From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Wed Dec 8 03:37:12 1999 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 19:37:12 -0800 Subject: List starting back up Message-ID: Dear readers, It has been more than a month since I last sent out messages on the Indo-European mailing list. I apologize for the long interval. The backlog is not as large as one might expect. I will clear it out over the next few days, in batches addressed to the same topic where possible, and will include newer postings as they come in. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From drewsr at ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu Wed Dec 8 19:38:43 1999 From: drewsr at ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu (Robert Drews) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 13:38:43 -0600 Subject: Greater Anatolia colloquium program Message-ID: Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family Announcement has already been made that on March 17-19 of 2000 a colloquium on the above topic will be held at the University of Richmond. The program for the three-day colloquium has now been completed and is published below. Assuming the Indo-Hittite theory as a point of departure, the organizers hope that the colloquium will explore but also narrow the possibilities for the relationship of Greater Anatolia (everything from the Aegean to the Caspian, and from the Caucasus to the Jazirah) to both the Anatolian and the "traditional" Indo-European branches of Indo-Hittite. Public lecture at 7:30 PM on Friday, March 17, in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Professor Lord Colin Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archaeology, and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge "Indo-European Origins: The Case for Anatolia" Reception following the lecture. Classical World Galleries will be open. Saturday morning session: 9:00AM - 12:00 noon, in Room 118, Jepson Hall, University of Richmond 9:00: Welcome Stuart Wheeler, Chair, Department of Classical Studies, University of Richmond David Leary, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Richmond 9:15: Opening remarks Robert Drews, Professor of Classics and History, Vanderbilt Univ.,and NEH Visiting Professor of Humanities, Univ. of Richmond 9:30: Elizabeth Barber, Professor of Linguistics and Archaeology, Occidental College "The Clues in the Clothes: Some Independent Evidence for the Movements of Families" 10:15: Intermission 10:30: Paul Zimansky, Assoc. Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Boston University "Archaeological Inquiries into Ethno-Linguistic Diversity in Urartu" 11:15: Peter Kuniholm, Professor of History of Art and Archaeology, and Director of the Aegean Dendrochronology Project, Cornell University "Pinning down the Date of the Black Sea Inundation" Lunch 12:00 to 1:15 Saturday afternoon session: 1:15 to 4:30 PM, in Room 118, Jepson Hall, University of Richmond 1:15: Colin Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge "Proto-Indo-European in Anatolia: Some Problems and Questions" 2:00: Jeremy Rutter, Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College Critical response to the first four papers 2:30: Discussion 3:00: Intermission 3:15: Margalit Finkelberg, Professor of Classics, Tel Aviv University "The Language of Linear A: Greek, Semitic, or Anatolian?" 4:00: Alexander Lehrman, Associate Professor of Russian, University of Delaware "Reconstructing Proto-Anatolian: Sister to Proto-Indo-European, Daughter to Proto-Indo-Hittite" Sunday morning session: 9:00 AM to 12:00 noon, in conference room at the Omni Richmond Hotel 9:00: Vyacheslav Ivanov, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Professor of Indo-European Studies, University of California, Los Angeles "Southern Anatolian and Northern Anatolian as Separate 'Indo-Hittite' Dialects, and Anatolian as a Late Linguistic Zone" 9:45: Bill Darden, Professor of Linguistics and Slavic Languages, University of Chicago "On the Question of the Anatolian Origin of Proto-Indo-Hittite" 10:30: Intermission 10:45: Craig Melchert, Professor of Linguistics, University of North Carolina Critical response to the last four papers 11:15: Discussion For information on registration and accommodations please visit the colloquium's website at http://hermes.richmond.edu/anatolia or contact Professor Stuart Wheeler at the Department of Classical Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173 (swheeler at richmond.edu). For more information on the program please contact Professor Robert Drews at the Department of Classical Studies, Vanderbilt University (robert.drews at vanderbilt.edu). Robert Drews Department of Classical Studies Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37235 phone: (615) 343-4115 fax: (615) 343:7261 robert.drews at vanderbilt.edu From webmaster at linguasphere.org Thu Dec 2 15:50:17 1999 From: webmaster at linguasphere.org (webmaster) Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 15:50:17 -0000 Subject: the Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities Message-ID: The Linguasphere Observatory is a research network devoted to the classification of the world's languages and dialects, the study and promotion of multilingualism and the exploration of our global linguistic environment. The Linguasphere website (www.linguasphere.org) currently contains the following extracts from the forthcoming Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities - - the MANDIC (MANDE) languages spoken in WEST AFRICA - the TAMAZIC (BERBER) languages spoken in NORTH AFRICA - the SEMITIC languages spoken in NORTH AFRICA and WESTERN ASIA - the CELTIC languages spoken in NORTHWEST EUROPE - the INDIC (INDO-ARYAN) languages spoken in SOUTH ASIA The observatory would be very grateful to receive comments from linguists on these extracts, which can be viewed and downloaded (together with an explanation of the methodology used entitled Guide to Extracts) -by selecting the Download Extracts button on the homepage. Any scientific support will of course be fully acknowledged. David Dalby Director - Linguasphere Observatory research at linguasphere.org http://www.linguasphere.org From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca Wed Dec 8 05:56:29 1999 From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 00:56:29 -0500 Subject: Root versus lexical languages. In-Reply-To: <13505698420.9.ALDERSON@toad.xkl.com> Message-ID: Dear List members-- I distinctly remember having been taught, as an undergraduate, that one can distinguish ROOT LANGUAGES from LEXICAL LANGUAGES. The latter are the more common type and consist of those languages (like English) where, as a rule, lexical items stand in isolation from one another, i.e. derivation is not regular or transparent. Root languages, on the other hand, are languages like Sanskrit or early Semitic languages, where derivation is so regular and transparent that, by taking a small number (800 to 1000) of roots, one can generate the bulk of the lexicon: this transparency is such that, for example, in an Arabic dictionary, roots, not words, are what is listed. My question is twofold: 1-Can anyone point me to published work comparing these two types of language, and 2-While the transformation of a root language into a lexical language is a banal, commonly observed phenomenon (from Sanskrit to the modern Indo-Aryan languages), is anything known about the reverse, i.e. how a lexical language turns into a root language? Many thanks in advance, Stephane Goyette, University of Ottawa. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Dec 8 23:59:39 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 23:59:39 -0000 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Dear Vartan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vartan and Nairy Matiossian" Sent: Sunday, October 31, 1999 1:48 AM > I would like to make a correction. Armenian (not ) doesn't > mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses > regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that > Albanian is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally, > "wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming > from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic > (according to V. Illyich-Svidich). I have heard this claim often but frankly have never run into anyone who is willing to defend the proposition. Are you game? Or is VIS the last word on it? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/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 Fri Dec 10 09:10:29 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 09:10:29 +0000 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Vartan Matiossian writes: [on the proposed comparisons of Basque * 'wine'] > I would like to make a correction. Armenian (not ) doesn't > mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses > regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that > Albanian is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally, > "wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming > from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic > (according to V. Illyich-Svidich). Many thanks for the correction. My (sole) source gives the Armenian word as 'wine', but I had no way of checking it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Dec 10 17:36:48 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 12:36:48 EST Subject: Fuzzy Language Boundaries Message-ID: The following message was drafted long ago, though a few minor revisions have been made since. Two paragraphs at the end were substantially revised at the request of the moderator. *** Mr. Trask has criticized others for using the term "language" in ways in which he himself has used the term. When they did, he repeatedly put different words in their mouths. Even when Steve Long quoted from Trask's book to show this, he still did not acknowledge that others are using terms the same ways he is. Examples from Trask today [many days ago] follow... In a message dated 10/20/99 6:02:33 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >When a language splits into daughters, there comes a time when we must >finally speak of distinct languages. >But one of my points on this list has been that the time when this occurs >is not, and cannot be, well defined. >That is, there was no moment when people >ceased to speak Latin and began to speak Portuguese. >And all of my objections to various postings on this list >have centered on this fact, and on related facts. >All the points I have objected to, it seems to me, >depend crucially upon the assumption that such a moment exists, No, they do not depend on that. People on this list never made that assumption. Everyone else accepted that there are fuzzy borderlines. The points Trask does not like were stated in terms of being able to differentiate in some situation between a daughter dialect which is the "same" language, by whatever criterion adopted, and a daughter dialect which is a "different" language. That can be done easily when the two dialects being compared are far apart on the scale of relative similarity to the parent, one so close that one has no problem calling it the "same" language, one so far away that one has no problem calling it a "different" language. There is no need whatsoever to deal with close-calls, borderline cases, in order to discuss the paradox that a daughter distinct language can co-exist with a parent. McLaughlin agreed that Trask was wrong here. >In my view, the relation "is the same language as" cannot be coherently given >the kind of precise and principled content which you appear to require for >your arguments. As pointed out, the kind of "precise and principled" version that Trask feels the lack of, perhaps because he does not like definitions with fuzzy borderlines, is NOT that required by any of us here. So we agree that the expression cannot be given Trask's (!) kind of precise content, but do not require it for the argument. >Except in a very broad and rough sense -- which is insufficient for >the kinds of conclusions you want to draw -- language varieties simply cannot >be divided absolutely into "the same" and "not the same". A very broad and rough sense *is* sufficient (the word "absolutely" is simply not appropriate to that broad and rough sense, and it was not required for the statement of the paradox). Again, all that was required was that one be able, in *some* cases, to distinguish "clearly same language" from "clearly different language". We need not have any criterion so precise as to be able to deal with all cases and give an easy answer or even any answer in the hard cases. If Trask had discussed what other people were discussing, this issue would have been resolved long ago. >and that the notion of "same >language" can be given a precise and principled sense. This I deny. That is not a difference between us. I agree with Trask, yet again, Like him, I deny that his kind of precise sense is possible -- as my statement that there are fuzzy borderline cases implies, there is no possible reasonable definition without fuzzy borderlines. >Nor does the passage in my book commit me to any view that mutual >comprehensibility is the sole or principal criterion for drawing language >boundaries. No one has said it was the sole criterion. It does appear to be "a" principal criterion, *one used also by Trask himself*. The paradox was framed in terms of that simper technical criterion, but as pointed out many times, a more complex criterion will do just as well. And again, the criterion does *not* have to be able to deal with the hardest borderline cases in order for the paradox to be statable. A rough one is sufficient. *** [SL] >> But please don't pretend that a language >> "changing enough" to be become a different language - ancestor or otherwise >> is something you don't understand. [LT] >In the context in which this notion has featured recently on this list, >I find this notion incoherent -- as I hope I have made clear by now. No, that is not true. Trask, just like the rest of us, finds the notion incoherent that there is a sudden point at which one language becomes a different language, or finds the notion incoherent that one can make sharp, non-fuzzy distinctions in all cases (however any of us wish to phrase that), or etc. (Trask can word it in his favorite way). Steve Long's quotations from Trask's book quite literally quote Trask as saying that a language can change enough to that we are forced to call it a different language (and of course there are cases where it has only changed imperceptibly, so we then normally call it the same language). *** >But you and Lloyd Anderson apparently want to defend a notion along the >lines of "A and B are the same language but are not identical". And this >notion, I think, cannot be given any coherent content -- at least not >sufficiently coherent for the purposes you appear to have in mind. *Any* gradient definition has those properties, that one can change less than X, and "same" will still be used, or one can change more than Y, and "different" will be used. Perfectly coherent, but with fuzzy boundaries. As *Trask himself* uses the terms (never mind whether he was speaking to beginners or not) the quoted material two paragraphs above makes perfect sense. The English of Trask today and the English of Trask two months ago are so nearly identical that no one (including Trask) would have any valid reason to call them "a different language", in the sense of a *normal* opposition of "same" vs. "different" language. Yet none of us think that means they are identical. This is *not* difficult thinking. The composite phrase "same language" can perfectly normally have a meaning, for most of its users, not entirely predictable from its parts, in an absolute sense of predictable, specifically not including a sense of absolute sameness, because this is the ordinary language use of the word "same", which does have fuzzy borderlines. [ moderator edit, by agreement with Mr. Anderson ] Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 11 19:55:54 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 14:55:54 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >That migrations do leave evidence. -- some do. Some don't. >It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that there was no significant >incursion during this period from the north into mainland Greece. -- well, yes, actually it does. See above. >There is nothing to suppose that IE speakers were not already present in >Greece when the Anatolian migration began c.2400 or that the migration did >not represent IE speakers. -- the linguistic relationship of Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iranian suggests a quite recent divergence when they're first recorded. >to suggest that an IE dialect(s) from the north became the dominant language >of Greece without leaving any significant evidence of arriving there -- why not? There are plenty of historically-attested instances of linguistic succession that didn't leave any archaeological traces to speak of. You've got to get over this assumption that linguistic events are going to leave unmistakable traces in the stones-and-bones record. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 11 04:25:42 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 23:25:42 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE) Message-ID: >sarima at ix.netcom.com writes: >Oooh, I had missed that somehow. Just to make sure I have the right place: >do you mean near the northern shore of the Caspian? Are they associated >with the NW Andronovo or the eastern (Volga-Ural) branch of the Yamnaya >complex? >> -- the Sintashta site, upper Ural river, northeast of the Caspian; early Andronovo, if memory serves. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Dec 15 08:07:51 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 03:07:51 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 12/10/99 10:40:36 PM, Jens wrote: <> With all respect, the arrows showing the spread of the "Kurgan complex" - which you are depending on - are not linguistic. Please recall that the first historian to identify the Pit Grave culture (as Kurgan is called in other locales) with PIE - Kossinna - took the evidence to mean that the IE homeland was Germany. Gordon Childe in the 1920's was by far the guiding light of the theory that shifted that homeland to the Ukraine - his The Aryans in the Penguin editions were still standardedly assigned in undergraduate courses in the early '70's. (But Childe later recanted, calling his early theories childish, and in 1949 his guess was that Anatolia was the IE homeland.) The Pit Graves/Kurgans were again used by M. Gimbutas as a way of tracking down the IE homeland. At first this approach followed the traditional dating 2500BC as the dispersal date. But in the wake of C-14, Renfrew et al, Gimbutas offered a new three wave theory by which PIE might have come into Europe, with the first wave as early as 4500BC. Mallory relies heavily upon Gimbutas for his qualified conclusions. All of these approaches were entirely based, first of all, on the archaeological evidence. Linguistics, along with various other cultural features, were supporting evidence. Obviously, the pit graves and pottery had to be there to justify any identification. In the meantime, other evidence erupted on the scene - not the least of which was the use of carbon dating to flesh out the Neolithic Revolution story and the central position of Anatolia. Innovations have been continually back-timed, so that it became apparent that bronze, megaliths, domestication of animals all preceded the 2500BC steppe elite horsemen of the Ukraine scenario by thousands of years. This back-timing also made somewhat irrelevant the appearance of many later developments often associated with the "coming of the IndoEuropeans", such as chariots and iron technology. Perhaps the most recent trend has been the realization that "kurgan" characteristics did not cause anything but minor changes in a great many areas where they were adopted. More important changes seem to have to do with climate, economics and resulting changes in trade and material processing and social structure. In general, the increased populations created by the Neolithic Revolution stayed where they were both in Europe and elsewhere "where IE is later found." The influx was not of new peoples in most cases and where they were we do not find horse warriors, but rather "the sheperds of the kurgan culture" as one recent research report described them. There is much evidence of pastoralism (the hallmark of the earliest "kurgan" cultural remains) first moving north and west into central Europe and then later east into southern Russia. And finally some of the major areas where we find "kurgan" developing "on its own" don't turn out to be IE when those areas enter history. This is not to say that the "Pit Grave" culture was not IE. But its overall impact seems to have been a supplement to some rather strong developments that were already going on in Europe and in Asia. Which suggest it was not PIE. I think the simplicity of the kurgan solution is only there so long as you don't dive into the evidence. When you do, Renfrew's neolithic proposal begins to make more and more "common sense." For a fairly recent and detailed summary of the actual archaeology of eartern Europe and the western steppes, let me suggest P. M. Dolukhanov's "The Early Slavs: Eastern Europe from Initial Settlement to Kievan Rus" (Longman pb 1996) - a relatively non-specialist book in print and readily available from most book distributors. Dolukhanov carefully and exhaustively cites finds, site, assemblages and dates - not an easy thing to find in English with regard to the region. (He also does the reader the service of separating the field summaries from his conclusions.) The conclusions are not favorable to Gimbutas (or Mallory). See p 94. One obvious reason is that while funeary practices and pottery types diffuse, the rest of the many cultures involved do not alter in a fashion that suggests being overwhelmed by significant groups of outsiders. Ideas seem more powerful than migrating nomads. I went back to look at what some other archaeologists were saying - I think this is representative. Andrew Sheratt, famous for his identification of the Neolithic secondary products revolution sometimes cited as supporting a kurgan-origins theory, not long ago published the "revisions" in his thinking since that time. These include currently supported conclusions about "the plough and wheeled vehicles arriving in Europe around 3500 BC as a result of events in the Near East" and "that Pit-Grave groups penetrated into eastern Hungary into areas abandoned by Baden communities because of increasing salination after 3000 BC. " And finally "if there was a "secondary products revolution", then it was part and parcel of a continuing series of consumer revolutions in the very unusual part of the world that we call western Asia (or, more ethnocentrically, the Near East)..." Kurgan seems to play a minor role in Sherratt's latest understandings. Another eminent British archaeologist, Alasdair Whittle, wrote some years ago about how overall impressions have changed in the archaeological community in Europe in the Neolithic (CamUPress 1996). A number of points he made are perhaps very relevant to one's thinking about the PIE question. Whittle mentioned often that the existing cultures (and perhaps language) of Neolithic Europe - with its megaliths and population increases and amalgation of rich Mesolithic cultures as in TRB - would have been a hard thing to displace by any means. Even after many centuries, "the LBK/Danubian tradition [and perhaps its language] would have been a powerful common element over very broad areas" Another point possibly relevant to language is the thin stratum represented by intervening cultural changes, Whittle emphasizing that the Corded Ware complex "can be seen to have massive continuities with what went before". Also, Whittle found "Gimbutas's large population movements and demographic changes" unsupportable from any evidence. And he conjectures that the expanse of PIE might be explained as a "language of communication" across different communities, adapted to both local needs and interregional trade - the Mediterranean being the logical site of the most "indigenous" versions. There is quite a bit more along these lines in the literature. Should any of this rule out the kurgan theory? I don't think so. But I don't think the matter can honestly be called settled. Certainly not on the basis of "simplicity." You wrote: <> But in fact what the archaeological evidence does is change - which it always has. There was a time when there were was no evidence of Hittites or of Linear B. And farming was supposed to have entered Europe about 2000BC. Compare, even in 1981, B. Lincoln (while denying that archaeology would have anything new to add to the subject) wrote that the first appearance of IndoEuropeans occured with "the Indo-Aryans in India around 1500 BC, the waves of invasion into Greece around 1600-1000 BC, and into Anatolia around 2000 BC." The linguistic evidence on the other hand is fundamentally unchanged since C-14 was introduced. (except I suppose for Mycenaean.) The real question is whether linguistic conclusions should change. The problem is basic. If you date IE unity on the basis of the date of the earliest wheel (only an example) then you know your dates will change if evidence of the wheel moves back a thousand years - which it well may. Unless you can stop the digging, of course. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Dec 11 13:55:09 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 13:55:09 GMT Subject: SV: Pre-Greek languages In-Reply-To: <01BF279E.7FBBE6C0.lmfosse@online.no> Message-ID: Lars Martin Fosse wrote: >Eduard Selleslagh [SMTP:edsel at glo.be] skrev 19. oktober 1999 08:52: >> [Ed Selleslagh] >> 3. The presence of Elamite (in Antiquity) and Brahwi (Dravidian) in Iran >> strongly suggests that the Dravidian territory stretched far more westward >> than at present. It seems - but I have no documentation at hand - that the >> old Indus valley culture is now recognized as having been Dravidian, which >> reinforces the hypothesis. >The presence of Brahui has been shown to be due to a migration of Dravidian >speakers from the South of India (probably mercenaries) a few hundred years >ago. They are therefore not relevant for the discussion of the earliest >period. >From the South of India? I'm aware of theories that derive Brahui from a migration from medieval Northern India (although I don't know what the arguments for it are), but Southern India would seem to be very strange: isn't it agreed that Brahui is closest to the North-East Dravidian languages Kurux and Malto? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Dec 11 23:46:11 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 17:46:11 -0600 Subject: Was Pre-Greek languages/now Sanskrit/Indus valley In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991101170847.00982a00@popd.netcruiser> Message-ID: Do any of the Hindu deities have Dravidian names that can be dated to a very early period? Can other any Hindu loanwords from Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, etc. be dated to a period corresponding to the fall of Mohendjo-Daro? [ moderator snip ] >This, however, is somewhat more secure. Several of the mythic and artistic >elements later so characteristic of Sanskrit culture appear to be present >in Indus Valley artwork. So substantial borrowing in the areas of >religion, myth and art, at least, seems well supported. >-------------- >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu Sat Dec 11 16:04:26 1999 From: rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu (rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 11:04:26 -0500 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >Well, at the time that Archaeology & Language was published, Renfrew's main >argument was with the "majority" theory at the time - which placed IE's >dispersal at 2500BC (Childe-Kossina-Gimbutas). >... >Now, the new "consensus" date has backed to 4000BC in the recent posts on >this list. But I wouldn't bet the ranch on it staying there. Partly because >the actual evidence for picking that date is not much stronger than the old >2500BC date. To try to track the "consensus date" sounds like a misrepresentation of the consensus. 2500 BC was (and is) more of a "terminus ante quem" than a date for IE dispersal (based of course on the earliest attested dates for Anatolian, Indic and Iranian -- and hence presumptive Indo-Iranian -- and possibly Mycenaean Greek). 4000 BC sounds like an attempt at a terminus post quem (others are Renfrew's 5000-4500 BC) based on the articles indisputably reconstructable to PIE. I would hope it is not a new "consensus date for IE dispersal". I doubt the available evidence allows us to narrow the date of IE dispersal down with such precision. Regards, Rohan. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 11 20:07:20 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 15:07:20 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Well, at the time that Archaeology & Language was published, Renfrew's main >argument was with the "majority" theory at the time - which placed IE's >dispersal at 2500BC (Childe-Kossina-Gimbutas). -- Gimbutas has it beginning around 4000 BCE, and that's been her date of choice for a long time. And the Ukraine is still the "majority" theory, and likely to remain so. >Quite possibly the book was the stroke that "demolished" that theoretical >date -- Renfrew is not taken very seriously outside his own coterie. His arguments are weak. Eg., he has Celtic arriving in the British Isles before 4000 BCE and then remaining absolutely uniform until historical times, whereupon it starts changing rapidly. His explanation for Indo-Iranian is even more ludicrous. >It is a conclusion based on consensus. -- consensus of linguists; hence a linguistic argument. >One important thing that Renfrew's book did was to bring objectivity back to >archaeology -- what Renfrew does is posit developments that are linguistically... ah... highly implausible. Or to be less reticent, "ridiculous". >It certainly wasn't the horse, which shows no sign of being a >factor in seige or decisive war before 1000BC. -- an absurd statement, seeing as every major Middle Eastern power depended on a chariot corps in the 2nd millenium BCE. >And the chariot was just a platform for conveying war leaders around in Homer. -- I suggest you study the data from the period when the chariot was an actual factor. It was primiarily used as a mobile platform for archers. >But Latin's prestige didn't come from a bunch of headbashing riders off the >steppes. -- No, headbashing armies from Italy. You know, the "Roman Empire"? >And Slavic has consumed a long list of "dominant elite" languages like they >were just popcorn at the ballpark. -- Slavic reached its present dimensions through a series of well-attested folk migrations and conquests starting in the 5th century AD. Prior to that it was confined to a relatively small area of northeastern Europe. Most of the area now covered by Slavic languages was occupied by Baltic, Finno-Ugrian, Illyrian, or other languages. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Dec 11 16:13:19 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 11:13:19 EST Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) Message-ID: Pat Ryan wrote: <> (This would seem to be an essential consideration in tracking the phonological history of any language. After all, a "central" question about Basque and its uniqueness is common ancestry with other languages. Evidence of its descent to seem to involve considering words that would be relatively "ubiquitous." At minimum, this matter would seem to deserve careful qualification and not a flat yes-or-no. But it seems I'm wrong...) In a message dated 12/11/99 5:38:52 AM, LTrask replied to Pat Ryan: <, but this ubiquity is not an argument for pushing the word back to Pre-Proto-Everything. Rather, it is a compelling argument for disregarding the word altogether, on grounds of *motivated* independent creation.>> This kind of statement reflects a basic problem in the way Prof. Trask is approaching the use of a computer in acheiving some kind of objective results about his subject matter. How is he defining "ubiquity"? Is this "miau" word in any dictionaries he is using to support his statement about "most of the languages of the planet?" How much ubiquity is enough ubiquity for exclusion? In Swedish, the sound a snake makes is called . In Polish, a word for snake is . The difference in usage can be subtle, but it is rather faithfully applied in both languages. Does this make too ubiquitous? Or would it make his list? Or does its appearance in both languages say something about the origins of the word and would that justify the word making that list? On the other hand, does not appear in the dictionaries of either language. Does that mean it's not ubiquitous enough to be excluded? Would you have to go to a Japanese, a Bantu and a Finnish lexicon to answer that question - diregarding Swedish and Polish? Is there something about a snake noise versus cat noise that makes one ubiquitous and the other not? Can you state that rule so that readers will know how you intend to apply this exclusionary process to other animal noises? In the interest of establishing the "principled" nature of your prescreening process. So that an observer may say with confidence that the results of your prescreening is not a case of GIGO? Without casting any aspersions on your judgments as a highly competent professional linguist, unless you can state "operationally coherent" definitions of your prescreening criteria, your choices can look VERY arbitrary. And if you can state operable definitions, the computer should be doing the "choosing" to confirm the objectivity of the distinctions being made. That is the "control" that would be expected in other fields when one would claim that a computer is confirming ones choices. And why is it again that you can't feed the entire contents of Basque into the computer first as "raw" data and then do these operations? Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Dec 12 08:05:51 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 08:05:51 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 1999 10:46 AM > Pat Ryan writes: > [on Basque 'mother'] >> I continue to believe that some terms which might be classified as >> Kinderlallsprache such as are a powerful indication of common >> linguistic descent; and should not be excluded from consideration of >> inclusion in Pre-Basque. >> It may be that this category of terms has preserved an older or non-typical >> phonological form than other words of the vocabulary but they should be >> seriously considered because of their ubiquity. [LT responded] > No. Their ubiquity is *precisely* the reason why they should be excluded. > After all, in most of the languages on the planet, the word for a cat-noise > is something like , but this ubiquity is not an argument for pushing > the word back to Pre-Proto-Everything. Rather, it is a compelling argument > for disregarding the word altogether, on grounds of *motivated* independent > creation. [PR] I feel that you may be mixing apples with oranges here. I would, myself, be quite sceptical of any claim that an imitative word like indicated anything more than an attempt to capture the quintessential acoustic impression of a cat-call. But, 1) there is nothing "imitative" about for 'mother'; 2) more importantly, does not have the form we would expect from childish babbling, which, I hope you would agree, would be along the lines of C(1)V(1)C(1)V(1). I gladly concede that , , , etc. are childish attempts to render other words, e.g. <*?ama> and <*?atV>, etc. but there is nothing that I know which *necessitates* or universally *inclines* children all over the world to connect /m/ with 'motherhood' or /d/ or /t/ with 'paternity' --- short of some universalistic sound-symbolism argument, which I provisionally do not accept. I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance they have in most human societies. Let us assume that, for reasons I cannot fathom, children all over the world are *independently motivated* (by what, pray tell ???) to employ for 'mother'. What could the cause be for reducing to <(?)ama> (why not <*ema>, <*uma>, <*ima>, etc.?)? Why not just retain exclusively? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/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 ECOLING at aol.com Sun Dec 12 02:28:21 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 21:28:21 EST Subject: Excluding much? Message-ID: It has been pointed out to me several times in private communication that Larry Trask's criteria in seeking to establish his list of "best" candidates for early Basque monomorphemic lexical items (I hope that phrasing accurately represents Trask's statements of his goals) contains two parts which together will cause the total list to be very seriously reduced, to a tiny number of items. I think Trask should have an opportunity to clarify or deal with this issue publicly, so here are the specifics. Among other reasons for asking this explicitly, I understood one of Trask's more recent communications about Basque to be saying that there are more documentary sources available than I had previously understood him as saying. (The question on interaction of these two criteria is quite independent of other questions which have been under discussion.) 1. Only include candidates attested in four out of five major dialect groupings (groupings I believe Trask has established based on his study of which are more closely related to each other, which more independent) 2. Only include candidates from the earliest documentation, either pre-1600, as Trask prefers, or pre-1700, as he has said he is willing to consider a modification. Do these two criteria together mean that almost no lexical items will qualify, only the most rudimentary lexicon, words which are almost totally independent of subject matter and style, such as English "and, the, good, very, when, not, come, go"? How many does Trask estimate this would permit to be included? Lloyd Anderson After writing the above, I read Trask's listings of ordinary vocabulary from the religious texts. That is a very good list, and I thank Trask for it. Most of it, though by no means all, fits the category I mention just above of words almost independent of subject matter and style. There remain for me two content questions. (a) What happens to the list Trask posted, when he applies the rule that four out of five dialects must attest each item to be included? Still the very most basic vocabulary should survive, perhaps a list much like what Trask just provided us, but though I believe so, it is an empirical question. (b) When I wrote the following, there was a scope ambiguity: Speaking of attestation primarily in religious texts: > That is a very strong bias of content, I would think against quite a > range of vocabulary from ordinary life. I intended not "against [there being] a range of vocabulary from ordinary life", which was Trask's interpretation in this case (a reasonable possibility), but rather I intended "against quite [large parts of the] vocabulary of ordinary life [which are not religious in content]". The grammatical items and most basic adjectives, nouns, and verbs, would still occur, probably in all dialects, but whether measured in a single dialect group attestation in religious texts, or if requiring four out of five dialect groups, I would think many words like these would not be found in such a high proportion of texts which are not oriented toward a subject content which would promote their inclusion. I will *of course* be wrong about some of the following, but others could be substituted. And I know from previous correspondence that Trask believes some of these are in vocabulary domains where almost all Basque vocabulary is loanwords from other languages. I assume not all of the items of ordinary life which would fail to be widely enough attested would be such loanwords. The following list is *of course* not designed with any knowledge specifically of Basque in mind. But it illustrates roughly some of what I mean is included by "ordinary life" on land and sea. "cartwheel", (horse's) "bit", "fleece", "canal", "rafter", "threshold", "sunrise", "planet", "yoke", "thresh", "root-cellar", "eye" (of potato), "scrape", "consult", "dig", "build", "rudder", "hull" (of boat), "hull" (of seed), "bill" (of bird), "down" (of bird), "mast", "shear", "midwife", "stillbirth", "roe" "kitten", "chick", "kid" (of goat), "foal", "filly", "vixen", "badger", etc. names of quite a number of plants and animals, perhaps some kin terms, some terms relating to marriage ceremonies, "visit", "adopted" (child), "village idiot", various kinds of earth and minerals and plant products, etc. etc. etc. The items I find in Trask's list posted today which are not the strongest core grammatical items but slightly more like those I have sketched above are from his first list: acquaintance, ability, arrive, country, drown, hair, custom, prudent, dark, and from the second list: king, star, gather, lord, dream, mouth Notice that there are no overlaps between these two sets of vocabulary from ordinary life, which are not in the highest-frequency sets. So I believe (perhaps wrongly) that many of these will not satisfy the criterion of occurring in four out of five dialects. Of course, Trask's samples were only a few lines from a New Testament preface and from Chapter One of Matthew. Once we include the entire text, things should be better. How much better? I do not claim to know. That is why I think my questions in this message are really empirical questions. Of course, if we correct our estimates again, by noting that even the rarest items which did occur in Trask's two short samples are not as rare as most of the sample items in the sketch I gave above, it again looks less probable that a wide range of rare vocabulary of ordinary life will be covered, therefore not a wide range of polysyllables, relative to the monomorphemic polysyllables which really did exist in spoken Basque of the time. From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Dec 12 02:28:18 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 21:28:18 EST Subject: *Degrees* of evidential value Message-ID: Larry Trask writes, concerning Pat Ryan's example /ama/ 'mother': >No. Their ubiquity is *precisely* the reason why they should be excluded. >After all, in most of the languages on the planet, the word for a cat-noise >is something like , but this ubiquity is >not an argument for pushing the word back to Pre-Proto-Everything. >Rather, it is a compelling argument for disregarding the word altogether, >on grounds of *motivated* independent creation. As in all discussions of sound symbolism and expressives, as for anything else, we do not have absolutely perfect knowledge of what causality is. But we do have the ability to partly solve the *simultaneous equations* (to use a metaphor or analogy) of these two kinds of factors. As long as *not all* languages have words for a 'cat-noise' which are *equally* similar to our English , we may be able to make some partial, statistical distinctions, and we may find that the different types of imitative words for a cat noise fall into groups which *partially* correlate with known language families and genetic relationships. They would then be weak, or very weak (take your pick) evidence. Now switch from "cat-noise' to the name of the animal, 'cat'. There should be a difference of *degree*, words for 'cat' should show more variety, less uniformity, than words for 'cat-noise' (though some words for 'cat' will also relate to ). *** Now to the generalization from such specific contrast as 'cat-noise' vs. 'cat': For *each meaning* which we can identify, and for which we can gather vocabulary, we should be able to develop a measure of the *degree* to which it shows arbitrariness across the world's languages, roughly the number of different sound forms which occur in words with that meaning, or better, the degree of difference between such alternative sound forms for the same meaning, weighted by independent occurrences (measured in a more sophisticated manner, which information-theory specialists can define for us). Then we can *weight* each concept according to those results, giving greater weight to those which are more arbitrary. There is no need to have absolute lines of inclusion and exclusion. Even expressives and sound-symbolic words can be of *some small* evidential value in estimating likelihood of a language A being more closely related to language B than to language C, or the reverse. I think almost anyone would grant that, given A equally close to B and to C on every other measure developed from vocabulary which is at the extreme of not having any expressive nuance, we might heuristically consider the value of expressive vocabulary as well. Since there is a gradient between non-expressive and expressive vocabulary, not a sharp line, there is a large amount of evidence we can use, without throwing it away. Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Dec 12 02:28:30 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 21:28:30 EST Subject: Sample bias, word length, frequency, circularity Message-ID: This message is on a distinct source of sample bias, one not in these discussions previously. And on one explanation of what was meant by "circularity" earlier. *** It is well known that more common lexical items are, as a statistical matter, shorter, and rarer lexical items are, as a statistical matter, longer. This is true world-wide, I assume the point is not debated? If this is true, then a selection of vocabulary which is very strongly biased towards the most common lexical items in a language will also be strongly biased towards the shorter items. A sample selected with a very strong bias towards shorter words will be unrepresentative of the language it is drawn from, especially if one is aiming at generalizations about canonical forms. (It will also be skewed towards more grammatical lexical items, "when, the, very, some, that, do".) This matter of a bias in word length is another factor which I did not previously mention explicitly, which argues against having too small a list of items included in a sample, if one wishes to draw conclusions of general validity, when one is trying to determine the canonical forms even for monomorphemic lexical items in early Basque (or any other language), and even if (as Trask very nearly specifies today), one is not interested initially in canonical forms of expressives. Multisyllabic forms which actually occurred in spoken early Basque are of course monomorphemic if they are not analyzable into components within Basque. Whether or not they will be picked up by a particular sampling technique -- that is a one of our questions. So the discussion in another message I have sent today, under the title "Excludes much", is highly relevant to the question of possible distortion of a sample of vocabulary. That other message contrasts roughly basic vocabulary of ordinary life on land and sea with the kind of basic vocabulary which is of highest frequency, independent of subject matter of texts, which will therefore be most likely to be found in at least four out of five dialect groups, following Trask's criteria for inclusion. Lloyd Anderson *** On other matters, I think we have reached some partial closure on one point. Trask has written: >But who ever said I was interested in canonical forms >"for the language as a whole"? I believe the original statements did not specify exclusions, and aimed at general validity, so one could reasonably assume they were intended for the language as a whole. The exclusion of expressives, *or systematically of any other group of words* (such as the longer words, as noted above), through any aspect of the sampling procedure, would of course tend to invalidate such general validity. *** Trask has affirmed: >Expressive formations may be constructed >according to different rules from ordinary words. >Indeed they are, but how can I hope to establish >this objectively unless I >*first* identify the rules for ordinary words? The methodological point would be I think that one cannot separate out ordinary words from expressives (or from any other category of words) in one's selection of data, without knowing how to recognize what expressives are. But as I have previously stated, as long as the expressives are not excluded as "not candidates for early Basque", they will be considered at some point. It is the phrasing which Trask used early in these discussions, which seems to aim at conclusions valid for "early Basque", and linked these with his criteria, rather than saying that his conclusions would be valid for "a subset of early Basque", namely that subset which is selected by his criteria, which seems to place his criteria above themselves being questioned. Perhaps this way of stating it makes it clearer what has been meant by "circularity". If we say that conclusions from analyzing a particular subset of early Basque will be valid for the subset of early Basque selected by the criteria used to select it, we of course have a plausibly valid statement. That makes explicit what the limitations may be. Trask's earlier statements seemed to aim at much broader validity, and omitted the limitations. That is at least one reason why they have seemed rather circular to a number of us. ********* Neither Trask's criteria nor any I have suggested single out expressives for either exclusion or exclusion (I have always granted that; it would be nice if Trask would grant it in return). Yet the point I have made is that Trask's criteria do so indirectly, because of the bias in written attestations of expressives, probably world-wide, and that limits the general validity of any results he would get from his sample. Since he has slightly narrowed his claims, this is of less concern. However, Trask's criteria also bias against longer lexical items, and that is not so trivial by any means. That is a bias against some canonical forms, at least statistically, and a bias against ordinary vocabulary which is not in the highest frequency class. Regarding this, which I intended only to be very careful: >(2) Words in particular semantic areas >may be constructed according to >different rules from other words. Trask responds: >This I find unworthy of taking seriously. >I know of no language in which such >a thing happens, and I certainly know of >no reason to suspect that it might be true of Basque. If one uses the term "semantic areas" rather more broadly than usual, I think I have indicated that it is true of every language, there are strong differences between the semantic ranges occurring in the most frequent, statistically shortest lexical items, and those occurring in the rarer, statistically longer lexical items. Since that application of the phrase certainly may not have occurred to Trask, I can understand his response. I would think that in most languages, color terms would not have different canonical forms from names of animals. But they might. I think we agree here. >Of course, if it *is* true of Basque, then that fact should >emerge from my investigations. But I'm not holding my breath. Well, yes, in a sense, but only when the sample is extended to include them. It cannot emerge from a sample which does not include them, but only from a contrast between that first sample and a larger sample or another sample. So again we come back to the point that it is perfectly fine for Trask to use a very narrow sample as a starting point, as narrow as he wishes. But he cannot then draw conclusions of general validity for the language as a whole, or even, given the probable sample bias, for the monomorphemic lexical items of early Basque. Biases in his sample selection almost certainly work against that. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Dec 12 07:36:54 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 07:36:54 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear Lloyd and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 1999 5:44 PM [LA wrote] > It is not a valid counterargument > to say that "possessive pronouns" must be "pronouns" in every respect. > That depends on the assumption that the composite is transparent, > and would lead to the conclusion that "White House" must be a white > house, even if it were another color, patently an error of reasoning. > Rather, "possessive" may already signal a member of the class > of determiners, or whatever one considers "possessive pronouns" > to be closest to, distributionally. [PR] I essentially agree with what you have written here but I honestly do not understand the application of the paragraph cited above. Could you expand or clarify it? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/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 Mon Dec 13 10:48:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 10:48:14 +0000 Subject: semantic definitions Message-ID: Pat Ryan writes: > Now, I would say that Larry would be the best choice to explain why a > semantic approach "doesn't work as well" but since I have repeatedly asked, > and in my opinion have not gotten a responsive answer to the question of > 'why the "slot-and-filler" approach (Larry's terminology) be characterized > as working better', perhaps you will jump in to explain with specifics not > with generalities why you also hold this view. Well, I don't think it's up to me, or to anybody, to demonstrate *ab initio* why semantic definitions of parts of speech don't work. Semantic definitions have been attempted many times, and all such attempts have been dismal failures. If Pat, or anybody, wants to argue that parts of speech *can* be defined semantically, then it is up to him to make a case, which we can then discuss. So, Pat, let's have it: where is your semantic definition of 'noun' or 'verb' or 'adjective' or 'pronoun'? Put it on the table, and let us have a look at it. Perhaps you'd like to consider cases like 'arrive' and 'arrival'. These appear to have the same meaning: we can say, equally, 'before she arrived' or 'before her arrival' -- yet one is a verb while the other is a noun. So how can the two be distinguished on semantic grounds? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Dec 13 11:16:54 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 11:16:54 +0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > In the discussion between Larry Trask and Pat Ryan, > each of them has a partly valid perspective. > Pat points out that "Personal Pronouns" may properly > include "possessives" or "possessive pronouns". Well, I would query this use of the factive verb 'point out'. I think you can only 'point out' something which is true, just as you can only 'realize' something which is true. > Trask objects that "possessives" are not pronouns, > as proven by distributional criteria. Indeed. > The gap in Trask's logic is the assumption that > the definition of "personal pronoun" > must depend essentially and exclusively on a distributional meaning, > and cannot have another legitimate basis. Actually, I never said that distribution was the *only* criterion. There exist other valid criteria for part-of-speech classification, such as inflectional and derivational possibilities. However, as it happens, these criteria are of little assistance in identifying pronouns in English, since English pronouns, in general, exhibit little inflection and virtually no derivation. Accordingly, distribution becomes the only genuinely useful criterion for identifying pronouns in English. > In fact, "personal pronoun" was defined by use long before > Trask or any of the rest of us were born, and does > indeed have "a" (not "the") legitimate use emphasizing more the > semantic content and less the distributional occurrence / > part-of-speech characteristics of use. Sorry; I disagree. It is true that our ancestors often classified words like 'my' as pronouns. But, in this, they were simply wrong. They also often classified determiners as adjectives, but they were wrong here too. They also often classified degree modifiers like 'very', the unique item 'not', and various other surprising things as adverbs, but again they were wrong. The observation that a classification is traditional is no argument that it is legitimate. After all, our ancestors also often classified whales as fish. But would anybody want to argue that this classification is therefore legitimate? Of course, you can get round all this by simply maintaining that words like 'pronoun' and 'fish' simply had different meanings for our ancestors from the ones they have for us. If anybody wants to pursue this possibility, and to use it to construct a case that older meanings are just as valid today as our modern ones, then we can discuss it. Meanwhile, I'll just dismiss this line of thought as irrelevant. > It is not a valid counterargument > to say that "possessive pronouns" must be "pronouns" in every respect. Depends on what you mean by "in every respect". If you mean only that there is no requirement that every pronoun must exhibit all the properties exhibited by every other pronoun, then of course I agree: subcategorization is just as prominent among pronouns as elsewhere. However, there is a more fundamental point here: words like 'my' do not exhibit *any* of the properties exhibited by pronouns. If you don't believe me, try it: name any property exhibited by pronouns generally, and you will find that words like 'my' do not exhibit it. Moreover, if you name any property exhibited by words like 'my', you will find that pronouns in general do not exhibit that property. I await proposed counterexamples with interest. ;-) > That depends on the assumption that the composite is transparent, > and would lead to the conclusion that "White House" must be a white > house, even if it were another color, patently an error of reasoning. Of course this is a patent error of reasoning, but what on earth has it to do with the classification of words like 'my'? If anything, this appears to be a (valid) argument against Pat Ryan's position: he wants to argue that 'my' must be a pronoun because it is transparently related to the real pronoun 'I'. > Rather, "possessive" may already signal a member of the class > of determiners, or whatever one considers "possessive pronouns" > to be closest to, distributionally. No; the label 'possessive' does not entail, or imply in any way, the label 'determiner'. Words like 'mine' are certainly possessive, but they are not determiners: in fact, they are pronouns. And, as I pointed out [;-)] earlier, the Latin forms like 'my' do not appear to be either pronouns or determiners, but rather adjectives. > So there is no absolute right or wrong in these discussions, > there are legitimate arguments for each point of view. Well, I wouldn't care to be classed as an absolutist, but so far I have seen no valid argument at all for classifying English 'my' as a pronoun, or as anything other than a determiner. > Which means it is NOT legitimate to say the other point > of view is simply wrong (however that may be phrased). Sure it is. If position P is supported by no evidence at all, and is moreover in flagrant conflict with all available evidence, then position P is wrong. Observing that P has been asserted by somebody, or that it was widely accepted in the past, is no argument. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Dec 13 15:46:21 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 15:46:21 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] A while ago, Lloyd Anderson suggested, in connection with his comments on the IE list about my criteria for identifying native, ancient and monomorphemic Basque words, that it might be useful to look at the Basque words for 'butterfly'. I am now able to oblige. But first a few comments. First, there is no word for 'butterfly' found throughout the country, or close to it: each of the numerous words is narrowly circumscribed in distribution. Second, the attested words sometimes exist in the form of numerous local variants, showing the kind of unsystematic variation typical of expressive formations but not of ordinary lexical items. Third, for the better-described dialects we often have numerous words and variants, while for the other dialects we typically have few or no words reported. For example, I can find no words reported at all for the three Pyrenean dialects, but I don't suppose that no such words exist: it is merely that these dialects are less well described than the others. Fourth, I do not suppose for a moment that the items listed below exhaust the recorded forms: they merely represent all the forms I can extract from the materials in my office and in our library. Where the information is available, I have listed the dialects for which a given form is recorded and its date of first attestation, but this information is often not available. The dialects cited, roughly from west to east, are as follows: B: Bizkaian Sout: Southern (extinct; recorded in 16th-century Alava) G: Gipuzkoan HN: High Navarrese L: Lapurdian LN: Low Navarrese Z: Zuberoan I have grouped the forms into nine classes, of which the first is subdivided. Group 1a. bitxilote (B) bitxileta pitxilote (B) pitxoleta (B) pitxeleta (B) pitxilota (B) These appear to be based on , western variant , 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an independent word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first element in expressive and nursery formations. The final element is entirely obscure, and very likely a meaningless expressive element. (See also Alavese Spanish . Alava was Basque-speaking until recently, and the local Spanish has, or until recently had, a number of loans from Basque.) Group 1b. mitxeleta (B, G) (1745) mitxilote (B) mitxoleta mitxelot (B) (and many more variants) These variants show an unexpected initial /m/. This might result either from a perception that they are expressive formations (/m/ is much favored in expressive formations in Basque), or from contamination by 'Mike', the regular diminutive of 'Michael'. (Personal names are frequent as first elements in expressive names for small creatures: note, for example, 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'.) Group 1c. tximeleta (B, G) (1912) txipilota txipeleta (G) txipilipeta (and others) Agud and Tovar see the last-cited variant as involving "clear nursery intervention". These appear to represent metathesized forms of the preceding. Curiously, these western forms are entirely absent from Azkue's 1905 dictionary, even though Azkue was a native speaker of the western dialect Bizkaian, for which he provided exceptionally detailed coverage in his dictionary. Today, the form , not recorded before 1912, is nearly universal in the western dialects, and has been accepted as the standard Basque word for 'butterfly'. Group 2. txitxidola (LN) txitxipapa (HN) txitxitera (Z) These eastern forms exhibit the reduplicated sequence , very common in nursery formations, with what appear to be arbitrary final elements: these final elements have no other existence. Group 3. pinpirin (L) (17th c) pinpirina (L) (17th c) pinpirineta (Z) pinpilinpauxa (L) (1905) The Lapurdian dialect is exceptionally fond of expressive formations in initial and , a pattern sparsely attested in other dialects; see Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for more examples. The last and longest form appears to contain a palatalized form of eastern (n.) 'pause, stop, hesitation, rest, repose' or its verbal derivative 'pause, stop'; these derive from Latin. Compare standard Castilian 'butterfly', literally 'Mary-perch', from 'perch, alight', itself descended from the Latin . Group 4. inguma (G) (1745) This curious word does not look like an expressive formation. But the same word is recorded from 1664 as 'incubus, succubus'. We may therefore surmise a possibly unattested late Latin * 'female incubus, succubus', which, if borrowed into Basque, would regularly yield the attested . The motivation is not obvious, but I have seen pictures of the night-demons portraying them as perched on top of the bodies of their sleeping victims, so maybe the butterfly's habit of perching is the motivation. Group 5. altxatulili altxa-lili (LN) altxabili (HN) The first two are transparently compounded from the Romance loan 'raise', stem , plus another Romance loan, 'lily, flower'. Or so it would seem, even though the semantic motivation eludes me. But the third variant rather muddies the waters. It may be a somewhat unusual dissimilation of the preceding. But Agud and Tovar suggest a different formation whose second element is the common verb 'be in motion'. Maybe, but V-V --> N is a decidedly unusual type of word-formation in Basque. Group 6. zintzitoil (L) xintxitoila (L) xintxitoil (L) xintxitola (L) xitxitol The first variant is unpalatalized, while the others show the palatalization typical of expressive formations. We cannot tell if the first form is conservative or merely a back-formation. In all its variants, this form is utterly opaque in formation. The form strongly suggests an expressive formation particularly typical of the eastern varieties. See Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for dozens of examples of this type. Group 7. maripanpalona This shows another pattern typical of expressive names for small creatures: the use of 'Mary' as a first element. The rest is opaque. Corominas suggests a link with Latin 'butterfly', but I doubt it. While I have no regional provenance for this form, I suspect that it is eastern, and eastern dialects, especially Lapurdian, just love expressive formations in and , recall. Group 8. atxitamatxi (Sout) This unique item, recorded only in the 16th century in the long-extinct Southern dialect (as , with Romance spelling and the final article <-a>), is totally opaque. It looks like a straight-out expressive formation. Group 9. jainkoaren oilo (LN) jankoilo The first is literally 'God's hen', the second 'God-hen'. I don't understand the motivation, but both hens and butterflies perch, so maybe that's it. That's it. So: what have we got? Well, the 'God's hen' and 'incubus' words appear to represent metaphorical senses of ordinary lexical items. But all the others show unmistakable evidence of expressive origins: length (four or more syllables); opaque elements; frequent presence of the segments and (typical of expressive formations); frequent presence of the syllable and its reduplicated form (typical of nursery formations); presence of clusters absent from ordinary lexical items (notably ); very considerable and highly irregular variation in form; severe localization of each word; general lack of early attestations. It is especially striking that a form which apparently didn't even exist in 1905 is now the most widespread word in the language. Now: does anybody want to make a case that *any* of these words is a good candidate for native, ancient and monomorphemic status in Basque? Lloyd, over to you. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Dec 14 21:45:15 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 15:45:15 -0600 Subject: permissible IE roots? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995: 120-22 give the following rules for IE roots with stops (that is, if my notes are correct): 1. No 2 consonants of the same order can occur in the same root 2. Series II * III can't occur in the same root 3. Series I & II almost never occur in the same root exceptions include *bhak'- "share, portion, etc", *bhâk'o- "beech", *k^'egh- "branch" (Germanic and Baltic only) [BUT *k^'egh- seems to violate rule 1] 4. In roots C1VC2-, both consonants must have the same voicing They state that allowable roots are I + III, III + I, II + II, III + III and (extremely rare) I + II. Series I bilabial also appears to be disallowed Gamkrelidze and Ivanov [14] Stop series I. glottalized (p') t' k' II. voiced (aspirated) bh dh gh III. unvoiced (aspirated) ph th kh Looking through Watkins 1985, there seem to be some violations of these rules. Watkins's stop series (traditional version) is as follows: (although his table presents them in order II-I-III) I b d g gw II p t k kw III bh dh gh gwh So, following G/I, the following should be allowed (using traditional values): I + III: dVbh, dVgh, dVgwh, gVbh, gVdh, gwVbh, gwVdh III + I: bhVd, bhVgh, bhVgw, dhVg, dhVgw, ghVd, gwhVd II + II: pVt, pVk, PVkw, tVp, tVk, tVkw, kVp, kVt, kwVp, kwVt III + III: bhVdh, bhVgh, bhVgwh, dhVbh, dhVgh, dhVgwh, ghVbh, ghVdh, gwhVbh, gwhVdh I + II (rare): dVp, dVk, dVkw, gVp, gVt, gwVp, gwVt, II + I (rare): pVd, pVg, pVgw, tVg, tVgw, kVd, kwVd problematic roots in Watkins: *ka:dh- "to shelter, cover", *kagh- "to catch, seize", *kaghlo- "pebble, hail", *kak-1 "to enable, help", *kekw- "to excrete", Question: Does the addition of other consonants or velar/palatal differences allow exceptions to G/I rules? e.g. *ghelegh- "type of metal", *kenk- with other consonants, *kekw-, stembh-, steigh- In addition, Watkins has roots with /b/, disallowed by most IE-ists, if what I read is correct. He includes the following roots with IE /b/: *baba- onomatopoeic root *badyo- "yellow, brown" (Western IE) *bak- "staff, rod, wialking stick" *bamb- onomatopoeic root *band- "a drop" *bel- "strong" *bend- "protruding point" [see Gaelic beinn, see also Basque mendi- < *bendi] *beu-1 "to swell, etc." allophonic with *bheu- *beu-2 onomatopoeic root Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 04:28:02 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 23:28:02 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >the earliest dates given to the wheel by archaeology. -- combined with the linguistics. The archaeologists say wheeled vehicles are 4th-millenium BCE. PIE has (several) words for "wheel". Therefore, the original PIE speakers had wheels. (Ditto words for 'vehicle', 'axle', etc.) >IE speakers could have become "acquainted" with the wheel after they >separated and adopted the traveling wagoneer's, wheelwright's or merchant's >word for the item. -- flat-out wrong. If the words had been loaned after the breakup of PIE, then the sound-shifts would show this. They don't. Therefore the word is of PIE date. >Hittite for wheel -- PIE *hwergh, "wheel" ==> Hittite 'hurki, Tocharian A 'warkant', Tocharian B 'yerkwanto'. Tocharian also shows deriviatives of *kwekulo (kokale), with a meaning of "wagon" (just as we often call a car 'my wheels'), and possible derivatives of *roto ('ratak', 'army', as in 'those on wheels'.) >And, BTW, how does Greek or Mycenaean jive with the statement that wheel has >a shared form in all IE languages? -- kuklos, from *kwekulo. >If did in fact originally refer to a circle (rather than >specifically to a wheel) then there is no surprise that the word would trace >back to PIE long before the wheel -- and every branch of IE used the same term for 'wheel'? I thought you said it was a later loan? >change as the evidence for the wheel keeps moving backward in time? -- you have some evidence for this? Last time I looked, the dating of wheeled vehicles hadn't changed in over a generation. >It's quite another to dismiss earlier dates as "quite inacceptible." -- it is unacceptable to put forward dates with no evidence. When you've got the evidence, come back and talk. Until then, we can only proceed on the evidence we actually have. From edsel at glo.be Sat Dec 18 11:10:50 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 12:10:50 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Saturday, December 18, 1999 5:21 AM [snip] >Starting with the linguistic side - very clearly, there are cases where >technological and cultural innovations carry their own terminology with them >and enter different languages with a common name long after those languages >have separated. (In some cases, they have even been conformed after the fact >to the local sound rules.) IE speakers could have become "acquainted" with >the wheel after they separated and adopted the traveling wagoneer's, >wheelwright's or merchant's word for the item. >And let me question whether the universal shared character of the attested >words for the wheel is even accurate. >What was the Hittite word for wheel? >Awhiles back, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote (3/9/99 12:12:33 AM): ><cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), >except for two curious items: "shaft/pole", Hittite hissa ~ Skt. >i:s.a:, Grk. oie:ks, Slav. oje(s)- and "(to) harness", Hittite >turiia- ~ Skt. dhu:r-,...>> >And, BTW, how does Greek or Mycenaean jive with the statement that wheel has >a shared form in all IE languages? >Miguel wrote to me: ><reflex of PIE *ek^wos. "Wheel" is a-mo (Cl. Greek harma "chariot").>> >And a simple reading of the Illiad (as Chapman noted a long time ago and Buck >gave a nod to) makes it rather clear that Homer's specific word for a wheel, >a chariot wheel, a potter's wheel, wheel tracks and a spinning wheel is >. What is equally pretty clear is that refers not >specifically to a wheel, but to anything circular, including a circle of >counselors or the walls surrounding a town. >If did in fact originally refer to a circle (rather than >specifically to a wheel) then there is no surprise that the word would trace >back to PIE long before the wheel - and the fact of the wheel's introduction >would only reflect a later shift in semantic meaning of . <*rotHo>, >the other supposed IE universal, does not even approach the meaning "wheel" >in Homer. [Ed Selleslagh] Steven has made a number of very good points here. Carrying the argument even further: What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, and represent only new uses as required by the emergence of new technology? (cf. German Rechner = computer, a new use of a much older word). My suggestions would be the following: Tro'chos/trocho's: maybe a variant (Mycenean inspired? cf. iqo - hippo's) related to Tro'pos/tropo's, meaning 'turn, return' *kwekwlo-, Gr. kyklos: circle, round. *rotHo- : rotate, turn around, revolve, spin. That would mean various things: 1. IE languages had a choice among pre-existing semantically related roots for the new technology. 2. Even if they had all chosen the same root, quod non, this would still not be proof of IE unity at the moment the wheel was invented or became known to IE lgs. speaking peoples. Just a thought... Ed. From sarima at friesen.net Mon Dec 20 02:51:29 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 18:51:29 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <0.6a3ef54e.25508c05@aol.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have changed Mr. Friesen's address from the original "sarima at ix.netcom.com" to the current "sarima at friesen.net" so that personal replies will go to the correct system. --rma ] At 01:48 PM 11/2/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Sean Crist replied (dated 10/28/99 2:09:32AM): ><because the wheel is not attested in the material record until much >later....>> > ... >Starting with the linguistic side - very clearly, there are cases where >technological and cultural innovations carry their own terminology with them Yes, and such items generally carry with them clear evidence of their later date - specifically they are "too similar" across divergent subfamilies. A good example is the word for coffee in the Romance languages: it is phonetically almost identically in all of them, including French which normally has a severe loss of sounds in inherited words. So, the presence of all of the normal sound changes in the word for wheel in all of the branches of IE rules out a time of origin after those sound changes had occurred. At the latest the word for wheel had to spread through the entire IE area within a *very* short time after the loss of unity. A period of a thousand years later is already *far* too long after the break-up for the spread of a word sharing the individual idiosyncrasies of the various branches. Thus it is the *combination* of the linguistic and archeological evidence that rules out the 7000 BC date. >and enter different languages with a common name long after those languages >have separated. (In some cases, they have even been conformed after the fact >to the local sound rules.) Only idiosyncratically, and thus certainly never in *all* of the divergent languages. It might have been retrofitted in one or two branches of IE, but having such a rare event occurring independently in *all* branches is unreasonable in the extreme. >Awhiles back, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote (3/9/99 12:12:33 AM): ><cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), >except for two curious items: "shaft/pole", Hittite hissa ~ Skt. >i:s.a:, Grk. oie:ks, Slav. oje(s)- and "(to) harness", Hittite >turiia- ~ Skt. dhu:r-,...>> Hittite is a difficult case since most of its vocabulary is non-IE. It would be interesting to cross-check this in some more conservative members of the Anatolian family. Of course in many ways horse" is a better basis than "wheel". But in the final analysis one cannot depend on any *single* word. One must use an extended portion of the technical vocabulary. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From edsel at glo.be Mon Dec 20 15:20:37 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 16:20:37 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] After my first response on Dec. 18, 1999, I have been thinking about the PIE root *kwekwlo- (and *rotH-) in a wider context, in particular about its possible presence in Basque. It is almost certain that the Basques, who had been living in virtual isolation throughout the last Ice Age, learned about the wheel from IE peoples or their otherwise spreading culture, since the terrain of the Pyrenean peoples offered little incentive for inventing the wheel, as opposed to steppe peoples who had to travel long distances over essentially flat terrain. In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. It appears in compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') and 'biribil' (a reduplicated form meaning 'round'). This could be a phonological adaptation of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, Du. wiel), or -just maybe- one of its oldest Celtic forms (But: mod. Welsh: 'olwyn' = wheel, apparently with metathesis), because Basque doesn't have /w/, and the closest Basque phoneme is /b/ (a tendency that is still alive in Castilian: Washington = Bassinton, at times even on TV! And a WC is often called 'un bater'). The Basque word 'ibili' needs some further explanation. It is obviously a compound, but of what? My hypothesis is as follows: *i-b(i)-bil-i, with haplology. The initial and final i's are common features of Basque verbs. -b(i)- would be a root that means 'walk, run' (cf. IE wad-), and -bil- '(a)round', of course. The hypothetical root *b(i) is the subject of a long running historical controversy. It is supposedly found in words like: bide ('way, road'), probably a compound of *bi- and the common suffix (of 'extent') -te, meaning something like 'the physical area where one walks'. ibi, more commonly ubi ('ford, a place where one can wade through the water'), according to e.g. Michelena, u-bide ('water-way': u-, uh- or ug- is the form of ur, 'water', in compounds), and to Bertoldi, a compound of ibi-bide, with haplology. The existence of a root *(i)b(i) has been posited since Hubschmidt, because of its wide diffusion, not only in the Basque areas, but also, and mainly in the Iberian zones. Both explanations are not necessarily contradictory: u-ibi-bide > ubi or ibi. A related problem is that of the Basque word for 'bridge': zubi, a compound of zur ('wood, wooden', possibly a remote relative of a.Grk. xylon) and ubi or bide, thus meaning either 'wooden road' or 'wooden ford'. ibai ('river') and ibar ('river valley bottom, Sp. vega, Du. waard, polder'), but this is very controversial. It would be explained via 'running [water]'. Ibai is often thought of as the origin of Sp. vega (via ibai-ka), while ibar is usually related to Iberia, the Iberians and the river Ebro, etc. Finally, I would not exclude the possibility of *(i)b(i) being related to IE wad- (ua-dh-) (Eng. wade, Du. waden, Lat. vade:re), especially via the forms ibai and/or ibar, if the initial i is a prefix, as has often been thought. All this is, of course, rather speculative, even though based upon a body of pretty well accepted ideas. Anyway, it looks like the hard core of very ancient and definitely Basque words is still shrinking after words like (h)artz (bear, Gr.arktos), gizon (man, PIE*ghdonios) and maybe buru (head, Sl. golova) etc. have been exposed as of IE origin - or was it simply a very ancient common substrate origin? If you don't believe Basque has any relatives, not even extinct ones, forget what I said. If you do, I hope it will stimulate you to look into this type of problems. Something interesting might come out of it, both for Basque and for P...PIE. Kind regards, Ed. Selleslagh From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 05:49:50 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 00:49:50 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Take the language that you describe an "ancestor" by whatever definition you >use above. Why are you assuming it also has to change status and become one >of the "daughters" just when another daughter emerges? -- because all living languages are in a process of constant change; they are all constantly evolving into their successors. What we call a "language" is a freeze-frame snapshot of this process, a description of the lexicon and structure _at a given moment_. The process is usually so slow that ordinary people don't notice it, but it's continuous nonetheless. A language which doesn't split into different branches will also, over time, 'cease to exist' and be supplanted by a successor-form. Greek is a good example. Modern Greek is not the same language as Classical; an ordinary speaker of Modern Greek and a representative Classical Greek speaker could not converse. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Dec 21 16:27:53 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 11:27:53 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <0.a30ebe91.254fbd90@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 1 Nov 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > You use the term "daughter" above. Whatever vague boundaries you used to > decide when a language BECOMES a "daughter" - think of why the other > remaining part of the parent also must at the same time become "a daughter?" > Whatever caused you to call the two languages "daughters", consider what > makes them both BECOME "daughters" and makes the parent disappear? So you > can say that a parent doesn't coexist with its daughter? This is a bit like asking what happened to the child who you used to be. Did that child "disappear" as you gradually became an adult? Maybe there's a sense in which that child disappeared, but I'd rather say that that child gradually changed into something other than what it was before. This isn't a perfect analogy since individual humans don't fork into multiple individuals of the same age, but it illustrates the point that thinking of the parent language "disappearing" isn't really the right way to think of the matter. > Take the language that you describe an "ancestor" by whatever definition you > use above. Why are you assuming it also has to change status and become one > of the "daughters" just when another daughter emerges? And at the very same > time (so that you can say there's no period of co-existence between parent > and daughter?) > "An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist with" a daughter. > Isn't this a reification? The only reason a parent can't co-exist with a > daughter is because you automatically change it into a daughter when there's > another daughter branching off. Aren't you creating another "daughter" > unnecessarily? > If you would have been satisfied with a single "ancestor" (by whatever your > definition is above) as a single language - if the branch off had not > happened - why are you turning that "ancestor" into a new language just > because a daughter branches off? > Isn't that reification? Aren't you unnecessarily creating a new "daughter > language" (however you mean it above) when nothing more than a part of it has > broken off? I think it's important to remember that while it's often useful to treat a language as a singular entity, what actually exists are multiple copies of more or less the same information in the minds of a community of humans. The copies are never perfectly identical, however: even in a small, relatively homogenous community of speakers, there are always variations from individual to individual. Further, the linguistic norm within any community always changes over time. A forking in a language follows from a forking in the community of speakers, typically because of migration leading to geographical separation. When the original single group splits into two groups who wander off from each other, the copies of the language information in the minds of the members of both groups start out basically identical. Over time, however, the norms in the two communities drift in separate directions, since the two groups are no longer in contact. In this post and in others, you've conceived of language branching as a main trunk which continues, and a daughter which separates off of this trunk and goes its own way (e.g., when you use the phrase "...a daughter branches off"). I'd argue that this is not looking at things the right way. There are only forkings. It's not possible for just one daughter to branch off; if there's been a forking, then you have two daughters. Perhaps some of the conceptual difficulty here comes from taking the biological metaphor of "parent" and "daughter" too literally. In biology, we are actually talking about separate individuals. I did not gradually develop from my mother or father by starting out as an identical copy of one of those individuals and gradually changing into someone else. In language, however, what we're talking about are copies of information which gradually change separately and become progressively more different from each other. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 07:16:24 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 02:16:24 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Satem is still a very good way to separate I-Ir from the western group. (I >believe the current stance is that satem may have been adopted by >Balto-Slavic.) -- The Baltic and Slavic languages have undergone satemization; there's no 'may' about it. eg., PIE Old Church Slavonic Lithuanian heart *krd sridice serdis hundred *kmtom suto simtas But both Slavic and Baltic (especially Baltic) also show some exceptions; eg., PIE *peku, 'cattle', becomes Lithuanian 'pekus', not 'pesus'. [ Moderator's note: Even Indo-Iranian shows some exceptions: Cf. Skt. _kravih._ "raw meat", Latin _cruor_ "gore, blood". --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 07:23:42 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 02:23:42 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >It would be good to know - however - why *specifically* you think some group >of IE speakers could not have branched off from PIE right from the start and >moved Northwest. That would be very interesting. -- because Baltic and Slavic share innovations, late isoglosses, with both Indo-Iranian and with Germanic. Eg., Both Baltic and Slavic and Indo-Iranian undergo satemization, and both groups also show the 'ruki rule' (modifications in *-s- after r, u, k or i. But Baltic and Slavic both share dateive and instrumental case endings in *-m- rather than in *-bh- as in all other IE languages which still have these cases. Exemplia, Lithuanian 'vilkams', OCS 'vulkomu', meaning 'to the wolves', but Sanskrit 'vrkebhyah'. This overlap indicates that after Indo-Iranian had moved far enough away to no longer share innovations with, say, Germanic, it was still in contact with Baltic and Slavic, and that Baltic and Slavic were still in contact with Germanic. In other words, there was still a dialect continuum across the whole Indo-European field at this time. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Dec 21 16:47:00 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 11:47:00 -0500 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <0.3a45a421.255501ae@aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 5 Nov 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Satem is still a very good way to separate I-Ir from the western group. (I > believe the current stance is that satem may have been adopted by > Balto-Slavic.) >From the early days of comparative work in the Indo-European languages, it has been universally observed and accepted that both Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic underwent the satem consonant shift. Saying that this is the "current stance" suggests that there's been controversy on the matter. > And Hittite separates itself from the northern group easily > enough. That leaves a distinct NW IE group. If we exclude Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, and Balto-Slavic, this leaves Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Greek, Armenian, Tocharian, and the poorly attested branches such as Phrygian. Did you really mean to include Greek, Armenian, and Tocharian in your "NW IE" grouping? This strikes me as a rather odd grouping, and I doubt it's what you meant. > ON THE OTHER HAND: No one to my knowledge has posted a list of the "shared > attributes" that the UPenn tree is based on. The best I saw was the few you > posted on the list and the few posted on the web. The most I can say is to point you to the articles which have already been published (I'm sure the references are on the web site), and to tell you again that the team is working on a monograph which will give every bit of information about their work. This is work in progress, and getting everything published takes time. [...] > It would be good to know - however - why *specifically* you think some group > of IE speakers could not have branched off from PIE right from the start and > moved Northwest. That would be very interesting. Suppose we construe "NW IE" to mean Italic, Celtic, and Germanic. It is quite true that these three branches share a number of lexical items not found in the other IE languages, and on those grounds, we might be tempted to group them. However, there are morphological items which would lead us to group the languages otherwise: for example, Italic and Celtic have an unusual superlative suffix not found in Germanic or in the other IE branches; other examples could be given. We know that words are readily borrowed, but inflectional morphology is almost never borrowed. Probably, the right answer is that the shared lexical items represent early loans between languages which don't form a proper clade in the IE phylogeny. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 07:41:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 02:41:51 EST Subject: IE technological vocabulary. Message-ID: Besides the words for "wheel", previously dealt with, we have: Yoke (for paired draught): PIE *iugom: from which Latin 'iugum', Hittit 'yukan', Sanskrit 'yugam'... In fact, transparent reflexes of 'yoke' fail to appear only in Albanian and Tocharian. Plow (agricultural implement): PIE *har: from which Latin 'aro', Lithuanian 'ariu', OCS 'orjo', Tocharian A 'are', etc.; and in Hittite, a derivative, 'hars' -- 'till the earth'. Axle: PIE *aks: from which Latin 'axis', Old English 'eax', Lithuanian 'asis', OCS 'osi', Mycenaean 'aksonos', Sanskrit 'aksa', etc. wagon/vehicle: PIE *wogho, from wich Old English 'waegn', etc., and through *ueghitlom, Latin 'vehiculum' and Sanskrit 'vahitram'; from *uoghos, OCS 'vozu', Mycenaean 'wokas', etc. And a whole great slew of other stuff relating to wheeled vehicles, plows, metal, weaving, milking and milk products, etc. Any _one_ item might be wrong, but it's vanishingly unlikely that they are as a group. The balance of probabilities, therefore, would be that it reflects a common inheritance, from the late Neolithic or the Copper Age. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Dec 21 06:52:30 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 01:52:30 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <0.c85d79a5.255503d4@aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 5 Nov 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 10/26/99 11:09:50 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote: > < what the internal structure is for the family tree? In other words, how > do we decide which of these languages are more closely related than others > in the family?>> > But what does "more closely related" mean? This isn't just a question about > terminology. It rather goes to what we are proving and hope to prove by > establishing "relatedness." Consider the structure of the Germanic Stammbaum: PGmc / \ PNWGmc \ / \ \ WGmc NGmc EGmc When I say that WGmc is more closely related to NGmc than to EGmc, I mean that the lowest node dominating WGmc and NGmc is dominated by the lowest node dominating WGmc and EGmc. In other words, WGmc is said to be more closely related to NGmc than to EGmc because WGmc and NGmc share some innovations which EGmc did not undergo. We've previously discussed at great length exactly what this hierarchical structure represents, so I won't repeat it here. > If - for example - a language has innovated and borrowed so wildly that it > retains very little of the ancestor, it may be "more closely related" in some > chronological sense. No. The _amount_ of innovation is not the basis on which we draw Stammba"ume; we draw these trees on the basis of what is _shared_. [...] > A "backwoods" language exposed to new and sophisticated cultural and > technological input might expand many times over its original form. > Many new words and concepts might be introduced. The presence of loan words doesn't alter the genetic affiliation of a language. > New tenses might suddenly be needed to indicate matters of time and > relationships that simply did not matter in the old days. People who > calculated time only in terms of the seasons might need to start > perceiving and discriminating befores and afters, duratives and > completedness, perfects and aorists. Languages can certainly develop new tense markings over their history, but the explanation you've given here is teleological. There's nothing that would suggest that languages develop more complex tense systems upon coming into contact with a technologically more sophisticated culture. [...] > This is a side-path off of the discussion in which Larry Trask discussed a > language changing so much that it might be perceived as a different language. > And perhaps it raises the question whether counting the number of apparent > differences between languages (as e.g. the UPenn tree does to some degree) is > a valid way to measure genetic distance. Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor did not just "count" any old differences; what they were specifically looking for are shared characteristics which cannot reasonably be attributed to parallel innovation. > How much must a language borrow, for example, before it starts to owe more to > the loaning language than it does to a parent or grandparent that has just > left a few strands of genetic relation? It might owe a great deal to the loaning language in terms of its lexicon, but we just don't find cases where languages substantially borrow syntax or inflectional morphology. This is one of the reasons why inflectional morphology is extremely valuable in the determining genetic affiliation. Loan words are one of those things that we try to factor out when determining genetic affiliation. It doesn't matter how many words a language has borrowed; its genetic affiliation does not and cannot change. As we've previously discussed, you can often identify loan words, because they will not have undergone the sound changes which occurred in the language prior to the borrowing. [...] > < of shared characteristics of the languages which cannot reasonably be > attributed to parallel innovation or to borrowing. >> > And of course there is an inverse function that applies here. If some > languages had those shared characteristics, but lost them before they became > documented in writing or otherwise left no evidence - it would be taken as > evidence of relative unrelatedness. No, no, no. It's well known that things such as morphological categories can be independently lost; this is a very common sort of parallel innovation. Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor were well aware of this, and dealt with this problem by assigning a separate numeric code to each language in the case of such loss so that such spurious groupings would not occur. [...] > The UPenn seems to use a "value" or a neutral count (in terms of shared > innovations) called "lost." A _separate_ value is assigned for each branch to mean "lost". > This APPEARS to apply only to attributes that > are presumed to have been present in PIE. But the fact is that a truly > innovative language might have lost shared innovations that arose after PIE, > and those lost shared innovations might have given us a completely different > picture of relatedness. > But because the loss happened before documentation, we are mislead into > thinking they were never there. > After all, if presumed attributes of PIE can be "lost" in daughter languages, > then attributes ("shared innovation") of a sub-family - e.g., NW IndoEuropean > - could have been lost in a particularly innovative member of that subgroup - > e.g., Greek or Latin - before documentation. And I don't believe there is > any methodology that could neceassrily recover them. See my previous paragraph. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 07:59:56 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 02:59:56 EST Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: >michael_nick at mail.ru writes: >I was told that Walter Wuest had an article on IE words denoting sexual >organs, but i couldn't find. Could anyone give a reference? I myself have >not infrequently been puzzled, that all three PIE words, which can be >reconstructed for 'vulva', have at the same time the meaning 'buttocks, >anus' (namely, *putos, *ksutos and *pisdeH2). Any suggestions? [ :-) ]. -- it's probably taboo replacement at work, with words that originally meant something like "down there" becoming too specific and being replaced in their turn. Eg., *pisdeH2 can be derived from *(h1e)pi- + s(e)d = "what one sits on". So you get a semantic progression from "what you sit on" ==> "ass" ==> "piece of ass" (cf. English slang!) ==> vulva/women's genitals. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Dec 18 06:16:51 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 06:16:51 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Dear Mike and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 7:54 AM > Dear IEists! > I was told that Walter Wuest had an article on IE words > denoting sexual organs, but i couldn't find. Could anyone > give a reference? I myself have not infrequently been puzzled, > that all three PIE words, which can be reconstructed for 'vulva', > have at the same time the meaning 'buttocks, anus' (namely, > *putos, *ksutos and *pisdeH2). Any suggestions? [ :-) ]. I would be very interested to read what others may write concerning *ksuto-s and *pisdeH2 but, for *pu:to-s, I think it is relatively certain that its basal meaning is 'source or site of strong fragrance' (as attested by *pu:ti-, 'rot'), a concept broad enough to include both cunnus and podex olfactorily. *ksuto-s probably is derived from *kes-, 'scratch, comb', and could characterize the 'vulva' (if shaved) and the 'buttocks' as 'smooth, hairless'; i.e. tactically. Both the 'vulva' and the 'buttocks' can also be characterized visually as a (bipartite) 'mound'. One way to account for this phenomenon is to attribute it to 'fat', and *pisdeH2 is very likely ultimately derived from *pey(6)-, 'be fat, be full of' + *sed-, 'sit', in the sense of 'seat/place of fatness'; this might be analogous with *ni-zd-os, 'nest'. Without having all attestations available, I will only speculate that the final -*H2 of your reconstruction is possibly due *not* to a "laryngeal" but rather is a result of Ablaut. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga mei?i, n?tr allar niu, geiri unda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i er mangi veit hvers hann af rotum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Dec 19 10:47:50 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 10:47:50 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Mike said: >all three PIE words, which can be reconstructed for 'vulva', > have at the same time the meaning 'buttocks, anus' The overlap need not be a surprise. Even in English (at least some dialects) this can happen. Some women of my acquaintance refer to "front bottom" and "back bottom", as if bottom meant both vulva and anus. Peter From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Tue Dec 21 11:23:43 1999 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 12:23:43 +0100 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: I don't know if anyone has provided Mike with data-specific references since his enquiry was posted. As for the cognitive processes which appear to underlie the projection of body-part terms from one part of the bodily domain to another, he could do worse than look at : 1) Wilkins D. Natural Tendencies of Semantic Change and the Search for Cognates. In Durie M. & M. Ross (eds.) (1996). The Comparative Method Reviewed. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996:264-304. and 2) Heine B. Cognitive Foundations of Grammar. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. esp. chap. 7. Best Wishes & Season's Greetings to all IEists, Dennis. From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Dec 29 20:30:48 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 20:30:48 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: A further thought: What about *no:t (back to backside) and *k'lou-ni (butocks to hips), neither of which seem to have been attached to the sexual organs? Peter From edsel at glo.be Sat Dec 18 11:39:20 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 12:39:20 +0100 Subject: Basque 'sei' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: Larry Trask Date: Saturday, December 18, 1999 7:48 AM >Ed Selleslagh writes: >> Iberian has two sibilants (and also rhotics) that might very well be the >> same as the Basque ones, including the affricated varieties. >Iberian certainly had two contrasting sibilants (at least), but the phonetic >nature of the contrast is entirely unknown. Aquitanian probably had at least >four, and perhaps six, of the things, but the Roman orthography was defective, >and the various sibilants were not written in any very consistent manner. [Ed Selleslagh] The nature of the contrast of the two Iberian sibilants is not entirely unknown, as some toponyms have survived: e.g. Saitabi(a) > Xa'tiva, which indicates that the S must have been rather closer to Basque (apical) s than z. Some Iberian words are extremely similar to some Basque words (I know you don't accept this to be anything but coincidence), and these similarities always point to a systematic correspondance of the two Iberian sibilants and Basque s and z. >From toponyms and other words one can deduce that Aquitanian and Iberian also had the corresponding affricates (ts and tz). In Iberian script these are written exactly as the non-affricated ones. In other scripts and in Aquitanian in Latin script orthography is pretty confusing, but often resembles later usages. I don't know where you found that Aquitanian may have had two additional sibilants. >> The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type >> distinction, I believe. >I don't follow. Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it is >apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably laminal. >But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from Latin /k/ >before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of affricate >before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region). [Ed] In derivations from Latin this true, but in all other cases it is not. I didn't mean that the Castilian s/z distinction is descended directly from the Basque apical/laminal opposition, as a parallel evolution in particular words, but that its very existence is due to a pre-existing awareness of such a phonological distinction (it did in Iberian), something most European languages don't have (and ditto for the rhotics). >> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants. >Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no >evidence that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still >less on Basque phonology. [Ed] As far as Castilian is concerned, I am not so sure: does any one have any references or information on that subject? In Basque, it is rather the opposite: e.g. kuttun < kitab, i.e. Arabic words were adapted to Basque phonology. Ed. From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Dec 18 12:05:29 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 13:05:29 +0100 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology In-Reply-To: <00d701bf41d8$4ab0b7e0$ef9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >> I would like to make a correction. Armenian (not ) doesn't >> mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses >> regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that >> Albanian is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally, >> "wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming >> from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic >> (according to V. Illyich-Svidich). >I have heard this claim often but frankly have never run into anyone who is >willing to defend the proposition. >Are you game? Or is VIS the last word on it? The wine-word has for long been thought to be an originally near-eastern Wanderwort, mainly because it is so widespread in the NE and because this region is generally thought to be the origin of wine-cultivation. However, there may be reasons to believe that the word is originally IE after all, since a connection to the root *weiH- "twist around athl." seems likely (cf. Latin vi:tis "vine", vieo: "bind", Lith. vyti, veju` "wind" etc.). The NE words, then, would be loans from one or several IE sources (Hattic windu-, Ar. wain, Hebr. yayin [which show a rather old intra-Semitic sound-law, pointing to some early date of the borrowing], Georgian Gvino may evidence the intermediate stage of the Armenian w- > g- shift, and thus point to a loan-scenario from (pre-)Armenian to Georgian (it doesn't seem to be of proto-language age in Kartvelian). So, the IE > elswhere-scenario is favoured over the elsewhere > IE one by its possibly being derived from an IE verbal root. Of course, there is room for doubt. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From varny at cvtci.com.ar Sat Dec 18 14:49:32 1999 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan and Nairy Matiossian) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 11:49:32 -0300 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Vartan and Nairy Matiossian" > Sent: Sunday, October 31, 1999 1:48 AM > >> I would like to make a correction. Armenian (not ) doesn't >> mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses >> regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that >> Albanian is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally, >> "wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming >> from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic >> (according to V. Illyich-Svidich). > I have heard this claim often but frankly have never run into anyone who is > willing to defend the proposition. > Are you game? Or is VIS the last word on it? Dear Pat, I'm not aware of any counterclaim to Illyich-Svidich. It doesn't mean there isn't any, just I'm too far from University-Libraries to be aware of daily developments. (For instance, I know personally Vahan Sargisian, I have been contributing to his Armeno-Basque studies journal, "Araxes", in Yerevan, I have several of his other articles, but I was pleasingly surprised to hear about his latest article in Fontes Linguae Vasconum, thanks to Ed Selleslagh). In connection to the Arm. etymology of "gini" (wine), Guevork Djahukian --besides noting VIS-- has advanced the view that it could be stemmed from IE *uin ("to twist, to twirl"), bearing in mind the regularity of the Arm. root. Regards, Vartan From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 21:23:15 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 16:23:15 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I think the simplicity of the kurgan solution is only there so long as you >don't dive into the evidence. When you do, Renfrew's neolithic proposal >begins to make more and more "common sense." -- except that it's linguistic nonsense, which requires Celtic to remain completely unchanged for 4000 years, Greek to be more closely related to Hittite than to Sanskrit, and so forth and so on. It's a "solution" to a non-existant problem. >The problem is basic. If you date IE unity on the basis of the date of the >earliest wheel (only an example) then you know your dates will change if >evidence of the wheel moves back a thousand years - which it well may. -- but it has not. Are we to date the IE unity on the basis of evidence as yet uncovered? A great many highly skilled people have been looking for evidence of wheeled vehicles for a long, long time. Nobody's found any prior to the 4th millenium. From sarima at friesen.net Tue Dec 21 00:50:42 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 16:50:42 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE) In-Reply-To: <0.5f5d9fbb.25832c46@aol.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have changed Mr. Friesen's address from "sarima at ix.netcom.com" to his new address "sarima at friesen.net". --rma ] At 11:25 PM 12/10/99 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- the Sintashta site, upper Ural river, northeast of the Caspian; early >Andronovo, if memory serves. That matches the map in Mallory's old book. My take on this would be that this supports my idea that the chariot proper was invented by Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers (as opposed to being PIE proper in origin). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Sun Dec 19 07:04:07 1999 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 23:04:07 -0800 Subject: Andronovo or Yamnaya? In-Reply-To: <0.5f5d9fbb.25832c46@aol.com> Message-ID: After a month's time, I've lost track of what the following was in reply to: can anyone enlighten me? Max Dashu >>sarima at ix.netcom.com writes: >>Oooh, I had missed that somehow. Just to make sure I have the right place: >>do you mean near the northern shore of the Caspian? Are they associated >>with the NW Andronovo or the eastern (Volga-Ural) branch of the Yamnaya >>complex? >> >-- the Sintashta site, upper Ural river, northeast of the Caspian; early >Andronovo, if memory serves. [ Moderator's note: This was in response to the following, from October: >From: JoatSimeon at aol.com >Message-ID: <0.28500277.253e9d18 at aol.com> >Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:20:40 EDT >Subject: Re: Dating the final IE unity [ moderator snip ] >>sarima at ix.netcom.com writes: >>The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is >>quit telling here. (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not >>yet known when he wrote his book).>> >-- very true; they showed up just where he predicted them. >Likewise, efforts to show that chariots are not associated with IE-speakers >(or at least early Indo-Iranians) have pretty well collapsed now that recent >excavations have shown the earliest chariots to be placed not in the middle >east or Anatolia in the 2nd millenium BCE, but in the southern Ural area and >no later than the 20th century BCE. My apologies for the confusion. --rma ] From sarima at ix.netcom.com Tue Dec 21 01:01:11 1999 From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 17:01:11 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <0.529527ab.2588a657@aol.com> Message-ID: At 03:07 AM 12/15/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In the meantime, other evidence erupted on the scene - not the least of which >was the use of carbon dating to flesh out the Neolithic Revolution story and >the central position of Anatolia. So? The linguistic evidence puts PIE as post-neolithic. Thus the Neolithic Revolution is too old on linguistic grounds. Personally, given the evidence recently published on the possibility of a common substratal influence between Albanian and Basque, I would more readily associate *that* unknown language group with the Neolithic Revolution. (I also have a hypothesis that many of the words containing 'a' that are found in various subsets of Celtic, Italic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic may come from a widespread substratal language family, which may, or may not, be the same, and which may also be a good candidate for the language family spread by the Neolothic Revolution). >Perhaps the most recent trend has been the realization that "kurgan" >characteristics did not cause anything but minor changes in a great many >areas where they were adopted. So? Why does language replacement *have* to make more than a minor change? > More important changes seem to have to do >with climate, economics and resulting changes in trade and material >processing and social structure. The economic changes seem, to me, to be a possibly sufficient motivation for adopting a new language - to the language of the rich folk who ran the trade system. > In general, the increased populations >created by the Neolithic Revolution stayed where they were both in Europe and >elsewhere "where IE is later found." So? What is wrong with an existing population adopting a new language? > The influx was not of new peoples in >most cases and where they were we do not find horse warriors, but rather "the >sheperds of the kurgan culture" as one recent research report described them. So? Just because the martial aspect of the model is wrong doesn't make the *whole* model wrong. There are other ways of spreading language than warfare and large-scale population replacement. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Dec 18 21:29:18 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 21:29:18 GMT Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) In-Reply-To: <0.6d88cf02.2583d21f@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In Swedish, the sound a snake makes is called . In Polish, a word for >snake is . That's actually (G: ), i.e. /vo~S/ /ve~Za/, from CSlav. *o~z^- < *angi-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From jrader at m-w.com Mon Dec 20 09:21:09 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 09:21:09 +0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) Message-ID: Not to nitpick, but the Polish word in question is , with a ogonek (hook) denoting nasality under the and a dot over the , meaning it's a voiced palato-alveolar fricative (devoiced in final position, but voiced when any inflectional ending is added). The nasal is phonetically not [a] with nasality but rather a vowel close to IPA open o with nasality; it alternates in the paradigm of the word with with a hook, a front nasal vowel. Jim Rader > In Swedish, the sound a snake makes is called . In Polish, a word for > snake is . The difference in usage can be subtle, but it is rather > faithfully applied in both languages. Does this make too ubiquitous? > Or would it make his list? Or does its appearance in both languages say > something about the origins of the word and would that justify the word > making that list? From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Dec 18 22:32:12 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 23:32:12 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) In-Reply-To: <0.6d88cf02.2583d21f@aol.com> Message-ID: >Without casting any aspersions on your judgments as a highly competent >professional linguist, unless you can state "operationally coherent" >definitions of your prescreening criteria, your choices can look VERY >arbitrary. And if you can state operable definitions, the computer should be >doing the "choosing" to confirm the objectivity of the distinctions being >made. That is the "control" that would be expected in other fields when one >would claim that a computer is confirming ones choices. Though I'm not sure I'm on the height of the current discussion, I think this is about excluding descriptive terms from word lists used to "prove" genetic relatedness (or, for that matter, to form hypotheses about it). I think, the operational definition Steve Long is asking for can be given without much ado. - Exclude all words which arouse the slightest suspicion that any sensual (mostly, of course, acoustical) perception which might be associated with the real-world item they denote may have played a role in shaping its actual form. This rules any kind of imitatives and expressive terms. Any real language family will be able to stand on its own legs, without such items taken into account. Any proposal which has to resort to these is in dire straits anyway. Of course, with linguae quarum affinitas est demonstrata (as opposed to demonstranda), it may well be the case that some highly expressive term may after all turn out to have come into existence due to some regular processes which derived from some less expressive root/word (as, for example, it is the case with Russian /zhvachki/ "chewing-gum" - a truly expressive word for my taste - which remounts to some very unexpressive root for "chew" in Slavic and, even less so, IE). Again, a successful demonstration of relatedness will be able to do without them, if the relationship really holds water. The reason for the necessity to exclude expressives is not hard to guess - it is simply that in the *systems* made up by linguistic items (so-called "languages") the very ability of human vocal tracts to (approximatively) imitate some noises found in the outside world operates as a strong attractor. And of course, we know that attractors (strange or not so strange) disturb systems. But without demonstrating systematicity in correspondences we have demonstrated nothing. Relationship is demonstrated, or, better, the demonstration of relatedness is strongest, the more items are shown to coincide which conform to the good old principle of "l'arbitraire du signe". Of course we do know, that this principle is not all-pervasive in language, iow. that iconocity is with us on various levels, so those items have to go without mercy or remorse. So, the operational definition is easy: throw the expressives out, here, unlike in law, a first suspicion dictates the sentence. Every sensible linguist who is doing classificatory work mainly to advance our knowledge about it will do this. There are of course others - *certainly* not on this list, but I've met them on others - who do classification mainly to advance their careers or their standing in some very exclusive circles, where it is of prime importance to claim something new or unorthodox - then, of course, different rules are to be observed. But this need not detain us here. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Dec 18 22:44:38 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 23:44:38 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria In-Reply-To: <004701bf4477$ca0cd9a0$719f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a >substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance >they have in most human societies. >Let us assume that, for reasons I cannot fathom, children all over the world >are *independently motivated* (by what, pray tell ???) to employ for >'mother'. I don't see any difficulty here. When you do nothing, repeat nothing specific with your vocal tract or articulatory apparatus but keep your mouth shut and switch on your vocal cords you have /m/. If, then, you go one step further and open your mouth for a change, guess what is the most likely vowel to come out ? Right. Now, what happens next is that mothers *do* like to be addressed by their infants as early as possible by something which could be interpreted as something in the way of a "word". What is more natural, then, to *conventionalize* the simplest audible syllable any infant is likely to produce very early in its career as a language-user as precisely that: "mother" ? To make it a bit more harder to meet this requirement for the infant, one introduces reduplication as a further requirement, and there you are. Of course, this doesn't *have* to happen in each and every speech community of mankind, it is only tremendously likely. Any different conventionalizations like Georgian /mama/ "father" or language without bilablials or whatnot should not disturb us here. In this respect, Pat may even be right in assuming that the first homines loquentes might have had a conventionalized "mother"-term closely resempling /mama/ or sthlth. *But*, the fact that it is still so wide-spread today among the world's languages would *not* cry for the explanation that it is a *retention* from olim's times. The very reasons outlined above make it clear that it is likely to be *innovated* time and again in languages. So, again, we have an attractor here, and the nursery words go out. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Dec 21 10:45:18 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 10:45:18 +0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Pat Ryan writes: [on Mama-papa words like Basque 'mother'] [snip] > I feel that you may be mixing apples with oranges here. > I would, myself, be quite sceptical of any claim that an imitative word like > indicated anything more than an attempt to capture the quintessential > acoustic impression of a cat-call. > But, 1) there is nothing "imitative" about for 'mother'; Agreed, but I didn't mean to say there was. The point is not that such words are imitative; the point is that they are *motivated*. > 2) more > importantly, does not have the form we would expect from childish > babbling, which, I hope you would agree, would be along the lines of > C(1)V(1)C(1)V(1). Yes; babbling is stereotypically of the form CVCV (reduplicated). But not invariably so. > I gladly concede that , , , etc. are childish attempts > to render other words, e.g. <*?ama> and <*?atV>, etc. Oh, no -- this is not the point at all. See below. > but there is nothing > that I know which *necessitates* or universally *inclines* children all over > the world to connect /m/ with 'motherhood' or /d/ or /t/ with > 'paternity' --- short of some universalistic sound-symbolism argument, which > I provisionally do not accept. No; this is a misunderstanding. Children do not make any such connections as those suggested at all. The point is that nursery words are *not* invented by children: they are invented by adults. Once children reach the stage at which they are beginning to have enough control over their vocal tracts to produce speech sounds consistently, they behave in a highly consistent fashion, as argued by Jakobson as long ago as 1941. The first vowel they learn to produce is [a] -- the easiest vowel to produce, since it requires minimal tongue action. The first consonants they produce are labials -- [m], [b], [p] -- presumably because these require no tongue control. The next consonants they learn are coronals -- [n], [d], [t] -- presumably because these require no more than the raising of the tip/blade of the tongue. Velars, which require bending of the tongue, come later, as do other consonants. Accordingly, the first consistent noises the eager parents hear from the child are things like [(m)ama], [(b)aba], [(p)apa], followed by [(t)ata], [(d)ada], and so on. It is at this point that the delighted parents decide that their child is trying to speak -- which is very doubtful -- and assume happily that the little bugger is trying to say 'mother' and 'father'. The assumption that the kid is trying to say 'mother', rather than 'tickle' or 'telephone' or 'banana' is one made *entirely* by the parents. Jumping to this conclusion, the happy parents begin to speak back to the child, using what they fondly -- but wrongly -- believe to be the child's own words. In this way, such "mama-papa words" -- as we call them -- can become institutionalized in adult speech. So, such words recur in lots of languages as a direct consequence of the observable universal progression of speech-sound production in infants, coupled with the widespread tendency of parents to interpret these early sounds as having specific meanings. That's all. > I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a > substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance > they have in most human societies. But this is fanciful, and there exists a far simpler explanation. Just listen to an infant producing its first speech sounds, and you have your explanation. Nothing more elaborate is called for. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Dec 22 09:31:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 09:31:53 +0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Steve Long writes: > Pat Ryan wrote: > < consideration of inclusion in Pre-Basque.... It may be that this category of > terms has preserved an older or non-typical phonological form than other > words of the vocabulary but they should be seriously considered because of > their ubiqiuity.>> [SL] > (This would seem to be an essential consideration in tracking the > phonological history of any language. After all, a "central" question about > Basque and its uniqueness is common ancestry with other languages. Evidence > of its descent to seem to involve considering words that would be relatively > "ubiquitous." At minimum, this matter would seem to deserve careful > qualification and not a flat yes-or-no. But it seems I'm wrong...) Indeed. The Basque for a cow-noise is , for a sheep-noise , for a dog-noise , for a rooster-noise . Now these words are strikingly similar in form and meaning to words in English and in a number of other languages. Does Steve, or anybody, want to argue that this observation constitutes evidence of any kind for the common ancestry of Basque and some other languages? > In a message dated 12/11/99 5:38:52 AM, LTrask replied to Pat Ryan: > < After all, in most of the languages on the planet, the word for a cat-noise > is something like , but this ubiquity is not an argument for pushing > the word back to Pre-Proto-Everything. Rather, it is a compelling argument > for disregarding the word altogether, on grounds of *motivated* independent > creation.>> > This kind of statement reflects a basic problem in the way Prof. Trask is > approaching the use of a computer in acheiving some kind of objective results > about his subject matter. How is he defining "ubiquity"? Is this "miau" > word in any dictionaries he is using to support his statement about "most of > the languages of the planet?" How much ubiquity is enough ubiquity for > exclusion? > In Swedish, the sound a snake makes is called . In Polish, a word for > snake is . The difference in usage can be subtle, but it is rather > faithfully applied in both languages. Does this make too ubiquitous? > Or would it make his list? Or does its appearance in both languages say > something about the origins of the word and would that justify the word > making that list? On the other hand, does not appear in the > dictionaries of either language. Does that mean it's not ubiquitous enough > to be excluded? Would you have to go to a Japanese, a Bantu and a Finnish > lexicon to answer that question - diregarding Swedish and Polish? Is there > something about a snake noise versus cat noise that makes one ubiquitous and > the other not? > Can you state that rule so that readers will know how you intend to apply > this exclusionary process to other animal noises? In the interest of > establishing the "principled" nature of your prescreening process. So that > an observer may say with confidence that the results of your prescreening is > not a case of GIGO? > Without casting any aspersions on your judgments as a highly competent > professional linguist, unless you can state "operationally coherent" > definitions of your prescreening criteria, your choices can look VERY > arbitrary. And if you can state operable definitions, the computer should be > doing the "choosing" to confirm the objectivity of the distinctions being > made. That is the "control" that would be expected in other fields when one > would claim that a computer is confirming ones choices. Perhaps I didn't express myself very well. Pat Ryan suggested that instances of form-meaning correspondences that are very widespread in languages, such as the mama-papa words, should be taken as serious evidence for remote common ancestry. I disagreed, on the ground that such form-meaning correspondences can readily be shown to be independently motivated. And it is not so much the ubiquity of such items that is the point: it is the motivation. But it is precisely such motivated form-meaning pairs that tend to exhibit some noticeable degree of "ubiquity" -- though never total ubiquity, of course. Let me cite an example from outside language. As is well known, many species produce what we label "danger calls" on perceiving a predator. Some species have two or three different calls for different kinds of predator -- for example, airborne versus ground-dwelling. Now, it has been observed that a diverse array of species -- birds and small mammals -- all use acoustically very similar danger calls for warning of hawks and similar flying predators: a kind of high-pitched [siiiii] noise. Since such calls are found in a range of birds and mammals, the descent view favored by Ryan would require us to derive all these calls from a single ancestral hawk-warning call in Proto-Mammal-Bird, over 300 million years ago. Right? But there's a much better explanation. Hawks have acute hearing, and they are very good at locating the source of a sound accurately. This fact would appear to make the production of *any* danger call a very dangerous enterprise for the individual producing it, and hence an evolutionary disaster for his species. *But*. It turns out that the hawk's usually reliable sound-location mechanism breaks down with high-pitched noises resembling [siiiii]: it can't locate the source. So, we have a simple explanation for the widespread form-meaning pairing that we observe in diverse species: independent motivated creation. Individuals that produce such calls are not spotted, and they survive and pass on their genes. Individuals that produce other calls get spotted and eaten. So, since there exists a simple explanation for the widespread form-meaning pairing in terms of motivation, its "ubiquity" is already accounted for, and there is no reason to appeal to common origin. As I pointed out in an earlier posting, just such a motivated explanation is available for mama-papa words (and, of course, for imitative words like 'moo'), and hence these items, the ones which recur so frequently in diverse languages, cannot serve as evidence for common origin. To put it another way, comparative linguistics is obliged to work with linguistic items which are arbitrary in form -- items, that is, whose form is in no way motivated by their meaning. Trying to work with motivated (non-arbitrary) items is a guarantee of spurious conclusions. > And why is it again that you can't feed the entire contents of Basque into > the computer first as "raw" data and then do these operations? As I've said before, the use or non-use of a computer is not a matter of principle, but only of procedure. Once the database is assembled, the computer is faster and more accurate than a person, but it still can't do anything other than what a person tells it to do. Nor does the use of a computer in any way guarantee greater objectivity. If I decide to reject words showing property P, then I can do this by hand or with a computer program, and the results will be the same. After all, the computer isn't going to inform me that it doesn't like my criteria. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 21:32:03 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 16:32:03 EST Subject: *Degrees* of evidential value Message-ID: >ECOLING at aol.com writes: << (though some words for 'cat' will also relate to ). >> -- Ancient Egyptian for "cat" was "miw". From mclasutt at brigham.net Sat Dec 18 23:41:14 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 16:41:14 -0700 Subject: Re Personal pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I love jumping into the middle of a discussion without having read in detail the previous discussion, but this is just too tempting. I've been reading quite a number of introductory syntax books lately for teaching purposes, and every single one of them lists the possessive pronouns as straightforward determiners. They aren't even classed as "components of a determiner" in the way that "The little poor child" is a component of a determiner in the sentence, "The little poor child's Christmas was quite happy." This really isn't a point of contention among linguists. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Sun Dec 19 01:51:57 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 01:51:57 GMT Subject: permissible IE roots? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995: 120-22 give the following rules for IE >roots with stops (that is, if my notes are correct): > 1. No 2 consonants of the same order can occur in the same root > 2. Series II * III can't occur in the same root > 3. Series I & II almost never occur in the same root exceptions >include *bhak'- "share, portion, etc", *bhbk'o- "beech", *k^'egh- "branch" >(Germanic and Baltic only) [BUT *k^'egh- seems to violate rule 1] Gamkrelidze and Ivanov explicitly allow combinations k^ .. k, kw .. k etc. (if I remember correctly, they take the occurrence of such roots with velar + palato-velar as evidence for the separate status of the palato-velars). > problematic roots in Watkins: *ka:dh- "to shelter, cover", *kagh- >"to catch, seize", *kaghlo- "pebble, hail", *kak-1 "to enable, help", >*kekw- "to excrete", > Question: > Does the addition of other consonants or velar/palatal differences >allow exceptions to G/I rules? e.g. *ghelegh- "type of metal", *kenk- with >other consonants, *kekw-, stembh-, steigh- See above for palatal/velar/labiovelar. The presence of *s-, which forces a following stop to be voiceless [presumably sd > st, sdh > st(h)], allows for exceptions to the rule. The rule does not work across morpheme boundaries (e.g. *ghelegh- is clearly extended from *ghel- "yellow") [admittedly there is a risk here that any exceptions to the rule can be explained away as "root extensions", making the theory unfalsifiable]. It's interesting that Watkins' exceptions all involve the problematic vowel *a. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Dec 19 10:42:05 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 10:42:05 -0000 Subject: permissible IE roots? Message-ID: Permissable roots: Yes there are exceptions. The "root constraints" refer to a striking imbalance in proportions of combinations, so that we can suggest some kind of constraint, which was overridden in "Lall-woerter" or borrowings or in expressive noises. The constraints are far from an invariable rule. (1) The IE /b/ Bird's summary of basic IE roots from Pokorny has 28 roots with initial b, 4 with medial b, and 27 with final b. Note that this includes 4 overlaps: the roots *bab = to swell and *bamb (listed twice) = to swell and = bump; and the root *baba = babbling. That's a total of 55 basic roots. About a third of these are clearly onomatapoeic. Compare the 28 with initial b against the 20 with initial g' and the 22 with initial kw. Initially, there is nothing particularly odd about /b/! The peculiar lack is in medial and final position. (2) Root constraints (a) Yes, for the purposes of root constraints, palatalised k' is treated differently from plain k, but kw appears to be treated the same as plain k. The evidence is: k' co-occurs with k. 10 cases with initial k', 1 with initial sk', 1 medial, 3 final. g' occurs three times with g, only in the order gVg'; g'h with gh twice. kw co-occurs with k' twice, once each way round, but not with k. (b) Yes, the presence of initial s- devoices the following consonant, and appears to neutralise voicing rules: so roots like *stegh are not uncommon. (3) Another constraint G & I suggest that only roots with two voiceless stops (or initial s which devoices the initial stop) show zero grade! Peter From dbaum at isdn.net.il Fri Dec 31 16:07:28 1999 From: dbaum at isdn.net.il (Daniel Baum) Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 18:07:28 +0200 Subject: permissible IE roots? Message-ID: Hi all, On a similar subject, would anyone happen to know why there appear to be no roots of the form CHH? There are roots with two laryngeals (such as one of the words for "to sit", as in Skt aaste), but none with two contiguous. Happy new year, century and millenium, Daniel Baum msdbaum at mscc.huji.ac.il, dbaum at isdn.net.il Home Page http://www.angelfire.com/il/dbaum Tel: ++972-2-583-6634; Mob. ++972-54-972-829 > Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995: 120-22 give the following rules for IE > roots with stops (that is, if my notes are correct): [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Dec 19 02:11:34 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 20:11:34 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Group 1a. >bitxilote (B) >bitxileta >pitxilote (B) >pitxoleta (B) >pitxeleta (B) >pitxilota (B) >These appear to be based on , western variant , 'pretty little >thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an >independent >word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first element in >expressive and nursery formations. The final element is entirely obscure, and >very likely a meaningless expressive element. Any possible link between and Spanish "bug, critter, varmint" and also various slang meanings [snip] >These variants show an unexpected initial /m/. This might result either >from a >perception that they are expressive formations (/m/ is much favored in >expressive formations in Basque), or from contamination by >'Mike', the >regular diminutive of 'Michael'. (Personal names are frequent as >first >elements in expressive names for small creatures: note, for example, > 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'.) maybe influenced by Spanish "Grasshopper", literally "jump weeds" [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Sun Dec 19 10:58:01 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 11:58:01 +0100 Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: Larry Trask Date: Sunday, December 19, 1999 12:11 AM >A while ago, Lloyd Anderson suggested, in connection with his comments on the >IE list about my criteria for identifying native, ancient and monomorphemic >Basque words, that it might be useful to look at the Basque words for >'butterfly'. I am now able to oblige. [Ed Selleslagh] First a general comment: the word for 'butterfly' is one of the most unpredictable and capricious ones in all languages I know of. I really wonder about its relevance for linguistics in general. Example: Western Germanic: Dutch: vlinder, German: Schmetterling, English: butterfly, and those are languages that share an impressive part of their vocabulary! >I have grouped the forms into nine classes, of which the first is subdivided. >Group 1a. >bitxilote (B) >bitxileta >pitxilote (B) >pitxoleta (B) >pitxeleta (B) >pitxilota (B) >These appear to be based on , western variant , 'pretty little >thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an >independent word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first >element in expressive and nursery formations. The final element is entirely >obscure, and very likely a meaningless expressive element. [Ed] I would rather guess that it's derived from 'bizi', and refers to the 'liveliness' of a butterfly, one of its most notable characteristics. The final element is clearly a diminitutivizing, 'endearing', suffix, very probably of Romance origin. In Mexico for instance, the suffix -Vlote is quite common in names for small animals or insects (In some cases, however, the origin might be Nahuatl). >(See also Alavese Spanish . Alava was Basque-speaking until >recently, and the local Spanish has, or until recently had, a number of loans >from Basque.) >Group 1b. >mitxeleta (B, G) (1745) >mitxilote (B) >mitxoleta >mitxelot (B) >(and many more variants) >These variants show an unexpected initial /m/. This might result either from >a perception that they are expressive formations (/m/ is much favored in >expressive formations in Basque), or from contamination by 'Mike', >the regular diminutive of 'Michael'. (Personal names are frequent as >first elements in expressive names for small creatures: note, for example, > 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'.) [Ed] It looks more plausible that it is simply a case of b > m as so often happened in Basque, even in Roman times: bacillum > makila. So, 1a and 1b are basically the same. >Group 1c. >tximeleta (B, G) (1912) >txipilota >txipeleta (G) >txipilipeta >(and others) >Agud and Tovar see the last-cited variant as involving "clear nursery >intervention". >These appear to represent metathesized forms of the preceding. Curiously, >these western forms are entirely absent from Azkue's 1905 dictionary, even >though Azkue was a native speaker of the western dialect Bizkaian, for which >he provided exceptionally detailed coverage in his dictionary. Today, the >form , not recorded before 1912, is nearly universal in the western >dialects, and has been accepted as the standard Basque word for 'butterfly'. [Ed] I rather agree with your idea of a metathesis. So, 1a, 1b and 1c may be considered to be one and the same: 'little lively thing'. >Group 2. >txitxidola (LN) >txitxipapa (HN) >txitxitera (Z) >These eastern forms exhibit the reduplicated sequence , very common in >nursery formations, with what appear to be arbitrary final elements: these >final elements have no other existence. [Ed] The first part looks like a direct (nursery style) derivation of Group 1. -dola has a diminutive meaning, -papa may be related to 'papillon', while -tera is a common derivative suffix. So, 2 is actually a descendant of 1. >Group 3. >pinpirin (L) (17th c) >pinpirina (L) (17th c) >pinpirineta (Z) >pinpilinpauxa (L) (1905) >The Lapurdian dialect is exceptionally fond of expressive formations in >initial and , a pattern sparsely attested in other dialects; see >Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for more examples. The last and longest >form appears to contain a palatalized form of eastern (n.) 'pause, >stop, hesitation, rest, repose' or its verbal derivative 'pause, >stop'; these derive from Latin. Compare standard Castilian >'butterfly', literally 'Mary-perch', from 'perch, alight', itself >descended from the Latin . [Ed] I completely agree. >Group 4. >inguma (G) (1745) >This curious word does not look like an expressive formation. But the same >word is recorded from 1664 as 'incubus, succubus'. We may therefore surmise a >possibly unattested late Latin * 'female incubus, succubus', which, if >borrowed into Basque, would regularly yield the attested . The >motivation is not obvious, but I have seen pictures of the night-demons >portraying them as perched on top of the bodies of their sleeping victims, so >maybe the butterfly's habit of perching is the motivation. [Ed] I completely agree. >Group 5. >altxatulili >altxa-lili (LN) >altxabili (HN) >The first two are transparently compounded from the Romance loan >'raise', stem , plus another Romance loan, 'lily, flower'. Or >so it would seem, even though the semantic motivation eludes me. But the >third variant rather muddies the waters. It may be a somewhat unusual >dissimilation of the preceding. But Agud and Tovar suggest a different >formation whose second element is the common verb 'be in motion'. >Maybe, but V-V --> N is a decidedly unusual type of word-formation in Basque. [Ed] I guess this is right. Group 6. >zintzitoil (L) >xintxitoila (L) >xintxitoil (L) >xintxitola (L) >xitxitol >The first variant is unpalatalized, while the others show the palatalization >typical of expressive formations. We cannot tell if the first form is >conservative or merely a back-formation. In all its variants, this form is >utterly opaque in formation. The form strongly suggests an expressive >formation particularly typical of the eastern varieties. See Lhande's >dictionary of French Basque for dozens of examples of this type. [Ed] The first part seems to go back to some onomatopeia 'zintz-', probably referring to the noise of a flying insect. The -tola part is, again, diminutivizing. >Group 7. >maripanpalona >This shows another pattern typical of expressive names for small creatures: >the use of 'Mary' as a first element. The rest is opaque. Corominas >suggests a link with Latin 'butterfly', but I doubt it. While I >have no regional provenance for this form, I suspect that it is eastern, and >eastern dialects, especially Lapurdian, just love expressive formations in > and , recall. [Ed] Instead of the Latin original 'papilio', I would suggest French 'papillon' or a southern 'French' variant of it. When words pass from one language into another, especially if it is an unrelated one, the weirdest things can happen: e.g. Greek to Turkish: Konstantinopolis > Istanbul (epenthetic i-), Sagalassos > Aglasun. Greek to Germanic and Romance: episkopos (=supervisor) > bisschop, Bischof, bishop, évêque, obispo, vescovo; presbyteros (=elder) > priester, Priester, priest, prêtre, prete. >Group 8. >atxitamatxi (Sout) >This unique item, recorded only in the 16th century in the long-extinct >Southern dialect (as , with Romance spelling and the final >article <-a>), is totally opaque. It looks like a straight-out expressive >formation. [Ed] I think we can safely analyze this as atxi-(e)ta-matxi, the last part being an expressive reduplication of the first. 'atxi' (a palatalized diminutive) may be related to the concept of 'tail'. So, it would mean something like 'little thing that moves its tail'. >Group 9. >jainkoaren oilo (LN) >jankoilo >The first is literally 'God's hen', the second 'God-hen'. I don't understand >the motivation, but both hens and butterflies perch, so maybe that's it. [Ed] Probably some superstition, comparable to the one surrounding the ladybird (a Marian name). >That's it. So: what have we got? >Well, the 'God's hen' and 'incubus' words appear to represent metaphorical >senses of ordinary lexical items. But all the others show unmistakable >evidence of expressive origins: length (four or more syllables); opaque >elements; frequent presence of the segments and (typical of expressive >formations); frequent presence of the syllable and its reduplicated form > (typical of nursery formations); presence of clusters absent from >ordinary lexical items (notably ); very considerable and highly irregular >variation in form; severe localization of each word; general lack of early >attestations. [Ed] Expressive, yes, but all built around basic Basque (or Romance) words, except in the case of 'God's hen' (popular belief) or 'pinpirin' (purely expressive, no meaning as such). BTW, I doubt whether you can speak of a cluster 'np', since there is a syllable separation right in the middle: pin-pirin. >It is especially striking that a form which apparently didn't even exist in >1905 is now the most widespread word in the language. >Now: does anybody want to make a case that *any* of these words is a good >candidate for native, ancient and monomorphemic status in Basque? Lloyd, over >to you. ;-) >Larry Trask [Ed] This shows that in Basque too, the word for 'butterfly' is highly unpredictable and capricious, as I mentioned for other languages. As to your second conclusion, I think it should not be that straightforward: on the one hand, it has become clear that most names of the butterfly go back to the basic vocabulary ('bizi'), so they have their place in the inventory. On the other hand, their formation/creation is highly unstable over time and thus difficult to handle since only some analysis, not just linguistic, yields useful data. Ed Selleslagh From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Dec 22 13:29:11 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 08:29:11 EST Subject: 'butterfly' in Basque, etymologies? Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: There are a number of new subscribers to the Indo-European list who may be confused by continued discussions of Basque etymologies here. I allow them because they often bring up points with respect to methodology that might not occur so clearly in Indo-European studies. --rma ] Larry Trask has provided a beautiful collection of words for 'butterfly' in various Basque dialects. I received his permission to repost the contents to the Sound Symbolism list, which has recently collected words for 'butterfly' from all over the world, Those interested in sound symbolism or "expressives" are rarely so fortunate as to receive such a detailed accounting from anywhere. There is so much information in this data that I believe we can make a great deal of sense out of it historically, that we can in essence point backwards towards the forms of words for 'butterfly' in early Basque or pre-Basque. At the same time, I believe these Basque forms show just how fuzzy the borderlines are between "expressives" and the rest of the vocabulary. Trask has contributed extensive annotations, of the kind only a Basque specialist can. He also may have additional information on sound changes in the history of Basque which can inform the considerations adduced here, making some specific hypotheses more or less likely. I add below other data and reasoning which are the special focus of a specialist in expressives, or of a specialist in the kind of data variation and incomplete information we have here. I use heuristics based on known kinds of language change to posit hypothetical reconstructions of early Basque words for 'butterfly', to estimate which of the attested forms are closer to an ancient Basque form, which have been more heavily altered, and how each has been altered, in a few cases also why. This is not the same thing as following the operation of regular sound changes, because much of language change is also analogical change, the mutual influence or contamination of elements of the vocabulary. As Malkiel and others have said, each word has its own history. Quite independently of the first draft of this message, without either of us yet having seen the other's notes, in reaction to Larry Trask's posting of this data set, Steve Long sent a private message pointing out Greek forms, including . I consider this a confirmation of the results of reconstruction from Basque dialects, and mention it again at the end of this message with more detail. I give first Larry Trask's general conclusions. Most of those general conclusions seem sensible to me, except the first one, that the origins of these words must necessarily be "expressive". There have been influences from the kinds of sound patterns found in expressives, certainly, but that is not the same as attributing the ultimate origins of the words to such sound patterns. I obviously accept Trask's accounts of what are common sounds and syllables in expressives in Basque -- that is his specialty, not mine. Here is what Trask says, omitting mention of the two items which he says appear to represent metaphorical senses of ordinary lexical items, and separating each point he makes to begin on its own line: ************************************************************ "... all the others show unmistakable evidence of expressive origins: length (four or more syllables); opaque elements; frequent presence of the segments and (typical of expressive formations); frequent presence of the syllable and its reduplicated form (typical of nursery formations); presence of clusters absent from ordinary lexical items (notably ); very considerable and highly irregular variation in form; severe localization of each word; general lack of early attestations." ************************************************************ And here is Trask's challenge: "Now: does anybody want to make a case that *any* of these words is a good candidate for native, ancient and monomorphemic status in Basque?" My answer would be no, not as that question is put. But they are good candidates for *descendants* from words which may have had monomorphemic status in ancient Basque. There is a similar question to which my answer would be yes. This other question is perhaps not of direct relevance to Trask's special goals, which he has specified elsewhere, but I think it is of great relevance to those of us interested in pushing back towards an understanding of the full vocabulary of early Basque or pre-Basque. I would indeed want to claim that the collection of these forms, taken as a whole, does probably point to the existence of a small number of ancestral forms in early Basque, ones which also share some of the properties of words for 'butterfly' elsewhere in Europe. There are difficulties in reconstructing earlier forms of many expressives, of two primary kinds. (1) Parts of them tend to be replaced with sound sequences which resemble elements of the general vocabulary or other expressives, thus losing information about the ancestral forms themselves. (2) Certain sound patterns may be favored in expressives of particular meanings, which also can override ancestral forms. Both of these can lead to "violations" of sound laws valid for most of the vocabulary. But it does not make reconstruction impossible, it just makes it harder. Here is why... An archetypal example of (1) above is the existing (!) English word , which derives by folk etymology from . The analog to the Basque situation would be close if we had in English dialects also a number of other reformations from original such as , , , , , and so on, all still having the same meaning, the plant 'asparagus'. How would we reconstruct back from such a set? With difficulty, obviously, but it is not entirely hopeless. We might reach a hypothetical *(a)spara{k/g}(r)as. Why is this, rather than something else, a plausible reconstruction? Forms which contain transparently real word parts may have undergone greater alterations as compared with the original, and forms which contain reduplications or near-reduplications may have leveled out distinctions existing in the original. Given these tools of analysis, not guaranteed valid by any means, but heuristics, the following are of lesser value for reconstruction, "sparrow", "spear", "grass", and "goose". though the words containing them still have some value since they suggest a rather than as more original in the first half, and <{k/g}(r)as> rather than in the second half. They thus help us to overcome a loss of information in reduplicated forms. The first half would then most likely derive from an earlier <(a)spara...> and the second half would be something in the range Given the in the first half, the in the second half might be part of a near-reduplicative effect, so we might even consider most likely. (Since I derived each of these forms by faily minimal alterations of known kinds from *asparagus, and by a number of *different* such alternations, it is not surprising that reconstructing back from them we can get something like .) ************************************************* Consider now what we may be able to do with the Basque data provided by Larry Trask. The following techniques and tools are merely heuristics, they cannot pretend to reach definitive proof, but I would contend that they are moderately powerful tools, and they yield a highly plausible hypothesis. I claim nothing stronger than that, but that is an achievement not to be merely sneezed at. I do indeed want to make a case that the majority of the Basque words cited below are reformations from an earlier Basque form or forms which fit the pattern for numerous words for 'butterfly' at least in parts of Europe (so perhaps with an etymology), but also elsewhere in the world (so perhaps reflecting in part some universals of sound-symbolism), one involving labials, /l/, sometimes /t/, and often reduplication. in Latin would be one of the relatives, and and so on, would also be related. The idea that these are all ultimately related is not new, but the difficulties of tracing the details are considerable. First let us take three of those above, and average their sounds, removing the from the German form: papi...lon Latin, cf. French violating normal sound changes from Latin to French by preservin the second

, regular is . metter-ling German, removing initial , common in other expressive vocabulary butter-fly English (I consider English to be a more recent folk etymology, with little value for historical recontruction, just as is recent; probably and certainly are older.) So we have something like the following, labial - flap-t - lateral - ?nasal not as a proven proto-form, but as an approximate averaging of attested forms. Since the labial alternative for the second syllable onset may be a partial reduplication, it has less value than the other two forms. Since is an English word, it has lesser evidential value than does in the German, though there is not much difference between these two in sound. ************************************************************ Now consider Larry Trask's list of Basque dialect words for 'butterfly'. While I will make comparisons with other European forms, this implies neither borrowing nor genetic inheritance nor any other very specific explanation -- it is merely a heuristic to seek possible explanations. I will come back later to what seems to be inferrable from the Basque data alone. Group 1a. bitxilote etc. Group 1b. mitxilote etc. Group 1c. txipilota etc., txipilipeta, tximeleta 1a-1b. are very similar to the German and English forms above, {b/m}itxi...lote The second stop is Basque before /i/, compared with German and English before a weak vowel. The third syllable begins with , and is as in the Latin and French forms. The final <...te> has no match in the English, German, Latin-French. The basque vowels are /i/ instead of the epsilon and caret vowels of the German and English, or the /a/ of Latin-French. For 1a, Trask comments: , western variant , 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an independent word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first element in expressive and nursery formations. My analysis would be as with and , that influence from the word would be late, and might have pushed the Basque forms to have medial instead of flap-t or similar, if that is not ancient, and to have initial if that was not ancient but was. For 1b, Trask comments: "These variants show an unexpected initial /m/. This might result either from a perception that they are expressive formations (/m/ is much favored in expressive formations in Basque), or from contamination by 'Mike', the regular diminutive of 'Michael'. (Personal names are frequent as first elements in expressive names for small creatures: note, for example, 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'.)" I would accept the expressive /m/, but consider the influence of personal names as perhaps quite late. For 1c. Following is a quote from Trask: "These appear to represent metathesized forms of the preceding. Curiously, these western forms are entirely absent from Azkue's 1905 dictionary, even though Azkue was a native speaker of the western dialect Bizkaian, for which he provided exceptionally detailed coverage in his dictionary. Today, the form , not recorded before 1912, is nearly universal in the western dialects, and has been accepted as the standard Basque word for 'butterfly'." "It is especially striking that a form which apparently didn't even exist in 1905 is now the most widespread word in the language." But there is more to say about . This has more syllables than any of the others, and might be a mixing of < txipilota> (attested) <...pilipeta> (attested part of the abnormally long form) If we combine Latin with Basque we might add to the equation a hypothetical earlier Basque form with <...ota> instead of the Latin-French <...on>. Is that at all plausible in terms of Basque or Romance word endings? ** *** Group 3. pinpirin (L) (17th c) pinpirina (L) (17th c) pinpirineta (Z) pinpilinpauxa (L) (1905) These forms have a nasal /n/ in each of the parts of the partial reduplication, an /n/ which is lacking in the preceding groups. If we remove it we would have **pipireta Thus compare ** (removing the nasals /n/ and /in/) ** (from the end of discussion of Group 2) Latin --> French Trask comments: "The Lapurdian dialect is exceptionally fond of expressive formations in initial and , a pattern sparsely attested in other dialects; see Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for more examples. The last and longest form appears to contain a palatalized form of eastern (n.) 'pause, stop, hesitation, rest, repose' or its verbal derivative 'pause, stop'; these derive from Latin. Compare standard Castilian 'butterfly', literally 'Mary-perch', from 'perch, alight', itself descended from the Latin ." I very much suspect that the etymologies using general vocabulary reflect quite late influences, distorting the earlier expressive word. Consider the last form, a very long one, which might again represent a contamination of two forms, and then add in the Spanish pinpirina <..pilinpauxa> (with one nasal /...in/) (with no extra nasal) The Spanish "mariposa" in particular, as "mary-perch", may be a back-formation like "sparrowgrass". It is too close to <...pilinpausa>, where /m~p/ and /r~l/. A late contamination with "Maria" is quite plausible. If the ending <...osa> of is in any way related to the <...ota> of words discussed above, we would have Latin ** hypothetical Group 1 Spanish <...pilinpauxa> attested in longer form <...pilipeta> attested in longer form *********************************************** Group 7. maripanpalona If we segment this as mari-panpalona, assuming as Trask notes, then we have <...panpalona Latin Group 3 This looks like Group 3, but with expressive heavy vowels open /a,o/ rather than the light vowel close /i/. Trask says: This shows another pattern typical of expressive names for small creatures: the use of 'Mary' as a first element. The rest is opaque. Corominas suggests a link with Latin 'butterfly', but I doubt it. While I have no regional provenance for this form, I suspect that it is eastern, and eastern dialects, especially Lapurdian, just love expressive formations in and , recall. *********************************************** So far, all of the forms considered may plausibly derive from a single common proto-form of ancient Basque, with modifications as is normal for expressive vocabulary. I make the statement above without attempting to specify exactly what the ancient Basque form might have been. *********************************************** The forms of Groups 2 and 6 following may plausibly derive from another common form of ancient Basque, one distinct from the one looking like Latin *papilon. But they may also go back to the same ancient form, simply with different kinds of changes since then. Group 2. txitxidola (LN) txitxipapa (HN) txitxitera (Z) Trask comments: "These eastern forms exhibit the reduplicated sequence , very common in nursery formations, with what appear to be arbitrary final elements: these final elements have no other existence." I would agree on reduplication, but the /...dola, ...tera/ seem metatheses from the /...lota/ of Group 1, and the /...papa/ seems to reflect the labials so common in words for butterfly. *** Group 6. xintxitoila etc. These seem highly similar to the first one in Group 2. -- is very similar to , perhaps in the way is similar to , so I would assume the same origin for and , whatever that origin was. Trask comments: "The first variant [] is unpalatalized, while the others show the palatalization typical of expressive formations. We cannot tell if the first form is conservative or merely a back-formation. In all its variants, this form is utterly opaque in formation. The form strongly suggests an expressive formation particularly typical of the eastern varieties. See Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for dozens of examples of this type." ************************************************* Group 5. altxatulili altxa-lili (LN) altxabili (HN) The third of these resembles Group 1c.: al txabili Group 1c. So I would consider either that this word may originally not have contained any of the words /altxa-/, /lili/, or /ibili/, all words of the normal vocabulary which may have affected the form of the expressive for 'butterfly' at some point. Trask comments: "The first two are transparently compounded from the Romance loan 'raise', stem , plus another Romance loan, 'lily, flower'. Or so it would seem, even though the semantic motivation eludes me." [LA interpolation: Just as "sparrowgrass" makes no semantic sense. A good indicator of late reformation.] Trask continues: "But the third variant rather muddies the waters. It may be a somewhat unusual dissimilation of the preceding. But Agud and Tovar suggest a different formation whose second element is the common verb 'be in motion'. Maybe, but V-V --> N is a decidedly unusual type of word-formation in Basque." ************************************************* So, in sum, the various forms which Trask displays from Basque dialects do to me suggest at least one reconstructible ancient Basque word for 'butterfly' (possibly two). I believe those forms will be something like: *patilon > *pitxilon / *pitxilota > various and *papilon > pinpilin > pinpilin-Vta etc. Of these two (probably themselves ultimately related), the first seems more European (see English, German words for 'butterfly'), while the second seems more specifically like Romance, and (if we believed that there was some very deep relationship), I would guess that it is a later borrowing from a relative of Latin into Basque. Or could both have been ancient Basque? The second could derive from the first, by making it partly reduplicative, more easily than the first could derive from the second, whether within Basque or elsewhere or earlier. The various attested forms result from reduplications, metatheses, substitution of words from the general vocabulary which happened to sound much like the earlier form of 'butterfly', influence from sound patterns common in other expressives, etc. Despite being normally four syllables, often with partial reduplication, it may not be analyzable into morpheme parts. Does that mean it qualifies as monomorphemic? *** AFTER writing the above message, I received from Steve Long a message which he had composed without yet seeing my draft. He pointed to a wide range of Greek words, among others these: >ptiloo^ >ptilon (Dor psilon) - soft feathers or down, anything like a wing or feather and >"ptil-?tos, ?, on, winged, esp[ecially] ptil?ta, opp[osite of] >pter?ta, dermoptera, membrane-winged creatures, Arist.HA490a6." [Steve commented:] >Note the last one - . Compare Trask's to which we can of course add 'wing' *ptero-, Notice how close this is to what I had reconstructed from the Basque data, completely unaware of the Greek (not even consciously aware of , though I do know the etmology of and when those words are in my consciousness) -- I actually feel a bit silly for not having thought of *ptero-! Lest someone think this is circular, the only external hints I used while reconstructing strictly within Basque were Latin , German , and English , oops, also Spanish . Yet the process led to two hypothetical ancient Basque proto-forms: *patilon (very close to Greek ptilo-) *papilon Draw what conclusions you will. I do not simply conclude that Basque borrowed from Greek, though that may be most reasonable, since as Roz Frank points out, there may be no Basque reflex of the root for 'wing', *ptero- or of *ptilo- other than in these words for 'butterfly'. (That very evidence suggests that it may have been monomorphemic in early Basque, not transparently divisible into morphological parts, and thus perhaps relevant to Larry Trask's search for "monomorphemic" such older items, despite its multisyllabic character, and even if it was borrowed at some point in pre-Basque.) I suppose this etymon must be older than that? Buck's "Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages" gives words related to this under 4.392 'wing' (Greek and OHG, OE) and 4.393 'feather' (Greek and Germanic and ? Slavic /pero/, assuming that is related. Nor do I conclude that Basque and PIE are related, neither from this single piece of evidence, nor from anything else I have read. Nor do I conclude that Basque and PIE are unrelated. *** I look forward to further ideas from either Basque specialists or specialists in sound symbolism, or from any other perspectives. [or, I guess I need to add as an afterthought, after the Greek evidence has been brought to bear, from IndoEuropeanists!] Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson From lmfosse at online.no Sun Dec 19 10:11:56 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 11:11:56 +0100 Subject: SV: SV: Pre-Greek languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Miguel Carrasquer Vidal [SMTP:mcv at wxs.nl] skrev 11. desember 1999 14:55: Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >>> 3. The presence of Elamite (in Antiquity) and Brahwi (Dravidian) in Iran >>> strongly suggests that the Dravidian territory stretched far more westward >>> than at present. It seems - but I have no documentation at hand - that the >>> old Indus valley culture is now recognized as having been Dravidian, which >>> reinforces the hypothesis. Lars M. Fosse wrote: >>The presence of Brahui has been shown to be due to a migration of Dravidian >>speakers from the South of India (probably mercenaries) a few hundred years >>ago. They are therefore not relevant for the discussion of the earliest >>period. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > From the South of India? I'm aware of theories that derive > Brahui from a migration from medieval Northern India (although I > don't know what the arguments for it are), but Southern India > would seem to be very strange: isn't it agreed that Brahui is > closest to the North-East Dravidian languages Kurux and Malto? The first to suggest that Brahui might represent a migration from southern India would seem to be Grierson. However, one of the most recent sources on the problem is the following paper by Hans Heinrich Hock, "Pre-Rigvedic Convergence between Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) and Dravidian? A Survey of the Issues and Controversies", in Ideology and Status of Sanskrit. Contributions to the history of the Sanskrit language. Ed. by Jan E. M. Houben. E. J. Brill, Leiden 1996. Hock says (p. 32): "While Brahui is now spoken in the extreme northwest [...] its presence in the area cannot be traced back much farther that the sixteenth century. To my [Hocks's] knowledge, Bloch (1911, see also 1925, 1929) was the first to suggest that Brahui may have migrated to the area from farther south: According to their own traditions, the Brahuis (and all other present-day linguistic groups) are different from the original indigenous population and have migrated to the area. More significant, because better established, is the fact that according to their own tradition, the Kurukh and Malto, close linguistic relatives of Brahui, migrated to their present locations via the Narmada valley, from a much more southern area in Karnataka. " Hock's paper deals with a Dravidian presence in the Northwest and its potential influence on Skt in general where Brahui has been used as part of the argument. Bernard Sergent in his "Genese de l'Inde" p. 130 points out that all indo-iranian loanwords in Brahui are from Baluchi [quoting Elfenbein], which means that the contact between the two languages has to be later than the 13th century. Although Parpola tries to modify the arguments put forward by Elfenbein, it would seem that the majority of scholars on the subject now adhere to the theory that the Brahui migrated from the South/Deccan sometime during the late Middle Ages, an opinion also shared by Emeneau. This of course does not mean that there were no Dravidians up North 3-4000 years ago although Sergent rejects that too on the basis of physical anthropological evidence. But it does mean that there were no Brahuis - or their direct ancestors in this area at an early date. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From sarima at friesen.net Tue Dec 21 01:04:20 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 17:04:20 -0800 Subject: Was Pre-Greek languages/now Sanskrit/Indus valley In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have replaced Mr. Friesen's old e-mail address "sarima at ix.netcom.com" with his new address "sarima at friesen.net". --rma ] At 05:46 PM 12/11/99 -0600, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Do any of the Hindu deities have Dravidian names that can be dated >to a very early period? > Can other any Hindu loanwords from Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, etc. be >dated to a period corresponding to the fall of Mohendjo-Daro? Actually, we could generalize this: Do the any of the non-IE deity names have recognizable similarities to *any* known language family? For that matter, what about other mythic names and specialized religious terms? The hypothesis then would be that the Indus Valley culture spoke a member of that family. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From sarima at friesen.net Mon Dec 20 02:19:57 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 18:19:57 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <0.35b5e0af.254fddde@aol.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have replaced Mr. Friesen's old e-mail address "sarima at ix.netcom.com" with his new address "sarima at friesen.net". --rma ] At 01:25 AM 11/2/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >We are talking about a period between roughly 2650BC - 1650BC in mainland >Greece. My statement was that there is no serious material evidence of a >significant immigration during that period, EXCEPT from Anatolia. >If there are other "lines of evidence" of an "incursion" from the north, I'd >very much like to hear what they are. Part of the problem is in trying to pin down what sort of "incursion" is required to import an IE language. What I am trying to suggest is that it does NOT need to be a "significant migration", and therefore may not be easily seen. Thus the absence of evidence for another significant migration is not necessarily significant. >What's the obvious inference? That migrations do leave evidence. That MAJOR migrations leave evidence clear. > And that >the warfare later resulting from these cultural differences do leave >evidence. So why didn't any incursion from the north leave evidence? The >inference is that it may not have happened. Or that it took a different *form*. >If above you mean by an "IE incursion," a movement of IE - speaking peoples >from the north, the question becomes where is the evidence? Any evidence. The main evidence is timing and cultural associations. True horses and wheeled carts and IE-style burials are known from the northeastern part of the Balkans earlier than they are known from either Greece *or* Anatolia. Such cultures are NOT known from either Mesopotamia or the Caucasus at any time prior to their appearance in Anatolia (even the Mitanni are not known until *after* the earliest evidence for Hittite speakers in Anatolia). This means that the Usatovo-Cernavoda complex is the most proximate available candidate for the source of IE speakers in Anatolia and the southern Balkans. In the absence of other viable candidates in the right time frame, an origin from that area is left as the only truly reasonable alternative. ><> >It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that there was no significant >incursion during this period from the north into mainland Greece. It seems >possible to *deny* its likelihood. This depends on what you mean by "significant". Certainly a major overturn in population is ruled out. But a limited infiltration of a small elite would not necessarily be easily visible. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From sarima at friesen.net Mon Dec 20 02:34:47 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 18:34:47 -0800 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <0.33afbcba.254ff8ca@aol.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have replaced Mr. Friesen's old e-mail address "sarima at ix.netcom.com" with his new address "sarima at friesen.net". --rma ] At 03:20 AM 11/2/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >And where exactly did these IE speaking "overlords" get their supposed >dominance? It certainly wasn't the horse, which shows no sign of being a >factor in seige or decisive war before 1000BC. And where is it said that warfare is the *only* way of establishing dominance? What about "buying" it? In that the horse and wheel could well give their possessors significant advantage, by allowing long-range trade with fewer intermediaries, and on shorter time-frames. > And the chariot was just a >platform for conveying war leaders around in Homer. There are very strong arguments that this was a late, and degenerate, state of affairs. In particular the evidence from Egypt prior to 1100 BC shows clearly that the chariot was a mobile combat platform, actively used in shock warfare. But that is probably irrelevant anyway, as the true war chariot seems to be post-PIE unity in date. ><spread of Latin into most of Europe, as the best models for the spread of IE >languages in prehistory.>> >But Latin's prestige didn't come from a bunch of headbashing riders off the >steppes. The advantages of Latin had to do with access to trade, crafts, >technology and much personal advancement that no profile of a pastoralist IE >speaking barbarian could appear to offer. Not by the time of Rome. But in earlier times they would have been the height of modern technology, and might well have had many of the same advantages relative to the neolithic cultures they came into contact with. (By Roman times even barbarians were iron-age). >In fact that model does work unless the invader has a steady flow of >technologically advanced resources and/or sheer population numbers shoring >him up. That was the case in the new world. On the other hand, the French >don't speak Frankish. The English do not speak Anglo-Norman or Danish. >Italians don't speak Odacer's language. And Slavic has consumed a long list >of "dominant elite" languages like they were just popcorn at the ballpark. I suspect a major factor is social. A language is accepted or ignored for reasons of group identification. Size or military dominance is only one aspect in establishing a desire for identifying with some group. ><< Also, place names based on late borrowings are a trifle unusual. Even >here in the USA, most non-English place names are substratal (Amerindian or >Spanish), and we are notorious polyculturalists.>> >The "late borrowings" do not refer I believe to place names. Herodotus >however does mention Pelagasian placenames - and he says he does not know >what kind of language Pelagasian is, but that it is not Greek. But it is the place names that most clearly indicate a non-IE presence in Greece. Renfrew needs to explain these. Even if the other non-IE elements are late borrowings, the presence of a non-IE substratum in the place names pretty much requires that Greek arrived from elsewhere at *some* point in time. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Dec 21 07:20:05 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 02:20:05 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 12/11/99 11:04:36 AM, rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu wrote: <> But 2500BC was very often the ONLY date given for a long time. In other circumstances, earliest possible dates generally share some equal time with latest possible dates. A fine example of how entrenched the 2500BC date (without qualification) has been can be found on none other than the *IE Documentation Center* web page on the the Univ of Texas at Austin site. (http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc/iedocctr/ie-lg/ie-lg.html) On that page we are offered only one link regarding the overall subject: "For an online discussion of the IE Language Families see The Indo-European Family of Languages (by Kerilyn Cole)." There we learn that "The general consensus is that the original Indo-European civilization developed somewhere in eastern Europe about 3000 B.C. About 2500 B.C. it broke up..." The date on this page is 1998. More importantly - in the context of my post - was the way the 2500BC date was used in Archaeology & Language (1987) (Cambridge Press pb). Renfrew wrote: "... My analysis of the literature suggest that the date of c.2500 BC often cited for the dispersal..." and "....the conclusions either of the Kossinna school or of the early Childe or of Gimbutas in favor of a late neolithic dispersal. The dispersal is thus set around 2500 BC." (pp165-66). Both references are not to inner limits on dispersal based on attestation, but rather the most likely dates reflected in specific theories of who the original "Indo-Europeans" were in the archaeological record. A reading of the sections involved will make it clear that Renfrew was not merely arguing about the latest possible date for dispersal based on attestation. And neither Childe nor Gimbutas were *merely* giving a terminus ante quem. (In 1960, Gimbutas's "Culture Change in Europe at the start of the second millenium BC" did not I'm told address any date earlier than 3000BC. I believe at that time the dialogue between the "long chronologists" and "short chronologists" was still going on. The Funk and Wagnell's Online Encyc has I believe the right order of events in its article on the subject: "Various names were proposed for the archaeological culture itself, based mainly on mortuary practices and ceramics types, the most known of which is the Kurgan ("burial mound") culture. The term was introduced in 1956 by the American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-94), who applied it to a more extensive homeland for the Proto-Indo-Europeans AND FOR WHICH OLDER DATES (between 4500 and 2500 BC) WERE ESTABLISHED BY RADIOCARBON c-14 AND SUBSEQUENT CALIBRATION DATING METHODS. Based on new data provided by Central and Eastern European archaeologists, the dating and spread of this culture are under reconsideration." (CAPS ARE MINE) I may be wrong about Gimbutas' early datings of PIE and I would very much appreciate being corrected if I am.) I have read a good number of critiques of Renfrew and I have not seen any that say that he misinterpreted the "consensus" of the time - not even Mallory. I believe the standard reading in ancient history courses of say twenty years ago routinely offered 2500BC as the *likely* date of dispersal - not qualified as just a latest possible date. So far as I know the only exception was the notice given to Swadesh and the Glottochronologists for suggesting such early dates as 4500BC for differentiation within the IE family - and they were hardly included in any "consensus." If in fact you know of any instances of such a description of the "consensus" from say before 1970 that explicitly leaves open a substantially earlier date of dispersal (4000BC or earlier), I for one would be very interested to see it. If you are saying there was always an admission of uncertainty, I'd have to agree with that. But that uncertainty was not what Renfrew was addressing. And I believe that uncertainty was not ordinarily described as the consensus of the time either among ancient historians or historical linguists. You wrote: <<4000 BC sounds like an attempt at a terminus post quem (others are Renfrew's 5000-4500 BC) based on the articles indisputably reconstructable to PIE. I would hope it is not a new "consensus date for IE dispersal". I doubt the available evidence allows us to narrow the date of IE dispersal down with such precision.>> The real point is I think that - given the archaeological record developing in Greece and elsewhere - a 2500BC date of first dispersal has seemed more and more improbable. So that the whole window has moved backward in time. And the new termini come out of theories based on new archaeological data that are not inconsistent with the historic outcome, given the already wide dispersal of IE at the times of actual attestations. The terminus post quem provided by the evidence of the spread of agriculture is the basis of Renfrew's theory. And that does not necessarily yield a 5000-4500BC date. The earliest date of dispersal could correlate with the first diffusion of agricultural culture into mainland Europe or elsewhere - both of which could be as much as a thousand years earlier than 5000BC. You wrote: <<...based on the articles indisputably reconstructable to PIE.>> What "articles" might you be refering to? Are these also the "available evidence" you refer to that you say will not let us narrow the date? You wrote: <> The early dates have been pretty much based on correlations with the appearance of widely dispersed characteristics of particular material cultures. There is no direct evidence of any IE language before 2200BC. Any theory of what happened before then carries by necessity a fair degree of uncertainty. Some theories do seem more probable than others, but not one has the advantage of direct proof. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Dec 22 05:55:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 00:55:54 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com cogently replied: <<-- No, headbashing armies from Italy. You know, the "Roman Empire"?>> Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived. Latin's main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship. Mallory has something to say about all this in ISIE and given the subtle nature of your argument, I think something is worth repeating: <> I wrote with regard to IE possibly assimilating non-IE speakers from the steppes, by analogy: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <> I don't know what this has to do with anything. The point was that there have been many cases where the "dominant elite" disappear in the pre-existing language. The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages of various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been assimilated by Russian. With regard to IE Overlords finding their superiority in the horse, I wrote <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- an absurd statement, seeing as every major Middle Eastern power depended on a chariot corps in the 2nd millenium BCE.>> Be assured I find your reply not absurd but very confusing. "Every major Middle Eastern power" were NOT steppe invaders nor IE speakers. But perhaps that is unfair. In what battle or seige specifically was the horse "decisive?" I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied with regard to Homer: <> By the "period when the chariot was an actual factor", you say you mean when it was being used by archers. I took your suggestion to heart and discovered that by all accounts the use of the chariot by archers was innovated by the Eygptians about 1200BC. I take it therefore that it is your well thought-out contention that the IndoEuropeans borrowed this idea from the Egyptians to conquer many lands and force IE languages upon them? I will further "study the data" from the period and let you know what I turn up. BTW, does it occur to you that any of your responses above may be missing the point in a big way? Steve Long From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Dec 21 06:09:34 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 01:09:34 -0500 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991102180950.009895c0@popd.netcruiser> Message-ID: A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; it is a strong argument against Renfrew. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Dec 21 10:08:52 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 10:08:52 +0000 Subject: Excluding much? Message-ID: [ moderator re-foramtted ] Lloyd Anderson writes: > It has been pointed out to me several times in private communication > that Larry Trask's criteria in seeking to establish his list of > "best" candidates for early Basque monomorphemic lexical items > (I hope that phrasing accurately represents Trask's statements > of his goals) Yep. > contains two parts which together will cause the total list to be > very seriously reduced, to a tiny number of items. > I think Trask should have an opportunity to clarify or deal > with this issue publicly, so here are the specifics. > Among other reasons for asking this explicitly, > I understood one of Trask's more recent communications > about Basque to be saying that there are more documentary > sources available than I had previously understood him as saying. Assorted fragments between the 10th and 16th centuries. Substantial connected texts date only from the 16th century. > (The question on interaction of these two criteria is quite > independent of other questions which have been under discussion.) > 1. Only include candidates attested in four out of five major dialect > groupings > (groupings I believe Trask has established based on his study of > which are more closely related to each other, which more > independent) Very roughly, yes, but the main point of my groupings is that some recognized dialects are smaller and less well described than others. Note, for example, in my earlier posting, the absence of any recorded words for 'butterfly' in the three small Pyrenean dialects. > 2. Only include candidates from the earliest documentation, > either pre-1600, as Trask prefers, > or pre-1700, as he has said he is willing to consider a > modification. > Do these two criteria together mean that almost no lexical > items will qualify, only the most rudimentary lexicon, > words which are almost totally independent of subject matter and style, Well, I'm not sure 'rudimentary' is the best choice of word. But I expect the words that make my list will mostly belong to that somewhat ill-defined area commonly called 'basic vocabulary', yes. > such as English "and, the, good, very, when, not, come, go"? Grammatical words will indeed be prominent, insofar as these exist (Basque often has affixes where English has independent words). But I expect to get several hundred lexical items as well. However, see below for a problem with verbs. > How many does Trask estimate this would permit to be included? Can't answer this before I've done the work, but I estimate several hundred. > After writing the above, I read Trask's listings of ordinary vocabulary from > the religious texts. That is a very good list, and I thank Trask for it. > Most of it, though by no means all, fits the category I mention just above of > words almost independent of subject matter and style. And I expect almost all of the words in my list to be like this. > There remain for me two content questions. > (a) What happens to the list Trask posted, when he applies the rule > that four out of five dialects must attest each item to be included? > Still the very most basic vocabulary should survive, > perhaps a list much like what Trask just provided us, > but though I believe so, it is an empirical question. It is. As I may have explained earlier, this criterion is proposed to allow the inclusion of words which are almost, but not quite, universal in the language, like <(h)itz> 'word', used in all dialects but the western dialect Bizkaian, which has the Romance loan instead. But I have to draw a firm line here. For example, 'pine tree' is the Latino-Romance loan almost everywhere, while the eastern dialect Roncalese has and its neighbor Zuberoan has in some varieties. It is highly possible that ~ represents an indigenous word displaced almost everywhere by the loan word, but I can't be sure of this, and the word does not qualify for inclusion. Anyway, this illustrates one of my goals in pursuing this project: I hope to be able to show that has exactly the form of an indigenous word, and hence that it can plausibly be regarded as just such a word, now largely displaced. But I can't reach conclusions like this one until I have first established the forms of indigenous Basque words by examining the clearest cases. > (b) When I wrote the following, there was a scope ambiguity: > Speaking of attestation primarily in religious texts: > > That is a very strong bias of content, I would think against quite a > > range of vocabulary from ordinary life. > I intended not "against [there being] a range of vocabulary from ordinary > life", > which was Trask's interpretation in this case (a reasonable possibility), > but rather I intended "against quite [large parts of the] vocabulary > of ordinary life [which are not religious in content]". The grammatical > items and most basic adjectives, nouns, and verbs, would still occur, > probably in all dialects, but whether measured in a single dialect group > attestation in religious texts, or if requiring four out of five dialect > groups, > I would think many words like these would not be found > in such a high proportion of texts which are not oriented toward > a subject content which would promote their inclusion. Quite possibly, but, yet again, my immediate goal is to find the *best* candidates, not all possible candidates. > I will *of course* be wrong about some of the following, > but others could be substituted. And I know from previous > correspondence that Trask believes some of these are in > vocabulary domains where almost all Basque vocabulary > is loanwords from other languages. I assume not all of the items of > ordinary life which would fail to be widely enough attested would > be such loanwords. The following list is *of course* not > designed with any knowledge specifically of Basque in mind. > But it illustrates roughly some of what I mean is included > by "ordinary life" on land and sea. OK; let's talk about this list. But first note a couple of things. 1. No ancient Basque verb is monomorphemic. A native verbal root is a bound morpheme, and hence no ancient verb will make my list. 2. Basque is *very* fond of compounds. 3. The entire Basque nautical vocabulary is borrowed. 4. The nature of the Basque terrain, and of Basque cultural traditions, means that certain of the suggested words are unlikely to be prominent in Basque. > "cartwheel", A compound in English, and a compound in Basque. > (horse's) "bit", The most usual word is a Romance loan; the other is a compound. > "fleece", Two words: one a compound, the other shared with Romance but of unknown origin. > "canal", The Basques live in mountains, and they don't build many canals. Of the two existing words, one is borrowed (it's the same word as the English word, also borrowed), and the other is a compound. > "rafter", Precise equivalents are compounds. Even the English word is bimorphemic in origin, though no longer transparently so. > "threshold", The English word is an old compound; the Basque one is a compound whose first member is also a compound: 'doorway-stone'. > "sunrise", The English word is a compound, and so are the several Basque words. This is a good example of a sense whose form has been repeatedly and independently constructed in Basque by forming compounds -- a common phenomenon in Basque > "planet", The English word is borrowed, and so is the Basque word, from the same source. > "yoke", Native and seemingly monomorphemic. First one. > "thresh", A verb, but anyway all the several Basque words are derivatives, often from nouns denoting the tools used -- another common practice in Basque. > "root-cellar", The Basque Country is built on limestone mountains, and the Basques, sensibly enough, don't build cellars. Instead, they build sheltered porches into their houses. > "eye" (of potato), The English word represents a transferred sense, and Basque uses exactly the same metaphor. > "scrape", Verb, and all the several Basque verbs here are derivatives. > "consult", Verb. The English word is borrowed, and so is the Basque one -- from the same source. > "dig", Verb, and a derivative. > "build", Verb. No real Basque equivalent: 'erect', 'put up' is used for buildings, 'make' for other things. > "rudder", "hull" (of boat), All nautical, and all borrowed. > "hull" (of seed), Several words, almost all compounds or loanwords. > "bill" (of bird), A very interesting case. The widespread word is , variant , which looks very much like an expressive formation, but is not definitely one. The word has been much discussed, and is widely suspected of being borrowed from Romance, though the Romance origin is not at all obvious, and requires a bit of fancy footwork. Attested from 1571 -- early enough. May possibly meet my distributional criterion; I'll have to check. But the widely held belief in a Romance origin will probably disqualify it. > "down" (of bird), Derivative, and bimorphemic. > "mast", Nautical, and a loanword. > "shear", Verb, and derived from a noun. > "midwife", Compound in English, and compound in Basque. > "stillbirth", No simple Basque lexicalization known to me. English word not recorded before 1785. > "roe" Compound: 'fish-eggs'. > "kitten", "chick", "kid" (of goat), "foal", "filly", Basque has a productive suffix <-(k)ume> 'offspring', 'young', and this is regularly used to derive names for young animals. All of these except 'chick' are so constructed in Basque, while 'chick' is the obviously imitative <(t)xito> ~ <(t)xita> ~ . This last word will probably meet my criteria, but will stand out a mile. > "vixen", Bimorphemic in English, and also in Basque: 'fox-female'. Anyway, the Basque words for 'fox' are borrowed, and, for that matter, so is the word for 'female' -- as is the English word. > "badger", Another very interesting case. The Basque word is , with about 18 regional variants. Comparative evidence points to an earlier *. There are two stories about this: (1) It's a compound of 'bear' with an unknown second element. Phonologically better than it looks, but that second element is mysterious. (2) It's borrowed from Latin . Phonologically good, apart from the irregular loss of the initial plosive (though there exist parallels). Who knows? Not sure what to do with this, but it looks too fishy to go straight into the list. Anyway, not recorded before 1745, and therefore out, even though I agree at once that the numerous and peculiar regional variants point to a much older word. > etc. > names of quite a number of plants and animals, Names of indigenous large animals are usually native, with a few striking exceptions like 'fox' and 'whale'. Names of indigenous plants and trees are about half native and half borrowed, though very many of the native ones are compounds. > perhaps some kin terms, Most kin terms are native, but most are bimorphemic. > some terms relating to marriage As good Catholics, the Basques take many such terms from the Romance usages of the Church. There are certainly some exceptions, but most are bimorphemic. Even western 'banns' can be shown to be a compound. > ceremonies, Almost all ceremonial terms are compounds or derivatives, and most of the rest are borrowed. > "visit", Verb. The English word is borrowed, and so is the Basque one, from the same source. > "adopted" (child), The English word is the participle of a verb. The Basque words are all polymorphemic: no simple lexicalization. > "village idiot", The English word is a compound of two borrowed words, and any Basque word would be a syntactic construction: the Basques do not appear to have a tradition of village idiots. > various kinds of earth and minerals and plant products, > etc. etc. etc. Too broad and general for me to comment on. So, all in all, not many words here which can possibly hope to make my list. [snip Biblical examples] > Of course, Trask's samples were only a few lines > from a New Testament preface and from Chapter One of Matthew. > Once we include the entire text, things should be better. > How much better? I do not claim to know. > That is why I think my questions in this message > are really empirical questions. Can't tell before I've done the work. > Of course, if we correct our estimates again, > by noting that even the rarest items which did occur > in Trask's two short samples are not as rare as > most of the sample items in the sketch I gave above, > it again looks less probable that a wide range of > rare vocabulary of ordinary life will be covered, But I'm not looking for "rare vocabulary". I'm looking for words that have the strongest claims to being native, ancient and monomorphemic. > therefore not a wide range of polysyllables, > relative to the monomorphemic polysyllables > which really did exist in spoken Basque of the time. But I'm not looking either for "a wide range of polysyllables". Long Basque words are almost invariably polymorphemic -- just as in English. How many English words can you think of that are native and ancient but three or four syllables long? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Dec 21 12:38:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 12:38:20 +0000 Subject: Sample bias, word length, frequency, circularity Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > This message is on a distinct source of sample bias, > one not in these discussions previously. > And on one explanation of > what was meant by "circularity" earlier. > It is well known that more common lexical items > are, as a statistical matter, shorter, > and rarer lexical items are, as a statistical matter, longer. > This is true world-wide, I assume the point is not debated? I know of no evidence against this, and I know of some hard evidence to support it. > If this is true, then a selection of vocabulary which is very > strongly biased towards the most common lexical items > in a language will also be strongly biased towards the shorter items. > A sample selected with a very strong bias towards shorter > words will be unrepresentative of the language it is drawn from, > especially if one is aiming at generalizations about canonical forms. Perhaps, but recall that I am not interested in finding canonical forms for word-forms. I am only interested in finding morpheme-structure conditions for monomorphemic lexical items. Hence polymorphemic word-forms are of no interest or relevance -- and most polysyllabic word-forms are also polymorphemic. > (It will also be skewed towards more grammatical lexical items, > "when, the, very, some, that, do".) Not really, in my case. Basque makes much heavier use of grammatical affixes than does English, and the Basque equivalents of such English words as 'when', 'the', 'if', 'to', 'with', 'of', 'in', 'toward', 'from', 'for', and 'because' are bound affixes, and hence will not qualify for my list. And a number of others are bimorphemic, such as those meaning 'although', 'since' (causal), 'after', 'before', and 'together', and these too will not make my list. The number of monomorphemic grammatical words is really rather small. > This matter of a bias in word length > is another factor which I did not previously mention explicitly, > which argues against having too small a list of items included > in a sample, if one wishes to draw conclusions of general validity, > when one is trying to determine the canonical forms > even for monomorphemic lexical items in early Basque > (or any other language), > and even if (as Trask very nearly specifies today), > one is not interested initially in canonical forms of expressives. > Multisyllabic forms which actually occurred > in spoken early Basque are of course monomorphemic > if they are not analyzable into components within Basque. > Whether or not they will be picked up by a particular > sampling technique -- that is a one of our questions. Any such Pre-Basque words which still exist today will, of course, be picked up if they meet my criteria, and not otherwise. But the vast majority of three-syllable words in Basque, and probably all longer words, are transparently either polymorphemic or borrowed. There is nothing surprising about this: the same is true for English. > So the discussion in another message I have sent today, > under the title "Excludes much", is highly relevant to the > question of possible distortion of a sample of vocabulary. > That other message contrasts roughly basic vocabulary > of ordinary life on land and sea with > the kind of basic vocabulary which is of highest frequency, > independent of subject matter of texts, > which will therefore be most likely to be found > in at least four out of five dialect groups, > following Trask's criteria for inclusion. But we can't decide in advance which words "ought to" be indigenous and monomorphemic. That's a matter for empirical investigation. > On other matters, > I think we have reached some partial closure on one point. > Trask has written: >> But who ever said I was interested in canonical forms >> "for the language as a whole"? > I believe the original statements did not specify exclusions, > and aimed at general validity, so one could reasonably > assume they were intended for the language as a whole. No: native, ancient and monomorphemic lexical items. That's all. I think I've been pretty explicit about this. > The exclusion of expressives, > *or systematically of any other group of words* > (such as the longer words, as noted above), > through any aspect of the sampling procedure, > would of course tend to invalidate such general validity. No; not at all. Polysyllabic words are excluded by definition: they are not relevant to my task. Obviously expressive words hardly ever satisfy my criteria, from which the most appropriate conclusion appears to be that *these particular words* are not ancient. Of course, Pre-Basque doubtless possessed *some* expressive words, but there is no evidence to support a claim that these were identical to the modern ones. Such evidence as we have suggests that expressive formations in Basque have been subject to constant renewal and replacement. > Trask has affirmed: >> Expressive formations may be constructed >> according to different rules from ordinary words. >> Indeed they are, but how can I hope to establish >> this objectively unless I >> *first* identify the rules for ordinary words? > The methodological point would be I think that > one cannot separate out ordinary words from > expressives (or from any other category of words) > in one's selection of data, without knowing how to > recognize what expressives are. Exactly. > But as I have previously stated, as long as the > expressives are not excluded as "not candidates > for early Basque", they will be considered at some point. I repeat: *all* words will be considered from the beginning, evaluated according to my criteria, and included if and only if they satisfy those criteria. > It is the phrasing which Trask used early in these discussions, > which seems to aim at conclusions valid for "early Basque", > and linked these with his criteria, > rather than saying that his conclusions would be > valid for "a subset of early Basque", > namely that subset which is selected by his criteria, Careful! I cannot directly examine Pre-Basque at all. If I could, I would simply do so. Instead, I must first attempt to compile a list of the best candidates for Pre-Basque status. Of course, I can't hope to recover the entire language, in all its detail. But, if my objective criteria lead to a set of several hundred best candidates which conform strongly to certain generalizations, then I think we have the basis of some conclusions. And that is the point of the exercise. > which seems to place his criteria above > themselves being questioned. Er -- what? > Perhaps this way of stating it makes it clearer > what has been meant by "circularity". Not to me, I'm afraid. > If we say that > conclusions from analyzing > a particular subset of early Basque will > be valid for the subset of early Basque > selected by the criteria used to select it, > we of course have a plausibly valid statement. > That makes explicit what the limitations may be. > Trask's earlier statements seemed to aim at much > broader validity, and omitted the limitations. > That is at least one reason why they have seemed > rather circular to a number of us. I don't see any circularity. Anyway, I am still asking Lloyd for his set of alternative criteria, ones which he thinks are better than mine. *Explicit* criteria, I mean, not generalities. Lloyd, should Basque 'crest' be included in my list or not? On the basis of what criteria should the question be answered? How about an answer? > Neither Trask's criteria nor any I have suggested > single out expressives for either exclusion or exclusion > (I have always granted that; it would be nice if > Trask would grant it in return). I would be happy to grant this if Lloyd would only say it explicitly. But, frequently, Lloyd has appeared to say that some kind of special provision should be made for expressive formations. So, Lloyd, are you now agreeing to the following? Expressive formations should be subject to no special treatment at all, but must be treated just like all other words, according to exactly the same criteria, whatever those are. Yes or no? > Yet the point I have made is that Trask's criteria > do so indirectly, because of the bias in written > attestations of expressives, probably world-wide, > and that limits the general validity of any results > he would get from his sample. Since he has slightly > narrowed his claims, this is of less concern. "Narrowed my claims"? How? What claims? I'm still doing just what I said I was doing at the beginning. > However, Trask's criteria also bias against > longer lexical items, and that is not so trivial > by any means. That is a bias against some canonical > forms, at least statistically, and a bias against > ordinary vocabulary which is not in the highest > frequency class. Again: long words are hardly ever monomorphemic. Rare words, even if monomorphemic, are unlikely to survive for 2000 years in an unwritten language. Whoops -- gotta go. Apologies for cutting this short. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From michael at mclafferty.com Wed Dec 22 07:15:45 1999 From: michael at mclafferty.com (Michael McLafferty) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 23:15:45 -0800 Subject: /*dhey6-/ in the AHD Message-ID: Standard Disclaimer: New to list, strictly an amateur, first posting, yadda-yadda-yadda... So, after visiting his website, I asked for Patrick Ryan's help as follows: >Found your site...during a search for a resource to >track down the IE root of Sanskrit /dhyaana(m)/ or /dhyAna(m)/ >"meditation, thought, reflection" (whence /zen/). >The online Sanskrit dictionaries I've found don't seem to give >IE roots. Mr Ryan responded helpfully: >Sanskrit /dhyaana(m)/...is traditionally derived from an IE root >*dheyH-, 'sehen, schauen' (Pokorny 1959:I,243). >Actually, this is also listed in the AHD under *dhey6-, to see, look. >(1976:1513). Eventually I replied to Mr Ryan: >...I looked in my AHD 3rd ed. and failed to see an entry for /*dhey6-/. >For some reason the editors dropped it, jumping from /*dheugh-/ to >/*dhghem-/. Eventually I dug out my 1st AHD and found the root you >cite, right between the two above. Did they discredit it? For those who haven't nodded off yet, he answered: >I am not really sure why there is this discrepancy. >So far as I know, the root is still recognized. >Why not propose the question to the list? So I have. Michael McLafferty [mac fhlaithbheartaigh] Portland, Oregon [Btw, I've been looking for a used copy of "Pokorny 1959" to own -- a bookseller has a volume called "POKORNY, JULIUS. INDOGERMANISCHES ETYMOLOGISCHES WORTERBUCH. Bern,: Franke, Funfzehnte Lieferung. 250 x 175 mm. 96pp." This can't be the whole thing, can it? Do they come up for sale very often?] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Dec 22 10:49:37 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 10:49:37 +0000 Subject: Azkue's dictionary Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Jon Patrick writes: > a response to Lloyd Anderson about the use of Azkue's dictionary. I comment > that his objections were centred firmly around its ease of use for > etymological studies not on the merit of the content itself and by default > Larry's answer justifies Lloyd's assertion, namely: >> On the whole, it seems from Larry Trask's review of it that Jon Patrick is >> on very solid ground in using Azkue's dictionary as a basis for >> analytical studies. > Larry reponded: >> But only, I think, if a detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics is first >> superimposed on the raw data. > Larry's response to Lloyd's comment struck me as an oblique but transparent > attack on the merit of my contribution to the analysis basque, being the only > person on the list without a "detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics", who > is debating the topics. Well, it appears I have offended Jon. If so, I apologize, but I wasn't in fact trying to attack his work in any way. If your only interest is in analyzing the content of Azkue's dictionary, then Azkue's dictionary is the best source I can think of. But what I was trying to point out is that Azkue's dictionary cannot be used at face value for historical work, for a number of reasons. First, Azkue's policy is to lump together unrelated homophones under a single entry, while at the same time providing separate entries (usually without cross-references) to variant forms of a single word -- sometimes as many as 18 or 25 separate entries for variants of one word. Azkue enters everyday words along with rare, obscure and doubtful words, all on equal footing. He enters a large number of loan words. He enters quite a few hapaxes. He enters words for which the only source is somebody else's earlier -- and sometimes dubious -- dictionary. He enters words for which the sole authority is the unsupported report of an outsider, such as the Dutchman van Eys or the Spaniard Hervas y Panduro. He enters neologisms coined by Basque writers. He enters compounds and derivatives without reference to their sources. And he makes mistakes. Some of his entries are errors copied from other written sources, and others are errors of hearing or of interpretation committed by him. And some of them are non-existent words, fantasies invented by Azkue in pursuit of his etymological speculations. All this means that the entries in Azkue's dictionary cannot be taken at face value, or treated on equal footing, for historical work. To be fair, Azkue is usually punctilious about providing provenances and sources for his entries, and this information is potentially valuable. But it is useless as long as it merely sits there on the page, or on a database. This information has to be interpreted by a human user, which means that decisions have to be made about what to do with it. Now, I have no quarrel at all with Jon's enterprise, and I wish him well with it. But I wouldn't want to see anybody drawing any historical conclusions on the basis of Azkue's list of headwords. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Dec 22 11:01:00 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 11:01:00 +0000 Subject: Sample bias, word length, frequency, circularity Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > It is well known that more common lexical items > are, as a statistical matter, shorter, > and rarer lexical items are, as a statistical matter, longer. > This is true world-wide, I assume the point is not debated? > If this is true, then a selection of vocabulary which is very > strongly biased towards the most common lexical items > in a language will also be strongly biased towards the shorter items. > A sample selected with a very strong bias towards shorter > words will be unrepresentative of the language it is drawn from, > especially if one is aiming at generalizations about canonical forms. Not really. I am only interested in monomorphemic words, and monomorphemic words tend to be short, while long words tend to be polymorphemic, in Basque as in all the languages I know anything about. Consequently, Lloyd's objection could only constitute a problem for me in the following scenario: Pre-Basque had lots of long monomorphemic words as well as short ones, but, for some reason, the long monomorphemic words have been generally lost from the language, while the short ones have preferentially survived. And I don't see this as a plausible scenario. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Dec 22 11:14:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 11:14:19 +0000 Subject: "is the same as" [was Re: Respect goes both ways!] Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have changed the Subject: line to reflect the actual content. --rma ] Stanley Friesen writes: > I guess I am not so adamant that sameness always be transitive. Well, if the relation 'is the same as' is to be taken as non-transitive, then what, if any, semantic content can be assigned to it? How would it then differ, say, from the relation 'is similar to'? > It is generally rather messy to try to apply a transitive form of > similarity to biological entities, not just language. For instance, > species delimitation can be difficult if one insists on transitivity (e.g. > the so-called ring species). When does a fertilized egg become a new > individual? So I just take it as *given* when talking about a biological > entity that the boundaries *are* fuzzy, as otherwise one must give up > almost all boundaries in biology. > And natural languages are clearly biological entities. So fuzziness is the > only useful way to go. I have no quarrel with anything in these last two paragraphs, with which I agree. But, if we agree to a fuzzy interpretation of 'is the same as', and hence to its negation 'is not the same as', then we can no longer manipulate these relations as though they had non-fuzzy interpretations, and draw non-fuzzy conclusions -- which I think is the practice I was objecting to in the first place. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Dec 27 16:53:42 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 27 Dec 1999 11:53:42 -0500 Subject: Root versus lexical languages. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 8 Dec 1999 s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca wrote: > Dear List members-- > I distinctly remember having been taught, as an undergraduate, that one > can distinguish ROOT LANGUAGES from LEXICAL LANGUAGES. The latter are the > more common type and consist of those languages (like English) where, as a > rule, lexical items stand in isolation from one another, i.e. derivation > is not regular or transparent. Root languages, on the other hand, are > languages like Sanskrit or early Semitic languages, where derivation is so > regular and transparent that, by taking a small number (800 to 1000) of > roots, one can generate the bulk of the lexicon: this transparency is such > that, for example, in an Arabic dictionary, roots, not words, are what is > listed. > My question is twofold: > 1-Can anyone point me to published work comparing these two types of > language, > and > 2-While the transformation of a root language into a lexical language is a > banal, commonly observed phenomenon (from Sanskrit to the modern > Indo-Aryan languages), is anything known about the reverse, i.e. how a > lexical language turns into a root language? Your terms "lexical" and "root" correspond roughly to the traditional terms "isolating" and "inflectional" (or "fusional"), respectively. The three traditional types of language- isolating, agglutinative, and inflectional- should be taken as useful but imprecise descriptive terms. Languages do not fit neatly into one of these three slots; it's a matter of more or less. You'll often hear rather simplistic statements about other characteristics which are supposed to go hand in hand with one of these morphological types. For example, it's said that Latin, as an inflectional language, has "free" word order, while English, as an isolating language, relies on word order to convey the same grammatical information. Actually, the word order in Latin is anything but free; you cannot arrange Latin words in any arbitrary order. Likewise, there is a certain range of freedom in English word order. Much the same syntactic constraints apply in all languages, regardless of what kind of morphology (if any) the language has. As for how an isolating language goes to an inflectional language, the real question is how a language can develop inflectional morphology which it didn't previously have. One way- and probably the main way- is for a previously separate word to become fused to another, i.e. reinterpreted as inflectional morphology on another word. This is where the modern English regular past tense -ed comes from; in prehistoric Germanic, the verb which comes down to us as "did" came to be fused on to other words as a suffix, producing the Germanic weak verbs. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Dec 29 20:25:44 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 20:25:44 -0000 Subject: Root versus lexical languages. Message-ID: I wonder if we really can "distinguish" the two types of language? Is it not more of a spectrum, of which we can identify the two ends? We might well be able to compare two languages and recognise that one lies more one way along this spectrum than the other, but I don't think we can make a division, in the way Stephane's posting suggests. Indeed, I have seen precisely this comparision usefully made for English and German in a German book about English. As for "lexical" languages developing into "root" languages, is that not currently happening in Chinese - where new formations are transparently formed from lexical items by the addition of a further syllable or even syllables, whose "lexical" meaning has become less important than their lexicalising function? E.g. the plural marker on pronouns, the -zhe suffix, the temporal/aspectual markers, the directional markers on verbs, and so on. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Wed Dec 29 18:54:19 1999 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 13:54:19 -0500 Subject: Wheeled Vehicles. Message-ID: From: "Stanley Friesen" wrote: > Given its design, the chariot is a fairly direct derivation of the > two-wheeled cart, with modifications to make it more suitable for > warfare and/or racing. If by `cart', you mean ox-carts, this is simply wrong. In two words, Trans-Mission :-) See below. ---- The chariot issue has raised its head again. I will limit myself to things which I have not said before (according to the list archive). I also will to be brief without being cryptic. For fuller details, please refer to the cited references. I suggest that all the participants in this discussion read the basic references (the books by Spruytte, and by Littauer and Crowell, and the articles by the Littauer in Antiquity in the late 60's for basic facts), but especially Spruytte and the paper by Littuaer and Crowell cited below before proceeding with this discussion.[A more discursive version of this post (except for paras 3, 4 and 5 of my reply) may be found distributed over several posts in the Indology list (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/indology.html) during 1998.] JoatSimeon wrote, in a message dated 20-Oct-1999, > For that matter, the light, spoke-wheeled, bentwood-and-wicker > chariot was pretty fully developed in the 21st century BCE, and in > the traditional Androvonovo area. JoatSimeon keeps repeating this ``bentwood-and-wicker'' stuff. Searching the archives, the only evidence for this (s)he has given is quotations from the article of Anthony and Vinogradov in Archaeology. The evidence available concerning the superstructure is extremely limited: All that we seem to have is some stains in one cemetery at Krivoe Ozero, as seen in Photo 4 on p.39. How anything about the superstructure, much less the claim of ``bentwood-and-wicker construction'' is deduced from this meager remain is beyond me. [The illustration on p.37 is clearly marked as ``Artist's conception'' in the blurb on p.36. I assume that all the list members know the difference between ``artist conception'' and material evidence.] As Littauer and Crowell (Antiquity 70(1996) pp.934-939) point out, one of the feature we can be sure of, namely the length of the axle, casts serious doubt on the durability of the vehicle. This has nothing to do with the narrow wheel base as suggested by Anthony and Vinogradov, but with tendency of wheels to wobble on the axle. After reading the article by Anthony in ``The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia'', I have become very skeptical about his arguments and conclusions. He shows a total misunderstanding of the horse harnesses reconstructed from finds in Tutankhaman's tomb. In footnote 10 (p.105), he says ``The yoke saddle was a harness device that seated the yoke firmly on the withers and shoulders of chariot horses, preventing slippage of the yoke more firmly on the withers and shoulders of chariot horses, preventing slippage of the yoke and keeping the weight off the horses throats and chests.'' There are three errors in this single sentence. This is all the more surprising since Anthony cites Spruytte ``Early harness systems'' elsewhere. Firstly, no serviceable harness system can place anything on the withers of horses (Spruytte p.11) and the harness system as reconstructed using the finds in Tutankhaman's tomb and representations in 2nd m. BCE does not. Secondly, the slippage of the neck bands was prevented by placing the axle of the chariot at the back, thus distributing part of the weight (about 18kg, or 9kg per horse, in the case of the reconstructed chariot with one rider, which comes to about 1/6 of the total weight) to the yoke making it much less likely to move up the horses' neck (Spruytte, p.41). The third error is much more serious as it shows total misunderstanding of the true function of the yoke saddle. I think that it is worthwhile to explain this in some detail. Firstly, despite the name, draught animals do not pull. They >push< against something with some part of their body and this push is transmitted as a pull via the yoke and the pole. In case of an ox-cart, the withers of the oxen push against the yoke. Equids cannot do that as their withers are not prominent enough and the yoke will not seat on their neck properly. If the yoke is tied down, then the equids will push against the neck bands with their neck. Experiments with mules pulling wagons (four wheels on two axles) showed that this was not impossible, but how well horses will do when pulling two-wheeled vehicles this way remains to be determined: Weight distribution will shift more markedly in one-axled vehicles making fast turns. Also, horses are said to be more nervous and likely to take fright more easily if their neck is constricted. The yoke saddle fits around the bottom of the neck and so the horses push against them with the muscles around the base of the neck, rather than pushing against the bands with the front of their necks. In other words, the yoke saddle is a primitive horse collar. See Spruytte, pp.26--27, p.40 and p.52. So yoke saddles are an integral part of the harness and fundamentally change how the force is transmitted, rather than simply serve to seat the yoke more firmly. Misunderstanding of such a basic fact vitiates the value of David Anthony's opinions on the form and function of chariots. Given this, I fail to see why anyone should accept his conclusions. [In an article in Antiquity in 1997, Anthony calls the Sintashta vehicle a ``proto-chariot''. So he might have become aware of these errors subsequent to 1996. If so, that is all the more reason to treat his earlier statements with more skeptically.] To sum up, there is inadequate evidence to believe that the vehicles in Sintashta area graves were of ``bentwood and wicker construction'', or that they used yoke saddles, backing elements and long naves that are so essential for a true chariot. To claim that the chariot was pretty fully developed is based on serious misunderstandings of the engineering issues and is {\em completely unwarranted}.

, regular is . metter-ling German, removing initial , common in other expressive vocabulary butter-fly English (I consider English to be a more recent folk etymology, with little value for historical recontruction, just as is recent; probably and certainly are older.) So we have something like the following, labial - flap-t - lateral - ?nasal not as a proven proto-form, but as an approximate averaging of attested forms. Since the labial alternative for the second syllable onset may be a partial reduplication, it has less value than the other two forms. Since is an English word, it has lesser evidential value than does in the German, though there is not much difference between these two in sound. ************************************************************ Now consider Larry Trask's list of Basque dialect words for 'butterfly'. While I will make comparisons with other European forms, this implies neither borrowing nor genetic inheritance nor any other very specific explanation -- it is merely a heuristic to seek possible explanations. I will come back later to what seems to be inferrable from the Basque data alone. Group 1a. bitxilote etc. Group 1b. mitxilote etc. Group 1c. txipilota etc., txipilipeta, tximeleta 1a-1b. are very similar to the German and English forms above, {b/m}itxi...lote The second stop is Basque before /i/, compared with German and English before a weak vowel. The third syllable begins with , and is as in the Latin and French forms. The final <...te> has no match in the English, German, Latin-French. The basque vowels are /i/ instead of the epsilon and caret vowels of the German and English, or the /a/ of Latin-French. For 1a, Trask comments: , western variant , 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an independent word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first element in expressive and nursery formations. My analysis would be as with and , that influence from the word would be late, and might have pushed the Basque forms to have medial instead of flap-t or similar, if that is not ancient, and to have initial if that was not ancient but was. For 1b, Trask comments: "These variants show an unexpected initial /m/. This might result either from a perception that they are expressive formations (/m/ is much favored in expressive formations in Basque), or from contamination by 'Mike', the regular diminutive of 'Michael'. (Personal names are frequent as first elements in expressive names for small creatures: note, for example, 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'.)" I would accept the expressive /m/, but consider the influence of personal names as perhaps quite late. For 1c. Following is a quote from Trask: "These appear to represent metathesized forms of the preceding. Curiously, these western forms are entirely absent from Azkue's 1905 dictionary, even though Azkue was a native speaker of the western dialect Bizkaian, for which he provided exceptionally detailed coverage in his dictionary. Today, the form , not recorded before 1912, is nearly universal in the western dialects, and has been accepted as the standard Basque word for 'butterfly'." "It is especially striking that a form which apparently didn't even exist in 1905 is now the most widespread word in the language." But there is more to say about . This has more syllables than any of the others, and might be a mixing of < txipilota> (attested) <...pilipeta> (attested part of the abnormally long form) If we combine Latin with Basque we might add to the equation a hypothetical earlier Basque form with <...ota> instead of the Latin-French <...on>. Is that at all plausible in terms of Basque or Romance word endings? ** *** Group 3. pinpirin (L) (17th c) pinpirina (L) (17th c) pinpirineta (Z) pinpilinpauxa (L) (1905) These forms have a nasal /n/ in each of the parts of the partial reduplication, an /n/ which is lacking in the preceding groups. If we remove it we would have **pipireta Thus compare ** (removing the nasals /n/ and /in/) ** (from the end of discussion of Group 2) Latin --> French Trask comments: "The Lapurdian dialect is exceptionally fond of expressive formations in initial and , a pattern sparsely attested in other dialects; see Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for more examples. The last and longest form appears to contain a palatalized form of eastern (n.) 'pause, stop, hesitation, rest, repose' or its verbal derivative 'pause, stop'; these derive from Latin. Compare standard Castilian 'butterfly', literally 'Mary-perch', from 'perch, alight', itself descended from the Latin ." I very much suspect that the etymologies using general vocabulary reflect quite late influences, distorting the earlier expressive word. Consider the last form, a very long one, which might again represent a contamination of two forms, and then add in the Spanish pinpirina <..pilinpauxa> (with one nasal /...in/) (with no extra nasal) The Spanish "mariposa" in particular, as "mary-perch", may be a back-formation like "sparrowgrass". It is too close to <...pilinpausa>, where /m~p/ and /r~l/. A late contamination with "Maria" is quite plausible. If the ending <...osa> of is in any way related to the <...ota> of words discussed above, we would have Latin ** hypothetical Group 1 Spanish <...pilinpauxa> attested in longer form <...pilipeta> attested in longer form *********************************************** Group 7. maripanpalona If we segment this as mari-panpalona, assuming as Trask notes, then we have <...panpalona Latin Group 3 This looks like Group 3, but with expressive heavy vowels open /a,o/ rather than the light vowel close /i/. Trask says: This shows another pattern typical of expressive names for small creatures: the use of 'Mary' as a first element. The rest is opaque. Corominas suggests a link with Latin 'butterfly', but I doubt it. While I have no regional provenance for this form, I suspect that it is eastern, and eastern dialects, especially Lapurdian, just love expressive formations in and , recall. *********************************************** So far, all of the forms considered may plausibly derive from a single common proto-form of ancient Basque, with modifications as is normal for expressive vocabulary. I make the statement above without attempting to specify exactly what the ancient Basque form might have been. *********************************************** The forms of Groups 2 and 6 following may plausibly derive from another common form of ancient Basque, one distinct from the one looking like Latin *papilon. But they may also go back to the same ancient form, simply with different kinds of changes since then. Group 2. txitxidola (LN) txitxipapa (HN) txitxitera (Z) Trask comments: "These eastern forms exhibit the reduplicated sequence , very common in nursery formations, with what appear to be arbitrary final elements: these final elements have no other existence." I would agree on reduplication, but the /...dola, ...tera/ seem metatheses from the /...lota/ of Group 1, and the /...papa/ seems to reflect the labials so common in words for butterfly. *** Group 6. xintxitoila etc. These seem highly similar to the first one in Group 2. -- is very similar to , perhaps in the way is similar to , so I would assume the same origin for and , whatever that origin was. Trask comments: "The first variant [] is unpalatalized, while the others show the palatalization typical of expressive formations. We cannot tell if the first form is conservative or merely a back-formation. In all its variants, this form is utterly opaque in formation. The form strongly suggests an expressive formation particularly typical of the eastern varieties. See Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for dozens of examples of this type." ************************************************* Group 5. altxatulili altxa-lili (LN) altxabili (HN) The third of these resembles Group 1c.: al txabili Group 1c. So I would consider either that this word may originally not have contained any of the words /altxa-/, /lili/, or /ibili/, all words of the normal vocabulary which may have affected the form of the expressive for 'butterfly' at some point. Trask comments: "The first two are transparently compounded from the Romance loan 'raise', stem , plus another Romance loan, 'lily, flower'. Or so it would seem, even though the semantic motivation eludes me." [LA interpolation: Just as "sparrowgrass" makes no semantic sense. A good indicator of late reformation.] Trask continues: "But the third variant rather muddies the waters. It may be a somewhat unusual dissimilation of the preceding. But Agud and Tovar suggest a different formation whose second element is the common verb 'be in motion'. Maybe, but V-V --> N is a decidedly unusual type of word-formation in Basque." ************************************************* So, in sum, the various forms which Trask displays from Basque dialects do to me suggest at least one reconstructible ancient Basque word for 'butterfly' (possibly two). I believe those forms will be something like: *patilon > *pitxilon / *pitxilota > various and *papilon > pinpilin > pinpilin-Vta etc. Of these two (probably themselves ultimately related), the first seems more European (see English, German words for 'butterfly'), while the second seems more specifically like Romance, and (if we believed that there was some very deep relationship), I would guess that it is a later borrowing from a relative of Latin into Basque. Or could both have been ancient Basque? The second could derive from the first, by making it partly reduplicative, more easily than the first could derive from the second, whether within Basque or elsewhere or earlier. The various attested forms result from reduplications, metatheses, substitution of words from the general vocabulary which happened to sound much like the earlier form of 'butterfly', influence from sound patterns common in other expressives, etc. Despite being normally four syllables, often with partial reduplication, it may not be analyzable into morpheme parts. Does that mean it qualifies as monomorphemic? *** AFTER writing the above message, I received from Steve Long a message which he had composed without yet seeing my draft. He pointed to a wide range of Greek words, among others these: >ptiloo^ >ptilon (Dor psilon) - soft feathers or down, anything like a wing or feather and >"ptil-�tos, �, on, winged, esp[ecially] ptil�ta, opp[osite of] >pter�ta, dermoptera, membrane-winged creatures, Arist.HA490a6." [Steve commented:] >Note the last one - . Compare Trask's to which we can of course add 'wing' *ptero-, Notice how close this is to what I had reconstructed from the Basque data, completely unaware of the Greek (not even consciously aware of , though I do know the etmology of and when those words are in my consciousness) -- I actually feel a bit silly for not having thought of *ptero-! Lest someone think this is circular, the only external hints I used while reconstructing strictly within Basque were Latin , German , and English , oops, also Spanish . Yet the process led to two hypothetical ancient Basque proto-forms: *patilon (very close to Greek ptilo-) *papilon Draw what conclusions you will. I do not simply conclude that Basque borrowed from Greek, though that may be most reasonable, since as Roz Frank points out, there may be no Basque reflex of the root for 'wing', *ptero- or of *ptilo- other than in these words for 'butterfly'. (That very evidence suggests that it may have been monomorphemic in early Basque, not transparently divisible into morphological parts, and thus perhaps relevant to Larry Trask's search for "monomorphemic" such older items, despite its multisyllabic character, and even if it was borrowed at some point in pre-Basque.) I suppose this etymon must be older than that? Buck's "Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages" gives words related to this under 4.392 'wing' (Greek and OHG, OE) and 4.393 'feather' (Greek and Germanic and ? Slavic /pero/, assuming that is related. Nor do I conclude that Basque and PIE are related, neither from this single piece of evidence, nor from anything else I have read. Nor do I conclude that Basque and PIE are unrelated. *** I look forward to further ideas from either Basque specialists or specialists in sound symbolism, or from any other perspectives. [or, I guess I need to add as an afterthought, after the Greek evidence has been brought to bear, from IndoEuropeanists!] Sincerely, Lloyd Anderson From lmfosse at online.no Sun Dec 19 10:11:56 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 11:11:56 +0100 Subject: SV: SV: Pre-Greek languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Miguel Carrasquer Vidal [SMTP:mcv at wxs.nl] skrev 11. desember 1999 14:55: Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >>> 3. The presence of Elamite (in Antiquity) and Brahwi (Dravidian) in Iran >>> strongly suggests that the Dravidian territory stretched far more westward >>> than at present. It seems - but I have no documentation at hand - that the >>> old Indus valley culture is now recognized as having been Dravidian, which >>> reinforces the hypothesis. Lars M. Fosse wrote: >>The presence of Brahui has been shown to be due to a migration of Dravidian >>speakers from the South of India (probably mercenaries) a few hundred years >>ago. They are therefore not relevant for the discussion of the earliest >>period. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > From the South of India? I'm aware of theories that derive > Brahui from a migration from medieval Northern India (although I > don't know what the arguments for it are), but Southern India > would seem to be very strange: isn't it agreed that Brahui is > closest to the North-East Dravidian languages Kurux and Malto? The first to suggest that Brahui might represent a migration from southern India would seem to be Grierson. However, one of the most recent sources on the problem is the following paper by Hans Heinrich Hock, "Pre-Rigvedic Convergence between Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) and Dravidian? A Survey of the Issues and Controversies", in Ideology and Status of Sanskrit. Contributions to the history of the Sanskrit language. Ed. by Jan E. M. Houben. E. J. Brill, Leiden 1996. Hock says (p. 32): "While Brahui is now spoken in the extreme northwest [...] its presence in the area cannot be traced back much farther that the sixteenth century. To my [Hocks's] knowledge, Bloch (1911, see also 1925, 1929) was the first to suggest that Brahui may have migrated to the area from farther south: According to their own traditions, the Brahuis (and all other present-day linguistic groups) are different from the original indigenous population and have migrated to the area. More significant, because better established, is the fact that according to their own tradition, the Kurukh and Malto, close linguistic relatives of Brahui, migrated to their present locations via the Narmada valley, from a much more southern area in Karnataka. " Hock's paper deals with a Dravidian presence in the Northwest and its potential influence on Skt in general where Brahui has been used as part of the argument. Bernard Sergent in his "Genese de l'Inde" p. 130 points out that all indo-iranian loanwords in Brahui are from Baluchi [quoting Elfenbein], which means that the contact between the two languages has to be later than the 13th century. Although Parpola tries to modify the arguments put forward by Elfenbein, it would seem that the majority of scholars on the subject now adhere to the theory that the Brahui migrated from the South/Deccan sometime during the late Middle Ages, an opinion also shared by Emeneau. This of course does not mean that there were no Dravidians up North 3-4000 years ago although Sergent rejects that too on the basis of physical anthropological evidence. But it does mean that there were no Brahuis - or their direct ancestors in this area at an early date. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From sarima at friesen.net Tue Dec 21 01:04:20 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 17:04:20 -0800 Subject: Was Pre-Greek languages/now Sanskrit/Indus valley In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have replaced Mr. Friesen's old e-mail address "sarima at ix.netcom.com" with his new address "sarima at friesen.net". --rma ] At 05:46 PM 12/11/99 -0600, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Do any of the Hindu deities have Dravidian names that can be dated >to a very early period? > Can other any Hindu loanwords from Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, etc. be >dated to a period corresponding to the fall of Mohendjo-Daro? Actually, we could generalize this: Do the any of the non-IE deity names have recognizable similarities to *any* known language family? For that matter, what about other mythic names and specialized religious terms? The hypothesis then would be that the Indus Valley culture spoke a member of that family. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From sarima at friesen.net Mon Dec 20 02:19:57 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 18:19:57 -0800 Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) In-Reply-To: <0.35b5e0af.254fddde@aol.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have replaced Mr. Friesen's old e-mail address "sarima at ix.netcom.com" with his new address "sarima at friesen.net". --rma ] At 01:25 AM 11/2/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >We are talking about a period between roughly 2650BC - 1650BC in mainland >Greece. My statement was that there is no serious material evidence of a >significant immigration during that period, EXCEPT from Anatolia. >If there are other "lines of evidence" of an "incursion" from the north, I'd >very much like to hear what they are. Part of the problem is in trying to pin down what sort of "incursion" is required to import an IE language. What I am trying to suggest is that it does NOT need to be a "significant migration", and therefore may not be easily seen. Thus the absence of evidence for another significant migration is not necessarily significant. >What's the obvious inference? That migrations do leave evidence. That MAJOR migrations leave evidence clear. > And that >the warfare later resulting from these cultural differences do leave >evidence. So why didn't any incursion from the north leave evidence? The >inference is that it may not have happened. Or that it took a different *form*. >If above you mean by an "IE incursion," a movement of IE - speaking peoples >from the north, the question becomes where is the evidence? Any evidence. The main evidence is timing and cultural associations. True horses and wheeled carts and IE-style burials are known from the northeastern part of the Balkans earlier than they are known from either Greece *or* Anatolia. Such cultures are NOT known from either Mesopotamia or the Caucasus at any time prior to their appearance in Anatolia (even the Mitanni are not known until *after* the earliest evidence for Hittite speakers in Anatolia). This means that the Usatovo-Cernavoda complex is the most proximate available candidate for the source of IE speakers in Anatolia and the southern Balkans. In the absence of other viable candidates in the right time frame, an origin from that area is left as the only truly reasonable alternative. ><> >It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that there was no significant >incursion during this period from the north into mainland Greece. It seems >possible to *deny* its likelihood. This depends on what you mean by "significant". Certainly a major overturn in population is ruled out. But a limited infiltration of a small elite would not necessarily be easily visible. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From sarima at friesen.net Mon Dec 20 02:34:47 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 18:34:47 -0800 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords In-Reply-To: <0.33afbcba.254ff8ca@aol.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have replaced Mr. Friesen's old e-mail address "sarima at ix.netcom.com" with his new address "sarima at friesen.net". --rma ] At 03:20 AM 11/2/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >And where exactly did these IE speaking "overlords" get their supposed >dominance? It certainly wasn't the horse, which shows no sign of being a >factor in seige or decisive war before 1000BC. And where is it said that warfare is the *only* way of establishing dominance? What about "buying" it? In that the horse and wheel could well give their possessors significant advantage, by allowing long-range trade with fewer intermediaries, and on shorter time-frames. > And the chariot was just a >platform for conveying war leaders around in Homer. There are very strong arguments that this was a late, and degenerate, state of affairs. In particular the evidence from Egypt prior to 1100 BC shows clearly that the chariot was a mobile combat platform, actively used in shock warfare. But that is probably irrelevant anyway, as the true war chariot seems to be post-PIE unity in date. ><spread of Latin into most of Europe, as the best models for the spread of IE >languages in prehistory.>> >But Latin's prestige didn't come from a bunch of headbashing riders off the >steppes. The advantages of Latin had to do with access to trade, crafts, >technology and much personal advancement that no profile of a pastoralist IE >speaking barbarian could appear to offer. Not by the time of Rome. But in earlier times they would have been the height of modern technology, and might well have had many of the same advantages relative to the neolithic cultures they came into contact with. (By Roman times even barbarians were iron-age). >In fact that model does work unless the invader has a steady flow of >technologically advanced resources and/or sheer population numbers shoring >him up. That was the case in the new world. On the other hand, the French >don't speak Frankish. The English do not speak Anglo-Norman or Danish. >Italians don't speak Odacer's language. And Slavic has consumed a long list >of "dominant elite" languages like they were just popcorn at the ballpark. I suspect a major factor is social. A language is accepted or ignored for reasons of group identification. Size or military dominance is only one aspect in establishing a desire for identifying with some group. ><< Also, place names based on late borrowings are a trifle unusual. Even >here in the USA, most non-English place names are substratal (Amerindian or >Spanish), and we are notorious polyculturalists.>> >The "late borrowings" do not refer I believe to place names. Herodotus >however does mention Pelagasian placenames - and he says he does not know >what kind of language Pelagasian is, but that it is not Greek. But it is the place names that most clearly indicate a non-IE presence in Greece. Renfrew needs to explain these. Even if the other non-IE elements are late borrowings, the presence of a non-IE substratum in the place names pretty much requires that Greek arrived from elsewhere at *some* point in time. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Dec 21 07:20:05 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 02:20:05 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: In a message dated 12/11/99 11:04:36 AM, rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu wrote: <> But 2500BC was very often the ONLY date given for a long time. In other circumstances, earliest possible dates generally share some equal time with latest possible dates. A fine example of how entrenched the 2500BC date (without qualification) has been can be found on none other than the *IE Documentation Center* web page on the the Univ of Texas at Austin site. (http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc/iedocctr/ie-lg/ie-lg.html) On that page we are offered only one link regarding the overall subject: "For an online discussion of the IE Language Families see The Indo-European Family of Languages (by Kerilyn Cole)." There we learn that "The general consensus is that the original Indo-European civilization developed somewhere in eastern Europe about 3000 B.C. About 2500 B.C. it broke up..." The date on this page is 1998. More importantly - in the context of my post - was the way the 2500BC date was used in Archaeology & Language (1987) (Cambridge Press pb). Renfrew wrote: "... My analysis of the literature suggest that the date of c.2500 BC often cited for the dispersal..." and "....the conclusions either of the Kossinna school or of the early Childe or of Gimbutas in favor of a late neolithic dispersal. The dispersal is thus set around 2500 BC." (pp165-66). Both references are not to inner limits on dispersal based on attestation, but rather the most likely dates reflected in specific theories of who the original "Indo-Europeans" were in the archaeological record. A reading of the sections involved will make it clear that Renfrew was not merely arguing about the latest possible date for dispersal based on attestation. And neither Childe nor Gimbutas were *merely* giving a terminus ante quem. (In 1960, Gimbutas's "Culture Change in Europe at the start of the second millenium BC" did not I'm told address any date earlier than 3000BC. I believe at that time the dialogue between the "long chronologists" and "short chronologists" was still going on. The Funk and Wagnell's Online Encyc has I believe the right order of events in its article on the subject: "Various names were proposed for the archaeological culture itself, based mainly on mortuary practices and ceramics types, the most known of which is the Kurgan ("burial mound") culture. The term was introduced in 1956 by the American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-94), who applied it to a more extensive homeland for the Proto-Indo-Europeans AND FOR WHICH OLDER DATES (between 4500 and 2500 BC) WERE ESTABLISHED BY RADIOCARBON c-14 AND SUBSEQUENT CALIBRATION DATING METHODS. Based on new data provided by Central and Eastern European archaeologists, the dating and spread of this culture are under reconsideration." (CAPS ARE MINE) I may be wrong about Gimbutas' early datings of PIE and I would very much appreciate being corrected if I am.) I have read a good number of critiques of Renfrew and I have not seen any that say that he misinterpreted the "consensus" of the time - not even Mallory. I believe the standard reading in ancient history courses of say twenty years ago routinely offered 2500BC as the *likely* date of dispersal - not qualified as just a latest possible date. So far as I know the only exception was the notice given to Swadesh and the Glottochronologists for suggesting such early dates as 4500BC for differentiation within the IE family - and they were hardly included in any "consensus." If in fact you know of any instances of such a description of the "consensus" from say before 1970 that explicitly leaves open a substantially earlier date of dispersal (4000BC or earlier), I for one would be very interested to see it. If you are saying there was always an admission of uncertainty, I'd have to agree with that. But that uncertainty was not what Renfrew was addressing. And I believe that uncertainty was not ordinarily described as the consensus of the time either among ancient historians or historical linguists. You wrote: <<4000 BC sounds like an attempt at a terminus post quem (others are Renfrew's 5000-4500 BC) based on the articles indisputably reconstructable to PIE. I would hope it is not a new "consensus date for IE dispersal". I doubt the available evidence allows us to narrow the date of IE dispersal down with such precision.>> The real point is I think that - given the archaeological record developing in Greece and elsewhere - a 2500BC date of first dispersal has seemed more and more improbable. So that the whole window has moved backward in time. And the new termini come out of theories based on new archaeological data that are not inconsistent with the historic outcome, given the already wide dispersal of IE at the times of actual attestations. The terminus post quem provided by the evidence of the spread of agriculture is the basis of Renfrew's theory. And that does not necessarily yield a 5000-4500BC date. The earliest date of dispersal could correlate with the first diffusion of agricultural culture into mainland Europe or elsewhere - both of which could be as much as a thousand years earlier than 5000BC. You wrote: <<...based on the articles indisputably reconstructable to PIE.>> What "articles" might you be refering to? Are these also the "available evidence" you refer to that you say will not let us narrow the date? You wrote: <> The early dates have been pretty much based on correlations with the appearance of widely dispersed characteristics of particular material cultures. There is no direct evidence of any IE language before 2200BC. Any theory of what happened before then carries by necessity a fair degree of uncertainty. Some theories do seem more probable than others, but not one has the advantage of direct proof. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Dec 22 05:55:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 00:55:54 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com cogently replied: <<-- No, headbashing armies from Italy. You know, the "Roman Empire"?>> Latin was spoken among the Celts before the Roman Army ever arrived. Latin's main attraction was the badge of Roman citizenship. Mallory has something to say about all this in ISIE and given the subtle nature of your argument, I think something is worth repeating: <> I wrote with regard to IE possibly assimilating non-IE speakers from the steppes, by analogy: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <> I don't know what this has to do with anything. The point was that there have been many cases where the "dominant elite" disappear in the pre-existing language. The point was, e.g., the Russians do not speak Mongul, Turkic, Gothic, Greek or Scandinavian - although all of these arguably represented the languages of various "dominant elite" - these speakers all seem to have been assimilated by Russian. With regard to IE Overlords finding their superiority in the horse, I wrote <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied: <<-- an absurd statement, seeing as every major Middle Eastern power depended on a chariot corps in the 2nd millenium BCE.>> Be assured I find your reply not absurd but very confusing. "Every major Middle Eastern power" were NOT steppe invaders nor IE speakers. But perhaps that is unfair. In what battle or seige specifically was the horse "decisive?" I wrote: <> JoatSimeon at aol.com replied with regard to Homer: <> By the "period when the chariot was an actual factor", you say you mean when it was being used by archers. I took your suggestion to heart and discovered that by all accounts the use of the chariot by archers was innovated by the Eygptians about 1200BC. I take it therefore that it is your well thought-out contention that the IndoEuropeans borrowed this idea from the Egyptians to conquer many lands and force IE languages upon them? I will further "study the data" from the period and let you know what I turn up. BTW, does it occur to you that any of your responses above may be missing the point in a big way? Steve Long From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Dec 21 06:09:34 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 01:09:34 -0500 Subject: Horses In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991102180950.009895c0@popd.netcruiser> Message-ID: A few months ago, I made a post to the list in which I stated that the PIE word *ekwos "horse" is not probative in the question of the PIE homeland, since one need not have domesticated the horse to have a word for it. I want to retract that post. Beekes (1995) reports that horses (wild or domesticated) were not found in Anatolia in the period which Renfrew claims for the final IE unity, and Ringe (personal communication) has corroborated this claim. This is an important incongruity between the firmly reconstructed IE vocabulary and the homeland which Renfrew posits; it is a strong argument against Renfrew. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Dec 21 10:08:52 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 10:08:52 +0000 Subject: Excluding much? Message-ID: [ moderator re-foramtted ] Lloyd Anderson writes: > It has been pointed out to me several times in private communication > that Larry Trask's criteria in seeking to establish his list of > "best" candidates for early Basque monomorphemic lexical items > (I hope that phrasing accurately represents Trask's statements > of his goals) Yep. > contains two parts which together will cause the total list to be > very seriously reduced, to a tiny number of items. > I think Trask should have an opportunity to clarify or deal > with this issue publicly, so here are the specifics. > Among other reasons for asking this explicitly, > I understood one of Trask's more recent communications > about Basque to be saying that there are more documentary > sources available than I had previously understood him as saying. Assorted fragments between the 10th and 16th centuries. Substantial connected texts date only from the 16th century. > (The question on interaction of these two criteria is quite > independent of other questions which have been under discussion.) > 1. Only include candidates attested in four out of five major dialect > groupings > (groupings I believe Trask has established based on his study of > which are more closely related to each other, which more > independent) Very roughly, yes, but the main point of my groupings is that some recognized dialects are smaller and less well described than others. Note, for example, in my earlier posting, the absence of any recorded words for 'butterfly' in the three small Pyrenean dialects. > 2. Only include candidates from the earliest documentation, > either pre-1600, as Trask prefers, > or pre-1700, as he has said he is willing to consider a > modification. > Do these two criteria together mean that almost no lexical > items will qualify, only the most rudimentary lexicon, > words which are almost totally independent of subject matter and style, Well, I'm not sure 'rudimentary' is the best choice of word. But I expect the words that make my list will mostly belong to that somewhat ill-defined area commonly called 'basic vocabulary', yes. > such as English "and, the, good, very, when, not, come, go"? Grammatical words will indeed be prominent, insofar as these exist (Basque often has affixes where English has independent words). But I expect to get several hundred lexical items as well. However, see below for a problem with verbs. > How many does Trask estimate this would permit to be included? Can't answer this before I've done the work, but I estimate several hundred. > After writing the above, I read Trask's listings of ordinary vocabulary from > the religious texts. That is a very good list, and I thank Trask for it. > Most of it, though by no means all, fits the category I mention just above of > words almost independent of subject matter and style. And I expect almost all of the words in my list to be like this. > There remain for me two content questions. > (a) What happens to the list Trask posted, when he applies the rule > that four out of five dialects must attest each item to be included? > Still the very most basic vocabulary should survive, > perhaps a list much like what Trask just provided us, > but though I believe so, it is an empirical question. It is. As I may have explained earlier, this criterion is proposed to allow the inclusion of words which are almost, but not quite, universal in the language, like <(h)itz> 'word', used in all dialects but the western dialect Bizkaian, which has the Romance loan instead. But I have to draw a firm line here. For example, 'pine tree' is the Latino-Romance loan almost everywhere, while the eastern dialect Roncalese has and its neighbor Zuberoan has in some varieties. It is highly possible that ~ represents an indigenous word displaced almost everywhere by the loan word, but I can't be sure of this, and the word does not qualify for inclusion. Anyway, this illustrates one of my goals in pursuing this project: I hope to be able to show that has exactly the form of an indigenous word, and hence that it can plausibly be regarded as just such a word, now largely displaced. But I can't reach conclusions like this one until I have first established the forms of indigenous Basque words by examining the clearest cases. > (b) When I wrote the following, there was a scope ambiguity: > Speaking of attestation primarily in religious texts: > > That is a very strong bias of content, I would think against quite a > > range of vocabulary from ordinary life. > I intended not "against [there being] a range of vocabulary from ordinary > life", > which was Trask's interpretation in this case (a reasonable possibility), > but rather I intended "against quite [large parts of the] vocabulary > of ordinary life [which are not religious in content]". The grammatical > items and most basic adjectives, nouns, and verbs, would still occur, > probably in all dialects, but whether measured in a single dialect group > attestation in religious texts, or if requiring four out of five dialect > groups, > I would think many words like these would not be found > in such a high proportion of texts which are not oriented toward > a subject content which would promote their inclusion. Quite possibly, but, yet again, my immediate goal is to find the *best* candidates, not all possible candidates. > I will *of course* be wrong about some of the following, > but others could be substituted. And I know from previous > correspondence that Trask believes some of these are in > vocabulary domains where almost all Basque vocabulary > is loanwords from other languages. I assume not all of the items of > ordinary life which would fail to be widely enough attested would > be such loanwords. The following list is *of course* not > designed with any knowledge specifically of Basque in mind. > But it illustrates roughly some of what I mean is included > by "ordinary life" on land and sea. OK; let's talk about this list. But first note a couple of things. 1. No ancient Basque verb is monomorphemic. A native verbal root is a bound morpheme, and hence no ancient verb will make my list. 2. Basque is *very* fond of compounds. 3. The entire Basque nautical vocabulary is borrowed. 4. The nature of the Basque terrain, and of Basque cultural traditions, means that certain of the suggested words are unlikely to be prominent in Basque. > "cartwheel", A compound in English, and a compound in Basque. > (horse's) "bit", The most usual word is a Romance loan; the other is a compound. > "fleece", Two words: one a compound, the other shared with Romance but of unknown origin. > "canal", The Basques live in mountains, and they don't build many canals. Of the two existing words, one is borrowed (it's the same word as the English word, also borrowed), and the other is a compound. > "rafter", Precise equivalents are compounds. Even the English word is bimorphemic in origin, though no longer transparently so. > "threshold", The English word is an old compound; the Basque one is a compound whose first member is also a compound: 'doorway-stone'. > "sunrise", The English word is a compound, and so are the several Basque words. This is a good example of a sense whose form has been repeatedly and independently constructed in Basque by forming compounds -- a common phenomenon in Basque > "planet", The English word is borrowed, and so is the Basque word, from the same source. > "yoke", Native and seemingly monomorphemic. First one. > "thresh", A verb, but anyway all the several Basque words are derivatives, often from nouns denoting the tools used -- another common practice in Basque. > "root-cellar", The Basque Country is built on limestone mountains, and the Basques, sensibly enough, don't build cellars. Instead, they build sheltered porches into their houses. > "eye" (of potato), The English word represents a transferred sense, and Basque uses exactly the same metaphor. > "scrape", Verb, and all the several Basque verbs here are derivatives. > "consult", Verb. The English word is borrowed, and so is the Basque one -- from the same source. > "dig", Verb, and a derivative. > "build", Verb. No real Basque equivalent: 'erect', 'put up' is used for buildings, 'make' for other things. > "rudder", "hull" (of boat), All nautical, and all borrowed. > "hull" (of seed), Several words, almost all compounds or loanwords. > "bill" (of bird), A very interesting case. The widespread word is , variant , which looks very much like an expressive formation, but is not definitely one. The word has been much discussed, and is widely suspected of being borrowed from Romance, though the Romance origin is not at all obvious, and requires a bit of fancy footwork. Attested from 1571 -- early enough. May possibly meet my distributional criterion; I'll have to check. But the widely held belief in a Romance origin will probably disqualify it. > "down" (of bird), Derivative, and bimorphemic. > "mast", Nautical, and a loanword. > "shear", Verb, and derived from a noun. > "midwife", Compound in English, and compound in Basque. > "stillbirth", No simple Basque lexicalization known to me. English word not recorded before 1785. > "roe" Compound: 'fish-eggs'. > "kitten", "chick", "kid" (of goat), "foal", "filly", Basque has a productive suffix <-(k)ume> 'offspring', 'young', and this is regularly used to derive names for young animals. All of these except 'chick' are so constructed in Basque, while 'chick' is the obviously imitative <(t)xito> ~ <(t)xita> ~ . This last word will probably meet my criteria, but will stand out a mile. > "vixen", Bimorphemic in English, and also in Basque: 'fox-female'. Anyway, the Basque words for 'fox' are borrowed, and, for that matter, so is the word for 'female' -- as is the English word. > "badger", Another very interesting case. The Basque word is , with about 18 regional variants. Comparative evidence points to an earlier *. There are two stories about this: (1) It's a compound of 'bear' with an unknown second element. Phonologically better than it looks, but that second element is mysterious. (2) It's borrowed from Latin . Phonologically good, apart from the irregular loss of the initial plosive (though there exist parallels). Who knows? Not sure what to do with this, but it looks too fishy to go straight into the list. Anyway, not recorded before 1745, and therefore out, even though I agree at once that the numerous and peculiar regional variants point to a much older word. > etc. > names of quite a number of plants and animals, Names of indigenous large animals are usually native, with a few striking exceptions like 'fox' and 'whale'. Names of indigenous plants and trees are about half native and half borrowed, though very many of the native ones are compounds. > perhaps some kin terms, Most kin terms are native, but most are bimorphemic. > some terms relating to marriage As good Catholics, the Basques take many such terms from the Romance usages of the Church. There are certainly some exceptions, but most are bimorphemic. Even western 'banns' can be shown to be a compound. > ceremonies, Almost all ceremonial terms are compounds or derivatives, and most of the rest are borrowed. > "visit", Verb. The English word is borrowed, and so is the Basque one, from the same source. > "adopted" (child), The English word is the participle of a verb. The Basque words are all polymorphemic: no simple lexicalization. > "village idiot", The English word is a compound of two borrowed words, and any Basque word would be a syntactic construction: the Basques do not appear to have a tradition of village idiots. > various kinds of earth and minerals and plant products, > etc. etc. etc. Too broad and general for me to comment on. So, all in all, not many words here which can possibly hope to make my list. [snip Biblical examples] > Of course, Trask's samples were only a few lines > from a New Testament preface and from Chapter One of Matthew. > Once we include the entire text, things should be better. > How much better? I do not claim to know. > That is why I think my questions in this message > are really empirical questions. Can't tell before I've done the work. > Of course, if we correct our estimates again, > by noting that even the rarest items which did occur > in Trask's two short samples are not as rare as > most of the sample items in the sketch I gave above, > it again looks less probable that a wide range of > rare vocabulary of ordinary life will be covered, But I'm not looking for "rare vocabulary". I'm looking for words that have the strongest claims to being native, ancient and monomorphemic. > therefore not a wide range of polysyllables, > relative to the monomorphemic polysyllables > which really did exist in spoken Basque of the time. But I'm not looking either for "a wide range of polysyllables". Long Basque words are almost invariably polymorphemic -- just as in English. How many English words can you think of that are native and ancient but three or four syllables long? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Dec 21 12:38:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 12:38:20 +0000 Subject: Sample bias, word length, frequency, circularity Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > This message is on a distinct source of sample bias, > one not in these discussions previously. > And on one explanation of > what was meant by "circularity" earlier. > It is well known that more common lexical items > are, as a statistical matter, shorter, > and rarer lexical items are, as a statistical matter, longer. > This is true world-wide, I assume the point is not debated? I know of no evidence against this, and I know of some hard evidence to support it. > If this is true, then a selection of vocabulary which is very > strongly biased towards the most common lexical items > in a language will also be strongly biased towards the shorter items. > A sample selected with a very strong bias towards shorter > words will be unrepresentative of the language it is drawn from, > especially if one is aiming at generalizations about canonical forms. Perhaps, but recall that I am not interested in finding canonical forms for word-forms. I am only interested in finding morpheme-structure conditions for monomorphemic lexical items. Hence polymorphemic word-forms are of no interest or relevance -- and most polysyllabic word-forms are also polymorphemic. > (It will also be skewed towards more grammatical lexical items, > "when, the, very, some, that, do".) Not really, in my case. Basque makes much heavier use of grammatical affixes than does English, and the Basque equivalents of such English words as 'when', 'the', 'if', 'to', 'with', 'of', 'in', 'toward', 'from', 'for', and 'because' are bound affixes, and hence will not qualify for my list. And a number of others are bimorphemic, such as those meaning 'although', 'since' (causal), 'after', 'before', and 'together', and these too will not make my list. The number of monomorphemic grammatical words is really rather small. > This matter of a bias in word length > is another factor which I did not previously mention explicitly, > which argues against having too small a list of items included > in a sample, if one wishes to draw conclusions of general validity, > when one is trying to determine the canonical forms > even for monomorphemic lexical items in early Basque > (or any other language), > and even if (as Trask very nearly specifies today), > one is not interested initially in canonical forms of expressives. > Multisyllabic forms which actually occurred > in spoken early Basque are of course monomorphemic > if they are not analyzable into components within Basque. > Whether or not they will be picked up by a particular > sampling technique -- that is a one of our questions. Any such Pre-Basque words which still exist today will, of course, be picked up if they meet my criteria, and not otherwise. But the vast majority of three-syllable words in Basque, and probably all longer words, are transparently either polymorphemic or borrowed. There is nothing surprising about this: the same is true for English. > So the discussion in another message I have sent today, > under the title "Excludes much", is highly relevant to the > question of possible distortion of a sample of vocabulary. > That other message contrasts roughly basic vocabulary > of ordinary life on land and sea with > the kind of basic vocabulary which is of highest frequency, > independent of subject matter of texts, > which will therefore be most likely to be found > in at least four out of five dialect groups, > following Trask's criteria for inclusion. But we can't decide in advance which words "ought to" be indigenous and monomorphemic. That's a matter for empirical investigation. > On other matters, > I think we have reached some partial closure on one point. > Trask has written: >> But who ever said I was interested in canonical forms >> "for the language as a whole"? > I believe the original statements did not specify exclusions, > and aimed at general validity, so one could reasonably > assume they were intended for the language as a whole. No: native, ancient and monomorphemic lexical items. That's all. I think I've been pretty explicit about this. > The exclusion of expressives, > *or systematically of any other group of words* > (such as the longer words, as noted above), > through any aspect of the sampling procedure, > would of course tend to invalidate such general validity. No; not at all. Polysyllabic words are excluded by definition: they are not relevant to my task. Obviously expressive words hardly ever satisfy my criteria, from which the most appropriate conclusion appears to be that *these particular words* are not ancient. Of course, Pre-Basque doubtless possessed *some* expressive words, but there is no evidence to support a claim that these were identical to the modern ones. Such evidence as we have suggests that expressive formations in Basque have been subject to constant renewal and replacement. > Trask has affirmed: >> Expressive formations may be constructed >> according to different rules from ordinary words. >> Indeed they are, but how can I hope to establish >> this objectively unless I >> *first* identify the rules for ordinary words? > The methodological point would be I think that > one cannot separate out ordinary words from > expressives (or from any other category of words) > in one's selection of data, without knowing how to > recognize what expressives are. Exactly. > But as I have previously stated, as long as the > expressives are not excluded as "not candidates > for early Basque", they will be considered at some point. I repeat: *all* words will be considered from the beginning, evaluated according to my criteria, and included if and only if they satisfy those criteria. > It is the phrasing which Trask used early in these discussions, > which seems to aim at conclusions valid for "early Basque", > and linked these with his criteria, > rather than saying that his conclusions would be > valid for "a subset of early Basque", > namely that subset which is selected by his criteria, Careful! I cannot directly examine Pre-Basque at all. If I could, I would simply do so. Instead, I must first attempt to compile a list of the best candidates for Pre-Basque status. Of course, I can't hope to recover the entire language, in all its detail. But, if my objective criteria lead to a set of several hundred best candidates which conform strongly to certain generalizations, then I think we have the basis of some conclusions. And that is the point of the exercise. > which seems to place his criteria above > themselves being questioned. Er -- what? > Perhaps this way of stating it makes it clearer > what has been meant by "circularity". Not to me, I'm afraid. > If we say that > conclusions from analyzing > a particular subset of early Basque will > be valid for the subset of early Basque > selected by the criteria used to select it, > we of course have a plausibly valid statement. > That makes explicit what the limitations may be. > Trask's earlier statements seemed to aim at much > broader validity, and omitted the limitations. > That is at least one reason why they have seemed > rather circular to a number of us. I don't see any circularity. Anyway, I am still asking Lloyd for his set of alternative criteria, ones which he thinks are better than mine. *Explicit* criteria, I mean, not generalities. Lloyd, should Basque 'crest' be included in my list or not? On the basis of what criteria should the question be answered? How about an answer? > Neither Trask's criteria nor any I have suggested > single out expressives for either exclusion or exclusion > (I have always granted that; it would be nice if > Trask would grant it in return). I would be happy to grant this if Lloyd would only say it explicitly. But, frequently, Lloyd has appeared to say that some kind of special provision should be made for expressive formations. So, Lloyd, are you now agreeing to the following? Expressive formations should be subject to no special treatment at all, but must be treated just like all other words, according to exactly the same criteria, whatever those are. Yes or no? > Yet the point I have made is that Trask's criteria > do so indirectly, because of the bias in written > attestations of expressives, probably world-wide, > and that limits the general validity of any results > he would get from his sample. Since he has slightly > narrowed his claims, this is of less concern. "Narrowed my claims"? How? What claims? I'm still doing just what I said I was doing at the beginning. > However, Trask's criteria also bias against > longer lexical items, and that is not so trivial > by any means. That is a bias against some canonical > forms, at least statistically, and a bias against > ordinary vocabulary which is not in the highest > frequency class. Again: long words are hardly ever monomorphemic. Rare words, even if monomorphemic, are unlikely to survive for 2000 years in an unwritten language. Whoops -- gotta go. Apologies for cutting this short. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From michael at mclafferty.com Wed Dec 22 07:15:45 1999 From: michael at mclafferty.com (Michael McLafferty) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 23:15:45 -0800 Subject: /*dhey6-/ in the AHD Message-ID: Standard Disclaimer: New to list, strictly an amateur, first posting, yadda-yadda-yadda... So, after visiting his website, I asked for Patrick Ryan's help as follows: >Found your site...during a search for a resource to >track down the IE root of Sanskrit /dhyaana(m)/ or /dhyAna(m)/ >"meditation, thought, reflection" (whence /zen/). >The online Sanskrit dictionaries I've found don't seem to give >IE roots. Mr Ryan responded helpfully: >Sanskrit /dhyaana(m)/...is traditionally derived from an IE root >*dheyH-, 'sehen, schauen' (Pokorny 1959:I,243). >Actually, this is also listed in the AHD under *dhey6-, to see, look. >(1976:1513). Eventually I replied to Mr Ryan: >...I looked in my AHD 3rd ed. and failed to see an entry for /*dhey6-/. >For some reason the editors dropped it, jumping from /*dheugh-/ to >/*dhghem-/. Eventually I dug out my 1st AHD and found the root you >cite, right between the two above. Did they discredit it? For those who haven't nodded off yet, he answered: >I am not really sure why there is this discrepancy. >So far as I know, the root is still recognized. >Why not propose the question to the list? So I have. Michael McLafferty [mac fhlaithbheartaigh] Portland, Oregon [Btw, I've been looking for a used copy of "Pokorny 1959" to own -- a bookseller has a volume called "POKORNY, JULIUS. INDOGERMANISCHES ETYMOLOGISCHES WORTERBUCH. Bern,: Franke, Funfzehnte Lieferung. 250 x 175 mm. 96pp." This can't be the whole thing, can it? Do they come up for sale very often?] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Dec 22 10:49:37 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 10:49:37 +0000 Subject: Azkue's dictionary Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Jon Patrick writes: > a response to Lloyd Anderson about the use of Azkue's dictionary. I comment > that his objections were centred firmly around its ease of use for > etymological studies not on the merit of the content itself and by default > Larry's answer justifies Lloyd's assertion, namely: >> On the whole, it seems from Larry Trask's review of it that Jon Patrick is >> on very solid ground in using Azkue's dictionary as a basis for >> analytical studies. > Larry reponded: >> But only, I think, if a detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics is first >> superimposed on the raw data. > Larry's response to Lloyd's comment struck me as an oblique but transparent > attack on the merit of my contribution to the analysis basque, being the only > person on the list without a "detailed knowledge of Basque linguistics", who > is debating the topics. Well, it appears I have offended Jon. If so, I apologize, but I wasn't in fact trying to attack his work in any way. If your only interest is in analyzing the content of Azkue's dictionary, then Azkue's dictionary is the best source I can think of. But what I was trying to point out is that Azkue's dictionary cannot be used at face value for historical work, for a number of reasons. First, Azkue's policy is to lump together unrelated homophones under a single entry, while at the same time providing separate entries (usually without cross-references) to variant forms of a single word -- sometimes as many as 18 or 25 separate entries for variants of one word. Azkue enters everyday words along with rare, obscure and doubtful words, all on equal footing. He enters a large number of loan words. He enters quite a few hapaxes. He enters words for which the only source is somebody else's earlier -- and sometimes dubious -- dictionary. He enters words for which the sole authority is the unsupported report of an outsider, such as the Dutchman van Eys or the Spaniard Hervas y Panduro. He enters neologisms coined by Basque writers. He enters compounds and derivatives without reference to their sources. And he makes mistakes. Some of his entries are errors copied from other written sources, and others are errors of hearing or of interpretation committed by him. And some of them are non-existent words, fantasies invented by Azkue in pursuit of his etymological speculations. All this means that the entries in Azkue's dictionary cannot be taken at face value, or treated on equal footing, for historical work. To be fair, Azkue is usually punctilious about providing provenances and sources for his entries, and this information is potentially valuable. But it is useless as long as it merely sits there on the page, or on a database. This information has to be interpreted by a human user, which means that decisions have to be made about what to do with it. Now, I have no quarrel at all with Jon's enterprise, and I wish him well with it. But I wouldn't want to see anybody drawing any historical conclusions on the basis of Azkue's list of headwords. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Dec 22 11:01:00 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 11:01:00 +0000 Subject: Sample bias, word length, frequency, circularity Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > It is well known that more common lexical items > are, as a statistical matter, shorter, > and rarer lexical items are, as a statistical matter, longer. > This is true world-wide, I assume the point is not debated? > If this is true, then a selection of vocabulary which is very > strongly biased towards the most common lexical items > in a language will also be strongly biased towards the shorter items. > A sample selected with a very strong bias towards shorter > words will be unrepresentative of the language it is drawn from, > especially if one is aiming at generalizations about canonical forms. Not really. I am only interested in monomorphemic words, and monomorphemic words tend to be short, while long words tend to be polymorphemic, in Basque as in all the languages I know anything about. Consequently, Lloyd's objection could only constitute a problem for me in the following scenario: Pre-Basque had lots of long monomorphemic words as well as short ones, but, for some reason, the long monomorphemic words have been generally lost from the language, while the short ones have preferentially survived. And I don't see this as a plausible scenario. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Dec 22 11:14:19 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 11:14:19 +0000 Subject: "is the same as" [was Re: Respect goes both ways!] Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have changed the Subject: line to reflect the actual content. --rma ] Stanley Friesen writes: > I guess I am not so adamant that sameness always be transitive. Well, if the relation 'is the same as' is to be taken as non-transitive, then what, if any, semantic content can be assigned to it? How would it then differ, say, from the relation 'is similar to'? > It is generally rather messy to try to apply a transitive form of > similarity to biological entities, not just language. For instance, > species delimitation can be difficult if one insists on transitivity (e.g. > the so-called ring species). When does a fertilized egg become a new > individual? So I just take it as *given* when talking about a biological > entity that the boundaries *are* fuzzy, as otherwise one must give up > almost all boundaries in biology. > And natural languages are clearly biological entities. So fuzziness is the > only useful way to go. I have no quarrel with anything in these last two paragraphs, with which I agree. But, if we agree to a fuzzy interpretation of 'is the same as', and hence to its negation 'is not the same as', then we can no longer manipulate these relations as though they had non-fuzzy interpretations, and draw non-fuzzy conclusions -- which I think is the practice I was objecting to in the first place. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Mon Dec 27 16:53:42 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Mon, 27 Dec 1999 11:53:42 -0500 Subject: Root versus lexical languages. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 8 Dec 1999 s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca wrote: > Dear List members-- > I distinctly remember having been taught, as an undergraduate, that one > can distinguish ROOT LANGUAGES from LEXICAL LANGUAGES. The latter are the > more common type and consist of those languages (like English) where, as a > rule, lexical items stand in isolation from one another, i.e. derivation > is not regular or transparent. Root languages, on the other hand, are > languages like Sanskrit or early Semitic languages, where derivation is so > regular and transparent that, by taking a small number (800 to 1000) of > roots, one can generate the bulk of the lexicon: this transparency is such > that, for example, in an Arabic dictionary, roots, not words, are what is > listed. > My question is twofold: > 1-Can anyone point me to published work comparing these two types of > language, > and > 2-While the transformation of a root language into a lexical language is a > banal, commonly observed phenomenon (from Sanskrit to the modern > Indo-Aryan languages), is anything known about the reverse, i.e. how a > lexical language turns into a root language? Your terms "lexical" and "root" correspond roughly to the traditional terms "isolating" and "inflectional" (or "fusional"), respectively. The three traditional types of language- isolating, agglutinative, and inflectional- should be taken as useful but imprecise descriptive terms. Languages do not fit neatly into one of these three slots; it's a matter of more or less. You'll often hear rather simplistic statements about other characteristics which are supposed to go hand in hand with one of these morphological types. For example, it's said that Latin, as an inflectional language, has "free" word order, while English, as an isolating language, relies on word order to convey the same grammatical information. Actually, the word order in Latin is anything but free; you cannot arrange Latin words in any arbitrary order. Likewise, there is a certain range of freedom in English word order. Much the same syntactic constraints apply in all languages, regardless of what kind of morphology (if any) the language has. As for how an isolating language goes to an inflectional language, the real question is how a language can develop inflectional morphology which it didn't previously have. One way- and probably the main way- is for a previously separate word to become fused to another, i.e. reinterpreted as inflectional morphology on another word. This is where the modern English regular past tense -ed comes from; in prehistoric Germanic, the verb which comes down to us as "did" came to be fused on to other words as a suffix, producing the Germanic weak verbs. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Dec 29 20:25:44 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 20:25:44 -0000 Subject: Root versus lexical languages. Message-ID: I wonder if we really can "distinguish" the two types of language? Is it not more of a spectrum, of which we can identify the two ends? We might well be able to compare two languages and recognise that one lies more one way along this spectrum than the other, but I don't think we can make a division, in the way Stephane's posting suggests. Indeed, I have seen precisely this comparision usefully made for English and German in a German book about English. As for "lexical" languages developing into "root" languages, is that not currently happening in Chinese - where new formations are transparently formed from lexical items by the addition of a further syllable or even syllables, whose "lexical" meaning has become less important than their lexicalising function? E.g. the plural marker on pronouns, the -zhe suffix, the temporal/aspectual markers, the directional markers on verbs, and so on. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Wed Dec 29 18:54:19 1999 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 13:54:19 -0500 Subject: Wheeled Vehicles. Message-ID: From: "Stanley Friesen" wrote: > Given its design, the chariot is a fairly direct derivation of the > two-wheeled cart, with modifications to make it more suitable for > warfare and/or racing. If by `cart', you mean ox-carts, this is simply wrong. In two words, Trans-Mission :-) See below. ---- The chariot issue has raised its head again. I will limit myself to things which I have not said before (according to the list archive). I also will to be brief without being cryptic. For fuller details, please refer to the cited references. I suggest that all the participants in this discussion read the basic references (the books by Spruytte, and by Littauer and Crowell, and the articles by the Littauer in Antiquity in the late 60's for basic facts), but especially Spruytte and the paper by Littuaer and Crowell cited below before proceeding with this discussion.[A more discursive version of this post (except for paras 3, 4 and 5 of my reply) may be found distributed over several posts in the Indology list (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/indology.html) during 1998.] JoatSimeon wrote, in a message dated 20-Oct-1999, > For that matter, the light, spoke-wheeled, bentwood-and-wicker > chariot was pretty fully developed in the 21st century BCE, and in > the traditional Androvonovo area. JoatSimeon keeps repeating this ``bentwood-and-wicker'' stuff. Searching the archives, the only evidence for this (s)he has given is quotations from the article of Anthony and Vinogradov in Archaeology. The evidence available concerning the superstructure is extremely limited: All that we seem to have is some stains in one cemetery at Krivoe Ozero, as seen in Photo 4 on p.39. How anything about the superstructure, much less the claim of ``bentwood-and-wicker construction'' is deduced from this meager remain is beyond me. [The illustration on p.37 is clearly marked as ``Artist's conception'' in the blurb on p.36. I assume that all the list members know the difference between ``artist conception'' and material evidence.] As Littauer and Crowell (Antiquity 70(1996) pp.934-939) point out, one of the feature we can be sure of, namely the length of the axle, casts serious doubt on the durability of the vehicle. This has nothing to do with the narrow wheel base as suggested by Anthony and Vinogradov, but with tendency of wheels to wobble on the axle. After reading the article by Anthony in ``The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia'', I have become very skeptical about his arguments and conclusions. He shows a total misunderstanding of the horse harnesses reconstructed from finds in Tutankhaman's tomb. In footnote 10 (p.105), he says ``The yoke saddle was a harness device that seated the yoke firmly on the withers and shoulders of chariot horses, preventing slippage of the yoke more firmly on the withers and shoulders of chariot horses, preventing slippage of the yoke and keeping the weight off the horses throats and chests.'' There are three errors in this single sentence. This is all the more surprising since Anthony cites Spruytte ``Early harness systems'' elsewhere. Firstly, no serviceable harness system can place anything on the withers of horses (Spruytte p.11) and the harness system as reconstructed using the finds in Tutankhaman's tomb and representations in 2nd m. BCE does not. Secondly, the slippage of the neck bands was prevented by placing the axle of the chariot at the back, thus distributing part of the weight (about 18kg, or 9kg per horse, in the case of the reconstructed chariot with one rider, which comes to about 1/6 of the total weight) to the yoke making it much less likely to move up the horses' neck (Spruytte, p.41). The third error is much more serious as it shows total misunderstanding of the true function of the yoke saddle. I think that it is worthwhile to explain this in some detail. Firstly, despite the name, draught animals do not pull. They >push< against something with some part of their body and this push is transmitted as a pull via the yoke and the pole. In case of an ox-cart, the withers of the oxen push against the yoke. Equids cannot do that as their withers are not prominent enough and the yoke will not seat on their neck properly. If the yoke is tied down, then the equids will push against the neck bands with their neck. Experiments with mules pulling wagons (four wheels on two axles) showed that this was not impossible, but how well horses will do when pulling two-wheeled vehicles this way remains to be determined: Weight distribution will shift more markedly in one-axled vehicles making fast turns. Also, horses are said to be more nervous and likely to take fright more easily if their neck is constricted. The yoke saddle fits around the bottom of the neck and so the horses push against them with the muscles around the base of the neck, rather than pushing against the bands with the front of their necks. In other words, the yoke saddle is a primitive horse collar. See Spruytte, pp.26--27, p.40 and p.52. So yoke saddles are an integral part of the harness and fundamentally change how the force is transmitted, rather than simply serve to seat the yoke more firmly. Misunderstanding of such a basic fact vitiates the value of David Anthony's opinions on the form and function of chariots. Given this, I fail to see why anyone should accept his conclusions. [In an article in Antiquity in 1997, Anthony calls the Sintashta vehicle a ``proto-chariot''. So he might have become aware of these errors subsequent to 1996. If so, that is all the more reason to treat his earlier statements with more skeptically.] To sum up, there is inadequate evidence to believe that the vehicles in Sintashta area graves were of ``bentwood and wicker construction'', or that they used yoke saddles, backing elements and long naves that are so essential for a true chariot. To claim that the chariot was pretty fully developed is based on serious misunderstandings of the engineering issues and is {\em completely unwarranted}. From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Wed Dec 8 03:37:12 1999 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 19:37:12 -0800 Subject: List starting back up Message-ID: Dear readers, It has been more than a month since I last sent out messages on the Indo-European mailing list. I apologize for the long interval. The backlog is not as large as one might expect. I will clear it out over the next few days, in batches addressed to the same topic where possible, and will include newer postings as they come in. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From drewsr at ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu Wed Dec 8 19:38:43 1999 From: drewsr at ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu (Robert Drews) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 13:38:43 -0600 Subject: Greater Anatolia colloquium program Message-ID: Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family Announcement has already been made that on March 17-19 of 2000 a colloquium on the above topic will be held at the University of Richmond. The program for the three-day colloquium has now been completed and is published below. Assuming the Indo-Hittite theory as a point of departure, the organizers hope that the colloquium will explore but also narrow the possibilities for the relationship of Greater Anatolia (everything from the Aegean to the Caspian, and from the Caucasus to the Jazirah) to both the Anatolian and the "traditional" Indo-European branches of Indo-Hittite. Public lecture at 7:30 PM on Friday, March 17, in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Professor Lord Colin Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archaeology, and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge "Indo-European Origins: The Case for Anatolia" Reception following the lecture. Classical World Galleries will be open. Saturday morning session: 9:00AM - 12:00 noon, in Room 118, Jepson Hall, University of Richmond 9:00: Welcome Stuart Wheeler, Chair, Department of Classical Studies, University of Richmond David Leary, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Richmond 9:15: Opening remarks Robert Drews, Professor of Classics and History, Vanderbilt Univ.,and NEH Visiting Professor of Humanities, Univ. of Richmond 9:30: Elizabeth Barber, Professor of Linguistics and Archaeology, Occidental College "The Clues in the Clothes: Some Independent Evidence for the Movements of Families" 10:15: Intermission 10:30: Paul Zimansky, Assoc. Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, Boston University "Archaeological Inquiries into Ethno-Linguistic Diversity in Urartu" 11:15: Peter Kuniholm, Professor of History of Art and Archaeology, and Director of the Aegean Dendrochronology Project, Cornell University "Pinning down the Date of the Black Sea Inundation" Lunch 12:00 to 1:15 Saturday afternoon session: 1:15 to 4:30 PM, in Room 118, Jepson Hall, University of Richmond 1:15: Colin Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge "Proto-Indo-European in Anatolia: Some Problems and Questions" 2:00: Jeremy Rutter, Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College Critical response to the first four papers 2:30: Discussion 3:00: Intermission 3:15: Margalit Finkelberg, Professor of Classics, Tel Aviv University "The Language of Linear A: Greek, Semitic, or Anatolian?" 4:00: Alexander Lehrman, Associate Professor of Russian, University of Delaware "Reconstructing Proto-Anatolian: Sister to Proto-Indo-European, Daughter to Proto-Indo-Hittite" Sunday morning session: 9:00 AM to 12:00 noon, in conference room at the Omni Richmond Hotel 9:00: Vyacheslav Ivanov, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Professor of Indo-European Studies, University of California, Los Angeles "Southern Anatolian and Northern Anatolian as Separate 'Indo-Hittite' Dialects, and Anatolian as a Late Linguistic Zone" 9:45: Bill Darden, Professor of Linguistics and Slavic Languages, University of Chicago "On the Question of the Anatolian Origin of Proto-Indo-Hittite" 10:30: Intermission 10:45: Craig Melchert, Professor of Linguistics, University of North Carolina Critical response to the last four papers 11:15: Discussion For information on registration and accommodations please visit the colloquium's website at http://hermes.richmond.edu/anatolia or contact Professor Stuart Wheeler at the Department of Classical Studies, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173 (swheeler at richmond.edu). For more information on the program please contact Professor Robert Drews at the Department of Classical Studies, Vanderbilt University (robert.drews at vanderbilt.edu). Robert Drews Department of Classical Studies Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37235 phone: (615) 343-4115 fax: (615) 343:7261 robert.drews at vanderbilt.edu From webmaster at linguasphere.org Thu Dec 2 15:50:17 1999 From: webmaster at linguasphere.org (webmaster) Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 15:50:17 -0000 Subject: the Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities Message-ID: The Linguasphere Observatory is a research network devoted to the classification of the world's languages and dialects, the study and promotion of multilingualism and the exploration of our global linguistic environment. The Linguasphere website (www.linguasphere.org) currently contains the following extracts from the forthcoming Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages and Speech Communities - - the MANDIC (MANDE) languages spoken in WEST AFRICA - the TAMAZIC (BERBER) languages spoken in NORTH AFRICA - the SEMITIC languages spoken in NORTH AFRICA and WESTERN ASIA - the CELTIC languages spoken in NORTHWEST EUROPE - the INDIC (INDO-ARYAN) languages spoken in SOUTH ASIA The observatory would be very grateful to receive comments from linguists on these extracts, which can be viewed and downloaded (together with an explanation of the methodology used entitled Guide to Extracts) -by selecting the Download Extracts button on the homepage. Any scientific support will of course be fully acknowledged. David Dalby Director - Linguasphere Observatory research at linguasphere.org http://www.linguasphere.org From s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca Wed Dec 8 05:56:29 1999 From: s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca (s455152 at aix1.uottawa.ca) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 00:56:29 -0500 Subject: Root versus lexical languages. In-Reply-To: <13505698420.9.ALDERSON@toad.xkl.com> Message-ID: Dear List members-- I distinctly remember having been taught, as an undergraduate, that one can distinguish ROOT LANGUAGES from LEXICAL LANGUAGES. The latter are the more common type and consist of those languages (like English) where, as a rule, lexical items stand in isolation from one another, i.e. derivation is not regular or transparent. Root languages, on the other hand, are languages like Sanskrit or early Semitic languages, where derivation is so regular and transparent that, by taking a small number (800 to 1000) of roots, one can generate the bulk of the lexicon: this transparency is such that, for example, in an Arabic dictionary, roots, not words, are what is listed. My question is twofold: 1-Can anyone point me to published work comparing these two types of language, and 2-While the transformation of a root language into a lexical language is a banal, commonly observed phenomenon (from Sanskrit to the modern Indo-Aryan languages), is anything known about the reverse, i.e. how a lexical language turns into a root language? Many thanks in advance, Stephane Goyette, University of Ottawa. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Dec 8 23:59:39 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 23:59:39 -0000 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Dear Vartan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vartan and Nairy Matiossian" Sent: Sunday, October 31, 1999 1:48 AM > I would like to make a correction. Armenian (not ) doesn't > mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses > regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that > Albanian is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally, > "wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming > from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic > (according to V. Illyich-Svidich). I have heard this claim often but frankly have never run into anyone who is willing to defend the proposition. Are you game? Or is VIS the last word on it? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/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 Fri Dec 10 09:10:29 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 09:10:29 +0000 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Vartan Matiossian writes: [on the proposed comparisons of Basque * 'wine'] > I would like to make a correction. Armenian (not ) doesn't > mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses > regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that > Albanian is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally, > "wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming > from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic > (according to V. Illyich-Svidich). Many thanks for the correction. My (sole) source gives the Armenian word as 'wine', but I had no way of checking it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From ECOLING at aol.com Fri Dec 10 17:36:48 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 12:36:48 EST Subject: Fuzzy Language Boundaries Message-ID: The following message was drafted long ago, though a few minor revisions have been made since. Two paragraphs at the end were substantially revised at the request of the moderator. *** Mr. Trask has criticized others for using the term "language" in ways in which he himself has used the term. When they did, he repeatedly put different words in their mouths. Even when Steve Long quoted from Trask's book to show this, he still did not acknowledge that others are using terms the same ways he is. Examples from Trask today [many days ago] follow... In a message dated 10/20/99 6:02:33 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >When a language splits into daughters, there comes a time when we must >finally speak of distinct languages. >But one of my points on this list has been that the time when this occurs >is not, and cannot be, well defined. >That is, there was no moment when people >ceased to speak Latin and began to speak Portuguese. >And all of my objections to various postings on this list >have centered on this fact, and on related facts. >All the points I have objected to, it seems to me, >depend crucially upon the assumption that such a moment exists, No, they do not depend on that. People on this list never made that assumption. Everyone else accepted that there are fuzzy borderlines. The points Trask does not like were stated in terms of being able to differentiate in some situation between a daughter dialect which is the "same" language, by whatever criterion adopted, and a daughter dialect which is a "different" language. That can be done easily when the two dialects being compared are far apart on the scale of relative similarity to the parent, one so close that one has no problem calling it the "same" language, one so far away that one has no problem calling it a "different" language. There is no need whatsoever to deal with close-calls, borderline cases, in order to discuss the paradox that a daughter distinct language can co-exist with a parent. McLaughlin agreed that Trask was wrong here. >In my view, the relation "is the same language as" cannot be coherently given >the kind of precise and principled content which you appear to require for >your arguments. As pointed out, the kind of "precise and principled" version that Trask feels the lack of, perhaps because he does not like definitions with fuzzy borderlines, is NOT that required by any of us here. So we agree that the expression cannot be given Trask's (!) kind of precise content, but do not require it for the argument. >Except in a very broad and rough sense -- which is insufficient for >the kinds of conclusions you want to draw -- language varieties simply cannot >be divided absolutely into "the same" and "not the same". A very broad and rough sense *is* sufficient (the word "absolutely" is simply not appropriate to that broad and rough sense, and it was not required for the statement of the paradox). Again, all that was required was that one be able, in *some* cases, to distinguish "clearly same language" from "clearly different language". We need not have any criterion so precise as to be able to deal with all cases and give an easy answer or even any answer in the hard cases. If Trask had discussed what other people were discussing, this issue would have been resolved long ago. >and that the notion of "same >language" can be given a precise and principled sense. This I deny. That is not a difference between us. I agree with Trask, yet again, Like him, I deny that his kind of precise sense is possible -- as my statement that there are fuzzy borderline cases implies, there is no possible reasonable definition without fuzzy borderlines. >Nor does the passage in my book commit me to any view that mutual >comprehensibility is the sole or principal criterion for drawing language >boundaries. No one has said it was the sole criterion. It does appear to be "a" principal criterion, *one used also by Trask himself*. The paradox was framed in terms of that simper technical criterion, but as pointed out many times, a more complex criterion will do just as well. And again, the criterion does *not* have to be able to deal with the hardest borderline cases in order for the paradox to be statable. A rough one is sufficient. *** [SL] >> But please don't pretend that a language >> "changing enough" to be become a different language - ancestor or otherwise >> is something you don't understand. [LT] >In the context in which this notion has featured recently on this list, >I find this notion incoherent -- as I hope I have made clear by now. No, that is not true. Trask, just like the rest of us, finds the notion incoherent that there is a sudden point at which one language becomes a different language, or finds the notion incoherent that one can make sharp, non-fuzzy distinctions in all cases (however any of us wish to phrase that), or etc. (Trask can word it in his favorite way). Steve Long's quotations from Trask's book quite literally quote Trask as saying that a language can change enough to that we are forced to call it a different language (and of course there are cases where it has only changed imperceptibly, so we then normally call it the same language). *** >But you and Lloyd Anderson apparently want to defend a notion along the >lines of "A and B are the same language but are not identical". And this >notion, I think, cannot be given any coherent content -- at least not >sufficiently coherent for the purposes you appear to have in mind. *Any* gradient definition has those properties, that one can change less than X, and "same" will still be used, or one can change more than Y, and "different" will be used. Perfectly coherent, but with fuzzy boundaries. As *Trask himself* uses the terms (never mind whether he was speaking to beginners or not) the quoted material two paragraphs above makes perfect sense. The English of Trask today and the English of Trask two months ago are so nearly identical that no one (including Trask) would have any valid reason to call them "a different language", in the sense of a *normal* opposition of "same" vs. "different" language. Yet none of us think that means they are identical. This is *not* difficult thinking. The composite phrase "same language" can perfectly normally have a meaning, for most of its users, not entirely predictable from its parts, in an absolute sense of predictable, specifically not including a sense of absolute sameness, because this is the ordinary language use of the word "same", which does have fuzzy borderlines. [ moderator edit, by agreement with Mr. Anderson ] Lloyd Anderson Ecological Linguistics From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 11 19:55:54 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 14:55:54 EST Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >That migrations do leave evidence. -- some do. Some don't. >It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that there was no significant >incursion during this period from the north into mainland Greece. -- well, yes, actually it does. See above. >There is nothing to suppose that IE speakers were not already present in >Greece when the Anatolian migration began c.2400 or that the migration did >not represent IE speakers. -- the linguistic relationship of Greek, Armenian and Indo-Iranian suggests a quite recent divergence when they're first recorded. >to suggest that an IE dialect(s) from the north became the dominant language >of Greece without leaving any significant evidence of arriving there -- why not? There are plenty of historically-attested instances of linguistic succession that didn't leave any archaeological traces to speak of. You've got to get over this assumption that linguistic events are going to leave unmistakable traces in the stones-and-bones record. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 11 04:25:42 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 23:25:42 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE) Message-ID: >sarima at ix.netcom.com writes: >Oooh, I had missed that somehow. Just to make sure I have the right place: >do you mean near the northern shore of the Caspian? Are they associated >with the NW Andronovo or the eastern (Volga-Ural) branch of the Yamnaya >complex? >> -- the Sintashta site, upper Ural river, northeast of the Caspian; early Andronovo, if memory serves. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Dec 15 08:07:51 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 03:07:51 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: In a message dated 12/10/99 10:40:36 PM, Jens wrote: <> With all respect, the arrows showing the spread of the "Kurgan complex" - which you are depending on - are not linguistic. Please recall that the first historian to identify the Pit Grave culture (as Kurgan is called in other locales) with PIE - Kossinna - took the evidence to mean that the IE homeland was Germany. Gordon Childe in the 1920's was by far the guiding light of the theory that shifted that homeland to the Ukraine - his The Aryans in the Penguin editions were still standardedly assigned in undergraduate courses in the early '70's. (But Childe later recanted, calling his early theories childish, and in 1949 his guess was that Anatolia was the IE homeland.) The Pit Graves/Kurgans were again used by M. Gimbutas as a way of tracking down the IE homeland. At first this approach followed the traditional dating 2500BC as the dispersal date. But in the wake of C-14, Renfrew et al, Gimbutas offered a new three wave theory by which PIE might have come into Europe, with the first wave as early as 4500BC. Mallory relies heavily upon Gimbutas for his qualified conclusions. All of these approaches were entirely based, first of all, on the archaeological evidence. Linguistics, along with various other cultural features, were supporting evidence. Obviously, the pit graves and pottery had to be there to justify any identification. In the meantime, other evidence erupted on the scene - not the least of which was the use of carbon dating to flesh out the Neolithic Revolution story and the central position of Anatolia. Innovations have been continually back-timed, so that it became apparent that bronze, megaliths, domestication of animals all preceded the 2500BC steppe elite horsemen of the Ukraine scenario by thousands of years. This back-timing also made somewhat irrelevant the appearance of many later developments often associated with the "coming of the IndoEuropeans", such as chariots and iron technology. Perhaps the most recent trend has been the realization that "kurgan" characteristics did not cause anything but minor changes in a great many areas where they were adopted. More important changes seem to have to do with climate, economics and resulting changes in trade and material processing and social structure. In general, the increased populations created by the Neolithic Revolution stayed where they were both in Europe and elsewhere "where IE is later found." The influx was not of new peoples in most cases and where they were we do not find horse warriors, but rather "the sheperds of the kurgan culture" as one recent research report described them. There is much evidence of pastoralism (the hallmark of the earliest "kurgan" cultural remains) first moving north and west into central Europe and then later east into southern Russia. And finally some of the major areas where we find "kurgan" developing "on its own" don't turn out to be IE when those areas enter history. This is not to say that the "Pit Grave" culture was not IE. But its overall impact seems to have been a supplement to some rather strong developments that were already going on in Europe and in Asia. Which suggest it was not PIE. I think the simplicity of the kurgan solution is only there so long as you don't dive into the evidence. When you do, Renfrew's neolithic proposal begins to make more and more "common sense." For a fairly recent and detailed summary of the actual archaeology of eartern Europe and the western steppes, let me suggest P. M. Dolukhanov's "The Early Slavs: Eastern Europe from Initial Settlement to Kievan Rus" (Longman pb 1996) - a relatively non-specialist book in print and readily available from most book distributors. Dolukhanov carefully and exhaustively cites finds, site, assemblages and dates - not an easy thing to find in English with regard to the region. (He also does the reader the service of separating the field summaries from his conclusions.) The conclusions are not favorable to Gimbutas (or Mallory). See p 94. One obvious reason is that while funeary practices and pottery types diffuse, the rest of the many cultures involved do not alter in a fashion that suggests being overwhelmed by significant groups of outsiders. Ideas seem more powerful than migrating nomads. I went back to look at what some other archaeologists were saying - I think this is representative. Andrew Sheratt, famous for his identification of the Neolithic secondary products revolution sometimes cited as supporting a kurgan-origins theory, not long ago published the "revisions" in his thinking since that time. These include currently supported conclusions about "the plough and wheeled vehicles arriving in Europe around 3500 BC as a result of events in the Near East" and "that Pit-Grave groups penetrated into eastern Hungary into areas abandoned by Baden communities because of increasing salination after 3000 BC. " And finally "if there was a "secondary products revolution", then it was part and parcel of a continuing series of consumer revolutions in the very unusual part of the world that we call western Asia (or, more ethnocentrically, the Near East)..." Kurgan seems to play a minor role in Sherratt's latest understandings. Another eminent British archaeologist, Alasdair Whittle, wrote some years ago about how overall impressions have changed in the archaeological community in Europe in the Neolithic (CamUPress 1996). A number of points he made are perhaps very relevant to one's thinking about the PIE question. Whittle mentioned often that the existing cultures (and perhaps language) of Neolithic Europe - with its megaliths and population increases and amalgation of rich Mesolithic cultures as in TRB - would have been a hard thing to displace by any means. Even after many centuries, "the LBK/Danubian tradition [and perhaps its language] would have been a powerful common element over very broad areas" Another point possibly relevant to language is the thin stratum represented by intervening cultural changes, Whittle emphasizing that the Corded Ware complex "can be seen to have massive continuities with what went before". Also, Whittle found "Gimbutas's large population movements and demographic changes" unsupportable from any evidence. And he conjectures that the expanse of PIE might be explained as a "language of communication" across different communities, adapted to both local needs and interregional trade - the Mediterranean being the logical site of the most "indigenous" versions. There is quite a bit more along these lines in the literature. Should any of this rule out the kurgan theory? I don't think so. But I don't think the matter can honestly be called settled. Certainly not on the basis of "simplicity." You wrote: <> But in fact what the archaeological evidence does is change - which it always has. There was a time when there were was no evidence of Hittites or of Linear B. And farming was supposed to have entered Europe about 2000BC. Compare, even in 1981, B. Lincoln (while denying that archaeology would have anything new to add to the subject) wrote that the first appearance of IndoEuropeans occured with "the Indo-Aryans in India around 1500 BC, the waves of invasion into Greece around 1600-1000 BC, and into Anatolia around 2000 BC." The linguistic evidence on the other hand is fundamentally unchanged since C-14 was introduced. (except I suppose for Mycenaean.) The real question is whether linguistic conclusions should change. The problem is basic. If you date IE unity on the basis of the date of the earliest wheel (only an example) then you know your dates will change if evidence of the wheel moves back a thousand years - which it well may. Unless you can stop the digging, of course. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Dec 11 13:55:09 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 13:55:09 GMT Subject: SV: Pre-Greek languages In-Reply-To: <01BF279E.7FBBE6C0.lmfosse@online.no> Message-ID: Lars Martin Fosse wrote: >Eduard Selleslagh [SMTP:edsel at glo.be] skrev 19. oktober 1999 08:52: >> [Ed Selleslagh] >> 3. The presence of Elamite (in Antiquity) and Brahwi (Dravidian) in Iran >> strongly suggests that the Dravidian territory stretched far more westward >> than at present. It seems - but I have no documentation at hand - that the >> old Indus valley culture is now recognized as having been Dravidian, which >> reinforces the hypothesis. >The presence of Brahui has been shown to be due to a migration of Dravidian >speakers from the South of India (probably mercenaries) a few hundred years >ago. They are therefore not relevant for the discussion of the earliest >period. >From the South of India? I'm aware of theories that derive Brahui from a migration from medieval Northern India (although I don't know what the arguments for it are), but Southern India would seem to be very strange: isn't it agreed that Brahui is closest to the North-East Dravidian languages Kurux and Malto? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Dec 11 23:46:11 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 17:46:11 -0600 Subject: Was Pre-Greek languages/now Sanskrit/Indus valley In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991101170847.00982a00@popd.netcruiser> Message-ID: Do any of the Hindu deities have Dravidian names that can be dated to a very early period? Can other any Hindu loanwords from Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, etc. be dated to a period corresponding to the fall of Mohendjo-Daro? [ moderator snip ] >This, however, is somewhat more secure. Several of the mythic and artistic >elements later so characteristic of Sanskrit culture appear to be present >in Indus Valley artwork. So substantial borrowing in the areas of >religion, myth and art, at least, seems well supported. >-------------- >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu Sat Dec 11 16:04:26 1999 From: rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu (rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 11:04:26 -0500 Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: >Well, at the time that Archaeology & Language was published, Renfrew's main >argument was with the "majority" theory at the time - which placed IE's >dispersal at 2500BC (Childe-Kossina-Gimbutas). >... >Now, the new "consensus" date has backed to 4000BC in the recent posts on >this list. But I wouldn't bet the ranch on it staying there. Partly because >the actual evidence for picking that date is not much stronger than the old >2500BC date. To try to track the "consensus date" sounds like a misrepresentation of the consensus. 2500 BC was (and is) more of a "terminus ante quem" than a date for IE dispersal (based of course on the earliest attested dates for Anatolian, Indic and Iranian -- and hence presumptive Indo-Iranian -- and possibly Mycenaean Greek). 4000 BC sounds like an attempt at a terminus post quem (others are Renfrew's 5000-4500 BC) based on the articles indisputably reconstructable to PIE. I would hope it is not a new "consensus date for IE dispersal". I doubt the available evidence allows us to narrow the date of IE dispersal down with such precision. Regards, Rohan. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 11 20:07:20 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 15:07:20 EST Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Well, at the time that Archaeology & Language was published, Renfrew's main >argument was with the "majority" theory at the time - which placed IE's >dispersal at 2500BC (Childe-Kossina-Gimbutas). -- Gimbutas has it beginning around 4000 BCE, and that's been her date of choice for a long time. And the Ukraine is still the "majority" theory, and likely to remain so. >Quite possibly the book was the stroke that "demolished" that theoretical >date -- Renfrew is not taken very seriously outside his own coterie. His arguments are weak. Eg., he has Celtic arriving in the British Isles before 4000 BCE and then remaining absolutely uniform until historical times, whereupon it starts changing rapidly. His explanation for Indo-Iranian is even more ludicrous. >It is a conclusion based on consensus. -- consensus of linguists; hence a linguistic argument. >One important thing that Renfrew's book did was to bring objectivity back to >archaeology -- what Renfrew does is posit developments that are linguistically... ah... highly implausible. Or to be less reticent, "ridiculous". >It certainly wasn't the horse, which shows no sign of being a >factor in seige or decisive war before 1000BC. -- an absurd statement, seeing as every major Middle Eastern power depended on a chariot corps in the 2nd millenium BCE. >And the chariot was just a platform for conveying war leaders around in Homer. -- I suggest you study the data from the period when the chariot was an actual factor. It was primiarily used as a mobile platform for archers. >But Latin's prestige didn't come from a bunch of headbashing riders off the >steppes. -- No, headbashing armies from Italy. You know, the "Roman Empire"? >And Slavic has consumed a long list of "dominant elite" languages like they >were just popcorn at the ballpark. -- Slavic reached its present dimensions through a series of well-attested folk migrations and conquests starting in the 5th century AD. Prior to that it was confined to a relatively small area of northeastern Europe. Most of the area now covered by Slavic languages was occupied by Baltic, Finno-Ugrian, Illyrian, or other languages. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Dec 11 16:13:19 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 11:13:19 EST Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) Message-ID: Pat Ryan wrote: <> (This would seem to be an essential consideration in tracking the phonological history of any language. After all, a "central" question about Basque and its uniqueness is common ancestry with other languages. Evidence of its descent to seem to involve considering words that would be relatively "ubiquitous." At minimum, this matter would seem to deserve careful qualification and not a flat yes-or-no. But it seems I'm wrong...) In a message dated 12/11/99 5:38:52 AM, LTrask replied to Pat Ryan: <, but this ubiquity is not an argument for pushing the word back to Pre-Proto-Everything. Rather, it is a compelling argument for disregarding the word altogether, on grounds of *motivated* independent creation.>> This kind of statement reflects a basic problem in the way Prof. Trask is approaching the use of a computer in acheiving some kind of objective results about his subject matter. How is he defining "ubiquity"? Is this "miau" word in any dictionaries he is using to support his statement about "most of the languages of the planet?" How much ubiquity is enough ubiquity for exclusion? In Swedish, the sound a snake makes is called . In Polish, a word for snake is . The difference in usage can be subtle, but it is rather faithfully applied in both languages. Does this make too ubiquitous? Or would it make his list? Or does its appearance in both languages say something about the origins of the word and would that justify the word making that list? On the other hand, does not appear in the dictionaries of either language. Does that mean it's not ubiquitous enough to be excluded? Would you have to go to a Japanese, a Bantu and a Finnish lexicon to answer that question - diregarding Swedish and Polish? Is there something about a snake noise versus cat noise that makes one ubiquitous and the other not? Can you state that rule so that readers will know how you intend to apply this exclusionary process to other animal noises? In the interest of establishing the "principled" nature of your prescreening process. So that an observer may say with confidence that the results of your prescreening is not a case of GIGO? Without casting any aspersions on your judgments as a highly competent professional linguist, unless you can state "operationally coherent" definitions of your prescreening criteria, your choices can look VERY arbitrary. And if you can state operable definitions, the computer should be doing the "choosing" to confirm the objectivity of the distinctions being made. That is the "control" that would be expected in other fields when one would claim that a computer is confirming ones choices. And why is it again that you can't feed the entire contents of Basque into the computer first as "raw" data and then do these operations? Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Dec 12 08:05:51 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 08:05:51 -0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 1999 10:46 AM > Pat Ryan writes: > [on Basque 'mother'] >> I continue to believe that some terms which might be classified as >> Kinderlallsprache such as are a powerful indication of common >> linguistic descent; and should not be excluded from consideration of >> inclusion in Pre-Basque. >> It may be that this category of terms has preserved an older or non-typical >> phonological form than other words of the vocabulary but they should be >> seriously considered because of their ubiquity. [LT responded] > No. Their ubiquity is *precisely* the reason why they should be excluded. > After all, in most of the languages on the planet, the word for a cat-noise > is something like , but this ubiquity is not an argument for pushing > the word back to Pre-Proto-Everything. Rather, it is a compelling argument > for disregarding the word altogether, on grounds of *motivated* independent > creation. [PR] I feel that you may be mixing apples with oranges here. I would, myself, be quite sceptical of any claim that an imitative word like indicated anything more than an attempt to capture the quintessential acoustic impression of a cat-call. But, 1) there is nothing "imitative" about for 'mother'; 2) more importantly, does not have the form we would expect from childish babbling, which, I hope you would agree, would be along the lines of C(1)V(1)C(1)V(1). I gladly concede that , , , etc. are childish attempts to render other words, e.g. <*?ama> and <*?atV>, etc. but there is nothing that I know which *necessitates* or universally *inclines* children all over the world to connect /m/ with 'motherhood' or /d/ or /t/ with 'paternity' --- short of some universalistic sound-symbolism argument, which I provisionally do not accept. I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance they have in most human societies. Let us assume that, for reasons I cannot fathom, children all over the world are *independently motivated* (by what, pray tell ???) to employ for 'mother'. What could the cause be for reducing to <(?)ama> (why not <*ema>, <*uma>, <*ima>, etc.?)? Why not just retain exclusively? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/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 ECOLING at aol.com Sun Dec 12 02:28:21 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 21:28:21 EST Subject: Excluding much? Message-ID: It has been pointed out to me several times in private communication that Larry Trask's criteria in seeking to establish his list of "best" candidates for early Basque monomorphemic lexical items (I hope that phrasing accurately represents Trask's statements of his goals) contains two parts which together will cause the total list to be very seriously reduced, to a tiny number of items. I think Trask should have an opportunity to clarify or deal with this issue publicly, so here are the specifics. Among other reasons for asking this explicitly, I understood one of Trask's more recent communications about Basque to be saying that there are more documentary sources available than I had previously understood him as saying. (The question on interaction of these two criteria is quite independent of other questions which have been under discussion.) 1. Only include candidates attested in four out of five major dialect groupings (groupings I believe Trask has established based on his study of which are more closely related to each other, which more independent) 2. Only include candidates from the earliest documentation, either pre-1600, as Trask prefers, or pre-1700, as he has said he is willing to consider a modification. Do these two criteria together mean that almost no lexical items will qualify, only the most rudimentary lexicon, words which are almost totally independent of subject matter and style, such as English "and, the, good, very, when, not, come, go"? How many does Trask estimate this would permit to be included? Lloyd Anderson After writing the above, I read Trask's listings of ordinary vocabulary from the religious texts. That is a very good list, and I thank Trask for it. Most of it, though by no means all, fits the category I mention just above of words almost independent of subject matter and style. There remain for me two content questions. (a) What happens to the list Trask posted, when he applies the rule that four out of five dialects must attest each item to be included? Still the very most basic vocabulary should survive, perhaps a list much like what Trask just provided us, but though I believe so, it is an empirical question. (b) When I wrote the following, there was a scope ambiguity: Speaking of attestation primarily in religious texts: > That is a very strong bias of content, I would think against quite a > range of vocabulary from ordinary life. I intended not "against [there being] a range of vocabulary from ordinary life", which was Trask's interpretation in this case (a reasonable possibility), but rather I intended "against quite [large parts of the] vocabulary of ordinary life [which are not religious in content]". The grammatical items and most basic adjectives, nouns, and verbs, would still occur, probably in all dialects, but whether measured in a single dialect group attestation in religious texts, or if requiring four out of five dialect groups, I would think many words like these would not be found in such a high proportion of texts which are not oriented toward a subject content which would promote their inclusion. I will *of course* be wrong about some of the following, but others could be substituted. And I know from previous correspondence that Trask believes some of these are in vocabulary domains where almost all Basque vocabulary is loanwords from other languages. I assume not all of the items of ordinary life which would fail to be widely enough attested would be such loanwords. The following list is *of course* not designed with any knowledge specifically of Basque in mind. But it illustrates roughly some of what I mean is included by "ordinary life" on land and sea. "cartwheel", (horse's) "bit", "fleece", "canal", "rafter", "threshold", "sunrise", "planet", "yoke", "thresh", "root-cellar", "eye" (of potato), "scrape", "consult", "dig", "build", "rudder", "hull" (of boat), "hull" (of seed), "bill" (of bird), "down" (of bird), "mast", "shear", "midwife", "stillbirth", "roe" "kitten", "chick", "kid" (of goat), "foal", "filly", "vixen", "badger", etc. names of quite a number of plants and animals, perhaps some kin terms, some terms relating to marriage ceremonies, "visit", "adopted" (child), "village idiot", various kinds of earth and minerals and plant products, etc. etc. etc. The items I find in Trask's list posted today which are not the strongest core grammatical items but slightly more like those I have sketched above are from his first list: acquaintance, ability, arrive, country, drown, hair, custom, prudent, dark, and from the second list: king, star, gather, lord, dream, mouth Notice that there are no overlaps between these two sets of vocabulary from ordinary life, which are not in the highest-frequency sets. So I believe (perhaps wrongly) that many of these will not satisfy the criterion of occurring in four out of five dialects. Of course, Trask's samples were only a few lines from a New Testament preface and from Chapter One of Matthew. Once we include the entire text, things should be better. How much better? I do not claim to know. That is why I think my questions in this message are really empirical questions. Of course, if we correct our estimates again, by noting that even the rarest items which did occur in Trask's two short samples are not as rare as most of the sample items in the sketch I gave above, it again looks less probable that a wide range of rare vocabulary of ordinary life will be covered, therefore not a wide range of polysyllables, relative to the monomorphemic polysyllables which really did exist in spoken Basque of the time. From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Dec 12 02:28:18 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 21:28:18 EST Subject: *Degrees* of evidential value Message-ID: Larry Trask writes, concerning Pat Ryan's example /ama/ 'mother': >No. Their ubiquity is *precisely* the reason why they should be excluded. >After all, in most of the languages on the planet, the word for a cat-noise >is something like , but this ubiquity is >not an argument for pushing the word back to Pre-Proto-Everything. >Rather, it is a compelling argument for disregarding the word altogether, >on grounds of *motivated* independent creation. As in all discussions of sound symbolism and expressives, as for anything else, we do not have absolutely perfect knowledge of what causality is. But we do have the ability to partly solve the *simultaneous equations* (to use a metaphor or analogy) of these two kinds of factors. As long as *not all* languages have words for a 'cat-noise' which are *equally* similar to our English , we may be able to make some partial, statistical distinctions, and we may find that the different types of imitative words for a cat noise fall into groups which *partially* correlate with known language families and genetic relationships. They would then be weak, or very weak (take your pick) evidence. Now switch from "cat-noise' to the name of the animal, 'cat'. There should be a difference of *degree*, words for 'cat' should show more variety, less uniformity, than words for 'cat-noise' (though some words for 'cat' will also relate to ). *** Now to the generalization from such specific contrast as 'cat-noise' vs. 'cat': For *each meaning* which we can identify, and for which we can gather vocabulary, we should be able to develop a measure of the *degree* to which it shows arbitrariness across the world's languages, roughly the number of different sound forms which occur in words with that meaning, or better, the degree of difference between such alternative sound forms for the same meaning, weighted by independent occurrences (measured in a more sophisticated manner, which information-theory specialists can define for us). Then we can *weight* each concept according to those results, giving greater weight to those which are more arbitrary. There is no need to have absolute lines of inclusion and exclusion. Even expressives and sound-symbolic words can be of *some small* evidential value in estimating likelihood of a language A being more closely related to language B than to language C, or the reverse. I think almost anyone would grant that, given A equally close to B and to C on every other measure developed from vocabulary which is at the extreme of not having any expressive nuance, we might heuristically consider the value of expressive vocabulary as well. Since there is a gradient between non-expressive and expressive vocabulary, not a sharp line, there is a large amount of evidence we can use, without throwing it away. Lloyd Anderson From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Dec 12 02:28:30 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 21:28:30 EST Subject: Sample bias, word length, frequency, circularity Message-ID: This message is on a distinct source of sample bias, one not in these discussions previously. And on one explanation of what was meant by "circularity" earlier. *** It is well known that more common lexical items are, as a statistical matter, shorter, and rarer lexical items are, as a statistical matter, longer. This is true world-wide, I assume the point is not debated? If this is true, then a selection of vocabulary which is very strongly biased towards the most common lexical items in a language will also be strongly biased towards the shorter items. A sample selected with a very strong bias towards shorter words will be unrepresentative of the language it is drawn from, especially if one is aiming at generalizations about canonical forms. (It will also be skewed towards more grammatical lexical items, "when, the, very, some, that, do".) This matter of a bias in word length is another factor which I did not previously mention explicitly, which argues against having too small a list of items included in a sample, if one wishes to draw conclusions of general validity, when one is trying to determine the canonical forms even for monomorphemic lexical items in early Basque (or any other language), and even if (as Trask very nearly specifies today), one is not interested initially in canonical forms of expressives. Multisyllabic forms which actually occurred in spoken early Basque are of course monomorphemic if they are not analyzable into components within Basque. Whether or not they will be picked up by a particular sampling technique -- that is a one of our questions. So the discussion in another message I have sent today, under the title "Excludes much", is highly relevant to the question of possible distortion of a sample of vocabulary. That other message contrasts roughly basic vocabulary of ordinary life on land and sea with the kind of basic vocabulary which is of highest frequency, independent of subject matter of texts, which will therefore be most likely to be found in at least four out of five dialect groups, following Trask's criteria for inclusion. Lloyd Anderson *** On other matters, I think we have reached some partial closure on one point. Trask has written: >But who ever said I was interested in canonical forms >"for the language as a whole"? I believe the original statements did not specify exclusions, and aimed at general validity, so one could reasonably assume they were intended for the language as a whole. The exclusion of expressives, *or systematically of any other group of words* (such as the longer words, as noted above), through any aspect of the sampling procedure, would of course tend to invalidate such general validity. *** Trask has affirmed: >Expressive formations may be constructed >according to different rules from ordinary words. >Indeed they are, but how can I hope to establish >this objectively unless I >*first* identify the rules for ordinary words? The methodological point would be I think that one cannot separate out ordinary words from expressives (or from any other category of words) in one's selection of data, without knowing how to recognize what expressives are. But as I have previously stated, as long as the expressives are not excluded as "not candidates for early Basque", they will be considered at some point. It is the phrasing which Trask used early in these discussions, which seems to aim at conclusions valid for "early Basque", and linked these with his criteria, rather than saying that his conclusions would be valid for "a subset of early Basque", namely that subset which is selected by his criteria, which seems to place his criteria above themselves being questioned. Perhaps this way of stating it makes it clearer what has been meant by "circularity". If we say that conclusions from analyzing a particular subset of early Basque will be valid for the subset of early Basque selected by the criteria used to select it, we of course have a plausibly valid statement. That makes explicit what the limitations may be. Trask's earlier statements seemed to aim at much broader validity, and omitted the limitations. That is at least one reason why they have seemed rather circular to a number of us. ********* Neither Trask's criteria nor any I have suggested single out expressives for either exclusion or exclusion (I have always granted that; it would be nice if Trask would grant it in return). Yet the point I have made is that Trask's criteria do so indirectly, because of the bias in written attestations of expressives, probably world-wide, and that limits the general validity of any results he would get from his sample. Since he has slightly narrowed his claims, this is of less concern. However, Trask's criteria also bias against longer lexical items, and that is not so trivial by any means. That is a bias against some canonical forms, at least statistically, and a bias against ordinary vocabulary which is not in the highest frequency class. Regarding this, which I intended only to be very careful: >(2) Words in particular semantic areas >may be constructed according to >different rules from other words. Trask responds: >This I find unworthy of taking seriously. >I know of no language in which such >a thing happens, and I certainly know of >no reason to suspect that it might be true of Basque. If one uses the term "semantic areas" rather more broadly than usual, I think I have indicated that it is true of every language, there are strong differences between the semantic ranges occurring in the most frequent, statistically shortest lexical items, and those occurring in the rarer, statistically longer lexical items. Since that application of the phrase certainly may not have occurred to Trask, I can understand his response. I would think that in most languages, color terms would not have different canonical forms from names of animals. But they might. I think we agree here. >Of course, if it *is* true of Basque, then that fact should >emerge from my investigations. But I'm not holding my breath. Well, yes, in a sense, but only when the sample is extended to include them. It cannot emerge from a sample which does not include them, but only from a contrast between that first sample and a larger sample or another sample. So again we come back to the point that it is perfectly fine for Trask to use a very narrow sample as a starting point, as narrow as he wishes. But he cannot then draw conclusions of general validity for the language as a whole, or even, given the probable sample bias, for the monomorphemic lexical items of early Basque. Biases in his sample selection almost certainly work against that. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Dec 12 07:36:54 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 07:36:54 -0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Dear Lloyd and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 1999 5:44 PM [LA wrote] > It is not a valid counterargument > to say that "possessive pronouns" must be "pronouns" in every respect. > That depends on the assumption that the composite is transparent, > and would lead to the conclusion that "White House" must be a white > house, even if it were another color, patently an error of reasoning. > Rather, "possessive" may already signal a member of the class > of determiners, or whatever one considers "possessive pronouns" > to be closest to, distributionally. [PR] I essentially agree with what you have written here but I honestly do not understand the application of the paragraph cited above. Could you expand or clarify it? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/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 Mon Dec 13 10:48:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 10:48:14 +0000 Subject: semantic definitions Message-ID: Pat Ryan writes: > Now, I would say that Larry would be the best choice to explain why a > semantic approach "doesn't work as well" but since I have repeatedly asked, > and in my opinion have not gotten a responsive answer to the question of > 'why the "slot-and-filler" approach (Larry's terminology) be characterized > as working better', perhaps you will jump in to explain with specifics not > with generalities why you also hold this view. Well, I don't think it's up to me, or to anybody, to demonstrate *ab initio* why semantic definitions of parts of speech don't work. Semantic definitions have been attempted many times, and all such attempts have been dismal failures. If Pat, or anybody, wants to argue that parts of speech *can* be defined semantically, then it is up to him to make a case, which we can then discuss. So, Pat, let's have it: where is your semantic definition of 'noun' or 'verb' or 'adjective' or 'pronoun'? Put it on the table, and let us have a look at it. Perhaps you'd like to consider cases like 'arrive' and 'arrival'. These appear to have the same meaning: we can say, equally, 'before she arrived' or 'before her arrival' -- yet one is a verb while the other is a noun. So how can the two be distinguished on semantic grounds? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Dec 13 11:16:54 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 11:16:54 +0000 Subject: Re Personal pronouns Message-ID: Lloyd Anderson writes: > In the discussion between Larry Trask and Pat Ryan, > each of them has a partly valid perspective. > Pat points out that "Personal Pronouns" may properly > include "possessives" or "possessive pronouns". Well, I would query this use of the factive verb 'point out'. I think you can only 'point out' something which is true, just as you can only 'realize' something which is true. > Trask objects that "possessives" are not pronouns, > as proven by distributional criteria. Indeed. > The gap in Trask's logic is the assumption that > the definition of "personal pronoun" > must depend essentially and exclusively on a distributional meaning, > and cannot have another legitimate basis. Actually, I never said that distribution was the *only* criterion. There exist other valid criteria for part-of-speech classification, such as inflectional and derivational possibilities. However, as it happens, these criteria are of little assistance in identifying pronouns in English, since English pronouns, in general, exhibit little inflection and virtually no derivation. Accordingly, distribution becomes the only genuinely useful criterion for identifying pronouns in English. > In fact, "personal pronoun" was defined by use long before > Trask or any of the rest of us were born, and does > indeed have "a" (not "the") legitimate use emphasizing more the > semantic content and less the distributional occurrence / > part-of-speech characteristics of use. Sorry; I disagree. It is true that our ancestors often classified words like 'my' as pronouns. But, in this, they were simply wrong. They also often classified determiners as adjectives, but they were wrong here too. They also often classified degree modifiers like 'very', the unique item 'not', and various other surprising things as adverbs, but again they were wrong. The observation that a classification is traditional is no argument that it is legitimate. After all, our ancestors also often classified whales as fish. But would anybody want to argue that this classification is therefore legitimate? Of course, you can get round all this by simply maintaining that words like 'pronoun' and 'fish' simply had different meanings for our ancestors from the ones they have for us. If anybody wants to pursue this possibility, and to use it to construct a case that older meanings are just as valid today as our modern ones, then we can discuss it. Meanwhile, I'll just dismiss this line of thought as irrelevant. > It is not a valid counterargument > to say that "possessive pronouns" must be "pronouns" in every respect. Depends on what you mean by "in every respect". If you mean only that there is no requirement that every pronoun must exhibit all the properties exhibited by every other pronoun, then of course I agree: subcategorization is just as prominent among pronouns as elsewhere. However, there is a more fundamental point here: words like 'my' do not exhibit *any* of the properties exhibited by pronouns. If you don't believe me, try it: name any property exhibited by pronouns generally, and you will find that words like 'my' do not exhibit it. Moreover, if you name any property exhibited by words like 'my', you will find that pronouns in general do not exhibit that property. I await proposed counterexamples with interest. ;-) > That depends on the assumption that the composite is transparent, > and would lead to the conclusion that "White House" must be a white > house, even if it were another color, patently an error of reasoning. Of course this is a patent error of reasoning, but what on earth has it to do with the classification of words like 'my'? If anything, this appears to be a (valid) argument against Pat Ryan's position: he wants to argue that 'my' must be a pronoun because it is transparently related to the real pronoun 'I'. > Rather, "possessive" may already signal a member of the class > of determiners, or whatever one considers "possessive pronouns" > to be closest to, distributionally. No; the label 'possessive' does not entail, or imply in any way, the label 'determiner'. Words like 'mine' are certainly possessive, but they are not determiners: in fact, they are pronouns. And, as I pointed out [;-)] earlier, the Latin forms like 'my' do not appear to be either pronouns or determiners, but rather adjectives. > So there is no absolute right or wrong in these discussions, > there are legitimate arguments for each point of view. Well, I wouldn't care to be classed as an absolutist, but so far I have seen no valid argument at all for classifying English 'my' as a pronoun, or as anything other than a determiner. > Which means it is NOT legitimate to say the other point > of view is simply wrong (however that may be phrased). Sure it is. If position P is supported by no evidence at all, and is moreover in flagrant conflict with all available evidence, then position P is wrong. Observing that P has been asserted by somebody, or that it was widely accepted in the past, is no argument. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Dec 13 15:46:21 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 15:46:21 +0000 Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] A while ago, Lloyd Anderson suggested, in connection with his comments on the IE list about my criteria for identifying native, ancient and monomorphemic Basque words, that it might be useful to look at the Basque words for 'butterfly'. I am now able to oblige. But first a few comments. First, there is no word for 'butterfly' found throughout the country, or close to it: each of the numerous words is narrowly circumscribed in distribution. Second, the attested words sometimes exist in the form of numerous local variants, showing the kind of unsystematic variation typical of expressive formations but not of ordinary lexical items. Third, for the better-described dialects we often have numerous words and variants, while for the other dialects we typically have few or no words reported. For example, I can find no words reported at all for the three Pyrenean dialects, but I don't suppose that no such words exist: it is merely that these dialects are less well described than the others. Fourth, I do not suppose for a moment that the items listed below exhaust the recorded forms: they merely represent all the forms I can extract from the materials in my office and in our library. Where the information is available, I have listed the dialects for which a given form is recorded and its date of first attestation, but this information is often not available. The dialects cited, roughly from west to east, are as follows: B: Bizkaian Sout: Southern (extinct; recorded in 16th-century Alava) G: Gipuzkoan HN: High Navarrese L: Lapurdian LN: Low Navarrese Z: Zuberoan I have grouped the forms into nine classes, of which the first is subdivided. Group 1a. bitxilote (B) bitxileta pitxilote (B) pitxoleta (B) pitxeleta (B) pitxilota (B) These appear to be based on , western variant , 'pretty little thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an independent word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first element in expressive and nursery formations. The final element is entirely obscure, and very likely a meaningless expressive element. (See also Alavese Spanish . Alava was Basque-speaking until recently, and the local Spanish has, or until recently had, a number of loans from Basque.) Group 1b. mitxeleta (B, G) (1745) mitxilote (B) mitxoleta mitxelot (B) (and many more variants) These variants show an unexpected initial /m/. This might result either from a perception that they are expressive formations (/m/ is much favored in expressive formations in Basque), or from contamination by 'Mike', the regular diminutive of 'Michael'. (Personal names are frequent as first elements in expressive names for small creatures: note, for example, 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'.) Group 1c. tximeleta (B, G) (1912) txipilota txipeleta (G) txipilipeta (and others) Agud and Tovar see the last-cited variant as involving "clear nursery intervention". These appear to represent metathesized forms of the preceding. Curiously, these western forms are entirely absent from Azkue's 1905 dictionary, even though Azkue was a native speaker of the western dialect Bizkaian, for which he provided exceptionally detailed coverage in his dictionary. Today, the form , not recorded before 1912, is nearly universal in the western dialects, and has been accepted as the standard Basque word for 'butterfly'. Group 2. txitxidola (LN) txitxipapa (HN) txitxitera (Z) These eastern forms exhibit the reduplicated sequence , very common in nursery formations, with what appear to be arbitrary final elements: these final elements have no other existence. Group 3. pinpirin (L) (17th c) pinpirina (L) (17th c) pinpirineta (Z) pinpilinpauxa (L) (1905) The Lapurdian dialect is exceptionally fond of expressive formations in initial and , a pattern sparsely attested in other dialects; see Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for more examples. The last and longest form appears to contain a palatalized form of eastern (n.) 'pause, stop, hesitation, rest, repose' or its verbal derivative 'pause, stop'; these derive from Latin. Compare standard Castilian 'butterfly', literally 'Mary-perch', from 'perch, alight', itself descended from the Latin . Group 4. inguma (G) (1745) This curious word does not look like an expressive formation. But the same word is recorded from 1664 as 'incubus, succubus'. We may therefore surmise a possibly unattested late Latin * 'female incubus, succubus', which, if borrowed into Basque, would regularly yield the attested . The motivation is not obvious, but I have seen pictures of the night-demons portraying them as perched on top of the bodies of their sleeping victims, so maybe the butterfly's habit of perching is the motivation. Group 5. altxatulili altxa-lili (LN) altxabili (HN) The first two are transparently compounded from the Romance loan 'raise', stem , plus another Romance loan, 'lily, flower'. Or so it would seem, even though the semantic motivation eludes me. But the third variant rather muddies the waters. It may be a somewhat unusual dissimilation of the preceding. But Agud and Tovar suggest a different formation whose second element is the common verb 'be in motion'. Maybe, but V-V --> N is a decidedly unusual type of word-formation in Basque. Group 6. zintzitoil (L) xintxitoila (L) xintxitoil (L) xintxitola (L) xitxitol The first variant is unpalatalized, while the others show the palatalization typical of expressive formations. We cannot tell if the first form is conservative or merely a back-formation. In all its variants, this form is utterly opaque in formation. The form strongly suggests an expressive formation particularly typical of the eastern varieties. See Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for dozens of examples of this type. Group 7. maripanpalona This shows another pattern typical of expressive names for small creatures: the use of 'Mary' as a first element. The rest is opaque. Corominas suggests a link with Latin 'butterfly', but I doubt it. While I have no regional provenance for this form, I suspect that it is eastern, and eastern dialects, especially Lapurdian, just love expressive formations in and , recall. Group 8. atxitamatxi (Sout) This unique item, recorded only in the 16th century in the long-extinct Southern dialect (as , with Romance spelling and the final article <-a>), is totally opaque. It looks like a straight-out expressive formation. Group 9. jainkoaren oilo (LN) jankoilo The first is literally 'God's hen', the second 'God-hen'. I don't understand the motivation, but both hens and butterflies perch, so maybe that's it. That's it. So: what have we got? Well, the 'God's hen' and 'incubus' words appear to represent metaphorical senses of ordinary lexical items. But all the others show unmistakable evidence of expressive origins: length (four or more syllables); opaque elements; frequent presence of the segments and (typical of expressive formations); frequent presence of the syllable and its reduplicated form (typical of nursery formations); presence of clusters absent from ordinary lexical items (notably ); very considerable and highly irregular variation in form; severe localization of each word; general lack of early attestations. It is especially striking that a form which apparently didn't even exist in 1905 is now the most widespread word in the language. Now: does anybody want to make a case that *any* of these words is a good candidate for native, ancient and monomorphemic status in Basque? Lloyd, over to you. ;-) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Dec 14 21:45:15 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 15:45:15 -0600 Subject: permissible IE roots? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995: 120-22 give the following rules for IE roots with stops (that is, if my notes are correct): 1. No 2 consonants of the same order can occur in the same root 2. Series II * III can't occur in the same root 3. Series I & II almost never occur in the same root exceptions include *bhak'- "share, portion, etc", *bh?k'o- "beech", *k^'egh- "branch" (Germanic and Baltic only) [BUT *k^'egh- seems to violate rule 1] 4. In roots C1VC2-, both consonants must have the same voicing They state that allowable roots are I + III, III + I, II + II, III + III and (extremely rare) I + II. Series I bilabial also appears to be disallowed Gamkrelidze and Ivanov [14] Stop series I. glottalized (p') t' k' II. voiced (aspirated) bh dh gh III. unvoiced (aspirated) ph th kh Looking through Watkins 1985, there seem to be some violations of these rules. Watkins's stop series (traditional version) is as follows: (although his table presents them in order II-I-III) I b d g gw II p t k kw III bh dh gh gwh So, following G/I, the following should be allowed (using traditional values): I + III: dVbh, dVgh, dVgwh, gVbh, gVdh, gwVbh, gwVdh III + I: bhVd, bhVgh, bhVgw, dhVg, dhVgw, ghVd, gwhVd II + II: pVt, pVk, PVkw, tVp, tVk, tVkw, kVp, kVt, kwVp, kwVt III + III: bhVdh, bhVgh, bhVgwh, dhVbh, dhVgh, dhVgwh, ghVbh, ghVdh, gwhVbh, gwhVdh I + II (rare): dVp, dVk, dVkw, gVp, gVt, gwVp, gwVt, II + I (rare): pVd, pVg, pVgw, tVg, tVgw, kVd, kwVd problematic roots in Watkins: *ka:dh- "to shelter, cover", *kagh- "to catch, seize", *kaghlo- "pebble, hail", *kak-1 "to enable, help", *kekw- "to excrete", Question: Does the addition of other consonants or velar/palatal differences allow exceptions to G/I rules? e.g. *ghelegh- "type of metal", *kenk- with other consonants, *kekw-, stembh-, steigh- In addition, Watkins has roots with /b/, disallowed by most IE-ists, if what I read is correct. He includes the following roots with IE /b/: *baba- onomatopoeic root *badyo- "yellow, brown" (Western IE) *bak- "staff, rod, wialking stick" *bamb- onomatopoeic root *band- "a drop" *bel- "strong" *bend- "protruding point" [see Gaelic beinn, see also Basque mendi- < *bendi] *beu-1 "to swell, etc." allophonic with *bheu- *beu-2 onomatopoeic root Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 04:28:02 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 23:28:02 EST Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >the earliest dates given to the wheel by archaeology. -- combined with the linguistics. The archaeologists say wheeled vehicles are 4th-millenium BCE. PIE has (several) words for "wheel". Therefore, the original PIE speakers had wheels. (Ditto words for 'vehicle', 'axle', etc.) >IE speakers could have become "acquainted" with the wheel after they >separated and adopted the traveling wagoneer's, wheelwright's or merchant's >word for the item. -- flat-out wrong. If the words had been loaned after the breakup of PIE, then the sound-shifts would show this. They don't. Therefore the word is of PIE date. >Hittite for wheel -- PIE *hwergh, "wheel" ==> Hittite 'hurki, Tocharian A 'warkant', Tocharian B 'yerkwanto'. Tocharian also shows deriviatives of *kwekulo (kokale), with a meaning of "wagon" (just as we often call a car 'my wheels'), and possible derivatives of *roto ('ratak', 'army', as in 'those on wheels'.) >And, BTW, how does Greek or Mycenaean jive with the statement that wheel has >a shared form in all IE languages? -- kuklos, from *kwekulo. >If did in fact originally refer to a circle (rather than >specifically to a wheel) then there is no surprise that the word would trace >back to PIE long before the wheel -- and every branch of IE used the same term for 'wheel'? I thought you said it was a later loan? >change as the evidence for the wheel keeps moving backward in time? -- you have some evidence for this? Last time I looked, the dating of wheeled vehicles hadn't changed in over a generation. >It's quite another to dismiss earlier dates as "quite inacceptible." -- it is unacceptable to put forward dates with no evidence. When you've got the evidence, come back and talk. Until then, we can only proceed on the evidence we actually have. From edsel at glo.be Sat Dec 18 11:10:50 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 12:10:50 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Saturday, December 18, 1999 5:21 AM [snip] >Starting with the linguistic side - very clearly, there are cases where >technological and cultural innovations carry their own terminology with them >and enter different languages with a common name long after those languages >have separated. (In some cases, they have even been conformed after the fact >to the local sound rules.) IE speakers could have become "acquainted" with >the wheel after they separated and adopted the traveling wagoneer's, >wheelwright's or merchant's word for the item. >And let me question whether the universal shared character of the attested >words for the wheel is even accurate. >What was the Hittite word for wheel? >Awhiles back, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote (3/9/99 12:12:33 AM): ><cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), >except for two curious items: "shaft/pole", Hittite hissa ~ Skt. >i:s.a:, Grk. oie:ks, Slav. oje(s)- and "(to) harness", Hittite >turiia- ~ Skt. dhu:r-,...>> >And, BTW, how does Greek or Mycenaean jive with the statement that wheel has >a shared form in all IE languages? >Miguel wrote to me: ><reflex of PIE *ek^wos. "Wheel" is a-mo (Cl. Greek harma "chariot").>> >And a simple reading of the Illiad (as Chapman noted a long time ago and Buck >gave a nod to) makes it rather clear that Homer's specific word for a wheel, >a chariot wheel, a potter's wheel, wheel tracks and a spinning wheel is >. What is equally pretty clear is that refers not >specifically to a wheel, but to anything circular, including a circle of >counselors or the walls surrounding a town. >If did in fact originally refer to a circle (rather than >specifically to a wheel) then there is no surprise that the word would trace >back to PIE long before the wheel - and the fact of the wheel's introduction >would only reflect a later shift in semantic meaning of . <*rotHo>, >the other supposed IE universal, does not even approach the meaning "wheel" >in Homer. [Ed Selleslagh] Steven has made a number of very good points here. Carrying the argument even further: What if all the IE words like *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- , and Gr. trochos are older than the wheel/chariot/wagon, and represent only new uses as required by the emergence of new technology? (cf. German Rechner = computer, a new use of a much older word). My suggestions would be the following: Tro'chos/trocho's: maybe a variant (Mycenean inspired? cf. iqo - hippo's) related to Tro'pos/tropo's, meaning 'turn, return' *kwekwlo-, Gr. kyklos: circle, round. *rotHo- : rotate, turn around, revolve, spin. That would mean various things: 1. IE languages had a choice among pre-existing semantically related roots for the new technology. 2. Even if they had all chosen the same root, quod non, this would still not be proof of IE unity at the moment the wheel was invented or became known to IE lgs. speaking peoples. Just a thought... Ed. From sarima at friesen.net Mon Dec 20 02:51:29 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 18:51:29 -0800 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE In-Reply-To: <0.6a3ef54e.25508c05@aol.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have changed Mr. Friesen's address from the original "sarima at ix.netcom.com" to the current "sarima at friesen.net" so that personal replies will go to the correct system. --rma ] At 01:48 PM 11/2/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Sean Crist replied (dated 10/28/99 2:09:32AM): ><because the wheel is not attested in the material record until much >later....>> > ... >Starting with the linguistic side - very clearly, there are cases where >technological and cultural innovations carry their own terminology with them Yes, and such items generally carry with them clear evidence of their later date - specifically they are "too similar" across divergent subfamilies. A good example is the word for coffee in the Romance languages: it is phonetically almost identically in all of them, including French which normally has a severe loss of sounds in inherited words. So, the presence of all of the normal sound changes in the word for wheel in all of the branches of IE rules out a time of origin after those sound changes had occurred. At the latest the word for wheel had to spread through the entire IE area within a *very* short time after the loss of unity. A period of a thousand years later is already *far* too long after the break-up for the spread of a word sharing the individual idiosyncrasies of the various branches. Thus it is the *combination* of the linguistic and archeological evidence that rules out the 7000 BC date. >and enter different languages with a common name long after those languages >have separated. (In some cases, they have even been conformed after the fact >to the local sound rules.) Only idiosyncratically, and thus certainly never in *all* of the divergent languages. It might have been retrofitted in one or two branches of IE, but having such a rare event occurring independently in *all* branches is unreasonable in the extreme. >Awhiles back, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote (3/9/99 12:12:33 AM): ><cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), >except for two curious items: "shaft/pole", Hittite hissa ~ Skt. >i:s.a:, Grk. oie:ks, Slav. oje(s)- and "(to) harness", Hittite >turiia- ~ Skt. dhu:r-,...>> Hittite is a difficult case since most of its vocabulary is non-IE. It would be interesting to cross-check this in some more conservative members of the Anatolian family. Of course in many ways horse" is a better basis than "wheel". But in the final analysis one cannot depend on any *single* word. One must use an extended portion of the technical vocabulary. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From edsel at glo.be Mon Dec 20 15:20:37 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 16:20:37 +0100 Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] After my first response on Dec. 18, 1999, I have been thinking about the PIE root *kwekwlo- (and *rotH-) in a wider context, in particular about its possible presence in Basque. It is almost certain that the Basques, who had been living in virtual isolation throughout the last Ice Age, learned about the wheel from IE peoples or their otherwise spreading culture, since the terrain of the Pyrenean peoples offered little incentive for inventing the wheel, as opposed to steppe peoples who had to travel long distances over essentially flat terrain. In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'. It appears in compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around') and 'biribil' (a reduplicated form meaning 'round'). This could be a phonological adaptation of a derivation of *kwekwlo-, especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, Du. wiel), or -just maybe- one of its oldest Celtic forms (But: mod. Welsh: 'olwyn' = wheel, apparently with metathesis), because Basque doesn't have /w/, and the closest Basque phoneme is /b/ (a tendency that is still alive in Castilian: Washington = Bassinton, at times even on TV! And a WC is often called 'un bater'). The Basque word 'ibili' needs some further explanation. It is obviously a compound, but of what? My hypothesis is as follows: *i-b(i)-bil-i, with haplology. The initial and final i's are common features of Basque verbs. -b(i)- would be a root that means 'walk, run' (cf. IE wad-), and -bil- '(a)round', of course. The hypothetical root *b(i) is the subject of a long running historical controversy. It is supposedly found in words like: bide ('way, road'), probably a compound of *bi- and the common suffix (of 'extent') -te, meaning something like 'the physical area where one walks'. ibi, more commonly ubi ('ford, a place where one can wade through the water'), according to e.g. Michelena, u-bide ('water-way': u-, uh- or ug- is the form of ur, 'water', in compounds), and to Bertoldi, a compound of ibi-bide, with haplology. The existence of a root *(i)b(i) has been posited since Hubschmidt, because of its wide diffusion, not only in the Basque areas, but also, and mainly in the Iberian zones. Both explanations are not necessarily contradictory: u-ibi-bide > ubi or ibi. A related problem is that of the Basque word for 'bridge': zubi, a compound of zur ('wood, wooden', possibly a remote relative of a.Grk. xylon) and ubi or bide, thus meaning either 'wooden road' or 'wooden ford'. ibai ('river') and ibar ('river valley bottom, Sp. vega, Du. waard, polder'), but this is very controversial. It would be explained via 'running [water]'. Ibai is often thought of as the origin of Sp. vega (via ibai-ka), while ibar is usually related to Iberia, the Iberians and the river Ebro, etc. Finally, I would not exclude the possibility of *(i)b(i) being related to IE wad- (ua-dh-) (Eng. wade, Du. waden, Lat. vade:re), especially via the forms ibai and/or ibar, if the initial i is a prefix, as has often been thought. All this is, of course, rather speculative, even though based upon a body of pretty well accepted ideas. Anyway, it looks like the hard core of very ancient and definitely Basque words is still shrinking after words like (h)artz (bear, Gr.arktos), gizon (man, PIE*ghdonios) and maybe buru (head, Sl. golova) etc. have been exposed as of IE origin - or was it simply a very ancient common substrate origin? If you don't believe Basque has any relatives, not even extinct ones, forget what I said. If you do, I hope it will stimulate you to look into this type of problems. Something interesting might come out of it, both for Basque and for P...PIE. Kind regards, Ed. Selleslagh From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 05:49:50 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 00:49:50 EST Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Take the language that you describe an "ancestor" by whatever definition you >use above. Why are you assuming it also has to change status and become one >of the "daughters" just when another daughter emerges? -- because all living languages are in a process of constant change; they are all constantly evolving into their successors. What we call a "language" is a freeze-frame snapshot of this process, a description of the lexicon and structure _at a given moment_. The process is usually so slow that ordinary people don't notice it, but it's continuous nonetheless. A language which doesn't split into different branches will also, over time, 'cease to exist' and be supplanted by a successor-form. Greek is a good example. Modern Greek is not the same language as Classical; an ordinary speaker of Modern Greek and a representative Classical Greek speaker could not converse. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Dec 21 16:27:53 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 11:27:53 -0500 Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter In-Reply-To: <0.a30ebe91.254fbd90@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 1 Nov 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > You use the term "daughter" above. Whatever vague boundaries you used to > decide when a language BECOMES a "daughter" - think of why the other > remaining part of the parent also must at the same time become "a daughter?" > Whatever caused you to call the two languages "daughters", consider what > makes them both BECOME "daughters" and makes the parent disappear? So you > can say that a parent doesn't coexist with its daughter? This is a bit like asking what happened to the child who you used to be. Did that child "disappear" as you gradually became an adult? Maybe there's a sense in which that child disappeared, but I'd rather say that that child gradually changed into something other than what it was before. This isn't a perfect analogy since individual humans don't fork into multiple individuals of the same age, but it illustrates the point that thinking of the parent language "disappearing" isn't really the right way to think of the matter. > Take the language that you describe an "ancestor" by whatever definition you > use above. Why are you assuming it also has to change status and become one > of the "daughters" just when another daughter emerges? And at the very same > time (so that you can say there's no period of co-existence between parent > and daughter?) > "An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist with" a daughter. > Isn't this a reification? The only reason a parent can't co-exist with a > daughter is because you automatically change it into a daughter when there's > another daughter branching off. Aren't you creating another "daughter" > unnecessarily? > If you would have been satisfied with a single "ancestor" (by whatever your > definition is above) as a single language - if the branch off had not > happened - why are you turning that "ancestor" into a new language just > because a daughter branches off? > Isn't that reification? Aren't you unnecessarily creating a new "daughter > language" (however you mean it above) when nothing more than a part of it has > broken off? I think it's important to remember that while it's often useful to treat a language as a singular entity, what actually exists are multiple copies of more or less the same information in the minds of a community of humans. The copies are never perfectly identical, however: even in a small, relatively homogenous community of speakers, there are always variations from individual to individual. Further, the linguistic norm within any community always changes over time. A forking in a language follows from a forking in the community of speakers, typically because of migration leading to geographical separation. When the original single group splits into two groups who wander off from each other, the copies of the language information in the minds of the members of both groups start out basically identical. Over time, however, the norms in the two communities drift in separate directions, since the two groups are no longer in contact. In this post and in others, you've conceived of language branching as a main trunk which continues, and a daughter which separates off of this trunk and goes its own way (e.g., when you use the phrase "...a daughter branches off"). I'd argue that this is not looking at things the right way. There are only forkings. It's not possible for just one daughter to branch off; if there's been a forking, then you have two daughters. Perhaps some of the conceptual difficulty here comes from taking the biological metaphor of "parent" and "daughter" too literally. In biology, we are actually talking about separate individuals. I did not gradually develop from my mother or father by starting out as an identical copy of one of those individuals and gradually changing into someone else. In language, however, what we're talking about are copies of information which gradually change separately and become progressively more different from each other. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 07:16:24 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 02:16:24 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Satem is still a very good way to separate I-Ir from the western group. (I >believe the current stance is that satem may have been adopted by >Balto-Slavic.) -- The Baltic and Slavic languages have undergone satemization; there's no 'may' about it. eg., PIE Old Church Slavonic Lithuanian heart *krd sridice serdis hundred *kmtom suto simtas But both Slavic and Baltic (especially Baltic) also show some exceptions; eg., PIE *peku, 'cattle', becomes Lithuanian 'pekus', not 'pesus'. [ Moderator's note: Even Indo-Iranian shows some exceptions: Cf. Skt. _kravih._ "raw meat", Latin _cruor_ "gore, blood". --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 07:23:42 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 02:23:42 EST Subject: Northwest IE attributes Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >It would be good to know - however - why *specifically* you think some group >of IE speakers could not have branched off from PIE right from the start and >moved Northwest. That would be very interesting. -- because Baltic and Slavic share innovations, late isoglosses, with both Indo-Iranian and with Germanic. Eg., Both Baltic and Slavic and Indo-Iranian undergo satemization, and both groups also show the 'ruki rule' (modifications in *-s- after r, u, k or i. But Baltic and Slavic both share dateive and instrumental case endings in *-m- rather than in *-bh- as in all other IE languages which still have these cases. Exemplia, Lithuanian 'vilkams', OCS 'vulkomu', meaning 'to the wolves', but Sanskrit 'vrkebhyah'. This overlap indicates that after Indo-Iranian had moved far enough away to no longer share innovations with, say, Germanic, it was still in contact with Baltic and Slavic, and that Baltic and Slavic were still in contact with Germanic. In other words, there was still a dialect continuum across the whole Indo-European field at this time. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Dec 21 16:47:00 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 11:47:00 -0500 Subject: Northwest IE attributes In-Reply-To: <0.3a45a421.255501ae@aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 5 Nov 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Satem is still a very good way to separate I-Ir from the western group. (I > believe the current stance is that satem may have been adopted by > Balto-Slavic.) >From the early days of comparative work in the Indo-European languages, it has been universally observed and accepted that both Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic underwent the satem consonant shift. Saying that this is the "current stance" suggests that there's been controversy on the matter. > And Hittite separates itself from the northern group easily > enough. That leaves a distinct NW IE group. If we exclude Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, and Balto-Slavic, this leaves Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Greek, Armenian, Tocharian, and the poorly attested branches such as Phrygian. Did you really mean to include Greek, Armenian, and Tocharian in your "NW IE" grouping? This strikes me as a rather odd grouping, and I doubt it's what you meant. > ON THE OTHER HAND: No one to my knowledge has posted a list of the "shared > attributes" that the UPenn tree is based on. The best I saw was the few you > posted on the list and the few posted on the web. The most I can say is to point you to the articles which have already been published (I'm sure the references are on the web site), and to tell you again that the team is working on a monograph which will give every bit of information about their work. This is work in progress, and getting everything published takes time. [...] > It would be good to know - however - why *specifically* you think some group > of IE speakers could not have branched off from PIE right from the start and > moved Northwest. That would be very interesting. Suppose we construe "NW IE" to mean Italic, Celtic, and Germanic. It is quite true that these three branches share a number of lexical items not found in the other IE languages, and on those grounds, we might be tempted to group them. However, there are morphological items which would lead us to group the languages otherwise: for example, Italic and Celtic have an unusual superlative suffix not found in Germanic or in the other IE branches; other examples could be given. We know that words are readily borrowed, but inflectional morphology is almost never borrowed. Probably, the right answer is that the shared lexical items represent early loans between languages which don't form a proper clade in the IE phylogeny. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 07:41:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 02:41:51 EST Subject: IE technological vocabulary. Message-ID: Besides the words for "wheel", previously dealt with, we have: Yoke (for paired draught): PIE *iugom: from which Latin 'iugum', Hittit 'yukan', Sanskrit 'yugam'... In fact, transparent reflexes of 'yoke' fail to appear only in Albanian and Tocharian. Plow (agricultural implement): PIE *har: from which Latin 'aro', Lithuanian 'ariu', OCS 'orjo', Tocharian A 'are', etc.; and in Hittite, a derivative, 'hars' -- 'till the earth'. Axle: PIE *aks: from which Latin 'axis', Old English 'eax', Lithuanian 'asis', OCS 'osi', Mycenaean 'aksonos', Sanskrit 'aksa', etc. wagon/vehicle: PIE *wogho, from wich Old English 'waegn', etc., and through *ueghitlom, Latin 'vehiculum' and Sanskrit 'vahitram'; from *uoghos, OCS 'vozu', Mycenaean 'wokas', etc. And a whole great slew of other stuff relating to wheeled vehicles, plows, metal, weaving, milking and milk products, etc. Any _one_ item might be wrong, but it's vanishingly unlikely that they are as a group. The balance of probabilities, therefore, would be that it reflects a common inheritance, from the late Neolithic or the Copper Age. From kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu Tue Dec 21 06:52:30 1999 From: kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu (Sean Crist) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 01:52:30 -0500 Subject: What is Relatedness? In-Reply-To: <0.c85d79a5.255503d4@aol.com> Message-ID: On Fri, 5 Nov 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 10/26/99 11:09:50 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote: > < what the internal structure is for the family tree? In other words, how > do we decide which of these languages are more closely related than others > in the family?>> > But what does "more closely related" mean? This isn't just a question about > terminology. It rather goes to what we are proving and hope to prove by > establishing "relatedness." Consider the structure of the Germanic Stammbaum: PGmc / \ PNWGmc \ / \ \ WGmc NGmc EGmc When I say that WGmc is more closely related to NGmc than to EGmc, I mean that the lowest node dominating WGmc and NGmc is dominated by the lowest node dominating WGmc and EGmc. In other words, WGmc is said to be more closely related to NGmc than to EGmc because WGmc and NGmc share some innovations which EGmc did not undergo. We've previously discussed at great length exactly what this hierarchical structure represents, so I won't repeat it here. > If - for example - a language has innovated and borrowed so wildly that it > retains very little of the ancestor, it may be "more closely related" in some > chronological sense. No. The _amount_ of innovation is not the basis on which we draw Stammba"ume; we draw these trees on the basis of what is _shared_. [...] > A "backwoods" language exposed to new and sophisticated cultural and > technological input might expand many times over its original form. > Many new words and concepts might be introduced. The presence of loan words doesn't alter the genetic affiliation of a language. > New tenses might suddenly be needed to indicate matters of time and > relationships that simply did not matter in the old days. People who > calculated time only in terms of the seasons might need to start > perceiving and discriminating befores and afters, duratives and > completedness, perfects and aorists. Languages can certainly develop new tense markings over their history, but the explanation you've given here is teleological. There's nothing that would suggest that languages develop more complex tense systems upon coming into contact with a technologically more sophisticated culture. [...] > This is a side-path off of the discussion in which Larry Trask discussed a > language changing so much that it might be perceived as a different language. > And perhaps it raises the question whether counting the number of apparent > differences between languages (as e.g. the UPenn tree does to some degree) is > a valid way to measure genetic distance. Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor did not just "count" any old differences; what they were specifically looking for are shared characteristics which cannot reasonably be attributed to parallel innovation. > How much must a language borrow, for example, before it starts to owe more to > the loaning language than it does to a parent or grandparent that has just > left a few strands of genetic relation? It might owe a great deal to the loaning language in terms of its lexicon, but we just don't find cases where languages substantially borrow syntax or inflectional morphology. This is one of the reasons why inflectional morphology is extremely valuable in the determining genetic affiliation. Loan words are one of those things that we try to factor out when determining genetic affiliation. It doesn't matter how many words a language has borrowed; its genetic affiliation does not and cannot change. As we've previously discussed, you can often identify loan words, because they will not have undergone the sound changes which occurred in the language prior to the borrowing. [...] > < of shared characteristics of the languages which cannot reasonably be > attributed to parallel innovation or to borrowing. >> > And of course there is an inverse function that applies here. If some > languages had those shared characteristics, but lost them before they became > documented in writing or otherwise left no evidence - it would be taken as > evidence of relative unrelatedness. No, no, no. It's well known that things such as morphological categories can be independently lost; this is a very common sort of parallel innovation. Ringe, Warnow, and Taylor were well aware of this, and dealt with this problem by assigning a separate numeric code to each language in the case of such loss so that such spurious groupings would not occur. [...] > The UPenn seems to use a "value" or a neutral count (in terms of shared > innovations) called "lost." A _separate_ value is assigned for each branch to mean "lost". > This APPEARS to apply only to attributes that > are presumed to have been present in PIE. But the fact is that a truly > innovative language might have lost shared innovations that arose after PIE, > and those lost shared innovations might have given us a completely different > picture of relatedness. > But because the loss happened before documentation, we are mislead into > thinking they were never there. > After all, if presumed attributes of PIE can be "lost" in daughter languages, > then attributes ("shared innovation") of a sub-family - e.g., NW IndoEuropean > - could have been lost in a particularly innovative member of that subgroup - > e.g., Greek or Latin - before documentation. And I don't believe there is > any methodology that could neceassrily recover them. See my previous paragraph. \/ __ __ _\_ --Sean Crist (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu) --- | | \ / http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/ _| ,| ,| ----- _| ,| ,| [_] | | | [_] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 07:59:56 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 02:59:56 EST Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: >michael_nick at mail.ru writes: >I was told that Walter Wuest had an article on IE words denoting sexual >organs, but i couldn't find. Could anyone give a reference? I myself have >not infrequently been puzzled, that all three PIE words, which can be >reconstructed for 'vulva', have at the same time the meaning 'buttocks, >anus' (namely, *putos, *ksutos and *pisdeH2). Any suggestions? [ :-) ]. -- it's probably taboo replacement at work, with words that originally meant something like "down there" becoming too specific and being replaced in their turn. Eg., *pisdeH2 can be derived from *(h1e)pi- + s(e)d = "what one sits on". So you get a semantic progression from "what you sit on" ==> "ass" ==> "piece of ass" (cf. English slang!) ==> vulva/women's genitals. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Dec 18 06:16:51 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 06:16:51 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Dear Mike and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael" Sent: Saturday, December 18, 1999 7:54 AM > Dear IEists! > I was told that Walter Wuest had an article on IE words > denoting sexual organs, but i couldn't find. Could anyone > give a reference? I myself have not infrequently been puzzled, > that all three PIE words, which can be reconstructed for 'vulva', > have at the same time the meaning 'buttocks, anus' (namely, > *putos, *ksutos and *pisdeH2). Any suggestions? [ :-) ]. I would be very interested to read what others may write concerning *ksuto-s and *pisdeH2 but, for *pu:to-s, I think it is relatively certain that its basal meaning is 'source or site of strong fragrance' (as attested by *pu:ti-, 'rot'), a concept broad enough to include both cunnus and podex olfactorily. *ksuto-s probably is derived from *kes-, 'scratch, comb', and could characterize the 'vulva' (if shaved) and the 'buttocks' as 'smooth, hairless'; i.e. tactically. Both the 'vulva' and the 'buttocks' can also be characterized visually as a (bipartite) 'mound'. One way to account for this phenomenon is to attribute it to 'fat', and *pisdeH2 is very likely ultimately derived from *pey(6)-, 'be fat, be full of' + *sed-, 'sit', in the sense of 'seat/place of fatness'; this might be analogous with *ni-zd-os, 'nest'. Without having all attestations available, I will only speculate that the final -*H2 of your reconstruction is possibly due *not* to a "laryngeal" but rather is a result of Ablaut. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga mei?i, n?tr allar niu, geiri unda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i er mangi veit hvers hann af rotum renn." (Havamal 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Dec 19 10:47:50 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 10:47:50 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: Mike said: >all three PIE words, which can be reconstructed for 'vulva', > have at the same time the meaning 'buttocks, anus' The overlap need not be a surprise. Even in English (at least some dialects) this can happen. Some women of my acquaintance refer to "front bottom" and "back bottom", as if bottom meant both vulva and anus. Peter From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Tue Dec 21 11:23:43 1999 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 12:23:43 +0100 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: I don't know if anyone has provided Mike with data-specific references since his enquiry was posted. As for the cognitive processes which appear to underlie the projection of body-part terms from one part of the bodily domain to another, he could do worse than look at : 1) Wilkins D. Natural Tendencies of Semantic Change and the Search for Cognates. In Durie M. & M. Ross (eds.) (1996). The Comparative Method Reviewed. New York: Oxford University Press. 1996:264-304. and 2) Heine B. Cognitive Foundations of Grammar. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. esp. chap. 7. Best Wishes & Season's Greetings to all IEists, Dennis. From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Dec 29 20:30:48 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 20:30:48 -0000 Subject: PIE words for sexual organs Message-ID: A further thought: What about *no:t (back to backside) and *k'lou-ni (butocks to hips), neither of which seem to have been attached to the sexual organs? Peter From edsel at glo.be Sat Dec 18 11:39:20 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 12:39:20 +0100 Subject: Basque 'sei' Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: Larry Trask Date: Saturday, December 18, 1999 7:48 AM >Ed Selleslagh writes: >> Iberian has two sibilants (and also rhotics) that might very well be the >> same as the Basque ones, including the affricated varieties. >Iberian certainly had two contrasting sibilants (at least), but the phonetic >nature of the contrast is entirely unknown. Aquitanian probably had at least >four, and perhaps six, of the things, but the Roman orthography was defective, >and the various sibilants were not written in any very consistent manner. [Ed Selleslagh] The nature of the contrast of the two Iberian sibilants is not entirely unknown, as some toponyms have survived: e.g. Saitabi(a) > Xa'tiva, which indicates that the S must have been rather closer to Basque (apical) s than z. Some Iberian words are extremely similar to some Basque words (I know you don't accept this to be anything but coincidence), and these similarities always point to a systematic correspondance of the two Iberian sibilants and Basque s and z. >From toponyms and other words one can deduce that Aquitanian and Iberian also had the corresponding affricates (ts and tz). In Iberian script these are written exactly as the non-affricated ones. In other scripts and in Aquitanian in Latin script orthography is pretty confusing, but often resembles later usages. I don't know where you found that Aquitanian may have had two additional sibilants. >> The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type >> distinction, I believe. >I don't follow. Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it is >apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably laminal. >But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from Latin /k/ >before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of affricate >before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region). [Ed] In derivations from Latin this true, but in all other cases it is not. I didn't mean that the Castilian s/z distinction is descended directly from the Basque apical/laminal opposition, as a parallel evolution in particular words, but that its very existence is due to a pre-existing awareness of such a phonological distinction (it did in Iberian), something most European languages don't have (and ditto for the rhotics). >> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants. >Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no >evidence that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still >less on Basque phonology. [Ed] As far as Castilian is concerned, I am not so sure: does any one have any references or information on that subject? In Basque, it is rather the opposite: e.g. kuttun < kitab, i.e. Arabic words were adapted to Basque phonology. Ed. From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Dec 18 12:05:29 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 13:05:29 +0100 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology In-Reply-To: <00d701bf41d8$4ab0b7e0$ef9f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >> I would like to make a correction. Armenian (not ) doesn't >> mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses >> regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that >> Albanian is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally, >> "wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming >> from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic >> (according to V. Illyich-Svidich). >I have heard this claim often but frankly have never run into anyone who is >willing to defend the proposition. >Are you game? Or is VIS the last word on it? The wine-word has for long been thought to be an originally near-eastern Wanderwort, mainly because it is so widespread in the NE and because this region is generally thought to be the origin of wine-cultivation. However, there may be reasons to believe that the word is originally IE after all, since a connection to the root *weiH- "twist around athl." seems likely (cf. Latin vi:tis "vine", vieo: "bind", Lith. vyti, veju` "wind" etc.). The NE words, then, would be loans from one or several IE sources (Hattic windu-, Ar. wain, Hebr. yayin [which show a rather old intra-Semitic sound-law, pointing to some early date of the borrowing], Georgian Gvino may evidence the intermediate stage of the Armenian w- > g- shift, and thus point to a loan-scenario from (pre-)Armenian to Georgian (it doesn't seem to be of proto-language age in Kartvelian). So, the IE > elswhere-scenario is favoured over the elsewhere > IE one by its possibly being derived from an IE verbal root. Of course, there is room for doubt. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From varny at cvtci.com.ar Sat Dec 18 14:49:32 1999 From: varny at cvtci.com.ar (Vartan and Nairy Matiossian) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 11:49:32 -0300 Subject: Fwd: Re: Pre-Basque Phonology Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Vartan and Nairy Matiossian" > Sent: Sunday, October 31, 1999 1:48 AM > >> I would like to make a correction. Armenian (not ) doesn't >> mean 'wine', but 'grapevine, grape'. There are two plausible hypotheses >> regarding its IE origins, by Pedersen and Ajarian. The latter adds that >> Albanian is unrelated to the Arm. term. Incidentally, >> "wine" is "gini" in Armenian, both English and Armenian terms coming >> from a common PIE source, seemingly borrowed from Proto-Semitic >> (according to V. Illyich-Svidich). > I have heard this claim often but frankly have never run into anyone who is > willing to defend the proposition. > Are you game? Or is VIS the last word on it? Dear Pat, I'm not aware of any counterclaim to Illyich-Svidich. It doesn't mean there isn't any, just I'm too far from University-Libraries to be aware of daily developments. (For instance, I know personally Vahan Sargisian, I have been contributing to his Armeno-Basque studies journal, "Araxes", in Yerevan, I have several of his other articles, but I was pleasingly surprised to hear about his latest article in Fontes Linguae Vasconum, thanks to Ed Selleslagh). In connection to the Arm. etymology of "gini" (wine), Guevork Djahukian --besides noting VIS-- has advanced the view that it could be stemmed from IE *uin ("to twist, to twirl"), bearing in mind the regularity of the Arm. root. Regards, Vartan From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 21:23:15 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 16:23:15 EST Subject: Dating the final IE unity Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I think the simplicity of the kurgan solution is only there so long as you >don't dive into the evidence. When you do, Renfrew's neolithic proposal >begins to make more and more "common sense." -- except that it's linguistic nonsense, which requires Celtic to remain completely unchanged for 4000 years, Greek to be more closely related to Hittite than to Sanskrit, and so forth and so on. It's a "solution" to a non-existant problem. >The problem is basic. If you date IE unity on the basis of the date of the >earliest wheel (only an example) then you know your dates will change if >evidence of the wheel moves back a thousand years - which it well may. -- but it has not. Are we to date the IE unity on the basis of evidence as yet uncovered? A great many highly skilled people have been looking for evidence of wheeled vehicles for a long, long time. Nobody's found any prior to the 4th millenium. From sarima at friesen.net Tue Dec 21 00:50:42 1999 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 16:50:42 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE) In-Reply-To: <0.5f5d9fbb.25832c46@aol.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: I have changed Mr. Friesen's address from "sarima at ix.netcom.com" to his new address "sarima at friesen.net". --rma ] At 11:25 PM 12/10/99 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >-- the Sintashta site, upper Ural river, northeast of the Caspian; early >Andronovo, if memory serves. That matches the map in Mallory's old book. My take on this would be that this supports my idea that the chariot proper was invented by Proto-Indo-Iranian speakers (as opposed to being PIE proper in origin). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Sun Dec 19 07:04:07 1999 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 23:04:07 -0800 Subject: Andronovo or Yamnaya? In-Reply-To: <0.5f5d9fbb.25832c46@aol.com> Message-ID: After a month's time, I've lost track of what the following was in reply to: can anyone enlighten me? Max Dashu >>sarima at ix.netcom.com writes: >>Oooh, I had missed that somehow. Just to make sure I have the right place: >>do you mean near the northern shore of the Caspian? Are they associated >>with the NW Andronovo or the eastern (Volga-Ural) branch of the Yamnaya >>complex? >> >-- the Sintashta site, upper Ural river, northeast of the Caspian; early >Andronovo, if memory serves. [ Moderator's note: This was in response to the following, from October: >From: JoatSimeon at aol.com >Message-ID: <0.28500277.253e9d18 at aol.com> >Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 00:20:40 EDT >Subject: Re: Dating the final IE unity [ moderator snip ] >>sarima at ix.netcom.com writes: >>The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is >>quit telling here. (Mallory does not actually mention this, as it was not >>yet known when he wrote his book).>> >-- very true; they showed up just where he predicted them. >Likewise, efforts to show that chariots are not associated with IE-speakers >(or at least early Indo-Iranians) have pretty well collapsed now that recent >excavations have shown the earliest chariots to be placed not in the middle >east or Anatolia in the 2nd millenium BCE, but in the southern Ural area and >no later than the 20th century BCE. My apologies for the confusion. --rma ] From sarima at ix.netcom.com Tue Dec 21 01:01:11 1999 From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 17:01:11 -0800 Subject: Dating the final IE unity In-Reply-To: <0.529527ab.2588a657@aol.com> Message-ID: At 03:07 AM 12/15/99 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In the meantime, other evidence erupted on the scene - not the least of which >was the use of carbon dating to flesh out the Neolithic Revolution story and >the central position of Anatolia. So? The linguistic evidence puts PIE as post-neolithic. Thus the Neolithic Revolution is too old on linguistic grounds. Personally, given the evidence recently published on the possibility of a common substratal influence between Albanian and Basque, I would more readily associate *that* unknown language group with the Neolithic Revolution. (I also have a hypothesis that many of the words containing 'a' that are found in various subsets of Celtic, Italic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic may come from a widespread substratal language family, which may, or may not, be the same, and which may also be a good candidate for the language family spread by the Neolothic Revolution). >Perhaps the most recent trend has been the realization that "kurgan" >characteristics did not cause anything but minor changes in a great many >areas where they were adopted. So? Why does language replacement *have* to make more than a minor change? > More important changes seem to have to do >with climate, economics and resulting changes in trade and material >processing and social structure. The economic changes seem, to me, to be a possibly sufficient motivation for adopting a new language - to the language of the rich folk who ran the trade system. > In general, the increased populations >created by the Neolithic Revolution stayed where they were both in Europe and >elsewhere "where IE is later found." So? What is wrong with an existing population adopting a new language? > The influx was not of new peoples in >most cases and where they were we do not find horse warriors, but rather "the >sheperds of the kurgan culture" as one recent research report described them. So? Just because the martial aspect of the model is wrong doesn't make the *whole* model wrong. There are other ways of spreading language than warfare and large-scale population replacement. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Dec 18 21:29:18 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 21:29:18 GMT Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) In-Reply-To: <0.6d88cf02.2583d21f@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In Swedish, the sound a snake makes is called . In Polish, a word for >snake is . That's actually (G: ), i.e. /vo~S/ /ve~Za/, from CSlav. *o~z^- < *angi-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From jrader at m-w.com Mon Dec 20 09:21:09 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 09:21:09 +0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) Message-ID: Not to nitpick, but the Polish word in question is , with a ogonek (hook) denoting nasality under the and a dot over the , meaning it's a voiced palato-alveolar fricative (devoiced in final position, but voiced when any inflectional ending is added). The nasal is phonetically not [a] with nasality but rather a vowel close to IPA open o with nasality; it alternates in the paradigm of the word with with a hook, a front nasal vowel. Jim Rader > In Swedish, the sound a snake makes is called . In Polish, a word for > snake is . The difference in usage can be subtle, but it is rather > faithfully applied in both languages. Does this make too ubiquitous? > Or would it make his list? Or does its appearance in both languages say > something about the origins of the word and would that justify the word > making that list? From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Dec 18 22:32:12 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 23:32:12 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) In-Reply-To: <0.6d88cf02.2583d21f@aol.com> Message-ID: >Without casting any aspersions on your judgments as a highly competent >professional linguist, unless you can state "operationally coherent" >definitions of your prescreening criteria, your choices can look VERY >arbitrary. And if you can state operable definitions, the computer should be >doing the "choosing" to confirm the objectivity of the distinctions being >made. That is the "control" that would be expected in other fields when one >would claim that a computer is confirming ones choices. Though I'm not sure I'm on the height of the current discussion, I think this is about excluding descriptive terms from word lists used to "prove" genetic relatedness (or, for that matter, to form hypotheses about it). I think, the operational definition Steve Long is asking for can be given without much ado. - Exclude all words which arouse the slightest suspicion that any sensual (mostly, of course, acoustical) perception which might be associated with the real-world item they denote may have played a role in shaping its actual form. This rules any kind of imitatives and expressive terms. Any real language family will be able to stand on its own legs, without such items taken into account. Any proposal which has to resort to these is in dire straits anyway. Of course, with linguae quarum affinitas est demonstrata (as opposed to demonstranda), it may well be the case that some highly expressive term may after all turn out to have come into existence due to some regular processes which derived from some less expressive root/word (as, for example, it is the case with Russian /zhvachki/ "chewing-gum" - a truly expressive word for my taste - which remounts to some very unexpressive root for "chew" in Slavic and, even less so, IE). Again, a successful demonstration of relatedness will be able to do without them, if the relationship really holds water. The reason for the necessity to exclude expressives is not hard to guess - it is simply that in the *systems* made up by linguistic items (so-called "languages") the very ability of human vocal tracts to (approximatively) imitate some noises found in the outside world operates as a strong attractor. And of course, we know that attractors (strange or not so strange) disturb systems. But without demonstrating systematicity in correspondences we have demonstrated nothing. Relationship is demonstrated, or, better, the demonstration of relatedness is strongest, the more items are shown to coincide which conform to the good old principle of "l'arbitraire du signe". Of course we do know, that this principle is not all-pervasive in language, iow. that iconocity is with us on various levels, so those items have to go without mercy or remorse. So, the operational definition is easy: throw the expressives out, here, unlike in law, a first suspicion dictates the sentence. Every sensible linguist who is doing classificatory work mainly to advance our knowledge about it will do this. There are of course others - *certainly* not on this list, but I've met them on others - who do classification mainly to advance their careers or their standing in some very exclusive circles, where it is of prime importance to claim something new or unorthodox - then, of course, different rules are to be observed. But this need not detain us here. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Dec 18 22:44:38 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 23:44:38 +0100 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria In-Reply-To: <004701bf4477$ca0cd9a0$719f113f@oemcomputer> Message-ID: >I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a >substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance >they have in most human societies. >Let us assume that, for reasons I cannot fathom, children all over the world >are *independently motivated* (by what, pray tell ???) to employ for >'mother'. I don't see any difficulty here. When you do nothing, repeat nothing specific with your vocal tract or articulatory apparatus but keep your mouth shut and switch on your vocal cords you have /m/. If, then, you go one step further and open your mouth for a change, guess what is the most likely vowel to come out ? Right. Now, what happens next is that mothers *do* like to be addressed by their infants as early as possible by something which could be interpreted as something in the way of a "word". What is more natural, then, to *conventionalize* the simplest audible syllable any infant is likely to produce very early in its career as a language-user as precisely that: "mother" ? To make it a bit more harder to meet this requirement for the infant, one introduces reduplication as a further requirement, and there you are. Of course, this doesn't *have* to happen in each and every speech community of mankind, it is only tremendously likely. Any different conventionalizations like Georgian /mama/ "father" or language without bilablials or whatnot should not disturb us here. In this respect, Pat may even be right in assuming that the first homines loquentes might have had a conventionalized "mother"-term closely resempling /mama/ or sthlth. *But*, the fact that it is still so wide-spread today among the world's languages would *not* cry for the explanation that it is a *retention* from olim's times. The very reasons outlined above make it clear that it is likely to be *innovated* time and again in languages. So, again, we have an attractor here, and the nursery words go out. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Dec 21 10:45:18 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 10:45:18 +0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Pat Ryan writes: [on Mama-papa words like Basque 'mother'] [snip] > I feel that you may be mixing apples with oranges here. > I would, myself, be quite sceptical of any claim that an imitative word like > indicated anything more than an attempt to capture the quintessential > acoustic impression of a cat-call. > But, 1) there is nothing "imitative" about for 'mother'; Agreed, but I didn't mean to say there was. The point is not that such words are imitative; the point is that they are *motivated*. > 2) more > importantly, does not have the form we would expect from childish > babbling, which, I hope you would agree, would be along the lines of > C(1)V(1)C(1)V(1). Yes; babbling is stereotypically of the form CVCV (reduplicated). But not invariably so. > I gladly concede that , , , etc. are childish attempts > to render other words, e.g. <*?ama> and <*?atV>, etc. Oh, no -- this is not the point at all. See below. > but there is nothing > that I know which *necessitates* or universally *inclines* children all over > the world to connect /m/ with 'motherhood' or /d/ or /t/ with > 'paternity' --- short of some universalistic sound-symbolism argument, which > I provisionally do not accept. No; this is a misunderstanding. Children do not make any such connections as those suggested at all. The point is that nursery words are *not* invented by children: they are invented by adults. Once children reach the stage at which they are beginning to have enough control over their vocal tracts to produce speech sounds consistently, they behave in a highly consistent fashion, as argued by Jakobson as long ago as 1941. The first vowel they learn to produce is [a] -- the easiest vowel to produce, since it requires minimal tongue action. The first consonants they produce are labials -- [m], [b], [p] -- presumably because these require no tongue control. The next consonants they learn are coronals -- [n], [d], [t] -- presumably because these require no more than the raising of the tip/blade of the tongue. Velars, which require bending of the tongue, come later, as do other consonants. Accordingly, the first consistent noises the eager parents hear from the child are things like [(m)ama], [(b)aba], [(p)apa], followed by [(t)ata], [(d)ada], and so on. It is at this point that the delighted parents decide that their child is trying to speak -- which is very doubtful -- and assume happily that the little bugger is trying to say 'mother' and 'father'. The assumption that the kid is trying to say 'mother', rather than 'tickle' or 'telephone' or 'banana' is one made *entirely* by the parents. Jumping to this conclusion, the happy parents begin to speak back to the child, using what they fondly -- but wrongly -- believe to be the child's own words. In this way, such "mama-papa words" -- as we call them -- can become institutionalized in adult speech. So, such words recur in lots of languages as a direct consequence of the observable universal progression of speech-sound production in infants, coupled with the widespread tendency of parents to interpret these early sounds as having specific meanings. That's all. > I would suggest rather that these very ancient words have been retained in a > substantially unchanged form because of the strong emotional significance > they have in most human societies. But this is fanciful, and there exists a far simpler explanation. Just listen to an infant producing its first speech sounds, and you have your explanation. Nothing more elaborate is called for. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Dec 22 09:31:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 09:31:53 +0000 Subject: Refining early Basque criteria (miau) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Steve Long writes: > Pat Ryan wrote: > < consideration of inclusion in Pre-Basque.... It may be that this category of > terms has preserved an older or non-typical phonological form than other > words of the vocabulary but they should be seriously considered because of > their ubiqiuity.>> [SL] > (This would seem to be an essential consideration in tracking the > phonological history of any language. After all, a "central" question about > Basque and its uniqueness is common ancestry with other languages. Evidence > of its descent to seem to involve considering words that would be relatively > "ubiquitous." At minimum, this matter would seem to deserve careful > qualification and not a flat yes-or-no. But it seems I'm wrong...) Indeed. The Basque for a cow-noise is , for a sheep-noise , for a dog-noise , for a rooster-noise . Now these words are strikingly similar in form and meaning to words in English and in a number of other languages. Does Steve, or anybody, want to argue that this observation constitutes evidence of any kind for the common ancestry of Basque and some other languages? > In a message dated 12/11/99 5:38:52 AM, LTrask replied to Pat Ryan: > < After all, in most of the languages on the planet, the word for a cat-noise > is something like , but this ubiquity is not an argument for pushing > the word back to Pre-Proto-Everything. Rather, it is a compelling argument > for disregarding the word altogether, on grounds of *motivated* independent > creation.>> > This kind of statement reflects a basic problem in the way Prof. Trask is > approaching the use of a computer in acheiving some kind of objective results > about his subject matter. How is he defining "ubiquity"? Is this "miau" > word in any dictionaries he is using to support his statement about "most of > the languages of the planet?" How much ubiquity is enough ubiquity for > exclusion? > In Swedish, the sound a snake makes is called . In Polish, a word for > snake is . The difference in usage can be subtle, but it is rather > faithfully applied in both languages. Does this make too ubiquitous? > Or would it make his list? Or does its appearance in both languages say > something about the origins of the word and would that justify the word > making that list? On the other hand, does not appear in the > dictionaries of either language. Does that mean it's not ubiquitous enough > to be excluded? Would you have to go to a Japanese, a Bantu and a Finnish > lexicon to answer that question - diregarding Swedish and Polish? Is there > something about a snake noise versus cat noise that makes one ubiquitous and > the other not? > Can you state that rule so that readers will know how you intend to apply > this exclusionary process to other animal noises? In the interest of > establishing the "principled" nature of your prescreening process. So that > an observer may say with confidence that the results of your prescreening is > not a case of GIGO? > Without casting any aspersions on your judgments as a highly competent > professional linguist, unless you can state "operationally coherent" > definitions of your prescreening criteria, your choices can look VERY > arbitrary. And if you can state operable definitions, the computer should be > doing the "choosing" to confirm the objectivity of the distinctions being > made. That is the "control" that would be expected in other fields when one > would claim that a computer is confirming ones choices. Perhaps I didn't express myself very well. Pat Ryan suggested that instances of form-meaning correspondences that are very widespread in languages, such as the mama-papa words, should be taken as serious evidence for remote common ancestry. I disagreed, on the ground that such form-meaning correspondences can readily be shown to be independently motivated. And it is not so much the ubiquity of such items that is the point: it is the motivation. But it is precisely such motivated form-meaning pairs that tend to exhibit some noticeable degree of "ubiquity" -- though never total ubiquity, of course. Let me cite an example from outside language. As is well known, many species produce what we label "danger calls" on perceiving a predator. Some species have two or three different calls for different kinds of predator -- for example, airborne versus ground-dwelling. Now, it has been observed that a diverse array of species -- birds and small mammals -- all use acoustically very similar danger calls for warning of hawks and similar flying predators: a kind of high-pitched [siiiii] noise. Since such calls are found in a range of birds and mammals, the descent view favored by Ryan would require us to derive all these calls from a single ancestral hawk-warning call in Proto-Mammal-Bird, over 300 million years ago. Right? But there's a much better explanation. Hawks have acute hearing, and they are very good at locating the source of a sound accurately. This fact would appear to make the production of *any* danger call a very dangerous enterprise for the individual producing it, and hence an evolutionary disaster for his species. *But*. It turns out that the hawk's usually reliable sound-location mechanism breaks down with high-pitched noises resembling [siiiii]: it can't locate the source. So, we have a simple explanation for the widespread form-meaning pairing that we observe in diverse species: independent motivated creation. Individuals that produce such calls are not spotted, and they survive and pass on their genes. Individuals that produce other calls get spotted and eaten. So, since there exists a simple explanation for the widespread form-meaning pairing in terms of motivation, its "ubiquity" is already accounted for, and there is no reason to appeal to common origin. As I pointed out in an earlier posting, just such a motivated explanation is available for mama-papa words (and, of course, for imitative words like 'moo'), and hence these items, the ones which recur so frequently in diverse languages, cannot serve as evidence for common origin. To put it another way, comparative linguistics is obliged to work with linguistic items which are arbitrary in form -- items, that is, whose form is in no way motivated by their meaning. Trying to work with motivated (non-arbitrary) items is a guarantee of spurious conclusions. > And why is it again that you can't feed the entire contents of Basque into > the computer first as "raw" data and then do these operations? As I've said before, the use or non-use of a computer is not a matter of principle, but only of procedure. Once the database is assembled, the computer is faster and more accurate than a person, but it still can't do anything other than what a person tells it to do. Nor does the use of a computer in any way guarantee greater objectivity. If I decide to reject words showing property P, then I can do this by hand or with a computer program, and the results will be the same. After all, the computer isn't going to inform me that it doesn't like my criteria. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Dec 18 21:32:03 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 16:32:03 EST Subject: *Degrees* of evidential value Message-ID: >ECOLING at aol.com writes: << (though some words for 'cat' will also relate to ). >> -- Ancient Egyptian for "cat" was "miw". From mclasutt at brigham.net Sat Dec 18 23:41:14 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 16:41:14 -0700 Subject: Re Personal pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I love jumping into the middle of a discussion without having read in detail the previous discussion, but this is just too tempting. I've been reading quite a number of introductory syntax books lately for teaching purposes, and every single one of them lists the possessive pronouns as straightforward determiners. They aren't even classed as "components of a determiner" in the way that "The little poor child" is a component of a determiner in the sentence, "The little poor child's Christmas was quite happy." This really isn't a point of contention among linguists. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Sun Dec 19 01:51:57 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 01:51:57 GMT Subject: permissible IE roots? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995: 120-22 give the following rules for IE >roots with stops (that is, if my notes are correct): > 1. No 2 consonants of the same order can occur in the same root > 2. Series II * III can't occur in the same root > 3. Series I & II almost never occur in the same root exceptions >include *bhak'- "share, portion, etc", *bhbk'o- "beech", *k^'egh- "branch" >(Germanic and Baltic only) [BUT *k^'egh- seems to violate rule 1] Gamkrelidze and Ivanov explicitly allow combinations k^ .. k, kw .. k etc. (if I remember correctly, they take the occurrence of such roots with velar + palato-velar as evidence for the separate status of the palato-velars). > problematic roots in Watkins: *ka:dh- "to shelter, cover", *kagh- >"to catch, seize", *kaghlo- "pebble, hail", *kak-1 "to enable, help", >*kekw- "to excrete", > Question: > Does the addition of other consonants or velar/palatal differences >allow exceptions to G/I rules? e.g. *ghelegh- "type of metal", *kenk- with >other consonants, *kekw-, stembh-, steigh- See above for palatal/velar/labiovelar. The presence of *s-, which forces a following stop to be voiceless [presumably sd > st, sdh > st(h)], allows for exceptions to the rule. The rule does not work across morpheme boundaries (e.g. *ghelegh- is clearly extended from *ghel- "yellow") [admittedly there is a risk here that any exceptions to the rule can be explained away as "root extensions", making the theory unfalsifiable]. It's interesting that Watkins' exceptions all involve the problematic vowel *a. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Dec 19 10:42:05 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 10:42:05 -0000 Subject: permissible IE roots? Message-ID: Permissable roots: Yes there are exceptions. The "root constraints" refer to a striking imbalance in proportions of combinations, so that we can suggest some kind of constraint, which was overridden in "Lall-woerter" or borrowings or in expressive noises. The constraints are far from an invariable rule. (1) The IE /b/ Bird's summary of basic IE roots from Pokorny has 28 roots with initial b, 4 with medial b, and 27 with final b. Note that this includes 4 overlaps: the roots *bab = to swell and *bamb (listed twice) = to swell and = bump; and the root *baba = babbling. That's a total of 55 basic roots. About a third of these are clearly onomatapoeic. Compare the 28 with initial b against the 20 with initial g' and the 22 with initial kw. Initially, there is nothing particularly odd about /b/! The peculiar lack is in medial and final position. (2) Root constraints (a) Yes, for the purposes of root constraints, palatalised k' is treated differently from plain k, but kw appears to be treated the same as plain k. The evidence is: k' co-occurs with k. 10 cases with initial k', 1 with initial sk', 1 medial, 3 final. g' occurs three times with g, only in the order gVg'; g'h with gh twice. kw co-occurs with k' twice, once each way round, but not with k. (b) Yes, the presence of initial s- devoices the following consonant, and appears to neutralise voicing rules: so roots like *stegh are not uncommon. (3) Another constraint G & I suggest that only roots with two voiceless stops (or initial s which devoices the initial stop) show zero grade! Peter From dbaum at isdn.net.il Fri Dec 31 16:07:28 1999 From: dbaum at isdn.net.il (Daniel Baum) Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 18:07:28 +0200 Subject: permissible IE roots? Message-ID: Hi all, On a similar subject, would anyone happen to know why there appear to be no roots of the form CHH? There are roots with two laryngeals (such as one of the words for "to sit", as in Skt aaste), but none with two contiguous. Happy new year, century and millenium, Daniel Baum msdbaum at mscc.huji.ac.il, dbaum at isdn.net.il Home Page http://www.angelfire.com/il/dbaum Tel: ++972-2-583-6634; Mob. ++972-54-972-829 > Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995: 120-22 give the following rules for IE > roots with stops (that is, if my notes are correct): [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Dec 19 02:11:34 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 20:11:34 -0600 Subject: Basque butterflies In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Group 1a. >bitxilote (B) >bitxileta >pitxilote (B) >pitxoleta (B) >pitxeleta (B) >pitxilota (B) >These appear to be based on , western variant , 'pretty little >thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an >independent >word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first element in >expressive and nursery formations. The final element is entirely obscure, and >very likely a meaningless expressive element. Any possible link between and Spanish "bug, critter, varmint" and also various slang meanings [snip] >These variants show an unexpected initial /m/. This might result either >from a >perception that they are expressive formations (/m/ is much favored in >expressive formations in Basque), or from contamination by >'Mike', the >regular diminutive of 'Michael'. (Personal names are frequent as >first >elements in expressive names for small creatures: note, for example, > 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'.) maybe influenced by Spanish "Grasshopper", literally "jump weeds" [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Sun Dec 19 10:58:01 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 11:58:01 +0100 Subject: Basque butterflies Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: Larry Trask Date: Sunday, December 19, 1999 12:11 AM >A while ago, Lloyd Anderson suggested, in connection with his comments on the >IE list about my criteria for identifying native, ancient and monomorphemic >Basque words, that it might be useful to look at the Basque words for >'butterfly'. I am now able to oblige. [Ed Selleslagh] First a general comment: the word for 'butterfly' is one of the most unpredictable and capricious ones in all languages I know of. I really wonder about its relevance for linguistics in general. Example: Western Germanic: Dutch: vlinder, German: Schmetterling, English: butterfly, and those are languages that share an impressive part of their vocabulary! >I have grouped the forms into nine classes, of which the first is subdivided. >Group 1a. >bitxilote (B) >bitxileta >pitxilote (B) >pitxoleta (B) >pitxeleta (B) >pitxilota (B) >These appear to be based on , western variant , 'pretty little >thing', 'ornament', 'jewel', an item well attested everywhere as an >independent word (though in varying senses), and also very frequent as a first >element in expressive and nursery formations. The final element is entirely >obscure, and very likely a meaningless expressive element. [Ed] I would rather guess that it's derived from 'bizi', and refers to the 'liveliness' of a butterfly, one of its most notable characteristics. The final element is clearly a diminitutivizing, 'endearing', suffix, very probably of Romance origin. In Mexico for instance, the suffix -Vlote is quite common in names for small animals or insects (In some cases, however, the origin might be Nahuatl). >(See also Alavese Spanish . Alava was Basque-speaking until >recently, and the local Spanish has, or until recently had, a number of loans >from Basque.) >Group 1b. >mitxeleta (B, G) (1745) >mitxilote (B) >mitxoleta >mitxelot (B) >(and many more variants) >These variants show an unexpected initial /m/. This might result either from >a perception that they are expressive formations (/m/ is much favored in >expressive formations in Basque), or from contamination by 'Mike', >the regular diminutive of 'Michael'. (Personal names are frequent as >first elements in expressive names for small creatures: note, for example, > 'grasshopper', literally 'Marty-jump'.) [Ed] It looks more plausible that it is simply a case of b > m as so often happened in Basque, even in Roman times: bacillum > makila. So, 1a and 1b are basically the same. >Group 1c. >tximeleta (B, G) (1912) >txipilota >txipeleta (G) >txipilipeta >(and others) >Agud and Tovar see the last-cited variant as involving "clear nursery >intervention". >These appear to represent metathesized forms of the preceding. Curiously, >these western forms are entirely absent from Azkue's 1905 dictionary, even >though Azkue was a native speaker of the western dialect Bizkaian, for which >he provided exceptionally detailed coverage in his dictionary. Today, the >form , not recorded before 1912, is nearly universal in the western >dialects, and has been accepted as the standard Basque word for 'butterfly'. [Ed] I rather agree with your idea of a metathesis. So, 1a, 1b and 1c may be considered to be one and the same: 'little lively thing'. >Group 2. >txitxidola (LN) >txitxipapa (HN) >txitxitera (Z) >These eastern forms exhibit the reduplicated sequence , very common in >nursery formations, with what appear to be arbitrary final elements: these >final elements have no other existence. [Ed] The first part looks like a direct (nursery style) derivation of Group 1. -dola has a diminutive meaning, -papa may be related to 'papillon', while -tera is a common derivative suffix. So, 2 is actually a descendant of 1. >Group 3. >pinpirin (L) (17th c) >pinpirina (L) (17th c) >pinpirineta (Z) >pinpilinpauxa (L) (1905) >The Lapurdian dialect is exceptionally fond of expressive formations in >initial and , a pattern sparsely attested in other dialects; see >Lhande's dictionary of French Basque for more examples. The last and longest >form appears to contain a palatalized form of eastern (n.) 'pause, >stop, hesitation, rest, repose' or its verbal derivative 'pause, >stop'; these derive from Latin. Compare standard Castilian >'butterfly', literally 'Mary-perch', from 'perch, alight', itself >descended from the Latin . [Ed] I completely agree. >Group 4. >inguma (G) (1745) >This curious word does not look like an expressive formation. But the same >word is recorded from 1664 as 'incubus, succubus'. We may therefore surmise a >possibly unattested late Latin * 'female incubus, succubus', which, if >borrowed into Basque, would regularly yield the attested . The >motivation is not obvious, but I have seen pictures of the night-demons >portraying them as perched on top of the bodies of their sleeping victims, so >maybe the butterfly's habit of perching is the motivation. [Ed] I completely agree. >Group 5. >altxatulili >altxa-lili (LN) >altxabili (HN) >The first two are transparently compounded from the Romance loan >'raise', stem , plus another Romance loan, 'lily, flower'. Or >so it would seem, even though the semantic motivation eludes me. But the >third variant rather muddies the waters. It may be a somewhat unusual >dissimilation of the preceding. But Agud and Tovar suggest a different >formation whose second element is the common verb 'be in motion'. >Maybe, but V-V --> N is a decidedly unusual type of word-formation in Basque. [Ed] I guess this is right. Group 6. >zintzitoil (L) >xintxitoila (L) >xintxitoil (L) >xintxitola (L) >xitxitol >The first variant is unpalatalized, while the others show the palatalization >typical of expressive formations. We cannot tell if the first form is >conservative or merely a back-formation. In all its variants, this form is >utterly opaque in formation. The form strongly suggests an expressive >formation particularly typical of the eastern varieties. See Lhande's >dictionary of French Basque for dozens of examples of this type. [Ed] The first part seems to go back to some onomatopeia 'zintz-', probably referring to the noise of a flying insect. The -tola part is, again, diminutivizing. >Group 7. >maripanpalona >This shows another pattern typical of expressive names for small creatures: >the use of 'Mary' as a first element. The rest is opaque. Corominas >suggests a link with Latin 'butterfly', but I doubt it. While I >have no regional provenance for this form, I suspect that it is eastern, and >eastern dialects, especially Lapurdian, just love expressive formations in > and , recall. [Ed] Instead of the Latin original 'papilio', I would suggest French 'papillon' or a southern 'French' variant of it. When words pass from one language into another, especially if it is an unrelated one, the weirdest things can happen: e.g. Greek to Turkish: Konstantinopolis > Istanbul (epenthetic i-), Sagalassos > Aglasun. Greek to Germanic and Romance: episkopos (=supervisor) > bisschop, Bischof, bishop, ?v?que, obispo, vescovo; presbyteros (=elder) > priester, Priester, priest, pr?tre, prete. >Group 8. >atxitamatxi (Sout) >This unique item, recorded only in the 16th century in the long-extinct >Southern dialect (as , with Romance spelling and the final >article <-a>), is totally opaque. It looks like a straight-out expressive >formation. [Ed] I think we can safely analyze this as atxi-(e)ta-matxi, the last part being an expressive reduplication of the first. 'atxi' (a palatalized diminutive) may be related to the concept of 'tail'. So, it would mean something like 'little thing that moves its tail'. >Group 9. >jainkoaren oilo (LN) >jankoilo >The first is literally 'God's hen', the second 'God-hen'. I don't understand >the motivation, but both hens and butterflies perch, so maybe that's it. [Ed] Probably some superstition, comparable to the one surrounding the ladybird (a Marian name). >That's it. So: what have we got? >Well, the 'God's hen' and 'incubus' words appear to represent metaphorical >senses of ordinary lexical items. But all the others show unmistakable >evidence of expressive origins: length (four or more syllables); opaque >elements; frequent presence of the segments and (typical of expressive >formations); frequent presence of the syllable and its reduplicated form > (typical of nursery formations); presence of clusters absent from >ordinary lexical items (notably ); very considerable and highly irregular >variation in form; severe localization of each word; general lack of early >attestations. [Ed] Expressive, yes, but all built around basic Basque (or Romance) words, except in the case of 'God's hen' (popular belief) or 'pinpirin' (purely expressive, no meaning as such). BTW, I doubt whether you can speak of a cluster 'np', since there is a syllable separation right in the middle: pin-pirin. >It is especially striking that a form which apparently didn't even exist in >1905 is now the most widespread word in the language. >Now: does anybody want to make a case that *any* of these words is a good >candidate for native, ancient and monomorphemic status in Basque? Lloyd, over >to you. ;-) >Larry Trask [Ed] This shows that in Basque too, the word for 'butterfly' is highly unpredictable and capricious, as I mentioned for other languages. As to your second conclusion, I think it should not be that straightforward: on the one hand, it has become clear that most names of the butterfly go back to the basic vocabulary ('bizi'), so they have their place in the inventory. On the other hand, their formation/creation is highly unstable over time and thus difficult to handle since only some analysis, not just linguistic, yields useful data. Ed Selleslagh From ECOLING at aol.com Wed Dec 22 13:29:11 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 08:29:11 EST Subject: 'butterfly' in Basque, etymologies? Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: There are a number of new subscribers to the Indo-European list who may be confused by continued discussions of Basque etymologies here. I allow them because they often bring up points with respect to methodology that might not occur so clearly in Indo-European studies. --rma ] Larry Trask has provided a beautiful collection of words for 'butterfly' in various Basque dialects. I received his permission to repost the contents to the Sound Symbolism list, which has recently collected words for 'butterfly' from all over the world, Those interested in sound symbolism or "expressives" are rarely so fortunate as to receive such a detailed accounting from anywhere. There is so much information in this data that I believe we can make a great deal of sense out of it historically, that we can in essence point backwards towards the forms of words for 'butterfly' in early Basque or pre-Basque. At the same time, I believe these Basque forms show just how fuzzy the borderlines are between "expressives" and the rest of the vocabulary. Trask has contributed extensive annotations, of the kind only a Basque specialist can. He also may have additional information on sound changes in the history of Basque which can inform the considerations adduced here, making some specific hypotheses more or less likely. I add below other data and reasoning which are the special focus of a specialist in expressives, or of a specialist in the kind of data variation and incomplete information we have here. I use heuristics based on known kinds of language change to posit hypothetical reconstructions of early Basque words for 'butterfly', to estimate which of the attested forms are closer to an ancient Basque form, which have been more heavily altered, and how each has been altered, in a few cases also why. This is not the same thing as following the operation of regular sound changes, because much of language change is also analogical change, the mutual influence or contamination of elements of the vocabulary. As Malkiel and others have said, each word has its own history. Quite independently of the first draft of this message, without either of us yet having seen the other's notes, in reaction to Larry Trask's posting of this data set, Steve Long sent a private message pointing out Greek forms, including . I consider this a confirmation of the results of reconstruction from Basque dialects, and mention it again at the end of this message with more detail. I give first Larry Trask's general conclusions. Most of those general conclusions seem sensible to me, except the first one, that the origins of these words must necessarily be "expressive". There have been influences from the kinds of sound patterns found in expressives, certainly, but that is not the same as attributing the ultimate origins of the words to such sound patterns. I obviously accept Trask's accounts of what are common sounds and syllables in expressives in Basque -- that is his specialty, not mine. Here is what Trask says, omitting mention of the two items which he says appear to represent metaphorical senses of ordinary lexical items, and separating each point he makes to begin on its own line: ************************************************************ "... all the others show unmistakable evidence of expressive origins: length (four or more syllables); opaque elements; frequent presence of the segments and (typical of expressive formations); frequent presence of the syllable and its reduplicated form (typical of nursery formations); presence of clusters absent from ordinary lexical items (notably ); very considerable and highly irregular variation in form; severe localization of each word; general lack of early attestations." ************************************************************ And here is Trask's challenge: "Now: does anybody want to make a case that *any* of these words is a good candidate for native, ancient and monomorphemic status in Basque?" My answer would be no, not as that question is put. But they are good candidates for *descendants* from words which may have had monomorphemic status in ancient Basque. There is a similar question to which my answer would be yes. This other question is perhaps not of direct relevance to Trask's special goals, which he has specified elsewhere, but I think it is of great relevance to those of us interested in pushing back towards an understanding of the full vocabulary of early Basque or pre-Basque. I would indeed want to claim that the collection of these forms, taken as a whole, does probably point to the existence of a small number of ancestral forms in early Basque, ones which also share some of the properties of words for 'butterfly' elsewhere in Europe. There are difficulties in reconstructing earlier forms of many expressives, of two primary kinds. (1) Parts of them tend to be replaced with sound sequences which resemble elements of the general vocabulary or other expressives, thus losing information about the ancestral forms themselves. (2) Certain sound patterns may be favored in expressives of particular meanings, which also can override ancestral forms. Both of these can lead to "violations" of sound laws valid for most of the vocabulary. But it does not make reconstruction impossible, it just makes it harder. Here is why... An archetypal example of (1) above is the existing (!) English word , which derives by folk etymology from . The analog to the Basque situation would be close if we had in English dialects also a number of other reformations from original such as , , , , , and so on, all still having the same meaning, the plant 'asparagus'. How would we reconstruct back from such a set? With difficulty, obviously, but it is not entirely hopeless. We might reach a hypothetical *(a)spara{k/g}(r)as. Why is this, rather than something else, a plausible reconstruction? Forms which contain transparently real word parts may have undergone greater alterations as compared with the original, and forms which contain reduplications or near-reduplications may have leveled out distinctions existing in the original. Given these tools of analysis, not guaranteed valid by any means, but heuristics, the following are of lesser value for reconstruction, "sparrow", "spear", "grass", and "goose". though the words containing them still have some value since they suggest a rather than as more original in the first half, and <{k/g}(r)as> rather than in the second half. They thus help us to overcome a loss of information in reduplicated forms. The first half would then most likely derive from an earlier <(a)spara...> and the second half would be something in the range Given the in the first half, the in the second half might be part of a near-reduplicative effect, so we might even consider most likely. (Since I derived each of these forms by faily minimal alterations of known kinds from *asparagus, and by a number of *different* such alternations, it is not surprising that reconstructing back from them we can get something like .) ************************************************* Consider now what we may be able to do with the Basque data provided by Larry Trask. The following techniques and tools are merely heuristics, they cannot pretend to reach definitive proof, but I would contend that they are moderately powerful tools, and they yield a highly plausible hypothesis. I claim nothing stronger than that, but that is an achievement not to be merely sneezed at. I do indeed want to make a case that the majority of the Basque words cited below are reformations from an earlier Basque form or forms which fit the pattern for numerous words for 'butterfly' at least in parts of Europe (so perhaps with an etymology), but also elsewhere in the world (so perhaps reflecting in part some universals of sound-symbolism), one involving labials, /l/, sometimes /t/, and often reduplication. in Latin would be one of the relatives, and and so on, would also be related. The idea that these are all ultimately related is not new, but the difficulties of tracing the details are considerable. First let us take three of those above, and average their sounds, removing the from the German form: papi...lon Latin, cf. French violating normal sound changes from Latin to French by preservin the second