Trask's procedure primarily in not having to render final judgements prematurely, because we can always go back and re-weight the criteria, look at them again from a different perspective. Without such databases, decisions are made once and cannot be easily reconsidered later with the benefit of full information. I think Trask misunderstood my reference to deviations from typologically common canonical form. In fact, it is precisely the extra frequency of Vowel-initial words which Trask notes for pre-Basque vocabulary which is significant (despite the existence of some other languages which have this also), whereas a predominance of CVCV- forms probably would not be, since it is world-wide more common. So, once again, let's keep the data available, analyze it with all the care Trask obviously can muster, but not hide the structure of the analysis, nor make it needlessly difficult to go back and reconsider particular decisions or whole groups of decisions at a later time. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 19 16:17:22 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 12:17:22 EDT Subject: 20-counting in Danish and beyond Message-ID: In Danish to og halv-fems (I do not speak Danish, my spelling will be wrong and Swedish-influenced, but approximately that) means 92. Literally, two and half-FIVES (FIVES would be 5x20 = 100 half-FIVES is half way from 4x20 to 5x20, or in other words 4+1/2 x 20 or 90. Those interested in sheep-scoring numbers might consult the paper "Hocus Pocus Nursery Rhymes" by Mary Ann Campbell and Lloyd Anderson, in Papers from the (Nth) Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1976, where some versions of "Hickory Dickory Dock" are brought together for comparison, and similar matters. Or the following bibliography: Ellis, A. J. 1877. The Anglo-cymric Score. Transactions of the Philological Society pp.316-372 Bolton, Henry Carrington. 1888. The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children. Their antiquity, origin, and wide distribution. London. 123pp. Eckenstein, Lina. 1906. Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes. London. Opie, Iona and Peter. 1951. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Collins, Vere H. 1959. A Book of English Proverbs. London, Longman's Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 19 16:54:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 11:54:01 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >But even if Out of Africa is correct you've never established the point where >it corresponds to a language or languages. I wouldn't presume to be able to do so. I'm just saying that the universal ability for language suggests that language dates back before a world wide dispersal and that genetic data suggests that all modern humans who dispersed from Africa come from the same mitochondrial pool. There is some argument on the precise dating of that pool but it is a determined fraction of the date of an ancestor common to all living human. So that separation date is an >arbitrary correlation as far as what left Africa - e.g., the evacuation of >New Guinea and 500 languages leave. I don't understand your point here [snip] >Neanderthals and moderns coexisted. No O of A needed. And why is >monogenesis needed to explain language capacity 300,000 years ago or 35,000 >years ago? None of these scenarios demand language monogenesis. If Neanderthals had language, then surely the first modern humans would have had it, thus all existing languages would have the same origin [snip] >Which means you are saying that modern language could have only started >40,000 years ago. No, you are ><<...I suspect that language was the key to modern human >expansion from Africa throughout the rest of the world.>> >I like that, but it's hard to buy. What you actually need is a raft or about >70,000 years to find a Bering Strait landbridge to the new world. The latter >has archaelogical support. Not realy, there are a handful of archaeologists who claim this but the excavations of most postulated pre-Clovis sites is said to be very flawed although are some sites less than 30,000 BP that are gaining acceptance. From what I remember, genetic evidence [and physical studies such as teeth] suggests that the first Native Americans arrived c. 15-30 KBP. There are suggestions that another group may have arrived later, corresponding to the Clovis culture. The first Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene speakers arrived much later. [snip] >Speech (hypoglossal canal-wise) may be a lot older than Out of Africa. >Language (as modern speech capacity or language system) could be a lot >younger. And Out of Africa could be just flat out dead wrong. So where does >that leave us? All modern humans have the same capability for language, which suggests that language developed before humans dispersed from Africa. The question of mono- vs. polygenesis in Africa can be argued various ways: Did language arise once among a small population and then expand to other modern humans? Did language arise once among a small population which then used its advantage to supplant all other humans? Did it arise separately among various groups in a small area which coalesced to form one ur-language? Did it arise separately among various groups among which only one survived or passed on its language? Are existing African languages families the only living descendants of various original language groups? And there's the question of whether to define as mono- or polygenesis a case of all existing languages descending from a common ancestor with some extinct languages from different origins Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 19 17:00:51 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 12:00:51 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I am sure that your auditory perception of French is far superior than mine :> >"Cent" and "sans" are homophonous in Quebec French (as indeed in all >overseas varieties of French), so that there is no need on the part of >Rick Mc Callister to assume us to have better auditory perception than the >rest of humanity, flattering though the idea might be to some of us. >Stephane Goyette >University of Ottawa Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 19 17:09:44 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 12:09:44 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: <000201bee68c$ad28e160$47038cd4@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: I seem to remember seeing the date of 60,000 BP. Regarding a dispersal date, I think the best way to look at it is as "a fixed percentage of Eve's date". So if "Eve" is set at 150KBP and dipersal at 80KBP, the fraction is roughly half. An adjustment of "Eve's" date to 200KBP suggests a dispersal shortly before 100KBP, and so on. [snip] >Incidentally, where do Australian Aborigines fit into this? Wasn't there >some evidence (or suggestion) in the news about 18 months ago, that the >Aborigines were very much older than had been previously thought? How do >the time scales fit together? >Pete Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From BMScott at stratos.net Thu Aug 19 22:55:25 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 18:55:25 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 8/13/99 4:16:39 AM, BMScott at stratos.net wrote: > < () 'a black man, negro, > i.e., an Ethiopian';... The adjective () is 'dark blue, > livid', with uses ranging into 'black'.>> > Well of course -madr, -madhr are very recognizable as not referring to men or > madness but to a red/brown dye, On the contrary, () 'man' is the nom. sing. (gen. sing. , nom. pl. ); /nn/ regularly became /D/ (edh) before /r/. It has nothing to do with ON () 'madder', which is found mostly in place-names (e.g., () 'Madder-dale'). [...] > How else could we explain the form 'blake' turning > up in the old text to mean both black and white? ME represents both OE 'black, dark-colored, dark' and OE 'pale, white (as with foam), bleak; bright, shining'. Brian M. Scott From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Thu Aug 19 23:49:22 1999 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 16:49:22 -0700 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: >Well of course -madr, -madhr are very recognizable as not referring to men or >madness but to a red/brown dye, for a long time quite popular among the >Scandinavians - (from Rubia tinctorium or Gallium boreale) and of course >bla'- might as well be black or white as blue. One would otherwise think >perhaps of "Blackmoor." How do you figure? Madr figures in Norse compounds as "man," for example "spa/madr," seer, prophet? And bla as "blue," as in Blakulla. Max Dashu From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Aug 20 03:30:25 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 06:30:25 +0300 Subject: French and Gaulish numbers (was: indoeuropean/hand) In-Reply-To: <37B42497.84BC1369@aye.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Steven A. Gustafson wrote: > Of course, six score and sixteen years ago, Abraham Lincoln suggested > that this kind of count was not wholly dead in English, at least as a > rhetorical flourish. It still isn't dead. I do a lot of English language checking for non-native speakers and note that Finnish idiom uses 'tens' as a semi-indefinite quantifier and when writing English they will say things like "there are tens of examples". I have to explain that English idiom uses 'dozens' or 'scores' for these semi-indefinite quantifiers: "there are dozens of examples", "there are scores of examples". Both of these are idiomatic. "Tens of examples" isn't. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Aug 20 04:08:13 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 00:08:13 EDT Subject: The UPenn IE Tree Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Does this mean that PIE co-exsts with Anatolian? -- it's supposed to mean that Anatolian branched off before PIE started its general breakup. In the sense that proto-Anatolian became quite different from PIE while PIE's internal divisions were still relatively slight. This can't be definitely proven but seems highly likely. "PIE" means "the last stage of the language when all the IE dialects were still mutually intelligible". The language, like all languages, was always undergoing change; it ceased to exist when its component dialects stopped sharing enough innovations, just as Latin ceased to exist as a living language sometime between 400 CE and 800 CE or so as its widespread dialects slowly ceased to be mutually comprehensible. (By way of contrast, Greek remained one language, changing over time -- not the same language as its ancestor, though. Rather as if Italian were the only descendant of Latin.) "PIE" means something rather like "late proto-Romance". The big difference is, of course, that Latin continued to be known in its written form(s) as a learned secondary language while PIE vanished into the black hole of entropy and can only be tentatively reconstructed via the comparative method. >Then where along that left side diagonal does PIE cease to exist? -- when there's no longer only one mutually intelligible IE language plus Anatolian, probably. Since that was way back in the prehistoric period, with no written records, we can only say that it was sometime before about 2000 BCE and after about 4000 BCE, by triangulation. Of course, one could argue that the Balto-Slavic protospeech of 2000 BCE would probably have been more or less comprehensible to a PIE speaker of 3000 BCE, just to complicate things. >a sampling artifact favoring Sanskrit, Germanic and Lithuanian/Slavic - the favored sources in many *PIE reconstructions? -- Sanskrit is 'favored' because it was recorded in a fixed form very early, mid-2nd-millenium BCE or so. Balto-Slavic, and particularly Baltic, are 'favored' because they're very archaic. From iglesias at axia.it Fri Aug 20 15:44:48 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 08:44:48 PDT Subject: Books on Indo-European Message-ID: Any suggestions on the latest books (or articles) in any language dealing coprehensively with: a) the Indo-European Urheimat question and taking into account all the latest theories; b) pre Indo-European languages in Europe (in particular taking into account - pro et contra - Leo Vennemann's theories - Vasconic, Atlantic substate of insular Celtic, etc.) Thanks and regards Frank Rossi iglesias at axia.it From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Aug 20 08:57:00 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 09:57:00 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: If the question relates to IE the answer must too. Incidentally, where do Australian Aborigines fit into this? Wasn't there some evidence (or suggestion) in the news about 18 months ago, that the Aborigines were very much older than had been previously thought? How do the time scales fit together? There was evidence of great age, but it was later contradicted by more accurate tests. The Jinmium cave paintings were dated to something like 70 000 yr BP based on one test, thermoluminescence, which however samples aggregates so could be fooled by ochre grains falling down into earlier natural deposits. But optical stimulated luminescence (and I might have these two the wrong way round -- not my field) can test single grains, and that brought the ochre grains forward to much more recent (ten or twenty thousand). This was reported in _Nature_, oh, three months ago? The earliest widely-accepted evidence for humans in Australia sets them at about 50 000 yr. There is also a deposit of ash about 120 000 yr ago that is unusual in nature and looks like evidence of deliberate burning. If a long date is ever established, perhaps the first inhabitants didn't have modern language, though they did have art. Australian languages are oddly bunched, with many small families in Arnhem Land and Kimberley (just where you'd land from Asia) and one huge, close family occupying all the rest, which therefore can't represent the ancient population. Aborigines are a genetic mix: there was a second wave around 10 000 BP. (Old memory of mine: I don't know what mtDNA says about this mix.) It's just possible that these brought speech along with the dingo. Nicholas Widdows From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 20 13:58:42 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 09:58:42 EDT Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa Message-ID: Just one point on the discussions. It is EVEN possible (though not the simplest explanation from some points of view, Nature need not be simple) that Neanderthals had several languages, from independent sources, and these languages were separately inherited by different groups of modern humans. So inheritance from Neanderthals does NOT necessarily imply monogenesis? Just checking the logic here. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Aug 20 16:18:33 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 16:18:33 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 8/18/99 7:36:25 PM, colkitto at sprint.ca wrote: ><<"Wallach" is clearly a sort of Latinisation of East Slavic volox- >< Common Slavic *volx- (cf. Polish Wloch, Czech vlach, etc.).>> >But does this clarify things? >'Wallachia' seems to first appear in German texts. So why in the world would >German writers latinize an East Slavic version of a familiar German word that >presumably has already been accepted into Western and Southern Slavic? >(Doesn't Wallachia looks like it could also be just plain Latinized MHGerman?) It's Latinized from South Slavic vlax(U). >If you buy Hall, duNay, et al., then the point of first Slavic contact with >the eastern European "Vlachs" is among the Southern Slavs. And place names >and early records (according to duNay) suggest that the original form was >'vlahi' in Bulgarian and Serbian. The alternate form 'vlasi' is understood >to be a borrowing from Avar or Hungarian 'olasi' (originally borrowed from >Slavic), and 'vlasi-" is how 'vlach' occurs in modern Bulgarian and Rumanian. vlasi is simply the South Slavic plural of vlax, showing Slavic 2nd palatalization x > s(') > s [S&E Slavic]. > "Vlachi' would seem to be the way the word traveled back north and west. Based on the sg. form vlax. >A different issue is when and where the Germanic 'walh' meaning Celtic or >Romance speakers or perhaps even Franks, etc., first appeared in Slavic. It >would appear pretty unlikely that it would be in East Slavic. It would >likely have been as early as the first written appearances of the word, in >Anglo-Saxon. In the 700's, Frankish annals were already mentioning Western >Slavs as 'ancient allies', and Southern Slavs had already been serving in the >Byzantine army for 200 years. One would presume that the word - not >referring to Vlachs but to Celts or Romance-speakers - was already >established in Slavic by that time. And presumably it was from the form >found in AS (walh-) or in OHG (circa 800AD - /uualha/). Indeed. The word is Common Slavic (*wolxU), and undergoes the usual changes in order to obtain an open syllable (metathesis to in Polish/Kashubian, metathesis + lengthening to > in Czech/Slovak/South Slavic and polnoglasie to in East Slavic). >As far as speaking of a "Common Slavic" form for a word borrowed from >Germanic that supposedly was inputed uniformly across 3/4's of a continent of >Slavic speakers - from the Elbe to the Ukraine - that seems terribly >unlikely, doesn't it? Where was Common Slavic spoken? >It also seems 'Walh' is unattested in Gothic in the 4th century. There's not much call for the word in a Bible translation. >On the face of it, it would look like Western Slavic along the Elbe or in >Bohemia would have borrowed the word first and with an earlier meaning and >then did apply it to Franks as Romance speakers and perhaps inhabitants of >Gaul. > >In Balkan Slavic, it apparently didn't apply to Latin-speaking Byzantines Greek-speaking. >or >Franks, but to a rural Romance speaking population. On first impression, >this would suggest that it came there later - after clerical and >administrative Latin had pretty much left the Balkans. And that later the >specific form /vlah-/ or /vlas-/ bounced back to the west to become 'Vlachi'. >The original meaning of 'walh' has of course disappeared from Czech and >Polish (as it has for example from Swedish) with national names taking its >place, so that the Balkan form referring to "Vlachs" is all that remains. Not quite. Apart from its continued use in Germanic (Welsh (=from Wales), Waals (=from Wallonia)), it's also still used in Polish for "Italian" (wl/och, pl. wl/osi) and "Italy" (Wl/ochy, pl.tant.). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 20 16:32:32 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:32:32 EDT Subject: Root aorists vs. marked presents Message-ID: Concerning the long-continuing discussion of "root aorist" in Latin, etc., I would like to refer people to a simply wonderful article by Gene Gragg in a volume of the Chicago Linguistics society many years ago, about Ethiopic verb stems, where he shows a very clear case that the choice of stems depends on the semantics of the verbs concerned, which stem will be primary unmarked, which marked as derived. In the discussion of root aorists and marked presents, etc. did anyone compile this kind of semantic information? I wonder whether I missed it in the discussion? Did anyone compile the examples being offered for Primary root-aorists with marked present stems vs. Primary present stems with marked sigmatic (etc?) aorists to see whether the semantics of the verbs concerned reinforces the validity of the two distinct sets of hypothesized pairings. Use of this semantics would even permit the inclusion in the data set of verbs which are only attested in later languages in one stem, not in both stems in the same language. This could greatly strengthen our ability to see whether the hypothesized form categories really constituted paired oppositions in early IE or pre-IE. I think that was the point of the discussions? There can of course also be semantic domains of verbs in which only one of the stems would be common, we need not have only two sets of verbs. The question is rather whether we can identify coherent semantic domains which predict which stem forms were used for verbs in those domains. We need to go beyond a purely formal approach. Perhaps much of this has already been done? Is it done in Rix: Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben? (By the way, I would like to get a copy of that book in any event, can anyone tell me an easy way? I think I found it once somewhere on the web, don't remember where now, cannot seem to find it again, could not find it recently at Amazon.com.) Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 20 16:32:30 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:32:30 EDT Subject: Perfective-Imperfective Message-ID: Momentary-Durative is a misleading set of terms, because BOTH are highly marked and specialized. Perfective-Imperfective in their standard uses probably work much better for the needs of this discussion. "Momentary" implies a suddenness or quickness which is not implied by Perfective. It is merely ONE USE of a typical perfective. "Durative" implies a lasting over a considerable time, which is not necessary to all imperfectives. It is merely ONE USE of a typical imperfective. The primary distinction is rather more usefully one of "treated as an indivisible unit" vs. "treated as having extent" (hence imperfective as context within which a unit-event perfective occurs or as marked ongoing, either way). Once we change these terms, then the communication from Peter Gray today looks quite different. Peter Gray writes: >let's remember that in >Classical Greek, although there are several uses for the present and aorist >stems, two contrasts stand out as very common, if not normative, and neither >really has the aorist as "+momentary": [comment: these ARE however typical uses of a perfective] Peter Gray writes: >(i) past tense: imperfect vs aorist with augment. Here the distinction >(IMHO) is not duration / momentary but rather background event / main event. >The imperfect tells us that something was going on before, during and/or >after the main event. If you like, the distinction is between description >and narrative. The same usage is found strongly in Latin. [comment: this is an archetypal pair of uses of perfectives (for the main event line) vs. imperfectives (for background) in narrative structures world-wide.] Peter Gray writes: >(ii) non-indicative (leaving aside the aorist participle, which retains a >past flavour): here the aorist is neutral, so the use of the present stem >puts a marked stress on continuity. So the distinction is not between two >members, both of them marked, but between continuous and neutral. [comment: this is also a fairly typical pair of uses of perfective vs. imperfective, combined with what is often a relic category, the non-indicative often preserving forms which at an earlier historical stage were the primary perfectives. Examples include the "precative" of later Akkadian, Babylonian, etc., and the "jussive" of classical Arabic, both derived from the old preterite (primarily perfective). Please see the maps of the paths of these changes in Lloyd Anderson: "The Perfect as a Universal and as a Language-Specific Category", pp.229-264 in Paul J. Hopper, ed.: Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics & Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1982. Other articles in that same volume address the event line / background distinction.] Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Aug 20 17:53:35 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:53:35 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >The original meaning of 'walh' has of course disappeared from Czech and >Polish (as it has for example from Swedish) with national names taking its >place, so that the Balkan form referring to "Vlachs" is all that remains. [snip] There's Polish wLochy "Italian", also [I've been told] "hairy" which definitely looks related to the term Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Aug 20 18:01:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 13:01:30 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <006d01beea2f$f8bc3900$7303703e@edsel> Message-ID: You occasionally hear that in Latin America. My wife refers to that phenomenon as "n~on~eo, n~on~ear" [from n~o "oink", I suppose] and associates it with airheads [snip] > In Spanish Castilian, e.g., I often hear >people insert very short vowels in consonant clusters, but they all deny doing >so, because of the written image they learned at school. E.g. I recently heard >'equilipse' for 'eclipse'. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Aug 20 18:40:14 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 14:40:14 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/19/99 11:43:44 PM, BMScott at stratos.net wrote: < () 'man' is the nom. sing. (gen. sing. , nom. pl. ); /nn/ regularly became /D/ (edh) before /r/. It has nothing to do with ON () 'madder', which is found mostly in place-names (e.g., () 'Madder-dale').>> I didn't say that 'madhr' had anything to do with 'madhra'. In fact I think I said it didn't. I was referrring to madhr- (I have ON as - sometimes in OE) as it might have been used in 'bla'madr". Here's where this came from, maybe a year ago on the ONN list: < in Arrow-Odds Tale does not mean "Bark-man" at all. in this case this comes from the cloth dye that in English they call madder.... we see the word also in the lists of cargo shipsIn the story Oddr is probably pretending to be a bark boiler who lives in the forest and makes dyes. Him putting on the bark was added. In latter redactions it was to explain why he was a bark-man because the copier only thought it should mean "Bark-man"...>> This is from a thread that included a discussion of the Icelandic <> as meaning the different colors I mentioned and also put on this list back then. (It was I think originally about barkskin meaning old age in the Eddas. :) ) And I was sure it included something on 'bla'madr' or 'bloamadr' but for the life of me I can't find it on the disks. Well, I can't be sure that any of this is right or wrong anyway. The point was that in the quote above could also mean or . It strikes me that if clothes can be dyed or colored so can bodies - in the case of woad-covered blue warriors who act madly, we have some serious historical precedent in the region. But I SURE DO hope none of this detracts from the main point I was making - which was that the old color terminology was 'semantically' unstable. You wrote: < represents both OE 'black, dark-colored, dark' and OE 'pale, white (as with foam), bleak; bright, shining'.>> Yes. Without accompanying derivations - as in real life - one word for what we might think of as two diametrically opposed 'colors.' And the OED says that even in OE is also found in the form and that only context tells them apart. Whole generations for whom things could not be a matter of 'black' or 'white!' Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Aug 20 18:48:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 13:48:47 -0500 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >In a message dated 8/13/99 4:16:39 AM, Brian M. Scott wrote: ><< 'plunder of the swarthy Northmen' is >also noted.>> >And what madness is this? The Celts calling Northmen 'Galls?' >A Northman (like Knut) who knew Latin could call them "Galls" right back! >The standard explanation is that in Old Irish, etc., "Gall" meant foreigner >because 'Gauls' were the only foreigners the Insulars knew. [snip] Or because the Gauls who settled in Leinster and the Vikings were both perceived as coastal raiders and pirates. I got the perception that Gall meant something more like "barbarian" or "foreign marauder Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Aug 20 20:03:29 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 16:03:29 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/19/99 11:58:57 PM, maxdashu at LanMinds.Com wrote: <> Okay, let me take it back and try again. In 'bla'madr', we may not only see the expected "madhr" > man, or a possible connection to 'madness' mentioned as a gloss - but also we may see - a form of a word that has referred to dyes and cloths and color in general for at least 1000 years. There is of course no obvious connection with "madhr" or "madness". But it may be appropriate in this instance to take a sideward glance at madhr(a), because of 'bla'madr's connection with color. This might be especially true because "madhra" itself refers to a brown-red dye that can approximate darker skin colors, and was sometimes used in neighboring languages to refer to dying or dyed objects in general. So that "-madr" here might be an affix or compound referring to being colored or dyed or covered with a color. This is no guarantee of course that "bla'madhr" does not in fact refer to that everyday, familiar, common household object and more likely meaning> a blue man. Regards, Steve Long From BMScott at stratos.net Sat Aug 21 02:00:54 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 22:00:54 -0400 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > But what if Gaelic borrowed the Germanic (e.g., Saxon) > "walh" (presumably meaning foreigner)? There was apparently > no initial /v/ or /w/ in Goidelic Celtic. But in medieval > times, it was not uncommon for the /g/ in Gaelic to stand-in > for the /w/ in English. Thurneysen says that PIE */w-/ became /B-/ (bilabial voiced fricative) and then /f-/ and that early loans from Latin show the same development, e.g., () from 'wine', from 'uesper'. Later there's () 'Valerianus' c.800. I'd expect an early borrowing to show , a later one, . Brian M. Scott From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Aug 21 05:35:46 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 08:35:46 +0300 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: <6ce63738.24ec31c0@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 18 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au wrote further: ><> >I'm wondering if there isn't a possible flaw here in using <parent form (reconstructed words...)>>. >Reconstructed words have already made assumptions about the >relationship between the parent and the daughter languages. In >fact they are nothing but a presumed relationship between the >daughter languages. Steve is quite correct here. A reconstruction is just that. In the best case it is only the statistically most probable original relationship between the forms found in the daughter languages. ><pairs then the shorter cost represents the daughter that is >closer to the parent. In the case of modern Cantonese and Beijing >we got 35,243.58 bits and 36790.93 bits respectively, indicating >Cantonese is closer to the common parent, Middle Chinese, than >Beijing. >> >Depending on how much reconstruction of the parent you used, >could this not be an artifact of the reconstructions? In *PIE, >certain aspects are considered the innovations of a particular >daughter language because they do not appear in the other >daughter languages, and are therefore factored out of the >reconstruction. If you only have two daughter languages - as you >did above - how do you identify the innovation versus the >original form in reconstruction? And if you decide in favor of >one or the other in reconstruction, it will show up in any >further use of that reconstruction. It is not so much a question of innovation versus preservation. It is a matter of how much innovation there is in each daughter language. When you have the parent preserved, this can be measured. If there is no innovation the daughter form and the parent form should be identical (thus answering the question of which is closer). But when you have to reconstruct the parent, all of this information (degree of suspected innovation) will go into the reconstruction. If you only have to reconstruct a few words and there is a high statistical probability of the reconstruction being correct based on information in the three languages other than the two forms of the word in the daughters then it will not have much effect on the measurement. But if you have to reconstruct many words and the reconstruction is based only on the forms found in the daughter languages then you are building the distance between them into the reconstruction and when you analyze it you will just get these distances back. >In effect, you may to some degree be measuring how the >relationship between the daughters has been perceived in the >reconstructions that you use, as much as anything else. Again correct. So long as you have three independent data points (the parent and two daughters) you can objectively determine the distance between any two of them. But when one of the data points is determined solely by the position of the other two, you cannot determine anything but the distance between those two (you cannot determine a triangle given only the length of one side). The third point is not a point but a locus (of all points from which it is possible to reach the other two points). Where this point is placed on the locus already reflects the perceived distance of the reconstructed parent form from its daughters. Playing it back from the other direction just gives you back what was put into it. It is circular. >I would think that the method you describe would be much more >functional if it at least triangulated daughter languages. And >avoided using prior reconstructions - proving itself on its own, >so to speak. If this means what I think it does (determining the distance between three daughter languages rather than two daughters and a parent) it might be useful for calibration of the method, but it still doesn't solve the problem of locating the parent. It just moves the problem from two dimensions to three. However, if you measure the distance between three daughter languages using each in succession as the node, it may give you a better idea, statistically, of where the parent should be located (based on your assumptions about distance between the daughters and the reconstructed parent). On the other hand, if this means measuring the distance from the parent to three daughter languages instead of just two, all this will do is increase the statistical probability of a correct reconstruction if one is needed. In general, the more daughters you add, the more confidence it may be possible to get for the statistical validity of the reconstruction. Again, if you have all of the languages preserved, the measurements should be quite good. But the method is not about elimination of innovation from the reconstruction, the method is about measuring the amount of innovation across the daughters. The problem is that if the parent form is not available, it is not possible to determine how much of what is seen in each of the daughter forms *is* innovation, which is what you are trying to measure. So if the measurement involves a minimal amount of reconstruction (and especially if the reconstruction is based in part on factors other than just the forms of the words in the daughter languages), I would expect the measurements to be quite valid. But if the measurement is based on a completely reconstructed parent language, all you are going to get out of it is what was put into the reconstruction. Of course, the more daughter languages you can measure, the more confidence you may get in the statistical probability of the reconstruction. Using more daughter languages will also help to reduce the likelihood of the daughters having innovated the same way independently (historical linguists really hate it when this happens because it screws everything up). And using the measurements obtained from the reconstruction may provide quantitative ideas about where there are problems and/or inconsistencies in the reconstruction. This is because it is a different way of looking at the reconstruction and looking at things in different ways will often produce new insights. But there is no way to separate the distances between the daughters from the reconstruction of the parent because that's what the reconstruction is. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca Sat Aug 21 21:20:11 1999 From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (Stephane Goyette) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 17:20:11 -0400 Subject: Quebec French nasal vowels. In-Reply-To: <006d01beea2f$f8bc3900$7303703e@edsel> Message-ID: See comments below. Stephane Goyette. > As the original culprit I'm responding to this. > With all due respect, I can testify from my repeated experience that people > in shops in Quebec (and I heard the same pronunciation in TV messages) > clearly distinguish the nasalized e and a in words like 'cent' and 'sans', > both when speaking and when listening. When I asked a shop attendant for a > film of 100 ASA ('cent ASA', pronounced /sa~/), she thought I said 'sans ASA' > and replied : 'c'est toujours avec'; when I pointed to the 100 on the > package, she said: 'Oh, vous voulez dire /se~ng/!' [or something like Fr. > 'saint' with a vaguely English -ng sounding ending]. I heard these > pronunciations over and over again. Nasals in Quebec French are subject to some variation in pronunciation, especially in the case of stress/unstressed differences due to emphasis, and I would venture to suggest you misperceived some such variation, especially when I read the above about an English-like 'ng' ending: no variety of Quebec French has consonantal increments after nasal vowels (unlike, for example, regional French in Southern France). I say this both as a linguist who has done some work on diachronic French linguistics and a native speaker of Quebec French. > I don't know if this is uneducated speech, or whether the Quebecois actually > think they pronounce it the same way even if they actually pronounce it > differently. To my European ears, Quebec French 'cent' and 'sans' (and > similar words) sound differently, and apparently to the Quebecois themselves > too, otherwise the type of misunderstandings I mentioned couldn't have > happened. In France they wouldn't. Non sequitur. Such misunderstandings could be due to other factors. For example, when asking for film "cent ASA" versus "sans ASA", there is an intonational difference which may have been misperceived; the salesperson, upon realizing the mistake, would naturally repeat the word, STRESSING it, emphasizing it, which would have lead you to conclude you were dealing with two phonologically distinct words. > As Larry Trask mentioned, this is original and authentic (but archaeic) > French pronunciation that got lost by convergence elsewhere. This is unbelievable. Arguing from authority is the weakest argument of all, and since the authority himself (Larry Trask) was open and honest enough to begin his posting on the subject by writing "I know nothing of Quebecois", I fail to see the purpose of quoting him on the subject. His comments on the dating of the en/an merger are quite correct, by the way --he certainly knows something of French. > Sometimes people make distinctions they don't perceive consciously, often as > a consequence of school indoctrination. In Spanish Castilian, e.g., I often > hear people insert very short vowels in consonant clusters, but they all deny > doing so, because of the written image they learned at school. E.g. I > recently heard 'equilipse' for 'eclipse'. All Spanish speakers (like the > 'Afrae aures') think all vowels, and in all positions, have the same length, > but in actual speech this manifestly not so; on the other hand, they find it > very hard to hear vowel length differences in other languages (shit/sheet!). Another non sequitur. Why then am I denying that I or other quebecois make a distinction present in writing? From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 02:19:16 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 22:19:16 EDT Subject: The UPenn IE Tree Message-ID: In a message dated 8/21/99 7:10:27 PM, you wrote: <> My questions were specifically addressed to the assumptions behind the Stammbaum. According to Sean Crist's response, that graph appears to be based on shared innovations over time rather than intelligibility. That is why after Anatolian splits off on the Stammbaum, we are told the appropriate language for what remains is "the innovations shared by all the IE branches except Anatolian". I was not after deeper truths in my message. Just trying to figure out what assumptions were behind this tree model. Sean Crist revealed a lot of that in his post in response. I don't think the model would yield any direct conclusions on relative intelligibility - but you might ask Sean. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 07:14:01 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 03:14:01 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/21/99 11:20:01 PM, you wrote: < () from 'wine', from 'uesper'. Later there's () 'Valerianus' c.800. I'd expect an early borrowing to show , a later one, . Brian M. Scott>> I'm not sure when the Irish would have borrowed this version of 'walh' etc from the Germanic. Of course the word could have been borrowed more than once as the meaning of the word changed. I'm not sure when the 'mGall' quote was from, but it would pretty likely be after 800. If those Northmen were from Normandy they would have been from the ON 'Valland' and in either case would have been recognized by clerics as being from 'Gallia'. As far as the borrowing, "galc = thicken cloth, fulling; from the English walk, waulk" (McBain's Etym Dict - Scot Gaelic) would be likely a loan from AS. On the other hand, "barant = warrant, Middle Irish baránta, Welsh gwarant" would be I think from the Anglo-Norman. MacFarlaine takes Gaelic 'balla' = wall, not early but from the AN 'bailley' - outer castle wall (cf., Old Bailey's) and wall = 'cailbhe' as the earlier word. On the other hand, Gaelic/goidelic 'cuinnsean' is given as from the English, 'whinger'. I've seen Scandinavian origins given for Gaelic "gaoth" = wind. And another problem is that earlier apparently the /v/- /u/- in Gaulish created a very different pattern - though which way the words travelled is terribly unclear. The PIE */w-/ obviously was but a distant memory. The problem with all this is not basically in the sounds I think, but in the fact that words and meanings bounced around like ping-pong balls in this time and area. So historically we don't know which got what from whom and when and how often. B_T_W, I just noticed that MacFarlaine gives a different, much more local explanation for "Gall" as foreigner - "Gall: foreigner, a Scottish Lowlander Galldachd: nf.ind. the country occupied by the non-Gaelic speakers of Scotland, usually termed the Lowlands of Scotland : air a' Ghalldachd, in the Lowlands." Were these 'Ghall-' supposed to be Britons or Germanic speakers? Hmmm. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 07:51:45 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 03:51:45 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/21/99 8:08:23 PM, nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk wrote: <> The full article is by Alan Thorne et al in Journal of Human Evolution June 99. The age of various finds are discussed there. However, just as important to this subject matter is the taxonomy of early and modern Australian aboriginal remains which show for example unique characteristics identified in Indonesia much before the O of A dates. One can forget in this discussion that there is quite a bit of evidence of a good deal of human habitation all over the rest of the eastern Hemisphere well before 100,000 BC. Out of Africa seems to postulate that these other humans were eliminated from the descent of the current world population. These pre-O of A's display culture and ,e.g., in the case of the Australians, physical continuity with the present. Multiregionalism simply postulates that different human strains have been mixing for a very long time and Out of Africa would at best represent a phase in that process. The genetic evidence is spectacular, but hardly settled. In any case, choosing to connect the events associated with Out of Africa with the development of language capability is arbitrary, does not jive and possibly conflicts with evidence of language capability in humans at other times - possibly at much earlier dates. Associating Out of Africa with modern languages (post 10,000 BCE, let's say) seems - to me at least - a bit farfetched. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 08:01:39 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 04:01:39 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 8/19/99 10:55:21 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> I simply meant that if the Out of Africa contingent did have language, there is no reason to think it was one language. E.g., if the humans inhabiting New Guinea for any imaginable reason suddenly left to colonize the world, they would carry with them 500-700 different languages. A 100,000 years in Africa would have been more than enough time to develop that kind of diversity. And at this point in our knowledge there's no reason to assume they didn't. Please remember that I just gave this as an aside to the overall discussion. It wasn't proving anything except what we don't know. Regards, Steve Long From lmfosse at online.no Sun Aug 22 09:06:52 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 11:06:52 +0200 Subject: Books on Indo-European Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Frank Rossi Sent: Friday, August 20, 1999 5:44 PM > Any suggestions on the latest books (or articles) in any language dealing > coprehensively with: > a) the Indo-European Urheimat question and taking into account all the > latest theories; The following three books would probably be useful to you: Sergent, Bernard. 1995. Les Indo-Européens. Paris: Payot. Sergent, Bernard. 1997. Genèse de l'Inde. Paris: Payot. Mallory, J. P. 1989. In search of the Indo-Europeans : language, archaeology, and myth. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson. You will find some older material in the following volume: Scherer, Anton, ed. 1968. Die Urheimat der Indogermanen, Wege der Forschung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Aug 22 15:43:40 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 18:43:40 +0300 Subject: Hypothesis formation vs. testing In-Reply-To: <75ea2350.24ed5f7c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >There is a great confusion in the advanced sciences, >or even in those which like to believe themselves advanced, >between >Hypothesis Testing >and >Hypothesis Formation. And part of this confusion arises from not knowing what hypothesis testing (or possibly a hypothesis) is. Because in trying to define "null hypothesis" on Sat, 7 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: I respectfully disagree with the person who recently argued between the following two alternatives that either could be an appropriate "null hypothesis" (...) > No languages are related. > > All languages are related. Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like "We do not know whether all languages are related (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) Any attempt to force anyone else to accept something that embodies a CLAIM (...), is MANIPULATING the discourse, instead of dealing with facts. which shows a spectacular lack of knowledge of what a hypothesis is. It was subsequently pointed out that "We do not know whether all languages are related" is not a hypothesis, to which ECOLING at aol.com replied on Thu, 12 Aug 1999: There may be more agreement than seems to be the case in this matter. In particular I would agree with the following: >"We don't know" won't suit for those >purposes, because it is not a hypothesis. is very similar to my position, that "We cannot currently know" is the null hypothesis, and "We can currently know" is the hypothesis to be tested. And, quite obviously, no one can succeed in establishing that "we do know" is valid, with current data and tools, applied to the question whether all languages are ULTIMATELY related. So we know the answer to THAT test, for now and for a long time to come. which simply ignored the point at issue. "We don't know" is not a hypothesis, it is a fact. So Lloyd has restated it as what he thought was a hypothesis (which by his own definition means that he is trying to MANIPULATE the discourse by making a CLAIM :>), but this is not really a hypothesis either. There is no particular semantic difference between "we don't know" and "we can't tell" so this is just another fact, not a hypothesis and is not at all suited to be a null hypothesis. Null hypothesis is a technical term in hypothesis testing and here is a definition of null hypothesis taken from the glossary of a textbook on statistical methods available on the web (http://www.stat.Berkeley.EDU/users/stark/SticiGui/Text/gloss.htm #null_hypothesis): Null hypothesis. In hypothesis testing, the hypothesis we wish to falsify on the basis of the data. The null hypothesis is typically that something is not present, that there is no effect, or that there is no difference between treatment and control. So "We can't tell" is no more appropriate as a null hypothesis than "We don't know" is. A fact can be either true or false, but that still doesn't make it a hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the outgrowth of Karl Popper's observation that since it is possible to disprove an inductive hypothesis by counter evidence, but impossible to "prove" an inductive hypothesis by simply amassing more evidence in favor of it, it is often more effective to establish a hypothesis by disproving some rival hypothesis. In the days before hypothesis testing became a science, the null hypothesis would have been called a straw-man argument -- something that is put forward simply to demolish so that its destruction makes the real argument more likely. But a scientific hypothesis must make a CLAIM, because that's what a scientific hypothesis is: a proposed explanation for some group of observed data (facts). Here are some definitions of hypothesis taken from the web: 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. So it can be seen that a scientific hypothesis (definition 1 above) CLAIMs to explain some specified group of phenomena. This is not an attempt to MANIPULATE the discourse. This *is* dealing with facts. And it is the responsibility of the proponent of a hypothesis to demonstrate its validity, either by an overwhelming amount of evidence in its favor or by falsifying all rival hypotheses. If there is no rival hypothesis that is capable of being disproved, then the original hypothesis is said to be non-falsifiable and falls outside the realm of science. It is a "just-so" story (fairy tale) and this is why "all languages are related" is inappropriate as a null hypothesis (although not necessarily as a working hypothesis); it is not falsifiable. If there is no evidence offered that the original hypothesis is the true explanation of the observed facts then it is not a scientific hypothesis it is merely a hypothesis according to definition 4 above. >When we cannot conclusively test certain hypotheses, it is still >legitimate to try to accumulate evidence that the hypotheses are >plausible and worth exploring further. Certainly, UFOologists and seekers after Atlantis and Noah's Ark are doing this all the time. And who knows, someday they may be successful. But I would feel a lot more secure with this statement if ECOLING at aol.com had not continued his message of Sat, 7 Aug 1999 with: If we don't know, then we don't know, it's as simple as that. I personally don't give a hoot what anyone wants to "assume", or tell me to assume, in the absence of data justifying such an assumption. Okay, I get the message. You don't give a hoot about what anyone else assumes but you don't mind telling everybody else what to assume. It's not a question of data. Presumably everybody has the same data. The problem is that for any set of data there are an infinite number of hypotheses that can account for the data. And then: Using a "burden of proof" argument is merely a way of trying to get someone to accept a conclusion in the absence of evidence. No, using a burden of proof argument is a way of trying to get someone to provide evidence to support his conclusion or CLAIM. An unsupported hypothesis (no proof offered) is "a mere assumption or guess" or a "provisional conjecture to guide investigation". The burden of proof is always with the one who makes a CLAIM to have an explanation for some observed facts that is different from the explanation that does not require proof (the null hypothesis). In American justice the null hypothesis is "innocent" (used to be, anyway). It is up to the prosecution to prove "beyond reasonable doubt" any charge brought. It is not, as in some countries, up to the defendant to prove his innocence. Innocence is assumed (or is supposed to be) until guilt is proved. Similarly, in comparative linguistics, given two similar sounding words with similar meanings in different languages, the null hypothesis is "coincidence". Coincidence is always possible and hence does not have to be proved. Anyone who wants to CLAIM that these words show a relationship between the two languages has to offer proof. Only facts are relevant, facts which could make one conclusion more probable than another, (facts which DO NOT have anything to do with our own mental convenience, not EVEN with assumptions that nature is simple in some way we mentally want her to be, when she may in this particular respect NOT be simple). But it is not only the facts that are relevant ("just the facts, ma'am" :>). The data are presumably the same for everyone. But a fact is not data. It is an observation about data. Two people looking at the same data might come up with different facts. Scientific discourse involves two separate areas (and they are not hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing): (1) factual statements about data, which rest on observations and which are either true or false, and (2) a hypothesis, a statement put forward in explanation of the facts. A fact is an empirically verifiable statement about phenomena in terms of a conceptual scheme; a fact is not an object in nature but a statement about nature. The hypothesis must be formulated so that it can be shown to be either inadequate [falsifiable] or substantiated to a high degree of probability by further facts. A single contrary case may disprove the hypothesis, although it need not. The hypothesis must be based on the facts available, and the facts should not be made to fit the hypothesis. The problem is that even the establishment of facts can be highly controversial in genetic linguistics, as in other sciences. Raimo Anttila, _Historical and Comparative Linguistics_, p. 23 I have chosen to quote Anttila here because he has a very pithy summary, and from this I can make an even starker summary: Facts are observations about data. The data are the same for everyone (exist in nature); facts may not be the same for everyone. A hypothesis is an attempt to explain the observed facts. As Anttila states, there are two things that make a sound hypothesis: It can be shown to be inadequate (i.e., it has a valid test for falsification) and it can be substantiated to a high degree of probability by further facts (facts that were not part of the basis of the original hypothesis). Saying that a hypothesis is valid because it accounts for the original facts is not a test of a hypothesis. It is simply circular reasoning (the hypothesis is created to account for the facts; the hypothesis must therefore be correct because it accounts for the facts). For any set of facts, there are an infinite number of hypotheses that will account for them. Some will just be more believable than others. >In a message dated 8/18/99 11:32:41 PM, Larry Trask writes: >>On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >>> No Burden of Proof is appropriate on the content of the >>> question whether all languages are ultimately related, simply >>> because we cannot test that question currently. >>I fully agree that the question `Are all languages related?' >>cannot be answered at present. I further believe that we will >>never be able to answer this question by purely linguistic means. >>However, there are people who disagree, one of the most >>prominent being Merritt Ruhlen. Ruhlen wishes to embrace the >>conclusion `All languages are related.' >As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent >statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such >conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might >be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). Yes, Greenberg is clearer and more cogent than Ruhlen. And it is proper methodology to assume something that cannot be proved to see where it leads. >Back to Trask: >>Now, in order to go about this, I maintain, [Ruhlen] should >>start with the negation of this statement as his null hypothesis, >>and then go on to show that there is so much evidence against >>this null hypothesis that it is untenable and must be rejected. >>But that's not what he does. >The last paragraph above is in complete contradiction to what >Larry Trask says he agrees with ("I fully agree"...). >If one believes it is not possible to test a proposition, then it >is NOT REASONABLE to ask anyone else to test it. >One cannot have this both ways. You are comparing a statement about what is possible and one about what is proper methodology and saying that one contradicts the other and blaming this on Larry Trask. This is simply an attempt at killing the messenger. If proper methodology requires that an investigator perform an impossible act and the investigator chooses to ignore this, then this speaks to the investigator's methodology, not to the methodology of the person who points this out. It is NOT REASONABLE to ask the investigator to perform an impossible act. But it is REASONABLE to point out that omission of this act makes the investigation methodologically suspect. If the investigator cannot perform a methodologically necessary act then he should not speak and act as if it were not necessary to perform the act. One cannot have this both ways. >>Instead, he *starts* with the hypothesis `All languages are >>related', and then proceeds to assemble what he sees as evidence >>in support of this last hypothesis. Amazingly enough [;-)]. he >>is able to find such evidence. >So far, this is legitimate in principle [but on practice, see below] >IF the purpose is to establish the plausibility of a hypothesis >(as distinct from testing it, NOTICE!). No, this is not even legitimate in principle. A hypothesis is something put forward as an explanation for observed facts. It is not something that one proposes and then goes out and looks for facts to support. One creates a hypothesis to account for facts (all the facts). One does not select and arrange the facts to fit the hypothesis. >This is how almost all hypotheses are first established as >hypotheses, simply by accumulating suggestive, anecdotal, >case-study evidence, in contexts in which we do not even know how >to estimate chance very well. It is true that many (most?) scientific hypotheses start as guesses. But not every guess is a scientific hypothesis. While anything is possible, not everything is probable. Basically, no evidence, no scientific hypothesis. And whatever happened to your: Only facts are relevant, facts which could make one conclusion more probable than another, (facts which DO NOT have anything to do with our own mental convenience, not EVEN with assumptions that nature is simple in some way we mentally want her to be, when she may in this particular respect NOT be simple). >>He therefore declares that, because he has found evidence in >>support of his desired conclusion, it must be true. But this is >>completely wrongheaded. >Here I agree with Trask, to the extent Ruhlen says something like >this. Then what is the problem? Why this diatribe about the difference between hypothesis testing and hypothesis formation? If creating a hypothesis ("a mere guess or assumption" or "a provisional conjecture to guide investigating") and then (selectively) collecting evidence to support it and then claiming that the hypothesis is proved because there is evidence to support it is the reverse of proper scientific methodology, then what makes the selection and arrangement of the facts collected for this purpose the formation of a hypothesis? Hypothesis formation is not the collecting of data. Hypothesis formation is an attempt to account for the data. If the hypothesis is formulated in the absence of data, collecting data to support the hypothesis is not hypothesis formation, it is just bad science. If one tries to say "isn't it lucky that the evidence collected already has a hypothesis to explain it" this is simply ignoring the fact that there are an infinite number of hypotheses to account for any collection of facts. >(I am much less familiar with Ruhlen than with Greenberg.) Then you should perhaps familiarize yourself with his methodology before you try to defend it. >>What Ruhlen *must* do, if he wants to persuade anybody, is not >>to try to demonstrate that his favored conclusion is supported by >>evidence, but rather that its contradictory -- the appropriate >>null hypothesis -- is so strongly disconfirmed that it cannot be >>maintained. >The contradictory of the strong claim (all related) is that there >are at least two languages which are not related to each other >genetically. >I would doubt that Ruhlen had evidence to exclude this >possibility, or that if asked clearly, he would say so. After >all (trivially) there are languages for which there are only one >or two words attested, and one can go on from there with very >little work to find other cases where I think Ruhlen would grant >there is not even a loose probability based on the data itself to >establish any relationship. Ruhlen would grant nothing of the kind. The relatedness of all languages is not an issue for Ruhlen. The following is Ruhlen's position on the matter (this quotation was posted by Larry Trask to another list; I have not verified it [our library has none of Ruhlen's books], but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the quotation): First, the search for linguistic `relationships' is now over (or should be), since it no longer makes sense to ask if two languages (or two language families) are related. *Everything* is related, and the question to be investigated within or among different families is the *degree* of their relationship, not the fact of it. [emphasis in the original] Merritt Ruhlen (1994), On the Origin of Languages, Stanford UP, p. 272. >[Trask's example All Swans are White not repeated here, but ...] >>This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is >>enough to render Ruhlen's work vacuous, >Not so, since Ruhlen can be treated as involved in hypothesis >FORMATION not hypothesis testing. On the contrary, Ruhlen is not formulating a hypothesis (we all should know how to do this by now: one starts with the data and then develops a hypothesis that accounts for the data [all the data]). What he is doing is precisely what you railed against when you said: Any attempt to force anyone else to accept something that embodies a CLAIM (...), is MANIPULATING the discourse, instead of dealing with facts. And if you really meant it when you said: If we don't know, then we don't know, it's as simple as that. I personally don't give a hoot what anyone wants to "assume", or tell me to assume, in the absence of data justifying such an assumption. Are you now saying that it's all right to "assume" so long as you can find some data that justify the assumption (while ignoring data that don't)? I really would not expect you to claim this. If Ruhlen can be considered to be involved in hypothesis FORMATION not hypothesis testing, then the hypothesis being formed is simply a hypothesis according to definition 4 above ("a mere guess or assumption"), not a hypothesis according to definition 1 (a scientific hypothesis). Collecting data is not hypothesis formation; it is a prerequisite to hypothesis formation. And the data on which a hypothesis is based cannot be used to test the hypothesis because that is simply circular. >>quite apart from the vast number of egregious errors in the >>material he cites as evidence, >Now THAT is quite another matter, and when present in very large >quantity, not merely slight differences from the analysis an expert in >a particular language would offer but more serious, complete >misunderstandings vitiating completely any use of particular data... >it does discredit the work as a whole, and can quite legitimately, >even without absolute proof of its wrong-headedness, >lead reasonable people to pay no more attention to it. >But note carefully the caveat above. It is NOT sufficient merely to >provide minor improvements of detail to the presentation, >to discredit the work. An expert can ALWAYS provide minor >improvements. That itself shows nothing at all. >>and quite apart from his failure to realize that lookalikes do >>not constitute evidence of any kind. >Disagree flatly, unless defined circularly so that "lookalikes" >means more than it says, namely so that it means "lookalikes >which are known to be unrelated as cognates". You can disagree as much as you want, but that won't change reality. Lookalikes are not evidence of anything except the trivial fact that the lookalikes exist. It requires evidence to show that lookalikes demonstrate a relationship between the languages in which they occur. Lookalikes can always be coincidence, even in languages that are known to be related. So without evidence to the contrary, lookalikes are coincidence just as an individual is innocent until proved guilty. It is the null hypothesis. The lookalikes may be a fact, but a fact is not a hypothesis (I hope this is clear by now). Some hypothesis must be presented to account for their presence (and the hypothesis that "all languages are related" is not adequate because it is non-falsifiable; one might as well account for them by saying "Santa Claus left them there"). >If it actually means "items which look alike in sound and >meaning", then of course such comparisons DO constitute >PRELIMINARY evidence. Any such preliminary evidence can be >discounted by showing that the resemblances are secondary and >late, or that they manifest a type of sound symbolism, or in >other ways. To the extent that lookalikes are a fact and facts can be used as evidence, this is true. But the question is and remains, what are they evidence of. The null hypothesis is that they are evidence that similar sounding words with similar meanings occur in the world's languages by pure chance. That they are evidence of anything else must be proved. So your explication is exactly backwards. Attempts to prove that the existence of the lookalikes demonstrates a relationship between the languages can be discounted by the means you point out, but the lookalikes still remain evidence (of the fact that chance resemblances do occur). >It was lookalikes in grammar and vocabulary which led to the >original hypothesis of the relatedness of the Indo-European >languages. Some of these turned out to be true cognates, some >turned out not to be cognates, merely chance lookalikes. >But the IE hypothesis thus preliminarily established withstood >the discounting of some of the lookalikes as non-cognates and the >reaffirmation of others a true cognates (whatever the terminology >used at the time). This is quite true, and it was quite clearly pointed out in the earliest identification of IE languages that the null hypothesis was disproved ("a stronger affinity, ..., than could possibly have been produced by accident"). The rest, as you say, has just been details. >Once again, I wish to urge us back to the FACTS. And this is a good idea. But FACTS are not hypotheses. FACTS are not even data. FACTS are observations based on data. FACTS can be true or false. It is, however, important to remember that hypotheses are attempts to account for FACTS (all the FACTS, not just selected FACTS) and that hypotheses must be judged by how well they account for the FACTS and that hypotheses must include a CLAIM (that the hypothesis correctly accounts for the FACTS). >And those FACTS include whatever we can establish about how >each of our tools works, where it works well and where it fails, >how deep historically each tool can push us with languages >of certain types or with language changes of certain types, >and whatever we can establish about new tools we have not yet >systematically used (such as explicit paths of historical >change in sound systems and in semantic spaces, and metrics >of distances along such paths of change...). In essence, we really only have one tool. It is called the scientific method. 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". Finally, the hypothesis should have some rival hypothesis that can be falsified before it can be considered scientific. All the other tools that we have are hypotheses that have logical consequents that can be empirically tested. Their value lies in the extent to which they are scientific hypotheses and are in accord with the scientific method. Otherwise we might as well try to solve the problems of historical linguistics by gazing into crystal balls. I will not go into the tools of historical linguistics at this point because this is long enough already and an opportunity to discuss these tools and the pitfalls in using them will doubtless occur soon. >We get nowhere by repeating the discrediting of STRAW MAN claims, >by holding hypothesis formation to standards of absolute >hypothesis testing, by counting minor corrections and >improvements to data as completely discrediting use of the data >when they do not, etc. etc. and so forth. It is not that we get nowhere; we just don't get where you want to go. Discrediting STRAW MAN claims (= null hypothesis) is part of the method, as is requiring a falsifiable null hypothesis as well as requiring that a hypothesis have a test for falsification. These things tell us whether a hypothesis is scientific or not. And although hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing are two different things, they are not the different things that you have made them out to be. The FACTS that are used in hypothesis formation cannot be used in hypothesis testing or else the proof of the hypothesis rests on circular reasoning. >The field is at an impasse in these discussions, until we return >the discussion to an empirical basis. This is, as the Monty Python people would say, the nub of the gist. Historical linguistics suffers from (and has apparently always suffered from) a surfeit of "bright ideas" and a dearth of hard data. Thus the 19th century (and indeed, much of the 20th) saw a proliferation of "bright ideas" (stadialism, the search for the "original language", primitive languages are spoken by primitive peoples, primitive languages are lexically poor and grammatically impoverished) most of which had more to do with nationalistic fervor and ethnic superiority (those same things that brought us colonialism and the race for resources and markets, WWI, WW2, and the more recent bouts of "ethnic cleansing") than with linguistic actuality and which have subsequently been discredited by the simple accretion of more data about more different languages. Most of these "bright ideas" were just speculation in advance of the evidence (or hypothesis FORMATION without FACTS). Only for IE (and to a lesser extent Semitic) is there sufficient hard data. This is because these families (or branches) have written records going back a long way which make histories of the languages possible that give us fixed points along the road and because these areas have been the subject of linguistic study for centuries. Other areas do not have the same advantages or the same collections of hard data, primarily because they have not been studied as long. Many people (particularly those who are not historical linguists) point to the inadequacy of the tools used in historical linguistics. Although to me this sounds like a version of "the poor workman blames his tools", the primary problem of historical linguistics is not the inadequacy of the tools, but a lack of hard data to use the tools on. When the data is available, the tools to investigate it will arise. So I completely agree that linguists should primarily be engaged in the collection of empirical data. They should be out in the field collecting hard data before it disappears rather than sitting around thinking up yet more "bright ideas" that will have to wait for more data before it can be seen whether they accurately reflect the real linguistic world or not. Unfortunately, not all linguists are suited by temperament or training to be field linguists. So they have to have something to do while the rest are out collecting data. Perhaps they could be better employed by putting the data already available into more usable form rather than speculating about what the data being collected will reveal. But speculating without evidence is more fun than writing grammars or dictionaries. >Pure philosophy will not get us much progress. If by pure philosophy you mean hypothesis FORMATION without FACTS then I agree. If you mean pointing out shoddy methodology, then I disagree. The scientific method is pure philosophy. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy, not a science (despite the -ology on the end). So it is pure philosophy that will set the tone for linguistics and determine whether it is seen as a scientific discipline or an attempt to prove causality by correlation like astrology (also not a science despite the -ology on the end). But I'm willing to have a moratorium on hypotheses without data. How about you? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 18:14:46 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 14:14:46 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: I wrote: <<(Doesn't Wallachia looks like it could also be just plain Latinized MHGerman?) In a message dated 8/21/99 8:54:25 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: < s(') > s [S&E Slavic].... < in Polish/Kashubian, metathesis + lengthening to > in Czech/Slovak/South Slavic and polnoglasie to in East Slavic).>> First of all, Wallachia as latinized South Slavic: Consider that we have many instances of Latinized 'vlach' that does not go the way of 'Wallachia' and all are earlier. There is everything from the Pope's "rex blachorum" (1206) to a "villa vlacha' (1295) to "Vlachii" and the "Blasii" and "Blachi" mentioned in the Hungarian Gesta (1100's). (And of course in one of the Egil sagas we see "Blocmannland" - looking like it came down the same path.) My best information is that /valachia/ as Vlachs first appears a bit later (@1300's?). duNay says the first mention of the place we call "Walachia" happens with the Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz (1415-1480). So what happened here? The palatalized /vl/ gets dropped suddenly in Latin after all those years and Latin and German return to /val/? Does that make sense? Here's another explanation. There were multiple forms of the word going round in the many years before 'Wallachia" shows up about . duNay says that Vlach is "walach" in German. And the OED shows that 'vlachs' first entered English as "wolocks" and "wallacks" as well as the expected "vlachs" and "walachs" from the latin. If the Slavic "volocks" did not survive palatalization, the German version of it should have. It would then make more sense to see "Walachia" or "Wallachia" as: 1) a latinization of either the earlier pre-pal. Slavic "volocks" or "volochs." (But not East Slavic "volox"). Or a form that survived palatalization with the initial vowel because it was a proper name. 2) a latinization of "wal/a/ch" (adj) as it sometimes appears in Germanic or as it might have been borrowed back early from the Slavic. Both of these seem to fit better, given that "vlach-" was already established in Latin well before "Wallachia" appears. They also acknowledge the original western form of the word with the initial vowel intact. At this point, I won't go into the fact that there is another form of Vlach that appears early in Southern Slavic, "vlah-", that does not even include -x(U)- that might be reflected from say "Volcae" but not from the OHG "uualha". <> I'd have to ask when? "Late Common Slavic" seeming to be an entity that spans a continent. I wrote: <> You replied: <> The example from Polish you give is not from the original meaning. (Walloon I think was the second phase. Welsh I think is on the money.) That's because the original word did not mean Italian or Italy. I'd like to handle that in another post when I have a little more time. But let me say that it looks like this word never meant "roman" or "italian" in English, for example, and it's connection with "roman" and "italian" is a later after effect of it being applied to the Franks. No, I don't think the original meaning included "Roman" or "Italian." I wrote: <> You wrote: <> Well, the new testament is pretty heavy with "Romans" isn't it? I suspect there was opportunity enough if that's what the word meant at that point in time. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Aug 22 19:35:42 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 14:35:42 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I don't see how the first inhabitants of Australia could have lacked language and then leave descendants who did possess language. If they lacked language, they would have either died out or we'd see some pecularity in their genetic ability to form language or some unique traits in their languages. Cavalli-Sforza indicates there was later wave, as you suggest, which probably accounts for the dingo, superior tools [I believe stone tools were introduced] and [I believe] greater human density while various animal species went extinct. I seem to remember that Tasmania was separated by the Bass Straight before this occurred. The Tasmanians DID have language but their technology was comparable to that of the earlier Australians: no dingo, no stone tools, no fire drill, etc. Language diversity is concentrated in N. Australia and while this is most likely related to outside contact, it doesn't necessarily indicate that Pama-Nyungen [sp?] languages spring from later arrivals. It could just be the case that the first P-N speakers picked up the new technologies and adapted them to local conditions earlier than anyone else. In an attempt at list relevance, this may well have been the case for IE: adapting Middle Eastern based agricultural technologies to temperate climates. [snip] >If a long date is ever established, perhaps the first inhabitants didn't >have modern language, though they did have art. Australian languages are >oddly bunched, with many small families in Arnhem Land and Kimberley (just >where you'd land from Asia) and one huge, close family occupying all the >rest, which therefore can't represent the ancient population. Aborigines are >a genetic mix: there was a second wave around 10 000 BP. (Old memory of >mine: I don't know what mtDNA says about this mix.) It's just possible that >these brought speech along with the dingo. >Nicholas Widdows Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Aug 22 19:43:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 14:43:30 -0500 Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'm sorry but I can't follow your logic. If Neandertals had language, that would presuppose that language went back to a common ancestor with modern humans. Without a genetic ability for language, humans could not have picked up language from Neandertals anymore than a chimp or a gorilla could. >Just one point on the discussions. >It is EVEN possible >(though not the simplest explanation from some points >of view, Nature need not be simple) >that Neanderthals had several languages, >from independent sources, >and these languages were separately inherited >by different groups of modern humans. >So inheritance from Neanderthals >does NOT necessarily imply monogenesis? >Just checking the logic here. >Lloyd Anderson >Ecological Linguistics Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 00:03:41 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 20:03:41 -0400 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: <199908130507.BAA27942@unagi.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > The idea is that the distance between languages is represented by the > series of changes that occur to a large set of words in moving from > their parent form to their daughter forms, so that distance apart is not > measured between the daughter languages but rather by their distance > from their parent. We feel this better represents the real world > process. > Our data has to be the word set in the parent form (reconstructed words > or real words) and then one word set for the each daughter language and > the set of phonological transformation rules between each parent and > daughter for each word in their chronological sequence. Hence we are > modelling the rules and their sequence of application for each word. The > extent to which any of this information is hypothetical merely defines > the hypotheses one is comparing, but importantly it does not effect the > computational method we apply to this data. This post certainly caught my interest, because I've got various ideas myself about how computers could be better used in language reconstruction. In a very general way, I think we have some of the same interests. I do have some comments about your specific approach. If I understand correctly, you're measuring language 'distance' at least partially in terms of how many historical phonological rules a language has undergone since it first diverged from some reconstructed ancestor: the more rules, the greater the distance. (I hope I haven't just plain misunderstood; if so, the following may not apply.) I think the basic problem your approach raises is this: how do you count historical phonological changes? For example, is the Great Vowel Shift in English one rule, or a dozen? It looks like your distance measure will depend a great deal on what choices you make on such questions. The rule count is going to depend in part on what phonological theory you're working in. A traditional historical grammar of a language often lists a multitude of small rules which a modern theory can conflate into a shorter list. Exactly how short you can make the list partly depends on what phonological theory you're working in. There may indeed be no phonological rules at all in the traditional sense; phonological change could all be just the reranking of constraints, which is what I'm assuming in my in-progress dissertation. I'll respond to your question about an online database of Indo-European under a separate cover. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 00:34:11 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 20:34:11 -0400 Subject: Online etymological databases In-Reply-To: <199908130507.BAA27942@unagi.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > Our method should be useful to appraise competing reconstructions of earlier > languages,say Indoeuropean, however to date we have not been able to find the > necessary data compiled in one place to easily apply it. Should anyone have a > good database of appropriate data we would be happy to submit it to our > methods. It doesn't exist yet. I'm slowly working on one for Germanic, and there's another effort which is working on one for all of Indo-European. This latter effort is mostly being carried out by people in Holland. I don't have their URL handy, but a web search should turn it up. I think that the general idea of the Holland group is excellent, but I think the way they're carrying it out is unfortunate (and I've discussed this with them): they're assigning each branch to a specialist in that branch, and they're not planning to release anything to the public until they have a product in a fairly advanced stage of completion. I think they could take a real lesson from free software efforts such as Linux, where the slogan is "release early, release often". They could get a lot of enthusiastic volunteer help and a lot of useful feedback and contribution if they'd open the project up to the public. For example, when I recently asked for volunteers to each type a few pages of an glossary of Old English whose copyright has expired, so that there could be a free online glossary of OE, I got a strong response. The whole glossary was covered in a little over a month. Many of the responses were from enthusiatic non-specialists (altho some specialists took some pages too). Sharing the work this way gets things done quickly. I'm poking at making a free online etymological database of the older Germanic languages; this database will be totally free, so that others can freely create useful derived works from it. As a preliminary, I'm taking old glossaries whose copyright has expired and putting them online. I've done this with a Gothic glossary and am working on the one for Old English; I'll probably do Old High German next and then work on actually creating the database. The next step toward that end will be to mark these glossaries up, probably with SGML tags of some sort, so that all the information can automatically be folded into one big database. This markup can probably be largely done by program, followed by hand correction. My long-term dream is to have all the references in this database which anyone could need: concordance-style references to instances of a word in the text, full conjugations and declensions, alternate spellings, pointers between cognates in related languages, pointers between compounds and their constituent elements, etc. Once there is such a database, one of the projects I'd like to tinker with is automated language reconstruction; I've got some ideas about how one might write a program to do this. The database has to come first, tho. What bits I've got online are at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/language_resources.html I'd be quite open to working with others on developing these resources. One of my main priorities is to produce resources which are free, both in terms of cost and in terms of freedom from any intellectual property encumbrances. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 00:39:56 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 20:39:56 -0400 Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance In-Reply-To: <86958a10.24e5a2ae@aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > We now have an international standard computer Code, Unicode, > which contains most of the characters needed for transliteration > (Latin-standard-based letters) and for phonetic transcription (IPA). > It would be useful to try to establish a standard for Comparative > Data sets, into which all existing computer data sets can be translated, > so that the massive sets of data can be made available for studies > such as this. I agree totally. We're on exactly the same wavelength here. I've looked into this a little and have tried to educate myself about SGML, which would be an obvious candidate for marking up the data sets. I don't know if there are any specific standard sets of SGML tags for marking up dictionaries; if there are, it would probably make sense to start with such a tag set, and extend it with whatever additional tags we need to represent cognations between languages, etc. If anyone on this list has any experience using SGML for such a purpose, please write to me, because I'll need to be tackling this problem before much longer! \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Aug 23 09:49:17 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 11:49:17 +0200 Subject: 20-counting in Danish and beyond In-Reply-To: <572cb0c0.24ed8812@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > In Danish > to og halv-fems > means 92. > Literally, > two and half-FIVES The <-s> in '90' is not a plural morpheme, but a shortening of the ending <-sindstyve> 'times twenty' in the more antiquate , developed from Old Danish , literally 'half-fifth times twenty'. , which is not used independently in Modern Danish (although in words like 'ever', literally 'any time(s)'), is from the Germanic root *sin§a-, just like the Old English 'time, road'. The hole system goes as follows: 20 tyve 30 tredive 40 fyrre (< fyrretyve, analogous) 50 halvtreds (< halvtredsindstyve 'half-third times twenty') 60 tres (< tresindstyve 'three times twenty') 70 halvfjerds (< halvfjerdsindstyve 'half-fourth times twenty') 80 firs (< firsindstyve 'four times twenty) 90 halvfems (< halvfemsindstyve 'half-fifth times twenty) Adam Hyllested From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 12:35:17 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 08:35:17 -0400 Subject: Books on Indo-European In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Frank Rossi wrote: > Any suggestions on the latest books (or articles) in any language dealing > coprehensively with: > a) the Indo-European Urheimat question and taking into account all the > latest theories; That would be Mallory, "In Search of the Indo-Europeans." It's a good general overview of the subject; it also serves in part as a rebuttal to Renfrew, who puts the IE homeland in Anatolia and largely equates the spread of agriculture with the spread of the IE languages. > b) pre Indo-European languages in Europe (in particular taking into account > - pro et contra - Leo Vennemann's theories - Vasconic, Atlantic substate of > insular Celtic, etc.) I take it you mean the unattested languages which IE presumably displaced rather than the attested non-IE languages (Etruscan, Iberian, Tartessian). I don't know if anyone has ever given an even-handed summary of the speculation on this topic. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 23 14:09:33 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:09:33 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > "Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human > speech sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." *Some* researchers. Not all, not most, not even -- I think -- a bare majority. Just some, and most of the ones I have encountered have been anthropologists or archeologists, not linguists or biologists. *Some* researchers, in fact, want to assign language to our hominid ancestors, *Homo erectus*. But, so far as I can judge, the majority view is still that language most likely arose with our own species, 100,000-200,000 years ago. [RM] > < 60,000 BP, that date would seem to be very wrong>> [SL] > Why? Who says those Australians had language at the time? The two > events have no necessary connection. Given the apparent biological centrality of our language faculty, it is for many of us exceedingly difficult to imagine biologically modern human beings without language. The case for the first emergence of fully modern languages only 40,000 or so years ago rests entirely, so far as I know, on a single argument: the argument that human material culture underwent a great and rapid flowering around that time, and that nothing other than the emergence of language could explain that flowering. But not everyone accepts that the claimed dramatic flowering is real. And, even if you do accept this, it is far from clear that the emergence of language is the only possible explanation. > And Out of Africa could be just flat out dead wrong. Yes, it could. But the multiregional hypothesis requires that our species should have emerged, not in a single location, but over a vast area of the globe, by continued gene-flow. And I have never heard of a *single* other species which is known or believed to have originated in such a way. Has anybody else? Multiregionalism has the consequence that the human species originated in a unique manner, unparalleled by the emergence of any other known species. And I find this deeply unpalatable. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 23 14:23:56 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:23:56 +0100 Subject: color terms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > My suspicion is that in the old days, people did not match colors > but things - among which natural color or dyes might or might not be > the common element. > How else could we explain the form 'blake' turning up in the old > text to mean both black and white? Well, we use `gray' for everything from very pale gray to charcoal gray. Not so different, really. We also use `blue' for everything from pale sky-blue to navy blue, something which surprises the speakers of, say, Russian, which has two entirely distinct basic color terms to cover this range. I don't see any great reason to be surprised because speakers of another language, or speakers of an earlier form of our own language, happen to apply their color terms in a different way from us. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 23 15:26:55 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 16:26:55 +0100 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: <7ba2e233.24e4e281@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [on the Penn tree for IE] > I simply must ask some questions about what this means. > 1. I assume the branching off in this 'Stammbaum' carries the > inference of being chronological in the sense of earlier or later > separations. (Rather than for example the degree of linguistic > difference between languages.) This may go without saying, but I'm > just checking. Yes; the tree is intended to be a relative -- not absolute -- chronology. > So here at this first juncture: > PIE > / \ > / Anatolian > Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian? It would have to > wouldn't it? No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant. It is concluded by the Penn group, and widely believed anyway, that Anatolian was the first branch of IE to split off from the rest. So, that top node, with its two daughters, represents an initial split of the single language PIE, with one daughter being the ancestor of Anatolian, and the other daughter being the single common ancestor of everything else. We now often speak of `broad PIE' -- the ancestor of the whole family -- and `narrow PIE' -- the ancestor of everything except Anatolian. Narrow PIE is a sister language of Proto-Anatolian: Broad PIE / \ / \ / \ / \ Narrow PIE Proto-Anatolian > Then where along that left side diagonal does PIE cease to exist? This is not a question about facts, but only one about terminology. I don't think anyone wants to apply the term `PIE' to anything below what I have just called `narrow PIE'. If you prefer Sturtevant's `Indo-Hittite' nomenclature, then the last tree gets renamed as follows: Proto-Indo-Hittite [sic] / \ / \ / \ / \ PIE Proto-Anatolian > This question of when PIE ends strikes me as an important question, > for a number of reasons. Actually, it's only a question of terminology, no more. > First, reconstruction always seems to proceed as if *PIE were a > static language - but coexistence could have meant centuries of > potential change within PIE itself. Coexistence has nothing to do with it, but otherwise you are dead right. PIE must have exhibited the same regional and social variation as any other living language, and it must have changed continuously even during the centuries when it could still reasonably be regarded as a single language. But reconstruction is not good at identifying variation -- which is not to deny that IEists have often drawn attention to possible instances of variation within PIE. As for the change over time within PIE, this has received a fair amount of attention. Ideally -- though not always actually -- reconstruction gives us the latest version of PIE, just before it began breaking up into distinct daughters. But it is perfectly possible in principle to do internal reconstruction *within* PIE to identify earlier and later stages of it, and precisely this has been attempted. For example, the German linguist Specht has argued rather persuasively that athematic nouns are generally older within PIE than are thematic nouns. And several people have devoted attention to the possibility of reconstructing a version of PIE which is substantially earlier than, and quite different from, the late version that we commonly see in the handbooks. Diakonov (I think it was) coined the name `Pre-PIE' for this earlier version, while others speak merely of `Early' and `Late' PIE (and sometimes also of an intervening `Middle' stage). > Second, it means that languages coexisting with PIE could have been > influenced by or influenced PIE after splitting off. And third it > would mean that PIE could have been influenced by non-PIE influences > between splittings. Yes, except that we wouldn't use the name `PIE' for anything descended from PIE. > And logically either PIE either coexisted with some of these branch-offs. No. It can be misleading to think of one branch as branching off from a `trunk'. There is no trunk. All that really happens is that the single ancestor (at any given point in time) splits into two (or more) distinct daughters. And thereafter it is a matter of chance whether any of those daughters go on to become ancestral to a large group of languages. > Or they all branched off at one time and PIE evaporated. The traditional picture does indeed see PIE as fissioning simultaneously into ten or twelve daughters. But it is precisely this picture which is challenged by the Penn tree. > OR PIE never disappeared but turned directly into one or a few of > these languages, which would be direct rather than indirect > descendents. Sorry; I don't follow. All IE languages are direct descendants of PIE, by definition. > I think those are all the choices. There are no others, but each > one should result in completely different reconstructions of *PIE. I don't see how. > 2. You wrote: <<... Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian are in a single > sub-branch of the IE family together, but Balto-Slavic and Germanic are in > this branch as well.>> > If that's the case, then what did that whole subbranch split off from? At > the point of the split of Greek Armenian, the left line is still there. > Above are the Italo-Celtic, Tocharian, Anatolian branches. Presumably they > are distinguishable from whatever it is that is out there that might be > called Proto-BS-Germanic-Indo-Iranian. > What does this mean for reconstruction of *PIE? What if it was > Proto-GrAr-BSGer-IIr that was the branch off and Italo-Celtic was the true > remainder of the PIE 'trunk'? (I don't think you can favor one or the other > branch - why should one be seen as more lineal to PIE than the other?) Exactly. It is merely an accident, in the Penn tree, that at almost no point does a branch split into two branches each of which goes on to split further into several of the major branches of the family. According to the Penn results, six of the eight splits recognized produce two daughters, one of which is the ancestor of only a single major branch of IE. The last split yields Baltic and Slavic. Just two of the earlier splits produce daughters each of which is the ancestor of two or more of the major branches we recognize. > In that case, Italo-Celtic would preserve PIE best and the other > branch would be the split-off, innovating away from the core. And > misleading us as to what PIE was like. No, no. First, the Penn tree does not even recognize an `Italo-Celtic' branch. It merely concludes that Anatolian was the first to separate from all the rest, Celtic the first to separate from the remainder, and Italic the first to separate from the new remainder. Second, the age of the split has nothing to do with the degree of conservatism or innovation in any given branch. In fact, almost everybody picks Lithuanian as the most conservative living IE language -- and yet Baltic split from Slavic only at a very late stage indeed, and Balto-Slavic split from others only rather late. The branch leading to Balto-Slavic has generally been more conservative than the branches leading elsewhere. > 3. < sister of Balto-Slavic, but that the pre-Germanic speakers came into > the political orbit of the prehistoric Italo-Celtic peoples and > absorbed loan words from them at some date prior to Grimm's Law.>> > How does the team view the new reconstruction of the obstruent > system (Hopper/Gamkrelidze/etc.) that suggests that Grimm's Law > actually reflects archaism rather than innovation? The Penn team didn't make much use of phonological characters, which they regard as less reliable than lexical and morphological characters. So this shouldn't make much difference. It is mainly the divergent results for lexical and morphological characters which make Germanic problematic. > With that view, would Balto-Slavic become a sister to Germanic that > came under the influence of IIr, ditching that archaism like IIr? Dunno, but I doubt it. > 4. Just hypothetically, if we were to assume that PIE was nothing > but very early Greek, how would this diagram and the findings behind > it change? Would the tree look all that different? Would it have > Greek-Armenian at the bottom of the main stem? Or would it? Sorry; I don't understand the question. In a sense, PIE *was* "very early Greek", since it is the direct ancestor of Greek. But it was equally "very early English", or "very early Bengali". > Does this diagram seem to put IIr in that last position (or > IIr-BS-Gr) - does that possibly reflect a sampling artifact favoring > Sanskrit, Germanic and Lithuanian/Slavic - the favored sources in > many *PIE reconstructions? Don't know what you mean by "that last position". Of course, the Penn work is potentially vulnerable to sampling artefacts. If they had chosen different characters, or different languages to represent the major branches, maybe the outcome would have been somewhat different. But this sort of thing can be tested for. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Mon Aug 23 16:35:57 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 11:35:57 -0500 Subject: Books on Indo-European Message-ID: Otto Schrader's 1890 Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples proposed the same homeland that Gimbutas subsequently found archaeological reasons to argue for. Her collected papers were posthumously published by two of her students as JIES Monograph 18 (1997). JIES, the journal and the monographs, are indexed on the website http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc. An upcoming issue of JIES, I am told, will carry an article by Renfrew and others. In the meantime James Mallory and Douglas Adams (1997 Fitz Dearborn, London) have published their Encyclopedia of IE Culture to update Schrader's Encyclopedia, a brave attempt that has problems (see Lehmann's review in Language, if it's out yet and Polomé's upcoming review in JIES). One major contribution is Mallory's set of entries on the various archaeological cultures, complete with drawings of graves and body positions. This comes close to taking into consideration a range of theories, but leaves readers their own options. CFJ >Any suggestions on the latest books (or articles) in any language dealing >coprehensively with: >a) the Indo-European Urheimat question and taking into account all the >latest theories; >b) pre Indo-European languages in Europe (in particular taking into account >- pro et contra - Leo Vennemann's theories - Vasconic, Atlantic substate of >insular Celtic, etc.) >Thanks and regards >Frank Rossi >iglesias at axia.it From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 19:43:01 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:43:01 -0400 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Aug 1999, Robert Whiting wrote: > Steve is quite correct here. A reconstruction is just that. In > the best case it is only the statistically most probable > original relationship between the forms found in the daughter > languages. The Comparative Method is not quantitative or probabilistic. It's incorrect to describe reconstructed forms as "statistically the most probable". That's not how the Comparative Method works; it doesn't compute numeric probabilities among competing reconstructions. I've seen other variations of the phrase "statistically probable" on this list in contexts which suggest that what the writer means is something like "what we've judged to be most likely." That's not a correct use of the terminology. >> Depending on how much reconstruction of the parent you used, >> could this not be an artifact of the reconstructions? In *PIE, >> certain aspects are considered the innovations of a particular >> daughter language because they do not appear in the other >> daughter languages, and are therefore factored out of the >> reconstruction. If you only have two daughter languages - as you >> did above - how do you identify the innovation versus the >> original form in reconstruction? And if you decide in favor of >> one or the other in reconstruction, it will show up in any >> further use of that reconstruction. (I know this is from an earlier post, but I'll go ahead and answer it here anyway.) Suppose that the proto-language has two phonological categories, e.g. */a/ and */o/. Suppose further that one of the daughter languages merges these categories, and the other doesn't. It will be obvious in the daughter languages which one innovated. > It is not so much a question of innovation versus preservation. > It is a matter of how much innovation there is in each daughter > language. When you have the parent preserved, this can be > measured. What exactly is being measured? This whole line of discussion assumes that "innovation" is something that can be measured. I'd like to know exactly what this means. What is being counted? [...] > will also help to reduce the likelihood of the daughters having > innovated the same way independently (historical linguists really > hate it when this happens because it screws everything up). Not as bad as you think, because you can often tell from the relative chronology that the change must have happened independently. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Mon Aug 23 23:19:38 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 09:19:38 +1000 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 21 Aug 1999 08:35:46 +0300." Message-ID: Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 08:35:46 +0300 (EETDST) From: Robert Whiting On Wed, 18 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: I agree pretty well with everything Robert White said on appraising my method, and I missed the email he is commenting on, so here I will just add a few footnotes. >jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au wrote further: ><> >I'm wondering if there isn't a possible flaw here in using <parent form (reconstructed words...)>>. >Reconstructed words have already made assumptions about the >relationship between the parent and the daughter languages. In >fact they are nothing but a presumed relationship between the >daughter languages. Steve is quite correct here. A reconstruction is just that. In the best case it is only the statistically most probable original relationship between the forms found in the daughter languages. In our case study we were very happy to use the Cantonese and Beijing materials because the mother language is Middle Chinese which is NOT a reconstructed language, although there is some small degree of uncertainty in the source materials. Hence this data formed a check on whether or not our method could produce sensible answers. The answer is 'yes', because it produced a result that was consistent with the perceptions of the scholars in the field, however, it also produced extra illuminations of the relationships between the languages. A book is to be published in the next week or two showing all the results. When I have the correct bibliographical info I will send it to the list. The linguist who worked with us was John Newman(it was his data). In the case of reconstructed parent languages our method would be useful to evaluate competing reconstructions. With only a single reconstruction from two daughter languages the answers may provide an nice generalisation story about the proximity of the daughters but the value of that is in hands of the interpreter. One important aspect of our method is the rigour it forces on the linguist to explain EVERY piece of the data. Generally I find dealing with linguistic data difficult because firstly, it is almost impossible to find a significantly sized set of data in the one place and secondly, the data is invariable incomplete in that the every rule of transformation for each word is present with the data set. I actually think that linguists are very poor data managers and on that dimension are very - how shall I say it - unrigorous. I would have thought it is time for the historical linguistics community to follow the example of the genome people and set up international databases of historical languages, reconstructions, etc using agreed data organisations, so that we can all get the data and agree on what data we are working on. I am trying to initiate such a project for basque. I f there other specific items from Bob's message you want me to comment on please let me know 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 jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 24 00:07:55 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 02:07:55 +0200 Subject: nasal pres / root aor In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, Carol F. Justus wrote: [Quoting me on nas.prs. in Hittite:] > CFJ: > The first Hittite forms have a bit of a typo. The alternation is between > harak(z)i 'perish(es)' and har-nin-k- 'destroy' where the nasal is an > infix. This differs from the tepu- 'small', tep-nu- 'make small, humiliate' > where the more productive nasal is the suffix -nu- (cf. also ar-hi 'I > reach, arrive', ar-nu-mi 'I bring'). The Greek present deik-nu-mi 'I show' > versus -s- aorist edeik-sa 'I showed' has a formally comparable present, > but the aorist still has the causative meaning without the causative > suffix, while Latin nasal of present pa-n-go 'I fasten' beside perfect > pe-pe:gi: 'I have fastened' also doesn't lose its transitive active > character without the nasal. Kronasser's Etymologie der hethitischen > Sprache (with Neu's later index) lists forms. > In Hittite we have two nasal affixes, an infix and a suffix. The Hittite > suffix is productive, the infix not. While there are cognate nasal affixes > elsewhere in IE languages, the individual systems in which we catch them > functioning would seem to have been sufficiently re-worked to call for > explanations as to the nature of the language-specific innovations. > The fact that Hittite -nu- is productive would seem to point to its being > an innovation. Historically, many consider the Wilusa-Alaksandu-Ahhijawa > evidence of the Hittite treaties to argue for a contact with Mycenaean > Achaeans around (W?)Ilium in the early second half of the second millennium > BC. If so, not only are Greek -nu- and Hittite -nu- distinct from the nasal > infix, but also one of many innovations taking place dialectally in > post-PIE times, in this instance probably the Greek form as a result of > contact with Hittite, as the Hittite form is productive in its meaning, the > Greek form less so. > Since we have the data studies of Strunk and others, we would seem to be in > a position now to go on to peal off the layers, distinguishing between > older and more recent features, also features that may be shared between > languages as a result of later contact. The Hittite infixed nasal and > suffixed nasal would seem to be cases in point. These nasals would > certainly not function like the Gothic Weak Class IV and I verbs such as > full-na-n 'fill' (intrs.) and full-ja-n 'fill' (trs.) from fulls 'full', > which show a new system of transitivity alternation. Even if someone wants > to identify Gothic -ja- with an old IE causative form, the Gothic nasal > does not function like an old IE causative, nor is the paradigmatic > alternation inherited. > Carol Thanks for correcting Hitt. hark-zi : har-ni-k-zi (3pl har-nin-k-anzi). I reject the basic difference between this infix -n- and the suffix -nu- (though I see their different degree of productivity as clearly as anybody else). My point is that the -n- is also infixed in the denominative type tep-n-u-zzi 'makes inferior' (tepu- 'small'). The conglomerate -nu- replaced infixed -n- where infixation had become awkward (as in ar-), then also elsewhere. I see no causative value in Gk. deiknumi which means 'show' like the root. This brings a bit of confusion: the Gk. verbs in root + -nu:-/-nu- do not necessarily reflect IE nasal presents since the type became productive. But this is immaterial: the point is that widely there is no palpable causative value to the nasal infix anymore, because the verbal derivation had gone full circle, in that the the old middle voice of the causative which meant, e.g., "I am being caused to listen", had lost both its middle voice value (to the extent that it could take active desinences) and its causative meaning, being thus the perfect durative companion of the root aorist of a root meaning 'listen up'. It is therefore mistaken to demand that a causative component gets subtracted when the nasal disappears in the inflection - that component mostly had disappeared in the nasal present also. This account unites the various types of denominative and deverbative nasal derivatives into a coherent picture. Note that Kronasser and Neu actually give some Hittite examples of factitive nu-verbs losing the factitive meaning when used in the middle voice (dassanu- act. 'make strong', mid. 'become strong'). These then have the same semantic shade as the de-adjectival nasal verbs I quoted from Balto-Slavic and Germanic. The expectation that something productive was an innovation in its nucleus already is not logical. Any old thing may become productive, including anything old. I would not be surprised if some productivity attached to the *-new-/-nu- variant of the nasal present already in PIE, seeing that it is gaining ground in Germanic, Indic and Armenian too. This spread does not look very well like the result of post-PIE contacts. The nasal of fullnan *is* the same thing, only repeated at a later date: A nasal infix structure was replaced by a variant that could be suffixed, and the meaning is that of the middle voice of the factitive, 'become full'. The transitive fulljan is denominative pure and simple: just like diups 'deep' formed diupjan 'make deep', thus 'full' formed 'make full'. This type of factitive, made from the adjective stem directly (with present-forming *-ye/o- in the present stem), must have been somehow functionally opposed to the collective-based variant in *-aH2- (+ *-ye/o- in the prs.): OIc. ny:ja from *newe-ye/o- 'make a new thing' vs. Lat. (re)nova:re from *newa-H2-ye/o- 'make new things'? I believe your "call for explanations as to the nature of the language-specific innovations" in the reworking of the nasal types has been answered. Jens From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Aug 24 02:59:14 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 22:59:14 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I was not after deeper truths in my message. Just trying to figure out what > assumptions were behind this tree model. Sean Crist revealed a lot of that > in his post in response. I don't think the model would yield any direct > conclusions on relative intelligibility - but you might ask Sean. That's correct; as far as I'm aware, Ringe et. al. don't make any statements regarding mutual intelligibility. It's a matter of innovations being shared or not shared. Presumably, two dialects which had recently branched (i.e., undergone innovations which are not shared) would remain mutually intelligible for a while, much as the dialects of modern English are mutually intelligible, despite there having been innovations not shared by all dialects. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Aug 24 07:08:45 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 07:08:45 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >First of all, Wallachia as latinized South Slavic: >Consider that we have many instances of Latinized 'vlach' that does not go >the way of 'Wallachia' and all are earlier. There is everything from the >Pope's "rex blachorum" (1206) to a "villa vlacha' (1295) to "Vlachii" and the >"Blasii" and "Blachi" mentioned in the Hungarian Gesta (1100's). (And of >course in one of the Egil sagas we see "Blocmannland" - looking like it came >down the same path.) My best information is that /valachia/ as Vlachs first >appears a bit later (@1300's?). duNay says the first mention of the place we >call "Walachia" happens with the Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz (1415-1480). >So what happened here? The palatalized /vl/ Palatalized vl-? >gets dropped suddenly in Latin >after all those years and Latin and German return to /val/? Does that make >sense? Why not? Vl- as an initial cluster doesn't come naturally to many languages (e.g. Romanian) and may be changed to bl- or val- in borrowing. >Here's another explanation. There were multiple forms of the word going >round in the many years before 'Wallachia" shows up about . duNay says that >Vlach is "walach" in German. And the OED shows that 'vlachs' first entered >English as "wolocks" and "wallacks" as well as the expected "vlachs" and >"walachs" from the latin. If the Slavic "volocks" did not survive >palatalization, the German version of it should have. It would then make >more sense to see "Walachia" or "Wallachia" as: >1) a latinization of either the earlier pre-pal. Slavic "volocks" or >"volochs." (But not East Slavic "volox"). Or a form that survived >palatalization with the initial vowel because it was a proper name. I really don't understand your use of the word palatalization. >2) a latinization of "wal/a/ch" (adj) as it sometimes appears in Germanic or >as it might have been borrowed back early from the Slavic. >Both of these seem to fit better, given that "vlach-" was already established >in Latin well before "Wallachia" appears. They also acknowledge the original >western form of the word with the initial vowel intact. >At this point, I won't go into the fact that there is another form of Vlach >that appears early in Southern Slavic, "vlah-", that does not even include >-x(U)- that might be reflected from say "Volcae" but not from the OHG >"uualha". /x/ is the voiceless velar fricative sometimes written or . >I wrote: ><> >You wrote: ><> >Well, the new testament is pretty heavy with "Romans" isn't it? >I suspect there was opportunity enough if that's what the word meant at that >point in time. The word at that point in time meant "Romance speaker", while Ulfila uses "Roman" (i.e. at the time and place, a person speaking Greek). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From BMScott at stratos.net Tue Aug 24 07:45:24 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 03:45:24 -0400 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > As far as the borrowing, "galc = thicken cloth, fulling; > from the English walk, waulk" (McBain's Etym Dict - Scot > Gaelic) would be likely a loan from AS. Just to keep the record straight, the OED s.v. walk(2) observes that the word is not found in English in this sense until the 14th c. So far as I can discover, is a specifically Sc.Gael. borrowing. > B_T_W, I just noticed that MacFarlaine gives a different, > much more local explanation for "Gall" as foreigner - > "Gall: foreigner, a Scottish Lowlander The Dict. of the Irish Lang. gives the following senses in Old and Middle Ir., of which the first is earliest: (1) a Gaul, (apparently sometimes equated with Frank); (2) a Scandinavian invader; (3) an Anglo-Norman, an Irishman of Norman descent; (d) a foreigner. Dinneen says that it was applied in succession to Gauls, Franks, Danes, Normans, and English. There appears to be no reason to think that is anything other than 'a Gaul' in origin. Brian M. Scott From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 24 08:08:17 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 04:08:17 EDT Subject: How new hypotheses grow Message-ID: In a message dated 8/24/99 12:28:35 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi is clearly offended by what I have written. In part, I think the tone is self-evident for what it is, and requires little response. But the misunderstandings and misrepresentations I will try to answer to some degree. The major and underlying difference is that I am much more consciously aware, or at least more concerned by the fact that "methods" can yield wrong results, can be misapplied, etc. etc. I have contributed a number of messages pointing out where I think if we can make the data structures of our field of historical linguistics more easily available, we may avoid some of the "kook" noise, or at least shorten the lifetime of fanciful creations which are without support. I have also contributed many messages pointing out ways in which we may be able to strengthen our tools, and I would prefer that we in the field of historical linguistics do exactly that. I believe the kinds of discussions in which people throw theories (note! theories) of scientific method at each other, neglecting the sociology of how new hypotheses are actually discovered, are not profitable. I believe it is actually fairly well known that "philosophy of science" often makes errors in disregarding the "history of science". So I believe here also. *** Here a couple of the kinds of challenges I favor. I am sure experts in particular language families can devise others better than these. One good challenge would be for historical linguists to figure out what kinds of data pattern studies would serve to bring forth evidence that could establish an Indo-European family based ONLY on Albanian and some one other IE language. (Or which could place Albanian in the IE family tree, where Ringe's team said their tools could not do it.) In other words, take instances in which languages are known to be related, and ask how could we have known that given much less data then we in fact do have; what methods of comparison and reconstruction are robust against such reductions of data sets? Another good challenge: A statement attributed to Ives Goddard some years ago will also illustrate a good domain for posing more challenging problems to improve our methods. In substance it was: [Wiyot and Yurok are clearly related to Algonquian, but our traditional Comparative Method cannot establish that.] It is many years ago now, and I am sure someone else could report this better. The question arises then, why is it that the best historical linguists of American Indian languages were quite thoroughly convinced AT SOME POINT that these languages were related, yet the standard kind of evidence was somehow lacking? What was it that they found so thoroughly convincing? That is crucial, because it just might possibly suggest the development of new tools which can penetrate deeper. Experts' intuitions have a wonderful way of often, not always, leading to demonstrable claims. Intuition is not formless, it can be studied and analyzed (after which we of course no longer call it intuition, and conveniently forget in many cases where it came from). Nor are such successful intuitions MERELY the tiny fraction of "guesses" with no foundation, which happened by chance to turn out true. In the most valuable cases, what we discover is a new kind of evidence or way of handling data so that it becomes evidence. Also, and equally important, what was it that the Amerindian specialists felt at that earlier time point was not measuring up to needed standards in the applicability of the traditional comparative method to the data (or facts)? If we discover that that kind of evidence, while of course our standard and most convenient kind, is not absolutely necessary to a convincing case, then we will have opened new paths to gathering evidence in the future. (Saying this does NOT imply I want to "relax" any standards whatsoever, or be "lax" in any way whatsoever, it is simply part of the process of discovering EMPIRICALLY what kinds of data sets and tools are likely to yield arguments which in the longer run lead to more evidence and to proofs. Just like the tools we now use and TAKE FOR GRANTED, except that while a tool is being developed it is not taken for granted, and of course should not be.) Well, there are two of the challenges I think would improve our tools, if these challenges can be met well. *** Mr Whiting clearly does NOT understand what I have written. He apparently mistakes my attempts to counter what I regard as the illegitimate parts of critiques as attempts to defend claims which I have no wish to defend and have not defended. (Ruhlen, see quotation below.) Whiting also attributes to me, in magisterial tones, a "spectacular lack of knowledge of what a hypothesis is." Quite on the contrary, I know full well what a hypothesis is, and I have absolutely no wish to support any kook claims, which Mr. Whiting at least by innuendo seems to attribute to me. BUT... I HAVE ALSO grown up in a family with two parents who were professional researchers, I am one myself, and I learned very early how the supposed scientific method can be manipulated to give the appearance of certainty where there is none, EITHER to "prove" or to "disprove" a hypothesis. I have learned how often people substitute "Straw man" hypotheses which they can easily disprove, instead of the actual hypothesis someone else really was proposing, which they cannot so easily disprove. I have learned to not consider that honest. In short, I simply do not assume that those who use the scientific method are completely unbiased, perfect judges, or somehow gods above the rest of humanity. That in no way means that I discount the importance of the scientific method. The latter does not in any way follow from the former, and anyone who thinks so has not understood the balanced sophistication of the reasoning I have presented. I do not advocate extremes. The fact that someone makes a mistake on one item in no way leads me logically to conclude that they are wrong on everything else as well. If (as everyone now acknowledges, it is a common saying) we all know that statistics can lie, then why should the requirements of our traditional "comparative method" be beyond question? Particular statistical measures are known to be appropriate only to problems of particular kinds of structure. The same must almost certainly be true in a sense of our traditional comparative method, that it works well in some situations, poorly in others, and gives the wrong result in yet other situations. (I think a workbook in historical linguistics which I used years ago in teaching actually said explicitly that if the rules were followed correctly with a particular data set involving languages of China, that the answer would be a wrong answer.) *** Here is merely one of many examples where Mr. Whiting does not understand what I wrote, or chooses to argue against a "Straw Man" instead of against what I actually wrote: I wrote: >As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent >statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such >conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might >be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). [that was to contrast with Ruhlen, who I believe is less explicit about that. A small digression to clarify Greenberg's method. All Greenberg's work does is demonstrate NON-relatedness, not relatedness. Or rather, his method seeks the greatest SEPARATIONS, language groupings whose relationship (there by assumption not by proof) is the MOST DISTANT. I know this statement may seem paradoxical since Greenberg is famous for claiming that all of Amerind except Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut is one large family. What that really means is that Greenberg's method cannot establish any great cleavage among the remaining Amerind languages, they seem to be a large number of language families with overlapping similarities without evidence dividing them into a very few super-super-families. Whether that reflects chance similarities or true genetic relations is beyond Greenberg's method. He simply assumes everything is related. We can use his data collections (of course with improvements and corrections wherever possible) whether or not we agree with that assumption.] Later I wrote: >(I am much less familiar with Ruhlen than with Greenberg.) to which Whiting remarked: >Then you should perhaps familiarize yourself with his methodology >before you try to defend it. I did not defend Ruhlen's methodology in any terms having to do with proving a hypothesis. This is a clear misunderstanding or misrepresentation. It is an example of what I call "Straw Man" reasoning. If I HAD tried to defend Ruhlen's methodology by claiming Ruhlen was doing any kind of legitimate hypothesis testing my logic would be easy to defeat, because Ruhlen has not done so. But Whiting today treats me AS IF I had done so (that is the Straw Man), and defeats that instead of arguing against what I actually did say. Which does not address IN ANY WAY what I was actually saying in this part of the discussion. I had answered a comment by Larry Trask: >>This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is >>enough to render Ruhlen's work vacuous, as follows: >Not so, since Ruhlen can be treated as involved in hypothesis >FORMATION not hypothesis testing. to which Whiting remarks: >On the contrary, Ruhlen is not formulating a hypothesis (we all >should know how to do this by now: one starts with the data and >then develops a hypothesis sure, so far, that is what we do, and in the case of Ket-Athabaskan (see below), that is I believe what Ruhlen did also. continuing: [a hypothesis] >that accounts for the data [all the data]). No, that last part is not anywhere near the early stages of hypothesis formation, and many hypotheses which are considered by the majority of professionals in a field to be strongly confirmed do not account for ALL of the data. In fact, perhaps no hypothesis EVER accounts for ALL of the data. Attempting to insist on that too early in the process puts a brake on all new discovery, by condemning the very process which has been known, throughout the history of science, to yield new discoveries... Namely, the WILLINGNESS TO SUSPEND JUDGEMENT FOR A WHILE, TO WORK WITH HYPOTHESES WHICH ARE NOT YET STRONGLY CONFIRMED. This is ONE of the two major illnesses of the wars in modern historical linguistics, the eagerness to condemn tentative hypotheses too early. The other major illness is just the opposite, of course, that is, the eagerness of some people to propose some supposedly earth-shaking new discovery, even if they really have not much to suggest it is worth pursuing, simply because they are wannabe "discoverers". Of course, we cannot "know" in advance how particular hypotheses will turn out when we DO figure out how to test them. Often, we do not even know exactly how to state a hypothesis formally at first (and therefore we do not know what its negative, its corresponding null hypothesis, would be). By BREAKING the continuum of growth of new hypotheses, known in the history of science, we hamstring the development of new knowledge. Here is I think a paragraph from Mr. Whiting which illustrates the inability of many linguists to grant that "hypothesis" is an appropriate term for ideas through a very broad range, from shortly after initial glimmers, through initial formal proposal (with as yet no test), through until repeated tests have been passed and we have a confirmed hypothesis. >If Ruhlen can be considered to be involved in hypothesis >FORMATION not hypothesis testing, then the hypothesis being >formed is simply a hypothesis according to definition 4 above >("a mere guess or assumption"), not a hypothesis according to >definition 1 (a scientific hypothesis). Of course, there is a difference between those two, but there is also a continuum linking them. Whiting continues in that same paragraph: >Collecting data is not hypothesis formation; >it is a prerequisite to hypothesis formation. Whiting seems no longer willing to grant that anything prior to his favored use of "hypothesis" could also be a "hypothesis". Because the collecting of data is also a POSTREQUISITE to most hypothesis formation, because hypotheses are formed at VERY EARLY STAGES of most successful discoveries or investigations. >And the data on which a hypothesis is based cannot be >used to test the hypothesis because that is simply circular. That is actually done all the time. People form hypotheses based on a set of data, then apply a statistical test to the set of data, including in it the same set of data from which they derived their hypothesis, though hopefully in better practice at least an expanded set of data in those cases where it is possible to obtain more data. That is not sufficient of course, but it is a universal procedure, and it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. Should a presentation of evidence for the Indo-European language family systematically exclude all of the most convincing data, the data which originally led to the tentative hypothesis? Of course not. In another paragraph, Whiting writes: >It is true that many (most?) scientific hypotheses start as >guesses. I'm happy with that sentence. >But not every guess is a scientific hypothesis. I would have thought NONE of them are, the way he was distinguishing "guess" from "hypothesis" earlier. >While anything is possible, not everything is probable. >Basically, no evidence, no scientific hypothesis. But the presence of evidence does not guarantee a "scientific hypothesis", presumably a term referring to a hypothesis which is being subjected to scientific testing and is at least quite a distance along the path of confirmation, if not confirmed. Initial glimmers and guesses are ALSO based on evidence. Data does not cease to be "evidence" merely because a hypothesis referring to that data is not yet securely confirmed. Not all "evidence" turns out to be valid evidence for what it was being used as "evidence" for. But it was still used as "evidence". (basically a "showing" used in arguing in favor of something) *** Concerning "Lookalikes" I responded to Trask's: >>and quite apart from his failure to realize that lookalikes do >>not constitute evidence of any kind. by saying: >Disagree flatly, unless defined circularly so that "lookalikes" >means more than it says, namely so that it means "lookalikes >which are known to be unrelated as cognates". >If it actually means "items which look alike in sound and >meaning", then of course such comparisons DO constitute >PRELIMINARY evidence. Any such preliminary evidence can be >discounted by showing that the resemblances are secondary and >late, or that they manifest a type of sound symbolism, or in >other ways. Whiting writes: >To the extent that lookalikes are a fact and facts can be used as >evidence, this is true. [as in the formation of the initial hypothesis of the Indo-European language family, which was first a guess, then a tentative hypothesis (no longer merely a guess), and gradually became more and more strongly confirmed...] Whiting continues: >But the question is and remains, what >are they evidence of. The null hypothesis is that they are >evidence that similar sounding words with similar meanings occur >in the world's languages by pure chance. Wow, this is strange. "The" [unique] null hypothesis? No, that is NOT the null hypothesis to a claim of particular lookalikes being real cognates. That would rather be the null hypothesis to counter a hypothesis that similar sounding words with similar meanings do not (ever) occur in the world's languages by pure chance. Rather, the null hypothesis corresponding to a hypothesis that a PARTICULAR set of look-alikes in the Indo-European languages were evidence that they constituted a family, would be that those particular similarities (of the look-alikes) arose from some other cause, (including possibly chance resemblances or sound symbolism but not limited to those, since this is merely the null hypothesis), and in particular did not arise from descent from a parent language. In his statement of the scientific method, Whiting says ("3" is formulation of a hypothesis to account for the data, 1 and 2 are identification of a problem and collection of relevant data): >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. Unless one uses words in such a way that ANY basis for formulating a hypothesis constitutes either (1) or (2) by definition, then this is not a valid description of how science proceeds. The basis for formulating a hypothesis is simply outside the scientific method, a hypothesis can come from anywhere at all. It is how one handles the careful accumulation of data afterwards that makes for valid science vs. sheer speculation. *** Mr. Whiting really does seem to want to avoid discussion of the possibility of improving the tools of historical linguistics. He says: >Many people ... point to the inadequacy of the tools > used in historical linguistics. Although to me this sounds like a version of "the poor workman blames his tools", [Notice that I at least phrased it just the reverse of that, not blaming the tools, but looking to ways to strengthen them and to add new tools, so we can perhaps address some range of problems which our current crop of traditional comparativists say are beyond possibility. It is only reasonable to assume that we can almost always make SOME progress of this kind, in almost any field...] Whiting continues: >the primary problem of historical >linguistics is not the inadequacy of the tools, but a lack of >hard data to use the tools on. I can even agree with the above! But not with the following: >When the data is available, the >tools to investigate it will arise. Because what his previous comment meant was that with more data, the EXISTING tools would be adequate. (Since there would be no impetus then to develop newer and more powerful tools, his last statement is counter-indicated.) *** Since Mr. Whiting illegitimately to tag me with being a defender of Ruhlen's methodology (the more easily to attack my arguements?), when I had NOT defended Ruhlen's methodology as concerns hypothesis testing, let me now specify the one place where I am most willing to give up some of my time to read what Ruhlen has written. Ruhlen has suggested that there may be a relation between Ket (Yeniseian, in Siberia) and Athabaskan. Is this worth spending any time on? (That is the ONLY question I would ask at such an early stage of any hypothesis, NEVER "is it proven?".) Well, given that almost everyone agrees the Amerindians of various groups are related to peoples of NE Asia, and given that the Athabaskans are most likely a relatively recent set of migrants from Asia, followed later only by Eskimo-Aleuts, and crucially given that there has not been much work on such possible links (I think not, anyhow), it is not impossible, and quite plausible, that there might be some such relation. My first question would be whether look-alikes are indeed significantly easier to find between Athabaskan and Ket than between Athabaskan and other languages of NE Asia. Perhaps Greenberg's focusing on the lateness of Eskimo-Aleut and Athabaskan migration to the Americas, as compared with other Amerindian, has posed a problem in such a way that one of the small number of people willing to look for distant language relationships might happen to see enough look-alikes to get the beginning glimmers of a hypothesis. That's how much of real science works, starting with glimmers. I have absolutely no idea whether this one will pan out or not. It is inherently conceivable enough, and Ruhlen has no vested interest specifically in Ket as opposed to any other language of NE Asia, that if he judges Athabaskan to be more similar to Ket than to other languages of that area, it warrants listening. New hypotheses must come from somewhere, and they often must break the framework of our established thinking. What makes me saddest is that too many of those who have taken on the responsibility of carrying our society's knowledge in historical linguistics seem to forget our roots in simple observation, and that those roots do not go away as we add sophistication to our observation and more and more tools for the testing of hypotheses. Remember the saying: "Science = self-conscious common sense" Sincerely yours, Lloyd Anderson *** For me, "Straw Man" has a very negative connotation, I learned the term in the context of argumentation in which the debater is not actually debating what was really proposed, but something else, the more easily to appear to defeat it. In a later part of his message, Whiting says: >Discrediting STRAW MAN claims (= null hypothesis) >is part of the method, in which he appears to be treating Straw Man claims as equal to null hypotheses. Quite on the contrary, in the usage I know, "straw man" claims are so named precisely because they are NOT the real man, they are NOT what anyone was claiming, and it is the null hypothesis OPPOSITE of such a straw-man claim which the debater is trying to make seem more reasonable. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 09:55:46 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 10:55:46 +0100 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > My questions were specifically addressed to the assumptions behind the > Stammbaum. According to Sean Crist's response, that graph appears to be > based on shared innovations over time rather than intelligibility. Yes. All linguistic trees are based upon shared innovations, the only plausible basis we've ever discovered for constructing trees. Intelligibility is not a factor: it cannot be quantified in any useful way. > That is why after Anatolian splits off on the Stammbaum, we are told > the appropriate language for what remains is "the innovations shared > by all the IE branches except Anatolian". Yes, providing you accept the Herkunfthypothese. This hypothesis holds that all of the several features absent in Anatolian but present in all other branches were absent from broad PIE and were innovations in narrow PIE after the split of Anatolian. But there is another view, the Schwundhypothese, which holds that all these features were present in broad PIE but then lost in Anatolian. I'm afraid I don't know if anybody is defending the Schwundhypothese today. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Aug 24 12:12:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 08:12:54 EDT Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa Message-ID: In a message dated 8/24/99 12:47:24 AM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> No, we don't have to presuppose that. Language as a cultural feature could have arisen independently with the Neanderthals. <> I think that this might be your problem here. At this point, we have no idea when a genetic ability for language would have 'emerged' (technical term.) In fact, we don't even know what one would look like - though people have been looking for physiological attributes for awhile. Humans quite before Neanderthal apparently had the 'brains' for it. The Duke group offered plausible evidence that Neanderthals had the physical ability in their jaws and mouths to 'speak' with the complexity required to emit human 'language' sounds, which apes don't have. This work is not really statistically settled. Right now, it remains that by far the #1 way to identify "a genetic ability for language" is to find language spoken. Otherwise, there is nothing to be gained by using those terms in this context. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 12:44:58 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 13:44:58 +0100 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree: correction In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In an earlier posting, I remarked that the Penn tree for IE recognized no Italo-Celtic grouping. This was true for the original publication. However, I've just been informed off-list that the Penn group have more recently produced a revised version of their tree, which *does* recognize such a grouping. My apologies for misleading you, but I am a little concerned by the news. As I understand it, the change was produced by adding only a single character to the set of characters used. If this is right, it suggests that the approach used at Penn is somewhat less than robust. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 13:34:17 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 14:34:17 +0100 Subject: Quebec French nasal vowels. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca wrote: [somebody else] >> As Larry Trask mentioned, this is original and authentic (but archaeic) >> French pronunciation that got lost by convergence elsewhere. > This is unbelievable. Arguing from authority is the weakest argument > of all, and since the authority himself (Larry Trask) was open and > honest enough to begin his posting on the subject by writing "I know > nothing of Quebecois", I fail to see the purpose of quoting him on > the subject. His comments on the dating of the en/an merger are > quite correct, by the way --he certainly knows something of French. Perhaps I might clarify this a bit. It is true that I know nothing of Quebec French. It is also true that I know something of the history of European French, but I am hardly a specialist here, and the observations I made in my earlier posting were taken from standard reference sources in my office -- which I think I identified. I am certainly no authority here, but then I don't think the anonymous person quoted above was really presenting me as an authority: he was merely quoting me. Now, what I said in my earlier posting was the following. It is reliably reported that the contrast between the vowels of and still exists today in some varieties of European French, even though the contrast has been gradually disappearing in French for centuries. Given the reports I saw that these vowels are distinguished today in Quebec French, I *surmised* (this is the verb I used) that the contrast had simply failed to be lost so far in Quebec, just as in certain parts of France. That's all. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Aug 24 13:37:16 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:37:16 +0300 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Sean Crist wrote: > On Sat, 21 Aug 1999, Robert Whiting wrote: >> Steve is quite correct here. A reconstruction is just that. In >> the best case it is only the statistically most probable >> original relationship between the forms found in the daughter >> languages. > The Comparative Method is not quantitative or probabilistic. It's > incorrect to describe reconstructed forms as "statistically the most > probable". That's not how the Comparative Method works; it doesn't > compute numeric probabilities among competing reconstructions. And it is incorrect to describe "In the best case it [a reconstruction] is only the statistically most probable original relationship between the forms found in the daughter languages" as a statement about the comparative method. Please read what is said before going into knee-jerk reactions. Nothing was said about the comparative method. The comparative method doesn't compute anything. If you want a paraphrase of the comparative method, it is "similar things that are in complementary distribution are often aspects of the same thing." Although the comparative method is one of the major tools of historical linguistics it is not the only one and it does not give a "best case" reconstruction. In general, it doesn't give you a reconstruction at all. What it gives you is the idea that there is something that two different but similar forms that do not contrast could have both developed from. It doesn't tell you what that something is. If you have /b/ and /f/ in complementary distribution in two languages (or even in the same language) you can use the comparative method to show that they might be descended from the same phoneme. You can call that phoneme */b/ or */f/ or *[labial consonanat], but the only thing that you can tell about it phonologically is that there should be some reasonable path from it to both /b/ and /f/. But don't automatically associate "reconstruction" with "comparative method" in your mind. And keep in mind that the discussion was about reconstructions in Middle Chinese which is an attested language so there may very well be statistical means of arriving at the best reconstruction. > I've seen other variations of the phrase "statistically probable" on this > list in contexts which suggest that what the writer means is something > like "what we've judged to be most likely." That's not a correct use of > the terminology. This is doubtless true, but then practically everybody plays fast and loose with terms like "likely" and "probable". And people often use the term "statistically probable" without having real statistics available, in which case they usually mean that they know of a lot of cases where some particular event has happened and only a few where it hasn't. >> It is not so much a question of innovation versus preservation. >> It is a matter of how much innovation there is in each daughter >> language. When you have the parent preserved, this can be >> measured. > What exactly is being measured? This whole line of discussion assumes > that "innovation" is something that can be measured. I'd like to know > exactly what this means. What is being counted? You seem to be confused about what the topic of discussion is. Basically it is about measuring pathways of change between two daughter languages and a parent to see which of the daughters is closer to the parent *when all three are known*. The method was described in a message posted by Jon Patrick on Thu, 12 Aug 1999 (see http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/ wa?A2=ind9908&L=indo-european&O=T&P=11528 for the message; note put this URL back together before using it). Essentially the method is like counting up the little numbers between the stars on your Texaco road map to figure which route between two places is the shortest. My comments were to the effect that the method could only be effective if all three languages were known and reconstruction of the parent was minimal (and not limited to the comparative method). > [...] >> will also help to reduce the likelihood of the daughters having >> innovated the same way independently (historical linguists really >> hate it when this happens because it screws everything up). > Not as bad as you think, because you can often tell from the relative > chronology that the change must have happened independently. Which is why it is easier to do historical linguistics with languages that have a history. But if you only have, say, the modern forms, as in many African or Polynesian languages, it is almost impossible to tell common retention from independent innovation from influence of one of the daughters on the other. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 13:42:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 14:42:08 +0100 Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > Just one point on the discussions. > It is EVEN possible > (though not the simplest explanation from some points > of view, Nature need not be simple) > that Neanderthals had several languages, > from independent sources, If Neandertals had language at all -- and this is debated -- then they undoubtedly had a number of different languages at any given time, just like us. > and these languages were separately inherited > by different groups of modern humans. Sorry, but I can't see this. The position of the Neandertals in our family tree is still much debated, but the majority view still sees them as *not* being among our direct ancestors. So, if Neandertals had language, then surely so did the common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans, and no appeal to "borrowing" from Neandertals is necessary or appropriate. Anyway, our ancestors could not have acquired language unless they already had a language faculty. And, if they had a language faculty, then surely they would already have possessed language themselves. > So inheritance from Neanderthals > does NOT necessarily imply monogenesis? No, but inheritance (or borrowing) of language from Neandertals strains my credulity to the breaking point. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 14:07:44 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 15:07:44 +0100 Subject: Hypothesis formation vs. testing In-Reply-To: <75ea2350.24ed5f7c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: [LT] >> I fully agree that the question `Are all languages related?' cannot be >> answered at present. I further believe that we will never be able to >> answer this question by purely linguistic means. >> However, there are people who disagree, one of the most prominent being >> Merritt Ruhlen. Ruhlen wishes to embrace the conclusion `All languages >> are related.' > As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent > statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such > conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might > be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). The assumption that all languages are related is out of order. The assumption that all languages *might* be related is hardly an assumption at all, and in any case such an idea is excluded by no one. > Greenberg's method of comparison serves to find the CLOSEST > resemblances (merely that, CLOSEST). In the Americas, his method > leads him to the conclusion (no surprise) that Eskimo-Aliut is not > closely related to any other Amerindian languages, and that > Athabaskan / Na-Dene (with outliers) is not closely related to any > other Amerindian languages, (though conceivably not as distant from > them as Eskimo-Aliut ?). This account of Greenberg's work makes it appear to resemble certain far more rigorous work in progress elsewhere, such as at Cambridge University. The Cambridge group are working with a variety of algorithms which can, in principle, determine degree of closeness, and which can hence produce unrooted trees illustrating relative linguistic distance. But these algorithms are utterly incapable of distinguishing relatedness and unrelatedness. If, for example, you run one of the algorithms with a bunch of IE languages plus Basque and Chinese, the result is a tree showing Basque and Chinese as the most divergent members -- that's all. If the same is true of Greenberg's highly informal approach, then G cannot distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness, and he has no business setting up imaginary "families". > His actual conclusions are about relative UNRELATEDNESS of language > families (notice, not about absolute unrelatedness, which he does > not claim his method has the power to evaluate). Just as well. It is logically impossible to prove absolute unrelatedness, and G would be mad to undertake such a thing. > Beyond that, Greenberg's methods do NOT enable him to establish any > similar degree of unrelatedness among the remaining languages of the > Americas. > I hope I have stated that carefully enough, to make obvious that it > is a matter of degree, not absolutes, and that Greenberg's method > actually demonstrates the points of SEPARATION rather than the > points of UNION. Fine, but then G's methods do not suffice to set up language families -- even though that is exactly what he does. > Greenberg's method is potentially useful in that it is likely to > reveal some deep language family relationships which were not > previously suspected, I said exactly this on page 389 of my textbook. > AS LONG AS we do not introduce systematic biases > which overpower whatever residual similarities still exist > despite all of the changes which obscure those deep relationships. I'd be interested to know just what `systematic biases' you have in mind. > In other words, mere noise in the data, or dirty data, > if the noise or dirt are random, should not be expected to selectively > bias our judgements of closeness of resemblance... No. I can't agree. Suppose two languages A and B are genuinely but distantly related. In this case, it is at least conceivable that false positives (spurious matches) would be counterbalanced by false negatives (the overlooking of genuine evidence). But suppose the two languages are not in fact related at all. In this case, false negatives cannot exist, because there is no genuine evidence to be overlooked. Hence the only possible errors are false positives: spurious evidence. And the great danger is that the accumulation of false positives will lead to the positing of spurious relationships. Many of G's critics have hammered him precisely on this point. > [and we can study how we make such judgements to try to strengthen > this component of Greenberg's method, to strengthen their robustness > against noisy data and our mental failings of judgement] In their present form, G's methods appear to me to have no robustness at all. Words are similar if Greenberg says they are. And languages are related if Greenberg judges that he has found enough similarities between them. There are no objective criteria or procedures at all, and there is no possibility that anyone else could replicate G's work. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 15:03:28 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:03:28 +0100 Subject: Hypothesis formation vs. testing In-Reply-To: <75ea2350.24ed5f7c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > Back to Trask: >> Now, in order to go about this, I maintain, [Ruhlen] should start with the >> negation of this statement as his null hypothesis, and then go on to >> show that there is so much evidence against this null hypothesis that it >> is untenable and must be rejected. But that's not what he does. > The last paragraph above is in complete contradiction to what Larry > Trask says he agrees with ("I fully agree"...). If one believes it > is not possible to test a proposition, then it is NOT REASONABLE to > ask anyone else to test it. One cannot have this both ways. Not at all. I myself do not believe that monogenesis can possibly be investigated by purely linguistic methods, and so I have no interest at all in trying to investigate it. Ruhlen, in great contrast, *does* believe that monogenesis can be investigated by linguistic methods. OK, fine: he's entitled to believe this if he wants. But, then, if he wants to conduct such an investigation, he must go about this in a principled and rigorous manner. However, he doesn't -- not at all. So I have every right to criticize his work, not because his beliefs are different from mine, but because his procedures are unacceptable. I have *not* asked Ruhlen to test monogenesis. I have merely said that (a) I don't believe it can be tested, and (b) Ruhlen's procedures are wholly inadequate for conducting a test of anything. No contradiction there. [LT] >> Instead, he *starts* with the hypothesis `All languages are related', >> and then proceeds to assemble what he sees as evidence in support of >> this last hypothesis. Amazingly enough [;-)]. he is able to find such >> evidence. > So far, this is legitimate in principle [but on practice, see below] > IF the purpose is to establish the plausibility of a hypothesis > (as distinct from testing it, NOTICE!). But this is absolutely *not* what Ruhlen believes he is doing. Read what he has written. Ruhlen plainly believes that he has not merely tested monogenesis but proved it. He says so in plain English. > This is how almost all hypotheses are first established as hypotheses, > simply by accumulating suggestive, anecdotal, case-study evidence, > in contexts in which we do not even know how to estimate chance > very well. But we can certainly estimate chance well enough to include estimates of chance in our investigations, crude though these may be at present. Ruhlen, however, simply excludes chance altogether in his work. As far as he is concerned, chance resemblances arise so rarely that they can be *completely* discounted, and therefore *all* resemblances must be cognates. This is not a secret: look at what he does, or merely read pp. 12-14 of his book The Origin of Language (Wiley). > The contradictory of the strong claim (all related) is that there > are at least two languages which are not related to each other > genetically. I would doubt that Ruhlen had evidence to exclude this > possibility, or that if asked clearly, he would say so. You don't have to wonder about Ruhlen's position. Read what he says on p. 213 of his book, for example. Ruhlen asserts that it is *proved* that all languages are related. > After all (trivially) there are languages for which there are only > one or two words attested, and one can go on from there with very > little work to find other cases where I think Ruhlen would grant > there is not even a loose probability based on the data itself to > establish any relationship. I'm afraid you are putting words into Ruhlen's mouth. Ruhlen, so far as I am aware, has *never* admitted in print that there exist any languages at all which are certainly, probably or even possibly not related to all the others. If anybody can locate such a passage in R's published work, I will be glad to hear about it. [LT] >> This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is enough to >> render Ruhlen's work vacuous, > Not so, since Ruhlen can be treated as involved in hypothesis > FORMATION not hypothesis testing. This is plainly *not* what Ruhlen sees himself as doing. [LT] >> quite apart from the vast number of >> egregious errors in the material he cites as evidence, > Now THAT is quite another matter, and when present in very large > quantity, not merely slight differences from the analysis an expert in > a particular language would offer but more serious, complete > misunderstandings vitiating completely any use of particular data... > it does discredit the work as a whole, and can quite legitimately, > even without absolute proof of its wrong-headedness, > lead reasonable people to pay no more attention to it. > But note carefully the caveat above. It is NOT sufficient merely to > provide minor improvements of detail to the presentation, > to discredit the work. An expert can ALWAYS provide minor > improvements. That itself shows nothing at all. We are not talking about minor improvements. At least as far as Basque is concerned, the errors in Ruhlen's data are so awful as to be beyond salvation. Anyway, he never pays any attention to my corrections: he just tells me I must be wrong because his comparisons are so compelling. [LT] >> and quite apart >> from his failure to realize that lookalikes do not constitute evidence >> of any kind. > Disagree flatly, unless defined circularly so that "lookalikes" > means more than it says, namely so that it means "lookalikes which > are known to be unrelated as cognates". No. By `lookalikes', I mean words or morphemes which, in the opinion of some investigator, are similar in form and meaning. This is in no way circular, though it is certainly highly objective, at least until tightened up by the provision of fully explicit criteria for adjudging similarity. > If it actually means "items which look alike in sound and meaning", > then of course such comparisons DO constitute PRELIMINARY evidence. Sure, but this isn't very interesting. We can always find lookalikes between any arbitrary languages. > Any such preliminary evidence can be discounted by showing > that the resemblances are secondary and late, > or that they manifest a type of sound symbolism, > or in other ways. All of which I have in fact done, in Ruhlen's case, to no avail. > It was lookalikes in grammar and vocabulary which led to > the original hypothesis of the relatedness of the Indo-European > languages. Some of these turned out to be true cognates, > some turned out not to be cognates, merely chance lookalikes. > But the IE hypothesis thus preliminarily established withstood the > discounting of some of the lookalikes as non-cognates > and the reaffirmation of others a true cognates (whatever the > terminology used at the time). Sorry, but I can't see this as a fair characterization of the discovery of IE. What did the trick was not just miscellaneous lookalikes but the observation of shared morphological paradigms. > Once again, I wish to urge us back to the FACTS. > And those FACTS include whatever we can establish about how > each of our tools works, where it works well and where it fails, > how deep historically each tool can push us with languages > of certain types or with language changes of certain types, > and whatever we can establish about new tools we have not yet > systematically used (such as explicit paths of historical > change in sound systems and in semantic spaces, and metrics > of distances along such paths of change...). > We get nowhere by repeating the discrediting of STRAW MAN > claims, by holding hypothesis formation to standards of absolute > hypothesis testing, by counting minor corrections and improvements > to data as completely discrediting use of the data when they do not, > etc. etc. and so forth. > The field is at an impasse in these discussions, > until we return the discussion to an empirical basis. > Pure philosophy will not get us much progress. And neither will the accumulation of lookalikes. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 15:20:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:20:08 +0100 Subject: Premature final judgements In-Reply-To: <65505b55.24ed63f3@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: [LT] >> It doesn't matter that there is evidence in support of Nostratic: what >> matters is that there is insufficient evidence to reject unrelatedness. > Wrong here. It DOES matter. Very much so. It makes the question > worth investigating with better data and better tools. Clarification. What I meant was this: from the point of view of accepting or rejecting Nostratic, it does not matter that there exists some evidence to support the proposal, because there is insufficient evidence to reject unrelatedness. That's all. > The problem with the strict absolutists (which Larry Trask is behaving > as in these discussions) is that they think we have to render FINAL > JUDGEMENTS on whether a hypothesis is proven or not > at every step along the way. They have little room for the long > withholding or deferring of judgement. Nonsense, I'm afraid. First, I have no idea why you want to label me a "strict absolutist", whatever that means. Second, it is quite false that I demand, or have ever demanded, final judgements on any hypothesis "at every step along the way". This is a travesty of my position. Where do you get such ideas? All I have ever done is to point out that certain data are faulty, that certain procedures are unacceptable, and that certain much-trumpeted conclusions are unsubstantiated. I see nothing wrong with this, and I don't apologize for it. > If we had to render final judgement on Nostratic right now, > we would have to say, of course "unproven" (to some level of > certainty which is of no concern to me here). > BUT WE DON'T HAVE TO RENDER FINAL JUDGEMENT NOW. And who is claiming otherwise? > Trask says: >> Oh, sure. In practice, we are hardly ever able to work through an issue >> in the optimal manner I have described. Real life is inevitably >> messier. We make mistakes and eventually correct them; new evidence >> becomes available; new tools become available; all sorts of things >> happen along the way. But how we do the work is one thing, while how we >> present our results in order to persuade our colleagues is another. > The same leeway needs to be granted to the proposers of new hypotheses > today as was granted to those in the past, namely, that they cannot prove > their hypotheses when they start out with them. Sure. But that leeway does not extend to immunity from criticism for lousy data, lousy methodology, and unsubstantiated claims. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 16:12:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 17:12:53 +0100 Subject: Excluding data In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > Larry Trask today defended his criteria for what to exclude > from an initial list of potential proto-Basque vocabulary. > Let me start by quoting his point that he is not excluding data: >> Second, nothing is thrown away. All data remain available for later >> consideration, after an initial list is obtained. > Of course, but the "initial" list can bias things mightily. > Trask quite misunderstands my point about excessive reliance on > canonical forms (CVCV vs. VCVCV etc. etc.). But I am not relying *at all* on canonical forms in setting up my list: I am relying only upon the criteria I cited earlier. It is my hope -- indeed, my belief -- that canonical forms (morpheme-structure conditions) will *emerge* from the data. > The criteria for selecting an "initial" list can bias us in many ways. > Excluding sound-symbolic words can artificially and circularly > lead us to expect a much greater conformance to hypothetical > canonical forms that is in fact the case in most languages. > Or the reverse, assuming a simpler set of canonical forms > can promote the exclusion of sound-symbolic words. But I have *not* excluded sound-symbolic words other than obvious imitative words like `moo' and `spit'. Please read what I've written. I wrote quite explicitly that I was *declining* to exclude expressive and sound-symbolic formations, *in order to avoid possible circularity*, but in the confident expectation that such forms would be excluded anyway by my other criteria -- notably, by their limited distribution. > Here is Trask's discussion of this, > which I hope is evidently circular in form, > whether or not his /tipi/ ~ /tiki/ is in fact > descended from Proto-Basque. > That is, because this sound-expressive word does not conform > to the canonical form hypothesized for much of the less concrete Basque > vocabulary, therefore we have an extra argument in favor of > excluding it (though he does include this one). But what if > there are several canonical forms, as in most real-world languages, > some forms occurring more often in sound-expressive vocabulary? This is possible, of course. But, in the Basque case, practically every item that I would want to regard as sound-symbolic or expressive will be excluded from my initial list for other, independent, reasons. The only one I can think of that won't be is the universal and early-attested word ~ `small'. But this word, though it will make the initial list, will stand out from all the other words in the list to an almost wild degree. > [Demonstrating that sound-symbolic words have a different canonical > form has little value in arguing that they were not proto-Basque, > precisely because such differences of canonical form do occur in many > real languages, so why not also in (proto-)Basque?] Because the data are overwhelmingly against any such suggestion, in the Basque case. > [Expressive and sound-symbolic words are also very much under-recorded > for many languages and language families. Many of them are not known > to learned scholars who are not native users of the languages, because > they are used in language registers which are never the domain of activity > of those scholars. True enough, but this is no more than an argument for doing careful work. More particularly, it is an argument for being intimately familiar with the languages you are working on, instead of extracting words blindly from somebody else's dictionary. And anybody who's ever read three of my postings will know that I wholeheartedly endorse just this position. > So this criterion is PARTLY defective or circular. No, it isn't. Not at all. I wish you'd stop describing almost everything I say as "circular". ;-) > There is a partly definitional relation between sound-symbolic and > narrowness of attestation in recordings.] Definitional, my censored. A word is not sound-symbolic because it is sparsely attested, nor is it not sound-symbolic because it is widely attested. Basque ~ is attested everywhere and at all periods, and yet I still believe it is sound-symbolic, just like English `teensy', because of its strange form. Basque `carve' is a hapax, but I don't believe it's sound-symbolic. [LT] >> [Basque ~ ] looks as much like a >> native and ancient Basque lexical item as `pizza' looks like a native >> and ancient English word. > [pizza is not sound-symbolic, and uses odd (for English) spelling, > but never mind...] I wasn't suggesting that it was. If this bothers you, try English `zap' instead. This look to you like a native and ancient English word? You expect to find a verb in the Old English Bible? > To me, this is a clear indication not of something wrong with including > the word /tipi/ ~ /tiki/ as potentially proto-Basque, > but something inconsistent in the total set of criteria, > UNDER THE CONDITIONS that we are trying > to force a consistent canonical form onto our hypothesized "initial list" > of potential proto-Basque vocabulary. That goal may be wrong-headed. Once again, you are accusing me of something I haven't done. I am *not* trying to "force a consistent canonical form" onto the words in my initial list. I am merely proposing to set up an initial list, by my criteria, in order to see what emerges. Are my postings not written in English, or what? ;-) > The criteria, and how they are used, are themselves JUST A SET > OF TOOLS, and those tools, and how they are in fact used, > need themselves to be evaluated to see whether they lead to errors. > The exclusion of a sound-symbolic word on the grounds that it > has a different canonical form from other vocabulary is a clear error, > given the factual knowledge that such sound-symbolic forms > do often (world-wide) have different limitations on their phonological > forms. But I'm *not* excluding the damn word because it's sound-symbolic. The word ~ meets all my criteria, and so it will appear in the initial list. Didn't I say that? But, within that list, it will stand out *com' una casa*, as they say in Spanish. [LT] >> And the primary object is >> to exclude the words which should be excluded, not to >> include every single word which should be included. > It is not one or the other, it is both. No. This is not possible. We have to choose one or the other, and I choose the first. *Once* we have excluded the words which must be excluded, *then* we can turn our attention to seeking out words which have been provisionally, but wrongly, excluded. But we can't do both at once. I confess at once that a number of genuinely native and ancient Basque words will be excluded from my initial list, for various reasons but mostly from limited distribution. But they can be picked up later. > Any tool for achieving this can make either sort of error, > errors of inclusion or errors of exclusion. It is not simple. > The mistake here, in my view, is very much akin to the mistake > of rushing to judgement discussed in another message today, > when we are dealing with more complex situations of > provisional hypotheses. I am not "rushing to judgement". I am instead proceeding as cautiously and as prudently as possible. > The various criteria for what is a proto-Basque word > interact in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. > There is no point in hiding these difficulties to render a "final" > decision, even if it is claimed to be only an "initial" list. When I write "initial", I mean "initial", and I definitely do not mean "final". Do these words have different meanings in your part of the world? And I am not "hiding" any difficulties at all. Quite the contrary: I am doing my level best to recognize the difficulties and to address them: hence my criteria. > I think Trask's procedure here is rather unlike that of most > comparativists, But I'm not *doing* comparison. I'm doing morpheme structure in an unrecorded but substantially reconstructed language. > in that they usually LABEL which languages or dialects a form occurs > in, Yes, and so do we. And a word found nowhere but in one or two dialects is not going to make it into my initial list -- though it *might* get into an expanded later list. >>> But there is every reason to USE every one of the criteria >>> (those which Larry Trask expressed as cutoffs), >>> to use them as LABELS on the vocabulary items, >>> which in a computer database can be taken into consideration >>> whenever any question is asked of the database. >> Sure, but that's a different exercise. > Not a different exercise at all, the same one, simply not > throwing away data or making it hard to access or reconsider. > The ability to have all of the data available in a database, > tagged and labeled according to all of the criteria Trask mentions, > differs from Trask's procedure primarily in not having to render > final judgements prematurely, because we can always go back and > re-weight the criteria, look at them again from a different perspective. > Without such databases, decisions are made once and cannot be > easily reconsidered later with the benefit of full information. Sorry, but this makes no sense to me. I am compiling a database. For my purposes, it matters not at all whether that database takes the form of a tagged corpus on line or annotated notes on sheets of paper. On-line databases are easier to manipulate, that's all. But, once the database is in place, nothing at all happens until we decide to do something with it. I have already explained what I propose to do with mine. And, whether on line or on paper, I still have to choose my criteria and apply them, now don't I? > So, once again, let's keep the data available, > analyze it with all the care Trask obviously can muster, > but not hide the structure of the analysis, > nor make it needlessly difficult to go back and reconsider particular > decisions or whole groups of decisions at a later time. Well, I'm becoming exasperated. If you think you can do a better job of elucidating Pre-Basque morpheme-structure conditions than I can, feel free. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Aug 24 16:47:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 12:47:24 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) Message-ID: I quoted: "Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human speech sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." In a message dated 8/24/99 2:43:15 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: <<*Some* researchers. Not all, not most, not even -- I think -- a bare majority. Just some, and most of the ones I have encountered have been anthropologists or archeologists, not linguists or biologists.>> I can only believe this is a confusion in terms. Paleoanthropology is really paleobiology and nothing else. (Cultural anthropology really doesn't have much to say or go by at the time periods we are talking about.) Fundamentally we are talking about nothing but bones. And proof of "modern human speech" is not exactly recoverable from the very small sample of hominid bones we are talking about. The UCal paper I took the quote from I believe reflects the view that the robustness of earlier jaw formations (weak chin) that is evidenced in early homo sapiens sapiens is indistinquishable from much earlier specimens and does not approximate modern form until about 40,000BCE <<*Some* researchers, in fact, want to assign language to our hominid ancestors, *Homo erectus*. But, so far as I can judge, the majority view is still that language most likely arose with our own species, 100,000-200,000 years ago.>> Are you saying "language" or are you saying "the ability to make modern human speech sounds?" I can pull at least 50 papers by "biologists" that use "language" not in reference to humans, but to apes and birds. If anyone - not a creationist - is identifying "modern human speech" with 100,000 years ago, they are surmising - and nothing more - based on the Out of Africa theory, which has its problems. As far as your term 'our own species', I think that is the core of the problem. "Homo sapiens" does not first magically appear at a magical @100,000BP. Homo erectus apparently in many places dies out as early as 250,000BP. But there is a whole category of remains labeled "Homo sapiens (archaic)" dating from as early as 500,000BP that early on share erectus and sapiens characteristics. There is no reason to think Homo sapiens archaic was not 'our own species." There is no clear "moment of creation" demarcation between "Homo erectus" and "Homo sapiens" or between "Homo sapiens (archaic)" and "Homo sapiens sapiens." (That perception is really a result of the DNA tests that put the day of creation sometime in the middle of Homo sapiens archaic period.) It's important to remember that the hominids of these periods may not represent different species at all. If we generally define "species" as the ability to reproduce, then you may not even be able to exclude Neanderthals from "our own species." See Duarte C., Mauricio J., Pettitt P.B., Souto P., Trinkaus E., van der Plicht H. et al. (1999): The early upper Paleolithic human skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and modern human emergence in Iberia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 96:7604-9. (24,500-year-old skeleton of a young boy found in Portugal contains characteristics of both modern human and Neandertals, and is evidence that the two groups interbred.) And it is not clear that the shared characteristics of early Homo sapiens and later Homo erectus do not represent interbreeding. See Swisher C.C. III, Rink W.J., Anton S.C., Schwarcz H.P., Curtis G., Supryo A., and Widiasmoro (1996): Latest Homo erectus of Java: potential contemporaneity with Homo sapiens in southeast Asia. Science 274:1870-1874. There is however evidence from DNA apparently recovered from Neanderthal remains of separate speciation. (Kahn P. and Gibbons A. (1997): DNA from an extinct human. Science, 277:176-8. Krings M., Stone A., Schmitz R.W., Krainitzki H., Stoneking M., and Paabo S. (1997): Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans. Cell, 90:19-30.) However its not clear that this justifies a separate species status for Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, if interbreeding is the test. The conclusion that modern humans made some kind of a biological leap, not part of a continuum of expected development from prior forms is not justified by the evidence. Even if we found evidence of a Garden of Eden or extraterrestials, the patterns are of gradual transition from one form to another and that's all that we have in front of us. <> Once again, what do you mean by language? 1. the ability to communicate? 2. the act of speaking? 3. Saussurian language systems? The apparent "biological centrality of our" ability to speak in general may send us back 500,000 years or earlier. Our ability to communicate goes back much further - the apes have it. Language systems (as opposed to the act of speaking) - many of us believe are not biological and that we thought them up - like we did other complex enhancements to what nature gave us. She didn't give us wings, but we can fly. She didn't give us fins, but we can swim under the polar caps. And who would have expected even 20,000 years ago that with what was given us, we could have invented the modern hotel piano bar - much less modern language systems. <<...it is for many of us exceedingly difficult to imagine biologically modern human beings without language.>> I say this with respect. As difficult as it would have been for the writers of Genesis to picture homo erectus instead of Adam and Eve, so it is difficult for us to picture humans not looking typically human, speaking and even noticing they were naked on day one. This is a natural anachronism. The trouble is that there was no day one. Unless there was a reasonably long period when humans could not speak in a modern sense and reasonably long periods when humans could barely 'speak', we are dealing with an unaccountable aberration in how such traits - biological or not - normally evolve. <> I think you've misunderstood. Multiregionalism merely means that the modern human population can be traced back to multiple locations in the past - not one - UNLESS you go back about say 2 million years. That's all it says. Picture a species dispersing, evolving into different strains, and then interbreeding along the way. An example? Think dogs. First picture the original wolf-dog. Call him "Adam". Then picture a dispersal of dogs here, there, everywhere. Then simply recall the fact that a Chinese Pug and a Great Dane (or maybe a Chihuahua and a St Bernard) can mate and reproduce. (But don't picture it, please.) It doesn't mean there was more than one "Adam". But it does mean that what we call "the modern dog" - the dog species - has changed a great deal, and that those changes happened in many different locations (i.e., multiregionalism), since Adam came along. Regards, Steve Long From jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 24 18:02:52 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 20:02:52 +0200 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Larry Trask wrote [i.a.]: > Multiregionalism has the consequence that the human species originated > in a unique manner, unparalleled by the emergence of any other known > species. And I find this deeply unpalatable. This is one of the occasions where one would like the keyboard to have a button to light up the APPLAUSE sign. Couldn't be said better. Jens From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Aug 24 19:37:16 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 13:37:16 -0600 Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance Message-ID: ---------- > From: Sean Crist > On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >> We now have an international standard computer Code, Unicode, >> which contains most of the characters needed for transliteration >> (Latin-standard-based letters) and for phonetic transcription (IPA). >> It would be useful to try to establish a standard for Comparative >> Data sets, into which all existing computer data sets can be translated, >> so that the massive sets of data can be made available for studies >> such as this. > I agree totally. We're on exactly the same wavelength here. The only problem with Unicode is that it isn't uniformly supported by computer programs. Any Unicode-based effort would be restricted to the Internet Explorer browser as Netscape Navigator doesn't support it. You either wish for the future and sacrifice present compatibility, or you make some compromises. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 25 04:15:25 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 00:15:25 EDT Subject: color terms Message-ID: In a message dated 8/24/99 2:45:51 AM, you wrote: <> The surprise actually happens when we think otherwise. But are semantics taken as lightly as you seem to indicate? I've seen etymologies discounted on this list because a word that meant "iron" could not have meant "silver." I can find it for you if you like. I quoted: <<"Glas" is used for foliage and softer greens, but also for various shades of grey, from sheep to steel.>> I wrote: <> You wrote: <> Well, there's is a bigger difference between black and white than shades of gray. And green and gray is a pretty big difference indeed - in the same word. But I was getting at a bigger difference than that. Funny that you should choose grays, as in shades of. The word itself has come to mean not only "charcoal gray' but indefiniteness. How about reds? We have used that to refer to everything from communists to a baseball players to (in the singular) deficits. That's a much wider range of indefiniteness of meaning. We use color terms for more than colors. That was important to the point about "bla'madr." I wrote: <> My point of course was that a 'blueman' might have nothing to do with blue. Not as easy a point to make as I might have thought. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 25 04:47:06 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 00:47:06 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/24/99 10:12:02 PM, BMScott at stratos.net wrote: <> Let's make it a little straighter. The OED goes on to say "OE had the agent-n wealcere Walker (a common west German formation), but it is possible the corresponding sense of the Teut. vb. had not survived into OE..." I take it that my AS guess was therefore not far off. < is a specifically Sc.Gael. borrowing.>> That's good enough for my point. <> I'd love to see the source for Gall = a Gaul. I didn't think written Irish went back far enough for Gauls to still be around to refer to. That's why the equation with Frank on the other hand may make a lot of sense. And that brings us back to "walh." Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 25 10:40:57 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 11:40:57 +0100 Subject: Dumb typo In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sorry, folks: I've just noticed a stupid typo in one of my postings. What I wrote was this: > No. By `lookalikes', I mean words or morphemes which, in the opinion of > some investigator, are similar in form and meaning. This is in no way > circular, though it is certainly highly objective, at least until > tightened up by the provision of fully explicit criteria for adjudging > similarity. This should, of course, have read "it is certainly highly subjective". My apologies if I've bewildered anybody. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 25 11:15:41 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 12:15:41 +0100 Subject: How new hypotheses grow In-Reply-To: <3d14e7ba.24f3acf1@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > The question arises then, why is it that the best historical > linguists of American Indian languages were quite thoroughly > convinced AT SOME POINT that these languages were related, > yet the standard kind of evidence was somehow lacking? > What was it that they found so thoroughly convincing? A very good question. In reply, I recommend chapter 2 of the following book: Lyle Campbell (1997), American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America, Oxford UP. Briefly, Campbell sums up what he calls the "reductionist frenzy" as follows. Several (but certainly not most) early Americanists were interested in finding larger groupings than had been demonstrated. One of these was Sapir, the most brilliant and admired American linguist of his day. According to Sapir's student Mary Haas, Sapir himself regarded his breathtaking mega-agglomerations as no more than hypotheses to be investigated, but he nonetheless published them in a way which led readers to assume he was fully committed to his proposals. Partly because of Sapir's eminence, and partly just because his (and other) proposed groupings appeared in print so often, these groupings came to be reified. That is, readers assumed that things like `Penutian' and `Hokan-Siouan' must be real just because they were mentioned all the time in the books. But not all linguists were taken in. For example, Campbell quotes the distinguished A. L. Kroeber as follows (p. 75): "Tremendous havoc can be wreaked when archaeologists or ethologists begin to buil[d] structures of inference on Sapir's brilliant but flimsy gossamer web of prophecies as if it were a solid foundation." In short, the proposed mega-families came to be widely recognized as a result of authority (Sapir's eminence) and repetition (constant publication) -- even though there was no hard evidence to back them up. As a result, Campbell laments, Americanists have been obliged to devote a great deal of time to disassembling the proposed super-families and to searching out whatever evidence might exist for grouping *any* of the languages assigned to them. This is a salutory lesson in the dangers of reification: because we have invented a name, we persuade ourselves all too easily that there must be something "out there" for the name to apply to. Something similar has happened in my own field. A few decades ago, a number of linguists were pursuing the idea of a genetic link between Basque and the Caucasian languages. One enthusiast -- I think it was Martinet, but I'm not sure -- coined the term `Euskaro-Caucasian' for this putative family. As a result, the term `Euskaro-Caucasian' crept into the literature, and it appears in at least one major reference work. And yet there is *no* persuasive evidence that Basque is related to *any* of the Caucasian families, or even that these last are all related to one another. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 25 13:41:06 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 09:41:06 EDT Subject: Language from Neanderthals. Message-ID: >> So inheritance from Neanderthals >> does NOT necessarily imply monogenesis? >>No, but inheritance (or borrowing) of language from Neandertals strains >>my credulity to the breaking point. We agree completely here. I also wrote that it is far from the simplest hypothesis. I merely wanted to make explicit a necessary link in the reasoning. I did not PROPOSE inheritance or borrowing of language from Neanderthals, that was the hypothesis being considered by others, which I was responding to. Does NOT mean I was in favor of it! Lloyd From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 25 15:32:38 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 11:32:38 EDT Subject: Cambridge and Greenberg's methods Message-ID: I am very grateful to Larry Trask for his discussion of Joseph Greenberg's methods and Cambridge methods today. I hope we can have more discussion of the Cambridge methods. But I will insist (and provide evidence below) that Trask still does not understand that Greenberg is doing something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM claiming to prove particular language families are related. Barring the difference of whether one expresses one's conclusions as rooted family trees (Greenberg, I don't remember whether he used tree diagrams for this) or unrooted family trees (the Cambridge Group that Trask refers to), there may be little difference between them (little difference in matters noted in Trask's discussion today; of course there may be other differences that we consider important). [LT] >>Ruhlen wishes to embrace the conclusion `All languages >> are related.' [LA] >> As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent >> statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such >> conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might >> be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). [LT] >The assumption that all languages are related is out of order. >The assumption that all languages *might* be related is hardly an >assumption at all, and in any case such an idea is excluded by no one. The assumption is of course quite in order, to see what it might lead to, as long as it is merely that, an assumption. So there is really no difference between the above two statements just above. Except some emotional flavoring which antagonizes some people. Because even if all languages ARE ultimately related, that does NOT imply that standard reconstructive method can establish the relation between two randomly chosen languages. If Albanian is so difficult merely within Indo-European, then much more difficult will be more distant cases. All one needs to understand Greenberg's reasoning is to assume that all languages *might* be related. As far as I can tell, the only difference noted by Trask is in whether one expresses one's tentative conclusions as (if all languages are related, then here are some conceivable family trees for the deeper connections), or as (here are some conceivable deeper connections, though we do not express them as family trees). In terms of politics, it would perhaps have been more useful in the long run if Greenberg had not expressed his conclusions AS IF they were family trees. That is clearly a red flag to some people. They seem to treat such expressions as if they were final conclusions proven by sufficient evidence, for two languages or language families taken in isolation from all others, rather than one investigator's claim that the evidence he evaluated as he evaluates it suggests those trees rather than some others (merely that, the preferable conclusion to others rather than a proven conclusion). Personally, I have no problem at all treating that as the expression of a tentative hypothesis only (how could it have ever been anything else?), and I have been simply amazed at the antagonisms. Shouldn't we always try to make the best use of the contributions of each one of us? Didn't Greenberg attempt to systematize a large amount of data which others can then correct and improve on? [LA] >> Greenberg's method of comparison serves to find the CLOSEST >> resemblances (merely that, CLOSEST). In the Americas, his method >> leads him to the conclusion (no surprise) that Eskimo-Aliut is not >> closely related to any other Amerindian languages, and that >> Athabaskan / Na-Dene (with outliers) is not closely related to any >> other Amerindian languages, (though conceivably not as distant from >> them as Eskimo-Aliut ?). [LT] >This account of Greenberg's work makes it appear to resemble certain far >more rigorous work in progress elsewhere, such as at Cambridge >University. The Cambridge group are working with a variety of >algorithms which can, in principle, determine degree of closeness, and >which can hence produce unrooted trees illustrating relative linguistic >distance. But these algorithms are utterly incapable of distinguishing >relatedness and unrelatedness. If, for example, you run one of the >algorithms with a bunch of IE languages plus Basque and Chinese, the >result is a tree showing Basque and Chinese as the most divergent >members -- that's all. >If the same is true of Greenberg's highly informal approach, then G >cannot distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness, Exactly. I have always, from the very beginning, understood that was exactly what Greenberg's approach did. He would classify Basque and Chinese as the most divergent members of such a set. He would conclude neither "related" nor "unrelated" if he did not assume all languages were related. Given the assumption of all languages potentially related, which since unprovable amounts merely to a way of expressing one's hypotheses, he concludes "most divergent", just as he in fact did for the families Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut. The difference in these modes of expression is utterly trivial as long as we are concerned with tentative hypotheses, not with ultimate truth. [Barring of course the comments "rigorous" vs. "informal", which is a completely separate issue, whether algorithms do adequately capture the best human judgments; please see below.] [LT] >and he has no >business setting up imaginary "families". Given that this is merely a way of expressing degree of divergence, under Greenberg's assumptions, I find it unobjectionable. I don't draw any more conclusions from it than are warranted, one investigator's tentative judgements of stronger vs. weaker resemblances. That is all. *** I am not sure what Cambridge's "unrooted trees" are, other than as a graph-theoretic term that the direction of change is unspecified, because no node is singled out as an "origin". In addition to that, the use of unrooted trees may also be a way to acknowledge in part the positions of those who suggest we should be giving much more consideration to dialect networks, areal phenomena, etc. etc. than to binary trees. It is a perfectly legitimate position that we are forced to that at greater time depths, where it is harder to distinguish borrowings from genetic inheritances (where, at sufficient remove, borrowings actually become genetic inheritances for most practical purposes). In fact, I think the lack of major cleavages in Greenberg's Amerind, that is, everything except Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut, is virtually the same conclusion as having an unrooted tree or dialect network or even, WITHIN that more limited context, not linking the families of which it is composed at the highest levels. AND, notice, it could also simply be an expression of an inability of Greenberg's methods to penetrate deeper, to distinguish at such a depth between neighbor-influences such as borrowing and genetic inheritance. Perhaps here there really is so much noise that Greenberg's method of judgements from data sets cannot yield much. I do not claim to know. But that is NOT the same as saying I conclude anyone should completely discount Greenberg's estimates. [LA] >> His actual conclusions are about relative UNRELATEDNESS of language >> families (notice, not about absolute unrelatedness, which he does >> not claim his method has the power to evaluate). [LT] >Just as well. It is logically impossible to prove absolute >unrelatedness, and G would be mad to undertake such a thing. [LA] >> Beyond that, Greenberg's methods do NOT enable him to establish any >> similar degree of unrelatedness among the remaining languages of the >> Americas. >> I hope I have stated that carefully enough, to make obvious that it >> is a matter of degree, not absolutes, and that Greenberg's method >> actually demonstrates the points of SEPARATION rather than the >> points of UNION. [LT] >Fine, but then G's methods do not suffice to set up language families -- >even though that is exactly what he does. No he does not. Greenberg's language families (family trees) are an expression precisely of separations just as much as of unions. The two are equivalent, under the assumption that we cannot know about absolute truth of language relationship. I will readily admit that Greenberg should have REPEATED more often and more clearly that his method assumed ultimate relatedness, and merely dealt with different degrees of closeness, that his method did not purport to prove relatedness of two particular language families. [LA] >> Greenberg's method is potentially useful in that it is likely to >> reveal some deep language family relationships which were not >> previously suspected, [LT] >I said exactly this on page 389 of my textbook. I look forward to reading this. *** [LA] >> AS LONG AS we do not introduce systematic biases >> which overpower whatever residual similarities still exist >> despite all of the changes which obscure those deep relationships. [LT] >I'd be interested to know just what `systematic biases' you have in >mind. I gave a paper at a Berkeley meeting once, in which I mentioned the possibility that a greater specialization by Greenberg in Andean-Equatorial more than in the other languages of South America might in some way bias his conclusions to find closer relations between that family and other families, simply because with more of the Andean-Equatorial vocabulary running around in his head, he would be more likely to be struck by similarities of other languages families to something he already knew in Andean-Equatorial, more likely than to be struck by similarities among other languages families other than Andean-Equatorial. I simply don't remember whether I felt at the time I could draw any conclusions. *** [LA] >> In other words, mere noise in the data, or dirty data, >> if the noise or dirt are random, should not be expected to selectively >> bias our judgements of closeness of resemblance... [LT] >No. I can't agree. I find the "don't agree" puzzling, since the definition of "random" precludes any systematic bias, almost by definition. Trask continues to explain this (which I cite later). There is a way of evaluating this, at least partly. If we take the same data sets that Greenberg used, and in that Berkeley paper I did it for South American languages, and consider different levels of strictness of correspondence in sound and meaning, we can divide the vocabulary matches proposed in different sets. Taking only the closest matches, do we get a different set of closest language relations? (This might of course be because the closest matches represent middling-ancient borrowings, not in fact the very oldest layer of genetic inheritances, even assuming ultimate relatedness.) As I remember, the results gave only a slightly different degree of closeness for some particular language families. That might suggest that very deep genetic relations and middle-ancient or recent borrowings were not terribly different in the relations they reflect (genetic vs. neighbors). No big surprise. [LT explaining why he believes random noise could affect conclusions] (But (LA) he is really discussing conclusions yes/no about relatedness as ultimate truth, what was NOT in consideration above, instead of RELATIVE degrees of divergence of W from X vs. from Y) [LT] >Suppose two languages A and B are genuinely but distantly related. >In this case, it is at least conceivable that false positives (spurious >matches) would be counterbalanced by false negatives (the overlooking of >genuine evidence). >But suppose the two languages are not in fact related at all. In this >case, false negatives cannot exist, because there is no genuine evidence >to be overlooked. Hence the only possible errors are false positives: >spurious evidence. And the great danger is that the accumulation of >false positives will lead to the positing of spurious relationships. >Many of G's critics have hammered him precisely on this point. The point I made about random noise had NOT to do with whether particular languages are ultimately related, but whether a given language or family W is more closely related to others X or Y. In that context, why should "random" (by definition) noise in the data selectively favor W to X rather than W to Y? No possible reason that I can imagine. Quite a separate question is whether PARTICULAR STRUCTURES of languages will be handled by our judgements, whether human ones or algorithmic ones, in different ways such that increasing the amount of noise in the data selectively affects our ability to make use of data from those differently structured languages. The obvious example is languages where most morphemes are CV. But if we define "noise" carefully, as a percentage of the morpheme's information content, or in terms of degree-of-deviation along paths of phonetic or semantic change, then it is not clear that CV-morpheme languages are at a disadvantage in terms of noise. [As a tangent, a declaration that CV-morpheme languages cannot be subjected to comparative linguistics because no morpheme could meet the minimal CVC criterion for comparison is simply silly. That proves that the minimal CVC criterion is merely a convenience, an indication of our preferences, for greater security (of course we prefer greater security) and not an absolute requirement for comparison. Yet many comparativists use this criterion as if it were an absolute! A real language which I have been told is subject to this limitation of having only or mainly CV morphemes is Yuchi.] *** [LA] >> [and we can study how we make such judgements to try to strengthen >> this component of Greenberg's method, to strengthen their robustness >> against noisy data and our mental failings of judgement] >In their present form, G's methods appear to me to have no robustness at >all. Words are similar if Greenberg says they are. And languages are >related if Greenberg judges that he has found enough similarities >between them. There are no objective criteria or procedures at all, and >there is no possibility that anyone else could replicate G's work. Greenberg's methods are much more robust when applied as he applies them, to estimating which language families are more closely related, than they would be if they were applied to try to yield a conclusion about two language families being absolutely related (vs. not related). This is almost always misunderstood, and Trask's switch between the two kinds of questions in the discussion quoted above of the effects of random noise seems to indicate that he has not seen this either. MOST comparativists are focused on particular languages, which I think is a reason why they do not understand what Greenberg has done, or its strengths. They imagine him doing what they regard with some reason as impressionistic judgements on a particular pair of languages, to conclude that that pair are related. IF that were what Greenberg had done, then the criticisms would be ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE. But that is not what Greenberg did. *** Algorithms vs. Human Judgements: Trask seems to approve the Cambridge use of Algorithms, and to discount Greenberg's judgements of similarities. He calls the one "rigorous" and the other "highly informal". I don't think either is necessarily better than the other. The assumptions built into each can systematically bias the results, and such bias will be an increasing problem for BOTH with increasing time depth and increasing noise in the data. That is why I have consistently emphasized that we need to explicitly EVALUATE OUR TOOLS, whether algorithms or human judgements. The tools have an unfortunate tendency to become taken for granted, forgetting that all tools have unknown biases. Here is an illustrative example of where I think judgements can go wrong. Which is the "closer" pair, in the sense that they are more likely to descend from a common genetic proto-form (or perhaps even to be borrowed at some time depth)? kane pone or kone pane ?? Many comparativists would not see any difference between these. Yet, because distinctive features may move from segment to segment, one can argue that it might be the second pair should be treated as closer. Each of them has labialization in ONE of the first two segments. As merely ONE of several possible sources for this, we can easily imagine if we had: *kwa > ko and *kwa > pa. On the other hand, of course, it could be that the *o > a / p__. So these things are tough, when attempting estimates of possible relations at great language depths. Do the two language families compared both have distinctive *p distinct from *k ?? Does either of them have a pattern of assimilation of vowels to neighboring consonants? And so on, other information can affect either human judgements or algorithms. We are not involved in judgements of similarity alone, but rather in judgements of whether a given pair could have a common proto-form. I do NOT assume that algorithms are inherently superior to human judgements, at least not yet. Assumptions are built into all algorithms, and even the designers may not be aware of all the assumptions they are building in. That is merely normal. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 25 15:52:23 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 11:52:23 EDT Subject: Ruhlen's work Message-ID: Larry Trask writes: >We are not talking about minor improvements. At least as far as Basque >is concerned, the errors in Ruhlen's data are so awful as to be beyond >salvation. Anyway, he never pays any attention to my corrections: he >just tells me I must be wrong because his comparisons are so compelling. It is the last sentence of this which I regard as the strongest criticism of Ruhlen's work. Although sometimes external comparisons CAN cause the re-evaluation of morpheme structure within a single language or family, nevertheless I do not think Ruhlen has at least usually done the kind of work that could support such conclusions. Consider "sparrowgrass", OBVIOUSLY a compound of two English morphemes, until we realize that it is actually a reformation of "asparagus", a borrowed word, to make it LOOK LIKE a compound of English morphemes. "Lookalikes" can even affect the specialist within a single language! (I couldn't resist that needle .) The "obvious" is sometimes not true. As with any other writer on any subject, I always grant that there may be useful aspects of someone's work quite different from what the authors themselves think is the point of their work! Such paradoxes are part of normal life. This happens more often with people who are otherwise known to be uniformly careful, but not only with them. In the development of the fields of Mayan hieroglyph decipherment and history, the late Linda Schele made a number of terrific contributions, AND was at times over-eager to draw cosmic conclusions. Both are in one person. So what? We have still gained enormously from her. I regard Greenberg in the same way. Ruhlen may contribute something useful by stimulating attempts to find NE Asian relatives of Athabaskan, whether or not his Ket (Yeniseian) suggested comparisons pan out. \At least the search for NE Asian relatives of Athabaskan may provide some useful results of some kind, possibly unanticipated ones. DNA studies may give us more hints of where to look, though of course only hints, perhaps even misleading ones. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Wed Aug 25 16:29:10 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 12:29:10 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree: correction In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > In an earlier posting, I remarked that the Penn tree for IE recognized > no Italo-Celtic grouping. This was true for the original publication. > However, I've just been informed off-list that the Penn group have more > recently produced a revised version of their tree, which *does* > recognize such a grouping. > My apologies for misleading you, but I am a little concerned by the > news. As I understand it, the change was produced by adding only a > single character to the set of characters used. If this is right, it > suggests that the approach used at Penn is somewhat less than robust. We shouldn't be particularly disturbed that the addition of a single character could result in a differently structured tree. If the character we've added is the first to indicate a shared innovation between two branches, then it's the expected and desired result that the recomputed tree should group those two branches together (assuming that there aren't other conflicting characters). Celtic and Italic were always very close together in the tree; now they're grouped together. Even from the earliest stages of this work by Ringe, Taylor, and Warnow (at least, from the earliest versions of their handouts that I have), there have been certain structures within the tree which have been very robust and which have changed little even with later refinements in the character set. This is true of the early separation of Anatolian, of the grouping of Greek and Armenian, and of the grouping of the Satem core (Indic, Iranian, Slavic, Baltic). As the character set has been refined, there have been some resulting changes in the placement of Tocharian, Italic, and Celtic. In nearly all of the versions of the tree, these three branches separated from the others some time after the separation of Anatolian, but prior to the separation of Greco-Armenian. The big picture hasn't changed much. What has changed is this: 1) the team now claim that Italic and Celtic form an Italo-Celtic branch together. In an earlier version, the four best trees returned by the algorithm either had Italic and Celtic branching off separately (but one right after another), or else had a certain indeterminate structure which could be resolved several ways, one of which is an Italo-Celtic grouping. 2) the team now claim that Tocharian branched off before, not after, Italic and Celtic. I'm racking my brains trying to remember what the character was which caused Italo-Celtic to pop out grouped together; I asked Don Ringe that specific question, and I remember that it was some morphological character. I would have thought it was the optative */a:/, but that character has been in there since early versions of the work. I'll ask Don next time I see him. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Aug 25 16:35:31 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 11:35:31 -0500 Subject: A quibble on Engl. _zap_ Message-ID: In saying some eminently sensible things, Larry managed to pick first _pizza_ and then _zap_ as examples of words which might be ancient in English but aren't. But _zap_ is no more possible than _pizza_, since OE (a) had no phoneme /z/ and (b) did not use in writing English words. Medially, [z] was common but is written , as befits an allophone of /s/. BTW, was there an "OE Bible" (as opposed to translations of individual books) in which a **zapian or **sapian might have occurred? Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 25 19:48:48 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 15:48:48 EDT Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: <> In a message dated 8/25/99 12:28:27 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: <<...So, if Neandertals had language, then surely so did the common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans,...>> Why does that follow? Why couldn't language could have started during the existence of Neanderthals. With much respect, I don't think there is any evidence for this. <<...and no appeal to "borrowing" from Neandertals is necessary or appropriate.>> Again, I don't think there is any evidence for this. <> You may not be aware that rather recently the reverse process actually went on in the scientific community. Based on a stream of work starting with Solecki, in fact, with much fanfare - Homo neanderthalensis was rechristened, in most textbooks I guess, to Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. It even made Time back in around 1993 or so. That status is being challenged again currently. As to the "majority" you refer to, I'd suggest that you might want to take a second look when you use that term. I suspect that a head count in this arena would be difficult to take, and even that "a majority" might not include opinions you would want included. (If you are refering to some kind of actual survey, however it would be good to know about.) Most researchers would honestly say I think that there are no clear probabilities in tracing the Neanderthal's relatedness or unrelatedness to humans. Any strong opinion would be fairly worthless as a matter of sheer uncertainty. I'd like to refer you to Naming our Ancestors (Meikle and Parker, 1994). Its a very useful reference on the terms and principles of hominid taxonomy. <> I'd ask you to look at this statement again and consider its meaningfulness. There really is no way to ascertain what a language faculty is or would look like without evidence of language - of which there is none at this early date. <> Again I'd ask you to look at this. Logically, if a language faculty is different than language, then yes they could have had the faculty and no language. One doesn't follow the other - unless they are one and the same entity. Back in the 1980's when Broca's area in the brain was widely promoted as the essential element to language (since that time its been fairly well proven that it is not essential at all) an identification in the bones was made that may be of interest here: <> This is to my knowledge the only correlation made between the actual physical evidence and some notion of a brain based language "faculty." It would date language significantly earlier than anything mentioned on this list. The only current dialogue I know of that actually pertains to the physical evidence is the jaw nerve canal studies at Duke and UC that I mentioned earlier. These seem to indicate a capability for complex speech comparable to modern (current) humans, though the findings have been challenged on averaging grounds. Regard, Steve Long From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Thu Aug 26 01:56:02 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 21:56:02 -0400 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Robert Whiting wrote: > And it is incorrect to describe "In the best case it [a reconstruction] > is only the statistically most probable original relationship between > the forms found in the daughter languages" as a statement about the > comparative method. Please read what is said before going into > knee-jerk reactions. Nothing was said about the comparative method. All right. If I'm recalling correctly, the author of the original message said that one of the things he was measuring was the "distance" between attested forms and reconstructed forms. Since the Comparative Method is the only widely accepted method for reconstructing prehistoric forms, I assumed that the writer was going with reconstructed forms produced by the Comparative Method. You're right, tho, that he didn't specify that this is the case. > The comparative method doesn't compute anything. It does. It's essentially a function which takes attested languages as its input and gives reconstructed languages as its output. In principle, a program could be written to do it; the major unsolved problem is modeling the semantics in a way that allows a program to make human-like judgments regarding what semantic developments are reasonable. The phonology, tho, could almost certainly already be computed by program. > Although the comparative method is one of the major tools of > historical linguistics it is not the only one and it does not > give a "best case" reconstruction. In general, it doesn't give > you a reconstruction at all. What it gives you is the idea that > there is something that two different but similar forms that do not > contrast could have both developed from. It doesn't tell you what > that something is. If you have /b/ and /f/ in complementary > distribution in two languages (or even in the same language) you > can use the comparative method to show that they might be descended > from the same phoneme. You can call that phoneme */b/ or */f/ or > *[labial consonanat], but the only thing that you can tell about it > phonologically is that there should be some reasonable path from it > to both /b/ and /f/. Yes, I've made essentially this same point on this list before: the Comparative method reconstructs phonological categories, not the prehistoric phonetic realizations of those categories. I phrased it in different terms, but it's essentially the same point. The Comparative method _does_ give a reconstruction; just not one of the phonetics. > But don't automatically associate "reconstruction" with "comparative > method" in your mind. And keep in mind that the discussion was about > reconstructions in Middle Chinese which is an attested language so > there may very well be statistical means of arriving at the best > reconstruction. If there's some other way of going from attested forms to reconstructions of prehistoric forms without using the Comparative Method, I'd like to know about it. The only reason we're able to say anything at all about prehistoric languages is that sound changes have a particular property, namely, they are exceptionless (with a small amount of hand-waving here). The Comparative Method crucially exploits this property of sound changes. > You seem to be confused about what the topic of discussion is. > Basically it is about measuring pathways of change between two > daughter languages and a parent to see which of the daughters > is closer to the parent *when all three are known*. The method > was described in a message posted by Jon Patrick on Thu, 12 Aug > 1999 (see http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/ > wa?A2=ind9908&L=indo-european&O=T&P=11528 for the message; note put this > URL back together before using it). Essentially the method is like > counting up the little numbers between the stars on your Texaco road > map to figure which route between two places is the shortest. I understand the idea of computing an optimal path perfectly well, and I've understood from the start of the thread that this was the methodology being employed. My question is this: exactly what happens during the transitions in the probabilistic automata, and how are the probabilities for the transitions determined? Automata normally perform a concatenation operation across each arc between states. One can imagine an automaton-like machine where the transitions can perform other sorts of operations, such as an umlaut rule (i.e., context sensitive substitutions). I'm not sure whether it's proper to use the term "automaton" to describe this richer sort of machine. But if the machine in question is strictly concatentative (as automata at least canonically are), I'm puzzled as to how you would model historical sound change in such a machine, since historical sound change isn't concatenative. >> Not as bad as you think, because you can often tell from the relative >> chronology that the change must have happened independently. > Which is why it is easier to do historical linguistics with languages > that have a history. But if you only have, say, the modern forms, as > in many African or Polynesian languages, it is almost impossible to > tell common retention from independent innovation from influence of > one of the daughters on the other. That's not true at all. Whether or not loans happened in the light of written history, you can identify a word as a loan from a related language because of the sound changes it has and has not undergone. For example, while English "cardiac" does ultimately go back to the PIE word for "heart", you can readily tell that it is a loan from a non-Germanic language, because it has not undergone Grimm's Law, which applied exceptionlessly in prehistoric Germanic. This same method of identifying loans among related languages works just as well for languages which don't have a long written tradition. Now, it's true that there is a problematic case: it's hard to detect loans which occurred between related languages soon after their branching, before very many of the telltale sound changes took place. This appears to have happened between Germanic and Italo-Celtic, but it's very hard to tell that it did happen using traditional methodology. However, there are many many cases where you can identify the loan words as I described. You don't need a long written tradition to be able to work out the relative chronology of prehistoric sound changes. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From BMScott at stratos.net Thu Aug 26 02:37:22 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 22:37:22 -0400 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > < observes that the word is not found in English in this > sense until the 14th c.>> > The OED goes on to say "OE had the agent-n wealcere > Walker (a common west German formation), but it is possible > the corresponding sense of the Teut. vb. had not survived > into OE..." I take it that my AS guess was therefore not > far off. Very hopeful of you. My sources are regrettably limited, but I see nothing here to connect safely with OE. Moreover, it seems to be Sc.Gael. 'fuller', not 'do.', that produced Sc.Gael. bynames (in record at least from the 14th c.); this suggests that may have been a late-comer. > < in Old and Middle Ir., of which the first is earliest: > (1) a Gaul, (apparently sometimes equated with Frank)...>> > I'd love to see the source for Gall = a Gaul. I didn't > think written Irish went back far enough for Gauls to still > be around to refer to. That's why the equation with Frank > on the other hand may make a lot of sense. And that > brings us back to "walh." I'd be delighted to hear from someone who actually knows OIr usage first-hand, but I imagine that a 'Gaul' was originally simply someone from Gallia - a geographical term certainly known to the early Irish (as when 'noble race of Franks' is glossed 'tribus Gallie'). I still see no reason introduce to explain it. Brian M. Scott From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 26 02:47:27 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 22:47:27 EDT Subject: Conservative dilemma Message-ID: referring to Algonquian - Wiyot - Yurok (Algonquian-Ritwan): >> The question arises then, why is it that the best historical >> linguists of American Indian languages were quite thoroughly >> convinced AT SOME POINT that these languages were related, >> yet the standard kind of evidence was somehow lacking? >> What was it that they found so thoroughly convincing? Larry Trask's message today in which he quotes the above paragraph completely fails to understand the point, because he does not know the Amerindian field, and does not relize that the hypothesis I mentioned is now considered by nearly everyone to be solidly demonstrated scientific hypothesis. This was not some iffy hypothesis believed by uncareful researchers, it is a hypothesis believed by the most conservative researchers. The comment Trask quotes from Campbell simply is not relevant to this case. The "best historical linguistics" I was referring to are the CONSERVATIVES whom Larry Trask I think most admires. It was THOSE CONSERVATIVES who were completely convinced that the two "outlier" languages are related to Algonquian, yet some of THOSE SAME CONSERVATIVES also believed that their standard comparative method was not adequate to prove this relationship. The POINT is that the most CONSERVATIVE linguists were able to base their conclusions on something beyond the standard comparative method. THEREFORE, this is a prime field in which to explore WHAT these conservatives found so convincing, precisely in order to slightly extend our tools, our self-conscious understanding of how we reason. (Not all conservatives consider this a dilemma, some consider that the standard conservative method CAN demonstrate the relationship. But some consider it cannot, and for a larger number, there was an earlier period when they considered it had not done so, yet they were convinced the relationship was real and was genetic. For THOSE conservatives, and at THAT time period, the dilemma exists and provides us a great opportunity.) I think Trask (along with many others) considers that the standard traditional comparative method is practically a definition of valid evidentiary reasoning. They do not consider it merely a tool, which can be extended, or which might have weaknesses (such as sometimes, when properly applied to certain data sets, giving the wrong result, a case I mentioned earlier). They simply are unable to treat its validity and range of applicability as an EMPIRICAL question. (Many of them would not say this as a theoretical claim, but in practice they act just as if they believed it.) Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Aug 26 05:56:45 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 01:56:45 EDT Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) Message-ID: (First let me say that I've looked at the chart in Larry Trask's Historical Linguistics (p.369) so many times the page is starting to fall out. And I am aware that the one used by Sean Crist is a slightly different version.) << So here at this first juncture: > PIE > / \ > / Anatolian > Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian? It would have to, > wouldn't it? No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>> Now I am not saying I have a problem with this. I'm sure there are good methodological reason for the rule that "an ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant." (But if it is only terminological, I might ask why it is necessary.) However, from a historical viewpoint, from the view of any modern science whose subject is considered in time, the specific system reflected in the Stambaum seems odd. (Repeating again that I'm not challenging the linguistic basis of the chart.) Sometimes you learn something about systems by putting them through some extreme applications. Like sticking a thermometer in a bucket of ice. I'd like to try a simple little test. Let me give a pure hypothetical. The names of the languages may be the same as in the Stammbaum, but otherwise this is nothing but an imaginery situation. Take our Stammbaum and lets arbitrarily put "Celtic" at the top where PIE is now. "Celtic" is the first ancestor on our tree. Now add a factual premise. That - throughout the relative time period represented in all the branchings of the Stammbaum to the present - a "language" that its speakers called "Celtic" at the onset persisted in its original form without change, from day one to the present. Throughout this whole time, there was complete continuity and zero innovations in that "language", and therefore no "innovations" were shared with any of the other languages that are represented in the branches. Lets call this group of identical languages "Celtic 1...Celtic 6" Now lets say the branchings are pretty much the same as they were in the original Stammbaum - so we now have: Celtic / \ / Anatolian /\ / \ / Tocharian /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / Italic /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Greek Armenian /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / / \ / / \ Indo- Balto- Germanic Iranian Slavic (I'm not sure about I-Ir, which seems to be part of the stem.) But every branch reflects a set of innovations placed at a relative point in time. Celtic 1....Celtic 6 however has no innovations and starts first in time. According to LT, we cannot call Celtic 'Celtic' anymore after Anatolian branches because a daughter exists (Anatolian). So lets call it C2. C2 is identical in every way shape and form to Celtic. All innovations (in relation to Celtic) only exist in Anatolian. Same scenario with Tocharian. Tocharian innovates and becomes a different language than C2 - which remained identical to Celtic. We also know that Tocharian is solely decended from C2. The resulting C3 on the other hand remains identical to C2 and Celtic. This continues to the current day, so that the present C6 is identical to the parent Celtic, sharing none of the innovations of any of the branches that have emerged along the line. How would these daughter languages - identical to the original parent except in name - be indicated on this Stammbaum? I don't know. Would they get a branch or are they the stem? I don't know. Or would it look exactly as it does above? (NOTE: Putting the rule about co-existing ancestors aside for the moment, a historian or everyday person might call Celtic through C6 by one name, since all are identical. But the existence of those other daughter branches made us rename "Celtic" each time a new daughter arrived.) Now to test the system. Some new assumptions: 1. We have no record of the original language - Celtic. 2. We have no record of C2, C3, C4, C5. 3. Only C6 is recorded, datable to the latest branch off (I-Ir, B-S, Ger?) in relative time. 4. We have a record of all other languages and the relative times are about the same as those reflected in the original Stammbaum. Some things that should be clear from this little experiment: 1. Generally, we would have no way of knowing that the apparent shared or totally unique 'innovations' in C6 are not "innovations" at all, but reflect entirely the first parent. 2. In fact we would probably identify any unique attributes in C6 as recent unshared innovations. They would not be found in the other recorded languages, but in fact they would be original attributes lost in the innovating daughter languages. 3. Our assumption was that Celtic...C5 (identical languages) were the immediate parents of each branch-off language. But because we have no record of those Celtic....C5 languages we might find parent-daughter or subgroup relations where there are none (based on inherited commonalities lost in some of the innovating daughters) 4. The number of apparent 'shared innovations' between C6 and some of the other branching languages might suggest a closer relation with some rather than others. But our assumption was that in fact all were equidistant. 5. We would not reconstruct the parent anywhere close to C6, assuming it to be a recent and maybe odd daughter. But in fact that would be the only accurate reconstruction. It really isn't pertinent to say that this could never happen. We could always adjust the scenario enough to make it more possible. Whether it is probable or not does not matter. The point is that if it did happen, the Stammbaum with its given assumptions, would not be able to reflect these events accurately. (But it would give the appearance of an accurate solution.) I think that this happens because the system is based on innovations but not conservations. If you only measure the vectors of change, the vectors of continuity become invisible. A little like reconstructing the lineage of dinosaurs by assuming they are all similar, and then measuring how much they differed. Rather than trying to find a way to rationally measure the similarities in the first place. On the other hand, I have no better system to offer. This does I hope explains my awkward question about how long PIE could continue to co-exist with its daughter languages. And how the answer might affect the direction of reconstructions. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Thu Aug 26 11:00:13 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 13:00:13 +0200 Subject: Quebec French nasal vowels. Message-ID: To: Stephane Goyette I'm sorry you so misinterpreted (the intentions of) my posts. It was certainly not my intention to hurt any Quebecois sensitivity, and least of all to be offensive or even slightly unpleasant. Regional variants of languages in various countries are a normal phenomenon, especially when there is such geographic separation. Even Holland and Flanders Dutch sound very different (but aren't really), and they are next door, as are German, Austrian and Swiss German, or French, Belgian and Swiss French. I don't think they (except some purists) loose any sleep over their differences, or anybody pointing at them. Anyway, the original discussion was about twenty-based number systems and their presence/absence in e.g. various local variants of French (quatre-vingts <=> octante, soixante-dix <=> septante, etc.), among other things. Best regards, Ed. Selleslagh From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Aug 26 13:28:35 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 14:28:35 +0100 Subject: A quibble on Engl. _zap_ In-Reply-To: <01JF6LAWE2MA9X215Z@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: > In saying some eminently sensible things, Larry managed to pick > first _pizza_ and then _zap_ as examples of words which might be > ancient in English but aren't. > But _zap_ is no more possible than _pizza_, since OE (a) had no > phoneme /z/ and (b) did not use in writing English words. > Medially, [z] was common but is written , as befits an allophone > of /s/. We seem to be talking at cross purposes here. I picked `zap' specifically because it has an anomalous form for a native word and because an Old English * would have been impossible. That was the point of the example. > BTW, was there an "OE Bible" (as opposed to translations of > individual books) in which a **zapian or **sapian might have > occurred? No, I'm not aware that there is a single `Old English Bible' on a par with, say, the King James Bible. But I've often seen the label `Old English Bible' applied informally to the collective body of OE translations. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Aug 26 13:48:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 14:48:53 +0100 Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT] > <<...So, if Neandertals had language, then surely so did > the common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans,...>> > Why does that follow? Why couldn't language could have started > during the existence of Neanderthals. With much respect, I don't > think there is any evidence for this. The suggestion I was replying to was that our own ancestors might have acquired language, by contact, from Neandertals who already had it. And that idea I find implausible. The entirely different view, that language originated early enough that both Neandertals and our own direct ancestors -- assuming these were distinct -- both inherited it, is one I have no quarrel with. [LT] > <<...and no appeal to "borrowing" from Neandertals is necessary or > appropriate.>> > Again, I don't think there is any evidence for this. Sorry; I don't follow. Evidence for what? [LT] > < debated, but the majority view still sees them as *not* being among our > direct ancestors. >> > You may not be aware that rather recently the reverse process > actually went on in the scientific community. Based on a stream of > work starting with Solecki, in fact, with much fanfare - Homo > neanderthalensis was rechristened, in most textbooks I guess, to > Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. It even made Time back in around > 1993 or so. That status is being challenged again currently. Oh, I am aware of this. I've been following this story, though not intently, for decades. > As to the "majority" you refer to, I'd suggest that you might want > to take a second look when you use that term. I suspect that a head > count in this arena would be difficult to take, and even that "a > majority" might not include opinions you would want included. (If > you are refering to some kind of actual survey, however it would be > good to know about.) I know of no survey. I am merely reporting impressionistically on what I read. And my clear impression at present is that those who want to see Neandertals as direct human ancestors are a minority, and have been for some time. There are others who, more cautiously, want to see Neandertals as having made *some* contribution to our genes, but even these do not appear to be a majority at present. > Most researchers would honestly say I think that there are no clear > probabilities in tracing the Neanderthal's relatedness or > unrelatedness to humans. Any strong opinion would be fairly > worthless as a matter of sheer uncertainty. Well, I have no memory for names, but, a year or two ago, a German study was published, with much fanfare, announcing that genetic investigations had revealed no Neandertal contribution to our own genes. The chief researcher had an unusual name, which looked Estonian or Finnish to me, but, as usual, I can't remember it. Anybody else recall it? > I'd like to refer you to Naming our Ancestors (Meikle and Parker, > 1994). Its a very useful reference on the terms and principles of hominid > taxonomy. Well, I don't know this, and I thank you for the reference, but the issue here is not one of terms and principles, but rather one of tree-drawing. > < already had a language faculty.>> > I'd ask you to look at this statement again and consider its > meaningfulness. Why? I was considering the possibility of acquiring language by contact. And I really find it hard to believe that a species with a biological language faculty could fail to have language, or that a species with no language faculty could acquire one by contact. > There really is no way to ascertain what a language faculty is or > would look like without evidence of language - of which there is > none at this early date. Fair enough. [LT] > < possessed language themselves.>> > Again I'd ask you to look at this. Logically, if a language faculty > is different than language, then yes they could have had the faculty > and no language. One doesn't follow the other - unless they are one > and the same entity. The first statement may be logically valid, but I myself find it hard to conceive of such a state of affairs. I really do not believe that learning a language is like learning to ice-skate. Clearly our ancestors had an "ice-skating faculty" before any of them ever learned to ice-skate, but I just can't see our language faculty as the same sort of animal as an "ice-skating faculty". Of course, you're free to disagree with me here, and I know of one linguist who does, but only one. > Back in the 1980's when Broca's area in the brain was widely > promoted as the essential element to language (since that time its > been fairly well proven that it is not essential at all) an > identification in the bones was made that may be of interest here: > < habilis brain cast, and indicates it was possibly capable of speech. > Homo habilis is thought to have been about 127 cm (5'0") tall, and > about 45 kg (100 lb) in weight, although females may have been > smaller. >> > This is to my knowledge the only correlation made between the actual > physical evidence and some notion of a brain based language > "faculty." It would date language significantly earlier than > anything mentioned on this list. Yes, and I alluded to this in an earlier posting, though I recall that the work I saw focused on H. erectus, not on H. habilis. Maybe I'm misremembering. > The only current dialogue I know of that actually pertains to the physical > evidence is the jaw nerve canal studies at Duke and UC that I mentioned > earlier. These seem to indicate a capability for complex speech comparable > to modern (current) humans, though the findings have been challenged on > averaging grounds. I have no quarrel in principle with arguments that language is older than our own species. I see no reason to reject such a suggestion out of hand. It's just that I haven't come across very many people defending such a position. However, if this position eventually triumphs, fine. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Thu Aug 26 14:07:39 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 16:07:39 +0200 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > [...] But there is another view, the > Schwundhypothese, which holds that all these features were present in > broad PIE but then lost in Anatolian. I'm afraid I don't know if > anybody is defending the Schwundhypothese today. I am. And I'm not alone. But even so, there are a precious few really palpable innovations common to extra-Anatolian Indo-European (the inflection of the word for 'earth' would be decisive by itself) that do prove that Anatolian was the first branch to go (or be left behind). BTW, who calls the opposite "Herkunfthypothese"? It appears more like a "Hinzukunftshypothese", but I guess that's not sensible German. The main point is the time depth of innovations. The opponents to the "Schwund- hypothese" claim that the Hittite grammatical poverty basically represents the original state of affairs, an attitude disproved many times (its extreme version "can be shredded, point by devastating point", to copy your own words on a different issue). They say the extra features have been added in the non-Anatolian trunk after the separation from its Anatolian branch, which in most particular cases just cannot be. Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 26 15:37:54 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 10:37:54 -0500 Subject: color terms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Colors do seem to be more subject to change or interpretation than most words. Colors for people of various hues have some interesting variations. In Latin America, Indians [from India as well as Native Americans] are often spoke of as morado, "purple" [although this may actually be more related to moro "Moorish"]. I've run into Brazilians who have told me that they were "orange". I'm told that Kenyans refer to Europeans as "red". The "blue" people of Appalachia would be seen as "olive" by most Americans. [snip] >The surprise actually happens when we think otherwise. But are semantics >taken as lightly as you seem to indicate? I've seen etymologies discounted >on this list because a word that meant "iron" could not have meant "silver." >I can find it for you if you like. [snip] >My point of course was that a 'blueman' might have nothing to do with blue. >Not as easy a point to make as I might have thought. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 26 15:42:52 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 10:42:52 -0500 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' In-Reply-To: <84caaf9f.24f4cf4a@aol.com> Message-ID: I've read that the term goes back to the Laghin invasion, a Gaulish tribe who gave their name to Leinster < Laighin tir [sp?] sometime around 1 AD, give or take a couple of centuries [it's been a while since I read it] [snip] ><Middle Ir., of which the first is earliest: (1) a Gaul, (apparently >sometimes equated with Frank)...>> >I'd love to see the source for Gall = a Gaul. I didn't think written Irish >went back far enough for Gauls to still be around to refer to. That's why the >equation with Frank on the other hand may make a lot of sense. And that >brings us back to "walh." >Regards, >Steve Long Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Aug 26 16:15:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 17:15:08 +0100 Subject: Cambridge and Greenberg's methods In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I am very grateful to Larry Trask for his discussion of > Joseph Greenberg's methods and Cambridge methods today. > I hope we can have more discussion of the Cambridge methods. > But I will insist (and provide evidence below) > that Trask still does not understand that Greenberg is doing > something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM > claiming to prove particular language families are related. No. Here is a direct quote from page 38 of Greenberg's Amerind book: "The thesis of this book is that all the indigenous languages of the Americas, except those of the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut groups, fall into a single vast assemblage. The bulk of this volume will be devoted to a demonstration of the genetic unity of what I will call the Amerind family." Nothing ambiguous about this. Note in particular that word `demonstration'. Greenberg is claiming not only that Amerind is a single genetic family but that his book *proves* it. I'm afraid that Lloyd Anderson is trying to see Greenberg as doing something very different from what Greenberg plainly *is* doing. Greenberg is not putting forward hypotheses for possible consideration by others. He's telling us loud and clear "It's over. Amerind is proved." Elsewhere in this book, and in other publications, Greenberg makes it clear that he considers Amerind to be established beyond discussion, and that the only interesting question is to find its closest relative (his own candidate is his Eurasiatic construct). > Barring the difference of whether one expresses one's conclusions as > rooted family trees (Greenberg, I don't remember whether he used > tree diagrams for this) G does indeed propose rooted family trees of the familiar kind, though he considers his subgrouping of Amerind to be less secure than the reality of the family. > or unrooted family trees (the Cambridge Group that Trask refers to), I am not aware that G has ever made any use of unrooted trees, or even expressed any interest in them. > there may be little difference between them (little difference in > matters noted in Trask's discussion today; of course there may be > other differences that we consider important). There are huge differences. The Cambridge work merely tries to quantify linguistic distance; the results are (or may be) expressed as unrooted trees, and *no claims whatever* are made about genetic relations. > [LT] >> The assumption that all languages are related is out of order. >> The assumption that all languages *might* be related is hardly an >> assumption at all, and in any case such an idea is excluded by no one. > The assumption is of course quite in order, to see what it might > lead to, as long as it is merely that, an assumption. So there is > really no difference between the above two statements just above. Statement 1: All languages are related. Statement 2: All languages might be related. You really can't see any differences between these? Gad. I know of no one who queries (2), but I know of very few people prepared to defend (1). > Except some emotional flavoring which antagonizes some people. Sorry, but the difference between (1) and (2) looks to me like far more than "emotional flavoring". > All one needs to understand Greenberg's reasoning is to assume > that all languages *might* be related. No. I am happy to agree that all languages might be related, a position which commits me to nothing at all, apart from a rejection of the contrary proposition that polygenesis is certainly false. But it does not follow that I have to accept *any* of Greenberg's conclusions. > As far as I can tell, the only difference noted by Trask > is in whether one expresses one's tentative conclusions as > (if all languages are related, then here are some > conceivable family trees for the deeper connections), > or as > (here are some conceivable deeper connections, > though we do not express them as family trees). Well, I won't be drawn into this. I'll just point out, yet again, that neither of these has anything to do with Greenberg's work. Greenberg's work, on Amerind and elsewhere, takes the following form and no other: "All the languages listed below are *certainly* related." > In terms of politics, it would perhaps have been more useful in the > long run if Greenberg had not expressed his conclusions AS IF they > were family trees. A fundamental misconception. Family trees are *intrinsic* to what Greenberg does. Indeed, he's not even interested in anything other than family trees. And politics has nothing to do with it: it's the *linguistics* that's at issue. If Greenberg had wanted to be politic, he might have said something like this: "Here is some interesting evidence suggestive of a possible hypothesis. Maybe it's worth looking into this." But he does no such thing, and moreover he plainly has no interest in such a softly-softly approach. He thinks he's proving family trees. End of story. > That is clearly a red flag to some people. They seem to treat such > expressions as if they were final conclusions proven by sufficient > evidence, But this is exactly *Greenberg's* position! Read what he writes. > for two languages or language families taken in isolation from all > others, rather than one investigator's claim that the evidence he > evaluated as he evaluates it suggests those trees rather than some > others (merely that, the preferable conclusion to others rather than > a proven conclusion). Again, nothing to do with Greenberg, unless we impute to him the idea that monogenesis is true and provable. In fact, he probably does believe this, since he's hinted it heavily on several occasions, but so far he has stopped short of asserting it in print. The point is not whether tree X is better or worse than tree Y: the point is whether there is any justification for drawing a tree at all. > Personally, I have no problem at all treating that as the expression > of a tentative hypothesis only (how could it have ever been anything > else?), But that's not how Greenberg presents it. > and I have been simply amazed at the antagonisms. Here I have some sympathy. The stridency of a few of G's critics is greater than I consider proper. But we shouldn't let that unfortunate stridency blind us to the very substantial *linguistic* critiques of G's work. > Shouldn't we always try to make the best use of the contributions of > each one of us? Didn't Greenberg attempt to systematize a large > amount of data which others can then correct and improve on? G's own view is that such corrections and improvements can extend only to the details, to the subgrouping and to the individual comparisons. He does not allow for the possibility that his vast mega-agglomerations like Amerind are merely phantasms -- as many of his critics maintain. [LT on the Cambridge work] >> If the same is true of Greenberg's highly informal approach, then G >> cannot distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness, > Exactly. I have always, from the very beginning, understood that > was exactly what Greenberg's approach did. Nope. Read what he writes. He damn well *does* believe that he can distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness -- insofar as he recognizes a concept of unrelatedness at all, which I frankly doubt that he does, given his constant asides about "Proto-Sapiens". > He would classify Basque and Chinese as the most divergent members > of such a set. You have a point here, though not the one you intend. For G, *no* language ever gets left out of his agglomerations. The only issue, for him, is which agglomeration to put it into. And even that seems to be only a temporary measure, pending the revelation of the single Great Tree to which all languages belong. Johanna Nichols has described G's refusal to accept isolates or unaffiliated tiny families as "pathological", a view which I endorse. The Cambridge group don't distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness because, with their methods, they can't. Greenberg doesn't because he won't. > He would conclude neither "related" nor "unrelated" if he did not > assume all languages were related. Can you cite one single passage from any of G's publications in which he concludes that any two languages or families are "unrelated"? Or "neither related nor unrelated"? > Given the assumption of all languages > potentially related, which since unprovable amounts merely to a way > of expressing one's hypotheses, Well, starting out by assuming the truth of something you consider to be unprovable strikes me as a daft way of proceeding. Here's something I consider unprovable (and unfalsifiable): The universe was created last Tuesday morning, and all of us were created complete with false memories of our earlier existence. Now, would it make any sense for me to assume the truth of this, and try from there to establish anything interesting? > he concludes "most divergent", just as he in fact did for the > families Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut. The difference in these modes > of expression is utterly trivial as long as we are concerned with > tentative hypotheses, not with ultimate truth. But G firmly believes that he has established "ultimate truth". > [LT] >> and he has no >> business setting up imaginary "families". > Given that this is merely a way of expressing degree of divergence, > under Greenberg's assumptions, I find it unobjectionable. > I don't draw any more conclusions from it than are warranted, > one investigator's tentative judgements of stronger vs. weaker > resemblances. That is all. I am speechless. I guess it's time for me to withdraw from this discussion, dubtless to the great relief of the moderator. I close with a reaffirmation of my central point: Lloyd Anderson's attempt at characterizing Greenberg's work bears no relation to Greenberg's work. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Thu Aug 26 23:34:27 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 01:34:27 +0200 Subject: nasal pres / root aor In-Reply-To: <000901bee55a$4e27c880$7819063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: > [...] I want to > ask a quick question. You give examples of nasal present + root aorist from > Tocharian, Baltic, and Hittite. > The options for PIE aorists appear to have been root, -s- or the rare > reduplicated aorist. Leaving aside the reduplicated aorist, because it > scarcely counts, that leaves root or -s- for most verbs. > Now Baltic has no -s- aorist, and I believe that Hittite doesn't either. > Doesn't this mean the evidence from those languages is meaningless? Sorry to take so long in answering a quick - and good - question. It is true that Baltic had little choice the way it shaped its verbal system; but the older choices that underlie the system fit the nasal present + root aorist pattern very well. But I admit it could be used also to support a PIE combination of sk^-prs. and root aor. which does not seem to have been a pervading companionship. In Lith. & Latv. there is a complemenatry distribution between nasal present and st-present (IE *sk^-prs. unless you want to create unnecessary trouble), while Slavic has only the nasal type in ingressives, and in Slavic the corresponding aorist is also the morphemeless continuant of the root aorist. So, with some sophistery, one could say that the only prs. and aor. combination pointed to by Baltic and Slavic together is n-prs. + root-aor. However, that is not a cogent argument, and I would not accept its weight if I did not like it for independent reasons. Hittite of course has no aorist, nor for that matter present stems: It only has verbal stems, meaning that for each verbal lexeme all forms are derived from the same stem. Still, the derivative status of the nasal type links it to the corresponding verb with the nasal with which it has a paradigmatic connection in the other languages. Again, Strunk has pointed out a possible relic pair in Hittite as well: hunik-zi/hunink-anzi 'wound' vs. huek-zi 'stab, kill' which look like n-prs. + root aor. of the same verb (note the 'unfinished business' implied by the old present stem as opposed to the terminal aorist). It is therefore certainly a fair possibility that the Hittite verb has developed from a system like the one seen in the rest of IE. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Thu Aug 26 23:53:59 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 01:53:59 +0200 Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <00d101bee298$47b80060$2b70fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 9 Aug 1999, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: - a very full mail, of which I can reply to only a small fragment at present: [...] >> [Jens:] >> The PIE function of the different derivative categories must be at least >> compatible with that of their later reflexes, and the simplest solution is >> that wherever we find non-trivial correspondences between the daughter >> languages we have a relatively direct reflexion of the protolanguage. > The perfect was rolled into the (perfective) past in Germanic, Italic, > Tocharian and possibly Celtic. Does that mean that the Perfect was > originally a past, and Indic and Greek innovated that into a > resultative/perfect? Or should we pay attention to the fact that the > development is typically the other way? By the time PIE broke up, the perfect and the aorist must have been functionally close in enough instances to make this development natural. The aorist is in a sense a perfective past, and when the perfect was used as a past, this too must have had a perfective note to it, so a clash looks quite threatening. I may take up some of the other points you raised at a later time. Jens From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 27 01:13:21 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 21:13:21 EDT Subject: Algorithm for comparative method? Message-ID: In a message dated 8/26/99 6:10:47 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes concerning the possibility of doing the comparative method by algorithm: >the major unsolved problem is >modeling the semantics in a way that allows a program to make human-like >judgments regarding what semantic developments are reasonable. The >phonology, tho, could almost certainly already be computed by program. I would suggest that the phonology hides problems just as great as the semantics, because we do not have an explicit empirically based metric there either! No metric of how probable each state-to-state transition is between particular sounds, in specified contexts of languages of particular overal phonological or phonetic structure, etc. Given that the number of languages is so small (even if we count 6000), there will always be large problems of estimation. For this reason many different kinds of evidence will need to be used at the same time, to make judicious choices when the data does not compel us. For example, by using archaeology and biology and natural history to estimate the direction of some sound changes like vowel space rotations, if we do not have sufficient purely linguistic evidence. Developing a handbook of such information is very much like the task of developing the handbook of physical and chemical constants. Linguistics is in its infancy to a great degree because this is still handled on an intuitive basis, and one investigator's judgement may be quite different from another's, based on the accidents of what "odd" languages that investigator happens to be familiar with. There needs to be a much better way of integrating data from many different sources, making it available to all. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Aug 27 04:33:54 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 23:33:54 -0500 Subject: Online etymological databases Message-ID: Dear Sean and IEists: My sincerest appreciation for the valuable information you are making available online. I hope other listmembers will express their appreciation also offline. Pat [ moderator snip ] From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Aug 27 05:38:02 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 23:38:02 -0600 Subject: Conservative dilemma In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Just to set the record straight on the origin of the Wiyot-Yurok-Algonkian language family (Algic) that Lloyd Anderson has mentioned recently. The grouping of Wiyot and Yurok together was the work of Dixon and Kroeber, whose methodology was primarily lexical similarities (not thorough sound laws, but something closer to Greenberg's methodology). By Kroeber's own statement, lexical similarity supersedes grammatical similarity when there is a discrepancy. Sapir related these two to Algonkian. Sapir's methodology was classical, however. I don't know exactly what Lloyd is talking about when he says that the comparative method doesn't work in comparing the three parts of Algic. Sapir himself wrote (in his article in 1913), "There is good lexical, morphological, and phonological evidence to genetically relate Algonkin to Wiyot and Yurok". He stressed the importance of regular sound correspondences. Much of Truman Michelson's (1914) opposition to Algic was geographic at its core, although he also noted a number of morphological traits that were un-Algonkian and quite Californian. (We'd call that a Sprachbund effect today.) Michelson's opposition to Algic was also a result of the tenor of the times. Sapir, Dixon, Kroeber, et al. were combining Powell's 58 families right and left. It's not surprising that a correct proposal was labelled as false in the contemporary climate. The issue lay dormant until the superior linguistic materials on Wiyot and Yurok of Teeter and Robbins and Bloomfield's thorough reconstruction of Proto-Algonkian showed that Sapir had been right after all in all areas--lexical, morphological, and grammatical. The final nail in the coffin of nonrelatedness was in the comparison of certain features in Algonkian and Wiyot and Yurok that were irregular. The irregularities in each were "regular" when compared across the board. For example, a -t- is inserted in Proto-Algonkian between a possessive pronominal prefix and a vowel-initial root, whereas in Wiyot a -t- is inserted between possessive prefixes and a root beginning with hV (with the subsequent loss of the h). Algonkian *ne + *ehkw- = *netehkw- 'my louse', Wiyot du- + hikw = dutikw 'my louse'. This is all part of the Comparative Method. I looked at the index of Lyle Campbell's "American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America" and saw four lines of references each to Yurok and Wiyot. I looked at these and found absolutely no evidence for Lloyd's implication the Comparative Method wasn't used to establish this relationship. Sapir used it, Kroeber and Dixon didn't. But Kroeber and Dixon didn't relate W & Y to Algonkian--Sapir did, using classical Comparative Methodology. I don't hang around too many Algonkianists, so if Lloyd has some inside scoop that isn't in the literature, I'm unaware of it. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Fri Aug 27 09:44:52 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 19:44:52 +1000 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:35:37 +0100." Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] My apologies for my lateness in replying to this message but life has been pandemonium here. This is my repsonse to Larry Trask's criteria for the admission of words in an analysis of early basque. Some methodological issues are relevant to all language analyses. [LT] Of course, I exclude verbs, since native verbal roots are never free forms. This surprised me. Do you mean "sar zaitez" (Come in!) is not legal euskara and that "sar" is not a word. While the dictionary form of the word is "sartu" I will use "sar" in the analysis. If we agree to include verbal roots, that will add several hundred more. Which I have always included in the work. I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even 1500 strong candidates. But I'll wait and see. We have finished collecting and classifying the monosyllables. I now just have to pull the list together. We have discussed you proposal on how to accept words and give the following responses; [LT] I propose the following. Let's compile a list of the Basque words each of which meets the following minimal requirements. (1) There is no reason to suppose it is polymorphemic. Agreed [The great bulk of the words in any Basque dictionary are *transparently* polymorphemic, and can be excluded at once.] (2) It is found throughout the language, or nearly so. [Since the better dictionaries assign words to the conventional dialects, it is easy to formalize this requirement as we see fit.] Don't agree - the forms of words in certain dialects are important to understanding their history. (3) It is attested early. [Let's say before 1600, which is `early' for Basque.] Don't agree - the corpus of materials at that time is tiny. for example there are words in corpora predating Larramendi's dictionary(1747) which he didn't include. In line with what you say below, Larramendi's dictionary constructed many neologisms which we do not intend using. (4) There is no reason to believe that it is shared with languages known to have been in contact with Basque. [Subjective, and hard to formalize, but I believe that doubtful cases are few enough to constitute only a minor problem.] Agreed -but we recognise this may not be entirely clearcut. To these I would like to add two more, though these are not essential: (5) It does not appear to be a nursery word. The comment by a list member indicated nursery words can provide useful information. I would propose to analyse them separately to understand their commonness with the main group. (6) It does not appear to be of imitative origin. Ditto for nursery words - with the extra comment that imitative words sometimes do have a true word associated with them, e.g. taup : taupa (heartbeat) Now, (5) would exclude only a very few words not excluded by the other criteria, notably `mother' and `father', while (6) would exclude a much larger number of items which would be automatically excluded in any serious comparative work, like `meow', `moo', `baa', `ding-dong', `spit', and probably also `sneeze'. This last sounds roughly like oo-SHEEN, and, in my view, is too likely to be imitative to be included in any list. Anything that is debatable is included in the anlaysis. One's person's opinion amongst a collection should not have the right of veto in word selection. The default case is acceptance - there has to be a substantial reason for withdrawing a word from the analysis list. Having compiled the list, let us then examine it and determine the phonological characteristics of the words on the list. I am fairly confident that I can guess what the results will be, at least in their main lines, though there will doubtless be a few surprises in the details. We shall go forward on this basis. I intend producing a list of ALL the Azkue words with a commentary on whether they have been included in the analysis and the reasons for their rejection. However monosyllables are first. It is most important to get them processed as they are needed to assist in identifying potential compounds of 2-, 3-, 4-syllbale words. [on my English examples] > I wonder if we are talking at crossed purposes here. I'm not saying > the known history of a word should be ignored. If we have such > information then it should be used. Agreed. > But I am saying that words we have today that are not identified as > having any alternative history could be fairly considered for > informing about early euskara. Here I can't agree. I have the gravest reservations about including words not recorded before 1871, or before 1935; about including words found nowhere but in Larramendi's dictionary or in Hiribarren's dictionary; about including words recorded only in one small area; about including words reported only by the Dutch linguist van Eys or only by the Spanish polymath Hervas y Panduro; about including all sorts of things which, in my view, are deeply suspect for one reason or another. I think you position is extremely conservative. My response is as above. I believe it is not enough merely to exclude obvious loan words: we must be *far* more discriminating, or we are going to wind up with a list containing more junk than genuine native and ancient words. If you can demonstrate they are junk then they can be removed otherwise they are observed data and should not to be culled unjustifiably -that is just managing the data to get the result one wants and is poor statistical method. *Once* we have a list of the most plausible candidates for native and ancient status, *then* we can consider judiciously whether further words might plausibly be added to it. But we have to start by being as rigorous as possible, not by tossing in everything that isn't obviously borrowed. So we will reach a position where we proffer a list and you may cull it - it will be interesting to see the differences. > Let's take the opposite scenario. In the Azkue list there are 9854 > words of which 1436 have modern orthography that can't be mapped > into the orthogrpahy you use for describing early euskara. Not sure I understand this. In your book you use an orthography for describing early euskara. I have extracted into a sub-list all the words that can't be early euskara on the sole principle they don't conform to that orthography e.g. words with , ... There are 1436 of them. Of course this is not to deny the words can be traced back to an earlier form. Wen we have the reconstructed forms we will be able to use them. > Of the 8318 words that do fit your orthography, 5022 can be found in > one of the modern lexicons/dictionaries of Aulestia, Kintana, Morris > or XUXEN. if we analyse these words and show that they strongly > conform to the Michelena description of early euskara and/or your > restating of it, will you consider that result irrelevant to > determining the merit of that description, especially given the > phonological conservatism of euskara? Yes, I would. Let me cite just a few Basque words from Aulestia's dictionary: `greyhound' `if' `word' `turnip' `toad' `courage' `skirt' `plaster' `strong' `write' `ax' `field' `honor' `hen' `sky' And so on, and so on, for god knows how many more. Now, every single one of these words conforms *perfectly* to our ideas of what native and ancient Basque words can look like, without the slightest complication. And yet, in every case, I can adduce overwhelming evidence that the word is not native, or is not ancient, or is not monomorphemic. This is not on the point of discussion. I have already said known non-native words need to be deleted. However I also say, "a suspicion" that it is not native is not sufficient to reject the word from analysis, otherwise one is potentially loading the dice. Conformity to pre-existing ideas about possible phonological forms is not nearly good enough: such an approach must inevitably sweep up huge numbers of words which demonstrably should not be there, and, by implication, very many more which really (if not demonstrably) should not be there. I'm using it in the other direction, that is, conformity to pre-existing phonological forms is a means of separating the original list to give us a smaller set of words to begin working with. This operation does not override the criteria of removing known loans. > I would also like to point out there could be a further difference > in our perspectives due to different but unspoken methodologies and > goals. I am interested in describing the stochastic or probabilistic > characteristics of word formation in euskara. By `word formation', I suppose you mean what I would call `morpheme-structure constraints'? Well, fine if you're only interested in modern Basque, but I myself am interested in the morpheme-structure constraints of Pre-Basque, and therefore I don't want to count as evidence anything that doesn't appear to be a strong candidate for a Pre-Basque word, in its earliest reconstructible form. I understand your motivation and the demand for rigour you are placing here, however my concern is that such a method can very readily be arbitrary and will be applied to favour the working hypotheses of the scholars, thus producing a self fulfilling prophecy. I prefer the alternative approach founded in observational disciplines like psychology, land surveying, etc. which say you only reject observations when you have very good reasons to. > Whilst getting a legitimate set of words to anlayse is important the > presence of a few doubtful words does not necessarily destroy such a > description as a legitimate probabilistic statement. Agreed, but I worry about that phrasing `a few words'. If we are not maximally rigorous, I fear that what we'll get is a whole mountain of words that shouldn't be there -- more improper words, in fact, than proper ones, which will surely ruin any stochastic approach. I think we agree in spirit on the need for rigour -it is just one dimension of rigour we have different concerns about. > I do not wish to deny the importance of systematic study of each > word but noisy data doesn't invalidate a probabilisitic study nor > necessarily pre-determine it to being unable to say something useful > about the structure of the data. Production of a putative core word > list of early euskara will be a spin-off of this work. Excellent, but I'd be very cautious about including modern words. I am most concerned about not including modern words hence my starting point is Azkue and nothing more recent in terms of the source of words. However I have used modern wordlists to assist in filtering the initial Azkue list, in an attempt to identify the Azkue words that have some doubt of veracity attached to them, that is words in the Azkue list that are not found in modern sources are partitioned off for separate analysis. [LT] >> I don't see why. A dictionary of modern English is of no direct >> relevance to ascertaining the nature of Old English, and a dictionary of >> modern Basque is of no direct relevance to ascertaining the nature of >> Pre-Basque. You might as well try to find out what Latin was like by >> reading a dictionary of modern French. > This of course assumes there is little relatedness between the two > and there is not a systematic development from one to the other. The > already phonological conservatism of euskara suggests that the words > in Azkue have greater validity for studying early euskara than > modern english for studying middle english. Not necessarily. Phonological conservatism is only one factor among several. It matters little that Basque phonology has been conservative if not much of the Pre-Basque lexicon still survives. I guess that is one of things we are trying to get to - a putative early and by implication Proto-Basque lexicon. > I'm a little mystified with this in the context of euskara. As far > as I have heard the dominant ancient external influence has come > from Latin with suggestions of a small number of items from Celtic > and a few others. Once these are identified then is not everything > ancient also native because there is nothing else left but ancient > native words, or am I missing something? Once ancient loans are identified -- if they can be -- then everything ancient remaining is also native, in some sense. But there remains the *big* problem of determining what is ancient to begin with. The great bulk of the Basque vocabulary is not ancient, just as the great bulk of the modern English vocabulary is not ancient. If you can't demonstrate a word is borrowed and it has the morphology of an old word then it is an old word. To say it is possibly not old is a truism and uninformative cheers Jon ______________________________________________________________ The meaning of your communication is the response you get From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 27 09:50:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 10:50:01 +0100 Subject: Conservative dilemma In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > referring to Algonquian - Wiyot - Yurok (Algonquian-Ritwan): >>> The question arises then, why is it that the best historical >>> linguists of American Indian languages were quite thoroughly >>> convinced AT SOME POINT that these languages were related, >>> yet the standard kind of evidence was somehow lacking? >>> What was it that they found so thoroughly convincing? > Larry Trask's message today in which he quotes the above paragraph > completely fails to understand the point, > because he does not know the Amerindian field, > and does not relize that the hypothesis I mentioned is now considered > by nearly everyone to be solidly demonstrated scientific hypothesis. If you are referring to Algic (Algonquian-Wiyot-Yurok), then *of course* I know that it is almost universally accepted. I say so in my textbook, and I say so again in my forthcoming dictionary. But the original passage I was replying to did not appear to be about Algic, but rather about the assorted super-families set up mainly by Sapir, though often extended (and occasionally originated) by others. Lloyd appeared to be asking why early Americanists were so enthusiastic about these groupings, and my posting was a response to this query. > This was not some iffy hypothesis believed by uncareful researchers, > it is a hypothesis believed by the most conservative researchers. > The comment Trask quotes from Campbell simply is not relevant > to this case. Agreed, but it is highly relevant to a lot of other cases. > The "best historical linguistics" I was referring to are the CONSERVATIVES > whom Larry Trask I think most admires. > It was THOSE CONSERVATIVES who were completely convinced > that the two "outlier" languages are related to Algonquian, > yet some of THOSE SAME CONSERVATIVES also believed that > their standard comparative method was not adequate to prove this > relationship. So far as I know, the case for Algic rests solidly on shared inflectional morphology, which is normally considered adequate for proof. Comparative reconstruction is of limited applicability because there is so little shared vocabulary between Algonquian and the California languages. > The POINT is that the most CONSERVATIVE linguists > were able to base their conclusions on something beyond the > standard comparative method. THEREFORE, > this is a prime field in which to explore WHAT these > conservatives found so convincing, > precisely in order to slightly extend our tools, > our self-conscious understanding of how we reason. But shared morphology is not a new idea. Proof of relationship by shared morphology is an idea that's been around since the beginning. It played a major role in establishing IE, and it is the evidence appealed to in order to establish Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo, neither of which has yet been reconstructed to general satisfaction. > (Not all conservatives consider this a dilemma, > some consider that the standard conservative method > CAN demonstrate the relationship. But some consider > it cannot, and for a larger number, there was an earlier > period when they considered it had not done so, > yet they were convinced the relationship was real and > was genetic. For THOSE conservatives, > and at THAT time period, the dilemma exists and > provides us a great opportunity.) Sorry, but I don't see a dilemma here. What dilemma? > I think Trask (along with many others) > considers that the standard traditional comparative method > is practically a definition of valid evidentiary reasoning. I have never said any such thing. You are putting words into my mouth. > They do not consider it merely a tool, which can be > extended, or which might have weaknesses (such as > sometimes, when properly applied to certain data sets, > giving the wrong result, a case I mentioned earlier). Oh, for heaven's sake, Lloyd. Read my textbook of historical linguistics. There you will find that I say that the comparative method is only a tool, that it has its limitations, that it is potentially subject to pitfalls, that there exist other tools which also have their virtues, and that there is hope that mathematical methods might be developed to take us further back in time than the comparative method can be applied. Where are you *getting* this stuff from? You seem to be setting up a fantasy Trask of your own creation and going after that. Why not just read what I write? > They simply are unable to treat its validity and range > of applicability as an EMPIRICAL question. Read my textbook, and then see if you can still post this assertion without turning crimson. > (Many of them would not say this as a theoretical claim, > but in practice they act just as if they believed it.) I don't know just who `they' is supposed to include, but I can assure you it doesn't apply to me. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Aug 27 13:13:49 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 09:13:49 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) In-Reply-To: <83142bec.24f6311d@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Take our Stammbaum and lets arbitrarily put "Celtic" at the top where PIE is > now. "Celtic" is the first ancestor on our tree. > Now add a factual premise. That - throughout the relative time period > represented in all the branchings of the Stammbaum to the present - a > "language" that its speakers called "Celtic" at the onset persisted in its > original form without change, from day one to the present. You're starting with a premise which contradicts all of our experience; it just doesn't ever happen that a language is static. All living languages, it seems, are in prepetual change. > Throughout this whole time, there was complete continuity and zero > innovations in that "language", and therefore no "innovations" were shared > with any of the other languages that are represented in the branches. Lets > call this group of identical languages "Celtic 1...Celtic 6" > Now lets say the branchings are pretty much the same as they were in the > original Stammbaum - so we now have: [Tree structure deleted] If it miraculously were the case that the parent language remained unchanged over centuries, while various languages split off from it, then from a purely character-based standpoint, the tree wouldn't look like this; it would look more like the traditional IE tree where all the branches radiate off directly from the root. I don't think the methodology of Ringe, Taylor, and Warnow could distinguish a simultaneous 12-way split from the situation you describe. It doesn't matter, because both scenarios are overwhelmingly unlikely. > According to LT, we cannot call Celtic 'Celtic' anymore after Anatolian > branches because a daughter exists (Anatolian). So lets call it C2. C2 is > identical in every way shape and form to Celtic. All innovations (in > relation to Celtic) only exist in Anatolian. [...] It looks to me like your concern here is what to call the internal nodes in the tree. This is _purely_ a matter of nomenclature. > How would these daughter languages - identical to the original parent except > in name - be indicated on this Stammbaum? I don't know. Would they get a > branch or are they the stem? I don't know. Or would it look exactly as it > does above? It sounds like you are making a distinction between the "main truck" (stem?) versus "branches". This isn't a correct characterization; picture the tree as a hanging mobile. The fact that it was graphically represented as having a spine down the left means nothing; we could easily spin the pieces of this hanging mobile around so that the illusory "spine" takes a jagged path snaking thru the tree, putting some other "spine" at the left (e.g., with Greek, say, to the very left). Doing so would not affect the meaning of the tree at all. > (NOTE: Putting the rule about co-existing ancestors aside for the moment, a > historian or everyday person might call Celtic through C6 by one name, since > all are identical. But the existence of those other daughter branches made > us rename "Celtic" each time a new daughter arrived.) Purely a matter of nomenclature. > 1. Generally, we would have no way of knowing that the apparent shared or > totally unique 'innovations' in C6 are not "innovations" at all, but reflect > entirely the first parent. I can't tell whether you're taking seriously the idea that PIE could have actually looked like the actual Proto-Celtic, or if you're just using "Celtic" as an arbitrary substitute label for PIE. Naturally, it _can't_ have been the case that PIE looked like Celtic, because the other branches would have to undergo some impossible unmergings. [...] > It really isn't pertinent to say that this could never happen. We could > always adjust the scenario enough to make it more possible. If think it is entirely pertinent; you're describing a state of affairs which has some basic differences with the universe that we live in. It's true that the character-based approach would not work well in the universe you're describing, much in the same way that our theories of physics would not work well in a universe where things fall up rather than down. I don't find this the least bit problematic. > Whether it is probable or not does not matter. The point is that if it did > happen, the Stammbaum with its given assumptions, would not be able to > reflect these events accurately. (But it would give the appearance of an > accurate solution.) Yes, I agree that if the situation you describe were true, then the character-based approach could not arrive at the tree that you drew. > This does I hope explains my awkward question about how long PIE could > continue to co-exist with its daughter languages. And how the answer might > affect the direction of reconstructions. As I said before, it's purely a matter of nomenclature whether you want to apply the term "PIE" to some of the internal nodes in the tree. It's purely a matter of convention that we apply that label strictly to the root of the tree. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From wrschmidt at adelphia.net Fri Aug 27 13:26:13 1999 From: wrschmidt at adelphia.net (William Schmidt) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 09:26:13 -0400 Subject: color terms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:15 AM 8/25/99 -0400, you wrote: [ moderator snip ] >My point of course was that a 'blueman' might have nothing to do with blue. >Not as easy a point to make as I might have thought. In fact, "blue" can also mean sad, as in, e.g., "He is blue," or exasperated, as in e.g., "He talked until he was blue in the face." Moreover, Old Norse "bla" meant livid, synonomous with mad. Consequently, there are reasons for believing that people applied blue pigments to their faces in antiquity to indicate madness. WRSChmidt From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 27 15:00:43 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 16:00:43 +0100 Subject: Cambridge and Greenberg's methods In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I am not sure what Cambridge's "unrooted trees" are, other than > as a graph-theoretic term that the direction of change is unspecified, > because no node is singled out as an "origin". That is broadly correct. > In addition to that, the use of unrooted trees may also be a way to > acknowledge in part the positions of those who suggest we should be > giving much more consideration to dialect networks, areal phenomena, > etc. etc. than to binary trees. It is a perfectly legitimate > position that we are forced to that at greater time depths, where it > is harder to distinguish borrowings from genetic inheritances > (where, at sufficient remove, borrowings actually become genetic > inheritances for most practical purposes). But unrooted trees are incompatible with genetic relationships -- or, at least, they have nothing to say about these. > In fact, I think the lack of major cleavages in Greenberg's Amerind, > that is, everything except Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut, is virtually > the same conclusion as having an unrooted tree or dialect network or > even, WITHIN that more limited context, not linking the families of > which it is composed at the highest levels. No. First, Greenberg *does* recognize major cleavages, even though he expresses some diffidence about them. Second, unrooted trees are wholly incompatible with what G thinks he's doing. He does rooted trees, and only rooted trees. > AND, notice, it could also simply be an expression of an inability of > Greenberg's methods to penetrate deeper, to distinguish at such a depth > between neighbor-influences such as borrowing and genetic inheritance. > Perhaps here there really is so much noise that Greenberg's method of > judgements from data sets cannot yield much. Well, I have no quarrel with *this*. ;-) > I do not claim to know. But that is NOT the same as saying I > conclude anyone should completely discount Greenberg's estimates. Wny not? > [LT] >> Fine, but then G's methods do not suffice to set up language families -- >> even though that is exactly what he does. > No he does not. Look. You don't have to take my word for it. Ask Greenberg. He will tell you flatly that he is setting up language families. Why do you keep misrepresenting him so grievously? Just what do you think Greenberg means when he uses terms like `Amerind', `Indo-Pacific' and `Khoisan'? > Greenberg's language families (family trees) > are an expression precisely of separations just as much as of unions. > The two are equivalent, under the assumption that we cannot know > about absolute truth of language relationship. And this too is emphatically *not* Greenberg's position. > I will readily admit that Greenberg should have REPEATED more > often and more clearly that his method assumed ultimate relatedness, > and merely dealt with different degrees of closeness, that his method > did not purport to prove relatedness of two particular language families. Maybe you think that's what he should be doing, but it is definitely not what Greenberg thinks he is doing. > [LT] >> Suppose two languages A and B are genuinely but distantly related. >> In this case, it is at least conceivable that false positives (spurious >> matches) would be counterbalanced by false negatives (the overlooking of >> genuine evidence). >> But suppose the two languages are not in fact related at all. In this >> case, false negatives cannot exist, because there is no genuine evidence >> to be overlooked. Hence the only possible errors are false positives: >> spurious evidence. And the great danger is that the accumulation of >> false positives will lead to the positing of spurious relationships. >> Many of G's critics have hammered him precisely on this point. > The point I made about random noise had NOT to do with whether > particular languages are ultimately related, but whether a given language > or family W is more closely related to others X or Y. > In that context, why should "random" (by definition) noise in the data > selectively favor W to X rather than W to Y? No possible reason that > I can imagine. But this only holds good if you assume in advance that all languages are related. This is exactly the assumption which I chided you for earlier, and it is also exactly the assumption which you have just told me in an off-list posting that you do not hold. So what is going on? > Greenberg's methods are much more robust when applied as he applies > them, to estimating which language families are more closely related, > than they would be if they were applied to try to yield a conclusion > about two language families being absolutely related (vs. not related). > This is almost always misunderstood, and Trask's switch between the > two kinds of questions in the discussion quoted above > of the effects of random noise > seems to indicate that he has not seen this either. I have switched nothing. You have. Greenberg is interested only in absolute relatedness, and he says so. > Trask seems to approve the Cambridge use of Algorithms, > and to discount Greenberg's judgements of similarities. > He calls the one "rigorous" and the other "highly informal". Correct. > I don't think either is necessarily better than the other. > The assumptions built into each can systematically bias the > results, and such bias will be an increasing problem for BOTH > with increasing time depth and increasing noise in the data. But the Cambridge work is mathematical and fully explicit; it can be tested. G's work is not and cannot be. The Cambridge group make it fully explicit what they are counting and how. Greenberg does not. The *only* criterion involved in Greenberg's work is Greenberg's opinion. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From morrisrp at sbu.ac.uk Fri Aug 27 16:18:42 1999 From: morrisrp at sbu.ac.uk (Rupert Morris) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 17:18:42 +0100 Subject: On-line Etymological databases Message-ID: Sean Crist 22 Aug 1999 does not mention the magnificent example of an on-line database which would provide an excellent template for Indo-european and possibly be a location for it. So far they have included a vast range of Altaic languages and also included Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as Dravidian, North Caucasian and they are starting on Semitic. The URL is http://starling.rinet.ru. I use it for Japanese and it is very easy to use and in English! They are looking to extend it to the whole world and including IE in it would make perfect sense. begin: vcard fn: Rupert Morris n: Morris ;Rupert org: Business School South Bank University adr: School Office Rm 101 London Rd;;103 Borough Road;London;;SE1 0AA;United Kingdom email;internet: morrisrp at sbu.ac.uk title: School Administrative Officer tel;work: (0044) - 0 171-815-7836 tel;fax: (0044) - 0 171-815-7865 tel;home: (0044) - 0 181-402-3529 note: Qualifications : BA Hons Grad. ICSA x-mozilla-cpt: ;0 x-mozilla-html: TRUE version: 2.1 end: vcard From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 27 19:04:15 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 15:04:15 EDT Subject: Multilateral comparison Message-ID: This message is devoted to clarifying what multilateral comparison is, how it has been successfully used as a heuristic in the past, and its role relative to proofs of genetic relationship. Both the method and its role are often misunderstood or misrepresented. Sections: 1. Draft consensus statement on the value of Multilateral Comparison as heuristic. 2. How this can contribute to civility in our field. 3. Examples of successful uses of Multilateral Comparison -- some validated cases and as-yet-pending cases. 4. Greenberg's view that M.C. is sufficient proof -- his extrapolation beyond the validated cases. 5. Classification BOTH as a precursor to the Comparative Method AND as a result of the Comparative Method! 6. How to find a null hypothesis opposite of M.C. results? Other ways of testing the results of Multilateral Comparison. 7. Resistance of Multilateral Comparison to "noise" in the data, where bilateral comparison (the Compartive Method) is not resistant to as great a degree. 8. Importance of refining judgements of "similar" or "closely related", beyond current intuitive or superficial definitions. 9. So what has Greenberg actually done? Something very similar to the Cambridge team. *** 1. Draft consensus statement on the value of Multilateral Comparison as heuristic. Here is a summary statement which I think can be supported by many without reservation, at least if the terms are understood with the meanings clear from the following context. Any suggestions for improvements in such a statement will be most welcome, so that it is even more balanced and moderate. Those of us who do NOT wish to be assaulted by the obviously political battles can do something about it. Expressions of simple agreement with this, from moderates in these debates, might also be useful. (Sometimes moderates have to take a stand to constrain extremists.) ? Consensus statement ? Multilateral Comparison is a heuristic which has been successfully used many times in the past and may be used in the future to throw up promising hypotheses to be further investigated also by other methods, especially the Comparative Method which can handle the data with more detail and precision. There has as yet been insufficient empirical work to estimate to what depths Multilateral Comparison can be useful. There can also be more empirical work to estimate what refinements or extensions of the Comparative Method may be able to penetrate greater depths. *** 2. How this can contribute to civility in our field. >From an active supporter of the "conservative" tradition of comparative reconstruction, whose contributions I value in that regard, I recently received the following statement. I have not received permission to quote the source, so must leave it unattributed: >...I myself find it [hard] to muster any enthusiasm for [multilateral] >comparison, except perhaps as a heuristic for throwing up promising >hypotheses to be further investigated by other methods. (The words replaced in brackets were in the original "harder" and "mass". Since "mass comparison" and "wide-rangers" and other such terms have a pejorative cast, I am using more neutral terminology.) The "except" in the quoted statement is crucial, assuming as is normal in science that heuristic discovery procedures are VALUED (and of course are distinguished from proofs). I think we would have a very civil field of historical and comparative linguistics, at least on these issues, if we could reach some greater consensus. Those who practice comparative reconstruction and for that or any other reason dislike Greenberg's work should be more willing to say such things more publicly, preferably in a simple positive form something like the statement near the beginning of this message. Greenberg and advocates should be more willing to grant that the conclusions from only this one method are not as solid as conclusions using also other methods. *** 3. Examples of successful uses of Multilateral Comparison -- some validated cases and borderline cases. I think there are a LARGE number of us who accept Greenberg's methods as a heuristic, and as a heuristic only. I am certainly one, and have always been. I have always been agnostic about claims to "proof" using only multilateral comparison, simply because it has not been sufficiently tested. Here are some examples where it has been successfully used: A. The great collection of Eurasian vocabularies done under Catherine the Great of Russia in the 1700's arranged those vocabularies to place the most similar ones adjacent to each other. My understanding is that the classification so established has remained valid, has not been superseded by more recent family trees, trees "proven" valid by the Comparative Method or in other way. This should then be counted as a successful use of multilateral comparison. B. Greenberg's work on African language classification years ago can probably be seen in the same light. Although there were precursors (which we need neither minimize nor exaggerate), and he created new larger classifications (which we need neither minimize nor exaggerate), my understanding from debates pro and con some years ago was that his classifications have remained valid. (Same caveats as above for number 1.) This also should be counted as a successful use of multilateral comparison. There are obviously many other cases like these. Pioneers in Polynesian or Austronesian and in many other language families have used Multilateral Comparison, implicitly or explicitly. They have ALSO at various stages used the Comparative Method or its precursor fragments. C. In his Language in the Americas, Greenberg gave a table of basic vocabulary from languages of Europe, showing that the method of Multilateral Comparison correctly classifies those into major families, where those are known via the Comparative Method. This should be counted as a successful illustration of Multilateral Comparison. (Question: did it include the difficult case of Albanian? Albanian-with-other-IndoEuropean is a fruitful field for testing both Multilateral Comparison and the Comparative Method.) D. In his Language in the Americas, Multilateral Comparison clearly singles out Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene (Athabaskan etc.) as two families, and does NOT segment the rest in the same way. To the extent of those two families, Mutlilateral Comparison is at least congruent with knowledge resulting from use of the Comparative Method. (Does anyhone think Greenberg fudged his results to get this, or that it would not result from Multilateral Comparison alone?) What about the rest? E. What is additional in Greenberg's Language in the Americas is particularly the following two points. These are not yet confirmed or disconfirmed, to the level of "proof", so we cannot yet estimate whether Multilateral Comparison has been valid in this extended application at presumably greater time depths. E-1. Neither Eskimo-Aleut nor Na-Dene are grouped by Multilateral Comparison with other languages or families of the Americas. This is a negative statement. E-2. Multilateral Comparison does not lead to the conclusion that there are other cleavages in the Americas between families as divergent as Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene are from each other or from any other language families of the Americas. This also is a negative statement. What are possible conclusions we might draw, if we for the sake of argument grant that the results of Multilateral Comparison so far may be valid for case E as well as for cases A-B-C-D? It may be that the remaining Amerind, or much of it, formed a family at a much greater time depth; or that there has been sufficient borrowing back and forth in many directions to blur any deep cleavages which may once have existed, or ???) Notice the above statements do NOT conclude either "related" or "not related" concerning the remaining Amerind. I have tried to word them very precisely to reflect exactly what Multilateral Comparison CAN contribute AS A HEURISTIC. As a heuristic, what it suggests is that we look for additional deep genetic relationships, which we may be able eventually do prove by refinements of Comparative Method, WITHIN remaining Amerind, but not between parts of Amerind and Na-Dene or Eskimo-Aleut. This heuristic conclusion does not seem highly improbable to me. It may or may not be true, but that is quite another matter, a matter for the future. *** 4. Greenberg's view that M.C. is sufficient proof -- his extrapolation beyond the validated cases. Greenberg obviously believes that his methods establish firm knowledge. This appears to be based on an extrapolation from the clear cases like 3A-B-C-D. Whether such an extrapolation is valid remains to be tested, since presumably Multilateral Comparison has not been used on data sets with such potentially gigantic time depths as Amerind. *** 5. Classification BOTH as a precursor to the Comparative Method AND as a result of the Comparative Method! Greenberg believes Classification is a PRECURSOR to the Comparative Method, which it may very well be in terms of heuristics and the history of how useful hypotheses have been discovered. Look at the History of Science to study this question, not at the Philosophy of Science. However, Classification is a RESULT of the Comparative Method when viewed from the point of view of establishing secure knowledge, "proofs" of relationship. Look at the Philsophy of Science to study notions of "proof". Much of the battles over Multilateral Comparison and the Comparative Method seem really to be turf battles, practitioners of one method who feel sleighted by or who sleight the practitioners of another method. If we recognize that the same word can have two very different logical statuses from different turf perspectives, perhaps we can help to avoid such battles or at least to shorten them, to tell the combatants to lay off, we need both, and they themselves USE both even if they don't like to admit it (in both directions, here). *** 6. How to find a null hypothesis opposite of M.C. results? The results of Multilateral Comparison are a statement of roughly the following form: "The following Classification tree of given individuals (languages) appears to reflect their likely historical close relations vs. divergencies better than any other Classification tree." And in cases where an algorithm is used, there may be a measure of the security of the conclusion, based on how much better this particular result is than alternative Classification trees would be for the same data. That result is a hypothesis about the real world. WHAT is the null hypothesis corresponding to such a hypothesis? Presumably that some (other) algorithm which we also take to be a valid application of classification principles would NOT replicate the same results? Or that another human judge applying the same method would not replicate the same results. (But see below.) We all know that this is indeed a hypothesis, Yet if we are responding to it carefully, we have trouble, if the specifics are good, trying to falsify it. Why? One reason is that the hypothesis is entirely post-hoc, there is (at the stage it is formulated) no additional evidence available for use, all the evidence used to develop the hypothesis is the same evidence which would at that stage be used to test it. So if we used a computer algorithm to evaluate, the result would be the same again. Yet it IS an empirical hypothesis. If the human judge or the algorithm is a good one, we are not likely to disagree with the conclusions, though we may sometimes think there is not enough convincing data. The hypothesis can be tested by enlarging the data set, to see whether the results are still the same, or by eliminating certain languages from the data set, to see whether the results are robust against such changes for the languages which remain in the set, or by using slightly different algorithms, to see whether they yield the same results, or by applying the Comparative Method if possible, to see what it yields. Are there other radically different ways of testing it? *** 7. Resistance of Multilateral Comparison to "noise" in the data, where bilateral comparison is not resistant to as great a degree. This is often not understood. Because Multilateral Comparison is IN PRINCIPLE only concerned with which are CLOSER vs. MORE DIVERGENT, a matter of degree, Multilateral Comparison with informal judgements of similarity does not, except in the clearest cases, lead to secure conclusions about genetic relationships per se, neither yes nor no. But a strength of Multilateral Comparison is that random noise in the data will, if it is truly random, not usually affect the results in terms of rankings of DEGREES of closeness vs. divergence. Random noise will eliminate similarities in more or less EQUAL PROPORTIONS from each potential comparison of closeness. (If the amount of evidence for closeness is reduced to near the quantum level of single units of evidence, then the amount of noise is too great for the method, noise would completely swamp any conceivable residue of earlier relationships. But that is quite another matter.) By contrast, bilateral comparison (many applications of the Comparative Method) depends more essentially on the absolute quantity of evidence available. For this reason, practitioners of the Comparative Method maintain that it cannot penetrate beyond some limit (which they may give as 2000 or 4000 or even 10,000 years, rarely more, rarely even that much), because the residue of evidence for genetic relation decays fast enough to leave too few traces. Multilateral comparison can work with RELATIVELY FEWER traces of earlier relationship, though just how many fewer is a matter for empirical study. A similar potential stabilizing factor in Multilateral Comparison is that it may easily lead to recognition of loan words from language family Z which could interfere with comparisons between languages X and Y both of whom borrowed the loan word from Z. A specialist comparing only X and Y might not be aware of the word in family Z. *** 8. Importance of refining judgements of "similar" or "closely related", beyond current intuitive or superficial definitions. Increases in the power of both Multilateral Comparison and the Comparative Method will come as we build an empirical basis, like the Handbook of Physical and Chemical Constants, for explicit conscious judgments of "similarity", or rather, changes, rather than the current informal judgments or systematic computerization of informal judgments: what sounds more often change proximally into what other sounds, in languages of which kind of phonetic structure, and what meanings more often change proximally into what other meanings, in languages of which kind of semantic structure? *** 9. So what has Greenberg actually done? Well, the preceding has been my attempt at a synthesis. I have never believed that Greenberg had "proven" his conclusions. I have always believed that Multilateral Comparison was a valuable heuristic, from the moment I understood the concept. I see no reason for any turf specialists to trash others whose contributions can be made use of. What Greenberg has DONE with Multilaterial Comparison is not necessarily what he says he has done. What he has done is to organize a large body of data to suggest paths for future research, by suggesting relative degrees of similarity vs. divergence among languages and language families. In this regard, if we discount his excess claims to have proven his conclusions, rather than to have used a heuristic to suggest them, it is very much like what the Cambridge group has been doing, as described by Larry Trask, which is also a useful heuristic, for the same reasons. Greenberg's work, like anyone else's, should be used for its positive value, with preliminary comments as needed to specify that his statements of "proof" are premature since the tool has not been validated at such presumably great time depths, but that any such unsubstantiated claims for the method of Multilateral Comparison in no way demonstrate it is not a valuable heuristic. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 27 19:04:09 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 15:04:09 EDT Subject: Larry Trask is right that... Message-ID: Larry Trask is right that I overstated Greenberg's reasonableness, by focusing as I always have on his very rare more modest statements that he "assumed" the languages of his studies to be related, and only could draw conclusions about relative degrees of similarities. For me, his belief that his method alone was sufficient was an unproven extrapolation from his African Language classification and from some easy applications. I just thought it was silly, and it never bothered me much. I sort of think it is always a good idea to try to find what is of use in someone else's work and emphasize it, (even if it is different from what they themselves thought was of most value in their own work! :-)). The method of Multilateral Comparison has always been simply a heuristic. Please see a separate exposition of Multilateral Comparison, its strengths, and how it has not been properly understood, in another message today. I would much rather spend my time with positive contributions and trying to work towards consensus, as in that message. Greenberg does not own and did not invent Mutlilateral Comparison, it was used at least as early as Catherine the Great, with results in that case uncontradicted to this day. I still maintain that if we discount Greenberg's excess claims to have proven his conclusions, rather than to have used a heuristic to suggest them, what he has IN FACT done is very much like what the Cambridge group has been doing, as described by Larry Trask. That Cambridge work is also a useful heuristic, primarily for the same reasons, although their explorations of computer algorithms will presumably also be productive. However, the fundamental gut-level resistance is still manifest on the part of so many very competent comparative linguists, the unwillingness to admit that heuristics and the hypothesis-formation stages of discovery are part of the normal scientific method, as they have always been. They use them themselves, for goodness sake! (They may not present them in public, but that is another question.) Below I will present a consistent pattern in which Trask repeatedly fails to distinguish between what Greenberg has actually done and what Greenberg's view of his own work is. But first... Trask seems unable to handle an assumption that all languages are related, to see where it leads, EVEN AS AN EXPLICIT WORKING ASSUMPTION. Consider his misstatements in the following discourse yesterday: [LT] >>> The assumption that all languages are related is out of order. >>> The assumption that all languages *might* be related is hardly an >>> assumption at all, and in any case such an idea is excluded by no one. [LA] >> The assumption is of course quite in order, to see what it might >> lead to, as long as it is merely that, an assumption. So there is >> really no difference between the above two statements just above. Now Trask changes the question, by neglecting the explicit limitation "as long as it is merely that, an assumption": [LT] >Statement 1: All languages are related. >Statement 2: All languages might be related. >You really can't see any differences between these? Gad. [somewhat insulting, of course...] [LT] >I know of no one who queries (2), but I know of very few people prepared >to defend (1). [LA] >> Except some emotional flavoring which antagonizes some people. [LT] >Sorry, but the difference between (1) and (2) looks to me like far more >than "emotional flavoring". Of course, I was not discussing the contrast between Trask's (1) and (2) at all. Given the totally explicit "as long as it is merely that, an assumption" the proper contrast is the following: (1) "What if all languages are related?" (2) "What if all languages may be related?" The nature of a working assumption (and assumptions in self-conscious science are that, working assumptions) is of course logically equivalent to a "what if?" exploration, while one is inside the "what if?", and when that modal value is applied to a sentence, anything within the scope of the modal acquires modal value. Therefore it makes no difference whether there is a redundant modal inside the scope. In fact (2) is slightly aberrant English precisely because of the redundancy. It almost requires a "so what" response because it has failed to even make a working assumption! So actually not (2) but (1) is the preferred form for such a working assumption. Assumption (2), taken as distinct from (1), would not justify spending as much time on Multilateral comparison, it would rather justify something in the form of Pascal's famous wager: not knowing X or not-X, it would be better if we did Y, because we lose nothing and may gain. If we take "What if all languages are related?" as a working premise, then all use of Multilateral Comparison, whether by Greenberg or by anyone else, is to be understood in a particular way, that it cannot prove relationship (that was by working assumption, remember), but that it can indicate relatively closer similarities or relatively greater divergence. (If used as a heuristic, it might later LEAD TO discovery of something we could regard as a proof. But that is a separate question.) Very simple, unobjectionable, and no cause for trench warfare such as we have witnessed in the last years in historical linguistics. There is simply no justification whatsoever for trying to ostracise Greenberg or his work from the field, when it is so easy to state simply that its value is as a heuristic, that the method has not yet been tested at such great time depths, and that we may all benefit from using the heuristic as such. It is certainly falsifying the education of our young linguists if it is concealed from them how Multilateral Comparison was successfully used in Catherine the Great's time, for example, and again and again since then. It is also falsifying the education of our young linguists if they are not given thorough grounding in the Comparative Method. Both are valid, and have different uses, strengths, and weaknesses. The greatest giveaway phrase in academic trashing that I know is the phrase "fundamentally flawed", which is usually devoid of much content, and is used to ostracise person and work, to claim that they are not part of a professional field. It has been applied in this case from near the beginning of the debates over Greenberg's work. Applied to someone who systematically and with some (!) degree of care accumulated a gigantic amount of data and organized it, to the potential benefit of others Others can of course correct the data and improve it. I was glad to see Trask acknowledging the excess vituperation we have been subjected to: [LA] >> and I have been simply amazed at the antagonisms. [LT] >Here I have some sympathy. The stridency of a few of G's critics is >greater than I consider proper. But we shouldn't let that unfortunate >stridency blind us to the very substantial *linguistic* critiques of G's >work. I agree with the second part also. I urged those comparative linguists who said they had sets of vocabulary corrections to Greenberg's data to publish them pronto. [LA] >> Shouldn't we always try to make the best use of the contributions of >> each one of us? Didn't Greenberg attempt to systematize a large >> amount of data which others can then correct and improve on? But notice in his reply to the sentence above that Trask has shifted to a different topic, not what Greenberg actually or potentially contributed, but what Greenberg's own view of his contribution was. Strictly and logically speaking, irrelevant to whether others of us can make use of Greenberg's work as a starting point for further progress. [LT] >G's own view is that such corrections and improvements can extend only >to the details, to the subgrouping and to the individual comparisons. >He does not allow for the possibility that his vast mega-agglomerations >like Amerind are merely phantasms -- as many of his critics maintain. [LT, in the context of the Cambridge work] >>> If the same is true of Greenberg's highly informal approach, then G >>> cannot distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness, [LA] >> Exactly. I have always, from the very beginning, understood that >> was exactly what Greenberg's approach did. Note in his immediate reply to the sentence just quoted that Trask AGAIN focuses on what Greenberg says about his work, instead of what his work actually does. [LT] >Nope. Read what he writes. He damn well *does* believe that he can >distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness -- insofar as he recognizes >a >concept of unrelatedness at all, which I frankly doubt that he does, >given his constant asides about "Proto-Sapiens". [LA] >> He would classify Basque and Chinese as the most divergent members >> of such a set. [LT] >You have a point here, though not the one you intend. Actually, exactly the point I intend, reinforced by Trask's next sentence with which I totally agree. [LT] >For G, *no* language ever gets left out of his agglomerations. The only >issue, for him, is which agglomeration to put it into. ... An agglomeration of only one (!) at a particular level (!) is of course not an agglomeration but rather an isolate (!) at that level (!). Since there is always a higher level potentially, it is not significant to say everything is in an agglomeration. That would be significant only if there were some which were not part of any grouping. Rather one must deal with something MORE SUBTLE (in this respect only), relative DEGREES of similarity or divergence. [LA] >> he concludes "most divergent", just as he in fact did for the >> families Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut. The difference in these modes >> of expression is utterly trivial as long as we are concerned with >> tentative hypotheses, not with ultimate truth. And yet again, in his immediate reply to the sentence quoted just above, Trask switches from what use WE can make of Greenberg's work, which is what I have been primarily discussing and was discussing in the quote above, to what Greenberg himself thinks of it. [LT] >But G firmly believes that he has established "ultimate truth". I don't have to care what Greenberg thinks of his work. As a member of society, I have an obligation to make the best of it, if it has value. As a heuristic and a starting point for later works, it clearly does have some value. That is ALL that is required. Finally, Trask's summary: >I close with a reaffirmation of my central point: Lloyd Anderson's >attempt at characterizing Greenberg's work bears no relation to >Greenberg's work. Once again, Trask has failed to distinguish Greenberg's work from Greenberg's view of his own work. My characterization of certain aspects of Greenberg's work bears little relation to what Greenberg most commonly SAYS about those aspects of his work. That is an entirely different question. Can we get past this in the field of historical linguistics? I am very glad for the existence of all of the comparative linguists like Trask who do good work, and who critique data and point out errors in reasoning of others. I also emotionally want to stick up for them when they are maligned. I was exceedingly offended at a Smithsonian lecture by a speaker who USED the work of generations of comparative linguists, who presented new methods and said how good they were and how sloppy those preceding generations were, yet who also said the results of the new superior methods were quite similar in most respects to the results of preceding scholarship. Isn't there something wrong here? Can't we have people more respectful of the work of others? I chose typological and comparative linguistics for my profession because I thought it was both interesting and important, for our souls to understand our past and our common humanity and our diversity. This field has made me extremely sad through the pervasive antagonisms which have grown up in it towards some of the potentially most stimulating new statements of problems. Would everyone please just stop ad hominem attacks and cooperate more? More important, for the survival and welfare of the field, can the established comparative linguists please manage to discover that comparative linguistics is NOT A NEARLY-DEAD FIELD, that there are new things to do, new ways of refining tools, new empirical questions for which handbooks of data can be created, etc. etc.??? By all means teach good methods, honestly and inclusively, with due regard to both hypothesis discovery and hypothesis testing and much hard work all along the way. But USE the enthusiasm generated by new sets of questions, instead of depressing everyone by trying to stomp on innovation, and acting as if the Comparative Method itself were a dead fossile which cannot be improved! Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From editor at paleog.com Fri Aug 27 22:52:41 1999 From: editor at paleog.com (Yuriy Longinoff) Date: Sat, 28 Aug 1999 02:52:41 +0400 Subject: Online etymological databases Message-ID: [ moderator snip ] To my knowledge the largest Etymological on-line database was made by S. Starostin (http://starling.rinet.ru). It does not include Indo-European languages yet, but as I understand the input of Indo-European data is being under way, involving several specialists in different Indo-European groups. The database they used was written specially for this project and easily can be converted to text mode what is very useful for publication of data. (The good example is the North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary by S. Starostin and S Nikolayev, the camery ready copy of which was converted directly from the database within several minutes). Yu. Longinov, From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sat Aug 28 03:31:24 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 23:31:24 -0400 Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance In-Reply-To: <199908241934.NAA18727@boc.brigham.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: > The only problem with Unicode is that it isn't uniformly supported by > computer programs. Any Unicode-based effort would be restricted to the > Internet Explorer browser as Netscape Navigator doesn't support it. You > either wish for the future and sacrifice present compatibility, or you make > some compromises. Well, I guess you've got to consider what the options are. I think they are the following: 1. Unicode. Current drawback: not yet universally supported. 2. Make do with ASCII or the extended ASCII set (ISO-8859-1 Latin 1), which forces you to do things like use @ for the Old English a+e ligature, etc. This really cramps you; even aside from the legibility problem, it would be a challenge to work out a set of conventions for encoding data from all the IE languages in a uniform and usable way with so few discrete characters. 3. Use a hodge-podge of other encoding schemes. This suffers the same problem that Unicode currently does (no encoding scheme beyond ASCII has universal acceptance), and suffers from the additional problem of conflicting character codes, etc. I'm sure that there are needed characters included in Unicode but not included in any other standard encoding scheme (e.g. the Gothic "hw" character, which does have a code in Unicode but not in any other encoding standard I know of). Further, support for these other encoding schemes it likely to gradually go away as Unicode support grows. 4. Do nothing and wait until Unicode support is broader. Drawback: unnecessary delay to the development of useful materials! Many of the major players in the industry are backing Unicode, and it's pretty clear that support for Unicode will continue to increase. If predictions about the computer industry are worth anything at all, then it's just a matter of time before Unicode editing, display, and text processing capabilities are conveniently available to everyone. As a short-term stopgap measure, one can always write scripts to convert data from a Unicode-encoded database to some other encoding for users who need it; and the programmer CDs from the Unicode consortium come with extensive conversion tables for exactly this purpose. In case you hadn't noticed, I think Unicode is the greatest thing since sliced bread. :-) \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From mahoa at bu.edu Sat Aug 28 21:23:35 1999 From: mahoa at bu.edu (Anne Mahoney) Date: Sat, 28 Aug 1999 17:23:35 -0400 Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: > I don't know if there are any specific standard sets of SGML tags for > marking up dictionaries. Yes, try the TEI Guidelines, available at http://www.uic.edu:80/orgs/tei/. The Text Encoding Initiative has produced a DTD that's the main standard for humanities work using SGML. See chapter 12 of the guidelines for the tag set for dictionaries. --Anne Mahoney From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 29 09:23:55 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 05:23:55 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/26/99 6:10:22 PM, you wrote: < 'Gaul' was originally simply someone from Gallia - a geographical term certainly known to the early Irish >> Please look back to my message dated 8/23/99 9:29:48 PM: << If those Northmen were from Normandy they would have been from the ON 'Valland' and in either case would have been recognized by clerics as being from 'Gallia'.>> You wrote: <<...but I imagine that a 'Gaul' was originally simply someone from Gallia.>> That makes perfect sense. But, once again, I think there's a slight problem in that there seems to be no more "Gallicae" left in "Gallia" by the time Old Ir appears in print. And there hadn't been for some time. I'm bothered by that. <<(as when 'noble race of Franks' is glossed 'tribus Gallie'). >> Now to say that 'Frank' was lierally translated as 'Gallie' in Med Latin is okay with me. Because from the 9th C. I believe 'Frank' is also being translated in OHG as 'uualha" and that versions of that word have already been appearing across the Channel for centuries before that. "mGall" is probably originally from the Latin. But I guess I'm looking for the source of the "gloss" that turned a Gall = Gaul into a Gall = Northman. < safely with OE. Moreover, it seems to be Sc.Gael. 'fuller', not 'do.', that produced Sc.Gael. bynames (in record at least from the 14th c.); this suggests that may have been a late-comer.>> Maybe. Maybe not. You no doubt noticed that 'fuller" is given a separate path in OED and had a long existence with the initial /f/ in English. The Oxford Dict of Eng. Etym says "walk" is probably from the OE "wealcere." In either case, "fulling" (unlike "fuller") is an old idea - presumably predating the process of making fulling or the status of being a "fuller" - and it is honestly hard for me to see why Gaelic would have waited until the 16th Century to adopt a word for such an old and basic idea when in the 16th Century: - the more modern English "full-" was already available as was the Middle Gaelic "fu:cadh" (fulling) and even the Irish 'u:caire' (fuller). - the word was already nearly obsolete in English and was by then quite in collision with the other "walk" in English. - the apparent sound laws still did not favor 'walk' to 'galc' in the 16th C. So if McBain is right about "galc = thicken cloth, fulling; from the English walk, waulk", then it may have entered Gaelic early indeed. Now I did also say that this could have happened in a more roundabout way. My overall point was that in this murky time we do not really know how words bounced around and "who gave what to whom when." If I remember that is why I suggested that the expected /w/ to /f/or/u/ might not apply. Now if you go back to the OED, you'll see a couple of things. One, you'll see that the German form of 'walk' is given as the origin of the It "gualcare" and OFr *gaucher. That might be an explanation of how the word had already converted to the initial /g/ before it entered Gaelic. I actually gave you other instances of Germanic /w/'s that did yield /f/ or /u/ for the same reason. Not to challenge that pattern as untrue. My thought was that 'walh' to 'Gall' could have followed the same path, so that 'Gall' entered Gaelic (and maybe Irish) more than once with different meanings. You wrote: < to explain it.>> My reasons are not primarily linguistic but historical. There's something that needs to make better sense in terms of meanings and I'm trying to find the right paths. (Although the tone of these exchanges have been a bit adversarial, please believe I've learned a lot from them and I appreciate what you are saying very much. Perhaps I've even given you something to think about.) You spoke of expecting /f/ or /u/ from the Germanic /w/. Here's an indirect path to look at that comes not from the Germanic, but the Gaulish (what little there is of it is often very close to the Latin in the pattern of appearance of the initial /v/): (This is all from McBain's.) feàrna alder tree, Irish fearn, fearnóg, Early Irish fern, fernog, Welsh gwern, Cornish gwernen, GAULISH verno-, French verne, *verno- fiodh wood, so Irish, Old Irish fid, Welsh guid, gwydd, gwydden (sing.), Cornish guiden, Breton gwezenn, tree, gwez, trees, GAULISH vidu- ...; Anglo-Saxon wudu, Old High German witu. fionn white, Irish fionn, Old Irish find, Welsh gwyn, Cornish guyn, Breton gwenn, GAULISH vindo-,... fiù worthy, Irish fiú, Old Irish fiú, Welsh gwiw, Cornish guiu, Old Breton uuiu, GAULISH vesu- flath a chief, prince, Irish flaith, Old Irish flaith, chief, dominion, flaithem(an), chief (*vlatimon-), Welsh gwlad, region, Middle Welsh gulatic, rex, Cornish gulat, patria, Breton gloat, realm, GAULISH vlatos ; Latin valere,... Gothic valdan, German walten, rule, fo under, Irish, Old Irish fo, Welsh go-, Old Welsh guo-, Cornish go-, Cornish, Bret. gou-, GAULISH vo- Note that the path in all these seems to be (in whatever direction) Goidelic /f/, Brythonic /gw/ or /g/, Gaulish /v/. I'm curious. What would be your reaction to this pattern as an explanation of 'Gall' or 'Gaul' (gwal or kwal?) being transferred as let's say a "learned" word from Brythonic to Goidelic? Thanks for any reaction you have. Regards, Steve Long PS - The reason I use quotes and not brackets is because my e-mail seems to make things in brackets disappear for no reason I can figure out. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 29 09:28:44 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 05:28:44 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/26/99 10:02:34 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> Yes. You mentioned that earlier and I missed it. We are even told they are sometimes called 'Gaillion' and similiar names. In the 'Book of Invasions', Ugainy, king of Ireland, is succeeded by sons Laery and Covac. Covac kills Leary and his son to grab the kingship. Maon, Leary's grandson, goes to Gaul "to stay with some relatives." From there, "Maon returned to Ireland with a Gaulish army and killed Covac and all his nobles at Dinrigh, Maon was re-named Labra the Mariner and married Moriath, and the Gauls settled in Leinster (The Province of the Spearmen) which is named after them." We are also told the Laighi "are mythologically referred to as the Tuatha De Danann. Their name association with Laighi, the ancient name for Leinster, suggests that this was where they first settled." In the amazing complexities of Irish myth, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha de Danann and the Milesians are all successive invaders of Ireland - and not surprisingly all are associated with Gaul or Gaulish tribes. The Fir Bolg are also called "Belgi" and are sometimes subdivided into "men of Domnu, men of Gaillion, and men of Bolg." (The Dumnonii are Celts who figure who heavily in both Gaulish and British history. The Belgae are the northern most 'Gauls' in Ceasar's "Omne Gallia...") The Tuatha de Danaan also are associated with 'France' as the Laighi. They are often dated to 300 or 100 BCE. They are defeated by the Milesians. The Milesians, the last of the mythic invaders, are often associated with the coming of the Goidelic. These "sons of Milidh... are said to have come from either Spain or France to the island of Ireland, and to be the ancestors of the Gaels." In terms of hard evidence, there isn't a lot of it. LaTene has been found in Ireland, but not very much. The question of when Celts actually got to Ireland is not settled. But Mallory in ISOIE (see p 274 n 19) suggests that the evidence points to a series of late arrivals, all presumably with contacts to continental Celts. And even St Patrick apparently complains about late-arriving pagan "rhetorici" arriving from the continent. The Irish monks who "preserve Western Civilization" are often described as exiles from the continent. Medieval scholars like "Zimmer and Kuno Meyer contend that the seeds of that literary culture, which flourished in Ireland of the sixth century, had been sown therein in the first and second decades of the preceding century by Gaulish scholars." I see here also that "Dr. Meyer answers the objection" [that "if so large and so important an invasion of scholars took place we ought have some reference to the fact in the Irish annals"] "...was in part due to the fact that their presence was in no way exceptional but for their newly acquired Christianity." All of the above is exactly what bothers me about the "mGall". Ireland and Scotland were filled with folk who could very well identify themselves as Gauls or descendents of Gauls or of settlers from Gaul/Gallia. Not only because of this kind of folk origins history, but also because of the simple established Pan-Celtic connection. And whatever the origins of the word, the affinity with "Gael" (which occasionally appears as "Gal-") would also have been a clue. Did the multiple usages of "Gall" over time create so many semantic versions that we would expect serious loss by collision? In which case, it wouldn't be impossible that a Germanic usage in some form, being the most current, slipped in ahead of all the older meanings. "Gallia" itself would have been a "learned" word and would have had a better chance of co-existing without collision with that new import. Of course going back to the original quote, if these Northmen happened to be from "Valland", that is, Gallia - the term may have referred to nothing more than their place of origin. The connection with "outlander" or even "invader" may be unnecessary. Regards, Steve From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Aug 29 11:22:01 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 07:22:01 -0400 Subject: Perfective-Imperfective Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] wrote: > "Durative" implies a lasting over a considerable time, which is not necessary > to all imperfectives. My understanding is that ``durative'' means that the event is thought of as occupying a period of time, so that one can be in midst of it. > "treated as an indivisible unit" [perfective (NR)] > vs. "treated as having extent" [imperfective (NR)] I don't understand these terms. ``having extent'' in what? If time, how is ``having extent in time'' different from ``having a duration''? Also, given that ``indivisible'' refers to possibility rather than what is being done, what does ``treated as an indivisible unit mean''? Is it the same as ``treated as an undivided whole'' (even if it is divisible)? For example, why does `ebasileue deka ete' indivisible but not have extent? > [comment: this is also a fairly typical pair of uses of perfective > vs. imperfective, combined with what is often a relic category, > the non-indicative often preserving forms which at an earlier historical > stage were the primary perfectives. An alternate possibility is that the rise of a new imperfective has limited the older forms to a perfective function. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Aug 29 11:40:02 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 07:40:02 -0400 Subject: Root aorists vs. marked presents Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] wrote: > Did anyone compile the examples being offered for > Primary root-aorists with marked present stems > vs. > Primary present stems with marked sigmatic (etc?) aorists I guess the original list is from Brugmann, refined by others. Unfortunately, Brugmann and his contemporaries did not distinguish aspect from aktionsart. In general outline, and using the Vendler classification, the argument is that root presents refer to activities and root aorists to achievements. [Of course, only Indic and Hittite matter for root presents. The picture is also clouded by polymorphism, especially as this is rather frequent in Vedic. One bone of contention between Jens and me is whether this polymorphism is primary or secondary. If the stem formants were derivational, I have a hard time understanding why polymorphism cannot be original] Now we can revisit the arguments over the category of accomplishments is real (:-) and, if so, how they were represented in PIE. > Perhaps much of this has already been done? > Is it done in Rix: Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben? > (By the way, I would like to get a copy of that book in any event, can anyone > tell me an easy way? I think I found it once somewhere on the web, don't > remember where now, cannot seem to find it again, could not find it recently > at Amazon.com.) Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble do not seem to list books from publishers without a presence in the US. Is there a comparable service in Europe. [Harrasowitz, who is usually used by libraries for such books, does not seem to deign to talk to mere individuals.] From adahyl at cphling.dk Sun Aug 29 12:53:07 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 14:53:07 +0200 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sorry for bringing up an old subject - I have been on the road for a while without internet access or time to go through all postings on the list: On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: (Quoting me:) >> But if we only knew the modern IE languages, we would still be able to >> reconstruct words like (...) >> The same is true for morphological paradigms etc. > Well, I would love to see morphological paradigms reconstructable on the > basis of English, Italian and Hindi ... I was not claiming that we could reconstruct PIE morphological paradigms _only_ on the basis of these three very innovative languages. But reconstructing the morphology of a proto-language spoken 5000 or more years ago on the basis of modern languages is of course possible - that is what linguists do every day, reconstructing Proto-Austronesian, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Oto-Manguean etc. Adam Hyllested From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Aug 30 00:59:27 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 19:59:27 -0500 Subject: Perfective-Imperfective Message-ID: Dear Lloyd and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, August 20, 1999 11:32 AM > Momentary-Durative is a misleading set of terms, > because BOTH are highly marked and specialized. > Perfective-Imperfective in their standard uses > probably work much better for the needs of this discussion. [ moderator snip ] Pat comments: Actuallly, I believe the terms momentary and durative are more more readily understood than perfective and imperfective. Larry, for example, in his dictionary defines "perfective" as "A superordinate aspectual category involving a lack of explicit reference to the internal temporal consistency of a situation", which, I believe is most unhelpful. As grammarians of those languages in which the perfective aspect is prominent know, the essence of the perfective is "one which desribes an action which has been or will be definitely completed" (The Russian Verb, Nevill Forbes, Oxford, 1961). Larry writes that the perfective aspect "is chiefly expressed by the simple past-tense form", and then offers the example "The hamster climbed up behind the bookcase." But he obviously does not realize that the "up" is what, in this case, makes the verb of perfective aspect. "The hamster (has) climbed up behind the bookcase." "The hamster climbs up behind the bookcase." "The hamster will climb up behind the bookcase." All above are equally "perfective". "The hamster (has) climbed behind the bookcase." "The hamster climbs behind the bookcase." "The hamster climb behind the bookcase." All above are equally "imperfective", or would normally be construed so. I am sure any of our list-members who command Russian will subscribe to this basic division. If Larry and other modern linguists want to obsfuscate the traditional meaning of "reflexive (verb)" to cover non-instances of the definition "A verb which indicates an action of which the subject or agent and the object are identical" (Mario Pei, Dictionary of Linguistics, New York, 1954), as he seems to, there is little harm done once one is aware of his expanded definition but neglecting to identify the *primary* characteristic of perfective aspect in a definition is, assuredly, fuzzily "modern" but unfortunately, completely beside the point. Once one has the correct definitions in mind, one can see why Lehmann has no hesitation in attributing to the IE injunctive (-perfective, +durative), to the aorist (+perfective, + momentary), to the perfect (+perfectuve, -momentary) (Winfred Lehmann, Proto-Indo-European Syntax, Austin, 1974). It is also surprising that Larry's definition makes no mention of "definiteness". "He ate bread" will usually be imperfective; "He ate the bread" will usually be perfective. The problem, of course, is that English grammarians did not previously recognize these regular mechanisms in English (and other IE languages except Slavic), and they are not a part of everyone's cultural background. Pat From colkitto at sprint.ca Tue Aug 31 03:49:44 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 23:49:44 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk >Yes, providing you accept the Herkunfthypothese. This hypothesis holds >that all of the several features absent in Anatolian but present in all >other branches were absent from broad PIE and were innovations in narrow >PIE after the split of Anatolian. But there is another view, the >Schwundhypothese, which holds that all these features were present in >broad PIE but then lost in Anatolian. I'm afraid I don't know if >anybody is defending the Schwundhypothese today. Actually, in Paris a couple of years ago Calvert Watkins suggested the Schwunbdhypothese was true with regard to gender. Robert Orr From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Aug 30 18:24:58 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 14:24:58 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 8/24/99 10:04:28 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> I not only misread what you wrote but also confused myself - I had deleted a comment on your reference to how vlax was pluralized to vlasi by the 2nd palatalization and just forgot what I was talking about. Sorry about that. What I meant to say was that Walachia (often Wallachia) might not originate from the post-metathesis you described in: < vlax(U) in Czech/Slovak/South Slavic and polnoglasie to volox(U) in East Slavic).>> My thinking was that a form with the initial vowel intact could have survived in German and possibly in Polish. And that it survived because it referred to something other than the eastern European Vlachs. Briefly, my reasoning is: 1. Latin had already accomodated the 'metathesis' form (vl-, bl-), without the intial vowel, many times before Walachia appears. 2. There is a whole path the original form - walh - takes, that does not refer to Vlachs or Romans or Latin Speakers, but that would have still been pertinent in German - and therefore possibly in Czech or Polish - at the time vlox might have emerged as refering to the specific people, 'the Vlachs', in Southern Slavic (@ 800 AD or as early as 500 AD) 3. This split can be seen in the two forms, with and without the intial vowel, co-existing e.g. in Scandinavian and English and French, and meaning two different things. Plus, both vlachs and wolocks and wallachs apparently enter English all about the same time. 4. The /x/ affix had already appeared in medieval German with reference not to Vlachs, but in the context of the other form /val-/ that refers to e.g., Welsh. But Walach came to mean Vlach much later. 5. The 'Walachia' was first applied to its present location, apparently in the Latin of a Pole in the 15th Century, who presumably had ready access to the vl- form, both in Latin and in Polish. 6. As the Latinized South Slavic/Greek/Hungarian version early moved north and west (after 800 AD), there was still good reason for the co-existence of the earlier meaning and form of walh/volox, but that reason pretty much disappeared soon afterwards. You wrote: <> But Rumanian it seems did accept /vl-/ lock, stock and barrel. In all the quotes I've seen and some seem to be as old as the written language, Vlachs are vlahii. (e.g., S. Dragomir, Vlahii din nordul peninsulei Balcanice în evul mediu, (Bucharest 1959). The two languages where I think it might make sense are German and Russian. The Russian polnoglasie version seems very ahistorical as the basis for the Latinization. But German seems to make very good sense. You wrote: <> But the written and sounded 'vlahi' (see the Rumanian above) could just as easily reflect the form walh, traveling separately into the Balkans and never acquiring /x/ from the Slavic or later German. It may be that the written 'h' was just mistaken for an /h/, but the appearance of the written 'vlahi' is relatively early and apparently reflects the sound as early as the language specific metatheses you mention. Also, while more modern Rumanians do not call themselves 'vlahii' or 'valahii', speakers in some dialects did. The reason all this matters is because I'm looking for evidence that volox, vlox in the Balkans did not originally refer to Vlachs in the sense that that word would find common usage only in the 11th Century. This might seem obvious if the word is presummed to have meant Latin or Romance speakers. But I am looking to evidence that the word began to mean that only after 800AD or so, when the Franks and their sphere began to identify itself as the Holy Roman Empire. The OED seems to indicate that 'walh' and its reflexes never referred to Romans in OE or ME. The OHG 'uualha' as 'romani' seems appear first in the late 9th century. You wrote: < "Roman" (i.e. at the time and place, a person speaking Greek).>> This is with regard to why 'walh' does not appear in Ulfila's Gothic as 'Roman' but 'Rumoneis' does. Historically, it seems very difficult to support the idea that 'Rumoneis' only refered to Greek speakers in Gothic. If anything, we'd expect Gothic to extend 'walh' to Greeks or Greek as Roman citizens. In Ulfila's day, the language of the Empire and of the Roman Empire, even in Constantinople was still Latin. Constantine's language, from his youth in Dacia, was Latin. Edicts and inscriptions and anything that the Goths made contact with along the Danube that was distinctly Roman would have been in Latin. Ulfila would have had good reason to differentiate Roman and Latin from Greek, since Arianism - his 'heresy' was authored by a fairly contemporary Greek speaking Hellenist Alexandrian (North African). His 'heresy' however was banned in Latin. His foster-son and apologist, Auxentius, wrote Ulfila's defense in Latin and quite clearly understood the difference between Romans and Latin and Greek speakers. (Jordanes, the Gothic historian will even still be writing in Latin in 550 AD in Constantinople.) There really is much more evidence that 'Rumoneis' could not have referred to just Greek speakers in Gothic. There is more evidence I believe that at that time and place Gothic was simply reserving 'walh' to stand for something closer to its original meaning - which would not have appeared in Ulfila's writing and this explains its absence. 'Rumoneis' meant Roman, right down to the translation of the Paul's Epistle. "Walh' would have meant something else at the time, much closer to its original meaning: Celt, Gaul, someone from Gallia. And when the Southern Slavs show up, e.g., in the Eastern Roman Army @530AD, they may have already learned that meaning (maybe not even from Germans.) And it may be that it would take another 400 years for them to transfer the term to mean Vlachs or Romance speakers - when that more current meaning first appears. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Aug 30 20:43:53 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 15:43:53 -0500 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) In-Reply-To: <83142bec.24f6311d@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] [snip] >No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>> >Now I am not saying I have a problem with this. I'm sure there are good >methodological reason for the rule that "an ancestral language cannot >co-exist with its own descendant." (But if it is only terminological, I >might ask why it is necessary.) [snip] Actually it can. Both Spanish and its daughter language Ladino are alive, although Ladino, the daughter language is endangered. English and the Papuan languages [etc.] that spawned Tok Pisin are all alive. But the Spanish that gave rise to Ladino has probably changed as much as [if not more than] Ladino has. Spanish and Ladino are also mutually comprehensible, although you occasionally have to ask what a word means. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 [ Moderator's comment: 15th century Spanish is no more "alive" than 15th century English, so modern Ladino and other modern Spanish dialects are not a case of a contemporaneous parent & descendant language pair, but of dialects that are called different languages for sociopolitical reasons. Certainly in the sense that Mr. Long intends, no language ever lives alongside its parent for more than a single generation (if that long). --rma ] From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 03:56:19 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 23:56:19 EDT Subject: Conservative dilemma Message-ID: Concerning John McLaughlin's post today on Algonquian and Wiyot-Yurok. I was interested in a particular stage in the process, not the current state of affairs today (see below). But first... John addresses mostly the question whether the Comparative Method has now succeeded in establishing the relationship of these languages. When I wrote my previous message, I believed it had by now done so to the satisfaction of at least most, but since I had not recently heard of the views of some previous doubters, I at least hope I was precise in my previous statements, not committing as to all current views. Give the matching irregularities mentioned by John, I would assume that there are no serious doubters today. I certainly know of none. In my previous message, however, my point was quite a different one. I was NOT AT ALL interested in whether Algonquian and Wiyot-Yurok were demonstrably relatable by the Comparative Method today. That is the eventual result of a long process. I was interested in this as a case study, specifically a case study of an INTERMEDIATE PERIOD in discovery or proof (whichever way you wish to think about it). The statement I made was that AT ONE TIME at least some conservative comparativists did NOT accept that the Comparative Method could establish or had established the relationships in this case (I do not remember enough to distinguish those two phrasings). But the SAME people believed firmly that the languages were indeed related. It necessarily follows from this that they believed this based on something other than a complete proof using the comparative method. So I was saying that this potentially is a way to treat the Comparative Method empirically, to discover WHAT would cause sane and conservative people to become convinced of a language relationship BEFORE there had been a proof, or at least a complete proof, via the Comparative Method. Therefore: convincing evidence of relationship NEED NOT BE a complete proof by the Comparative Method, though it may perhaps necessarily involve some contribution by the Comparative Method (that is the narrowest possible conclusion I can draw). Discovering the answer to THAT question, how someone could be convinced not entirely by the C.M., could lead to extensions of the Comparative Method, which some might regard as secure tools, others might regard as heuristics, and we need not be concerned about what they choose to call it, as long as we regard it as a legitimate step in the process from inkling to discovery to hypothesis to proof. THAT process, as a continuum not a dichotomy, was my point. When I mentioned this sort of paradox in another context some years back, Karl Teeter very kindly sent me his work on the subject. Of course HE was quite convinced already then that the Comparative Method had solved the problem. My statements were about an earlier stage. (If I did not name names, there was a reason, it might embarrass someone or cause a denial, when viewed now many years later in retrospect. I can however safely say that one of the highest placed and most respected and most conservative people in the Amerindianist field was the doubter whose views I most clearly remember as being under discussion at that time, and that another of the highest placed and most respected people in the Amerindianist field, though not such an extreme conservative, was the person who first observed the paradox of being convinced of the relationship yet not by a complete Comparative Method proof, and verbalized it explicitly, bringing it to my attention.) *** No one example matters, so let's go to the other one I mentioned to see the analogy: Albanian and IndoEuropean. There are I would assume none today who doubt that Albanian is proven by the Comparative Method to be an Indo-European language. Yet only recently one correspondent stated that Ringe and the Philadelphia group excluded Albanian from their algorithmic approach to the family tree of Indo-European because their algorithms would not work on it. (Their algorithms use less information than does the Comparative Method, it is safe to say?) Was there perhaps a similar situation with Albanian, that the relationship was AT SOME STAGE accepted as certain by a large proportion of those interested, yet they would have said that at that time there was as yet no proof by the Comparative Method? If so, it is another example of what I am referring to. In distinction to the Algonquian-Wiyot/Yurok example, I do not have the benefit of capturing intermediate stages as moments in time, I was not present to observe intermediate stages in the linking of Albanian to IE. *** Just for consistency, since we are concerned in these discusions with the legitimacy of logical arguments more than whether particular languages are or are not related, if we are trying to strengthen our tools... I need to point out an oddity of reasoning. John McLaughlin writes: >For example, a -t- is inserted in Proto-Algonkian >between a possessive pronominal prefix and a vowel-initial root, >whereas in Wiyot a -t- is inserted >between possessive prefixes and a root beginning with hV >(with the subsequent loss of the h). >Algonkian *ne + *ehkw- = *netehkw- 'my louse', >Wiyot du- + hikw = dutikw 'my louse'. Do not misunderstand, I am not going to argue that this is NOT evidence. I am merely going to point out, for consistency, that it is WEAK evidence. The -t- is about the weakest possible consonant which could substitute for hiatus or glottal stop, so it COULD HAVE arisen independently in two cases, and not be an inherited relic at all. Because other evidence seems consistent with a genetic relation, it seems reasonable to assume that this also is a genetic inheritance in this case. Now consider Greenberg's attempt to find a morphological irregularity to bolster his claims of genetic relationship among some of the languages of his Amerind. He adduced some alternation I think it was in 3rd sg. pronominals between y- and t-. This is WEAK evidence, for exactly the same reasons that it is weak evidence in the Wiyot-Algonquian case. Because we do NOT (yet?) have evidence to convince most that all of these "Amerind" languages can be demonstrated to be related, it is argued against Greenberg that this could have arisen by chance, and is therefore "not" evidence. But evidence is evidence, whether or not it is part of a successful proof (or legal case). It is simply not logically consistent to accept in one case but not in another this kind of very weak resemblance, involving the weakest, least information-rich sounds. (Yes, I could try to argue along with the rest of you that the Wiyot- Algonquian case might be better if it is specific to pronominal prefixes; and of course because much more effort has been spent on it too! But that would be cheating, based on the final result much later.) To have a SCIENTIFIC algorithm or method for judging relatedness, we must assign a very small weight to a "lookalike" of this kind, but not a zero weight, and we must do it consistently, not fudging our examples by pretending it is there only in cases where we "know" the ultimate answer from some additional data. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Aug 31 04:12:14 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 00:12:14 -0400 Subject: Algorithm for comparative method? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I would suggest that the phonology hides problems just as great as the > semantics, > because we do not have an explicit empirically based metric there either! > No metric of how probable each state-to-state transition is between > particular sounds, in specified contexts of languages of particular overal > phonological or phonetic structure, etc. I don't see that that makes any difference. The Comparative Method operates by looking at correspondences between languages and working backwards thru the mergers which have applied. Occasionally, applying the Comparative Method to a body of data leads us to posit sound changes which seem phonetically unnatural. This should not distress us, however, since we occasionally find crazy rules within the phonologies of well-documented modern languages; it's just one of those things that happens every now and then ("crazy rule" is actually the correct technical term for such rules). For example, the language Kashaya has a rule i -> u / d __ (/i/ becomes /u/ after /d/), which is phonologically and phonetically absurd, yet it happens. When the Comparative Method yields a rule which seems phonetically implausible, it's an occasion to double check your work. However, it's bad methodology to impugn the analysis- or the Comparative Method- just because a rule we've posited goes against our expectations. We know that there _are_ sometimes rules right here in the light of the present which are phonetically unnatural. So I don't see how a metric for what's phonologically or phonetically plausible is going to be of direct help here. This isn't how the Comparative Method works, in any case. When I say that a computer can already compute the phonological half of the work in the Comparative Method, I mean just this: it could look at the correspondences between cognates and compute backwards to undo the mergers which have applied. For example, if language A has /a/ contrasting with /o/, but language B has /a/ for both, and if there is nothing in the phonological environments which allows us to predict where you get /a/ and where you get /o/ in Language A, then we reconstruct an */a/ - */o/ contrast for the protolanguage, and posit a rule which merged them in Language B. I _think_ that this is a computationally tractable problem, but nobody has done it yet as far as I know. > Developing a handbook of such information is very much like the task of > developing the handbook of physical and chemical constants. > Linguistics is in its infancy to a great degree > because this is still handled on an intuitive basis, and one investigator's > judgement may be quite different from another's, based on the accidents > of what "odd" languages that investigator happens to be familiar with. > There needs to be a much better way of integrating data from many different > sources, making it available to all. This is really a matter of opinion, but IMHO, I think you're underestimating how much we know. Linguistics is not a new discipline; in its modern incarnation, it's been around for two centuries, and the formal, mathematical models of linguistics have been being pursued for the better part of this century, depending on what you take as their beginning (Saussure, Trubetskoy, etc.). A relatively comprehensive and recent statement of the theories of phonology which have been distilled from this huge mass of data is John Goldsmith, ed. 1995 _The Handbook of Phonological Theory_. I think I'd be hard pressed to come away from a text of that sort and describe the state of our knowledge as one of "infancy". \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 04:48:01 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 00:48:01 EDT Subject: Conservative dilemma Message-ID: Larry Trask has ONCE AGAIN seemed to be replying to a comment about an intermediate stage between inkling, discovery, and proof, but has CHANGED the subject to talk about the final stages of proof, so the reply is in substantial part not relevant. Here is the evidence: [LT] >But the original passage I was replying to did not appear to be about >Algic, but rather about the assorted super-families set up mainly by >Sapir, though often extended (and occasionally originated) by others. >Lloyd appeared to be asking why early Americanists were so enthusiastic >about these groupings, and my posting was a response to this query. No, I did not ask that, AND I DO NOT BELIEVE I APPEARED TO BE ASKING THAT. I referred specifically to Algic. I do not think I mentioned Sapir. I certainly did not mention others such as Powell, Kroeber, Swadesh, etc. I did not mention "early" Americanists. I did not mention an early period of excess enthusiasms about large-scale groupings. That was the farthest thing from the topic of MY communications, though it obviously is central to Larry Trask's since he switched to it. [LA referring specifically to Algic] >> This was not some iffy hypothesis believed by uncareful researchers, >> it is a hypothesis believed by the most conservative researchers. >> The comment Trask quotes from Campbell simply is not relevant >> to this case. [LT] >Agreed, but it is highly relevant to a lot of other cases. So? I was not discussing those other cases at all! Larry Trask is welcome to discuss them if he wishes, but please not while claiming to be replying to statements which were NOT about them. If Larry Trask wishes to go on and on about excess enthusiasms, in cases which everyone agrees are of that type, there would of course be little point in anyone commenting further. I have commented in the past only when I thought grand generalizations were being uttered which were not supporable typologically as absolutes, such as what appeared to be a preference for finding a single same consistent canonical form for expressive-symbolism vocabulary and for the rest of the vocabulary of Basque or any other language. *** Having changed the subject once, Trask then does it again, by changing from a discussion of what SOME conservatives believed IN THE PAST to what is the case today. [LA] >> The "best historical linguistics" I was referring to are the CONSERVATIVES >> whom Larry Trask I think most admires. >> It was THOSE CONSERVATIVES who were completely convinced >> that the two "outlier" languages are related to Algonquian, >> yet some of THOSE SAME CONSERVATIVES also believed that >> their standard comparative method was not adequate to prove this >> relationship. [LT] >So far as I know, the case for Algic rests solidly on shared >inflectional morphology, which is normally considered adequate for >proof. Note carefully the PRESENT TENSE verb "rests". That is in no way relevant to what the situation was in the past, as I indeed pointed out there was a difference earlier from now. I do not see how I could have been clearer. [LT] >Comparative reconstruction is of limited applicability because >there is so little shared vocabulary between Algonquian and the >California languages. My belief (without actually looking at Teeter, though it is merely a few feet from me as I write) is that lexicon is also involved in the current arguments for the relationship. "Little" is after all not "none". Perhaps we can use this as a test case for what lexical cognate sets might look like when there are very few of them remaining because relations are distant. Only by studying such cases can we get a better handle on what happens to vocabulary resemblances at great genetic depths. Do "recurring sound correspondences" progressively disappear, but despite that, we judge that "sound correspondences" still remain, and take a more prominent position? That is, do we base our judgments at these greater depths not on the recurrence of the same sound correspondence repeated many times, which would make cognacies provable no matter how odd or crazy-looking a correspondence might be, or do we rather base our judgments on the phonetic reasonableness of the individual (often unique) correspondences and on the structural reasonableness of the SET of (often unique) sound correspondences as a whole? (So that we can reconstruct changes of whole systems into whole systems more plausibly?) *** It appears that Larry Trask is much more balanced in the textbook he has written than he is in the discussions on email. Here, it seems like pulling teeth to get him to regard proof as not definitionally related to the Comparative Method. Yet he asserts that in his textbook he has done so. I have no reason to doubt his word, and accept it. I have not read his textbook, and am conversing with what he actually says here on the IE list. So why the difficulties on email? Is there some felt need to defeat ANY notion that there might be ANY value in for example Greenberg's work? That is certainly what it appears to me to be. If so, it appears to be something political, because he has agreed in principle that Multilateral Comparison can be useful as a heuristic to generate hypotheses for further investigation by other means. (He now tells me he has said something like that in his textbook.) Please see on that another message on Multilateral Comparison. Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 05:40:41 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 01:40:41 EDT Subject: Random Noise in Multilateral Comparison. Message-ID: In a discussion about Random Noise, I was making a point that it is much less serious a problem in Multilateral Comparison than it is when one is trying to make an argument that two particular selected languages ARE GENETICALLY RELATED. >> The point I made about random noise had NOT to do with whether >> particular languages are ultimately related, but whether a given language >> or family W is more closely related to others X or Y. >> In that context, why should "random" (by definition) noise in the data >> selectively favor W to X rather than W to Y? No possible reason that >> I can imagine. To this Larry Trask replied: >But this only holds good if you assume in advance that all languages are >related. This is exactly the assumption which I chided you for earlier, >and it is also exactly the assumption which you have just told me in an >off-list posting that you do not hold. So what is going on? There is a severe gap in Trask's logic here. There is no inconsistency on my part. Saying that W is more closely related to X than to Y INCLUDES the possibility that it is related to X and not to Y. Saying that W is more closely related to Y than to X INCLUDES the possibility that it is related to Y and not to X. Of course all three may be ultimately related, or none of the three may be, as well. So there is absolutely no necessary assumption about absolute statements of relationship needed in Multilateral Comparison. *** Greenberg assumes that all languages are ultimately related, or at least within the domains to which he has applied Multilateral Comparison. I do NOT make that assumption. (But I have no difficulty reading the work of someone who makes the assumption, because it affects almost nothing except preferred choice of words.) Multilateral Comparison works the same way either with or without that assumption. With the assumption of ultimate relatedness, we get a single family tree. Without the assumption, one simply concludes that the languages which Multilateral Comparison groups as closer are more likely to be related, or are likely to be more closely related; this includes of course the converse that those which Multilateral Comparison groups least closely are the ones most likely to be unrelated. IT DOES NOT MATTER whether Greenberg takes all languages in his studies to be related, as most of his statements seem to imply, or whether he is simply making a working assumption (which he much too rarely says). Whichever he actually believes, what he has actually accomplished by doing Multilateral Comparison is the same in either case. It yields the same kinds of results, just expressed in different words. Within a context like all of the Americas, Multilateral Comparison method essentially gave the results that Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut were UNRELATED (note: WITHIN that domain, whatever they are ultimately). Good linguists should have no difficulty whatsoever in using data sets from people whose assumptions differ from theirs in this structurally trivial way. The kind of information yielded by Greenberg's use of Multilateral Comparison is structurally the same whatever the reader's assumptions about ultimate relationships. There is no elaborate translation required for understanding. There is merely a gracious tolerance required for conversations with other linguists with whom one does not agree about some things. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Aug 31 06:01:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 02:01:24 EDT Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool Message-ID: << The comparative method doesn't compute anything. In a message dated 8/26/99 5:10:47 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu replied: <> Which brings up an interesting question. Why use 'semantics'? After all, in the usual presentation of the Comparative Method, the meaning of the word is just really a way of squaring up different languages. First of all, to make a guess about whether they may be related. And secondly "meanings" - generally dictionary/glossary meanings - just line up the languages in a convenient way so that phonology can be more easily compared. We can after all imagine two hypothetical languages where every word in one is phonologically cognate with a corresponding word in the other - and even have clear historical proof of this total cognation - but at the same time find in usage none of these cognates are 'semantically' similiar in any way that is apparent. True, this an imaginary situation. But it is possible because we know that the paths of phonetic cognation may be quite distinct from the paths that yield 'semantic' change. Some 25th Century NeoGrammarian could have difficulty seeing the relationship between the prescribed "gaiety" of the Eastern season's priestly vestures and the judicial recognition of "gay" rights. Presume sketchy contextual information and the 'semantic' relatedness might seem implausible. So might there not be, with the mega-statistical probabilities created by a mega-data base, a way to avoid the whole issue of meaning? The co-occurence of sound categories in well-populated distributions should yield high degrees of statistical certainties (so long as you got the dates right). But then if we just did the phonetics we might find ourselves asking whether the result really describes what we mean by language. But I guess it's all a matter of what we are trying to understand. <> I believe internal reconstruction is one often mentioned. Typographical inference is another. <> Now, to be fair, what you are speaking about is a working assumption. (In fact, the most productive thing about Grimm's Law may have been the 'exceptions'.) But it is a little silly to say that the only thing we can say about prehistoric languages is that their sound changes were exceptionless. In fact, by definition, we don't know anything directly about the sounds of prehistoric languages. So we don't know, by definition, it the sound categories included exceptions or not. But we have decrypted prehistoric languages without any knowledge of what sounds the characters represented. <> It's a little like looking at the pistons in a car engine and asking which one will get you to Chicago. You are assuming a point-for-point analogy between the internal system or structure used by the automation and the external structure it is being applied to analyze. The "linkages "in "concatenative" do not have to mirror the elements you are analyzing. They are rather internal relationships yielding values that mathematically correspond to but do not have to structurally mirror the values you've attached to external events. /a/>/a/ may correspond to a single "link" in your concatenation. /a/ > /b/ may correspond to six, even though your real-life event may correspond to only one. Those six links represent values you have assigned to /a/ > /b/, which the machine achieves any why it must in order to match the operations required. 'Invisible' intermediate formulae in a spreadsheet are a good example. <> Unless of course you are among the number of linguists (no small number) that find Grimm's Law representing archaisms, in which case you must find another path for the loan. But, in one very important definitional sense, every word in modern English is a "loan" word. What, for example, is not a loan word in Old French, if 'Frankish' is described as a "different language?" <> Just as well, eh? No added element of uncertainty at all caused by a lack of writing? Have you tried your hand at finding the loans in Thracian? <> There is also the problematic case where loans went back and forth without documentation or were loaned from a third language of which we have an incomplete record. And another where the chronology of the loan is based on eroneous historical information, so that the giver and taker have been confused. And another where the inherent arbitrariness of sound changes (why p>f?) can suggest relationships where commonalities are purely accidental. Etc. By the way, do you think there was an intermediate period between p>f where there was /p'h/? Just curious? <> We have trouble being sure of the continuity of atomic half-lives, the constancy of gravity and the accuracy of radio-carbon dating. Surely, you might take a slightly less certain tone about the chronology of prehistoric sound changes. A certain humility seems to be a characteristic of the better scientist. After all, you never know when an IE Rosetta Stone or a Quantum Phyics of Linguistics may show up and demand the humility you can voluntarily adopt before hand. regards, Steve Long From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 06:14:39 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 02:14:39 EDT Subject: Unfair to Greenberg Message-ID: Concerning the Cambridge use of unrooted trees, as compared with Greenberg, both of them draw conclusions about relative similarity, hence potentially about relative closeness of genetic relationship on a probabilitistic basis. Since Greenberg does not reconstruct proto-languages, the "roots" of his trees have only the weakest of implications, if any at all beyond the usual distinctions from a dialect chain or dialect space, so that is not an important difference between his expression of results and the "unrooted trees" of the Cambridge project. Greenberg of course is a human being making human judgments, therefore not as explicit in what the criteria of the judgements are as a computer would be, and potentially not as consistent. Just like any other human being doing Multilateral Comparison. The Cambridge computer algorithms are of course applied mechanically, and are therefore completely consistent. In addition they are explicit about what their criteria are for decisions. That does not mean the Computer algorithms are better. Computer algorithms can sometimes be better than an individual human for very complex tasks if they can be refined over time by many people, and when appropriate, conflicting goals can be harmonized or balanced. But unless done very very well they can also be inferior to human judgements. Computer algorithms can have biases built into them, and more consistently applied biases are worse than biases applied less regularly. Trask cannot stand the idea that Multilateral Comparison done by Greenberg and done by Cambridge has much in common. Trask is making a completely unfair comparison below. [LA] >> Trask seems to approve the Cambridge use of Algorithms, >> and to discount Greenberg's judgements of similarities. >> He calls the one "rigorous" and the other "highly informal". [LT] >Correct. [LA] >> I don't think either is necessarily better than the other. >> The assumptions built into each can systematically bias the >> results, and such bias will be an increasing problem for BOTH >> with increasing time depth and increasing noise in the data. [LT] >But the Cambridge work is mathematical and fully explicit; it can be >tested. G's work is not and cannot be. The Cambridge group make it >fully explicit what they are counting and how. Greenberg does not. >The *only* criterion involved in Greenberg's work is Greenberg's >opinion. The comparison just expressed is not fair by any stretch of the imagination. To be fair, Trask could have compared Greenberg with another human being doing classification by Multilateral Comparison. (We are after all talking about a situation of very distant relationships, where are genetic relationships at all, so recurring sound correspondences are not likely to be established, and THAT sense of "explicit" cannot distinguish Greenberg from another human.) Or Trask could have generalized and referred to ANY human making judgments, so the burden of the difference would not fall selectively on Greenberg. But as stated previously, it is not even certain that computer algorithms are in general better than human judgments in these matters. Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From dziewon at xs4all.nl Mon Aug 30 16:34:22 1999 From: dziewon at xs4all.nl (R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink [Rein]) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 18:34:22 +0200 Subject: Unicode in linguistics [was Re: Ancestor-descendant distance] Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: heading ] On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Sean Crist wrote: >On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >> The only problem with Unicode is that it isn't uniformly supported by >> computer programs. Any Unicode-based effort would be restricted to the >> Internet Explorer browser as Netscape Navigator doesn't support it. You >> either wish for the future and sacrifice present compatibility, or you make >> some compromises. As far as I know all programmes in the MicroSoft Office 2000 packet have full Unicode support. MS competitors simply cannot ignore Unicode for long. Macintosh OS 8.5 is supporting Unicode [a bit late, though...] So what are we waiting for! Gtx, Rein p.s. can we have a discussion on whether we'll need UTF-8 or UCS-2 later on? [ Moderator's comment: This discussion, while interesting, has gone far beyond the bounds of the list. Please move to private e-mail or another forum. --rma ] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Aug 31 13:33:18 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 09:33:18 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>> > Actually it can. > Both Spanish and its daughter language Ladino are alive, although > Ladino, the daughter language is endangered. > English and the Papuan languages [etc.] that spawned Tok Pisin are > all alive. The moderator already answered the case of Ladino, but let me answer about Tok Pisin. Tok Pisin is a creole. English is not an "ancestor" of Tok Pisin in the same sense that Latin is an "ancestor" of Italian; lineal descent and creolization are two totally different things. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 13:50:35 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 09:50:35 EDT Subject: Re Perfective/Imperfective Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 8/31/99 3:45:57 AM, vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu writes: >> "treated as an indivisible unit" [perfective (NR)] >> vs. "treated as having extent" [imperfective (NR)] >I don't understand these terms. ``having extent'' in what? If time, how is >``having extent in time'' different from ``having a duration''? Also, given >that ``indivisible'' refers to possibility rather than what is being done, >what does ``treated as an indivisible unit mean''? Is it the same as ``treated >as an undivided whole'' (even if it is divisible)? There are two differences which might be relevant. I posted my message because it appeared to me in earlier postings that debates over "momentary" and "durative" were caused in part by taking those terms as representing extreme marked values, more than merely perfective and imperfective. Hence there were legitimate counterexamples which would potentially be of no concern if we were using minimal interpretations as is more commonly done with "perfective" and "imperfective". Part of this difference was also that these terms refer not to what occurs in the real world, but rather to the mental concepts which are being expressed. Thus: "treated as an indivisible unit" is different from "is an indivisible unit" ("treated as an undivided whole" is different from "is an undivided whole") And "treated as having extent" is different from "has extent". In my experience, "momentary" is more often used with a tinge of "cannot be divided", more than merely "treated as undivided", almost as a semelfactive or Aktionsart like 'explode', 'bang', 'break' (as opposed to 'break up'), etc. And "durative" similarly is a more marked and specialized category than "imperfective", in my statistical experience. Durative might be a subset of imperfective uses, or might tend in the direction of Aktionsart flavorings. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 13:52:54 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 09:52:54 EDT Subject: ? Nasal formative (pres/aor) Message-ID: Whether we believe there was originally only one nasal derivational formative, or we believe there were two distinct ones, for at least one of them... Can we ask what might have been a plausible more concrete semantic when it was still an independent root? (main verb or auxiliary???) How about 'attain', 'reach', 'gain', 'approach', 'come near' or the like? That works for semelfactives (in sense of becoming, or sense of 'happen' in French 'il ARRIVE que VERB'). When there is an agent in the present imperfective of the original MAIN VERB or AUX *nV..., then a meaning 'try to' could develop, as in many cases where an agent is in continued control of an activity that goes on for a while; perhaps as in the Hittite possible relic pair 'wound' with n-formative and 'kill' without it. Contrast 'beat' or 'batter' (agentive) vs. 'hit' (either agentive or impersonal 'he was hit by a flying windowpane'). Do such meanings resonate with anyone? Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 14:06:13 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 10:06:13 EDT Subject: "Perfective" definition Message-ID: Larry Trask's definition of "perfective", which Pat quoted today, is very much on target. >Larry, for example, in his dictionary defines "perfective" as "A >superordinate aspectual category involving a lack of explicit reference >to >the internal temporal consistency of a situation", Other than not knowing what the "superordinate" means here (general, abstract?), "lack of explicit reference to the internal temporal consistency of a situation" is very much like the shorter "treated as an indivisible unit" which I use. Either works. The crucial point is to include the concept that it is not what the situation is in reality, but raher how it is "treated" or "referred to" in the minds of speakers and listeners. Beyond that, it is possible to add some prototypical examples, but they are not definitional, merely illustrative. The Russian perfective vs. imperfective is NOT the same thing as the universal term perfective vs. imperfective. At least in many cases, the Russian so-called "perfective" is more a telic completive, hence the use of pre-verbs, much like "climb" vs. "climb up", as Pat rightly notes for English. The category so NAMED in any particular language has its own special flavors, narrowing or broadening of particular uses, which distinguish it from a pure universal definitional perfective or imperfective. (An even more common problem is what is called a "perfect", which may often be simply "past" or "anterior" or "perfective" instead of the universal category centered somewhere around (current-relevance perfect), which is actually a special kind of PRESENT with indications of past event subordinated to the present.) Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics 31 Aug 99, 10 am From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Aug 31 17:13:15 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 12:13:15 -0500 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) Message-ID: [summary of a discussion where I don't know quite who said what] >>No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>> >[snip] > Actually it can. > Both Spanish and its daughter language Ladino are alive, although >Ladino, the daughter language is endangered. > English and the Papuan languages [etc.] that spawned Tok Pisin are >all alive. > But the Spanish that gave rise to Ladino has probably changed as >much as [if not more than] Ladino has. Spanish and Ladino are also >mutually comprehensible, although you occasionally have to ask what a word >means. >Rick Mc Callister >W-1634 >Mississippi University for Women >Columbus MS 39701 >[ Moderator's comment: > 15th century Spanish is no more "alive" than 15th century English, so modern > Ladino and other modern Spanish dialects are not a case of a contemporaneous > parent & descendant language pair, but of dialects that are called different > languages for sociopolitical reasons. Certainly in the sense that Mr. Long > intends, no language ever lives alongside its parent for more than a single > generation (if that long). > --rma ] How about this example: medieval Franch, Spanish, Italian etc. beside medieval Latin, which certainly must be regarded as a living language but was effectively indistinguishable from the "Vulgar Latin" that was the actual source of these tongues? Similarly, what about Sanskrit (still living, for some Indians, and long kept alive for scholarly use) and modern Indic languages? If they are not descended precisely from Sanskrit as codified by Pan.ini, that is mere chance; there would be no *logical* problem in saying that they had, just as there is no logical problem in saying that medieval Latin coexisted with its descendants, the medieval romance tongues. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Aug 31 19:13:20 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 19:13:20 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >4. The /x/ affix It's not an affix. Gmc. *walx- < Celt. *wolk-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Aug 1 12:25:27 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 1 Aug 1999 13:25:27 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <006101bed1a5$98f8be00$319ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [on my list of typical subject properties in Basque] > Why do you not give us an example of these so-called subject > properties in some ergative language besides Basque? I've chosen Basque because it is the ergative language I know the best, and I can speak with some authority here. But most other ergative languages I've read about do not appear to be significantly different -- though a few certainly are. > And how were these properties selected? Empirically. See Ed Keenan's famous article in C. N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic. [on my examples of reflexives and reciprocals] > Since '*Each other was talking to Susie and Mike' is equally > ridiculous, I fail to see any valuable point made. I'm afraid you have failed to understand the point of my examples. If transitive sentences in ergative languages were "really" passives, then the absolutive NP should be the subject, and it should exhibit typical subject properties, such as an inability to be reflexive or reciprocal. In Basque, however, absolutive NPs in transitive sentences can freely be reflexive or reciprocal, whereas ergative NPs cannot. It is only in intransitive sentences that absolutive NPs cannot be reflexive or reciprocal. So, ergative NPs in transitive sentences -- but not absolutive NPs in transitive sentences -- share the subject properties of absolutive NPs in intransitive sentences. This is exactly the opposite of what is predicted by the "passive" theory, and it constitutes a nail in the coffin of that theory. > Frankly, I am amazed. A reflexive requires an agent and a patient, Sorry; not so. Consider these examples: Susie saw herself in the mirror. Susie is annoyed with herself. Susie excelled herself. The first two certainly, and the third arguably, contain no agent, and the third one certainly, and the first two arguably, contain no patient. Yet all are overtly reflexive. > and a reciprocal requires two agents and two patients. No; same problem: Susie and Mike collided with each other. Susie and Mike fancy each other. Susie and Mike resemble each other. Not an agent in sight, and not many patients, either. Reflexives and reciprocals are *grammatical* constructions, not semantic states of affairs. > An intransitive verb, by definition, has only one NP element Also wrong: Susie is sleeping with Mike. Susie smiled at Mike. Susie got ready for Mike. All intransitive, but all with multiple NPs. > so any two(or four)-NP-element construction obviously is a > contradiction in terms. Not remotely true, I'm afraid. [in the same vein] > More nonsense! 'Each other' cannot function as an ergative or > nominative subject. So what? That is semantic not grammatical. Completely false. Suppose Susie slapped Mike, and Mike slapped Susie. The semantics is straightforward: Slap(Susie, Mike) And Slap(Mike, Susie) This semantics remains invariant however a language may choose to express it grammatically. Grammatically, a language is free in principle to express this as `Susie and Mike slapped each other', or as `Each other slapped Susie and Mike', or in any other way it chooses. In Dyirbal, for example, a transitive verb is made reciprocal by adding to it an affix which renders it strictly intransitive, and there is no overt object. (And reflexives are made in the same way, with a different affix.) Turkish is rather similar. The semantics is constant, but the grammatical expression varies widely. > That it can be used in some languages in an oblique case (as in > English above) is to be expected. Possibly so, but the crucial observation is that, in the vast majority of known languages, a reflexive or a reciprocal cannot stand in subject position. The possible placement of reflexive and reciprocal NPs therefore provides us with valuable evidence in identifying subjects -- and, as it happens, with powerful evidence against the "passive" view of ergative languages, which makes all the wrong predictions. > Of all the languages I have ever seen, Basque is, by a mile, far the > most "unusual" language. Nope. Except that its morphological ergativity is unusually thoroughgoing, Basque is not unusual in any respect I can think of. Basque is syntactically unremarkable and morphologically highly regular. Basque only becomes "unusual" if you insist on applying to it demonstrably fallacious views like the "passive" theory of ergatives. Only then does it start to appear bizarre. [LT] >> The "passive" view of ergative languages in general is indefensible. > Obviously, I do not think so. And Estival and Myhill (and probably > Shibatani) do not either --- not to mention the majority of > linguists of the past. Estival and Myhill, in Dixon's account of them, emphatically do *not* embrace the passive theory of ergatives: they only endorse the view that ergatives invariably *originate* from passives. To my knowledge, Shibatani has never offered the slightest endorsement of the passive theory. As for the linguists of the past, well, they didn't know much syntax, and they got it badly wrong -- as we now realize. The linguists of the past frequently believed in all sorts of crazy things which we have long since laid to rest: stadialism, linguistic Darwinism, primitive languages, all sorts of things. Even the great Otto Jespersen, to cite just one name, believed in primitive languages and in absolute progress in grammatical systems. But nobody believes in this stuff today. Linguistics has moved on in the last few decades, and in our understanding of syntax as much as in any other area. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From edsel at glo.be Tue Aug 3 22:03:18 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 18:03:18 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <001301bed1dd$067597a0$345673ce@oemcomputer> Message-ID: At 07:51 19/07/99 -0400, you wrote: >Ed Selleslagh writes: ><> >-Cornu- is "horn." -Cornus- is the dogwood tree. [Ed Seleslagh] I'm sorry, I got confused. ><like po:pulus) are feminine.>> >I had ever understood that all trees were feminine for essentially >mythological reasons; they were thought to be the dwelling places of female >spirits. [Ed] No problem with that. 'extremities, branches...'. That would also account for manus, acus, cornu >and >tribus being feminine, but not for domus nor idus. 'Foot, pes...' are >probably >not viewed as extremities, but as 'base' to stand on.>> >Now, my understanding is that the root idea of -idus- is of a division by >halves. When the months used to be lunar, the kalends marked the first >appearance of the slip of the new moon, and the ides were the date of the >full moon. Perhaps this could be worked into your hypothesis as well. [Ed] Maybe, but I have no idea how. Have you? Domus can be fitted in your 'dwelling' remark. Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Tue Aug 3 23:57:43 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 19:57:43 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <379F5678.2D4504CB@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: At 21:14 28/07/99 +0200, you wrote: [ moderator snip ] >[Damien Erwan Perrotin] >The idea is interesting, but probably inexact as am- is not present only >in Latin but also in Lydian (ama : to love) and in Breton (afan : to >kiss from an older Brythonnic *ama). It is still possible that the >Lydian form was a borrowing from an Etruscan-like tongue of the Aegean, >but that is quite unlikely for Breton. So there can be only three >explainations for the ressemblance you point out : >a: chance ressemblance (always possible) >b: Etruscan borrowed the word from Latin or from Celtic >c: Etruscan is remotely linked to IE and this root is a remnant of this >old relationship. >Personnally, I favor the third thesis, but there is still work to do >before proving it. >Damien Erwan Perrotin [Ed] Has it been proven that the Breton afan was derived from an originally Brythonic *ama? (I have no problem with the reconstruction itself, I even mentioned it in a different way). Brythonic languages like Welsh contain large numbers of words that are most likely loans from Latin. It's all a matter of timing, of course. It could very well be that b.(from some early Celtic or Italic, later: Latin), maybe even back and forth, and c. were involved. According to M. Carrasquer's Stammbaum, which I subcribe to, IE and Etruscan (and the like) are cousins. (I can send you the GIF file, but not via this list). The only thing I'm pretty convinced of is that the Etr. and Lat. am- and the Lat. amb- (IE m.b-) roots are related, the problem is 'how?'. The scarcity of data about the direct relatives of Etruscan are a major obstacle. Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 4 00:14:06 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:14:06 -0400 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin In-Reply-To: <001701bed474$c95a8480$fd4a0d97@api-b0d3l6> Message-ID: At 20:59 22/07/99 +0200, you wrote: >I was wondering about the origins of the Latin adjectival >suffix -n-us, -n-a, -n-um appearing in words like _mater-nus_ "maternal; >motherly; belonging/pertaining to the mother", _pater-nus_ "paternal; >fatherly; belonging/pertaining to the father", _feli-nus_ "feline; >belonging/pertaining to the cat; belonging/pertaining to the family/genus >of the cats/felidae" and the like. Can it be traced back to IE? Does the >morpheme exist in other IE or non-IE languages? Any idea abt its etymology >and/or development? >Thanks in advance for your answers. >Cheers >Paolo Agostini [Ed Selleslagh] I'm equally intrigued by this. This -n- or -en also pops up in a variety of non-IE languages, most notably in Etruscan ( -na, which may be the origin, or the enhancing factor in Latin) where it indicates origin or ascendance, in Uralic and in Basque (Vasconic?) where it denotes the genitive. (In Basque, -en-a means: 'that, him, her of...') It also occurs in the oldest form of genitive in living Germanic ( Ger. der Mensch, des Menschen; Du. de mens, des mensen), but that has been attributed to old -n stems - a theory that looks a bit odd to me. In all those languages it represents some form of 'genitive notion'. Intriguing, to say the least. Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 4 00:30:20 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:30:20 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <791745c8.24c543da@aol.com> Message-ID: At 23:15 19/07/99 EDT, you wrote: >In a message dated 7/19/99 12:15:24 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: ><"(c)h" in the Germanic loanword which was dropped in the modern >Germanic languages (OE wealh, OHG walh).>> >That would explain a lot of the way the variances seem to go. But what >happens in MHG? I have 'Walch' (n), 'walsch', 'walche' (adj). It seems >like there's some back and forth. I guess that makes sense in that 'vlach' >itself is a form borrowed back from Slavic. >In Old Norse, where the reference to anything Rumanian is least likely, >'valskr' is typically reconstructed from '*valr' (which would put it before >800 AD.) I wonder if that reconstruction isn't questionable. >Regards, >Steve Long [Ed Selleslagh] I agree with you. In Dutch we have Waal (French speaking Belgian) and the adjective Waals (older form, still in use in West-Flemish dialect: Waalsch. The -sch is s+ach-laut, which corresponds to Scand. -sk and Eng. -sh). There is no trace of -lch in MDu or ODu. My hypothesis for the origin of the East-European -ch in Walach and the like: a derivative ending, often depreciative, still productive as -ak in Slavic (but also as an adjective forming suffix in Greek -ako's and in various forms in other IE lgs, and even in Etruscan -ach and in Sumerian -age). Ed Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 06:42:28 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 01:42:28 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Thursday, July 29, 1999 1:14 PM >> Pat responds: >> There is no *tangible* way for us to ever know whether languages arose >> monogenetically or polygenetically however most linguists, even when they >> deny its recoverability, have correctly weighed the odds of mono- vs. >> polygenesis, and subscribe to monogenesis. If a probablistically calculated >> hypothesis is "ideology", then everything done in historical linguistics is >> "ideology". > "most linguists" ??????????????? > I'm flabbergasted. I would like to know *one* of those, who did/does what > you claim "most linguists" do. Of course, I have no real way of knowing but I presume this writer might: "The hypothesis of the monogenesis of language is one that most linguists believe to be plausible. Indeed, the appearance of language may define modern Homo sapiens." Philip E. Ross (Staff writer) in "Hard Words", pp. 138-147, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 1991. By the way, Larry is on record as favoring monogenesis. Pat [ Moderator's comment: Larry Trask is on record as favouring monogenesis as the more parsimonious position; he is also on record as believing the argument either way is too weak to defend against the other. Since Mr. Ross is unlikely to have conducted a statistically valid survey of linguists before writing the quoted material, I would be extremely hesitant myself to base any argument thereon. Let us agree to disagree, silently, on this question and move on. It is irrelevant to Indo-European studies, and has taken enough of our time. --rma ] 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 Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Aug 3 08:16:47 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 10:16:47 +0200 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Unless you're saying that language arose in the last 100,000 years >[i.e. before humans left Africa], then I don't think you can make a serious >claim that there are any true isolates. Basque and Burushaski are surely >related to other languages but the lumpers are going to have to work a lot >harder to prove it. Some of them I know are satisfied with declaring it, so why waste time on "proof" ? ;-) > My understanding is that language arose before humans left Africa, >so any claims of polygenesis would have to be examined among African >languages. Given that the only existing language families in Africa are >Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic and the Khoisan languages >[which may be between 1and 5 families], it seems that the onus of proof is >on the polygenesists. I fail to see the logic in this (which is certainly my fault): out of Africa, OK, maybe. But what does this have to do with African languages ? Or, why should a "claim of polygenesis" only be testable against them ? As I said, there is no real reason to believe that "language arose" only once, consequently all the human groups which went "out of Africa" at some time in history could have been speakers of seperate, independently "arisen" languages in the first place. So "claims of polygenesis" could be tested against whatever evidence there may be available on a global scale. I use the quotes around "claims of p." because for me this is no claim at all but simply the default assumption. Relatedness is a positive fact, testable against hard evidence. Lack of this evidence, the nature of which is and always was controversial, leads to the default assumption of non-relatedness. And, speaking about Africa: not everyone in the field accepts the genetic status of Nilo-Saharan. Even Niger-Kordofanian is not accepted by everyone, though the critics seem to be in a minority position (which does of course not mean that they are wrong !). I, for one, do think that at least Niger-Congo is OK (from my limited experience with it; there are striking morphological patterns recurring in, say, Kwa and Bantu), but noone really knows how this huge language family came to dominate most of Africa. One scenario is, of course, spread, no, not over previously uninhabitated territory, but spread over territory dominated by different languages which either became "niger-congoized" by intensive language contact or, if you don't like this scenario, by language shift to Niger-Congo with all kinds of substratum items surviving into the languages we can observe today, resp. classify as N-C. So even the alleged "fact" that Africa has now no more than 5 language families has any bearing on the question of poly- vs. monogenesis. Europe has only two language families, if you are in that mood (Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian ;-), which I'm not, but pre-Indoeuropean groups have been identified before the spread of IE (or N.) on the continent. I guess the familiar family-tree model with ideally one language at its beginning and several to many ones at its contemporary bottom (to which I wholeheartedly subscribe in those cases where such a thing has been established !) leads to a somewhat slanted picture. It is true that, where we look at language families, the present may be variegated and the past look quite uniform. But if we look at *territories* on Earth which are dominated by one language and investigate its past, in strikingly many cases we find that what looks like a linguistically homogeneous area, was not so in earlier times. Most languages which spread ofer a considerable territory did so at the expense of other ones spoken by pre-spread population groups in that area. We don't have sufficient information for every single case in the world where this may have happened, but where we do the picture is quite clearly this: modern uniformity of language most often replaced former diversity. See yourself ! One more thing: even the "out of Africa"-theory is not accepted (or acceptable) in every detail. While it is true that East Africa seems to be the home of *anatomically* modern Man, it does not follow that *homo loquens* originated in the same place. I don't see how this should follow. Humans as bearers of cultural traditions, artificial skills and articulate language may have "arisen" independently in several places of the Old World. I pondered about this in a previous post. No, the onus of "proof" is on the shoulders of the monogeneticists, and even on that of the oligogeneticists. There simply is no analogy between the development of a biological species and that of cultural traditions and artefacts. One of them is language. We use our brains to handle it, but it hasn't come to us readymade with those brains. This could be a fascinating discussion to pursue further, but I use the opportunity to say that I'll be away for the next two months, starting this week, to do some fieldwork on the Lower Yenissey (on Dene-Caucasian ;-). Anything said on this list about this matter in the meantime is, due to my absence, irrelevant, meaningless and most probably seriously misguided ;-) ;-) ;-) Stefan Georg PS: You did see the emoticons, did you ? Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 3 08:14:03 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 09:14:03 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Unless you're saying that language arose in the last 100,000 > years [i.e. before humans left Africa], then I don't think you can > make a serious claim that there are any true isolates. Er -- what is a "true isolate"? A language which arose independently of all other languages? If so, I'm afraid I can't see that as a useful construct. Since we have no way of investigatng the ultimate origins of languages, we have no way of determining whether any language has such an independent origin. I prefer to use `isolate' in its ordinary sense of a language which cannot be shown to be related to any other known language. > Basque and Burushaski are surely related to other languages but the > lumpers are going to have to work a lot harder to prove it. Quite possibly Basque and Burushaski really are very remotely related to other known languages, but no one has ever succeeded in finding any persuasive evidence that either is related to anything else at all. At least for Basque, which I know better, I believe that the chances are now vanishingly small that any relatives will *ever* be discovered. There's almost nothing left to look at. > My understanding is that language arose before humans left Africa, > so any claims of polygenesis would have to be examined among African > languages. Given that the only existing language families in Africa are > Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic and the Khoisan languages > [which may be between 1and 5 families], Well. Niger-Kordofanian and Afro-Asiatic are widely accepted as valid, even though the published evidence in support of each is sparse. However, not only Khoisan but also Nilo-Saharan are at present little more than hopeful areal groupings. Neither is supported by any significant body of evidence, and both are doubted by some specialists. > it seems that the onus of proof is on the polygenesists. Why? In comparative linguistics, the null hypothesis is always this: No languages are related. This is the hypothesis we seek to falsify when we try to show that some languages really are related -- as we have managed to do in many cases, of course. But putting the burden of proof onto the polygeneticists strikes me as a serious methodological error: it is equivalent to changing the null hypothesis to this: All languages are related. And I cannot see that this is a wise move, or even a possible move. Doing so would render demonstrations of relatedness otiose, and require instead demonstrations of *unrelatedness*. And it is a logical impossibility to demonstrate that two languages are unrelated. The best we can ever hope for in this direction is to show that there exists no evidence to relate two languages -- but such an outcome clearly does not prove that those languages are unrelated. If we had no IE languages but Welsh and Albanian, I very much doubt that we could make a persuasive case that they were related, and we would have to conclude that there was no evidence to relate them, yet this would clearly not prove unrelatedness. I'm afraid that the burden of proof is *always* on the shoulders of those who wish to argue for relatedness, not of those who want to argue for unrelatedness. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 14:27:17 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 09:27:17 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-Language Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, July 30, 1999 3:38 PM >>> -- with minor exceptions (such as "kuku"), words _are_ arbitrary sound >>> assemblages. >> Pat writes: >> Why do you not explain to us all why that is true? I am firmly convinced >> that it is unequivocally incorrect. > -- because any sound within the human range will do as well as any other for > any given referent. A rose may be a znfargle. Martin A. Nowak and David C. Krakauer have recently published an article entitled "The Evolution of Language" in PNAS: Vol. 96, July 1999, pp. 8028-8033, which might be of interest to you in this context. [ moderator snip ] 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 Aug 3 17:43:48 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 12:43:48 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: <001201bedcd2$f08bf6e0$6f18063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Rick said: >>. DNA studies obtensibly show that non-African >> humans seem to go back a single population distinct from Africans. >"Distinct" from Africans? Not in my reading of the texts. I don't wish to >raise a non-linguistic topic, but your implication - that languages split >into African and non-African - is a language topic, and we need some >scientist out there to give us the DNA truth. >Peter Distinct in the sense that, according to what I read in New Scientist, Scientific American, etc., non-African [modern human] populations began leaving Africa about 100,000 BP. If language was developed before 100,000 BP --and my understanding is that this is the consensus, then these languages would seem to have a common origin in Africa. How they are related to existing African families is another question. I believe they probably are. But given that the origin of language in Africa has not been dated, this is the most difficult aspect to account for in any scenario of monogenesis. But given that, if one includes AA, there are 3 African language families plus the Khoisan languages, this narrows things down quite a bit. Any division between African and non-African languages would be clouded by the question of Afro-Asiatic and the possibility of other languages coming out of Africa and non-African languages going back into Africa. On the face of it, non-African languages would seem to have entered Asia from the relative small Red Sea area I'm not claiming that there wasn't any genetic flow between Africa and the rest of the world. There obviously was. Another consideration is that it is indeed possible that language was invented BEFORE modern humans arose, in which case, monogenesis would be the only obvious conclusion. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 3 13:13:57 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 14:13:57 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <003001bed9c8$273abcc0$869ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Well, 'anaphora' is primarily a rhetorical device; No. It's a grammatical phenomenon, or, at most, a semantico-grammatical phenomenon. Like most linguistic features, it can probably be used rhetorically, but it is not essentially rhetorical in nature. In fact, probably no linguistic object, structure or relationship is intrinsically rhetorical in nature. `Rhetoric' is a functional concept, not a structural one. > my dictionary, however, does acknowledge the use of 'anaphora' in a > grammatical sense although Larry seems to prefer "anaphor" in the > grammatical and, I presume (but do not know), 'anaphora' in the > rhetorical sense. No. My dictionary cites `anaphora' only as the abstract noun derived from `anaphor'. Anaphora is the relation between an anaphor and its antecedent, or, more generally, the use of anaphors. > Since "discourse cohesion strategy" is not defined in Larry's dictionary, That's because it's not a grammatical term, and mine is a dictionary of grammatical terms. > I have no idea exactly how one will want to define it. Perhaps > 'anaphors' are excluded; perhaps not. I think anybody who works on cohesion would include anaphora as a major cohesive device. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 3 14:37:27 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 15:37:27 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <001d01bed9df$87785fe0$f4d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [on cases like this one:] >> `John hit me and went away' *must* mean `John went away'. > Another word for a "rule" is a "convention". Again, we appear to be > chasing our tails (definitions). There is nothing conventional about it. We are looking at a rule of English syntax. If anything is a rule of English syntax, this is. A convention, by definition, can be changed by agreement. We do not have that option here. [on this one:] >> `John hit Bill and went away'. >> Now, in English, it is John who went away, not Bill. However, according >> to my understanding of Dixon, if you say what looks like the literal >> equivalent of this in Dyirbal, it is *Bill* who went away, not John. >> This is one of the ways in which syntactic ergativity manifests itself >> in Dyirbal. > Is it really that simple? Yes. > Would we not be coming close to describing both 'nominative' and > 'ergative' phenomena if we said that "a null-NP frequently refers to > the foregoing NP with which it agrees in case"? No, not at all. Quite apart from that slippery `frequently', this doesn't remotely work. First, the English example has no case-marking -- yet the facts are clear. Second, in Basque and in other ergative languages, the null NP in such a construction co-refers to the NP with which it DISagrees in case -- or, rather, with the NP with which it would disagree in case if the null NP were overtly present and bore the required case-marking. Much of the point here is that, in a morphologically ergative language, the morphology -- including the case-marking -- is at odds with the syntax. And `subject' is a syntactic notion, not a morphological one. [on ergative languages] > First, as you know, I have questioned whether Dyirbal is, in fact, > "split", and have proposed a different explanation for the data. Dyirbal is about as thoroughly ergative as any language I have ever seen, but, even so, Dixon makes it quite clear that a split exists. > Second, the point that Leo is making about distinguishing syntactic > from morphological subjects needs to be addressed by you in terms of > "subject" properties. I have already discussed this at length. In a Basque transitive sentence, it is the ergative NP, and not the absolutive NP, which shares the subject properties of the absolutive NP in an intransitive sentence. As far as I am concerned, that is the end of the matter. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Aug 3 15:00:28 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:00:28 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <003001bed9c8$273abcc0$869ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >Pat writes: >Well, 'anaphora' is primarily a rhetorical device; my dictionary, however, >does acknowledge the use of 'anaphora' in a grammatical sense although Larry >seems to prefer "anaphor" in the grammatical and, I presume (but do not >know), 'anaphora' in the rhetorical sense. 'Anaphora' is Greek. 'Anaphor' is nativized English. Why picking on this ? >Since "discourse cohesion strategy" is not defined in Larry's dictionary, I >have no idea exactly how one will want to define it. Perhaps 'anaphors' are >excluded; perhaps not. This was your term. I'd define it as any "strategy used to maintain the cohesion of discourse". St. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 15:03:06 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 10:03:06 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Thursday, July 29, 1999 5:47 AM >> Pat responded: >> I suggest you read it. "But we do still encounter scholars who insist that >> there is a necessary diachronic connection, e.g. Estival and Myhill >> (1988:445): 'we propose here the hypothesis that in fact all ergative >> constructions have developed from passives'." Are you suggesting that >> Estival and Myhill are not "linguists", or that Shibatani, in whose book >> this essay appeared, is not a "linguist"? The quotation above is from p. >> 189 of Dixon's 1994 book. What are you playing at? R-S responded: > Linguists can do wrong. Pat responds: I can do wrong. You can do wrong. Anyone can do wrong. And perhaps they are wrong but it refutes the idea that only non-PhD "linguists" like myself can hold such a view, does it not? That was the point, was it not? >> Pat responds (on L.T's catalogue of subject properties): >> If you are referring to the "tests" above, you have proved nothing. R-S responded: > This is much in line with what I said in today's other post of mine. You > see, you read, you understand (or don't), but you reject nevertheless. > Always. > The subject-property-test *is* sufficient to discriminate between ergative > and passive constructions. Pat resonded: There is one mistake that you consistently make, Ralf-Stefan, and that is you frame every discussion as if it were a *personal* contest between you and your "antagonist". I am not interested in "beating" you, I am only interested in hearing the best arguments on the other side of any issue on which I have a position. The value of such discussions will not be that I persuade you or you persuade me but rather that other readers, hopefully more objective than either one of us, will weigh our respective "Informationen" and reach an opinion of their own. As far as the "subject-property test", it is not a "test" per se but a definition. And the relationship it may be identifying does not, as another poster mentioned, necessarily have to be "subjectiveness". R-S continued: > Again: > Take an intransitive sentence in an exclusively accusative language. S-V > S is, by convention, called "subject" (just a convention). It's semantic > role can be one of the following: Agent, Experiencer aso. (some people > insist on Agent being restricted to agents of transitive constructions, bog > s nimi). > Now, take a transitive one. A-V-O > What accusative languages do is to treat S *and* A alike under all > circumstances (there are such languages, i.e. split-free accusative-lgs.). Pat interjects: Oh, so "our" type of languages, accusative-type, can be *split-free* but "their" type of languages, ergative-type, cannot be. Akkusativ ueber alles! R-S continued: > This leads to the notion that these languages know a macro-category > comprising S and A, which most conventionally is called "subject" also, in > compliance with western grammatical tradition. > Now subjects have properties of various sorts, part of which have been > enumerated by Larry Trask. The real list is longer, and you can expand it > yourself. It is nothing more than a list of things which are generally true > for "subjects" in these languages. > Now, part of the things a passive formation does to a sentence is that the > *subject* is now what was semantically the undergoer/patient (choose your > favourite term) of the corresponding active sentence, an example: > active: Stefan proves Pat wrong (active, A-V-O) > Pat is proven wrong by Stefan (passive, S-V[pass]-Agent-periphrasis) > "Pat", in this passive sentence, has been moved to a position (not only in > terms of word order), where it assumes all the functions commonly found > with S. It has become the "subject" of the sentence, according to > traditional terminolgy. The syntactic properties (partly enumerated by > Larry, but the list is longer) found with "Stefan" in the active sentence > are now found with "Pat" in its passive equivalent. > Now let's look at ergative constructions: > Again, we find intransitive sentences there: S-V (gosh, I'm starting from > scratch, but I think I have to) > And transitive sentences as well: A-V-O. What makes the construction > ergative is, of course, nothing but the fact that S and O are treated alike > in this language (or in some subsystems of this language). > Now, in a morphologically ergative language, such a sentence may look like: > A-erg V O-abs > a passive sentence, we recall, looks like (word order irrelevant): S V > Agent-periphrasis (P. is proven wrong by S., to take a random example with > positive truth-value, however;-). > Of course, ergative constructions and passives bear some resemblance: in > both the (semantic !) Agent is morphologically marked, in both the semantic > patient may be morphologically unmarked (this does not work when there is > an overt accusative marker in the language, of course). However, this is > where the resemblance ends. In an ergative sentence like: > Stefan-Erg proves Pat-Abs wrong we should expect, under the > ergative-as-passive scenario, that subject properties remain with Pat (as > in the "true" passive above); however, they rest with "Stefan". Pat responds: What you seem not to be able to grasp because of your unfamiliarity with languages like Sumerian is that the ergative "subject" is frequently NOT EXPRESSED. And, I am not even sure that "subject" is a useful term to apply to relationships between ergative and nominative languages. R-S wrote: > This is the general picture only, and the test has to be carried out with > real "ergative languages" of course, but this is what you will find. It is > nothing less that the watershed between ergative constructions and passive > constructions. It does not matter whether you accept the full list of > "subject properties" enumerated. You may accept some and dislike others. > With those you do accept, though, you will find this picture. The more > subject properties you can bring yourself to accept, the more instances of > the difference between ergative and passive constructions you will find. > It's that easy. But you do have to look at complex constructions, not only > at the minimal sentence. > This does *not* mean that ergativity in some given language may not have > come about via a passive transformation. It may. In order to claim the > right of being accepted as a "real" ergative construction (and not the > passive it may have been in an earlier life), the shift of subject > properties to the Agent-phrase (the ERG-NP) from the Patient-phrase is > crucial. Pat responds: Ralf-Stefan is going in a circle. R-S continued: > For a succinct demonstration that, what looked to some people like an > ergative construction, but is rather to interpreted as passive, see my (and > A.P. Volodin's) "Die itelmenische Sprache", Wiesbaden 1999, though I admit > that we could have been a bit clearer on the issue. If anything, this > thread has prompted me to write a clearer exposition of the relevant > chapter in this book. >> Pat responded: >> Obviously, I do not think so. And Estival and Myhill (and probably >> Shibatani) do not either --- not to mention the majority of linguists of the >> past. R-S continued: > Estivall/Myhill/Shibatani should speak up for themselves. As for the > linguists of the past, well, they are linguists of the past, if they had > got everything straight already in 1890, what the hell are we doing here (I > assume, that's what you ask anyway reading all this ;-). Pat writes: They have. And they wrote it so they would not be misinterpreted. As a general observation, we often find that we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater; and that is not modernity --- it is faddism. 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 W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Tue Aug 3 15:36:42 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:36:42 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Pat and IEists, > Pat writes: > Since "discourse cohesion strategy" is not defined in Larry's dictionary, I > have no idea exactly how one will want to define it. Perhaps 'anaphors' are > excluded; perhaps not. This really is funny! Do you mean that linguistic categories, paradigmatic or syntactic strategies, or other structural items terms of which are not defined in Larry's dictionary do not exist? Stefan's 'discourse cohesion strategies' (better known as 'discourse cohesion devices' (DCD)) represent a well-established label in typology (as well as in CA, by the way). DCDs are those linguistic structures (suprasegmental startegies, morphemes, syntatic conventions) or emergent 'activities' of related structures that allow the coupling of phrasal information and its co/context (you probably know the difference - you can also say 'endophoric' = cotext, 'exophoric' = context). The main point is that besides the grammaticalization of elements in terms of a DCD (for instance, topic marker, co- vs. switch reference markers, etc.) sentence internal strategies may be used to generate discourse cohesion. The most prominent one is the notion of 'pivot' which in some respects shares properties with 'subjectivization'. How sensitive actance marking is with respect to discourse cohesion can be easily shown, let me quote an well-known example from Hua (Papua): (1) d-go' ro-0-da Kori-ue ISg:O-scare feel-3Sg:A-1Sg:SS run=away-1Sg:S 'I felt scared and ran away.' (2) Korihu-ga-na d-auia-h-ie run=away-1Sg:DS-3Sg 1Sg:O-shame-feel-3Sg:A (Haiman 1980:360) 'I ran away, and I am ashamed.' [SS = same 'subject', DS = different 'subject', A = agentive, O = objective, S = subjective] There is a kind of 'impersonal' cionstruction in Hua (often related to verba sentiendi or uncontrolled verbs) that has an 'un-accusative' reading (objective + verb). In (1) this structures precedes the intransitive sentence 'I ran away'. The expected switch from SS (conditioned by S=A) to DS (here O followed by S) does not take place. In (2), however, just this switch happens. Here, S precedes O, and we have DS! SS/DS serve as a DCD here, their sentence internal distribution, however, is conditioned by aspects of the information flow within the co(!)text. The same is often true for accusative or ergative strategies (cf. German 'ich schlug den Hund und wurde von ihm gebissen' ('subject' as a DCD) vs. 'ich schlug den Hund [und] der [Hund] bi? mich' (switch reference, which generates a totally different pragmatic or discoursive strategy... Another nice example in from Khalka-Mongolian (Stefan could tell you much more about that, he's the expert in Mongolian, not me! and sorry for the very rough transcription/transliteration), cf. (3) cecg-iyg gertee xare/zh yav-ax-ad ne/ genet Baatar dayralda-zhee Zezeg-ACC at=home back go-VN-LOC 3Sg:TOP suddenly Baatar meet-PAST:IMPERF 'As Ceceg was going home, Baatar suddenly meet him.' (4) Bi dund surguule/ t?gs-??d end ir-sen 1Sg:NOM middle schol:ACC:indef finish-CV:PERF PROX come-VN:PRET 'After having fished the middle school, I came here.' Here, DS conditions the switch from S=A encoded by the nominative (as in (4)) to S=A encoded by the (definite) accusative (cecg-iyg) in (4). You see that sentence internal coding strategies (incl. ACC/PASS and ERG/AP strategies) may be very well dominated by the 'discourse', or, in other words, funtion as a DCD. We cannot explain ACC and ERG behavior, if we do not refer to such possible strategies which sometimes are even primary as opposed to secondary sentence internal reasons emerging from discourse cohesion.... We must not rule them out just because they are not mentioned in a teminological dictionary... In another posting, Pat says: > I suspect the (original [?]) real function of an > anti-passive is suggesting lessened effective agency. What do you think? It's the same story as with passives: foregrounding or backgrounding (often intertwined)? As I said: Antipassives reflect nothing but a morphosyntactic (and somtimes discoursive) behavior. They effect the relationsship of A and O just as pssaives do. The formal 'demotion' of A=ERG to A(>S)=ABS and that of O=ABS to O(>PERIPH)=OBL (OBL serves as a dummy here) may be caused by the semantics of A as well as that of O. If we have an A-motivited antipassive than aspects like 'lessened agentivity' MAY enter the game (remeber that this presupposes that A has a semantic reading here. We all know that A is structural term, which MAY be spelled out semantically, but which also may serve as a syntactic, and/or pragmatic strategy of grounding and/or discourse cohesion, see above). If we have an O-dominated antipassive, then parameters such as mass nouns and non-countability, lessening of referentiality (for instance in Yupik) etc. may become relevant (the general tendency is that A is more likely to react on semantic settings, and O to react on pragmatic settings (both can be metaphorized SEM>PRA for A and PRA>SEM for O). Finally, the verbal relation itself may condition antipassives, for instance durative, habitual, imperfective, etc. All depends on the individual language system in question. The functions/semantics of an antipassive are nearly always *emergent* properties which means that they cannot be identified by a single 'linguistic category' or so, but only by monitoring the complex behavior of ALL (co-paradigmatisized) strategies, structures, and paradigms involved in the process of forming antipassives (as well as in the formation of the 'underlying' 'active' structure (i.e., ERG). The same holds for passives, which as you surely know can occur in co-existence with antipassives in a language system.... Finally, Pat says (in the same posting): > Sorry, Wolfgang, after so much with which I can agree, I am unconvinced. I > do not believe the essence of accusativity is in word-order. I don't think that this is a matter of belief! It's just the question how we are used to define ACC and ERG. If we claim that ACC and ERG represent some kind of paradigmatic *behavior* that is scaled along the Accusative Ergative Continuum then we should expect the AEC and its instantiation(s) to present in ANY language, even in isolating ones. If you look at English (not my best language, as all of you will know), we HAVE to decide whether the pair (5) The woman saw the dog. (6) The woman went downtown. follow an ACC or an ERG strategy. Because A in (5) ('the woman') *behaves* like S in (6) ('the woman'), we can say that there is soem kind of S=A behavior. If you look at other language systems with a more or less fixed word order you will easily see that word order is crucial for the AEC. The same naturally holds for languages that have OTHER (morphosyntactic) means to react on the prerogatives of the AEC.... Wolfgang [Note: My email address has been modified: Please use W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de!] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ [ Moderator's transcription for those who have problems with 8-bit text: ] (4) Bi dund surguule/ t{\"o}gs-{\"o}{\"o}d end ir-sen 1Sg:NOM middle schol:ACC:indef finish-CV:PERF PROX come-VN:PRET 'After having fished the middle school, I came here.' From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Aug 3 13:54:32 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 14:54:32 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Vidhyanath said: > The ta-adjective is resultative in Vedic ... it patterns ergatively as > resultative participles often do. ... the great majority have a passive > meaning, ... some others are ... intransitives, ... Some again may even be > transitive actives, This is true also in Latin and partly in Greek. Intransitive: gata- in Skt, so ventus in Latin and -batos in Greek. Active: deponent verbs in Latin, e.g. locutus, ratus, vectus, etc. The Greek forms in -tos are almost all passive in meaning, often with the idea of "able to be ...", but it is worth noting the artificial literary device in Latin, whereby a passive past participle is given an active meaning, after the model of the Greek middle, e.g. laevo suspensi loculos tabulamque lacerto (Horace, Satire 1:6:74) "hanging their satchels and tablets from their left arm" > (2) ra:men.a+as'vam a:ruhyate > [A] horse is being mounted by R. Should that be as'vas (nominative)? If not, is the verb impersonal? Peter From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Aug 3 18:45:23 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 18:45:23 GMT Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >Even the great >Otto Jespersen, to cite just one name, believed in primitive languages >and in absolute progress in grammatical systems. But nobody believes in >this stuff today. Except, apparently, Bernard H. Bichakjian. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 21:37:50 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 16:37:50 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Friday, July 30, 1999 3:40 AM [ moderator snip ] > Your original assertion was that the passive interpretation of ergative > languages was not only defensible but, in your view, correct. By this > you clearly meant that ergative constructions, in general, *are* > passives. This is the view which was once popular among European > linguists, which has been effectively demolished, and which is correctly > dismissed by Dixon elsewhere on that same page as without support among > linguists today. Pat responds: Well, maybe you think it has been demolished but obviously other practicing linguists do not. [LT] > The point in your cited passage is an entirely different one: do all > ergatives derive historically from passives? Dixon notes that a few > people have argued that the answer is `yes', but then goes on to provide > what, in his view, is good evidence that the correct answer is `no'. Pat responds: Well, Dixon is wrong and so are you. [LR] > Whatever view one might adopt on this second point, it is clearly > distinct from the first point. Claiming that "all ergatives *descend* > from passives" is the same proposition as "all ergatives *are* passives" > is rather like claiming that "all humans descend from their > grandparents" is the same proposition as "all humans *are* their > grandparents. Pat responds: I am not interested in your rhetorical flourishes. Stick to the point if you want to discuss it. [ Moderator's comment: I think that effectively ends this debate: If Mr. Ryan believes that pointing out such a change in argument is a "rhetorical flourish", there is little left to be said, on either side. --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 proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 22:25:40 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:25:40 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Sunday, August 01, 1999 7:25 AM > On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [on my list of typical subject properties in Basque] >> Why do you not give us an example of these so-called subject >> properties in some ergative language besides Basque? Larry responded: > I've chosen Basque because it is the ergative language I know the best, > and I can speak with some authority here. But most other ergative > languages I've read about do not appear to be significantly different -- > though a few certainly are. >> And how were these properties selected? > Empirically. See Ed Keenan's famous article in C. N. Li (ed.), Subject > and Topic. > [on my examples of reflexives and reciprocals] >> Since '*Each other was talking to Susie and Mike' is equally >> ridiculous, I fail to see any valuable point made. > I'm afraid you have failed to understand the point of my examples. > If transitive sentences in ergative languages were "really" passives, > then the absolutive NP should be the subject, and it should exhibit > typical subject properties, such as an inability to be reflexive or > reciprocal. Pat responds: It is you who are missing the point. The absolutive NP in an ergative language is the patient. Lacking an agent (which would be the ergative), there is no possibility of a reflexive or reciprocal. It takes an agent and a patient to tango the Reflexive or Reciprocal. Sumerian regularly expresses reflexives: how? by putting the agent in the ergative and the patient (which is the same) in the absolutive. Larry continued: > In Basque, however, absolutive NPs in transitive sentences > can freely be reflexive or reciprocal, whereas ergative NPs cannot. > It is only in intransitive sentences that absolutive NPs cannot be > reflexive or reciprocal. So, ergative NPs in transitive sentences -- > but not absolutive NPs in transitive sentences -- share the subject > properties of absolutive NPs in intransitive sentences. This is exactly > the opposite of what is predicted by the "passive" theory, and it > constitutes a nail in the coffin of that theory. Pat responds: I am unconvinced. Of course an absolutive NP in a transitive sentence in Basque can be the patient half of a reflexive or reciprocal. The ergative would be the agent half. So what's the big deal? Pat wrote previously: >> Frankly, I am amazed. A reflexive requires an agent and a patient, Larry responded: > Sorry; not so. Consider these examples: > Susie saw herself in the mirror. > Susie is annoyed with herself. > Susie excelled herself. > The first two certainly, and the third arguably, contain no agent, and > the third one certainly, and the first two arguably, contain no patient. > Yet all are overtly reflexive. Pat responds: Larry, this is patent nonsense. In the sentence: "Susie saw the room behind her in the mirror", "Susie" is certainly an agent and "room" is certainly a patient. Your sentence is exactly analogous. "herself" is the patient (a paraphrase for "Susie"), and "Susie" is the agent. In your second sentence, it is equivalent to "Susie[1] annoyed Susie[2]". "annoy" is construed in English as a two-element verb (usually), of which the first element is the agent ("Susie[1]") and the second element is the patient ("Susie[2]'). It is incredible to find anyone, let alone a linguist, denying that any true reflexive construction does not mandatorily contain an agent, which is coterminous with its patient. Pat wrote previously: >> and a reciprocal requires two agents and two patients. Larry responded: > No; same problem: > Susie and Mike collided with each other. > Susie and Mike fancy each other. > Susie and Mike resemble each other. > Not an agent in sight, and not many patients, either. Pat responds: Agent: Susie; patient: Mike; second agent: Mike; second agent: Susie. Larry continued: > Reflexives and reciprocals are *grammatical* constructions, not semantic > states of affairs. Pat responds: I suppose we could dance around the definitions of "grammatical" and "semantic" but the fact is that, e.g. "reflexive" means simply: "a verb having an identical subject and direct object". The fact that you want to extend "reflexive" into areas in which it does not belong based on pseudo-reflexive constructions in some languages does not alter one iota what a true reflexive is. Pat wrote previously: >> An intransitive verb, by definition, has only one NP element Larry responded: > Also wrong: > Susie is sleeping with Mike. > Susie smiled at Mike. > Susie got ready for Mike. > All intransitive, but all with multiple NPs. Pat responds: Well, it is my fault for leaving out the qualification "essential" or "core". Actually, I thought you might grasp that without the qualifiation. Do you think there is a difference between: "Joe is hitting" and "Joe is sleeping"? Or is it just a peculiarity of my personality that would make me ask: "Hitting whom?" but NOT ask "Sleeping with whom?" ? Pat wrote: >> Of all the languages I have ever seen, Basque is, by a mile, far the >> most "unusual" language. Larry responded: > Nope. Pat writes: Larry, I do not need nor want you to assume the prerogative of correcting my expressed impressionistic opinions. Larry continued: > Except that its morphological ergativity is unusually > thoroughgoing, Basque is not unusual in any respect I can think of. > Basque is syntactically unremarkable and morphologically highly regular. > Basque only becomes "unusual" if you insist on applying to it > demonstrably fallacious views like the "passive" theory of ergatives. > Only then does it start to appear bizarre. Pat responds: It is bizarre, in my opinion, because of its weird phonology, and the habit it has of borrowing (according to you and Michelena) vocabulary from everywhere for just about everything so that one is hard put to find originally Basque words for anything. > [LT] >>> The "passive" view of ergative languages in general is indefensible. Pat wrote previously: >> Obviously, I do not think so. And Estival and Myhill (and probably >> Shibatani) do not either --- not to mention the majority of >> linguists of the past. Larry responded: > Estival and Myhill, in Dixon's account of them, emphatically do *not* > embrace the passive theory of ergatives: they only endorse the view that > ergatives invariably *originate* from passives. To my knowledge, > Shibatani has never offered the slightest endorsement of the passive > theory. Pat responds: Shibatni's endorsement is implied by his allowing Estival and Myhill to publish under his aegis. Are you not the one who is forever complaining about wrong-minded ideas being allowed to see the light of a printing press? Would Estival and Myhill be published in a book under your editorship? Fat chance! Larry continued: > As for the linguists of the past, well, they didn't know much syntax, > and they got it badly wrong -- as we now realize. > The linguists of the past frequently believed in all sorts of crazy > things which we have long since laid to rest: stadialism, linguistic > Darwinism, primitive languages, all sorts of things. Even the great > Otto Jespersen, to cite just one name, believed in primitive languages > and in absolute progress in grammatical systems. But nobody believes in > this stuff today. > Linguistics has moved on in the last few decades, and in our > understanding of syntax as much as in any other area. Pat responds: And will continue to move on, past you and many who preside 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 petegray at btinternet.com Wed Aug 4 19:35:32 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 20:35:32 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Let me stress that this is a question, not a claim, since I have not the slightest knowledge of any actual ergative languages. On these topics: (a) `John hit me and went away' & `I hit John and went away' (b) The distinction between passives and ergativity. Consider a co-ordinate sentence with suppressed second subject: (a) In an accusative language, or a language with a passive construction, it appears as: A(agent) verb(passive) B(grammatical subject; logical object) and verb If the second verb is passive, this should mean that B suffers both actions (and presumably A is the agent of both). But if the second verb is active, it means that B suffers the first action, then performs the second. For example, Latin: a Paula pulsatur Marcus et necatur (odd word order, but you get the point) by Paula is-beaten Marcus(subject) and is-being-killed. and a Paula pulsatur Marcus et ridet by Paula is-beaten Marcus(subject) and he laughs. (b) What happens in a truly ergative language? A(ergative) verb(of action) B(absolute) and verb Am I right in thinking that if the second verb can take an ergative subject, A is the agent of both (and B is presumably the object); whereas if the verb cannot take an ergative subject (i.e. it is a description rather than an action), then either B must be the subject (as Dixon claims for Dyirbal?), or the sentence is meaningless or ungrammatical (Is this the case in Basque, Larry?) I guess that different ergative languages will interpret this in different ways, but is there any mileage in pursuing co-ordinate sentences in order to reveal a difference between passive languages and ergative languages? It seems to me that there are two differences: (a) where A affects B for both verbs, the rules are different in passive and ergative languages: in one the second verb must be passive, and in the other it must be able to take an ergative subject. (b) where A does not affect B for both verbs, we get totally different meanings and structures. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Aug 3 22:02:10 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:02:10 -0500 Subject: Ergative & Basque In-Reply-To: <37A184ED.A097DEC8@si.unirioja.es> Message-ID: >About and auxiliary verbs: >> This western usage is clearly calqued on the famous Castilian >> distinction between `be' (unmarked) and `be' (in a place >> or in a state). I'm curious about your usage of marked vs. unmarked vis-a-vis ser and estar. English speakers probably see this dichotomy as marked vs. unmarked but I don't know if Spanish speakers would. I'm wondering if the average person wouldn't see them as completely different verbs. I'd like to hear from native speakers, and Italian speakers re essere vs. stare. [snip] >AFAIK, in English 'He's dead' is both Spanish and . [snip] But they do mean different things. Esta' muerto is a resultant condition while ha muerto is present perfect "s/he's died" Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Aug 3 22:31:45 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:31:45 -0500 Subject: Ergative & Basque Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Saturday, July 31, 1999 2:04 PM > I could much better understand > things if the search is continued back to an origin of the opposition in a > difference between "is" and "there is to" (= "has"). That would make the > ergative just a roundabout use of the same general case categories as > used by the "accusative" syntax. That the search cannot be pushed that far > back for many languages does not change the possibility of such a > prehistory: you can draw no conclusions from inconclusive evidence. Pat interjects: There may be some evidence still around; what is the *-s of the nominative is, in fact, derived from a comitative *-s (related to Russian s[o])? 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 Wed Aug 4 08:39:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:39:01 +0100 Subject: Ergative & Basque In-Reply-To: <37A184ED.A097DEC8@si.unirioja.es> Message-ID: On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Inaki Agirre Perez wrote: > AFAIK, in English 'He's dead' is both Spanish and muerto>. Yes, although the second is more literally equivalent to English `He has died'. > The translation in Basque would be , with verb. > A momentary sense could be achieved by , as if you have just > discovered the fact that he's dead, but is ungrammatical in > my Basque (western). Very interesting. In the Lapurdian Basque which I learned first, `He's dead' is usually , with as a possible alternative. In the Bizkaian Basque which I learned later, `He's dead' is usually or , and is strictly `He has died'. Perhaps this example is unfortunate. First, in Basque is both an adjective meaning `dead' and a verb meaning `die', something which is rather unusual in Basque. Moreover, there is a pragmatic overlap between `He has died' and `He's dead', which further clouds the issue. I'm a little surprised that you don't accept at all, since the form is very familiar to me, and I've even seen it in writing. But I guess that's the way things work in languages. In my own NE American English, `That's a lousy show any more' is perfectly normal, while people not so many miles away from me find it hopelessly ungrammatical, and perhaps even incomprehensible. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jrader at m-w.com Tue Aug 3 16:01:17 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 16:01:17 +0000 Subject: Passivity as a transition Message-ID: I think you've lumped together two unrelated etyma here. See the articles on , , and in Chantraine, _Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque_ (or any other Greek etymological dictionary, for that matter). Jim Rader > So "enkoneo" will later come to mean in haste. "Akoniti" will mean after > Homer, without effort. And "diakonia" will become a common name for a > servant or service in general - literally "through dust" but actually > "through raising dust" making haste or effort. > Regards, > Steve Long From prida at artnet.com.br Sun Aug 1 02:08:47 1999 From: prida at artnet.com.br (Priscilla de Paula) Date: Sat, 31 Jul 1999 23:08:47 -0300 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: [ Moderator's comment: This apparently private note was sent to the Indo-European list, and was forwarded to Mr. Gustafson. Since he has responded to the note with comments relevant to this list, I am posting the original query as well. --rma ] [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Sir : I saw in the end of the text a century of Nostradamus in the languedoc langague of the Midle Age in France. This supose that nearly in the end of this century will be restared a Kingdom of Angleterre or may be also a alegory sense of the presence of a angel manifestation in the earth. The profecy brought to the present can say about the appearance of some celestial phenomenon that can interfere in the evolution of normal facts. Can you comment something about your interpretation ? Thanks. Adelgicius paulae Steve Gustafson wrote: [ moderator snip ] > L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois > Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur > Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois > Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. > --- M. de Notre-Dame From stevegus at aye.net Tue Aug 3 14:46:14 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 10:46:14 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Priscilla de Paula wrote: L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame > Dear Sir : I saw in the end of the text a century of Nostradamus in the > languedoc langague of the Midle Age in France. This supose that nearly in the > end of this century will be restared a Kingdom of Angleterre or may be also a > alegory sense of the presence of a angel manifestation in the earth. The > profecy brought to the present can say about the appearance of some celestial > phenomenon that can interfere in the evolution of normal facts. Can you > comment something about your interpretation ? Thanks. Adelgicius paulae To risk being severely off-topic --- My translation would be (this being Nostradamus, there are a number of obscurities in the text, of course): In the year one thousand nine hundred ninety nine, seven months, >From the sky will come the great King of Terror To revive the great King of Angolmois Before and after, Mars to rule playfully. I believe that this text is in relatively standard Middle French, and not Langue d'Oc. I am going to have to change that signature, since it seems not to have come to pass . At any rate, most Nostradamus buffs seem to believe that it refers to Armageddon and the Judgment Day occurring in July 1999. (Unless, of course, these prophesies run on the Old Style calendar, in which case there is still a week or so for Armageddon to start.) The King of Angolmois is usually claimed to be a distorted version of -Mongolois-, referring to a revived Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, and perhaps the prophesied Antichrist. (It might be likelier to mean a king from Angoule^me, but that hardly seems as dramatic.) To get back slightly on topic, from a linguistic viewpoint, one of the interesting things about Nostradamus' text is how it came to pass that the perfectly sensible word he used for "ninety" (nonante) got replaced in Academy French by "quatre-vingt-dix." I've seen the explanation mooted that the quatre-vingt numbers are a holdover from ancient Gaulish, and didn't know that we knew enough Gaulish to tell. But perhaps so long as the French Academy staves off the moral horrors of creeping decimalism, the Antichrist will be kept at bay. Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Ecce domina quae fidet omnia micantia aurea esse, et scalam in caelos emit. Adveniente novit ipsa, etiamsi clausae sint portae cauponum, propositum assequitur verbo. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Aug 3 22:47:33 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:47:33 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990730185209.24c75d06@online.be> Message-ID: Various researchers link ides/-idus to Etruscan see below *itu- "Ides" < "to divide" [az96: 25; g/lb83, pa, dep] see Latin gloss idus, itus, ituare [az96: 25; g/lb83] see ituna [mp68] itus "middle" [g/lb83, lb 90, mp 75] see Latin ides [g/lb83, lb 90, mp 75] re: ituna ital "fondato, fisso?" [az96] < *sed- "seat, base" [az96] itani "statue" [az96] itesale "foundation, firmament" [az96] itha "base, seat" [az96] itiia "fondatezza" [az96] itir "bases" [az96] itli "base" [az96] itna < ituna "to found, base" [az96] [snip] >>Now, my understanding is that the root idea of -idus- is of a division by >>halves. When the months used to be lunar, the kalends marked the first >>appearance of the slip of the new moon, and the ides were the date of the >>full moon. Perhaps this could be worked into your hypothesis as well. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Aug 3 14:46:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 15:46:35 +0100 Subject: nasal pres / root aor Message-ID: On Strunk ... nasal presents & root aorists, I have now read Strunk. His primary argument is that the patterns of stem alteration observable in Skt within the nasal infix present tenses are not an "Abstufung" (gradation) in the present, but are simply due to the corresponding ablaut in the root. He says full grade II underlies the strong stem of the root, not an infix *-ne-. He explains classes 5 & 9 (roots ending in -u and -H respectively) easily this way, but has trouble with class 7 (roots ending in -C). He says (p31) "A relationship between nasal present and root aorist ... (which in a number of ["mehreren"] verbs of the -n@ and -nu class is clear) can here not be proved." We note that Rix (lexicon I-G Verbs) partially demurs, saying that the distinction of full grades I and II in nasal presents is "not sufficiently proved". Either way, the basic tenet of Strunk's argument at this point is now standard stuff. The point of our discussion arises in his next argument. He says that nasal infix presents are built from the zero and full grades of the root, and that therefore, if we have a nasal infix present, we should expect to find root forms as well, wherever zero grades are found, particular in the aorist. He also mentions the -tos forms. He says (my trans.) "There *must* be a strong affinity between nasal present and root aorist." This is where my problems begin. What does he mean by "affinity"? And when you mention, Jens, a "paradigmatic companionship", what do you mean? Naively, but understandably, I thought you and Strunk meant within a language, but you say: > It was never claimed for the individual languages, only for the common > reconstructed protolanguage. which is a good reflection of what Strunk says. That means you are arguing only that if a PIE language has a nasal present, there is likely to be a root aorist somewhere else in PIE. Strunk gives 8 major examples in his book - and in two of them he has to find the root aorist in a different language from the nasal present. Now my argument is that this is not really "paradigmatic companionship". I do not believe it is anything more than a restatement of what a nasal present is. It seems to me that you and Strunk are merely saying: A PIE root can form: (a) presents of varying kinds in various LL, incl. perhaps a nasal present somewhere; (b) aorists of various kinds in various LL, incl often a root aorist somewhere. So we are not surprised that a good number of roots which show a nasal present somewhere also show a root aorist somewhere else. The "paradigmatic companionship" is only a significant claim if it occurs within the same language, which - at least here - you deny. To be fair, we should look to see if there is a strong PIE correlation, and if there is a correlation within individual languages. This posting is long enough, so I'll do that in part two. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Aug 3 16:22:40 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 17:22:40 +0100 Subject: nasal pres / root aorist II Message-ID: Do nasal presents very regularly show root aorists, either in the same language or others? To save bored readers from wading through the details, here's the conclusion I reach at the end: So for PIE we need to crunch numbers and get a proper statistical analysis, and for individual languages only Greek and Sanksrit have a hope of showing a genuine correlation, but for both it is, if anything, nothing more than a general tendency. It certainly can't support the original claim that since Sanskrit shows the form tundate, it must once have had a root aorist to go with it. Here's the details: ****A: in PIE I was pleased to have a good look through Rix's Lexicon (thank you for the reference, Jens). A proper study needs to be done - as I have said before - to see which present formations statistically go with which aorists. Neither Strunk nor Rix provide this. Some clue comes, however from the variety available. Rix suggests that there were three original aorist forms, root, sigmatic, and reduplicated. He says that in PIE there are 265 certain examples of root aorists, 79 sigmatic, and 5 reduplicated (or of total suggested forms, 392 root, 174 sigmatic, 14 reduplicated). So of the 349 aorist forms he thinks certain, 76% are root aorists; of the total 580 aorists suggested, 68% are root aorists. Therefore in PIE 68-76% of verbs which have an aorist, show a root aorist somewhere. We should therefore not be surprised if in PIE 68-76% of the verbs with any given present formation, which have an aorist, show a root aorist somewhere. This would be a meaningless random result. Now not all verbs show an aorist, but the claim is that verbs with a nasal infix present go with a root aorist. (Does this mean all nasal infix verbs, or only those that have an aorist?) I checked a random sample of 16 verbs with nasal presents. Nine of them had no aorist; the other 7 all had root aorists somewhere in PIE. A miniscule sample, but suggestive. I'm sure you will be pleased by it, Jens. In any case, it is clear that there is a need for Strunk's claim to be based on a proper statistical analysis, not just on a theoretical assertion supported by his ridiculously small group of 8 selected examples. ****B: in an individual languages Strunk and Jens do not make the claim that nasal presents are associated with root aorists within a particular langauge (which would be a much more significant claim), but it is worth testing nonetheless. Strunk says (p128) "[This system] appears precisely in Indo-Iranian and Greek" He says that this proves the archaic character of these two languages. I said: >> (a) In Greek it is largely true, but there are exceptions; so a bald >> statement would need qualification. >> (b) In Latin it is largely untrue, since the aorists are either sigmatic or >> the rare reduplicative aorist (tango tetigi, claimed by some as an aorist >> on the basis of Homer tetago:n, or the lengthened vowel: pango pe:gi (~ >> perfect pepigi). I can only find cumbo cubui which supports the claim in >> Latin. Jens said: > You might also have thought of cerno:/cre:vi:, fundo:/fu:di:, > linquo:/li:qui:, rumpo:/ru:pi:, sino:/si:vi:, sperno:/spre:vi:, > sterno:/stra:vi:, vinco:/vi:ci:. li:qui and vi:ci probably have the same origin as vi:di (which you significantly did not include, because its origin is known), that is to say in an -o- grade perfect. (*-oi- > *-ei- after v, or between /l/ and labial or labiovelar, then *-ei- > i: as normal) fu:di and ru:pi could equally be from o grade perfects (we know that iu:vi is). In any case, If they are aorists, they would have to be full grade, and I excluded them because I thought that "root" meant "root", not full grade - though I see the Strunk uses "root" to mean full grade, too. cre:vi, spre:vi, si:ve, stra:vi are clearly -vi formation (Latin) perfects, on a laryngeal base. The origin of these -v-forms is still unknown. In what sense do you make them either a root form, or an aorist? I note that elsewhere in your posting you claim that the Greek sigmatic aorists can be counted as root forms. This means you count zero grade, full grade, Greek sigmatic, and Latin -vi formations all as root aorists for the purposes of your claim. (a) The wider the definition of "root aorist" the less meaningful your claim becomes. (b) You would need to show that there is indeed a proper root aorist underlying these forms. But (i) this cannot be done in Latin - the best we can do is show a zero grade form (as in many Latin perfects); (ii) how would you distinguish a sigmatic aorist in Greek from a root aorist? For Sanskrit, I gave examples which contradicted the claim, and Jens gave some which supported it. Neither of us had (or has ?) complete accurate figures. In my sample I took random instances, so I restricted myself to just one Skt class. Jens said: >why ignore those of class nine (too good?) - ? That was a petty jibe, Jens, and unworthy of you. In fact the figures for class nine are not good. Of those Whitney lists as "older", 7 show no aorist, 10 do not show a root aorist, and 13 do. You get 13 / 30, about 43% - not bad, but not totally convincing, either. So for PIE we need someone to crunch numbers and get a proper statistical analysis, and for individual languages only Greek and Sanskrit have a hope of showing a genuine correlation, but for both it is, if anything, nothing more than a general tendency. It certainly can't support the original claim that since Sanskrit shows the form tundate, it must once have had a root aorist to go with it. Peter From vjpaniego at worldonline.es Tue Aug 3 21:53:15 1999 From: vjpaniego at worldonline.es (Victor y Rosario) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 23:53:15 +0200 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin Message-ID: Re: where the -n- comes from (in adjectives such as Latin _mater-nus_ etc) a hint may be found in the opposition r/n. According to Francisco Rodriguez Adrados and his Indoeuropean Linguistics, 1. A declension was born in PIE which used -r in nominative and -n- in the rest of cases. Cf Hittite uttar/uddanas (*thing*), Old Iranian ahar/ahnas (*day*) or Latin femur/feminis. 2. Adjectives were generally created from genitives. For example, in Hittite *kurur* meant *hostility*. The phrase *anthusas kururas*, *man of hostility*, formally genitive, was eventually interpreted as *hostile man*. 3. As the r/n declension was little productive, the genitive -nos was recycled in Latin into an adjectival suffix. Si non e4 vero, e4 ben trovato. ======================== Victor J. Paniego Siles, Spain From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 4 14:40:08 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:40:08 -0500 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990730182619.24c74102@online.be> Message-ID: In Toponimia [or Toponomastica?] della Toscana Meridionale this morpheme seems to pop up a bit more in Latin/early Romance versions of name than in the Etruscan form although this may be a case of lack of evidence Another curiousity is that the Romance form is often feminine while the Latin form ends in -ennius, -enus, etc. [snip] >>I was wondering about the origins of the Latin adjectival >>suffix -n-us, -n-a, -n-um [snip] >>Paolo Agostini >[Ed Selleslagh] >I'm equally intrigued by this. This -n- or -en also pops up in a variety of >non-IE languages, most notably in Etruscan ( -na, which may be the origin, >or the enhancing factor in Latin) where it indicates origin or ascendance, >in Uralic and in Basque (Vasconic?) where it denotes the genitive. (In >Basque, -en-a means: 'that, him, her of...') It also occurs in the oldest >form of genitive in living Germanic ( Ger. der Mensch, des Menschen; Du. de >mens, des mensen), but that has been attributed to old -n stems - a theory >that looks a bit odd to me. >In all those languages it represents some form of 'genitive notion'. >Intriguing, to say the least. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From vjpaniego at worldonline.es Tue Aug 3 21:55:12 1999 From: vjpaniego at worldonline.es (Victor y Rosario) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 23:55:12 +0200 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: Re: the name Vlach and its likely origin, a brilliant paper was written by the Romanian linguist Mihai Isbasescu on *altnordischen Quellen u(ber Vlah*. Some evidence is given as to identify the germanic word *blakumen* with *Vlachs*: 1. A c.1050 grave inscription in Gotland refers to two nobles killed when battling against *blakumen*. 2. The Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringle illustrates a campaign by Alexios Comnenos (early 12th century) in *Blokumannaland*, translated into Latin as *in Blachorum terram*. 3. In the 13th century a reference is made in the Flatenyjarbok about a raid against *Blo(kumenn*. 4. Another saga (Fornaldar Sogur Nordrlanda) gives *Blo(kumannaland*. After calling again our attention on the many sources that use b- and -k- for the name of this people (e.g. *Balak* in the Armenian Geography by Chorenatzi, 9th century), Isbasescu concludes that either a. These items represent more or less the word *Vlach* as heard by other ethnic groups (access to written sources, especially in the case of the Scandinavian inscriptions, is considered unlikely), or b. The word was coined by Germanic tribes, with the meaning of *the black-haired or -skinned ones*. This suggestive hypothesis, as far as I know well founded on linguistic and historical data, is worth reading it. ======================== Victor J. Paniego Siles, Spain From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 4 06:24:36 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 01:24:36 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Sent: Friday, July 30, 1999 6:42 PM > At 23:15 19/07/99 EDT, you wrote: > My hypothesis for the origin of the East-European -ch in Walach and the > like: a derivative ending, often depreciative, still productive as -ak in > Slavic (but also as an adjective forming suffix in Greek -ako's and in > various forms in other IE lgs, and even in Etruscan -ach and in Sumerian > -age). Pat asks: Sumerian -age? Do you have a reference for that "suffix"? 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 Thu Aug 5 16:56:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 12:56:27 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/3/99 7:33:26 PM, edsel at glo.be wrote: <> It does make sense. One wouldn't need to look to a borrowing from Germanic to account for "Slovaki" or "Polaki." As a derivative (from a place, region or group name) of course it would naturally take on a corona of additional meanings. As far as the Greek goes, I have this from I don't know where: "A suffix of Greek origin for forming of names is known in Rumanian: -ache, from Greek -achV: Michalache, Vasilache, etc." This puts a slightly different twist on it. So could "Vlacki" have even been from a self-name that traveled into other tongues. In some early more western records it even appears as "Blacki" and "Blaki" and that is why I would ask what "Balkan" is from. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 4 05:46:15 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 01:46:15 EDT Subject: Semantic change Message-ID: In a message dated 8/3/99 5:29:56 PM, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: <> In some cases, we might go even farther and suggest that over thousands of years <<"identity" of meanings or even "near-identity" of meanings>> is itself implausible. This would be especially true where major changes separate what the cognates refer to as opposed to what the common ancestor referred to. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 4 06:09:52 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 02:09:52 EDT Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? Message-ID: In a message dated 7/30/99 12:32:35 AM, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: <> I can't supply what you are asking for here, but I can offer some observations that may be pertinent, at least as far as the Balkan groups you mention. And although I'm not sure this reflects the "new way of looking at things," I think it's fairly current. In general, the archaeological evidence seems at best ambiguous about the <> But it is a little difficult to see how these could be <> Thracians, Dacians and Illyrians - as far as their remains have been correctly identified - each left evidence of fairly distinct material cultures behind them. This may be attributed to some degree to when and from where these material influences came from. The culture that we would identify as "Thracian", for example, was involved in Iron Age metalurgy far earlier than anything we find north of the Danube that we might call Dacian. Illyrians' sites on the other hand show strong affinities with cultures of the Italian Peninsula in terms of material goods. Beyond mere influence, north of the Danube, in areas commonly designated as "Dacia" on historical maps, there is significant evidence of the presence of cultures other than "Dacian." Dating before about 100BC, over 140 Celtic settlements or cemetaries have been found in Transylvania and the Banat - perhaps more than "Dacian" remains. (Germanic metalwork and much Scythian-Sarnmatian material have also been found in the area from about this time.) And this Celtic presence did not represent merely local settlements - brooch types found in Romania are "almost identical" to the LaTene B types found in central Europe. This seems rather important when one sees statements like the following: "...the Dacian pottery of the 2nd to the 4th centuries [AD] preserved everywhere ? both within the province and outside of it ? [display] the powerful traditions from the late La Tene, from which it developed relatively uniformly." Pottery is of course a basic yard marker of material cultural identification, and this statement cannot be made regarding Thracian or even Illyrian pottery. Certain burial practices also suggest a deeper cultural difference between the groups. For example, we hear that rituals "such as placing the inventary over the cavity, assembling of fragments of earthenware together with stones, animal bones, and other objects, are old Dacian customs." On the other hand, "the ritual of burning of the cavities.. dates from the period before the occupation of Dacia by the Romans. The funeral ritual of burned cavities is not Dacian and does not appear in significant numbers [in Dacia] before the Roman conquest. It is found in Pannonia, Moesia, and Illyricum. Garasanin (quoted by B?rzu Cemet. 1973, p. 92), assumed that it is of Illyrian origin; it was, in any case, widedspread in Illyria." The contrast with the burial tombs and necropolises (with almost Mycenaean-like "honeycombs") of the 3-5th Century BC Thracians and their later Greek inspired practices is quite dramatic. There are quite a few other examples that are not exactly suggestive of a "one people with different names" premise. One does not find the continuity in discoverable material culture that one finds in connection with, e.g., the Celts, Germans or Slavs. But the truth is that the correlations in the geographic area of the upper Danube is quite muddled. (For example, I just saw in one article "Daco-Roman" sites identified as "Cherniakhov", which is much more often associated with the coming of the Goths and which extended well into the Ukraine. But this subject matter seems to generate these kinds of surprises.) In terms of the writers: Homer identifies the Thracians (and Mysians) and puts them on the side of the Trojans. Herodotus (say 450BC) identifies both Thracians and Getae, saying that the Getae are different from all other Thracians. This is in the course of describing Darius' invasion of Europe in his attempt to attack the Scythians from the west. Perhaps important here is that Darius subdues the Getae before his army ever crosses north of the Danube. Herodotus also describes the more northwestern neighbors of the Scythians as the 'Agythoni" - 550 years later, Ptolemy will place the Gythoni south of the Venedi and just north of Dacia - about the same place. A number of historians described Alexander's march to the Danube. He is first attacked in a northern mountain pass by Thracian "traders" who roll wagons down the slopes at his army. He chases other Thracians to the Danube, then crosses it to attack Getae on the other side who run off into the "uninhabited country" to the north. "All the independent tribes" along the Danube - mainly Celts - along with Celts from Illyria send emissaries to make peace. Later the Cimbri attack "Dacians" near Italy before invading in the 2d cent. BC. The "Getae" consolidate and invade east, west and south into the Balkans in 80BC under Burebista. Then they fall back. Strabo the Greek (around the time of Christ) says that the Greeks once confused the Thracians with the Getae; that the Getae speak Thracian: that for some time the Getae had been moved or escaped to Thrace because of the attacks of the Scythians, Sarmatians and Bastarnae/Peucini (who both Strabo and Tacitus describe as Germanic types). Strabo also says that the Getae and the Dacians are of the same people, but that the Dacians live in the west on the borders of Germania (where Caesar also places them) far from Greece. Strabo also correctly notes that the Thracian word for 'town' used in compound is -bria. Getea/Dacia rises again in the 2d Century AD under Decaballus (sp?) is conquered by Trajan and becomes a buffer province (under the name 'Dacia") for 160 years until the part north of the Danube is abandoned because of barbarian incursions. The Romans however continually also used "Getae," often to refer to Thracians, Boeotians and even as a surname or a slave name. Linguistically, the most seemingly complete assessment I've gotten my hands on is by Duridanov from the 1980's I believe. He compares Thracian and Dacian and concludes they were "two different Indo-European languages", based on such phonetic differences as Dacian 'b,d,g' vs. Thracian 'p,t,k'; Dacian 'p,t,k' vs. Thracian 'ph, th, kh'; Dacian 's' vs. Thracian 'st'; etc. It should be noted however that there are almost no Dacian inscriptions and (by far) the longest Thracian one (the Ezero gold ring- 4th Cent BC?) is 61 Greek characters long and appears indecipherable (Duridanov mentions more than 20 different translations; on a museum tour in the US in 1998 no translation was even offered.) The main source of data is personal and place names. Given the form of the evidence, maybe the most certain element in the whole mess, the suffix for 'town', goes against Dacian=Thracian. As JP Mallory put it in 'In Search of the IEs': "Certainly it is odd that the standard suffix in Dacian indicating a town '-dava', is not reflected in any of the three Thracian words for town, villiage or fort (-bria, -para and -diza.)" The Illyrian, Moesian, etc., questions are just about as complex. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 4 14:53:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:53:12 -0500 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, Macedonian, Albanian and Greek? Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with Indo-Iranian? Is Albanian considered more likely to be Illyrian than Thracian? Is Phrygian still considered as a possible ancestor or close relative of Armenian? Is Macedonian considered closer to Greek or Thracian? [snip] >-- Hittite and Phrygian are distinct. They're both IE, of course, but >Phrygian is not a member of the Anatolian subgroup of IE. Like Armenian, >it's intrusive in Anatolia and is post-Hittite. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 4 10:46:31 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 06:46:31 EDT Subject: Hittite & Celtic dative in /k/ ? Message-ID: In a message dated 8/3/99 6:49:38 PM, 114064.1241 at compuserve.com writes: >the comparison is unlikely, as the Hittite form is also used for the >accusative, an use for which it has cognates in Germanic (gotic mik) and >perhaps in Slavic (russian ko - to with only an allative meaning). The >primary meaning was probably allative, as for most accusative in IE. This kind of information in no way lessens the probability of connection, since (as stated just above) the accusative may derive from an older dative (or allative or etc.). This kind of information CAN suggest that a connection may have great(er) time depth, to allow time (how much?) for a common change to occur in one or another language. (I assume it is not being proposed that the ORIGINAL meaning was accusative, and that the accusative developed into a dative or allative? That would be a case of a more grammatical or "bleached" meaning changing into a more concrete meaning, possible of course but less likely.) As a modern example, consider the use of the "dative" preposition "a" (if one wishes to call it that, where we do not have inflectional cases) with Spanish animate direct objects. >the Goidelic form is assumed to derive from *angh "near" >which is found in Latin angustus. >Its closest cognates, assuming to Stokes, is Breton hag >(and) and Welsh ac (same meaning) I am not as familiar with typological tendencies for an adessive (being "at" or "near") to develop either into a dative or into an accusative. Whether the speculated connection is valid or not is quite another question. I just do not see how the offered information (except the *angh part) has a bearing other than to strengthen the plausibility. Until someone finds another example of a postposition "near" turning into a dative/accusative etc., in some language of the world, I am doubtful of this etymology on typological grounds. I would love to have my typological horizons expanded if this is really a clear case, with intermediate stages actually attested. Lloyd Anderson From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Wed Aug 4 20:35:43 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 21:35:43 +0100 Subject: Hittite & Celtic dative in /k/ ? Message-ID: I do not have anything to hand to cover the provenance of 'aig', or the likely date by which the conjugated prepositions arose in Insular Celtic, but it is worth noting that Rhys and Morris found links not with Hittite but with (?ur)Berber. Note also that there is an semantic overlap between 'have' and 'own', and a dialectal variation between forms based on 'aig' ('at' among other senses) and 'le' ('with' do.). I would instinctively doubt a link between the Gadelic and Hittite forms, if only on the assumption that 'agam/agad/aici/aige/againn/agaibh/acu' (and orthographic variations) are themselves insular innovations, but that does not address the source of 'aig', of course. Dennis King might have something more specific to add. Gordon Selway At 11:12 am 26/7/99, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >In the light of the discussions on Hittites and other early Indo-European >peoples of Anatolia and the Balkans, going on on IE and ANE lists, it may >be relevant to consider whether even Celts and Hittites may have shared >any things linguistically or culturally, as areal manifestations. > >Here it is one small item for your consideration. >Here is a tidbit linking Celtic and Hittite which I found many years ago, >when compiling typological comparisons of the semantic domains of "be" >and "have". >I wondered at the time whether it is a relic Dative case preposition / >postposition which Hittite and Celtic shared, presumably as a retention, >but conceivably as an areal phenomenon, or both of the above. Does >Tocharian have it too? (I have no idea whether the later Indic Dative >postposition with /k/ is related or a chance lookalike.) >The forms being discussed, the dative case of the 1st singular pronoun, >are statistically likely to be highly conservative, both because they are >pronouns and also as oblique cases rather than the more often innovating >nominative etc. > >********** >Celtic preposition ag- where Hittite had postposition -uk above: >Irish >ta' ... aige "he has", with the preposition /ag-/ (Watkins) >ni fhuil fear agam "not husband to-me" or rather "I have no husband" >ag-am "to-me" >Gaelic >tha airgiod agam "is money to-me", or rather "I have money" >*** >Lloyd Anderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 4 14:25:20 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:25:20 -0500 Subject: Principled Comparative Method In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This may be because, as a whole --among white speakers, Southern accents seem to be in the process of being replaced by something resembling general American English with a slight Southern intonation. After living in the South for most of the last 20 years I generally find that only aout 5% or 10% of white students speak with a Southern accent but I don'tThose that do tend to be religious fundalmentalists from rural or small town working class backgrounds. Among my relatives in Appalachia, most do not have the traditional accent. I lived for a while in Spartanburg, South Carolina where about 5 or 10% of my students (mainly from just north of there) said /U/ > /u/ (that is "bush" pronounced as "boosh") but only about half said /I/ > /i/ ("fit" pronounced as "feet"). The lack of symmetry may be due to instability of the local accent. [snip] > In any case, I'd be really careful in assuming that phonological >rules always apply across entire classes of categories. It's true that >things often do work this way, but they don't always. > Around 12 years ago, I was interviewing a speaker of the South >Midlands dialect area of American English. In this dialect, /I/ > /i/ for >some speakers, and /U/ > /u/ for some speakers. I assumed that if the >speaker had one rule, she'd have the other as well; I figured that the >general rule was "high lax vowels become tense". To my great surprise, >she had the second rule but not the first. There was no denying what I >was hearing; my assumptions about the expected symmetry within the system >were just plain wrong. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 4 17:13:26 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 13:13:26 EDT Subject: Comparative AND Reconstructive Method Message-ID: In a message dated 8/3/99 7:27:07 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes: > As a matter of terminology, the kind of argumentation you propose >here falls outside the Comparative Method. It's true that we do sometimes >fall back on this kind of external guesswork, but it's the sort of special >pleading you make to bolster some assumption which you need for your >argument. It is more common than such a statement would lead us to think. > In any case, I'd be really careful in assuming that phonological >rules always apply across entire classes of categories. It's true that >things often do work this way, but they don't always. Completely agree. If they often do work this way, then the presence of some parts of such a pattern makes the occurrence of other parts of the same pattern more probable, to some marginal degree. That is all I intended, and all I would claim. No set of evidence is ever completely conclusive in any absolute sense. Of course not. But... We do use "circumstantial evidence" in all aspects of life. > Around 12 years ago, I was interviewing a speaker of the South >Midlands dialect area of American English. In this dialect, /I/ > /i/ for >some speakers, and /U/ > /u/ for some speakers. I assumed that if the >speaker had one rule, she'd have the other as well; I figured that the >general rule was "high lax vowels become tense". To my great surprise, >she had the second rule but not the first. There was no denying what I >was hearing; my assumptions about the expected symmetry within the system >were just plain wrong. > I've fallen into this same kind of trap plenty of other times. >There are so many cases of beautiful symmetry and parallelism in >phonological systems that it's an ongoing challenge to remember that >things don't always work out so neatly. Even in the Japanese case that >you give, there are recent loan words (e.g. tiishatsu "T-shirt") to mess >up the nice symmetry of the system. There are actually many older Sino-Japanese loans too "sha sho shu she" all exist in such loans. (Actually, I did NOT make the claim implied here, I was not claiming that "shi" MUST derive historically only from *si, merely that there is an asymmetrical sub-system, which happens to be native not in loan words, in which it does.) >> One of them I am quite certain is to develop both articulatory and >> acoustic "spaces", relative "distances" between different articulations >> and different acoustic effects, so that when attempting to judge >> likelihood of cognacy of pairs of words, we can judge similarity >> by degrees, not by yes/no dichotomies. (These will partly depend >> on the general typology of the sound systems of the languages >> concerned, they will not be completely universal, but they will >> also not be completely idiosyncratic.) >The Comparative Method is concerned with the reconstruction of categories, >_not_ the phonetic values which might have been the realization of those >categories. This is a very important point. When we talk about >Proto-Indo-European */a/, we don't mean "the phonological category in >Proto-Indo-European which had the phonetic realization [a]"; we mean "the >hypothetical PIE category which gave rise to the Sanskrit category /a/, >the Latin category /a/, etc." Agreed in part, in part not. We DO and MUST mean not merely something which represents a set of correspondences, we DO and MUST mean something WHOSE PHONETIC SUBSTANCE could have given rise to the observed attestation. (We can easily make errors, as reconstructing c-hachek (English "ch") because it occurs in a wide range of descendant languages, where it might have gotten there by drift in each descendant separately, and the actual form of the proto-language had *ky for all of these.) Therefore the following is not valid: >As far as the Comparative Method is concerned, we could designate that >PIE >category with an integer, e.g. "Category 27". */a/ is just a convenient >label or nickname for it. Re the following, the hypothesized proto-form should be much more than merely a guess, it should be a highly-educated hypothesis or estimate, resting not on "intuition" but on educated reasoning and experience. >Along with that label comes a built-in guess >about what the prehistoric phonetic value for that category might have >been, but this is _just_ a guess; the actual phonetic value is beyond the >reach of the Comparative Method. Whether one calls it "Comparative Method" or not, Calvert Watkins is absolutely correct, that the RESULTS of the valid application of the method must in general aim at a reconstructed language FROM WHICH one can derive the hypothesized descendants, (of course preferably by mechanisms of language change which are known to occur, though we must allow for discovering new ones). The substance of the reconstructions DOES matter. If some wish to call this "Reconstructive Method", and distinguish it from a very narrow sense of the "Comparative Method", then they will logically be forced to CEASE applying the term "comparative method" to much of what we traditionally have called that. The "comparative method" includes, ideally, the "reconstructive" aspects also. There is no point in trying to define it to exclude those, because they are part and parcel of the best comparative practice. Quite the contrary, making EXPLICIT that comparative method includes reconstructive method, and is NOT mere superficial comparison, is quite consistent with what many traditionalists maintain. Making this explicit allows us to IMPROVE AND EXTEND the totality of our comparative & reconstructive methods. Hiding it under the rug blocks progress, and misrepresents to students what we think know and how we know it. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 4 14:27:35 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 09:27:35 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <000001beda9e$456e5860$4ad3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: What is the AA root for jm-3? Or what are its cognates in other AA languages? [ moderator snip ] >Pat comments: >Some might be interested in Egyptian jm-3, 'kind, gentle, well-disposed, >pleasining, gracious, be delighted, charmed', which I believe is likely to >represent an AA example of the same root. [snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Wed Aug 4 20:25:31 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 22:25:31 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- >From PATRICK C. RYAN Sent : Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:33:30 >Pat comments: >Some might be interested in Egyptian jm-3, 'kind, gentle, well-disposed, >pleasining, gracious, be delighted, charmed', which I believe is likely to >represent an AA example of the same root. I am quite sceptical about the relationship. If am- is indeed related to amb, then the Proto-IE prototype should have been, according to Martinet something like H2e-mbhi, or H2-mbhi, with an initial laryngeal. If it is not, the prototype should have been H2em, then too with a laryngeal, as there is no recorded VC root in IE and that /j/ is conserved in most IE dialects. So unless you supose that the IE laryngeal is the reflex of an AA /j/, I will going on finding the link you draw quite doubtfull. It is still however possible that this similarity you supose is the result of a early borrowing, much like prn for house. Don't forget that if Renfrew's theory (or Sherrat"s) is true, IE originated in the middle east at the contact of some AA tongues and that some borrowings must have taken place. An instance of this is Sumerian tapiru (metal-worker), probably borrowed to an otherwise unknown IE-like tongue. Damien Erwan Perrotin From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Wed Aug 4 21:12:10 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 23:12:10 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: >From Eduard Selleslagh Sent : Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:35 >Ed wrote >Has it been proven that the Breton afan was derived from an originally >Brythonic *ama? (I have no problem with the reconstruction itself, I even >mentioned it in a different way). Brythonic languages like Welsh contain >large numbers of words that are most likely loans from Latin. It's all a >matter of timing, of course. It is difficult to be sure in that matters (the result would have been the same), but if Brythonnic had borrowed Latin Amare, it would be with its first meaning (to love), and would have replaced the indigenous term (*car) still in use in Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Moreover, the Breton term suggests that the original word was not a verb but the noun af (kiss), wich does descent from an older *av, itself from *am (albeit *ab is not phonetically impossible), all of this fairly regular in Breton (if the verb had been first, and not derivated from the noun, it would have been, regularly *avan). This noun cannot be a Latin loanword, as there is nor corresponding word in Latin (the equivalent is amor, which would have yielded *aver, or *avor). >According to M.Carrasquer's Stammbaum, which I subcribe to, IE and Etruscan >(and the like)are cousins. I definitely aggree, this the thesis of my new published book (in French, sorry), and the basis of the handbook I am working on. >The only thing I'm pretty convinced of is that the Etr. and Lat. am- and >the Lat. amb- (IE m.b-) roots are related, the problem is 'how?' There I am quite dubious. If we assume that the oldest form of Latin amb- and the like is H2e-mbhe or H2-mbhe, the second member of which is a particle meaning beside, and which is at the origin of English by and of the Sanskrit dative plural in -bh- (Martinet, 1986), what seems quite acceptable. If we suppose this root began with a prenasalized *mbh (Martinet too), which is still the best hypothesis to explain such alternations as Greek nephos (cloud), Welsh nef (from *nemos, sky) or Breton env (he, from Celtic *emo) and Hittite abas (this). The we could draw possible hypothesis. When stressed the prenasalized becomes am- in Etruscan at the initial : thus am(u) (to be) from *mbheu (to be, to become). ame (with) from *mbhe (beside) (Old English be) amake (wife) from *mbhendhto- (bound) When unstressed,at the initial it remains unchanged or become a /m/ mulch (beautiful) from *mbhleg- (to shine) : the Etruscan word was written with a m but was borrowed by Latin as pulcher, hence the possibility of mutu (thyme) from *mbhent- (mint) (Breton bent). At the interior of a word, it seems that it become a p (which in turn can become a spirant, but the value of "aspirated" consonnants in Etruscan is not clear). snuiaph (probably heavenly, as it is associated with pulumchva - stars - in the Tablets of Pyrgi) from (s)nembh- (cloud, sky) : Greek nephos, Breton nenv. ipa (which, this) from *embho- (this) : Hittite apas, Breton env, Celtic *emo In that view the reflex of *H2e-mbhe would be something like *ep or *ap. It is however possible that Etruscan am (which is known through the very Indo-European looking proper name aminth (eros)) is the result of an Anatolian adstrat, perhaps the famous Twrs of the Egyptian inscription. As we are sure that the root is present in Anatolian (c.f Lydian) that is even relatively likely. Of course, all my analysis of Etruscan does only reflect my personnal - an much in working - opinion an theory. c.f Geocities/Athens/Crete/4060 for very provisionnal details. Damien Erwan Perrotin From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Aug 5 20:19:11 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 21:19:11 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Thank you for your detailed reply, Jens - and for taking the time to give such a full answer. The evidence from Vedic root presents and -s- aorists is especially helpful. Incidentally, how does this fit with your suggestion that -s- aorists and -sk presents go together? Peter From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Aug 8 02:38:38 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 22:38:38 EDT Subject: ? "Vocabulary Density" Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: In general, I do not allow cross-posting between these two lists, because those who subscribe to both receive two copies, which in turn makes it difficult for those who read both to keep straight where a reply will be seen. However, since in my opinion this is a very important query, I will cross-post to both groups any responses that come from either group, and ask that those who read both bear with this departure. If there is very much discussion--more than a half-dozen responses or so--I will find a different way to deal with it that avoids needless duplication. --rma ] A query to those of you interested in language evolution and deep language relations... Has anyone analyzed in a careful technical way a question whether modern languages have IN NORMAL USE a greater density of vocabularies across the same size meaning space than reconstructed languages? Is there any conceivable way to separate that question from the influence of what is reconstructible vs. what is lost? The result is not at all a foregone conclusion, as much vocabulary having to do with practical traditional activities, such as shipbuilding, fishing, agriculture, animal husbandry, is going out of use among those raised in cities who have no experience with such activities, and no reason to discuss them, even to hear discussions of them. And it is not a foregone conclusion, because one might wish to argue that the semantic space of modern life is itself larger than the semantic space of hundreds or thousands of years ago. More concepts, more words to refer to them. The density could thus remain constant. But does it in fact? Would we not have to make matters comparable by studying density (saturation?) of vocabulary across traditional semantic spaces which may remain constant? Or is it circular, that the amount of vocabulary available and in ordinary use is the DEFINITION of how "large" the semantic space is, so that distinct terms retain a constant "semantic distance" from each other? I would think that is a purely circular way of reasoning, and cannot be valid. I'm not sure this question can be addressed in any useful way, given the biases of how we get access to the facts. And I will be happy if I am proven ignorant by someone citing some good references. The reason it seems important to me is that the density of vocabulary across semantic space may be an important factor involved in causalities of language change. If Livermore Labs can use its nuclear engineering skills to analyze traffic flow dynamics using concepts of physics (metaphorically gases, liquids, solids; state-transitions etc.), why cannot linguistics develop some similar more technical concepts and analyses. Even the field of Voting (Electoral) systems is now becoming quantified and structured with causally (?) related variables. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Aug 8 02:38:40 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 22:38:40 EDT Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? Message-ID: I respectfully disagree with the person who recently argued between the following two alternatives that either could be an appropriate "null hypothesis" (though I am greatly appreciative of that same person's many other contributions!) > No languages are related. > > All languages are related. Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like "We do not know whether all languages are related (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) Any attempt to force anyone else to accept something that embodies a CLAIM (as both of the first two alternatives above do), is MANIPULATING the discourse, instead of dealing with facts. If we don't know, then we don't know, it's as simple as that. I personally don't give a hoot what anyone wants to "assume", or tell me to assume, in the absence of data justifying such an assumption. Using a "burden of proof" argument is merely a way of trying to get someone to accept a conclusion in the absence of evidence. Only facts are relevant, facts which could make one conclusion more probable than another, (facts which DO NOT have anything to do with our own mental convenience, not EVEN with assumptions that nature is simple in some way we mentally want her to be, when she may in this particular respect NOT be simple). I would love it if we could get back to improving our tools, and to improving our databases so we can more easily find relevant data, and other such useful endeavors. I do not presume to have yet seen all of the useful procedures, not by any means. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Aug 8 03:30:27 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1999 22:30:27 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The reason I'm harping on non-African languages is that non-Africans supposedly have common ancestors who split off from Africans no earlier than around 100,000 BP, at least according to my understanding of what I've seen recently. Unless language arose after that point, then non-African languages [and perhaps some African languages] developed from whatever language they spoke. These groups did not leave Africa at the same time but evidently split off from the same group in North East Africa. Although it's possible that there were later outliers who arrived from other parts of Africa, these would have most likely been swamped by the expansion of existing families. In any case, the existing outliers all seem to have arrived before surrounding languages. Basque is possible the only candidate for a non-congener among non-African languages, in the sense that it's only existing unclassified language near Africa. It may well have entered Europe via the Maghreb. Even if they did, they may well have descended from the same population that gave rise to non-Africans and supposedly the bulk of North Africans. In any case, I'm certain that Stefan will come back from Siberia with proof linking Yeniseian to other Asian languages :> [snip] [snip] >Well. Niger-Kordofanian and Afro-Asiatic are widely accepted as valid, >even though the published evidence in support of each is sparse. >However, not only Khoisan but also Nilo-Saharan are at present little >more than hopeful areal groupings. Neither is supported by any >significant body of evidence, and both are doubted by some specialists. My understanding is that Nilo-Saharan is accepted by most, but that there are problems in fine details and possibly with the inclusion of Songhai. Khoisan, as I said, seems to be somewhere between one and five families with shared aspects of phonology and lexicon. The grammatical features, as described by Encyclopedia Britannica, seem to divide it into 2 or 3 groups with 2 very divergent grammatical systems. >> it seems that the onus of proof is on the polygenesists. >Why? Because bottlenecks and rapid expansions by given families very likely wiped out any possible non-congeners. >In comparative linguistics, the null hypothesis is always this: > No languages are related. I see what you're saying but I'm speaking from a pragmatic perspective, taking into account only existing languages, Given that Sumerian, Etruscan, Minoan, Pictish, et al. aren't around I don't take them into account any more than I'd take into account Neandertals and Australopithicines in an argument of mono- vs. poly-genesis of human evolution. [snip] >And I cannot see that this is a wise move, or even a possible move. >Doing so would render demonstrations of relatedness otiose, and require >instead demonstrations of *unrelatedness*. And it is a logical >impossibility to demonstrate that two languages are unrelated. The best >we can ever hope for in this direction is to show that there exists no >evidence to relate two languages -- but such an outcome clearly does not >prove that those languages are unrelated. >If we had no IE languages but Welsh and Albanian, I very much doubt that >we could make a persuasive case that they were related, and we would >have to conclude that there was no evidence to relate them, yet this >would clearly not prove unrelatedness. I couldn't but you could :> [snip] Unfortunately, I fear that monogenesis will be proven by mass extinction of possible non-congeners within the next 50 years or so. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Aug 8 15:29:40 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 11:29:40 EDT Subject: Maps of Semantic space & change Message-ID: For very distant language comparisons: If we create "maps" of nearest-neighbors in semantic space, or rather of PATHS of known change possibilities, and if what we map are "USES" rather than "GESAMTBEDEUTUNGEN" (since the latter is usually an attempt to simplify our thinking by positing some common element even if it is not in the heads of the users, although a cluster of neighboring USES can reinforce each other) Then, comparing any proto-language to its descendant language, we should be able to do both statistics and detailed studies on HOW MANY STEPS of CHANGE-OF-USE have occurred along paths of semantic change (on average, or a histogram of frequencies, or in particular cases), and then if we take many such studies and compare the results VERSUS THE TIME DIFFERENCE between ancestral and descendant language, this would be one way of quantifying the issues which are important to very deep language comparisons, and estimating how the data changes as we gradually move to greater time depths. *** We could do similar studies using two cousin languages, rather than one descendant and a proto language, to get estimates on the kind of situation we normally face with two languages or families which are NOT YET KNOWN to be genetically related. This would involve extrapolation from cases where the cousin languages are known to be related, but are increasingly distant, to what the data would look like with even greater distance. *** Although we can begin measuring time as a substitute for distance in linguistic change, we might (in the recent past at least) be able to correlate with other sense of distance, since different social conditions may lead to different rates of change per unit of time. *** I happen to be aware of my own work on maps of semantic spaces, which I intended as tools of this sort. I would love it if others can add more examples from other authors. I am sure such exist. Papers by Lloyd Anderson on Maps of Semantic Space & Change "Evidentials, Paths of Change, and Mental Maps: Typologically Regular Assymetries" 1982 pp.273-312 in Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols (eds.): Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation "The "Perfect" as a Universal and as a Language-Specific Category" pp.227-264 in Paul J. Hopper (ed.): Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics & Pragmatics Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1982 "Adjectival Morphology and Semantic Space" CLS-23, 1987 Papers from the 23rd Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society *** Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmcmahon at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk Sun Aug 8 16:53:50 1999 From: rmcmahon at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk (Dr. R. McMahon) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 17:53:50 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) (fwd) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Dr. McMahon is not a subscriber to the list, so CC: to his address if you wish him to see your response. --rma ] Rob McMahon (PhD) Clinical Scientist Box 158, Level 1 Addenbrooke's Hospital Cambridge. > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Sat, 31 Jul 1999 11:00:11 +0100 > From: petegray > Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com > To: Indo-European at xkl.com > Subject: Re: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Hi, The message above was passed to me for interest, and I hope no-one minds me posting a few comments. Although I'm not working on this stuff myself, I'm a molecular geneticist with a background in population genetics and a long standing interest in human diversity. So the comments that follow are my own interpretations of a rather diverse database of information. Firstly, the study of the genetic patterns underlying human population and individual diversity is really just in its infancy and there are more issues of debate in the genetics community than can be easily covered in a few lines (it really needs someone to sit down and do a full scale review article, but.....). Having said that, here are a few points that might be relevant. 1. There are several different sets of genetic data that could be used to make statements about the relation between human groups, and by inference the languages spoken by those groups; these split into two types. a. the frequency of rare, and not so rare, variants in proteins and cell surface antigens in different populations, eg the ABO and other blood group data. b. Molecular data tracing the history of individual stretches of the DNA that carries the genetic information. The molecular data is what people have been focusing on in the past few years as it has the potential to be least affected by very recent changes in population demographics and interpopulation marriage, and, perhaps most importantly, can be analysed without reference to a superimposed data structure. To make that a bit clearer, if one wants to say anything about population frequency data (data type'a') one first defines the populations to be sampled, a process that usually means selecting human samples from a geographically defined, isolated population or using some marker of 'tribal affinity' (usually language) which could confound the subsequent analysis and make any conclusions drawn suspect. Any stretch of DNA studied at the molecular level will retain a 'memory' of its own history independent of the population that the current carrier finds himself in. The question is then merely one of how closely the history of individual parts of the genome (molecules) reflect the histories of current human groups. And obviously, different parts of the genome, eg the Y-chromosome (determines male sex and is only inherited from father to son), the mitochondrial DNA ( a small DNA ring passed only from mothers to their children) and the rest of the chromosomes (which exist as pairs, one from father and one from mother), could give completely different stories about the individuals in a population. It's perhaps encouraging then, that in a broad sense at least, the three types of molecular data are beginning to give similar patterns, that don't conflict too badly with those previously obtained from data type a. 2. The mitochondrial picture, a thumbnail sketch. To keep things simple I'll just tell a just-so story without dwelling on the potential problems, error bars or areas of uncertainty--but remember THIS IS A GROSS SIMPLIFICATION. Take a group of individuals from around the World and type their mitochondrial DNA by sequencing short stretches that are known to undergo rapid rates of change. Arranging these into a set of aligned sequences it can be seen that some changes occured before others. You can then draw a 'tree' relating the individual molecules, gradually the groups will become bigger and start to link up at deeper and deeper nodes. At some point all of the groups will join up (coalesce) at the 'root' of the tree, that is all the sequences can be seen to share a common ancestor. The age of this common ancestor can then be estimated by counting the average number of changes down the divergent 'branches' and scaling that by estimates of the rates at which new variation is accumulating per year. Similar estimates can be made for each higher order node in the tree and then one can look at the tips and see if any of the groups correlate with other factors, such as language and geography. For example, a particular node might connect 15 samples and be dated at 12,000 years; if all of these individuals came from North America one might suggest that North American had been isolated from other groups for at least that long..... Using a bit of hand waving and some pretty good guesstimates, the pattern that then emerges is as follows. a. All human mt Variation originated from a single molecule present in Africa at about 250-150 thousand years ago. This was NOT the only molecule present in the human species at that time, just the lucky one whose descendants always managed to leave female offspring. b. There are 7-8 old coalescent groups with ages estimated to be around 80 thousand years ago, and of these only one is represented in significant numbers outside Africa, MEMBERS OF THIS GROUP ARE ALSO WIDELY DISPERSED WITHIN AFRICA. c. There are many later signatures of expansion both within and outside Africa, some of which could indicate later expansions from a similar group of African populations to the initial 'big bang' group, and or other groups. While others indicate recent events such as agriculture. Most indigenous human 'Tribes' seem to have coalescent dates that are relatively recent being in the order of 10-40 thousand years. So one might be tempted to say that Humans arose and divesified within Africa. These population underwent a dramatic expansion about 80 thousand years ago and representatives from a limited number of these diversified groups then subsequently moved out from Africa colonising the rest of the World. Subsequently, other African groups may also have moved out with later expansions, while on the other hand there is some indication that some of the original Asian colonists may have expanded in later periods back towards Europe and North Africa, particulary around 50-30 thousand years ago. However, in purely quantitative terms more genetic variation exists within Africa, despite this being perhaps the least well studied genetically of the major continental masses (excepting Australia), than in the rest of the World. I hope that this little summary is useful to the ongoing debate, but if anything requires clarification, I'd be happy to try. Rob McMahon > Rick said: > >. DNA studies obtensibly show that non-African > > humans seem to go back a single population distinct from Africans. > "Distinct" from Africans? Not in my reading of the texts. I don't wish to > raise a non-linguistic topic, but your implication - that languages split > into African and non-African - is a language topic, and we need some > scientist out there to give us the DNA truth. > Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 8 17:16:45 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 13:16:45 EDT Subject: Passivity as a transition (raising dust) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 8/8/99 1:22:04 AM, jrader at m-w.com wrote: <, , and in Chantraine, _Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque_ (or any other Greek etymological dictionary, for that matter).>> I don't have Chantraine, but I see in my notes: koneo^, (konis) raise dust: hence, hasten, ...EM 268.29: elsewh. only in compd. enkoneo^. enkon-eo^, to be quick and active, esp.in service,... akoni_ti or akon-ei (SIG36ti=SIG B (Olympia, V. B.C.), Dem. 19.77), Adv. of akonitos , without the dust of the arena, i.e.without struggle,without effort, usualy of the conqueror, Thuc. 4.73, Xen. Ages. 6.3... All of the above are from Lidell-Scott and are cited in Palmer, The Greek Language (1980) and Thomson The Greek Language (1964). The development is actually quite clear in the texts. In Homer, making dust and making haste start being interchangeable adverbially. The word is not compounded yet in some instances. By the time of Aeschylus, Prom. Unbound, (su se keleuthon hen^per e^lthes enkonei palin - go hasten back to from where you came) the compounding is clear, but the verb still doesn't stand by itself. (Another possible source is mentioned for the metaphor. One of these authorities however points out that the allusion to the ceremonial dust (konia) used by wrestlers doesn't work because this is applied before the match (for grip) and winning without applying the dust would be cheating - not triumph.) Trickier is diakoneo^. One of the earliest appearances - perhaps the earliest we have - of the word is in Herodotus (4.154), where the task referrred to is not mundane service but kidnapping and murder (men hoi die^kone^sein ho ti an dee^thei) - the kind that raises some dust and takes some effort. Only later is diakoneo^ specific to household type service (but not slavery.) Homer however uses enkoneo^ (not diakoneo^) adverbially (aipsa d' ara storesan doio^ leche' enkoneousai - pres part.) specifically with regard to servants doing a specific action. Only later (about the time of Xenophon) does diakoneo^ become a stand-alone verb and then a noun. The compounded form of dia/koneo^ looks pretty obvious to me, but no one else seemed to commit to it, so you may have me there - though I'd really like to see some textually based alternative explanation for the word. I don't know what Chantraine's logic is (I understand he/she takes a diachronic approach) - if multiple etyma are reconstructed from non-Greek sources I'd love to know what those sources are. This all seems to be pretty much just another Greek innovation - just as L-S have it - and we can pretty much see it happening. But since you seem to have access to ALL the other Greek etymological dictionaries, perhaps you can give us a survey? Regards, Steve Long From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sun Aug 8 17:18:47 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 13:18:47 -0400 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, > Macedonian, Albanian and Greek? > Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with > Indo-Iranian? > Is Albanian considered more likely to be Illyrian than Thracian? > Is Phrygian still considered as a possible ancestor or close > relative of Armenian? > Is Macedonian considered closer to Greek or Thracian? Here is a partial answer; I'll explain below why it can only be partial. In the last few years, Don Ringe, Tandy Warnow, and Ann Taylor collaborated to produce a phylogeny of the Indo-European languages. Don and Ann are historical linguists specializing in Indo-European, and Tandy is a computer scientist who works on computational biology. They used an algorithm developed to produce optimal phylogenies of biological species (e.g. you might code "vertebrate" as "1" and "non-vertebrate" as "2", etc. The computational problem, which is quite difficult, is to compute the correct phylogeny, or family tree, for the species being considered). What was new in their approach was to use this methodology to produce a phylogeny of a family of languages (e.g. perhaps you would code Indo-Iranian with a "1" to mean "undergoes the RUKI rule", and Italic with a "2" to mean "doesn't undergo RUKI"). The phylogeny they produced is as follows (at least, this is a version of their phylogeny which comes from a fairly mature stage of their work, and it's the one that Don was assuming in his classes in the 1997-1998 academic year; but there may be some slight adjustments in their forthcoming monograph): PIE / \ / Anatolian /\ / \ / Tocharian /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Celtic Italic /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Greek Armenian /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / / \ / / \ Indo- Balto- Germanic Iranian Slavic A few notes: -The position of Germanic in the tree is somewhat indeterminate. If you run the analysis strictly on the basis of _morphological_ characters, Germanic appears as in the tree above above. If you run it on the basis of _lexical_ characters, it groups with Italo-Celtic. The team hypothesize that Germanic started out in life as a sister of Balto-Slavic, but that the pre-Germanic speakers came into the political orbit of the prehistoric Italo-Celtic peoples and absorbed loan words from them at some date prior to Grimm's Law. Also, the whole part of the tree including Germanic, BS, and IIr is somewhat indeterminate; some innovations, such as the satem consonant change, are shared by IIr and BS but not Germanic. Probably, these three branches originally formed a dialect continuum which cannot be perfectly modelled in a Stammbaum. -The team originally included Albanian in the analysis, but its position in the tree is wildly indeterminate, which is not surprising considering the very late attestation of Albanian. Albanian has undergone such a great amount of innovation that it's hard to group it with anything. -The team did not include Phrygian, Illyrian, Venetic, etc., because these languages are so poorly attested that in many cases, we don't have even a single token of a particular character to be able to code it for analysis. So, to return to your questions: > What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, > Macedonian, Albanian and Greek? > Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with > Indo-Iranian? You're correct that Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian are in a single sub-branch of the IE family together, but Balto-Slavic and Germanic are in this branch as well. We can't say anything about Phrygian, Thracian, and Albanian on the basis of this kind of analysis; there are not enough data to do so. > Is Albanian considered more likely to be Illyrian than Thracian? We can't tell. Illyrian and Thracian are so poorly attested that we just can't tell. > Is Phrygian still considered as a possible ancestor or close > relative of Armenian? Once again, we can't tell. Who knows; maybe someday we'll find a huge cave full of Illyrian, Thracian, and Phrygian writings which will clear up much for us. It's not altogether hopeless; after all, Hittite and the two Tocharian languages were discovered in this century. Until then, we have to say that we don't know. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Aug 8 17:45:30 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 17:45:30 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <004901beddfb$a6462fe0$4a2907d4@paniegotinn> Message-ID: "Victor y Rosario" wrote: >After calling again our attention on the many sources that use b- and -k- >for the name of this people (e.g. *Balak* in the Armenian Geography by >Chorenatzi, 9th century), Isbasescu concludes that either >a. These items represent more or less the word *Vlach* as heard by other >ethnic groups (access to written sources, especially in the case of the >Scandinavian inscriptions, is considered unlikely), Yes. >or >b. The word was coined by Germanic tribes, with the meaning of *the >black-haired or -skinned ones*. I don't think so. As far as I know, there was no *blak(u)- in the sense of "black" in early Scandinavian. It's only in English and OHG (blah). Despite the objections made here, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the traditional account: Vlach, "Roman", name given to the Balkan Romanians by their Slavic neighbours. vlax, vlox, volox "Roman", borrowed by the Slavs from Germanic walh. walh, "Roman, foreigner", applied by the Germanic tribes to their neighbours, especially those to to the south. Formerly "Celt, foreigner", from the name of a Celtic tribe to the south of Germania (called Volcae by the Romans). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Sun Aug 8 17:57:05 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 19:57:05 +0200 Subject: Hittite & Celtic dative in /k/ ? Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson wrote Sun, 8 Aug 1999 >I am not as familiar with typological tendencies for an >adessive (being "at" or "near") to develop either into a dative Whether the speculated connection is valid or not is quite another question. >I just do not see how the offered information (except the *angh part) >has a bearing other than to strengthen the plausibility. >Until someone finds another example of a postposition "near" >turning into a dative/accusative etc., in some language of the world, >I am doubtful of this etymology >on typological grounds. >I would love to have my typological horizons expanded if this is really a >clear case, >with intermediate stages actually attested. Irish is such a case, as the preposition ag has a dative meaning only in possessive construction of the kind "this is to me", a common feature in Modern Celtic. In all other case it is adessive. It is also used to form the continous present in a "I am at his seing" construction, where it cannot be considered as a dative. The use of adessive to express the verb "to have" is a common feature in Celtic. We have so Breton "Se a zo ganin" (I have this), using the preposition gan (with) and not da (to). Another exemple is Russian /u/ (at, near to) which is used to form the equivalent of I have : /u minja jest'/ litterally : by me there is. The transition from adessive to dative is also attested in Welsh "i" derivated from *in, but with a strict dative meaning. There is also the faroese preposition "hj?" whose classical meaning is "by; with" (meaning retained in Icelandic), but is used in colloquial speech with the meaning "for" or "of". Anyway, I am quite sceptical about the use of typology in the study of Celtic tongues (at least modern ones). These languages have so much "curiosities" in them - at least from an IE point of view, that typology is often hazardous. Examples are relative form of the verb, verb centered syntax, non-redundant conjugation. Damien Erwan Perrotin From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Aug 8 17:58:12 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 17:58:12 GMT Subject: Hittite & Celtic dative in /k/ ? In-Reply-To: <27c64704.24d97407@aol.com> Message-ID: ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 8/3/99 6:49:38 PM, 114064.1241 at compuserve.com writes: >>the comparison is unlikely, as the Hittite form is also used for the >>accusative, an use for which it has cognates in Germanic (gotic mik) and >>perhaps in Slavic (russian ko - to with only an allative meaning). The >>primary meaning was probably allative, as for most accusative in IE. >This kind of information in no way lessens the probability of connection, >since (as stated just above) the accusative may derive from an older >dative (or allative or etc.). This kind of information CAN suggest that >a connection may have great(er) time depth, to allow time (how much?) for >a common change to occur in one or another language. >(I assume it is not being proposed that the ORIGINAL meaning was >accusative, and that the accusative developed into a dative or allative? Neither dative nor allative. Simply an emphatic particle (cf. Greek -ge) added to what would otherwise have been endingless pronominal forms: Nom. u-k, ammu-k zi-k we-es, anz-as sum-es Gen amm-el tu-el anz-el sum-el DL ammu-k tu-k anz-as sum-as Acc ammu-k tu-k anz-as sum-as Abl amm-eda-z tu-eda-z anz-eda-z sum-eda-z Luwian has amu, Palaic ti/tu. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Aug 8 18:15:24 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 18:15:24 GMT Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: >What is the AA root for jm-3? >Or what are its cognates in other AA languages? No idea. Conceivably, Arabic ?mr (root of emir), which has something to do with "order". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Aug 8 18:16:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 18:16:32 GMT Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37A8A1B8.791764C0@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: Damien Erwan Perrotin <114064.1241 at Compuserve.com> wrote: >An instance of this is Sumerian tapiru (metal-worker), >probably borrowed to an otherwise unknown IE-like tongue. Could you expand? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sun Aug 8 18:33:19 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 14:33:19 -0400 Subject: Comparative AND Reconstructive Method In-Reply-To: <5f675b6.24d9ceb6@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Wed, 4 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >> The Comparative Method is concerned with the reconstruction of categories, >> _not_ the phonetic values which might have been the realization of those >> categories. This is a very important point. When we talk about >> Proto-Indo-European */a/, we don't mean "the phonological category in >> Proto-Indo-European which had the phonetic realization [a]"; we mean "the >> hypothetical PIE category which gave rise to the Sanskrit category /a/, the >> Latin category /a/, etc." > Agreed in part, in part not. > We DO and MUST mean not merely something which represents a set of > correspondences, we DO and MUST mean something WHOSE PHONETIC SUBSTANCE could > have given rise to the observed attestation. We assume that the speakers of the languages we reconstruct had phonetics. What I am saying is this: the Comparative Method (strictly defined) does not tell us what the phonetic values of the reconstructed categories were. This is simply a statement about what the Comparative Method is, and what it can and cannot do. > Therefore the following is not valid: >> As far as the Comparative Method is concerned, we could designate that PIE >> category with an integer, e.g. "Category 27". */a/ is just a convenient >> label or nickname for it. > Re the following, the hypothesized proto-form should be much more than > merely a guess, it should be a highly-educated hypothesis or estimate, > resting not on "intuition" but on educated reasoning and experience. I'll agree this far: if I were betting on the phonetic value of PIE */a/, I'd put my money on the pronunciation [a], much in the same way that I'd bet e.g. that the human skeletons we excavate from 1000 BCE in Denmark probably belonged to individuals who had white skin. There is, however, no direct evidence which allows us to confidently state the skin color of those individuals. We assume that they had skin, and we can make educated guesses about their skin color, but we're not entitled to state their skin color as a fact. When it comes to the prehistoric mergers of phonological _categories_, however, we _do_ have evidence of what happened. The evidence is the correspondence sets among related, historically attested languages. > Whether one calls it "Comparative Method" or not, Calvert Watkins is > absolutely correct, that the RESULTS of the valid application of the method > must in general aim at a reconstructed language FROM WHICH one can derive the > hypothesized descendants, I agree totally (other than the fussy point of switching "hypothesized" to "attested", which is probably what you meant). I'd be surprised if Watkins would disagree with what I'm saying, however; it is not at odds with your paragraph. > If some wish to call this "Reconstructive Method", and distinguish it from a > very narrow sense of the "Comparative Method", then they will logically be > forced to CEASE applying the term "comparative method" to much of what we > traditionally have called that. The "comparative method" includes, ideally, > the "reconstructive" aspects also. There is no point in trying to define it > to exclude those, because they are part and parcel of the best comparative > practice. > Making this explicit allows us to IMPROVE AND EXTEND the totality of our > comparative & reconstructive methods. > Hiding it under the rug blocks progress, and misrepresents to students what > we think know and how we know it. I'm going with the definition of the Comparative Method in the strict technical sense of the term, as discussed in Hoenigswald 1973. I guess it depends on what you mean by 'know'. Conclusions drawn from the mechanical application of an investigative method are one thing; educated speculation is another. When we reconstruct PIE laryngeals, we do so on the basis of a strict application of the Comparative Method; when we speculate about the phonetic values of those categories, we're doing just that: speculating. The most important point, I think, is this: while the question of the phonetic values of e.g. the PIE laryngeals is interesting, it _doesn't matter_ from the standpoint of the Comparative Method. You don't have to know the phonetic values of those categories to be able to do the Comparative Method. > Lloyd Anderson > Ecological Linguistics What is Ecological Linguistics, BTW? \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Aug 8 18:44:31 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 14:44:31 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: As far as African language families go, most of the area below the Sahara has seen rather drastic shifts over the last few millenia. The enormous expansion of Bantu languages from a small area of the Cameroons to more than half the continent is the most obvious; more recently, Fulani/Peul has spread from the Senegal region in pockets as far east as Lake Chad, and the Nguni sub-group of Bantu reshuffled much of southern Africa. Or on a smaller scale, Maa (Masaai) has spread down the Rift Valley, and Galla/Oromo into the Ethiopian highlands, or Somali in all directions, since the medieval period. There's no reason to believe all this mobility started just as we came into position to observe it, so extrapolating from the present linguistic situation back beyond the last couple of thousand years is, to put it mildly, very speculative. From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 11 07:48:03 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 03:48:03 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <37A700B6.A195B8DC@aye.net> Message-ID: >To risk being severely off-topic --- >My translation would be (this being Nostradamus, there are a number of >obscurities in the text, of course): >In the year one thousand nine hundred ninety nine, seven months, >>>From the sky will come the great King of Terror >To revive the great King of Angolmois >Before and after, Mars to rule playfully. >I believe that this text is in relatively standard Middle French, and >not Langue d'Oc. I am going to have to change that signature, since it >seems not to have come to pass . At any rate, most Nostradamus buffs >seem to believe that it refers to Armageddon and the Judgment Day >occurring in July 1999. >(Unless, of course, these prophesies run on the Old Style calendar, in >which case there is still a week or so for Armageddon to start.) >The King of Angolmois is usually claimed to be a distorted version of >-Mongolois-, referring to a revived Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, and >perhaps the prophesied Antichrist. (It might be likelier to mean a king >from Angoule^me, but that hardly seems as dramatic.) >To get back slightly on topic, from a linguistic viewpoint, one of the >interesting things about Nostradamus' text is how it came to pass that >the perfectly sensible word he used for "ninety" (nonante) got replaced >in Academy French by "quatre-vingt-dix." I've seen the explanation >mooted that the quatre-vingt numbers are a holdover from ancient >Gaulish, and didn't know that we knew enough Gaulish to tell. But >perhaps so long as the French Academy staves off the moral horrors of >creeping decimalism, the Antichrist will be kept at bay. >Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law [Ed Selleslagh] I would rather say 'luckily' instead of 'playfully'. 'Nonante' is still standard Belgian and Swiss French. The Swiss even use 'octante' instead of 'quatre-vingts'. By the way, the French don't use 'septante' either, but 'soixante-dix'. What about the Quebecois? They usually speak rather old-fashioned French (to European ears) (I've been there twice, but didn't pay attention, probably because I already had enough trouble with 'cent' and 'sans', which sound the same to all but to the Quebecois). I don't know about Gaulish having had a twenty-based number system (nothing unusual in the world, cf. Mayas), but Basque (and presumably Aquitanian, spoken in SW France 2000 years ago) certainly has one, and in a very consistent way, up to eighty-nineteen. It is of course possible that Gaulish inherited some of this when the Celts conquered most of present-day France. Note that Welsh (p-Celtic, probably like that of the Belgae, probably self-named 'balchai' in their language) shows some traces of (former?) ergativity, which might have a similar origin. Until we know more about the pre-Celtic linguistic situation in territories that became Celtic, the Vasconic component, substrate, or whatever it might be called, should not be written off out of hand, IMHO. I find it difficult to believe that 'quatre-vingts' is an Academy invention: more probably a carefully preserved (regional? Parisian?) archaeism made fashionable again. Note: the French Revolution is at the origins of the extreme decimalism in non-British Europe (metric system, decimal currency, they even decimalized the week - something that wasn't popular and hence didn't last: imagine a sunday every ten days...). The English must feel very sad the French - of all people - and not they themselves have a non-decimal number system ;-) Finally, if the Old Style (Julian) calender still applied, Nostradamus might have been referring to the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999. I guess it could have been predicted by calculus in his days, at least by some astronomer. Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 11 08:09:37 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 04:09:37 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <002801bede42$25a60e40$909ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: At 01:24 4/08/99 -0500, you wrote: >Dear Ed and IEists: [ moderator snip ] >Pat asks: >Sumerian -age? Do you have a reference for that "suffix"? >Pat >PATRICK C. RYAN [Ed] I am still in my vacation home in Spain, so I don't have my references here. Maybe I should have said 'ending'. I have seen '-age' mentioned as a variant of '-ak'. I'll have to look it up after Aug. 20. May be I was confused. Can you clarify for the time being? Ed. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From edsel at glo.be Wed Aug 11 08:28:52 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 04:28:52 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37A8ACA6.503B6FE0@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: At 23:12 4/08/99 +0200, you wrote: >>>From Eduard Selleslagh >Sent : Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:35 >>Ed wrote >>Has it been proven that the Breton afan was derived from an originally >>Brythonic *ama? (I have no problem with the reconstruction itself, I even >>mentioned it in a different way). Brythonic languages like Welsh contain >>large numbers of words that are most likely loans from Latin. It's all a >>matter of timing, of course. >It is difficult to be sure in that matters (the result would have been >the same), but if Brythonnic had borrowed Latin Amare, it would be with >its first meaning (to love), and would have replaced the indigenous term >(*car) still in use in Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Moreover, the Breton >term suggests that the original word was not a verb but the noun af >(kiss), wich does descent from an older *av, itself from *am (albeit *ab >is not phonetically impossible), all of this fairly regular in Breton >(if the verb had been first, and not derivated from the noun, it would >have been, regularly *avan). This noun cannot be a Latin loanword, as >there is nor corresponding word in Latin (the equivalent is amor, which >would have yielded *aver, or *avor). >>According to M.Carrasquer's Stammbaum, which I subcribe to, IE and Etruscan >>(and the like)are cousins. >I definitely aggree, this the thesis of my new published book (in >French, sorry), and the basis of the handbook I am working on. >>The only thing I'm pretty convinced of is that the Etr. and Lat. am- and >>the Lat. amb- (IE m.b-) roots are related, the problem is 'how?' >There I am quite dubious. If we assume that the oldest form of Latin >amb- and the like is H2e-mbhe or H2-mbhe, the second member of which is >a particle meaning beside, and which is at the origin of English by and >of the Sanskrit dative plural in -bh- (Martinet, 1986), what seems quite >acceptable. If we suppose this root began with a prenasalized *mbh >(Martinet too), which is still the best hypothesis to explain such >alternations as Greek nephos (cloud), Welsh nef (from *nemos, sky) or >Breton env (he, from Celtic *emo) and Hittite abas (this). The we could >draw possible hypothesis. >When stressed the prenasalized becomes am- in Etruscan at the initial : >thus >am(u) (to be) from *mbheu (to be, to become). >ame (with) from *mbhe (beside) (Old English be) >amake (wife) from *mbhendhto- (bound) >When unstressed,at the initial it remains unchanged or become a /m/ >mulch (beautiful) from *mbhleg- (to shine) : the Etruscan word was >written with a m but was borrowed by Latin as pulcher, hence the >possibility of >mutu (thyme) from *mbhent- (mint) (Breton bent). >At the interior of a word, it seems that it become a p (which in turn >can become a spirant, but the value of "aspirated" consonnants in >Etruscan is not clear). >snuiaph (probably heavenly, as it is associated with pulumchva - stars - >in the Tablets of Pyrgi) from (s)nembh- (cloud, sky) : Greek nephos, >Breton nenv. >ipa (which, this) from *embho- (this) : Hittite apas, Breton env, Celtic >*emo >In that view the reflex of *H2e-mbhe would be something like *ep or *ap. >It is however possible that Etruscan am (which is known through the very >Indo-European looking proper name aminth (eros)) is the result of an >Anatolian adstrat, perhaps the famous Twrs of the Egyptian inscription. >As we are sure that the root is present in Anatolian (c.f Lydian) that >is even relatively likely. >Of course, all my analysis of Etruscan does only reflect my personnal - >an much in working - opinion an theory. c.f Geocities/Athens/Crete/4060 >for very provisionnal details. >Damien Erwan Perrotin [Ed Selleslagh] Thank you for the interesting and informative contribution. Here are a few side remarks. 1. I got confused by Breton 'afan': I had interpreted the f as /v/, like in Welsh. 2. It seems that your reasoning brings Catalan 'amb' ('with', from Latin 'apud') and Latin 'apud' back into the picture. 3. Not only the Sanskrit dative plura in -bh-, but also the Latin one -ibus. 4. Note that Breton/Welsh 'aber' corresponds to the Dutch/Flemish (Belgae!) river names 'Amel' and 'Amer' (the latter is also used to refer to the neighboring flood plain or 'polder' ('vega' in Spanish). So the sound change m/b works both ways exchanges among the languages we were discussing. 5. Maybe the (Etruscan, Lydian,.. later Latin) am- and the IE-Latin amb- roots just share a common ancestry like the languages themselves (one or two steps before PIE) , then developed more or less separately but got exchanged among parallel branches of the Stammbaum at several moments and in several places (Anatolia, Italy,...). Ed. P.S. 1. Are you Breton? 2. My second language is French. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From pagos at bigfoot.com Sun Aug 8 19:46:37 1999 From: pagos at bigfoot.com (Paolo Agostini) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 21:46:37 +0200 Subject: R: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: On 08 August 1999 09:54 Rick Mc Callister wrote: >Various researchers link ides/-idus to Etruscan >*itu- "Ides" < "to divide" [az96: 25; g/lb83, pa, dep] >see Latin gloss idus, itus, ituare [az96: 25; g/lb83] >see ituna [mp68] >itus "middle" [g/lb83, lb 90, mp 75] >see Latin ides [g/lb83, lb 90, mp 75] The Romans called _idus_ (from a former _*eidus_) the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October and the 13th day of the other months. If memory serves me well, it was the lexicographer Hesychius of Alexandria who wrote in the 5th century "the verb _iduo_ originates from the language of the Etruscans, from whom the Romans learned many religious rites and customs, and it means _to divide_ because the _ides_ divide the months in two halves". In the 5th century though Etruscan was a dead language since three centuries at least. At the end of last century there were some scholars who maintained that the word originated from IE _*idh_ "to be bright" (of the moon), yet the idea was soon abandoned. Among the IE languages, the base occurs in Latin only. The word is very likely a Semitic borrowing, from the base `WD ('ayin-waw-daleth) the meaning of which is "to return (every year or periodically); to repeat (cycle, period); to count, reckon", cfr. Aramaic _'yidb'_ "festival"; Syriac _'eyda'_ and _'eyada'_ "ceremony, usage"; Hebrew _'yid_ "Idolatrous festival" and _'ed_ "monthly courses, menstruation"; Arabic _'id_ "festival" and _'iddah_ "period of time", _'adda_ "he counted/reckoned", _'adad, 'idad, 'idda_ "number", _`a:da_ "custom, tradition". There is also a secondary form of the same verb, i.e. 'TD ('ayin-thaw-daleth) "he counted/reckoned" from which Latin forms like _ituo_ might derive. According to the meaning of the Semitic base, the Latin word _*eidus_ simply meant "a period of time; a counted number of days; a day that returns every month". Latin has a number of Semitic loan-words which are due to areal contacts, cfr. _cornu_ "horn" from Semitic _qarnu_ "horn"; _taurus_ (and Greek _tauros_) "bull" from Semitic _tawr_ of s.m.; _vacca_ "cow" from Semitic _*baqa_ of s.m. etc. It also has a number of words of Egyptian origin, cfr. Latin _iris_ (and Greek _iris_ "iris; rainbow") from Egyptian _iri_ "eye", etc. What I mean is that not every Latin word of obscure origin goes back to Etruscan ;-) Cheers Paolo Agostini From jer at cphling.dk Mon Aug 9 00:41:43 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 02:41:43 +0200 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin In-Reply-To: <001701bed474$c95a8480$fd4a0d97@api-b0d3l6> Message-ID: On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Paolo Agostini wrote: > [Can ...] the Latin adjectival > suffix -n-us, -n-a, -n-um appearing in words like _mater-nus_ > [...], _pater-nus_ [...], _feli-nus_ [...] be traced back to IE? Does the > morpheme exist in other IE or non-IE languages? Any idea abt its etymology > and/or development? This thread has already provoked replies from Damien Perrotin and Eduard Selleslagh involving Etruscan and some more promising nasal suffixes of diverse IE languages. The suffix involved must be *-ino-, a common suffix of appurtenance, particularly well attested in derivatives from names of seasons and other time spans, as Gk. earino's, OCS vesnInU 'of spring'. It was plausibly derived by Chantraine from the locative of the season name, which was typically an r/n-stem, as *we's-n-i 'in spring', adding the "thematic vowel" *-o- (the real seat of the expresion of appurtenance), with a histus-filling ("ephelcystic") *-n- in between, and dissimilation of the product *-ni-n-o- to *-ri-n-o-. The r/n stem seems to have been generalized for all seasons, cf. the beautiful pair Lat. hi:bernus = Gk. kheimerino's equated by Szemere'nyi as IE *g'heimerinos (with dissim. in Lat.). The part -rnus was repeated with other designations of time in Lat., as diurnus (from the loc. diu:, the "endingless" variant of Skt. dya'v-i) and from there noct-urnus (if not from noctu:, itself copied on diu: at a time when this still meant 'throughout the day, all day long' and not just 'long'). The special meaning of the old derivatives in *-ino- makes it sensible to derive them from the locative: *wesr-ino-s is 'what is _in_ spring'. This distinguishes *-ino- from the suffix *-io- which has no such obvious connection with the locative (although it has been argued to have precisely that origin). A derivative like *ek'wi-o-s 'pertaining to a horse' does not signify thing on or inside a horse with any preference over things connected with a horse in a non-local fashion, so the suffix form *-i-o- is simply the product of the addition of a "thematic vowel" *-o- to the bare stem normally posited as *ek'wo-, in which we observe the transformation of two thematic vowels to *-i-o-. I see this as a simple consequence of the reduction rule of an unaccented thematic vowel to *-i- applying in very old lexicalizations; since _both_ thematic vowels could not be accented, the product *-i-o- may simply be from *-o- + *-o-. It seems that the addition of a syllabic morpheme shifted the accent towards the end, so that *-o'- yielded *-o-o'- whence *-i-o'-. It should not be held against the analysis that examples with an independent accent show *-i'-o- with accent of the -i- part, for that would be the further development anyway if the form is older than the introduction of initial accent I claim to have discovered for a prestage of PIE. This analysis provides an answer to the question why there is no *-n- in *-i-o-: there was no word boundary here, while in the hypostatic derivatives based on locatives in *-i as *-ri-n-o- there was. A preform like *p at 2teri-n-o-s may indeed have existed in IE, but then with the specific meaning 'which is at the father'; but it may just as well reflect a simple Latin (Italic) analogy with the season-based adjectives. In Balto-Slavic *-ino- enjoyed an enormous productivity (Russ. vostok 'east', vosto{cv}nyj 'eastern' from *-k-ino-s). This has nothing to do with the -n- of Germanic n-stems which turns up wherever the stem final is allowed to surface, not only in the genitive. For 'pertaining to a father', the conglomerate *-io- of thematic stems was generalized and had created *p at 2tr-i'o-s in PIE already. Thus, the -n- is not in origin a morpheme of appurtenance or of a genitival relation, and so there is no point in equating it with something outside of IE which is. Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Aug 9 07:25:29 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 03:25:29 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/8/99 8:31:22 AM, vjpaniego at worldonline.es wrote: <<1. A c.1050 grave inscription in Gotland refers to two nobles killed when battling against *blakumen*. 2. The Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringle illustrates a campaign by Alexios Comnenos (early 12th century) in *Blokumannaland*, translated into Latin as *in Blachorum terram*. 3. In the 13th century a reference is made in the Flatenyjarbok about a raid against *Blo(kumenn*.>> Just to straighten the chronology out a bit: The first referenece commonly given for "vlachs" is generally a note about their whereabouts written in a monastery on Mt. Athos in the 8th Century AD. Given that this piece was probably written in Greek, it would not be a surprise that the initial letter would have been a "B" rather than a "V". ("V"'s not being extra popular in Greek.) The would be one good way to explain why the word occasionally appears as Blahi, Blaki or Blacki, especially in records coming from eastern clerics. It would also explain why the pope would name Kaloian "rex Bulgari and Blachorum" in 1206 AD - Latin having lost its canonical hold in that region some centuries before, the name coming from the Greek. And such an momentous event could probably explain why an educated Scandinavian like Snorri would afterwards use the B form. And of course these citations don't exactly cancel out the references to Blacki or Vlachi (or Valah or Wallahs) in earlier or contemporary documents, ranging from Nestor to Gestae Hungarorum to Serb court records. The eleventh century inscription might as well refer to the "Blakmann" whose fleet does battle with Alvild among icebergs in Saxo. We have no evidence that Vlachs ever made much of an appearance in the Baltic. By the way, in connection with this name, it has been pointed out that the meaning might well be from the OE 'blak', ON 'bleiko-", OSl 'blec', reconstructed as OTeutonic *blaiko-. meaning shining or white. But, who's to say - the early Vlachs may have had white or at least shiny hair. "Vlach" is probably indeed ultimately from the German, but I suspect not from the Swedes giving hair color based group names out in the Balkans. <> I've re-read this a number of times and get the distinct feeling that there is only one choice among the two choices? Am I right? Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 9 09:11:25 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 10:11:25 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <37c13806.208933172@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [LT] >> Even the great >> Otto Jespersen, to cite just one name, believed in primitive languages >> and in absolute progress in grammatical systems. But nobody believes in >> this stuff today. > Except, apparently, Bernard H. Bichakjian. Indeed. I was forgetting about Bichakjian. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 9 11:42:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 12:42:01 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002d01beddff$26542400$eb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: Well, I have visions of the moderator reaching for the plug, but here goes. > It is you who are missing the point. The absolutive NP in an ergative > language is the patient. Sorry; not so. In Basque, and in most ergative languages, it is perfectly possible for an agent to stand in the absolutive case, and it commonly does so when the sentence contains an agent but no patient -- that is, with intransitive verbs which take agent subjects, like `speak', `eat dinner', `dance' and `go'. An ergative language, by definition, does *not* distinguish agents from patients. Rather, it distinguishes transitive subjects on the one hand from intransitive subjects and direct objects on the other. It makes no difference whether a given NP is an agent, a patient, or neither. A language that systematically marks the difference between agents and non-agents is an *active* language, not an ergative language, and active languages exist. Among the ones I have seen reported are Crow, Eastern Pomo, 19th-century Batsbi (I'm told that contemporary Batsbi is different), and, according to some accounts, Sumerian. > Lacking an agent (which would be the ergative), there is no > possibility of a reflexive or reciprocal. It takes an agent and a > patient to tango the Reflexive or Reciprocal. Also quite false. In Basque, just as in English, both reflexives and reciprocals can occur freely in sentences which lack an agent or a patient or even both. In Basque, reflexives and reciprocals can occur freely in sentences lacking an ergative NP. Basque has a set of dedicated reflexive NPs, of which `himself/herself' is the third-singular one, and it has a dedicated reciprocal NP `each other, one another', which has no other existence in the language. But look at these examples: Jon bere buruari mintzatzen zaio. `John is talking to himself.' Jon eta Miren elkarrekin joan ziren. `John and Mary went together.' (literally, `with each other') The verbs `talk, speak' and `go' are strictly intransitive, and neither can occur with an ergative NP. Yet both can happily take reflexive and reciprocal NPs. > Sumerian regularly expresses reflexives: how? by putting the agent > in the ergative and the patient (which is the same) in the > absolutive. Very interesting, and a strategy which I have not often seen. But this is only one strategy among many, and no universals follow from it. [on my examples of reflexives lacking agents or patients or both] >> Susie saw herself in the mirror. >> Susie is annoyed with herself. >> Susie excelled herself. > Larry, this is patent nonsense. > In the sentence: "Susie saw the room behind her in the mirror", > "Susie" is certainly an agent and "room" is certainly a patient. Certainly not. Try reading the definitions of `agent' and `patient' in my dictionary. In general, the subject of `see' is not an agent, and its object is not a patient: the referent of the subject NP isn't instigating anything, and the referent of the object NP isn't undergoing anything. > Your sentence is exactly analogous. "herself" is the patient (a > paraphrase for "Susie"), and "Susie" is the agent. 'Fraid not. > In your second sentence, it is equivalent to "Susie[1] annoyed > Susie[2]". "annoy" is construed in English as a two-element verb > (usually), of which the first element is the agent ("Susie[1]") and > the second element is the patient ("Susie[2]'). No. First, the rather unnatural `Susie annoyed herself' does not at all mean the same thing as `Susie is annoyed with herself'. Second, it is most unlikely that `Susie' is an agent even in `Susie annoyed herself'. People do not commonly set out deliberately to annoy themselves, as required here by the agentive reading. > It is incredible to find anyone, let alone a linguist, denying that > any true reflexive construction does not mandatorily contain an > agent, which is coterminous with its patient. Well, it may astound you, but it's the plain truth, or rather it would be the plain truth if you replaced `denying' by `asserting', which I presume is what you meant. [on my further examples] >> Susie and Mike collided with each other. >> Susie and Mike fancy each other. >> Susie and Mike resemble each other. >> Not an agent in sight, and not many patients, either. > Agent: Susie; patient: Mike; second agent: Mike; second agent: Susie. Nope. `Susie' and `Mike' would be agents only if they consciously and deliberately instigated the action, which is hardly likely to be the case in any of my examples. People do not deliberately set out to collide with each other, to fancy each other, or to resemble each other: all of these are things that happen to us, not things that we do. Are you sure you understand the meaning of the term `agent'? > I suppose we could dance around the definitions of "grammatical" and > "semantic" but the fact is that, e.g. "reflexive" means simply: "a > verb having an identical subject and direct object". No, not remotely true. To begin with, a reflexive is not a verb at all. An NP can be a reflexive, and a clause can be reflexive. But a verb can't be reflexive, at least not in English. (The Romance languages, of course, have verb-forms which are commonly called `reflexive verbs', but the term is used here in a rather special sense: the Romance reflexive verbs are not, in general, strictly reflexive.) Moreover, the two coreferential NPs need not be the subject and the direct object. See the examples above. > The fact that you want to extend "reflexive" into areas in which it > does not belong based on pseudo-reflexive constructions in some > languages does not alter one iota what a true reflexive is. I've no idea what you mean by a `true reflexive', but it doesn't appear to bear much resemblance to what everybody else calls a reflexive. And I certainly can't guess what you mean by `pseudo-reflexive'. [on Pat's claim] >>> An intransitive verb, by definition, has only one NP element [and my response] >> Susie is sleeping with Mike. >> Susie smiled at Mike. >> Susie got ready for Mike. >> All intransitive, but all with multiple NPs. > Well, it is my fault for leaving out the qualification "essential" or > "core". > Actually, I thought you might grasp that without the qualifiation. > Do you think there is a difference between: > "Joe is hitting" and > "Joe is sleeping"? > Or is it just a peculiarity of my personality that would make me ask: > "Hitting whom?" but NOT ask "Sleeping with whom?" ? Well, I am astonished. In my experience, `sleeping with' is not something you can do by yourself, and `sleeping' is not at all the same activity as `sleeping with'. Of course, things may be different in Arkansas, but, given what I've been reading about Bill Clinton, I doubt it. ;-) >>> Of all the languages I have ever seen, Basque is, by a mile, far the >>> most "unusual" language. [LT] >> Nope. > Larry, I do not need nor want you to assume the prerogative of > correcting my expressed impressionistic opinions. Well, perhaps you'd like to lay out your reasons for seeing Basque as highly unusual. I've been studying the language for 28 years, and I haven't noticed many peculiarities. > It is bizarre, in my opinion, because of its weird phonology, "Weird"? Why "weird"? Basque has an exceptionally simple segmental phonology, comparable in many respects to that of Castilian Spanish. It has a small set of phonemes, very simple phonotactics, and few alternations. Phonologically, it is *much* simpler than English, and simpler than almost any other European language I can think of. It lacks the mutations of Celtic, the consonant gradations of Finnish, and the elaborate stem-alternations of most IE languages. > and the habit it has of borrowing (according to you and Michelena) > vocabulary from everywhere for just about everything so that one is > hard put to find originally Basque words for anything. A grave overstatement. Basque has indeed borrowed extensively, but in this it is hardly alone, especially among minority languages. And it is trivial to list hundreds of Basque words and morphemes which are clearly native and probably ancient. Where are you getting this stuff from? > Shibatni's endorsement is implied by his allowing Estival and Myhill > to publish under his aegis. No. An editor does not, in general, endorse all the views expressed by those contributing to the book he edits. I have edited some books myself, and am about to edit another. Like any editor, I do not prevent contributors from publishing views I disagree with. > Are you not the one who is forever complaining about wrong-minded > ideas being allowed to see the light of a printing press? To be precise, I have often complained about transparently shoddy work being accepted for publication, even in refereed books and journals. It is an editor's responsibility to prevent crappy work from appearing in his books and journals, but not to suppress conclusions he doesn't like. > Would Estival and Myhill be published in a book under your > editorship? Fat chance! You do me an injustice. When editing or refereeing, I have frequently accepted or approved work with whose conclusions I do not agree. I content myself with correcting obvious errors, pointing out flaws in argumentation, and cleaning up the English. You seem to have a jaundiced view of the academic world. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 9 15:25:43 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 16:25:43 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <005501beddc1$6c5837e0$f0d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Oh, so "our" type of languages, accusative-type, can be *split-free* > but "their" type of languages, ergative-type, cannot be. Akkusativ > ueber alles! No need for the rhetorical flourishes -- and this really is rhetoric. There are lots of accusative languages which show no trace of ergativity. But it's very hard -- perhaps even impossible -- to find an ergative language which shows no trace of accusativity. Possibly without exception, a language which exhibits ergativity at all is ergative only in certain respects and accusative in other respects. That's just the way it is. This is an empirical result, not an ideological position. If you know of even a single language which is 100% ergative and 0% accusative, let's hear about it. Nobody else seems to have located one. > What you seem not to be able to grasp because of your unfamiliarity > with languages like Sumerian is that the ergative "subject" is > frequently NOT EXPRESSED. Perhaps, but so what? Lots of languages frequently don't bother to express subjects overtly -- Spanish, Italian, Japanese, hundreds of them. Why is it significant that Sumerian is another one? In Basque, not only ergative subjects, but also absolutive subjects, direct objects and indirect objects are commonly omitted when they would otherwise be pronominal. Is this significant? Even in English, in which a well-formed sentence normally requires an overt subject, it is common in ordinary speech to omit the subject. Look at my very first sentence above for an example, and consider other common locutions like these: Beats me. Don't know what you mean by that. Can't say. Looks like rain. Seems we have a problem. Been drinking? Why is the omissibility of subjects of any interest at all? > And, I am not even sure that "subject" is a useful term to apply > to relationships between ergative and nominative languages. Oh, `subject' is a *very* useful term, even though there appear to be languages in which grammatical subjects are poorly developed or maybe even absent altogether. Anyway, the concept of `subject' is not even essential to demolish the "passive" view of ergative languages. All ya gotta do is to list the syntactic properties of the three major NP-types -- S, A and P in Dixon's notation -- and see which two pattern together. It's almost always S and A, which therefore constitute a single syntactic category, whether or not we choose to call this the class of subjects. And it's hardly ever S and P, as required by any version of the "passive" interpretation. Facts are facts. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Aug 8 15:05:23 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 16:05:23 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: Rick said: > non-African [modern human] > populations began leaving Africa about 100,000 BP. If language was > developed before 100,000 BP --and my understanding is that this is the > consensus, then these languages would seem to have a common origin in > Africa. I'm happy with "origin in Africa". It may or may not have been "common". > How they are related to existing African families is another > question. I do hope I misunderstand you - and I'm sure I must. You are not seriously suggesting that the people of African are not "modern humans"? [ Moderator's comment: I'm certain you have misunderstood, although the phrasing could have been better. I think the distinction was between an emigration of "modern humans" and a prior emigration of older hominids. --rma ] If you agree that they are just as much "modern humans" as everyone else, then on your argument you either have common contact before departure, or you have a flow of people back into Africa, either of which rather destroys your theory of African languages being grand relics of some pre-modern speech. If you do not believe that the peoples of Africa are "modern humans", then I need to cease the discussion before I say something rude. Peter [ Moderator's comment: I think what was meant is that the language families found outside Africa may relate to those within Africa in several ways: 1. All the language families may be grouped into a single super-family. 2. All the language families outside of Africa may be grouped with one or more, but *not* all, those within Africa. 3. Some language families found outside Africa may be grouped with one or more of those within Africa, and others with others. --rma ] From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Mon Aug 9 18:51:52 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 14:51:52 -0400 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > Is this anything other than the accusative of goal? If you take a:+ruh = climb onto. > [...] I cannot see the relevance of this for a discussion > of the question whether the ta-participle is passive or > resultative: with transitive verbs it plainly is both, we > are not that much is disagreement. - By the Modern Indic > rules of agreement it does seem to me to be the passive > (of transitive verbs, of course) that formed the pattern. > Where am I wrong? If a certain form, as far back as we can trace it, referred to the object of transitive verbs, and the subject of intransitive verbs, are we obliged to call it a passive, Especially when a different formation was used to form a more conventional passive? Anoterh question is why another passive, using the suffix ya (<*ye/o) was created if the to-adjective was already being used for the passive? From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Mon Aug 9 18:51:56 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 14:51:56 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: First, some methodological issues. As I understand it, a cornerstone of historic linguistics, or any historical science, is that we should try to explain as much as possible by processes that we can and have observed. This should go for syntactic change as much as for phonological or morphological. Secondly, some changes seem to be much more common than their reversals. In such cases, requiring the reverse change must be supported by proportionately stronger evidence than we would want for the more common kind. In particular, the tendency is for new formations to arise to denote ``core'' notions and expand outward to denote allied notions as well. Correspondingly, older formations tend to become restricted away from one or more core notions, depending on the new formations. This means that we need to be careful in distinguishing specilized and general notions in diachronic syntax. For example, progressive is a special case of imperfective. But we do not confuse the two, nor see progressive as a natural outgrowth of imperfective. We need to be just as careful with less familiar categories such as completives. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > On Mon, 26 Jul 1999, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: >>> [Jens:] >>> If my observation that there is an alliance between the sk^-present >>> type and the s-aorist is correct ... then the s-aorist was originally >>> inchoative in function. [...] >> [Nath:] >> This makes it harder for me to understand how the aorist became the >> perfective. `Started driving', in contrast to `drove', suggests >> incomplete action. > The aorist reports a turn of event that caused a new situation: is that > not the perfect thing to express a beginning? Aorist of `start/begin' would be the thing to express a beginning. But why is the thing to express the whole event? While there are several examples where an auxillary meaning `finish' generalizes to become a `perfect', and in a few cases to a perfective, there seem to be none in which `begin' does so. > [Jens:] > The PIE function of the different derivative categories must be at least > compatible with that of their later reflexes, and the simplest solution is > that wherever we find non-trivial correspondences between the daughter > languages we have a relatively direct reflexion of the protolanguage. The perfect was rolled into the (perfective) past in Germanic, Italic, Tocharian and possibly Celtic. Does that mean that the Perfect was originally a past, and Indic and Greek innovated that into a resultative/perfect? Or should be pay attention to the fact that the development is typically the other way? > Why would a morpheme with lengthening and -s- turn up as the > expression of non-durative past in Italo-Celtic, Slavic, Armenian, > Greek and Tocharian if that were not its function in PIE already? Now the (sigmatic) aorist is non-durative. But, > [Nath:] >> How do you classify ``I learned that chapter in one month?'' > [Jens:] I believe as a job for the aorist. the aorist is compatible with duration, > [Nath:] >> Could the imperfect report `action pure et simple', or was that reserved >> for the aorist? How did PIE speakers report a durative action that was >> done, like ``I walked home''? How did they say ``I made pots >> yesterday''? > [Jens:] > I guess they walked home in the aorist, made pots (generically) in the > ipf., but made a specific pot or set of pots in the aorist. but not with unbounded but whole events. [I am assuming that `generically' includes ``I made pots yesterday'', rather than just ``I used to make pots''.] This looks remarkably like Modern Russian, but unlike perfectum-imperfectum distinction of Latin, or the aorist-imperfect distinction of Slavic (even in Modern Bulgarian, the imperfective aorist is regularly used in this case) etc. The difference between the two, and the historical reasons for such differences are amply discussed in the references I gave. It seems to me that Szeremenyi was correct to charge that the syntax of the Modern Slavic languages (that have lost the aorist-imperfect distinction) was unjustifiably transferred to other IE languages and thence to PIE. If the situation in the oldest known stages of languages with a distinct imperfect were really the guide, we would not assign ``I made pots yesterday'' to the domain of the imperfect. However, > But who am I to know? Please don't demand that I write a fable. So we don't really know. We are left with having to extrapolate back. That means that we need to weigh the liklihood of the different possibilites. In particular, we need to cross-check the traditional view of PIE syntax with the evidence coming from the studies of grammatization. Perhaps my Uniformatarian bias is showing, but I refuse to believe that IE evolution was subject to processes unkown in other languages. >[Nath:] >> The point is that an alternate explanation is possible: Completives have >> a ``hot news'' value, which makes it plausible to see them develop into >> recent past. They also can develop into perfectives, Slavic being a >> usable example There are gaps in the examples, but I find this more >> plausible than deriving the Vedic usage out of perfecitve-imperfective >> opposition. > [Jens:] But Vedic _is_ an IE language. So IE languages evolve in a manner completely different from other languages? I suspect that what you want to say is something else, namely aspect for PIE is so well established that we must believe the less probable. That brings us to > [Jens:] With reference to PIE they must [ie, verbs such as *ghenti, (Vedic) ta:s.t.i etc must be imperfect (NR)] > in case such was the system - and that it was is very well established. Could please point to me some sources where Szeremenyi's criticisms are answered. In particular, they must take in account the differences between aorist-imperfect distinction and the perfective-imperfective distinction of Russian etc, and explain why the latter is so well established for PIE when aorist-imperfect distinction worked the other way even in Slavic. I cannot take seriously any argument that ignores such a basic point. To be blunt, it is not even clear that those arguing for aspect in PIE are even aware of the difference, even though it has been pointed out repeatedly, starting from Jespersen at least. > [Nath:] >> How do you explain that it is the so-called imperfect that is the tense >> of narration in Vedic? > [Jens:] > Sorry to take so long in coming to the point, this _is_ a very important > question which deserves more attention than is perhaps mostly accorded to > it. Now, under no circumstances can we completely divorce the imperfect > from the present, for they are formed from the same stem - that must mean > _something_. And I do not think we can disregard the situation- changing > effect of the aorist stem which turns up in all corners of IE. First the point that the imperfect and present are formed from the same stem: This means nothing in those languages which lack aspect, or what seems to be the more common situation, languages that have only a progressive-present/nonpast-past system, especially those in which the present is denoted by zero. An example in the sample used by Bybee et al is Bari. In such cases, the present is imperfective if anything, covering habitual and generic. But the past is formed by adding a prefix ( in some other languages, a particle). Is this so different from PIE? I am not sure if `situation changing' is same as `moving the narrative forward' or not. If they are not the same, then we are in partial agreement. The so-called imperfect can still narrate while the aorist signals an high-lighted action or a juncture. This is not too different from past/perfective vs completive. Completives can be situation changing, and when they become generalized halfway (ie, with the older past/perfective still being in majority in narration), they come to be seen as providing sutiable end points for segments of narration. But the older past/perfective still drives narratives forward. Panjabi uses the older construction based on the PPP often enough to be classified with the perfectives in Dahl's study. Yet it uses the compounded verbs (ie, used with a ``vector verb'') in the most protptypical perfective situations (especially from the Slavic viewpoint). Which has situation changing effect, both or just the latter? > So, if the present stem is situation-preserving, and the aorist stem > situation-changing, how do we explain the Vedic facts? They do not look so > odd to me: The present is also a narrative form, namely to report what is > going on: "The horse is turning at the corner, it's emerging in full > sunlight, and is now approaching the finish line" - this would all be in > the present indicative in Vedic I guess. If the corresponding past > narrative is the imperfect, that could simply be due to the status of this > category as the past of the present stem. But languages with a perfective do not do that. As soon as the narrative is in the past, they use the perfective. > [Jens:] > If instead of perfective past you read concluding past which is just a > natural further development, If it is so natural, we should be able to find several such examples, at least as often as the reverse. What we generally find is that forms start from a restricted ``core'' category to more generalized situations. When older forms lose ground, they become restricted to the ``periphery'' which can cover varied ground. In particular, there are several examples of an auxillary meaning finish becoming the marker of `perfect' or perfective. [They are not the same: ``I read War and Peace yesterday'' is not the same as ``I finished reading War and Peace yesterday''.] How many examples are there of the development you are proposing, of perfectives becoming restricted to the function of emphasizing the attainment of result? > [Jens:] > The IE imperfect is not just Greek. The Slavic imperfect, which mostly > translates the Gk. ipf. in OCS, is an almost direct continuation of the IE > ipf. (in Baltic it has become a preterite pure and simple due to the loss > of the aorist). The Armenian ipf. has endings in -i- from *-e:- stemming > from the verb 'be' (all thematic verbs rhyme with 'be' in Arm.) which > formed *e:st from *e-H1es-t with the augment. The Toch. ipf. is basically > the optative, but there are some long-vowel imperfects which in my view > simply copy the old relation *es-/*e:s- of 'be'. Old Irish no-bered 'was > carrying' is from the middle-voice ipf. *bhereto, notably always > compounded (if only by the default preverb no-) and so rather obviously > continuing an augmented form. No matter what one thinks of Lat. ama:bam it > does contain the same span as Oscan fufans and so adds the same preterital > marker to the present stem as the latter had added to the perfect stem; > and ama:ver-a:-s has preteritalized the perfect stem just as er-a:-s has > the present stem, so here, too, the ipf. is the preterite of the present > stem. Even Albanian ish or ishte (the C,amian forms) may artlessly reflect > *est (in part with productive superimposed ending, probably borrowed from > the aor. qe), i.e. the present stem with secondary ending. Armenian contains extra material and it is not clear that this was functionless; the imperfectivity can come from the stative auxillary (< *eHes-). Synchronically Latin proves nothing because the perfect is the past, so the imperfect is not present stem plus the past. Diachronically, era:- contains an auxillary (a stative one at that) and it seems that -ba:- does as well. Again it is not obvious that the auxillaries were functionless from the beginning, that is that they were added only at the stage where other ways of referring to the past [and there must have been since the perfect and pluperfect originally denoted states] had been eliminated. Without that, we don't know that the imperfectivity is due to the present stem and not due to the use of auxillaries. That leaves Tocharian and Celtic. These do deserve a closer look. But their typical imperfectives are formed differently We need to weigh this against the fact that Vedic has several root presents for which imperfectivity of the past is problematic, and of which you said > I find no problem with the existence of individual verbs that act in > individual ways that have to be entered in the lexicon. That sound fairly > normal. Note also that this is the mirror image of the problem of eber in Armenian, and some aorists in Slavic that look like they are from PIE ``imperfect'' (according to Szemernyi). Given that Tocharian and Irish texts are from a much latter time from Vedic or Hittie, how do we know that the former preserve the archaic state and not the latter. Please don't say that ``we know that is how it was'' because that is what requires proof. There is also the long vowel of the Tocharian imperfect: If it is analogical as you seem to be suggesting, or was based on some verbal noun (Kortlandt), we cannot directly compare it to the Greek-Indo-Iranian imperfect. >> Do we really understand the variety of syntactic structures and their >> diachrony that well? I have mentioned the Tamil -vidu construction a few >> times. You will find some linguists call that a perfective and the Tamil >> simple past an imperfective. This is simply wrong as the simple past is >> and has been the tense of narration for the 2000+ year recorded >> history, and this distinction is nothing like the >> perfective-imperfective distintion in Russian or Arabic [...]. > [Jens:] > Maybe we have something as important as the explanation of the Indic > development here. Perhaps Anatolian and Iranian have been influenced by > some common source which could not distinguish different types of > synthetic preterites? Good old substratum explanation to the rescue. But what substratum? Semitic, a natural candidate if you really menat Iranian, had aspect by 1700 BCE. If you meant Indian here, it should be noted that the use of auxillaries in Tamil is post 2nd c. CE. There are reasons to suspect that at an earlier stage, which had just two forms, the opposition was aspectual and not based on tense. Since the only forms common to all Dravidian languages are these two forms, we are in the same situation. > [Jens:] > As long as our mistakes are comparable to calling the expression of > imperfective action "imperfect" and the expresiion of perfective action > "perfect" in a language that really has a perfective-imperfective > distinction, I see little cause for alarm. BTW, emperical approaches (based on `prototypical' uses) have little difficulty distinguishing between perfect and perfective. This could be considered harmless till someone uses the names alone to decide what the syntax should be. In particular, we really don't know how the ``imperfect'' was used in PIE. All we can do is use grammatization studies to evaluate probabilities of different developments that can give what we observe in the extant texts. This is of course what we do for phonology and morphology and all I am saying that the same goes for syntax. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Aug 10 03:01:48 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 23:01:48 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: << At 23:15 19/07/99 EDT, wrote: My hypothesis for the origin of the East-European -ch in Walach and the like: a derivative ending,... still productive as -ak in Slavic (but also as an adjective forming suffix in Greek -ako's...>> >From a post sent to me: <> I suppose this might be a case of -achi being attached to a place name. S. Long From jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 10 16:25:08 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 18:25:08 +0200 Subject: nasal pres / root aorist II In-Reply-To: <003701beddcc$8a808d20$7302063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: [...] > ****A: in PIE [...] > Now not all verbs show an aorist, but the claim is that verbs with a nasal > infix present go with a root aorist. (Does this mean all nasal infix > verbs, or only those that have an aorist?) J: Not everything present in PIE need have been retained down to an attested language millennia later, so the question makes little sense. P: > I checked a random sample of 16 verbs with nasal presents. Nine of them > had no aorist; the other 7 all had root aorists somewhere in PIE. A > miniscule sample, but suggestive. I'm sure you will be pleased by it, > Jens. In any case, it is clear that there is a need for Strunk's claim to > be based on a proper statistical analysis, not just on a theoretical > assertion supported by his ridiculously small group of 8 selected examples. J: Statistics may be totally misleading, if one type runs crazy and become productive. It seems the s-aorist has done that (luckily then often forgetting some of its old characteristics so that we can still spot it as secondary). P: > ****B: in an individual languages > Strunk and Jens do not make the claim that nasal presents are associated > with root aorists within a particular langauge (which would be a much more > significant claim), but it is worth testing nonetheless. J: The "same-language" ideal is indeed met here and there, see the other posting, simultaneous with this one. P: > Strunk says (p128) "[This system] appears precisely in Indo-Iranian and > Greek" He says that this proves the archaic character of these two > languages. J: I believe you have a word of criticism hanging in the air. To me (too?), the inference is no quite logical. Others would say that it proved the archaic character of the system, since it is retained in precisely Greek and Indo-Ir. which are by widespread consent the most archaic branches of IE. But even that is of course open to question. > I [petegray] said: >>> (a) In Greek it is largely true, but there are exceptions; so a bald >>> statement would need qualification. >>> (b) In Latin it is largely untrue, since the aorists are either sigmatic or >>> the rare reduplicative aorist (tango tetigi, claimed by some as an aorist >>> on the basis of Homer tetago:n, or the lengthened vowel: pango pe:gi (~ >>> perfect pepigi). I can only find cumbo cubui which supports the claim in >>> Latin. > Jens said: >> You might also have thought of cerno:/cre:vi:, fundo:/fu:di:, >> linquo:/li:qui:, rumpo:/ru:pi:, sino:/si:vi:, sperno:/spre:vi:, >> sterno:/stra:vi:, vinco:/vi:ci:. > li:qui and vi:ci probably have the same origin as vi:di (which you > significantly did not include, because its origin is known), that is to say > in an -o- grade perfect. (*-oi- > *-ei- after v, or between /l/ and labial > or labiovelar, then *-ei- > i: as normal) Jens now says: vi:di cannot be the perfect which with this verb means 'know': vi:di: means 'I saw' which is the meaning of the aorist (I have, however, seen vi:di: _quoted_ to mean 'I know', but I know of no textual basis for it; in case I have overlooked something, it is in reference to the meaning 'I saw, I have seen' I insist that it reflects an aorist). I grant you that li:qui: and vi:ci: could be perfects (the "li:ber" rule might work in li:qui:, good point; and vi:c- could even be *wi-wik-, aor. or pf.). However, in that case it is a _very_ odd principle that the o-grade perfect is never retained de- (or un-) reduplicated when the vowel would be retained as /o/ into Latin times. P: > fu:di and ru:pi could equally be from o grade perfects (we know that > iu:vi is). J: Nothing excludes that iu:vi: has IE *-ew- (Italic cannot distinguish eu and ou, cf. also novus : Gk. ne'os), but the example is useless in this context, sure. P: > In any case, If they are aorists, they would have to be full grade, > and I excluded them because I thought that "root" meant "root", not full > grade - though I see the Strunk uses "root" to mean full grade, too. J: A root may alternate between any of its ablaut grades. Root presents and root aorist often have full grade in the daughter languages, originally the alternated, as *{gw}em-t, 3pl *{gw}m-ent 'came' (still Vedic a'gan, a'gman) P: > cre:vi, spre:vi, si:vi, stra:vi are clearly -vi formation (Latin) perfects, > on a laryngeal base. The origin of these -v-forms is still unknown. > In what sense do you make them either a root form, or an aorist? J: The Latin v-"perfect" is obviously an innovation, but that does not make the verbs forming it innovations themselves - they must have had _some_form in the protolanguage. And the locus of diffusion of the Latin -v- is not ard to find: in /fu[v]i:/ there was an automatic glide which could be regarded as phonemic or subphonemic, sincefui:/ and /fuvi:/ would be pronounced the same. Thus, if fu- formed fu-vi:, what would other verbs in vowels like ama:- form if not ama:-vi: and the like? A comparable extra -v- is seen in Sanskrit in 3pl aor. abhu:van, pf. 1/3sg babhu:va, 3pl babhu:vur., only in Sanskrit the additional -v- was not utilized as a pattern for other verbs, while in Latin it was. I guess the Old English verba pura in -wan have a comparable origin: since bu:wan 'dwell' is simply bu:- + -an (possibly from *bu:-j-an with loss of intervocalic *-j- by phonetic rule, itself a back-formation based on the aorist *bhuH-t, Ved. a'-bhu:-t), the root form *kne:- (whence North/West-Gmc. *kna:-) 'know' formed cna:wan; and *se:- formed sa:wan 'to sow' etc. Therefore there ought to be no reservations against the right of an expected root aorist with 3sg *kreH1-t to turn up as cre:-v-i:. The form *kreH1-t itself is from *kreH1y-t which corresponds to a nasal present of the shape *kri-ne'-H1-ti/*kri-n-H1-e'nti by the rules I have been able to work out; therefore, cerno:, cre:vi: looks very good. The same goes for se:vi: 'sowed' and, with bigger or smaller footnotes, for the others as well. P: > I note that > elsewhere in your posting you claim that the Greek sigmatic aorists can be > counted as root forms. This means you count zero grade, full grade, Greek > sigmatic, and Latin -vi formations all as root aorists for the purposes of > your claim. J: That's right, I've got no inhibitions at all. A Gk. aorist like epe'ras(s)a from pe'rne:mi (Dor. -a:-) 'sell' cannot be an old s-aorist, for they have lengthened grade. Instead it must represent a reformation of *e-pera from *e-per at 2-t with commonplace addition of productive morphemes, this giving 3sg e-pe'ra-s(s)-e just as lu'o: forms e'-lu:-s-e. By the same token, a Vedic aor. like a-s'ami:t 'laboured, fatigued' cannot be an s-aor., but only a set.-root's root aorist from *e-k^em at 2-t, and this is not overthrown by the existence of a 1sg a'-s'ami-s.-am which is simply due to backformation from a wrong analysis of the for in -i:-t as being sigmatic. Thus, the old aor. to go with s'amna:ti was 1sg *as'amam, 2sg a's'ami:s, 3sg a's'ami:t, just as gr.bhna:'ti formed aor 1sg a'grabham (from *e-grebH2-m.), a'grabhi:s, -i:t. The true s-aorists from set.-root do have lengthened grade, cf. a'-ka:ri-s.-am. -ka:ri:-t 'commemorated'. This stratification has been worked out very clearly by Johanna Narten in a solid monograph of lasting value and seems now disputed by nobody informed. - Note that the Gk. prs. pe'rne:mi already reveals the paradigmatic companionship of the nasal present with something having non-lengthened full grade and so rather obviously points to an IE set of n-prs. and root-aor. P: > (a) The wider the definition of "root aorist" the less meaningful your > claim becomes. J: Not if the re-definitions apply to reformations that have kept their diagnostic value as these have. P: > (b) You would need to show that there is indeed a proper root aorist > underlying these forms. But (i) this cannot be done in Latin - the best we > can do is show a zero grade form (as in many Latin perfects); J: There is no way cre:vi: or se:vi: could be based on IE perfects. P: > (ii) how would > you distinguish a sigmatic aorist in Greek from a root aorist? J: If the forms has no /s/ (or its reflex), there is no problem. Thus e'kamon can only be a root aorist vis-a-vis the n-prs. ka'mno: 'fatigue, wear out' (the same paradigm as in Sanskrit). If there is -s-, significant (i.e. not Osthoff-triggered) short vocalism points to root aor. A well-establised s-aorists like *de:'ik^-s-m. (Lat. di:xi:, Avest. da:is^-) is thus opaque in Gk. e'-deik-s-a because of Osthoff's shortening. I know of only Barton's brilliant analysis of ege:'ra: 'I grew old' as a provable s-aor. in Gk.: Proto-Greek *e-ge:ra-h-a from IE *g^e:'r at 2-s-m. - an analysis I would have wished I had made myself. P: > For Sanskrit, I gave examples which contradicted the claim, and Jens gave > some which supported it. Neither of us had (or has ?) complete accurate > figures. In my sample I took random instances, so I restricted myself to > just one Skt class. Jens said: > [J:] >>why ignore those of class nine (too good?) - ? > [P:] > That was a petty jibe, Jens, and unworthy of you. In fact the figures for > class nine are not good. Of those Whitney lists as "older", 7 show no > aorist, 10 do not show a root aorist, and 13 do. You get 13 / 30, about > 43% - not bad, but not totally convincing, either. P: I looked through Macdonell's lists for class nine, finding: 11 work fine: as'na:'ti as'i:t gr.bhn.a:'ti a'grabhi:t ja:na:'ti jn~eya:'s pr.n.a:'ti a'pra:t vr.n.i:te' sbj. va'rat s'r.n.a:'t as'ari:t s'rathni:te' as'ranthi:t sina:'ti a'sa:t skabhna:'ti askambhi:t stabhna:mi a'stambhi:t str.n.a:'mi a'stari:s 3 have thematic prs. based on the sbj. of the root aor. thus recovered: jina:'ti ja'yate juna:ti ja'vate puna:ti pavate 2 have this in the other languages: badhna:ti Gmc. *binda- ubhna:ti Gmc. *weba- 2 won't behave: mina:ti forms mes.t.a, while hrun.a:ti has red. and s-aor. forms I have left nothing out on purpose, but I have not made _very_ thorough inquiries into the accuracy of Macdonell's data. This ought to mean tat corrections may be expected to go both ways and outweight each other. The picture this gives is not bad: Out of 18, 11 still behave as they should, 3 have clear traces of having done so earlier, 2 do so elsewhere, only 2 don't fit. Again, it looks like the opposite of random distribution. P: > So for PIE we need someone to crunch numbers and get a proper statistical > analysis, and for individual languages only Greek and Sanskrit have a hope > of showing a genuine correlation, but for both it is, if anything, nothing > more than a general tendency. It certainly can't support the original > claim that since Sanskrit shows the form tundate, it must once have had a > root aorist to go with it. J: But it does do that, for tund- recurs in Lat. tundo:, and in neither language is the infixing of nasals productive, ergo this stems from PIE, and in the very same root at that. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 10 18:37:52 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 20:37:52 +0200 Subject: nasal pres / root aor In-Reply-To: <003601beddcc$8660a4a0$7302063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: > On Strunk ... nasal presents & root aorists, > I have now read Strunk. [...] > We note that Rix (lexicon I-G Verbs) partially demurs, saying that the > distinction of full grades I and II in nasal presents is "not sufficiently > proved". > Either way, the basic tenet of Strunk's argument at this point is now > standard stuff. The point of our discussion arises in his next argument. > [..] He says (my > trans.) "There *must* be a strong affinity between nasal present and root > aorist." > This is where my problems begin. What does he mean by "affinity"? And > when you mention, Jens, a "paradigmatic companionship", what do you mean? > Naively, but understandably, I thought you and Strunk meant within a > language, but you say: >> It was never claimed for the individual languages, only for the common >> reconstructed protolanguage. > which is a good reflection of what Strunk says. > That means you are arguing only that if a PIE language has a nasal present, > there is likely to be a root aorist somewhere else in PIE. Strunk gives 8 > major examples in his book - and in two of them he has to find the root > aorist in a different language from the nasal present. (J aside: Delete the P in PIE, the attested languages are not _P_IE.) > Now my argument is that this is not really "paradigmatic companionship". > I do not believe it is anything more than a restatement of what a nasal > present is. It seems to me that you and Strunk are merely saying: > A PIE root can form: > (a) presents of varying kinds in various LL, incl. perhaps a nasal present > somewhere; > (b) aorists of various kinds in various LL, incl often a root aorist > somewhere. > So we are not surprised that a good number of roots which show a nasal > present somewhere also show a root aorist somewhere else. The > "paradigmatic companionship" is only a significant claim if it occurs within > the same language, which - at least here - you deny. > To be fair, we should look to see if there is a strong PIE correlation, and > if there is a correlation within individual languages. [Reference to next posting.] I hope I'm allowed such extensive a quote from Peter's posting, seeing that it makes the context very clear. I do indeed believe that the existence of a nasal present in the IE protolanguage _normally_ implied the existence of a root aorist in the same protolanguage. But that does not necessary repeat itself in the daughter languages because of the many changes that have occurred between PIE and any attested IE language. Still, the impression is so clear that one is justified to believe that, in PIE, it was clearer still. It may be like the strong verbs of Germanic: you don't find many well-structured strong verbs in present-day Gmc. lgg., but you do find enough to put you on the track of something that seems to have had more of a system to it once than it has now. I have made some checkings into the tenacity of this companionship, and it does actually look quite good. I think it is a fair statement that, wherever the nasal is present-forming, there is a non-present form differing only by lack of the nasal. Now, that is a root aorist (where it is not the perfect). There are at least three cases of strong support what were not used by Strunk: 1. Tocharian: "Zu Ps. VI geho"ren (...) Ko. V und Pt. I", "Neben Ps. B VII steht regelma"ssig Ko. V und Pt. I." (Krause & Thomas, Tocharisches Elementarbuch I, 204 and 205). By P(r)s. VI is meant the formation with -na:- (from -n at -, the weak form of the Indic class IX), while Prs. VII of the B dialect refers to the nasal-infix structure matching Lat. vinco:, Ved. yunakti etc. These both regularly take "Preterite I" which is the IE root aorist. Here we have a language that synchronically presents the paradigmatic companionship assumed by Strunk for PIE. Note that this is not the IE perfect which is continued in two other Toch. categories, viz. (i) in the subjunctive (!), (ii) in the Preterite III which also reflects the s-aorist (due to the special Tocharian merger of the vowels *-o- of the perfect and *-e:- of the s-aorist. 2. Baltic: Lithuanian (3rd person) prs. bunda, prt. budo (busti 'wake up'), rinka riko (rikti 'make a mistake'), minga migo (migti 'fall asleep'), tinka tiko (tikti 'touch, fit') and many others have an -n- inserted in the present, while the prt. lacks it. The meaning is practically always situation-changing, i.e. the natural domain of an aorist, so we expect a root aorist to be formed without further ado. And what could the preterite stems bud-, rik-, mig-, tik- etc. be if not the weak form of root aorists? The meaning is mostly intransitive-reflexive which makes it even better, for the added preterite morpheme *-a:- (whence Lith. -o-) is opposed to a different preterite morpheme *-e:- (Lith. -e:-, spelled with the dotted e) which is typically active and transitive. Now, it is a widespread doctrine that thematic verbs had *-e-/-o- in the active, but constant *-o- in the middle voice. Therefore, if the basis is the 3sg in act. *-e-t, mid. *-o (or *-o-t), these would come out as Balt. *-e and *-a resp.; and when _they_ go inflected by the addition of thematic endings, the result would be act. *-e-e and mid. *-a-a which would yield exactly Lith. -e: and -o as we find them to be. For the addition of thematic "endings" cf. the fate of the root aorist in Slavic 3sg nes-e (Ved. a:nat. /-:nas'/ from *Hnek^-t 'reached'). This means that the constant weak-grade form of the Baltic nasal infix presents simply reflects the IE middle-voice stem which of course had weak form all through. This is decisively supported by the semantics of nasal verbs derived from adjectives which are, not factitive as in Hittite, but ingressive: bukas 'blunt' forms bunka buko (bukti 'become blunt'), dubus 'deep' forms dumba dubo (dubti 'become hollow, concave'), pigus/-as 'cheap' forms pinga pigo (pigti 'get cheaper'). This can only be the middle voice of a factitive: "be made cheaper" = "become cheaper". 3. Hittite. Though Anatolian does not distinguish different stems within a given verbal lexeme, the nasal-infix stems are opposed to structures without the nasal. And in Hittite there is a clearcut opposition of function, the nasal structure being causative: hark-zi 'vanishes' : hanik-zi 'destroys'. This is of course not the function of the Lith. intransitives like minga 'falls asleep', but if we remember and respect the probable origin of the Lith. structure in the middle voice, it's okay again: then the middle voice of a causative "makes oneself fall asleep" or "is being caused to fall asleep" will come full circle and end up meaning 'fall asleep' just as the base verb did in the first place. And, with an adjectival basis, Hitt. tepu-s 'small, inferior' forms tep-n-u-zzi 'makes inferior, humiliates' (which was a PIE lexeme, cf. Ved. dabhno'ti 'damages'). A corresponding Baltic verb would have been based on the midle voice and have meant 'become inferior', as the midle voice presumably meant already in PIE (or even earlier). The productive derivative status of the nasal structure in Hittite is not the whole story, however: There are also remains of lexemes that had passed through the whole history reflected by th other languages, thus notably tamekzi, tamenkanzi 'adhere, stick (vel.sim.)' from *tm.-ne-k-ti = Skt. tana'kti 'run thick, coagulate' (root *temk- of Eng. tight) and hamekzi, hamenkanzi/hamankanzi 'bind' from *H2m.-ne-g^h-ti (root of Lat. ango:, Gk. a'nkho: 'tighten, narrow'). The full story of the nasal present must be something like this: The formation was in origin _factitive_ "make (into) -", "cause to be -". But since the verbal root was also an agent noun (vr.tra-ha'n- is a 'killer of Vr.tra-', Lat. re:g- is a 'ruler'), the nasal structure made from root nouns of agent-noun semantic created simple causatives: 'make a binder' = 'make bind'. Then, the middle voice of that 'be made a binder, be made bind, be caused to bind' was simply an elaborate way of saying 'bind'. Thereby the structure widely lost its specifically middle-voice semantics, and so it is no great wonder if it turns up with active endings. The whole scenario must - at least in large part - have been completed before the working of the ablaut, for the new active forms have escaped the accent shifts seen in the middle voice: *(H)yew-ne'-g-e 'is made join' replaced the middle endings by active ones, 3sg inj. *(H)yew-ne'-g-t, while the middle was restructured to *(H)yew-ne-g-to' with accent shift onto the syllabic ending, and only then did the ablaut reductions make act. *(H)yune'g-t, mid. *(H)yung-to' out of these forms. - Note that the presumed earlier middle-voice preform of a nasal prs. like Vedic s'r.n.o'ti 'hears' is indeed found in Old Irish ro-cluinethar 'hears' which is a deponent verb. Despite the retention of productivity in Hittite, the nasal present type has plainly become grammaticalized as "just a present" with individual verbs in PIE, and it is hard to escape the impression that the corresponding aorist (when there was one) was the root-aorist type. Jens From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Aug 9 18:42:24 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 19:42:24 +0100 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? Message-ID: >From Rick: > What is the current consensus re Phrygian, Armenian, Thracian, > Macedonian, Albanian and Greek? > Are they considered as part of an Indo-Balkan subfamily along with > Indo-Iranian? For the well attested languages we can say that there are too many differences, not least the centum/satem, and the RUKI palatalisation, both of which Albanian & Armenian show, but Greek does not. There are close connections between Greek and Indo-Iranian, and many points of contact with Armenian, but they must be kept in perspective. There are many differences as well. To talk of a sub-family is a bit too extreme. As for the less well attested languages, I think the evidence is so slim that opinions differ! Peter From jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 10 19:19:13 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 21:19:13 +0200 Subject: S-aorist meaning In-Reply-To: <009f01bedf85$036a5fe0$40038cd4@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: > [...] > The evidence from Vedic root presents and -s- aorists > is especially helpful. Incidentally, how does this fit with your > suggestion that -s- aorists and -sk presents go together? Well, the language could have been nicer: The productivity of the s-aorist of course bleeds the old pattern with some of its persuasive power. Still, the link between -s- and -sk^e/o- seems inescapable in the derivative verbs: If Hittite forms ingressive de-adjectival verbs in -es- meaning 'become' (idalaw-es- 'become evil'), and Lat. sene:sco: 'is growing old' has the same semantic shade, the connection is established. And, since the stative ("be") is expressed by the *-eH1- (of "e:-verbs"), while -s- is a known aorist marker, and *-sk^e/o- is a known present-stem morpheme, the mathematical result is that *-s- and *-sk^e/o- are both inchoative morphemes. The longer, present, form is of course durative, situation-elaborating, which, with an inchoative, would mean something like an uncompleted change of situation: "be in the process of beginning to be -", i.e. "be developing into -, become more and more -". And on that background it is nice to find that a handful or more sk-presents do have s-aorists beside them (as Ved. pr.ccha'ti : aor. a'pra:ks.am, a'pra:t.). Need I mention that Tocharian examples (B -sk-, A -s- by phonetic development) has a strong predilection for the s-preterite (pre. III), in Toch. A without exceptions? Jens From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Aug 10 19:52:07 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 14:52:07 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear IE Gentlefolk: In arguing with Larry, Pat wrote: >> Second, the point that Leo is making about distinguishing syntactic >> from morphological subjects needs to be addressed by you in terms of >> "subject" properties. Larry replied: >I have already discussed this at length. In a Basque transitive >sentence, it is the ergative NP, and not the absolutive NP, which shares >the subject properties of the absolutive NP in an intransitive sentence. >As far as I am concerned, that is the end of the matter. If Basque and Dyirbal were the whole story, that might be the case; my question as to whether these syntactic properties are actually *subject* properties would then be merely a matter of nomenclature. But the reality is more complicated, since in many languages, some of these properties belong to the morphological subject, others to what I have called (in my Case Grammar framework) the Highest Ranking NP (HRNP). Consider German for a moment. Reflexivization and many other syntactic properties are controlled by the morphological subject, regardless of its "rank" in the Case Hierarchy. But word order in the "Mittelfeld" is, to a considerable extent, hierarchical, with the HRNP leftmost. Since German seems also to have a rule permitting the morphological subject to be relocated to the start of the Mittelfeld, the differences are not always apparent; but the following contrast may be instructive: 1. Hat ein Professor dem Studenten geholfen? 'Did a professor help the student?' 2. ??Hat dem Studenten ein Professor geholfen? 3. ?*Hat ein Professor dem Studenten gefehlt? 'Was a Professor lacking for the student?' 4. Hat dem Studenten ein Professor gefehlt? _Helfen_ in (1) and (2) is agentive; the object is Beneficiary rather than patient (hence the dative casemarking). The higher ranking Agent is naturally placed before the Beneficiary, even though it is indefinite. _Fehlen_ 'to be lacking' has a Patient as subject; I analyze the surface dative as Beneficiary (Experiencer in sentences where _fehlen_ means rather 'feel the absence of; miss'). Both Beneficiary and Experiencer rank higher than Patient; I believe this is why (4) is acceptable (surface order follows ranking), while (3) is very poor (indefinite morphological subjects should not be so relocated; (5), with a definite morphological subject, is, however, acceptable). 5. Hat der Professor dem Studenten gefehlt? It is very interesting to examine "subject" properties in languages of the Philippines. I'm working from memory, but if I remember correctly, about half of the "subject" properties belong to the noun marked with _ang_ (a morphological subject, though often called "topic"), and half belong to the HRNP. Since the two tend not to coincide, Tagalog syntax is interesting... If I haven't fouled up the facts here, one must conclude that while one might speak of a "syntactic subject" in German (even though some word order matters work differently), there would be no point whatsoever in searching for a syntactic subject in Tagalog, since the properties are evenly split. If so, then the term "syntactic subject" might best be abandoned for *all* languages, since the terms "morphological subject" and "HRNP" appear to cover all cases in all language types. None of above is meant in any way to endorse Pat's view of ergativity, which is indeed indefensible. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 11 06:09:27 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 02:09:27 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) (fwd) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/10/99 11:35:34 PM, Rob McMahon (PhD) wrote: <> Dr. McMahon is expressing the "Out of Africa" hypothesis of modern human origins here. The main opposing theory is commonly called "Multiregionalism" which dates modern humanity significantly earlier (as far back as 2 million years) and offers a much more complex picture of interaction among human groups. For the sake of balance, list members should be aware that the matter is not settled and a summary of the issues (once again) can be found in the most recent Scientific American (Aug 1999 p.13), 'IN FOCUS: IS OUT OF AFRICA GOING OUT THE DOOR? - New doubts on a popular theory of human origins" Aside from question regarding calibration and mutation rates, fossil evidence may be seen as conflicting with the "Out of Africa" theory. In any case, under the category "Back Down to Earth", it is worthwhile considering what is involved in correlating any language - documented or reconstructed - with events occurring 100-50 thousands years ago. A simple reality check reminds us that we have just previously been arguing whether it is even justified to date the origin of the entire IE family of languages before 5500BC. There is nothing wrong with speculation, but there is a credibilty issue for serious scholarship in holding out that such speculation can be in some way be confirmed by unsettled findings in other fields, whose subject matter is not connected with language except in a very loose sense. Regards, Steve Long cc: rmcmahon at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 11 08:47:11 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 09:47:11 +0100 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? In-Reply-To: <448104ea.24de47b0@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I respectfully disagree with the person who > recently argued between the following two > alternatives that either could be an appropriate "null hypothesis" > (though I am greatly appreciative of that same person's > many other contributions!) It was me. >> No languages are related. >> >> All languages are related. > Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like > "We do not know whether all languages are related > (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) No, I'm afraid not. This last statement is not a hypothesis, but merely an observation of the present state of our knowledge. As such, it is not subject to test. A null hypothesis must be something we can test. A null hypothesis is not a statement of anyone's belief. It is an analytical tool set up to permit investigation. Having set it up, we then attempt to find sufficient evidence to disconfirm it. If we can do that, we have made progress: we know that the null hypothesis is false, at least in certain cases, and that its contradictory is therefore true in those cases. Here's an example from a book I've been reading. The author, a statistician and a baseball fan, is interested in finding out whether the performance of baseball players is affected by the nature of the ballparks in which they play -- that is, he's interested in what baseball historians call the `park effect'. Accordingly, he sets up his null hypothesis as follows: A baseball player's performance is unaffected by the parks he plays in. Now, this is *not* the author's belief. Quite the contrary: he makes it clear that he personally believes this hypothesis to be false. But he can't achieve anything merely by declaring it to be false. So, naturally, what he does is to state it, and then to go on to assemble evidence against it. As it happens, he is able to assemble so much evidence against it that he feels safe in concluding that it is false, and that its contradictory must be true. That's how things work. Same in comparative linguistics. If we want or hope to establish that certain languages are related, we must take as our null hypothesis the statement I set out earlier: No languages are related. By assembling persuasive evidence against this hypothesis in particular cases, we succeed in disconfirming it for those cases, and therefore in establishing that certain languages *are* related. For example, in the case of the languages we call the Germanic languages, so much evidence can be adduced against the null hypothesis that it becomes untenable for those languages, and its contradictory must be accepted: the Germanic languages really are related. In general, the appropriate null hypothesis is the hypothesis you hope to disconfirm, not the one you hope to confirm. Suppose we adopted instead the opposite null hypothesis: All languages are related. To investigate this, we would have to seek to disconfirm it by assembling persuasive evidence against it, at least in some cases. And that, as I pointed out earlier, is an impossibility: we cannot prove that *any* languages are absolutely unrelated. Hence no progress is possible. To reiterate: a null hypothesis is not a statement of belief. In fact, the null hypothesis is usually the very opposite of what we hope or suspect is the truth, the conclusion we would like to establish. As both my baseball example and my linguistic example suggest, a suitable null hypothesis is normally stated in the negative: it declares that there is *no* relation between the objects of inquiry. This is so because we are normally interested in showing that these things *are* related. Even when we really do want to show that things are unrelated, the null hypothesis is still stated in the negative. Suppose I want to show that there is no correlation between star-signs and personality. The appropriate null hypothesis is the negative: Star-signs are unrelated to personality. I will then go on to show -- I hope -- that no evidence can be assembled that disconfirms the null hypothesis, and hence that there is no reason to reject the null hypothesis this time. > Any attempt to force anyone else to accept something > that embodies a CLAIM (as both of the first two alternatives > above do), is MANIPULATING the discourse, > instead of dealing with facts. No, not at all. Stating a null hypothesis is *not* an attempt to force anyone to believe it. > If we don't know, then we don't know, it's as simple as that. Well, yes, but, if we want to escape from our ignorance, we must go about our investigations in an orderly way. > I personally don't give a hoot what anyone wants > to "assume", or tell me to assume, in the absence of > data justifying such an assumption. Again: a null hypothesis is neither a statement of belief nor an attempt at intellectual intimidation. It is merely an analytical tool. > Using a "burden of proof" argument is merely > a way of trying to get someone to accept a conclusion > in the absence of evidence. Hardly. The burden of proof is always on the person who wants to defend the contradictory of the appropriate null hypothesis. If I hope to persuade my colleagues that Basque and Burushaski are related, then the null hypothesis is that they are *not* related, and it is up to me to assemble enough evidence to disconfirm the null hypothesis in the eyes of my colleagues. That's how comparative linguistics works. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 11 13:47:41 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 08:47:41 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: Dear Ed and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Sent: Sunday, August 08, 1999 9:10 PM > [Ed] > I am still in my vacation home in Spain, so I don't have my references here. > Maybe I should have said 'ending'. I have seen '-age' mentioned as a > variant of '-ak'. I'll have to look it up after Aug. 20. May be I was > confused. Can you clarify for the time being? Pat responds: To the best of my knowledge, there is, per se, no ending or suffix -age. There is a suffix -ak which indicates the genitive (derived, IMHO, from ak(a), 'make, do', which I believe is better translated as '*have, *possess'[related to IE *e:ik-]). According to current Sumerological opinion, -ak appears simply as -a when it is *not* followed by a vocalic suffix. But, for example, if a genitive phrase is in a syntactic position which requires a vocalic suffix, such as lug~al kalam-a (king of the land) + -e (ergative), the final consonant reappears: lug~al kalam(m)ak-e. The final syllable is frequently written -ke{4}, a sign for which another reading is ge{2}. There is no serious suggestion of which I am aware that -k- is voiced (or de-aspirated) to -g- intervocalically so that the likeliest reading of the compound suffix is -ak-e (though usually written Ca-ke{4}. 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 jrader at m-w.com Wed Aug 11 10:04:32 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 10:04:32 +0000 Subject: Passivity as a transition (raising dust) Message-ID: Well, my "any other Greek etymological dictionary" may have been unwarranted sarcasm, but my point is that guessing about derivational and etymological relationships without acknowledging the literature is going to be a waste of your own time in a field like Greek, where a long tradition of scholarship exists. I'm sorry if you don't have access to a library, but I'm afraid there's not much I can do about that. At any rate, I've looked at Boisacq, Hoffman, Frisk, and Chantraine, as well as Pokorny, and the thinking is uniform. Greek is compared with Latin , from both of which a base <*kenis-> on an Indo-European level may be reconstructable. Pokorny glosses <*ken-> with "sich muehen, eifrig streben, sich sputen," and Latin is compared. Jim Rader > In a message dated 8/8/99 1:22:04 AM, jrader at m-w.com wrote: > < articles on , , and in Chantraine, > _Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque_ (or any other Greek > etymological dictionary, for that matter).>> > I don't have Chantraine, but I see in my notes: [ moderator snip ] > But since you seem to have access to ALL the other Greek etymological > dictionaries, perhaps you can give us a survey? > Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 11 14:35:37 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:35:37 +0100 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Aug 1999 Jon Patrick wrote: [LT] >> One day I hope to compile a list of the >> Basque words that can reasonably be regarded as monomorphemic, as native >> and as having been in the language for at least 2000 years. I don't >> expect that list to contain more than several hundred words. > We are working on this problem here at the moment. Myself and two > Doctoral Philology students from the Basque Country. We are working > on monosyllables first and think that in total it is likely to be a > few thousand. Well, this sounds optimistically high to me, I confess. My admittedly unsystematic experiments lead me to believe that the number of monomorphemic items which are good candidates for native and ancient status is unlikely to be more than a few hundred. Of course, I exclude verbs, since native verbal roots are never free forms. If we agree to include verbal roots, that will add several hundred more. I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even 1500 strong candidates. But I'll wait and see. [on Azkue's preface] > So you would seem to agree then that the Azkue list contains all the > words Azkue thought were native euskara ( as well as others of > course). Yes, though that is not the point we were discussing earlier. > I assume we are using the term "native" to mean words not > derived from any other language at least in the last 2000 years. More or less. [LT] >> Sorry; this does not follow. The mere existence of a word in modern >> Basque is no guarantee that it is either native or ancient. > I'm quite confused by this response. If they can't be identified as > loans (my comment) you say there is no guarantee they are native or > ancient. I guess I have to say, true. OK; we agree. > But surely your statement kills all work dead in the water. No; not at all. There's a lot of room between `certainly borrowed' and `certainly native', and nothing is guaranteed in advance to be native and ancient. > It seems you are saying we need "guarantees" that words are of some > class/type/characterisitic to persue any analysis. Note my statement > doesn't assert such words are "guaranteed" to be native or ancient, > but that they do represent evidence worthy of pursuing. No, I don't require advance guarantees: none are available in any case. I propose the following. Let's compile a list of the Basque words each of which meets the following minimal requirements. (1) There is no reason to suppose it is polymorphemic. [The great bulk of the words in any Basque dictionary are *transparently* polymorphemic, and can be excluded at once.] (2) It is found throughout the language, or nearly so. [Since the better dictionaries assign words to the conventional dialects, it is easy to formalize this requirement as we see fit.] (3) It is attested early. [Let's say before 1600, which is `early' for Basque.] (4) There is no reason to believe that it is shared with languages known to have been in contact with Basque. [Subjective, and hard to formalize, but I believe that doubtful cases are few enough to constitute only a minor problem.] To these I would like to add two more, though these are not essential: (5) It does not appear to be a nursery word. (6) It does not appear to be of imitative origin. Now, (5) would exclude only a very few words not excluded by the other criteria, notably `mother' and `father', while (6) would exclude a much larger number of items which would be automatically excluded in any serious comparative work, like `meow', `moo', `baa', `ding-dong', `spit', and probably also `sneeze'. This last sounds roughly like oo-SHEEN, and, in my view, is too likely to be imitative to be included in any list. Having compiled the list, let us then examine it and determine the phonological characteristics of the words on the list. I am fairly confident that I can guess what the results will be, at least in their main lines, though there will doubtless be a few surprises in the details. [on my English examples] > I wonder if we are talking at crossed purposes here. I'm not saying > the known history of a word should be ignored. If we have such > information then it should be used. Agreed. > But I am saying that words we have today that are not identified as > having any alternative history could be fairly considered for > informing about early euskara. Here I can't agree. I have the gravest reservations about including words not recorded before 1871, or before 1935; about including words found nowhere but in Larramendi's dictionary or in Hiribarren's dictionary; about including words recorded only in one small area; about including words reported only by the Dutch linguist van Eys or only by the Spanish polymath Hervas y Panduro; about including all sorts of things which, in my view, are deeply suspect for one reason or another. I believe it is not enough merely to exclude obvious loan words: we must be *far* more discriminating, or we are going to wind up with a list containing more junk than genuine native and ancient words. *Once* we have a list of the most plausible candidates for native and ancient status, *then* we can consider judiciously whether further words might plausibly be added to it. But we have to start by being as rigorous as possible, not by tossing in everything that isn't obviously borrowed. > Let's take the opposite scenario. In the Azkue list there are 9854 > words of which 1436 have modern orthography that can't be mapped > into the orthogrpahy you use for describing early euskara. Not sure I understand this. > Of the 8318 words that do fit your orthography, 5022 can be found in > one of the modern lexicons/dictionaries of Aulestia, Kintana, Morris > or XUXEN. if we analyse these words and show that they strongly > conform to the Michelena description of early euskara and/or your > restating of it, will you consider that result irrelevant to > determining the merit of that description, especially given the > phonological conservatism of euskara? Yes, I would. Let me cite just a few Basque words from Aulestia's dictionary: `greyhound' `if' `word' `turnip' `toad' `courage' `skirt' `plaster' `strong' `write' `ax' `field' `honor' `hen' `sky' And so on, and so on, for god knows how many more. Now, every single one of these words conforms *perfectly* to our ideas of what native and ancient Basque words can look like, without the slightest complication. And yet, in every case, I can adduce overwhelming evidence that the word is not native, or is not ancient, or is not monomorphemic. Conformity to pre-existing ideas about possible phonological forms is not nearly good enough: such an approach must inevitably sweep up huge numbers of words which demonstrably should not be there, and, by implication, very many more which really (if not demonstrably) should not be there. > I would also like to point out there could be a further difference > in our perspectives due to different but unspoken methodologies and > goals. I am interested in describing the stochastic or probabilistic > characteristics of word formation in euskara. By `word formation', I suppose you mean what I would call `morpheme-structure constraints'? Well, fine if you're only interested in modern Basque, but I myself am interested in the morpheme-structure constraints of Pre-Basque, and therefore I don't want to count as evidence anything that doesn't appear to be a strong candidate for a Pre-Basque word, in its earliest reconstructible form. > Whilst getting a legitimate set of words to anlayse is important the > presence of a few doubtful words does not necessarily destroy such a > description as a legitimate probabilistic statement. Agreed, but I worry about that phrasing `a few words'. If we are not maximally rigorous, I fear that what we'll get is a whole mountain of words that shouldn't be there -- more improper words, in fact, than proper ones, which will surely ruin any stochastic approach. > I do not wish to deny the importance of systematic study of each > word but noisy data doesn't invalidate a probabilisitic study nor > necessarily pre-determine it to being unable to say something useful > about the structure of the data. Production of a putative core word > list of early euskara will be a spin-off of this work. Excellent, but I'd be very cautious about including modern words. [LT] >> I don't see why. A dictionary of modern English is of no direct >> relevance to ascertaining the nature of Old English, and a dictionary of >> modern Basque is of no direct relevance to ascertaining the nature of >> Pre-Basque. You might as well try to find out what Latin was like by >> reading a dictionary of modern French. > This of course assumes there is little relatedness between the two > and there is not a systematic development from one to the other. The > already phonological conservatism of euskara suggests that the words > in Azkue have greater validity for studying early euskara than > modern english for studying middle english. Not necessarily. Phonological conservatism is only one factor among several. It matters little that Basque phonology has been conservative if not much of the Pre-Basque lexicon still survives. > and Michelena's work as meritorious as it is, is not the last of the > story and the Azkue list can help us add to that, I'm sure. Well, I'll look forward to seeing what you come up with. [on my distinction between `native' and `ancient'] > I'm a little mystified with this in the context of euskara. As far > as I have heard the dominant ancient external influence has come > from Latin with suggestions of a small number of items from Celtic > and a few others. Once these are identified then is not everything > ancient also native because there is nothing else left but ancient > native words, or am I missing something? Once ancient loans are identified -- if they can be -- then everything ancient remaining is also native, in some sense. But there remains the *big* problem of determining what is ancient to begin with. The great bulk of the Basque vocabulary is not ancient, just as the great bulk of the modern English vocabulary is not ancient. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 11 15:06:21 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 11:06:21 EDT Subject: Unwarranted certainty Message-ID: In a message dated 8/11/99 3:17:42 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes: >I guess it depends on what you mean by 'know'. Conclusions drawn from the >mechanical application of an investigative method are one thing; educated >speculation is another. When we reconstruct PIE laryngeals, we do so on >the basis of a strict application of the Comparative Method; when we >speculate about the phonetic values of those categories, we're doing just >that: speculating. There is another distinction being made here which I wish to challenge. Even when there is no hypothesis included about the phonetic nature of the recontructed phoneme based on sound correspondences, IT IS SIMPLY NOT THE CASE that use the narrow-sense comparative method yields conclusions which are certain beyond reasonable doubt, while use of what I have called reconstructive method is educated speculation. The plausibility of the hypothesized original sound values and of the changes necessary under hypothesis to get from them to attested presumed descendants can actually have a bearing on whether we believe the reconstruction of the phonemic categories (without regard to their sound value) had been done correctly. The "comparative method" is a tool like other tools, applied blindly it can yield wrong results. There are known cases of this. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From stevegus at aye.net Wed Aug 11 14:41:35 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 10:41:35 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > I don't know about Gaulish having had a twenty-based number system (nothing > unusual in the world, cf. Mayas), but Basque (and presumably Aquitanian, > spoken in SW France 2000 years ago) certainly has one, and in a very > consistent way, up to eighty-nineteen. It is of course possible that > Gaulish inherited some of this when the Celts conquered most of present-day > France. It is my understanding that a 20-based number system was preserved in part in Irish, but that it has fallen by the wayside in the current standardized language. I will need to confirm this by checking Thurneysen next time I pass by there. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Ecce domina quae fidet omnia micantia aurea esse, et scalam in caelos emit. Adveniente novit ipsa, etiamsi clausae sint portae cauponum, propositum assequitur verbo. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Wed Aug 11 15:30:13 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 11:30:13 -0400 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? In-Reply-To: <448104ea.24de47b0@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I respectfully disagree with the person who > recently argued between the following two > alternatives that either could be an appropriate "null hypothesis" > (though I am greatly appreciative of that same person's > many other contributions!) >> No languages are related. >> >> All languages are related. > Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like > "We do not know whether all languages are related > (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) "We don't know" isn't a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a proposition about how things are. Science proceeds by rejecting hypotheses. To start the process, you have to have some initial hypothesis. The null hypothesis is some statement of the form "There is no connection between A and B". If you find evidence that the null hypothesis is wrong, then you reject the null hypothesis. As Larry Trask has already pointed out, there are good epistemological reasons for taking "there is no connection" as our initial hypothesis, rather than "there is a connection"; and I won't belabor that point. What's important is that you start with some hypothesis or other and work on finding grounds to reject it. "We don't know" won't suit for those purposes, because it is not a hypothesis. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Wed Aug 11 16:37:34 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 18:37:34 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote >An instance of this is Sumerian tapiru (metal-worker), >probably borrowed to an otherwise unknown IE-like tongue. >Could you expand? Tapiru is a Sumerian word whose precise meaning is "craftman working copper by hammering it". It is very likely to be a loanword since Sumerian does not have pollysyllabic roots and tapiru can not be analyzed as a compound. It is very similar to an IE root with a very similar meaning *dhebhros (craftman) found in Latin faber and Armenian darbin (smith). As the Sumerian word does not fit into the general system of the language it is unlikely we have there a chance ressemblance. This could be a loanword from Guti, the language of a Zagros tribe some suspect to have been Indo-European, but as we know only their name, this cannot be proven. Another hypothesis was to suppose this word was borrowed along with the copper-working thechnics. This technic was brought in Mesopotamia by the Halaf culture, whose center was in Northern Iraq, but originated (the thechnic) in Eastern Anatolia, around Catal H?y?k and Arslantepe. Anatolia has been seriously proponed as the homeland of the Indo-European tongues (Renfrew, Gamkrelidze) or of their ancestors (Sheratt). It is possible that the first metal-workers of Anatolia were speaking something close to IE, hence the curious look of the Sumerian word for this kind of craftman. It could also have gone down from the Steppe through the Caucasus, but this is unlikely as copper metalurgy was rather late in the Pontic Region (around -3000 against -6000 in Anatolia). Of course, all this is highly hypothetical. Damien Erwan Perrotin [ Moderator re-transcription: Anatolia, around Catal H{\"u}y{\"u}k and Arslantepe. --rma ] From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Wed Aug 11 17:03:23 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 12:03:23 -0500 Subject: nasal pres / root aor Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I'm sorry to take this our of context, but point concerns Jens' Hittite data: Jens wrote: ... >3. Hittite. Though Anatolian does not distinguish different stems within a >given verbal lexeme, the nasal-infix stems are opposed to structures >without the nasal. And in Hittite there is a clearcut opposition of >function, the nasal structure being causative: hark-zi 'vanishes' : >hanik-zi 'destroys'. This is of course not the function of the Lith. >intransitives like minga 'falls asleep', but if we remember and respect >the probable origin of the Lith. structure in the middle voice, it's okay >again: then the middle voice of a causative "makes oneself fall asleep" or >"is being caused to fall asleep" will come full circle and end up meaning >'fall asleep' just as the base verb did in the first place. And, with an >adjectival basis, Hitt. tepu-s 'small, inferior' forms tep-n-u-zzi 'makes >inferior, humiliates' (which was a PIE lexeme, cf. Ved. dabhno'ti >'damages'). A corresponding Baltic verb would have been based on the >midle voice and have meant 'become inferior', as the midle voice >presumably meant already in PIE (or even earlier). >The productive derivative status of the nasal structure in Hittite is not >the whole story, however: There are also remains of lexemes that had >passed through the whole history reflected by th other languages, thus >notably tamekzi, tamenkanzi 'adhere, stick (vel.sim.)' from *tm.-ne-k-ti = >Skt. tana'kti 'run thick, coagulate' (root *temk- of Eng. tight) and >hamekzi, hamenkanzi/hamankanzi 'bind' from *H2m.-ne-g^h-ti (root of Lat. >ango:, Gk. a'nkho: 'tighten, narrow'). >The full story of the nasal present must be something like this: The >formation was in origin _factitive_ "make (into) -", "cause to be -". But >since the verbal root was also an agent noun (vr.tra-ha'n- is a 'killer of >Vr.tra-', Lat. re:g- is a 'ruler'), the nasal structure made from root >nouns of agent-noun semantic created simple causatives: 'make a binder' = >'make bind'. Then, the middle voice of that 'be made a binder, be made >bind, be caused to bind' was simply an elaborate way of saying 'bind'. >Thereby the structure widely lost its specifically middle-voice semantics, >and so it is no great wonder if it turns up with active endings. The whole >scenario must - at least in large part - have been completed before the >working of the ablaut, for the new active forms have escaped the accent >shifts seen in the middle voice: *(H)yew-ne'-g-e 'is made join' replaced >the middle endings by active ones, 3sg inj. *(H)yew-ne'-g-t, while the >middle was restructured to *(H)yew-ne-g-to' with accent shift onto the >syllabic ending, and only then did the ablaut reductions make act. >*(H)yune'g-t, mid. *(H)yung-to' out of these forms. - Note that the >presumed earlier middle-voice preform of a nasal prs. like Vedic >s'r.n.o'ti 'hears' is indeed found in Old Irish ro-cluinethar 'hears' >which is a deponent verb. >Despite the retention of productivity in Hittite, the nasal present type >has plainly become grammaticalized as "just a present" with individual >verbs in PIE, and it is hard to escape the impression that the >corresponding aorist (when there was one) was the root-aorist type. CFJ: The first Hittite forms have a bit of a typo. The alternation is between harak(z)i 'perish(es)' and har-nin-k- 'destroy' where the nasal is an infix. This differs from the tepu- 'small', tep-nu- 'make small, humiliate' where the more productive nasal is the suffix -nu- (cf. also ar-hi 'I reach, arrive', ar-nu-mi 'I bring'). The Greek present deik-nu-mi 'I show' versus -s- aorist edeik-sa 'I showed' has a formally comparable present, but the aorist still has the causative meaning without the causative suffix, while Latin nasal of present pa-n-go 'I fasten' beside perfect pe-pe:gi: 'I have fastened' also doesn't lose its transitive active character without the nasal. Kronasser's Etymologie der hethitischen Sprache (with Neu's later index) lists forms. In Hittite we have two nasal affixes, an infix and a suffix. The Hittite suffix is productive, the infix not. While there are cognate nasal affixes elsewhere in IE languages, the individual systems in which we catch them functioning would seem to have been sufficiently re-worked to call for explanations as to the nature of the language-specific innovations. The fact that Hittite -nu- is productive would seem to point to its being an innovation. Historically, many consider the Wilusa-Alaksandu-Ahhijawa evidence of the Hittite treaties to argue for a contact with Mycenaean Achaeans around (W?)Ilium in the early second half of the second millennium BC. If so, not only are Greek -nu- and Hittite -nu- distinct from the nasal infix, but also one of many innovations taking place dialectally in post-PIE times, in this instance probably the Greek form as a result of contact with Hittite, as the Hittite form is productive in its meaning, the Greek form less so. Since we have the data studies of Strunk and others, we would seem to be in a position now to go on to peal off the layers, distinguishing between older and more recent features, also features that may be shared between languages as a result of later contact. The Hittite infixed nasal and suffixed nasal would seem to be cases in point. These nasals would certainly not function like the Gothic Weak Class IV and I verbs such as full-na-n 'fill' (intrs.) and full-ja-n 'fill' (trs.) from fulls 'full', which show a new system of transitivity alternation. Even if someone wants to identify Gothic -ja- with an old IE causative form, the Gothic nasal does not function like an old IE causative, nor is the paradigmatic alternation inherited. Carol From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 11 17:16:46 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 12:16:46 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: <000201bee295$256a98e0$7418063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: Pete: You misunderstood. "Non-African [modern human]" means as opposed to non-African pre-modern Neandertal, etc. The "not limited to Africa" mitochondrial gene pool obviously arose in Africa along with other modern humans. [snip] >[ Moderator's comment: > I think what was meant is that the language families found outside > Africa may > relate to those within Africa in several ways: > 1. All the language families may be grouped into a single super-family. > 2. All the language families outside of Africa may be grouped with one or > more, but *not* all, those within Africa. > 3. Some language families found outside Africa may be grouped with one or > more of those within Africa, and others with others. > --rma ] That's pretty much it. I'd modify statement 2 to "All the language families outside of Africa may be grouped with one or more, but *not necessarily* all, those within Africa." As in the following diagram: Modern Humans: arose c. 250-150KBP I. Mitochondrial pools limited to Africa II. Mitochondrial pool not limited to Africa: arose after 100KBP Again, my point is that non-African languages probably arose from the language used by the first speakers of this group. Some African languages [in the geographical sense] may or may not have originated from that language: e.g. Afro-Asiatic is postulated to have originated somewhere between Ethipia and Palestine, which is within the area populated by this mitochondrial group. Cavalli-Sforza claims it arose from that group. Niger-Kordofanian, IF it arose in the Sudan MAY have been originally spoken by members of this mitochondrial pool. The may be said of Nilo-Saharan. Cavalli-Sforza syggests that the Khoisan [as opposed to all the speakers of those languages] may have arisen in Ethiopia and may be more closely related to the "not limited to Africa mitochondrial pool." In any case, because IE and AA seem to have wiped out almost all possible candidates for languages outside of Africa that possibly may have had a different origin, my argument for mono-genesis of "non-African" languages [with the possible exception of AA] is based currently existing languages. Although it's possible, I doubt that any languages from the "not-limited-to-Africa" pool leap-frogged IE and AA. If you factor in [the possibility of] Nostratic, the odds are even slimmer. I'm not saying that there wasn't any population movement between Africa and the rest of the world afterwards. Just that it probably didn't result in introducing new language families that survived to the present. Except for linguistic pioneers moving into areas unhabited by modern humans, the opportunities for linguistic expansion would have been extremely limited until the rise of agriculture and sedentary life. The great linguistic expansions in Africa occured in recent history due to agriculture and metallurgy and did not affect areas outside of Africa. I want to stress that this opinion is based on what I've read regarding the current state of analysis published in widely read magazines. Mitochondrial and other studies obviously need to be refined and carried out with larger samples. Because of worldwide travel over the last few centuries, I'm sure it's very possible to come up with misleading results. Given that my own maternal grandmother was Melungeon [a local Appalachian name for people descended from American Indians, runaway African slaves and European indentured servants], my own mitochondria may well be from any of the 7 or 8 pools. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Wed Aug 11 17:16:52 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 19:16:52 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: >Eduard Selleslagh wrote >Thank you for the interesting and informative contribution. Here are a few >side remarks. >1. I got confused by Breton 'afan': I had interpreted the f as /v/, like in >Welsh. Yes, I should hace precised this. Breton spelling is derivated from French >2. It seems that your reasoning brings Catalan 'amb' ('with', from Latin >'apud') and Latin 'apud' back into the picture. that is possible, but we must remain prudent, as there is no ettested equivalent in Etruscan. >3. Not only the Sanskrit dative plura in -bh-, but also the Latin one -ibus. Yes, and probably the -m ending of the slavic and germanic tongues (from *mbh). I was giving Sanskrit as an exemple (Irish -aibh should work too). >4. Note that Breton/Welsh 'aber' corresponds to the Dutch/Flemish (Belgae!) >river names 'Amel' and 'Amer' (the latter is also used to refer to the >neighboring flood plain or 'polder' ('vega' in Spanish). So the sound >change m/b works both ways exchanges among the languages we were discussing. We know almost nothing about the Belgian tongue, not even if it was celtic, or member of some "north-western block", so that a relationship is possible. The standart etymology for aber (old Welsh aper, Pictish place-manes abar) is ad-bero "to out flow", where the second member is the IE verb *bher (probably not *mbher as the possible Etruscan counterpart would be farth- (to bring, to offer), not *mart or *amart) this etymology is co,firmed by Breton Kemper (the confluence) which can be analyzed as ken-bero (the place wher it flows together). Still it is possible that Belgian, or the peri-indo-european neolithic tongue which could have preceded it changed its bh to m or that the first member of the name of these river was *H2embh (around), yielding something as *H2embh-bher (the one which is flowing around) later simplified in Amer. But this is hypothetical. >5. Maybe the (Etruscan, Lydian,.. later Latin) am- and the IE-Latin amb- >roots just share a common ancestry like the languages themselves (one or >two steps before PIE) , then developed more or less separately but got >exchanged among parallel branches of the Stammbaum at several moments and >in several places (Anatolia, Italy,...). Possible but the phonetics seems to me rather uncertain. Another gypothesis is that Etruscan Am was not Etruscan in the first place but was borrowed from the (Anatolian ?) tongue of the Teresh, a sea people which is said to have landed there after having been housted fro Egypt. The change would have been done in the Egean region and would have been specific to the Anatolian tongues of the place (hence the Lydian). Still remains the Breton form (a borrowing to Rhaetic in the Alpine region, or brought in by Etruscan traders ??? Highly hypothetical anyway). I would not bet my wages on this however. >Ed. >P.S. >1. Are you Breton? Yes, but from the French speaking eastern part of the country. I learned the language during my teens. Damien Erwan Perrotin From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 11 17:52:58 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 12:52:58 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.16.19990808204318.0a6fe1fa@online.be> Message-ID: When I was in Montreal I heard /kaetr at -vae~-dzIs/ on the radio and something like /kaet-vay~dzIs/ in the stores [ae = sound similar to vowel of American English at] [snip] What about the Quebecois? They >usually speak rather old-fashioned French (to European ears) (I've been >there twice, but didn't pay attention, probably because I already had >enough trouble with 'cent' and 'sans', which sound the same to all but to >the Quebecois). [snip] What's the scoop on 'cent' and 'sans'. I thought both were /sa~/ Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Aug 11 18:02:25 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 13:02:25 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <37afbde7.2736619@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: I seem to remember that the Vikings used a term translated as "Bluemen" to refer to Moors. I think it was something like blaamen, blagmen, blahmen. The term was supposedly calqued in Gaelic and later in English, hence the use of "Blue men, Blue People" in referring to the Melungeons of Appalachia. Dennis King might know a bit more about this. [snip] >I don't think so. As far as I know, there was no *blak(u)- in >the sense of "black" in early Scandinavian. It's only in English >and OHG (blah). [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 11 18:06:43 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 13:06:43 -0500 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Vidhyanath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 1:51 PM I hope you and Jens will not mind a statement or two from an interested reader of your exchange. > For example, progressive is a special case of imperfective. But we > do not confuse the two, nor see progressive as a natural outgrowth of > imperfective. We need to be just as careful with less familiar categories > such as completives. Keeping aspects and tenses clearly separated is a very tricky mental exercise even when the language under discussion is fairly consistent in matching form to actual usage but I believe you may be mixing apples and oranges to call the "progressive a special case of the imperfective" (aspect). If one says in English: "He is eating up the food," we have a present progressive perfective. "He was eating up the food, " past progressive perfective; "He is eating the food, " present progressive imperfective; "He was eating the food, " past progressive imperfective. In fact, IMHO, the major original employment of IE -*i, which, added to "secondary" personal endings yields the "primary" set, was to create a "progressive" form, with "progressive" understood as designating a verbal action regarded as a period of time during which something else happened or was happening. Thus, I believe its original employment was to mark a temporal subordinate clause in the early absence of subordinating conjunctions. While he ate the up food, I drank. = He was eating up the food (and) I drank. I believe we can regard the forms with primary endings as virtual personalized progressive participles. >>> [Nath:] >>> This makes it harder for me to understand how the aorist became the >>> perfective. `Started driving', in contrast to `drove', suggests >>> incomplete action. Pat comments: Again, I believe you are mixing fruits. An aorist, e.g. IE *wid-e't, is already perfective. It is also momentary. The ingressive is a sub-category of *momentary action*, through which the moment of onset of an action is highlighted. >> [Nath:] >>> How do you classify ``I learned that chapter in one month?'' >> [Jens:] I believe as a job for the aorist. > the aorist is compatible with duration, Pat again: According to Lehmann, the aorist is +momentary, hence -durational. Nath continued: > But languages with a perfective do not do that. As soon as the narrative is > in the past, they use the perfective. Pat interjects: That does not seem to be true of Russian: pisal (impf. past); napisal (pf. past). 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 Wed Aug 11 18:48:04 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 19:48:04 +0100 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? Message-ID: >an > algorithm developed to produce ... > the correct phylogeny, or family tree, Applied to languages, this is no better than the isoglosses you choose, and this takes us back to an earlier debate where it became clear that an isoglossic approach fails to consider: (i) wave theory (which may underlie the satem/centum and RUKI isoglosses) (ii) language continua (iii) language convergence and Sprachbuende (is that word sufficiently anglicised yet for an English plural to be accepted? If not, which German plural is the correct one - is it a language bunch (-bunde) or a language alliance (-buende)?) (iv) time of attestation. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 11 19:45:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:45:57 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) Message-ID: [To the Moderator: I wrote this message earlier but did not send it. In light of some recent posts on this list, perhaps it has some use.] In a message dated 8/7/99 8:50:50 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> One might see some direct relevance to IE in all this. After all, whatever yardstick separates say Albanian from say English - either in terms of comparative linguistics or historical time - is nothing compared to 100,000 years. If we extrapolate the degree of dissimilarity between IE languages after say 9000 years (some would say 5500 years), how much dissimilarity would there be between languages separated by 10 or 20 times that time frame. Should we expect any commonality at all? in terms of Glottochronology, what should we expect - when languages separated by a few thousand years can yield 'kaput', 'penn', 'sarah-' and 'golova' for an item as basic as a head? In terms of morphology, can we really expect that inflective forms could survive, distinguishing inanimate versus animate or even present versus past, when the common human memory offers no clear remembrance of a something as big as an ice age? Some stuff re the science on this matter: 1. Scientific American Aug 1999 p 13 "IS OUT OF AFRICA OUT THE DOOR?" summarizes the growing evidence that the premise is not in sync with the bones (especially in the Far East.) Remember also that the original theory based on mtDNA backdating the African 'Eve" is now considered flawed and too recent - and that she was even then dated to 200,000BP - so that language separations set at 100,000 might as well arbitrarily start back with her or her children. Then, like an exodus out of New Guinea, we could have a 500 languages leaving Africa at one time. 2. Scientific American March 1998 Review of Ian Tattersall's 'Evolution and Human uniqueness' summarizes some of the arguments that Neanderthals had language. This would significantly backdate the appearance of human language by 100's of 1000's of years. And there's nothing to say that modern humans could not have learned language from Neanderthals. 3. From an AP story (2/15/99) quoting a paper appearing in the same week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team at Berkeley challenging a Duke study positing Neanderthal speech capabilities based on the size of the hypoglossal canal (jaw nerves): "Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human speech sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." (This I believe revolved around the time of the appearance of Cro-Magnon.) Finally, I suspect the big problem here is in the use of the word "language". All of this goes to the distinction I think Sassure originally made between "the act of speaking" and a "language system." Birds and apes and prairie dogs "signal" each other with sounds that will follow regular and complex conventions - some of them quite local and apparently group-learned. And apes, though not physically equipped for human speech, have acquired non-oral vocabularies of 100's of words - nouns and verbs. This is 'language' in the broad sense, the way paleonthologists and biologists use the word. On this list, one becomes accustomed to thinking of language in a stricter sense. Language systems are much more intricate things than the ability to communicate by making sounds. Coming out of Africa, humans may have made common noises that were very effective signals within respective groups. But did any of those "local" signaling systems equate to a "language system?" And given the distance (in form or time) between *PIE and modern English, what would be the distance in time between *PIE and one of those simple signaling systems? <> Don't think that follows anymore than that the use of clothing or boats had to be monogenetic - they apparently were not. The wonderful concept of "Zeit Geist" should not be forgotten here. Unless monopolized - kept a secret or otherwise controlled - human capabilities tend to spread and create the medium for new capabilities. Spoken language (unlike written language) is very hard to monopolize and easy to imitate. Once the capability arrived, languages may have been a product of the Zeit Geist. I recall reading - at first with shock - Stephen J. Gould suggest that life may have originated more than once. Now it seems to make some sense. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 11 20:25:16 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:25:16 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Rick Mc Callister Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 1999 9:27 AM Rick asked: > What is the AA root for jm-3? > Or what are its cognates in other AA languages? [ moderator snip ] Rick, I do not have Orel and Stobova so I cannot say if the root is mentioned there. In Ehret's sadly unsatisfactory work, it is not mentioned. The -3, I consider to be a factitive suffix, used rather frequently in Egyptian, so the AA root would be that from which jm- derived. The underlying root might be simply *?ama so that the underlying meaning might be simply 'to treat as a mother would=to mother'. In another post on this subject, a tentative relationship with Arabic ?-m-r was proposed. I believe the likelier IE cognate of ?-m-r is *me:-ro (from *H{2}emer-), with a basal meaning of 'put a value on, rank'. However, it is interesting to note Sumerian ZUR, which also has the reading amar, one of the meanings of which is 'take care of, care for'. 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 Aug 11 20:34:57 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:34:57 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Damien and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Damien Erwan Perrotin <114064.1241 at Compuserve.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 1999 3:25 PM > ----- Original Message ----- > From PATRICK C. RYAN > Sent : Tue, 3 Aug 1999 20:33:30 >> Pat commented: >> Some might be interested in Egyptian jm-3, 'kind, gentle, well-disposed, >> pleasining, gracious, be delighted, charmed', which I believe is likely to >> represent an AA example of the same root. Damien responded: > I am quite sceptical about the relationship. If am- is indeed related to > amb, then the Proto-IE prototype should have been, according to Martinet > something like H2e-mbhi, or H2-mbhi, with an initial laryngeal. If it is > not, the prototype should have been H2em, then too with a laryngeal, as > there is no recorded VC root in IE Pat comments: There is a *H{2}am- in Pokorny meaning 'grasp'. But, like Pokorny, I believe this is probably the basis for the entries under *me:-. Damien continued: > and that /j/ is conserved in most IE > dialects. So unless you supose that the IE laryngeal is the reflex of an > AA /j/, Pat responds: No, I propose that IE *H and AA *? are the results of Nostratic *? but that AA *?(i/a) produced Egyptian j. 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 Aug 11 23:01:06 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 18:01:06 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Dear Paolo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Paolo Agostini Sent: Sunday, August 08, 1999 2:46 PM Paolo wrote: > The Romans called _idus_ (from a former _*eidus_) the 15th day of the > months of March, May, July, and October and the 13th day of the other > months. If memory serves me well, it was the lexicographer Hesychius of > Alexandria who wrote in the 5th century "the verb _iduo_ originates from the > language of the Etruscans, from whom the Romans learned many religious rites > and customs, and it means _to divide_ because the _ides_ divide the months > in two halves". In the 5th century though Etruscan was a dead language since > three centuries at least. > At the end of last century there were some scholars who maintained that the > word originated from IE _*idh_ "to be bright" (of the moon), yet the idea > was soon abandoned. Among the IE languages, the base occurs in Latin only. Pat comments: Paolo, you may have another root in mind but IE *(a)i-dh- occurs in several IE languages: Old Indian inddhe'; Greek ai'tho:; OHG eit, etal. Paolo continued: > The word is very likely a Semitic borrowing, from the base `WD > ('ayin-waw-daleth) the meaning of which is "to return (every year or > periodically); to repeat (cycle, period); to count, reckon", cfr. Aramaic > _'yidb'_ "festival"; Syriac _'eyda'_ and _'eyada'_ "ceremony, usage"; > Hebrew _'yid_ "Idolatrous festival" and _'ed_ "monthly courses, > menstruation"; Arabic _'id_ "festival" and _'iddah_ "period of time", > _'adda_ "he counted/reckoned", _'adad, 'idad, 'idda_ "number", _`a:da_ > "custom, tradition". There is also a secondary form of the same verb, i.e. > 'TD ('ayin-thaw-daleth) "he counted/reckoned" from which Latin forms like > _ituo_ might derive. Pat comments: Yes, $-w-d is a little strange in producing so many derivatives with -i/y-; and probably $(a)id- would have been heard by Romans as id- but is it not a little complicated to assume that the medial -w-, which shows up in few of the Arabic derivatives, somehow gets metathesized to final position to produce I:du:s rather than *I:dus? Paolo continued: > According to the meaning of the Semitic base, the Latin word _*eidus_ simply > meant "a period of time; a counted number of days; a day that returns every > month". Pat comments: But what are the characteristics of this particular day/night: presumably, it was the time of the full moon. Therefore, I believe it is probably a denominative -wo' stem of *oid-, 'swell', producing the zero-grade *id- = *idwo'-, 'swollen'. Idus is a particular day first, and the period between full moons seems a secondary usage. As for Etruscan *itu-, 'divide', I believe it is only attested in a Latin gloss; and we know these were not always reliable. For a Latin *ituare (does it exist? my dictionary is not large {?} enough to include it), it would seem to me that IE *ai-to-, 'portion', would provide a simpler source. 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 Wed Aug 11 18:17:48 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 19:17:48 +0100 Subject: ? "Vocabulary Density" Message-ID: Some initial thoughts: (a) languages differ enormously from one another in their vocabulary density and in the distribution of their vocabulary across the total "semantic space", as you put it. If we are going to compare them with reconstructed languages, don't we need to establish some kind of benchmark for existent languages first? (b) I can only speak for PIE amongst the reconstructed languages. Its reconstructed vocabulary is certainly odd. Not including obvious root extensions: (i) There are 18 roots for glisten/glitter, and 12 for shine (total 30) (ii) There are 8 for goat (iii) there are 8 or 9 for grow (iv) There are 23 for hit (v) There are 10 for jump (vi) There are 11 for weave/plait (vii) There are 12 for pull (viii) There are 11 for press (ix) There are 24 for turn (x) There 17 for swell There are a large number of roots with similar semantic connotations, (over half the semantic concepts have at least two reconstructed independent roots). Some of these have large numbers of these "pseudo-synonyms". Given the patchy and limited nature of what we can reconstruct, it certainly seems that reconstructed PIE has its words clustered around some concepts at the expense of others. So this gives two questions: (A) Is this pattern anything like natural languages? (B)Is the overall average anything like the overall average in natural languages? Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 11 23:46:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 18:46:31 -0500 Subject: -n- adjectival suffix in Latin Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Sunday, August 08, 1999 7:41 PM >The suffix involved must be *-ino-, a common suffix > of appurtenance, particularly well attested in derivatives from names of > seasons and other time spans, as Gk. earino's, OCS vesnInU 'of spring'. It > was plausibly derived by Chantraine from the locative of the season name, > which was typically an r/n-stem, as *we's-n-i 'in spring', adding the > "thematic vowel" *-o- (the real seat of the expression of appurtenance), > with a histus-filling ("ephelcystic") *-n- in between, and dissimilation > of the product *-ni-n-o- to *-ri-n-o-. Pat comments: Sorry. If this seems "plausible" to you and Chantraine, it seems absolutely unlikely to me. And since when is -*o a suffix expressing "appurtenance"? And what about Avestan vangri, 'in spring' (probably better 'of the spring, springlike')? Jens continued: > The r/n stem seems to have been > generalized for all seasons, cf. the beautiful pair Lat. hi:bernus = Gk. > kheimerino's equated by Szemere'nyi as IE *g'heimerinos (with dissim. in > Lat.). The part -rnus was repeated with other designations of time in > Lat., as diurnus (from the loc. diu:, the "endingless" variant of Skt. > dya'v-i) and from there noct-urnus (if not from noctu:, itself copied on > diu: at a time when this still meant 'throughout the day, all day long' > and not just 'long'). Pat comments: It seems to me you are just making a muddle of two separate items; 1) -n in -r/n stems, and a totally separate -i-no (from -i + -no). Jens continued: > The special meaning of the old derivatives in *-ino- makes it sensible > to derive them from the locative: *wesr-ino-s is 'what is _in_ spring'. Pat comments: I disagree. The oldest locative (and locative properly means 'at' not 'in') for IE is, as Beekes indicates, -0 or -:. Locative -i is properly the adjective formant which shows up in e.g. Latin genitives. Jens continued: > This distinguishes *-ino- from the suffix *-io- which has no such obvious > connection with the locative (although it has been argued to have > precisely that origin). A derivative like *ek'wi-o-s 'pertaining to a > horse' does not signify thing on or inside a horse with any preference > over things connected with a horse in a non-local fashion, so the suffix > form *-i-o- is simply the product of the addition of a "thematic vowel" > *-o- to the bare stem normally posited as *ek'wo-, in which we observe the > transformation of two thematic vowels to *-i-o-. Pat comments: Ah, a transubstantiation! If a theoretical *ek^wo- + -o formalized a glide, it would not doubt have been -w- not -y-. This is, IMHO, the most unlikely proposal you have yet made on this list. Jens continued: > I see this as a simple > consequence of the reduction rule of an unaccented thematic vowel to *-i- > applying in very old lexicalizations; Pat interjects: There is no such rduction rule! Jens continued: > since _both_ thematic vowels could > not be accented, the product *-i-o- may simply be from *-o- + *-o-. It > seems that the addition of a syllabic morpheme shifted the accent towards > the end, so that *-o'- yielded *-o-o'- whence *-i-o'-. It should not be > held against the analysis that examples with an independent accent show > *-i'-o- with accent of the -i- part, for that would be the further > development anyway if the form is older than the introduction of initial > accent I claim to have discovered for a prestage of PIE. This analysis > provides an answer to the question why there is no *-n- in *-i-o-: there > was no word boundary here, while in the hypostatic derivatives based on > locatives in *-i as *-ri-n-o- there was. > A preform like *p at 2teri-n-o-s may indeed have existed in IE, but then > with the specific meaning 'which is at the father'; but it may just as > well reflect a simple Latin (Italic) analogy with the season-based > adjectives. Pat interjects: "Father" --- a man for all seasons! Jens continued: > In Balto-Slavic *-ino- enjoyed an enormous productivity (Russ. > vostok 'east', vosto{cv}nyj 'eastern' from *-k-ino-s). This has nothing to > do with the -n- of Germanic n-stems which turns up wherever the stem final > is allowed to surface, not only in the genitive. For 'pertaining to a > father', the conglomerate *-io- of thematic stems was generalized and had > created *p at 2tr-i'o-s in PIE already. > Thus, the -n- is not in origin a morpheme of appurtenance or of a > genitival relation, and so there is no point in equating it with something > outside of IE which is. Pat comments: Strongly disagree. n-formants are very common outside of IE as individulizers; the simple application of *na, 'one'. 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 Thu Aug 12 02:09:17 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 22:09:17 EDT Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? Message-ID: In a message dated 8/10/99 10:03:06 PM, ECOLING at aol.com wrote: <> Just a note that the null hypothesis is a technical term. It is taken as a requirement of scientific testing. In a basic sense, it simply means that you cannot prove something true if you cannot also prove it false. The classic example is the postulate: everything in the universe is expanding at a constant rate. (Not just cosmology, but also lightwaves and rulers and anything that we would use to measure this expansion with.) We can't think of a way of disproving this statement, because all the means of disproving it have been eliminated. Since it can't be scientifically disproved, it can't be scientifically proved. Now the same problem exists with the statement that all languages are related. Short of going back in time, how we can we prove the negative? If we prove that two languages are totally dissimilar, it still does not prove they are unrelated. No way to test the null hypothesis. No way to prove the hypothesis. <<"We do not know whether all languages are related (or whether there was polygenesis)...">> Short of hard scientific proof, we do have some evidence pointing us in one direction or the other. First off, we can imagine a world where everyone speaks the same language, like on StarTrek. Absent other evidence, that would strongly suggest monogenesis. If everyone spoke an IE language, you'd have a pretty good case for monogenesis, even if Albanian isn't that close to English. But the world we live in is not monolingual or even close. And, historically, we can't even be sure if humans had language before they dispersed to their respective corners. Finally, consider how things would be different than they are now if 'polygenesis' were the case? Would we have even more languages? Would they be even more different than they are now? Would we have any stronger comparative proof of polygenesis than we have now? What would that proof be like? Wouldn't a 'polygenetic' world pretty much look the way things look now? Given the historical and modern situation, it does feel like polygenesis might be more likely - though that's not provable either. Regards, Steve Long From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 12 03:03:13 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 23:03:13 EDT Subject: Odd reconstructed "Vocabulary Density" Message-ID: Pete Gray wrote as quoted at the end of this message. I think the conclusion is that reconstruction (or the comparative method or whatever one wishes to call it) should try to do a much better job of attributing small differences in sense to reconstructed items. It is NOT the case that the meaning "grow" is somehow more neutral or less specific than the other meanings which are nearby in its semantic field. Rather, our current methods, by convention, artificially push the reconstructed meanings towards the crude set of pigeon-holes we work with. Just as in sociolinguistics, where it is known that meta-talk ABOUT our own speech is much less accurate than the observable behavior we exhibit when actually speaking. We need to have self-conscious correctives against this recurring error endemic to the conscious analysis process. The comparative / reconstructive methods, in the guise of claiming not to be more precise than the limited data warrant, are actually throwing away information on details of meaning. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics Following quoted from Pete Gray: *** (b) I can only speak for PIE amongst the reconstructed languages. Its reconstructed vocabulary is certainly odd. Not including obvious root extensions: (i) There are 18 roots for glisten/glitter, and 12 for shine (total 30) (ii) There are 8 for goat (iii) there are 8 or 9 for grow (iv) There are 23 for hit (v) There are 10 for jump (vi) There are 11 for weave/plait (vii) There are 12 for pull (viii) There are 11 for press (ix) There are 24 for turn (x) There 17 for swell There are a large number of roots with similar semantic connotations, (over half the semantic concepts have at least two reconstructed independent roots). Some of these have large numbers of these "pseudo-synonyms". Given the patchy and limited nature of what we can reconstruct, it certainly seems that reconstructed PIE has its words clustered around some concepts at the expense of others. So this gives two questions: (A) Is this pattern anything like natural languages? (B)Is the overall average anything like the overall average in natural languages? From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Thu Aug 12 04:27:07 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 14:27:07 +1000 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 19 Jul 1999 11:08:41 EDT." Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson said The real task of extending the Comparative Method to deeper time depths is to make explicit more of these sophisticated tools, and to CREATE more such tools by discovering what ways of handling the data are robust across what kinds of intervening changes. I would like to present to the list the description of a tool I developed with a doctoral student to address the issue of measuring the phonological relatedness of languages. It seems to address in part some of the issues introduced by LA. We applied it to measuring the distance between modern Beijing and Modern Cantonese. We initially wanted to use it on the basque dialects but couldn't get sufficient data. The idea is that the distance between languages is represented by the series of changes that occur to a large set of words in moving from their parent form to their daughter forms, so that distance apart is not measured between the daughter languages but rather by their distance from their parent. We feel this better represents the real world process. Our data has to be the word set in the parent form (reconstructed words or real words) and then one word set for the each daughter language and the set of phonological transformation rules between each parent and daughter for each word in their chronological sequence. Hence we are modelling the rules and their sequence of application for each word. The extent to which any of this information is hypothetical merely defines the hypotheses one is comparing, but importantly it does not effect the computational method we apply to this data. The computational method is in part new and in part old. The old part is that for the sequence of phonological rules for the first word of a parent-daughter couple we construct a finite state automata. For the second and subsequent rule sequences we overlay the rule sequence on the original automata creating new transitions were needed for new rules as yet unrepresented in the automata. By counting the transitions along each pathway as we build up the automata we are creating frequency counts of rules in their sequence of application. Such an automata is a Probabilistic Finite State Automata (PFSA). Once all words are placed on the Automata it is the Canonical PFSA that describes the total diachronic rule set and structure for that parent-daughter pair and nothing else. This description then captures the characteristics of the total data set (of this class of data). The newish part of the method is to apply the principle of minimum message length (MML) encoding to calculate the cost of the message to describe this PFSA. This is an information theory principle which of itself dates back to the 1940's but our development of it for PFSAs is new. If we have the cost of the messages for two parent-daughter pairs then the shorter cost represents the daughter that is closer to the parent. In the case of modern Cantonese and Beijing we got 35,243.58 bits and 36790.93 bits respectively, indicating Cantonese is closer to the common parent, Middle Chinese, than Beijing. The difference between these 2 numbers can viewed as an approximate odds ratio 1:2^diff (that is meant to be "two to the power of the difference"). However a further analysis can be performed. The canonical PFSA can be reduced , by merging states, to some form that yields a minimised MML. Such a minimised PFSA strikes a balance between the number of states and the frequencies of the transitions out of each states. essentially it merges together paths through the PFSA that have relatively similar rules and frequencies of rules and also places very rare transitions in places that lessens their cost, e.g. transitioning them back to their originating state. A minimum PFSA does exist although you can't guarantee that you can find it. Note that no data is thrown away. Everything is always kept in the PFSA. The minimised PFSA give the following results for Cantonese and Beijing as 30379.01 bits and 30366.55 bits respectively. In each language pairing the number of states is reduced by about 80% and the number of arcs by 50%. The most interesting part of this result is that reversal of the results as to which is closest to its parent. In the first case being Cantonese, and the second Beijing. This distinction is more pronounced when Allophonic features are also included in the analysis. One appraisal of these results is that the generalisation process(=PFSA minimisation) has discerned more structure in Beijing than Cantonese. The analysis of the generalised Automata revealed hitherto unsuspected relationships between diachronic rules. Our method should be useful to appraise competing reconstructions of earlier languages,say Indoeuropean, however to date we have not been able to find the necessary data compiled in one place to easily apply it. Should anyone have a good database of appropriate data we would be happy to submit it to our methods. Jon Patrick From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Aug 12 06:32:06 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 02:32:06 EDT Subject: Passivity as a transition (raising dust) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/11/99 8:52:09 PM, jrader at m-w.com wrote: << I'm sorry if you don't have access to a library, but I'm afraid there's not much I can do about that. >> What can I say? I not only cited scholarship to you, but the texts themselves. Perhaps I'm wrong, but you really won't be able to tell whether what I'm saying makes any sense until you take a pause from being so vituperative. You just wrote: < is compared with Latin , from both of which a base <*kenis-> on an Indo-European level may be reconstructable.>> What I wrote was that there was a 'semantic' innovation (dust>effort>service) in Greek. My point was that this change of meaning caused a verb (koneo) to be participalized in usage during a interim period before it became morphologically stabilized as a noun (e.g., diakonia) with the new meaning. I had mentioned konis, koneo^, enkoneo^, akonei, diakoneo^, etc., as representing the transition in meaning by metaphor from 'dust' to 'effort' to 'service.' You however responded that I was "confusing two unrelated etyma". I responded that I'd love to know what the other one was. Your response is 'konis' = dust, ashes, related to Latin 'cinis' = dust, ashes, and reconstructed as IE *kenis-, which I suppose may have meant dust, ashes. That's where I started. It doesn't contradict what I said. Then you add: < with "sich muehen, eifrig streben, sich sputen," and Latin is compared.>> Now I take that to be the other "etymon." I was expecting some Sanskrit or Hittite. I think Pokorny may have simply been translating the Latin. Of course, the gloss would be unnecessary if the connection between dust and "striving" is Greek and not PIE. As for 'co^n-or, co^n-atus', (subst, 'conata, conatarum') I'd suspect it might be in some way from the Greek. The obvious connection is to such forms as "akoniti"(adv), found in an early record as 'akonitos' derived in Lidell-Scott form 'konio' - without dust. Also Homer (Illiad 21.541) - "kekonimenoi pheugon" - fleeing getting dusty (passive verb form.) Compare Ovid Meta 3.60 - "magna conamine". ('conamen, -inis' = an effort) There is also 'koniortos' - recorded beginning with Herodotus and often as 'raised dust', 'a cloud of dust.' Which follows the same transition in meaning that can be seen in the Greek 'konistra' - literally a place of dust, a place where animals roll in the dust - but later the famous wrestling arena. Hence, 'konia' = dust of the arena as "a metaphor for toil (striving?) in Aristotle IA709a." (The old ritual sprinkling of dust upon themselves by wrestlers, in the form 'konio^ntai', was mentioned by Palmer I think as a possible source for dia-koneo^ - ie, an undertaking, task) I'm obviously on shaky ground on how should appear if it were borrowed from the Greek before about 100BC. But there doesn't seem to be any connection between 'cinis' and 'conor' in Latin. My guess is that the link between raising dust and making an effort did not pass into Latin because it is not from PIE. And that Latin received 'cinis' from PIE and 'co^nor' from the Greek, who innovated it. So I'm suggesting that Pokorny may be wrong in looking for a PIE origin for a meaning that originated as a metaphor in early Greek. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Aug 12 09:07:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 10:07:19 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [somebody else] > What about the Quebecois? They > >usually speak rather old-fashioned French (to European ears) (I've been > >there twice, but didn't pay attention, probably because I already had > >enough trouble with 'cent' and 'sans', which sound the same to all but to > >the Quebecois). > What's the scoop on 'cent' and 'sans'. I thought both were /sa~/ In standard European French, yes. But the nasalized counterparts of /e/ and /a/ were once distinguished in French. Over the centuries, they have tended to fall together, but the merger has not so far applied in some varieties. According to Glanville Price's history of French, the Chanson de Roland shows evidence of the merger by the 12th century. However, Henriette Walter, in her book on contemporary French, reports that the two vowels are still distinguished today by speakers in a sizeable region southwest of Paris. I know nothing about Quebecois, but I surmise that the merger has not applied there either. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From W.Behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de Thu Aug 12 13:08:10 1999 From: W.Behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de (W.Behr (in Bochum today)) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 13:08:10 +0000 Subject: (was: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days!) re: Sum. t In-Reply-To: <37B1A6C9.73B37AF3@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: Dear Miguel & Damien, if it is _tibira_ (later also_tabira_) 'metal-worker' you are talking about here, I think that Gernot Wilhelm has conclusively shown that we are dealing with a loan from Hurritic, i.e. an "agent-orientated resultative _-iri/e_ participle" (Wilhelm), or "antipassive-participle", derived from the Hurr. root _tab/taw_ [w = u+subscript arch) 'to cast (metal)'. In Hurr., this root has the derivations _tabali_ 'copper-founder' and _tabiri_ 'he, who has cast' (Otten). For details see G. Wilhelm, "Gedanken zur Fruehgeschichte der Hurriter und zum hurritisch-urartaeischen Sprachvergleich", in: V. Haas ed., _Hurriter und Hurritisch (Konstanzer Altorientalische Symosien; II, Xenia --- Konstanzer Althistorische Forschungen und Symposien; 21): 43-68, Lonstanz : Universitaetsverlag 1988. Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 18:37:34 +0200 From: Damien Erwan Perrotin <114064.1241 at Compuserve.com> [ moderator snip ] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Wolfgang Behr, Lecturer in Chinese History and Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies, University of Bochum, Germany ~ http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/oaw/gc/personal/Behr/WOLFGANG.HTM ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From edsel at glo.be Fri Aug 13 06:24:20 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 02:24:20 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:52 11/08/99 -0500, you wrote: [ moderator snip ] > What's the scoop on 'cent' and 'sans'. I thought both were /sa~/ >Rick Mc Callister [Ed] 'cent' sounds more or less like /si~ng/ and 'sans' like /sa~/ in Quebecois. Using the standard French pronunciation for 'cent' can cause hilarious confusion, as happened to me. Eduard Selleslagh B-9120 Haasdonk (Beveren) Belgium Phone & Fax: +32-3-775.69.69 E-Mail: edsel at glo.be From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Aug 12 12:55:24 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 07:55:24 -0500 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? Message-ID: Dear Seam and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sean Crist Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 1999 10:30 AM Sean wrote: > As Larry Trask has already pointed out, there are good epistemological > reasons for taking "there is no connection" as our initial hypothesis, > rather than "there is a connection"; and I won't belabor that point. > What's important is that you start with some hypothesis or other and work > on finding grounds to reject it. "We don't know" won't suit for those > purposes, because it is not a hypothesis. Pat asks: But surely taking as a null hypothesis a formulation like: "No languages are related", which has been disconfirmed --- *repeatedly*, is useless? 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 stevegus at aye.net Thu Aug 12 14:01:29 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 10:01:29 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > As for Etruscan *itu-, 'divide', I believe it is only attested in a Latin > gloss; and we know these were not always reliable. For a Latin *ituare (does > it exist? my dictionary is not large {?} enough to include it), it would > seem to me that IE *ai-to-, 'portion', would provide a simpler source. I don't believe there is an *ituare or *ituere attested in Latin. Traditionally, according to Pliny the Elder, -idus- is related to the root of -divido-, 'divide,' which is obviously di- added to *vido; and that would also relate it to -vidua-, 'widow;' apparently the root meaning, still present in Latin in the verb -viduo- was -separated-; and this sense carried into French -vide-, 'empty'. The loss of the v- in -idus- would seem to me to present a problem with this traditional explanation. [On another topic; I checked Thurneysen's Old Irish grammar, and apparently Old Irish did -not- count by scores; they formed the ordinal eighties, nineties, and all the rest with a suffix -mogo, e.g. -seachtmogo-, -ochtmogo-. The Welsh dictionary -Y Geiriaddwr Mawr- (sp?) gives eighty and ninety both ways; they seem somewhat simplified, since they are not suffixed forms, but simply descriptive analytical statements; ninety is merely -nau deg- or -pedwar ugain a deg-.] -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Ecce domina quae fidet omnia micantia aurea esse, et scalam in caelos emit. Adveniente novit ipsa, etiamsi clausae sint portae cauponum, propositum assequitur verbo. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Thu Aug 12 13:52:59 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:52:59 -0400 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? In-Reply-To: <004a01bee42b$2f385460$461a063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: >> an >> algorithm developed to produce ... >> the correct phylogeny, or family tree, > Applied to languages, this is no better than the isoglosses you choose, True. The same is true when this methodology is applied to biological species; the results are no better than the biological traits you choose. In both cases, the characters you choose are a matter of professional judgment. > and > this takes us back to an earlier debate where it became clear that an > isoglossic approach fails to consider: > (i) wave theory (which may underlie the satem/centum and RUKI isoglosses) > (ii) language continua > (iii) language convergence and Sprachbuende (is that word sufficiently > anglicised yet for an English plural to be accepted? If not, which German > plural is the correct one - is it a language bunch (-bunde) or a language > alliance (-buende)?) These three are really one and the same. To quote something that Don Ringe once said when presenting this work, "Why do we make trees? Because we can." Ringe et. al. are quite conscious of the problem you describe. For example, when they attempted to apply this methodology to the West Germanic languages, the attempt "failed spectacularly". Apparently, the reason is that these languages/dialects developed in close contact with each other, and innovations were shared in ways which cannot be modelled in a Stammbaum. In the case of the Indo-European tree that I gave, however, there wasn't this kind of failure, with a few points of messiness such as the placement of Germanic and of shared innovations between IIr and BS. Mathematically speaking, the set of possible trees is a fairly small subset of the set of possible wave diagrams. If we can produce a tree which is a fairly near perfect phylogeny, we should do so, since the Stammbaum model is the more constrained one. > (iv) time of attestation. I don't understand the problem here; could you say more? \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 12 15:08:24 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 11:08:24 EDT Subject: Basque statistics Message-ID: We have far too little study of the biases and distortions imposed by our tools of analysis, at the same time as the tools are valuable. Thanks to Larry Trask for a clear statement of ways of purifying vocabulary lists, in attempting to identify native ancient Basque vocabulary. If we do not believe any list is TOTALLY "pure", then we are rather concerned with degrees of "purity", relatively more pure and less pure. Rather than using particular cutoff criteria, it can be more sophisticated (though also much more work) to study the DIFFERENCE between vocabulary sets selected by a particular criterion from vocabulary sets which were not limited by that particular criterion. While early attestation is obviously a valuable cutoff (3), if the aim is to achieve the absolutely purest vocabulary set possible, it may run the error of excluding much authentic native Basque vocabulary which simply happened not to be recorded "early". Can we rather have several "degrees of earliness", or distinctions of WHICH sources of attestation? Trask does some of the latter, suggesting to exclude some sources which he believes are particularly unreliable. > (3) It is attested early. > > [Let's say before 1600, which is `early' for Basque.] *** The following (4) is also perfectly reasonable, if intended merely to achieve the "purest" possible vocabulary set, but it also can exclude legitimate native ancient Basque vocabulary, especially if, for example, some of that vocabulary has been borrowed FROM Basque INTO another language or languages. > (4) There is no reason to believe that it is shared with > languages known to have been in contact with Basque. > [Subjective, and hard to formalize, but I believe that doubtful > cases are few enough to constitute only a minor problem.] Nursery words may be among the most persistent in many cultures, so I do not see a reason to flatly exclude these. Label them as nursery words, perhaps (though the category is actually much broader than the two examples)... *** > (5) It does not appear to be a nursery word. >... >Now, (5) would exclude only a very few words not excluded by the other >criteria, notably `mother' and `father', And even sound-imitative words may sometimes be of use, they can undergo regular sound changes (as for laughter "ha-ha" becoming Russian "xoxotat' " with a>o shift). Or more borderline, "teeny" becoming "tiny" in the English Great Vowel Shift, regenerated (or borrowed from other dialects?) as "teeny" again. So again, not absolutely excluding them, but studying what difference it makes to patterning if they are included vs. excluded. > (6) It does not appear to be of imitative origin. >while (6) would >exclude a much larger number of items which would be automatically >excluded in any serious comparative work, like `meow', >`moo', `baa', `ding-dong', `spit', and probably also > `sneeze'. This last sounds roughly like oo-SHEEN, and, in my >view, is too likely to be imitative to be included in any list. *** Even asking that a word be found in all or many dialects is not a simple criterion: > (2) It is found throughout the language, or nearly so. > > [Since the better dictionaries assign words to the conventional > dialects, it is easy to formalize this requirement as we > see fit.] There are other subsidiary criteria which can reinforce or undermine the probabilities that a word was ancient Basque, which can be combined with information about WHICH dialects it is attested in, not just how many of them or which branches of the dialect family tree. *** My point in all of the above is that using simple cutoffs is a kind of rush-to-judgement, the opposite of the ability to delay judgements which is the hallmark of many good research personalities. The reason to avoid simple cutoffs is because it throws away potentially important data. But there is every reason to USE every one of the criteria (those which Larry Trask expressed as cutoffs), to use them as LABELS on the vocabulary items, which in a computer database can be taken into consideration whenever any question is asked of the database. In most studies of canonical forms, ones which do attempt to purify vocabulary lists, I would expect there is a statistical tendency known as regression towards the mean, that is, some reinforcement of universally typologically dominant patterns, such as CV-CV(-CV) syllable structure. It would be where we find that deviations from such universal patterns are reinforced statistically by steps of "purifying" a vocabulary set that we would have the most interesting characteristics perhaps attributable to an early or proto-language. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 12 16:36:57 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 11:36:57 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >If we extrapolate the degree of dissimilarity between IE languages after say >9000 years (some would say 5500 years), how much dissimilarity would there be >between languages separated by 10 or 20 times that time frame. Should we >expect any commonality at all? Maybe, maybe not. But that's no excuse for not looking. You may not be able to get back to an ur-sprache but you would certainly make some interesting discoveries. In fact, I'm sure that after Stefan gets back from Siberia he's going to get together with Larry to formulate a Basque-Yeniseian language family :> >in terms of Glottochronology, what should we expect - when languages >separated by a few thousand years can yield 'kaput', 'penn', 'sarah-' and >'golova' for an item as basic as a head? [snip] >Some stuff re the science on this matter: >1. Scientific American Aug 1999 p 13 "IS OUT OF AFRICA OUT THE DOOR?" >summarizes the growing evidence that the premise is not in sync with the >bones (especially in the Far East.) Remember also that the original theory >based on mtDNA backdating the African 'Eve" is now considered flawed and too >recent - and that she was even then dated to 200,000BP - so that language >separations set at 100,000 might as well arbitrarily start back with her or >her children. Then, like an exodus out of New Guinea, we could have a 500 >languages leaving Africa at one time. It is true that the date for Eve has been questioned but remember that all non-Africans (as well as some Africans) are in the same mitochondrial pool. The point is that the mitochondrial separation date for this group is still a determined fraction of the date for Eve. As I remember the multi-genesis theory is based on skull similarities that are rejected by the overwhelming majority of anthropologists. >2. Scientific American March 1998 Review of Ian Tattersall's 'Evolution and >Human uniqueness' summarizes some of the arguments that Neanderthals had >language. This would significantly backdate the appearance of human language >by 100's of 1000's of years. True, but speech and language are two different things. The ability to speak obviously does not presuppose modern language abilities. I don't propose a date for language evolution. >And there's nothing to say that modern humans >could not have learned language from Neanderthals. I don't see how. There are no indications of an "out of Europe" scenario. If you mean that modern humans inherited language from their ancestors, this obviously presupposes monogenesis >3. From an AP story (2/15/99) quoting a paper appearing in the same week in >the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team at Berkeley >challenging a Duke study positing Neanderthal speech capabilities based on >the size of the hypoglossal canal (jaw nerves): >"Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human speech >sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." (This I believe >revolved around the time of the appearance of Cro-Magnon.) Given that the Australians had already reached Australia about 60,000 BP, that date would seem to be very wrong >Finally, I suspect the big problem here is in the use of the word "language". Agreed but I suspect that language was the key to modern human expansion from Africa throughout the rest of the world. [snip] >Coming out of Africa, humans may have made common noises that were very >effective signals within respective groups. But did any of those "local" >signaling systems equate to a "language system?" And given the distance (in >form or time) between *PIE and modern English, what would be the distance in >time between *PIE and one of those simple signaling systems? If this scenario is true, it still presupposes monogenesis [snip] >The wonderful concept of "Zeit Geist" should not be forgotten here. Unless >monopolized - kept a secret or otherwise controlled - human capabilities tend >to spread and create the medium for new capabilities. Spoken language >(unlike written language) is very hard to monopolize and easy to imitate. >Once the capability arrived, languages may have been a product of the Zeit >Geist. If you don't possess genetic language ability, you're not going to be able to learn to speak by imitation. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 12 16:20:48 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 12:20:48 EDT Subject: Burden of Proof out of place Message-ID: There may be more agreement than seems to be the case in this matter. In particular I would agree with the following: >"We don't know" won't suit for those >purposes, because it is not a hypothesis. is very similar to my position, that "We cannot currently know" is the null hypothesis, and "We can currently know" is the hypothesis to be tested. And, quite obviously, no one can succeed in establishing that "we do know" is valid, with current data and tools, applied to the question whether all languages are ULTIMATELY related. So we know the answer to THAT test, for now and for a long time to come. No Burden of Proof is appropriate on the content of the question whether all languages are ultimately related, simply because we cannot test that question currently. That is my summary. Going back to the earlier discussion in more detail... >>> No languages are related. >>> >>> All languages are related. > >> Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like > >> "We do not know whether all languages are related >> (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) > >No, I'm afraid not. This last statement is not a hypothesis, but merely >an observation of the present state of our knowledge. As such, it is >not subject to test. A null hypothesis must be something we can test. Exactly my point. To put it another way, because we cannot test whether all languages are (ultimately) related, there is no appropriate null hypothesis. The "ultimately" makes this a very different kind of question from the kinds for which null hypothesis and testing are appropriate. Incidentally, a statement that no language families are related other than those currently known to be related (a more reasonable alternative to "No languages are related") is also not yet subject to any immediate kind of test using our current tools, sort of by definition of "immediate" and "currently known". Trask gives an example an investigation of whether baseball parks affect the performance of baseball players. The null hypothesis is that they do not. Trask states: >Now, this is *not* the author's belief. Quite the contrary: he makes it >clear that he personally believes this hypothesis to be false. But he >can't achieve anything merely by declaring it to be false. So, >naturally, what he does is to state it, and then to go on to assemble >evidence against it. As it happens, he is able to assemble so much >evidence against it that he feels safe in concluding that it is false, >and that its contradictory must be true. That's how things work. Actually, how they work most often is that the investigator has plausible evidence for a conclusion, and then AFTER THAT sets up a null hypothesis which the investigator already has some reason to think is false and can be defeated, and then proceeds to lay out the evidence to defeat it. Notice how potentially circular this is, in the way the question asked is designed precisely to bolster a previously drawn conclusion! (Not in all cases: when a previously unknown or unused, and independent, data set is examined in a test, there is no circularity.) In questions which are NOT testable... >> Using a "burden of proof" argument is merely >> a way of trying to get someone to accept a conclusion >> in the absence of evidence. When we are dealing with something we cannot test, I staunchly maintain that the above statement is still true, despite Larry Trask's disagreement: >Hardly. The burden of proof is always on the person who wants to defend >the contradictory of the appropriate null hypothesis. Since the "null hypothesis" can be manipulated, and must be subject to test, and since the kind of hypothesis under consideration is not currently subject to test, this reasoning simply does not apply. In the following case, by contrast, a null hypothesis is appropriate. >If I hope to >persuade my colleagues that Basque and Burushaski are related, then the >null hypothesis is that they are *not* related, and it is up to me to >assemble enough evidence to disconfirm the null hypothesis in the eyes >of my colleagues. That's how comparative linguistics works. Of course, in the above case, people tend to conclude that the two language families are not related. The appropriate conclusion is that they cannot currently be proven to be related, using currently available data and tools. I am NOT arguing that all languages are ultimately related. Just that our conclusions should be based on actual evidence, not on elaborate structures involving manipulable claims of "burden of proof" which often involves much more politics than fact. By declaration of almost all comparative linguists, comparative linguistics cannot establish such ultimate common origins, certainly not with tools currently used. Perhaps evidence from mitochondrial DNA, inherited viruses, and other evidence of human paleontology will eventually lead people to a conclusion on this question quite independent of the vocabularies and grammars of spoken languages. Perhaps it never will. But in a domain where we cannot test hypotheses, null hypotheses and burden-of-proof have no place. So stated, at least much of that seems to be in agreement with the other comments on this list. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 12 16:55:49 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 11:55:49 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <015101bee44d$683e9860$d89ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: According to my notes I got this from Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante 1983, and from Adolfo Zavarone 1996. The Bonfantes are about as reliable as they come and Zavarone's book is well documented. I got the form from his glossary but I haven't finished picking through all the chapters yet because they're so detailed. > >For a Latin *ituare (does >it exist? my dictionary is not large {?} enough to include it), it would >seem to me that IE *ai-to-, 'portion', would provide a simpler source. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From BMScott at stratos.net Thu Aug 12 17:58:05 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 13:58:05 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I seem to remember that the Vikings used a term translated as > "Bluemen" to refer to Moors. I think it was something like blaamen, > blagmen, blahmen. Cleasby & Vigfusson gloss () 'a black man, negro, i.e., an Ethiopian'; it is distinguished from the Saracens and Arabians. In romances it apparently refers to a kind of berserker. The adjective () is 'dark blue, livid', with uses ranging into 'black'. > The term was supposedly calqued in Gaelic and later in > English, hence the use of "Blue men, Blue People" in referring to the > Melungeons of Appalachia. Dennis King might know a bit more about this. The Dictionary of the Irish Language does show used in the sense 'Negro'. ( is 'blue, esp. deep blue; green (as of vegetation); dark, swarthy, black'.) I've no idea whether it was a calque; 'plunder of the swarthy Northmen' is also noted. Brian M. Scott From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Aug 12 17:57:34 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 17:57:34 GMT Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37B1A6C9.73B37AF3@Compuserve.com> Message-ID: Damien Erwan Perrotin <114064.1241 at Compuserve.com> wrote: >Tapiru is a Sumerian word whose precise meaning is "craftman working >copper by hammering it". It is very likely to be a loanword since >Sumerian does not have pollysyllabic roots and tapiru can not be >analyzed as a compound. It is very similar to an IE root with a very >similar meaning *dhebhros (craftman) found in Latin faber and Armenian >darbin (smith). Of course. I only realized the connection must be *dhebhros after sending the message. >Another hypothesis was to >suppose this word was borrowed along with the copper-working thechnics. >This technic was brought in Mesopotamia by the Halaf culture, whose >center was in Northern Iraq, but originated (the thechnic) in Eastern >Anatolia, around Catal Hu"yu"k and Arslantepe. Or the Balkans. The Sumerian for "copper" is of course (another word that's too long to be native Sumerian). PIE *Hreudh- >Anatolia has been seriously proponed as the homeland of the >Indo-European tongues (Renfrew, Gamkrelidze) or of their ancestors >(Sheratt). Their ancestors. I didn't know Sherrat agreed with me :-) ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Aug 12 18:15:27 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 18:15:27 GMT Subject: R: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <000301bee1da$603a34a0$a54a0d97@api-b0d3l6> Message-ID: "Paolo Agostini" wrote: >The Romans called _idus_ (from a former _*eidus_) the 15th day of the >months of March, May, July, and October and the 13th day of the other >months. If memory serves me well, it was the lexicographer Hesychius of >Alexandria who wrote in the 5th century "the verb _iduo_ originates from the >language of the Etruscans, from whom the Romans learned many religious rites >and customs, and it means _to divide_ because the _ides_ divide the months >in two halves". In the 5th century though Etruscan was a dead language since >three centuries at least. Beekes and van der Meer tentatively link Etruscan in the Pyrgi bilingual to ("nac thefarie veliiunas thamuce cleva etanal masan tiur unias $elace vacal etc."), where it occurs next to "masan" (the name of a month) and "tiur" (moon, month). >At the end of last century there were some scholars who maintained that the >word originated from IE _*idh_ "to be bright" (of the moon), yet the idea >was soon abandoned. Among the IE languages, the base occurs in Latin only. C.D. Buck suggests that OIr. "moon" is related to Latin , Oscan . >The word is very likely a Semitic borrowing, from the base `WD >('ayin-waw-daleth) the meaning of which is "to return (every year or >periodically); to repeat (cycle, period); to count, reckon", cfr. Aramaic >_'yidb'_ "festival"; Syriac _'eyda'_ and _'eyada'_ "ceremony, usage"; >Hebrew _'yid_ "Idolatrous festival" and _'ed_ "monthly courses, >menstruation"; Arabic _'id_ "festival" and _'iddah_ "period of time", >_'adda_ "he counted/reckoned", _'adad, 'idad, 'idda_ "number", _`a:da_ >"custom, tradition". There is also a secondary form of the same verb, i.e. >'TD ('ayin-thaw-daleth) "he counted/reckoned" from which Latin forms like >_ituo_ might derive. >According to the meaning of the Semitic base, the Latin word _*eidus_ simply >meant "a period of time; a counted number of days; a day that returns every >month". There is also Sumerian iti ~ itu, id4 "moon". Akkadian? >Latin has a number of Semitic loan-words which are due to areal contacts, >cfr. _cornu_ "horn" from Semitic _qarnu_ "horn"; _taurus_ (and Greek >_tauros_) "bull" from Semitic _tawr_ of s.m.; Well, these words are not only Latin. *k^er-n- "horn" is general IE, and *tauro- occurs in Greek, Albanian, Balto-Slavic and Germanic (Iranian too, if you count Av. staora- together with Germanic *stiur-). >_vacca_ "cow" from Semitic _*baqa_ of s.m. etc. Doubtful. Why v-? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Thu Aug 12 20:29:02 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 16:29:02 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > If one says in English: "He is eating up the food," we have a present > progressive perfective. > "He was eating up the food, " past progressive perfective; What is your definition of ``perfective''? In particular, do you think that, say Stadnard Arabic has perfective vs imperfective distinction? It looks to me like your ``perfective vs imperfective'' is my ``non-atelic vs telic'' or, ``having an overt bounder vs not so''. I base my definition on the data collected in Dahl, Tense and Aspect Systems, 1985. Perfective is the form used to refer to events considered as a whole and having a definite end point; it must be opposed to an imperfective which is seen as either neutral with regard to result/termination or explicitely denying it [which makes it unsuitable to be the narrative form.] > In fact, IMHO, the major original employment of IE -*i, which, added to > "secondary" personal endings yields the "primary" set, was to create a > "progressive" form, with "progressive" understood as designating a verbal > action regarded as a period of time during which something else happened or > was happening. The focal use of progressive is to state that a dynamic action extends across a reference moment. It does not seem to be common when duration is to be indicated. See Dahl, p.91. > While he ate the up food, I drank. = He was eating up the food (and) I > drank. English uses the progressive in more contexts than many other languages. So we need to be careful.[But even then, it seems to me that ``John was singing for ten minutes'' makes the listener think that something else is coming, unlike ``John sang for ten minutes.'' which stands by itself.] >> But languages with a perfective do not do that. As soon as the narrative is >> in the past, they use the perfective. > Pat interjects: > That does not seem to be true of Russian: pisal (impf. past); napisal (pf. > past). What is the frequency of imperfectives among the past forms in stories narrated using past forms? From mclasutt at brigham.net Thu Aug 12 23:49:17 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 17:49:17 -0600 Subject: ? "Vocabulary Density" Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Concerning semantic space in reconstructed languages, there is a fundamental problem. Just as we cannot reconstruct the exact phonetic nature of any segment in a proto-language, we cannot possibly reconstruct the exact semantic range of any given form in a proto-language. Given the modern phonetic correspondence set of [e], [i], [e], [e], [i], [I], and [ae], we might conclude that the proto-segment was probably a mid-front vowel, but be couldn't get any more precise than that. Now let's look at a typical Indo-European type of semantic set (I'm making this set up, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility based on what I've seen in Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uto-Aztecan, Proto-Utian, or any one of a dozen other reconstructions I've looked at). "run, escape"; "go, run away"; "go away"; "run (of a horse)"; "river flows"; etc. Now, given prior knowledge that the sound correspondences match what we already know about the proto-language, what is the exact semantic range of the proto-form? It could be a very broad form entailing all these meanings from which the daughters narrowed the meaning after adding other forms from elsewhere for the broad form (e.g., 'pig' in OE meant both the live and the dead animal, but now just means the dead one after the introduction of 'pork'). It could also be that the proto-form was restricted in meaning to, say, "river flows" and that the other daughters have broadened the meaning to include other notions of rapid movement away from the speaker (e.g., "ship" expanding from just a noun for a vessel on the sea to now meaning either a vessel on the sea or in space as well as the act of moving goods either by sea, truck or train). I agree with Lloyd's assertion that a strict one-to-one semantic match doesn't necessarily reflect reality, but the problem in establishing a genetic relationship between two languages is that once a little semantic leeway is allowed, it becomes far too easy for that semantic leeway to allow us to match anything to anything. Last year sometime I spent an hour in the k section of my Shoshoni dictionaries and matched about a dozen words between Shoshoni /k/ and English /k/ with plausible semantic leeway. Two or three of those words even had a two-consonant match (like kaan 'rat' and con 'deceptive criminal'). With the possibility of chance resemblances high enough as it is (especially when matching t, p, k, s, m, and n), we can't let our imaginations get carried away by allowing semantic leeway as well. Once firm phonological correspondences have been established with regular shift identified, then we have a scientific check on the plausibility of any given semantic match. Without the prior establishment of a genetic relationship with firm sound correspondences, however, semantic leeway must be avoided. -- John E. McLaughlin Assistant Professor Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From dwanders at pacbell.net Thu Aug 12 17:17:18 1999 From: dwanders at pacbell.net (dwanders at pacbell.net) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 17:17:18 -0000 Subject: "UCLA IE Studies, vol. 1" Message-ID: Announcing a collection of papers in Indo-European studies by faculty and students of the UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies: UCLA INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES, Volume 1 (July, 1999) edited by Vyacheslav V. Ivanov and Brent Vine 331 pages / $12 (including postage) [order form below] - CONTENTS: PHONOLOGY Greek rhiza 'root' and 'Schwa Secundum' Brent Vine MORPHOLOGY A Lexical Analysis of Simple *-r/n- Heteroclisis in Proto-Indo- European Jay Friedman Latin -inare/-inari Brent Vine (MORPHO)SYNTAX Word Order Change in Umbrian: From Postpositions to Prepositions Christopher Wilhelm Indo-European Syntactic Rules and Gothic Morphology Vyacheslav V. Ivanov WURZELN, WORTER UND SACHEN Aggression and Sustenance: Driving (*ag'-) and Beating (*gwhen-) Symbiosis in (Proto-)Indo-European Raimo Anttila Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European Vyacheslav V. Ivanov An Ancient Name for the Lyre Vyacheslav V. Ivanov Old Novgorodian Nevide, Russian nevidal' : Greek aide:los Vyacheslav V. Ivanov A Note on the Duenos Inscription Brent Vine BOOK REVIEWS Remarks on a So-Called Encyclopedia of Language (review of David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd ed., 1997) Bengt Lofstedt Recent Work from St. Petersburg, I (Classical and Indo-European Linguistics, Celtic Studies) Brent Vine Recent Work from St. Petersburg, II (Balkan Studies, Slavic Linguistics and Ethnolinguistics) Vyacheslav V. Ivanov ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ORDER FORM (please print out, or produce something similar) Name _________________________________ Mailing address ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ No. of copies ordered (@ $12 ea. [or equivalent in foreign currency], incl. postage): _______ I enclose a check (payable to "UCLA FOUNDATION") in the amount of: $ ________ mail orders to: Brent Vine Program in IE Studies, UCLA 100 Dodd Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417 / USA (questions: vine at humnet.ucla.edu) From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Aug 18 04:31:21 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 23:31:21 -0500 Subject: Oops! Message-ID: Dear IEists: Through a series of computer problems, I have lost my INBOX and SENT folders. For those of you with whom I was discussing this or that, would you kindly send me a copy of your last response to proto-language at email.msn.com if you feel it might be of interest to continue the discussion. Thank you. Pat Ryan From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Aug 14 04:54:03 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 00:54:03 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Wednesday, August 11, 1999 10:38 AM ><< At 23:15 19/07/99 EDT, wrote: >My hypothesis for the origin of the East-European -ch in Walach and the like: >a derivative ending,... still productive as -ak in Slavic (but also as an >adjective forming suffix in Greek -ako's...>> >>>From a post sent to me: <or was a place called Kastrorachi.>> I suppose this might be a case of -achi >being attached to a place name. >S. Long "Wallach" is clearly a sort of Latinisation of East Slavic volox- < Common Slavic *volx- (cf. Polish Wloch, Czech vlach, etc.). The -ach in Wallach is NOT/NICHT/NE/NEM/IKKI/DDIM, etc.etc. related to Slavic -ak . Common Slavic *volx may be seen as a borrowing from germanic cf. Old English wealh pl. wealas, Robert Orr From pagos at bigfoot.com Fri Aug 13 05:06:01 1999 From: pagos at bigfoot.com (Paolo Agostini) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 07:06:01 +0200 Subject: R: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On 12 August 1999 10:04 Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> The word is very likely a Semitic borrowing, from the base `WD >> ('ayin-waw-daleth) the meaning of which is "to return (every year or >> periodically); to repeat (cycle, period); to count, reckon Pat comments: >Yes, $-w-d is a little strange in producing so many derivatives with -i/y-; >and probably $(a)id- would have been heard by Romans as id- but is it not a >little complicated to assume that the medial -w-, which shows up in few of >the Arabic derivatives, somehow gets metathesized to final position to >produce I:du:s rather than *I:dus? There's no metathesis, Pat. The verb is a so-called "verbum mediae infirmae", (I think we could translate this expression in English as "verb having an unstable second radical"). You might wish to learn abt the behaviour of this and similar verbs as occurring in the oldest Semitic language we know by checking Von Soden, W.: _Grundriss der Akkadischen Grammatik_. Rome, 1995 (3), p. 179-180. Cheers Paolo Agostini From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Aug 13 07:05:34 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 08:05:34 +0100 Subject: nasal pres / root aor Message-ID: Thanks for your full reply, Jens. It deserves good thought - but I want to ask a quick question. You give examples of nasal present + root aorist from Tocharian, Baltic, and Hittite. The options for PIE aorists appear to have been root, -s- or the rare reduplicated aorist. Leaving aside the reduplicated aorist, because it scarcely counts, that leaves root or -s- for most verbs. Now Baltic has no -s- aorist, and I believe that Hittite doesn't either. Doesn't this mean the evidence from those languages is meaningless? Peter From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 08:46:50 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 09:46:50 +0100 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? In-Reply-To: <003c01bee4c2$115abc20$479ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > But surely taking as a null hypothesis a formulation like: "No > languages are related", which has been disconfirmed --- > *repeatedly*, is useless? No. It's merely that, in seeking a relation between some *particular* languages, the null hypothesis is "These *particular* languages are not related." Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 08:58:32 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 09:58:32 +0100 Subject: Basque-Yeniseian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > In fact, I'm sure that after Stefan gets back from > Siberia he's going to get together with Larry to formulate a > Basque-Yeniseian language family :> Oh, this has already been done, by John Bengtson in a series of publications and by Merritt Ruhlen in chapter 4 of his 1994 book On the Origin of Languages (the Stanford book, not the Wiley one). The comparisons, in my view, are woeful, and I have criticized them severely. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Aug 13 09:44:00 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 05:44:00 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/13/99 3:07:50 AM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> But even if Out of Africa is correct you've never established the point where it corresponds to a language or languages. So that separation date is an arbitrary correlation as far as what left Africa - e.g., the evacuation of New Guinea and 500 languages leave. <> Please check out the August SciAm. This is a front-of-issue news story. Also paleobiologists have never confirmed Out of Africa. I believe it is almost entirely a statistical concept based on present populations. And as pointed out in the article, Out of Africa data is not inconsistent with Multiregionalism. <<>> <> Neanderthals and moderns coexisted. No O of A needed. And why is monogenesis needed to explain language capacity 300,000 years ago or 35,000 years ago? None of these scenarios demand language monogenesis. <<<"Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human speech sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." >>> <> Why? Who says those Australians had language at the time? The two events have no necessary connection. <<...speech and language are two different things. The ability to speak obviously does not presuppose modern language abilities. I don't propose a date for language evolution.>> Which means you are saying that modern language could have only started 40,000 years ago. <<...I suspect that language was the key to modern human expansion from Africa throughout the rest of the world.>> I like that, but it's hard to buy. What you actually need is a raft or about 70,000 years to find a Bering Strait landbridge to the new world. The latter has archaelogical support. <> This is the loop of logic that defeats analysis by genetic skills. The main way you know if you have the genetic ability to speak is if you speak. But if you don't speak, it doesn't mean you don't have the genetic ability. So yes by definition you can't speak if you don't have the ability to speak. We're still at square one. Speech (hypoglossal canal-wise) may be a lot older than Out of Africa. Language (as modern speech capacity or language system) could be a lot younger. And Out of Africa could be just flat out dead wrong. So where does that leave us? Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 10:38:11 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 11:38:11 +0100 Subject: Burden of Proof out of place In-Reply-To: <80d274f9.24e44e60@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > No Burden of Proof is appropriate on the content of the question > whether all languages are ultimately related, > simply because we cannot test that question currently. I fully agree that the question `Are all languages related?' cannot be answered at present. I further believe that we will never be able to answer this question by purely linguistic means. However, there are people who disagree, one of the most prominent being Merritt Ruhlen. Ruhlen wishes to embrace the conclusion `All languages are related.' Now, in order to go about this, I maintain, he should start with the negation of this statement as his null hypothesis, and then go on to show that there is so much evidence against this null hypothesis that it is untenable and must be rejected. But that's not what he does. Instead, he *starts* with the hypothesis `All languages are related', and then proceeds to assemble what he sees as evidence in support of this last hypothesis. Amazingly enough [;-)]. he is able to find such evidence. He therefore declares that, because he has found evidence in support of his desired conclusion, it must be true. But this is completely wrongheaded. What Ruhlen *must* do, if he wants to persuade anybody, is not to try to demonstrate that his favored conclusion is supported by evidence, but rather that its contradictory -- the appropriate null hypothesis -- is so strongly disconfirmed that it cannot be maintained. To draw a crude analogy, suppose I am interested in persuading you of the truth of the proposition `All swans are white.' In this undertaking, it will be wholly inadequate for me merely to show you a whole bunch of white swans. Instead, I must undertake the more difficult task of disconfirming the contradictory, `Some swans are not white.' That is, I must adduce powerful evidence that no non-white swan is to be found anywhere. What Ruhlen does is effectively to produce a number of white swans. He has entirely failed to understand the need to disconfirm the required null hypothesis -- the contradictory of the conclusion he wants to reach -- and he has contented himself with merely assembling scraps of evidence -- or what he sees as evidence -- in support of his desired conclusion. As a result, he has completely failed to produce any grounds at all for rejecting the true null hypothesis: `Some languages are not related'. This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is enough to render Ruhlen's work vacuous, quite apart from the vast number of egregious errors in the material he cites as evidence, and quite apart from his failure to realize that lookalikes do not constitute evidence of any kind. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 11:25:38 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 12:25:38 +0100 Subject: circularity In-Reply-To: <80d274f9.24e44e60@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: [on my baseball `park effects' example] > Actually, how they work most often is that the investigator has > plausible evidence for a conclusion, and then AFTER THAT sets up a > null hypothesis which the investigator already has some reason to > think is false and can be defeated, and then proceeds to lay out the > evidence to defeat it. Oh, sure. In practice, we are hardly ever able to work through an issue in the optimal manner I have described. Real life is inevitably messier. We make mistakes and eventually correct them; new evidence becomes available; new tools become available; all sorts of things happen along the way. But how we do the work is one thing, while how we present our results in order to persuade our colleagues is another. Obviously the linguists who established the validity of the IE family did not overtly begin with the null hypothesis `These languages are not related'. But, once a sufficient amount of work had been done, the results were laid out in the handbooks, in the form of phonological and morphological correspondences which are so pervasive and so systematic that the null hypothesis is untenable. We accept IE today, not because Bopp and Grimm thought it was a neat idea, and not because the IEists have cunningly manipulated the issue, but because the evidence assembled in the handbooks against unrelatedness is overwhelming. > Notice how potentially circular this is, in the way the question > asked is designed precisely to bolster a previously drawn > conclusion! No, I can see no circularity at all. If we want to show that two or more things are related, then the only possible null hypothesis is that they are not related, and the disconfirmation of this null hypothesis is the only way of establishing the proposed relationship. There is no choice of null hypothesis; there is no scope for intellectual intimidation; and there is no circularity. The null hypothesis of unrelatedness among the IE languages is massively disconfirmed by the evidence. The null hypothesis of no park effects in baseball is likewise massively disconfirmed. But the null hypothesis of unrelatedness among the families assigned to Nostratic is at present *not* disconfirmed, and that is why few linguists accept Nostratic. It doesn't matter that there is evidence in support of Nostratic: what matters is that there is insufficient evidence to reject unrelatedness. Let me return to my baseball example. Now, thoughtful baseball fans have believed for years that park effects were real, and probably anybody who's ever watched a few games at that pitchers' graveyard called Coors Field believes in park effects. However, there exist baseball fans who do not believe in the reality of park effects. Even if there were none, it wouldn't matter, since a universally held belief does not necessarily constitute a truth. But, until recently, real evidence in favor of park effects has been sketchy and informal -- not much better than anecdotal: "Batting averages at Oakland-Alameda County Stadium have been lower than at other parks in the last few years." Observations like this one are interesting, but they don't suffice to disconfirm the null hypothesis of no park effects. Maybe OAC Stadium has just happened to see a lot of pitchers' duels recently, entirely by chance, or maybe the A's have had great pitchers. So, what that statistician did was to state the null hypothesis and then to test it statistically, with one test after another. The results are clear: the null hypothesis is massively disconfirmed by the statistical evidence to a very high level of confidence. That is, the absence of park effects could be consistent with the data only in something like one case in a trillion (I forget the precise number, but it was big). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Fri Aug 13 13:58:47 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 09:58:47 -0400 Subject: French and Gaulish numbers (was: indoeuropean/hand) Message-ID: . . . And, reading further, like I didn't have time to yesterday, it turns out that Thurneysen goes on to review the evidence of Gaulish numerals in some details; but the highest number in the evidence he cites is 'forty,' and that is formed on the petru- root. If higher Gaulish numbers have been discovered since then, I don't know. The irregularities in the eighties and nineties in French numbers would seem not to be survivals of a -consistent- Gaulish system. Of course, six score and sixteen years ago, Abraham Lincoln suggested that this kind of count was not wholly dead in English, at least as a rhetorical flourish. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com Ecce domina quae fidet omnia micantia aurea esse, et scalam in caelos emit. Adveniente novit ipsa, etiamsi clausae sint portae cauponum, propositum assequitur verbo. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 13 15:14:38 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:14:38 +0100 Subject: Basque statistics In-Reply-To: <799937ef.24e43d68@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > While early attestation is obviously a valuable cutoff (3), > if the aim is to achieve the absolutely purest vocabulary set possible, > it may run the error of excluding much authentic native Basque > vocabulary which simply happened not to be recorded "early". > Can we rather have several "degrees of earliness", or distinctions > of WHICH sources of attestation? Trask does some of the latter, > suggesting to exclude some sources which he believes are > particularly unreliable. Of course, any cutoff criterion is likely to exclude a few genuinely native and ancient Basque words, but it will certainly also exclude a much larger number of words which are not native and ancient. And the primary object is to exclude the words which should be excluded, not to include every single word which should be included. The objective is to construct a list of those words which have the strongest claim to being native and ancient. It is therefore far more important to exclude every word which does not have a good claim to native and ancient status than it is to sweep up every word which *might* be native and ancient. First things first. > The following (4) is also perfectly reasonable, > if intended merely to achieve the "purest" possible vocabulary set, > but it also can exclude legitimate native ancient Basque vocabulary, > especially if, for example, some of that vocabulary has been borrowed > FROM Basque INTO another language or languages. [LT] >> (4) There is no reason to believe that it is shared with >> languages known to have been in contact with Basque. Well, we know for certain that Basque has taken thousands of words from Latin and Romance, while loans in the other direction are very rare and almost entirely confined to those local Romance varieties in direct contact with Basque. In fact, Basque `left (hand)', which has been widely borrowed into Ibero-Romance, is perhaps the *only* Basque word borrowed widely into Romance, apart from those borrowed in the last few years. That being so, it seems clear that words shared between Basque and its neighbors should be systematically excluded from our list, because, for any given word of this type, the probability is overwhelming that Basque has borrowed it. If Basque loans into Romance were numerous, then the existence or not of shared vocabulary would probably have to be rejected altogether as a criterion. However, such is not the case. > Nursery words may be among the most persistent in many cultures, so > I do not see a reason to flatly exclude these. Label them as > nursery words, perhaps (though the category is actually much broader > than the two examples)... I'm afraid I can't agree. Nursery words are routinely excluded from the initial stages of any comparison because they are so treacherous: they are frequently invented independently in different languages. *Once* a genetic link has been established, it is legitimate to see if any nursery words can be reconstructed for the ancestral language. But you can't use words like `mother' as evidence for a link in the first place. > And even sound-imitative words may sometimes be of use, > they can undergo regular sound changes (as for laughter > "ha-ha" becoming Russian "xoxotat' " with a>o shift). > Or more borderline, "teeny" becoming "tiny" in the English > Great Vowel Shift, regenerated (or borrowed from other dialects?) > as "teeny" again. So again, not absolutely excluding them, > but studying what difference it makes to patterning if they > are included vs. excluded. Much the same comment as with nursery words. Anyway, words like `teeny' are not so much imitative as expressive or sound-symbolic. Basque has a huge number of such words, but I am deliberately choosing not to exclude them expressly from the initial list. Why? First, because the hopeful long-rangers seeking improbable relatives for Basque have frequently cited such words as comparanda and have complained bitterly that I am being circular when I reject these words as suitable comparanda because of their expressive formation. Therefore, *demonstrating* that these words do not look like native and ancient Basque words is precisely one of the goals I hope to achieve. Second, because I am confident that these words will be ruled out by the criteria I have already listed -- notably by the requirement that a word should be found throughout the language. With only a few exceptions, expressive and sound-symbolic formations in Basque are severely restricted in distribution, being confined in each case to a small area. One of the few exceptions is ~ 'small', which satisfies all six of my criteria and will have to go into the initial list. But, in that list, it will stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, because of its utterly anomalous phonological form: (a) it has an initial voiceless plosive; (b) it has an initial coronal plosive; (c) it has the form CVCV with plosives in both C positions and a voiceless plosive in the second C position; (d) it exhibits a unique regional variation in form. In my view, this will be more than enough to remove the word from the second version of the list, or at least to earn it a flag as an anomalous item. Even though it exists everywhere, and even though it is recorded exceptionally early (about 1400), it looks as much like a native and ancient Basque lexical item as `pizza' looks like a native and ancient English word. > Even asking that a word be found in all or many dialects is not a simple > criterion: > There are other subsidiary criteria which can reinforce or undermine > the probabilities that a word was ancient Basque, which can be > combined with information about WHICH dialects it is attested in, > not just how many of them or which branches of the dialect family tree. Agreed, but. There exist words which are shared between the eastern and western dialects of Basque but which are unattested in the central dialects. By the peripherality criterion, these words are good candidates for ancient status: they look like words which were once universal in the language but which have been lost from central dialects. But I still prefer to exclude such words from our initial list. Once that initial list is set up, then these east-west words are the next group to look at, to see if they too have the phonological shapes of native and ancient words. But I don't think they ought to be included at the first stage. There are hundreds of words found in all dialects: let's look at those first. > My point in all of the above is that using simple cutoffs is a kind of > rush-to-judgement, the opposite of the ability to delay judgements > which is the hallmark of many good research personalities. > The reason to avoid simple cutoffs is because it throws away potentially > important data. Again I can't agree. First, cutoffs are not a rush to judgement: they are merely common prudence, a desire to advance as slowly and as carefully as possible. Second, nothing is thrown away. All data remain available for later consideration, after an initial list is obtained. As I stressed above, the first goal is to exclude questionable words, not to avoid excluding genuine ones. > But there is every reason to USE every one of the criteria > (those which Larry Trask expressed as cutoffs), > to use them as LABELS on the vocabulary items, > which in a computer database can be taken into consideration > whenever any question is asked of the database. Sure, but that's a different exercise. > In most studies of canonical forms, ones which do attempt to purify > vocabulary lists, I would expect there is a statistical tendency > known as regression towards the mean, that is, some reinforcement of > universally typologically dominant patterns, such as CV-CV(-CV) > syllable structure. It would be where we find that deviations from > such universal patterns are reinforced statistically by steps of > "purifying" a vocabulary set that we would have the most interesting > characteristics perhaps attributable to an early or proto-language. Well, I am unwilling to assume in advance that CV syllable structures must have been typical of Pre-Basque. In fact, my preliminary work suggests strongly that Pre-Basque had an enormous proportion of vowel-initial words, probably totaling at least 50% of the recoverable lexicon, and possibly more. This I consider unusual, though a query last year on the LINGUIST List turned up a few other languages with the same property. Romance languages generally have a much lower proportion of vowel-initial words -- for example, a quick trawl of my biggest Spanish dictionary suggests that about 25% of Spanish words are vowel-initial. So, if we assume that we should automatically be preferring C-initials, we are likely to start preferring Romance words to native Basque words. Advance assumptions about what we `ought' to find are dangerous. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Aug 13 16:11:21 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:11:21 GMT Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <000201bee502$1b336180$c070fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >What is the frequency of imperfectives among the past forms in stories >narrated using past forms? Lower than the perfective of course, unless the author is being very negative (negative sentences tend to have imperfective: if it didn't happen, the action wasn't completed). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 13 16:32:46 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 12:32:46 EDT Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance Message-ID: Jon Patrick writes: >The idea is that the distance between languages is represented by the >series of changes that occur to a large set of words in moving from their >parent form to their daughter forms, so that distance apart is not measured >between the daughter languages but rather by their distance from their >parent. We feel this better represents the real world process. This is a crucial conceptual change, that can lead to much progress in Comparative / Reconstructive linguistics. I certainly hope that various data sets can be used with the methods Patrick describes, to observe what the results are. But as in any creation of any proposed tool, we must at the same time be evaluating the tool itself, not taking it for granted. Patrick quoted me including this: > and to CREATE more such tools by discovering what ways of > handling the data are robust across what kinds of intervening changes. How do we know whether the proposed tool is robust across different kinds of changes and different real-world situations? We must evaluate the tool against cases where we think we know what answers it should give, and try to see what parameters do limit or might limit its extrapolation to cases where we have no independent basis for drawing a conclusion. A study of the work of Ringe and company on the family tree of Indo-European, in comparison with the method proposed by Jon Patrick, could be interesting. I would think, from the brief description Patrick supplied, and from what I have read of Ringe's work, that Patrick would want a larger quantity of computerized data than was put into the data set used by Ringe? We now have an international standard computer Code, Unicode, which contains most of the characters needed for transliteration (Latin-standard-based letters) and for phonetic transcription (IPA). It would be useful to try to establish a standard for Comparative Data sets, into which all existing computer data sets can be translated, so that the massive sets of data can be made available for studies such as this. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Fri Aug 13 17:27:16 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 19:27:16 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: PATRICK C. RYAN wrote >There is a *H{2}am- in Pokorny meaning 'grasp'. But, like Pokorny, I believe >this is probably the basis for the entries under *me:-. true, but Pokorny's work is from 1959, when Lydian was not fully known and its IE character was not recognized by everyone. Breton is not very much known outside Celtic countries and most scholars use Welsh instead (where Afan is not recorded). And a true Breton Etymological Dictionnary has still to be written. So that *am was mostly known through Latin, what restricted comparative study. As for me, I would favor an H2em etymology. An evolution from grasp to kiss is well recorded in French and the evolution from "love" to "kiss" well recorded in Slavic tongues. >(...) I propose that IE *H and AA *? are the results of Nostratic *? but that >AA *?(i/a) produced Egyptian j. That is possible,( I am not a specialist of AA) but I would like to see cognates from other AA tongues which would have never been in contact with IE tongues. Egyptian has come into contact with Anatolian tongues (which did have the root), Indian tongues (in Mitanni and, shortly, in Syria), and some tongues of the Egean which could be related to IE (philistine, Cretan), this to avoid borrowing from either side, or from another source Damien Erwan Perrotin From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Fri Aug 13 17:42:13 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 19:42:13 +0200 Subject: Latin tapiru Message-ID: Wolfgang Behr wrote >if it is _tibira_ (later also_tabira_) 'metal-worker' you are >talking about here yes, it is, but the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonnants is not easy to do in Sumerian, due to the nature of the script and (overall) its use by Akkadian speakers. I think that Gernot Wilhelm has conclusively shown that we are dealing with a loan from Hurritic, i.e. an "agent-orientated resultative _-iri/e_ participle" (Wilhelm), or "antipassive-participle", derived from the Hurr. root _tab/taw_ [w = u+subscript arch) 'to cast (metal)'. In Hurr., this root has the derivations _tabali_ 'copper-founder' and _tabiri_ 'he, who has cast' (Otten). Possible, even if it is hard to be conclusive about such a badly known tongue as Hurrian (whose earliest records are posterior to the death of Sumerian, so that we do not know how it was like by 3000 B.C). Moreover, we know that Hurrian has been submitted to Indo-Aryan influences, and the Hurrian speaking area seems to be outside the region of the development of Copper metalurgy, which is closer from Hattian speakings areas Even if we accept the relationship, we have still to explain why three unrelated tongues share the same word for the same relatively recent activity. Note also that it is not the only IE looking word in Sumerian. We have also temen (foundations of a temple) urudu (ore) sah (pig), more doubtfull however Damien Erwan Perrotin From 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com Fri Aug 13 18:06:18 1999 From: 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com (Damien Erwan Perrotin) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:06:18 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote >Or the Balkans. The Sumerian for "copper" is of course >(another word that's too long to be native Sumerian). PIE >*Hreudh- the link seems tentative, but I am skeptical about a Balkanic origin. Relationships between Balkans and Mesopotamia are quite scarce at such an early date. Moreover Copper metalurgy in Mesopotamia originated in Catal Huyuk around 6000 B.C and then spreadt eastwards. In Balkans, we have to wait until 4000 - 3000 B.C. So that an Anatolian origin is more likely. >Their ancestors. I didn't know Sherrat agreed with me :-) He did postulate that IE was a kind of koine, or trade language wich developed on the european coast of the black sea, around 4000 B.C.The basis of this tongue would have been the language of the agarian cultures of Anatolia which colonized Europe around 6000 B.C. (quoted inthe postface of Mallory's In search of the Indo-Europeans). That is the thesis I personnaly favor, albeit I would rather place IE in the mixt cultures of the steppe-agrarian cultures inteface, as Usatovo or Cernavoda, in a context of drastic social, technological and political change. A kind of Copper Age Swahili :-) By the way, that is the only way to explain the likely (according to me) relationship between Etruscan and IE, as it would be an archeological non-sense to place the ancestors of Etruscans in Crimea. Damien Erwan Perrotin From pagos at bigfoot.com Fri Aug 13 18:56:54 1999 From: pagos at bigfoot.com (Paolo Agostini) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:56:54 +0200 Subject: R: R: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: On 13 August 1999 12:26 Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >Beekes and van der Meer tentatively link Etruscan in the >Pyrgi bilingual to ("nac thefarie veliiunas thamuce cleva >etanal masan tiur unias $elace vacal etc."), where it occurs next >to "masan" (the name of a month) and "tiur" (moon, month). They might be right. Nonetheless, the fact that the word occurs in the bilingual (that is Phoenician and Etruscan) Laminae of Pyrgi supplies further support to the Semitic origin of the word. The Phoenician/Punic influx in Caere/Pyrgi was very strong. An archaeological finding in Pyrgi showed the presence, near the temple of Ishtar, of a peculiar building with seventeen small cells (the total number of cells was very likely 20) with a large scope and several altars in front of them: Archaeologists assume that this might have been the sacrarium (sanctuary) where the priestesses of the Phoenician goddess Ishtar practized the sacred prostitution. A mention of this custom is possibly to be found in Plautus where he accuses the Etruscan girls of prostituting themselves _tusco more_ ("the Etruscan way") in order to raise their dowry. Another peculiarity of some tombs found in the area of Pyrgi / Caere (Cerveteri) is the inscription _mutna, mutana_ meaning "sepulchre" or "tomb". The word does not occur elsewhere in Etruria. It is very likely a compound word from mut- + -na, and I am prone to link the first part of it to Phoenician MWT "death, dead". >There is also Sumerian iti ~ itu, id4 "moon". This might be the ultimate origin of _idus_, yet the word arrived in the Italic / Latin world much later. Akkadian, Aramaic or Phoenicio-Punic might have played an important role in the transmission of particular Kulturwoerter. For example, Sabatino Moscati in his book "Italia Punica" (Rusconi. Milano, 1995) maintains that the Phoenicio-Punic influence in Italy has been largely underestimated. And let's not forget that Caere / Pyrgi are only 50 km away from Rome. [BTW, if you listen to an Arab when he pronounces the word _'id al fitr_ or _'id al kabir_ "the great festival" (that is the last day of the month of Ramadhan) you will easily realize why the 'ayin was vocalized as an /e/ in _*eidus_] >>Latin has a number of Semitic loan-words which are due to areal contacts, >>cfr. _cornu_ "horn" from Semitic _qarnu_ "horn"; _taurus_ (and Greek >>_tauros_) "bull" from Semitic _tawr_ of s.m.; >Well, these words are not only Latin. *k^er-n- "horn" is general >IE, and *tauro- occurs in Greek, Albanian, Balto-Slavic and >Germanic (Iranian too, if you count Av. staora- together with >Germanic *stiur-). Possibly, Bovidae were first domesticated and used for agriculture in the Near East, and it seems that the Semitic Kulturwoerter related thereto spread very far. >>_vacca_ "cow" from Semitic _*baqa_ of s.m. etc. >Doubtful. Why v-? You are right. I should have written _*baqa'_ and/or _*bhaqa'_. Cfr. also Turkic _byq_, _buqa_ and _byqa_, Russian _byq_, Bulgarian _bik_, Hungarian _bika_ "bull" &tc.. All these words are likely to originate from the Semitic root BQ' (beth-qoph-'ayin) "to cleave, split, break open" (i.e. the ground) -- cfr. the forms having an _R_ as the third radical as in Hebrew _baqar_ "cattle, herd, oxen" and Aramaic_Syriac _baqara_ "cattle, herd". I'm afraid this answer of mine is severely off-topic for the IE-list, and I apologize for this. Cheers Paolo Agostini From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca Fri Aug 13 20:41:27 1999 From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (Stephane Goyette) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:41:27 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Cent" and "sans" are homophonous in Quebec French (as indeed in all overseas varieties of French), so that there is no need on the part of Rick Mc Callister to assume us to have better auditory perception than the rest of humanity, flattering though the idea might be to some of us. Stephane Goyette University of Ottawa [ moderator snip ] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Aug 13 21:54:28 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 17:54:28 -0400 Subject: ? Why "Burden of proof" ? In-Reply-To: <003c01bee4c2$115abc20$479ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > But surely taking as a null hypothesis a formulation like: "No languages are > related", which has been disconfirmed --- *repeatedly*, is useless? For any two languages, the null hypothesis is that those languages aren't related. This is not the same as what you just said. The hypothesis as you've phrased it would be the null hypothesis for the question, "Are any languages related?" That question was answered two centuries ago. In that sense, yes, the hypothesis as you've phrased it is of little use. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Aug 13 18:55:58 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 19:55:58 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: In reply to Rick: Granted, and I apologise for misunderstanding your contrast between Africans and modern humans. Incidentally, where do Australian Aborigines fit into this? Wasn't there some evidence (or suggestion) in the news about 18 months ago, that the Aborigines were very much older than had been previously thought? How do the time scales fit together? Pete From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Aug 13 19:52:22 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:52:22 +0100 Subject: Hittites ~ Phrygians ~ Balkan peoples? Message-ID: >> (iv) time of attestation. > I don't understand the problem here; could you say more? I mean nothing spectacular - only the obvious stuff that much information is lost, so classification becomes less clear. Imagine a world in which Latin was attested poorly and only at a late stage. A researcher finds the word for "a hundred" and one or two other such words, and so classifies it as a satem language. Or a world in which Baltic once had -s- aorists, but lost them before the time of our first texts. Or a world in which Albanian originally had reflexes of the Baltic-Germanic -m- dative plurals, but no trace is left. There is still a strong tendency to read back into PIE as a whole, the structures we find in those IE languages which are found very early, especially Greek and Sanskrit. If we had Germanic from the same date, our reconstruction might look rather different. If we did not have Hittite, the Greek-Sanskrit model would seem more certain. So I guess I'm only saying that we need to remember how widely separated chronologically the IE languages are - which I'm sure you don't anyone to remind you of! Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Aug 13 19:17:38 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 20:17:38 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: > Pat said: > According to Lehmann, the aorist is +momentary, hence -durational. It can still be applied to an action which continued over a long period. For example, ebasileuse in Greek. This would be used when the length of duration was not the focus. At the risk of teaching my grandmothers to suck eggs, let's remember that in Classical Greek, although there are several uses for the present and aorist stems, two contrasts stand out as very common, if not normative, and neither really has the aorist as "+momentary": (i) past tense: imperfect vs aorist with augment. Here the distinction (IMHO) is not duration / momentary but rather background event / main event. The imperfect tells us that something was going on before, during and/or after the main event. If you like, the distinction is between description and narrative. The same usage is found strongly in Latin. (ii) non-indicative (leaving aside the aorist participle, which retains a past flavour): here the aorist is neutral, so the use of the present stem puts a marked stress on continuity. So the distinction is not between two members, both of them marked, but between continuous and neutral. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Aug 16 05:33:49 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 01:33:49 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/13/99 4:16:39 AM, BMScott at stratos.net wrote: < () 'a black man, negro, i.e., an Ethiopian';... The adjective () is 'dark blue, livid', with uses ranging into 'black'.>> Well of course -madr, -madhr are very recognizable as not referring to men or madness but to a red/brown dye, for a long time quite popular among the Scandinavians - (from Rubia tinctorium or Gallium boreale) and of course bla'- might as well be black or white as blue. One would otherwise think perhaps of "Blackmoor." The basic problem with colors in the old tongues is that they often don't make any sense in our world. A very good example of semantics that just won't stay put long enough to be semantical. To help confuse things more, here's two entries from the original OED: "1225 Ancr. R. 234 - Blac as a bloamon." "1152 Erfurt Glossary "blata , pigmentum: haui-b:auum"... blo(')wa,... perhaps cognate with L. flavus - yellow" And from the Old Norse list last year: <> One explanation for all of this is that ancient peoples would use the color names for pigments irrespective of "color" or even contrary to how these matched with other pigments or natural colors - which often end up being not what we think of as colors at all. Here's a part of a post on Celtic colors from before this list had archives: <> Dennis King In a message dated 11/22/98 3:07:37 PM... In the same thread I recall one post which insisted that we can certainly identify some ancient colors just from common expertise, e.g., blood is always red. To which the next post replied, 'except in Homer, where blood is always black." My suspicion is that in the old days, people did not match colors but things - among which natural color or dyes might or might not be the common element. How else could we explain the form 'blake' turning up in the old text to mean both black and white? Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 16 13:56:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:56:14 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <001201bedf78$07930de0$69078cd4@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: > Consider a co-ordinate sentence with suppressed second subject: > (a) In an accusative language, or a language with a passive construction, it > appears as: > A(agent) verb(passive) B(grammatical subject; logical object) and > verb > If the second verb is passive, this should mean that B suffers both actions > (and presumably A is the agent of both). Not necessarily: `Thomas a Becket was criticized by the King and was murdered.' > But if the second verb is active, > it means that B suffers the first action, then performs the second. For > example, Latin: > a Paula pulsatur Marcus et necatur (odd word order, but you get the point) > by Paula is-beaten Marcus(subject) and is-being-killed. > and > a Paula pulsatur Marcus et ridet > by Paula is-beaten Marcus(subject) and he laughs. But, assuming these are grammatical in Latin, surely `Marcus' is the subject of all the verbs, since it alone stands in the subject case. > (b) What happens in a truly ergative language? Don't know what is meant by `a truly ergative language', I'm afraid. > A(ergative) verb(of action) B(absolute) and verb > Am I right in thinking that if the second verb can take an ergative subject, > A is the agent of both (and B is presumably the object); whereas if the > verb cannot take an ergative subject (i.e. it is a description rather than > an action), then either B must be the subject (as Dixon claims for > Dyirbal?), or the sentence is meaningless or ungrammatical (Is this the > case in Basque, Larry?) Not all ergative languages have passives. Basque has one, but the passive does not permit the overt expression of an agent, so the examples above cannot be expressed literally in Basque. In general, when two verb phrases are coordinated in Basque, the subject of the first is also the subject of the second. This is so regardless of case-marking. If the two VPs differ in transitivity, then the overt NP subject takes the case-marking appropriate to the closer verb, but that doesn't interfere with its being the logical subject of the other verb. > I guess that different ergative languages will interpret this in > different ways, but is there any mileage in pursuing co-ordinate sentences > in order to reveal a difference between passive languages and ergative > languages? Coordination is, in generally, a potentially useful test for establishing shared syntactic properties, but it doesn't always give useful results. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Aug 13 02:52:49 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 22:52:49 EDT Subject: The UPenn IE Tree Message-ID: In a message dated 8/11/99 12:29:18 AM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote: << PIE / \ / Anatolian /\ / \ / Tocharian /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Celtic Italic /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Greek Armenian /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / / \ / / \ Indo- Balto- Germanic Iranian Slavic >> I simply must ask some questions about what this means. 1. I assume the branching off in this 'Stammbaum' carries the inference of being chronological in the sense of earlier or later separations. (Rather than for example the degree of linguistic difference between languages.) This may go without saying, but I'm just checking. So here at this first juncture: PIE / \ / Anatolian Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian? It would have to wouldn't it? Then where along that left side diagonal does PIE cease to exist? I've addressed this issue in exchanges with Miguel Carrasquer Vidal awhile ago and I don't know where they ended up. (I think I lost hold of it when I asked whether PIE could have been a lingua franca of sorts or a Latin.) This question of when PIE ends strikes me as an important question, for a number of reasons. First, reconstruction always seems to proceed as if *PIE were a static language - but coexistence could have meant centuries of potential change within PIE itself. Second, it means that languages coexisting with PIE could have been influenced by or influenced PIE after splitting off. And third it would mean that PIE could have been influenced by non-PIE influences between splittings. And logically either PIE either coexisted with some of these branch-offs. Or they all branched off at one time and PIE evaporated. OR PIE never diappeared but turned directly into one or a few of these languages, which would be direct rather than indirect descendents. I think those are all the choices. There are no others, but each one should result in completely different reconstructions of *PIE. 2. You wrote: <<... Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian are in a single sub-branch of the IE family together, but Balto-Slavic and Germanic are in this branch as well.>> If that's the case, then what did that whole subbranch split off from? At the point of the split of Greek Armenian, the left line is still there. Above are the Italo-Celtic, Tocharian, Anatolian branches. Presumably they are distinguishable from whatever it is that is out there that might be called Proto-BS-Germanic-Indo-Iranian. What does this mean for reconstruction of *PIE? What if it was Proto-GrAr-BSGer-IIr that was the branch off and Italo-Celtic was the true remainder of the PIE 'trunk'? (I don't think you can favor one or the other branch - why should one be seen as more lineal to PIE than the other?) In that case, Italo-Celtic would preserve PIE best and the other branch would be the split-off, innovating away from the core. And misleading us as to what PIE was like. 3. <> How does the team view the new reconstruction of the obstruent system (Hopper/Gamkrelidze/etc.) that suggests that Grimm's Law actually reflects archaism rather than innovation? With that view, would Balto-Slavic become a sister to Germanic that came under the influence of IIr, ditching that archaism like IIr? 4. Just hypothetically, if we were to assume that PIE was nothing but very early Greek, how would this diagram and the findings behind it change? Would the tree look all that different? Would it have Greek-Armenian at the bottom of the main stem? Or would it? Does this diagram seem to put IIr in that last position (or IIr-BS-Gr) - does that possibly reflect a sampling artifact favoring Sanskrit, Germanic and Lithuanian/Slavic - the favored sources in many *PIE reconstructions? Regards, Steve Long From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Aug 13 05:24:56 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 01:24:56 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: <7ba2e233.24e4e281@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I simply must ask some questions about what this means. > 1. I assume the branching off in this 'Stammbaum' carries the inference of > being chronological in the sense of earlier or later separations. (Rather > than for example the degree of linguistic difference between languages.) > This may go without saying, but I'm just checking. Yes, that is correct. Note that this rooted phylogeny includes no intrinsic claim about the _absolute_ dating of the branchings; it is only a set of claims about the relative dating. However, given that the latest possible date for the PIE unity is c. 4000 B.C.E. (pace Renfrew), and that Hittite and Sanskrit are both attested by the middle of the second millenium B.C.E., then all of this branching must have happened in the space of around two or three millenia. > So here at this first juncture: > PIE > / \ > / Anatolian > Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian? It would have to wouldn't > it? This is a question of terminology. In strict terms, we could call this something like proto-Tocharo-Italo-Celtico-Greco-Armenian-Balto-Slavic- Germanic-Indo-Iranian. When we're talking about this many undifferentiated branches, such terminology is obviously unwieldy. In more usable terms, we would talk about "the innovations shared by all the IE branches except Anatolian", etc. Ringe does, however, frequently use such terms as "Proto-Italo-Celtic" or "Proto-Greco-Armenian". He sometimes uses the term "core languages" to mean Greco-Armenian plus Indo-Balto-Germanic. > Then where along that left side diagonal does PIE cease to exist? > I've addressed this issue in exchanges with Miguel Carrasquer Vidal awhile > ago and I don't know where they ended up. (I think I lost hold of it when I > asked whether PIE could have been a lingua franca of sorts or a Latin.) > This question of when PIE ends strikes me as an important question, for a > number of reasons. First, reconstruction always seems to proceed as if *PIE > were a static language - but coexistence could have meant centuries of > potential change within PIE itself. Second, it means that languages > coexisting with PIE could have been influenced by or influenced PIE after > splitting off. And third it would mean that PIE could have been influenced > by non-PIE influences between splittings. Yes; I think Ringe would agree with everything you've just said (altho I think that he would reject particular explanations in terms of influence by unattested non-IE languages as unsupported by evidence; but otherwise, I think he'd agree). In particular, I've heard Ringe say things like, "such-and-such verbal system was just starting to get off the ground when Tocharian branched off", and discuss how that verbal system further developed along the left spine of the tree. I'd have to go back to my class notes to get the details; I'm in over my head at this point (Germanic phonology is my main area; IE is a background interest). > And logically either PIE either coexisted with some of these branch-offs. Or > they all branched off at one time and PIE evaporated. OR PIE never > diappeared but turned directly into one or a few of these languages, which > would be direct rather than indirect descendents. That's just a question of terminology. PIE ultimately gave rise to all of the attested PIE languages. We can quibble over what the labels should be for the intermediate nodes in the tree, but that's just a matter of nomenclature. What the branchings _mean_, however, are that there were innovations in each branch not shared with the other. > I think those are all the choices. There are no others, but each one should > result in completely different reconstructions of *PIE. No, it wouldn't; no. > 2. You wrote: <<... Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian are in a single > sub-branch of the IE family together, but Balto-Slavic and Germanic are in > this branch as well.>> > If that's the case, then what did that whole subbranch split off from? At > the point of the split of Greek Armenian, the left line is still there. > Above are the Italo-Celtic, Tocharian, Anatolian branches. Presumably they > are distinguishable from whatever it is that is out there that might be > called Proto-BS-Germanic-Indo-Iranian. > What does this mean for reconstruction of *PIE? What if it was > Proto-GrAr-BSGer-IIr that was the branch off and Italo-Celtic was the true > remainder of the PIE 'trunk'? (I don't think you can favor one or the other > branch - why should one be seen as more lineal to PIE than the other?) In > that case, Italo-Celtic would preserve PIE best and the other branch would be > the split-off, innovating away from the core. And misleading us as to what > PIE was like. Once again, this is merely a matter of terminology. There is no sense in which one branch is the "main" branch, unless it means that there is a greater number of later branchings within that branch. > 3. < Balto-Slavic, but that the pre-Germanic speakers came into the political > orbit of the prehistoric Italo-Celtic peoples and absorbed loan words from > them at some date prior to Grimm's Law.>> > How does the team view the new reconstruction of the obstruent system > (Hopper/Gamkrelidze/etc.) that suggests that Grimm's Law actually reflects > archaism rather than innovation? Ringe rejects that hypothesis in no uncertain terms. He discusses this in his monograph on the relative chronology of the Tocharian sound changes. Here are the arguments in favor of the glottalic hypothesis, and the counterarguments. Pro-glottalic: 1. The phonological inventory of PIE as it is traditionally reconstructed is not attested among the modern languages of the world, and therefore is not a possible phonological inventory; the reconstruction must be wrong. 2. Under the glottalic hypothesis, you can dispense with Grimm's Law; Germanic and Armenian simply preserve a more archaic state of affairs. Thus, the glottalic hypothesis is more economical. 3. One dialect of Armenian "preserves" the glottalic system unchanged. 4. Under the traditional reconstruction, the rarity of initial *b is somewhat odd. A constraint against *p' is pretty normal among attested phonological systems similar to the proposed glottalic PIE system. 5. The glottalic hypothesis gives a more natural account of the constraints on what consonants can co-occur in a root. (I'm not going to go into this since I'd have to type two whole pages of my class notes, but I'll just note that the argument has been made.) Ringe gives half a point for #5. For the others: 4. *b is statistically uncommon in PIE, but not entirely prohibited. An inviolable constraint against *b might be odd, but the constraint (if any) isn't inviolable. 3. The dialect of Armenian in question is spoken smack up against Georgian, which has a system like that of Armenian; it looks like a case of a Sprachbund among apparently unrelated languages, which has happened before elsewhere. 2. It's true that the glottalic hypothesis doesn't need Grimm's Law for Gmc and Armenian, but it _does_ need an anti-Grimm's Law for all the other branches of PIE. So the economy argument fails. 1. Most importantly, the typological argument is wrong. It's just plain wrong. There are attested languages in Indonesia with a consonant inventory similar to that of traditionally reconstructed PIE. It's perhaps the most spectacular case ever of the field being led astray by a typological argument. There is at least one more subtle argument which I'm not going to try to reproduce here; it is discussed in Ringe's monograph. > With that view, would Balto-Slavic become a sister to Germanic that came > under the influence of IIr, ditching that archaism like IIr? > 4. Just hypothetically, if we were to assume that PIE was nothing but very > early Greek, how would this diagram and the findings behind it change? Would > the tree look all that different? Would it have Greek-Armenian at the bottom > of the main stem? Or would it? The algorithm which the team used produces an unrooted phylogeny, i.e. it does not compute what point in the phylogeny is the root. If you picture this flat phylogeny as a web made of string lying on a table, you could pick the tree up at any node (including a leaf node) or at any point between two nodes, and assign that point in the tree as the root. I'd have to go back to the articles to give the exact arguments for rooting the tree as the team have it; I'd rather say nothing than give a misremembered argument. > Does this diagram seem to put IIr in that last position (or IIr-BS-Gr) - does > that possibly reflect a sampling artifact favoring Sanskrit, Germanic and > Lithuanian/Slavic - the favored sources in many *PIE reconstructions? It's simply a statement about characteristics which are shared by these languages and not the others. It doesn't mean that we like these languages more than the others. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 18 15:56:48 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 11:56:48 EDT Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool Message-ID: In a message dated 8/12/99 11:43:21 PM, jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au quoted: <> Perhaps what the discipline really needs here are better ways to reconstruct, rather than better ways to use reconstructions. And the answer may be - as it was in geology and paleobiology - to find ways to better correlate the data to time and place. After all, this is history. And if the evidence sometimes confuses us about what happened, it is first of a matter of history. - then language. And history at first glance can mislead us. Consider the process that geologic science went through to explain seashells found on mountains. Was it the water that rose or was it the mountains? Or was it that these were not seashells at all, but some other phenomenon that bore an accidental resemblance to seashells? All three possibilties were considered. And we should understand with some humility that the answer was then not obvious and neither was the proof. (Even Leonardo got it wrong about the seashells, but his reasoning was both contemporary and ingenious.) In ancient languages, it is not impossible that parent languages could be daughters and daughters could be parents, depending on where we place them in time. Is the first recorded language the oldest? Or is that assumption another case of history misleading us - leaving seashells on mountains? The tools needed first should get the history right, so that the apparent relationship between langauges are not merely artifacts. jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au wrote further: <> I'm wondering if there isn't a possible flaw here in using <>. Reconstructed words have already made assumptions about the relationship between the parent and the daughter languages. In fact they are nothing but a presumed relationship between the daughter languages. <> Depending on how much reconstruction of the parent you used, could this not be an artifact of the reconstructions? In *PIE, certain aspects are considered the innovations of a particular daughter language because they do not appear in the other daughter languages, and are therefore factored out of the reconstruction. If you only have two daughter languages - as you did above - how do you identify the innovation versus the original form in reconstruction? And if you decide in favor of one or the other in reconstruction, it will show up in any further use of that reconstruction. In effect, you may to some degree be measuring how the relationship between the daughters has been perceived in the reconstructions that you use, as much as anything else. I would think that the method you describe would be much more functional if it at least triangulated daughter languages. And avoided using prior reconstructions - proving itself on its own, so to speak. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 18 16:43:38 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 12:43:38 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/13/99 4:16:39 AM, Brian M. Scott wrote: << 'plunder of the swarthy Northmen' is also noted.>> And what madness is this? The Celts calling Northmen 'Galls?' A Northman (like Knut) who knew Latin could call them "Galls" right back! The standard explanation is that in Old Irish, etc., "Gall" meant foreigner because 'Gauls' were the only foreigners the Insulars knew. But it seems a bit untidy for Gaels using the names of their continental 'gaol' (relatives) to describe foreigners. Especially with the Romans around. But what if Gaelic borrowed the Germanic (e.g., Saxon) "walh" (presumably meaning foreigner)? There was apparently no initial /v/ or /w/ in Goidelic Celtic. But in medieval times, it was not uncommon for the /g/ in Gaelic to stand-in for the /w/ in English. (So that we have , e.g., "galc" - thicken cloth, fulling; from the English walk, waulk.) So we can in this manner see Germanics calling Celts (whom the Romans called Gallic), 'Walh', and Gaelic Celts picking it up, going back to the initial /g/ and calling Germanics 'Gall' - which is what the Romans called the Gallic Celts! And although there is no clear connection between Gaelic and Gallic, there is irony enough in this. Regards, Steve Long From sarant at village.uunet.lu Thu Aug 19 05:54:37 1999 From: sarant at village.uunet.lu (Nikos Sarantakos) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 07:54:37 +0200 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: <004c01bee611$08cc6cc0$eb8e6395@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Well, this is my first message to this list... I read this: >-----Original Message----- >From: X99Lynx at aol.com >Date: Wednesday, August 11, 1999 10:38 AM [ moderator snip ] >>>From a post sent to me: <>or was a place called Kastrorachi.>> I suppose this might be a case of -achi >>being attached to a place name. No, the place name Kastrorachi is a compound word consisting of kastro (castle) and 'rachi' (slope in the case of mountains). Rachi is a normal Greek word, no suffix. Nikos Sarantakos From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Aug 19 07:11:02 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 03:11:02 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/18/99 7:36:25 PM, colkitto at sprint.ca wrote: <<"Wallach" is clearly a sort of Latinisation of East Slavic volox- < Common Slavic *volx- (cf. Polish Wloch, Czech vlach, etc.).>> But does this clarify things? 'Wallachia' seems to first appear in German texts. So why in the world would German writers latinize an East Slavic version of a familiar German word that presumably has already been accepted into Western and Southern Slavic? (Doesn't Wallachia looks like it could also be just plain Latinized MHGerman?) If you buy Hall, duNay, et al., then the point of first Slavic contact with the eastern European "Vlachs" is among the Southern Slavs. And place names and early records (according to duNay) suggest that the original form was 'vlahi' in Bulgarian and Serbian. The alternate form 'vlasi' is understood to be a borrowing from Avar or Hungarian 'olasi' (originally borrowed from Slavic), and 'vlasi-" is how 'vlach' occurs in modern Bulgarian and Rumanian. "Vlachi' would seem to be the way the word traveled back north and west. A different issue is when and where the Germanic 'walh' meaning Celtic or Romance speakers or perhaps even Franks, etc., first appeared in Slavic. It would appear pretty unlikely that it would be in East Slavic. It would likely have been as early as the first written appearances of the word, in Anglo-Saxon. In the 700's, Frankish annals were already mentioning Western Slavs as 'ancient allies', and Southern Slavs had already been serving in the Byzantine army for 200 years. One would presume that the word - not referring to Vlachs but to Celts or Romance-speakers - was already established in Slavic by that time. And presumably it was from the form found in AS (walh-) or in OHG (circa 800AD - /uualha/). Under these circumstances, the difference between the early Western and Southern forms (assumedly "valaki" or "volochi" versus "vlahi") may be relevant. But the East Slavic form would seem historically to appear to be later, borrowed from the south or west and somewhat irrelevant to those origins. As far as speaking of a "Common Slavic" form for a word borrowed from Germanic that supposedly was inputed uniformly across 3/4's of a continent of Slavic speakers - from the Elbe to the Ukraine - that seems terribly unlikely, doesn't it? It also seems 'Walh' is unattested in Gothic in the 4th century. Its supposed point of origin is around the Alps and the preponderance of Germanic occurences are in the west. On the face of it, it would look like Western Slavic along the Elbe or in Bohemia would have borrowed the word first and with an earlier meaning and then did apply it to Franks as Romance speakers and perhaps inhabitants of Gaul. In Balkan Slavic, it apparently didn't apply to Latin-speaking Byzantines or Franks, but to a rural Romance speaking population. On first impression, this would suggest that it came there later - after clerical and administrative Latin had pretty much left the Balkans. And that later the specific form /vlah-/ or /vlas-/ bounced back to the west to become 'Vlachi'. The original meaning of 'walh' has of course disappeared from Czech and Polish (as it has for example from Swedish) with national names taking its place, so that the Balkan form referring to "Vlachs" is all that remains. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Thu Aug 19 10:06:23 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 12:06:23 +0200 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca Date: Thursday, August 19, 1999 8:35 AM >"Cent" and "sans" are homophonous in Quebec French (as indeed in all >overseas varieties of French), so that there is no need on the part of >Rick Mc Callister to assume us to have better auditory perception than the >rest of humanity, flattering though the idea might be to some of us. >Stephane Goyette >University of Ottawa [Ed Selleslagh] As the original culprit I'm responding to this. With all due respect, I can testify from my repeated experience that people in shops in Quebec (and I heard the same pronunciation in TV messages) clearly distinguish the nasalized e and a in words like 'cent' and 'sans', both when speaking and when listening. When I asked a shop attendant for a film of 100 ASA ('cent ASA', pronounced /sa~/), she thought I said 'sans ASA' and replied : 'c'est toujours avec'; when I pointed to the 100 on the package, she said: 'Oh, vous voulez dire /se~ng/!' [or something like Fr. 'saint' with a vaguely English -ng sounding ending]. I heard these pronunciations over and over again. I don't know if this is uneducated speech, or whether the Quebecois actually think they pronounce it the same way even if they actually pronounce it differently. To my European ears, Quebec French 'cent' and 'sans' (and similar words) sound differently, and apparently to the Quebecois themselves too, otherwise the type of misunderstandings I mentioned couldn't have happened. In France they wouldn't. As Larry Trask mentioned, this is original and authentic (but archaeic) French pronunciation that got lost by convergence elsewhere. Sometimes people make distinctions they don't perceive consciously, often as a consequence of school indoctrination. In Spanish Castilian, e.g., I often hear people insert very short vowels in consonant clusters, but they all deny doing so, because of the written image they learned at school. E.g. I recently heard 'equilipse' for 'eclipse'. All Spanish speakers (like the 'Afrae aures') think all vowels, and in all positions, have the same length, but in actual speech this manifestly not so; on the other hand, they find it very hard to hear vowel length differences in other languages (shit/sheet!). Ed From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 19 13:24:12 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 09:24:12 EDT Subject: Hypothesis formation vs. testing Message-ID: There is a great confusion in the advanced sciences, or even in those which like to believe themselves advanced, between Hypothesis Testing and Hypothesis Formation. When we cannot conclusively test certain hypotheses, it is still legitimate to try to accumulate evidence that the hypotheses are plausible and worth exploring further. In a message dated 8/18/99 11:32:41 PM, Larry Trask writes: >On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >> No Burden of Proof is appropriate on the content of the question >> whether all languages are ultimately related, >> simply because we cannot test that question currently. >I fully agree that the question `Are all languages related?' cannot be >answered at present. I further believe that we will never be able to >answer this question by purely linguistic means. >However, there are people who disagree, one of the most prominent being >Merritt Ruhlen. Ruhlen wishes to embrace the conclusion `All languages >are related.' As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). Greenberg's method of comparison serves to find the CLOSEST resemblances (merely that, CLOSEST). In the Americas, his method leads him to the conclusion (no surprise) that Eskimo-Aliut is not closely related to any other Amerindian languages, and that Athabaskan / Na-Dene (with outliers) is not closely related to any other Amerindian languages, (though conceivably not as distant from them as Eskimo-Aliut ?). His actual conclusions are about relative UNRELATEDNESS of language families (notice, not about absolute unrelatedness, which he does not claim his method has the power to evaluate). Beyond that, Greenberg's methods do NOT enable him to establish any similar degree of unrelatedness among the remaining languages of the Americas. I hope I have stated that carefully enough, to make obvious that it is a matter of degree, not absolutes, and that Greenberg's method actually demonstrates the points of SEPARATION rather than the points of UNION. Greenberg's method is potentially useful in that it is likely to reveal some deep language family relationships which were not previously suspected, AS LONG AS we do not introduce systematic biases which overpower whatever residual similarities still exist despite all of the changes which obscure those deep relationships. In other words, mere noise in the data, or dirty data, if the noise or dirt are random, should not be expected to selectively bias our judgements of closeness of resemblance... [and we can study how we make such judgements to try to strengthen this component of Greenberg's method, to strengthen their robustness against noisy data and our mental failings of judgement] Back to Trask: >Now, in order to go about this, I maintain, [Ruhlen] should start with the >negation of this statement as his null hypothesis, and then go on to >show that there is so much evidence against this null hypothesis that it >is untenable and must be rejected. But that's not what he does. The last paragraph above is in complete contradiction to what Larry Trask says he agrees with ("I fully agree"...). If one believes it is not possible to test a proposition, then it is NOT REASONABLE to ask anyone else to test it. One cannot have this both ways. >Instead, he *starts* with the hypothesis `All languages are related', >and then proceeds to assemble what he sees as evidence in support of >this last hypothesis. Amazingly enough [;-)]. he is able to find such >evidence. So far, this is legitimate in principle [but on practice, see below] IF the purpose is to establish the plausibility of a hypothesis (as distinct from testing it, NOTICE!). This is how almost all hypotheses are first established as hypotheses, simply by accumulating suggestive, anecdotal, case-study evidence, in contexts in which we do not even know how to estimate chance very well. >He therefore declares that, because he has found evidence in >support of his desired conclusion, it must be true. But this is >completely wrongheaded. Here I agree with Trask, to the extent Ruhlen says something like this. (I am much less familiar with Ruhlen than with Greenberg.) >What Ruhlen *must* do, if he wants to persuade anybody, is not to try to >demonstrate that his favored conclusion is supported by evidence, but >rather that its contradictory -- the appropriate null hypothesis -- is >so strongly disconfirmed that it cannot be maintained. The contradictory of the strong claim (all related) is that there are at least two languages which are not related to each other genetically. I would doubt that Ruhlen had evidence to exclude this possibility, or that if asked clearly, he would say so. After all (trivially) there are languages for which there are only one or two words attested, and one can go on from there with very little work to find other cases where I think Ruhlen would grant there is not even a loose probability based on the data itself to establish any relationship. [Trask's example All Swans are White not repeated here, but ...] >This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is enough to >render Ruhlen's work vacuous, Not so, since Ruhlen can be treated as involved in hypothesis FORMATION not hypothesis testing. >quite apart from the vast number of >egregious errors in the material he cites as evidence, Now THAT is quite another matter, and when present in very large quantity, not merely slight differences from the analysis an expert in a particular language would offer but more serious, complete misunderstandings vitiating completely any use of particular data... it does discredit the work as a whole, and can quite legitimately, even without absolute proof of its wrong-headedness, lead reasonable people to pay no more attention to it. But note carefully the caveat above. It is NOT sufficient merely to provide minor improvements of detail to the presentation, to discredit the work. An expert can ALWAYS provide minor improvements. That itself shows nothing at all. >and quite apart >from his failure to realize that lookalikes do not constitute evidence >of any kind. Disagree flatly, unless defined circularly so that "lookalikes" means more than it says, namely so that it means "lookalikes which are known to be unrelated as cognates". If it actually means "items which look alike in sound and meaning", then of course such comparisons DO constitute PRELIMINARY evidence. Any such preliminary evidence can be discounted by showing that the resemblances are secondary and late, or that they manifest a type of sound symbolism, or in other ways. It was lookalikes in grammar and vocabulary which led to the original hypothesis of the relatedness of the Indo-European languages. Some of these turned out to be true cognates, some turned out not to be cognates, merely chance lookalikes. But the IE hypothesis thus preliminarily established withstood the discounting of some of the lookalikes as non-cognates and the reaffirmation of others a true cognates (whatever the terminology used at the time). Once again, I wish to urge us back to the FACTS. And those FACTS include whatever we can establish about how each of our tools works, where it works well and where it fails, how deep historically each tool can push us with languages of certain types or with language changes of certain types, and whatever we can establish about new tools we have not yet systematically used (such as explicit paths of historical change in sound systems and in semantic spaces, and metrics of distances along such paths of change...). We get nowhere by repeating the discrediting of STRAW MAN claims, by holding hypothesis formation to standards of absolute hypothesis testing, by counting minor corrections and improvements to data as completely discrediting use of the data when they do not, etc. etc. and so forth. The field is at an impasse in these discussions, until we return the discussion to an empirical basis. Pure philosophy will not get us much progress. Sincere best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 19 13:43:15 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 09:43:15 EDT Subject: Premature final judgements Message-ID: In a message dated 8/18/99 11:50:18 PM, Larry Trask writes: >But the null hypothesis of >unrelatedness among the families assigned to Nostratic is at present >*not* disconfirmed, and that is why few linguists accept Nostratic. Agreed. I don't accept it either. (Nor do I reject it certainly!) >It doesn't matter that there is evidence in support of Nostratic: what >matters is that there is insufficient evidence to reject unrelatedness. Wrong here. It DOES matter. Very much so. It makes the question worth investigating with better data and better tools. The major dilemma in modern comparative linguistics is how to make both the data and the tools available in such a way that new hypotheses can be reasonably considered and looked at, NECESSARILY not by people who are the primary experts all at once in ALL of the language families being considered, since no one can be such an expert in so much information. The problem with the strict absolutists (which Larry Trask is behaving as in these discussions) is that they think we have to render FINAL JUDGEMENTS on whether a hypothesis is proven or not at every step along the way. They have little room for the long withholding or deferring of judgement. If we had to render final judgement on Nostratic right now, we would have to say, of course "unproven" (to some level of certainty which is of no concern to me here). BUT WE DON'T HAVE TO RENDER FINAL JUDGEMENT NOW. If we did always have to render final judgement immediately, then (circularly) new ideas could never be investigated, because the very fact that they were new would mean that at the beginning they could not already be provable. A propos of my comments on normal reality here: >> Actually, how they work most often is that the investigator has >> plausible evidence for a conclusion, and then AFTER THAT sets up a >> null hypothesis which the investigator already has some reason to >> think is false and can be defeated, and then proceeds to lay out the >> evidence to defeat it. Trask says: >Oh, sure. In practice, we are hardly ever able to work through an issue >in the optimal manner I have described. Real life is inevitably >messier. We make mistakes and eventually correct them; new evidence >becomes available; new tools become available; all sorts of things >happen along the way. But how we do the work is one thing, while how we >present our results in order to persuade our colleagues is another. The same leeway needs to be granted to the proposers of new hypotheses today as was granted to those in the past, namely, that they cannot prove their hypotheses when they start out with them. *** To solve these unprofitable discussions, we need more and more tools AND to give people easy access to those tools. Is there for each recognized language family a web site listing the most up-to-date resources, not excluding some of the older ones which may preserve useful information which modern investigators did not choose to include in compilations? Larry Trask has created some of those tools for Basque. His views of what are the best dictionaries and other sources should be part of such a web site for Basque. For Indo-European there is now a nearly complete dictionary of verbs with their attested stems in each Indo-European language family (Rix: Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben), something which is not available for most or any other language family. My purpose in mentioning these things is that it should be possible to REFER someone with a new hypothesis to the best existing literature, not merely what is in the head of some expert who may not be interested in the the new hypothesis or even opposed to it. Only if we can refer someone in that way is it reasonable to ask that they take account of existing scholarship. And when existing scholarship is not available in an easily accessible form, it is NOT reasonable to criticize anyone for not making use of it, as too often happens. What is involved here MAY be the democratization of all academic learning. Those of us who wish to maintain high quality and reliability MUST be concerned with how to make the high quality information sources MORE easily available than the low quality ones. And to do so without engaging in censorship of unpopular hypotheses. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 19 14:22:57 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 10:22:57 EDT Subject: Excluding data Message-ID: Larry Trask today defended his criteria for what to exclude from an initial list of potential proto-Basque vocabulary. Let me start by quoting his point that he is not excluding data: >Second, nothing is thrown away. All data remain available for later >consideration, after an initial list is obtained. Of course, but the "initial" list can bias things mightily. Trask quite misunderstands my point about excessive reliance on canonical forms (CVCV vs. VCVCV etc. etc.). The criteria for selecting an "initial" list can bias us in many ways. Excluding sound-symbolic words can artificially and circularly lead us to expect a much greater conformance to hypothetical canonical forms that is in fact the case in most languages. Or the reverse, assuming a simpler set of canonical forms can promote the exclusion of sound-symbolic words. Here is Trask's discussion of this, which I hope is evidently circular in form, whether or not his /tipi/ ~ /tiki/ is in fact descended from Proto-Basque. That is, because this sound-expressive word does not conform to the canonical form hypothesized for much of the less concrete Basque vocabulary, therefore we have an extra argument in favor of excluding it (though he does include this one). But what if there are several canonical forms, as in most real-world languages, some forms occurring more often in sound-expressive vocabulary? >Anyway, words like `teeny' are not so much imitative as expressive or >sound-symbolic. Basque has a huge number of such words, but I am >deliberately choosing not to exclude them expressly from the initial >list. Why? First, because the hopeful long-rangers seeking improbable >relatives for Basque have frequently cited such words as comparanda and >have complained bitterly that I am being circular when I reject these >words as suitable comparanda because of their expressive formation. >Therefore, *demonstrating* that these words do not look like native and >ancient Basque words is precisely one of the goals I hope to achieve. [Demonstrating that sound-symbolic words have a different canonical form has little value in arguing that they were not proto-Basque, precisely because such differences of canonical form do occur in many real languages, so why not also in (proto-)Basque?] >Second, because I am confident that these words will be ruled out by the >criteria I have already listed -- notably by the requirement that a word >should be found throughout the language. With only a few exceptions, >expressive and sound-symbolic formations in Basque are severely >restricted in distribution, being confined in each case to a small area. [Expressive and sound-symbolic words are also very much under-recorded for many languages and language families. Many of them are not known to learned scholars who are not native users of the languages, because they are used in language registers which are never the domain of activity of those scholars. So this criterion is PARTLY defective or circular. There is a partly definitional relation between sound-symbolic and narrowness of attestation in recordings.] >One of the few exceptions is ~ 'small', which satisfies >all six of my criteria and will have to go into the initial list. But, >in that list, it will stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, because >of its utterly anomalous phonological form: > (a) it has an initial voiceless plosive; > (b) it has an initial coronal plosive; > (c) it has the form CVCV with plosives in both C positions > and a voiceless plosive in the second C position; > (d) it exhibits a unique regional variation in form. >In my view, this will be more than enough to remove the word from the >second version of the list, or at least to earn it a flag as an >anomalous item. Even though it exists everywhere, and even though it is >recorded exceptionally early (about 1400), it looks as much like a >native and ancient Basque lexical item as `pizza' looks like a native >and ancient English word. [pizza is not sound-symbolic, and uses odd (for English) spelling, but never mind...] To me, this is a clear indication not of something wrong with including the word /tipi/ ~ /tiki/ as potentially proto-Basque, but something inconsistent in the total set of criteria, UNDER THE CONDITIONS that we are trying to force a consistent canonical form onto our hypothesized "initial list" of potential proto-Basque vocabulary. That goal may be wrong-headed. The criteria, and how they are used, are themselves JUST A SET OF TOOLS, and those tools, and how they are in fact used, need themselves to be evaluated to see whether they lead to errors. The exclusion of a sound-symbolic word on the grounds that it has a different canonical form from other vocabulary is a clear error, given the factual knowledge that such sound-symbolic forms do often (world-wide) have different limitations on their phonological forms. More generally, Trask introduces his message today with the following response to my comment: >> While early attestation is obviously a valuable cutoff (3), >> if the aim is to achieve the absolutely purest vocabulary set possible, >> it may run the error of excluding much authentic native Basque >> vocabulary which simply happened not to be recorded "early". >> Can we rather have several "degrees of earliness", or distinctions >> of WHICH sources of attestation? Trask does some of the latter, >> suggesting to exclude some sources which he believes are >> particularly unreliable. [Trask:] >Of course, any cutoff criterion is likely to exclude a few genuinely >native and ancient Basque words, but it will certainly also exclude a >much larger number of words which are not native and ancient. Agreed, usually so. But I must flatly disagree with the following quote. A primary object can legitimately be to attempt to distinguish proto-Basque words from words now used in Basque which do not descend from proto-Basque. But that is not at all the same as this: >And the primary object is >to exclude the words which should be excluded, not to >include every single word which should be included. It is not one or the other, it is both. Any tool for achieving this can make either sort of error, errors of inclusion or errors of exclusion. It is not simple. The mistake here, in my view, is very much akin to the mistake of rushing to judgement discussed in another message today, when we are dealing with more complex situations of provisional hypotheses. The various criteria for what is a proto-Basque word interact in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. There is no point in hiding these difficulties to render a "final" decision, even if it is claimed to be only an "initial" list. Rather, simply add to our knowledge of the data set, so anyone can at any time reconsider the interedependence of any of our criteria (tools). On distribution: >> Even asking that a word be found in all or many dialects is not a simple >> criterion: >> There are other subsidiary criteria which can reinforce or undermine >> the probabilities that a word was ancient Basque, which can be >> combined with information about WHICH dialects it is attested in, >> not just how many of them or which branches of the dialect family tree. >Agreed, but. There exist words which are shared between the eastern and >western dialects of Basque but which are unattested in the central >dialects. By the peripherality criterion, these words are good >candidates for ancient status: they look like words which were once >universal in the language but which have been lost from central >dialects. But I still prefer to exclude such words from our initial >list. Once that initial list is set up, then these east-west words are >the next group to look at, to see if they too have the phonological >shapes of native and ancient words. But I don't think they ought to be >included at the first stage. There are hundreds of words found in all >dialects: let's look at those first. I think Trask's procedure here is rather unlike that of most comparativists, in that they usually LABEL which languages or dialects a form occurs in, and if it occurs in certain combinations of descendants, it is treated as probably descended from the proto-language. [For Basque, there might be a special case, if one hypothesized borrowings from RELATED (Romance) languages separately into different peripheral Basque dialects.] >> But there is every reason to USE every one of the criteria >> (those which Larry Trask expressed as cutoffs), >> to use them as LABELS on the vocabulary items, >> which in a computer database can be taken into consideration >> whenever any question is asked of the database. >Sure, but that's a different exercise. Not a different exercise at all, the same one, simply not throwing away data or making it hard to access or reconsider. The ability to have all of the data available in a database, tagged and labeled according to all of the criteria Trask mentions, differs from Trask's procedure primarily in not having to render final judgements prematurely, because we can always go back and re-weight the criteria, look at them again from a different perspective. Without such databases, decisions are made once and cannot be easily reconsidered later with the benefit of full information. I think Trask misunderstood my reference to deviations from typologically common canonical form. In fact, it is precisely the extra frequency of Vowel-initial words which Trask notes for pre-Basque vocabulary which is significant (despite the existence of some other languages which have this also), whereas a predominance of CVCV- forms probably would not be, since it is world-wide more common. So, once again, let's keep the data available, analyze it with all the care Trask obviously can muster, but not hide the structure of the analysis, nor make it needlessly difficult to go back and reconsider particular decisions or whole groups of decisions at a later time. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 19 16:17:22 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 12:17:22 EDT Subject: 20-counting in Danish and beyond Message-ID: In Danish to og halv-fems (I do not speak Danish, my spelling will be wrong and Swedish-influenced, but approximately that) means 92. Literally, two and half-FIVES (FIVES would be 5x20 = 100 half-FIVES is half way from 4x20 to 5x20, or in other words 4+1/2 x 20 or 90. Those interested in sheep-scoring numbers might consult the paper "Hocus Pocus Nursery Rhymes" by Mary Ann Campbell and Lloyd Anderson, in Papers from the (Nth) Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1976, where some versions of "Hickory Dickory Dock" are brought together for comparison, and similar matters. Or the following bibliography: Ellis, A. J. 1877. The Anglo-cymric Score. Transactions of the Philological Society pp.316-372 Bolton, Henry Carrington. 1888. The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children. Their antiquity, origin, and wide distribution. London. 123pp. Eckenstein, Lina. 1906. Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes. London. Opie, Iona and Peter. 1951. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Collins, Vere H. 1959. A Book of English Proverbs. London, Longman's Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 19 16:54:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 11:54:01 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >But even if Out of Africa is correct you've never established the point where >it corresponds to a language or languages. I wouldn't presume to be able to do so. I'm just saying that the universal ability for language suggests that language dates back before a world wide dispersal and that genetic data suggests that all modern humans who dispersed from Africa come from the same mitochondrial pool. There is some argument on the precise dating of that pool but it is a determined fraction of the date of an ancestor common to all living human. So that separation date is an >arbitrary correlation as far as what left Africa - e.g., the evacuation of >New Guinea and 500 languages leave. I don't understand your point here [snip] >Neanderthals and moderns coexisted. No O of A needed. And why is >monogenesis needed to explain language capacity 300,000 years ago or 35,000 >years ago? None of these scenarios demand language monogenesis. If Neanderthals had language, then surely the first modern humans would have had it, thus all existing languages would have the same origin [snip] >Which means you are saying that modern language could have only started >40,000 years ago. No, you are ><<...I suspect that language was the key to modern human >expansion from Africa throughout the rest of the world.>> >I like that, but it's hard to buy. What you actually need is a raft or about >70,000 years to find a Bering Strait landbridge to the new world. The latter >has archaelogical support. Not realy, there are a handful of archaeologists who claim this but the excavations of most postulated pre-Clovis sites is said to be very flawed although are some sites less than 30,000 BP that are gaining acceptance. From what I remember, genetic evidence [and physical studies such as teeth] suggests that the first Native Americans arrived c. 15-30 KBP. There are suggestions that another group may have arrived later, corresponding to the Clovis culture. The first Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene speakers arrived much later. [snip] >Speech (hypoglossal canal-wise) may be a lot older than Out of Africa. >Language (as modern speech capacity or language system) could be a lot >younger. And Out of Africa could be just flat out dead wrong. So where does >that leave us? All modern humans have the same capability for language, which suggests that language developed before humans dispersed from Africa. The question of mono- vs. polygenesis in Africa can be argued various ways: Did language arise once among a small population and then expand to other modern humans? Did language arise once among a small population which then used its advantage to supplant all other humans? Did it arise separately among various groups in a small area which coalesced to form one ur-language? Did it arise separately among various groups among which only one survived or passed on its language? Are existing African languages families the only living descendants of various original language groups? And there's the question of whether to define as mono- or polygenesis a case of all existing languages descending from a common ancestor with some extinct languages from different origins Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 19 17:00:51 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 12:00:51 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I am sure that your auditory perception of French is far superior than mine :> >"Cent" and "sans" are homophonous in Quebec French (as indeed in all >overseas varieties of French), so that there is no need on the part of >Rick Mc Callister to assume us to have better auditory perception than the >rest of humanity, flattering though the idea might be to some of us. >Stephane Goyette >University of Ottawa Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 19 17:09:44 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 12:09:44 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: <000201bee68c$ad28e160$47038cd4@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: I seem to remember seeing the date of 60,000 BP. Regarding a dispersal date, I think the best way to look at it is as "a fixed percentage of Eve's date". So if "Eve" is set at 150KBP and dipersal at 80KBP, the fraction is roughly half. An adjustment of "Eve's" date to 200KBP suggests a dispersal shortly before 100KBP, and so on. [snip] >Incidentally, where do Australian Aborigines fit into this? Wasn't there >some evidence (or suggestion) in the news about 18 months ago, that the >Aborigines were very much older than had been previously thought? How do >the time scales fit together? >Pete Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From BMScott at stratos.net Thu Aug 19 22:55:25 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 18:55:25 -0400 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 8/13/99 4:16:39 AM, BMScott at stratos.net wrote: > < () 'a black man, negro, > i.e., an Ethiopian';... The adjective () is 'dark blue, > livid', with uses ranging into 'black'.>> > Well of course -madr, -madhr are very recognizable as not referring to men or > madness but to a red/brown dye, On the contrary, () 'man' is the nom. sing. (gen. sing. , nom. pl. ); /nn/ regularly became /D/ (edh) before /r/. It has nothing to do with ON () 'madder', which is found mostly in place-names (e.g., () 'Madder-dale'). [...] > How else could we explain the form 'blake' turning > up in the old text to mean both black and white? ME represents both OE 'black, dark-colored, dark' and OE 'pale, white (as with foam), bleak; bright, shining'. Brian M. Scott From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Thu Aug 19 23:49:22 1999 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 16:49:22 -0700 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: >Well of course -madr, -madhr are very recognizable as not referring to men or >madness but to a red/brown dye, for a long time quite popular among the >Scandinavians - (from Rubia tinctorium or Gallium boreale) and of course >bla'- might as well be black or white as blue. One would otherwise think >perhaps of "Blackmoor." How do you figure? Madr figures in Norse compounds as "man," for example "spa/madr," seer, prophet? And bla as "blue," as in Blakulla. Max Dashu From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Aug 20 03:30:25 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 06:30:25 +0300 Subject: French and Gaulish numbers (was: indoeuropean/hand) In-Reply-To: <37B42497.84BC1369@aye.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Steven A. Gustafson wrote: > Of course, six score and sixteen years ago, Abraham Lincoln suggested > that this kind of count was not wholly dead in English, at least as a > rhetorical flourish. It still isn't dead. I do a lot of English language checking for non-native speakers and note that Finnish idiom uses 'tens' as a semi-indefinite quantifier and when writing English they will say things like "there are tens of examples". I have to explain that English idiom uses 'dozens' or 'scores' for these semi-indefinite quantifiers: "there are dozens of examples", "there are scores of examples". Both of these are idiomatic. "Tens of examples" isn't. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Aug 20 04:08:13 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 00:08:13 EDT Subject: The UPenn IE Tree Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Does this mean that PIE co-exsts with Anatolian? -- it's supposed to mean that Anatolian branched off before PIE started its general breakup. In the sense that proto-Anatolian became quite different from PIE while PIE's internal divisions were still relatively slight. This can't be definitely proven but seems highly likely. "PIE" means "the last stage of the language when all the IE dialects were still mutually intelligible". The language, like all languages, was always undergoing change; it ceased to exist when its component dialects stopped sharing enough innovations, just as Latin ceased to exist as a living language sometime between 400 CE and 800 CE or so as its widespread dialects slowly ceased to be mutually comprehensible. (By way of contrast, Greek remained one language, changing over time -- not the same language as its ancestor, though. Rather as if Italian were the only descendant of Latin.) "PIE" means something rather like "late proto-Romance". The big difference is, of course, that Latin continued to be known in its written form(s) as a learned secondary language while PIE vanished into the black hole of entropy and can only be tentatively reconstructed via the comparative method. >Then where along that left side diagonal does PIE cease to exist? -- when there's no longer only one mutually intelligible IE language plus Anatolian, probably. Since that was way back in the prehistoric period, with no written records, we can only say that it was sometime before about 2000 BCE and after about 4000 BCE, by triangulation. Of course, one could argue that the Balto-Slavic protospeech of 2000 BCE would probably have been more or less comprehensible to a PIE speaker of 3000 BCE, just to complicate things. >a sampling artifact favoring Sanskrit, Germanic and Lithuanian/Slavic - the favored sources in many *PIE reconstructions? -- Sanskrit is 'favored' because it was recorded in a fixed form very early, mid-2nd-millenium BCE or so. Balto-Slavic, and particularly Baltic, are 'favored' because they're very archaic. From iglesias at axia.it Fri Aug 20 15:44:48 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 08:44:48 PDT Subject: Books on Indo-European Message-ID: Any suggestions on the latest books (or articles) in any language dealing coprehensively with: a) the Indo-European Urheimat question and taking into account all the latest theories; b) pre Indo-European languages in Europe (in particular taking into account - pro et contra - Leo Vennemann's theories - Vasconic, Atlantic substate of insular Celtic, etc.) Thanks and regards Frank Rossi iglesias at axia.it From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Aug 20 08:57:00 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 09:57:00 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: If the question relates to IE the answer must too. Incidentally, where do Australian Aborigines fit into this? Wasn't there some evidence (or suggestion) in the news about 18 months ago, that the Aborigines were very much older than had been previously thought? How do the time scales fit together? There was evidence of great age, but it was later contradicted by more accurate tests. The Jinmium cave paintings were dated to something like 70 000 yr BP based on one test, thermoluminescence, which however samples aggregates so could be fooled by ochre grains falling down into earlier natural deposits. But optical stimulated luminescence (and I might have these two the wrong way round -- not my field) can test single grains, and that brought the ochre grains forward to much more recent (ten or twenty thousand). This was reported in _Nature_, oh, three months ago? The earliest widely-accepted evidence for humans in Australia sets them at about 50 000 yr. There is also a deposit of ash about 120 000 yr ago that is unusual in nature and looks like evidence of deliberate burning. If a long date is ever established, perhaps the first inhabitants didn't have modern language, though they did have art. Australian languages are oddly bunched, with many small families in Arnhem Land and Kimberley (just where you'd land from Asia) and one huge, close family occupying all the rest, which therefore can't represent the ancient population. Aborigines are a genetic mix: there was a second wave around 10 000 BP. (Old memory of mine: I don't know what mtDNA says about this mix.) It's just possible that these brought speech along with the dingo. Nicholas Widdows From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 20 13:58:42 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 09:58:42 EDT Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa Message-ID: Just one point on the discussions. It is EVEN possible (though not the simplest explanation from some points of view, Nature need not be simple) that Neanderthals had several languages, from independent sources, and these languages were separately inherited by different groups of modern humans. So inheritance from Neanderthals does NOT necessarily imply monogenesis? Just checking the logic here. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Aug 20 16:18:33 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 16:18:33 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 8/18/99 7:36:25 PM, colkitto at sprint.ca wrote: ><<"Wallach" is clearly a sort of Latinisation of East Slavic volox- >< Common Slavic *volx- (cf. Polish Wloch, Czech vlach, etc.).>> >But does this clarify things? >'Wallachia' seems to first appear in German texts. So why in the world would >German writers latinize an East Slavic version of a familiar German word that >presumably has already been accepted into Western and Southern Slavic? >(Doesn't Wallachia looks like it could also be just plain Latinized MHGerman?) It's Latinized from South Slavic vlax(U). >If you buy Hall, duNay, et al., then the point of first Slavic contact with >the eastern European "Vlachs" is among the Southern Slavs. And place names >and early records (according to duNay) suggest that the original form was >'vlahi' in Bulgarian and Serbian. The alternate form 'vlasi' is understood >to be a borrowing from Avar or Hungarian 'olasi' (originally borrowed from >Slavic), and 'vlasi-" is how 'vlach' occurs in modern Bulgarian and Rumanian. vlasi is simply the South Slavic plural of vlax, showing Slavic 2nd palatalization x > s(') > s [S&E Slavic]. > "Vlachi' would seem to be the way the word traveled back north and west. Based on the sg. form vlax. >A different issue is when and where the Germanic 'walh' meaning Celtic or >Romance speakers or perhaps even Franks, etc., first appeared in Slavic. It >would appear pretty unlikely that it would be in East Slavic. It would >likely have been as early as the first written appearances of the word, in >Anglo-Saxon. In the 700's, Frankish annals were already mentioning Western >Slavs as 'ancient allies', and Southern Slavs had already been serving in the >Byzantine army for 200 years. One would presume that the word - not >referring to Vlachs but to Celts or Romance-speakers - was already >established in Slavic by that time. And presumably it was from the form >found in AS (walh-) or in OHG (circa 800AD - /uualha/). Indeed. The word is Common Slavic (*wolxU), and undergoes the usual changes in order to obtain an open syllable (metathesis to in Polish/Kashubian, metathesis + lengthening to > in Czech/Slovak/South Slavic and polnoglasie to in East Slavic). >As far as speaking of a "Common Slavic" form for a word borrowed from >Germanic that supposedly was inputed uniformly across 3/4's of a continent of >Slavic speakers - from the Elbe to the Ukraine - that seems terribly >unlikely, doesn't it? Where was Common Slavic spoken? >It also seems 'Walh' is unattested in Gothic in the 4th century. There's not much call for the word in a Bible translation. >On the face of it, it would look like Western Slavic along the Elbe or in >Bohemia would have borrowed the word first and with an earlier meaning and >then did apply it to Franks as Romance speakers and perhaps inhabitants of >Gaul. > >In Balkan Slavic, it apparently didn't apply to Latin-speaking Byzantines Greek-speaking. >or >Franks, but to a rural Romance speaking population. On first impression, >this would suggest that it came there later - after clerical and >administrative Latin had pretty much left the Balkans. And that later the >specific form /vlah-/ or /vlas-/ bounced back to the west to become 'Vlachi'. >The original meaning of 'walh' has of course disappeared from Czech and >Polish (as it has for example from Swedish) with national names taking its >place, so that the Balkan form referring to "Vlachs" is all that remains. Not quite. Apart from its continued use in Germanic (Welsh (=from Wales), Waals (=from Wallonia)), it's also still used in Polish for "Italian" (wl/och, pl. wl/osi) and "Italy" (Wl/ochy, pl.tant.). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 20 16:32:32 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:32:32 EDT Subject: Root aorists vs. marked presents Message-ID: Concerning the long-continuing discussion of "root aorist" in Latin, etc., I would like to refer people to a simply wonderful article by Gene Gragg in a volume of the Chicago Linguistics society many years ago, about Ethiopic verb stems, where he shows a very clear case that the choice of stems depends on the semantics of the verbs concerned, which stem will be primary unmarked, which marked as derived. In the discussion of root aorists and marked presents, etc. did anyone compile this kind of semantic information? I wonder whether I missed it in the discussion? Did anyone compile the examples being offered for Primary root-aorists with marked present stems vs. Primary present stems with marked sigmatic (etc?) aorists to see whether the semantics of the verbs concerned reinforces the validity of the two distinct sets of hypothesized pairings. Use of this semantics would even permit the inclusion in the data set of verbs which are only attested in later languages in one stem, not in both stems in the same language. This could greatly strengthen our ability to see whether the hypothesized form categories really constituted paired oppositions in early IE or pre-IE. I think that was the point of the discussions? There can of course also be semantic domains of verbs in which only one of the stems would be common, we need not have only two sets of verbs. The question is rather whether we can identify coherent semantic domains which predict which stem forms were used for verbs in those domains. We need to go beyond a purely formal approach. Perhaps much of this has already been done? Is it done in Rix: Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben? (By the way, I would like to get a copy of that book in any event, can anyone tell me an easy way? I think I found it once somewhere on the web, don't remember where now, cannot seem to find it again, could not find it recently at Amazon.com.) Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 20 16:32:30 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:32:30 EDT Subject: Perfective-Imperfective Message-ID: Momentary-Durative is a misleading set of terms, because BOTH are highly marked and specialized. Perfective-Imperfective in their standard uses probably work much better for the needs of this discussion. "Momentary" implies a suddenness or quickness which is not implied by Perfective. It is merely ONE USE of a typical perfective. "Durative" implies a lasting over a considerable time, which is not necessary to all imperfectives. It is merely ONE USE of a typical imperfective. The primary distinction is rather more usefully one of "treated as an indivisible unit" vs. "treated as having extent" (hence imperfective as context within which a unit-event perfective occurs or as marked ongoing, either way). Once we change these terms, then the communication from Peter Gray today looks quite different. Peter Gray writes: >let's remember that in >Classical Greek, although there are several uses for the present and aorist >stems, two contrasts stand out as very common, if not normative, and neither >really has the aorist as "+momentary": [comment: these ARE however typical uses of a perfective] Peter Gray writes: >(i) past tense: imperfect vs aorist with augment. Here the distinction >(IMHO) is not duration / momentary but rather background event / main event. >The imperfect tells us that something was going on before, during and/or >after the main event. If you like, the distinction is between description >and narrative. The same usage is found strongly in Latin. [comment: this is an archetypal pair of uses of perfectives (for the main event line) vs. imperfectives (for background) in narrative structures world-wide.] Peter Gray writes: >(ii) non-indicative (leaving aside the aorist participle, which retains a >past flavour): here the aorist is neutral, so the use of the present stem >puts a marked stress on continuity. So the distinction is not between two >members, both of them marked, but between continuous and neutral. [comment: this is also a fairly typical pair of uses of perfective vs. imperfective, combined with what is often a relic category, the non-indicative often preserving forms which at an earlier historical stage were the primary perfectives. Examples include the "precative" of later Akkadian, Babylonian, etc., and the "jussive" of classical Arabic, both derived from the old preterite (primarily perfective). Please see the maps of the paths of these changes in Lloyd Anderson: "The Perfect as a Universal and as a Language-Specific Category", pp.229-264 in Paul J. Hopper, ed.: Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics & Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1982. Other articles in that same volume address the event line / background distinction.] Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Aug 20 17:53:35 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:53:35 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >The original meaning of 'walh' has of course disappeared from Czech and >Polish (as it has for example from Swedish) with national names taking its >place, so that the Balkan form referring to "Vlachs" is all that remains. [snip] There's Polish wLochy "Italian", also [I've been told] "hairy" which definitely looks related to the term Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Aug 20 18:01:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 13:01:30 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <006d01beea2f$f8bc3900$7303703e@edsel> Message-ID: You occasionally hear that in Latin America. My wife refers to that phenomenon as "n~on~eo, n~on~ear" [from n~o "oink", I suppose] and associates it with airheads [snip] > In Spanish Castilian, e.g., I often hear >people insert very short vowels in consonant clusters, but they all deny doing >so, because of the written image they learned at school. E.g. I recently heard >'equilipse' for 'eclipse'. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Aug 20 18:40:14 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 14:40:14 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/19/99 11:43:44 PM, BMScott at stratos.net wrote: < () 'man' is the nom. sing. (gen. sing. , nom. pl. ); /nn/ regularly became /D/ (edh) before /r/. It has nothing to do with ON () 'madder', which is found mostly in place-names (e.g., () 'Madder-dale').>> I didn't say that 'madhr' had anything to do with 'madhra'. In fact I think I said it didn't. I was referrring to madhr- (I have ON as - sometimes in OE) as it might have been used in 'bla'madr". Here's where this came from, maybe a year ago on the ONN list: < in Arrow-Odds Tale does not mean "Bark-man" at all. in this case this comes from the cloth dye that in English they call madder.... we see the word also in the lists of cargo shipsIn the story Oddr is probably pretending to be a bark boiler who lives in the forest and makes dyes. Him putting on the bark was added. In latter redactions it was to explain why he was a bark-man because the copier only thought it should mean "Bark-man"...>> This is from a thread that included a discussion of the Icelandic <> as meaning the different colors I mentioned and also put on this list back then. (It was I think originally about barkskin meaning old age in the Eddas. :) ) And I was sure it included something on 'bla'madr' or 'bloamadr' but for the life of me I can't find it on the disks. Well, I can't be sure that any of this is right or wrong anyway. The point was that in the quote above could also mean or . It strikes me that if clothes can be dyed or colored so can bodies - in the case of woad-covered blue warriors who act madly, we have some serious historical precedent in the region. But I SURE DO hope none of this detracts from the main point I was making - which was that the old color terminology was 'semantically' unstable. You wrote: < represents both OE 'black, dark-colored, dark' and OE 'pale, white (as with foam), bleak; bright, shining'.>> Yes. Without accompanying derivations - as in real life - one word for what we might think of as two diametrically opposed 'colors.' And the OED says that even in OE is also found in the form and that only context tells them apart. Whole generations for whom things could not be a matter of 'black' or 'white!' Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Aug 20 18:48:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 13:48:47 -0500 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >In a message dated 8/13/99 4:16:39 AM, Brian M. Scott wrote: ><< 'plunder of the swarthy Northmen' is >also noted.>> >And what madness is this? The Celts calling Northmen 'Galls?' >A Northman (like Knut) who knew Latin could call them "Galls" right back! >The standard explanation is that in Old Irish, etc., "Gall" meant foreigner >because 'Gauls' were the only foreigners the Insulars knew. [snip] Or because the Gauls who settled in Leinster and the Vikings were both perceived as coastal raiders and pirates. I got the perception that Gall meant something more like "barbarian" or "foreign marauder Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Aug 20 20:03:29 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 16:03:29 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: In a message dated 8/19/99 11:58:57 PM, maxdashu at LanMinds.Com wrote: <> Okay, let me take it back and try again. In 'bla'madr', we may not only see the expected "madhr" > man, or a possible connection to 'madness' mentioned as a gloss - but also we may see - a form of a word that has referred to dyes and cloths and color in general for at least 1000 years. There is of course no obvious connection with "madhr" or "madness". But it may be appropriate in this instance to take a sideward glance at madhr(a), because of 'bla'madr's connection with color. This might be especially true because "madhra" itself refers to a brown-red dye that can approximate darker skin colors, and was sometimes used in neighboring languages to refer to dying or dyed objects in general. So that "-madr" here might be an affix or compound referring to being colored or dyed or covered with a color. This is no guarantee of course that "bla'madhr" does not in fact refer to that everyday, familiar, common household object and more likely meaning> a blue man. Regards, Steve Long From BMScott at stratos.net Sat Aug 21 02:00:54 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 22:00:54 -0400 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > But what if Gaelic borrowed the Germanic (e.g., Saxon) > "walh" (presumably meaning foreigner)? There was apparently > no initial /v/ or /w/ in Goidelic Celtic. But in medieval > times, it was not uncommon for the /g/ in Gaelic to stand-in > for the /w/ in English. Thurneysen says that PIE */w-/ became /B-/ (bilabial voiced fricative) and then /f-/ and that early loans from Latin show the same development, e.g., () from 'wine', from 'uesper'. Later there's () 'Valerianus' c.800. I'd expect an early borrowing to show , a later one, . Brian M. Scott From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Aug 21 05:35:46 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 08:35:46 +0300 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: <6ce63738.24ec31c0@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 18 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au wrote further: ><> >I'm wondering if there isn't a possible flaw here in using <parent form (reconstructed words...)>>. >Reconstructed words have already made assumptions about the >relationship between the parent and the daughter languages. In >fact they are nothing but a presumed relationship between the >daughter languages. Steve is quite correct here. A reconstruction is just that. In the best case it is only the statistically most probable original relationship between the forms found in the daughter languages. ><pairs then the shorter cost represents the daughter that is >closer to the parent. In the case of modern Cantonese and Beijing >we got 35,243.58 bits and 36790.93 bits respectively, indicating >Cantonese is closer to the common parent, Middle Chinese, than >Beijing. >> >Depending on how much reconstruction of the parent you used, >could this not be an artifact of the reconstructions? In *PIE, >certain aspects are considered the innovations of a particular >daughter language because they do not appear in the other >daughter languages, and are therefore factored out of the >reconstruction. If you only have two daughter languages - as you >did above - how do you identify the innovation versus the >original form in reconstruction? And if you decide in favor of >one or the other in reconstruction, it will show up in any >further use of that reconstruction. It is not so much a question of innovation versus preservation. It is a matter of how much innovation there is in each daughter language. When you have the parent preserved, this can be measured. If there is no innovation the daughter form and the parent form should be identical (thus answering the question of which is closer). But when you have to reconstruct the parent, all of this information (degree of suspected innovation) will go into the reconstruction. If you only have to reconstruct a few words and there is a high statistical probability of the reconstruction being correct based on information in the three languages other than the two forms of the word in the daughters then it will not have much effect on the measurement. But if you have to reconstruct many words and the reconstruction is based only on the forms found in the daughter languages then you are building the distance between them into the reconstruction and when you analyze it you will just get these distances back. >In effect, you may to some degree be measuring how the >relationship between the daughters has been perceived in the >reconstructions that you use, as much as anything else. Again correct. So long as you have three independent data points (the parent and two daughters) you can objectively determine the distance between any two of them. But when one of the data points is determined solely by the position of the other two, you cannot determine anything but the distance between those two (you cannot determine a triangle given only the length of one side). The third point is not a point but a locus (of all points from which it is possible to reach the other two points). Where this point is placed on the locus already reflects the perceived distance of the reconstructed parent form from its daughters. Playing it back from the other direction just gives you back what was put into it. It is circular. >I would think that the method you describe would be much more >functional if it at least triangulated daughter languages. And >avoided using prior reconstructions - proving itself on its own, >so to speak. If this means what I think it does (determining the distance between three daughter languages rather than two daughters and a parent) it might be useful for calibration of the method, but it still doesn't solve the problem of locating the parent. It just moves the problem from two dimensions to three. However, if you measure the distance between three daughter languages using each in succession as the node, it may give you a better idea, statistically, of where the parent should be located (based on your assumptions about distance between the daughters and the reconstructed parent). On the other hand, if this means measuring the distance from the parent to three daughter languages instead of just two, all this will do is increase the statistical probability of a correct reconstruction if one is needed. In general, the more daughters you add, the more confidence it may be possible to get for the statistical validity of the reconstruction. Again, if you have all of the languages preserved, the measurements should be quite good. But the method is not about elimination of innovation from the reconstruction, the method is about measuring the amount of innovation across the daughters. The problem is that if the parent form is not available, it is not possible to determine how much of what is seen in each of the daughter forms *is* innovation, which is what you are trying to measure. So if the measurement involves a minimal amount of reconstruction (and especially if the reconstruction is based in part on factors other than just the forms of the words in the daughter languages), I would expect the measurements to be quite valid. But if the measurement is based on a completely reconstructed parent language, all you are going to get out of it is what was put into the reconstruction. Of course, the more daughter languages you can measure, the more confidence you may get in the statistical probability of the reconstruction. Using more daughter languages will also help to reduce the likelihood of the daughters having innovated the same way independently (historical linguists really hate it when this happens because it screws everything up). And using the measurements obtained from the reconstruction may provide quantitative ideas about where there are problems and/or inconsistencies in the reconstruction. This is because it is a different way of looking at the reconstruction and looking at things in different ways will often produce new insights. But there is no way to separate the distances between the daughters from the reconstruction of the parent because that's what the reconstruction is. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca Sat Aug 21 21:20:11 1999 From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (Stephane Goyette) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 17:20:11 -0400 Subject: Quebec French nasal vowels. In-Reply-To: <006d01beea2f$f8bc3900$7303703e@edsel> Message-ID: See comments below. Stephane Goyette. > As the original culprit I'm responding to this. > With all due respect, I can testify from my repeated experience that people > in shops in Quebec (and I heard the same pronunciation in TV messages) > clearly distinguish the nasalized e and a in words like 'cent' and 'sans', > both when speaking and when listening. When I asked a shop attendant for a > film of 100 ASA ('cent ASA', pronounced /sa~/), she thought I said 'sans ASA' > and replied : 'c'est toujours avec'; when I pointed to the 100 on the > package, she said: 'Oh, vous voulez dire /se~ng/!' [or something like Fr. > 'saint' with a vaguely English -ng sounding ending]. I heard these > pronunciations over and over again. Nasals in Quebec French are subject to some variation in pronunciation, especially in the case of stress/unstressed differences due to emphasis, and I would venture to suggest you misperceived some such variation, especially when I read the above about an English-like 'ng' ending: no variety of Quebec French has consonantal increments after nasal vowels (unlike, for example, regional French in Southern France). I say this both as a linguist who has done some work on diachronic French linguistics and a native speaker of Quebec French. > I don't know if this is uneducated speech, or whether the Quebecois actually > think they pronounce it the same way even if they actually pronounce it > differently. To my European ears, Quebec French 'cent' and 'sans' (and > similar words) sound differently, and apparently to the Quebecois themselves > too, otherwise the type of misunderstandings I mentioned couldn't have > happened. In France they wouldn't. Non sequitur. Such misunderstandings could be due to other factors. For example, when asking for film "cent ASA" versus "sans ASA", there is an intonational difference which may have been misperceived; the salesperson, upon realizing the mistake, would naturally repeat the word, STRESSING it, emphasizing it, which would have lead you to conclude you were dealing with two phonologically distinct words. > As Larry Trask mentioned, this is original and authentic (but archaeic) > French pronunciation that got lost by convergence elsewhere. This is unbelievable. Arguing from authority is the weakest argument of all, and since the authority himself (Larry Trask) was open and honest enough to begin his posting on the subject by writing "I know nothing of Quebecois", I fail to see the purpose of quoting him on the subject. His comments on the dating of the en/an merger are quite correct, by the way --he certainly knows something of French. > Sometimes people make distinctions they don't perceive consciously, often as > a consequence of school indoctrination. In Spanish Castilian, e.g., I often > hear people insert very short vowels in consonant clusters, but they all deny > doing so, because of the written image they learned at school. E.g. I > recently heard 'equilipse' for 'eclipse'. All Spanish speakers (like the > 'Afrae aures') think all vowels, and in all positions, have the same length, > but in actual speech this manifestly not so; on the other hand, they find it > very hard to hear vowel length differences in other languages (shit/sheet!). Another non sequitur. Why then am I denying that I or other quebecois make a distinction present in writing? From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 02:19:16 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 22:19:16 EDT Subject: The UPenn IE Tree Message-ID: In a message dated 8/21/99 7:10:27 PM, you wrote: <> My questions were specifically addressed to the assumptions behind the Stammbaum. According to Sean Crist's response, that graph appears to be based on shared innovations over time rather than intelligibility. That is why after Anatolian splits off on the Stammbaum, we are told the appropriate language for what remains is "the innovations shared by all the IE branches except Anatolian". I was not after deeper truths in my message. Just trying to figure out what assumptions were behind this tree model. Sean Crist revealed a lot of that in his post in response. I don't think the model would yield any direct conclusions on relative intelligibility - but you might ask Sean. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 07:14:01 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 03:14:01 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/21/99 11:20:01 PM, you wrote: < () from 'wine', from 'uesper'. Later there's () 'Valerianus' c.800. I'd expect an early borrowing to show , a later one, . Brian M. Scott>> I'm not sure when the Irish would have borrowed this version of 'walh' etc from the Germanic. Of course the word could have been borrowed more than once as the meaning of the word changed. I'm not sure when the 'mGall' quote was from, but it would pretty likely be after 800. If those Northmen were from Normandy they would have been from the ON 'Valland' and in either case would have been recognized by clerics as being from 'Gallia'. As far as the borrowing, "galc = thicken cloth, fulling; from the English walk, waulk" (McBain's Etym Dict - Scot Gaelic) would be likely a loan from AS. On the other hand, "barant = warrant, Middle Irish bar?nta, Welsh gwarant" would be I think from the Anglo-Norman. MacFarlaine takes Gaelic 'balla' = wall, not early but from the AN 'bailley' - outer castle wall (cf., Old Bailey's) and wall = 'cailbhe' as the earlier word. On the other hand, Gaelic/goidelic 'cuinnsean' is given as from the English, 'whinger'. I've seen Scandinavian origins given for Gaelic "gaoth" = wind. And another problem is that earlier apparently the /v/- /u/- in Gaulish created a very different pattern - though which way the words travelled is terribly unclear. The PIE */w-/ obviously was but a distant memory. The problem with all this is not basically in the sounds I think, but in the fact that words and meanings bounced around like ping-pong balls in this time and area. So historically we don't know which got what from whom and when and how often. B_T_W, I just noticed that MacFarlaine gives a different, much more local explanation for "Gall" as foreigner - "Gall: foreigner, a Scottish Lowlander Galldachd: nf.ind. the country occupied by the non-Gaelic speakers of Scotland, usually termed the Lowlands of Scotland : air a' Ghalldachd, in the Lowlands." Were these 'Ghall-' supposed to be Britons or Germanic speakers? Hmmm. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 07:51:45 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 03:51:45 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) Message-ID: In a message dated 8/21/99 8:08:23 PM, nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk wrote: <> The full article is by Alan Thorne et al in Journal of Human Evolution June 99. The age of various finds are discussed there. However, just as important to this subject matter is the taxonomy of early and modern Australian aboriginal remains which show for example unique characteristics identified in Indonesia much before the O of A dates. One can forget in this discussion that there is quite a bit of evidence of a good deal of human habitation all over the rest of the eastern Hemisphere well before 100,000 BC. Out of Africa seems to postulate that these other humans were eliminated from the descent of the current world population. These pre-O of A's display culture and ,e.g., in the case of the Australians, physical continuity with the present. Multiregionalism simply postulates that different human strains have been mixing for a very long time and Out of Africa would at best represent a phase in that process. The genetic evidence is spectacular, but hardly settled. In any case, choosing to connect the events associated with Out of Africa with the development of language capability is arbitrary, does not jive and possibly conflicts with evidence of language capability in humans at other times - possibly at much earlier dates. Associating Out of Africa with modern languages (post 10,000 BCE, let's say) seems - to me at least - a bit farfetched. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 08:01:39 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 04:01:39 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 8/19/99 10:55:21 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> I simply meant that if the Out of Africa contingent did have language, there is no reason to think it was one language. E.g., if the humans inhabiting New Guinea for any imaginable reason suddenly left to colonize the world, they would carry with them 500-700 different languages. A 100,000 years in Africa would have been more than enough time to develop that kind of diversity. And at this point in our knowledge there's no reason to assume they didn't. Please remember that I just gave this as an aside to the overall discussion. It wasn't proving anything except what we don't know. Regards, Steve Long From lmfosse at online.no Sun Aug 22 09:06:52 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 11:06:52 +0200 Subject: Books on Indo-European Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Frank Rossi Sent: Friday, August 20, 1999 5:44 PM > Any suggestions on the latest books (or articles) in any language dealing > coprehensively with: > a) the Indo-European Urheimat question and taking into account all the > latest theories; The following three books would probably be useful to you: Sergent, Bernard. 1995. Les Indo-Europ?ens. Paris: Payot. Sergent, Bernard. 1997. Gen?se de l'Inde. Paris: Payot. Mallory, J. P. 1989. In search of the Indo-Europeans : language, archaeology, and myth. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson. You will find some older material in the following volume: Scherer, Anton, ed. 1968. Die Urheimat der Indogermanen, Wege der Forschung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Aug 22 15:43:40 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 18:43:40 +0300 Subject: Hypothesis formation vs. testing In-Reply-To: <75ea2350.24ed5f7c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >There is a great confusion in the advanced sciences, >or even in those which like to believe themselves advanced, >between >Hypothesis Testing >and >Hypothesis Formation. And part of this confusion arises from not knowing what hypothesis testing (or possibly a hypothesis) is. Because in trying to define "null hypothesis" on Sat, 7 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: I respectfully disagree with the person who recently argued between the following two alternatives that either could be an appropriate "null hypothesis" (...) > No languages are related. > > All languages are related. Rather, the real null hypothesis is something like "We do not know whether all languages are related (or whether there was polygenesis)" (etc.) Any attempt to force anyone else to accept something that embodies a CLAIM (...), is MANIPULATING the discourse, instead of dealing with facts. which shows a spectacular lack of knowledge of what a hypothesis is. It was subsequently pointed out that "We do not know whether all languages are related" is not a hypothesis, to which ECOLING at aol.com replied on Thu, 12 Aug 1999: There may be more agreement than seems to be the case in this matter. In particular I would agree with the following: >"We don't know" won't suit for those >purposes, because it is not a hypothesis. is very similar to my position, that "We cannot currently know" is the null hypothesis, and "We can currently know" is the hypothesis to be tested. And, quite obviously, no one can succeed in establishing that "we do know" is valid, with current data and tools, applied to the question whether all languages are ULTIMATELY related. So we know the answer to THAT test, for now and for a long time to come. which simply ignored the point at issue. "We don't know" is not a hypothesis, it is a fact. So Lloyd has restated it as what he thought was a hypothesis (which by his own definition means that he is trying to MANIPULATE the discourse by making a CLAIM :>), but this is not really a hypothesis either. There is no particular semantic difference between "we don't know" and "we can't tell" so this is just another fact, not a hypothesis and is not at all suited to be a null hypothesis. Null hypothesis is a technical term in hypothesis testing and here is a definition of null hypothesis taken from the glossary of a textbook on statistical methods available on the web (http://www.stat.Berkeley.EDU/users/stark/SticiGui/Text/gloss.htm #null_hypothesis): Null hypothesis. In hypothesis testing, the hypothesis we wish to falsify on the basis of the data. The null hypothesis is typically that something is not present, that there is no effect, or that there is no difference between treatment and control. So "We can't tell" is no more appropriate as a null hypothesis than "We don't know" is. A fact can be either true or false, but that still doesn't make it a hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the outgrowth of Karl Popper's observation that since it is possible to disprove an inductive hypothesis by counter evidence, but impossible to "prove" an inductive hypothesis by simply amassing more evidence in favor of it, it is often more effective to establish a hypothesis by disproving some rival hypothesis. In the days before hypothesis testing became a science, the null hypothesis would have been called a straw-man argument -- something that is put forward simply to demolish so that its destruction makes the real argument more likely. But a scientific hypothesis must make a CLAIM, because that's what a scientific hypothesis is: a proposed explanation for some group of observed data (facts). Here are some definitions of hypothesis taken from the web: 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. So it can be seen that a scientific hypothesis (definition 1 above) CLAIMs to explain some specified group of phenomena. This is not an attempt to MANIPULATE the discourse. This *is* dealing with facts. And it is the responsibility of the proponent of a hypothesis to demonstrate its validity, either by an overwhelming amount of evidence in its favor or by falsifying all rival hypotheses. If there is no rival hypothesis that is capable of being disproved, then the original hypothesis is said to be non-falsifiable and falls outside the realm of science. It is a "just-so" story (fairy tale) and this is why "all languages are related" is inappropriate as a null hypothesis (although not necessarily as a working hypothesis); it is not falsifiable. If there is no evidence offered that the original hypothesis is the true explanation of the observed facts then it is not a scientific hypothesis it is merely a hypothesis according to definition 4 above. >When we cannot conclusively test certain hypotheses, it is still >legitimate to try to accumulate evidence that the hypotheses are >plausible and worth exploring further. Certainly, UFOologists and seekers after Atlantis and Noah's Ark are doing this all the time. And who knows, someday they may be successful. But I would feel a lot more secure with this statement if ECOLING at aol.com had not continued his message of Sat, 7 Aug 1999 with: If we don't know, then we don't know, it's as simple as that. I personally don't give a hoot what anyone wants to "assume", or tell me to assume, in the absence of data justifying such an assumption. Okay, I get the message. You don't give a hoot about what anyone else assumes but you don't mind telling everybody else what to assume. It's not a question of data. Presumably everybody has the same data. The problem is that for any set of data there are an infinite number of hypotheses that can account for the data. And then: Using a "burden of proof" argument is merely a way of trying to get someone to accept a conclusion in the absence of evidence. No, using a burden of proof argument is a way of trying to get someone to provide evidence to support his conclusion or CLAIM. An unsupported hypothesis (no proof offered) is "a mere assumption or guess" or a "provisional conjecture to guide investigation". The burden of proof is always with the one who makes a CLAIM to have an explanation for some observed facts that is different from the explanation that does not require proof (the null hypothesis). In American justice the null hypothesis is "innocent" (used to be, anyway). It is up to the prosecution to prove "beyond reasonable doubt" any charge brought. It is not, as in some countries, up to the defendant to prove his innocence. Innocence is assumed (or is supposed to be) until guilt is proved. Similarly, in comparative linguistics, given two similar sounding words with similar meanings in different languages, the null hypothesis is "coincidence". Coincidence is always possible and hence does not have to be proved. Anyone who wants to CLAIM that these words show a relationship between the two languages has to offer proof. Only facts are relevant, facts which could make one conclusion more probable than another, (facts which DO NOT have anything to do with our own mental convenience, not EVEN with assumptions that nature is simple in some way we mentally want her to be, when she may in this particular respect NOT be simple). But it is not only the facts that are relevant ("just the facts, ma'am" :>). The data are presumably the same for everyone. But a fact is not data. It is an observation about data. Two people looking at the same data might come up with different facts. Scientific discourse involves two separate areas (and they are not hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing): (1) factual statements about data, which rest on observations and which are either true or false, and (2) a hypothesis, a statement put forward in explanation of the facts. A fact is an empirically verifiable statement about phenomena in terms of a conceptual scheme; a fact is not an object in nature but a statement about nature. The hypothesis must be formulated so that it can be shown to be either inadequate [falsifiable] or substantiated to a high degree of probability by further facts. A single contrary case may disprove the hypothesis, although it need not. The hypothesis must be based on the facts available, and the facts should not be made to fit the hypothesis. The problem is that even the establishment of facts can be highly controversial in genetic linguistics, as in other sciences. Raimo Anttila, _Historical and Comparative Linguistics_, p. 23 I have chosen to quote Anttila here because he has a very pithy summary, and from this I can make an even starker summary: Facts are observations about data. The data are the same for everyone (exist in nature); facts may not be the same for everyone. A hypothesis is an attempt to explain the observed facts. As Anttila states, there are two things that make a sound hypothesis: It can be shown to be inadequate (i.e., it has a valid test for falsification) and it can be substantiated to a high degree of probability by further facts (facts that were not part of the basis of the original hypothesis). Saying that a hypothesis is valid because it accounts for the original facts is not a test of a hypothesis. It is simply circular reasoning (the hypothesis is created to account for the facts; the hypothesis must therefore be correct because it accounts for the facts). For any set of facts, there are an infinite number of hypotheses that will account for them. Some will just be more believable than others. >In a message dated 8/18/99 11:32:41 PM, Larry Trask writes: >>On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >>> No Burden of Proof is appropriate on the content of the >>> question whether all languages are ultimately related, simply >>> because we cannot test that question currently. >>I fully agree that the question `Are all languages related?' >>cannot be answered at present. I further believe that we will >>never be able to answer this question by purely linguistic means. >>However, there are people who disagree, one of the most >>prominent being Merritt Ruhlen. Ruhlen wishes to embrace the >>conclusion `All languages are related.' >As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent >statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such >conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might >be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). Yes, Greenberg is clearer and more cogent than Ruhlen. And it is proper methodology to assume something that cannot be proved to see where it leads. >Back to Trask: >>Now, in order to go about this, I maintain, [Ruhlen] should >>start with the negation of this statement as his null hypothesis, >>and then go on to show that there is so much evidence against >>this null hypothesis that it is untenable and must be rejected. >>But that's not what he does. >The last paragraph above is in complete contradiction to what >Larry Trask says he agrees with ("I fully agree"...). >If one believes it is not possible to test a proposition, then it >is NOT REASONABLE to ask anyone else to test it. >One cannot have this both ways. You are comparing a statement about what is possible and one about what is proper methodology and saying that one contradicts the other and blaming this on Larry Trask. This is simply an attempt at killing the messenger. If proper methodology requires that an investigator perform an impossible act and the investigator chooses to ignore this, then this speaks to the investigator's methodology, not to the methodology of the person who points this out. It is NOT REASONABLE to ask the investigator to perform an impossible act. But it is REASONABLE to point out that omission of this act makes the investigation methodologically suspect. If the investigator cannot perform a methodologically necessary act then he should not speak and act as if it were not necessary to perform the act. One cannot have this both ways. >>Instead, he *starts* with the hypothesis `All languages are >>related', and then proceeds to assemble what he sees as evidence >>in support of this last hypothesis. Amazingly enough [;-)]. he >>is able to find such evidence. >So far, this is legitimate in principle [but on practice, see below] >IF the purpose is to establish the plausibility of a hypothesis >(as distinct from testing it, NOTICE!). No, this is not even legitimate in principle. A hypothesis is something put forward as an explanation for observed facts. It is not something that one proposes and then goes out and looks for facts to support. One creates a hypothesis to account for facts (all the facts). One does not select and arrange the facts to fit the hypothesis. >This is how almost all hypotheses are first established as >hypotheses, simply by accumulating suggestive, anecdotal, >case-study evidence, in contexts in which we do not even know how >to estimate chance very well. It is true that many (most?) scientific hypotheses start as guesses. But not every guess is a scientific hypothesis. While anything is possible, not everything is probable. Basically, no evidence, no scientific hypothesis. And whatever happened to your: Only facts are relevant, facts which could make one conclusion more probable than another, (facts which DO NOT have anything to do with our own mental convenience, not EVEN with assumptions that nature is simple in some way we mentally want her to be, when she may in this particular respect NOT be simple). >>He therefore declares that, because he has found evidence in >>support of his desired conclusion, it must be true. But this is >>completely wrongheaded. >Here I agree with Trask, to the extent Ruhlen says something like >this. Then what is the problem? Why this diatribe about the difference between hypothesis testing and hypothesis formation? If creating a hypothesis ("a mere guess or assumption" or "a provisional conjecture to guide investigating") and then (selectively) collecting evidence to support it and then claiming that the hypothesis is proved because there is evidence to support it is the reverse of proper scientific methodology, then what makes the selection and arrangement of the facts collected for this purpose the formation of a hypothesis? Hypothesis formation is not the collecting of data. Hypothesis formation is an attempt to account for the data. If the hypothesis is formulated in the absence of data, collecting data to support the hypothesis is not hypothesis formation, it is just bad science. If one tries to say "isn't it lucky that the evidence collected already has a hypothesis to explain it" this is simply ignoring the fact that there are an infinite number of hypotheses to account for any collection of facts. >(I am much less familiar with Ruhlen than with Greenberg.) Then you should perhaps familiarize yourself with his methodology before you try to defend it. >>What Ruhlen *must* do, if he wants to persuade anybody, is not >>to try to demonstrate that his favored conclusion is supported by >>evidence, but rather that its contradictory -- the appropriate >>null hypothesis -- is so strongly disconfirmed that it cannot be >>maintained. >The contradictory of the strong claim (all related) is that there >are at least two languages which are not related to each other >genetically. >I would doubt that Ruhlen had evidence to exclude this >possibility, or that if asked clearly, he would say so. After >all (trivially) there are languages for which there are only one >or two words attested, and one can go on from there with very >little work to find other cases where I think Ruhlen would grant >there is not even a loose probability based on the data itself to >establish any relationship. Ruhlen would grant nothing of the kind. The relatedness of all languages is not an issue for Ruhlen. The following is Ruhlen's position on the matter (this quotation was posted by Larry Trask to another list; I have not verified it [our library has none of Ruhlen's books], but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the quotation): First, the search for linguistic `relationships' is now over (or should be), since it no longer makes sense to ask if two languages (or two language families) are related. *Everything* is related, and the question to be investigated within or among different families is the *degree* of their relationship, not the fact of it. [emphasis in the original] Merritt Ruhlen (1994), On the Origin of Languages, Stanford UP, p. 272. >[Trask's example All Swans are White not repeated here, but ...] >>This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is >>enough to render Ruhlen's work vacuous, >Not so, since Ruhlen can be treated as involved in hypothesis >FORMATION not hypothesis testing. On the contrary, Ruhlen is not formulating a hypothesis (we all should know how to do this by now: one starts with the data and then develops a hypothesis that accounts for the data [all the data]). What he is doing is precisely what you railed against when you said: Any attempt to force anyone else to accept something that embodies a CLAIM (...), is MANIPULATING the discourse, instead of dealing with facts. And if you really meant it when you said: If we don't know, then we don't know, it's as simple as that. I personally don't give a hoot what anyone wants to "assume", or tell me to assume, in the absence of data justifying such an assumption. Are you now saying that it's all right to "assume" so long as you can find some data that justify the assumption (while ignoring data that don't)? I really would not expect you to claim this. If Ruhlen can be considered to be involved in hypothesis FORMATION not hypothesis testing, then the hypothesis being formed is simply a hypothesis according to definition 4 above ("a mere guess or assumption"), not a hypothesis according to definition 1 (a scientific hypothesis). Collecting data is not hypothesis formation; it is a prerequisite to hypothesis formation. And the data on which a hypothesis is based cannot be used to test the hypothesis because that is simply circular. >>quite apart from the vast number of egregious errors in the >>material he cites as evidence, >Now THAT is quite another matter, and when present in very large >quantity, not merely slight differences from the analysis an expert in >a particular language would offer but more serious, complete >misunderstandings vitiating completely any use of particular data... >it does discredit the work as a whole, and can quite legitimately, >even without absolute proof of its wrong-headedness, >lead reasonable people to pay no more attention to it. >But note carefully the caveat above. It is NOT sufficient merely to >provide minor improvements of detail to the presentation, >to discredit the work. An expert can ALWAYS provide minor >improvements. That itself shows nothing at all. >>and quite apart from his failure to realize that lookalikes do >>not constitute evidence of any kind. >Disagree flatly, unless defined circularly so that "lookalikes" >means more than it says, namely so that it means "lookalikes >which are known to be unrelated as cognates". You can disagree as much as you want, but that won't change reality. Lookalikes are not evidence of anything except the trivial fact that the lookalikes exist. It requires evidence to show that lookalikes demonstrate a relationship between the languages in which they occur. Lookalikes can always be coincidence, even in languages that are known to be related. So without evidence to the contrary, lookalikes are coincidence just as an individual is innocent until proved guilty. It is the null hypothesis. The lookalikes may be a fact, but a fact is not a hypothesis (I hope this is clear by now). Some hypothesis must be presented to account for their presence (and the hypothesis that "all languages are related" is not adequate because it is non-falsifiable; one might as well account for them by saying "Santa Claus left them there"). >If it actually means "items which look alike in sound and >meaning", then of course such comparisons DO constitute >PRELIMINARY evidence. Any such preliminary evidence can be >discounted by showing that the resemblances are secondary and >late, or that they manifest a type of sound symbolism, or in >other ways. To the extent that lookalikes are a fact and facts can be used as evidence, this is true. But the question is and remains, what are they evidence of. The null hypothesis is that they are evidence that similar sounding words with similar meanings occur in the world's languages by pure chance. That they are evidence of anything else must be proved. So your explication is exactly backwards. Attempts to prove that the existence of the lookalikes demonstrates a relationship between the languages can be discounted by the means you point out, but the lookalikes still remain evidence (of the fact that chance resemblances do occur). >It was lookalikes in grammar and vocabulary which led to the >original hypothesis of the relatedness of the Indo-European >languages. Some of these turned out to be true cognates, some >turned out not to be cognates, merely chance lookalikes. >But the IE hypothesis thus preliminarily established withstood >the discounting of some of the lookalikes as non-cognates and the >reaffirmation of others a true cognates (whatever the terminology >used at the time). This is quite true, and it was quite clearly pointed out in the earliest identification of IE languages that the null hypothesis was disproved ("a stronger affinity, ..., than could possibly have been produced by accident"). The rest, as you say, has just been details. >Once again, I wish to urge us back to the FACTS. And this is a good idea. But FACTS are not hypotheses. FACTS are not even data. FACTS are observations based on data. FACTS can be true or false. It is, however, important to remember that hypotheses are attempts to account for FACTS (all the FACTS, not just selected FACTS) and that hypotheses must be judged by how well they account for the FACTS and that hypotheses must include a CLAIM (that the hypothesis correctly accounts for the FACTS). >And those FACTS include whatever we can establish about how >each of our tools works, where it works well and where it fails, >how deep historically each tool can push us with languages >of certain types or with language changes of certain types, >and whatever we can establish about new tools we have not yet >systematically used (such as explicit paths of historical >change in sound systems and in semantic spaces, and metrics >of distances along such paths of change...). In essence, we really only have one tool. It is called the scientific method. 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". Finally, the hypothesis should have some rival hypothesis that can be falsified before it can be considered scientific. All the other tools that we have are hypotheses that have logical consequents that can be empirically tested. Their value lies in the extent to which they are scientific hypotheses and are in accord with the scientific method. Otherwise we might as well try to solve the problems of historical linguistics by gazing into crystal balls. I will not go into the tools of historical linguistics at this point because this is long enough already and an opportunity to discuss these tools and the pitfalls in using them will doubtless occur soon. >We get nowhere by repeating the discrediting of STRAW MAN claims, >by holding hypothesis formation to standards of absolute >hypothesis testing, by counting minor corrections and >improvements to data as completely discrediting use of the data >when they do not, etc. etc. and so forth. It is not that we get nowhere; we just don't get where you want to go. Discrediting STRAW MAN claims (= null hypothesis) is part of the method, as is requiring a falsifiable null hypothesis as well as requiring that a hypothesis have a test for falsification. These things tell us whether a hypothesis is scientific or not. And although hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing are two different things, they are not the different things that you have made them out to be. The FACTS that are used in hypothesis formation cannot be used in hypothesis testing or else the proof of the hypothesis rests on circular reasoning. >The field is at an impasse in these discussions, until we return >the discussion to an empirical basis. This is, as the Monty Python people would say, the nub of the gist. Historical linguistics suffers from (and has apparently always suffered from) a surfeit of "bright ideas" and a dearth of hard data. Thus the 19th century (and indeed, much of the 20th) saw a proliferation of "bright ideas" (stadialism, the search for the "original language", primitive languages are spoken by primitive peoples, primitive languages are lexically poor and grammatically impoverished) most of which had more to do with nationalistic fervor and ethnic superiority (those same things that brought us colonialism and the race for resources and markets, WWI, WW2, and the more recent bouts of "ethnic cleansing") than with linguistic actuality and which have subsequently been discredited by the simple accretion of more data about more different languages. Most of these "bright ideas" were just speculation in advance of the evidence (or hypothesis FORMATION without FACTS). Only for IE (and to a lesser extent Semitic) is there sufficient hard data. This is because these families (or branches) have written records going back a long way which make histories of the languages possible that give us fixed points along the road and because these areas have been the subject of linguistic study for centuries. Other areas do not have the same advantages or the same collections of hard data, primarily because they have not been studied as long. Many people (particularly those who are not historical linguists) point to the inadequacy of the tools used in historical linguistics. Although to me this sounds like a version of "the poor workman blames his tools", the primary problem of historical linguistics is not the inadequacy of the tools, but a lack of hard data to use the tools on. When the data is available, the tools to investigate it will arise. So I completely agree that linguists should primarily be engaged in the collection of empirical data. They should be out in the field collecting hard data before it disappears rather than sitting around thinking up yet more "bright ideas" that will have to wait for more data before it can be seen whether they accurately reflect the real linguistic world or not. Unfortunately, not all linguists are suited by temperament or training to be field linguists. So they have to have something to do while the rest are out collecting data. Perhaps they could be better employed by putting the data already available into more usable form rather than speculating about what the data being collected will reveal. But speculating without evidence is more fun than writing grammars or dictionaries. >Pure philosophy will not get us much progress. If by pure philosophy you mean hypothesis FORMATION without FACTS then I agree. If you mean pointing out shoddy methodology, then I disagree. The scientific method is pure philosophy. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy, not a science (despite the -ology on the end). So it is pure philosophy that will set the tone for linguistics and determine whether it is seen as a scientific discipline or an attempt to prove causality by correlation like astrology (also not a science despite the -ology on the end). But I'm willing to have a moratorium on hypotheses without data. How about you? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 22 18:14:46 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 14:14:46 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: I wrote: <<(Doesn't Wallachia looks like it could also be just plain Latinized MHGerman?) In a message dated 8/21/99 8:54:25 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: < s(') > s [S&E Slavic].... < in Polish/Kashubian, metathesis + lengthening to > in Czech/Slovak/South Slavic and polnoglasie to in East Slavic).>> First of all, Wallachia as latinized South Slavic: Consider that we have many instances of Latinized 'vlach' that does not go the way of 'Wallachia' and all are earlier. There is everything from the Pope's "rex blachorum" (1206) to a "villa vlacha' (1295) to "Vlachii" and the "Blasii" and "Blachi" mentioned in the Hungarian Gesta (1100's). (And of course in one of the Egil sagas we see "Blocmannland" - looking like it came down the same path.) My best information is that /valachia/ as Vlachs first appears a bit later (@1300's?). duNay says the first mention of the place we call "Walachia" happens with the Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz (1415-1480). So what happened here? The palatalized /vl/ gets dropped suddenly in Latin after all those years and Latin and German return to /val/? Does that make sense? Here's another explanation. There were multiple forms of the word going round in the many years before 'Wallachia" shows up about . duNay says that Vlach is "walach" in German. And the OED shows that 'vlachs' first entered English as "wolocks" and "wallacks" as well as the expected "vlachs" and "walachs" from the latin. If the Slavic "volocks" did not survive palatalization, the German version of it should have. It would then make more sense to see "Walachia" or "Wallachia" as: 1) a latinization of either the earlier pre-pal. Slavic "volocks" or "volochs." (But not East Slavic "volox"). Or a form that survived palatalization with the initial vowel because it was a proper name. 2) a latinization of "wal/a/ch" (adj) as it sometimes appears in Germanic or as it might have been borrowed back early from the Slavic. Both of these seem to fit better, given that "vlach-" was already established in Latin well before "Wallachia" appears. They also acknowledge the original western form of the word with the initial vowel intact. At this point, I won't go into the fact that there is another form of Vlach that appears early in Southern Slavic, "vlah-", that does not even include -x(U)- that might be reflected from say "Volcae" but not from the OHG "uualha". <> I'd have to ask when? "Late Common Slavic" seeming to be an entity that spans a continent. I wrote: <> You replied: <> The example from Polish you give is not from the original meaning. (Walloon I think was the second phase. Welsh I think is on the money.) That's because the original word did not mean Italian or Italy. I'd like to handle that in another post when I have a little more time. But let me say that it looks like this word never meant "roman" or "italian" in English, for example, and it's connection with "roman" and "italian" is a later after effect of it being applied to the Franks. No, I don't think the original meaning included "Roman" or "Italian." I wrote: <> You wrote: <> Well, the new testament is pretty heavy with "Romans" isn't it? I suspect there was opportunity enough if that's what the word meant at that point in time. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Aug 22 19:35:42 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 14:35:42 -0500 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I don't see how the first inhabitants of Australia could have lacked language and then leave descendants who did possess language. If they lacked language, they would have either died out or we'd see some pecularity in their genetic ability to form language or some unique traits in their languages. Cavalli-Sforza indicates there was later wave, as you suggest, which probably accounts for the dingo, superior tools [I believe stone tools were introduced] and [I believe] greater human density while various animal species went extinct. I seem to remember that Tasmania was separated by the Bass Straight before this occurred. The Tasmanians DID have language but their technology was comparable to that of the earlier Australians: no dingo, no stone tools, no fire drill, etc. Language diversity is concentrated in N. Australia and while this is most likely related to outside contact, it doesn't necessarily indicate that Pama-Nyungen [sp?] languages spring from later arrivals. It could just be the case that the first P-N speakers picked up the new technologies and adapted them to local conditions earlier than anyone else. In an attempt at list relevance, this may well have been the case for IE: adapting Middle Eastern based agricultural technologies to temperate climates. [snip] >If a long date is ever established, perhaps the first inhabitants didn't >have modern language, though they did have art. Australian languages are >oddly bunched, with many small families in Arnhem Land and Kimberley (just >where you'd land from Asia) and one huge, close family occupying all the >rest, which therefore can't represent the ancient population. Aborigines are >a genetic mix: there was a second wave around 10 000 BP. (Old memory of >mine: I don't know what mtDNA says about this mix.) It's just possible that >these brought speech along with the dingo. >Nicholas Widdows Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Aug 22 19:43:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 14:43:30 -0500 Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'm sorry but I can't follow your logic. If Neandertals had language, that would presuppose that language went back to a common ancestor with modern humans. Without a genetic ability for language, humans could not have picked up language from Neandertals anymore than a chimp or a gorilla could. >Just one point on the discussions. >It is EVEN possible >(though not the simplest explanation from some points >of view, Nature need not be simple) >that Neanderthals had several languages, >from independent sources, >and these languages were separately inherited >by different groups of modern humans. >So inheritance from Neanderthals >does NOT necessarily imply monogenesis? >Just checking the logic here. >Lloyd Anderson >Ecological Linguistics Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 00:03:41 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 20:03:41 -0400 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: <199908130507.BAA27942@unagi.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > The idea is that the distance between languages is represented by the > series of changes that occur to a large set of words in moving from > their parent form to their daughter forms, so that distance apart is not > measured between the daughter languages but rather by their distance > from their parent. We feel this better represents the real world > process. > Our data has to be the word set in the parent form (reconstructed words > or real words) and then one word set for the each daughter language and > the set of phonological transformation rules between each parent and > daughter for each word in their chronological sequence. Hence we are > modelling the rules and their sequence of application for each word. The > extent to which any of this information is hypothetical merely defines > the hypotheses one is comparing, but importantly it does not effect the > computational method we apply to this data. This post certainly caught my interest, because I've got various ideas myself about how computers could be better used in language reconstruction. In a very general way, I think we have some of the same interests. I do have some comments about your specific approach. If I understand correctly, you're measuring language 'distance' at least partially in terms of how many historical phonological rules a language has undergone since it first diverged from some reconstructed ancestor: the more rules, the greater the distance. (I hope I haven't just plain misunderstood; if so, the following may not apply.) I think the basic problem your approach raises is this: how do you count historical phonological changes? For example, is the Great Vowel Shift in English one rule, or a dozen? It looks like your distance measure will depend a great deal on what choices you make on such questions. The rule count is going to depend in part on what phonological theory you're working in. A traditional historical grammar of a language often lists a multitude of small rules which a modern theory can conflate into a shorter list. Exactly how short you can make the list partly depends on what phonological theory you're working in. There may indeed be no phonological rules at all in the traditional sense; phonological change could all be just the reranking of constraints, which is what I'm assuming in my in-progress dissertation. I'll respond to your question about an online database of Indo-European under a separate cover. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 00:34:11 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 20:34:11 -0400 Subject: Online etymological databases In-Reply-To: <199908130507.BAA27942@unagi.cis.upenn.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999, Jon Patrick wrote: > Our method should be useful to appraise competing reconstructions of earlier > languages,say Indoeuropean, however to date we have not been able to find the > necessary data compiled in one place to easily apply it. Should anyone have a > good database of appropriate data we would be happy to submit it to our > methods. It doesn't exist yet. I'm slowly working on one for Germanic, and there's another effort which is working on one for all of Indo-European. This latter effort is mostly being carried out by people in Holland. I don't have their URL handy, but a web search should turn it up. I think that the general idea of the Holland group is excellent, but I think the way they're carrying it out is unfortunate (and I've discussed this with them): they're assigning each branch to a specialist in that branch, and they're not planning to release anything to the public until they have a product in a fairly advanced stage of completion. I think they could take a real lesson from free software efforts such as Linux, where the slogan is "release early, release often". They could get a lot of enthusiastic volunteer help and a lot of useful feedback and contribution if they'd open the project up to the public. For example, when I recently asked for volunteers to each type a few pages of an glossary of Old English whose copyright has expired, so that there could be a free online glossary of OE, I got a strong response. The whole glossary was covered in a little over a month. Many of the responses were from enthusiatic non-specialists (altho some specialists took some pages too). Sharing the work this way gets things done quickly. I'm poking at making a free online etymological database of the older Germanic languages; this database will be totally free, so that others can freely create useful derived works from it. As a preliminary, I'm taking old glossaries whose copyright has expired and putting them online. I've done this with a Gothic glossary and am working on the one for Old English; I'll probably do Old High German next and then work on actually creating the database. The next step toward that end will be to mark these glossaries up, probably with SGML tags of some sort, so that all the information can automatically be folded into one big database. This markup can probably be largely done by program, followed by hand correction. My long-term dream is to have all the references in this database which anyone could need: concordance-style references to instances of a word in the text, full conjugations and declensions, alternate spellings, pointers between cognates in related languages, pointers between compounds and their constituent elements, etc. Once there is such a database, one of the projects I'd like to tinker with is automated language reconstruction; I've got some ideas about how one might write a program to do this. The database has to come first, tho. What bits I've got online are at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/language_resources.html I'd be quite open to working with others on developing these resources. One of my main priorities is to produce resources which are free, both in terms of cost and in terms of freedom from any intellectual property encumbrances. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 00:39:56 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 20:39:56 -0400 Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance In-Reply-To: <86958a10.24e5a2ae@aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > We now have an international standard computer Code, Unicode, > which contains most of the characters needed for transliteration > (Latin-standard-based letters) and for phonetic transcription (IPA). > It would be useful to try to establish a standard for Comparative > Data sets, into which all existing computer data sets can be translated, > so that the massive sets of data can be made available for studies > such as this. I agree totally. We're on exactly the same wavelength here. I've looked into this a little and have tried to educate myself about SGML, which would be an obvious candidate for marking up the data sets. I don't know if there are any specific standard sets of SGML tags for marking up dictionaries; if there are, it would probably make sense to start with such a tag set, and extend it with whatever additional tags we need to represent cognations between languages, etc. If anyone on this list has any experience using SGML for such a purpose, please write to me, because I'll need to be tackling this problem before much longer! \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Aug 23 09:49:17 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 11:49:17 +0200 Subject: 20-counting in Danish and beyond In-Reply-To: <572cb0c0.24ed8812@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > In Danish > to og halv-fems > means 92. > Literally, > two and half-FIVES The <-s> in '90' is not a plural morpheme, but a shortening of the ending <-sindstyve> 'times twenty' in the more antiquate , developed from Old Danish , literally 'half-fifth times twenty'. , which is not used independently in Modern Danish (although in words like 'ever', literally 'any time(s)'), is from the Germanic root *sin?a-, just like the Old English 'time, road'. The hole system goes as follows: 20 tyve 30 tredive 40 fyrre (< fyrretyve, analogous) 50 halvtreds (< halvtredsindstyve 'half-third times twenty') 60 tres (< tresindstyve 'three times twenty') 70 halvfjerds (< halvfjerdsindstyve 'half-fourth times twenty') 80 firs (< firsindstyve 'four times twenty) 90 halvfems (< halvfemsindstyve 'half-fifth times twenty) Adam Hyllested From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 12:35:17 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 08:35:17 -0400 Subject: Books on Indo-European In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Frank Rossi wrote: > Any suggestions on the latest books (or articles) in any language dealing > coprehensively with: > a) the Indo-European Urheimat question and taking into account all the > latest theories; That would be Mallory, "In Search of the Indo-Europeans." It's a good general overview of the subject; it also serves in part as a rebuttal to Renfrew, who puts the IE homeland in Anatolia and largely equates the spread of agriculture with the spread of the IE languages. > b) pre Indo-European languages in Europe (in particular taking into account > - pro et contra - Leo Vennemann's theories - Vasconic, Atlantic substate of > insular Celtic, etc.) I take it you mean the unattested languages which IE presumably displaced rather than the attested non-IE languages (Etruscan, Iberian, Tartessian). I don't know if anyone has ever given an even-handed summary of the speculation on this topic. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 23 14:09:33 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:09:33 +0100 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > "Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human > speech sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." *Some* researchers. Not all, not most, not even -- I think -- a bare majority. Just some, and most of the ones I have encountered have been anthropologists or archeologists, not linguists or biologists. *Some* researchers, in fact, want to assign language to our hominid ancestors, *Homo erectus*. But, so far as I can judge, the majority view is still that language most likely arose with our own species, 100,000-200,000 years ago. [RM] > < 60,000 BP, that date would seem to be very wrong>> [SL] > Why? Who says those Australians had language at the time? The two > events have no necessary connection. Given the apparent biological centrality of our language faculty, it is for many of us exceedingly difficult to imagine biologically modern human beings without language. The case for the first emergence of fully modern languages only 40,000 or so years ago rests entirely, so far as I know, on a single argument: the argument that human material culture underwent a great and rapid flowering around that time, and that nothing other than the emergence of language could explain that flowering. But not everyone accepts that the claimed dramatic flowering is real. And, even if you do accept this, it is far from clear that the emergence of language is the only possible explanation. > And Out of Africa could be just flat out dead wrong. Yes, it could. But the multiregional hypothesis requires that our species should have emerged, not in a single location, but over a vast area of the globe, by continued gene-flow. And I have never heard of a *single* other species which is known or believed to have originated in such a way. Has anybody else? Multiregionalism has the consequence that the human species originated in a unique manner, unparalleled by the emergence of any other known species. And I find this deeply unpalatable. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 23 14:23:56 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:23:56 +0100 Subject: color terms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > My suspicion is that in the old days, people did not match colors > but things - among which natural color or dyes might or might not be > the common element. > How else could we explain the form 'blake' turning up in the old > text to mean both black and white? Well, we use `gray' for everything from very pale gray to charcoal gray. Not so different, really. We also use `blue' for everything from pale sky-blue to navy blue, something which surprises the speakers of, say, Russian, which has two entirely distinct basic color terms to cover this range. I don't see any great reason to be surprised because speakers of another language, or speakers of an earlier form of our own language, happen to apply their color terms in a different way from us. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Aug 23 15:26:55 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 16:26:55 +0100 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: <7ba2e233.24e4e281@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [on the Penn tree for IE] > I simply must ask some questions about what this means. > 1. I assume the branching off in this 'Stammbaum' carries the > inference of being chronological in the sense of earlier or later > separations. (Rather than for example the degree of linguistic > difference between languages.) This may go without saying, but I'm > just checking. Yes; the tree is intended to be a relative -- not absolute -- chronology. > So here at this first juncture: > PIE > / \ > / Anatolian > Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian? It would have to > wouldn't it? No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant. It is concluded by the Penn group, and widely believed anyway, that Anatolian was the first branch of IE to split off from the rest. So, that top node, with its two daughters, represents an initial split of the single language PIE, with one daughter being the ancestor of Anatolian, and the other daughter being the single common ancestor of everything else. We now often speak of `broad PIE' -- the ancestor of the whole family -- and `narrow PIE' -- the ancestor of everything except Anatolian. Narrow PIE is a sister language of Proto-Anatolian: Broad PIE / \ / \ / \ / \ Narrow PIE Proto-Anatolian > Then where along that left side diagonal does PIE cease to exist? This is not a question about facts, but only one about terminology. I don't think anyone wants to apply the term `PIE' to anything below what I have just called `narrow PIE'. If you prefer Sturtevant's `Indo-Hittite' nomenclature, then the last tree gets renamed as follows: Proto-Indo-Hittite [sic] / \ / \ / \ / \ PIE Proto-Anatolian > This question of when PIE ends strikes me as an important question, > for a number of reasons. Actually, it's only a question of terminology, no more. > First, reconstruction always seems to proceed as if *PIE were a > static language - but coexistence could have meant centuries of > potential change within PIE itself. Coexistence has nothing to do with it, but otherwise you are dead right. PIE must have exhibited the same regional and social variation as any other living language, and it must have changed continuously even during the centuries when it could still reasonably be regarded as a single language. But reconstruction is not good at identifying variation -- which is not to deny that IEists have often drawn attention to possible instances of variation within PIE. As for the change over time within PIE, this has received a fair amount of attention. Ideally -- though not always actually -- reconstruction gives us the latest version of PIE, just before it began breaking up into distinct daughters. But it is perfectly possible in principle to do internal reconstruction *within* PIE to identify earlier and later stages of it, and precisely this has been attempted. For example, the German linguist Specht has argued rather persuasively that athematic nouns are generally older within PIE than are thematic nouns. And several people have devoted attention to the possibility of reconstructing a version of PIE which is substantially earlier than, and quite different from, the late version that we commonly see in the handbooks. Diakonov (I think it was) coined the name `Pre-PIE' for this earlier version, while others speak merely of `Early' and `Late' PIE (and sometimes also of an intervening `Middle' stage). > Second, it means that languages coexisting with PIE could have been > influenced by or influenced PIE after splitting off. And third it > would mean that PIE could have been influenced by non-PIE influences > between splittings. Yes, except that we wouldn't use the name `PIE' for anything descended from PIE. > And logically either PIE either coexisted with some of these branch-offs. No. It can be misleading to think of one branch as branching off from a `trunk'. There is no trunk. All that really happens is that the single ancestor (at any given point in time) splits into two (or more) distinct daughters. And thereafter it is a matter of chance whether any of those daughters go on to become ancestral to a large group of languages. > Or they all branched off at one time and PIE evaporated. The traditional picture does indeed see PIE as fissioning simultaneously into ten or twelve daughters. But it is precisely this picture which is challenged by the Penn tree. > OR PIE never disappeared but turned directly into one or a few of > these languages, which would be direct rather than indirect > descendents. Sorry; I don't follow. All IE languages are direct descendants of PIE, by definition. > I think those are all the choices. There are no others, but each > one should result in completely different reconstructions of *PIE. I don't see how. > 2. You wrote: <<... Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian are in a single > sub-branch of the IE family together, but Balto-Slavic and Germanic are in > this branch as well.>> > If that's the case, then what did that whole subbranch split off from? At > the point of the split of Greek Armenian, the left line is still there. > Above are the Italo-Celtic, Tocharian, Anatolian branches. Presumably they > are distinguishable from whatever it is that is out there that might be > called Proto-BS-Germanic-Indo-Iranian. > What does this mean for reconstruction of *PIE? What if it was > Proto-GrAr-BSGer-IIr that was the branch off and Italo-Celtic was the true > remainder of the PIE 'trunk'? (I don't think you can favor one or the other > branch - why should one be seen as more lineal to PIE than the other?) Exactly. It is merely an accident, in the Penn tree, that at almost no point does a branch split into two branches each of which goes on to split further into several of the major branches of the family. According to the Penn results, six of the eight splits recognized produce two daughters, one of which is the ancestor of only a single major branch of IE. The last split yields Baltic and Slavic. Just two of the earlier splits produce daughters each of which is the ancestor of two or more of the major branches we recognize. > In that case, Italo-Celtic would preserve PIE best and the other > branch would be the split-off, innovating away from the core. And > misleading us as to what PIE was like. No, no. First, the Penn tree does not even recognize an `Italo-Celtic' branch. It merely concludes that Anatolian was the first to separate from all the rest, Celtic the first to separate from the remainder, and Italic the first to separate from the new remainder. Second, the age of the split has nothing to do with the degree of conservatism or innovation in any given branch. In fact, almost everybody picks Lithuanian as the most conservative living IE language -- and yet Baltic split from Slavic only at a very late stage indeed, and Balto-Slavic split from others only rather late. The branch leading to Balto-Slavic has generally been more conservative than the branches leading elsewhere. > 3. < sister of Balto-Slavic, but that the pre-Germanic speakers came into > the political orbit of the prehistoric Italo-Celtic peoples and > absorbed loan words from them at some date prior to Grimm's Law.>> > How does the team view the new reconstruction of the obstruent > system (Hopper/Gamkrelidze/etc.) that suggests that Grimm's Law > actually reflects archaism rather than innovation? The Penn team didn't make much use of phonological characters, which they regard as less reliable than lexical and morphological characters. So this shouldn't make much difference. It is mainly the divergent results for lexical and morphological characters which make Germanic problematic. > With that view, would Balto-Slavic become a sister to Germanic that > came under the influence of IIr, ditching that archaism like IIr? Dunno, but I doubt it. > 4. Just hypothetically, if we were to assume that PIE was nothing > but very early Greek, how would this diagram and the findings behind > it change? Would the tree look all that different? Would it have > Greek-Armenian at the bottom of the main stem? Or would it? Sorry; I don't understand the question. In a sense, PIE *was* "very early Greek", since it is the direct ancestor of Greek. But it was equally "very early English", or "very early Bengali". > Does this diagram seem to put IIr in that last position (or > IIr-BS-Gr) - does that possibly reflect a sampling artifact favoring > Sanskrit, Germanic and Lithuanian/Slavic - the favored sources in > many *PIE reconstructions? Don't know what you mean by "that last position". Of course, the Penn work is potentially vulnerable to sampling artefacts. If they had chosen different characters, or different languages to represent the major branches, maybe the outcome would have been somewhat different. But this sort of thing can be tested for. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Mon Aug 23 16:35:57 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 11:35:57 -0500 Subject: Books on Indo-European Message-ID: Otto Schrader's 1890 Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples proposed the same homeland that Gimbutas subsequently found archaeological reasons to argue for. Her collected papers were posthumously published by two of her students as JIES Monograph 18 (1997). JIES, the journal and the monographs, are indexed on the website http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc. An upcoming issue of JIES, I am told, will carry an article by Renfrew and others. In the meantime James Mallory and Douglas Adams (1997 Fitz Dearborn, London) have published their Encyclopedia of IE Culture to update Schrader's Encyclopedia, a brave attempt that has problems (see Lehmann's review in Language, if it's out yet and Polom?'s upcoming review in JIES). One major contribution is Mallory's set of entries on the various archaeological cultures, complete with drawings of graves and body positions. This comes close to taking into consideration a range of theories, but leaves readers their own options. CFJ >Any suggestions on the latest books (or articles) in any language dealing >coprehensively with: >a) the Indo-European Urheimat question and taking into account all the >latest theories; >b) pre Indo-European languages in Europe (in particular taking into account >- pro et contra - Leo Vennemann's theories - Vasconic, Atlantic substate of >insular Celtic, etc.) >Thanks and regards >Frank Rossi >iglesias at axia.it From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Aug 23 19:43:01 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:43:01 -0400 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Aug 1999, Robert Whiting wrote: > Steve is quite correct here. A reconstruction is just that. In > the best case it is only the statistically most probable > original relationship between the forms found in the daughter > languages. The Comparative Method is not quantitative or probabilistic. It's incorrect to describe reconstructed forms as "statistically the most probable". That's not how the Comparative Method works; it doesn't compute numeric probabilities among competing reconstructions. I've seen other variations of the phrase "statistically probable" on this list in contexts which suggest that what the writer means is something like "what we've judged to be most likely." That's not a correct use of the terminology. >> Depending on how much reconstruction of the parent you used, >> could this not be an artifact of the reconstructions? In *PIE, >> certain aspects are considered the innovations of a particular >> daughter language because they do not appear in the other >> daughter languages, and are therefore factored out of the >> reconstruction. If you only have two daughter languages - as you >> did above - how do you identify the innovation versus the >> original form in reconstruction? And if you decide in favor of >> one or the other in reconstruction, it will show up in any >> further use of that reconstruction. (I know this is from an earlier post, but I'll go ahead and answer it here anyway.) Suppose that the proto-language has two phonological categories, e.g. */a/ and */o/. Suppose further that one of the daughter languages merges these categories, and the other doesn't. It will be obvious in the daughter languages which one innovated. > It is not so much a question of innovation versus preservation. > It is a matter of how much innovation there is in each daughter > language. When you have the parent preserved, this can be > measured. What exactly is being measured? This whole line of discussion assumes that "innovation" is something that can be measured. I'd like to know exactly what this means. What is being counted? [...] > will also help to reduce the likelihood of the daughters having > innovated the same way independently (historical linguists really > hate it when this happens because it screws everything up). Not as bad as you think, because you can often tell from the relative chronology that the change must have happened independently. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Mon Aug 23 23:19:38 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 09:19:38 +1000 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 21 Aug 1999 08:35:46 +0300." Message-ID: Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 08:35:46 +0300 (EETDST) From: Robert Whiting On Wed, 18 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: I agree pretty well with everything Robert White said on appraising my method, and I missed the email he is commenting on, so here I will just add a few footnotes. >jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au wrote further: ><> >I'm wondering if there isn't a possible flaw here in using <parent form (reconstructed words...)>>. >Reconstructed words have already made assumptions about the >relationship between the parent and the daughter languages. In >fact they are nothing but a presumed relationship between the >daughter languages. Steve is quite correct here. A reconstruction is just that. In the best case it is only the statistically most probable original relationship between the forms found in the daughter languages. In our case study we were very happy to use the Cantonese and Beijing materials because the mother language is Middle Chinese which is NOT a reconstructed language, although there is some small degree of uncertainty in the source materials. Hence this data formed a check on whether or not our method could produce sensible answers. The answer is 'yes', because it produced a result that was consistent with the perceptions of the scholars in the field, however, it also produced extra illuminations of the relationships between the languages. A book is to be published in the next week or two showing all the results. When I have the correct bibliographical info I will send it to the list. The linguist who worked with us was John Newman(it was his data). In the case of reconstructed parent languages our method would be useful to evaluate competing reconstructions. With only a single reconstruction from two daughter languages the answers may provide an nice generalisation story about the proximity of the daughters but the value of that is in hands of the interpreter. One important aspect of our method is the rigour it forces on the linguist to explain EVERY piece of the data. Generally I find dealing with linguistic data difficult because firstly, it is almost impossible to find a significantly sized set of data in the one place and secondly, the data is invariable incomplete in that the every rule of transformation for each word is present with the data set. I actually think that linguists are very poor data managers and on that dimension are very - how shall I say it - unrigorous. I would have thought it is time for the historical linguistics community to follow the example of the genome people and set up international databases of historical languages, reconstructions, etc using agreed data organisations, so that we can all get the data and agree on what data we are working on. I am trying to initiate such a project for basque. I f there other specific items from Bob's message you want me to comment on please let me know 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 jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 24 00:07:55 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 02:07:55 +0200 Subject: nasal pres / root aor In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, Carol F. Justus wrote: [Quoting me on nas.prs. in Hittite:] > CFJ: > The first Hittite forms have a bit of a typo. The alternation is between > harak(z)i 'perish(es)' and har-nin-k- 'destroy' where the nasal is an > infix. This differs from the tepu- 'small', tep-nu- 'make small, humiliate' > where the more productive nasal is the suffix -nu- (cf. also ar-hi 'I > reach, arrive', ar-nu-mi 'I bring'). The Greek present deik-nu-mi 'I show' > versus -s- aorist edeik-sa 'I showed' has a formally comparable present, > but the aorist still has the causative meaning without the causative > suffix, while Latin nasal of present pa-n-go 'I fasten' beside perfect > pe-pe:gi: 'I have fastened' also doesn't lose its transitive active > character without the nasal. Kronasser's Etymologie der hethitischen > Sprache (with Neu's later index) lists forms. > In Hittite we have two nasal affixes, an infix and a suffix. The Hittite > suffix is productive, the infix not. While there are cognate nasal affixes > elsewhere in IE languages, the individual systems in which we catch them > functioning would seem to have been sufficiently re-worked to call for > explanations as to the nature of the language-specific innovations. > The fact that Hittite -nu- is productive would seem to point to its being > an innovation. Historically, many consider the Wilusa-Alaksandu-Ahhijawa > evidence of the Hittite treaties to argue for a contact with Mycenaean > Achaeans around (W?)Ilium in the early second half of the second millennium > BC. If so, not only are Greek -nu- and Hittite -nu- distinct from the nasal > infix, but also one of many innovations taking place dialectally in > post-PIE times, in this instance probably the Greek form as a result of > contact with Hittite, as the Hittite form is productive in its meaning, the > Greek form less so. > Since we have the data studies of Strunk and others, we would seem to be in > a position now to go on to peal off the layers, distinguishing between > older and more recent features, also features that may be shared between > languages as a result of later contact. The Hittite infixed nasal and > suffixed nasal would seem to be cases in point. These nasals would > certainly not function like the Gothic Weak Class IV and I verbs such as > full-na-n 'fill' (intrs.) and full-ja-n 'fill' (trs.) from fulls 'full', > which show a new system of transitivity alternation. Even if someone wants > to identify Gothic -ja- with an old IE causative form, the Gothic nasal > does not function like an old IE causative, nor is the paradigmatic > alternation inherited. > Carol Thanks for correcting Hitt. hark-zi : har-ni-k-zi (3pl har-nin-k-anzi). I reject the basic difference between this infix -n- and the suffix -nu- (though I see their different degree of productivity as clearly as anybody else). My point is that the -n- is also infixed in the denominative type tep-n-u-zzi 'makes inferior' (tepu- 'small'). The conglomerate -nu- replaced infixed -n- where infixation had become awkward (as in ar-), then also elsewhere. I see no causative value in Gk. deiknumi which means 'show' like the root. This brings a bit of confusion: the Gk. verbs in root + -nu:-/-nu- do not necessarily reflect IE nasal presents since the type became productive. But this is immaterial: the point is that widely there is no palpable causative value to the nasal infix anymore, because the verbal derivation had gone full circle, in that the the old middle voice of the causative which meant, e.g., "I am being caused to listen", had lost both its middle voice value (to the extent that it could take active desinences) and its causative meaning, being thus the perfect durative companion of the root aorist of a root meaning 'listen up'. It is therefore mistaken to demand that a causative component gets subtracted when the nasal disappears in the inflection - that component mostly had disappeared in the nasal present also. This account unites the various types of denominative and deverbative nasal derivatives into a coherent picture. Note that Kronasser and Neu actually give some Hittite examples of factitive nu-verbs losing the factitive meaning when used in the middle voice (dassanu- act. 'make strong', mid. 'become strong'). These then have the same semantic shade as the de-adjectival nasal verbs I quoted from Balto-Slavic and Germanic. The expectation that something productive was an innovation in its nucleus already is not logical. Any old thing may become productive, including anything old. I would not be surprised if some productivity attached to the *-new-/-nu- variant of the nasal present already in PIE, seeing that it is gaining ground in Germanic, Indic and Armenian too. This spread does not look very well like the result of post-PIE contacts. The nasal of fullnan *is* the same thing, only repeated at a later date: A nasal infix structure was replaced by a variant that could be suffixed, and the meaning is that of the middle voice of the factitive, 'become full'. The transitive fulljan is denominative pure and simple: just like diups 'deep' formed diupjan 'make deep', thus 'full' formed 'make full'. This type of factitive, made from the adjective stem directly (with present-forming *-ye/o- in the present stem), must have been somehow functionally opposed to the collective-based variant in *-aH2- (+ *-ye/o- in the prs.): OIc. ny:ja from *newe-ye/o- 'make a new thing' vs. Lat. (re)nova:re from *newa-H2-ye/o- 'make new things'? I believe your "call for explanations as to the nature of the language-specific innovations" in the reworking of the nasal types has been answered. Jens From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Aug 24 02:59:14 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 22:59:14 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I was not after deeper truths in my message. Just trying to figure out what > assumptions were behind this tree model. Sean Crist revealed a lot of that > in his post in response. I don't think the model would yield any direct > conclusions on relative intelligibility - but you might ask Sean. That's correct; as far as I'm aware, Ringe et. al. don't make any statements regarding mutual intelligibility. It's a matter of innovations being shared or not shared. Presumably, two dialects which had recently branched (i.e., undergone innovations which are not shared) would remain mutually intelligible for a while, much as the dialects of modern English are mutually intelligible, despite there having been innovations not shared by all dialects. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Aug 24 07:08:45 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 07:08:45 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >First of all, Wallachia as latinized South Slavic: >Consider that we have many instances of Latinized 'vlach' that does not go >the way of 'Wallachia' and all are earlier. There is everything from the >Pope's "rex blachorum" (1206) to a "villa vlacha' (1295) to "Vlachii" and the >"Blasii" and "Blachi" mentioned in the Hungarian Gesta (1100's). (And of >course in one of the Egil sagas we see "Blocmannland" - looking like it came >down the same path.) My best information is that /valachia/ as Vlachs first >appears a bit later (@1300's?). duNay says the first mention of the place we >call "Walachia" happens with the Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz (1415-1480). >So what happened here? The palatalized /vl/ Palatalized vl-? >gets dropped suddenly in Latin >after all those years and Latin and German return to /val/? Does that make >sense? Why not? Vl- as an initial cluster doesn't come naturally to many languages (e.g. Romanian) and may be changed to bl- or val- in borrowing. >Here's another explanation. There were multiple forms of the word going >round in the many years before 'Wallachia" shows up about . duNay says that >Vlach is "walach" in German. And the OED shows that 'vlachs' first entered >English as "wolocks" and "wallacks" as well as the expected "vlachs" and >"walachs" from the latin. If the Slavic "volocks" did not survive >palatalization, the German version of it should have. It would then make >more sense to see "Walachia" or "Wallachia" as: >1) a latinization of either the earlier pre-pal. Slavic "volocks" or >"volochs." (But not East Slavic "volox"). Or a form that survived >palatalization with the initial vowel because it was a proper name. I really don't understand your use of the word palatalization. >2) a latinization of "wal/a/ch" (adj) as it sometimes appears in Germanic or >as it might have been borrowed back early from the Slavic. >Both of these seem to fit better, given that "vlach-" was already established >in Latin well before "Wallachia" appears. They also acknowledge the original >western form of the word with the initial vowel intact. >At this point, I won't go into the fact that there is another form of Vlach >that appears early in Southern Slavic, "vlah-", that does not even include >-x(U)- that might be reflected from say "Volcae" but not from the OHG >"uualha". /x/ is the voiceless velar fricative sometimes written or . >I wrote: ><> >You wrote: ><> >Well, the new testament is pretty heavy with "Romans" isn't it? >I suspect there was opportunity enough if that's what the word meant at that >point in time. The word at that point in time meant "Romance speaker", while Ulfila uses "Roman" (i.e. at the time and place, a person speaking Greek). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From BMScott at stratos.net Tue Aug 24 07:45:24 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 03:45:24 -0400 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > As far as the borrowing, "galc = thicken cloth, fulling; > from the English walk, waulk" (McBain's Etym Dict - Scot > Gaelic) would be likely a loan from AS. Just to keep the record straight, the OED s.v. walk(2) observes that the word is not found in English in this sense until the 14th c. So far as I can discover, is a specifically Sc.Gael. borrowing. > B_T_W, I just noticed that MacFarlaine gives a different, > much more local explanation for "Gall" as foreigner - > "Gall: foreigner, a Scottish Lowlander The Dict. of the Irish Lang. gives the following senses in Old and Middle Ir., of which the first is earliest: (1) a Gaul, (apparently sometimes equated with Frank); (2) a Scandinavian invader; (3) an Anglo-Norman, an Irishman of Norman descent; (d) a foreigner. Dinneen says that it was applied in succession to Gauls, Franks, Danes, Normans, and English. There appears to be no reason to think that is anything other than 'a Gaul' in origin. Brian M. Scott From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 24 08:08:17 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 04:08:17 EDT Subject: How new hypotheses grow Message-ID: In a message dated 8/24/99 12:28:35 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi is clearly offended by what I have written. In part, I think the tone is self-evident for what it is, and requires little response. But the misunderstandings and misrepresentations I will try to answer to some degree. The major and underlying difference is that I am much more consciously aware, or at least more concerned by the fact that "methods" can yield wrong results, can be misapplied, etc. etc. I have contributed a number of messages pointing out where I think if we can make the data structures of our field of historical linguistics more easily available, we may avoid some of the "kook" noise, or at least shorten the lifetime of fanciful creations which are without support. I have also contributed many messages pointing out ways in which we may be able to strengthen our tools, and I would prefer that we in the field of historical linguistics do exactly that. I believe the kinds of discussions in which people throw theories (note! theories) of scientific method at each other, neglecting the sociology of how new hypotheses are actually discovered, are not profitable. I believe it is actually fairly well known that "philosophy of science" often makes errors in disregarding the "history of science". So I believe here also. *** Here a couple of the kinds of challenges I favor. I am sure experts in particular language families can devise others better than these. One good challenge would be for historical linguists to figure out what kinds of data pattern studies would serve to bring forth evidence that could establish an Indo-European family based ONLY on Albanian and some one other IE language. (Or which could place Albanian in the IE family tree, where Ringe's team said their tools could not do it.) In other words, take instances in which languages are known to be related, and ask how could we have known that given much less data then we in fact do have; what methods of comparison and reconstruction are robust against such reductions of data sets? Another good challenge: A statement attributed to Ives Goddard some years ago will also illustrate a good domain for posing more challenging problems to improve our methods. In substance it was: [Wiyot and Yurok are clearly related to Algonquian, but our traditional Comparative Method cannot establish that.] It is many years ago now, and I am sure someone else could report this better. The question arises then, why is it that the best historical linguists of American Indian languages were quite thoroughly convinced AT SOME POINT that these languages were related, yet the standard kind of evidence was somehow lacking? What was it that they found so thoroughly convincing? That is crucial, because it just might possibly suggest the development of new tools which can penetrate deeper. Experts' intuitions have a wonderful way of often, not always, leading to demonstrable claims. Intuition is not formless, it can be studied and analyzed (after which we of course no longer call it intuition, and conveniently forget in many cases where it came from). Nor are such successful intuitions MERELY the tiny fraction of "guesses" with no foundation, which happened by chance to turn out true. In the most valuable cases, what we discover is a new kind of evidence or way of handling data so that it becomes evidence. Also, and equally important, what was it that the Amerindian specialists felt at that earlier time point was not measuring up to needed standards in the applicability of the traditional comparative method to the data (or facts)? If we discover that that kind of evidence, while of course our standard and most convenient kind, is not absolutely necessary to a convincing case, then we will have opened new paths to gathering evidence in the future. (Saying this does NOT imply I want to "relax" any standards whatsoever, or be "lax" in any way whatsoever, it is simply part of the process of discovering EMPIRICALLY what kinds of data sets and tools are likely to yield arguments which in the longer run lead to more evidence and to proofs. Just like the tools we now use and TAKE FOR GRANTED, except that while a tool is being developed it is not taken for granted, and of course should not be.) Well, there are two of the challenges I think would improve our tools, if these challenges can be met well. *** Mr Whiting clearly does NOT understand what I have written. He apparently mistakes my attempts to counter what I regard as the illegitimate parts of critiques as attempts to defend claims which I have no wish to defend and have not defended. (Ruhlen, see quotation below.) Whiting also attributes to me, in magisterial tones, a "spectacular lack of knowledge of what a hypothesis is." Quite on the contrary, I know full well what a hypothesis is, and I have absolutely no wish to support any kook claims, which Mr. Whiting at least by innuendo seems to attribute to me. BUT... I HAVE ALSO grown up in a family with two parents who were professional researchers, I am one myself, and I learned very early how the supposed scientific method can be manipulated to give the appearance of certainty where there is none, EITHER to "prove" or to "disprove" a hypothesis. I have learned how often people substitute "Straw man" hypotheses which they can easily disprove, instead of the actual hypothesis someone else really was proposing, which they cannot so easily disprove. I have learned to not consider that honest. In short, I simply do not assume that those who use the scientific method are completely unbiased, perfect judges, or somehow gods above the rest of humanity. That in no way means that I discount the importance of the scientific method. The latter does not in any way follow from the former, and anyone who thinks so has not understood the balanced sophistication of the reasoning I have presented. I do not advocate extremes. The fact that someone makes a mistake on one item in no way leads me logically to conclude that they are wrong on everything else as well. If (as everyone now acknowledges, it is a common saying) we all know that statistics can lie, then why should the requirements of our traditional "comparative method" be beyond question? Particular statistical measures are known to be appropriate only to problems of particular kinds of structure. The same must almost certainly be true in a sense of our traditional comparative method, that it works well in some situations, poorly in others, and gives the wrong result in yet other situations. (I think a workbook in historical linguistics which I used years ago in teaching actually said explicitly that if the rules were followed correctly with a particular data set involving languages of China, that the answer would be a wrong answer.) *** Here is merely one of many examples where Mr. Whiting does not understand what I wrote, or chooses to argue against a "Straw Man" instead of against what I actually wrote: I wrote: >As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent >statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such >conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might >be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). [that was to contrast with Ruhlen, who I believe is less explicit about that. A small digression to clarify Greenberg's method. All Greenberg's work does is demonstrate NON-relatedness, not relatedness. Or rather, his method seeks the greatest SEPARATIONS, language groupings whose relationship (there by assumption not by proof) is the MOST DISTANT. I know this statement may seem paradoxical since Greenberg is famous for claiming that all of Amerind except Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut is one large family. What that really means is that Greenberg's method cannot establish any great cleavage among the remaining Amerind languages, they seem to be a large number of language families with overlapping similarities without evidence dividing them into a very few super-super-families. Whether that reflects chance similarities or true genetic relations is beyond Greenberg's method. He simply assumes everything is related. We can use his data collections (of course with improvements and corrections wherever possible) whether or not we agree with that assumption.] Later I wrote: >(I am much less familiar with Ruhlen than with Greenberg.) to which Whiting remarked: >Then you should perhaps familiarize yourself with his methodology >before you try to defend it. I did not defend Ruhlen's methodology in any terms having to do with proving a hypothesis. This is a clear misunderstanding or misrepresentation. It is an example of what I call "Straw Man" reasoning. If I HAD tried to defend Ruhlen's methodology by claiming Ruhlen was doing any kind of legitimate hypothesis testing my logic would be easy to defeat, because Ruhlen has not done so. But Whiting today treats me AS IF I had done so (that is the Straw Man), and defeats that instead of arguing against what I actually did say. Which does not address IN ANY WAY what I was actually saying in this part of the discussion. I had answered a comment by Larry Trask: >>This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is >>enough to render Ruhlen's work vacuous, as follows: >Not so, since Ruhlen can be treated as involved in hypothesis >FORMATION not hypothesis testing. to which Whiting remarks: >On the contrary, Ruhlen is not formulating a hypothesis (we all >should know how to do this by now: one starts with the data and >then develops a hypothesis sure, so far, that is what we do, and in the case of Ket-Athabaskan (see below), that is I believe what Ruhlen did also. continuing: [a hypothesis] >that accounts for the data [all the data]). No, that last part is not anywhere near the early stages of hypothesis formation, and many hypotheses which are considered by the majority of professionals in a field to be strongly confirmed do not account for ALL of the data. In fact, perhaps no hypothesis EVER accounts for ALL of the data. Attempting to insist on that too early in the process puts a brake on all new discovery, by condemning the very process which has been known, throughout the history of science, to yield new discoveries... Namely, the WILLINGNESS TO SUSPEND JUDGEMENT FOR A WHILE, TO WORK WITH HYPOTHESES WHICH ARE NOT YET STRONGLY CONFIRMED. This is ONE of the two major illnesses of the wars in modern historical linguistics, the eagerness to condemn tentative hypotheses too early. The other major illness is just the opposite, of course, that is, the eagerness of some people to propose some supposedly earth-shaking new discovery, even if they really have not much to suggest it is worth pursuing, simply because they are wannabe "discoverers". Of course, we cannot "know" in advance how particular hypotheses will turn out when we DO figure out how to test them. Often, we do not even know exactly how to state a hypothesis formally at first (and therefore we do not know what its negative, its corresponding null hypothesis, would be). By BREAKING the continuum of growth of new hypotheses, known in the history of science, we hamstring the development of new knowledge. Here is I think a paragraph from Mr. Whiting which illustrates the inability of many linguists to grant that "hypothesis" is an appropriate term for ideas through a very broad range, from shortly after initial glimmers, through initial formal proposal (with as yet no test), through until repeated tests have been passed and we have a confirmed hypothesis. >If Ruhlen can be considered to be involved in hypothesis >FORMATION not hypothesis testing, then the hypothesis being >formed is simply a hypothesis according to definition 4 above >("a mere guess or assumption"), not a hypothesis according to >definition 1 (a scientific hypothesis). Of course, there is a difference between those two, but there is also a continuum linking them. Whiting continues in that same paragraph: >Collecting data is not hypothesis formation; >it is a prerequisite to hypothesis formation. Whiting seems no longer willing to grant that anything prior to his favored use of "hypothesis" could also be a "hypothesis". Because the collecting of data is also a POSTREQUISITE to most hypothesis formation, because hypotheses are formed at VERY EARLY STAGES of most successful discoveries or investigations. >And the data on which a hypothesis is based cannot be >used to test the hypothesis because that is simply circular. That is actually done all the time. People form hypotheses based on a set of data, then apply a statistical test to the set of data, including in it the same set of data from which they derived their hypothesis, though hopefully in better practice at least an expanded set of data in those cases where it is possible to obtain more data. That is not sufficient of course, but it is a universal procedure, and it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. Should a presentation of evidence for the Indo-European language family systematically exclude all of the most convincing data, the data which originally led to the tentative hypothesis? Of course not. In another paragraph, Whiting writes: >It is true that many (most?) scientific hypotheses start as >guesses. I'm happy with that sentence. >But not every guess is a scientific hypothesis. I would have thought NONE of them are, the way he was distinguishing "guess" from "hypothesis" earlier. >While anything is possible, not everything is probable. >Basically, no evidence, no scientific hypothesis. But the presence of evidence does not guarantee a "scientific hypothesis", presumably a term referring to a hypothesis which is being subjected to scientific testing and is at least quite a distance along the path of confirmation, if not confirmed. Initial glimmers and guesses are ALSO based on evidence. Data does not cease to be "evidence" merely because a hypothesis referring to that data is not yet securely confirmed. Not all "evidence" turns out to be valid evidence for what it was being used as "evidence" for. But it was still used as "evidence". (basically a "showing" used in arguing in favor of something) *** Concerning "Lookalikes" I responded to Trask's: >>and quite apart from his failure to realize that lookalikes do >>not constitute evidence of any kind. by saying: >Disagree flatly, unless defined circularly so that "lookalikes" >means more than it says, namely so that it means "lookalikes >which are known to be unrelated as cognates". >If it actually means "items which look alike in sound and >meaning", then of course such comparisons DO constitute >PRELIMINARY evidence. Any such preliminary evidence can be >discounted by showing that the resemblances are secondary and >late, or that they manifest a type of sound symbolism, or in >other ways. Whiting writes: >To the extent that lookalikes are a fact and facts can be used as >evidence, this is true. [as in the formation of the initial hypothesis of the Indo-European language family, which was first a guess, then a tentative hypothesis (no longer merely a guess), and gradually became more and more strongly confirmed...] Whiting continues: >But the question is and remains, what >are they evidence of. The null hypothesis is that they are >evidence that similar sounding words with similar meanings occur >in the world's languages by pure chance. Wow, this is strange. "The" [unique] null hypothesis? No, that is NOT the null hypothesis to a claim of particular lookalikes being real cognates. That would rather be the null hypothesis to counter a hypothesis that similar sounding words with similar meanings do not (ever) occur in the world's languages by pure chance. Rather, the null hypothesis corresponding to a hypothesis that a PARTICULAR set of look-alikes in the Indo-European languages were evidence that they constituted a family, would be that those particular similarities (of the look-alikes) arose from some other cause, (including possibly chance resemblances or sound symbolism but not limited to those, since this is merely the null hypothesis), and in particular did not arise from descent from a parent language. In his statement of the scientific method, Whiting says ("3" is formulation of a hypothesis to account for the data, 1 and 2 are identification of a problem and collection of relevant data): >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. Unless one uses words in such a way that ANY basis for formulating a hypothesis constitutes either (1) or (2) by definition, then this is not a valid description of how science proceeds. The basis for formulating a hypothesis is simply outside the scientific method, a hypothesis can come from anywhere at all. It is how one handles the careful accumulation of data afterwards that makes for valid science vs. sheer speculation. *** Mr. Whiting really does seem to want to avoid discussion of the possibility of improving the tools of historical linguistics. He says: >Many people ... point to the inadequacy of the tools > used in historical linguistics. Although to me this sounds like a version of "the poor workman blames his tools", [Notice that I at least phrased it just the reverse of that, not blaming the tools, but looking to ways to strengthen them and to add new tools, so we can perhaps address some range of problems which our current crop of traditional comparativists say are beyond possibility. It is only reasonable to assume that we can almost always make SOME progress of this kind, in almost any field...] Whiting continues: >the primary problem of historical >linguistics is not the inadequacy of the tools, but a lack of >hard data to use the tools on. I can even agree with the above! But not with the following: >When the data is available, the >tools to investigate it will arise. Because what his previous comment meant was that with more data, the EXISTING tools would be adequate. (Since there would be no impetus then to develop newer and more powerful tools, his last statement is counter-indicated.) *** Since Mr. Whiting illegitimately to tag me with being a defender of Ruhlen's methodology (the more easily to attack my arguements?), when I had NOT defended Ruhlen's methodology as concerns hypothesis testing, let me now specify the one place where I am most willing to give up some of my time to read what Ruhlen has written. Ruhlen has suggested that there may be a relation between Ket (Yeniseian, in Siberia) and Athabaskan. Is this worth spending any time on? (That is the ONLY question I would ask at such an early stage of any hypothesis, NEVER "is it proven?".) Well, given that almost everyone agrees the Amerindians of various groups are related to peoples of NE Asia, and given that the Athabaskans are most likely a relatively recent set of migrants from Asia, followed later only by Eskimo-Aleuts, and crucially given that there has not been much work on such possible links (I think not, anyhow), it is not impossible, and quite plausible, that there might be some such relation. My first question would be whether look-alikes are indeed significantly easier to find between Athabaskan and Ket than between Athabaskan and other languages of NE Asia. Perhaps Greenberg's focusing on the lateness of Eskimo-Aleut and Athabaskan migration to the Americas, as compared with other Amerindian, has posed a problem in such a way that one of the small number of people willing to look for distant language relationships might happen to see enough look-alikes to get the beginning glimmers of a hypothesis. That's how much of real science works, starting with glimmers. I have absolutely no idea whether this one will pan out or not. It is inherently conceivable enough, and Ruhlen has no vested interest specifically in Ket as opposed to any other language of NE Asia, that if he judges Athabaskan to be more similar to Ket than to other languages of that area, it warrants listening. New hypotheses must come from somewhere, and they often must break the framework of our established thinking. What makes me saddest is that too many of those who have taken on the responsibility of carrying our society's knowledge in historical linguistics seem to forget our roots in simple observation, and that those roots do not go away as we add sophistication to our observation and more and more tools for the testing of hypotheses. Remember the saying: "Science = self-conscious common sense" Sincerely yours, Lloyd Anderson *** For me, "Straw Man" has a very negative connotation, I learned the term in the context of argumentation in which the debater is not actually debating what was really proposed, but something else, the more easily to appear to defeat it. In a later part of his message, Whiting says: >Discrediting STRAW MAN claims (= null hypothesis) >is part of the method, in which he appears to be treating Straw Man claims as equal to null hypotheses. Quite on the contrary, in the usage I know, "straw man" claims are so named precisely because they are NOT the real man, they are NOT what anyone was claiming, and it is the null hypothesis OPPOSITE of such a straw-man claim which the debater is trying to make seem more reasonable. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 09:55:46 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 10:55:46 +0100 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > My questions were specifically addressed to the assumptions behind the > Stammbaum. According to Sean Crist's response, that graph appears to be > based on shared innovations over time rather than intelligibility. Yes. All linguistic trees are based upon shared innovations, the only plausible basis we've ever discovered for constructing trees. Intelligibility is not a factor: it cannot be quantified in any useful way. > That is why after Anatolian splits off on the Stammbaum, we are told > the appropriate language for what remains is "the innovations shared > by all the IE branches except Anatolian". Yes, providing you accept the Herkunfthypothese. This hypothesis holds that all of the several features absent in Anatolian but present in all other branches were absent from broad PIE and were innovations in narrow PIE after the split of Anatolian. But there is another view, the Schwundhypothese, which holds that all these features were present in broad PIE but then lost in Anatolian. I'm afraid I don't know if anybody is defending the Schwundhypothese today. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Aug 24 12:12:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 08:12:54 EDT Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa Message-ID: In a message dated 8/24/99 12:47:24 AM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> No, we don't have to presuppose that. Language as a cultural feature could have arisen independently with the Neanderthals. <> I think that this might be your problem here. At this point, we have no idea when a genetic ability for language would have 'emerged' (technical term.) In fact, we don't even know what one would look like - though people have been looking for physiological attributes for awhile. Humans quite before Neanderthal apparently had the 'brains' for it. The Duke group offered plausible evidence that Neanderthals had the physical ability in their jaws and mouths to 'speak' with the complexity required to emit human 'language' sounds, which apes don't have. This work is not really statistically settled. Right now, it remains that by far the #1 way to identify "a genetic ability for language" is to find language spoken. Otherwise, there is nothing to be gained by using those terms in this context. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 12:44:58 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 13:44:58 +0100 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree: correction In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In an earlier posting, I remarked that the Penn tree for IE recognized no Italo-Celtic grouping. This was true for the original publication. However, I've just been informed off-list that the Penn group have more recently produced a revised version of their tree, which *does* recognize such a grouping. My apologies for misleading you, but I am a little concerned by the news. As I understand it, the change was produced by adding only a single character to the set of characters used. If this is right, it suggests that the approach used at Penn is somewhat less than robust. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 13:34:17 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 14:34:17 +0100 Subject: Quebec French nasal vowels. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca wrote: [somebody else] >> As Larry Trask mentioned, this is original and authentic (but archaeic) >> French pronunciation that got lost by convergence elsewhere. > This is unbelievable. Arguing from authority is the weakest argument > of all, and since the authority himself (Larry Trask) was open and > honest enough to begin his posting on the subject by writing "I know > nothing of Quebecois", I fail to see the purpose of quoting him on > the subject. His comments on the dating of the en/an merger are > quite correct, by the way --he certainly knows something of French. Perhaps I might clarify this a bit. It is true that I know nothing of Quebec French. It is also true that I know something of the history of European French, but I am hardly a specialist here, and the observations I made in my earlier posting were taken from standard reference sources in my office -- which I think I identified. I am certainly no authority here, but then I don't think the anonymous person quoted above was really presenting me as an authority: he was merely quoting me. Now, what I said in my earlier posting was the following. It is reliably reported that the contrast between the vowels of and still exists today in some varieties of European French, even though the contrast has been gradually disappearing in French for centuries. Given the reports I saw that these vowels are distinguished today in Quebec French, I *surmised* (this is the verb I used) that the contrast had simply failed to be lost so far in Quebec, just as in certain parts of France. That's all. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Aug 24 13:37:16 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:37:16 +0300 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Sean Crist wrote: > On Sat, 21 Aug 1999, Robert Whiting wrote: >> Steve is quite correct here. A reconstruction is just that. In >> the best case it is only the statistically most probable >> original relationship between the forms found in the daughter >> languages. > The Comparative Method is not quantitative or probabilistic. It's > incorrect to describe reconstructed forms as "statistically the most > probable". That's not how the Comparative Method works; it doesn't > compute numeric probabilities among competing reconstructions. And it is incorrect to describe "In the best case it [a reconstruction] is only the statistically most probable original relationship between the forms found in the daughter languages" as a statement about the comparative method. Please read what is said before going into knee-jerk reactions. Nothing was said about the comparative method. The comparative method doesn't compute anything. If you want a paraphrase of the comparative method, it is "similar things that are in complementary distribution are often aspects of the same thing." Although the comparative method is one of the major tools of historical linguistics it is not the only one and it does not give a "best case" reconstruction. In general, it doesn't give you a reconstruction at all. What it gives you is the idea that there is something that two different but similar forms that do not contrast could have both developed from. It doesn't tell you what that something is. If you have /b/ and /f/ in complementary distribution in two languages (or even in the same language) you can use the comparative method to show that they might be descended from the same phoneme. You can call that phoneme */b/ or */f/ or *[labial consonanat], but the only thing that you can tell about it phonologically is that there should be some reasonable path from it to both /b/ and /f/. But don't automatically associate "reconstruction" with "comparative method" in your mind. And keep in mind that the discussion was about reconstructions in Middle Chinese which is an attested language so there may very well be statistical means of arriving at the best reconstruction. > I've seen other variations of the phrase "statistically probable" on this > list in contexts which suggest that what the writer means is something > like "what we've judged to be most likely." That's not a correct use of > the terminology. This is doubtless true, but then practically everybody plays fast and loose with terms like "likely" and "probable". And people often use the term "statistically probable" without having real statistics available, in which case they usually mean that they know of a lot of cases where some particular event has happened and only a few where it hasn't. >> It is not so much a question of innovation versus preservation. >> It is a matter of how much innovation there is in each daughter >> language. When you have the parent preserved, this can be >> measured. > What exactly is being measured? This whole line of discussion assumes > that "innovation" is something that can be measured. I'd like to know > exactly what this means. What is being counted? You seem to be confused about what the topic of discussion is. Basically it is about measuring pathways of change between two daughter languages and a parent to see which of the daughters is closer to the parent *when all three are known*. The method was described in a message posted by Jon Patrick on Thu, 12 Aug 1999 (see http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/ wa?A2=ind9908&L=indo-european&O=T&P=11528 for the message; note put this URL back together before using it). Essentially the method is like counting up the little numbers between the stars on your Texaco road map to figure which route between two places is the shortest. My comments were to the effect that the method could only be effective if all three languages were known and reconstruction of the parent was minimal (and not limited to the comparative method). > [...] >> will also help to reduce the likelihood of the daughters having >> innovated the same way independently (historical linguists really >> hate it when this happens because it screws everything up). > Not as bad as you think, because you can often tell from the relative > chronology that the change must have happened independently. Which is why it is easier to do historical linguistics with languages that have a history. But if you only have, say, the modern forms, as in many African or Polynesian languages, it is almost impossible to tell common retention from independent innovation from influence of one of the daughters on the other. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 13:42:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 14:42:08 +0100 Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > Just one point on the discussions. > It is EVEN possible > (though not the simplest explanation from some points > of view, Nature need not be simple) > that Neanderthals had several languages, > from independent sources, If Neandertals had language at all -- and this is debated -- then they undoubtedly had a number of different languages at any given time, just like us. > and these languages were separately inherited > by different groups of modern humans. Sorry, but I can't see this. The position of the Neandertals in our family tree is still much debated, but the majority view still sees them as *not* being among our direct ancestors. So, if Neandertals had language, then surely so did the common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans, and no appeal to "borrowing" from Neandertals is necessary or appropriate. Anyway, our ancestors could not have acquired language unless they already had a language faculty. And, if they had a language faculty, then surely they would already have possessed language themselves. > So inheritance from Neanderthals > does NOT necessarily imply monogenesis? No, but inheritance (or borrowing) of language from Neandertals strains my credulity to the breaking point. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 14:07:44 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 15:07:44 +0100 Subject: Hypothesis formation vs. testing In-Reply-To: <75ea2350.24ed5f7c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: [LT] >> I fully agree that the question `Are all languages related?' cannot be >> answered at present. I further believe that we will never be able to >> answer this question by purely linguistic means. >> However, there are people who disagree, one of the most prominent being >> Merritt Ruhlen. Ruhlen wishes to embrace the conclusion `All languages >> are related.' > As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent > statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such > conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might > be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). The assumption that all languages are related is out of order. The assumption that all languages *might* be related is hardly an assumption at all, and in any case such an idea is excluded by no one. > Greenberg's method of comparison serves to find the CLOSEST > resemblances (merely that, CLOSEST). In the Americas, his method > leads him to the conclusion (no surprise) that Eskimo-Aliut is not > closely related to any other Amerindian languages, and that > Athabaskan / Na-Dene (with outliers) is not closely related to any > other Amerindian languages, (though conceivably not as distant from > them as Eskimo-Aliut ?). This account of Greenberg's work makes it appear to resemble certain far more rigorous work in progress elsewhere, such as at Cambridge University. The Cambridge group are working with a variety of algorithms which can, in principle, determine degree of closeness, and which can hence produce unrooted trees illustrating relative linguistic distance. But these algorithms are utterly incapable of distinguishing relatedness and unrelatedness. If, for example, you run one of the algorithms with a bunch of IE languages plus Basque and Chinese, the result is a tree showing Basque and Chinese as the most divergent members -- that's all. If the same is true of Greenberg's highly informal approach, then G cannot distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness, and he has no business setting up imaginary "families". > His actual conclusions are about relative UNRELATEDNESS of language > families (notice, not about absolute unrelatedness, which he does > not claim his method has the power to evaluate). Just as well. It is logically impossible to prove absolute unrelatedness, and G would be mad to undertake such a thing. > Beyond that, Greenberg's methods do NOT enable him to establish any > similar degree of unrelatedness among the remaining languages of the > Americas. > I hope I have stated that carefully enough, to make obvious that it > is a matter of degree, not absolutes, and that Greenberg's method > actually demonstrates the points of SEPARATION rather than the > points of UNION. Fine, but then G's methods do not suffice to set up language families -- even though that is exactly what he does. > Greenberg's method is potentially useful in that it is likely to > reveal some deep language family relationships which were not > previously suspected, I said exactly this on page 389 of my textbook. > AS LONG AS we do not introduce systematic biases > which overpower whatever residual similarities still exist > despite all of the changes which obscure those deep relationships. I'd be interested to know just what `systematic biases' you have in mind. > In other words, mere noise in the data, or dirty data, > if the noise or dirt are random, should not be expected to selectively > bias our judgements of closeness of resemblance... No. I can't agree. Suppose two languages A and B are genuinely but distantly related. In this case, it is at least conceivable that false positives (spurious matches) would be counterbalanced by false negatives (the overlooking of genuine evidence). But suppose the two languages are not in fact related at all. In this case, false negatives cannot exist, because there is no genuine evidence to be overlooked. Hence the only possible errors are false positives: spurious evidence. And the great danger is that the accumulation of false positives will lead to the positing of spurious relationships. Many of G's critics have hammered him precisely on this point. > [and we can study how we make such judgements to try to strengthen > this component of Greenberg's method, to strengthen their robustness > against noisy data and our mental failings of judgement] In their present form, G's methods appear to me to have no robustness at all. Words are similar if Greenberg says they are. And languages are related if Greenberg judges that he has found enough similarities between them. There are no objective criteria or procedures at all, and there is no possibility that anyone else could replicate G's work. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 15:03:28 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:03:28 +0100 Subject: Hypothesis formation vs. testing In-Reply-To: <75ea2350.24ed5f7c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > Back to Trask: >> Now, in order to go about this, I maintain, [Ruhlen] should start with the >> negation of this statement as his null hypothesis, and then go on to >> show that there is so much evidence against this null hypothesis that it >> is untenable and must be rejected. But that's not what he does. > The last paragraph above is in complete contradiction to what Larry > Trask says he agrees with ("I fully agree"...). If one believes it > is not possible to test a proposition, then it is NOT REASONABLE to > ask anyone else to test it. One cannot have this both ways. Not at all. I myself do not believe that monogenesis can possibly be investigated by purely linguistic methods, and so I have no interest at all in trying to investigate it. Ruhlen, in great contrast, *does* believe that monogenesis can be investigated by linguistic methods. OK, fine: he's entitled to believe this if he wants. But, then, if he wants to conduct such an investigation, he must go about this in a principled and rigorous manner. However, he doesn't -- not at all. So I have every right to criticize his work, not because his beliefs are different from mine, but because his procedures are unacceptable. I have *not* asked Ruhlen to test monogenesis. I have merely said that (a) I don't believe it can be tested, and (b) Ruhlen's procedures are wholly inadequate for conducting a test of anything. No contradiction there. [LT] >> Instead, he *starts* with the hypothesis `All languages are related', >> and then proceeds to assemble what he sees as evidence in support of >> this last hypothesis. Amazingly enough [;-)]. he is able to find such >> evidence. > So far, this is legitimate in principle [but on practice, see below] > IF the purpose is to establish the plausibility of a hypothesis > (as distinct from testing it, NOTICE!). But this is absolutely *not* what Ruhlen believes he is doing. Read what he has written. Ruhlen plainly believes that he has not merely tested monogenesis but proved it. He says so in plain English. > This is how almost all hypotheses are first established as hypotheses, > simply by accumulating suggestive, anecdotal, case-study evidence, > in contexts in which we do not even know how to estimate chance > very well. But we can certainly estimate chance well enough to include estimates of chance in our investigations, crude though these may be at present. Ruhlen, however, simply excludes chance altogether in his work. As far as he is concerned, chance resemblances arise so rarely that they can be *completely* discounted, and therefore *all* resemblances must be cognates. This is not a secret: look at what he does, or merely read pp. 12-14 of his book The Origin of Language (Wiley). > The contradictory of the strong claim (all related) is that there > are at least two languages which are not related to each other > genetically. I would doubt that Ruhlen had evidence to exclude this > possibility, or that if asked clearly, he would say so. You don't have to wonder about Ruhlen's position. Read what he says on p. 213 of his book, for example. Ruhlen asserts that it is *proved* that all languages are related. > After all (trivially) there are languages for which there are only > one or two words attested, and one can go on from there with very > little work to find other cases where I think Ruhlen would grant > there is not even a loose probability based on the data itself to > establish any relationship. I'm afraid you are putting words into Ruhlen's mouth. Ruhlen, so far as I am aware, has *never* admitted in print that there exist any languages at all which are certainly, probably or even possibly not related to all the others. If anybody can locate such a passage in R's published work, I will be glad to hear about it. [LT] >> This fundamental failure to understand proper methodology is enough to >> render Ruhlen's work vacuous, > Not so, since Ruhlen can be treated as involved in hypothesis > FORMATION not hypothesis testing. This is plainly *not* what Ruhlen sees himself as doing. [LT] >> quite apart from the vast number of >> egregious errors in the material he cites as evidence, > Now THAT is quite another matter, and when present in very large > quantity, not merely slight differences from the analysis an expert in > a particular language would offer but more serious, complete > misunderstandings vitiating completely any use of particular data... > it does discredit the work as a whole, and can quite legitimately, > even without absolute proof of its wrong-headedness, > lead reasonable people to pay no more attention to it. > But note carefully the caveat above. It is NOT sufficient merely to > provide minor improvements of detail to the presentation, > to discredit the work. An expert can ALWAYS provide minor > improvements. That itself shows nothing at all. We are not talking about minor improvements. At least as far as Basque is concerned, the errors in Ruhlen's data are so awful as to be beyond salvation. Anyway, he never pays any attention to my corrections: he just tells me I must be wrong because his comparisons are so compelling. [LT] >> and quite apart >> from his failure to realize that lookalikes do not constitute evidence >> of any kind. > Disagree flatly, unless defined circularly so that "lookalikes" > means more than it says, namely so that it means "lookalikes which > are known to be unrelated as cognates". No. By `lookalikes', I mean words or morphemes which, in the opinion of some investigator, are similar in form and meaning. This is in no way circular, though it is certainly highly objective, at least until tightened up by the provision of fully explicit criteria for adjudging similarity. > If it actually means "items which look alike in sound and meaning", > then of course such comparisons DO constitute PRELIMINARY evidence. Sure, but this isn't very interesting. We can always find lookalikes between any arbitrary languages. > Any such preliminary evidence can be discounted by showing > that the resemblances are secondary and late, > or that they manifest a type of sound symbolism, > or in other ways. All of which I have in fact done, in Ruhlen's case, to no avail. > It was lookalikes in grammar and vocabulary which led to > the original hypothesis of the relatedness of the Indo-European > languages. Some of these turned out to be true cognates, > some turned out not to be cognates, merely chance lookalikes. > But the IE hypothesis thus preliminarily established withstood the > discounting of some of the lookalikes as non-cognates > and the reaffirmation of others a true cognates (whatever the > terminology used at the time). Sorry, but I can't see this as a fair characterization of the discovery of IE. What did the trick was not just miscellaneous lookalikes but the observation of shared morphological paradigms. > Once again, I wish to urge us back to the FACTS. > And those FACTS include whatever we can establish about how > each of our tools works, where it works well and where it fails, > how deep historically each tool can push us with languages > of certain types or with language changes of certain types, > and whatever we can establish about new tools we have not yet > systematically used (such as explicit paths of historical > change in sound systems and in semantic spaces, and metrics > of distances along such paths of change...). > We get nowhere by repeating the discrediting of STRAW MAN > claims, by holding hypothesis formation to standards of absolute > hypothesis testing, by counting minor corrections and improvements > to data as completely discrediting use of the data when they do not, > etc. etc. and so forth. > The field is at an impasse in these discussions, > until we return the discussion to an empirical basis. > Pure philosophy will not get us much progress. And neither will the accumulation of lookalikes. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 15:20:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:20:08 +0100 Subject: Premature final judgements In-Reply-To: <65505b55.24ed63f3@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: [LT] >> It doesn't matter that there is evidence in support of Nostratic: what >> matters is that there is insufficient evidence to reject unrelatedness. > Wrong here. It DOES matter. Very much so. It makes the question > worth investigating with better data and better tools. Clarification. What I meant was this: from the point of view of accepting or rejecting Nostratic, it does not matter that there exists some evidence to support the proposal, because there is insufficient evidence to reject unrelatedness. That's all. > The problem with the strict absolutists (which Larry Trask is behaving > as in these discussions) is that they think we have to render FINAL > JUDGEMENTS on whether a hypothesis is proven or not > at every step along the way. They have little room for the long > withholding or deferring of judgement. Nonsense, I'm afraid. First, I have no idea why you want to label me a "strict absolutist", whatever that means. Second, it is quite false that I demand, or have ever demanded, final judgements on any hypothesis "at every step along the way". This is a travesty of my position. Where do you get such ideas? All I have ever done is to point out that certain data are faulty, that certain procedures are unacceptable, and that certain much-trumpeted conclusions are unsubstantiated. I see nothing wrong with this, and I don't apologize for it. > If we had to render final judgement on Nostratic right now, > we would have to say, of course "unproven" (to some level of > certainty which is of no concern to me here). > BUT WE DON'T HAVE TO RENDER FINAL JUDGEMENT NOW. And who is claiming otherwise? > Trask says: >> Oh, sure. In practice, we are hardly ever able to work through an issue >> in the optimal manner I have described. Real life is inevitably >> messier. We make mistakes and eventually correct them; new evidence >> becomes available; new tools become available; all sorts of things >> happen along the way. But how we do the work is one thing, while how we >> present our results in order to persuade our colleagues is another. > The same leeway needs to be granted to the proposers of new hypotheses > today as was granted to those in the past, namely, that they cannot prove > their hypotheses when they start out with them. Sure. But that leeway does not extend to immunity from criticism for lousy data, lousy methodology, and unsubstantiated claims. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Aug 24 16:12:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 17:12:53 +0100 Subject: Excluding data In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 19 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > Larry Trask today defended his criteria for what to exclude > from an initial list of potential proto-Basque vocabulary. > Let me start by quoting his point that he is not excluding data: >> Second, nothing is thrown away. All data remain available for later >> consideration, after an initial list is obtained. > Of course, but the "initial" list can bias things mightily. > Trask quite misunderstands my point about excessive reliance on > canonical forms (CVCV vs. VCVCV etc. etc.). But I am not relying *at all* on canonical forms in setting up my list: I am relying only upon the criteria I cited earlier. It is my hope -- indeed, my belief -- that canonical forms (morpheme-structure conditions) will *emerge* from the data. > The criteria for selecting an "initial" list can bias us in many ways. > Excluding sound-symbolic words can artificially and circularly > lead us to expect a much greater conformance to hypothetical > canonical forms that is in fact the case in most languages. > Or the reverse, assuming a simpler set of canonical forms > can promote the exclusion of sound-symbolic words. But I have *not* excluded sound-symbolic words other than obvious imitative words like `moo' and `spit'. Please read what I've written. I wrote quite explicitly that I was *declining* to exclude expressive and sound-symbolic formations, *in order to avoid possible circularity*, but in the confident expectation that such forms would be excluded anyway by my other criteria -- notably, by their limited distribution. > Here is Trask's discussion of this, > which I hope is evidently circular in form, > whether or not his /tipi/ ~ /tiki/ is in fact > descended from Proto-Basque. > That is, because this sound-expressive word does not conform > to the canonical form hypothesized for much of the less concrete Basque > vocabulary, therefore we have an extra argument in favor of > excluding it (though he does include this one). But what if > there are several canonical forms, as in most real-world languages, > some forms occurring more often in sound-expressive vocabulary? This is possible, of course. But, in the Basque case, practically every item that I would want to regard as sound-symbolic or expressive will be excluded from my initial list for other, independent, reasons. The only one I can think of that won't be is the universal and early-attested word ~ `small'. But this word, though it will make the initial list, will stand out from all the other words in the list to an almost wild degree. > [Demonstrating that sound-symbolic words have a different canonical > form has little value in arguing that they were not proto-Basque, > precisely because such differences of canonical form do occur in many > real languages, so why not also in (proto-)Basque?] Because the data are overwhelmingly against any such suggestion, in the Basque case. > [Expressive and sound-symbolic words are also very much under-recorded > for many languages and language families. Many of them are not known > to learned scholars who are not native users of the languages, because > they are used in language registers which are never the domain of activity > of those scholars. True enough, but this is no more than an argument for doing careful work. More particularly, it is an argument for being intimately familiar with the languages you are working on, instead of extracting words blindly from somebody else's dictionary. And anybody who's ever read three of my postings will know that I wholeheartedly endorse just this position. > So this criterion is PARTLY defective or circular. No, it isn't. Not at all. I wish you'd stop describing almost everything I say as "circular". ;-) > There is a partly definitional relation between sound-symbolic and > narrowness of attestation in recordings.] Definitional, my censored. A word is not sound-symbolic because it is sparsely attested, nor is it not sound-symbolic because it is widely attested. Basque ~ is attested everywhere and at all periods, and yet I still believe it is sound-symbolic, just like English `teensy', because of its strange form. Basque `carve' is a hapax, but I don't believe it's sound-symbolic. [LT] >> [Basque ~ ] looks as much like a >> native and ancient Basque lexical item as `pizza' looks like a native >> and ancient English word. > [pizza is not sound-symbolic, and uses odd (for English) spelling, > but never mind...] I wasn't suggesting that it was. If this bothers you, try English `zap' instead. This look to you like a native and ancient English word? You expect to find a verb in the Old English Bible? > To me, this is a clear indication not of something wrong with including > the word /tipi/ ~ /tiki/ as potentially proto-Basque, > but something inconsistent in the total set of criteria, > UNDER THE CONDITIONS that we are trying > to force a consistent canonical form onto our hypothesized "initial list" > of potential proto-Basque vocabulary. That goal may be wrong-headed. Once again, you are accusing me of something I haven't done. I am *not* trying to "force a consistent canonical form" onto the words in my initial list. I am merely proposing to set up an initial list, by my criteria, in order to see what emerges. Are my postings not written in English, or what? ;-) > The criteria, and how they are used, are themselves JUST A SET > OF TOOLS, and those tools, and how they are in fact used, > need themselves to be evaluated to see whether they lead to errors. > The exclusion of a sound-symbolic word on the grounds that it > has a different canonical form from other vocabulary is a clear error, > given the factual knowledge that such sound-symbolic forms > do often (world-wide) have different limitations on their phonological > forms. But I'm *not* excluding the damn word because it's sound-symbolic. The word ~ meets all my criteria, and so it will appear in the initial list. Didn't I say that? But, within that list, it will stand out *com' una casa*, as they say in Spanish. [LT] >> And the primary object is >> to exclude the words which should be excluded, not to >> include every single word which should be included. > It is not one or the other, it is both. No. This is not possible. We have to choose one or the other, and I choose the first. *Once* we have excluded the words which must be excluded, *then* we can turn our attention to seeking out words which have been provisionally, but wrongly, excluded. But we can't do both at once. I confess at once that a number of genuinely native and ancient Basque words will be excluded from my initial list, for various reasons but mostly from limited distribution. But they can be picked up later. > Any tool for achieving this can make either sort of error, > errors of inclusion or errors of exclusion. It is not simple. > The mistake here, in my view, is very much akin to the mistake > of rushing to judgement discussed in another message today, > when we are dealing with more complex situations of > provisional hypotheses. I am not "rushing to judgement". I am instead proceeding as cautiously and as prudently as possible. > The various criteria for what is a proto-Basque word > interact in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. > There is no point in hiding these difficulties to render a "final" > decision, even if it is claimed to be only an "initial" list. When I write "initial", I mean "initial", and I definitely do not mean "final". Do these words have different meanings in your part of the world? And I am not "hiding" any difficulties at all. Quite the contrary: I am doing my level best to recognize the difficulties and to address them: hence my criteria. > I think Trask's procedure here is rather unlike that of most > comparativists, But I'm not *doing* comparison. I'm doing morpheme structure in an unrecorded but substantially reconstructed language. > in that they usually LABEL which languages or dialects a form occurs > in, Yes, and so do we. And a word found nowhere but in one or two dialects is not going to make it into my initial list -- though it *might* get into an expanded later list. >>> But there is every reason to USE every one of the criteria >>> (those which Larry Trask expressed as cutoffs), >>> to use them as LABELS on the vocabulary items, >>> which in a computer database can be taken into consideration >>> whenever any question is asked of the database. >> Sure, but that's a different exercise. > Not a different exercise at all, the same one, simply not > throwing away data or making it hard to access or reconsider. > The ability to have all of the data available in a database, > tagged and labeled according to all of the criteria Trask mentions, > differs from Trask's procedure primarily in not having to render > final judgements prematurely, because we can always go back and > re-weight the criteria, look at them again from a different perspective. > Without such databases, decisions are made once and cannot be > easily reconsidered later with the benefit of full information. Sorry, but this makes no sense to me. I am compiling a database. For my purposes, it matters not at all whether that database takes the form of a tagged corpus on line or annotated notes on sheets of paper. On-line databases are easier to manipulate, that's all. But, once the database is in place, nothing at all happens until we decide to do something with it. I have already explained what I propose to do with mine. And, whether on line or on paper, I still have to choose my criteria and apply them, now don't I? > So, once again, let's keep the data available, > analyze it with all the care Trask obviously can muster, > but not hide the structure of the analysis, > nor make it needlessly difficult to go back and reconsider particular > decisions or whole groups of decisions at a later time. Well, I'm becoming exasperated. If you think you can do a better job of elucidating Pre-Basque morpheme-structure conditions than I can, feel free. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Aug 24 16:47:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 12:47:24 EDT Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) Message-ID: I quoted: "Researchers have long believed that the ability to make modern human speech sounds did not develop until about 40,000 years ago." In a message dated 8/24/99 2:43:15 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: <<*Some* researchers. Not all, not most, not even -- I think -- a bare majority. Just some, and most of the ones I have encountered have been anthropologists or archeologists, not linguists or biologists.>> I can only believe this is a confusion in terms. Paleoanthropology is really paleobiology and nothing else. (Cultural anthropology really doesn't have much to say or go by at the time periods we are talking about.) Fundamentally we are talking about nothing but bones. And proof of "modern human speech" is not exactly recoverable from the very small sample of hominid bones we are talking about. The UCal paper I took the quote from I believe reflects the view that the robustness of earlier jaw formations (weak chin) that is evidenced in early homo sapiens sapiens is indistinquishable from much earlier specimens and does not approximate modern form until about 40,000BCE <<*Some* researchers, in fact, want to assign language to our hominid ancestors, *Homo erectus*. But, so far as I can judge, the majority view is still that language most likely arose with our own species, 100,000-200,000 years ago.>> Are you saying "language" or are you saying "the ability to make modern human speech sounds?" I can pull at least 50 papers by "biologists" that use "language" not in reference to humans, but to apes and birds. If anyone - not a creationist - is identifying "modern human speech" with 100,000 years ago, they are surmising - and nothing more - based on the Out of Africa theory, which has its problems. As far as your term 'our own species', I think that is the core of the problem. "Homo sapiens" does not first magically appear at a magical @100,000BP. Homo erectus apparently in many places dies out as early as 250,000BP. But there is a whole category of remains labeled "Homo sapiens (archaic)" dating from as early as 500,000BP that early on share erectus and sapiens characteristics. There is no reason to think Homo sapiens archaic was not 'our own species." There is no clear "moment of creation" demarcation between "Homo erectus" and "Homo sapiens" or between "Homo sapiens (archaic)" and "Homo sapiens sapiens." (That perception is really a result of the DNA tests that put the day of creation sometime in the middle of Homo sapiens archaic period.) It's important to remember that the hominids of these periods may not represent different species at all. If we generally define "species" as the ability to reproduce, then you may not even be able to exclude Neanderthals from "our own species." See Duarte C., Mauricio J., Pettitt P.B., Souto P., Trinkaus E., van der Plicht H. et al. (1999): The early upper Paleolithic human skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and modern human emergence in Iberia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 96:7604-9. (24,500-year-old skeleton of a young boy found in Portugal contains characteristics of both modern human and Neandertals, and is evidence that the two groups interbred.) And it is not clear that the shared characteristics of early Homo sapiens and later Homo erectus do not represent interbreeding. See Swisher C.C. III, Rink W.J., Anton S.C., Schwarcz H.P., Curtis G., Supryo A., and Widiasmoro (1996): Latest Homo erectus of Java: potential contemporaneity with Homo sapiens in southeast Asia. Science 274:1870-1874. There is however evidence from DNA apparently recovered from Neanderthal remains of separate speciation. (Kahn P. and Gibbons A. (1997): DNA from an extinct human. Science, 277:176-8. Krings M., Stone A., Schmitz R.W., Krainitzki H., Stoneking M., and Paabo S. (1997): Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of modern humans. Cell, 90:19-30.) However its not clear that this justifies a separate species status for Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, if interbreeding is the test. The conclusion that modern humans made some kind of a biological leap, not part of a continuum of expected development from prior forms is not justified by the evidence. Even if we found evidence of a Garden of Eden or extraterrestials, the patterns are of gradual transition from one form to another and that's all that we have in front of us. <> Once again, what do you mean by language? 1. the ability to communicate? 2. the act of speaking? 3. Saussurian language systems? The apparent "biological centrality of our" ability to speak in general may send us back 500,000 years or earlier. Our ability to communicate goes back much further - the apes have it. Language systems (as opposed to the act of speaking) - many of us believe are not biological and that we thought them up - like we did other complex enhancements to what nature gave us. She didn't give us wings, but we can fly. She didn't give us fins, but we can swim under the polar caps. And who would have expected even 20,000 years ago that with what was given us, we could have invented the modern hotel piano bar - much less modern language systems. <<...it is for many of us exceedingly difficult to imagine biologically modern human beings without language.>> I say this with respect. As difficult as it would have been for the writers of Genesis to picture homo erectus instead of Adam and Eve, so it is difficult for us to picture humans not looking typically human, speaking and even noticing they were naked on day one. This is a natural anachronism. The trouble is that there was no day one. Unless there was a reasonably long period when humans could not speak in a modern sense and reasonably long periods when humans could barely 'speak', we are dealing with an unaccountable aberration in how such traits - biological or not - normally evolve. <> I think you've misunderstood. Multiregionalism merely means that the modern human population can be traced back to multiple locations in the past - not one - UNLESS you go back about say 2 million years. That's all it says. Picture a species dispersing, evolving into different strains, and then interbreeding along the way. An example? Think dogs. First picture the original wolf-dog. Call him "Adam". Then picture a dispersal of dogs here, there, everywhere. Then simply recall the fact that a Chinese Pug and a Great Dane (or maybe a Chihuahua and a St Bernard) can mate and reproduce. (But don't picture it, please.) It doesn't mean there was more than one "Adam". But it does mean that what we call "the modern dog" - the dog species - has changed a great deal, and that those changes happened in many different locations (i.e., multiregionalism), since Adam came along. Regards, Steve Long From jer at cphling.dk Tue Aug 24 18:02:52 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 20:02:52 +0200 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Out of Africa) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Larry Trask wrote [i.a.]: > Multiregionalism has the consequence that the human species originated > in a unique manner, unparalleled by the emergence of any other known > species. And I find this deeply unpalatable. This is one of the occasions where one would like the keyboard to have a button to light up the APPLAUSE sign. Couldn't be said better. Jens From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Aug 24 19:37:16 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 13:37:16 -0600 Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance Message-ID: ---------- > From: Sean Crist > On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: >> We now have an international standard computer Code, Unicode, >> which contains most of the characters needed for transliteration >> (Latin-standard-based letters) and for phonetic transcription (IPA). >> It would be useful to try to establish a standard for Comparative >> Data sets, into which all existing computer data sets can be translated, >> so that the massive sets of data can be made available for studies >> such as this. > I agree totally. We're on exactly the same wavelength here. The only problem with Unicode is that it isn't uniformly supported by computer programs. Any Unicode-based effort would be restricted to the Internet Explorer browser as Netscape Navigator doesn't support it. You either wish for the future and sacrifice present compatibility, or you make some compromises. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 25 04:15:25 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 00:15:25 EDT Subject: color terms Message-ID: In a message dated 8/24/99 2:45:51 AM, you wrote: <> The surprise actually happens when we think otherwise. But are semantics taken as lightly as you seem to indicate? I've seen etymologies discounted on this list because a word that meant "iron" could not have meant "silver." I can find it for you if you like. I quoted: <<"Glas" is used for foliage and softer greens, but also for various shades of grey, from sheep to steel.>> I wrote: <> You wrote: <> Well, there's is a bigger difference between black and white than shades of gray. And green and gray is a pretty big difference indeed - in the same word. But I was getting at a bigger difference than that. Funny that you should choose grays, as in shades of. The word itself has come to mean not only "charcoal gray' but indefiniteness. How about reds? We have used that to refer to everything from communists to a baseball players to (in the singular) deficits. That's a much wider range of indefiniteness of meaning. We use color terms for more than colors. That was important to the point about "bla'madr." I wrote: <> My point of course was that a 'blueman' might have nothing to do with blue. Not as easy a point to make as I might have thought. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 25 04:47:06 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 00:47:06 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/24/99 10:12:02 PM, BMScott at stratos.net wrote: <> Let's make it a little straighter. The OED goes on to say "OE had the agent-n wealcere Walker (a common west German formation), but it is possible the corresponding sense of the Teut. vb. had not survived into OE..." I take it that my AS guess was therefore not far off. < is a specifically Sc.Gael. borrowing.>> That's good enough for my point. <> I'd love to see the source for Gall = a Gaul. I didn't think written Irish went back far enough for Gauls to still be around to refer to. That's why the equation with Frank on the other hand may make a lot of sense. And that brings us back to "walh." Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 25 10:40:57 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 11:40:57 +0100 Subject: Dumb typo In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sorry, folks: I've just noticed a stupid typo in one of my postings. What I wrote was this: > No. By `lookalikes', I mean words or morphemes which, in the opinion of > some investigator, are similar in form and meaning. This is in no way > circular, though it is certainly highly objective, at least until > tightened up by the provision of fully explicit criteria for adjudging > similarity. This should, of course, have read "it is certainly highly subjective". My apologies if I've bewildered anybody. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Aug 25 11:15:41 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 12:15:41 +0100 Subject: How new hypotheses grow In-Reply-To: <3d14e7ba.24f3acf1@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > The question arises then, why is it that the best historical > linguists of American Indian languages were quite thoroughly > convinced AT SOME POINT that these languages were related, > yet the standard kind of evidence was somehow lacking? > What was it that they found so thoroughly convincing? A very good question. In reply, I recommend chapter 2 of the following book: Lyle Campbell (1997), American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America, Oxford UP. Briefly, Campbell sums up what he calls the "reductionist frenzy" as follows. Several (but certainly not most) early Americanists were interested in finding larger groupings than had been demonstrated. One of these was Sapir, the most brilliant and admired American linguist of his day. According to Sapir's student Mary Haas, Sapir himself regarded his breathtaking mega-agglomerations as no more than hypotheses to be investigated, but he nonetheless published them in a way which led readers to assume he was fully committed to his proposals. Partly because of Sapir's eminence, and partly just because his (and other) proposed groupings appeared in print so often, these groupings came to be reified. That is, readers assumed that things like `Penutian' and `Hokan-Siouan' must be real just because they were mentioned all the time in the books. But not all linguists were taken in. For example, Campbell quotes the distinguished A. L. Kroeber as follows (p. 75): "Tremendous havoc can be wreaked when archaeologists or ethologists begin to buil[d] structures of inference on Sapir's brilliant but flimsy gossamer web of prophecies as if it were a solid foundation." In short, the proposed mega-families came to be widely recognized as a result of authority (Sapir's eminence) and repetition (constant publication) -- even though there was no hard evidence to back them up. As a result, Campbell laments, Americanists have been obliged to devote a great deal of time to disassembling the proposed super-families and to searching out whatever evidence might exist for grouping *any* of the languages assigned to them. This is a salutory lesson in the dangers of reification: because we have invented a name, we persuade ourselves all too easily that there must be something "out there" for the name to apply to. Something similar has happened in my own field. A few decades ago, a number of linguists were pursuing the idea of a genetic link between Basque and the Caucasian languages. One enthusiast -- I think it was Martinet, but I'm not sure -- coined the term `Euskaro-Caucasian' for this putative family. As a result, the term `Euskaro-Caucasian' crept into the literature, and it appears in at least one major reference work. And yet there is *no* persuasive evidence that Basque is related to *any* of the Caucasian families, or even that these last are all related to one another. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 25 13:41:06 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 09:41:06 EDT Subject: Language from Neanderthals. Message-ID: >> So inheritance from Neanderthals >> does NOT necessarily imply monogenesis? >>No, but inheritance (or borrowing) of language from Neandertals strains >>my credulity to the breaking point. We agree completely here. I also wrote that it is far from the simplest hypothesis. I merely wanted to make explicit a necessary link in the reasoning. I did not PROPOSE inheritance or borrowing of language from Neanderthals, that was the hypothesis being considered by others, which I was responding to. Does NOT mean I was in favor of it! Lloyd From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 25 15:32:38 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 11:32:38 EDT Subject: Cambridge and Greenberg's methods Message-ID: I am very grateful to Larry Trask for his discussion of Joseph Greenberg's methods and Cambridge methods today. I hope we can have more discussion of the Cambridge methods. But I will insist (and provide evidence below) that Trask still does not understand that Greenberg is doing something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM claiming to prove particular language families are related. Barring the difference of whether one expresses one's conclusions as rooted family trees (Greenberg, I don't remember whether he used tree diagrams for this) or unrooted family trees (the Cambridge Group that Trask refers to), there may be little difference between them (little difference in matters noted in Trask's discussion today; of course there may be other differences that we consider important). [LT] >>Ruhlen wishes to embrace the conclusion `All languages >> are related.' [LA] >> As I have understood Joseph Greenberg's clearer and more cogent >> statements, his own work actually does NOT propose to prove any such >> conclusion. It is rather an ASSUMPTION that all languages are or might >> be related (i.e. we are not to exclude that). [LT] >The assumption that all languages are related is out of order. >The assumption that all languages *might* be related is hardly an >assumption at all, and in any case such an idea is excluded by no one. The assumption is of course quite in order, to see what it might lead to, as long as it is merely that, an assumption. So there is really no difference between the above two statements just above. Except some emotional flavoring which antagonizes some people. Because even if all languages ARE ultimately related, that does NOT imply that standard reconstructive method can establish the relation between two randomly chosen languages. If Albanian is so difficult merely within Indo-European, then much more difficult will be more distant cases. All one needs to understand Greenberg's reasoning is to assume that all languages *might* be related. As far as I can tell, the only difference noted by Trask is in whether one expresses one's tentative conclusions as (if all languages are related, then here are some conceivable family trees for the deeper connections), or as (here are some conceivable deeper connections, though we do not express them as family trees). In terms of politics, it would perhaps have been more useful in the long run if Greenberg had not expressed his conclusions AS IF they were family trees. That is clearly a red flag to some people. They seem to treat such expressions as if they were final conclusions proven by sufficient evidence, for two languages or language families taken in isolation from all others, rather than one investigator's claim that the evidence he evaluated as he evaluates it suggests those trees rather than some others (merely that, the preferable conclusion to others rather than a proven conclusion). Personally, I have no problem at all treating that as the expression of a tentative hypothesis only (how could it have ever been anything else?), and I have been simply amazed at the antagonisms. Shouldn't we always try to make the best use of the contributions of each one of us? Didn't Greenberg attempt to systematize a large amount of data which others can then correct and improve on? [LA] >> Greenberg's method of comparison serves to find the CLOSEST >> resemblances (merely that, CLOSEST). In the Americas, his method >> leads him to the conclusion (no surprise) that Eskimo-Aliut is not >> closely related to any other Amerindian languages, and that >> Athabaskan / Na-Dene (with outliers) is not closely related to any >> other Amerindian languages, (though conceivably not as distant from >> them as Eskimo-Aliut ?). [LT] >This account of Greenberg's work makes it appear to resemble certain far >more rigorous work in progress elsewhere, such as at Cambridge >University. The Cambridge group are working with a variety of >algorithms which can, in principle, determine degree of closeness, and >which can hence produce unrooted trees illustrating relative linguistic >distance. But these algorithms are utterly incapable of distinguishing >relatedness and unrelatedness. If, for example, you run one of the >algorithms with a bunch of IE languages plus Basque and Chinese, the >result is a tree showing Basque and Chinese as the most divergent >members -- that's all. >If the same is true of Greenberg's highly informal approach, then G >cannot distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness, Exactly. I have always, from the very beginning, understood that was exactly what Greenberg's approach did. He would classify Basque and Chinese as the most divergent members of such a set. He would conclude neither "related" nor "unrelated" if he did not assume all languages were related. Given the assumption of all languages potentially related, which since unprovable amounts merely to a way of expressing one's hypotheses, he concludes "most divergent", just as he in fact did for the families Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut. The difference in these modes of expression is utterly trivial as long as we are concerned with tentative hypotheses, not with ultimate truth. [Barring of course the comments "rigorous" vs. "informal", which is a completely separate issue, whether algorithms do adequately capture the best human judgments; please see below.] [LT] >and he has no >business setting up imaginary "families". Given that this is merely a way of expressing degree of divergence, under Greenberg's assumptions, I find it unobjectionable. I don't draw any more conclusions from it than are warranted, one investigator's tentative judgements of stronger vs. weaker resemblances. That is all. *** I am not sure what Cambridge's "unrooted trees" are, other than as a graph-theoretic term that the direction of change is unspecified, because no node is singled out as an "origin". In addition to that, the use of unrooted trees may also be a way to acknowledge in part the positions of those who suggest we should be giving much more consideration to dialect networks, areal phenomena, etc. etc. than to binary trees. It is a perfectly legitimate position that we are forced to that at greater time depths, where it is harder to distinguish borrowings from genetic inheritances (where, at sufficient remove, borrowings actually become genetic inheritances for most practical purposes). In fact, I think the lack of major cleavages in Greenberg's Amerind, that is, everything except Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut, is virtually the same conclusion as having an unrooted tree or dialect network or even, WITHIN that more limited context, not linking the families of which it is composed at the highest levels. AND, notice, it could also simply be an expression of an inability of Greenberg's methods to penetrate deeper, to distinguish at such a depth between neighbor-influences such as borrowing and genetic inheritance. Perhaps here there really is so much noise that Greenberg's method of judgements from data sets cannot yield much. I do not claim to know. But that is NOT the same as saying I conclude anyone should completely discount Greenberg's estimates. [LA] >> His actual conclusions are about relative UNRELATEDNESS of language >> families (notice, not about absolute unrelatedness, which he does >> not claim his method has the power to evaluate). [LT] >Just as well. It is logically impossible to prove absolute >unrelatedness, and G would be mad to undertake such a thing. [LA] >> Beyond that, Greenberg's methods do NOT enable him to establish any >> similar degree of unrelatedness among the remaining languages of the >> Americas. >> I hope I have stated that carefully enough, to make obvious that it >> is a matter of degree, not absolutes, and that Greenberg's method >> actually demonstrates the points of SEPARATION rather than the >> points of UNION. [LT] >Fine, but then G's methods do not suffice to set up language families -- >even though that is exactly what he does. No he does not. Greenberg's language families (family trees) are an expression precisely of separations just as much as of unions. The two are equivalent, under the assumption that we cannot know about absolute truth of language relationship. I will readily admit that Greenberg should have REPEATED more often and more clearly that his method assumed ultimate relatedness, and merely dealt with different degrees of closeness, that his method did not purport to prove relatedness of two particular language families. [LA] >> Greenberg's method is potentially useful in that it is likely to >> reveal some deep language family relationships which were not >> previously suspected, [LT] >I said exactly this on page 389 of my textbook. I look forward to reading this. *** [LA] >> AS LONG AS we do not introduce systematic biases >> which overpower whatever residual similarities still exist >> despite all of the changes which obscure those deep relationships. [LT] >I'd be interested to know just what `systematic biases' you have in >mind. I gave a paper at a Berkeley meeting once, in which I mentioned the possibility that a greater specialization by Greenberg in Andean-Equatorial more than in the other languages of South America might in some way bias his conclusions to find closer relations between that family and other families, simply because with more of the Andean-Equatorial vocabulary running around in his head, he would be more likely to be struck by similarities of other languages families to something he already knew in Andean-Equatorial, more likely than to be struck by similarities among other languages families other than Andean-Equatorial. I simply don't remember whether I felt at the time I could draw any conclusions. *** [LA] >> In other words, mere noise in the data, or dirty data, >> if the noise or dirt are random, should not be expected to selectively >> bias our judgements of closeness of resemblance... [LT] >No. I can't agree. I find the "don't agree" puzzling, since the definition of "random" precludes any systematic bias, almost by definition. Trask continues to explain this (which I cite later). There is a way of evaluating this, at least partly. If we take the same data sets that Greenberg used, and in that Berkeley paper I did it for South American languages, and consider different levels of strictness of correspondence in sound and meaning, we can divide the vocabulary matches proposed in different sets. Taking only the closest matches, do we get a different set of closest language relations? (This might of course be because the closest matches represent middling-ancient borrowings, not in fact the very oldest layer of genetic inheritances, even assuming ultimate relatedness.) As I remember, the results gave only a slightly different degree of closeness for some particular language families. That might suggest that very deep genetic relations and middle-ancient or recent borrowings were not terribly different in the relations they reflect (genetic vs. neighbors). No big surprise. [LT explaining why he believes random noise could affect conclusions] (But (LA) he is really discussing conclusions yes/no about relatedness as ultimate truth, what was NOT in consideration above, instead of RELATIVE degrees of divergence of W from X vs. from Y) [LT] >Suppose two languages A and B are genuinely but distantly related. >In this case, it is at least conceivable that false positives (spurious >matches) would be counterbalanced by false negatives (the overlooking of >genuine evidence). >But suppose the two languages are not in fact related at all. In this >case, false negatives cannot exist, because there is no genuine evidence >to be overlooked. Hence the only possible errors are false positives: >spurious evidence. And the great danger is that the accumulation of >false positives will lead to the positing of spurious relationships. >Many of G's critics have hammered him precisely on this point. The point I made about random noise had NOT to do with whether particular languages are ultimately related, but whether a given language or family W is more closely related to others X or Y. In that context, why should "random" (by definition) noise in the data selectively favor W to X rather than W to Y? No possible reason that I can imagine. Quite a separate question is whether PARTICULAR STRUCTURES of languages will be handled by our judgements, whether human ones or algorithmic ones, in different ways such that increasing the amount of noise in the data selectively affects our ability to make use of data from those differently structured languages. The obvious example is languages where most morphemes are CV. But if we define "noise" carefully, as a percentage of the morpheme's information content, or in terms of degree-of-deviation along paths of phonetic or semantic change, then it is not clear that CV-morpheme languages are at a disadvantage in terms of noise. [As a tangent, a declaration that CV-morpheme languages cannot be subjected to comparative linguistics because no morpheme could meet the minimal CVC criterion for comparison is simply silly. That proves that the minimal CVC criterion is merely a convenience, an indication of our preferences, for greater security (of course we prefer greater security) and not an absolute requirement for comparison. Yet many comparativists use this criterion as if it were an absolute! A real language which I have been told is subject to this limitation of having only or mainly CV morphemes is Yuchi.] *** [LA] >> [and we can study how we make such judgements to try to strengthen >> this component of Greenberg's method, to strengthen their robustness >> against noisy data and our mental failings of judgement] >In their present form, G's methods appear to me to have no robustness at >all. Words are similar if Greenberg says they are. And languages are >related if Greenberg judges that he has found enough similarities >between them. There are no objective criteria or procedures at all, and >there is no possibility that anyone else could replicate G's work. Greenberg's methods are much more robust when applied as he applies them, to estimating which language families are more closely related, than they would be if they were applied to try to yield a conclusion about two language families being absolutely related (vs. not related). This is almost always misunderstood, and Trask's switch between the two kinds of questions in the discussion quoted above of the effects of random noise seems to indicate that he has not seen this either. MOST comparativists are focused on particular languages, which I think is a reason why they do not understand what Greenberg has done, or its strengths. They imagine him doing what they regard with some reason as impressionistic judgements on a particular pair of languages, to conclude that that pair are related. IF that were what Greenberg had done, then the criticisms would be ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE. But that is not what Greenberg did. *** Algorithms vs. Human Judgements: Trask seems to approve the Cambridge use of Algorithms, and to discount Greenberg's judgements of similarities. He calls the one "rigorous" and the other "highly informal". I don't think either is necessarily better than the other. The assumptions built into each can systematically bias the results, and such bias will be an increasing problem for BOTH with increasing time depth and increasing noise in the data. That is why I have consistently emphasized that we need to explicitly EVALUATE OUR TOOLS, whether algorithms or human judgements. The tools have an unfortunate tendency to become taken for granted, forgetting that all tools have unknown biases. Here is an illustrative example of where I think judgements can go wrong. Which is the "closer" pair, in the sense that they are more likely to descend from a common genetic proto-form (or perhaps even to be borrowed at some time depth)? kane pone or kone pane ?? Many comparativists would not see any difference between these. Yet, because distinctive features may move from segment to segment, one can argue that it might be the second pair should be treated as closer. Each of them has labialization in ONE of the first two segments. As merely ONE of several possible sources for this, we can easily imagine if we had: *kwa > ko and *kwa > pa. On the other hand, of course, it could be that the *o > a / p__. So these things are tough, when attempting estimates of possible relations at great language depths. Do the two language families compared both have distinctive *p distinct from *k ?? Does either of them have a pattern of assimilation of vowels to neighboring consonants? And so on, other information can affect either human judgements or algorithms. We are not involved in judgements of similarity alone, but rather in judgements of whether a given pair could have a common proto-form. I do NOT assume that algorithms are inherently superior to human judgements, at least not yet. Assumptions are built into all algorithms, and even the designers may not be aware of all the assumptions they are building in. That is merely normal. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Aug 25 15:52:23 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 11:52:23 EDT Subject: Ruhlen's work Message-ID: Larry Trask writes: >We are not talking about minor improvements. At least as far as Basque >is concerned, the errors in Ruhlen's data are so awful as to be beyond >salvation. Anyway, he never pays any attention to my corrections: he >just tells me I must be wrong because his comparisons are so compelling. It is the last sentence of this which I regard as the strongest criticism of Ruhlen's work. Although sometimes external comparisons CAN cause the re-evaluation of morpheme structure within a single language or family, nevertheless I do not think Ruhlen has at least usually done the kind of work that could support such conclusions. Consider "sparrowgrass", OBVIOUSLY a compound of two English morphemes, until we realize that it is actually a reformation of "asparagus", a borrowed word, to make it LOOK LIKE a compound of English morphemes. "Lookalikes" can even affect the specialist within a single language! (I couldn't resist that needle .) The "obvious" is sometimes not true. As with any other writer on any subject, I always grant that there may be useful aspects of someone's work quite different from what the authors themselves think is the point of their work! Such paradoxes are part of normal life. This happens more often with people who are otherwise known to be uniformly careful, but not only with them. In the development of the fields of Mayan hieroglyph decipherment and history, the late Linda Schele made a number of terrific contributions, AND was at times over-eager to draw cosmic conclusions. Both are in one person. So what? We have still gained enormously from her. I regard Greenberg in the same way. Ruhlen may contribute something useful by stimulating attempts to find NE Asian relatives of Athabaskan, whether or not his Ket (Yeniseian) suggested comparisons pan out. \At least the search for NE Asian relatives of Athabaskan may provide some useful results of some kind, possibly unanticipated ones. DNA studies may give us more hints of where to look, though of course only hints, perhaps even misleading ones. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Wed Aug 25 16:29:10 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 12:29:10 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree: correction In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > In an earlier posting, I remarked that the Penn tree for IE recognized > no Italo-Celtic grouping. This was true for the original publication. > However, I've just been informed off-list that the Penn group have more > recently produced a revised version of their tree, which *does* > recognize such a grouping. > My apologies for misleading you, but I am a little concerned by the > news. As I understand it, the change was produced by adding only a > single character to the set of characters used. If this is right, it > suggests that the approach used at Penn is somewhat less than robust. We shouldn't be particularly disturbed that the addition of a single character could result in a differently structured tree. If the character we've added is the first to indicate a shared innovation between two branches, then it's the expected and desired result that the recomputed tree should group those two branches together (assuming that there aren't other conflicting characters). Celtic and Italic were always very close together in the tree; now they're grouped together. Even from the earliest stages of this work by Ringe, Taylor, and Warnow (at least, from the earliest versions of their handouts that I have), there have been certain structures within the tree which have been very robust and which have changed little even with later refinements in the character set. This is true of the early separation of Anatolian, of the grouping of Greek and Armenian, and of the grouping of the Satem core (Indic, Iranian, Slavic, Baltic). As the character set has been refined, there have been some resulting changes in the placement of Tocharian, Italic, and Celtic. In nearly all of the versions of the tree, these three branches separated from the others some time after the separation of Anatolian, but prior to the separation of Greco-Armenian. The big picture hasn't changed much. What has changed is this: 1) the team now claim that Italic and Celtic form an Italo-Celtic branch together. In an earlier version, the four best trees returned by the algorithm either had Italic and Celtic branching off separately (but one right after another), or else had a certain indeterminate structure which could be resolved several ways, one of which is an Italo-Celtic grouping. 2) the team now claim that Tocharian branched off before, not after, Italic and Celtic. I'm racking my brains trying to remember what the character was which caused Italo-Celtic to pop out grouped together; I asked Don Ringe that specific question, and I remember that it was some morphological character. I would have thought it was the optative */a:/, but that character has been in there since early versions of the work. I'll ask Don next time I see him. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Aug 25 16:35:31 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 11:35:31 -0500 Subject: A quibble on Engl. _zap_ Message-ID: In saying some eminently sensible things, Larry managed to pick first _pizza_ and then _zap_ as examples of words which might be ancient in English but aren't. But _zap_ is no more possible than _pizza_, since OE (a) had no phoneme /z/ and (b) did not use in writing English words. Medially, [z] was common but is written , as befits an allophone of /s/. BTW, was there an "OE Bible" (as opposed to translations of individual books) in which a **zapian or **sapian might have occurred? Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 25 19:48:48 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 15:48:48 EDT Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: <> In a message dated 8/25/99 12:28:27 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk wrote: <<...So, if Neandertals had language, then surely so did the common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans,...>> Why does that follow? Why couldn't language could have started during the existence of Neanderthals. With much respect, I don't think there is any evidence for this. <<...and no appeal to "borrowing" from Neandertals is necessary or appropriate.>> Again, I don't think there is any evidence for this. <> You may not be aware that rather recently the reverse process actually went on in the scientific community. Based on a stream of work starting with Solecki, in fact, with much fanfare - Homo neanderthalensis was rechristened, in most textbooks I guess, to Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. It even made Time back in around 1993 or so. That status is being challenged again currently. As to the "majority" you refer to, I'd suggest that you might want to take a second look when you use that term. I suspect that a head count in this arena would be difficult to take, and even that "a majority" might not include opinions you would want included. (If you are refering to some kind of actual survey, however it would be good to know about.) Most researchers would honestly say I think that there are no clear probabilities in tracing the Neanderthal's relatedness or unrelatedness to humans. Any strong opinion would be fairly worthless as a matter of sheer uncertainty. I'd like to refer you to Naming our Ancestors (Meikle and Parker, 1994). Its a very useful reference on the terms and principles of hominid taxonomy. <> I'd ask you to look at this statement again and consider its meaningfulness. There really is no way to ascertain what a language faculty is or would look like without evidence of language - of which there is none at this early date. <> Again I'd ask you to look at this. Logically, if a language faculty is different than language, then yes they could have had the faculty and no language. One doesn't follow the other - unless they are one and the same entity. Back in the 1980's when Broca's area in the brain was widely promoted as the essential element to language (since that time its been fairly well proven that it is not essential at all) an identification in the bones was made that may be of interest here: <> This is to my knowledge the only correlation made between the actual physical evidence and some notion of a brain based language "faculty." It would date language significantly earlier than anything mentioned on this list. The only current dialogue I know of that actually pertains to the physical evidence is the jaw nerve canal studies at Duke and UC that I mentioned earlier. These seem to indicate a capability for complex speech comparable to modern (current) humans, though the findings have been challenged on averaging grounds. Regard, Steve Long From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Thu Aug 26 01:56:02 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 21:56:02 -0400 Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Robert Whiting wrote: > And it is incorrect to describe "In the best case it [a reconstruction] > is only the statistically most probable original relationship between > the forms found in the daughter languages" as a statement about the > comparative method. Please read what is said before going into > knee-jerk reactions. Nothing was said about the comparative method. All right. If I'm recalling correctly, the author of the original message said that one of the things he was measuring was the "distance" between attested forms and reconstructed forms. Since the Comparative Method is the only widely accepted method for reconstructing prehistoric forms, I assumed that the writer was going with reconstructed forms produced by the Comparative Method. You're right, tho, that he didn't specify that this is the case. > The comparative method doesn't compute anything. It does. It's essentially a function which takes attested languages as its input and gives reconstructed languages as its output. In principle, a program could be written to do it; the major unsolved problem is modeling the semantics in a way that allows a program to make human-like judgments regarding what semantic developments are reasonable. The phonology, tho, could almost certainly already be computed by program. > Although the comparative method is one of the major tools of > historical linguistics it is not the only one and it does not > give a "best case" reconstruction. In general, it doesn't give > you a reconstruction at all. What it gives you is the idea that > there is something that two different but similar forms that do not > contrast could have both developed from. It doesn't tell you what > that something is. If you have /b/ and /f/ in complementary > distribution in two languages (or even in the same language) you > can use the comparative method to show that they might be descended > from the same phoneme. You can call that phoneme */b/ or */f/ or > *[labial consonanat], but the only thing that you can tell about it > phonologically is that there should be some reasonable path from it > to both /b/ and /f/. Yes, I've made essentially this same point on this list before: the Comparative method reconstructs phonological categories, not the prehistoric phonetic realizations of those categories. I phrased it in different terms, but it's essentially the same point. The Comparative method _does_ give a reconstruction; just not one of the phonetics. > But don't automatically associate "reconstruction" with "comparative > method" in your mind. And keep in mind that the discussion was about > reconstructions in Middle Chinese which is an attested language so > there may very well be statistical means of arriving at the best > reconstruction. If there's some other way of going from attested forms to reconstructions of prehistoric forms without using the Comparative Method, I'd like to know about it. The only reason we're able to say anything at all about prehistoric languages is that sound changes have a particular property, namely, they are exceptionless (with a small amount of hand-waving here). The Comparative Method crucially exploits this property of sound changes. > You seem to be confused about what the topic of discussion is. > Basically it is about measuring pathways of change between two > daughter languages and a parent to see which of the daughters > is closer to the parent *when all three are known*. The method > was described in a message posted by Jon Patrick on Thu, 12 Aug > 1999 (see http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/ > wa?A2=ind9908&L=indo-european&O=T&P=11528 for the message; note put this > URL back together before using it). Essentially the method is like > counting up the little numbers between the stars on your Texaco road > map to figure which route between two places is the shortest. I understand the idea of computing an optimal path perfectly well, and I've understood from the start of the thread that this was the methodology being employed. My question is this: exactly what happens during the transitions in the probabilistic automata, and how are the probabilities for the transitions determined? Automata normally perform a concatenation operation across each arc between states. One can imagine an automaton-like machine where the transitions can perform other sorts of operations, such as an umlaut rule (i.e., context sensitive substitutions). I'm not sure whether it's proper to use the term "automaton" to describe this richer sort of machine. But if the machine in question is strictly concatentative (as automata at least canonically are), I'm puzzled as to how you would model historical sound change in such a machine, since historical sound change isn't concatenative. >> Not as bad as you think, because you can often tell from the relative >> chronology that the change must have happened independently. > Which is why it is easier to do historical linguistics with languages > that have a history. But if you only have, say, the modern forms, as > in many African or Polynesian languages, it is almost impossible to > tell common retention from independent innovation from influence of > one of the daughters on the other. That's not true at all. Whether or not loans happened in the light of written history, you can identify a word as a loan from a related language because of the sound changes it has and has not undergone. For example, while English "cardiac" does ultimately go back to the PIE word for "heart", you can readily tell that it is a loan from a non-Germanic language, because it has not undergone Grimm's Law, which applied exceptionlessly in prehistoric Germanic. This same method of identifying loans among related languages works just as well for languages which don't have a long written tradition. Now, it's true that there is a problematic case: it's hard to detect loans which occurred between related languages soon after their branching, before very many of the telltale sound changes took place. This appears to have happened between Germanic and Italo-Celtic, but it's very hard to tell that it did happen using traditional methodology. However, there are many many cases where you can identify the loan words as I described. You don't need a long written tradition to be able to work out the relative chronology of prehistoric sound changes. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From BMScott at stratos.net Thu Aug 26 02:37:22 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 22:37:22 -0400 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > < observes that the word is not found in English in this > sense until the 14th c.>> > The OED goes on to say "OE had the agent-n wealcere > Walker (a common west German formation), but it is possible > the corresponding sense of the Teut. vb. had not survived > into OE..." I take it that my AS guess was therefore not > far off. Very hopeful of you. My sources are regrettably limited, but I see nothing here to connect safely with OE. Moreover, it seems to be Sc.Gael. 'fuller', not 'do.', that produced Sc.Gael. bynames (in record at least from the 14th c.); this suggests that may have been a late-comer. > < in Old and Middle Ir., of which the first is earliest: > (1) a Gaul, (apparently sometimes equated with Frank)...>> > I'd love to see the source for Gall = a Gaul. I didn't > think written Irish went back far enough for Gauls to still > be around to refer to. That's why the equation with Frank > on the other hand may make a lot of sense. And that > brings us back to "walh." I'd be delighted to hear from someone who actually knows OIr usage first-hand, but I imagine that a 'Gaul' was originally simply someone from Gallia - a geographical term certainly known to the early Irish (as when 'noble race of Franks' is glossed 'tribus Gallie'). I still see no reason introduce to explain it. Brian M. Scott From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Aug 26 02:47:27 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 22:47:27 EDT Subject: Conservative dilemma Message-ID: referring to Algonquian - Wiyot - Yurok (Algonquian-Ritwan): >> The question arises then, why is it that the best historical >> linguists of American Indian languages were quite thoroughly >> convinced AT SOME POINT that these languages were related, >> yet the standard kind of evidence was somehow lacking? >> What was it that they found so thoroughly convincing? Larry Trask's message today in which he quotes the above paragraph completely fails to understand the point, because he does not know the Amerindian field, and does not relize that the hypothesis I mentioned is now considered by nearly everyone to be solidly demonstrated scientific hypothesis. This was not some iffy hypothesis believed by uncareful researchers, it is a hypothesis believed by the most conservative researchers. The comment Trask quotes from Campbell simply is not relevant to this case. The "best historical linguistics" I was referring to are the CONSERVATIVES whom Larry Trask I think most admires. It was THOSE CONSERVATIVES who were completely convinced that the two "outlier" languages are related to Algonquian, yet some of THOSE SAME CONSERVATIVES also believed that their standard comparative method was not adequate to prove this relationship. The POINT is that the most CONSERVATIVE linguists were able to base their conclusions on something beyond the standard comparative method. THEREFORE, this is a prime field in which to explore WHAT these conservatives found so convincing, precisely in order to slightly extend our tools, our self-conscious understanding of how we reason. (Not all conservatives consider this a dilemma, some consider that the standard conservative method CAN demonstrate the relationship. But some consider it cannot, and for a larger number, there was an earlier period when they considered it had not done so, yet they were convinced the relationship was real and was genetic. For THOSE conservatives, and at THAT time period, the dilemma exists and provides us a great opportunity.) I think Trask (along with many others) considers that the standard traditional comparative method is practically a definition of valid evidentiary reasoning. They do not consider it merely a tool, which can be extended, or which might have weaknesses (such as sometimes, when properly applied to certain data sets, giving the wrong result, a case I mentioned earlier). They simply are unable to treat its validity and range of applicability as an EMPIRICAL question. (Many of them would not say this as a theoretical claim, but in practice they act just as if they believed it.) Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Aug 26 05:56:45 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 01:56:45 EDT Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) Message-ID: (First let me say that I've looked at the chart in Larry Trask's Historical Linguistics (p.369) so many times the page is starting to fall out. And I am aware that the one used by Sean Crist is a slightly different version.) << So here at this first juncture: > PIE > / \ > / Anatolian > Does this mean that PIE co-exists with Anatolian? It would have to, > wouldn't it? No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>> Now I am not saying I have a problem with this. I'm sure there are good methodological reason for the rule that "an ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant." (But if it is only terminological, I might ask why it is necessary.) However, from a historical viewpoint, from the view of any modern science whose subject is considered in time, the specific system reflected in the Stambaum seems odd. (Repeating again that I'm not challenging the linguistic basis of the chart.) Sometimes you learn something about systems by putting them through some extreme applications. Like sticking a thermometer in a bucket of ice. I'd like to try a simple little test. Let me give a pure hypothetical. The names of the languages may be the same as in the Stammbaum, but otherwise this is nothing but an imaginery situation. Take our Stammbaum and lets arbitrarily put "Celtic" at the top where PIE is now. "Celtic" is the first ancestor on our tree. Now add a factual premise. That - throughout the relative time period represented in all the branchings of the Stammbaum to the present - a "language" that its speakers called "Celtic" at the onset persisted in its original form without change, from day one to the present. Throughout this whole time, there was complete continuity and zero innovations in that "language", and therefore no "innovations" were shared with any of the other languages that are represented in the branches. Lets call this group of identical languages "Celtic 1...Celtic 6" Now lets say the branchings are pretty much the same as they were in the original Stammbaum - so we now have: Celtic / \ / Anatolian /\ / \ / Tocharian /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / Italic /\ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / Greek Armenian /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / /\ / / \ / / \ / / \ Indo- Balto- Germanic Iranian Slavic (I'm not sure about I-Ir, which seems to be part of the stem.) But every branch reflects a set of innovations placed at a relative point in time. Celtic 1....Celtic 6 however has no innovations and starts first in time. According to LT, we cannot call Celtic 'Celtic' anymore after Anatolian branches because a daughter exists (Anatolian). So lets call it C2. C2 is identical in every way shape and form to Celtic. All innovations (in relation to Celtic) only exist in Anatolian. Same scenario with Tocharian. Tocharian innovates and becomes a different language than C2 - which remained identical to Celtic. We also know that Tocharian is solely decended from C2. The resulting C3 on the other hand remains identical to C2 and Celtic. This continues to the current day, so that the present C6 is identical to the parent Celtic, sharing none of the innovations of any of the branches that have emerged along the line. How would these daughter languages - identical to the original parent except in name - be indicated on this Stammbaum? I don't know. Would they get a branch or are they the stem? I don't know. Or would it look exactly as it does above? (NOTE: Putting the rule about co-existing ancestors aside for the moment, a historian or everyday person might call Celtic through C6 by one name, since all are identical. But the existence of those other daughter branches made us rename "Celtic" each time a new daughter arrived.) Now to test the system. Some new assumptions: 1. We have no record of the original language - Celtic. 2. We have no record of C2, C3, C4, C5. 3. Only C6 is recorded, datable to the latest branch off (I-Ir, B-S, Ger?) in relative time. 4. We have a record of all other languages and the relative times are about the same as those reflected in the original Stammbaum. Some things that should be clear from this little experiment: 1. Generally, we would have no way of knowing that the apparent shared or totally unique 'innovations' in C6 are not "innovations" at all, but reflect entirely the first parent. 2. In fact we would probably identify any unique attributes in C6 as recent unshared innovations. They would not be found in the other recorded languages, but in fact they would be original attributes lost in the innovating daughter languages. 3. Our assumption was that Celtic...C5 (identical languages) were the immediate parents of each branch-off language. But because we have no record of those Celtic....C5 languages we might find parent-daughter or subgroup relations where there are none (based on inherited commonalities lost in some of the innovating daughters) 4. The number of apparent 'shared innovations' between C6 and some of the other branching languages might suggest a closer relation with some rather than others. But our assumption was that in fact all were equidistant. 5. We would not reconstruct the parent anywhere close to C6, assuming it to be a recent and maybe odd daughter. But in fact that would be the only accurate reconstruction. It really isn't pertinent to say that this could never happen. We could always adjust the scenario enough to make it more possible. Whether it is probable or not does not matter. The point is that if it did happen, the Stammbaum with its given assumptions, would not be able to reflect these events accurately. (But it would give the appearance of an accurate solution.) I think that this happens because the system is based on innovations but not conservations. If you only measure the vectors of change, the vectors of continuity become invisible. A little like reconstructing the lineage of dinosaurs by assuming they are all similar, and then measuring how much they differed. Rather than trying to find a way to rationally measure the similarities in the first place. On the other hand, I have no better system to offer. This does I hope explains my awkward question about how long PIE could continue to co-exist with its daughter languages. And how the answer might affect the direction of reconstructions. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Thu Aug 26 11:00:13 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 13:00:13 +0200 Subject: Quebec French nasal vowels. Message-ID: To: Stephane Goyette I'm sorry you so misinterpreted (the intentions of) my posts. It was certainly not my intention to hurt any Quebecois sensitivity, and least of all to be offensive or even slightly unpleasant. Regional variants of languages in various countries are a normal phenomenon, especially when there is such geographic separation. Even Holland and Flanders Dutch sound very different (but aren't really), and they are next door, as are German, Austrian and Swiss German, or French, Belgian and Swiss French. I don't think they (except some purists) loose any sleep over their differences, or anybody pointing at them. Anyway, the original discussion was about twenty-based number systems and their presence/absence in e.g. various local variants of French (quatre-vingts <=> octante, soixante-dix <=> septante, etc.), among other things. Best regards, Ed. Selleslagh From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Aug 26 13:28:35 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 14:28:35 +0100 Subject: A quibble on Engl. _zap_ In-Reply-To: <01JF6LAWE2MA9X215Z@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: > In saying some eminently sensible things, Larry managed to pick > first _pizza_ and then _zap_ as examples of words which might be > ancient in English but aren't. > But _zap_ is no more possible than _pizza_, since OE (a) had no > phoneme /z/ and (b) did not use in writing English words. > Medially, [z] was common but is written , as befits an allophone > of /s/. We seem to be talking at cross purposes here. I picked `zap' specifically because it has an anomalous form for a native word and because an Old English * would have been impossible. That was the point of the example. > BTW, was there an "OE Bible" (as opposed to translations of > individual books) in which a **zapian or **sapian might have > occurred? No, I'm not aware that there is a single `Old English Bible' on a par with, say, the King James Bible. But I've often seen the label `Old English Bible' applied informally to the collective body of OE translations. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Aug 26 13:48:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 14:48:53 +0100 Subject: ? Polygenesis, Out of Africa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT] > <<...So, if Neandertals had language, then surely so did > the common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans,...>> > Why does that follow? Why couldn't language could have started > during the existence of Neanderthals. With much respect, I don't > think there is any evidence for this. The suggestion I was replying to was that our own ancestors might have acquired language, by contact, from Neandertals who already had it. And that idea I find implausible. The entirely different view, that language originated early enough that both Neandertals and our own direct ancestors -- assuming these were distinct -- both inherited it, is one I have no quarrel with. [LT] > <<...and no appeal to "borrowing" from Neandertals is necessary or > appropriate.>> > Again, I don't think there is any evidence for this. Sorry; I don't follow. Evidence for what? [LT] > < debated, but the majority view still sees them as *not* being among our > direct ancestors. >> > You may not be aware that rather recently the reverse process > actually went on in the scientific community. Based on a stream of > work starting with Solecki, in fact, with much fanfare - Homo > neanderthalensis was rechristened, in most textbooks I guess, to > Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. It even made Time back in around > 1993 or so. That status is being challenged again currently. Oh, I am aware of this. I've been following this story, though not intently, for decades. > As to the "majority" you refer to, I'd suggest that you might want > to take a second look when you use that term. I suspect that a head > count in this arena would be difficult to take, and even that "a > majority" might not include opinions you would want included. (If > you are refering to some kind of actual survey, however it would be > good to know about.) I know of no survey. I am merely reporting impressionistically on what I read. And my clear impression at present is that those who want to see Neandertals as direct human ancestors are a minority, and have been for some time. There are others who, more cautiously, want to see Neandertals as having made *some* contribution to our genes, but even these do not appear to be a majority at present. > Most researchers would honestly say I think that there are no clear > probabilities in tracing the Neanderthal's relatedness or > unrelatedness to humans. Any strong opinion would be fairly > worthless as a matter of sheer uncertainty. Well, I have no memory for names, but, a year or two ago, a German study was published, with much fanfare, announcing that genetic investigations had revealed no Neandertal contribution to our own genes. The chief researcher had an unusual name, which looked Estonian or Finnish to me, but, as usual, I can't remember it. Anybody else recall it? > I'd like to refer you to Naming our Ancestors (Meikle and Parker, > 1994). Its a very useful reference on the terms and principles of hominid > taxonomy. Well, I don't know this, and I thank you for the reference, but the issue here is not one of terms and principles, but rather one of tree-drawing. > < already had a language faculty.>> > I'd ask you to look at this statement again and consider its > meaningfulness. Why? I was considering the possibility of acquiring language by contact. And I really find it hard to believe that a species with a biological language faculty could fail to have language, or that a species with no language faculty could acquire one by contact. > There really is no way to ascertain what a language faculty is or > would look like without evidence of language - of which there is > none at this early date. Fair enough. [LT] > < possessed language themselves.>> > Again I'd ask you to look at this. Logically, if a language faculty > is different than language, then yes they could have had the faculty > and no language. One doesn't follow the other - unless they are one > and the same entity. The first statement may be logically valid, but I myself find it hard to conceive of such a state of affairs. I really do not believe that learning a language is like learning to ice-skate. Clearly our ancestors had an "ice-skating faculty" before any of them ever learned to ice-skate, but I just can't see our language faculty as the same sort of animal as an "ice-skating faculty". Of course, you're free to disagree with me here, and I know of one linguist who does, but only one. > Back in the 1980's when Broca's area in the brain was widely > promoted as the essential element to language (since that time its > been fairly well proven that it is not essential at all) an > identification in the bones was made that may be of interest here: > < habilis brain cast, and indicates it was possibly capable of speech. > Homo habilis is thought to have been about 127 cm (5'0") tall, and > about 45 kg (100 lb) in weight, although females may have been > smaller. >> > This is to my knowledge the only correlation made between the actual > physical evidence and some notion of a brain based language > "faculty." It would date language significantly earlier than > anything mentioned on this list. Yes, and I alluded to this in an earlier posting, though I recall that the work I saw focused on H. erectus, not on H. habilis. Maybe I'm misremembering. > The only current dialogue I know of that actually pertains to the physical > evidence is the jaw nerve canal studies at Duke and UC that I mentioned > earlier. These seem to indicate a capability for complex speech comparable > to modern (current) humans, though the findings have been challenged on > averaging grounds. I have no quarrel in principle with arguments that language is older than our own species. I see no reason to reject such a suggestion out of hand. It's just that I haven't come across very many people defending such a position. However, if this position eventually triumphs, fine. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Thu Aug 26 14:07:39 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 16:07:39 +0200 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > [...] But there is another view, the > Schwundhypothese, which holds that all these features were present in > broad PIE but then lost in Anatolian. I'm afraid I don't know if > anybody is defending the Schwundhypothese today. I am. And I'm not alone. But even so, there are a precious few really palpable innovations common to extra-Anatolian Indo-European (the inflection of the word for 'earth' would be decisive by itself) that do prove that Anatolian was the first branch to go (or be left behind). BTW, who calls the opposite "Herkunfthypothese"? It appears more like a "Hinzukunftshypothese", but I guess that's not sensible German. The main point is the time depth of innovations. The opponents to the "Schwund- hypothese" claim that the Hittite grammatical poverty basically represents the original state of affairs, an attitude disproved many times (its extreme version "can be shredded, point by devastating point", to copy your own words on a different issue). They say the extra features have been added in the non-Anatolian trunk after the separation from its Anatolian branch, which in most particular cases just cannot be. Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 26 15:37:54 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 10:37:54 -0500 Subject: color terms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Colors do seem to be more subject to change or interpretation than most words. Colors for people of various hues have some interesting variations. In Latin America, Indians [from India as well as Native Americans] are often spoke of as morado, "purple" [although this may actually be more related to moro "Moorish"]. I've run into Brazilians who have told me that they were "orange". I'm told that Kenyans refer to Europeans as "red". The "blue" people of Appalachia would be seen as "olive" by most Americans. [snip] >The surprise actually happens when we think otherwise. But are semantics >taken as lightly as you seem to indicate? I've seen etymologies discounted >on this list because a word that meant "iron" could not have meant "silver." >I can find it for you if you like. [snip] >My point of course was that a 'blueman' might have nothing to do with blue. >Not as easy a point to make as I might have thought. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Aug 26 15:42:52 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 10:42:52 -0500 Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' In-Reply-To: <84caaf9f.24f4cf4a@aol.com> Message-ID: I've read that the term goes back to the Laghin invasion, a Gaulish tribe who gave their name to Leinster < Laighin tir [sp?] sometime around 1 AD, give or take a couple of centuries [it's been a while since I read it] [snip] ><Middle Ir., of which the first is earliest: (1) a Gaul, (apparently >sometimes equated with Frank)...>> >I'd love to see the source for Gall = a Gaul. I didn't think written Irish >went back far enough for Gauls to still be around to refer to. That's why the >equation with Frank on the other hand may make a lot of sense. And that >brings us back to "walh." >Regards, >Steve Long Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Aug 26 16:15:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 17:15:08 +0100 Subject: Cambridge and Greenberg's methods In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I am very grateful to Larry Trask for his discussion of > Joseph Greenberg's methods and Cambridge methods today. > I hope we can have more discussion of the Cambridge methods. > But I will insist (and provide evidence below) > that Trask still does not understand that Greenberg is doing > something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM > claiming to prove particular language families are related. No. Here is a direct quote from page 38 of Greenberg's Amerind book: "The thesis of this book is that all the indigenous languages of the Americas, except those of the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut groups, fall into a single vast assemblage. The bulk of this volume will be devoted to a demonstration of the genetic unity of what I will call the Amerind family." Nothing ambiguous about this. Note in particular that word `demonstration'. Greenberg is claiming not only that Amerind is a single genetic family but that his book *proves* it. I'm afraid that Lloyd Anderson is trying to see Greenberg as doing something very different from what Greenberg plainly *is* doing. Greenberg is not putting forward hypotheses for possible consideration by others. He's telling us loud and clear "It's over. Amerind is proved." Elsewhere in this book, and in other publications, Greenberg makes it clear that he considers Amerind to be established beyond discussion, and that the only interesting question is to find its closest relative (his own candidate is his Eurasiatic construct). > Barring the difference of whether one expresses one's conclusions as > rooted family trees (Greenberg, I don't remember whether he used > tree diagrams for this) G does indeed propose rooted family trees of the familiar kind, though he considers his subgrouping of Amerind to be less secure than the reality of the family. > or unrooted family trees (the Cambridge Group that Trask refers to), I am not aware that G has ever made any use of unrooted trees, or even expressed any interest in them. > there may be little difference between them (little difference in > matters noted in Trask's discussion today; of course there may be > other differences that we consider important). There are huge differences. The Cambridge work merely tries to quantify linguistic distance; the results are (or may be) expressed as unrooted trees, and *no claims whatever* are made about genetic relations. > [LT] >> The assumption that all languages are related is out of order. >> The assumption that all languages *might* be related is hardly an >> assumption at all, and in any case such an idea is excluded by no one. > The assumption is of course quite in order, to see what it might > lead to, as long as it is merely that, an assumption. So there is > really no difference between the above two statements just above. Statement 1: All languages are related. Statement 2: All languages might be related. You really can't see any differences between these? Gad. I know of no one who queries (2), but I know of very few people prepared to defend (1). > Except some emotional flavoring which antagonizes some people. Sorry, but the difference between (1) and (2) looks to me like far more than "emotional flavoring". > All one needs to understand Greenberg's reasoning is to assume > that all languages *might* be related. No. I am happy to agree that all languages might be related, a position which commits me to nothing at all, apart from a rejection of the contrary proposition that polygenesis is certainly false. But it does not follow that I have to accept *any* of Greenberg's conclusions. > As far as I can tell, the only difference noted by Trask > is in whether one expresses one's tentative conclusions as > (if all languages are related, then here are some > conceivable family trees for the deeper connections), > or as > (here are some conceivable deeper connections, > though we do not express them as family trees). Well, I won't be drawn into this. I'll just point out, yet again, that neither of these has anything to do with Greenberg's work. Greenberg's work, on Amerind and elsewhere, takes the following form and no other: "All the languages listed below are *certainly* related." > In terms of politics, it would perhaps have been more useful in the > long run if Greenberg had not expressed his conclusions AS IF they > were family trees. A fundamental misconception. Family trees are *intrinsic* to what Greenberg does. Indeed, he's not even interested in anything other than family trees. And politics has nothing to do with it: it's the *linguistics* that's at issue. If Greenberg had wanted to be politic, he might have said something like this: "Here is some interesting evidence suggestive of a possible hypothesis. Maybe it's worth looking into this." But he does no such thing, and moreover he plainly has no interest in such a softly-softly approach. He thinks he's proving family trees. End of story. > That is clearly a red flag to some people. They seem to treat such > expressions as if they were final conclusions proven by sufficient > evidence, But this is exactly *Greenberg's* position! Read what he writes. > for two languages or language families taken in isolation from all > others, rather than one investigator's claim that the evidence he > evaluated as he evaluates it suggests those trees rather than some > others (merely that, the preferable conclusion to others rather than > a proven conclusion). Again, nothing to do with Greenberg, unless we impute to him the idea that monogenesis is true and provable. In fact, he probably does believe this, since he's hinted it heavily on several occasions, but so far he has stopped short of asserting it in print. The point is not whether tree X is better or worse than tree Y: the point is whether there is any justification for drawing a tree at all. > Personally, I have no problem at all treating that as the expression > of a tentative hypothesis only (how could it have ever been anything > else?), But that's not how Greenberg presents it. > and I have been simply amazed at the antagonisms. Here I have some sympathy. The stridency of a few of G's critics is greater than I consider proper. But we shouldn't let that unfortunate stridency blind us to the very substantial *linguistic* critiques of G's work. > Shouldn't we always try to make the best use of the contributions of > each one of us? Didn't Greenberg attempt to systematize a large > amount of data which others can then correct and improve on? G's own view is that such corrections and improvements can extend only to the details, to the subgrouping and to the individual comparisons. He does not allow for the possibility that his vast mega-agglomerations like Amerind are merely phantasms -- as many of his critics maintain. [LT on the Cambridge work] >> If the same is true of Greenberg's highly informal approach, then G >> cannot distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness, > Exactly. I have always, from the very beginning, understood that > was exactly what Greenberg's approach did. Nope. Read what he writes. He damn well *does* believe that he can distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness -- insofar as he recognizes a concept of unrelatedness at all, which I frankly doubt that he does, given his constant asides about "Proto-Sapiens". > He would classify Basque and Chinese as the most divergent members > of such a set. You have a point here, though not the one you intend. For G, *no* language ever gets left out of his agglomerations. The only issue, for him, is which agglomeration to put it into. And even that seems to be only a temporary measure, pending the revelation of the single Great Tree to which all languages belong. Johanna Nichols has described G's refusal to accept isolates or unaffiliated tiny families as "pathological", a view which I endorse. The Cambridge group don't distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness because, with their methods, they can't. Greenberg doesn't because he won't. > He would conclude neither "related" nor "unrelated" if he did not > assume all languages were related. Can you cite one single passage from any of G's publications in which he concludes that any two languages or families are "unrelated"? Or "neither related nor unrelated"? > Given the assumption of all languages > potentially related, which since unprovable amounts merely to a way > of expressing one's hypotheses, Well, starting out by assuming the truth of something you consider to be unprovable strikes me as a daft way of proceeding. Here's something I consider unprovable (and unfalsifiable): The universe was created last Tuesday morning, and all of us were created complete with false memories of our earlier existence. Now, would it make any sense for me to assume the truth of this, and try from there to establish anything interesting? > he concludes "most divergent", just as he in fact did for the > families Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut. The difference in these modes > of expression is utterly trivial as long as we are concerned with > tentative hypotheses, not with ultimate truth. But G firmly believes that he has established "ultimate truth". > [LT] >> and he has no >> business setting up imaginary "families". > Given that this is merely a way of expressing degree of divergence, > under Greenberg's assumptions, I find it unobjectionable. > I don't draw any more conclusions from it than are warranted, > one investigator's tentative judgements of stronger vs. weaker > resemblances. That is all. I am speechless. I guess it's time for me to withdraw from this discussion, dubtless to the great relief of the moderator. I close with a reaffirmation of my central point: Lloyd Anderson's attempt at characterizing Greenberg's work bears no relation to Greenberg's work. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jer at cphling.dk Thu Aug 26 23:34:27 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 01:34:27 +0200 Subject: nasal pres / root aor In-Reply-To: <000901bee55a$4e27c880$7819063e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, petegray wrote: > [...] I want to > ask a quick question. You give examples of nasal present + root aorist from > Tocharian, Baltic, and Hittite. > The options for PIE aorists appear to have been root, -s- or the rare > reduplicated aorist. Leaving aside the reduplicated aorist, because it > scarcely counts, that leaves root or -s- for most verbs. > Now Baltic has no -s- aorist, and I believe that Hittite doesn't either. > Doesn't this mean the evidence from those languages is meaningless? Sorry to take so long in answering a quick - and good - question. It is true that Baltic had little choice the way it shaped its verbal system; but the older choices that underlie the system fit the nasal present + root aorist pattern very well. But I admit it could be used also to support a PIE combination of sk^-prs. and root aor. which does not seem to have been a pervading companionship. In Lith. & Latv. there is a complemenatry distribution between nasal present and st-present (IE *sk^-prs. unless you want to create unnecessary trouble), while Slavic has only the nasal type in ingressives, and in Slavic the corresponding aorist is also the morphemeless continuant of the root aorist. So, with some sophistery, one could say that the only prs. and aor. combination pointed to by Baltic and Slavic together is n-prs. + root-aor. However, that is not a cogent argument, and I would not accept its weight if I did not like it for independent reasons. Hittite of course has no aorist, nor for that matter present stems: It only has verbal stems, meaning that for each verbal lexeme all forms are derived from the same stem. Still, the derivative status of the nasal type links it to the corresponding verb with the nasal with which it has a paradigmatic connection in the other languages. Again, Strunk has pointed out a possible relic pair in Hittite as well: hunik-zi/hunink-anzi 'wound' vs. huek-zi 'stab, kill' which look like n-prs. + root aor. of the same verb (note the 'unfinished business' implied by the old present stem as opposed to the terminal aorist). It is therefore certainly a fair possibility that the Hittite verb has developed from a system like the one seen in the rest of IE. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Thu Aug 26 23:53:59 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 01:53:59 +0200 Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <00d101bee298$47b80060$2b70fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 9 Aug 1999, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: - a very full mail, of which I can reply to only a small fragment at present: [...] >> [Jens:] >> The PIE function of the different derivative categories must be at least >> compatible with that of their later reflexes, and the simplest solution is >> that wherever we find non-trivial correspondences between the daughter >> languages we have a relatively direct reflexion of the protolanguage. > The perfect was rolled into the (perfective) past in Germanic, Italic, > Tocharian and possibly Celtic. Does that mean that the Perfect was > originally a past, and Indic and Greek innovated that into a > resultative/perfect? Or should we pay attention to the fact that the > development is typically the other way? By the time PIE broke up, the perfect and the aorist must have been functionally close in enough instances to make this development natural. The aorist is in a sense a perfective past, and when the perfect was used as a past, this too must have had a perfective note to it, so a clash looks quite threatening. I may take up some of the other points you raised at a later time. Jens From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 27 01:13:21 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 21:13:21 EDT Subject: Algorithm for comparative method? Message-ID: In a message dated 8/26/99 6:10:47 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu writes concerning the possibility of doing the comparative method by algorithm: >the major unsolved problem is >modeling the semantics in a way that allows a program to make human-like >judgments regarding what semantic developments are reasonable. The >phonology, tho, could almost certainly already be computed by program. I would suggest that the phonology hides problems just as great as the semantics, because we do not have an explicit empirically based metric there either! No metric of how probable each state-to-state transition is between particular sounds, in specified contexts of languages of particular overal phonological or phonetic structure, etc. Given that the number of languages is so small (even if we count 6000), there will always be large problems of estimation. For this reason many different kinds of evidence will need to be used at the same time, to make judicious choices when the data does not compel us. For example, by using archaeology and biology and natural history to estimate the direction of some sound changes like vowel space rotations, if we do not have sufficient purely linguistic evidence. Developing a handbook of such information is very much like the task of developing the handbook of physical and chemical constants. Linguistics is in its infancy to a great degree because this is still handled on an intuitive basis, and one investigator's judgement may be quite different from another's, based on the accidents of what "odd" languages that investigator happens to be familiar with. There needs to be a much better way of integrating data from many different sources, making it available to all. Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Aug 27 04:33:54 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 23:33:54 -0500 Subject: Online etymological databases Message-ID: Dear Sean and IEists: My sincerest appreciation for the valuable information you are making available online. I hope other listmembers will express their appreciation also offline. Pat [ moderator snip ] From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Aug 27 05:38:02 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 23:38:02 -0600 Subject: Conservative dilemma In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Just to set the record straight on the origin of the Wiyot-Yurok-Algonkian language family (Algic) that Lloyd Anderson has mentioned recently. The grouping of Wiyot and Yurok together was the work of Dixon and Kroeber, whose methodology was primarily lexical similarities (not thorough sound laws, but something closer to Greenberg's methodology). By Kroeber's own statement, lexical similarity supersedes grammatical similarity when there is a discrepancy. Sapir related these two to Algonkian. Sapir's methodology was classical, however. I don't know exactly what Lloyd is talking about when he says that the comparative method doesn't work in comparing the three parts of Algic. Sapir himself wrote (in his article in 1913), "There is good lexical, morphological, and phonological evidence to genetically relate Algonkin to Wiyot and Yurok". He stressed the importance of regular sound correspondences. Much of Truman Michelson's (1914) opposition to Algic was geographic at its core, although he also noted a number of morphological traits that were un-Algonkian and quite Californian. (We'd call that a Sprachbund effect today.) Michelson's opposition to Algic was also a result of the tenor of the times. Sapir, Dixon, Kroeber, et al. were combining Powell's 58 families right and left. It's not surprising that a correct proposal was labelled as false in the contemporary climate. The issue lay dormant until the superior linguistic materials on Wiyot and Yurok of Teeter and Robbins and Bloomfield's thorough reconstruction of Proto-Algonkian showed that Sapir had been right after all in all areas--lexical, morphological, and grammatical. The final nail in the coffin of nonrelatedness was in the comparison of certain features in Algonkian and Wiyot and Yurok that were irregular. The irregularities in each were "regular" when compared across the board. For example, a -t- is inserted in Proto-Algonkian between a possessive pronominal prefix and a vowel-initial root, whereas in Wiyot a -t- is inserted between possessive prefixes and a root beginning with hV (with the subsequent loss of the h). Algonkian *ne + *ehkw- = *netehkw- 'my louse', Wiyot du- + hikw = dutikw 'my louse'. This is all part of the Comparative Method. I looked at the index of Lyle Campbell's "American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America" and saw four lines of references each to Yurok and Wiyot. I looked at these and found absolutely no evidence for Lloyd's implication the Comparative Method wasn't used to establish this relationship. Sapir used it, Kroeber and Dixon didn't. But Kroeber and Dixon didn't relate W & Y to Algonkian--Sapir did, using classical Comparative Methodology. I don't hang around too many Algonkianists, so if Lloyd has some inside scoop that isn't in the literature, I'm unaware of it. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor mclasutt at brigham.net Program Director Utah State University On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet English Department 3200 Old Main Hill Utah State University Logan, UT 84322-3200 (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (fax) From jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au Fri Aug 27 09:44:52 1999 From: jonpat at staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Jon Patrick) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 19:44:52 +1000 Subject: Plosive-liquid clusters in euskara borrowed from IE? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 11 Aug 1999 15:35:37 +0100." Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] My apologies for my lateness in replying to this message but life has been pandemonium here. This is my repsonse to Larry Trask's criteria for the admission of words in an analysis of early basque. Some methodological issues are relevant to all language analyses. [LT] Of course, I exclude verbs, since native verbal roots are never free forms. This surprised me. Do you mean "sar zaitez" (Come in!) is not legal euskara and that "sar" is not a word. While the dictionary form of the word is "sartu" I will use "sar" in the analysis. If we agree to include verbal roots, that will add several hundred more. Which I have always included in the work. I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even 1500 strong candidates. But I'll wait and see. We have finished collecting and classifying the monosyllables. I now just have to pull the list together. We have discussed you proposal on how to accept words and give the following responses; [LT] I propose the following. Let's compile a list of the Basque words each of which meets the following minimal requirements. (1) There is no reason to suppose it is polymorphemic. Agreed [The great bulk of the words in any Basque dictionary are *transparently* polymorphemic, and can be excluded at once.] (2) It is found throughout the language, or nearly so. [Since the better dictionaries assign words to the conventional dialects, it is easy to formalize this requirement as we see fit.] Don't agree - the forms of words in certain dialects are important to understanding their history. (3) It is attested early. [Let's say before 1600, which is `early' for Basque.] Don't agree - the corpus of materials at that time is tiny. for example there are words in corpora predating Larramendi's dictionary(1747) which he didn't include. In line with what you say below, Larramendi's dictionary constructed many neologisms which we do not intend using. (4) There is no reason to believe that it is shared with languages known to have been in contact with Basque. [Subjective, and hard to formalize, but I believe that doubtful cases are few enough to constitute only a minor problem.] Agreed -but we recognise this may not be entirely clearcut. To these I would like to add two more, though these are not essential: (5) It does not appear to be a nursery word. The comment by a list member indicated nursery words can provide useful information. I would propose to analyse them separately to understand their commonness with the main group. (6) It does not appear to be of imitative origin. Ditto for nursery words - with the extra comment that imitative words sometimes do have a true word associated with them, e.g. taup : taupa (heartbeat) Now, (5) would exclude only a very few words not excluded by the other criteria, notably `mother' and `father', while (6) would exclude a much larger number of items which would be automatically excluded in any serious comparative work, like `meow', `moo', `baa', `ding-dong', `spit', and probably also `sneeze'. This last sounds roughly like oo-SHEEN, and, in my view, is too likely to be imitative to be included in any list. Anything that is debatable is included in the anlaysis. One's person's opinion amongst a collection should not have the right of veto in word selection. The default case is acceptance - there has to be a substantial reason for withdrawing a word from the analysis list. Having compiled the list, let us then examine it and determine the phonological characteristics of the words on the list. I am fairly confident that I can guess what the results will be, at least in their main lines, though there will doubtless be a few surprises in the details. We shall go forward on this basis. I intend producing a list of ALL the Azkue words with a commentary on whether they have been included in the analysis and the reasons for their rejection. However monosyllables are first. It is most important to get them processed as they are needed to assist in identifying potential compounds of 2-, 3-, 4-syllbale words. [on my English examples] > I wonder if we are talking at crossed purposes here. I'm not saying > the known history of a word should be ignored. If we have such > information then it should be used. Agreed. > But I am saying that words we have today that are not identified as > having any alternative history could be fairly considered for > informing about early euskara. Here I can't agree. I have the gravest reservations about including words not recorded before 1871, or before 1935; about including words found nowhere but in Larramendi's dictionary or in Hiribarren's dictionary; about including words recorded only in one small area; about including words reported only by the Dutch linguist van Eys or only by the Spanish polymath Hervas y Panduro; about including all sorts of things which, in my view, are deeply suspect for one reason or another. I think you position is extremely conservative. My response is as above. I believe it is not enough merely to exclude obvious loan words: we must be *far* more discriminating, or we are going to wind up with a list containing more junk than genuine native and ancient words. If you can demonstrate they are junk then they can be removed otherwise they are observed data and should not to be culled unjustifiably -that is just managing the data to get the result one wants and is poor statistical method. *Once* we have a list of the most plausible candidates for native and ancient status, *then* we can consider judiciously whether further words might plausibly be added to it. But we have to start by being as rigorous as possible, not by tossing in everything that isn't obviously borrowed. So we will reach a position where we proffer a list and you may cull it - it will be interesting to see the differences. > Let's take the opposite scenario. In the Azkue list there are 9854 > words of which 1436 have modern orthography that can't be mapped > into the orthogrpahy you use for describing early euskara. Not sure I understand this. In your book you use an orthography for describing early euskara. I have extracted into a sub-list all the words that can't be early euskara on the sole principle they don't conform to that orthography e.g. words with , ... There are 1436 of them. Of course this is not to deny the words can be traced back to an earlier form. Wen we have the reconstructed forms we will be able to use them. > Of the 8318 words that do fit your orthography, 5022 can be found in > one of the modern lexicons/dictionaries of Aulestia, Kintana, Morris > or XUXEN. if we analyse these words and show that they strongly > conform to the Michelena description of early euskara and/or your > restating of it, will you consider that result irrelevant to > determining the merit of that description, especially given the > phonological conservatism of euskara? Yes, I would. Let me cite just a few Basque words from Aulestia's dictionary: `greyhound' `if' `word' `turnip' `toad' `courage' `skirt' `plaster' `strong' `write' `ax' `field' `honor' `hen' `sky' And so on, and so on, for god knows how many more. Now, every single one of these words conforms *perfectly* to our ideas of what native and ancient Basque words can look like, without the slightest complication. And yet, in every case, I can adduce overwhelming evidence that the word is not native, or is not ancient, or is not monomorphemic. This is not on the point of discussion. I have already said known non-native words need to be deleted. However I also say, "a suspicion" that it is not native is not sufficient to reject the word from analysis, otherwise one is potentially loading the dice. Conformity to pre-existing ideas about possible phonological forms is not nearly good enough: such an approach must inevitably sweep up huge numbers of words which demonstrably should not be there, and, by implication, very many more which really (if not demonstrably) should not be there. I'm using it in the other direction, that is, conformity to pre-existing phonological forms is a means of separating the original list to give us a smaller set of words to begin working with. This operation does not override the criteria of removing known loans. > I would also like to point out there could be a further difference > in our perspectives due to different but unspoken methodologies and > goals. I am interested in describing the stochastic or probabilistic > characteristics of word formation in euskara. By `word formation', I suppose you mean what I would call `morpheme-structure constraints'? Well, fine if you're only interested in modern Basque, but I myself am interested in the morpheme-structure constraints of Pre-Basque, and therefore I don't want to count as evidence anything that doesn't appear to be a strong candidate for a Pre-Basque word, in its earliest reconstructible form. I understand your motivation and the demand for rigour you are placing here, however my concern is that such a method can very readily be arbitrary and will be applied to favour the working hypotheses of the scholars, thus producing a self fulfilling prophecy. I prefer the alternative approach founded in observational disciplines like psychology, land surveying, etc. which say you only reject observations when you have very good reasons to. > Whilst getting a legitimate set of words to anlayse is important the > presence of a few doubtful words does not necessarily destroy such a > description as a legitimate probabilistic statement. Agreed, but I worry about that phrasing `a few words'. If we are not maximally rigorous, I fear that what we'll get is a whole mountain of words that shouldn't be there -- more improper words, in fact, than proper ones, which will surely ruin any stochastic approach. I think we agree in spirit on the need for rigour -it is just one dimension of rigour we have different concerns about. > I do not wish to deny the importance of systematic study of each > word but noisy data doesn't invalidate a probabilisitic study nor > necessarily pre-determine it to being unable to say something useful > about the structure of the data. Production of a putative core word > list of early euskara will be a spin-off of this work. Excellent, but I'd be very cautious about including modern words. I am most concerned about not including modern words hence my starting point is Azkue and nothing more recent in terms of the source of words. However I have used modern wordlists to assist in filtering the initial Azkue list, in an attempt to identify the Azkue words that have some doubt of veracity attached to them, that is words in the Azkue list that are not found in modern sources are partitioned off for separate analysis. [LT] >> I don't see why. A dictionary of modern English is of no direct >> relevance to ascertaining the nature of Old English, and a dictionary of >> modern Basque is of no direct relevance to ascertaining the nature of >> Pre-Basque. You might as well try to find out what Latin was like by >> reading a dictionary of modern French. > This of course assumes there is little relatedness between the two > and there is not a systematic development from one to the other. The > already phonological conservatism of euskara suggests that the words > in Azkue have greater validity for studying early euskara than > modern english for studying middle english. Not necessarily. Phonological conservatism is only one factor among several. It matters little that Basque phonology has been conservative if not much of the Pre-Basque lexicon still survives. I guess that is one of things we are trying to get to - a putative early and by implication Proto-Basque lexicon. > I'm a little mystified with this in the context of euskara. As far > as I have heard the dominant ancient external influence has come > from Latin with suggestions of a small number of items from Celtic > and a few others. Once these are identified then is not everything > ancient also native because there is nothing else left but ancient > native words, or am I missing something? Once ancient loans are identified -- if they can be -- then everything ancient remaining is also native, in some sense. But there remains the *big* problem of determining what is ancient to begin with. The great bulk of the Basque vocabulary is not ancient, just as the great bulk of the modern English vocabulary is not ancient. If you can't demonstrate a word is borrowed and it has the morphology of an old word then it is an old word. To say it is possibly not old is a truism and uninformative cheers Jon ______________________________________________________________ The meaning of your communication is the response you get From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 27 09:50:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 10:50:01 +0100 Subject: Conservative dilemma In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > referring to Algonquian - Wiyot - Yurok (Algonquian-Ritwan): >>> The question arises then, why is it that the best historical >>> linguists of American Indian languages were quite thoroughly >>> convinced AT SOME POINT that these languages were related, >>> yet the standard kind of evidence was somehow lacking? >>> What was it that they found so thoroughly convincing? > Larry Trask's message today in which he quotes the above paragraph > completely fails to understand the point, > because he does not know the Amerindian field, > and does not relize that the hypothesis I mentioned is now considered > by nearly everyone to be solidly demonstrated scientific hypothesis. If you are referring to Algic (Algonquian-Wiyot-Yurok), then *of course* I know that it is almost universally accepted. I say so in my textbook, and I say so again in my forthcoming dictionary. But the original passage I was replying to did not appear to be about Algic, but rather about the assorted super-families set up mainly by Sapir, though often extended (and occasionally originated) by others. Lloyd appeared to be asking why early Americanists were so enthusiastic about these groupings, and my posting was a response to this query. > This was not some iffy hypothesis believed by uncareful researchers, > it is a hypothesis believed by the most conservative researchers. > The comment Trask quotes from Campbell simply is not relevant > to this case. Agreed, but it is highly relevant to a lot of other cases. > The "best historical linguistics" I was referring to are the CONSERVATIVES > whom Larry Trask I think most admires. > It was THOSE CONSERVATIVES who were completely convinced > that the two "outlier" languages are related to Algonquian, > yet some of THOSE SAME CONSERVATIVES also believed that > their standard comparative method was not adequate to prove this > relationship. So far as I know, the case for Algic rests solidly on shared inflectional morphology, which is normally considered adequate for proof. Comparative reconstruction is of limited applicability because there is so little shared vocabulary between Algonquian and the California languages. > The POINT is that the most CONSERVATIVE linguists > were able to base their conclusions on something beyond the > standard comparative method. THEREFORE, > this is a prime field in which to explore WHAT these > conservatives found so convincing, > precisely in order to slightly extend our tools, > our self-conscious understanding of how we reason. But shared morphology is not a new idea. Proof of relationship by shared morphology is an idea that's been around since the beginning. It played a major role in establishing IE, and it is the evidence appealed to in order to establish Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo, neither of which has yet been reconstructed to general satisfaction. > (Not all conservatives consider this a dilemma, > some consider that the standard conservative method > CAN demonstrate the relationship. But some consider > it cannot, and for a larger number, there was an earlier > period when they considered it had not done so, > yet they were convinced the relationship was real and > was genetic. For THOSE conservatives, > and at THAT time period, the dilemma exists and > provides us a great opportunity.) Sorry, but I don't see a dilemma here. What dilemma? > I think Trask (along with many others) > considers that the standard traditional comparative method > is practically a definition of valid evidentiary reasoning. I have never said any such thing. You are putting words into my mouth. > They do not consider it merely a tool, which can be > extended, or which might have weaknesses (such as > sometimes, when properly applied to certain data sets, > giving the wrong result, a case I mentioned earlier). Oh, for heaven's sake, Lloyd. Read my textbook of historical linguistics. There you will find that I say that the comparative method is only a tool, that it has its limitations, that it is potentially subject to pitfalls, that there exist other tools which also have their virtues, and that there is hope that mathematical methods might be developed to take us further back in time than the comparative method can be applied. Where are you *getting* this stuff from? You seem to be setting up a fantasy Trask of your own creation and going after that. Why not just read what I write? > They simply are unable to treat its validity and range > of applicability as an EMPIRICAL question. Read my textbook, and then see if you can still post this assertion without turning crimson. > (Many of them would not say this as a theoretical claim, > but in practice they act just as if they believed it.) I don't know just who `they' is supposed to include, but I can assure you it doesn't apply to me. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Fri Aug 27 13:13:49 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 09:13:49 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) In-Reply-To: <83142bec.24f6311d@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Aug 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Take our Stammbaum and lets arbitrarily put "Celtic" at the top where PIE is > now. "Celtic" is the first ancestor on our tree. > Now add a factual premise. That - throughout the relative time period > represented in all the branchings of the Stammbaum to the present - a > "language" that its speakers called "Celtic" at the onset persisted in its > original form without change, from day one to the present. You're starting with a premise which contradicts all of our experience; it just doesn't ever happen that a language is static. All living languages, it seems, are in prepetual change. > Throughout this whole time, there was complete continuity and zero > innovations in that "language", and therefore no "innovations" were shared > with any of the other languages that are represented in the branches. Lets > call this group of identical languages "Celtic 1...Celtic 6" > Now lets say the branchings are pretty much the same as they were in the > original Stammbaum - so we now have: [Tree structure deleted] If it miraculously were the case that the parent language remained unchanged over centuries, while various languages split off from it, then from a purely character-based standpoint, the tree wouldn't look like this; it would look more like the traditional IE tree where all the branches radiate off directly from the root. I don't think the methodology of Ringe, Taylor, and Warnow could distinguish a simultaneous 12-way split from the situation you describe. It doesn't matter, because both scenarios are overwhelmingly unlikely. > According to LT, we cannot call Celtic 'Celtic' anymore after Anatolian > branches because a daughter exists (Anatolian). So lets call it C2. C2 is > identical in every way shape and form to Celtic. All innovations (in > relation to Celtic) only exist in Anatolian. [...] It looks to me like your concern here is what to call the internal nodes in the tree. This is _purely_ a matter of nomenclature. > How would these daughter languages - identical to the original parent except > in name - be indicated on this Stammbaum? I don't know. Would they get a > branch or are they the stem? I don't know. Or would it look exactly as it > does above? It sounds like you are making a distinction between the "main truck" (stem?) versus "branches". This isn't a correct characterization; picture the tree as a hanging mobile. The fact that it was graphically represented as having a spine down the left means nothing; we could easily spin the pieces of this hanging mobile around so that the illusory "spine" takes a jagged path snaking thru the tree, putting some other "spine" at the left (e.g., with Greek, say, to the very left). Doing so would not affect the meaning of the tree at all. > (NOTE: Putting the rule about co-existing ancestors aside for the moment, a > historian or everyday person might call Celtic through C6 by one name, since > all are identical. But the existence of those other daughter branches made > us rename "Celtic" each time a new daughter arrived.) Purely a matter of nomenclature. > 1. Generally, we would have no way of knowing that the apparent shared or > totally unique 'innovations' in C6 are not "innovations" at all, but reflect > entirely the first parent. I can't tell whether you're taking seriously the idea that PIE could have actually looked like the actual Proto-Celtic, or if you're just using "Celtic" as an arbitrary substitute label for PIE. Naturally, it _can't_ have been the case that PIE looked like Celtic, because the other branches would have to undergo some impossible unmergings. [...] > It really isn't pertinent to say that this could never happen. We could > always adjust the scenario enough to make it more possible. If think it is entirely pertinent; you're describing a state of affairs which has some basic differences with the universe that we live in. It's true that the character-based approach would not work well in the universe you're describing, much in the same way that our theories of physics would not work well in a universe where things fall up rather than down. I don't find this the least bit problematic. > Whether it is probable or not does not matter. The point is that if it did > happen, the Stammbaum with its given assumptions, would not be able to > reflect these events accurately. (But it would give the appearance of an > accurate solution.) Yes, I agree that if the situation you describe were true, then the character-based approach could not arrive at the tree that you drew. > This does I hope explains my awkward question about how long PIE could > continue to co-exist with its daughter languages. And how the answer might > affect the direction of reconstructions. As I said before, it's purely a matter of nomenclature whether you want to apply the term "PIE" to some of the internal nodes in the tree. It's purely a matter of convention that we apply that label strictly to the root of the tree. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From wrschmidt at adelphia.net Fri Aug 27 13:26:13 1999 From: wrschmidt at adelphia.net (William Schmidt) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 09:26:13 -0400 Subject: color terms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:15 AM 8/25/99 -0400, you wrote: [ moderator snip ] >My point of course was that a 'blueman' might have nothing to do with blue. >Not as easy a point to make as I might have thought. In fact, "blue" can also mean sad, as in, e.g., "He is blue," or exasperated, as in e.g., "He talked until he was blue in the face." Moreover, Old Norse "bla" meant livid, synonomous with mad. Consequently, there are reasons for believing that people applied blue pigments to their faces in antiquity to indicate madness. WRSChmidt From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Aug 27 15:00:43 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 16:00:43 +0100 Subject: Cambridge and Greenberg's methods In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I am not sure what Cambridge's "unrooted trees" are, other than > as a graph-theoretic term that the direction of change is unspecified, > because no node is singled out as an "origin". That is broadly correct. > In addition to that, the use of unrooted trees may also be a way to > acknowledge in part the positions of those who suggest we should be > giving much more consideration to dialect networks, areal phenomena, > etc. etc. than to binary trees. It is a perfectly legitimate > position that we are forced to that at greater time depths, where it > is harder to distinguish borrowings from genetic inheritances > (where, at sufficient remove, borrowings actually become genetic > inheritances for most practical purposes). But unrooted trees are incompatible with genetic relationships -- or, at least, they have nothing to say about these. > In fact, I think the lack of major cleavages in Greenberg's Amerind, > that is, everything except Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut, is virtually > the same conclusion as having an unrooted tree or dialect network or > even, WITHIN that more limited context, not linking the families of > which it is composed at the highest levels. No. First, Greenberg *does* recognize major cleavages, even though he expresses some diffidence about them. Second, unrooted trees are wholly incompatible with what G thinks he's doing. He does rooted trees, and only rooted trees. > AND, notice, it could also simply be an expression of an inability of > Greenberg's methods to penetrate deeper, to distinguish at such a depth > between neighbor-influences such as borrowing and genetic inheritance. > Perhaps here there really is so much noise that Greenberg's method of > judgements from data sets cannot yield much. Well, I have no quarrel with *this*. ;-) > I do not claim to know. But that is NOT the same as saying I > conclude anyone should completely discount Greenberg's estimates. Wny not? > [LT] >> Fine, but then G's methods do not suffice to set up language families -- >> even though that is exactly what he does. > No he does not. Look. You don't have to take my word for it. Ask Greenberg. He will tell you flatly that he is setting up language families. Why do you keep misrepresenting him so grievously? Just what do you think Greenberg means when he uses terms like `Amerind', `Indo-Pacific' and `Khoisan'? > Greenberg's language families (family trees) > are an expression precisely of separations just as much as of unions. > The two are equivalent, under the assumption that we cannot know > about absolute truth of language relationship. And this too is emphatically *not* Greenberg's position. > I will readily admit that Greenberg should have REPEATED more > often and more clearly that his method assumed ultimate relatedness, > and merely dealt with different degrees of closeness, that his method > did not purport to prove relatedness of two particular language families. Maybe you think that's what he should be doing, but it is definitely not what Greenberg thinks he is doing. > [LT] >> Suppose two languages A and B are genuinely but distantly related. >> In this case, it is at least conceivable that false positives (spurious >> matches) would be counterbalanced by false negatives (the overlooking of >> genuine evidence). >> But suppose the two languages are not in fact related at all. In this >> case, false negatives cannot exist, because there is no genuine evidence >> to be overlooked. Hence the only possible errors are false positives: >> spurious evidence. And the great danger is that the accumulation of >> false positives will lead to the positing of spurious relationships. >> Many of G's critics have hammered him precisely on this point. > The point I made about random noise had NOT to do with whether > particular languages are ultimately related, but whether a given language > or family W is more closely related to others X or Y. > In that context, why should "random" (by definition) noise in the data > selectively favor W to X rather than W to Y? No possible reason that > I can imagine. But this only holds good if you assume in advance that all languages are related. This is exactly the assumption which I chided you for earlier, and it is also exactly the assumption which you have just told me in an off-list posting that you do not hold. So what is going on? > Greenberg's methods are much more robust when applied as he applies > them, to estimating which language families are more closely related, > than they would be if they were applied to try to yield a conclusion > about two language families being absolutely related (vs. not related). > This is almost always misunderstood, and Trask's switch between the > two kinds of questions in the discussion quoted above > of the effects of random noise > seems to indicate that he has not seen this either. I have switched nothing. You have. Greenberg is interested only in absolute relatedness, and he says so. > Trask seems to approve the Cambridge use of Algorithms, > and to discount Greenberg's judgements of similarities. > He calls the one "rigorous" and the other "highly informal". Correct. > I don't think either is necessarily better than the other. > The assumptions built into each can systematically bias the > results, and such bias will be an increasing problem for BOTH > with increasing time depth and increasing noise in the data. But the Cambridge work is mathematical and fully explicit; it can be tested. G's work is not and cannot be. The Cambridge group make it fully explicit what they are counting and how. Greenberg does not. The *only* criterion involved in Greenberg's work is Greenberg's opinion. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From morrisrp at sbu.ac.uk Fri Aug 27 16:18:42 1999 From: morrisrp at sbu.ac.uk (Rupert Morris) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 17:18:42 +0100 Subject: On-line Etymological databases Message-ID: Sean Crist 22 Aug 1999 does not mention the magnificent example of an on-line database which would provide an excellent template for Indo-european and possibly be a location for it. So far they have included a vast range of Altaic languages and also included Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as Dravidian, North Caucasian and they are starting on Semitic. The URL is http://starling.rinet.ru. I use it for Japanese and it is very easy to use and in English! They are looking to extend it to the whole world and including IE in it would make perfect sense. begin: vcard fn: Rupert Morris n: Morris ;Rupert org: Business School South Bank University adr: School Office Rm 101 London Rd;;103 Borough Road;London;;SE1 0AA;United Kingdom email;internet: morrisrp at sbu.ac.uk title: School Administrative Officer tel;work: (0044) - 0 171-815-7836 tel;fax: (0044) - 0 171-815-7865 tel;home: (0044) - 0 181-402-3529 note: Qualifications : BA Hons Grad. ICSA x-mozilla-cpt: ;0 x-mozilla-html: TRUE version: 2.1 end: vcard From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 27 19:04:15 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 15:04:15 EDT Subject: Multilateral comparison Message-ID: This message is devoted to clarifying what multilateral comparison is, how it has been successfully used as a heuristic in the past, and its role relative to proofs of genetic relationship. Both the method and its role are often misunderstood or misrepresented. Sections: 1. Draft consensus statement on the value of Multilateral Comparison as heuristic. 2. How this can contribute to civility in our field. 3. Examples of successful uses of Multilateral Comparison -- some validated cases and as-yet-pending cases. 4. Greenberg's view that M.C. is sufficient proof -- his extrapolation beyond the validated cases. 5. Classification BOTH as a precursor to the Comparative Method AND as a result of the Comparative Method! 6. How to find a null hypothesis opposite of M.C. results? Other ways of testing the results of Multilateral Comparison. 7. Resistance of Multilateral Comparison to "noise" in the data, where bilateral comparison (the Compartive Method) is not resistant to as great a degree. 8. Importance of refining judgements of "similar" or "closely related", beyond current intuitive or superficial definitions. 9. So what has Greenberg actually done? Something very similar to the Cambridge team. *** 1. Draft consensus statement on the value of Multilateral Comparison as heuristic. Here is a summary statement which I think can be supported by many without reservation, at least if the terms are understood with the meanings clear from the following context. Any suggestions for improvements in such a statement will be most welcome, so that it is even more balanced and moderate. Those of us who do NOT wish to be assaulted by the obviously political battles can do something about it. Expressions of simple agreement with this, from moderates in these debates, might also be useful. (Sometimes moderates have to take a stand to constrain extremists.) ? Consensus statement ? Multilateral Comparison is a heuristic which has been successfully used many times in the past and may be used in the future to throw up promising hypotheses to be further investigated also by other methods, especially the Comparative Method which can handle the data with more detail and precision. There has as yet been insufficient empirical work to estimate to what depths Multilateral Comparison can be useful. There can also be more empirical work to estimate what refinements or extensions of the Comparative Method may be able to penetrate greater depths. *** 2. How this can contribute to civility in our field. >From an active supporter of the "conservative" tradition of comparative reconstruction, whose contributions I value in that regard, I recently received the following statement. I have not received permission to quote the source, so must leave it unattributed: >...I myself find it [hard] to muster any enthusiasm for [multilateral] >comparison, except perhaps as a heuristic for throwing up promising >hypotheses to be further investigated by other methods. (The words replaced in brackets were in the original "harder" and "mass". Since "mass comparison" and "wide-rangers" and other such terms have a pejorative cast, I am using more neutral terminology.) The "except" in the quoted statement is crucial, assuming as is normal in science that heuristic discovery procedures are VALUED (and of course are distinguished from proofs). I think we would have a very civil field of historical and comparative linguistics, at least on these issues, if we could reach some greater consensus. Those who practice comparative reconstruction and for that or any other reason dislike Greenberg's work should be more willing to say such things more publicly, preferably in a simple positive form something like the statement near the beginning of this message. Greenberg and advocates should be more willing to grant that the conclusions from only this one method are not as solid as conclusions using also other methods. *** 3. Examples of successful uses of Multilateral Comparison -- some validated cases and borderline cases. I think there are a LARGE number of us who accept Greenberg's methods as a heuristic, and as a heuristic only. I am certainly one, and have always been. I have always been agnostic about claims to "proof" using only multilateral comparison, simply because it has not been sufficiently tested. Here are some examples where it has been successfully used: A. The great collection of Eurasian vocabularies done under Catherine the Great of Russia in the 1700's arranged those vocabularies to place the most similar ones adjacent to each other. My understanding is that the classification so established has remained valid, has not been superseded by more recent family trees, trees "proven" valid by the Comparative Method or in other way. This should then be counted as a successful use of multilateral comparison. B. Greenberg's work on African language classification years ago can probably be seen in the same light. Although there were precursors (which we need neither minimize nor exaggerate), and he created new larger classifications (which we need neither minimize nor exaggerate), my understanding from debates pro and con some years ago was that his classifications have remained valid. (Same caveats as above for number 1.) This also should be counted as a successful use of multilateral comparison. There are obviously many other cases like these. Pioneers in Polynesian or Austronesian and in many other language families have used Multilateral Comparison, implicitly or explicitly. They have ALSO at various stages used the Comparative Method or its precursor fragments. C. In his Language in the Americas, Greenberg gave a table of basic vocabulary from languages of Europe, showing that the method of Multilateral Comparison correctly classifies those into major families, where those are known via the Comparative Method. This should be counted as a successful illustration of Multilateral Comparison. (Question: did it include the difficult case of Albanian? Albanian-with-other-IndoEuropean is a fruitful field for testing both Multilateral Comparison and the Comparative Method.) D. In his Language in the Americas, Multilateral Comparison clearly singles out Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene (Athabaskan etc.) as two families, and does NOT segment the rest in the same way. To the extent of those two families, Mutlilateral Comparison is at least congruent with knowledge resulting from use of the Comparative Method. (Does anyhone think Greenberg fudged his results to get this, or that it would not result from Multilateral Comparison alone?) What about the rest? E. What is additional in Greenberg's Language in the Americas is particularly the following two points. These are not yet confirmed or disconfirmed, to the level of "proof", so we cannot yet estimate whether Multilateral Comparison has been valid in this extended application at presumably greater time depths. E-1. Neither Eskimo-Aleut nor Na-Dene are grouped by Multilateral Comparison with other languages or families of the Americas. This is a negative statement. E-2. Multilateral Comparison does not lead to the conclusion that there are other cleavages in the Americas between families as divergent as Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene are from each other or from any other language families of the Americas. This also is a negative statement. What are possible conclusions we might draw, if we for the sake of argument grant that the results of Multilateral Comparison so far may be valid for case E as well as for cases A-B-C-D? It may be that the remaining Amerind, or much of it, formed a family at a much greater time depth; or that there has been sufficient borrowing back and forth in many directions to blur any deep cleavages which may once have existed, or ???) Notice the above statements do NOT conclude either "related" or "not related" concerning the remaining Amerind. I have tried to word them very precisely to reflect exactly what Multilateral Comparison CAN contribute AS A HEURISTIC. As a heuristic, what it suggests is that we look for additional deep genetic relationships, which we may be able eventually do prove by refinements of Comparative Method, WITHIN remaining Amerind, but not between parts of Amerind and Na-Dene or Eskimo-Aleut. This heuristic conclusion does not seem highly improbable to me. It may or may not be true, but that is quite another matter, a matter for the future. *** 4. Greenberg's view that M.C. is sufficient proof -- his extrapolation beyond the validated cases. Greenberg obviously believes that his methods establish firm knowledge. This appears to be based on an extrapolation from the clear cases like 3A-B-C-D. Whether such an extrapolation is valid remains to be tested, since presumably Multilateral Comparison has not been used on data sets with such potentially gigantic time depths as Amerind. *** 5. Classification BOTH as a precursor to the Comparative Method AND as a result of the Comparative Method! Greenberg believes Classification is a PRECURSOR to the Comparative Method, which it may very well be in terms of heuristics and the history of how useful hypotheses have been discovered. Look at the History of Science to study this question, not at the Philosophy of Science. However, Classification is a RESULT of the Comparative Method when viewed from the point of view of establishing secure knowledge, "proofs" of relationship. Look at the Philsophy of Science to study notions of "proof". Much of the battles over Multilateral Comparison and the Comparative Method seem really to be turf battles, practitioners of one method who feel sleighted by or who sleight the practitioners of another method. If we recognize that the same word can have two very different logical statuses from different turf perspectives, perhaps we can help to avoid such battles or at least to shorten them, to tell the combatants to lay off, we need both, and they themselves USE both even if they don't like to admit it (in both directions, here). *** 6. How to find a null hypothesis opposite of M.C. results? The results of Multilateral Comparison are a statement of roughly the following form: "The following Classification tree of given individuals (languages) appears to reflect their likely historical close relations vs. divergencies better than any other Classification tree." And in cases where an algorithm is used, there may be a measure of the security of the conclusion, based on how much better this particular result is than alternative Classification trees would be for the same data. That result is a hypothesis about the real world. WHAT is the null hypothesis corresponding to such a hypothesis? Presumably that some (other) algorithm which we also take to be a valid application of classification principles would NOT replicate the same results? Or that another human judge applying the same method would not replicate the same results. (But see below.) We all know that this is indeed a hypothesis, Yet if we are responding to it carefully, we have trouble, if the specifics are good, trying to falsify it. Why? One reason is that the hypothesis is entirely post-hoc, there is (at the stage it is formulated) no additional evidence available for use, all the evidence used to develop the hypothesis is the same evidence which would at that stage be used to test it. So if we used a computer algorithm to evaluate, the result would be the same again. Yet it IS an empirical hypothesis. If the human judge or the algorithm is a good one, we are not likely to disagree with the conclusions, though we may sometimes think there is not enough convincing data. The hypothesis can be tested by enlarging the data set, to see whether the results are still the same, or by eliminating certain languages from the data set, to see whether the results are robust against such changes for the languages which remain in the set, or by using slightly different algorithms, to see whether they yield the same results, or by applying the Comparative Method if possible, to see what it yields. Are there other radically different ways of testing it? *** 7. Resistance of Multilateral Comparison to "noise" in the data, where bilateral comparison is not resistant to as great a degree. This is often not understood. Because Multilateral Comparison is IN PRINCIPLE only concerned with which are CLOSER vs. MORE DIVERGENT, a matter of degree, Multilateral Comparison with informal judgements of similarity does not, except in the clearest cases, lead to secure conclusions about genetic relationships per se, neither yes nor no. But a strength of Multilateral Comparison is that random noise in the data will, if it is truly random, not usually affect the results in terms of rankings of DEGREES of closeness vs. divergence. Random noise will eliminate similarities in more or less EQUAL PROPORTIONS from each potential comparison of closeness. (If the amount of evidence for closeness is reduced to near the quantum level of single units of evidence, then the amount of noise is too great for the method, noise would completely swamp any conceivable residue of earlier relationships. But that is quite another matter.) By contrast, bilateral comparison (many applications of the Comparative Method) depends more essentially on the absolute quantity of evidence available. For this reason, practitioners of the Comparative Method maintain that it cannot penetrate beyond some limit (which they may give as 2000 or 4000 or even 10,000 years, rarely more, rarely even that much), because the residue of evidence for genetic relation decays fast enough to leave too few traces. Multilateral comparison can work with RELATIVELY FEWER traces of earlier relationship, though just how many fewer is a matter for empirical study. A similar potential stabilizing factor in Multilateral Comparison is that it may easily lead to recognition of loan words from language family Z which could interfere with comparisons between languages X and Y both of whom borrowed the loan word from Z. A specialist comparing only X and Y might not be aware of the word in family Z. *** 8. Importance of refining judgements of "similar" or "closely related", beyond current intuitive or superficial definitions. Increases in the power of both Multilateral Comparison and the Comparative Method will come as we build an empirical basis, like the Handbook of Physical and Chemical Constants, for explicit conscious judgments of "similarity", or rather, changes, rather than the current informal judgments or systematic computerization of informal judgments: what sounds more often change proximally into what other sounds, in languages of which kind of phonetic structure, and what meanings more often change proximally into what other meanings, in languages of which kind of semantic structure? *** 9. So what has Greenberg actually done? Well, the preceding has been my attempt at a synthesis. I have never believed that Greenberg had "proven" his conclusions. I have always believed that Multilateral Comparison was a valuable heuristic, from the moment I understood the concept. I see no reason for any turf specialists to trash others whose contributions can be made use of. What Greenberg has DONE with Multilaterial Comparison is not necessarily what he says he has done. What he has done is to organize a large body of data to suggest paths for future research, by suggesting relative degrees of similarity vs. divergence among languages and language families. In this regard, if we discount his excess claims to have proven his conclusions, rather than to have used a heuristic to suggest them, it is very much like what the Cambridge group has been doing, as described by Larry Trask, which is also a useful heuristic, for the same reasons. Greenberg's work, like anyone else's, should be used for its positive value, with preliminary comments as needed to specify that his statements of "proof" are premature since the tool has not been validated at such presumably great time depths, but that any such unsubstantiated claims for the method of Multilateral Comparison in no way demonstrate it is not a valuable heuristic. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Aug 27 19:04:09 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 15:04:09 EDT Subject: Larry Trask is right that... Message-ID: Larry Trask is right that I overstated Greenberg's reasonableness, by focusing as I always have on his very rare more modest statements that he "assumed" the languages of his studies to be related, and only could draw conclusions about relative degrees of similarities. For me, his belief that his method alone was sufficient was an unproven extrapolation from his African Language classification and from some easy applications. I just thought it was silly, and it never bothered me much. I sort of think it is always a good idea to try to find what is of use in someone else's work and emphasize it, (even if it is different from what they themselves thought was of most value in their own work! :-)). The method of Multilateral Comparison has always been simply a heuristic. Please see a separate exposition of Multilateral Comparison, its strengths, and how it has not been properly understood, in another message today. I would much rather spend my time with positive contributions and trying to work towards consensus, as in that message. Greenberg does not own and did not invent Mutlilateral Comparison, it was used at least as early as Catherine the Great, with results in that case uncontradicted to this day. I still maintain that if we discount Greenberg's excess claims to have proven his conclusions, rather than to have used a heuristic to suggest them, what he has IN FACT done is very much like what the Cambridge group has been doing, as described by Larry Trask. That Cambridge work is also a useful heuristic, primarily for the same reasons, although their explorations of computer algorithms will presumably also be productive. However, the fundamental gut-level resistance is still manifest on the part of so many very competent comparative linguists, the unwillingness to admit that heuristics and the hypothesis-formation stages of discovery are part of the normal scientific method, as they have always been. They use them themselves, for goodness sake! (They may not present them in public, but that is another question.) Below I will present a consistent pattern in which Trask repeatedly fails to distinguish between what Greenberg has actually done and what Greenberg's view of his own work is. But first... Trask seems unable to handle an assumption that all languages are related, to see where it leads, EVEN AS AN EXPLICIT WORKING ASSUMPTION. Consider his misstatements in the following discourse yesterday: [LT] >>> The assumption that all languages are related is out of order. >>> The assumption that all languages *might* be related is hardly an >>> assumption at all, and in any case such an idea is excluded by no one. [LA] >> The assumption is of course quite in order, to see what it might >> lead to, as long as it is merely that, an assumption. So there is >> really no difference between the above two statements just above. Now Trask changes the question, by neglecting the explicit limitation "as long as it is merely that, an assumption": [LT] >Statement 1: All languages are related. >Statement 2: All languages might be related. >You really can't see any differences between these? Gad. [somewhat insulting, of course...] [LT] >I know of no one who queries (2), but I know of very few people prepared >to defend (1). [LA] >> Except some emotional flavoring which antagonizes some people. [LT] >Sorry, but the difference between (1) and (2) looks to me like far more >than "emotional flavoring". Of course, I was not discussing the contrast between Trask's (1) and (2) at all. Given the totally explicit "as long as it is merely that, an assumption" the proper contrast is the following: (1) "What if all languages are related?" (2) "What if all languages may be related?" The nature of a working assumption (and assumptions in self-conscious science are that, working assumptions) is of course logically equivalent to a "what if?" exploration, while one is inside the "what if?", and when that modal value is applied to a sentence, anything within the scope of the modal acquires modal value. Therefore it makes no difference whether there is a redundant modal inside the scope. In fact (2) is slightly aberrant English precisely because of the redundancy. It almost requires a "so what" response because it has failed to even make a working assumption! So actually not (2) but (1) is the preferred form for such a working assumption. Assumption (2), taken as distinct from (1), would not justify spending as much time on Multilateral comparison, it would rather justify something in the form of Pascal's famous wager: not knowing X or not-X, it would be better if we did Y, because we lose nothing and may gain. If we take "What if all languages are related?" as a working premise, then all use of Multilateral Comparison, whether by Greenberg or by anyone else, is to be understood in a particular way, that it cannot prove relationship (that was by working assumption, remember), but that it can indicate relatively closer similarities or relatively greater divergence. (If used as a heuristic, it might later LEAD TO discovery of something we could regard as a proof. But that is a separate question.) Very simple, unobjectionable, and no cause for trench warfare such as we have witnessed in the last years in historical linguistics. There is simply no justification whatsoever for trying to ostracise Greenberg or his work from the field, when it is so easy to state simply that its value is as a heuristic, that the method has not yet been tested at such great time depths, and that we may all benefit from using the heuristic as such. It is certainly falsifying the education of our young linguists if it is concealed from them how Multilateral Comparison was successfully used in Catherine the Great's time, for example, and again and again since then. It is also falsifying the education of our young linguists if they are not given thorough grounding in the Comparative Method. Both are valid, and have different uses, strengths, and weaknesses. The greatest giveaway phrase in academic trashing that I know is the phrase "fundamentally flawed", which is usually devoid of much content, and is used to ostracise person and work, to claim that they are not part of a professional field. It has been applied in this case from near the beginning of the debates over Greenberg's work. Applied to someone who systematically and with some (!) degree of care accumulated a gigantic amount of data and organized it, to the potential benefit of others Others can of course correct the data and improve it. I was glad to see Trask acknowledging the excess vituperation we have been subjected to: [LA] >> and I have been simply amazed at the antagonisms. [LT] >Here I have some sympathy. The stridency of a few of G's critics is >greater than I consider proper. But we shouldn't let that unfortunate >stridency blind us to the very substantial *linguistic* critiques of G's >work. I agree with the second part also. I urged those comparative linguists who said they had sets of vocabulary corrections to Greenberg's data to publish them pronto. [LA] >> Shouldn't we always try to make the best use of the contributions of >> each one of us? Didn't Greenberg attempt to systematize a large >> amount of data which others can then correct and improve on? But notice in his reply to the sentence above that Trask has shifted to a different topic, not what Greenberg actually or potentially contributed, but what Greenberg's own view of his contribution was. Strictly and logically speaking, irrelevant to whether others of us can make use of Greenberg's work as a starting point for further progress. [LT] >G's own view is that such corrections and improvements can extend only >to the details, to the subgrouping and to the individual comparisons. >He does not allow for the possibility that his vast mega-agglomerations >like Amerind are merely phantasms -- as many of his critics maintain. [LT, in the context of the Cambridge work] >>> If the same is true of Greenberg's highly informal approach, then G >>> cannot distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness, [LA] >> Exactly. I have always, from the very beginning, understood that >> was exactly what Greenberg's approach did. Note in his immediate reply to the sentence just quoted that Trask AGAIN focuses on what Greenberg says about his work, instead of what his work actually does. [LT] >Nope. Read what he writes. He damn well *does* believe that he can >distinguish relatedness from unrelatedness -- insofar as he recognizes >a >concept of unrelatedness at all, which I frankly doubt that he does, >given his constant asides about "Proto-Sapiens". [LA] >> He would classify Basque and Chinese as the most divergent members >> of such a set. [LT] >You have a point here, though not the one you intend. Actually, exactly the point I intend, reinforced by Trask's next sentence with which I totally agree. [LT] >For G, *no* language ever gets left out of his agglomerations. The only >issue, for him, is which agglomeration to put it into. ... An agglomeration of only one (!) at a particular level (!) is of course not an agglomeration but rather an isolate (!) at that level (!). Since there is always a higher level potentially, it is not significant to say everything is in an agglomeration. That would be significant only if there were some which were not part of any grouping. Rather one must deal with something MORE SUBTLE (in this respect only), relative DEGREES of similarity or divergence. [LA] >> he concludes "most divergent", just as he in fact did for the >> families Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut. The difference in these modes >> of expression is utterly trivial as long as we are concerned with >> tentative hypotheses, not with ultimate truth. And yet again, in his immediate reply to the sentence quoted just above, Trask switches from what use WE can make of Greenberg's work, which is what I have been primarily discussing and was discussing in the quote above, to what Greenberg himself thinks of it. [LT] >But G firmly believes that he has established "ultimate truth". I don't have to care what Greenberg thinks of his work. As a member of society, I have an obligation to make the best of it, if it has value. As a heuristic and a starting point for later works, it clearly does have some value. That is ALL that is required. Finally, Trask's summary: >I close with a reaffirmation of my central point: Lloyd Anderson's >attempt at characterizing Greenberg's work bears no relation to >Greenberg's work. Once again, Trask has failed to distinguish Greenberg's work from Greenberg's view of his own work. My characterization of certain aspects of Greenberg's work bears little relation to what Greenberg most commonly SAYS about those aspects of his work. That is an entirely different question. Can we get past this in the field of historical linguistics? I am very glad for the existence of all of the comparative linguists like Trask who do good work, and who critique data and point out errors in reasoning of others. I also emotionally want to stick up for them when they are maligned. I was exceedingly offended at a Smithsonian lecture by a speaker who USED the work of generations of comparative linguists, who presented new methods and said how good they were and how sloppy those preceding generations were, yet who also said the results of the new superior methods were quite similar in most respects to the results of preceding scholarship. Isn't there something wrong here? Can't we have people more respectful of the work of others? I chose typological and comparative linguistics for my profession because I thought it was both interesting and important, for our souls to understand our past and our common humanity and our diversity. This field has made me extremely sad through the pervasive antagonisms which have grown up in it towards some of the potentially most stimulating new statements of problems. Would everyone please just stop ad hominem attacks and cooperate more? More important, for the survival and welfare of the field, can the established comparative linguists please manage to discover that comparative linguistics is NOT A NEARLY-DEAD FIELD, that there are new things to do, new ways of refining tools, new empirical questions for which handbooks of data can be created, etc. etc.??? By all means teach good methods, honestly and inclusively, with due regard to both hypothesis discovery and hypothesis testing and much hard work all along the way. But USE the enthusiasm generated by new sets of questions, instead of depressing everyone by trying to stomp on innovation, and acting as if the Comparative Method itself were a dead fossile which cannot be improved! Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From editor at paleog.com Fri Aug 27 22:52:41 1999 From: editor at paleog.com (Yuriy Longinoff) Date: Sat, 28 Aug 1999 02:52:41 +0400 Subject: Online etymological databases Message-ID: [ moderator snip ] To my knowledge the largest Etymological on-line database was made by S. Starostin (http://starling.rinet.ru). It does not include Indo-European languages yet, but as I understand the input of Indo-European data is being under way, involving several specialists in different Indo-European groups. The database they used was written specially for this project and easily can be converted to text mode what is very useful for publication of data. (The good example is the North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary by S. Starostin and S Nikolayev, the camery ready copy of which was converted directly from the database within several minutes). Yu. Longinov, From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Sat Aug 28 03:31:24 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 23:31:24 -0400 Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance In-Reply-To: <199908241934.NAA18727@boc.brigham.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: > The only problem with Unicode is that it isn't uniformly supported by > computer programs. Any Unicode-based effort would be restricted to the > Internet Explorer browser as Netscape Navigator doesn't support it. You > either wish for the future and sacrifice present compatibility, or you make > some compromises. Well, I guess you've got to consider what the options are. I think they are the following: 1. Unicode. Current drawback: not yet universally supported. 2. Make do with ASCII or the extended ASCII set (ISO-8859-1 Latin 1), which forces you to do things like use @ for the Old English a+e ligature, etc. This really cramps you; even aside from the legibility problem, it would be a challenge to work out a set of conventions for encoding data from all the IE languages in a uniform and usable way with so few discrete characters. 3. Use a hodge-podge of other encoding schemes. This suffers the same problem that Unicode currently does (no encoding scheme beyond ASCII has universal acceptance), and suffers from the additional problem of conflicting character codes, etc. I'm sure that there are needed characters included in Unicode but not included in any other standard encoding scheme (e.g. the Gothic "hw" character, which does have a code in Unicode but not in any other encoding standard I know of). Further, support for these other encoding schemes it likely to gradually go away as Unicode support grows. 4. Do nothing and wait until Unicode support is broader. Drawback: unnecessary delay to the development of useful materials! Many of the major players in the industry are backing Unicode, and it's pretty clear that support for Unicode will continue to increase. If predictions about the computer industry are worth anything at all, then it's just a matter of time before Unicode editing, display, and text processing capabilities are conveniently available to everyone. As a short-term stopgap measure, one can always write scripts to convert data from a Unicode-encoded database to some other encoding for users who need it; and the programmer CDs from the Unicode consortium come with extensive conversion tables for exactly this purpose. In case you hadn't noticed, I think Unicode is the greatest thing since sliced bread. :-) \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From mahoa at bu.edu Sat Aug 28 21:23:35 1999 From: mahoa at bu.edu (Anne Mahoney) Date: Sat, 28 Aug 1999 17:23:35 -0400 Subject: Ancestor-descendant distance Message-ID: Sean Crist wrote: > I don't know if there are any specific standard sets of SGML tags for > marking up dictionaries. Yes, try the TEI Guidelines, available at http://www.uic.edu:80/orgs/tei/. The Text Encoding Initiative has produced a DTD that's the main standard for humanities work using SGML. See chapter 12 of the guidelines for the tag set for dictionaries. --Anne Mahoney From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 29 09:23:55 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 05:23:55 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/26/99 6:10:22 PM, you wrote: < 'Gaul' was originally simply someone from Gallia - a geographical term certainly known to the early Irish >> Please look back to my message dated 8/23/99 9:29:48 PM: << If those Northmen were from Normandy they would have been from the ON 'Valland' and in either case would have been recognized by clerics as being from 'Gallia'.>> You wrote: <<...but I imagine that a 'Gaul' was originally simply someone from Gallia.>> That makes perfect sense. But, once again, I think there's a slight problem in that there seems to be no more "Gallicae" left in "Gallia" by the time Old Ir appears in print. And there hadn't been for some time. I'm bothered by that. <<(as when 'noble race of Franks' is glossed 'tribus Gallie'). >> Now to say that 'Frank' was lierally translated as 'Gallie' in Med Latin is okay with me. Because from the 9th C. I believe 'Frank' is also being translated in OHG as 'uualha" and that versions of that word have already been appearing across the Channel for centuries before that. "mGall" is probably originally from the Latin. But I guess I'm looking for the source of the "gloss" that turned a Gall = Gaul into a Gall = Northman. < safely with OE. Moreover, it seems to be Sc.Gael. 'fuller', not 'do.', that produced Sc.Gael. bynames (in record at least from the 14th c.); this suggests that may have been a late-comer.>> Maybe. Maybe not. You no doubt noticed that 'fuller" is given a separate path in OED and had a long existence with the initial /f/ in English. The Oxford Dict of Eng. Etym says "walk" is probably from the OE "wealcere." In either case, "fulling" (unlike "fuller") is an old idea - presumably predating the process of making fulling or the status of being a "fuller" - and it is honestly hard for me to see why Gaelic would have waited until the 16th Century to adopt a word for such an old and basic idea when in the 16th Century: - the more modern English "full-" was already available as was the Middle Gaelic "fu:cadh" (fulling) and even the Irish 'u:caire' (fuller). - the word was already nearly obsolete in English and was by then quite in collision with the other "walk" in English. - the apparent sound laws still did not favor 'walk' to 'galc' in the 16th C. So if McBain is right about "galc = thicken cloth, fulling; from the English walk, waulk", then it may have entered Gaelic early indeed. Now I did also say that this could have happened in a more roundabout way. My overall point was that in this murky time we do not really know how words bounced around and "who gave what to whom when." If I remember that is why I suggested that the expected /w/ to /f/or/u/ might not apply. Now if you go back to the OED, you'll see a couple of things. One, you'll see that the German form of 'walk' is given as the origin of the It "gualcare" and OFr *gaucher. That might be an explanation of how the word had already converted to the initial /g/ before it entered Gaelic. I actually gave you other instances of Germanic /w/'s that did yield /f/ or /u/ for the same reason. Not to challenge that pattern as untrue. My thought was that 'walh' to 'Gall' could have followed the same path, so that 'Gall' entered Gaelic (and maybe Irish) more than once with different meanings. You wrote: < to explain it.>> My reasons are not primarily linguistic but historical. There's something that needs to make better sense in terms of meanings and I'm trying to find the right paths. (Although the tone of these exchanges have been a bit adversarial, please believe I've learned a lot from them and I appreciate what you are saying very much. Perhaps I've even given you something to think about.) You spoke of expecting /f/ or /u/ from the Germanic /w/. Here's an indirect path to look at that comes not from the Germanic, but the Gaulish (what little there is of it is often very close to the Latin in the pattern of appearance of the initial /v/): (This is all from McBain's.) fe?rna alder tree, Irish fearn, fearn?g, Early Irish fern, fernog, Welsh gwern, Cornish gwernen, GAULISH verno-, French verne, *verno- fiodh wood, so Irish, Old Irish fid, Welsh guid, gwydd, gwydden (sing.), Cornish guiden, Breton gwezenn, tree, gwez, trees, GAULISH vidu- ...; Anglo-Saxon wudu, Old High German witu. fionn white, Irish fionn, Old Irish find, Welsh gwyn, Cornish guyn, Breton gwenn, GAULISH vindo-,... fi? worthy, Irish fi?, Old Irish fi?, Welsh gwiw, Cornish guiu, Old Breton uuiu, GAULISH vesu- flath a chief, prince, Irish flaith, Old Irish flaith, chief, dominion, flaithem(an), chief (*vlatimon-), Welsh gwlad, region, Middle Welsh gulatic, rex, Cornish gulat, patria, Breton gloat, realm, GAULISH vlatos ; Latin valere,... Gothic valdan, German walten, rule, fo under, Irish, Old Irish fo, Welsh go-, Old Welsh guo-, Cornish go-, Cornish, Bret. gou-, GAULISH vo- Note that the path in all these seems to be (in whatever direction) Goidelic /f/, Brythonic /gw/ or /g/, Gaulish /v/. I'm curious. What would be your reaction to this pattern as an explanation of 'Gall' or 'Gaul' (gwal or kwal?) being transferred as let's say a "learned" word from Brythonic to Goidelic? Thanks for any reaction you have. Regards, Steve Long PS - The reason I use quotes and not brackets is because my e-mail seems to make things in brackets disappear for no reason I can figure out. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Aug 29 09:28:44 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 05:28:44 EDT Subject: Horthmen as 'mGall' Message-ID: In a message dated 8/26/99 10:02:34 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> Yes. You mentioned that earlier and I missed it. We are even told they are sometimes called 'Gaillion' and similiar names. In the 'Book of Invasions', Ugainy, king of Ireland, is succeeded by sons Laery and Covac. Covac kills Leary and his son to grab the kingship. Maon, Leary's grandson, goes to Gaul "to stay with some relatives." From there, "Maon returned to Ireland with a Gaulish army and killed Covac and all his nobles at Dinrigh, Maon was re-named Labra the Mariner and married Moriath, and the Gauls settled in Leinster (The Province of the Spearmen) which is named after them." We are also told the Laighi "are mythologically referred to as the Tuatha De Danann. Their name association with Laighi, the ancient name for Leinster, suggests that this was where they first settled." In the amazing complexities of Irish myth, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha de Danann and the Milesians are all successive invaders of Ireland - and not surprisingly all are associated with Gaul or Gaulish tribes. The Fir Bolg are also called "Belgi" and are sometimes subdivided into "men of Domnu, men of Gaillion, and men of Bolg." (The Dumnonii are Celts who figure who heavily in both Gaulish and British history. The Belgae are the northern most 'Gauls' in Ceasar's "Omne Gallia...") The Tuatha de Danaan also are associated with 'France' as the Laighi. They are often dated to 300 or 100 BCE. They are defeated by the Milesians. The Milesians, the last of the mythic invaders, are often associated with the coming of the Goidelic. These "sons of Milidh... are said to have come from either Spain or France to the island of Ireland, and to be the ancestors of the Gaels." In terms of hard evidence, there isn't a lot of it. LaTene has been found in Ireland, but not very much. The question of when Celts actually got to Ireland is not settled. But Mallory in ISOIE (see p 274 n 19) suggests that the evidence points to a series of late arrivals, all presumably with contacts to continental Celts. And even St Patrick apparently complains about late-arriving pagan "rhetorici" arriving from the continent. The Irish monks who "preserve Western Civilization" are often described as exiles from the continent. Medieval scholars like "Zimmer and Kuno Meyer contend that the seeds of that literary culture, which flourished in Ireland of the sixth century, had been sown therein in the first and second decades of the preceding century by Gaulish scholars." I see here also that "Dr. Meyer answers the objection" [that "if so large and so important an invasion of scholars took place we ought have some reference to the fact in the Irish annals"] "...was in part due to the fact that their presence was in no way exceptional but for their newly acquired Christianity." All of the above is exactly what bothers me about the "mGall". Ireland and Scotland were filled with folk who could very well identify themselves as Gauls or descendents of Gauls or of settlers from Gaul/Gallia. Not only because of this kind of folk origins history, but also because of the simple established Pan-Celtic connection. And whatever the origins of the word, the affinity with "Gael" (which occasionally appears as "Gal-") would also have been a clue. Did the multiple usages of "Gall" over time create so many semantic versions that we would expect serious loss by collision? In which case, it wouldn't be impossible that a Germanic usage in some form, being the most current, slipped in ahead of all the older meanings. "Gallia" itself would have been a "learned" word and would have had a better chance of co-existing without collision with that new import. Of course going back to the original quote, if these Northmen happened to be from "Valland", that is, Gallia - the term may have referred to nothing more than their place of origin. The connection with "outlander" or even "invader" may be unnecessary. Regards, Steve From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Aug 29 11:22:01 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 07:22:01 -0400 Subject: Perfective-Imperfective Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] wrote: > "Durative" implies a lasting over a considerable time, which is not necessary > to all imperfectives. My understanding is that ``durative'' means that the event is thought of as occupying a period of time, so that one can be in midst of it. > "treated as an indivisible unit" [perfective (NR)] > vs. "treated as having extent" [imperfective (NR)] I don't understand these terms. ``having extent'' in what? If time, how is ``having extent in time'' different from ``having a duration''? Also, given that ``indivisible'' refers to possibility rather than what is being done, what does ``treated as an indivisible unit mean''? Is it the same as ``treated as an undivided whole'' (even if it is divisible)? For example, why does `ebasileue deka ete' indivisible but not have extent? > [comment: this is also a fairly typical pair of uses of perfective > vs. imperfective, combined with what is often a relic category, > the non-indicative often preserving forms which at an earlier historical > stage were the primary perfectives. An alternate possibility is that the rise of a new imperfective has limited the older forms to a perfective function. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Aug 29 11:40:02 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 07:40:02 -0400 Subject: Root aorists vs. marked presents Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] wrote: > Did anyone compile the examples being offered for > Primary root-aorists with marked present stems > vs. > Primary present stems with marked sigmatic (etc?) aorists I guess the original list is from Brugmann, refined by others. Unfortunately, Brugmann and his contemporaries did not distinguish aspect from aktionsart. In general outline, and using the Vendler classification, the argument is that root presents refer to activities and root aorists to achievements. [Of course, only Indic and Hittite matter for root presents. The picture is also clouded by polymorphism, especially as this is rather frequent in Vedic. One bone of contention between Jens and me is whether this polymorphism is primary or secondary. If the stem formants were derivational, I have a hard time understanding why polymorphism cannot be original] Now we can revisit the arguments over the category of accomplishments is real (:-) and, if so, how they were represented in PIE. > Perhaps much of this has already been done? > Is it done in Rix: Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben? > (By the way, I would like to get a copy of that book in any event, can anyone > tell me an easy way? I think I found it once somewhere on the web, don't > remember where now, cannot seem to find it again, could not find it recently > at Amazon.com.) Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble do not seem to list books from publishers without a presence in the US. Is there a comparable service in Europe. [Harrasowitz, who is usually used by libraries for such books, does not seem to deign to talk to mere individuals.] From adahyl at cphling.dk Sun Aug 29 12:53:07 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 14:53:07 +0200 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World (Proto-Language) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sorry for bringing up an old subject - I have been on the road for a while without internet access or time to go through all postings on the list: On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote: (Quoting me:) >> But if we only knew the modern IE languages, we would still be able to >> reconstruct words like (...) >> The same is true for morphological paradigms etc. > Well, I would love to see morphological paradigms reconstructable on the > basis of English, Italian and Hindi ... I was not claiming that we could reconstruct PIE morphological paradigms _only_ on the basis of these three very innovative languages. But reconstructing the morphology of a proto-language spoken 5000 or more years ago on the basis of modern languages is of course possible - that is what linguists do every day, reconstructing Proto-Austronesian, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Oto-Manguean etc. Adam Hyllested From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Aug 30 00:59:27 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 19:59:27 -0500 Subject: Perfective-Imperfective Message-ID: Dear Lloyd and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, August 20, 1999 11:32 AM > Momentary-Durative is a misleading set of terms, > because BOTH are highly marked and specialized. > Perfective-Imperfective in their standard uses > probably work much better for the needs of this discussion. [ moderator snip ] Pat comments: Actuallly, I believe the terms momentary and durative are more more readily understood than perfective and imperfective. Larry, for example, in his dictionary defines "perfective" as "A superordinate aspectual category involving a lack of explicit reference to the internal temporal consistency of a situation", which, I believe is most unhelpful. As grammarians of those languages in which the perfective aspect is prominent know, the essence of the perfective is "one which desribes an action which has been or will be definitely completed" (The Russian Verb, Nevill Forbes, Oxford, 1961). Larry writes that the perfective aspect "is chiefly expressed by the simple past-tense form", and then offers the example "The hamster climbed up behind the bookcase." But he obviously does not realize that the "up" is what, in this case, makes the verb of perfective aspect. "The hamster (has) climbed up behind the bookcase." "The hamster climbs up behind the bookcase." "The hamster will climb up behind the bookcase." All above are equally "perfective". "The hamster (has) climbed behind the bookcase." "The hamster climbs behind the bookcase." "The hamster climb behind the bookcase." All above are equally "imperfective", or would normally be construed so. I am sure any of our list-members who command Russian will subscribe to this basic division. If Larry and other modern linguists want to obsfuscate the traditional meaning of "reflexive (verb)" to cover non-instances of the definition "A verb which indicates an action of which the subject or agent and the object are identical" (Mario Pei, Dictionary of Linguistics, New York, 1954), as he seems to, there is little harm done once one is aware of his expanded definition but neglecting to identify the *primary* characteristic of perfective aspect in a definition is, assuredly, fuzzily "modern" but unfortunately, completely beside the point. Once one has the correct definitions in mind, one can see why Lehmann has no hesitation in attributing to the IE injunctive (-perfective, +durative), to the aorist (+perfective, + momentary), to the perfect (+perfectuve, -momentary) (Winfred Lehmann, Proto-Indo-European Syntax, Austin, 1974). It is also surprising that Larry's definition makes no mention of "definiteness". "He ate bread" will usually be imperfective; "He ate the bread" will usually be perfective. The problem, of course, is that English grammarians did not previously recognize these regular mechanisms in English (and other IE languages except Slavic), and they are not a part of everyone's cultural background. Pat From colkitto at sprint.ca Tue Aug 31 03:49:44 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 23:49:44 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk >Yes, providing you accept the Herkunfthypothese. This hypothesis holds >that all of the several features absent in Anatolian but present in all >other branches were absent from broad PIE and were innovations in narrow >PIE after the split of Anatolian. But there is another view, the >Schwundhypothese, which holds that all these features were present in >broad PIE but then lost in Anatolian. I'm afraid I don't know if >anybody is defending the Schwundhypothese today. Actually, in Paris a couple of years ago Calvert Watkins suggested the Schwunbdhypothese was true with regard to gender. Robert Orr From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Aug 30 18:24:58 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 14:24:58 EDT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 8/24/99 10:04:28 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> I not only misread what you wrote but also confused myself - I had deleted a comment on your reference to how vlax was pluralized to vlasi by the 2nd palatalization and just forgot what I was talking about. Sorry about that. What I meant to say was that Walachia (often Wallachia) might not originate from the post-metathesis you described in: < vlax(U) in Czech/Slovak/South Slavic and polnoglasie to volox(U) in East Slavic).>> My thinking was that a form with the initial vowel intact could have survived in German and possibly in Polish. And that it survived because it referred to something other than the eastern European Vlachs. Briefly, my reasoning is: 1. Latin had already accomodated the 'metathesis' form (vl-, bl-), without the intial vowel, many times before Walachia appears. 2. There is a whole path the original form - walh - takes, that does not refer to Vlachs or Romans or Latin Speakers, but that would have still been pertinent in German - and therefore possibly in Czech or Polish - at the time vlox might have emerged as refering to the specific people, 'the Vlachs', in Southern Slavic (@ 800 AD or as early as 500 AD) 3. This split can be seen in the two forms, with and without the intial vowel, co-existing e.g. in Scandinavian and English and French, and meaning two different things. Plus, both vlachs and wolocks and wallachs apparently enter English all about the same time. 4. The /x/ affix had already appeared in medieval German with reference not to Vlachs, but in the context of the other form /val-/ that refers to e.g., Welsh. But Walach came to mean Vlach much later. 5. The 'Walachia' was first applied to its present location, apparently in the Latin of a Pole in the 15th Century, who presumably had ready access to the vl- form, both in Latin and in Polish. 6. As the Latinized South Slavic/Greek/Hungarian version early moved north and west (after 800 AD), there was still good reason for the co-existence of the earlier meaning and form of walh/volox, but that reason pretty much disappeared soon afterwards. You wrote: <> But Rumanian it seems did accept /vl-/ lock, stock and barrel. In all the quotes I've seen and some seem to be as old as the written language, Vlachs are vlahii. (e.g., S. Dragomir, Vlahii din nordul peninsulei Balcanice ?n evul mediu, (Bucharest 1959). The two languages where I think it might make sense are German and Russian. The Russian polnoglasie version seems very ahistorical as the basis for the Latinization. But German seems to make very good sense. You wrote: <> But the written and sounded 'vlahi' (see the Rumanian above) could just as easily reflect the form walh, traveling separately into the Balkans and never acquiring /x/ from the Slavic or later German. It may be that the written 'h' was just mistaken for an /h/, but the appearance of the written 'vlahi' is relatively early and apparently reflects the sound as early as the language specific metatheses you mention. Also, while more modern Rumanians do not call themselves 'vlahii' or 'valahii', speakers in some dialects did. The reason all this matters is because I'm looking for evidence that volox, vlox in the Balkans did not originally refer to Vlachs in the sense that that word would find common usage only in the 11th Century. This might seem obvious if the word is presummed to have meant Latin or Romance speakers. But I am looking to evidence that the word began to mean that only after 800AD or so, when the Franks and their sphere began to identify itself as the Holy Roman Empire. The OED seems to indicate that 'walh' and its reflexes never referred to Romans in OE or ME. The OHG 'uualha' as 'romani' seems appear first in the late 9th century. You wrote: < "Roman" (i.e. at the time and place, a person speaking Greek).>> This is with regard to why 'walh' does not appear in Ulfila's Gothic as 'Roman' but 'Rumoneis' does. Historically, it seems very difficult to support the idea that 'Rumoneis' only refered to Greek speakers in Gothic. If anything, we'd expect Gothic to extend 'walh' to Greeks or Greek as Roman citizens. In Ulfila's day, the language of the Empire and of the Roman Empire, even in Constantinople was still Latin. Constantine's language, from his youth in Dacia, was Latin. Edicts and inscriptions and anything that the Goths made contact with along the Danube that was distinctly Roman would have been in Latin. Ulfila would have had good reason to differentiate Roman and Latin from Greek, since Arianism - his 'heresy' was authored by a fairly contemporary Greek speaking Hellenist Alexandrian (North African). His 'heresy' however was banned in Latin. His foster-son and apologist, Auxentius, wrote Ulfila's defense in Latin and quite clearly understood the difference between Romans and Latin and Greek speakers. (Jordanes, the Gothic historian will even still be writing in Latin in 550 AD in Constantinople.) There really is much more evidence that 'Rumoneis' could not have referred to just Greek speakers in Gothic. There is more evidence I believe that at that time and place Gothic was simply reserving 'walh' to stand for something closer to its original meaning - which would not have appeared in Ulfila's writing and this explains its absence. 'Rumoneis' meant Roman, right down to the translation of the Paul's Epistle. "Walh' would have meant something else at the time, much closer to its original meaning: Celt, Gaul, someone from Gallia. And when the Southern Slavs show up, e.g., in the Eastern Roman Army @530AD, they may have already learned that meaning (maybe not even from Germans.) And it may be that it would take another 400 years for them to transfer the term to mean Vlachs or Romance speakers - when that more current meaning first appears. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Aug 30 20:43:53 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 15:43:53 -0500 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) In-Reply-To: <83142bec.24f6311d@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] [snip] >No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>> >Now I am not saying I have a problem with this. I'm sure there are good >methodological reason for the rule that "an ancestral language cannot >co-exist with its own descendant." (But if it is only terminological, I >might ask why it is necessary.) [snip] Actually it can. Both Spanish and its daughter language Ladino are alive, although Ladino, the daughter language is endangered. English and the Papuan languages [etc.] that spawned Tok Pisin are all alive. But the Spanish that gave rise to Ladino has probably changed as much as [if not more than] Ladino has. Spanish and Ladino are also mutually comprehensible, although you occasionally have to ask what a word means. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 [ Moderator's comment: 15th century Spanish is no more "alive" than 15th century English, so modern Ladino and other modern Spanish dialects are not a case of a contemporaneous parent & descendant language pair, but of dialects that are called different languages for sociopolitical reasons. Certainly in the sense that Mr. Long intends, no language ever lives alongside its parent for more than a single generation (if that long). --rma ] From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 03:56:19 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 23:56:19 EDT Subject: Conservative dilemma Message-ID: Concerning John McLaughlin's post today on Algonquian and Wiyot-Yurok. I was interested in a particular stage in the process, not the current state of affairs today (see below). But first... John addresses mostly the question whether the Comparative Method has now succeeded in establishing the relationship of these languages. When I wrote my previous message, I believed it had by now done so to the satisfaction of at least most, but since I had not recently heard of the views of some previous doubters, I at least hope I was precise in my previous statements, not committing as to all current views. Give the matching irregularities mentioned by John, I would assume that there are no serious doubters today. I certainly know of none. In my previous message, however, my point was quite a different one. I was NOT AT ALL interested in whether Algonquian and Wiyot-Yurok were demonstrably relatable by the Comparative Method today. That is the eventual result of a long process. I was interested in this as a case study, specifically a case study of an INTERMEDIATE PERIOD in discovery or proof (whichever way you wish to think about it). The statement I made was that AT ONE TIME at least some conservative comparativists did NOT accept that the Comparative Method could establish or had established the relationships in this case (I do not remember enough to distinguish those two phrasings). But the SAME people believed firmly that the languages were indeed related. It necessarily follows from this that they believed this based on something other than a complete proof using the comparative method. So I was saying that this potentially is a way to treat the Comparative Method empirically, to discover WHAT would cause sane and conservative people to become convinced of a language relationship BEFORE there had been a proof, or at least a complete proof, via the Comparative Method. Therefore: convincing evidence of relationship NEED NOT BE a complete proof by the Comparative Method, though it may perhaps necessarily involve some contribution by the Comparative Method (that is the narrowest possible conclusion I can draw). Discovering the answer to THAT question, how someone could be convinced not entirely by the C.M., could lead to extensions of the Comparative Method, which some might regard as secure tools, others might regard as heuristics, and we need not be concerned about what they choose to call it, as long as we regard it as a legitimate step in the process from inkling to discovery to hypothesis to proof. THAT process, as a continuum not a dichotomy, was my point. When I mentioned this sort of paradox in another context some years back, Karl Teeter very kindly sent me his work on the subject. Of course HE was quite convinced already then that the Comparative Method had solved the problem. My statements were about an earlier stage. (If I did not name names, there was a reason, it might embarrass someone or cause a denial, when viewed now many years later in retrospect. I can however safely say that one of the highest placed and most respected and most conservative people in the Amerindianist field was the doubter whose views I most clearly remember as being under discussion at that time, and that another of the highest placed and most respected people in the Amerindianist field, though not such an extreme conservative, was the person who first observed the paradox of being convinced of the relationship yet not by a complete Comparative Method proof, and verbalized it explicitly, bringing it to my attention.) *** No one example matters, so let's go to the other one I mentioned to see the analogy: Albanian and IndoEuropean. There are I would assume none today who doubt that Albanian is proven by the Comparative Method to be an Indo-European language. Yet only recently one correspondent stated that Ringe and the Philadelphia group excluded Albanian from their algorithmic approach to the family tree of Indo-European because their algorithms would not work on it. (Their algorithms use less information than does the Comparative Method, it is safe to say?) Was there perhaps a similar situation with Albanian, that the relationship was AT SOME STAGE accepted as certain by a large proportion of those interested, yet they would have said that at that time there was as yet no proof by the Comparative Method? If so, it is another example of what I am referring to. In distinction to the Algonquian-Wiyot/Yurok example, I do not have the benefit of capturing intermediate stages as moments in time, I was not present to observe intermediate stages in the linking of Albanian to IE. *** Just for consistency, since we are concerned in these discusions with the legitimacy of logical arguments more than whether particular languages are or are not related, if we are trying to strengthen our tools... I need to point out an oddity of reasoning. John McLaughlin writes: >For example, a -t- is inserted in Proto-Algonkian >between a possessive pronominal prefix and a vowel-initial root, >whereas in Wiyot a -t- is inserted >between possessive prefixes and a root beginning with hV >(with the subsequent loss of the h). >Algonkian *ne + *ehkw- = *netehkw- 'my louse', >Wiyot du- + hikw = dutikw 'my louse'. Do not misunderstand, I am not going to argue that this is NOT evidence. I am merely going to point out, for consistency, that it is WEAK evidence. The -t- is about the weakest possible consonant which could substitute for hiatus or glottal stop, so it COULD HAVE arisen independently in two cases, and not be an inherited relic at all. Because other evidence seems consistent with a genetic relation, it seems reasonable to assume that this also is a genetic inheritance in this case. Now consider Greenberg's attempt to find a morphological irregularity to bolster his claims of genetic relationship among some of the languages of his Amerind. He adduced some alternation I think it was in 3rd sg. pronominals between y- and t-. This is WEAK evidence, for exactly the same reasons that it is weak evidence in the Wiyot-Algonquian case. Because we do NOT (yet?) have evidence to convince most that all of these "Amerind" languages can be demonstrated to be related, it is argued against Greenberg that this could have arisen by chance, and is therefore "not" evidence. But evidence is evidence, whether or not it is part of a successful proof (or legal case). It is simply not logically consistent to accept in one case but not in another this kind of very weak resemblance, involving the weakest, least information-rich sounds. (Yes, I could try to argue along with the rest of you that the Wiyot- Algonquian case might be better if it is specific to pronominal prefixes; and of course because much more effort has been spent on it too! But that would be cheating, based on the final result much later.) To have a SCIENTIFIC algorithm or method for judging relatedness, we must assign a very small weight to a "lookalike" of this kind, but not a zero weight, and we must do it consistently, not fudging our examples by pretending it is there only in cases where we "know" the ultimate answer from some additional data. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Aug 31 04:12:14 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 00:12:14 -0400 Subject: Algorithm for comparative method? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Aug 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > I would suggest that the phonology hides problems just as great as the > semantics, > because we do not have an explicit empirically based metric there either! > No metric of how probable each state-to-state transition is between > particular sounds, in specified contexts of languages of particular overal > phonological or phonetic structure, etc. I don't see that that makes any difference. The Comparative Method operates by looking at correspondences between languages and working backwards thru the mergers which have applied. Occasionally, applying the Comparative Method to a body of data leads us to posit sound changes which seem phonetically unnatural. This should not distress us, however, since we occasionally find crazy rules within the phonologies of well-documented modern languages; it's just one of those things that happens every now and then ("crazy rule" is actually the correct technical term for such rules). For example, the language Kashaya has a rule i -> u / d __ (/i/ becomes /u/ after /d/), which is phonologically and phonetically absurd, yet it happens. When the Comparative Method yields a rule which seems phonetically implausible, it's an occasion to double check your work. However, it's bad methodology to impugn the analysis- or the Comparative Method- just because a rule we've posited goes against our expectations. We know that there _are_ sometimes rules right here in the light of the present which are phonetically unnatural. So I don't see how a metric for what's phonologically or phonetically plausible is going to be of direct help here. This isn't how the Comparative Method works, in any case. When I say that a computer can already compute the phonological half of the work in the Comparative Method, I mean just this: it could look at the correspondences between cognates and compute backwards to undo the mergers which have applied. For example, if language A has /a/ contrasting with /o/, but language B has /a/ for both, and if there is nothing in the phonological environments which allows us to predict where you get /a/ and where you get /o/ in Language A, then we reconstruct an */a/ - */o/ contrast for the protolanguage, and posit a rule which merged them in Language B. I _think_ that this is a computationally tractable problem, but nobody has done it yet as far as I know. > Developing a handbook of such information is very much like the task of > developing the handbook of physical and chemical constants. > Linguistics is in its infancy to a great degree > because this is still handled on an intuitive basis, and one investigator's > judgement may be quite different from another's, based on the accidents > of what "odd" languages that investigator happens to be familiar with. > There needs to be a much better way of integrating data from many different > sources, making it available to all. This is really a matter of opinion, but IMHO, I think you're underestimating how much we know. Linguistics is not a new discipline; in its modern incarnation, it's been around for two centuries, and the formal, mathematical models of linguistics have been being pursued for the better part of this century, depending on what you take as their beginning (Saussure, Trubetskoy, etc.). A relatively comprehensive and recent statement of the theories of phonology which have been distilled from this huge mass of data is John Goldsmith, ed. 1995 _The Handbook of Phonological Theory_. I think I'd be hard pressed to come away from a text of that sort and describe the state of our knowledge as one of "infancy". \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 04:48:01 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 00:48:01 EDT Subject: Conservative dilemma Message-ID: Larry Trask has ONCE AGAIN seemed to be replying to a comment about an intermediate stage between inkling, discovery, and proof, but has CHANGED the subject to talk about the final stages of proof, so the reply is in substantial part not relevant. Here is the evidence: [LT] >But the original passage I was replying to did not appear to be about >Algic, but rather about the assorted super-families set up mainly by >Sapir, though often extended (and occasionally originated) by others. >Lloyd appeared to be asking why early Americanists were so enthusiastic >about these groupings, and my posting was a response to this query. No, I did not ask that, AND I DO NOT BELIEVE I APPEARED TO BE ASKING THAT. I referred specifically to Algic. I do not think I mentioned Sapir. I certainly did not mention others such as Powell, Kroeber, Swadesh, etc. I did not mention "early" Americanists. I did not mention an early period of excess enthusiasms about large-scale groupings. That was the farthest thing from the topic of MY communications, though it obviously is central to Larry Trask's since he switched to it. [LA referring specifically to Algic] >> This was not some iffy hypothesis believed by uncareful researchers, >> it is a hypothesis believed by the most conservative researchers. >> The comment Trask quotes from Campbell simply is not relevant >> to this case. [LT] >Agreed, but it is highly relevant to a lot of other cases. So? I was not discussing those other cases at all! Larry Trask is welcome to discuss them if he wishes, but please not while claiming to be replying to statements which were NOT about them. If Larry Trask wishes to go on and on about excess enthusiasms, in cases which everyone agrees are of that type, there would of course be little point in anyone commenting further. I have commented in the past only when I thought grand generalizations were being uttered which were not supporable typologically as absolutes, such as what appeared to be a preference for finding a single same consistent canonical form for expressive-symbolism vocabulary and for the rest of the vocabulary of Basque or any other language. *** Having changed the subject once, Trask then does it again, by changing from a discussion of what SOME conservatives believed IN THE PAST to what is the case today. [LA] >> The "best historical linguistics" I was referring to are the CONSERVATIVES >> whom Larry Trask I think most admires. >> It was THOSE CONSERVATIVES who were completely convinced >> that the two "outlier" languages are related to Algonquian, >> yet some of THOSE SAME CONSERVATIVES also believed that >> their standard comparative method was not adequate to prove this >> relationship. [LT] >So far as I know, the case for Algic rests solidly on shared >inflectional morphology, which is normally considered adequate for >proof. Note carefully the PRESENT TENSE verb "rests". That is in no way relevant to what the situation was in the past, as I indeed pointed out there was a difference earlier from now. I do not see how I could have been clearer. [LT] >Comparative reconstruction is of limited applicability because >there is so little shared vocabulary between Algonquian and the >California languages. My belief (without actually looking at Teeter, though it is merely a few feet from me as I write) is that lexicon is also involved in the current arguments for the relationship. "Little" is after all not "none". Perhaps we can use this as a test case for what lexical cognate sets might look like when there are very few of them remaining because relations are distant. Only by studying such cases can we get a better handle on what happens to vocabulary resemblances at great genetic depths. Do "recurring sound correspondences" progressively disappear, but despite that, we judge that "sound correspondences" still remain, and take a more prominent position? That is, do we base our judgments at these greater depths not on the recurrence of the same sound correspondence repeated many times, which would make cognacies provable no matter how odd or crazy-looking a correspondence might be, or do we rather base our judgments on the phonetic reasonableness of the individual (often unique) correspondences and on the structural reasonableness of the SET of (often unique) sound correspondences as a whole? (So that we can reconstruct changes of whole systems into whole systems more plausibly?) *** It appears that Larry Trask is much more balanced in the textbook he has written than he is in the discussions on email. Here, it seems like pulling teeth to get him to regard proof as not definitionally related to the Comparative Method. Yet he asserts that in his textbook he has done so. I have no reason to doubt his word, and accept it. I have not read his textbook, and am conversing with what he actually says here on the IE list. So why the difficulties on email? Is there some felt need to defeat ANY notion that there might be ANY value in for example Greenberg's work? That is certainly what it appears to me to be. If so, it appears to be something political, because he has agreed in principle that Multilateral Comparison can be useful as a heuristic to generate hypotheses for further investigation by other means. (He now tells me he has said something like that in his textbook.) Please see on that another message on Multilateral Comparison. Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 05:40:41 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 01:40:41 EDT Subject: Random Noise in Multilateral Comparison. Message-ID: In a discussion about Random Noise, I was making a point that it is much less serious a problem in Multilateral Comparison than it is when one is trying to make an argument that two particular selected languages ARE GENETICALLY RELATED. >> The point I made about random noise had NOT to do with whether >> particular languages are ultimately related, but whether a given language >> or family W is more closely related to others X or Y. >> In that context, why should "random" (by definition) noise in the data >> selectively favor W to X rather than W to Y? No possible reason that >> I can imagine. To this Larry Trask replied: >But this only holds good if you assume in advance that all languages are >related. This is exactly the assumption which I chided you for earlier, >and it is also exactly the assumption which you have just told me in an >off-list posting that you do not hold. So what is going on? There is a severe gap in Trask's logic here. There is no inconsistency on my part. Saying that W is more closely related to X than to Y INCLUDES the possibility that it is related to X and not to Y. Saying that W is more closely related to Y than to X INCLUDES the possibility that it is related to Y and not to X. Of course all three may be ultimately related, or none of the three may be, as well. So there is absolutely no necessary assumption about absolute statements of relationship needed in Multilateral Comparison. *** Greenberg assumes that all languages are ultimately related, or at least within the domains to which he has applied Multilateral Comparison. I do NOT make that assumption. (But I have no difficulty reading the work of someone who makes the assumption, because it affects almost nothing except preferred choice of words.) Multilateral Comparison works the same way either with or without that assumption. With the assumption of ultimate relatedness, we get a single family tree. Without the assumption, one simply concludes that the languages which Multilateral Comparison groups as closer are more likely to be related, or are likely to be more closely related; this includes of course the converse that those which Multilateral Comparison groups least closely are the ones most likely to be unrelated. IT DOES NOT MATTER whether Greenberg takes all languages in his studies to be related, as most of his statements seem to imply, or whether he is simply making a working assumption (which he much too rarely says). Whichever he actually believes, what he has actually accomplished by doing Multilateral Comparison is the same in either case. It yields the same kinds of results, just expressed in different words. Within a context like all of the Americas, Multilateral Comparison method essentially gave the results that Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut were UNRELATED (note: WITHIN that domain, whatever they are ultimately). Good linguists should have no difficulty whatsoever in using data sets from people whose assumptions differ from theirs in this structurally trivial way. The kind of information yielded by Greenberg's use of Multilateral Comparison is structurally the same whatever the reader's assumptions about ultimate relationships. There is no elaborate translation required for understanding. There is merely a gracious tolerance required for conversations with other linguists with whom one does not agree about some things. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Aug 31 06:01:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 02:01:24 EDT Subject: Principled Comparative Method - a new tool Message-ID: << The comparative method doesn't compute anything. In a message dated 8/26/99 5:10:47 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu replied: <> Which brings up an interesting question. Why use 'semantics'? After all, in the usual presentation of the Comparative Method, the meaning of the word is just really a way of squaring up different languages. First of all, to make a guess about whether they may be related. And secondly "meanings" - generally dictionary/glossary meanings - just line up the languages in a convenient way so that phonology can be more easily compared. We can after all imagine two hypothetical languages where every word in one is phonologically cognate with a corresponding word in the other - and even have clear historical proof of this total cognation - but at the same time find in usage none of these cognates are 'semantically' similiar in any way that is apparent. True, this an imaginary situation. But it is possible because we know that the paths of phonetic cognation may be quite distinct from the paths that yield 'semantic' change. Some 25th Century NeoGrammarian could have difficulty seeing the relationship between the prescribed "gaiety" of the Eastern season's priestly vestures and the judicial recognition of "gay" rights. Presume sketchy contextual information and the 'semantic' relatedness might seem implausible. So might there not be, with the mega-statistical probabilities created by a mega-data base, a way to avoid the whole issue of meaning? The co-occurence of sound categories in well-populated distributions should yield high degrees of statistical certainties (so long as you got the dates right). But then if we just did the phonetics we might find ourselves asking whether the result really describes what we mean by language. But I guess it's all a matter of what we are trying to understand. <> I believe internal reconstruction is one often mentioned. Typographical inference is another. <> Now, to be fair, what you are speaking about is a working assumption. (In fact, the most productive thing about Grimm's Law may have been the 'exceptions'.) But it is a little silly to say that the only thing we can say about prehistoric languages is that their sound changes were exceptionless. In fact, by definition, we don't know anything directly about the sounds of prehistoric languages. So we don't know, by definition, it the sound categories included exceptions or not. But we have decrypted prehistoric languages without any knowledge of what sounds the characters represented. <> It's a little like looking at the pistons in a car engine and asking which one will get you to Chicago. You are assuming a point-for-point analogy between the internal system or structure used by the automation and the external structure it is being applied to analyze. The "linkages "in "concatenative" do not have to mirror the elements you are analyzing. They are rather internal relationships yielding values that mathematically correspond to but do not have to structurally mirror the values you've attached to external events. /a/>/a/ may correspond to a single "link" in your concatenation. /a/ > /b/ may correspond to six, even though your real-life event may correspond to only one. Those six links represent values you have assigned to /a/ > /b/, which the machine achieves any why it must in order to match the operations required. 'Invisible' intermediate formulae in a spreadsheet are a good example. <> Unless of course you are among the number of linguists (no small number) that find Grimm's Law representing archaisms, in which case you must find another path for the loan. But, in one very important definitional sense, every word in modern English is a "loan" word. What, for example, is not a loan word in Old French, if 'Frankish' is described as a "different language?" <> Just as well, eh? No added element of uncertainty at all caused by a lack of writing? Have you tried your hand at finding the loans in Thracian? <> There is also the problematic case where loans went back and forth without documentation or were loaned from a third language of which we have an incomplete record. And another where the chronology of the loan is based on eroneous historical information, so that the giver and taker have been confused. And another where the inherent arbitrariness of sound changes (why p>f?) can suggest relationships where commonalities are purely accidental. Etc. By the way, do you think there was an intermediate period between p>f where there was /p'h/? Just curious? <> We have trouble being sure of the continuity of atomic half-lives, the constancy of gravity and the accuracy of radio-carbon dating. Surely, you might take a slightly less certain tone about the chronology of prehistoric sound changes. A certain humility seems to be a characteristic of the better scientist. After all, you never know when an IE Rosetta Stone or a Quantum Phyics of Linguistics may show up and demand the humility you can voluntarily adopt before hand. regards, Steve Long From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 06:14:39 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 02:14:39 EDT Subject: Unfair to Greenberg Message-ID: Concerning the Cambridge use of unrooted trees, as compared with Greenberg, both of them draw conclusions about relative similarity, hence potentially about relative closeness of genetic relationship on a probabilitistic basis. Since Greenberg does not reconstruct proto-languages, the "roots" of his trees have only the weakest of implications, if any at all beyond the usual distinctions from a dialect chain or dialect space, so that is not an important difference between his expression of results and the "unrooted trees" of the Cambridge project. Greenberg of course is a human being making human judgments, therefore not as explicit in what the criteria of the judgements are as a computer would be, and potentially not as consistent. Just like any other human being doing Multilateral Comparison. The Cambridge computer algorithms are of course applied mechanically, and are therefore completely consistent. In addition they are explicit about what their criteria are for decisions. That does not mean the Computer algorithms are better. Computer algorithms can sometimes be better than an individual human for very complex tasks if they can be refined over time by many people, and when appropriate, conflicting goals can be harmonized or balanced. But unless done very very well they can also be inferior to human judgements. Computer algorithms can have biases built into them, and more consistently applied biases are worse than biases applied less regularly. Trask cannot stand the idea that Multilateral Comparison done by Greenberg and done by Cambridge has much in common. Trask is making a completely unfair comparison below. [LA] >> Trask seems to approve the Cambridge use of Algorithms, >> and to discount Greenberg's judgements of similarities. >> He calls the one "rigorous" and the other "highly informal". [LT] >Correct. [LA] >> I don't think either is necessarily better than the other. >> The assumptions built into each can systematically bias the >> results, and such bias will be an increasing problem for BOTH >> with increasing time depth and increasing noise in the data. [LT] >But the Cambridge work is mathematical and fully explicit; it can be >tested. G's work is not and cannot be. The Cambridge group make it >fully explicit what they are counting and how. Greenberg does not. >The *only* criterion involved in Greenberg's work is Greenberg's >opinion. The comparison just expressed is not fair by any stretch of the imagination. To be fair, Trask could have compared Greenberg with another human being doing classification by Multilateral Comparison. (We are after all talking about a situation of very distant relationships, where are genetic relationships at all, so recurring sound correspondences are not likely to be established, and THAT sense of "explicit" cannot distinguish Greenberg from another human.) Or Trask could have generalized and referred to ANY human making judgments, so the burden of the difference would not fall selectively on Greenberg. But as stated previously, it is not even certain that computer algorithms are in general better than human judgments in these matters. Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From dziewon at xs4all.nl Mon Aug 30 16:34:22 1999 From: dziewon at xs4all.nl (R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink [Rein]) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 18:34:22 +0200 Subject: Unicode in linguistics [was Re: Ancestor-descendant distance] Message-ID: [ moderator changed Subject: heading ] On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Sean Crist wrote: >On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: >> The only problem with Unicode is that it isn't uniformly supported by >> computer programs. Any Unicode-based effort would be restricted to the >> Internet Explorer browser as Netscape Navigator doesn't support it. You >> either wish for the future and sacrifice present compatibility, or you make >> some compromises. As far as I know all programmes in the MicroSoft Office 2000 packet have full Unicode support. MS competitors simply cannot ignore Unicode for long. Macintosh OS 8.5 is supporting Unicode [a bit late, though...] So what are we waiting for! Gtx, Rein p.s. can we have a discussion on whether we'll need UTF-8 or UCS-2 later on? [ Moderator's comment: This discussion, while interesting, has gone far beyond the bounds of the list. Please move to private e-mail or another forum. --rma ] From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Aug 31 13:33:18 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 09:33:18 -0400 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>> > Actually it can. > Both Spanish and its daughter language Ladino are alive, although > Ladino, the daughter language is endangered. > English and the Papuan languages [etc.] that spawned Tok Pisin are > all alive. The moderator already answered the case of Ladino, but let me answer about Tok Pisin. Tok Pisin is a creole. English is not an "ancestor" of Tok Pisin in the same sense that Latin is an "ancestor" of Italian; lineal descent and creolization are two totally different things. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 13:50:35 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 09:50:35 EDT Subject: Re Perfective/Imperfective Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 8/31/99 3:45:57 AM, vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu writes: >> "treated as an indivisible unit" [perfective (NR)] >> vs. "treated as having extent" [imperfective (NR)] >I don't understand these terms. ``having extent'' in what? If time, how is >``having extent in time'' different from ``having a duration''? Also, given >that ``indivisible'' refers to possibility rather than what is being done, >what does ``treated as an indivisible unit mean''? Is it the same as ``treated >as an undivided whole'' (even if it is divisible)? There are two differences which might be relevant. I posted my message because it appeared to me in earlier postings that debates over "momentary" and "durative" were caused in part by taking those terms as representing extreme marked values, more than merely perfective and imperfective. Hence there were legitimate counterexamples which would potentially be of no concern if we were using minimal interpretations as is more commonly done with "perfective" and "imperfective". Part of this difference was also that these terms refer not to what occurs in the real world, but rather to the mental concepts which are being expressed. Thus: "treated as an indivisible unit" is different from "is an indivisible unit" ("treated as an undivided whole" is different from "is an undivided whole") And "treated as having extent" is different from "has extent". In my experience, "momentary" is more often used with a tinge of "cannot be divided", more than merely "treated as undivided", almost as a semelfactive or Aktionsart like 'explode', 'bang', 'break' (as opposed to 'break up'), etc. And "durative" similarly is a more marked and specialized category than "imperfective", in my statistical experience. Durative might be a subset of imperfective uses, or might tend in the direction of Aktionsart flavorings. Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 13:52:54 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 09:52:54 EDT Subject: ? Nasal formative (pres/aor) Message-ID: Whether we believe there was originally only one nasal derivational formative, or we believe there were two distinct ones, for at least one of them... Can we ask what might have been a plausible more concrete semantic when it was still an independent root? (main verb or auxiliary???) How about 'attain', 'reach', 'gain', 'approach', 'come near' or the like? That works for semelfactives (in sense of becoming, or sense of 'happen' in French 'il ARRIVE que VERB'). When there is an agent in the present imperfective of the original MAIN VERB or AUX *nV..., then a meaning 'try to' could develop, as in many cases where an agent is in continued control of an activity that goes on for a while; perhaps as in the Hittite possible relic pair 'wound' with n-formative and 'kill' without it. Contrast 'beat' or 'batter' (agentive) vs. 'hit' (either agentive or impersonal 'he was hit by a flying windowpane'). Do such meanings resonate with anyone? Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Tue Aug 31 14:06:13 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 10:06:13 EDT Subject: "Perfective" definition Message-ID: Larry Trask's definition of "perfective", which Pat quoted today, is very much on target. >Larry, for example, in his dictionary defines "perfective" as "A >superordinate aspectual category involving a lack of explicit reference >to >the internal temporal consistency of a situation", Other than not knowing what the "superordinate" means here (general, abstract?), "lack of explicit reference to the internal temporal consistency of a situation" is very much like the shorter "treated as an indivisible unit" which I use. Either works. The crucial point is to include the concept that it is not what the situation is in reality, but raher how it is "treated" or "referred to" in the minds of speakers and listeners. Beyond that, it is possible to add some prototypical examples, but they are not definitional, merely illustrative. The Russian perfective vs. imperfective is NOT the same thing as the universal term perfective vs. imperfective. At least in many cases, the Russian so-called "perfective" is more a telic completive, hence the use of pre-verbs, much like "climb" vs. "climb up", as Pat rightly notes for English. The category so NAMED in any particular language has its own special flavors, narrowing or broadening of particular uses, which distinguish it from a pure universal definitional perfective or imperfective. (An even more common problem is what is called a "perfect", which may often be simply "past" or "anterior" or "perfective" instead of the universal category centered somewhere around (current-relevance perfect), which is actually a special kind of PRESENT with indications of past event subordinated to the present.) Best wishes, Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics 31 Aug 99, 10 am From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Aug 31 17:13:15 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 12:13:15 -0500 Subject: The UPenn IE Tree (a test) Message-ID: [summary of a discussion where I don't know quite who said what] >>No. An ancestral language cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>> >[snip] > Actually it can. > Both Spanish and its daughter language Ladino are alive, although >Ladino, the daughter language is endangered. > English and the Papuan languages [etc.] that spawned Tok Pisin are >all alive. > But the Spanish that gave rise to Ladino has probably changed as >much as [if not more than] Ladino has. Spanish and Ladino are also >mutually comprehensible, although you occasionally have to ask what a word >means. >Rick Mc Callister >W-1634 >Mississippi University for Women >Columbus MS 39701 >[ Moderator's comment: > 15th century Spanish is no more "alive" than 15th century English, so modern > Ladino and other modern Spanish dialects are not a case of a contemporaneous > parent & descendant language pair, but of dialects that are called different > languages for sociopolitical reasons. Certainly in the sense that Mr. Long > intends, no language ever lives alongside its parent for more than a single > generation (if that long). > --rma ] How about this example: medieval Franch, Spanish, Italian etc. beside medieval Latin, which certainly must be regarded as a living language but was effectively indistinguishable from the "Vulgar Latin" that was the actual source of these tongues? Similarly, what about Sanskrit (still living, for some Indians, and long kept alive for scholarly use) and modern Indic languages? If they are not descended precisely from Sanskrit as codified by Pan.ini, that is mere chance; there would be no *logical* problem in saying that they had, just as there is no logical problem in saying that medieval Latin coexisted with its descendants, the medieval romance tongues. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Aug 31 19:13:20 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 19:13:20 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance [long] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >4. The /x/ affix It's not an affix. Gmc. *walx- < Celt. *wolk-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl