From fabcav at adr.dk Tue Jun 1 06:40:31 1999 From: fabcav at adr.dk (Fabrice Cavoto) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 08:40:31 +0200 Subject: SV: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Has anyone given any evidence for ergativity in pre-IE yet? [Fabrice Cavoto] No, but the question has been debatted many times, already by H. Pedersen (1907). But I totally agree with you that there is no way to see in IE the features that normally are needed to claim that a lgge. is ergative, so IE, at least at its latest stage, was not ergative. The interesting question is to try to see if it ever has been, and what Pedersen (and others after him) did was to try to determine features that could be TRACES of an anterior ergative type. Of course, even if someone should find uncontroversial traces, this would not automatically mean that IE once was ergative, but it could mean that it had developped an ergative structure in specific parts, or on the contrary that it had retained those features there: we can't know. Also it might be right that just like pure ergativity is not found, pure accusativity might not be found neither, so the supposed traces of ergativity in IE should not imply that they are traces from an older stage. From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Jun 1 08:38:35 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 03:38:35 -0500 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: petegray wrote: > For example, the common (in both senses) pronunciation > of -au- as /o:/ is "extremely well attested". Yet in Romance the vowel > seems to have been not /o:/ but short /o/, Certainly not in Spanish, at any rate. causa became /ko:sa/, to /kosa/ (short /o/ became /O/), which survived as /kosa/, had it been /kosa/ in Vulgar Latin, it would've become /kOsa/ in Old Spanish, and /kwesa/ in Modern Spanish, which did not occur. *Cuesa is not a word. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Tue Jun 1 19:06:16 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 12:06:16 -0700 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically >> in which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act >> like nouns" is completely unjustified! to which Nik Taylor responded: > Not entirely so. One cannot say, for example, *the he. To the best of > my knowledge, of languages with articles, none of them use them with > pronouns. In addition, pronouns usually (always?) cannot have > non-predicate adjectives, "old man" is acceptable, "old he" is not. >From the point of view of syntactic/grammatical theory, pronouns are routinely treated not as pro-`nouns' but as pro-NPs. Hence the difficulty of collocating them with adjectives or determiners, since in constructions like `the old man' `the' and `old' are assumed to be *inside* the NP. If you mention an old man early in a discourse context and later refer to that same old man as `he', `he' is replacing the entire NP `an/the old man', not simply the noun `man'. >From this point of view, the one pronominal element that in normal English usage is literally a pro-`noun' is the indefinite `one', as in `the one i saw yesterday'; `the *old* one (as opposed to the young one)'; etc. Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From colkitto at sprint.ca Wed Jun 2 05:50:20 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 01:50:20 -0400 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: >I have not been asserting that languages "become more complex, less >ambiguous, and more expressive". I have asserted only that the >proto-language, which was simple, became more complex, less ambiguous, and >more expressive over time. R.M.W. Dixon suggests in his recent book "The Rise and fall of Languages" that once the language facility was "discovered" by humans, language would have developed rapidly, possibly in the space of a generation or two, and the end result of that development would have been quite complex, comparable to modern languages. Whether this development took place once, or several times, is currently beyond our capabilities to reconstruct. Robert Orr From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jun 1 06:00:03 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 08:00:03 +0200 Subject: Syllabicity In-Reply-To: <374DE8D9.B0113098@ufl.edu> Message-ID: >"Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically in >> which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act like nouns" >> is completely unjustified! >Not entirely so. One cannot say, for example, *the he. To the best of >my knowledge, of languages with articles, none of them use them with >pronouns. Since articles are determiners, and (personal) pronouns used for anaphora, any referent of a personal pronoun is, in discourse terms, determined by definition (the speech act participants are determined, better individualized by default), in unmarked usage. To use a determiner on an inherently determined constituent would thus be pleonastic, to use an indefinite article (an "indeterminer" ???) contradictory. >In addition, pronouns usually (always?) cannot have >non-predicate adjectives, "old man" is acceptable, "old he" is not. I forgot. Silly me. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From fabcav at adr.dk Tue Jun 1 06:13:42 1999 From: fabcav at adr.dk (Fabrice Cavoto) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 08:13:42 +0200 Subject: SV: SV: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>From yours and Larry's statements, it certainly sounds like ergativity >is a feature that you can add to and take away from any language, and >when it's not there, the language has the default type of accusative. [Fabrice Cavoto] This is certainly not what I ment. You can't 'just add or take away' ergativity from a lgge. Observing it, you see if the lgge. you are dealing with is ergative or not, or if it has some ergative features restricted to some specific parts (as the continuum to which Dr. Wolfgang Schulze refers to) or not. I know that some do consider the one or the other type as the 'default-type'. I only can agree with this when speaking of structures within the SAME lgge., f.ex. if the shift to the other type is found only as an additional marking for a specific part of speech. So I agree with you that it is not correct to say that 'when a lgge. is not ergative, it has the 'default accusative type''. From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Jun 1 06:24:44 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 01:24:44 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Nicholas Widdows wrote: > Possibly some descendants of Pre-Proto-World have by chance preserved > against all entropy some features of PPW; such as CV morpheme pattern. But CV can also be the result of CVC pattern. Chinese, for instance, lost many syllable-final consonants, altho it's by no means CV, it's close. > I'd > imagine all its descendants had an equal stake in this lottery, so why > didn't CV happen to be preserved in Inuktitut or Ge^-Pano-Carib or > Gunwingguan or Gur, rather than -- remarkable coincidence -- the two most > "ancient" languages we can read, in the jejune sense of ancient meaning a > mere 97% of the distance from PPW. Perhaps it is just co-incidence. Whatever PW was, whether it was CV (my suspicion, given that that's the simplest structure), in the time period involved between PW and Proto-Nostraic, CV could've easily become CVC, and then back to CV, among other patterns. And, of course, this is only a *reconstructed* form. We can't base proto-World on reconstructions that we're not even sure of yet. Nostraic, if it is a genuine family, still has a long way to go (from what I've seen of it) to be considered on firm ground. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 08:46:55 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 03:46:55 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Nicholas and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Nicholas Widdows Sent: Friday, May 28, 1999 10:27 AM > > languages like IE, > which have principally CVC roots, can be analyzed so that the CVC roots are > recognized to be the results of compounds of CV+CV elements in an earlier > (than Nostratic) language. Nicholas wrote: > Possibly some descendants of Pre-Proto-World have by chance preserved > against all entropy some features of PPW; such as CV morpheme pattern. I'd > imagine all its descendants had an equal stake in this lottery, so why > didn't CV happen to be preserved in Inuktitut or Ge^-Pano-Carib or > Gunwingguan or Gur, rather than -- remarkable coincidence -- the two most > "ancient" languages we can read, in the jejune sense of ancient meaning a > mere 97% of the distance from PPW. Pat comments: Only a very small number of the words in Egyptian appear as monosyllables (b, place); and most of the early Egyptian reconstructed monosyllables are inferred from the syllabic signs rather than clearly attested: e.g. *d, *hand (/ta/); *g, *basket (/nga/). In Sumerian, many of the apparent monosyllables correspond to less simple roots in IE, so that Cu may represent early *Co or *Ca/ow or *Co/uj. Simple CV roots do, perforce, have large functional loads in languages in which they are the predominant root form, with or without the mediation of additional features like tone but we have to try to distinguish between languages that are CV as a result of phonological degeneration like Chinese or arrested development like Sumerian. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 09:45:07 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 04:45:07 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Saturday, May 29, 1999 4:01 AM Pat asked: >> And, I perceive a difference between "Viele Hunde haben >> Schwa{"}nze" and "Hunde haben Schwa{"}nze" --- do you not? Ralf-Stefan answered: > Sure, but the latter could be conveyed by "Hund haben Schwanz", in > opposition to, say, "Dies Hund haben Schwanz", "Viele Hund h.S." etc. > pp.). If you need to disambiguate, you do, even if you don't have a > morphological plural in your language. Pat, rather surprised: I always thought "haben" was somehow a morphological plural. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 09:56:52 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 04:56:52 -0500 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Dear Vidhyanath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Saturday, May 29, 1999 3:34 PM > Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> Actually, if I had to summarize my argument against the consonantal nature >> of laryngeals in IE (except Hittite), I would say that the phenomena are >> reconstructable in terms of lengthened vowels so the presumption is that >> they were lengthened vowels, and the burden of proof is on those who propose >> their consonantal nature *in IE*. > Forms such as Skt aayunak suggest initial laryngeal, but it must disappear > in yugam, Lat iugum . What vowel does this? I am not knowledgeable enough about Sanskrit to really properly address your question. Why not describe the form and the point you are maing in greater detail? However, if you are suggesting that IE *yeu- should be recontructed as *Hyeu-, I believe that unlikely. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 1 08:45:22 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 10:45:22 +0200 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Nik Taylor Date: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 3:02 AM [snip] >However, that diphthongizing only resulted when it was /O/, descended >from Latin short /o/, long /o:/ evolved into /o/, which remained /o/, >thus ho:ra became hora, not *huera, while ossum (?) became hueso. /au/ >became long /o:/, so of course it wasn't diphthongized. /aurum/ became >/o:ru/, which naturally became /oro/ in Spanish and Italian. [Ed Selleslagh] Sp. hueso comes from Lat. os (gen. ossis), 'bone', not to be confounded with Lat. os (gen. oris), 'mouth'. The -o ending in Spanish is the result of blind analogy since it is normally the result of acc. -um (nom. -us) of o-stem words cf. lobo < lupus). Ed. From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 1 10:58:06 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 12:58:06 +0200 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: petegray Date: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 10:18 AM [Ed Selleslagh] I would like to add some comments even though I agree with almost everything you said: >There are several points in Steven's posting on Classical Latin which >require response. >Firstly, There is no need to suggest that Classical Latin was ever at any >stage actually spoken. It has its sources in many things, not least the >drive to produce a language as capable of great literature as Greek. We >can even trace in the literature the development of the so called Classical >Norms, as certain forms or constructions are felt to be in some way more >appropriate than others. The achievement of Vergil and Caesar (rather than >Cicero) is to write great Latin within the norms which had been established >for written literature over the previous hundred years. [Ed] Remember that Caesar usually spoke Greek with his family and friends. >We know that Caesar, Cicero and the rest spoke very differently from the way >they wrote (see Cicero's more intimate letters); and we know that the drive to >refine the language begins in earnest somewhere between Plautus (writing about >200 BC) and Terence (writing after the full impact of Greek literature has hit >Rome, and dying in 154BC). The spoken language continued as spoken language >does, with the educated people using some of the more "refined" forms in their >speech, but not all, while the less educated used few or none. >It is the connection of this spoken language to proto-Romance that is >puzzling. A simple equation of the two is not adequate, as it leaves lots of >problems. For example, the common (in both senses) pronunciation of -au- as >/o:/ is "extremely well attested". Yet in Romance the vowel seems to have >been not /o:/ but short /o/, and the original /a/ seems to have survived very >late - at least as late as the 5th century - for several reasons, not least >the French initial consonant in "chose" (co- would have given co-). [Ed] This may be somewhat less clear cut: actually, almost all French words that maintained the initial Lat. co- are Latinizing neologisms ('mots savants', some dating back to the early Middle Ages) that skipped the intermediate stages of French language development. There is an enormous lot of that in French in general (e.g. normal: moûtier, Latinizing: monastère). Some Lat. co- words gave cö- (cor > coeur) or cui- (coquere > cuire); an exception is Lat. coccinus > cochenille (incl. diminutivization), but that may just be dissimilation. Most original French co- words stem from Lat. cu-. >Likewise CL has sapere (short first e) but Romance points to sape:re. And >many more such examples. [Ed] Indeed. Probably the result of popular confusion and the Analogy Bulldozer. >Another problem is the remarkable uniformity of the Vulgar Latin texts from >the 3rd to the 8th centuries BC. It is scarcely conceivable that peasants in >Spain, France and Romania all spoke alike; yet they seem to have written >alike. So again, a simple equation of Vulgar Latin with proto-Romance may not >be adequate. [Ed] It is more likely that Vulgar Latin was a later written language based upon popular speech that continued to evolve throughout the Classical Latin period. There are more languages with more than one written language: e.g. New Greek (written Dhimotikí (Dèmotikè) = the official one since the early seventies, and Katharévousa, the archaicizing version used before, and still in some inscriptions: 'Ellás, instead of Ellada), Norwegian (the story was already told here). In the Dutch speaking part of Belgium there is a tendency toward an intermediate written language, between the common denominator of the widely different dialects, and official Dutch (as determined by the Language Union of Flanders and Holland). Most politicians use it. In other words, I think Vulgar Latin may have been another attempt at unifying the language (by selection of common features in the spoken languages/dialects), but in another timeframe than CL (starting in the 3rd or 4th century A.D., when the disintegration of the classical world began). So, Proto-Romance, as the unique origin of Romance languages, may never have existed; the precursors of those languages probably were local Romance dialects, with local sub-and superstrata (e.g. in Castilian: Basque and Visigothic; in French (originally only spoken in the northern half): mainly Brythonic Celtic and some western Germanic. The example of causa > chose strangely looks like some Celtic mutation influence/contamination, which does not mean it must be). >However, the claim that Classical Latin is proto-Romance is yet more >difficult, or even far-fetched. There are too many things from >pre-classical Latin which have disappeared in the written language, but >resurface in both Vulgar Latin and Romance. The actual speech of the >Romans must have maintained these features through the classical period. [snip] > CL developed through the first century BC, and even Lucretius >(dies 55 BC) cannot be considered a model of Classical Latin. CL, properly >speaking, does have a very brief time span. This is another sign of the >fact that it is an artifical fashion, not an actual spoken language. [Ed] Actually, a language, even a written form of it, that lasts for 500 years or more without any evolution worth mentioning looks like a natural impossibility to me, especially considering the confusion of the time (migrations, mixing with people from a different language group, general illiteracy, no mass media, communications falling apart,...). So, after the 1st century A.D.it must have been a revered relic, as dead as the dodo. Ed. From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Tue Jun 1 10:54:40 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 12:54:40 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Peter wrote: > A couple of features explained by a theory of ergativity are: > (a) the identity of nominative and accusative for all neuters. > (b) the lack of a true original passive. > (c) the origin of the verbal endings (see Szemerenyi p 330 for a brief and > confusing summary) [Let me first ask the audience to excuse the format of my lasting posting [Re: accusative and ergative languages (May 28)]: I accidently hit the "send" bottom before having finished my mail and before having proof read the text [which is - viewing my bad English - a necessary step - sorry if some typos remain in THIS mail, too!]]. Now, let's turn to Peter's criteria for possible IE features of ergativity and check them with respect to what General Linguistics and Typology tell us about ergativity etc. AS I said in my last posting, a general definition of ACC vs. ERG should be based on the assumption that these phenomena do not represent categorial properties of a given language system, but reflect the behavior of certain (compatible) morphosyntactic and morphosemantic structures with respect to a) system internal relations, b) communicative conditions, and c) cognitive aspect of information processing and categorization. These parameters interact in a complex way and cannot be seen in isolation (except for analytic purposes); moreover, all of them are embedded into the historical dimension of language systems which renders a purely synchronic interpretation of such morphosyntatic features highly problematic. The general behavior of ACC and ERG can be formalizes as {S=A;O} for ACC and {S=O;A} for ERG which read: In an ACC stategy, the structures associated with the "grammatical" roles subjecective (S) and agentive (A) behave alike, wheras the objective (O) (clustered with the indirect objective (IO)) behave different. In an ERG strategy, it is S and O that behave alike, wheras A behaves different. I think, this formulation is on common ground. We should be aware of the fact that the above given formulae do not refer to a specific linguistic category such as NP or AGR. In my mind ACC and ERG strategies - often secondarily splitted up - dominate most of the the 'operating system' of a language that is those parts of grammar that control the linguistic interpretation of event experience in terms of 'sentences'. However, some of these linguistic categories are more likely to be effected by the accusative-ergatiev continumm (AEC) than others which can be explained by the assumption that the totality of grammar is prototypically organized: The more central a part of grammar is the more likely it is that it plays a crucial role with respect to the AEC. A problem of locating reconstructed paradigms on the AEC surely is that we do not deal with a homogenous 'synchronic' stratum but with different time layers: Parts of our reconstructed IE grammar may be relatively young, others much older (depending on the comparative evidence and on the time depth reached by documented sources). Let us check now some of the reconstructed paradigms of IE (we deal with some kind of internal functional reconstruction here): > (a) the identity of nominative and accusative for all neuters. It should easily come clear that this feature in itself does not have anything to do with the AEC. The only thing we can conclude from this is that true neuters rarely show up as agents (that they hardly ever played the role of a subjective (S) or agentive (A) except in a metaphorical sense). Neutral NPs hence are very likely to represents objectives (O). This is very natural - it tells us nothing about the AEC just because this feature does NOT refer to the discrimination of S, A, and O. What we get is: (1) NP[+neutral < -animate] > {O} But how NPs reflected S and A? Accrding to MY klnowledge there is NO evidence that intransitive NPs (i.e., S) ever behaved different from transitive NPs (i.e, A) with respect to CASE marking. Note that this does not touch the question of case marking itself! For nominal (!) NPs we get: (2) NP[+animate] > {S=A} [Note that I use 'animate' in a rather vague sense - I neglect a discussion of which underlying semantics of this cut-off point we should ascribe to IE] The problem of IE case inflection surely is that is seems rather atypical in a typologcal perspective (though NOT unattested elsewhere!). One point is that S and A both are marked or zero (as it is (lateron) the case for O, cf. (I neglect the dual here): (3) S [SG: O, *-s; PL: *-es] A [SG: 0, -*s; PL: *-es] 0 [SG: 0, *-m; PL: *-H2] The O-marker *-m seems to be a somewhat younger formation stemming from a directive or so that secondarily effected the neutral o-stems. The rise of O-marking via a directive (or, let us say, any 'locative') case is a typical strategy that has to be associated with the ACC strategy. Normally, it is labeled 'Differentiated Object(ive) Marking (DOM)' or simply O-split. It can be paralleled with the O-plit for instance in Spanish. In late IE, the marked variant of the O-split obviously had already been generalized (IF PL ACC *-ns stems from *-ms and this again from *-m-s, then the plural *-s-marker should be regarded as a relatively young phenomenon). For an earlier phase of IE NP inflection we can assume (I neglect the plural forms]: (4) S [O, *-s] INFER [+animate] A [0, *-s] INFER [+naimate] O [0] INFER [±animate] Evidently, this paradigm does not reflect any kind of ERG strategy. Such a strategy often has been inferred from the fact that the {S=A}-marker *-s seems to have something in common with the genitive (singular (!)) (*-es, *-os, *-s). From this some kind of 'genitivus-ergativus' had been reconstructed from Pre-IE. Naturally, a genitivus-ergativus is attested in a considerable number of languages (Yupik-Eskimo, Lak (East Caucasian), to name only two). However, again IE *-s does not behave ERG, even IF we can associate it with the genitive marker (singular): *-(e/o)s also encodes the S-function, which is ANTI ERG. I think it would be much better to propose a strategy of topicalization within the ACC (or 'neutral'?) paradigm for Pre-IE, cf.: (5) *NP[S]-s VERB < *NP[S]-s[TOP] VERB *NP[A]-s NP[O]-zero VERB < *NP[A]-s[TOP] NP[O]-zero VERB It would then be very temptive to relative *-s to the most natural means to encode topicality, namely to the *so- deixis (in {S=A}-function). Hence in Pre-IE a phrase like 'the woman went' would have been 'WOMAN(*-s) went', and 'the woman saw the tree' would read 'WOMAN(*-s) tree(-zero) saw' (lateron the transitive structure would have been changed to 'WOMAN(*-s) to-tree(*-m) saw'). Those NP that were zero-marked in {S=A} function obviously carried some kind of inherent topicality which did not necessitate an *-s-marking. To conclude this point: The noun inflection of IE does not show ANY trace of an ERG strategy, rather we have to deal with an ACC based topicalization that has its good parallel for instance in some Afro-Asiatic languages... > (b) the lack of a true original passive. This again has nothing to do with the AEC! If IE lacked a true passive the only thing we can infer from that is that IE once had been a role dominated language (see VanValin's 'Role-and Reference Grammar') that did not use fore- or backgrounding strategies. There are ACC languages with and without passives just as ERG languages with and without antipassives and/or passives... > (c) the origin of the verbal endings We have to distinguish 'origin' from 'function'! In a functional perspective, IE personal clitics ALWAYS show an ACC behavior: They are - as far as I know - NEVER conditioned by the O-role ('object', if you want). In order to clarufy this point cf. the following example from Lak (East Caucasian): (6) ta-na-l ZERO-at:-ay-s:a-ra na he-SA-ERG CLI-hit-PRES-ASS-1Sg I:ABS 'He surely hits me' [SA = stem augment, CLI = noun class I [+masc;+hum], ASS = assertive] Here, ZERO as well as -ra are triggered by the first person pronoun 'I' in objective function [note that the system of personal aggreement in LAk is much more complicated, so please do not infer from this example that Lak ALWAYS has O-AGR!). Nothing the like is known from IE. If we again look at my above given TOP-hypothesis, it comes clear, why: The clitic in the verb obviously marks the anaphoric slot produced by the TOP procedure, and this is ACC, cf.: (7) NP(S)(*-s)[TOP] VERB-AGR[TOP] NP[A](*-s)[TOP] NP[O](-zero) VERB-AGR[TOP] Note that (7) does not tell us about the formal history of the AGR-elements.If we look at the typology of the grammaticalization of AGR-paradigms, it becomes obvious that such paradigms hardly evolve at once: Rather, they start with one person (very often 1Sg) or the SAP-cluster (1Sg and 2Sg encoded by ONE morpheme) and gradually become generalized. For Pre-IE it seems probable to regard the 1Sg as a starting point: But IF the 1Sg marker is the grammaticalized form of the 1Sg personal pronoun (*-m etc.) then this does NOT force us to look for the same source regarding the other persons (esp. 2Sg.). It may well be that e.g. the 2Sg *-s stems from say a deictic paradigm... But again this is irrelevant for the AEC as long as AGR behaves in one direction, namely ACC in IE (the perfect(ive) markers do not change the picture). We could go one discussing the paradigm of personal and deicitic pronouns, traces of the discourse cohesion devices in IE, relativization strategies, word order etc. (what I won't do here). Whatever that basic strategies of IE morphosyntax and morphosematics had been: Neither its 'operating system' in its globality nor the relevant subparadigms show any convincing trace of {S=O;A} behavior [in case you know of one plase tell me!]. This does not mean that I regard ACC as being more 'natural' than ERG or so: both are two parallel options to which language systems refer to a different extent. What is surprising with respect to IE is the fact that it seems to have been quite radically ACC dominated. But explaining this finding is another story... Wolfgang -- [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Jun 1 12:55:44 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 06:55:44 -0600 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Nik Taylor wrote: > "Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton" wrote: >> I'm sorry, Pat, but your statement about Evolution here shows EXACTLY why >> modern languages (and any other language we have any evidence of) are NOT >> evolving. > Actually, "evolve" is a neutral term, indicating mere change by the > accumulation of small scale changes. It is usually "survival > enhancing", at least in the short term, but can also refer to changes > that are neutral, or even harmful. But linguists should be very careful in distinguishing between the two words "evolve/evolution" and "change". We don't use the strict biological definition of "evolution" and any linguist who tries to do so is not going to be taken seriously. Linguistic "evolution" is that part of the history of language between the first human utterances and the stabilization of modern human grammar. It ended before the first recorded or reconstructed human languages. "Change" is what goes on now and has gone on throughout our recorded linguistic history. "Evolution" was the process of increasing complexity. "Change" shows no change in overall complexity, but additions and losses of different forms (words, structures, sounds). Ancient Sumerian is no more or less complex in its total grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) than is Modern English. There is a lot of change that has occurred between Proto-Indo-European and Modern English, but no evolution. John McLaughlin Utah State University From jrader at m-w.com Tue Jun 1 09:22:36 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 09:22:36 +0000 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: A minor correction to Larry's post: Mangue, the southernmost outlier of Otomanguean, was spoken in Nicaragua and Costa Rica but has been extinct for some time. Chiapanec was spoken in Chiapas but is also extinct. I don't believe any contemporary Otomanguean language is spoken east or south of Oaxaca, aside from very recent emigration. Even given the outlier Mangue, the geographical spread of Otomanguean is actually rather limited in comparison to families such as Athabaskan, Algonquian, Uto-Aztecan, and Maipurean/Arawakan--which makes the great internal diversity of Otomanguean all the more interesting. Jim Rader [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 1 16:08:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 11:08:01 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I don't know how natural alexandrine meter is. Histories of versification, which are generally written by poets or literary theorists, tend to be linguistically suspect. My understanding is that alexandrine verse can be seen as a stylization of earlier anisosyllablic epic verse which fixed the syllable count at 2 hemistychs of 7 syllables (if the last word had penultimate stress) or 6 syllables if the last word had ultimate stress (which is, of course, how French evolved). The earlier anisosyllabic epic verse, seen in Spanish cuaderna vi/a, is supposedly based on Germanic forms. As much as anything else, it seems like cramming 2 lines of ballad into one line [although the opposite is also claimed re ballad]. [snip] >Whatever the language has can indeed be used as raw material for the >culture. So the accentuation of English allows it to "naturally" fall into >iambic pentameter, French into alexandrines, Finnish into Kalevala metre, >Italian into Verdi libretti. OE and ON had their huge lists of battles, >seas, byrnies, and heroes, and used them to wonderful effect. Chinese could >be shimmeringly ambiguous, if they chose. [snip] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jun 1 18:17:56 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 14:17:56 EDT Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: >Patrick C. Ryan >I have not been asserting that languages "become more complex, less ambiguous, >and more expressive". I have asserted only that the proto-language, which was >simple, became more complex, less ambiguous, and more expressive over time. -- funny, you gave a disinct impression that you did. From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 1 17:35:31 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 18:35:31 +0100 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: Nik said: >pronouns usually (always?) cannot have > non-predicate adjectives, "old man" is acceptable, "old he" is not. English does it sometimes: do you remember the song, which I only partially recall, about "lovable you"? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 1 18:14:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 19:14:14 +0100 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: I (peter) said: > At the danger of being politically incorrect, I find different languages > differently "expressive"... Nicholas replied: > The languages do? Some prominent users do; and you get cultural traditions... > ... I don't think the _linguistic_ constraints had much of a part ... An interesting question, Nicholas. To what extent is the way a language actually works a function of the language, and to what extent is it a function of culture? It would be bizarre to pretend that nothing is lost in translation - traduttore traditore. It would be equally bizarre to pretend that all languages actually do express all ideas equally. The interesting bit is whether this difference is linguistic, or cultural. Latin which is recognisably Latin must express certain factors such as number and tense. I would say this is linguistic rather than cultural. German and French speakers are faced with the awful choice of socially marked second person pronouns; whatever the cultural origin of this, it remains a linguistic fact, albeit with entertaining and embarrassing social consequences. Of course there are also some factors in the actual use of language which are purely cultural, but to deny any linguistic factors at all seems rather to be overstating your case! Peter From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Jun 1 18:43:02 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 13:43:02 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Leo (mistakenly attributed by Pat to R-S): >> The lack of contrast between [phin] and non-existent *[pin] ([p] normal in >> _spin_) shows that aspiration is not significant in English, or in other >> words, that [ph] and [p] must be assigned to the same phoneme. Well and >> good. Knowing this, we can tell that [phaet] and [baet] are different >> words. But this does not mean that [ph] and [b], or /p/ and /b/, actually >> *have* meaning, as some of the unfortunate wording in Larry's dictionary led >> Pat to conclude. If they did, we'd have to say that /p-/ and /b-/were >> prefixes attached to the roots /aet/ and /in/. >Pat responds: >Sorry that my phrasing was such that obviously you and Leo thought that a >misinterpretation by me of the wording in Larry's dictionary had led to my >believing that phonemes have meaning. I do not believe that for any modern >human language. What does "modern" have to do with it? A human language is a human language... Leo (BTW, I'm also the one responsible for "Wir vielleicht schon...") Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Jun 1 19:34:55 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 14:34:55 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Leo spelled out one of his objections to Pat's analysis of 2.pl -te as identical with 3.sg. -t, except for stress accent: >> We both assume no more than one stress accent per word, don't we? If so, >> the problem is that it is at least *very* difficult to explain final _-e_ as >> the result of stress accent on that syllable (and you have said that more >> than once) if, at the same, *any* _e_ must be so explained (else it should >> vanish, n'est-ce pas?). And even if the augment is regarded as a prefix >> added later in some languages, *bherete must then have had three syllables >> with stress accent, else we should expect (in traditional terms) **_bhr.te_, >> with weak ("zero") grade of the root and zero grade of the thematic vowel. >> Instead, Greek _epherete_ and Skt. _abharatha_ 'ye carried' point to e-grade >> of the root and of the thematic vowel. >Pat responds: >One of the phenomena I believe I have identified in early language is that >the plural morpheme was, at one point, simply stress-accentuation. How odd then that the plural veb forms are not identical to singular ones escept for the accent. Ditto nouns. >It would make our lives easier if we could assume no more than one stress >accent per wood but I would not rule out a secondary stress-accent in a case >like _a{'}bharatha{"???}. Neither would I. >Yes, I believe that vowel retention is generally a function of stress-accent >but I find the explanation that *bherete "had three syllables with >stress-accent" ununderstandable in terms of what I think of as >stress-accent. I'm not claiming any such thing. But you have made a connection between the retention of _e_ and stress accent at whatever level. How is 2.pl. *_bherete_ possible in your theory unless it has three stress accents, quod Deus avertat? [Leo's questioning of Pat's identification of -t, -te as 'member of tribe' omitted] >Pat responds: >As to one of your points, I do not believe that earliest IE allowed a 3rd p. >inanimate subject of a non-stative verb; hence, no -*t referring to an >inanimate subject. Only animates "do things" which is not illogical if you >associate agentivity with intention. How so, if you are also claiming that PIE was ergative? In ergative languages, the morphological subject of an agent-patient sentence (barring "antipassive" or the like) is precisely the patient, not the agent. >I also believe that the IE reflexes of T{H}O properly (originally) refer >only to animate entities; a similar form, T{?}O (IE *dV) referred properly >to inanimate objects, and is the basis for neuters in -*d. We should then expect the two to be kept distinct, especially with primary endings: -ti contrasting with *-di. But it doesn't happen. >Regarding -*t and -*te, I do not believe that any grammatical morpheme in IE >can originally have had the form -*C since I believe that all grammatical >morphemes are originally grammaticalized -*Ce (at a minimum) non-grammatical >morphemes. On this basis, both -*t and -*te must derive from earlier -*tV. >In the absence of evidence to differentiate them, I assume a unitary origin. They have different meanings. The null hypothesis should therefore be that they are distinct, even if you are unable to find a phonetic distinction. Beliefs about the shape of free morphemes have nothing to do with the case. >For *te-w-to-, although we would both acknowledge -*to, I am not going to be >able to persuade you that a morpheme *te- could be the basis to which a >collective morpheme -*w was added --- in a paragraph or two because you are >unwilling to look beyond IE where *CeC roots are the general rule. It is my >belief that every IE *CeC root can potentially be analyzed into *CV + *CV, >and that these monosyllabic morphemes are recognizable is some early >languages: e.g. Egyptian , 'loaf', is cognate with IE -*dV, neuter >formant. You're right: you can't convince me. But not because I have any preconceived ideas about root shapes in PIE (not that I know of any *roots* that are that short). The problem is that your semantics are simply beyond the pale of anything that could be called linguistic *science*. Looking beyond PIE won't change that. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 03:58:40 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 22:58:40 -0500 Subject: Pronouns (was Syllabicity) Message-ID: Dear Nick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Nik Taylor Sent: Thursday, May 27, 1999 7:52 PM > "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically in >> which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act like nouns" >> is completely unjustified! > Not entirely so. One cannot say, for example, *the he. To the best of > my knowledge, of languages with articles, none of them use them with > pronouns. In addition, pronouns usually (always?) cannot have > non-predicate adjectives, "old man" is acceptable, "old he" is not. In my opinion, an IE form like *eme is analyzable as *e- + *me, where *e- is Pokorny's *3. e-. In addition, Pokorny lists forms from a reconstructed *eiso- such as Oscan eizois, presumably *ei- + so + . . . Then, of course, we have Latin iste, 'that of yours'. I cannot think of a case where "old he" would be preferred over "old one (masc.)"; that is perhaps why it is not attested. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Jun 1 05:12:31 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 00:12:31 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > So you do not believe fully modern man was present 200K BP? You are > definitely in the minority here. 30K is the generally accepted value, I believe. PIE was spoken, what, about 8,000 years ago? Assuming language appeared 30K BP (and probably much earlier), PIE is still quite recent. > We do not need a time-machine to reconstruct IE, do we? Yeah, and look at this list. If PIE was unarguably reconstructed, there wouldn't be much of a list, now would there? Because of the fact that it was spoken just 8 millennia ago, or whatever, how much less certainty would there be about proto-World?! -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 09:35:11 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 04:35:11 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, May 28, 1999 2:42 AM >> Pat responded: >> I am well aware of this usage and terminology. Leo asked: > Is there some reason why you don't adhere to it? Some of your arguments seem > to depend on your *not* accepting it. Why don't you? Pat answered: I hope none of my arguments depend on individual usages of words (shades of Hegel!). And actually, I cannot think of a really good reason for me to continue a non-standard usage of the word 'semantic'; henceforward, unless I inadvertently regress, I will refer to lexical and grammatical differences. Pat continued: >> However, I fail to see how the points you have presented relate meaningfully >> to the point I am attempting to make. >> I claimed above that -*ter, the common component of 'father, mother, >> brother, daughter', is not coincidental but a regular component of basic >> nuclear family terminology. On the basis of words like *g{^}en6-ter- >> (procreator, father), I believe it likely that it should be interpreted >> as an agentive. But even if it were not agentive -*ter, it is beyond the >> bounds of reasonable scepticism to suppose that its multiple attestations in >> family member terminology is not analyzable as a suffix. >Leo objected: > My objection, originally, was precisely to the notion that it was an agent > suffix. I didn't mean to deny that there was a suffix, although I do wonder > whether that is the best analysis. A suffix on what? Pat answers: In these matters, it is always legitimate to "wonder". But I believe the roots can, in most cases, be plausibly identified: ye{'}n6ter is, I admit, difficult. Leo continued: > If the words were formed that way! But _papa_ ia every bit as much a > Lallwort as _mama_. Parents read amazing things into baby's babbling. Pat answered: >> And frankly, I am at a loss to see any problem with a reduced grade of >> the root preceding a suffix (agentive -*ter), which normally takes the >> stress-accent. Am I missing something? Leo countered: > I don't know. Why did you bring that up? Pat answers: Perhaps I misread something you wrote. I thought you had mentioned a difference of accent or unexpected stem-form. >> Pat, withdrawing: >> I refuse to get into another futile discussion of Lallwo{"}rter. Actually, >> one of the interesting arguments for monogenesis is the intriguing >> similarity of all over the world. Leo commented: > That say as much about babies and little about languages, or monogesis > thereof. Pat answers: I do not think 'withdrawing' is the correct characterization. I do not subscribe to the current theory of Lallwo{"}rter as I believe you do, and here we must simply agree to disagree since neither of us will be persuaded by the other. >>> Leo continued on a different topic: >>> I don't have Larry's dictionary. But I'll say this point blank: what he >>> gives is merely a characteristic of phonemes. Morphemes must consist of >>> one or more phonemes (despite the problem of "zero allomorphs"). It is >>> because of this that phonemes are the smallest units capable of *signaling* >>> meaning. But they are units of *sound*. It might be helpful if you >>> included Larry's *entire* comment, for what you're citing is simply *not* a >>> definition of a phoneme. See any manual of linguistics which actually >>> discusses the things! >> Pat, for Leo's edification: >> phoneme . . . n. In many theories of phonology, a fundamental (often *the* >> fundamental) unit of phonological structure, an abstract *segment* which is >> one of a set of such segments in the phonological system of a particular >> language or speech variety, ___often defined as 'the smallest unit which can >> make a difference in meaning'___. Leo commented: > Larry is cautious and trying to include as many theories as possible. But > "unit of phonological structure" refers precisely to the *sound* system. I > have never seen the phoneme *defined* anywhere as he does in the final > clause, although it happens to be a true statement, it's a characterization > rather than a definition. Unfortunately, it is misleading. In some of your > earlier stuff, you seem to have taken it to mean that phonemes actually > *have* meaning. And quite certainly you're wrong when you claimed that lack > of a difference in meaning must mean that the difference in sound *must* be > irrelevant. While I've quarreled enough with Lehmann, his idea that [e e: > {e}] became separate phonemes when they were no longer predictable, because > of changes in the accentual system, is good structuralist theory, and not > original with him. What happens, in a nutshell, is that the different vowels > are no longer predictable but instead signal whatever it was that the > difference in accent signaled, while it existed. Pat answers: I do believe there is a strong possibility that, in the very earliest stages of language, phonemes did have actual meanings but even by the time of CV roots, this association (if it ever existed a la sound symbolism) had been lost in terms of the basic meaning of these monosyllables (though it might linger on almost as a grace-note to the meaning in the form of nuances or emotional interpretations). Now, evidently, my early training in linguistics differed from your own since, as another wrote recently, this definition of phoneme has to be with the (once fashionable?) idea of minimal pairs. >> Leo responded re ablaut: >>> I have no idea whether it was a deliberate anything. All I know is that >>> short e alternates with short o, and that the two traditional kinds of long >>> e: alternate with long o:. The "lengthened grade" variety also alternates >>> with short e/o; the "natural long" ones deriving from vowel + laryngeal >>> alternate with traditional schwa. Once established, it could be exploited. >> Pat commented: >> And "exploited" it was, to provide a nuance. Leo responded: > Over time, often more. But that was over time. Leo, on "original" e:'s: > Indeed not. We must be talking past each other on this. But lengthened > grade does show ablaut. The word for 'foot' has Doric Greek nom. sing > _po:s_, which supposedly must reflect lengthened o: (other Gk. _pous_ can > derive from *_pod-s_. And the Germanic forms have generalized the o: form: > Gothic _fo:tus_, OE _fo:t_, OHG _fuoz_. Meanwhile, Latin has _pe:s_, which > could be from either *_ped-s_ or *pe:d-s_. Will that do? Pat, puzzled: Then how did "original" e: creep into the discussion? Do you believe that there could be two morphemes in IE, *CeC and *Ce:C, that differed **lexically** when *Ce:C is not the result of earlier *CeHC? >>>> Pat differed: >>>> IE "pronouns" in every significant way look and act like nouns --- with >>>> the sole exception that the inflections seem to be more conservative. >>>> Outside of a very few simple forms like *me, *te, *se, etc., which might >>>> slip in under the rubric of nominal, simple nominal and verbal CV-roots, >>>> which had wide semantic ranges, were *differentiated* by additional >>>> elements at a very early time --- at least in the languages from which IE >>>> derives. If we are unwilling to look beyond IE, then we must say, >>>> principally, that the simplest nominal and verbal root-form is CVC. >> Leo responded: >>> But there you have it! The IE pronouns neither look nor act like nouns! >>> Pushing it back to Nostratic doesn't change anything there, since you're >>> saying that they must have been different there too. >> Pat, hopefully not patronizingly, responded: >> A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically in >> which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act like nouns" >> is completely unjustified! Leo objected: > Not so. The morphology speaks for itself, so I'll do the syntax. If they > could, you could say: > *I want to meet the new her. > *I want to meet secretary. > *Poor he/him has to work on Saturday. Pat objected: I have heard equivalent sentences but, I admit, only in humor. Leo continued: > But you can't. Neither can you use interrogative pronouns like nouns, or > demonstratives, or indefinites -- there are a great many things called > "pronouns", and they behave differently from nouns in *many* languages. > No le veo. 'I don't see him.' *No veo le. > No veo a Carlos. I don't see Charly.' *No veo a le. > So no, pronouns need *not* have the syntax of nouns. They act different. Pat, more or less agreeing: But do you not think that where their employments differ, one of the major reasons is the typical brevity of many pronominal elements, and their encliticity? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Jun 2 09:28:38 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 04:28:38 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> -- this may be true, but it's utterly irrelevant to the languages under >> discussion here. All _extant_ languages are of the same general level of >> development, whether PIE or Esperanto. >> Any more "primitive" stage of linguistic development is lost. None of the >> languages of which we have records show any such 'simplicity'. They are all >> about the same, at the fundamental level of serving the purposes of human >> communication. > Pat responds: > "Irrelevant" must be your favorite word. What happened to your "*in any > era*"? Have you just dropped that idea without acknowledging how > wrong-headed it is? > What "extant" languages show is totally irrelevant to what they may have > been like in the far distant past. (a) Linguistics must procede under the assumption that the kinds of phenomena that we see today have always been that way. We cannot go around assuming that entirely unprecedented changes or features were the case centuries or millennia earlier. They might well have been, but, methodologicly speaking, *there is no way to prove that*. Any processes you do claim existed would be entirely lacking in empirical foundation, by definition, and thus subject to a high probability of error (here we're getting back to Aristotle's fundamental problem). (b) So, what extant languages show might well be entirely relevant, if there is no methodological means to reconstruct the protolanguage. When you are trying to describe a language, you have to know what it is first -- and when you're dealing with reconstructed languages, this is an iffy business at best. Also, if the known data about extant languages all disagree fundamentally with a hypothesis, it is the duty of the linguistic establishment not to accept that hypothesis as true unless further evidence comes along to reinforce it (which could happen). =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Jun 2 11:52:26 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 06:52:26 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Nik Taylor wrote: > "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> So you do not believe fully modern man was present 200K BP? You are >> definitely in the minority here. > 30K is the generally accepted value, I believe. PIE was spoken, what, > about 8,000 years ago? Assuming language appeared 30K BP (and probably > much earlier), PIE is still quite recent. There are about as many "generally accepted values" as there are people discussing the issue. The fact is, we (the linguistic community, the scientific establishment, whatever) don't really *know*. Sure, there are a lot of what are probably good *guesses*, but in terms of any rigorous analysis of empirical data (like trying to guess when language developed in modern man based on brain mass), no, there's not much of that. I've heard anything from a 500k years BP to what you now use, which is the most recent I've heard of any figure (not that that makes any difference in the matter). Estimates about when PIE was spoken (if we can call PIE a homogenous language at all), are similarly much debated, and with equal murkiness and generality in reasoning, often. Nonetheless, as for what I *believe* about the amtter (not what I can prove), I find it unlikely that PIE reflects much of any postulated ur-unity. >> We do not need a time-machine to reconstruct IE, do we? > Yeah, and look at this list. If PIE was unarguably reconstructed, there > wouldn't be much of a list, now would there? Because of the fact that > it was spoken just 8 millennia ago, or whatever, how much less certainty > would there be about proto-World?! Right -- I don't think anybody can honestly and believably claim that just by the methods of historical reconstruction we can actually know what speech-patterns those hunter-gatherers in the Caucasus, or in the Steppe, or wherever they were, were *actually* using sitting around their campfires. Don't get me wrong -- I think we can have a very good idea about it, but it won't be perfect. In other words, we *would* need a timemachine if we really wanted to know what they *actually* spoke, as opposed to our best guesses. =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From stevegus at aye.net Wed Jun 2 01:29:46 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 21:29:46 -0400 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the newperfect? Message-ID: > Didn't diphthongation in Spanish only affect "open /O/", not "closed /o/" > and wasn't /o/ from /au/ a "closed /o/"? My understanding is: Moving from Latin to Proto-Romance, differences in length were levelled, and in most cases they were replaced with differences in quality. Proto-Romance applied a simple rule to vowel length: each stressed vowel is long, each unstressed vowel is short. Latin /o/ and /u:/ > /aa/ in Proto-Romance [/aa/ here represents the sound of 'a' with a circle above it, or the backwards 'c' of the IPA] [ Moderator's note: Represented by [O] in (most versions of) ASCII-to-IPA transcription. --rma ] Latin /o:/ > /o/ Similar developments confounded /ai/ {ae} with /e/; /e:/ and /i/ fell together as /e/; /a/ and /u/ were unaffected. As to the fate of /au/; it seems to have survived to a late date in French, if their orthography does not mislead us, and it might. I think it survives today in Rumanian, and possibly Sardinian. Now, the point of the 'fuego' example was to show that CL -short- /o/ in -focum- gets diphthongized when it is stressed; so by the time this change was happening, it must have been treated as long. French and Spanish share a further development in the vowel that results from short /e/: -pied(e)-. Long -o-, of course, gets the same treatment when stressed, but the process seems to be unreliable even in the same words: -fortem- > -fuerte- in Spain, -fort(e)- in France and Italy. It seems to me, therefore, that this change was one that -could- at least happen sometimes to both /aa/ and /o/. The difficulty seems to me to revolve around the quality of the vowel resulting from /au/, and when the change took place. Since /au/ was always long in CL, if it became /o/ early on it seems likelier that it would have shared the fate of /o:/. On the other hand, the fate of /ai/ {ae} and the fact that it shares its fate with -short- /e/, though it too was always long in CL, might suggest the possibility that /au/ would also turn into a short vowel. At any rate, it seems likelier that the loss of /au/ occurred after the new diphthongs in Spain, Italy, and France came into being. Exceptions to the diphthongization might also come about because of reborrowing from the learned language; if the Latin-using monks were more interested in hours than Giovanni in the grapevines, their word for 'hour' might prevail over expected phonetic developments. -- Ante principium erat quaedam testudo; et sola fuit; et circumspicit, et vidit vicinam eius, quae mater sua erat. Et deposuit se super vicinam eius, et ecce: paruit ei in lacrimis quercum, quae omne die crevit, et tunc decidit, et fecit pontem. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 2 03:19:51 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 22:19:51 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Robert and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Orr Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 12:50 AM Pat wrote: >> I have not been asserting that languages "become more complex, less >> ambiguous, and more expressive". I have asserted only that the >> proto-language, which was simple, became more complex, less ambiguous, >> and more expressive over time. Robert commented: > R.M.W. Dixon suggests in his recent book "The Rise and fall of Languages" > that once the language facility was "discovered" by humans, language would > have developed rapidly, possibly in the space of a generation or two, and > the end result of that development would have been quite complex, > comparable to modern languages. Pat comments: I consider the idea that language was "discovered" absurd, and the idea that fully developed language took only a generation or two to appear: quite preposterous! What, pray tell, are the qualifications of R. M. W. Dixon? [ Moderator's reply: More than 30 years working in Australian languages, as well as other families in other parts of the world. You would do well to check out references such as this, his most recent book, before taking this tone again about *any* linguist, sir. Even those of us who disagree with his conclusions respect them, and his other accomplishments. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From Georg at home.ivm.de Wed Jun 2 07:21:03 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 09:21:03 +0200 Subject: Sociological Linguistics In-Reply-To: <005001beac13$6fba77c0$8d9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >Pat, rather surprised: >I always thought "haben" was somehow a morphological plural. Infinitive, Pidgin German (or rather: interlinear-gloss-German). I'm illustrating a language without morphological plurals expressing multitudes, remember ? Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Jun 2 08:39:29 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 03:39:29 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Nik Taylor wrote: > "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> unless, of course, you believe that God bestowed fully developed language >> on Adam, which belief would disqualify you from any rational discussion of >> the topic. > Why should that disqualify a person from "any rational discussion"? > Admittedly, it would make discussion a moot point, unless it were a > theological discussion on what kind of language God would've created. More to the point: seeing as how Mr. Ryan, convinced though he might be about the nature of early speech, has not yet provided any constructive evidence about what this might be, it seems that he is advocating something at least as rational as believing that God gave Adam human language fully developed, since there is no positive evidence for either*. Unless you can come up with some good hard soundlaws and provable cognates to show what Proto-World would be like, then it seems a little silly even to continue discussion of the matter. *(Interestingly, the Bible might actually disagree with the idea of language existing at the beginning fully formed, considering Gen 2:19, where God brings all the animals before Adam to see what he'd name them) >> I have asserted that early language, for any non-believer, would have had >> to have gone through a stage that was less expressive (more ambiguous) than >> languages of which we currently have documented information. > But, this is a moot > point. We cannot possibly reconstruct that far back. Even Nostratic, > if it is legitimate, would've been long past that point. Mr. Ryan's belief, whether or not it is correct, essentially, in its logical underpinnings, bears no qualitative difference from Aristotle's assertion that heavier things fall faster than lighter things. Aristotle's error was in not testing his proposition, in not having any empirical evidence to back up what his hypothesis claimed. Until Mr. Ryan can provide scientific evidence as to what the nature of Proto-World was like, his assertion will have as much scientific validity. (Again, this does not mean it's wrong; just that it's pointless to discuss the matter without further investigation) =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Jun 2 09:12:35 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 04:12:35 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > In spoken American English final /-t/ often becomes /?/ > So can /kaen/ & can't /kaen?/ have to be distinguished by a combination of > stress & tone > I can go /aykaeGO/ with rising tone on the last syllable > I can't go /ayKAEN?go/ with rising tone on the 2nd syllable Not in any dialect of American English *I* know of... all varieties of American English feature unrelease of the stop there, which, though in some ways acousticly similar to [?], is not the same thing as [?]. The only case I know of where [?] is an allophone in American English is before syllabic nasals, as in "button". > Now, as a non-linguist, I don't know the > dynamics/inter-relationship of stress & tone but both tone and stress are > clearly involved --thereby creating a new complication. In most places, such features are not actually needed. In phrases like "I can go", the vowel is entirely eliminated, producing a syllabic nasal [ai kn, gou]. "can't" can't undergo this process of reduction, at least in my dialect. (Also, for me at least, this occurs to the extent that to use "can" with a full vowel is a mark of high stress, in which case I would likely be very clear in articulating the /n/ as opposed to the /nt/) But this doesn't really change the thrust of your point: that complexities in one area of a language, when reduced, will be compensated new complexities elsewhere. Here, morphosyntactic relationships become more complex as the former phonological distinctions become less so. =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Wed Jun 2 12:54:57 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 13:54:57 +0100 Subject: Cultural influence (was: Sociological...) Message-ID: Peter goes: >>> I find different languages differently "expressive" So I go: >>> I don't think the _linguistic_ constraints had much of a part So he goes: > Of course there are also some factors in the actual use of language which > are purely cultural, but to deny any linguistic factors at all seems rather > to be overstating your case! So I go: How curious that you read that so. I must admit that I did pause over the phrasing there, but let my second or third attempt through as reasonably unambiguous. I simply meant "I don't think they had _much_ of a part", and didn't want it to be read litotically as "I think they _didn't_ have any part". But litotes seems to be so ingrained in English that it's hard to avoid the imputation. (I'm reminded of the strange fact that in English "I don't like" means "I dislike", and that you have to labour and squirm to convey the simple meaning "it's not the case that I _like_".) Is there a bit of national character involved in this reading? Did American readers read it as litotes? So no denial intended, and no overstating. Peter quoque dicere: > Latin which is recognisably Latin must express certain factors such as > number and tense. I would say this is linguistic rather than cultural. > German and French speakers are faced with the awful choice of socially > marked second person pronouns It's rather like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: pretty and appealing like a soap bubble when you first read about it, and collapses if you touch it. What I would say is that _normally_ the specific linguistic features don't have a big influence on thought, though you can make them more important if you're shaping a cultural artefact. In English I feel myself thinking in terms of you:sg, you:du, you:pl, and T/V, and will commonly say "you two", "any of you"; I also have an almost grammatical difference between "this lady/gentleman here" (in earshot) and "that woman/man over there" that reminds me of Japanese. But I never feel the need to think of we:incl and we:excl. That is, my thought ranges over divisions that my language doesn't. If I was Indonesian I'd have and but no "we", and I'd have no grammatical tense or number; but I think I'd think about people and time and quantity much the same way I do now. Of course I'm not saying it's entirely invisible. The use of plural "you" as singular all over Europe, and even more so the proliferation of forms like and , must have been conscious on some people's part. Nicholas From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 2 20:04:40 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 21:04:40 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Wolfgang wrote a full reply to my suggestion of three places where IE might have been ergative. I appreciated the comments about the variation over time, and about the fact that languages are almost never purely ergative or accusative. I am responding to one point in particular. On the identity of nominative and accusative for all neuters, he said: > The only thing we can conclude from this is > that true neuters rarely show up as agents (that they hardly ever played > the role of a subjective (S) or agentive (A) except in a metaphorical > sense). Neutral NPs hence are very likely to represents objectives (O). > This is very natural - it tells us nothing about [where IE lies on a > continuum of ergativitiy and accusativity] Perhaps I fail to understand. Did you mean to count both subjective and agentive as "agents", and say that it was natural that inanimates should not play that role? If pre-IE had an animate / inanimate distinction, we can believe that inanimates might never or very rarely be agents, but it is more difficult to believe they were never subjects. I find it difficult to believe that in a language which produced PIE, Mr IE was unable to say to Mrs IE, "The is nice (or dangerous, or whatever)." It is precisely the use of an objective form for the subject-topic of a stative sentence which leads some people to argue that there are hints of an earlier ergative stage here. Have I missed something in your argument? Peter From edsel at glo.be Wed Jun 2 17:34:23 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 19:34:23 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Wolfgang Schulze Date: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 8:16 AM [snip] >Evidently, this paradigm does not reflect any kind of ERG strategy. Such >a strategy often has been inferred from the fact that the {S=A}-marker >*-s seems to have something in common with the genitive (singular (!)) >(*-es, *-os, *-s). From this some kind of 'genitivus-ergativus' had been >reconstructed from Pre-IE. Naturally, a genitivus-ergativus is attested >in a considerable number of languages (Yupik-Eskimo, Lak (East >Caucasian), to name only two). However, again IE *-s does not behave >ERG, even IF we can associate it with the genitive marker (singular): >*-(e/o)s also encodes the S-function, which is ANTI ERG. [snip] [Ed Selleslagh] Thank you for this illuminating contribution. May I add some thoughts? As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', which could just as well be called 'ablativus-ergativus', the genitive and the ablative both being 'pointers' to the origin of the action. Note the similarity of the Latin construction : passive + a(b) + ablative. So, it seems that the need for some (pseudo-?)ergative way of speaking is still lingering on in IE languages. In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also had an 'ablative meaning'!). Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 2 19:23:07 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 14:23:07 -0500 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? In-Reply-To: <37539C0B.7DF59CD9@ufl.edu> Message-ID: By the time became /ko:sa/, the long /o:/ vs. short /o/ dichotomy had become one of "open" /O/ vs. "closed" /o/ --hadn't it? Wouldn't /kausa, kauza, kawsa, kawza/ have gone through the intermediate step of /kowsa, kowza/ before becoming /ko:sa, ko:za/? I'm thinking of Portuguese causa /kawza/ > cousa /kowza/ > coisa /koyza/ >petegray wrote: >> For example, the common (in both senses) pronunciation >> of -au- as /o:/ is "extremely well attested". Yet in Romance the vowel >> seems to have been not /o:/ but short /o/, >Certainly not in Spanish, at any rate. causa became /ko:sa/, to /kosa/ >(short /o/ became /O/), which survived as /kosa/, had it been /kosa/ in >Vulgar Latin, it would've become /kOsa/ in Old Spanish, and /kwesa/ in >Modern Spanish, which did not occur. *Cuesa is not a word. [ Moderator's comment: Actually, it was Nik Tailor who wrote the more recent text above. --rma ] >"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father >was hanged." - Irish proverb >http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files >http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html >ICQ: 18656696 >AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 2 19:32:44 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 20:32:44 +0100 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: I said:: [Latin au > o: in "vulgar Latin", but often Romance seems to show au > O] Nik said: > Certainly not in Spanish, at any rate. causa became .../kosa/ > ...not.../kwesa/ . You could point to Old Spanish coa < cauda, too. There are cases where Romance derivatives show an original long o:, but I believe the cases of short O are more common. Note that the Latin /au/ survived in Provencal and Rumanian. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 3 00:22:11 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 19:22:11 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 2:34 PM >> Pat responded: >> One of the phenomena I believe I have identified in early language is that >> the plural morpheme was, at one point, simply stress-accentuation. Leo objected: > How odd then that the plural veb forms are not identical to singular ones > escept for the accent. Ditto nouns. Pat responds: Sometimes I believe you are merely pulling my leg. The phonomenon I think I detected in early language has nothing to do with singular or plural verbal inflections, which are much later. The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms of the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). Since early transitive verbal roots can be analyzed as *CV (object) + *CV (verbal idea), a pluralization of the verbal idea indicates repetition leading to perfectivity; the pluralization of the object indicates multiple objects leading to an interpretation of imperfectivity. Pat continued: >> Yes, I believe that vowel retention is generally a function of stress-accent >> but I find the explanation that *bherete "had three syllables with >> stress-accent" ununderstandable in terms of what I think of as >> stress-accent. Leo objected: > I'm not claiming any such thing. But you have made a connection between the > retention of _e_ and stress accent at whatever level. How is 2.pl. > *_bherete_ possible in your theory unless it has three stress accents, quod > Deus avertat? Pat responds: Then why write "had three syllables with stress-accent"? Spell out what you mean to say so that I will not have occasion to misinterpret it. There can be many explanations for the retention of the principally stress-unaccented vowels as you well know. The likeliest is that the period during which lack of stress-accent caused zero-grade stem forms had passed. Another: the necessity for differentiation of 3rd sing and 2nd pl. overrode normal patterns (if still operational). Etcetera. Leo, on another subject: > How so, if you are also claiming that PIE was ergative? In ergative > languages, the morphological subject of an agent-patient sentence (barring > "antipassive" or the like) is precisely the patient, not the agent. Pat responds: Are you just trying to create confusion? There is no law that in an ergative language any agreement markers on the verb *must* refer to the patient. Pat continued: >> I also believe that the IE reflexes of T{H}O (IE *tV) properly (originally) >> refer only to animate entities; a similar form, T{?}O (IE *dV) referred >> properly to inanimate objects, and is the basis for neuters in -*d. Leo replied: > We should then expect the two to be kept distinct, especially with primary > endings: -ti contrasting with *-di. But it doesn't happen. Pat responds: If the athematic primary and secondary endings referred to the ergative (in an ergative context) or the nominative (in an accusative context), i.e. where agentially referential, there would obviously be no need for an inanimate *-d(i). The only traces I see in IE of a reference to the patient in IE inflections is in the element *-dh(V)- occurring in the middle (PL T[?]SA, 'body, self'). Pat continued: >> Regarding -*t and -*te, I do not believe that any grammatical morpheme in >> IE can originally have had the form -*C since I believe that all grammatical >> morphemes are originally grammaticalized -*Ce (at a minimum) non-grammatical >> morphemes. On this basis, both -*t and -*te must derive from earlier -*tV. >> In the absence of evidence to differentiate them, I assume a unitary origin. Leo objected: > They have different meanings. The null hypothesis should therefore be that > they are distinct, even if you are unable to find a phonetic distinction. > Beliefs about the shape of free morphemes have nothing to do with the case. Pat rejoins: Oh, yes but they do. And please, let us not get into another sterile discussion of null hypotheses, for which five linguists evince six opinions. Pat continued: >> For *te-w-to-, although we would both acknowledge -*to, I am not going to be >> able to persuade you that a morpheme *te- could be the basis to which a >> collective morpheme -*w was added --- in a paragraph or two because you are >> unwilling to look beyond IE where *CeC roots are the general rule. It is my >> belief that every IE *CeC root can potentially be analyzed into *CV + *CV, >> and that these monosyllabic morphemes are recognizable is some early >> languages: e.g. Egyptian , 'loaf', is cognate with IE -*dV, neuter >> formant. Leo answered: > You're right: you can't convince me. But not because I have any preconceived > ideas about root shapes in PIE (not that I know of any *roots* that are that > short). The problem is that your semantics are simply beyond the pale of > anything that could be called linguistic *science*. Looking beyond PIE won't > change that. Pat responds: Semantics is in the eye of the beholder. For a look at what I believe are reasonable semantic relationships, see http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/ProtoLanguage-Monosyllables.htm#T ?O Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From ctp at germsem.uni-kiel.de Thu Jun 3 02:26:36 1999 From: ctp at germsem.uni-kiel.de (Christian Petersen) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 04:26:36 +0200 Subject: ... (dual forms) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Lieber Ralf-Stefan und Indogermanisten, unfortunately, I've not been able to pick the fruits of this list for a long time; but now I am about to move and change job, and hence have to sign off for a while. But before I do that, I'd like to tell you a brief anecdote that happened to the Icelandic IEist/Tocharologist/Balticist/Laryngealist Jvrundur Hilmarsson, who died quite untimely of cancer in his 40s. He wanted to find out about Lithuanian dual forms in order to prove that they were still productive. So he took a trip to Vilnius and went out to the countryside to ask elderly people whether they have ever encountered the (dual) forms xyz. But everyone he met was unaware of suchalike. So without having achieved anything in this matter, he gave up after a fortnight and booked the return flight. After the checkout, the passengers were driven to the plane by bus. The bus was very crowded, so that not everyone could get a seat. All of a sudden, the bus had to brake very hard, and the people standing could not keep a firm hold, and thus accidentally pushed their neighbours. Among them was an old woman with a full bag in each hand; and the young man she kicked was upset and asked her to take more care. Her reply was this: "If I had three hands, I could hold myself tight, but I only have TWO HANDS." And there it was. Those of you who are interested in Gothic might check out this site: http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/%7Ereimar/gotisch.html#verweise Everyone have a nice summer Christian From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Thu Jun 3 17:39:36 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 10:39:36 -0700 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) Message-ID: Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: > But linguists should be very careful in distinguishing between the two > words "evolve/evolution" and "change". We don't use the strict > biological definition of "evolution" and any linguist who tries to do > so is not going to be taken seriously. Linguistic "evolution" is that > part of the history of language between the first human utterances and > the stabilization of modern human grammar. It ended before the first > recorded or reconstructed human languages. "Change" is what goes on now > and has gone on throughout our recorded linguistic history. > "Evolution" was the process of increasing complexity. "Change" shows > no change in overall complexity, but additions and losses of different > forms (words, structures, sounds). Ancient Sumerian is no more or less > complex in its total grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) than is > Modern English. There is a lot of change that has occurred between > Proto-Indo-European and Modern English, but no evolution. Really???? Is this how people are using the terminology????? Strange; i've been routinely using the word `evolve'/`evolution' to refer to the process whereby, e.g., Modern English derives from Middle English etc. Why, just yesterday i was lecturing my sophomores on the centralization of diphthongs on Martha's Vineyard, and explicitly referring to this as an example of linguistic `evolution'. Am i WAY off track here terminologically? Maybe it's time somebody (me, since i'm the one doing it) asked for a show of hands. How many historical linguists reserve the lexeme `evolve' for the restricted sense that John allows? How many would allow it for the process whereby a recognizably new language (e.g., Modern English) arises from a pre-existing language (e.g., Middle English)? And what about intermediate gradations between these extremes? Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** [ Moderator's comment: I'll start: I understand John McLaughlin's point, but I tend to use the word as Steven Schaufele does, a usage I consider a metaphorical extension of the biological sense. --rma ] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Jun 3 03:45:38 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 22:45:38 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: Pat promised: >henceforward, unless I >inadvertently regress, I will refer to lexical and grammatical differences. That will help clarify things greatly. A question on the use of the word morpheme: Some of use it for the smallest element of a word (i.e., either root or affix), but in some of our discussion we have tended to restrict it to grammatical morphemes (essentially, to affixes). I think all of us (including me) have to be more careful here than we have been. > >Pat answers: >I do not think 'withdrawing' is the correct characterization. I do not >subscribe to the current theory of Lallwo{"}rter as I believe you do, and >here we must simply agree to disagree since neither of us will be persuaded >by the other. I agree that there's little to be gained by pursuing the matter. I would only caution that one must be as careful of possible Lallwoerter as of onomatopoetic expressions, since either could be created anew at any time. I mean, how old is the word _cuckoo_? Since that's how the European cuckoo really sounds (even outside clocks_, it is futile to look for etymological connections, since anyone hearing it at any time could create the word anew. And that's the problem with Lallwoerter: babies do babble the same everywhere, and parents love to think that their offspring are talking to them. So etymologies of words auch as 'father' and 'mother' are riskier than normal as far as the root goes. The suffix, of course, if that's what it is, is another matter, since that's not babbling. [stuff deleted] Pat claimed: >I do believe there is a strong possibility that, in the very earliest stages >of language, phonemes did have actual meanings but even by the time of CV >roots, this association (if it ever existed a la sound symbolism) had been >lost in terms of the basic meaning of these monosyllables (though it might >linger on almost as a grace-note to the meaning in the form of nuances or >emotional interpretations). This can be interpreted several ways. The most literal reading would be that any [s], anywhere, anytime, meant the same thing. If that's what you mean, all I could say is that it's pure conjecture, and naturally there's no way to prove or disprove it. It would be a non-scientific statement and thus have no place in a serious discussion on the origins of language. There's also a phonetic problem: while vowels, nasals, [r] and [l], and fricatives could plausibly exist by themselves, stops really can't (and couldn't back then either, unless our vocal apparatus functioned very differently). Yet stops dominate in PIE roots, in the sense that there are many more of them than of the other consonant phonemes. Why would that be? Pat again: >Now, evidently, my early training in linguistics differed from your own >since, as another wrote recently, this definition of phoneme has to be with >the (once fashionable?) idea of minimal pairs. I don't quite understand this sentence, but I don't that that's the explanation for our differences. My original training was structuralist (phoneme = a class of sounds, out there in the real world); I now regard it as a psychological entity, and not necessarily the best analysis for all situations (remember what I wrote privately about the vowels of Turkish grammatical morphemes, where distinctive feature analysis works well but phonemes are clumsy). Minimal pairs, closely associated with structuralism, are still a very useful diagnostic even for the psychological analyses. The fact that [phit] and [bit] are different still tells us that their mental phonological representation must be different. [stuff omotted] >Pat, puzzled: >Then how did "original" e: creep into the discussion? Do you believe that >there could be two morphemes in IE, *CeC and *Ce:C, that differed >**lexically** when *Ce:C is not the result of earlier *CeHC? I don't know of any for *early* PIE, and there shouldn't have been any. I'll need help here from someone who knows more, but don't some scholars posit original long vowels for *late* PIE? We would be talking about either newly created roots or about borroiwings from non-IE languages. Can anyone contribute something? >Pat, more or less agreeing [that nouns and pronouns may have different syntax]: >But do you not think that where their employments differ, one of the major >reasons is the typical brevity of many pronominal elements, and their >encliticity? This is probably true for word order -- at least, if there's any truth to Behaghel's "Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder", by which words and phrases tend to get longer as the clause goes on. This "law", of course, is based on empirical observation but seems to work in a good many languages. But that won't explain why they can't be used with determiners, or with adjectives and may behave oddly when used with prepositions. (All of this, by the way, is language-specific; noun and pronoun direct objects differ much more in Spanish than in English.) Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jun 4 04:44:07 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 00:44:07 -0400 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Date: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 2:07 AM . The example of causa > chose strangely looks like some Celtic mutation . influence/contamination Oh? Robert Orr From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Jun 3 04:33:11 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 23:33:11 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >>Evidently, this paradigm does not reflect any kind of ERG strategy. Such >>a strategy often has been inferred from the fact that the {S=A}-marker >>*-s seems to have something in common with the genitive (singular (!)) >>(*-es, *-os, *-s). From this some kind of 'genitivus-ergativus' had been >>reconstructed from Pre-IE. Naturally, a genitivus-ergativus is attested >>in a considerable number of languages (Yupik-Eskimo, Lak (East >>Caucasian), to name only two). However, again IE *-s does not behave >>ERG, even IF we can associate it with the genitive marker (singular): >>*-(e/o)s also encodes the S-function, which is ANTI ERG. To which Ed Selleslagh responded: >As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the >passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit >periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', which could just as well be >called 'ablativus-ergativus', the genitive and the ablative both being >'pointers' to the origin of the action. Note the similarity of the Latin >construction : passive + a(b) + ablative. So, it seems that the need for >some (pseudo-?)ergative way of speaking is still lingering on in IE >languages. that's pushing it a bit far. German also uses _durch_ 'through' for this purpose, mainly for less active participants. English uses _by_. Ancient Greek used _hypo_ 'under'. And so it goes. But what do these have in common? Surely not a tendency toward a combined ergative-genitive case. Rather, we have the phenomenon that languages have definite ideas about which prepositions are appropriate for non-local functions, but their choices are largely arbitrary and differ from language to language (or region to region). Most Americans wait *for* the bus, but people in Memphis can also wait *on* the bus to come. Germans wait _auf den Bus_ -- *onto* the bus. I often tell my German students: "Never trust a preposition." That's exaggerated, of course, but a useful warning to them *not* to translate English usage into German. Meanwhile, we wait for, or on, or onto, or even simply await, a better explanation of agentive _von_ in German. Leo >In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the >ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative >plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of >'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also had >an 'ablative meaning'!). >Ed. Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 3 05:24:12 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 00:24:12 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Tom and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Wier Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 3:39 AM >> "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >>> unless, of course, you believe that God bestowed fully developed >>> language on Adam, which belief would disqualify you from any rational >>> discussion of the topic. Nik Taylor wrote: > Why should that disqualify a person from "any rational discussion"? > Admittedly, it would make discussion a moot point, unless it were a > theological discussion on what kind of language God would've created. > More to the point: seeing as how Mr. Ryan, convinced though he > might be about the nature of early speech, has not yet provided any > constructive evidence about what this might be, it seems that he > is advocating something at least as rational as believing that God gave > Adam human language fully developed, since there is no positive > evidence for either*. Unless you can come up with some good hard > soundlaws and provable cognates to show what Proto-World would > be like, then it seems a little silly even to continue discussion of the > matter. > *(Interestingly, the Bible might actually disagree with the idea > of language existing at the beginning fully formed, considering > Gen 2:19, where God brings all the animals before Adam to see what > he'd name them) Pat responds: I get an average of 10 visits a day to my website, at which I attempt to provide soundlaws and cognates. If you have not visited it, why do you not? http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 Pat continued: >>> I have asserted that early language, for any non-believer, would have had >>> to have gone through a stage that was less expressive (more ambiguous) than >>> languages of which we currently have documented information. So did Nick: > But, this is a moot point. We cannot possibly reconstruct that far back. > Even Nostratic, if it is legitimate, would've been long past that point. > Mr. Ryan's belief, whether or not it is correct, essentially, in its logical > underpinnings, bears no qualitative difference from Aristotle's assertion > that heavier things fall faster than lighter things. Aristotle's error was > in not testing his proposition, in not having any empirical evidence to back > up what his hypothesis claimed. Until Mr. Ryan can provide scientific > evidence as to what the nature of Proto-World was like, his assertion will > have as much scientific validity. (Again, this does not mean it's wrong; > just that it's pointless to discuss the matter without further investigation) Pat responds: I do not go into the theory of the Proto-Language in detail because 1) I have already done it at my website; 2) much of the material is not appropriate for the Indo-European list, and some, not even for the Nostratic list; and 3) I do not believe the moderator would permit it. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 3 05:41:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 00:41:31 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Tom and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Wier Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 4:28 AM >> Pat responded: >> "Irrelevant" must be your favorite word. What happened to your "*in any >> era*"? Have you just dropped that idea without acknowledging how >> wrong-headed it is? >> What "extant" languages show is totally irrelevant to what they may have >> been like in the far distant past. Tom commented: > (a) Linguistics must procede under the assumption that the kinds of > phenomena that we see today have always been that way. We cannot > go around assuming that entirely unprecedented changes or features > were the case centuries or millennia earlier. They might well have been, > but, methodologicly speaking, *there is no way to prove that*. Any > processes you do claim existed would be entirely lacking in empirical > foundation, by definition, and thus subject to a high probability of error > (here we're getting back to Aristotle's fundamental problem). Pat responds: If you ever visit my website, you will see that nothing I hypothesize about the Proto-Language does not have similar modern parallels. Tom continued: > (b) So, what extant languages show might well be entirely relevant, if > there is no methodological means to reconstruct the protolanguage. > When you are trying to describe a language, you have to know what it > is first -- and when you're dealing with reconstructed languages, this > is an iffy business at best. Also, if the known data about extant > languages all disagree fundamentally with a hypothesis, it is the duty > of the linguistic establishment not to accept that hypothesis as true > unless further evidence comes along to reinforce it (which could > happen). Pat responds: Strange words from a man who announces "credo ergo ero (indicium non necessarium)". But, anyway, instead of generalities, take any of what you believe to be my hypotheses --- those you believe "disagree fundamentally" with "data about extant languages" --- and show me where they conflict. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 3 06:02:52 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 01:02:52 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 3:04 PM Peter wrote: > It is precisely the use of an objective form for the subject-topic of a > stative sentence which leads some people to argue that there are hints of > an earlier ergative stage here. > Have I missed something in your argument? Pat comments: Perhaps I have missed something also. In what IE language does an objective form function as the subject-topic of a stative sentence? [ Moderator's comment: The reference is, I believe, to o-stem neuter nominative/accusative which looks like o-stem non-neuter accusative. However, in other stem formations, the parallel in appearance does not exist. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From inaki.agirre at si.unirioja.es Thu Jun 3 19:16:03 1999 From: inaki.agirre at si.unirioja.es (Inaki Agirre Perez) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 20:16:03 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: > In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the > ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative > plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of > 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also had > an 'ablative meaning'!). Could you be clearer about this point, Ed? Basque ergative case is s. -AK pl. -EK, both from *-EGAK if I recall it right. Ablative is s. -TIK and partitive is -IK. They have a very close meaning in NPs like 'one of you', say ZUETARIK BAT = ZUETATIK BAT, but I don't grasp the point with ergative or nominative. Inaki From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Jun 4 05:35:24 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 23:35:24 -0600 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Steven Schaufele wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Really???? Is this how people are using the terminology????? Strange; > i've been routinely using the word `evolve'/`evolution' to refer to the > process whereby, e.g., Modern English derives from Middle English etc. > Why, just yesterday i was lecturing my sophomores on the centralization > of diphthongs on Martha's Vineyard, and explicitly referring to this as > an example of linguistic `evolution'. Am i WAY off track here > terminologically? Maybe it's time somebody (me, since i'm the one doing > it) asked for a show of hands. How many historical linguists reserve > the lexeme `evolve' for the restricted sense that John allows? How many > would allow it for the process whereby a recognizably new language > (e.g., Modern English) arises from a pre-existing language (e.g., Middle > English)? And what about intermediate gradations between these > extremes? I'll add a few bits of evidence to this, even though my vote's been counted. Take a look at the historical linguistics textbooks. They all use the term 'change' to account for everything historical. Terry Crowley, An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, 2nd ed, 1992, Oxford. Contents headings: "Language Change", "Sound Change", "Ordering of Changes", "Phonemic Change", "Phonetic Change", etc. In looking at his chapter on subgrouping, for example, I see "changed to", "derived from", and "descended from", but never "evolved from". The only context in which he uses "evolve" is in an appropriate context of the rise of a creole from a pidgin, or of the initial rise of a pidgin. In this case "evolve" is perfectly appropriate, since a pidgin is a greatly simplified language that came from pieces of substrate and superstrate languages and a creole is a fully complex human language. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 1987, Cambridge. In section 54, Language change, the word "evolution" never occurs. Instead Crystal uses terms like "split from", "diverged from", etc. I briefly scanned half a dozen other texts on historical linguistics and found the same situation. The words "evolve/evolution" are never used with respect to the change over time from one fully modern, complex human language to another. I quote from one of my personal heroes--Mary Haas--in The Prehistory of Languages, 1969, Mouton. (pg. 13): "The 'prehistory of languages' is not to be confused with a different topic which might be called the 'prehistory of language'....This means that language may very well have been slowly evolving over hundreds of thousands of years....Our concern here, however, is with what may be called the 'prehistory of languages'." This is the last use of the term "evolve" in her book. On pg 33, she writes, "If we turn the whole thing round and look at it from the other direction we see that the daughter languages are not only different from each other but also from the protolanguage. We describe this differentiation by calling it 'linguistic change'." Recently, the now moribund Evolution of Language list came to a general consensus (Pat Ryan may have disagreed) exactly along these traditional lines, namely, that "language evolution" be reserved for the animal to human development of language and "language change" for the traditionally understood definition of "language change" as the accumulation of grammatical and lexical differences that eventually renders two speech communities unable to communicate with one another through their native tongues. John McLaughlin Utah State University From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 4 09:42:34 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 11:42:34 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 5:22 AM [ moderator snip ] >To which Ed Selleslagh responded: >>As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the >>passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit >>periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', which could just as well be >>called 'ablativus-ergativus', the genitive and the ablative both being >>'pointers' to the origin of the action. Note the similarity of the Latin >>construction : passive + a(b) + ablative. So, it seems that the need for >>some (pseudo-?)ergative way of speaking is still lingering on in IE >>languages. >That's pushing it a bit far. German also uses _durch_ 'through' for this >purpose, mainly for less active participants. English uses _by_. Ancient >Greek used _hypo_ 'under'. And so it goes. But what do these have in common? >Surely not a tendency toward a combined ergative-genitive case. Rather, we >have the phenomenon that languages have definite ideas about which >prepositions are appropriate for non-local functions, but their choices are >largely arbitrary and differ from language to language (or region to region). >Most Americans wait *for* the bus, but people in Memphis can also wait *on* >the bus to come. Germans wait _auf den Bus_ -- *onto* the bus. I often tell >my German students: "Never trust a preposition." That's exaggerated, of >course, but a useful warning to them *not* to translate English usage into >German. >Meanwhile, we wait for, or on, or onto, or even simply await, a better >explanation of agentive _von_ in German. >Leo [Ed] Generally speaking, I agree with you about the relative arbitrariness of the choice of prepositions. However, these choices are between a limited number of approaches, each with its own logic, especially in the context of the agentative cum pseudo-ergative construction. a)The German construction with 'von' and the Latin one with 'ab' follow the logic of pointing at the origin of the action, and so constitutes an 'ablative/genitive of origin' approach. It is closest to the actual ergative in Basque, at least in my view. In my opinion, this is a sufficient explanation for the agentative use of 'von'. b)The German construction with 'durch' ('door' in Dutch, 'by' in English) is an 'instrumental' approach. (Basque -z case, which I believe to be the origin of Castilian patronymics ending in -(e)z: many of them have Basque forms of Christian names preceding the ending: e.g. Ibane (Juan), Pere or Peru(Pedro), or Basque morphology when using Castilian names: JuaRez, from JuaN) c)The classical Greek with 'hypó + genitive' denotes a 'subject-dominated' approach, something happening 'under the control, influence... of', nonetheless with a rather strong shade of the 'ablative/genitive/origin' approach contained in the use of the genitive instead of a dative or accusative. It is clear that in the case of the preposition 'hypó' the case used with it is all-important since it fundametally affects the true meaning of 'hypó'. No wonder, to me, that ablative, instrumental and locative fused morphologically into one 'ablativus' in Latin. >>In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the >>ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative >>plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of >>'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also had >>an 'ablative meaning'!). [Ed] See also my response to Iñaki Agirre Pérez. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 4 08:57:35 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 10:57:35 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Inaki Agirre Perez Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 6:28 AM >> In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the >> ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative >> plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of >> 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also >> had an 'ablative meaning'!). >Could you be clearer about this point, Ed? Basque ergative case is s. >-AK pl. -EK, both from *-EGAK if I recall it right. Ablative is s. -TIK >and partitive is -IK. They have a very close meaning in NPs like 'one of >you', say ZUETARIK BAT = ZUETATIK BAT, but I don't grasp the point with >ergative or nominative. >Iñaki [Ed] I tried to be clear by saying 'containing the ending -k' and 'a construction', but obviously failed. What I meant is that the complete, very probably composite, suffixes/endings all contain the final segment -k, which I believe has some basic ablative/genitive(of origin) meaning that manifests itself in the various grammatical cases I mentioned. It may also be present in the 'genitive' (of origin) suffix -ko; I even dare suggest that -ko might be the 'autonomous' form (i.e. not in fused composite suffixes) of -k. My point is that all the cases I mentioned have in common the fact that they point to an origin, be it of an action (ergative case), a geographical place (ablative and genitive of origin) or a group/category (partitive, (indefinite) plural). As an additional remark: it is quite remarkable that this -k and -ko also occur in Slavic languages, as derivation suffixes in very related contexts/meanings (-(j)ak, -ik, -ko). And in Greek : -(i)akós. Ed. From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Fri Jun 4 14:59:11 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 16:59:11 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In response to my last posting Eduard Selleslagh said: > As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the > passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit > periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', which could just as well be > called 'ablativus-ergativus', the genitive and the ablative both being > 'pointers' to the origin of the action. Note the similarity of the Latin > construction : passive + a(b) + ablative. So, it seems that the need for > some (pseudo-?)ergative way of speaking is still lingering on in IE > languages. As Leo said: "[]hat's pushing it a bit far." The constructions Ed mentioned belong to the paradigm of fore/backgrounding strategies (aka "diathesis"). Diathesis presupposes that there is a basic strategy of enconding participants in a "simple sentence", passives and/or antipassives. The way how backgrounded participants (most often semantic agents) are marked heavily depends on the individual language though some general tendencies may be observed (among them a genitivus-ablativus etc.). The most characteristic feature of most types of diathesis is that such marked NPs are normally located in the periphery of a "sentence", indicated by an appropriate oblique construction. Note that such peripheries sometimes can be secondarily splitted up, e.g. in German (cf. Leo: "German also uses _durch_ 'through' for this purpose, mainly for less active participants." [I do not in total agree with the semantics proposed by Leo's, but that does not matter here]. The question of whether or not a language system operates via diathesis depends on the general nature of role assigment in the language: We have to assume that NPs are marked by a functional cluster that covers (at least) the three domains 'semantics', 'reference', and 'pragmatics' [semantic, syntactic, and pragmatical roles, if you prefer more traditional terms]. Some languages favor a semantic-centered clustering (such as our famous Dakota), others reference-centering (many languages with classical diathesis), again others pragmatic centering (Tagalog etc.). Diathesis as a referential strategy (phrase internal as well as discourse dependent) presupposes a reference-dominated type. Many Modern IE languages are of this type (though some of them show a shift twoards pragmatic centering (among them German and Dutch), but PIE itself obviously lacked this strategy which comes clear from the fact that we cannot reconstruct a common "passive" for PIE. Diathesis is are very active feature in language change. It can come and go, and nothing allows us to propose a Passive for PIE just because a number of (modern) IE languages share this feature. If we look at the question of ERG and passive, we can sometimes observe a tendency to establish a pseudo-ergative strategy based on the passive (some modern Indo-Iranian languages, partly Cl. Armenian etc.). But this a secondary process often bound to specific (perfective) TAM forms. And: The ergativisation of passives (including shifts in word order etc.) does not argue for an earlier phase of ERG, on the contrary: Passives are typical for ACC systems (though also attested in what sometimes are (wrongly) thought to be "true" or "pure" ERG systems such as Inuit). The standard diathesis in ERG systems is the antipassive, cf. ACC PASS ERG AP S=A [A] S=O [O} O S( Perhaps I fail to understand. Did you mean to count both subjective and > agentive as "agents", and say that it was natural that inanimates should not > play that role? If pre-IE had an animate / inanimate distinction, we can > believe that inanimates might never or very rarely be agents, but it is more > difficult to believe they were never subjects. I find it difficult to > believe that in a language which produced PIE, Mr IE was unable to say to > Mrs IE, "The is nice (or dangerous, or whatever)." This surely is a problematic aspect. What we need is a better characterization of what is "subject", "subjective", "agentive" and so on. I will skip this question here because it would lead us into the deep ocean of Grammar Theory which has as many faces as researchers, I think. In short: True statives very often show an atypical behavior with respect to the AEC which in itself is a question of how the degree of transitivity of DYNAMIC actions is formalized [ERG focusses on the "effect" of an action, ACC on the "source" etc., see among MANY others Hopper/Thompson 1980, Silverstein 1976 (and Schulze 1998, if I may humbly add this reference). Sometimes, statives appear to be derived from intransitives: They are either subsumed under this strategy (as in many ACC and ERG systems) or split of there from in terms of Split-S marking ("active typology"). The fact that statives and perfective structures seem tio have been closely related in PIE indicates that PIE knew (at least in its agreement system) some kind of Split-S. IF this split was present with case marking, too, then we should assume that (in)animate statives were zero-marked, just as the old O-marker before the O-Split via *-m became effective, cf. S(inactive)-zero VERB(stative)(AGR(S(inactive))) S(active)-s VERB(AGR(S(active))) A-s O-zero/m VERB(AGR(A)) Note that I do not ascribe a general active typology to PIE (as Lehmman and others), I which I do not believe. It is just a simple S-split which is as "normal" as O-splits are. As our moderator has put it: "The reference is, I believe, to o-stem neuter nominative/accusative which looks like o-stem non-neuter accusative. However, in other stem formations, the parallel in appearance does not exist". Old neuters were zero-marked both in S and O function, whereas animates were -s-marked in S- and -m-marked in O-function, cf. Animate Inanimate S(inact) -s -0 S(act) -s --- A -s --- 0 -m -0 [A "good" acticve typology would yield: Animate Inanimate S(inact) --- -m S(act) -s --- A -s --- 0 -m -m (if we use the PPIE coding system as a symbol)] Hence, I think that PIE showed a doubled split in its case marking: S-split and O-split, before both splits were harmonized again. To make this point clear, I'd like to add what Mr. or Mrs. PIE would may have used as a scheme for case marking and agreement (I trasnlate *-s into TOP[ic], *-m in DIR[ective], and *-0 (zero) into ZERO: a) water-ZERO cold-AGR(water(inact)) S(inanim) = ZERO b) woman-TOP young(-AGR(woman(active)) S(anim) = TOP c) woman-TOP run-(AGR(woman(active)) S(anim) = TOP d) woman-TOP man-DIR see-AGR(woman) A(anim) = TOP O(anim) = DIR e) woman-TOP water-ZERO see-AGR(woman) A(anim) = TOP O(inanim) = ZERO Naturally, such as scheme is nothing but a very rough and only tentative paradigm. We have to assume that PIE knew as many (esp. metaphorical) variants as documented on other languages. Such variants may have allowed PIE spekaers to use inanimates as S in dynamic constructions or as A. Still, the overall picture remains the same: The operating system of PIE clearly showed an ACC strategy in its protypical kernel, semantically splitted according to [±animate] or so. This ACC strategy seemed to be dominated by topicalization routines with animates, a clear indices for the semantic basis of PIE "case" marking. Finally, AGR does not change this picture, even if we assign the *-H2e etc. series to statives/inactives, and the *-m etc. series to dynamics/actives: In this case, even the dichotomy [±anim] becomes irrelevant, because it does not show up in a specific set of clitics. ALL these clitics have an ACC AGR scheme... I hope, that this helps to understand my point. Wolfgang [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de |http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Jun 4 16:31:43 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 19:31:43 +0300 Subject: Sociological Linguistics In-Reply-To: <002f01bead84$2f83aec0$8a9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > If you ever visit my website, you will see that nothing I hypothesize about > the Proto-Language does not have similar modern parallels. What is the "similar modern parallel" for your supposition that a phonological distinctive feature ([+aspiration]) marks a semantic category ([+animate])? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Jun 4 16:20:29 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 17:20:29 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: > Dr. John E. McLaughlin; then Steven Schaufele; then Moderator : [snip dispute whether evolution is change] Me: Evolution is accumulation or proliferation of change. Life-forms and languages both constantly evolve, but the processes are unrelated. Darwin and Wallace didn't discover evolution of life, they discovered that natural selection is a sufficient cause of it. In language other causes are probably dominant (as it's hard to see selective advantage in most changes). One of the most recent large biological evolutionary changes in humans was the acquisition of language organs in the brain (assuming some such theory as fact...). This cleared the board for a whole new radiation of linguistic evolution, which continues. This is the only point at which the two examples of evolution meet. The equation of "evolution" with "evolution by natural selection" is common and natural, though it isn't even valid in biology, and the usage might now be so firmly established that it's unwise to use the word in any other correct sense, where there's any danger of conflict. It now sounds like either a metaphor derived from biology, or an attempt to derive conclusions by generalization of the discoveries of biology. If we're obliged to accept this common usage, we can speak literally and correctly of evolution in modern language by thinking of the organ acquisition as akin to the Cambrian invention of Baupla"ne, and everything since as an equilibrium that hasn't been punctuated, rich in neutral changes. HTH Nicholas From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Jun 4 16:44:00 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 17:44:00 +0100 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: On a non-linguistic forum recently I spotted the throwaway remark that the drink comes from an Indian word for 'five' because it has five ingredients. I immediately barged in and debunked this. But as the _OED_ is wrong about , I thought I'd ask the experts whether they can add anything to the _OED_ explanation or controvert it. In summary, it first occurs in English in 1632, and is repeatedly cited, always with and with variable ingredients; the expression then turns up in Continental languages as , , , . Clearly at this date it was pronounced with [u]. No suitable Indian language has [u] in 'five'. The first record of an [a] is also the first cited connexion with 'five': in 1698 one Fryer, who had travelled in India in 1672-81, wrote of "_Paunch_ (which is Indostan for Five) from Five Ingredients". It seems obvious to me that Fryer was indulging in or transmitting a folk-etymology, and all the years of evidence before him disallow it. The prosaic container is most likely. Does anyone have any good reason to disagree? Secondly, is there a more appropriate list around that delights in etymological niggles, as this has nothing deep to do with sigmatic aorist laryngeals? I want to ask someone their opinion of deriving the jive terms from Wolof; but not here. Nicholas From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 4 19:19:04 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 20:19:04 +0100 Subject: Cultural influence Message-ID: Nicholas accuses me of litotesising. I accept the point, and happily apologise. So we return to the primary question, where we both seem to agree, that the expressivity of a language is - at least partially - a question of balance between linguistic constraints and cultural fashion. He also says: > It's rather like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: I had intended something a little more concrete. Nicholas himself gives an example in his reply, when he says: >'I'm reminded of the strange fact that in English "I don't like" means "I >dislike", and that you have to labour and squirm to convey the simple >meaning "it's not the case that I _like_".' Perhaps there are more elegant ways of saying it in English, but here, at least, is an example of a presumably native speaker of English being aware of the linguistic constraints on his expressiveness. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 4 19:27:03 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 20:27:03 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Ed said: > As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the > passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit > periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', ... So did English once, although probably no longer. For example, John 14:21 (AV) "... he that loveth me shall be loved of my father, ..." Peter From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Fri Jun 4 21:50:50 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 16:50:50 -0500 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>> Pat responded: >>> One of the phenomena I believe I have identified in early language is that >>> the plural morpheme was, at one point, simply stress-accentuation. >Leo objected: >> How odd then that the plural veb forms are not identical to singular ones >> escept for the accent. Ditto nouns. >Pat responds: >Sometimes I believe you are merely pulling my leg. The phonomenon I think I >detected in early language has nothing to do with singular or plural verbal >inflections, which are much later. No, I'm not pulling your leg. I do wonder, though: is "early language" a distinct entity of some sort? I had not taken it that way, thinking you meant it rather as a collective for "early languages". Unless, of course, you were shifting the stress to the second syllble to indicate plurality: early lan-GUAGE. >The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms of >the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and >momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). Since early transitive verbal roots can >be analyzed as *CV (object) + *CV (verbal idea), a pluralization of the >verbal idea indicates repetition leading to perfectivity; the pluralization >of the object indicates multiple objects leading to an interpretation of >imperfectivity. Unless you posit humongous numbers of consonant and vowel phonemes, don't you then have a problem that the total number of phonetically different roots would have been (C+1)(V), i.e. the number of consonants + 1 (for no consonant at all) times the number of vowels? Awfully limiting. >Pat continued: >>> Yes, I believe that vowel retention is generally a function of >>> stress-accent but I find the explanation that *bherete "had three syllables >>> with stress-accent" ununderstandable in terms of what I think of as >>> stress-accent. > >Then why write "had three syllables with stress-accent"? Spell out what you >mean to say so that I will not have occasion to misinterpret it. You have said that V (or e/o, or ^) is dropped unless under stress accent. _bherete_ had three e's. Hence: three accents. That's what I meant. >There can be many explanations for the retention of the principally >stress-unaccented vowels as you well know. The likeliest is that the period >during which lack of stress-accent caused zero-grade stem forms had passed. But then, what happened to the expected *_bhr.te'_ from the period while the rule still operated? Such forms abound. The Germanic strong preterite, which reflects ablauting PIE perfect formations, still shows weak grades in the plural. So retention is no explanation, although a new analogical formation would work -- that is, if one could find an old form with plural e-grade to provide the analogy. >Another: the necessity for differentiation of 3rd sing and 2nd pl. overrode >normal patterns (if still operational). Etcetera. With different grade of the root, there was surely differentiation. It's the e-grade of the root and the thematic vowel that requires explanation, not that of the suffix. > >Leo, on another subject: >> How so, if you are also claiming that PIE was ergative? In ergative >> languages, the morphological subject of an agent-patient sentence (barring >> "antipassive" or the like) is precisely the patient, not the agent. >Pat responds: >Are you just trying to create confusion? There is no law that in an ergative >language any agreement markers on the verb *must* refer to the patient. [stuff omitted] >If the athematic primary and secondary endings referred to the >ergative (in an ergative context) or the nominative (in an accusative >context), i.e. where agentially referential, there would obviously be >no need for an inanimate *-d(i). The only traces I see in IE of a >reference to the patient in IE inflections is in the element *-dh(V)- >occurring in the middle (PL T[?]SA, 'body, self'). No, I'm no trying to cause confusion; I just think you don't realize the implications of what you're claiming. Some languages don't mark any NPs on the verb, a great many mark only one, and some mark more (Basque can have up to three). When only one is marked, it is almost invariably the morphological subject. Accusative languages normally make the highest-ranking noun phrase (by a hierarchy of "deep cases" of the sort proposed by Fillmore 1968) the morphological subject; for an agent-patient sentence, this will be the agent. Ergative languages normally make the patient the morphological subject. (I say "normally" because many languages can upset the process by passive or "antipassive" formations, and some verbs may make unusual choices.) When only one NP is marked on the verb, it is this morphological subject -- i.e., in ergative languages, the patient in an agent-patient sentence. I should add that there are a few languages with ergative casemarking but accusative verb agreement. So yes, there is no *law* that verb agreement markers in an ergative language will *always* refer to the patient; but overwhelmingly they do. So I'm trying to say that in suggesting that those of an ergative PIE did not, you are proposing a typologically unusual system, probably without realizing it. BTW, what do you mean by "ergative" or "accusative context"? Pat continued: >>>Regarding -*t and -*te, I do not believe that any grammatical morpheme >>>in IE can originally have had the form -*C since I believe that all >>>grammatical morphemes are originally grammaticalized -*Ce (at a >>>minimum) non-grammatical morphemes. On this basis, both -*t and -*te >>>must derive from earlier -*tV. In the absence of evidence to >>>differentiate them, I assume a unitary origin. Leo objected: >>They have different meanings. The null hypothesis should therefore be >>that they are distinct, even if you are unable to find a phonetic >>distinction. Beliefs about the shape of free morphemes have nothing to >>do with the case. Pat rejoins: >Oh, yes but they do. And please, let us not get into another sterile >discussion of null hypotheses, for which five linguists evince six >opinions. I'm not fond of "null hypotheses", and I apologize for using the jargony term, which perhaps hid the point I wanted to make. If morphemes are the smallest units capable of bearing meanings, then phonetically identical chunks with very different meanings should be assumed to be different, not the same. In other words, does a "let ball" in Tennis have anything to do with our verb _let_? Phonetically, they're identical; the meaning is different, indeed, opposite. They should therefore be assumed to be different morphemes. (Historically, this happens to be true, but that's just icing on the cake.) Only the *strongest* evidence of earlier shared meaning could then overturn this assumption. Pat continued: >>For *te-w-to-, although we would both acknowledge -*to, I am not going >>to be able to persuade you that a morpheme *te- could be the basis to >>which a collective morpheme -*w was added --- in a paragraph or two >>because you are unwilling to look beyond IE where *CeC roots are the >>general rule. It is my belief that every IE *CeC root can potentially >>be analyzed into *CV + *CV, and that these monosyllabic morphemes are >>recognizable is some early languages: e.g. Egyptian , 'loaf', is >>cognate with IE -*dV, neuter formant. Leo answered: >>You're right: you can't convince me. But not because I have any >>preconceived ideas about root shapes in PIE (not that I know of any >>*roots* that are that short). The problem is that your semantics are >>simply beyond the pale of anything that could be called linguistic >>*science*. Looking beyond PIE won't change that. Pat responds: >Semantics is in the eye of the beholder. For a look at what I believe are >reasonable semantic relationships, see >http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/ProtoLanguage-Monosyllables.htm#T ?O I will look, I promise. But I will not accept this identification. Why not? Because it depends on one dental stop + one unidentified vowel. We do not even know that either the stop or the vowel is the same in both languages. The words belong to different morphologial-syntactic categories: noun in Egyptian, gender+case marker in PIE. The only semantic correlation is that after all, loaves are things. This identification is, as I just said, beyond the pale of anything that could be called linguistic *science*. Given the limited number of phonetically distinct roots available under your proposals, the most one could say was that the two were *homonyms*. But homonyms are not identities, any more than the let ball has been let through. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Jun 4 13:22:01 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 15:22:01 +0200 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) In-Reply-To: <3756BDD8.611A@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: DR. JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN: >> Linguistic "evolution" is that part of the history of language between >> the first human utterances and the stabilization of modern human >> grammar (...) "Change" is what goes on now and has gone on throughout >> our recorded linguistic history. (...) Ancient Sumerian is no more or >> less complex in its total grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) >> than is Modern English. There is a lot of change that has occurred >> between Proto-Indo-European and Modern English, but no evolution. STEVEN SCHAUFELE: > Really???? Is this how people are using the terminology????? Strange; > i've been routinely using the word `evolve'/`evolution' to refer to the > process whereby, e.g., Modern English derives from Middle English etc. > (...) How many historical linguists reserve the lexeme `evolve' for the > restricted sense that John allows? [ moderator snip ] I admit that using the word 'evolution' may indicate that the new language has developed into something superior to its predecessor. But there are so many other parallels between the behavior of linguistic and biological development that I would not hesitate to let the two sciences share a common terminology. Adam Hyllested From fortytwo at ufl.edu Sat Jun 5 04:54:00 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 23:54:00 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) Message-ID: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton" wrote: > I briefly scanned half a dozen other texts on historical linguistics and > found the same situation. The words "evolve/evolution" are never used with > respect to the change over time from one fully modern, complex human language > to another. But I've frequently heard expressions like "the Evolution of English", or "Latin evolved into Spanish, French, etc." Besides which, I rather like the term. Evolution implies a general, widespread change, one which occurs by the accumulation of small-scale changes, which has certain tendencies (such as the tendency for inflections to be eroded away, or particles to be gramaticalized), while simple "change" implies none of that. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From fortytwo at ufl.edu Sat Jun 5 04:58:29 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 23:58:29 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > What is the "similar modern parallel" for your supposition that a > phonological distinctive feature ([+aspiration]) marks a semantic > category ([+animate])? Besides which, this hypothetical proto-language would have to be spoken by beings of sub-human intelligence. People of human intelligence can quickly create fully developed languages, as in the evolution of creoles from pidgins, and the spontaneous development of sign languages such as ISN (Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense), which literally evolved out of nothing when deaf people were placed together, and is now a fully developed language (with a small vocabulary, of course). Speech used by sub-humans is DEFINITELY had no "modern parallel" -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Sat Jun 5 09:01:26 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 04:01:26 -0500 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: Nicholas Widdows wrote: > In summary, it first occurs in English in 1632, and is repeatedly cited, > always with and with variable ingredients; the expression punch> then turns up in Continental languages as , , > , . Clearly at this date it was pronounced with > [u]. No suitable Indian language has [u] in 'five'. If it were [u], why would it have been carried over into (what I presume to be) French with what looks like an [O]? It seems [U] would be a better candidate than [u], which French certainly has. =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 4 19:51:26 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 20:51:26 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard said: > I had an idea that Latin perfects with a {v} inserted may have come by > contraction of a periphrastic perfect using the Latin perfect active > participle [in -vos..] J Hewson 1997 "Tense and Aspect in IE" says that the Tocharian preterite is based precisely on this formation. >...that Latin perfects with the {v} missing [... donastis, norunt etc] are >not contracted but original, Philip Baldi 1999 "Foundations of Latin" makes the same point, though from a different origin. You are not alone! Peter From edsel at glo.be Sat Jun 5 12:38:11 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 14:38:11 +0200 Subject: Fw: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: rfrank To: edsel at glo.be Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 12:54 PM Subject: Re: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity >Hi Ed, >Could you forward this to the IE-list? >Talk to you soon. >Thanks >R. >petegray escribió: >> Wolfgang wrote a full reply to my suggestion of three places where IE might >> have been ergative. I appreciated the comments about the variation over >> time, and about the fact that languages are almost never purely ergative or >> accusative. I am responding to one point in particular. On the identity of >> nominative and accusative for all neuters, he said: >>> The only thing we can conclude from this is that true neuters rarely show >>> up as agents (that they hardly ever played the role of a subjective (S) or >>> agentive (A) except in a metaphorical sense). Neutral NPs hence are very >>> likely to represents objectives (O). This is very natural - it tells us >>> nothing about [where IE lies on a continuum of ergativitiy and >>> accusativity] >> [Peter] Perhaps I fail to understand. Did you mean to count both subjective >> and agentive as "agents", and say that it was natural that inanimates should >> not play that role? If pre-IE had an animate / inanimate distinction, we >> can believe that inanimates might never or very rarely be agents, but it is >> more difficult to believe they were never subjects. >[snip] > [Roz] Without going into a prolonged discussion of the comments above, I > would state that based on my knowledge of a historically attested ergative > language, namely, Euskera (Basque), the statements above entail several > assumptions or premises which may not be appicable to the case at hand, i.e., > to reconstructing the *ergative stage(s) of PIE. > 1) First, the comments assume that the ergative stage in question or perhaps > better stated, the ergative languages that preceeded and/or contributed the > hypothetical ergative feature(s) to PIE, had such an animate/inanimate > division (and/or tripartite division with the neuter) and further that as > such the conceptual or cognitive frame governing or defining the > animate/inanimate division was essentially identical to the one that is > employed by IE speakers today. That is an assumption. > 2) Then there is the assumption that animacy is somehow a requirement for > agency. > 3) And further that the only recourse that an ergative language has/might > have for marking the notion of agency is by means of the ergative. > If applied to the case of Euskera all three of these assumptions would be > false. >Best wishes, >Roz Frank From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jun 5 14:06:07 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 15:06:07 +0100 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: One possible explanation of punch derived from panc, is that a common pronunciation of what is written short /a/ in Hindi is rather like a back schwa vowel. Exact parallels can be found the spellings Punjab (from the same root, panc!), suttee, and pundit, all spelled with -a- vowels in Hindi. No doubt others have more detailed information. Peter From mclasutt at brigham.net Sat Jun 5 15:56:46 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 09:56:46 -0600 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Nicholas: [snip of your arguments about biology and language] Your analogy of linguistic change being analogous to the slow accumulation of change in biological organisms is, I'm sorry to say, false to a certain extent. Were you a member of the Evolution of Language list last year? If so, you'll remember that we worked on this issue for a long time and two things basically emerged from that discussion: 1) Nonlinguists were constantly trying to pigeonhole linguistic change into some hard science/evolutionary model that could be quantified and codified like biological evolution can be. 2) Linguists were equally firm in their contention that linguistic change does not fit into that model, and that every language we have records of (whether written or reconstructed) shows the same level of expressibility and complexity that every other language does, thus no "evolution" has occurred within the last 10,000 or so years. In fact, linguists tend to agree that modern language was fully developed by about 40,000 years or so (that's a terminus ad quem, not a fixed point for the conclusion as some linguists think it was finished long before that). That date is based on the peopling of Australia. Language complexity reached a point where it took about twelve years to learn it fluently and no longer. Since then it's been stable--change, but NO evolution. Basically, we look at the difference between the evolution of the system (Language versus languages), but change within the system (languages, not Language). This is a fundamental distinction which nearly all linguists make. No serious linguist is going to argue that the change from Anglo-Saxon to Modern English has somehow improved the overall nature of Language or even affected the overall nature of Language. Likewise, no serious linguist is going to argue that Modern English is any better at discussing any topic than Anglo-Saxon was. The only advantage that Modern English has is in a readily available vocabulary for some topics as opposed to others, but Anglo-Saxon had all the word-building and borrowing processes already at hand that could solve that deficiency quickly. The grammars are functionally equivalent, as is the grammar of any language in the world. I've got tapes of Timbisha speakers in Death Valley talking about the details of park administration and environmental preservation completely in their language. They've borrowed some English words ("Death Valley" refers to the national park, but "Timbisha" refers to the physical valley, for example), adapted some native words for a modern meaning ("trail" is now "road", "bow" is now "gun"), and coined some new words using old parts ("green leaf" is "money"). They didn't have any problems using their language. How long was Latin used as a medium for writing scientific papers? Newton and Bacon wrote their major scientific works in Classical Latin 1500 years after it had ceased to be anyone's native language. I have a grammar of Kutenai written in Latin in the 1920s. The author used Classical Latin grammar and had absolutely no problem dealing with modern linguistic thinking and terminology. In other words, he quite easily used a language dead for at least 2000 years in a modern setting to discuss a modern topic. That's exactly what linguists mean when they say that all languages are equivalent. The system which evolved several tens of thousands of years ago is quite stable given the time required to learn it (no more than twelve years) and the expressibility of any one of its daughters. Linguistics evolution will kick in again when the human brain takes another leap forward. If you must think in terms of an evolutionary model for language, then think in terms of Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium. Basically organisms stay in a stable state for long periods of time. That's exactly where language is right now and for the past several tens of thousands of years. Sometime in the future, some island population of humans will rapidly evolve a larger or more complex brain and language will take another evolutionary step. But until then, "language evolution" is an incorrect term to use as a substitute for "language change". Remember, in linguistics, "evolution" refers to Language and the system, "change" refers to individual languages. John McL From gd2 at is2.nyu.edu Sat Jun 5 17:29:02 1999 From: gd2 at is2.nyu.edu (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 13:29:02 -0400 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: At 05:44 PM 6/4/99 Nicholas Widdows wrote: >Secondly, is there a more appropriate list around that delights in >etymological niggles, as this has nothing deep to do with sigmatic aorist >laryngeals? I want to ask someone their opinion of deriving the jive terms > from Wolof; but not here. Try the American Dialect Society list. Subscription information is at: http://www.americandialect.org/adsl.shtml Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jun 6 13:12:47 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1999 08:12:47 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Robert and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Whiting Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 11:31 AM > On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> If you ever visit my website, you will see that nothing I hypothesize >> about the Proto-Language does not have similar modern parallels. Robert asked: > What is the "similar modern parallel" for your supposition that a > phonological distinctive feature ([+aspiration]) marks a semantic > category ([+animate])? Pat answered: Oops. 'Nothing' is a little word with a big meaning. Should have qualified to 'almost nothing'. On the feature you mention, there may be a language that employs such a device but I am not aware of any other than the Proto-Language that does. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jun 6 15:25:53 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1999 10:25:53 -0500 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 4:50 PM Leo mused: > No, I'm not pulling your leg. I do wonder, though: is "early language" a > distinct entity of some sort? I had not taken it that way, thinking you > meant it rather as a collective for "early languages". Unless, of course, > you were shifting the stress to the second syllble to indicate plurality: > early lan-GUAGE. Pat: I think he's got it! ({:-)) Pat, previously: >> The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms >> of the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and >> momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). Since early transitive verbal roots can >> be analyzed as *CV (object) + *CV (verbal idea), a pluralization of the >> verbal idea indicates repetition leading to perfectivity; the pluralization >> of the object indicates multiple objects leading to an interpretation of >> imperfectivity. Leo commented: > Unless you posit humongous numbers of consonant and vowel phonemes, don't you > then have a problem that the total number of phonetically different roots > would have been (C+1)(V), i.e. the number of consonants + 1 (for no consonant > at all) times the number of vowels? Awfully limiting. Pat answered: Yes, it certainly was limiting. It led to each of the 90 monosyllables having the strangely wide semantic ranges (by our standards) that many reserachers (like G. A. Klimov: 1977) have noticed in certain ("active") languages, like *MO = blood, juice; *FO = ear, leaf. But the process is still residually present today since how similar really are the 'limbs' of a tree and human being? These limitations were the source of the impetus for compounding: to narrow the semantic ranges of these monosyllables. Pat, on vowel retention: >> There can be many explanations for the retention of the principally >> stress-unaccented vowels as you well know. The likeliest is that the >> period during which lack of stress-accent caused zero-grade stem forms had >> passed. Leo queried: > But then, what happened to the expected *_bhr.te'_ from the period while the > rule still operated? Such forms abound. The Germanic strong preterite, > which reflects ablauting PIE perfect formations, still shows weak grades in > the plural. So retention is no explanation, although a new analogical > formation would work -- that is, if one could find an old form with plural > e-grade to provide the analogy. Pat attempts an answer: The only answer I can offer is that I believe all plural forms originated quite a bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms. Pat continued: >> Another: the necessity for differentiation of 3rd sing and 2nd pl. >> overrode normal patterns (if still operational). Etcetera. Leo objected: > With different grade of the root, there was surely differentiation. It's > the e-grade of the root and the thematic vowel that requires explanation, not > that of the suffix. Pat responds: If I am interpreting what you are saying correctly, you are asking why the present/aorist thematic inflection had no ablaut. I can only answer with Beekes (1995:235): "We can thus say nothing more about the inflection. . ." >> Leo, on another subject: >>> How so, if you are also claiming that PIE was ergative? In ergative >>> languages, the morphological subject of an agent-patient sentence >>> (barring "antipassive" or the like) is precisely the patient, not the >>> agent. Leo, on VP marking: > No, I'm no trying to cause confusion; I just think you don't realize the > implications of what you're claiming. Some languages don't mark any NPs on > the verb, a great many mark only one, and some mark more (Basque can have up > to three). When only one is marked, it is almost invariably the > morphological subject. Accusative languages normally make the > highest-ranking noun phrase (by a hierarchy of "deep cases" of the sort > proposed by Fillmore 1968) the morphological subject; for an agent-patient > sentence, this will be the agent. Ergative languages normally make the > patient the morphological subject. (I say "normally" because many languages > can upset the process by passive or "antipassive" formations, and some verbs > may make unusual choices.) When only one NP is marked on the verb, it is > this morphological subject -- i.e., in ergative languages, the patient in an > agent-patient sentence. > I should add that there are a few languages with ergative casemarking but > accusative verb agreement. So yes, there is no *law* that verb agreement > markers in an ergative language will *always* refer to the patient; but > overwhelmingly they do. So I'm trying to say that in suggesting that > those of an ergative PIE did not, you are proposing a typologically unusual > system, probably without realizing it. BTW, what do you mean by "ergative" > or "accusative context"? Pat responds: First, by "ergative" or "accusative" context, I meant nothing more sinister than simply "ergative" or "accusative(/nominative)" construction. Second, there is, as you know, no necessity for a language to have been consistent at any given time; in fact, as languages change, there must be periods of inconsistency as adjustments toward relative consistency are being made. Third, I suspect that when IE was primarily ergative, personal endings as a system had not yet been developed. Only a third person number-neutral verb form was possible. A possibility for a verbal inflection at this very early stage may be what Beekes, among others, characterizes as simply *-e as found in the third person singulars of the present/aorist thematic and the perfect; the method of differentiation being --- at least of one stage --- simply the Ablaut of the stem vowel: perfect *bho{'}re vs. present/aorist *bhe{'}re. I also speculate that IE was a mixed system, so that the ergative construction showed up in a perfective context; the patient agreement marker being *-0; while in an imperfective context, the *effective* agent agreement marker was *-y (for Beekes simple *-e). This situation, in turn, grew out of a pre-Ablaut more consistently ergative system in which only two verbal forms existed: a passive perfective: *bhere{'} (*bher- + *-He, patient marker) and a passive imperfective *bherey (*bher- + *-He, patient marker + *-y, imperfective marker), which would be almost exactly the situation I see for Sumerian. [ moderator snip ] Leo wrote: > I will look, I promise. But I will not accept this identification. Why not? > Because it depends on one dental stop + one unidentified vowel. We do not > even know that either the stop or the vowel is the same in both languages. > The words belong to different morphological-syntactic categories: noun in > Egyptian, gender+case marker in PIE. The only semantic correlation is that > after all, loaves are things. This identification is, as I just said, beyond > the pale of anything that could be called linguistic *science*. Given the > limited number of phonetically distinct roots available under your proposals, > the most one could say was that the two were *homonyms*. But homonyms are > not identities, any more than the let ball has been let through. Pat writes: I hope when you do look you will agree (but I am not holding my breath either) that the semantic ranges of the monosyllables are well within the parameters demonstrated to exist in many languages (as documented by Klimov and others). As for your other objections, let me try to address them. a) "Because it depends on one dental stop + one unidentified vowel." I believe the vowel can be identified in two ways: by the fact of in Egyptian, which can only derive from an earlier *T(H/?)O; *T(H/?)A/E shows up in Egyptian as ; for a full argument, see my Afrasian essay; and the fact that Sumerian cognates, like du{6}, 'mound, hill, lump' establish the vowel as deriving from *O (though Sumerian can *also* derive from *AV, *EV, *OV); all this is detailed in my Sumerian essays. b) "The words belong to different morphological-syntactic categories: noun in Egyptian, gender+case marker in PIE." As, I am sure you know, -t is a gender marker in Egyptian (feminine and collective) as well. In my Proto-Language essays, I try to establish that the earliest monosyllables were all essentially nominal so that all inflections are grammaticalized nouns. As for the IE case marker (I presume you mean *-d), I believe it derives from *T[?]A, 'hand', and is cognate with the Sumerian use of -da as an instrumental (for usual -ta). c) "The only semantic correlation is that after all, loaves are things. This identification is, as I just said, beyond the pale of anything that could be called linguistic *science*." I believe the ultimate reference of *T[?]O is to the human torso, which was inanimately interpreted as 'lump'. The meanings 'loaf (lump of dough)', 'hill (lump of earth)', collective ('lump of related objects'), etc. seem to me to be justifiably related. d) "Given the limited number of phonetically distinct roots available under your proposals, the most one could say was that the two were *homonyms*." If I am correct in assuming that these monosyllables constituted the earlier morphemes, then there are theoretically *no* divergent morphemes that may phonologically approximate to become homonyms. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jun 7 11:33:50 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 12:33:50 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: <003b01bead1e$3a8e9700$1f02703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative > and the ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in > the nominative plural, in my view derived from a construction > implying a kind of 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des > gens'; Lat. 'de' also had an 'ablative meaning'!). With respect, I don't think it's possible to relate any two of these three Basque inflectional endings. A native and ancient Basque lexical item never ends in a plosive, except in a few cases in which the final plosive is secondary. In Basque of the historical period, however, several inflectional suffixes end in, or consist of, /t/ or /k/. Some of these endings are clearly secondary, like first-singular /-t/ from earlier */-da/. while others are of unknown origin. Possibly all are secondary. Ergative /-k/ is universal and attested in the 9th century. There is no way of knowing if it derives from the reduction of something longer, since the ergative can never be followed by any other suffix. The ending /-tik/ is the most widespread ablative marker today, but it is clearly recent. In addition to /-tik/, we also find /-ti/ in earlier Basque (still preserved today, I think, in some regions), /-ik/ in early texts, and /-(r)ean/ in early Bizkaian. In fact, all the local case suffixes exhibit significant variation in time and space, and there seems to me little doubt that the local case-endings are generally of recent origin in Basque. The common ablative /-tik/ may well result from a combination of /-ti/ with /-ik/, though there are problems with this. In modern Basque, /-ik/ is strictly the partitive ending, but its early attestation as an ablative suggests that it may have originated as an ablative and then become specialized as a partitive after the rise of other ablative endings. Complications: old Bizkaian, which has ablative /-(r)ean/, consistently uses /-ti/ to mean `by way of', `via', which may therefore have been the earlier function of /-ti/. And both ablative /-tik/ and partitive /-ik/ have extended forms /-tika/ and /-ika/, respectively; these longer forms may well be conservative. The absolutive (not nominative) plural /-k/ is the most interesting of all. We find plural /-k/ only in the absolutive, which generally has case-marker zero, while all the oblique cases exhibit an apparent plural marker /-e-/. One possibility is that the plural marker was originally */-g/, with devoicing to /-k/ in final position in the absolutive. In this view, the addition of a further overt case-suffix of any kind triggered the automatic Basque insertion of /-e-/ to separate this */-g-/ from a following consonant, and then the medial */-g-/, being invariably intervocalic, simply dropped (as is common in Basque), leaving only the originally non-morphological /-e-/ as the apparent marker of plurality in the oblique cases. But note something curious: it is trivial to reconstruct an earlier stage of Basque in which the plural marker /-k/ (or whatever it was) occurs *nowhere* but in the three demonstratives. Even in modern Basque, this /-k/ occurs only in the three demonstratives, in the ordinary (`definite') article, which itself plainly derives from a reduction of the distal demonstrative, and (in some varieties) pleonastically after the indefinite plural suffix /-zu/. An example of the last is provided by /bat/ `one, a' (< */bade/), plural /batzu/ `some, several', extended pleonastically to /batzuk/ in some varieties. Plural /-k/ occurs nowhere else at all. Not sure what all this means, but ablative /-tik/ and ablative/ partitive /-ik/ cannot possibly be identified with either ergative /-k/ or absolutive plural /-k/, and it seems most unlikely that these last two can be identified with each other. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jrader at m-w.com Mon Jun 7 09:43:36 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 09:43:36 +0000 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: There are occasional exchanges about the etymology of slangisms on ADS-L, the e-mail list of the American Dialect Society. You can find info on how to subscribe at the ADS website (www.americandialect.org). I should point that the focus of the list is not etymology, but American speech in general (phonetics, regionalisms, usage, neologisms, dialects, etc.). Etymological discussions that do not center on Americanisms are definitely off topic. I know of no e-mail list devoted solely to etymology. As for African origins of jazz and jive terms, the locus classicus is an essay by David Dalby, "The African Element in American English," that appeared in _Rappin' and Stylin' Out: Communication in Urban Black America_, ed. Thomas Kochman, Univ. of Illinois Press, c1972. I think it not inaccurate to say that most of Dalby's proposals have not been accepted. A continual stumbling block to progress in this area is that neither specialists in African-American Vernacular English (or AAVE, as it's usually abbreviated) nor specialists in African languages take much of an interest in etymology. Jim Rader > Secondly, is there a more appropriate list around that delights in > etymological niggles, as this has nothing deep to do with sigmatic aorist > laryngeals? I want to ask someone their opinion of deriving the jive terms > from Wolof; but not here. > Nicholas From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jun 7 16:56:25 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 17:56:25 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >> Dr. John E. McLaughlin; then Steven Schaufele; then Moderator : > [snip dispute whether evolution is change] I certainly agree with Steven Schaufele that `evolution' is used in historical linguistics to mean "change within a language". A case in point is the title of M L Samuels 1972 book `Linguistic Evolution with special reference to English'. He is certainly not attempting to show that English `evolved' by natural selection or any such mechanism. Of course, back in 1972 the `evolution of language' was still a non-subject, and Samuels, even if he was aware of the ambiguity, doubtless did not foresee being misunderstood. More recently Henning Andersen has distinguished 'evolutive innovation' within languages from both `adaptive innovation' and `spontaneous innovation'. In his usage there is nothing biological, or goal-directed, implied by the use of the term. Nonetheless, I am inclined to agree that using `evolution/evolve' as a (quasi-)synonym for `change' might be better avoided. I will endeavour to avoid it from now on. `Develop' is perhaps a suitable alternative in some contexts: a) ?English has evolved from Proto-Germanic... b) *English has changed from Proto-Germanic... c) English has developed from Proto-Germanic... Max Wheeler ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Jun 7 21:53:04 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 16:53:04 -0500 Subject: punch not < panc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The in English, of course, is /@/. English /ph at nc^/ does sound very close to Hindi . It's possible that other European languages got the word from written English BTW: I've also seen and heard that English "to hit with the fist" "one who punches, or gets punched (or worse, as in prison slang)" is from a Romany word for "five, fist" Along this line, I've wondered if --generally said to be derived from the dummy of Guy Fawkes-- is from Romany, given that Spanish gayo (said to be from Romany gaio "non-Gypsy") has the same meaning. Ditto English geeta (which I've only heard in gangster movies from the 1940s) and Spanish guita, both meaning "money" >On a non-linguistic forum recently I spotted the throwaway remark that > the drink comes from an Indian word for 'five' because it has five >ingredients. I immediately barged in and debunked this. But as the _OED_ is >wrong about , I thought I'd ask the experts whether they can add >anything to the _OED_ explanation or controvert it. >In summary, it first occurs in English in 1632, and is repeatedly cited, >always with and with variable ingredients; the expression punch> then turns up in Continental languages as , , >, . Clearly at this date it was pronounced with >[u]. No suitable Indian language has [u] in 'five'. From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Jun 8 04:02:29 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 23:02:29 -0500 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: >Nicholas Widdows wrote: >> In summary, it first occurs in English in 1632, and is repeatedly cited, >> always with and with variable ingredients; the expression > punch> then turns up in Continental languages as , , >> , . Clearly at this date it was pronounced with >> [u]. No suitable Indian language has [u] in 'five'. Tom Wier replied: >If it were [u], why would it have been carried over into (what >I presume to be) French with what looks like an [O]? It seems >[U] would be a better candidate than [u], which French certainly >has. The _pan~ca_ in question is a Sanskrit word, where so-called short is phonetically [^]. (This is a pronunciation of some antiquity. It is specified by the very last rule of Pan.ini's grammar, which cryptically states: "a a", meaning: "Instead of [a], say [^].") Need I add how the British spell [^]? The continental vowels would then be fairly standard attempts at what is (for them) one of the classic unpronounceable English vowels. I don't know any modern Indic languages (or any great amount of Sanskrit, for that matter), but I believe that a modern numeral with [^] can readily be found there. So if the standard etymology of _punch_ can be attacked, it's not on phonetic grounds. Anyone for semantics? Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Jun 8 04:10:04 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 23:10:04 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: >Anthony Appleyard said: >> I had an idea that Latin perfects with a {v} inserted may have come by >> contraction of a periphrastic perfect using the Latin perfect active >> participle [in -vos..] Oddly, Peter Gray agreed. Trouble is, Latin doesn't have a perfect active participle, or any other participle that looks like this. Are we confusing the *Greek* perfect active participle? Nah; that has a stem in -ot-. What's going on? Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 8 04:35:32 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 23:35:32 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Nik and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Nik Taylor Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 11:58 PM Nik wrote: Besides which, this hypothetical proto-language would have to be spoken by beings of sub-human intelligence. People of human intelligence can quickly create fully developed languages, as in the evolution of creoles from pidgins, and the spontaneous development of sign languages such as ISN (Idioma de Signos Nicarag|ense), which literally evolved out of nothing when deaf people were placed together, and is now a fully developed language (with a small vocabulary, of course). Speech used by sub-humans is DEFINITELY had no "modern parallel" Pat responds: Tell that to the "Wolf Boy". [ Moderator responds: These two situations are different: The "Wolf Boy", like Genie, grew up in isolation, unexposed to human communication; the Nicaraguan deaf who created ISN were placed together, and were aware of communication around them. Both in turn differ from the evolution of Language from an opened-out call system to modern-style Language, the stage which you hypothesize you can recall by examining modern languages and applying your intellect, a stage which indeed has no modern parallel. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 8 05:34:02 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 00:34:02 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Eduard, Roz, and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Sent: Saturday, June 05, 1999 7:38 AM -----Original Message----- From: rfrank To: edsel at glo.be Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 12:54 PM Subject: Re: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Roz wrote: > Without going into a prolonged discussion of the comments above, I > would state that based on my knowledge of a historically attested ergative > language, namely, Euskera (Basque), the statements above entail several > assumptions or premises which may not be appicable to the case at hand, > i.e., to reconstructing the *ergative stage(s) of PIE. > 1) First, the comments assume that the ergative stage in question or perhaps > better stated, the ergative languages that preceeded and/or contributed the > hypothetical ergative feature(s) to PIE, had such an animate/inanimate > division (and/or tripartite division with the neuter) and further that as > such the conceptual or cognitive frame governing or defining the > animate/inanimate division was essentially identical to the one that is > employed by IE speakers today. That is an assumption. Pat comments: It certainly is not necessary to suppose that the items in the categories animate/inanimate as conceptualized by speakers of IE languages today correspond identically to the items once held by speakers of IE to be animate or inanimate. However, the terms will have had the same conceptual basis: animate, "denoting a noun or noun phrase which is perceived as referring to a conscious, volitional entity, a human or higher animal." Inanimate, obviously, the opposite. IE: wind, +animate; English: wind, -animate. It appears to me that you are confusing the inventory of items in the category with the definition of the category. Roz continued: > 2) Then there is the assumption that animacy is somehow a requirement for > agency. Pat comments: An "agent" can be profitably defined as "the conscious instigator of an action". Animacy is the quality of a "conscious, volitional entity". Any language or human that does not assume "animacy" for "agents" is best spoken in a closed institution. I assume that you had "instrumentality" in mind when you wrote this but I think it would be desirable for you to distinguish what the proper linguistic use of "agency" and "instrumentality" are. Roz continued: > 3) And further that the only recourse that an ergative language has/might > have for marking the notion of agency is by means of the ergative. Pat commented: We all know (primarily?) ergative languages in which agency can be expressed by ergative case-endings in some contexts and by nominative or instrumental (etal.) case-endings in other contexts so I think you have misinterpreted the statements made. Roz finished: > If applied to the case of Euskera all three of these assumptions would be > false. Pat comments: I am under the impression that Basque "animate NPs form their local cases in a different manner from inanimate NPs" which seems to substantiate these categories for Basque, however idiosyncratically they may be itemized. In addition, I am under the impression that, in Basque, "the ergative case is used for the subject of a transitive verb", and that "it has no other function". Of course, I would defer to Larry Trask's opinions on Basque. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 8 10:06:04 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:06:04 +0200 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 9:09 AM [snip] > Along this line, I've wondered if --generally said to be > derived from the dummy of Guy Fawkes-- is from Romany, given that Spanish > gayo (said to be from Romany gaio "non-Gypsy") has the same meaning. > Ditto English geeta (which I've only heard in gangster movies from > the 1940s) and Spanish guita, both meaning "money" [Ed Selleslagh] In Spain I always heard non-Gypsies being called 'payos', not 'gayos'. Could these be two variants derived from a common 'guayos' ?(but in what language?) BTW, note that Romaní is a satem language - actually various languages - related to Indo-Iranian. (The Gypsies were 'imported', originally in Eastern Europe, as slaves from northern India/Pakistan or thereabout, by Turkic (Ottoman) peoples during their westbound migration from central Asia, that was stopped at the gates of Vienna, and led to the creation of the Ottoman Empire and the present state of Turkey. The Gypsies were abandoned by their masters when these were defeated in Central Europe. The migration from there through southern Germany to southern France (Saintes Maries de la Mer) and the Spanish Mediterranean coast and Andalusia is of a later date. Their English [E-gypsies] and Spanish [E-gi(p)tanos] name stems from popular belief that they came from Egypt). Ed. From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 8 10:58:07 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:58:07 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Larry Trask Date: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 8:19 AM >On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >> In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative >> and the ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in >> the nominative plural, in my view derived from a construction >> implying a kind of 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des >> gens'; Lat. 'de' also had an 'ablative meaning'!). >With respect, I don't think it's possible to relate any two of these >three Basque inflectional endings. [Ed Selleslagh] Of course, I agree with you as far as the facts are concerned, and thank you for explaining them in a much clearer and more complete way than I ever could. But I don't see how any of the facts actually contradicts my thesis; in fact I think various of them corroborate it, as I will indicate in more detail below. >A native and ancient Basque lexical item never ends in a plosive, except >in a few cases in which the final plosive is secondary. In Basque of >the historical period, however, several inflectional suffixes end in, or >consist of, /t/ or /k/. Some of these endings are clearly secondary, >like first-singular /-t/ from earlier */-da/. while others are of >unknown origin. Possibly all are secondary. >Ergative /-k/ is universal and attested in the 9th century. There is no >way of knowing if it derives from the reduction of something longer, >since the ergative can never be followed by any other suffix. >The ending /-tik/ is the most widespread ablative marker today, but it >is clearly recent. In addition to /-tik/, we also find /-ti/ in earlier >Basque (still preserved today, I think, in some regions), /-ik/ in early >texts, [Ed] Remember I also suggested that -ko might be or have been (in the composite suffixes) the 'autonomous' form of -k, i.e. the origin of -k. >and /-(r)ean/ in early Bizkaian. In fact, all the local case >suffixes exhibit significant variation in time and space, and there >seems to me little doubt that the local case-endings are generally of >recent origin in Basque. [Ed] Yes, they probably are, but they consist of constructions based upon a series of old simple suffixes, combined in various ways, with regional variations or preferences. Some don't use -k(o). The early Biskaian case looks like a adverbial construction. >The common ablative /-tik/ may well result from a combination of /-ti/ >with /-ik/, though there are problems with this. In modern Basque, >/-ik/ is strictly the partitive ending, but its early attestation as an >ablative suggests that it may have originated as an ablative and then >become specialized as a partitive after the rise of other ablative >endings. [Ed] That is exactly one of the things I suggested. >Complications: old Bizkaian, which has ablative /-(r)ean/, consistently >uses /-ti/ to mean `by way of', `via', which may therefore have been the >earlier function of /-ti/. And both ablative /-tik/ and partitive /-ik/ >have extended forms /-tika/ and /-ika/, respectively; these longer forms >may well be conservative. [Ed] Exactly. I suggested -ko, but -ka might do as well, or be a variant or a compound of -ko and something else. >The absolutive (not nominative) plural /-k/ is the most interesting of >all. We find plural /-k/ only in the absolutive, which generally has >case-marker zero, while all the oblique cases exhibit an apparent plural >marker /-e-/. One possibility is that the plural marker was originally >*/-g/, with devoicing to /-k/ in final position in the absolutive. In >this view, the addition of a further overt case-suffix of any kind >triggered the automatic Basque insertion of /-e-/ to separate this >*/-g-/ from a following consonant, and then the medial */-g-/, being >invariably intervocalic, simply dropped (as is common in Basque), >leaving only the originally non-morphological /-e-/ as the apparent >marker of plurality in the oblique cases. [Ed] Yes, this is really the full version of the story (cf. also Iñaki Agirre's posting), but I fail to see how this could contradict my thesis that the 'k' is actually an 'ablative-partitive' marker; It rather looks like an explanation why the originally present 'k/g' is now absent in all other plural cases. The alternation k-g is contextual and of no basic importantance to this matter, in my view. >But note something curious: it is trivial to reconstruct an earlier >stage of Basque in which the plural marker /-k/ (or whatever it was) >occurs *nowhere* but in the three demonstratives. Even in modern >Basque, this /-k/ occurs only in the three demonstratives, in the >ordinary (`definite') article, which itself plainly derives from a >reduction of the distal demonstrative, and (in some varieties) >pleonastically after the indefinite plural suffix /-zu/. An example of >the last is provided by /bat/ `one, a' (< */bade/), plural /batzu/ >`some, several', extended pleonastically to /batzuk/ in some varieties. >Plural /-k/ occurs nowhere else at all. [Ed] Your previous paragraph explains a lot of that. >Not sure what all this means, but ablative /-tik/ and ablative/ >partitive /-ik/ cannot possibly be identified with either ergative /-k/ >or absolutive plural /-k/, and it seems most unlikely that these last >two can be identified with each other. [Ed] I fail to see how this follows from what you said before: it seems to lead to quite the opposite. But that's my interpretation of the facts, of course. I hope the moderator and the IE-ists will forgive us this digression into Basque territory. At least it shows the problems there are comparable to the IE ones in this context. Ed. From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Tue Jun 8 12:45:55 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 13:45:55 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: Dr John McLaughlin wrote: > Your analogy of linguistic change being analogous to the slow accumulation > of change in biological organisms is, I'm sorry to say, false to a certain > extent. [snip rest] I labour to be brief, I become obscure. My previous posting was not at all meant the way you took it, and I still can't see how you read all of it and came away with the impression you did. With one exception, I agree 100% with all the facts of linguistics and biology that you cite, and have vigorously argued several times recently on this list that modern language evolved once and has not become significantly different since. My one exception is the meaning of the word "evolution". It's an English word meaning "unfolding, unrolling, development". It's not a technical term coined by biologists. Even in the biological context, it doesn't mean speciation. It doesn't mean punctuation, catastrophe, large-scale change. You're saying that it's used this way by linguists. Maybe it is by some, but clearly others on this list don't use it that way: they use it to mean "change, development". This is not to disagree about biological facts, it's to disagree about semantics. Assume for simplicity that modern language came from brain changes encoded in DNA in an evolutionary event in Africa about 50 000 years ago, as you and I believe. (Details not important.) That was a _biological_ event, and a _biological_ change in language. It was part of human DNA evolution, not part of language evolution. But once language came into existence, it too began to change, and continues to change. This change is not biological. It has no DNA counterpart, it probably has no great amount of natural selection. (And of course it's not progressive.) But many of us call it "evolution" because we use the word to refer to continuing change or development. Now it may be that we shouldn't do so, because many people think it must refer to a biological process, and a few think it must refer to large changes like speciation, and quite a few equate it with progress or increase in complexity. I disagree with all these, but the etymology and historical and technical uses of a word aren't enough to withstand popular misapprehension. If it's now hopelessly ambiguous, so be it. We should restrict the word to the biological event that began language change. I don't mind so much the restriction to one sense, the best-known example of evolution, as after all we can use synonyms like "development" for the rest. But I'm pretty sure it's wrong in biology too (in the usage of most biologists). Evolution of life is a gradual process with occasional instances of speciation, perhaps some periods of stasis with only neutral change, but evolution is always turned on, and means the whole process. So even treating the word as either literally or metaphorically biological, language is evolving right now, and has been from the start. Thus ends my public vindication. More details in a private e-mail. Nicholas From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Jun 8 12:15:34 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 08:15:34 -0400 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> Forms such as Skt aayunak suggest initial laryngeal, but it must disappear >> in yugam, Lat iugum . What vowel does this? > Why not describe the form and the point you are making in greater detail? The lengthening of the augment is usually attributed to laryngeal effects; the most well known being in the reflexes of *eHs- where the radical vowel must be lost in the weak cases. In post-RV Sanskrit, lengthening of the augment is limited to the cases where the rest of the verb begins with i/u/vocalic-r (so that the augmented forms begins ai< *a:i, au <*a:u or a:r). This must be due to leveling of laryngeal effects (from roots that began with *HVR- in PIE). But in RV, there are some cases where the augment is a: even when the root in Sanskrit begins with a liquid, such as a:yunak (<*eHyunegt/s) or a:nat. (<*eHnek't). This, again, is generally attributed to laryngeals. In case of *Hyueg, there is some support from Greek: Yoke (*Hyugom) is zugon (how should i transliterate Greek into ASCII?). Initial *y does not become z in Greek. Sihler is currently checked out of our library, but Rix makes *Hy > z a general rule for Greek. A similar thing happens in case of *Hner. Greek has a prothetic vowel. Sanskrit has only nar-/nr-, but in RV, the final vowel of a preceding word is lengthened in some compounds (e.g., su:nara). Initial laryngeal is the simplest explanation for this. As for as I know, no initial PIE vowel or vocalic liquid disappears in Indic. > However, if you are suggesting that IE *yeu- should be recontructed as > *Hyeu-, I believe that unlikely. So how do you explain Greek zugon? Regards -Nath From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Jun 8 13:50:35 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 09:50:35 -0400 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Wolfgang Schulze wrote: > If we look at the question of ERG and passive, we can sometimes observe > a tendency to establish a pseudo-ergative strategy based on the passive > (some modern Indo-Iranian languages, partly Cl. Armenian etc.). The (middle and) ModIA ergative construction in the past should not be traced to a passive. It is based on the descendent of the -to adjective, which in Indic was always >resultative<. mr.ta means dead, not killed. More tellingly, a:ru:d.ha, `mounted' had an active meaning. It is called ``past passive pariticiple'' because 19th c. grammar writers did not have better terminology. [It is not past either: s'uddha means `clean', not `cleaned'; ka:nta, `beloved' does not mean that the love is past, any more than the English word does in English. Some deny the name participle to this form on general grounds, see Bruenis, ``the nominal sentence in Sanskrit and MidIA.] There are good pragmatic reasons why resultative adjectives seem to have ergative-like agreement. If such constructions are used for general adjectives, it may seem like there are traces of ergativity. I wonder if such an explanation would work for PIE. Regards -Nath From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Jun 8 13:33:48 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 09:33:48 -0400 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan To: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 4:50 PM I seem to have deleted the message from Leo this is in reply to. I tried to find it in the archives at the Linguist page, but the archives seem to be unavailble. > Pat, previously: >>> The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms >>> of the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and >>> momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). I don't know if Leo made this point. If CCV- was the original ``perfective'', why is the thematic aorist so hard to reconstruct for PIE? *(e)videt and (e)bhuget and perhaps (e)rudhet but no others. In Indic we can see root aorists give rise to thematic ones by thematization (adars'ma gives way to adrs'a:ma, drs'ema etc). Rix sees a similar thing happening in Greek. From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Tue Jun 8 14:44:54 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 15:44:54 +0100 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: > The in English, of course, is /@/. English /ph at nc^/ > does sound very close to Hindi . It's possible that other European > languages got the word from written English > BTW: I've also seen and heard that English "to hit with the > fist" "one who punches, or gets punched (or worse, as in prison > slang)" is from a Romany word for "five, fist" The problem is timing. the drink was cited in 1632 when was the [U] allophone of the /u/ phoneme. The lowering to something in the [V] ~ [@] ~ [a] region might have been in place by 1698 when the association with the Hindi [@] allophone of /a/ was made, but not before (IMO). The continental spellings would've accurately reflected English pronunciation. as a pricking tool is attested from 1505 and as a verb 'hit with fist' from 1530, with dubious examples before 1500, when the original sense was apparently 'to prick'. is from about 1600. Same problem with the vowels. Nicholas From adahyl at cphling.dk Tue Jun 8 15:47:44 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 17:47:44 +0200 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) In-Reply-To: <3757659C.F72CEC56@brigham.net> Message-ID: McLaughlin (I think) wrote: > Take a look at the historical linguistics textbooks.(...) > The words "evolve/evolution" are never used with respect > to the change over time from one fully modern, complex human language to > another. David Nettle in his new book 'Language Diversity' (which is, I admit, not primarily about historical linguistics) seems to use the two terms indiscriminately. He prefaces chapter II by telling us that he will now deal with "language change". But the chapter itself is called "Language evolution". Adam Hyllested From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 8 19:16:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 20:16:51 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Roz gave three interesting comments on this topic, then said: > If applied to the case of Euskera all three of these assumptions would be > false. The trouble is, we are not talking of Ergative languages in general, but of PIE, for which we do have specific information, which certainly might not apply to other languages or language groups - such as the morphology & syntax of neuters outside Hittite, and the existence of an animate/inanimate distinction within Hittite. The fact that these facts are not necessary facts in all ergative languages does not invalidate them as facts in PIE. Peter From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Jun 9 04:39:28 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 23:39:28 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: Nicholas Widdows wrote: > it probably has no great amount of natural > selection. (And of course it's not progressive.) But many of us call it > "evolution" because we use the word to refer to continuing change or > development. Natural selection doesn't make species better. It makes species *better suited for their environment*. Language is a part of culture. Culture is not constant, it changes due to contact with other cultures, among other factors. Now, as it changes, what it "wants" in a language changes. Just as subterranean animals lose their eyes, a language in a culture becoming more egalitarian will lose a formal/informal distinction. In English, this also resulted in an inadvertent loss of singular/plural distinction in 2nd person. In some dialects of Spanish, _usted_ is being lost, same phenomenon, later time-period, similar cause. Granted, not all changes can be connected with that, and probably more examples of random change exist in linguistic evolution than in biological evolution. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 9 08:37:49 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 09:37:49 +0100 Subject: punch not < panc In-Reply-To: <01JC4W8GDAAQ9WBUDA@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: >So if the standard etymology of _punch_ can be attacked, it's not on phonetic >grounds. Anyone for semantics? Now that I think the phonetic obstacles have been removed (to a degree, at least; note that in most modern Indian lgs. /pa^nch/ is specifically noted with a nasalized /a/ - an artefact of the following nasal consonant, of course - which fact may have contributed to its reflex in English). Phonetics apart, the remaining problem seems to be that - in Indian languages other than English - the meaning is "5" and only that. I fail to find a trace of any possible usage of this word with the sense of "liquor, drink" othl. Only thing which comes close is /punch-ghar/, lit. "punch-house" for "inn". Attestation in English is from roughly the same time as "punch" itself, so it may or may not be Anglo-Indian rather than autochthonous (ghar = house is OK, though). In the absence of a clear Indian native word which combines form and content of modern "punch" (at least approximately) - which we should look for, preferably in Gujarati and Marathi, for the earliest (English !) attestations seem to be associated with this region, or Bengali, where the the earliest British stronghold was - the "five" etymology, which has become unquestioned standard, may be reclassified as an educated guess. However, as it happens some time, maybe *one* Indian cook *once* presented this kind of edifying drink to *one* colonial officer and, on being asked, he may have said "I call it /punch/, because I put five things into it". This can easily give rise to the rumour that "The Indians call it like that" in some travelogue or casino talk. With a cultural/culinary term like that, this may well be the whole untold story, and every attempt to find a similar form-meaning association in one of the potential donor languages may be in vain. Such things do happen, and there are things between heaven and earth, etymologists prefer not to dream of ... From pagostini at tin.it Wed Jun 9 08:01:18 1999 From: pagostini at tin.it (pagostini at tin.it) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 10:01:18 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects In-Reply-To: <01JC4WLLIYDK9WBUDA@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: >>> I had an idea that Latin perfects with a {v} inserted may have come by >>> contraction of a periphrastic perfect using the Latin perfect active >>> participle [in -vos..] Gentlemen, Did you ever happen to think that the Etruscan (supposedly) perfective forms in -v- might come into account as a possible (areal) source for Latin v-perfects? Cheers ---- Paolo Agostini From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Wed Jun 9 10:22:32 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 06:22:32 -0400 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: I wrote: > The lengthening of the augment is usually attributed to laryngeal effects; > the most well known being in the reflexes of *eHs- I meant *Hes, augmented weak forms being *eHs- Nath. From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Jun 9 10:50:16 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 12:50:16 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Vidhyanath Rao schrieb: > Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >> If we look at the question of ERG and passive, we can sometimes observe >> a tendency to establish a pseudo-ergative strategy based on the passive >> (some modern Indo-Iranian languages, partly Cl. Armenian etc.). > The (middle and) ModIA ergative construction in the past should not be > traced to a passive. It is based on the descendent of the -to adjective, > which in Indic was always >resultative<. mr.ta means dead, not killed. More > tellingly, a:ru:d.ha, `mounted' had an active meaning. It is called ``past > passive pariticiple'' because 19th c. grammar writers did not have better > terminology. I used the term 'passive' in a functional sense which means that 'passive' refers to ANY means to background an agent and/or foreground a patient. Naturally, this function is not restricted to the technique of 'classical' passivization. The pragmatics and semantics of such a strategy are strongly language-dependent though certain universal tendencies (not universals!) can be observed. One typical effect is that of resultiveness which is especially strong with the perfective aspect and non-SAP agents (see Hopper/Thompson 1980 for details). The main point with (anti)passives is that their 'demoted' NP is located in the periphery of a clause: Normally (I don't say ALWAYS!), it can be deleted. In ERG structures it is important to note that ERG plays the role of a subject or object (depending on the other techniques relevant to accusativity/ergativity present). Demoted NPs in (anti)passives never play one of these roles. AGAIN: Even if there are secondary ergative-like structures in some IE languages (grammaticalized via some kind of 'passive' / resultative or what so ever), this does not tell us ANYTHING about ERG in PIE. One the contrary: PASS-based ergatives can only emerge from accusative strategies. So, if you find parallels for the (new) Indo-Iranian structures in PIE, this only tells us that PIE in fact WAS of the ACC type! > There are good pragmatic reasons why resultative adjectives seem to have > ergative-like agreement. If such constructions are used for general > adjectives, it may seem like there are traces of ergativity. I wonder if > such an explanation would work for PIE. Ergative-like agreement with resultatives does not stem from an 'ergative' strategy but from the fact that resultatives often behave like predicative adjectives. Their agreement structure is triggered by the appropriate NP (something like 'man-sexus dead-sexus by NP'). A 'true' ERG agreement pattern would not by confined to such resultative structures, but would be present in the whole paradigm, cf. (as an example) Chechen (East Caucasian) stag w-öl-u man(CLI):ABS I-laugh:PRES-PRES 'The man is laughing' stag-a baga y-illi-na man-ERG mouth(CLIV):ABS IV-open:PAST-INFER 'The man has opened (his) mouth' Here, the noun class marker /w-/ (class I [male humans]) is triggered by the intransitive absolutive, just as /-/ (class IV (some inanimates)) is triggered by the transitivie absolutive. If we check AGR in PIE we should stick to the reconstructed AGR system itself, but not for possible secondary AGR systems derived from pseudo-adjectival (participle-like) forms. These do not tell us anything with respect to the basic question. Finally, let me briefly refer to Pat's and Roz' discussion on animacy, ergativity etc. First we should note that the semantics of animacy is heavily depending on how people exeprience and categorize their world(s) (at least in a diachronic sense). To caracterize "animacy [as] the quality of a "conscious, volitional entity"" (Pat) surely is an option, but not a must. Especially, 'volitionality' is a very doubtful feature. In some so-called active languages 'volition' is NOT a distinctive feature, rather an inferential one. 'Animacy' is not a categorial entity but a name for the behavior of the lexcial representation of a cognitive concept with respect to a scale which often is labeled animacy hierarchy. Second, the problem of 'animacy' and 'agentivity' has - in itself - nothing to do with ergativity/accusativity. It represents nothing but a 'natural' tendency to prefer animate NPs with high-transitive contructions. This is why speech act participants often are 'neutral' with respect to the morphological part of the AEC (Silverstein hierarchy). High/Low animacy is crucial with non-SAP agents: The more 'animate' a nSAP agent is the less a specific marking of its role becomes necessary (cf. names in the role of nSAP agents in many ERG languages that are unmarked). Hence we can conclude that ONE possible semantic aspect of ergative marking is the LOW degree of inherent agentivity which necessitates its supplementory marking (there are other strategies to use ERG morphology in order to overemphasize the left side of the agentivity hierarchy, but that does not matter here). But remember that again we deal with high-transitive structures only. An ERG typology clearly demands that intransitive (or low transitive) contructions are exempted from this strategy. Hence, we cannot not talk about 'agents' and 'animacy' in general (when discussing possible ERG features), but only about those that occur with (high) transitive structures. To get back to PIE: There are no clear signs that animate 'agents' were ever differentiated according to the degree of transitivity exerted by them. This again is a hint at an even *semantic* accusativity of PIE. Wolfgang [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 9 15:48:13 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 17:48:13 +0200 Subject: "syllabicity" In-Reply-To: <002e01bea78a$3044e720$73d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Wed, 26 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [... (Discussing IE possible monovocalism:)] > I [...] used *t(V) to attempt to indicate that a -*t was > the result of a stress-accent-motivated reduction from an earlier -*tV > while *tV showed the morpheme in its fuller form under the condition of > stress-accentuation. > How would you prefer to indicate a single morpheme, *tV, that has two > realizations: unstressed -*t and stressed -*tV? You are at the core of the matter now: You are talking morphophonemics, not phonemics, but using a notation that brings in morphological knowledge. And, while it could be wise to turn the debate to this point, that was not the issue to begin with. Of course there is a lot more predictability in wordforms if you are allowed to quote them in a shape that allows you to make predictions about their alternations. That in fact is why I have been so much occupied with IE morphophonemics (of course you may not know that, but I have, and it pays off). Jens From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 9 16:13:44 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 18:13:44 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bea851$0ead2c40$4d9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [...] I would go an unpalatable to some step further, and, agree with G. > A. Klimov, that an ergative form *must* precede an accusative type. There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close to being ergative; Kurdish too; Lithuanian is well on its way; and Eskimo has accusative remains in the pronouns. Also, the "have/be" periphrasis of perfect tense in Western Europe have passed through a stage of plain ergative syntax with this part of the verb. In all of these examples that ergativ has plainly arisen from a passive transformation: The event was described from the point of view of what happened to the object, and in course of time this nuance was suppressed and the "ergative" structure generalized to the point of ousting the old finite (subject-centered) verb. This view is often criticized for being based on the analyst's inability to think in terms of foreign categories, a criticism that completely ignores the fact that the categories concerned are in this instance not at all foreign to us. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 9 16:25:27 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 18:25:27 +0200 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) In-Reply-To: <002201bea851$214463a0$4d9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote - my, did he write! > [snip] To whoever needs this information: Egyptian is not - I said NOT - an Indo-European language. And it is not - I stubbornly repeat, NOT - a magic primeval language from which Proto-Indo-European has developed. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 9 17:15:01 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 19:15:01 +0200 Subject: IE pers.pron. (dual forms) In-Reply-To: <001b01bea895$baa19e20$7f9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [Jens:] >> I meant "completely unknown for the language concerned", which of course >> is what matters. I don't believe such a compensatory lengthening rule has >> ever been known for Sanskrit. If you assume -uy > -u: in Sanskrit, it is >> your task to demonstrate that there is such a "rule", meaning that the >> same change occurs in other cases where -u- and final -y meet. It would be >> an interesting discovery if you have examples to show that (for Sanskrit, >> mind you). > Pat responds: > Gee, Jens, I thought you knew about IE *ai -> Sanskrit [e:], or is that not > a lengthened vowel? Jens objects: My, Pat, that was not the rule we aere talking about. If you want to invoke a change of uy to [u:] in Sanskrit, you should point to _that_ happening elsewhere in the language. Actualy, the regular Sanskrit realization of /CwyC/ is [CviC], and the same holds if you substitute word boundary (#) for any of the C's; examples of the former are plentiful, as all compounds with first member dvi- 'two, double', while the latter is harder to find, but cf. darvi voc. of darvi: 'wooden laddle'. Whoever holds that /wy/ combines differently, will have to produce examples - of this combination, not just change the subject to a different one. [...] >>>>> Pat responded: >>>>> Sorry, I cannot accept the idea that laryngeals still functioning in >>>>> Sanskrit made yuge{'} sandhi-resistant. [...] > Jens counters: >> But facts ought to be given explanations, and in this case it lies right >> at hand. What is simpler than assuming that a neuter dual contains the >> neuter dual ending? Now, in consonant stems the neuter dual in Sanskrit >> ends in /-i:/. The most common (in Beekes' phonology, if I understand him >> correctly, the only) source of that is a PIE sequence of i + laryngeal. >> Then, if /yuge'/ is regular, and the stem is *yugo-, we are made to posit >> *yugo-iH. That fully explains its sandhi-resistence, for before a vowel, >> the H goes to the following syllable, leaving -oi to form a diphthong in a >> syllable of their own, whence Skt. -e, even before vowel in the following >> word. > Pat, amazed again: > Gosh, Jens, does not IE *e/oi -> Sanskrit [e:] also? Besides, 99% of the > cases when will come before a vowel involve a following word the > initial of which can anciently have been presumed to be derived from IE *H. Jens objects: Blimey, Pat, other words ending in Indo-Iranian *-ai (or *-ay, same thing) do not show sandhi resistence. For instance, datives in -e always change to -a before vowel initial. Strangely perhaps, it does not matter that the following vowel-initial word has often earlier had an initial laryngeal. Historical linguistics is often a very delicate matter, and you certainly have to look at a language before making sweeping statements about it. Jens From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Jun 9 17:40:46 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 12:40:46 -0500 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: Pat wrote: >I seem to have deleted the message from Leo this is in reply to. I tried to >find it in the archives at the Linguist page, but the archives seem to be >unavailble. >> Pat, previously: >>>> The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms >>>> of the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and >>>> momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). >I don't know if Leo made this point. If CCV- was the original >``perfective'', why is the thematic aorist so hard to reconstruct for PIE? >*(e)videt and (e)bhuget and perhaps (e)rudhet but no others. In Indic we can >see root aorists give rise to thematic ones by thematization (adars'ma gives >way to adrs'a:ma, drs'ema etc). Rix sees a similar thing happening in Greek. I didn't make the point, and since I don't save most of my posts, I don't know what I said in response. But I know I didn't say anything about aorist constructions. More significantly, I have decided not to respond to your other interesting message, in which you deal with some of my objections to your proposals. I have looked at your website, and in particular at the list of monosyllabic roots. By themselves, without examples, they're hard to evaluate. I find the proposed semantics sometimes plausible, sometimes absurd. What you added about the original meaning of the PIE inanimate : Egyptian 'bread' word being 'torso' only hurt your case, in my opinion. I'm afraid I'll have to discontinue the discussion. We are doing very different things from totally different premises. We can criticize and explain all we want, but we're not going to reach anything resembling agreement on principles and procedures, much less on results. So, with no spirit of rancor or ill will, I think we'd better just let it drop. Regards Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From wirix at tin.it Wed Jun 9 17:53:36 1999 From: wirix at tin.it (Wilmer "Xelloss" Ricciotti) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 19:53:36 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects In-Reply-To: <01JC4WLLIYDK9WBUDA@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]On Behalf Of CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Sent: martedl 8 giugno 1999 06:10 >Oddly, Peter Gray agreed. Trouble is, Latin doesn't have a perfect active >participle, or any other participle that looks like this. Are we confusing >the *Greek* perfect active participle? Nah; that has a stem in -ot-. What's >going on? *Classical* Latin doesn't have a perfect active participle; nevertheless this doesn't mean that Latin never had it, and it shouldn't be much different from *amavos or perhaps *amaus (I read somewhere that the preposition 'apud' is a perfect active participle, neuter gender... can anyone confirm?). Ancient latin also had present passive participles, which sometimes survived in fossil forms like alumnus from alo. (greek perfect active participle has a stem in -wot- (masculine) -wos- (neuter) or -ws- (+ -ja) (feminine)) Actually Anthony Appleyard's explanation for latin perfects in -vi/-ui isn't bad at all: thus forms like the pluperfect 'amaveram' would come from *amavos esam. In this case the -is-/-er- element of the perfect tenses would come from the stem of the verb esse, captured from a periphrastic formation. But we found this element in greek too, in pluperfects like elely'kein < elelyk-es-m. So this element seems to be more ancient... who can guess from where it comes? Wilmer Ricciotti wirix at tin.it From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 9 19:42:06 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 20:42:06 +0100 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: PIE *Hiugom and Greek initial z There is of course a continuing debate about the origin of the apparently double reflex in Greek of PIE initial *y-. It is an attractive proposition to suggest *y- > Gk /h/, while *Hy > Gk /z/, but the evidence is rather more complicated than Nath suggested, and the idea is still debated. There are some who think the complications are too much, and the idea can't work. Secondly, I note that Philip Baldi in hie Foundations of Latin cites PIE *Hiugom without comment, as if the initial Hy cluster were a proven fact. Generally, he is happy to express everything in terms of laryngeals, when there may be still some demurring in some quarters, but at least he does provide some reputable scholarly support for the idea of an initial laryngeal in "yoke". Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 9 19:56:15 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 20:56:15 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Latin perfects with a {v} inserted ... from a putative Latin perfect active participle [in -vos..] Leo said: > Peter Gray agreed. Not entirely - I merely support the possibility - at least until it is proved impossible! Leo went on: > the *Greek* perfect active participle? Nah; that has a stem in -ot-. Not in Mycenaean. e.g. te-tu-ko-wo-a2 = tetkhwoa. Neither Iranian nor Mycenaean shows the -t- in the -w- perfect participles. Sanskrit and Greek both show it, but not in the same cases, since Sanskrit has it only in those cases that have no reflex in Greek. It appears that Sanskrit and Greek both independently developed -t- forms at a late stage. The PIE participle therefore appears to be -wo:s ~ -wos ~ us with a feminine in -us-i:. It is at least therefore possible that Latin does not show this participle because it got developed into something else, namely the -v- stems ----- especially since there is an exact parallel in Tocharian. However, the details of this development would be complex, and I would need careful persuasion, but at least I'm listening! Peter From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Wed Jun 9 20:12:45 1999 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 13:12:45 -0700 Subject: gayo/gadje Message-ID: >> Spanish gayo (said to be from Romany gaio "non-Gypsy") >In Spain I always heard non-Gypsies being called 'payos', not 'gayos'. Could >these be two variants derived from a common 'guayos' I vote against "guayos." In eastern Europe the term is "gadje" or "gadjo." >(The Gypsies were 'imported', originally in Eastern Europe, as slaves from >northern India/Pakistan or thereabout, by Turkic (Ottoman) peoples during >their westbound migration from central Asia, that was stopped at the gates >of Vienna, and led to the creation of the Ottoman Empire and the present >state of Turkey. Not exactly. Roma migrations began around the 10th century, fleeing Turkic invaders, rather than exported by them. These were not the Ottoman Turks. They went through Iran and Armenia, where they were harried by the Seljuk Turks, and fled again toward Greece and into the Balkans. Many of these arrivals were enslaved in Rumania by the 1300s. The point is, generally they arrived in Europe on their own. Max Dashu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 9 21:09:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 16:09:01 -0500 Subject: punch not < panc In-Reply-To: <005001beb19d$d4926ba0$1405703e@edsel> Message-ID: gayo is used in the Southern Cone to mean "dude, guy, man, etc" I've seen it written as in dictionaries of [Spanish] calo/ & germani/a, so it was used in Spain in the 1500s I've seen the term in general books on Gypsies, including on British Gypsies payo, given that it means "chump, loser, clown, etc." sounds like it might be a play on words. I'm guessing that it comes from payaso < Italian pagliaccio >> Along this line, I've wondered if --generally said to be >> derived from the dummy of Guy Fawkes-- is from Romany, given that Spanish >> gayo (said to be from Romany gaio "non-Gypsy") has the same meaning. >> Ditto English geeta (which I've only heard in gangster movies from >> the 1940s) and Spanish guita, both meaning "money" >[Ed Selleslagh] >In Spain I always heard non-Gypsies being called 'payos', not 'gayos'. Could >these be two variants derived from a common 'guayos' ?(but in what >language?) BTW, note that Romaní is a satem language - actually various >languages - related to Indo-Iranian. From jer at cphling.dk Thu Jun 10 01:31:37 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 03:31:37 +0200 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity In-Reply-To: <002601beb031$09d82980$fb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Sun, 6 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [... (In discussion with Leo Connolly, Pat suggests that *bhe'rete has retained two unstressed e's because the time of deletion was over.)] > Leo queried: >> But then, what happened to the expected *_bhr.te'_ from the period while the >> rule still operated? [...] > Pat attempts an answer: > The only answer I can offer is that I believe all plural forms originated > quite a bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms. I, Jens, intrude: But secondarily created forms ought to be even more transparent than older forms. And it is a point in your reasoning that the material utilized to differentiate *bhe'ret and *bhe'rete (and **bhe'rt which does not appear to exist) was not distinctive. How, then, could it be available? [...] > A possibility for a verbal inflection at this very early stage may be what > Beekes, among others, characterizes as simply *-e as found in the third > person singulars of the present/aorist thematic and the perfect; the method > of differentiation being --- at least of one stage --- simply the Ablaut of > the stem vowel: perfect *bho{'}re vs. present/aorist *bhe{'}re. I also > speculate that IE was a mixed system, so that the ergative construction > showed up in a perfective context; the patient agreement marker being *-0; > while in an imperfective context, the *effective* agent agreement marker was > *-y (for Beekes simple *-e). > This situation, in turn, grew out of a pre-Ablaut more consistently ergative > system in which only two verbal forms existed: a passive perfective: > *bhere{'} (*bher- + *-He, patient marker) and a passive imperfective > *bherey (*bher- + *-He, patient marker + *-y, imperfective marker), which > would be almost exactly the situation I see for Sumerian. Have you any examples of a language just "differentiating" by using what must have been, up till then, non-existing phantom-variants which were suddenly invented without any model? Though often heard in attempts to explain morphological systems - no, you are not alone - this just appears impossible. And why would an older stage of the language be as in Sumerian? What if the Indo-Europeans really _meant_ what they said and intended the system to be the way we find it? Then we could have almost exactly the situation I see for Indo-European. That would be an even closer parallel - by what rule is it inferior? Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 10 01:52:34 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 20:52:34 -0500 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 7:15 AM Pat, previously: >> However, if you are suggesting that IE *yeu- should be recontructed as >> *Hyeu-, I believe that unlikely. Nath wrote: > So how do you explain Greek zugon? Pat answers: I do agree that the likeliest explanation for the [z] of zugon is that it results from an initial *Hy- but I would like to ask the following questions. 1) Obviously, *Heyew is not a canonical IE root form. 2) Would you consider the original root *Hey- and -w a root extension? 3) Would you consider the possibility that the root is *yew- and that *He is a preverb which may or may not have been present in the earliest IE? I have no answers for these questions myself, and I am only interested in your opinion. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 10 03:09:50 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 22:09:50 -0500 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 8:33 AM [ moderator snip ] > I don't know if Leo made this point. If CCV- was the original ``perfective'', > why is the thematic aorist so hard to reconstruct for PIE? *(e)videt and > (e)bhuget and perhaps (e)rudhet but no others. In Indic we can see root > aorists give rise to thematic ones by thematization (adars'ma gives way to > adrs'a:ma, drs'ema etc). Rix sees a similar thing happening in Greek. Lehmann does not consider C'CV per se perfective: he contrasts an aorist vida{'}t as +perfective, + momentary, and the perfect ve{'}da as +perfective, -momentary. You may or may not agree. But to attempt to address the idea behind your question if I understand it, the relative rarity of thematic aorists may be substantially attributable to the fact that there were two other competing aorists (or equivalents): the root aorists and s-aorists. Now, let me ask you a question in return. Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the athematic and thematic aorists? And what might that difference (if any) have been? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 10 05:54:15 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 00:54:15 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 11:25 AM [ moderator snip ] > To whoever needs this information: > Egyptian is not - I said NOT - an Indo-European language. And it is not - > I stubbornly repeat, NOT - a magic primeval language from which > Proto-Indo-European has developed. It is a complete mischaracterization of my views to imply that I believe that IE developed from Egyptian or, while we are at it, from Sumerian. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Thu Jun 10 06:24:30 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 01:24:30 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close > to being ergative; Well, what else can accusative evolve *from* if not ergative, possibly thru an intermediate active stage? And what else can ergative evolve from if not from accusative? So, it would probably be more reasonable to say that they tend to alternate, given enough time, that is ergative-->accusative-->ergative. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jun 10 08:08:31 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 09:08:31 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: <375DF000.B769FA8A@ufl.edu> Message-ID: > Now, as it changes, what it "wants" in a language >changes. Just as subterranean animals lose their eyes, a language in a >culture becoming more egalitarian will lose a formal/informal >distinction. In English, this also resulted in an inadvertent loss of >singular/plural distinction in 2nd person. With due respect, you are not really saying that English lost the number distinction here because of English society becoming (more) *egalitarian*, or are you ? Or, to stretch the argument, does anyone think that some languages innovated the category of inferentiality (Turkish as against Old Turkic, Lhasa Tibetan as against Written Tibetan, Bulgarian as against Old Church Slavonic aso. aso.) because the respective societies became , say, more *skeptical* ? Sorry, I'm not trying to make fun of you, sometimes language may indeed follow culture in certain respects, but, sorry again, I have difficulties with squaring the two notions "English" and "egalitarian". From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Thu Jun 10 10:51:24 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:51:24 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: >Nicholas Widdows wrote: >> it probably has no great amount of natural >> selection. (And of course it's not progressive.) Nik Tailor replied. > Natural selection doesn't make species better. It makes species *better > suited for their environment*. Yes. Hence my bracketed "of course": the preceding clauses were cases where biology does have a feature, and language doesn't. But I meant, of course _neither_ evolves progressively. > Just as subterranean animals lose their eyes, a language in a > culture becoming more egalitarian will lose a formal/informal > distinction. In English, this also resulted in an inadvertent loss of > singular/plural distinction in 2nd person. In some dialects of Spanish, > _usted_ is being lost, same phenomenon, later time-period, similar > cause. Almost certainly, an animal first retreats to caves, then loses sight; though it's theoretically possible that an animal could become blind and in consequence be forced to retreat to where this is no handicap. But in language the causation is much less clear. In English I think the use of for singular began as elevated address, spread to the bourgeoisie around 1600, and to the common people by about 1700. The Quakers maintained precisely for egalitarianism. My lord Foppington who minced under his jewels and pomaded wig said even to his servants. It might be true that now, when we have no choice, we do have a more egalitarian system. > Granted, not all changes can be connected with that, and > probably more examples of random change exist in linguistic evolution > than in biological evolution. Yes. I have no idea how one would quantify natural selection or assess causation. There must be some effect; there might be a big effect. I was just stressing the difference from biology. Nicholas Widdows [If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kick-boxing.] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Jun 10 12:02:45 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 07:02:45 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Leo wrote: >> Trouble is, Latin doesn't have a perfect active >>participle, or any other participle that looks like this. Wilmer replied: > >*Classical* Latin doesn't have a perfect active participle; nevertheless >this doesn't mean that Latin never had it, and it shouldn't be much >different from *amavos or perhaps *amaus (I read somewhere that the >preposition 'apud' is a perfect active participle, neuter gender... can >anyone confirm?). Ancient latin also had present passive participles, >which sometimes survived in fossil forms like alumnus from alo. Unless these forms are *attested*, *in Latin*, *as participles*, we cannot say that any kind of Latin actually *had* them. This is not to say that one Latin form or another did not derive from a participle, or to deny that these participles were still functional in Italic or in Pre-Latin. Certainly the mediopassive participles in -men- are reflected in Latin -- but did Latin still *have* them? Do we have any attestations? Sorry to be picky, but that's what I do. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From jer at cphling.dk Thu Jun 10 12:44:14 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 14:44:14 +0200 Subject: Intensive Reduplication In-Reply-To: <005501beb2b3$85c4a620$91f1abc3@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, petegray wrote: > PIE *Hiugom and Greek initial z > There is of course a continuing debate about the origin of the apparently > double reflex in Greek of PIE initial *y-. It is an attractive > proposition to suggest *y- > Gk /h/, while *Hy > Gk /z/, but the evidence is > rather more complicated than Nath suggested, and the idea is still debated. > There are some who think the complications are too much, and the idea can't > work. [...] Pardon my intruding, but I'd like to say that this still sounds attractive, if not in such a clean fashion. The matter was considered an open-and-shut case for a period of time in the mid-seventies after Martin Peters presented the analysis of Attic Greek /hi:'e:mi/ from *H1yi-H1yeH1-mi where the presence of a laryngeal could be proved. That led Peters and the rest of us to conclude that *Hy- gave Greek /h-/ and that, by contrast, Gk. /z-/ would have to be from plain *y-. Then came Rix' Historical Greek grammar containing beautiful arguments for initial laryngeals in some roots with Gk. /z-/ corresponding to Vedic y- and lengthened augment or compositional vowel. That brought the matter back where it started, except that Peters' /h-/ for *H1y- still stands. Plain IE *y- may be seen in Ved. yaj- 'to sacrifice', of which Gk. ha'gios 'holy' is a gerundive formation, cf. lack of lengthening in the desiderative i'yaks.ati. That indicates that, e.g., the relative pronoun, Gk. /ho's/, Ved. ya's, is IE plain *yo's, and that IE *y- without laryngeal gives Gk. /h-/. Then the difference between Gk. /h-/ and /z-/ is not just one of *Hy- and plain *y-, but we have to differentiate the laryngeals - after all we accept three of them. As /z-/ is also the outcome of *dy- and *gy- (with all kinds of g's), there would be very good sense in taking /z-/ to represent also *H3y-, given the phonetic character of *H3 as a voiced labiovelar spirant (or labiouvular or labiopharyngeal as some prefer on grounds I do not see). There remains only *H2y- for which /z-/ and /h-/ appear about equally likely. Phonetically *H2 was something like [x], a voiceless velar or postvelar spirant. If the coalescence of *y- and *H1y- means that *y- was devoiced to a voiceless y (much like the initial of English _huge_), then *H2y- [xy-] could well be expected to yield the same, i.e. /h-/. But if it was the stronger body of *H3y- that set it off from *H1y-, one could just as well expect *H2y- to join the "strong" series and end up as /z-/. The latter possibility, however, would mean that the y part of *H2y exerted an assimilatory influence on *H2 by voicing it, which is perhaps not very likely if *y- alone loses it voice. This brings us to the picture: IE *y- > Gk. /h-/ IE *H1y- > Gk. /h-/ IE *H2y- > Gk. /h-/ (or /z-/?) IE *H3y- > Gk. /z-/ Jens From jrader at m-w.com Thu Jun 10 09:21:48 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 09:21:48 +0000 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: In current Merriam-Webster dictionaries, the Indo-Aryan etymology of is prefaced by "perhaps." This amounts to saying that the etymology is an educated guess, to use Stefan's phrase, not an unquestioned standard. Hindi is given as the immediate possible source, though Gujarati, Marathi, or Bengali should probably be given more serious consideration. This, like most of the other Anglo-Indian etymologies in our dictionaries, needs re-vetting. Jim Rader > In the absence of a clear > Indian native word which combines form and content of modern "punch" (at > least approximately) - which we should look for, preferably in Gujarati and > Marathi, for the earliest (English !) attestations seem to be associated > with this region, or Bengali, where the the earliest British stronghold was > - the "five" etymology, which has become unquestioned standard, may be > reclassified as an educated guess. From alex at AN3039.spb.edu Thu Jun 10 17:35:42 1999 From: alex at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 20:35:42 +0300 Subject: Pronouns/ergative languages Message-ID: Nicholas Widdows wrote: Message-ID: Can you give examples? [snip] >There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close >to being ergative; Kurdish too; Lithuanian is well on its way; and >Eskimo has accusative remains in the pronouns. [snip] From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jun 11 01:21:59 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 20:21:59 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen >> Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 11:13 AM >>> On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >>>> [...] I would go an unpalatable to some step further, and, agree with >>>> G. A. Klimov, that an ergative form *must* precede an accusative type. Jens objected: >>> There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close to >>> being ergative; Kurdish too; Lithuanian is well on its way; and Eskimo has >>> accusative remains in the pronouns. Also, the "have/be" periphrasis of >>> perfect tense in Western Europe have passed through a stage of plain >>> ergative syntax with this part of the verb. In all of these examples that >>> ergative has plainly arisen from a passive transformation: The event was >>> described from the point of view of what happened to the object, and in >>> course of time this nuance was suppressed and the "ergative" structure >>> generalized to the point of ousting the old finite (subject-centered) verb. >>> This view is often criticized for being based on the analyst's inability to >>> think in terms of foreign categories, a criticism that completely ignores >>> the fact that the categories concerned are in this instance not at all >>> foreign to us. I do not think you are responding to what I am saying. Your examples suggest to me that you are under the impression that I denied that ergative structure could develop from accusative structure. I did not say that nor do I believe that. I do continue to believe that any language which is presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage sometime prior to that in its development. For most transitive verbs, I believe the closest connection is between it and its object so that, at some stage of development, an unmarked verb form should represent a passive. To try to understand ergative constructions from passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me to be potentially misleading. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Fri Jun 11 04:00:19 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 23:00:19 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote: > With due respect, you are not really saying that English lost the number > distinction here because of English society becoming (more) *egalitarian*, > or are you ? Something like that. Remember that in Middle English, the "ye" form, originally a plural, became a polite pronoun. Out of politeness, the older "thou" forms were lost. There was some degree of egalitarianism, or at least a more democratic society. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 11 09:55:54 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 11:55:54 +0200 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) In-Reply-To: <008d01beb305$ad1cb260$d29ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [In reply to a post of mine:] > It is a complete mischaracterization of my views to imply that I believe > that IE developed from Egyptian or, while we are at it, from Sumerian. I know, but you seem to have been forgetting that when forming many of your actual suggestions. They only make sense to me if Egyptian is a magic prestage of IE. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 11 10:50:45 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 12:50:45 +0200 Subject: Intensive Reduplication In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, I wrote: > [...] > [I]n the mid-seventies [...] Martin > Peters presented the analysis of Attic Greek /hi:'e:mi/ from > *H1yi-H1yeH1-mi where the presence of a laryngeal could be proved. [...] Actually, Peters said only *Hyi-HyeH1-mi with unspecified laryngeal in the initial. But as soon as Francis and Normier presented solid evidence that only /H1/ gives plain lengthening after high vowels in Greek (while iH2 iH3 yield ya:, yo:, and uH2 uH3 yield wa:, wo:), the H1 was a clear thing in the minds of those who accept this theory. Since Peters does not accept it, I should not have quoted his analysis in a shape that would suggest that he did. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jun 11 13:22:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 08:22:19 -0500 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 8:31 PM > On Sun, 6 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> The only answer I can offer is that I believe all plural forms originated >> quite a bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms. Jens commented: > I, Jens, intrude: But secondarily created forms ought to be even more > transparent than older forms. And it is a point in your reasoning that the > material utilized to differentiate *bhe'ret and *bhe'rete (and **bhe'rt > which does not appear to exist) was not distinctive. How, then, could it > be available? Pat responds: Jens, with the best of intentions, I cannot understand what you are asking here. Could you express it differently and more explicitly. Pat, previously: >> This situation, in turn, grew out of a pre-Ablaut more consistently ergative >> system in which only two verbal forms existed: a passive perfective: >> *bhere{'} (*bher- + *-He, patient marker) and a passive imperfective >> *bherey (*bher- + *-He, patient marker + *-y, imperfective marker), which >> would be almost exactly the situation I see for Sumerian. Jens asked: > Have you any examples of a language just "differentiating" by using what > must have been, up till then, non-existing phantom-variants which were > suddenly invented without any model? Though often heard in attempts to > explain morphological systems - no, you are not alone - this just appears > impossible. Pat responds: Sorry, Jens, again I cannot grasp what you are asking here. Cam you spell it out more explicitly? Jens continued: > And why would an older stage of the language be as in Sumerian? What if > the Indo-Europeans really _meant_ what they said and intended the system > to be the way we find it? Then we could have almost exactly the situation > I see for Indo-European. That would be an even closer parallel - by what > rule is it inferior? Pat responds: There is no reason why an older stage of IE should have the same inflectional patterns as Sumerian has, I remarked only because I found it curious. In Goettinger Beitraege zur Sprachwissenschaft, Heft 1, 1998, Gordon Whittaker has an article entitled "Traces of an early Indo-European language in southern Mesopotamia", which, I think is very interesting. Have you read it? Your final comments in this paragraph seem more an emotional release than an argument, if you will forgive my saying it. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 11 15:39:04 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 17:39:04 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Can you give examples? > asked in response to my posting:] >>There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close >>to being ergative; Kurdish too; Lithuanian is well on its way; and >>Eskimo has accusative remains in the pronouns. There are others on the list better informed than me, but I'll try, basing myself on some handbook aterial: 1. In Hindi the perfect preterite has the structure A-obl. ne O Vb-(gender/number of obj.) e.g.: lar.ke ne na:rangi: kha:i: "the boy ate the orange", where lar.ke is the oblique sg. of lar.ka: 'boy', the oblique case being obligatory before the postposition _ne_ marking the agent; and the verb is inflected in the fem.sg. ('orange' is fem.; the masc. is kha:ya:); the object is unmarked. - Intransitive verbs agree with the subject, e.g. lar.ka: a:ya: 'the boy came'. 2. Lithuanian has expressions like s^itas arklys mano pirktas 'this horse has been bought by me' (Quoted from Senn: Kleine lit. Sprachlehre, Heidelberg 1929, 107). Since gen. + nom. is also the general syntgm for 'have', this is pragmatically congruent with 'I have bought this horse'. Schmalstieg has written extensively on the subject. 3. Kurdish is much like Lithuanian. J.Blau, in Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum 331, gives the pair mirov-ek-i^ hesp di^t-0 "un homme a vu le cheval" kec,k-ek-e^ hesp di^t-in "une fille a vu les chevaux" -ek- is 'one, a'; -i^/-e^ is the izafet particle of belonging in the masc. and fem. sg., oblique case (old genitive, I take it); the object is unmarked; the verb is an old participle in -ta-, in the sg. with zero for understood 'is', the the pl. with -in 'are'. The original meaning thus appears to be "(it is) a-man-of-whom the-horse (is-)seen" and "(it is) a-girls-of-whom the-horses are-seen". Note the number concord in the auxiliary with the object (which then dispenses with plural marking itself). Intransitive verbs have agreement with the subject. 4. Eskimo at least has a concept of subject exactly like ours in their selection of reflexive as opposed to 3rd person, in that the reflexive always refers to the subject, be it of a transitive or an intransitive verb, never to the object. With certain semi-pronouns like Greenlandic tamar-ma '(I) whole', tamar-pit '(you) whole', this means that the non-reflexive 3rd sg. tama-at '(him) whole' never refers to the object, while the reflexive tamar-mi '(himself) whole' refers to the subject, irrespective of the transitivity of the verb, and so the opposition tama-at : tamar-mik is pragmatically like acc. vs. nom. - Also the variant forms of the plural of demonstrative pronouns, Greenlandic uku / uku-a 'them'/'they' are reported to have been earlier distributed according to this parameter, the longer form being nominative (while the later tendency is rather to reserve the longer form for the ergative/genitive role). The nom./acc.pl. of pronouns is no pervasive cross-dialectal opposition in Eskimo, but the reflexive selection according to subject role seems quite fundamental and certainly reveals an old thinking in terms of quite traditional categories. Jens Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 17:49:44 +0200 (MET DST) From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Subject: Re: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, I just wrote: > [T]his means that the [Greenlandic] > non-reflexive 3rd sg. tama-at '(him) whole' never refers to the object, > while the reflexive tamar-mi '(himself) whole' refers to the subject. I meant of course that the former never refers to the subject, while the latter always does that. May I add that the ergative systems exhibited by these languages, plainly based on old passive reconstructions with participles, are - when not specially marked - by virtue of their derivatory history quite naturally restricted to perfective statements. This explains the tense-split pointed out in Alexander Nikolayev's posting. Jens From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Fri Jun 11 17:22:43 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 19:22:43 +0200 Subject: PIE and ergativity Message-ID: "Alexander S. Nikolaev" schrieb: > Anyway, as far as Silverstein's hierarchy is concerned, i'd like to > put here the following idea: > As there really are some grounds to reconstruct genitivus-ergativus, > which was already mentioned in the discussion, one could throw a > glance at the typological data; the issue will be, that languages, > which possess a case, *combining* the two functions, namely ergative > and oblique, differ substantially from the languages, which are > characterized by independent ergative case. The former are, to say > roughly, less "ergative" and are very often diachronically on the way > of "accusativization" (or, vice versa, fuller "ergativization"). I cannot fully understand this point: First, we should note that case marking (if ever present in a given language system) is only ONE (possible) feature that can become relevent regarding the location of a language system on the AEC (accusative-ergative continuum). Hence, it is difficult to infer a general behavior of a language system regarding the AEC from just this feature. Second, if we include other aspects of morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic ergativity/accusativity (horribile dictu), the data demonstrate that a system with a syncretistic ergative case marker (irrelevant of how this syncretism pronounces itself) can be located either more on the middle of the AEC or on its very "edge". E.g., some East cauacsian languages have case syncretism but a strong ergative agreement pattern, whereas Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages mostly show an "independent" case marker (stemming from the deictic paradigm), but have a strong accusative AGR pattern (iwth some excceptions). > They take an intermediate position in the > continuum "ergative -- accusative"; and very often they are > characterized by the tense-split, and the ergative system in such > languages is confined to preterit tense(s). Such are Eskimo, Lach, > Burushaski, Kurdish (which, i know, is not a very good example, since > it developed a secondary ergative-like structure, but from a synchronic > point of view it will do). [There is, besides, a scanty piece of > evidence for tense-split in PIE]. Note that case syncretism in EC (East Caucasian) for instance does not correspopnd to an TAM split. Moreover, to claim that Burushaski's ergativity in restricted to preterit tense(s) seems not to be confirmed by ALL data available [ergativity in Burushaski is a very complicated matter beccause of its polypersonal agreement system, ERG-like stem suppletion in verbs and many other features]. The hypothesis that ERG is confined to preterit tense(s) in Eskimo is questionable, too [see the agreement system, some today's present tense structures clearly stem from old antipassives which presuppose ergativity, etc.]. I don't know which language you refer to by "Lach", but if you mean Lak (EC), than again the claim simply is wrong [Lak, as its presumed "sister" Dargwa, has a very sophisticated system of aspect/tense paradigms which are dominated by such factors as 'assertiveness', 'centrality' of speech act participant, residues of antipassives, doubled foregrounding strategies ('bi-absolutives') etc.]. > And in such semi-ergative or semi-accusative languages > Silverstein's hierarchy just doesn't work, being > a property of "full-ergative" languages (I apologize for my "terms", > which are not terminological at all, and, of course, i bear all the > responsibility for them). Perhaps you have missunderstood the actual instantiation of the Silverstein Hierarchy (SH). Today, SH is regarded as a a general behavior of lingustic paradigms with respect to the relationship of degree of animacy/empathy/centrality(speech act participants), degree of 'natural' agentivity, and (in)transitivity. SH accounts for both ACC and ERG strategies (there are for instance cases of languages that use ERG strategies for the most central/animate/empathetic participants (SAP pronouns) whereas the rest of the paradigm goes accusative [some kind of 'left shift' of the SH]). > Thus one can assume that it didn't > work in PIE either, and so the reasons which led Villar and Rumsey to > reject ergativity for PIE on the basis of this universal are not > important anymore, and hence one is entitled to believe that > inanimates just took the ergative marker less often, than animates. I > foresee the possible objection "but *all* the nouns with no respect > to gender are marked with genitive marker *os/*es/*s!" This i'm > inclined to explain as a consequence of tense-split structure of PIE: > this case in *os/*es/*s was common for all the nouns in present tense > and had the meaning of genitive; and the same marker performed the > functions of ergative case in preterit, and only animates could take > it, hence the examples of genitive of agent in historical IE dialects. I must admit that such a functional paradigm sounds VERY strange to me. The problem ist taht you operate on a pure functional level without having any formal indication that such a split of the {*es/*os/*s} morphology was actually active. Moreover, I do not understand how a PIE speaker would/could have discriminated both functions. In fact, case syncretism generally means that the morpheme in question establishs a functional cluster that is disambiguished (among others) by the semantics of a given NP, its position with respect to the kernel/periphery of a clause, its semantic/syntactic/pragmatic role with respect to a verbal frame etc. But such oppositions are not established by TAM (except you propose that a PIE speaker "felt" that a *s- etc. marked NP with present tenses was more genitive-like than with preterit tenses. But this is more than ad hoc!). Moreover, the history of a genitivus-ergativus (restricted per definitionem to transitive (!) structures) is often related to some kind of (alienable and/or inalienable) possessive coupling of a verbal structure with its presumed agent. Hence, it is the genitive which plays the primary functional role, from which a 'ergative' case is derived (grammaticalized). Consequently, there wouldn't be any functional difference in the two paradigmatic structures you propose, and, by consequence, no need to establish them at all. In order to substantiate your claim it would be good to have a valid typological parallel the history of which can be described with certainty. I don't know of such a system (or I did not understand yours correctly). [For an ACC interpretation of PIE case marking see my last postings, esp. that dated "Fri, 04 Jun 1999 16:59:11 +0200". Unfortunately, people from the IE list hardly did comment upon it (positively or negatively). Is it because a general ACC interpretation of PIE morphosyntax violates the overall feeling that there MUST be something ergative-like in the PIE air?]. > This intermediate stage of PIE, which, i believe, can be > reconstrructed within the framework of internal reconstruction method > and is *not* based on pure speculations, could of course be preceded > by another stage, when PIE was characterized by other structure, e.g. > active. The residues of the latter can be seen in the two-series > verbal system. Note that among typologists there is a general tendency (not to say a general agreement) that 'active' typology does NOT represent a seperate (third) type opposed to ACC and ERG in the tradition of Sapir etc. Rather, active typology is a name for a diversity of split phenomena that occur ON the AEC (S-split, A-split, O-split, IO-split etc.). Whatever the PIE morphosytax of simple clauses may have been: we have to describe it on the basis of the AEC. We don't have other (logical) options (see Schulze 1998 [http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/pkk_1abs.htm], chapter IV for an elaboration of this claim). But we should be ready to look at the 'dark side of ergativity', too, which means that we should be ready to dismiss our standard (favorite) way of interpreting morphosyntactic phenomena via ergativity, IF the data simply contradict. And that's what they do! Best wishes, Wolfgang -- [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 11 19:24:03 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 20:24:03 +0100 Subject: aorists Message-ID: Pat asked: > Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the > athematic and thematic aorists? Why should there be any difference in meaning? The difference could have been due to some other factor. Besides, we cannot really recover any difference between some of the many present formations (e.g. nasal infix versus -e- grade versus nasal suffix). There may as little difference of meaning as there is in Latin between competing perfects: such as pepigi, pe:gi, and panxi. That is to say, none! Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 11 19:58:01 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 20:58:01 +0100 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Thank you, Jens, for your analysis of PIE (H)y- and Greek /h/ ~ /z/. I want to question only the assumption that H3 was voiced. As we have seen earlier in this group, the evidence for that is very slight, if not minimal, if not based on one word in one language. It may, of course, have been voiced despite the lack of obvious and clear evidence, but I would challenge your statement of it as a proven fact. Can we approach it avoiding this assumption? Are there examples of proven H3 in words that have PIE Hy- and Greek /#z-/? Or do the phonetic conditions mean that the nature of the H is unrecoverable? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 11 19:50:41 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 20:50:41 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Leo said: > Unless these forms are *attested*, *in Latin*, *as participles*, we cannot > say that any kind of Latin actually *had* them. ... Sorry to be picky, but > that's what I do. I'm all for being picky, and think it is sometimes essential to prevent woolly speculation dressing itself as fact. Here, however, I think it misses the point, since Anthony's argument can be easily restated without the word to which you object - for example as "..Latin has reflexes of ..." I think the more interesting point is the substance of his argument. The -wos participle is widespread in IE, so we might legitimately look for reflexes of it in Latin (though the absence of an otherwise widespread feature is not in itself a problem). The absence of an active participle on the perfect stem requires an attempt at an explanation. The old view that you never say "why" of a language seems a cop-out now. Given the wide use made of the few actives from deponent verbs, we can't argue that there was no need for it. On the other hand the -to- participles do seem more securely PIE, more ancient, and more widespread. I know no Etruscan. Can anyone confirm Paolo Agostini's statement that Etruscan had a -v- perfective? Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Jun 12 03:27:53 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 23:27:53 EDT Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: >fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) >There was some degree of egalitarianism, or at least a more democratic society. -- most historians would be surprised by this. Status distinctions reached their absolute maximum in English society in the 17th and 18th centuries. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 12 05:28:25 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 00:28:25 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Friday, June 11, 1999 4:55 AM > On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> [In reply to a post of mine:] >> It is a complete mischaracterization of my views to imply that I believe >> that IE developed from Egyptian or, while we are at it, from Sumerian. > I know, but you seem to have been forgetting that when forming many of > your actual suggestions. They only make sense to me if Egyptian is a magic > prestage of IE. Pat resonds: Exercising maximum restraint: you are absolute\ly 100% incorrect in characterizing my intentions. If you (or ANY OTHERS) have read that into what I have written, may I profusely apologize? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 12 05:35:18 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 00:35:18 -0500 Subject: aorists Message-ID: Dear Peter: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Friday, June 11, 1999 2:24 PM > Pat asked: >> Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the >> athematic and thematic aorists? > Why should there be any difference in meaning? The difference could have > been due to some other factor. Besides, we cannot really recover any > difference between some of the many present formations (e.g. nasal infix > versus -e- grade versus nasal suffix). There may as little difference of > meaning as there is in Latin between competing perfects: such as pepigi, > pe:gi, and panxi. That is to say, none! Keine Antwort ist doch eine Antwort. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Jun 12 09:50:03 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 11:50:03 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <004f01beb3a8$cee75fa0$f39ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >I do not think you are responding to what I am saying. Your examples suggest >to me that you are under the impression that I denied that ergative >structure could develop from accusative structure. I did not say that nor do >I believe that. I do continue to believe that any language which is >presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage >sometime prior to that in its development. >For most transitive verbs, I believe the closest connection is between it >and its object so that, at some stage of development, an unmarked verb form >should represent a passive. To try to understand ergative constructions from >passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me >to be potentially misleading. You said twice that this is something which you *believe*, and this is OK with me, assuming that you are living in a community where you are free to believe whatever you choose to. But: this is of course without consequences for what we *know* about ergativity. First: as I think has been made clear several times here during this thread: there is no sense in the notion "ergative language", since ergativity is a phenomenon which may be present in some subsystems of a given language and absent in others, thus, while definitely showing this phenomenon to certain degrees, Georgian, Basque, Dyirbal and Thakali may be called "ergative languages", butt hey are in sometimes very different ways. What, in this respect, "going through an ergative stage" means is rather equivocal and requires special definitions, which seem to be lacking in your theory. "Ergative language" is a squishy notion. Secondly: if we take every possible manifestation of ergativity into account, we know hosts of cases where (in one, some, most subsystems of a language) a) ACC > ERG and b) ERG > ACC, as well as both construction types remaining stable through the observable history of a language. Logically, from this follows nothing more that both types can precede the other, and nothing more. The alleged necessity for ACC to be preceded by ERG at any rate is just not contradicted by *this* fact, but that is all one can derive from this. That, however, your scenario is the less likely one is confirmed by some simple observations, namely that "ergative languages" (used with the qualifications mentioned above, and loosely meaning a language with a marked dominance of ergative constructions in various subsystems, among them the alignment of the basic constituents in an unmarked transitive sentence [note that even the superficially simple term "transitivity" needs some definition before we can use it with sense; however, instead of doing this here, I may refer you to Hopper/Thompson in Lg 1980]) are globally in the minority, that they further tend to cluster in specifiable regions (I know Basque is an exception, no need to remind me), iow. that it is a phenomenon tending to areal spread aso. Furthermore, and what may be more significant, while we do know a great deal of languages without a single discernable trait of it, i.e. fully ACC languages, fully ERG languages don't seem to exist, i.e. all known languages with some ergativity display at least one subsystem which is organized on an ACC basis, the reverse not being observable (iow: there are only split-ergative languages, admittedly sometimes with less salient splits, but never without one). All this makes ergativity a more *marked* construction type than accusativity. This does not rule out the possibility of languages, for which only full accusativity is observable throughout their attested or confidently reconstructable history may not have had a (more) ERG past nevertheless, but in the absence of conclusive and specific evidence for this (the precise nature of which can, of course, be discussed) there can be no automatic rule which would force us to assume this. Finally, as Larry Trask has pointed out before, the idea of stadiality in language change has been safely laid to rest long ago, being nothing less than aprioristic ideology (if you like to stick to it nevertheless, you should be aware that you are in the fine company of, among others, N.Ja. Marr). It is no better confirmed than the notion that, e.g., feudalism precedes capitalism, which will yield to socialism eventually, or, back to linguistics, that all languages which display mostly pulmonic consonants, must have been preceded of necessity by stages which displayed a dominance of clicks in their systems. The idea of stadialism in language - which is of course a social institution - is philosophically on the same level as any other theory which tries to subject social institutions to inalterable laws of teleological development, like that of historical materialism. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Jun 12 10:14:11 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 12:14:11 +0200 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: <376089D3.B75E7501@ufl.edu> Message-ID: >> With due respect, you are not really saying that English lost the number >> distinction here because of English society becoming (more) *egalitarian*, >> or are you ? >Something like that. Remember that in Middle English, the "ye" form, >originally a plural, became a polite pronoun. Out of politeness, the >older "thou" forms were lost. There was some degree of egalitarianism, >or at least a more democratic society. It is hard to believe this, /you/ driving /thou/ out of its function until the 18th century, yet slavery being abolished in the Bristish empire in 1833 and the 13th amendment dating from 1865 (I suppose one addressed ones slaves with /you/ and not /thou/ in the 19th century, or am I mistaken here?). Of course, a wide-spread sense of egalitarianism in a society *may* lead to people *willfully* abandon politeness distinctions in their speech, but to infer that, whenever the latter occurs, the former holds as a prerequisite, is, imho, not viable. Neither the French nor the October revolution made this distinction disappear from the French and Russian languages respectively, although the sense of egalitarianism both incidents brought with them (or by which their makers were inspired) was at times hammered into the heads of the people. In more abstract terms: a linguistic community may reflect a social change A by some kind of language change B, but we may not, in the absence of unequivocal extra-linguistic data, infer A from observable B alone. St.G. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jun 12 12:23:53 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 08:23:53 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Peter Gray sic ait: > I know no Etruscan. Can anyone confirm Paolo Agostini's statement that > Etruscan had a -v- perfective? My understanding is that Etruscan formed a past tense, unmarked for aspect, in -c or -ce: -turce-, (he) gave, -svalce-, lived, -lupuce-, died. L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jun 12 21:54:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 16:54:47 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects In-Reply-To: <006c01beb445$46b717e0$d53aac3e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: According to Giuiano & Larissa Bonfante The Etruscan Language. NY: NYUP, 1983: 82-85 Active preterite ended in -ce [at least 3rd person sing. & pl.] Passive preterite ended in -xe , -khe <-che> [1st persons] Past participle ending seems to be -u which is passive if the verb is transitive and active if the verb is intransitive Active past participle ended in -thas [snip] >I know no Etruscan. Can anyone confirm Paolo Agostini's statement that >Etruscan had a -v- perfective? >Peter From jer at cphling.dk Sat Jun 12 22:34:53 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 00:34:53 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <004f01beb3a8$cee75fa0$f39ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [...] I do continue to believe that any language which is > presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage > sometime prior to that in its development. Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. > [...] To try to understand ergative constructions from > passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me > to be potentially misleading. "Potentially" perhaps, but in some cases certainly in accordance with the truth of a documented development. Why it that so often disregarded in typology-based solutions? Jens From elwhitaker at FTC-I.NET Sat Jun 12 16:07:55 1999 From: elwhitaker at FTC-I.NET (Elizabeth Whitaker) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 12:07:55 -0400 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: <376089D3.B75E7501@ufl.edu> Message-ID: At 11:00 PM 6/10/99 -0500, Nik Taylor wrote: >Something like that. Remember that in Middle English, the "ye" form, >originally a plural, became a polite pronoun. Out of politeness, the >older "thou" forms were lost. There was some degree of egalitarianism, >or at least a more democratic society. The Society of Friends' (Quakers') use of "thou" and "thee" instead of "you" forms was a reason they encountered so much disapproval in various forms. In other European languages, such as French, Russian, and German, there are definite social and cultural protocols about the circumstances in which one should use intimate or formal "you" forms. Elizabeth Whitaker From jer at cphling.dk Sat Jun 12 22:56:54 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 00:56:54 +0200 Subject: Differentiation In-Reply-To: <002c01beb40d$8dc19080$a59ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: In response to a thread woven by Patrick C. Ryan Dear Pat, In some recent postings you have suggested that some IE mrophological forms, indeed categories, have arisen "by differentiation". I have spoken out against it, and you have asked me why. You wrote you would have to consider a form like 2pl *bhe'rete "quite a bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms", i.e. younger than *bhe'ret (which lives on as the 3sg). The point was that you wanted vowels to be predictable from the consonant skeleton, so you set the basic ablaut rule that deletes all unstressed short vowels in action. Actually, that should not allow *bhe'ret either, but only *bhe'rt, but no matter, let's take to have been the form, just for the sake of the argument. My objection is that if in such a language vowels only exist accented, there would be no variants containing unstressed vowels, and thus there would be no material the language could differentiate. When languages make arbitrary differentiations, they utilize existing patterns, but *bhe'rete could simply not exist in a language on which the fundamental ablaut rule had worked. Therefore either the rule or the idea of differentiation is wrong. In fact, if grammatical number is something IE has in common with the other members of the presumed Nostratic macrofamily, it does not seem very likely that it would be an IE innovation, does it? To my eyes, it even looks as if the 1st and 2nd plural forms of the IE verb have the same conglomerate endings as in Uralic. I therefore do not believe they have arisen by a preocess of secondary differentiation which looks illogical to me in the first place. Jens From alex at AN3039.spb.edu Sun Jun 13 00:20:23 1999 From: alex at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 03:20:23 +0300 Subject: Ergativity in PIE Message-ID: Dear Wolfgang and List! Thank you for your comprehensive comments; and now i shall try to present some points "in my defense": >I cannot fully understand this point: First, we should note that case >marking (if ever present in a given language system) is only ONE >(possible) feature that can become relevent regarding the location of a >language system on the AEC (accusative-ergative continuum). Hence, it is >difficult to infer a general behavior of a language system regarding the >AEC from just this feature. I'm afraid i have to disagree here. As far as i know (and you certainly know better), there're five sections of grammar regarding which the way of encoding A, S and P can be relevant, namely: 1) case marking -- no comments here 2) verbal agreement -- for ergative verbal agreement compare the following Eskimo forms: k'avag' - ak'u - n'a --- 'i'm sleeping' 'to sleep'-Pres.Intr.-1Sg.S. and aglat-ak'a - t - n'a 'they're leading me' to lead-Pres.Tr.-3PlA-1SgP 3) rules of syntactic transformation The sentence "The father kicked his son and started crying" in an accusative language can mean only 'father started crying after he kicked his son', the missing S automatically being identified with A of the first part of sentense; and e.g. in Dyirbal sentence like this could only mean 'the son started crying having been kicked by his father' [sorry for such a brutal example] 4) word order: in Dyirbal unmarked word order is S-Vi and P-A-Vtr, while in english it would be A(S)-V-P 5) the structure of compounds But: in a given ergative language it's not at all necessary for the rules of ergative encoding to be realised in ALL the sections of grammar listed above. Thus i think it's possible to claim PIE ergativity, even if only the ergative structure of nominal system is reconstructed; meanwhile all of the other language mechanisms may keep on functioning on accusative basis. Cf. Chukchee, where the ergative system of case marking is attested, but the verbal agreement is accusative. Or the Walbiri language, where in a transitive sentence the 1st actant has the marker of an ergative case, but the markers of the A in verb are the same as of S. I'm sorry for this stepping aside into the problems of typology... Message-ID: Dear Wolfgang, you have expressed your surprise that nobody from the IE quarters replied to your posting of June 4. I do have a number fo questions and comments. Some may appear silly, given my poor acquaintance with much of typological discussion. However, to make a collateral field useful for IE studies, its practitioners must argue their points in such a fashion that we can understand them. Therefore I take the liberty to ask for clarification where I am doubt. On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, Wolfgang Schulze wrote: [...] Diathesis as a referential strategy (phrase internal as well as > discourse dependent) presupposes a reference-dominated type. Many Modern > IE languages are of this type [...], but PIE itself > obviously lacked this strategy which comes clear from the fact that we > cannot reconstruct a common "passive" for PIE. Diathesis is a very > active feature in language change. It can come and go, and nothing > allows us to propose a Passive for PIE just because a number of (modern) > IE languages share this feature. I strongly disagree witht he statement that PIE had no passive. In fact it had several. One of the basic functions of the middle voice was patently to express the passive use of transitive verbs. It goes so far that causatives in the middle voice lose their causative meaning: Skt. pa:ta'yate 'is made fly, flies'; also, while nasal presents from adjectives are factitive in Hittite (tepu- -> tepnuzzi 'makes small'), they are ingressive in Balto-Slavic and Germanic (ON rodhna 'turn red') which must reflect the function of the corresponding middle-voice inflection. Alongside this, there was the "stative" morpheme //-eH1-//; this was stative with intransitive verbs, as aorist *sed-eH1- 'enter a sitting position', prs. *sed-H1-ye'- 'be in a sitting position, sit', but passive when added to transitive verbal roots, as *k^lu-eH1- 'be heard', prs. *k^lu-H1-ye'- (Skr. s'ru:ya'te). This inflection combines the Sanskrit passive and the Greek "e:n-aorist" into a PIE paradigm. The high age of the passive meaning is proved by the equation of Skt. ja:'yate 'is created' and Old Irish do-gainethar 'is born' from *g^nH1-H1-ye'-tor, passive of *g^enH1-'create'. And of course the PPP of transitive verbs was passive, as *g^nH1-to'-s 'created, born' *{kw} orr-to'-s 'made', and could be used in combination with the genitive marking the agent. On the basis of idioms from different parts of IE one can safely posit a structure like *me'dhu H2nro's {kw}rto'm (H1esti) "the mead has been made by the man" as belonging to the protolanguage. > If we look at the question of ERG and passive, we can sometimes observe > a tendency to establish a pseudo-ergative strategy based on the passive > (some modern Indo-Iranian languages, partly Cl. Armenian etc.). But this > is a secondary process often bound to specific (perfective) TAM forms. In what way is this "pseudo-ergative" different from a "real ergative" - other than by the fact - not too frequent in typology - that its prehistory is known? - Is TAM "tense-aspect-mood"? [...] > Now, IF (I say IF) you want to ascribe some ERG features to the PIE > system it would make much more sense to declare ALL transitives as old > (and generalized) antipassives [...] Would that be possible? Some IE verbs are underived, can there be such a thing as a morphologically unmarked antipassive verb in a language? But the idea of antipassive looks good for the marking of the object: could *-m be an old adverbial ("goal") case originally used with an antipassive and generalized from there? You give up the idea for other reasons: > But this does not make sense as long as we don't have substantial > evidence for ERG strategies elsewhere in the paradigm [...] I believe we do, but is that really relevant? Could not the _forms_ of the verb be the sole survivors from an old ergative system? In an aside, you then speak of: > Georgian > which has an ACC (< AP) strategy in the present/future tenses/modes, but > an ERG strategy still present in the aorist, hence Georgian mirrors say > some Iranian languages on an ergative basis[]. A burning question to the IE-ist: Why is the ergative part of the Georgian verb held to be older than the non-ergative part? And why is its accusative construction taken to be an old antipassive? You suggest a set of structural combinations for basic sentence types, allowing for variants, but insist: > [...] Still, the overall picture remains the same: The operating system > of PIE clearly showed an ACC strategy in its protypical kernel, > semantically split according to [±animate] or so. This ACC strategy > seemed to be dominated by topicalization routines with animates, a clear > indices for the semantic basis of PIE "case" marking. Finally, AGR does > not change this picture, even if we assign the *-H2e etc. series to > statives/inactives, and the *-m etc. series to dynamics/actives: In this > case, even the dichotomy [±anim] becomes irrelevant, because it does not > show up in a specific set of clitics. ALL these clitics have an ACC AGR > scheme... If I understand this correctly, you are addressing several layers of the language in one mouthful. I agree that the PIE we reconstruct was not ergative, but had the same basic syntax as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. But does that exclude the existence of an older structure? Or are older structures disqualified as ergative for some other reason? What is the "topicalization" business based upon? If animates as subjects are marked with an *-s, it would mean that this role was not self-evident for them. Could that not indicate that the whole statement was primarily about the object, which was then only minimally marked, viz. in the case of animates for which this role is not as self-evident as it is with inanimates? A patient-centered statement structure is exactly what the classical ergative is. However, I am in great doubt, as I have grave misgivings about some of the alleged evidence for an IE (better, pre-IE) ergative; thus, the two endings containing /s/, the nom.sg. (*-s) and the gen.sg. (*-os), are not at all identical if one cares to look closer. Still, since we are groping in the dark anyway, what differences we have found between them may turn out to be secondary and ultimately not relevant. In there has been a pre-IE ergative, where does that leave the reflexive? The reflexive pronoun replaces the anaphoric when referring to the _subject_, in which case the transitivity or intransitivity of the verb does not matter. Shockingly, perhaps, this is the same in Eskimo: the reflexive ("fourth person") is used whenever 3rd person reference hits the subject - be it transitive or intransitive. In this selection, there is no companionship between the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive one. That would rather indicate that the ergative constructions are later creations, just as they are in Modern Indic. Could you elaborate on the clitics you have in mind? What are you talking about here? Jens From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Jun 13 02:21:11 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 22:21:11 -0400 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > 1) Obviously, *Heyew is not a canonical IE root form. > 2) Would you consider the original root *Hey- and -w a root extension? > 3) Would you consider the possibility that the root is *yew- and that *He is > a preverb which may or may not have been present in the earliest IE? There seems to be little reason to assume the existence of preverbs that were fused with verbs in PIE. Within Benvensite's theory of root shapes, we have to consider Hyew a stage II extension from an Hey. But for late PIE, I think that extended roots need to be considered distinct lexical items anyway, to the point is moot. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Jun 13 02:41:15 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 22:41:15 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Lehmann does not consider C'CV per se perfective: he contrasts an aorist > vida{'}t as +perfective, + momentary, and the perfect ve{'}da as > +perfective, -momentary. > You may or may not agree. Isn't perfective supposed to mean that the duration, if any, of the event is being ignored? I did not understand this +perf, -momentary (or +duration) business when I first heard it and I still do not. > But to attempt to address the idea behind your question if I understand > it, the relative rarity of thematic aorists may be substantially > attributable to the fact that there were two other competing aorists > (or equivalents): the root aorists and s-aorists. But s-aorists are generally considered to be a late formation too. So what kind of aorists did all the roots with root presents form, before there were thematic or s-aorists? > Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the > athematic and thematic aorists? And what might that difference (if any) > have been? I am not sure that there was an unified ``aorist'' in PIE. If I have to take a position other than ignorance, it will be that the different stem formations were not yet fully grammaticialzied. To try to find such differences of meaning will be as futile as trying to find a pattern in the changes in meaning brought about by ``prepositions'' in phrasal verbs in English. For example, *winedti (>vindati in Sans) must have meant ``is searching out'', *widet meant ``found'' while ``woida'' meant ``knows''. It is not clear to me that *(e)winedt meant >only< ``was searching out'' and never ``searched out'' (as avindat does in Sans). And without such a conclusion, perfective as a category does not make sense. From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jun 14 06:37:04 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 01:37:04 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 4:50 AM Pat wrote: >> I do not think you are responding to what I am saying. Your examples suggest >> to me that you are under the impression that I denied that ergative >> structure could develop from accusative structure. I did not say that nor do >> I believe that. I do continue to believe that any language which is >> presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage >> sometime prior to that in its development. >> For most transitive verbs, I believe the closest connection is between it >> and its object so that, at some stage of development, an unmarked verb form >> should represent a passive. To try to understand ergative constructions from >> passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me >> to be potentially misleading. R-S responds: > You said twice that this is something which you *believe*, and this is OK > with me, assuming that you are living in a community where you are free to > believe whatever you choose to. > But: this is of course without consequences for what we *know* about > ergativity. Pat comments: Your confidence amazes me. To contrast my "belief" with your "knowledge" is insufferably smug. There is not one thing which you "know" with which some other PhD has not differed at some time or some place. Unless you have somehow found Mimir's Well, your belief that you "know" is roughly on a footing with my belief (that I know). R-S continued: > First: as I think has been made clear several times here during this > thread: there is no sense in the notion "ergative language", since > ergativity is a phenomenon which may be present in some subsystems of a > given language and absent in others, thus, while definitely showing this > phenomenon to certain degrees, Georgian, Basque, Dyirbal and Thakali may be > called "ergative languages", butt hey are in sometimes very different ways. > What, in this respect, "going through an ergative stage" means is rather > equivocal and requires special definitions, which seem to be lacking in > your theory. "Ergative language" is a squishy notion. Pat responds: G. A. Klimov, which has your credentials, and who is rather highly regarded in Russia, asserts an ergative stage for language, and I subscribe to his interpretation. After having writing this, I can, in good faith, still entertain the idea that an "ergative stage" is really just a period in which ergative characteristics predominate; pure phenomena are notoriously difficult to capture under the microscope. I have no problem asserting that an "ergative stage" existed in each of the languages mentioned above at some time (in the sense described above), and that, over time, each has modified that facts of the stage in different ways and to different degrees. R-S continued: > Secondly: if we take every possible manifestation of ergativity into > account, we know hosts of cases where (in one, some, most subsystems of a > language) a) ACC > ERG and b) ERG > ACC, as well as both construction types > remaining stable through the observable history of a language. Logically, > from this follows nothing more that both types can precede the other, and > nothing more. The alleged necessity for ACC to be preceded by ERG at any > rate is just not contradicted by *this* fact, but that is all one can > derive from this. That, however, your scenario is the less likely one is > confirmed by some simple observations, namely that "ergative languages" > (used with the qualifications mentioned above, and loosely meaning a > language with a marked dominance of ergative constructions in various > subsystems, among them the alignment of the basic constituents in an > unmarked transitive sentence [note that even the superficially simple term > "transitivity" needs some definition before we can use it with sense; > however, instead of doing this here, I may refer you to Hopper/Thompson in > Lg 1980]) are globally in the minority, that they further tend to cluster > in specifiable regions (I know Basque is an exception, no need to remind > me), iow. that it is a phenomenon tending to areal spread aso. Furthermore, > and what may be more significant, while we do know a great deal of > languages without a single discernable trait of it, i.e. fully ACC > languages, fully ERG languages don't seem to exist, i.e. all known > languages with some ergativity display at least one subsystem which is > organized on an ACC basis, the reverse not being observable (iow: there are > only split-ergative languages, admittedly sometimes with less salient > splits, but never without one). All this makes ergativity a more *marked* > construction type than accusativity. This does not rule out the possibility > of languages, for which only full accusativity is observable throughout > their attested or confidently reconstructable history may not have had a > (more) ERG past nevertheless, but in the absence of conclusive and specific > evidence for this (the precise nature of which can, of course, be > discussed) there can be no automatic rule which would force us to assume > this. Pat responds: Would you mind detailing the non-ERG features you know in Sumerian? R-S further continued: > Finally, as Larry Trask has pointed out before, the idea of stadiality in > language change has been safely laid to rest long ago, being nothing less > than aprioristic ideology (if you like to stick to it nevertheless, you > should be aware that you are in the fine company of, among others, N.Ja. > Marr). It is no better confirmed than the notion that, e.g., feudalism > precedes capitalism, which will yield to socialism eventually, or, back to > linguistics, that all languages which display mostly pulmonic consonants, > must have been preceded of necessity by stages which displayed a dominance > of clicks in their systems. > The idea of stadialism in language - which is of course a social > institution - is philosophically on the same level as any other theory > which tries to subject social institutions to inalterable laws of > teleological development, like that of historical materialism. Pat responds: I continue to assert that complexity arises out of simplicity; and since I have found that the relationship between the object and the verb is primary, which loosely conforms to an ergative model of development, I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jun 14 13:15:39 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 08:15:39 -0500 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 9:21 PM > Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> 1) Obviously, *Heyew is not a canonical IE root form. >> 2) Would you consider the original root *Hey- and -w a root extension? >> 3) Would you consider the possibility that the root is *yew- and that *He is >> a preverb which may or may not have been present in the earliest IE? Nath wrote: > There seems to be little reason to assume the existence of preverbs that > were fused with verbs in PIE. Within Benvensite's theory of root shapes, we > have to consider Hyew a stage II extension from an Hey. But for late PIE, I > think that extended roots need to be considered distinct lexical items > anyway, so the point is moot. Pat comments: In order to regard *Hyew as a w-extended form of *Hey, it is necessary to demonstrate that existence of the root *Hey in the *appropriate meaning*.--- either alone or with other root extensions. Can you do it? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jun 14 13:58:56 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 08:58:56 -0500 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 9:41 PM > Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> Lehmann does not consider C'CV per se perfective: he contrasts an aorist >> vida{'}t as +perfective, + momentary, and the perfect ve{'}da as >> +perfective, -momentary. >> You may or may not agree. Nath asked: > Isn't perfective supposed to mean that the duration, if any, of the event is > being ignored? I did not understand this +perf, -momentary (or +duration) > business when I first heard it and I still do not. Pat attempts to answer: I have the feeling that this is because there are virtually as many "perfectives" as there are linguists. If one looks at Larry Trask's grammatical; dictionary, he attempts to make a distinction between "perfect aspect" and "perfective aspect"; and contrasts the "perfect" (not "perfective") aspect with the "resultative". I am not going to re-define any of these terms but I will say that what I think Lehmann meant : 'expresses an activity that continues/continued/etc. to its logical conclusion'. For example: "he is eating up the bread" (he intends to continue the activity of eating until there is no more of that bread, and that-bread-eating cannot be continued) ; obviously, by this interpretation of "perfective", it can occur in all other tenses: "he ate up the bread"; actually, my interpretation of "he ate the bread" would generally coincide with this last example, contrasting with "he ate bread" or "he is eating bread"., which leave the question open as to whether there is still bread left when he ceases the activity. Pat continued: >> But to attempt to address the idea behind your question if I understand >> it, the relative rarity of thematic aorists may be substantially >> attributable to the fact that there were two other competing aorists >> (or equivalents): the root aorists and s-aorists. Nath commented: > But s-aorists are generally considered to be a late formation too. So what > kind of aorists did all the roots with root presents form, before there were > thematic or s-aorists? Pat writes: I cannot answer that question. Pat wrote previously: >> Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the >> athematic and thematic aorists? And what might that difference (if any) >> have been? Nath responded: > I am not sure that there was an unified ``aorist'' in PIE. If I have to take > a position other than ignorance, it will be that the different stem > formations were not yet fully grammaticalized. To try to find such > differences of meaning will be as futile as trying to find a pattern in the > changes in meaning brought about by ``prepositions'' in phrasal verbs in > English. For example, > *winedti (>vindati in Sans) must have meant ``is searching out'', *widet > meant ``found'' while ``woida'' meant ``knows''. It is not clear to me that > *(e)winedt meant >only< ``was searching out'' and never ``searched out'' (as > avindat does in Sans). And without such a conclusion, perfective as a > category does not make sense. Pat comments: "Perfection" is in the eye of the beholder. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Mon Jun 14 15:27:52 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 10:27:52 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Dear Jens and Wolfgang, The issues of diathesis, ergativity, and reflexive pronouns under discussion here are indeed complex and in need of clarification. I comment on one really. For example: Quote from Schulze: >[...] Diathesis as a referential strategy (phrase internal as well as >> discourse dependent) presupposes a reference-dominated type. Many Modern >> IE languages are of this type [...], but PIE itself >> obviously lacked this strategy which comes clear from the fact that we >> cannot reconstruct a common "passive" for PIE. Diathesis is a very >> active feature in language change. It can come and go, and nothing >> allows us to propose a Passive for PIE just because a number of (modern) >> IE languages share this feature. Jens' response: >I strongly disagree witht he statement that PIE had no passive. In fact it >had several. One of the basic functions of the middle voice was patently >to express the passive use of transitive verbs. Let's stop here for a moment. To declare that PIE did or did not have a passive presupposes a clear definition of a passive and of a middle. Medio-passive is the compromise term, I believe. Keenan (1976 in Timothy Shopen's Language Typology and Syntactic Change: Clause Structure) defined it very clearly as a foregrounding and backgrounding device operating on the arguments of transitive VP's. In 1991 Klaiman (Grammatical Voice? Oxford UP?) then typologically distinguished between the role of a passive as derived voice in nominative-accusative languages and the role of the middle in active languages which have 'basic voice', not 'derived voice'. The role of a middle in active langauges was to move members of one verb class into the other of two verb classes, as active languages typically have two distinct verb classes: verbs such as 'sing, run, dance' (active) and 'lie, sit, stand' (stative). Such verbs are essentially intransitive. Devices also created transitive verbs. Those of you who know more about active languages may have more to say about the role of voice in those languages. I am citing here only the bare bones of Klaiman's analysis, and it really doesn't matter whether you say 'active' or 'split-ergative', if the properties are the same. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have suggested that PIE was active in type, citing the two verb classes in Hittite, the -mi and -hi conjugations, among other things. If active in type refers to having primarily intransitive verbs and derivational strategies to make them transitive, then PIE had no passive. It takes a transitive verb to be passivized. Along with primarily intransitive verbs and the lack of a passive, PIE had no transitive verb of possession, no 'have'. 'Have' entered dialectally by different paths. There are now two recent statements on the path of 'have' into attested IE languages, one in the second volume of the recently published Lehmann Fs. (Journal of IE Studies Monograph 31) and another in the Proceedings of the Xth UCLA IE Conference (JIES Monograph 32). Jens continued: >It goes so far that >causatives in the middle voice lose their causative meaning: Skt. >pa:ta'yate 'is made fly, flies'; also, while nasal presents from >adjectives are factitive in Hittite (tepu- -> tepnuzzi 'makes small'), >they are ingressive in Balto-Slavic and Germanic (ON rodhna 'turn red') >which must reflect the function of the corresponding middle-voice >inflection. Sanskrit pa:t- is the root. The suffix -aya- has made it causative, then the middle made it intransitive (with the same meaning as the root?). The middle could passivize it precisely because it first became transitive via the -aya- causative suffix. But an intransitive root *pa:t- could not be passivized. Hittite tepunzzi is transtive active by a similar process, but it does not undergo medio-passive passivization. I know of no *tepnutari. In playing around with such comparisons in fact I noticed that the *OR- root in Hittite does interesting things that differ from those in Greek. In Hittite ari 'arrives, reaches' is a -hi conjugation verb and contrasts with arta(ri) 'stands' (deponent middle), while the -mi version is a derived causative arnuzzi 'brings'. Formally comparable is Homeric Greek middle õ:rto 'sets off, starts up', transitive active órnumi 'arouse, urge', middle órnumai 'arise, start up'. One would expect a comparable Hittite *arnutari 'be brought', but it seems not to occur. What Hittite does have are pairs of suppletive active-passives. The Latin cognate oritur 'arises' is deponent. Although Latin does have some active-middle pairs comparable to those of Hittite, Greek, and Sanskrit (e.g. pascit 'nourishes', pascitur 'grazes, is nourished') beside its deponents, it otherwise has a productive passive voice. Latin derivational devices (e.g. -a:- first conjugation: novus 'new', nova:re 'renew') have created a lot of new transitive verbs. Coming back then to Jens: > Alongside this, there was the "stative" morpheme //-eH1-//; >this was stative with intransitive verbs, as aorist *sed-eH1- 'enter a >sitting position', prs. *sed-H1-ye'- 'be in a sitting position, sit', This stative was not productive in PIE (see the issue of 'have' in the Lehmann Fs.). The root 'sit' in fact is most interesting here. Hittite 'sit' is derived as middle of 'be': eszi 'is', esa(ri) 'sits'. With -za (often called a reflexive particle) in New Hittite then the combination -za esari means 'take a seat, sit down' (with sakki 'knows', -za sakki means 'acknowledges'). With the root *es- there was no need of a "stative" suffix, nor was there with middles, Greek he:stai, Sanskrit a:ste 'sits'. But the 'active' root *sed- 'sit' was another matter. In Latin the stative is very productive in its second conjugation -e:- verbs (habe:re 'have', sede:re 'sit' etc.). But its use there is part of a different verbal system, one in which there is a productive passive voice. These -e:- statives are often syntactically transitive but semantically stative, e.g. 'have': librum habet (see Bauer in HS?). This is not to deny that even Hittite had passive uses of medio-passives. The point is to look at what is productive in the system. Every language can do pretty much what any other can, but some languages do some things more naturally than others. By the time Greek and Sanskrit were productively operating with a medio-passive, it was already a bit removed from the medio-passive of Hittite. While Greek had retained quite a few athematic verbs beside the more productive thematic type, Sanskrit really didn't contrast a thematic and athematic type. And Latin had only one verb type, thematic in the present. Hittite still had two verb classes, its -mi and -hi types. Coming back then to Jens' causative suffixes in Sanskrit (-aya-) and Hittite (-nu-), I would suggest that they were two independent innovations after the breakup. They were transitivizing devices for these new nominative-accusative languages that were experimenting with a passive. The fact that -nu- occurs in both Hittite and Greek need not push it back to PIE. Achaeans and the Ahhiyawa were probably at least as well acquainted in post-PIE times as the Hittite treaties suggest Hittites were with the Ahhiyawa. There had to have been massively re-contacts early after the breakup. But linguistic systems probably kept change from moving too quickly, despite a lot of individual innovations. This is not meant as a statement about what changes can or do take place. This is part of a larger attempt to arrive a plausible solution to what did take place in one well-attested language family. Carol Justus From stevegus at aye.net Mon Jun 14 15:26:10 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 11:26:10 -0400 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Past participle ending seems to be -u > which is passive if the verb is transitive > and active if the verb is intransitive Ergativity? (Uh oh. . .) Etruscan would seem to me to be a perfect test for claims of Nostratic and other super-families. It is a prime candidate because it is a language about which we still know relatively little. It is not Indo-European, but it seems possibly related. For example, we know that Etruscan had: 1st sing. pronoun: nom. -mi-, acc. -mini-. Demonstratives -ita-, -eta- and -ica-, -eca-. Nouns seem to have had four cases. In the singular, these include a genitive which often ends in -as or -ial, a dative in -l or -al, and a locative in -thi. If there is a language that cannot be classified as Indo-European, but can be related to a reconstructed common ancestor, Etruscan would seem to be a likely candidate. In fact, if these features mentioned above were -all- we knew about Etruscan, it might have -been- classed as IE. Fortunately, we have a much larger body of texts. I've a pet crank theory that Etruscan might be related to the non-IE substrate spoken by the boat-people that seems to be present in Germanic. This is a far-fetched hypothesis. There do seem to be some vocabulary coincidences: -aisar-, Etruscan for "gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods." Both Etruscan and Germanic had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az. When borrowing Greek mythological names and other words, the Etruscans did phonetic violence to 'em that resembles the Germanic sound shift. Specifically, Greek b, d, g > p, t, k in Etruscan. Kastor stayed Castur in Etruscan, but Polydeukes became Pulutuk. (And Pulutuk became Pollux in Latin.) There does also seem to be some evidence of cultural contact between Germans and the inhabitants of Northern Italy at an early, pre-Roman date, probably around 200 BCE at latest. The Runic alphabet seems to have been created from an Etruscan or North Italian prototype. -- Amorem semel contraxi. Consanui, et morbi immunis sum. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Jun 14 17:49:04 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 13:49:04 EDT Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: In a message dated 6/14/99 12:16:52 AM Mountain Daylight Time, elwhitaker at FTC-I.NET writes: >In other European languages, such as French, Russian, and German, there are >definite social and cultural protocols about the circumstances in which one >should use intimate or formal "you" forms. -- there were in English in the 17th century as well. "Thee" corresponded exactly with French "tu" or German "du" -- it was used to intimates, social inferiors, and children. "You" was used to superiors; it was the formal/deferential mode. Parents used "thee" to children, for example, and children used "you" to their parents. For a low-status Quaker to use "thee" to a higher-status non-Quaker was socially subversive and in the context of the time, insulting. From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jun 14 18:15:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 19:15:35 +0100 Subject: aorists Message-ID: >> Pat asked: >>> ...difference in meaning between the >>> athematic and thematic aorists? Peter said: >> ..., none! Pat said: > Keine Antwort ist doch eine Antwort. Peter schriebt weiter: Wenn Sie eine klarere Antwort brauchen, sage ich, dass es keinen Grund gibt, einen Unterschied zu sehen. Peter From stevegus at aye.net Tue Jun 15 03:20:09 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 23:20:09 -0400 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: JoatSimeon writes: > -- there were in English in the 17th century as well. "Thee" corresponded > exactly with French "tu" or German "du" -- it was used to intimates, > social inferiors, and children. "You" was used to superiors; it was the > formal/deferential mode. Parents used "thee" to children, for example, > and children used "you" to their parents. Curious, how this got turned almost exactly on its head. To the extent that "thou" is still understood, it is a form of address restricted to Exalted Personages, like God, or Richard III, or the Mighty Thor. -- L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jun 15 07:55:37 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 08:55:37 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <000801beb630$547b3a40$a99ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I continue to assert that complexity arises out of simplicity; You may continue to assert this all you like, but what does it have to do with ergativity, or with linguistics at all? > and since I have found that the relationship between the object and > the verb is primary, which loosely conforms to an ergative model of > development, No, it doesn't. A division between objects and non-objects is accusativity, not ergativity. Ergativity is a division between transitive subjects and all else. > I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must > precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Jun 15 09:03:32 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 09:03:32 GMT Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new pe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I still think that one of the various threads leading to the Latin perfect with its frequent `v', was contraction of a periphrastic perfect e.g. *ama;vo:s (IE perfect active participle) + a tense of {es-} = "be", e.g. amavistis < *{amavor estes}. From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jun 15 08:09:27 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 10:09:27 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <000801beb630$547b3a40$a99ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: (without stage-directions, if I'm allowed to) >G. A. Klimov, which has your credentials, and who is rather highly regarded >in Russia, asserts an ergative stage for language, and I subscribe to his >interpretation. Appeal to authority. The least impressive way of reasoning of them all. By far. Si tacuisses. >Would you mind detailing the non-ERG features you know in Sumerian? Consistently ERG in terms of overt case marking in all TAM categories, enough to impress a non-linguist observer. However, ACC in terms of verbal cross-reference in the imperfective system, no doubt. Furthermore, the personal pronouns operate on a fully ACC basis, even in terms of case marking. Sumerian is, like all the other "ERG-lgs", really a split-ergative language. QED. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 15 09:13:05 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 11:13:05 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: Carol F. Justus Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 3:47 AM [snip] >This stative was not productive in PIE (see the issue of 'have' in the >Lehmann Fs.). The root 'sit' in fact is most interesting here. Hittite >'sit' is derived as middle of 'be': eszi 'is', esa(ri) 'sits'. With -za >(often called a reflexive particle) in New Hittite then the combination -za >esari means 'take a seat, sit down' (with sakki 'knows', -za sakki means >'acknowledges'). With the root *es- there was no need of a "stative" >suffix, nor was there with middles, Greek he:stai, Sanskrit a:ste 'sits'. >But the 'active' root *sed- 'sit' was another matter. In Latin the stative >is very productive in its second conjugation -e:- verbs (habe:re 'have', >sede:re 'sit' etc.). But its use there is part of a different verbal >system, one in which there is a productive passive voice. These -e:- >statives are often syntactically transitive but semantically stative, e.g. >'have': librum habet (see Bauer in HS?). [Ed Selleslagh] It seems to me - a non-specialist - that two Castilian constructions might be related to this. 1. the expression 'estáte quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is behind it? 2. the formally reflexive use of transitive verbs in Castilian that has exact parallels in (modern) Greek medio-passive: 'se prohibe (in older Spanish: prohibese) la entrada' (Greek: apagoréyetai he: éisodos (pron. /apagorévete i ísodhos/) or 'vendese esta casa' or 'enjuáguese el envase'. You also have the parallel 'encontrar / encontrarse' - 'brísko: (/vrísko/) / brískomai (/vrískome/)' . Any comments? Ed. From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 15 10:05:39 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 12:05:39 +0200 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Steven A. Gustafson Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 4:05 AM >Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> Past participle ending seems to be -u >> which is passive if the verb is transitive >> and active if the verb is intransitive >Ergativity? (Uh oh. . .) >Etruscan would seem to me to be a perfect test for claims of Nostratic >and other super-families. It is a prime candidate because it is a >language about which we still know relatively little. It is not >Indo-European, but it seems possibly related. For example, we know that >Etruscan had: >1st sing. pronoun: nom. -mi-, acc. -mini-. >Demonstratives -ita-, -eta- and -ica-, -eca-. >Nouns seem to have had four cases. In the singular, these include a >genitive which often ends in -as or -ial, a dative in -l or -al, and a >locative in -thi. >If there is a language that cannot be classified as Indo-European, but >can be related to a reconstructed common ancestor, Etruscan would seem >to be a likely candidate. In fact, if these features mentioned above >were -all- we knew about Etruscan, it might have -been- classed as IE. >Fortunately, we have a much larger body of texts. >I've a pet crank theory that Etruscan might be related to the non-IE >substrate spoken by the boat-people that seems to be present in >Germanic. This is a far-fetched hypothesis. [Ed Selleslagh] I have mine too: contact between Anatolian forefathers of the Etruscans (before their migration by sea to Tuscany via Lemnos) and those of the (at least North-East-) Germanic peoples on the shores of the Black Sea / Pontos Euxinos (Crimea?). Note that Miguel Carrasquer once made a nice, slightly speculative, 'Stammbaum' about this pre-PIE stage, that makes a lot of sense. >There do seem to be some vocabulary coincidences: -aisar-, Etruscan for >"gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods." Both Etruscan and Germanic >had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az. >When borrowing Greek mythological names and other words, the Etruscans >did phonetic violence to 'em that resembles the Germanic sound shift. >Specifically, Greek b, d, g > p, t, k in Etruscan. Kastor stayed Castur >in Etruscan, but Polydeukes became Pulutuk. (And Pulutuk became Pollux >in Latin.) [Ed] There is even more: p, t, k > f or ph(in certain positions), th , ch , like in Neptunus > Ne(f)thuns, Polyxéne: > phulphsna, Acaviser > Achvizr. And of course the apparently strong initial accent, held responsible for many of the peculiarities of Etruscan pronunciation of foreign names. Etruscan also shares quite a few traits of this kind with Lydian. Note also that Etruscan too has an ablative/genitive of origin -ach, e.g. Rumach = from Rome, Roman, or Velznach = from Volsinii/Bolsena (Lydian -ak; Greek analogy : adjectives with -(i)akós). Cfr. our recent discussion about the widespread -k(o) suffix, or part of suffixes. (Also in Slavic, as I mentioned before, and Uralic, e.g. as partitive-plural in Hungarian, which points to the same Pontic region; these are my highly personal interpretations!). [ moderator snip ] From jer at cphling.dk Tue Jun 15 15:26:03 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 17:26:03 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Carol F. Justus wrote: > Dear Jens and Wolfgang, > The issues of diathesis, ergativity, and reflexive pronouns under > discussion here are indeed complex and in need of clarification. I comment > on one really. I try and read really. [...] > Jens' response [to a correct report given by Wolfgang Schulze of what > is perhaps the most widespread view about an IE passive - Jens]: > [Jens:] >> I strongly disagree with the statement that PIE had no passive. In >> fact it had several. One of the basic functions of the middle voice >> was patently to express the passive use of transitive verbs. > Let's stop here for a moment. > [General references to people telling us what passive is in other > languages, esp.:] > In 1991 Klaiman (Grammatical Voice? Oxford UP?) then typologically > distinguished between the role of a passive as derived voice in > nominative-accusative languages and the role of the middle in active > languages which have 'basic voice', not 'derived voice'. The role of a > middle in active langauges was to move members of one verb class into > the other of two verb classes, as active languages typically have two > distinct verb classes: verbs such as 'sing, run, dance' (active) and > 'lie, sit, stand' (stative). Such verbs are essentially intransitive. > Devices also created transitive verbs. [...] > Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have suggested that PIE was active in type, citing > the two verb classes in Hittite, the -mi and -hi conjugations, among other > things. If active in type refers to having primarily intransitive verbs and > derivational strategies to make them transitive, then PIE had no passive. > It takes a transitive verb to be passivized. Well, the mi- and hi-conjugations plainly are NOT the two "basic series "they are cracked up to be, esp. in Ivanov's 1965 monograph. For one thing, there is an Anatolian mediopassive which is not a member of the hi-conjugation, so the hi-conjugation is not the flimsy "inactive" common precursor of the middle and the perfect of the other languages. On the contrary: The Anatolian hi-conjugation is the IE perfect, period. The stroy is a simple one which has been told - in perhaps not so simple terms - by Eichner and others many times. Anatolian has given up the IE distinction of verbal aspect stems, having then only one verbal stem per lexical verb. The actual stem surviving from PIE may be a "present stem" (as in es- 'be', kuen- 'kill'), an aorist stem (as in mer- 'vanish', sanh- 'seek', te- 'say', ganes- 'recognize') or a perfect stem (ishai- 'bind', ispai- 'eat one's fill', probably ar-/er- 'come' and, for semantic reasons, quite possibly sakk-/sekk- 'know'). All of these stems formed what could become a preterite, and so IE imperfects, aorists and perfects live on as Hitt. preterites, just as they do in Classical Sanskrit. On the analogy of the imperfect which had a present beside it from of old, preterites based on aorists and perfects created presents by adding the present ending enlargement -i. The 1sg prs. based on a perfect was *-ha-i, Old Hitt. -hhe > -hhi; the prt. -ha is retained in Luvian and Lycian, while Hittite adjusted the expected *-hha to the ending of the mi-conjugation -un (from syllabic *-m) thus creating -hhun. Thus, the preterite of the hi-conjugation basically continues the IE perfect (with some help from its closest friends, note esp. the 3sg -s from the s-aorist necessitated because of the lack of consonantal material in the 3sg perfect itself). The bulk of Hitt. hi-verbs, however, are intruders: Practically every verb that had the vocalism *-o- in IE has ended up being a Hitt. hi-verb, a fact that stronly indicates that the old stock of hi-verbs had that vocalism already, a demand met most easily if they were perfects. We find IE causative-iteratives, intensives, reduplicated aorists (!) in the hi-conjug., and also some for which the vocalism has not been precisely *-o-, but apparently close enough to make the verb share the fate of the perfect. Thus the denom. type newahh- is hi, although the vocalism was IE *-a- (from pre-IE laryngeal-coloured *-e-), and so is da:- 'take' based on the middle voice of *deH3- 'give' and so fairly plainly continuing *d at 3- with syllabified laryngeal. That such a crude and primitive analogy could work so well and not represent the truth would be beyond my comprehension and incompatible with normal standards of common sense. That, however, does not in itself exclude an old "active" typology for a prestage of IE, only now you have to look elsewhere for its traces, and that would of course be in the dichotomy prs. (prs./aor.) : midd./pf. (which then would show up as -mi vs. -hi in Hitt., if only indirectly). But I cannot see this looks too good either: While medium (or perfect) tantum verbs are indeed not very action-related, the opposite does not hold for the active. Naturally *H1ey- 'go' and *{gwh}en- 'kill' are good active verbs, but why is *H1es- 'be' and *k^{th}ey- 'dwell' members of the same club? My answer to that is simple: Because club membership is not at all based on an active/inactive parameter: They are active because they are not the mediopassive of anything. Has anyone in his right mind ever claimed that *{gwh}e'n-mi 'I kill' was intransitive? And what about 'eat' and 'millk'? And the many root aorists that are plainly underived too? Was {kw}e'r-t 'made' once intransitive? On what basis is THAT claimed to be known - or am I missing a point since it looks so silly? Media tantum like *k^e'y-or 'lies', "e:'s-or" 'sits' (reduplicated? simply not knowable), *we's-tor 'is dressed' and some others may be the medium part of an older two-voice system preserved with most other verbs. That would of course mean that the old function of the middle voice was not exclusively passive, for here it is not: you are not lying by being kept in a lying position (but _things_ are), this looks more like a reflexive which was then one of the meanings of the middle voice very early on (which nobody has ever denied, I guess). I would deny, however, that the reflexive (and reflexive-like) function was the ONLY function of the middle at any time, for there are too many things that demand its having a true passive force (by the unsurprising definitions you quoted) in a very remote period when some very old phonetic changes were operative. Thus, since there was no ban on transitive verbs in PIE which obviously had plenty of them, there was not THAT ban on a passive category. What a relief. > Along with primarily > intransitive verbs and the lack of a passive, PIE had no transitive verb of > possession, no 'have'. 'Have' entered dialectally by different paths. There > are now two recent statements on the path of 'have' into attested IE > languages, one in the second volume of the recently published Lehmann Fs. > (Journal of IE Studies Monograph 31) and another in the Proceedings of the > Xth UCLA IE Conference (JIES Monograph 32). I do not see the relevance of the question of how speakers of IE said 'have' for the discussion of the existence of a category expressing the passive of transitive verbs. I see the relevance of 'have' for a somewhat different discussion which seems not to have been addressed: How could a stative derivative with suffix *-eH1- from 'take' come to mean 'keep, hold, have' as it obviously did in so many instances? And if it is an areal thing as you claim (and I find no particular reason to believe), how could it happen just once so that there was a place it could spread from? This is the semantic nuance you rather expect for the perfect: 'I have taken and now hold' would be a very good way to say 'I have' in IE terms (cf. Eng. "I've got"), but that is not the way it is said, except perhaps in Slavic where OCS imamI can indeed be derived from an IE perfect. It seems the "stative" derivative verbs in *-eH1- still hold their secrets, and so I cannot exclude that they will eventually turn out to support the active/inactive idea - but neither can I exclude that they turn out to join all the other alleged indications and be simply irrelevant. [...] What you say about my description of the causative and factitive verbs that lost their transitive value (factitives then becoming ingressive) simply repeats what I said with a use of English modality as if it were an objection. If stripped of the rhetorics it appears to contain no added information and no expression of disagreement. [...] > Coming back then to Jens: >> Alongside this, there was the "stative" morpheme //-eH1-//; >> this was stative with intransitive verbs, as aorist *sed-eH1- 'enter a >> sitting position', prs. *sed-H1-ye'- 'be in a sitting position, sit', > This stative was not productive in PIE (see the issue of 'have' in the > Lehmann Fs.). The root 'sit' in fact is most interesting here. Hittite > 'sit' is derived as middle of 'be': eszi 'is', esa(ri) 'sits'. [...] If the stative formation was not productive in IE it is even better, for then it was a fossil which makes it even older. The stative has now been discovered in Indic, cf. Ilya Yakubovich in the 10th UCLA Conference volume, picking up an idea of Jamison's which she had given up herself. I may add to this the striking stem-formation of some of the forms of the root kas'- 'see', prs. ca's.t.e, aor. akhyat, formed from an apparent root-form "khya:-", as prs. khya:yate 'sees': this is simply the same stem formation as Lat. videt, i.e. from *-eH1-ye-ti/-tor. A plain middle voice of *H1es- would not give Skt. a:'ste, Gk. e:^stai with a long vowel as opposed to a'sti, esti(n) 'is'. They may be related, but not in exactly this way. > This is not to deny that even Hittite had passive uses of medio-passives. > The point is to look at what is productive in the system. [...] I hope most of us are too sophisticated to need that kind of lecturing. > Coming back then to Jens' causative suffixes in Sanskrit (-aya-) and > Hittite (-nu-), I would suggest that they were two independent innovations > after the breakup. But you have *-eye- in Hittite too (la:ki 'put lying', wasse- 'dress' frpm *logh-e'ye- and *wos-e'ye- resp., in the former with the normal passage into the hi-conjugation of a verb with o-vocalism, while the latter has resisted this analogical pressure); and you also have de-adjectival factitives in -nu- in Sanskrit (dabhno'ti, identical with tepnuzzi; dr.s.-n.o'-ti : Gk. thrasu's), as well as both of them elsewhere in diverse IE languages. Moreover, there is no obvious way they could have been created secondarily from inherited material. Both _must_ have been PIE, and theories incompatible with this inference just are no good. It seems to me that there is a basic error inherent in the frequent "explanation" of mysterious categories and forms as "late", "secondary" or "einzelsprachlich". If a morphological type is too young to belong to the protolanguage it must have been formed from material the protolanguage, indeed the particular poststage of it had, and then it should be easier, not harder, for us to discover its origins, for in that case the timespan to be bridged is shorter than in the case of very old forms. This error is very often committed when dealing with categories that have become productive, such as the thematic verbs or the s-aorist. They became productive, oh yes, and so all their examples cannot go back to the protolanguage, but some MUST, otherwise there would have been no nucleus for the expansion. [...] > This is not meant as a statement about what changes can or do take place. > This is part of a larger attempt to arrive at a plausible solution to > what did take place in one well-attested language family. My posting is meant as both. Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 15 18:01:05 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 13:01:05 -0500 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) In-Reply-To: <37651F12.CC2878C8@aye.net> Message-ID: [snip] >I've a pet crank theory that Etruscan might be related to the non-IE >substrate spoken by the boat-people that seems to be present in >Germanic. This is a far-fetched hypothesis. Adolfo Zavaroni's version of Etruscan in I documenti etruschi suggests links to Germanic --but (as I remember) he sees Etruscan as an IE language He uses linguistic comparison in a way that the Bonfantes rail against BUT his idea that Etruscan /ts/ & correspond to IE /st/ is interesting I don't know how Zavaroni situates Etruscan in IE, though I'd like to hear more about your theory, though --although I'm sure IE-list is not the place, maybe on Nostratic list >There do seem to be some vocabulary coincidences: -aisar-, Etruscan for >"gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods." Both Etruscan and Germanic >had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az. Someone pointed out to me that ON aesir was from *ansar [or something similar] >When borrowing Greek mythological names and other words, the Etruscans >did phonetic violence to 'em that resembles the Germanic sound shift. >Specifically, Greek b, d, g > p, t, k in Etruscan. Kastor stayed Castur >in Etruscan, but Polydeukes became Pulutuk. (And Pulutuk became Pollux >in Latin.) or Pultuce Zavaroni's view is that the Etruscans essentially invented folk etymologies for figures in Greek mythology As much as anything else. Etruscan's lack of voiced stops reminds me of Minoan & Cypro-Minoan scripts, which also lack these. Etruscan, however, did have aspirated stops, which [I believe] were also lacking in Minoan & Cypro-Minoan Aegean scripts [unless kh, ph & th were really unvoiced fricatives]. From donncha at eskimo.com Tue Jun 15 18:11:01 1999 From: donncha at eskimo.com (Dennis King) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 11:11:01 -0700 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: <649135e8.24969a90@aol.com> Message-ID: Ar 1:49 PM -0400 6/14/99, scríobh JoatSimeon at aol.com: >>In other European languages, such as French, Russian, and German, there are >>definite social and cultural protocols about the circumstances in which one >>should use intimate or formal "you" forms. >-- there were in English in the 17th century as well. "Thee" corresponded >exactly with French "tu" or German "du" -- it was used to intimates, social >inferiors, and children. "You" was used to superiors; it was the >formal/deferential mode. Unlike the languages mentioned, Irish has always used "tu/" for the singular and "sibh" for the plural, and the latter has never been a formal/deferential singular. It's quite interesting, however, that Scottish Gaelic, as it emerged as a separate language, followed the more widespread European convention of using the plural pronoun "sibh" as a singular of respect. My pet theory is that the Scottish Gaelic innovation is somehow linked to the spread of Calvanism in those parts, but that's just a wild guess. Question: what was the convention among the Greeks and Romans in this regard at the height of their civilizations? Dennis King From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 15 18:06:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:06:02 +0100 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: >> Patrick has problems with the shape of a suggested root *Hyugom. I am not sure of the nature of these problems. There are several other roots with zero grade HRRC, for example Hludh (come), h2wlh2 (wool), h2mlg' (milk), h3migh (mist), h1rudh-ro (red), h1widh-eu (widow). What is your objection, Pat? Is it that you are convinced all PIE roots must originally have been diconsonantal? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 15 18:29:06 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:29:06 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative (I) Message-ID: > Pat said: > I have the feeling that ... there are virtually as many > "perfectives" as there are linguists. Even if we had a clear definition of "perfect" or "perfective", we would still be unsure if it applied to PIE. Only Greek shows a clear aorist-perfect distinction. Sanskrit, in as much as it shows it all, has the aorist playing the role of the Greek perfect. Where both formations survive in other IE languages, they are conflated in meaning (as in Celtic), or in meaning and form, as in Latin. The -o-grade + perfect endings can be reconstructed, but its precise distinction from other forms is not clear. There is a strong possibility of a link between the perfect endings, the Hittite -hi forms, and a possible stative meaning. Reduplication is strongly linked with these forms in Greek and Sanskrit, but not in other languages (never in Latin). At least 4 aorist formations can be reconstructed for PIE: athematic, thematic, reduplicating and sigmatic. If these differed in meaning, or how they differed in meaning from the perfect cannot be clearly determined, since the Greek and Sanskrit evidence is not in accord, and other languages have "merged" the two formations. It is clear proof - if it were needed - that we can reconstruct morphology much more easily than meaning. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 15 18:30:42 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:30:42 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative (II) Message-ID: > Nath commented: >> what >> kind of aorists did all the roots with root presents form, before there were >> thematic or s-aorists? It is probable that the root aorist formation (but not of course the meaning) existed before the tense system arose - and therefore before the present tenses. So your question is back to front. Secondly, we are talking of a system in the process of developing. So we may not expect that every present formation had an aorist, or even vice versa. Besides, most so-called "root" presents have an -e- vowel, which would distinguish them at least from thematic aorists, which have zero grade. Overall, I think your question is a non-question. Peter From alex at AN3039.spb.edu Tue Jun 15 21:44:10 1999 From: alex at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 00:44:10 +0300 Subject: Intensive Reduplication (Initial *y in Greek) Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > This brings us to the picture: > IE *y- > Gk. /h-/ > IE *H1y- > Gk. /h-/ > IE *H2y- > Gk. /h-/ (or /z-/?) > IE *H3y- > Gk. /z-/ I'm sorry for my intruding, too; i would like to suggest an alternative version: It can be considered proven, that intervocal and initial *y was still present in the phoneme system of Proto-Greek before the processes of palatalizations. The important fact is that palatalizations were also actual for clusters like Cy, when the two sounds were divided with a morphological boundary, and after the palatalization the boundary wasn't clear anymore, e.g. *sed-yo > hezomai And thus -z- <*dy was understood as a productive verbal suffix, (d-yo> dyo) and hence doublets arose like agapa(y)o: || agapazo: which are attested in Homer's language. And thus there was a position of morphological neutralization of y|z, which lead to their interpretation as phonetic allophones on the synchronic level. Then this variativity was transferred to the initial position (where, i remind, was no morphologically caused position of neutralization); and when *-y- was lost in intervocal position, the opposition of initial h<*y and z in some words was lexicalized. As far as i remember, words, for which the development *y->*z- could be assumed, are all somehow semantically close ----- may be this could be the case, i mean the theory of lexical diffusion. Regards, Alex From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 16 00:38:03 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:38:03 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 5:34 PM > On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> [...] I do continue to believe that any language which is >> presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage >> sometime prior to that in its development. Jens asked: > Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of > events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. Pat answers: The best researched language family is Indo-European. IEists cannot agree if IE went through an ergative stage preceding its accusative stage so how can any reasonable person expect that five examples can be found that display the same proposed sequence "with certainty". I think a key to these relationships is the understanding the causation of natural sequences like synthetic -> analytic along the lines of what Larry Tarsk proposed, and, IMHO, as opposed to Ralf-Stefan's denial of any mechanical inevitability of certain phenomena. Pat continued: >> [...] To try to understand ergative constructions from >> passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me >> to be potentially misleading. Jens answered: > "Potentially" perhaps, but in some cases certainly in accordance with the > truth of a documented development. Why it that so often disregarded in > typology-based solutions? Pat comments: Well, there are more passive constructions than those developed during accusative stages of languages; and any explanation of passives should include an analysis of the data from the many types of languages in which it appears. It is not that this data should be disregarded but rather that it should be weighted. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 16 01:09:28 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 20:09:28 -0500 Subject: Differentiation Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 5:56 PM Jens wrote: > In response to a thread woven by Patrick C. Ryan > Dear Pat, > In some recent postings you have suggested that some IE mrophological > forms, indeed categories, have arisen "by differentiation". I have spoken > out against it, and you have asked me why. > You wrote you would have to consider a form like 2pl *bhe'rete "quite a > bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms", i.e. younger than > *bhe'ret (which lives on as the 3sg). The point was that you wanted vowels > to be predictable from the consonant skeleton, so you set the basic ablaut > rule that deletes all unstressed short vowels in action. Actually, that > should not allow *bhe'ret either, but only *bhe'rt, but no matter, let's > take to have been the form, just for the sake of the argument. Pat comments: Well, I would be rather naif if I proposed a rule to explain *bhe{'}ret which did not explain *bhe{'}et. In other discussions on related subjects, I have indicated that I think it likely that a secondary stress-accent explains apparent anomalies like this (**"bhe-'re-te -> '*bheret). There may be other factors to be considered as well: what effect tone may have had in combination with stress or no stress. Jens continued: > My objection is that if in such a language vowels only exist accented, > there would be no variants containing unstressed vowels, and thus there > would be no material the language could differentiate. When languages make > arbitrary differentiations, they utilize existing patterns, but *bhe'rete > could simply not exist in a language on which the fundamental ablaut rule > had worked. Therefore either the rule or the idea of differentiation is > wrong. Pat responds: Well, I think there is another clearer example of "differentiation": present secondary 1st sing. -m as opposed to 1st pl. -me. Jens continued: > In fact, if grammatical number is something IE has in common with the > other members of the presumed Nostratic macrofamily, it does not seem very > likely that it would be an IE innovation, does it? To my eyes, it even > looks as if the 1st and 2nd plural forms of the IE verb have the same > conglomerate endings as in Uralic. I therefore do not believe they have > arisen by a preocess of secondary differentiation which looks illogical to > me in the first place. Pat responds: "Differentiation" is just one possible explanation since we do not really have a perfectly clear understanding of the circumstances under which zero-grades appear else we could agree on an explanation of *bhe{'}et. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Jun 16 02:32:56 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 22:32:56 EDT Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: In a message dated 6/15/99 8:31:53 PM Mountain Daylight Time, stevegus at aye.net writes: << Curious, how this got turned almost exactly on its head. To the extent that "thou" is still understood, it is a form of address restricted to Exalted Personages, like God, or Richard III, or the Mighty Thor. >> -- oddly enough, God was usually addressed in the familiar form as well. You certainly wouldn't call the King "thee", though. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 16 06:13:45 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 01:13:45 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 3:09 AM Pat wrote: >> G. A. Klimov, who has your credentials, and who is rather highly regarded >> in Russia, asserts an ergative stage for language, and I subscribe to his >> interpretation. R-S replied: > Appeal to authority. The least impressive way of reasoning of them all. By > far. Si tacuisses. Pat resonpds: How clever to respond in this way! As if I was asking you to subscribe to Klimov's ideas simply because he is an eminent linguist! I was simply pointing out, since you obviously missed my point, that highly qualified linguists do disagree; and so, your opinion (and even, occasionally, the consensus) may or may not be found ultimately correct even as the "consensus" once firmly rejected the laryngeal theory in any form. Pat asked: >> Would you mind detailing the non-ERG features you know in Sumerian? R-S answered: > Consistently ERG in terms of overt case marking in all TAM categories, > enough to impress a non-linguist observer. However, ACC in terms of verbal > cross-reference in the imperfective system, no doubt. > Furthermore, the personal pronouns operate on a fully ACC basis, even in > terms of case marking. Sumerian is, like all the other "ERG-lgs", really a > split-ergative language. QED. Pat responds: QED. Just what do you believe your proved? And, I would like to ask you a question in view of your snide aside about a "non-linguist observer". Is it your opinion that no one is entitled to be considered a linguist, even an amateur linguist, if he/she does not possess a PhD in Linguistics? As for your characterization of the Sumerian imperfective system, which is properly called the maru: inflection *not* imperfective, just what characteristics do you *believe* it has that qualify as ACC? I am also puzzled by your idea that Sumerian pronouns "operate on a fully ACC basis" since , e.g. the 1st and 2nd persons ergative g[~]a[2].e and za.e contrast with 1st and 2nd persons absolutive g[~]a[2] and za in the same way nouns show an ergative in -e and an absolutive in -0. Perhaps you could explain your ideas in greater detail. From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Jun 16 06:38:46 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 01:38:46 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: Dennis King wrote: > Question: what was the convention among the Greeks and Romans in this > regard at the height of their civilizations? The Romans at some point, I'm not sure when this happened, began to use _vos_ as a formal pronoun, possibly reflecting the use of _nos_ as a first person singular by high-up individuals like the Emperor. I think this may have been in post-classical times, tho. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 16 15:27:38 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 10:27:38 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: <003b01beb716$b3a74540$1804703e@edsel> Message-ID: [snip] >1. the expression 'estáte quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable >because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not >susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as >medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is >behind it? Reflexive pronouns are used for inchoate, intensive & emphatic actions as well as for reflexive, reciprocal and mediopassive. Mediopassive constructions [strictly speaking] only occur in 3rd person: Se vende pizza. Se venden pizzas. [literally: "Pizza sells itself." "Pizzas sell themselves." Se me perdieron las llaves. [literally: "My keys lost themselves on me." Mue/rate "drop dead" Due/rmete "go to sleep" Te comiste el sandwich "you scarfed down the sandwich" [comer = German essen, comerse = German fressen] Te bebiste toda la botella "you chugged the whole bottle" >2. the formally reflexive use of transitive verbs in Castilian that has exact >parallels in (modern) Greek medio-passive: 'se prohibe (in older Spanish: >prohibese) la entrada' (Greek: apagoréyetai he: éisodos (pron. >/apagorévete i ísodhos/) or >'vendese [sic] esta casa' or 'enjuáguese el envase'. This is non-standard usage [but it's also found in older Spanish texts up to the XX century] Standard Spanish uses the subjunctive for these, e.g. Que se venda la casa, que se enjuague el envase You can say "rinse out your mouth, gargle" in standard Spanish but you normally say enjuague el vaso "rinse the glass" From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 16 15:39:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 10:39:19 -0500 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 1:06 PM >>> Patrick has problems with the shape of a suggested root *Hyugom. > I am not sure of the nature of these problems. There are several other > roots with zero grade HRRC, for example Hludh (come), h2wlh2 (wool), h2mlg' > (milk), h3migh (mist), h1rudh-ro (red), h1widh-eu (widow). > What is your objection, Pat? Is it that you are convinced all PIE roots > must originally have been diconsonantal? In a general way, continuing the line of reasoning that seems not to sit well with some, I continue to assert that the less complex must proceed the complex --- even if the less complex forms are not recoverable. So, yes, not only formally but actually, I do believe that all IE roots should be analyzable around a skeleton of CVC(V). Whether we can plausibly perform the analysis in the case of some very old roots as above, is, of course, another question but I think we should regard them as potentially so analyzable. What do you think? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 16 15:40:42 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 10:40:42 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've read that the use of sibh as singular formal is based on French vous and became widespread during the Stuart dynasty. But I've also seen this phrased as an apocryphal sounding story something along the lines that Bonnie Prince Charlie & his French companions insisted on being addressed as "vous", so they accomodated them by using "sibh". So the whole French connection may be apocryphal [snip] >Unlike the languages mentioned, Irish has always used "tu/" for the >singular and "sibh" for the plural, and the latter has never been a >formal/deferential singular. It's quite interesting, however, that >Scottish Gaelic, as it emerged as a separate language, followed the >more widespread European convention of using the plural pronoun >"sibh" as a singular of respect. My pet theory is that the Scottish >Gaelic innovation is somehow linked to the spread of Calvanism in >those parts, but that's just a wild guess. [snip] From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Wed Jun 16 14:16:49 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 10:16:49 -0400 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >>> 1) Obviously, *Heyew is not a canonical IE root form. >>> 2) Would you consider the original root *Hey- and -w a root extension? >>> 3) Would you consider the possibility that the root is *yew- and that *He >>> is a preverb which may or may not have been present in the earliest IE? > Nath wrote: >> There seems to be little reason to assume the existence of preverbs that >> were fused with verbs in PIE. Within Benvensite's theory of root shapes, we >> have to consider Hyew a stage II extension from an Hey. But for late PIE, I >> think that extended roots need to be considered distinct lexical items >> anyway, so the point is moot. > Pat comments: > In order to regard *Hyew as a w-extended form of *Hey, it is necessary to > demonstrate that existence of the root *Hey in the *appropriate meaning*.--- > either alone or with other root extensions. > Can you do it? No. But this is a criticism of Benveniste's theory. After all not all roots we can reconstruct for the stage of PIE just before it started breaking up can be connected to CeC shape roots. Are you proposing prefixes to account for every one of them? Once we reject Benveniste's theory, we need to add a 4) to your list above, namely that Hyew was the original simple root. That is perfectly fine with me too. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Wed Jun 16 17:43:50 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 13:43:50 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I have the feeling that this is because there are virtually as many > "perfectives" as there are linguists. That makes all discussion intolerably complicated. > I am not going to re-define any of these terms but I will say that what I > think Lehmann meant : 'expresses an activity that continues/continued/etc. > to its logical conclusion'. > For example: "he is eating up the bread" (he intends to continue the > activity of eating until there is no more of that bread, and > that-bread-eating cannot be continued) ; The almost unanimous opinion of linguists is that true presents, and a priori, progressives, are by definition imperfective. This is supposed to be the reason why there is no present of the aorist. But this won't apply anymore with the above definition, as your example illustrates. So, why is there no present of aorist? petegray wrote: > It is probable that the root aorist formation (but not of course the > meaning) existed before the tense system arose - and therefore before the > present tenses. So your question is back to front. Does this mean present tense arose only after the aorist formations, including thematic and sigmatic, became established? If so, why is the latter formation, the present, use the bare root in even one case? > Secondly, we are talking of a system in the process of developing. So we > may not expect that every present formation had an aorist, or even vice > versa. The original context of my question was the usual equation present stem = imperfective, aorist stem = perfective. If not every present formation had an aorist, this equation becomes problematic. > Besides, most so-called "root" presents have an -e- vowel, which > would distinguish them at least from thematic aorists, which have zero > grade. Why the ``so-called'' and quotation marks around root? What is the history of the forms as you see it? Anyway, I don't get what this has to do with the aspectual meaning of present and aorist. > Sanskrit, in as much as it shows it all, has > the aorist playing the role of the Greek perfect. In what way? Regards -Nath From stevegus at aye.net Wed Jun 16 20:35:21 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 16:35:21 -0400 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Adolfo Zavaroni's version of Etruscan in I documenti etruschi > suggests links to Germanic --but (as I remember) he sees Etruscan as an IE > language > He uses linguistic comparison in a way that the Bonfantes rail > against BUT his idea that Etruscan /ts/ & correspond to IE /st/ is > interesting > I don't know how Zavaroni situates Etruscan in IE, though >From the vocabulary we know, there are a number of other coincidences. A Greek gloss mentioned in Bonfante, don't have the reference handy, gives -capys- as the Etruscan word for "falcon." This would be *capu or *capus in the standard alphabet of the inscriptions. This is a possible sister to -hafoc-, OE for "hawk," with cognates in most Germanic languages. My understanding is that this too is one of those odd words in Germanic that seems to be non-IE. >> -aisar-, Etruscan for >> "gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods." Both Etruscan and Germanic >> had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az. > Someone pointed out to me that ON aesir was from *ansar [or > something similar] This is true, but my question would be: does *ansar represent a widely attested word for a deity, or is it another of those strange Germanic ones? From mahoa at bu.edu Wed Jun 16 20:27:07 1999 From: mahoa at bu.edu (Anne Mahoney) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 16:27:07 -0400 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dennis King wrote: > Question: what was the convention among the Greeks and Romans in this > regard at the height of their civilizations? In Latin tu was only singular and vos was only plural, though it was fairly common to use nos ("we") for 1st-person singular. Emperors did this (see Trajan's letters in book 10 of Pliny the Younger) but so did regular people even in the republic (e.g. Cicero). Sometimes it's mock-formal (the letter to Atticus in which Cicero says effectively "we have been increased by a son"); sometimes it doesn't seem to have any particular special tone. I think su is only singular, hueis only plural in 5th-c. Attic -- one definition of the "height of [Greek] civilization" :-) At least I am unaware of cases where hueis is used "formally" to a single person. --Anne Mahoney Boston U. From adolfoz at tin.it Wed Jun 16 23:32:19 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 00:32:19 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote > Adolfo Zavaroni's version of Etruscan in I documenti etruschi > suggests links to Germanic --but (as I remember) he sees Etruscan as an IE > language > He uses linguistic comparison in a way that the Bonfantes rail > against BUT his idea that Etruscan /ts/ & correspond to IE /st/ is > interesting > I don't know how Zavaroni situates Etruscan in IE... Peter Gray sic ait: > I know no Etruscan. Can anyone confirm Paolo Agostini's statement that > Etruscan had a -v- perfective? I cannot say that Etruscan *is* an IE language; I think that most of the attested lexicon is IE, probably because of borrowings from IE (Italic, ProtoCeltic; ProtoGermanish especially through Raetia and Alpine zones; some Greek technical names) to Etruscan and from Etruscan to some IE languages (Latin, Osko-Umbrian). Etruscan had strong contacts with close peoples for 700-800 years at least. Some morphological aspects (declension, derivatives) seem to be IE. Certainly the verbal morphology, extremely semplified (no personal conjugation; only present and past tense: but we know only texts containing short sentences) is very different from Latin, Greek, Old Indian verbal systems. Like Paolo Agostini, I too think that Etruscan had perfective forms in -v- (cf. tenve = Lat. tenuit, zilakhnve = '(he) ruled', heramve 'profatus est', eisnev < eisneve '(he) was sacerdos' etc.). The oldest of these forms (heramve) goes back to the VI B.C., while the past tense (also used as past participle) in -ke, -khe is attested already in the first inscriptions of the VII-VIII century B.C. It could not be excluded that -ve- (later -v) is due to Italic contacts. Adolfo Zavaroni From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 16 23:28:49 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 01:28:49 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002601beb790$7f68c9a0$fb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> [Pat, 10 Jun 1999:] >>> [...] I do continue to believe that any language which is presently or has >>> been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage sometime prior to >>> that in its development. > Jens asked: >> Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of >> events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. > Pat answer[ed]: > The best researched language family is Indo-European. IEists cannot agree if > IE went through an ergative stage preceding its accusative stage so how can > any reasonable person expect that five examples can be found that display > the same proposed sequence "with certainty". [...] That's precisely what I feared: I don't mean to be hairsplitting or to pick on anybody (forgive me if I have), the fact just is that I have developed a highly sensitive suspicion to general guidelines being insufficiently founded in relation to the data sets they are supposed to guide us through. Anybody who has spent most of an active lifetime in a scholarly linguistic environment being told that IE Studies ought to learn from typology, or that we should consider general linguistic tendencies more than we do, is fed up with warnings that the facts we find are not credible because they are surprising. Hell, if nothing is ever allowed to be surprising there is no point in investigating it! Our methods must be good enough to allow us to discover more than the selfevident. And I had the suspicion that the widespread claim that the IE accusative structure MUST proceed from an earlier ergative structure, contrary as it is to the few cases I can control, just might be based on arguments and observations less safe than the ones they are supposed to improve upon. If you are right in your assessment that Indo-European is the best-investigated data field of them all, then perhaps typology and general linguistics should rather bow their heads to _our_ supremacy than vice versa. Not that I'd ever act so arrogantly, but it is a nice feeling to just imagine that for a change. Jens From fortytwo at ufl.edu Thu Jun 17 02:20:39 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 21:20:39 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > -- oddly enough, God was usually addressed in the familiar form as well. You > certainly wouldn't call the King "thee", though. True, but God is the Father, and it makes sense to address ones Father familiarly, Jesus himself referred to God by the familiar word "abba". -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 17 05:05:41 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 00:05:41 -0500 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 1999 9:16 AM [ moderator snip ] > Once we reject Benveniste's theory, we need to add a 4) to your list above, > namely that Hyew was the original simple root. That is perfectly fine with > me too. I will commit the ultimate heresy by admitting that I think Benveniste's theory has validity not only for IE but for many languages outside of this language family. The only exceptions I see are that in some early languages, very occasionally we run into a simple CV form, such as Sumerian ta, arm' but even IE has *se, *so, *to, and *me to name a few I do think it remarkable that many simple IE CCVC "roots" seem to have a variously specified laryngeal as an initial. Do you not think that somewhat odd if we do not analyze these initials as *H{?}e-, i.e. as pre-verbs or some otherwise defined element of a compound? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 17 05:16:47 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 00:16:47 -0500 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Steven A. Gustafson Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 1999 3:35 PM > This is true, but my question would be: does *ansar represent a widely > attested word for a deity, or is it another of those strange Germanic > ones? My opinion is that *ansu- is a derivative of *ans-, 'favorable'; if it is, I think it may be connected not only with other IE languages through *ans- but even with Egyptian gs-3, 'favorite'. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jun 18 05:35:18 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 01:35:18 -0400 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: > I've read that the use of sibh as singular formal is based on >French vous and became widespread during the Stuart dynasty. But I've also >seen this phrased as an apocryphal sounding story something along the lines >that Bonnie Prince Charlie & his French companions insisted on being >addressed as "vous", so they accomodated them by using "sibh". So the whole >French connection may be apocryphal Aprocryphal indeed. Bonnie Prince Charlie & his French companions knew no Gaelic. Everything had to be translated for them. Robert Orr From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jun 18 05:56:21 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 01:56:21 -0400 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator snip ] >> Jens asked: >>> Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of >>> events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. A bit of digging in South Asia could easily furnish five such examples. But does that tell us that ALL languages passed through a stage "ergative-accusative"? Robert From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Jun 17 10:52:59 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:52:59 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <003b01beb7bf$83af68a0$fb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: Again without stage-directions: >How clever to respond in this way! As if I was asking you to subscribe to >Klimov's ideas simply because he is an eminent linguist! Well, it *did* sound like that, or why pointing out Klimov's reputation so verbosely ? I mean, if I agree with someone on a particular point, it really doesn't matter whether that person is Roman Jakobson or my local fishmonger. I agree, because I do, and any consequences of this I will have to face myself. Sapere aude. So, it would be enlightening to learn *what* the *specific* lines of Klimov's argumentation are, you agree with. So far, we have only heard the bottomline and the fact that Klimov was a deservedly prominent linguist. Where's the beef ? >I was simply pointing out, since you obviously missed my point, that highly >qualified linguists do disagree; and so, your opinion (and even, >occasionally, the consensus) may or may not be found ultimately correct even >as the "consensus" once firmly rejected the laryngeal theory in any form. That's a truism. What is interesting, is which particular things about the synchrony and diachrony of ergative traits in observable languages allow/force/disallow/prevent us from daring a determinist statement as that which you brought forward. The analogy you mention is irrelevant. While it is true enough that today's communes opiniones once were universally rejected, the only thing which follows is that we should use the notion of "truth" sparingly. What does not follow is, that every communis opinio of today will of necessity be debunked one day. But you carefully evade the task to expose Klimov's (or your, where you differ) line of argumentation. >QED. Just what do you believe your proved? That Sumerian is just another split-ergative language, since you seem to doubt my (oh, not *my*, I could refer you to *eminent* linguists ;-) assertion that, while non-split ACC-languages do exist, non-split ERG-languages are not known. You asked for the split in Sumerian, I gave it. >And, I would like to ask you a question in view of your snide aside about a >"non-linguist observer". Is it your opinion that no one is entitled to be >considered a linguist, even an amateur linguist, if he/she does not possess >a PhD in Linguistics? No, this is patently not my opinion, especially since I was an excellent linguist even before I was handed over my PhD diploma, which rules out this possibility ;-) ;-) (< --- see these !). It is, however, true that not every scholar who took part in the advancement of our knowledge of Sumerian, could be classified as a linguist in the modern sense. This is perfectly OK with most of them, I'm pretty sure, no offense intended. Linguistics would not be without the great philologers. The same holds for other disciplines as well, where modern linguistics (especially typological linguistics) sometimes has the right and duty to "correct" (better: adjust) the findings of the great philologists/grammarians (or better: not what they *found*, rather how they interpreted it). And it is certainly true that notions of ergativity, not to speak of split-ergativity, did not play a major role in the earlier days of Sumerology, i.e. well into this century, let alone the cross-linguistic typology of these phenomena (yes, I am aware of truly linguistic treatments of Sumerian, which do exist). So, I would not be disparaging, say, A. von Gabain calling her Alttuerkische Grammatik the work of a non-linguist. It is, and she knew it, and nevertheless it is a gold-mine for any linguist working on Old Turkic, I know of no linguist who could say different things about it, but the linguist's task is different from that of the pioneer philologist and grammar-writer (and, of course, linguistics is a discipline which sometimes makes progresses). Hope this makes that clear. Anyway, I'm happy to accept the label of "Non-Sumerologist" for myself. Are you a Sumerologist ? (Gonzalo, are you still with us ?) >As for your characterization of the Sumerian imperfective system, which is >properly called the maru: inflection *not* imperfective, just what >characteristics do you *believe* it has that qualify as ACC? Some Japanologists of my acquaintance (and some text-book authors) promise to kill everyone who dares to speak of a "verb" in Japanese in their presence, since these things are, of course, "properly called" /dousi/. What is this about ? The idea of typological linguistics is to *compare* languages, resp. their structural makeup. In order to be able to do this, exotistic terminology is best avoided. True enough, perfect matches between verbal (or other) categories among languages in terms of their functions are rarely encountered. However, to ensure comparability (with the usual disclaimers) a modernization of terminology is always to be wished for. I can and will object to your objection if, and only if, you (or someone else) will point out why this "maru:"-inflection may, under no circumstances, be regarded as a verbal category encoding imperfective aspect, as opposed to perfective aspect encoded by the HamTu-inflection (you see, I am myself a great "terminology-dropper"). You highlighted *believe* in your above response. Well, just as a small philosophical aside, of course everything which we think to *know* is really something we *believe*, but we may *believe* some things with slightly greater confidence than others, iow., that's what science is about. If you want to discuss this further, let's transfer this to the radical-constructivism-list. What makes me *believe* this, is data like the following: while it seems to be clear that case-marking (and some people think that ergativity is only about case-marking; however, I think highly enough of you not to assume that you are of this lot; moreover, after Wolfgang's postings here, noone else should be) in Sumerian operates ergatively regardless of TAM category, verbal cross-referenceing doesn't, it is just this which makes up for an ACC residue in the language. To wit: lugal-le Hi-li ib2-dim2-me. "The king fashioned the wig" The king is case-marekd as ERG (-(l)e), and the wig is ABS, so, in terms of case-marking a perfect ERG construction. The verb form, here given in transliteration, is morphologically to be analyzed: i- (conjugation prefix for maru: or imperfective (horribile dictu), -b- "personal affix for third person *inanimate*", so patently cross-referencing the patient here (cross-referencing the king would require the animate PA -n-), -dim- "The Root", -e imperfective suffixe (or maru:-suffix, now you be quiet ;-). Now, let's look at an intransitive imperfective sentence: lugal i3-du. (case-marking is of course not ergative, i- the maru:-marker). In order to have an ergative organization of verbal cross-referencing of constituents, we should expect the *patient* in the transitive sentence above, being treated *the same way* as the intransitive agent (some prefer "subject") in the last example, i.e. by being cross-referenced as -b-. It isn't. Actually it isn't overtly cross-referenced at all, though some Sumerologists prefer to insert a zero-affix cross-referencing the agent here at the end of the suffix-chain. Bog s nimi. The bottomline, the imperfective/maru:-system shows ACC-verbal cross-referencing by virtue of treating transitive patient and intransitive agent/suffix *differently*, the very gist of the definition of ergativity, which, I hope, I won't have to rehash here. Note, for completeness' sake, that this state of affairs doesn't repeat itself in the perfective/HamTu-conjugation. And, being myself, a stubborn: QED. >I am also puzzled by your idea that Sumerian pronouns "operate on a fully >ACC basis" since , e.g. the 1st and 2nd persons ergative g[~]a[2].e and za.e >contrast with 1st and 2nd persons absolutive g[~]a[2] and za in the same way >nouns show an ergative in -e and an absolutive in -0. Perhaps you could >explain your ideas in greater detail. It is true that g[~]a[2].e and za.e are formally ergative cases, by virtue of -e. However, I'm unaware of a systematic contrast between ergative and absolutive forms (i.e. without -e) used in a clear-cut ergative way in the language. No doubt this reflects my superficial knowledge of it. Various sources assure me that what seem to be "absolutive" forms g[~]a[2] and za are late Sumerian, and explicable as phonetically expectable reflexes of the longer (and earlier) forms. Even then, they are used in ERG and ABS functions indiscriminately, like the longer ones before. It would help your case if you could demonstrate with text examples that g[~]a[2].e and za.e are confined to ERG function, or better, that g[~]a[2] and za are, in Classical Sumerian (2600-2300 BCE) used in ABS function, i.e. as intransitive subjects and patients of transitive verbs. I. for one, don't know whether this is the case, but you seem to know, so it should be legitimate to ask you for examples. Until they come forth (in which case I will give this up happily), I will take this phenomenon as the second instance of an ergativity split in Sumerian, though admittedly the first one mentioned is the stronger one. To conclude: I stand by my "belief" that there is no such thing as a fully ERG language, i.e. one without any splits, as opposed to fully ACC languages. Sumerian is no counter-example. Any takers ? St. G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From stevegus at aye.net Thu Jun 17 15:30:17 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 11:30:17 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: > Like Paolo Agostini, I too think that Etruscan > had perfective forms in -v- > (cf. tenve = Lat. tenuit, zilakhnve = '(he) ruled', > heramve 'profatus est', eisnev < eisneve '(he) was sacerdos' etc.). Without context we can also understand, it's hard to tell; but it would seem to me that this form in -ve, if it's really there (and I would not presume to even form a personal opinion on that), would seem to me to have a past progressive or "imperfect" meaning, rather than a past definite. All the verbs you mention seem more plausible as past progressives: "he held," "he ruled," "it is foretold," "he was priest." (Then why -svalce-, "he lived?" rather than *svalve?) The word -eisnev- looks to me like it is made on an adjective; the root eis- "god," which has already come up, plus the adjective suffix -(i)na, familiar from -s/uthina-, "belonging to a tomb/the dead;" plus your tense ending. This may be a clue to its distribution. Perhaps it's some kind of participle? (-S/uthina-. An American idiom whose origin I don't know makes 'go south' mean 'to die.' Of course, the handy Germanic terms for the four cardinal directions are also at least partly hard to explain [except for perhaps 'east'] in PIE terms, and may therefore come from the non-IE Germanic substrate. I realise that my fancy is veering into linguistic X-Files territory here, to suggest that an Etruscan idiom made its way into colloquial American. [And, of course, the conventional explanation of -south- is that it represents "sun" + -th, with the /n/ dropped and the /u/ predictably lengthened for English. But the /n/ isn't there in Swedish -soeder-, and NGmc usually keeps it in this position (cf. -sooth- with Sw. -sant-); nor was it there in the Frankish source of French -sud-.]) > It could not be excluded that -ve- (later -v) is due to Italic > contacts. Of course; but the Latin perfects in -vi &c. are themselves of somewhat obscure origin, and don't seem to match anything that has been preserved for us in other Italic languages; which is what got this discussion started in the first place. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Thu Jun 17 17:13:27 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:13:27 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: >[ moderator re-formatted ] >-----Original Message----- >From: Carol F. Justus >Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 3:47 AM >[snip] >>This stative was not productive in PIE (see the issue of 'have' in the >>Lehmann Fs.). The root 'sit' in fact is most interesting here. Hittite >>'sit' is derived as middle of 'be': eszi 'is', esa(ri) 'sits'. With -za >>(often called a reflexive particle) in New Hittite then the combination -za >>esari means 'take a seat, sit down' (with sakki 'knows', -za sakki means >>'acknowledges'). With the root *es- there was no need of a "stative" >>suffix, nor was there with middles, Greek he:stai, Sanskrit a:ste 'sits'. >>But the 'active' root *sed- 'sit' was another matter. In Latin the stative >>is very productive in its second conjugation -e:- verbs (habe:re 'have', >>sede:re 'sit' etc.). But its use there is part of a different verbal >>system, one in which there is a productive passive voice. These -e:- >>statives are often syntactically transitive but semantically stative, e.g. >>'have': librum habet (see Bauer in HS?). >[Ed Selleslagh] >It seems to me - a non-specialist - that two Castilian constructions might >be related to this. Dear Ed, I will intercalate some comments to interesting questions that you raise: >1. the expression 'estáte quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable >because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not >susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as >medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is >behind it? The meaning here is expressed in Hittite, and other older IE languages by uses of non-cognate verbs 'have' (Puhvel's Hittite Etym. Dict. gives examples under har(k)-, an active -mi conjugation verb with no medio-passive counterparts)! The question as to what the universal process or linguistic category is deserves careful consideration in the context of the larger system of Castilian and what sort of system it is replacing, among other things. For what it may be worth old middles, Ancient Greek kei‰tai and Sanskrit såete 'lies, is in a lying position', lack the apparent volitionality that seems to be added with the new Hittite medio-passive in -ri and the particle -za. Spanish estar, I believe, is etymologically related to PIE *staµ- (*steH-) 'stand' which, in an Ancient Greek active root aorist had an intransitive meaning (stand, take a standing position: eå-steµ), but a transitive meaning with sigmatic aorist forms (eå-steµ-sa). I have no solution to this nor to what PIE *es- was supplemented in Spanish. My present hypothesis would wonder if it didn't have something to do with a general drift in overall structure that was taking place. Your data makes me wonder is whether there is a category that is simply being renewed with a different form or whether the form differs because the category has taken on a unique nuance to fit its niche in Castilian. >2. the formally reflexive use of transitive verbs in Castilian that has exact >parallels in (modern) Greek medio-passive: 'se prohibe (in older Spanish: >prohibese) la entrada' (Greek: apagoréyetai he: éisodos (pron. >/apagorévete i ísodhos/) or 'vendese esta casa' or 'enjuáguese el >envase'. You also have the parallel 'encontrar / encontrarse' - 'brísko: >(/vrísko/) / brískomai (/vrískome/)' . >Any comments? >Ed. Yes there is a similarity in meaning here with the medio-passive. In fact one of the classic definitions of the old medio-passive is 'reflexive', probably to the extent that the action involves the subject. But the fact that the Romance language reflexives are formally separate from the passives of those languages makes me hesitant to identify them as one with the old category, which could also have a passivemeaning. In Modern Greek, is there also a new separate passive? Already in Ancient Greek with some verbs in some tenses there was a new strictly passive suffix (-the:-) that often had passive meaning (The problem with the old categories was that a form might vary in function depending on the verb in question or the form of the verb. Smyth's Greek Grammar catalogs this without really offering the kinds of principled generalizations that we would now like. These issues deserve more study language-specific study in the context of the attempt to do what you suggest, give some general defintion. And the studies that we have deserve to be applied to the kinds of comparative contexts that you bring up. Thanks for the data. Carol From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Thu Jun 17 17:16:58 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:16:58 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens, Thank you for your detailed comments. The issues are those on which there has traditionally been a lot of disagreement and probably will be, perhaps as much because of differing research goals as anything. For me crosslinguistic definitions of categories are important for the explicit criteria they offer for re-evaluating received wisdom. Obviously, every language system will have its own genius, and comparisons are at best hypotheses that need constant checking as new information becomes available. The Hittite -hi conjugation is, of course, intimately related to the issue of voice. Your statemtent: "The Anatolian -hi conjugation is the IE perfect, period", however, may overstate your case! I wonder if you meant to say this in the sense 'is identical to' rather than some sense of 'corresponds to' or 'reflects'? Hittite also has a periphrastic construction with hark- 'have' plus the participle that Benveniste compared to a Latin habeo plus its past passive participle. It has been said to have 'perfect' meaning, and in function the Hittite hark- construction often had the sense of the old IE perfect. Well, that is just a note. I think you meant something more to do with formal comparison. On the formal the origin of the Hittite -hi conjugation, I feel more comfortable with Erich Neu's view that it reflects a categorial prototype of the historical Greek and Sanskrit perfect, not that category itself, and that Hittite, like the other older languages, also underwent changes from a PIE system that did not have the categorial oppositions of any of the attested languages. Yes, Hittite does have distinct -hi and medio-passive sets of endings, both sharing a PIE *-H. The derivation of Hittite -hi from older *-hai goes back to the view that an old occasional Hittite spelling -he (not the usual -hi) would argue for an *-ai after the *-H. Maybe so, but Hittite productively differentiated between the active -hi forms and the medio-passive forms, as well as active -mi forms: -mi -hi -ha(hari) -si -ti -ta(ti) -zi -i -a(ri), -ta(ri) I don't think we disagree about that. The issue seems to be the implication of these forms for the reconstruction of PIE. Some people also identify the -hi forms with thematic actives. The mappings are not one-to-one between Hittite and Greek or Sanskrit like they mostly are between Greek and Sanskrit. Another major issue is whether the Hittite or Anatolian system was more like PIE or had undergone major category losses, i.e., did Hittite lose a PIE perfect and have only recollection of it in the Hittite -hi conjugation, or did Hittite never get so far as creating an inflectional perfect? Before the decipherment of Hittite, Meillet (1908: Dialects of IE) identified peculiarities of Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian that he thought were post-PIE. Now that we have Hittite and Tocharian, there are more reasons to believe him. On Hittite kuen-, I translate it 'strike', not 'kill'. In Hittite royal annals, a king often 'strikes' the enemy with the result that sometimes the enemy dies, sometimes he just runs away. The action type of kuen- is not clearly transitive in any telic sense. Hittite kuen- is also a -mi verb for which the passive is the suppletive -hi verb ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'die', which is attested with medio-passive endings. One might have expected kuen-, if it behaved like English 'kill' to have active -mi and medio-passive forms. I don't know what the system of Hittite is doing here, but I find it fascinating to try to find out. But if Hittite was at all like PIE in this respect, then the argument for a PIE passive of *ghwen- is hereby weakened. One would like to find medio-passive forms of this root in Hittite, and I haven't. Yes, Ilya Yakubovich thinks that there is a Sanskrit stative that argues for a PIE stative. In the same volume I gave reasons for a very different view. I stand by my reasons and would agree with Jamison's having given up the idea. There are many issues here, the last more interesting to me: Jens wrote: >It seems to me that there is a basic error inherent in the frequent >"explanation" of mysterious categories and forms as "late", "secondary" or >"einzelsprachlich". If a morphological type is too young to belong to the >protolanguage it must have been formed from material the protolanguage, >indeed the particular poststage of it had, and then it should be easier, >not harder, for us to discover its origins, for in that case the timespan >to be bridged is shorter than in the case of very old forms. This error is >very often committed when dealing with categories that have become >productive, such as the thematic verbs or the s-aorist. They became >productive, oh yes, and so all their examples cannot go back to the >protolanguage, but some MUST, otherwise there would have been no nucleus >for the expansion. CFJ's view: This is precisely the challenge that faces us, to distinguish the age of a morphological form and category. Now we have the work of earlier centuries behind us and their work on basic similarities which scholars in this century like Meillet, Porzig, and others since have begun to sort out in terms of dialect groupings. We know that not all constructions go back as many thousands of years as others, and we know that one thing that languages all do is change. In the process they innovate, lose, and rearrange. What is productive at any given stage may or may not be old. And some languages had a lot longer to change before they were first written down, so it's really important to evaluate the relative archaism of a form or construction. Certainly the -s plural on English nouns enjoys a distribution that it did not centuries and millennia ago. The real challenge is to try to arrive at criteria for identifying the 'nucleus for the expansion' as opposed to the layers that got added. Contributions to this issue, however, are more likely to come in articles than our current format. Best regards, Carol From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jun 17 17:57:22 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:57:22 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In many European languages [I don't know the details of all], the king was addressed in the familiar by commoners, supposedly because he was God's representative on Earth >In a message dated 6/15/99 8:31:53 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >stevegus at aye.net writes: ><< Curious, how this got turned almost exactly on its head. To the extent >that > "thou" is still understood, it is a form of address restricted to Exalted >Personages, like God, or Richard III, or the Mighty Thor. >> >-- oddly enough, God was usually addressed in the familiar form as well. You >certainly wouldn't call the King "thee", though. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jun 17 18:23:56 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 19:23:56 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: > Dennis King wrote: >> Question: what was the convention among the Greeks and Romans in this >> regard at the height of their civilizations? I didn't speak earlier, because I was expecting others to. In neither Greek nor Latin is there any sign - at least in the Classical Languages - of the use of plural "you" for polite singular. The sole deciding factor is the number. I cannot speak for later developments. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jun 17 19:06:06 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 20:06:06 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Nath said: > Does this mean present tense arose only after the aorist formations, > including thematic and sigmatic, became established? My reading of the literature is that there is a fairly wide general agreement, that at first a tenseless verb was used with endings -m, -s, -t and so on. The precise formation of it may be more argued, so thematic - or especially sigmatic - aorists may be later than athematic and asigmatic. Then the endings -mi, -si, -ti and so on develop, as part of the need to mark present action, as a tense-based system gets going. Various devices were also used to mark the stems with continuity or incohativity or various other things, all being non-completed. One of those devices was accent on the stem, which produce full grade. Hence the appearance in Sanksrit of root accented presents with full grade beside zero grade presents with accented thematic vowel. The appearance of the accented augment in Sanskrit and Greek allows zero grade aorist stems. > If so, why is the latter formation, the present, use the bare root in even > one case? I don't quite understand your question. Zero grade presents do occur, where the accent is not on the root. Sanskrit tud'ati, or Greek grapho < *grbh-. They are very rare. Also remember that the only distinction between an aorist and an imperfect in Sanskrit, and between a second aorist and an imperfect in Greek, is whether or not a present stem of that form exists! No present, and we call the past form an aorist. When there is a present, we call it an imperfect. Does this answer your question why there are no presents from aorists? If there is a present, in Sanskrit at least, the tense is not called aorist. >> Besides, most so-called "root" presents have an -e- vowel, which >> would distinguish them at least from thematic aorists, which have zero >> grade. > Why the ``so-called'' and quotation marks around root? The full grade is already a marker of something, even if it is conditioned by presence of the accent. I was wanting to distinguish the handful of presents which were simply the bare root, from those that carried this or any other marker of the present. >> Sanskrit, in as much as it shows it all, has >> the aorist playing the role of the Greek perfect. > In what way? Greek uses the perfect for the present state which results from a previous action. Tethne:ka ("I have died") actually means the present state, "I am dead". In some parts of Sanskrit literature, it is the aorist which carries this meaning, not the perfect. Elsewhere aorist and perfect are in practice indistinguishable, and the perfect drops out of use. Hope that answers your questions Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jun 17 18:26:38 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 19:26:38 +0100 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: Pat said: > ... I do believe that all IE roots > should be analyzable around a skeleton of CVC(V). We know that an initial s- is sometimes added to these CVC- roots, giving the structure sCVC- . What do you think about an initial H- added before R? I believe the idea is not new. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jun 17 20:09:37 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 15:09:37 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37683402.7BCF@tin.it> Message-ID: Adolfo: Thanx for explaining your position re Etruscan and IE. I was a bit mystified by your many comparisons to Germanic. Do you see Etruscan as from Rhaetia? Or do you suspect that Northern Italian IE was closer to [or had more traits in common with] Germanic? Or do you perceive a common substrate in N. Italy, the Alps and Germany? What are your opinions re: Etruscan and pre-Hellenic Aegean languages and Anatolian languages? [ moderator snip ] From edsel at glo.be Thu Jun 17 20:33:08 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 22:33:08 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: Thursday, June 17, 1999 3:53 AM >[snip] >>1. the expression 'estáte quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable >>because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not >>susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as >>medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is >>behind it? > Reflexive pronouns are used for inchoate, intensive & emphatic >actions as well as for reflexive, reciprocal and mediopassive. > Mediopassive constructions [strictly speaking] only occur in 3rd >person: > Se vende pizza. Se venden pizzas. > [literally: "Pizza sells itself." "Pizzas sell themselves." > Se me perdieron las llaves. > [literally: "My keys lost themselves on me." > Mue/rate "drop dead" > Due/rmete "go to sleep" > Te comiste el sandwich "you scarfed down the sandwich" > [comer = German essen, comerse = German fressen] > Te bebiste toda la botella "you chugged the whole bottle" [Ed Selleslagh] I know, but what about my question? >>2. the formally reflexive use of transitive verbs in Castilian that has exact >>parallels in (modern) Greek medio-passive: 'se prohibe (in older Spanish: >>prohibese) la entrada' (Greek: apagoréyetai he: éisodos (pron. >>/apagorévete i ísodhos/) or >>'vendese [sic] esta casa' or 'enjuáguese el envase'. > This is non-standard usage [but it's also found in older Spanish >texts up to the XX century] > Standard Spanish uses the subjunctive for these, e.g. > Que se venda la casa, que se enjuague el envase > You can say "rinse out your mouth, gargle" in >standard Spanish but you normally say enjuague el vaso "rinse the glass" [Ed] There is no need for 'sic': it is not intended as a subjunctive. In fact, it used to be, until a few decades ago, the normal 'house for sale' sign in Spain, but nowadays it is becoming rare (replaced by 'Se vende...'), but slightly less so when unspecified 'Véndese' = 'For sale'. But that wasn't the point: I mentioned it because it's an older, more idiomatic form that exactly parallels the Greek medio-passive. On the other hand, 'enjuáguese el envase' is still the standard text (in Spain, not in Latin America) on reusable glass bottles etc.('envase' is used as a general word for any packaging container, 'recipiente'). It is of course a subjunctive, as it expresses a request. It is not a reflexive use of 'se' like in 'enjuáguese la boca', but more like an 'impersonal pronoun' (English 'one': 'one should rinse the bottle'). Unfortunately, 'standard Spanish' is a fiction, just like 'standard English', even though M. Vargas-Llosa is doing a great job as a member of the (Spanish) Real Academia de la Lengua, to include more American vocabulary and idioms in its dictionary. Sorry for all this digression, but my question still stands. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 18 09:13:19 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 11:13:19 +0200 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Nik Taylor Date: Friday, June 18, 1999 3:55 AM >JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> -- oddly enough, God was usually addressed in the familiar form as well. >> You certainly wouldn't call the King "thee", though. >True, but God is the Father, and it makes sense to address ones Father >familiarly, Jesus himself referred to God by the familiar word "abba". [Ed Selleslagh] I really don't believe there is any familiarity involved here: it is simply and willfully archaic and refers to the time when 'thou' was simply the 2nd person sg., before nobility started using plurals as a way to give themselves a greater weight in communication with 'lesser beings'. Our perception is heavily influenced by centuries of the latter. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 18 10:41:37 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 12:41:37 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Carol F. Justus Date: Friday, June 18, 1999 6:49 AM >Spanish estar, I believe, is etymologically related to PIE >*staµ- (*steH-) 'stand' which, in an Ancient Greek active root aorist had >an intransitive meaning (stand, take a standing position: eå-steµ), but a >transitive meaning with sigmatic aorist forms (eå-steµ-sa). I have no >solution to this nor to what PIE *es- was supplemented in Spanish. [Ed Selleslagh] In short, 'estar' is from Lat. 'stare', 'to stand, remain,...'; it means to be somewhere or in a certain condition (temporarily). Lat. 'esse' led to 'ser' = to be something (more absolute). [snip] >But the fact that the Romance language reflexives are formally separate >from the passives of those languages makes me hesitant to identify them as >one with the old category, which could also have a passive meaning. In >Modern Greek, is there also a new separate passive? [Ed] No. >Already in Ancient >Greek with some verbs in some tenses there was a new strictly passive >suffix (-the:-) that often had passive meaning (The problem with the old >categories was that a form might vary in function depending on the verb in >question or the form of the verb. Smyth's Greek Grammar catalogs this >without really offering the kinds of principled generalizations that we >would now like. [Ed] The modern Greek medio-passive can be reflexive, medio-passive or passive in meaning. Its aorist contains the /-th(i)-/ infix, both in the indicative and the subjunctive. The medio-passive is called /pathitikí fóni/, meaning 'passive (actually: suffering) voice'! Carol, thank you for the enlightening comments. I agree with you that we should delve more into such phenomena, as they often represent, IMHO, modern manifestations of a long-standing undercurrent, deeply embedded in the underlying cognitive framework, expressed with the means available at any given time, or by innovations made 'necessary' because of the loss of older means, the awareness of them, or the feel for them. Ed. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Jun 18 14:30:53 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 14:30:53 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Stephane Goyette wrote (Re: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect?):- > ...its distribution matches that of Classical Latin --take Romanian AUR > "gold", LAUD "I praise" versus FOC "fire", DORM "I sleep", where the au/o > distribution corresponds perfectly to that found in AURUM, LAUDEO, FOCUM and > DORMIO. ... I have seen a suggestion that:- (1) The Romanians are not descended from the Dacians, but from Vlachs (scattered nomadic mountain shepherds who are found over much of the Balkans) who found what is now Romania largely empty after Central Asia finally exhausted its supply of fresh tribes of steppe horsemen (Huns, Avars, Magyars, Patzinaks, etc) to maraud westwards and devastate south-east Europe; (2) The Vlachs are descended from Latinized Illyrians who fled into the mountains when the Avars marauded in; in which case the ancestors of the Romanians started learning Latin when Rome invaded Illyria, not when Rome invaded Dacia, and that alters the linguistic timetable a bit. From thorinn at diku.dk Fri Jun 18 14:25:05 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 16:25:05 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37691489.765DE510@aye.net> (stevegus@aye.net) Message-ID: > Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 11:30:17 -0400 > From: "Steven A. Gustafson" > [And, of course, the conventional explanation of -south- is that it > represents "sun" + -th, with the /n/ dropped and the /u/ predictably > lengthened for English. But the /n/ isn't there in Swedish -soeder-, > and NGmc usually keeps it in this position (cf. -sooth- with Sw. > -sant-); nor was it there in the Frankish source of French -sud-.]) ON sunnr > suðr. Danish has a doublet: "sønder" and "syd." Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 18 16:07:13 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:07:13 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Carol F. Justus wrote: > Dear Jens, > Thank you for your detailed comments. The issues are those on which there > has traditionally been a lot of disagreement and probably will be, perhaps > as much because of differing research goals as anything. For me > crosslinguistic definitions of categories are important for the explicit > criteria they offer for re-evaluating received wisdom. Obviously, every > language system will have its own genius, and comparisons are at best > hypotheses that need constant checking as new information becomes > available. Sure, sounds pretty, and I'm all for it as formulated; in reality however old wisdom is often not checked, but simply rejected without valid reason, when a new potential facet of the picture becomes available. There is a widespread tendency among scholars to go easy on logic if there is an "exciting" point of subgrouping or, better still, a "Stammbaum paradox" to be gained. As if far-reaching conclusions needed _less_ argumentative basis than unimportant ones. > The Hittite -hi conjugation is, of course, intimately related to the issue > of voice. Your statemtent: "The Anatolian -hi conjugation is the IE > perfect, period", however, may overstate your case! I wonder if you meant > to say this in the sense 'is identical to' rather than some sense of > 'corresponds to' or 'reflects'? [...] I think you > meant something more to do with formal comparison. > On the formal the origin of the Hittite -hi conjugation, I feel more > comfortable with Erich Neu's view that it reflects a categorial prototype > of the historical Greek and Sanskrit perfect, not that category itself, and > that Hittite, like the other older languages, also underwent changes from a > PIE system that did not have the categorial oppositions of any of the > attested languages. I meant that the forms of the hi-conjugation continue those of the IE perfect. The alternative demands miracles - in the plural. It would mean that an IE undivided "inactive" (fair characteristic of the category with H2 in the 1st sg.?) split into a mediopassive and a reduplicated perfect independently in so many languages that it can later turn up in both guises - with a consistent difference in function too - in all corners of the IE linguistic area. If we derive the nucleus of the hi-conjugation from the perfect, we have the same picture all over the map. And then we have a unitary protolanguage, so that the IE language branches can really come from a common older stock just as archaeologists and other researchers of realia take for granted that they do. As a descendant of the perfect, the hi-conjugation poses no greater problems than Germanic or Latin, or even the equation of Greek and Sanskrit. The details are problems of standard size which are quite easily overcome if the will is there. [...] > -mi -hi -ha(hari) > -si -ti -ta(ti) > -zi -i -a(ri), -ta(ri) > [...] The issue seems to be the > implication of these forms for the reconstruction of PIE. Some people > also identify the -hi forms with thematic actives. The mappings are > not one-to-one between Hittite and Greek or Sanskrit like they mostly > are between Greek and Sanskrit. The mappings are fine to me: (1) *-mi, *-si, *-ti is no problem to anybody. (2) Perfect *-H2a, *-tH2a, *-e with added -i to create a present tense gives precisely Hitt. -hi, -ti, -i with no problems at all, the core elements matching the endings of Skt.-Greek etc. with great accuracy. (3) MP *-H2a (zero-grade *- at 2), *-tH2a, *-o/*-to give the endings af Skt. as'i:ya'/a'mam.s-i, -tha:s (with some extension yet to be identified, similarly OIr. -cuirther), s'a'ye/s'e'te with problems no geater than those posed by the difference between Vedic and Avestan. Are these sets presumed to be unrelated? > Another major issue is whether the Hittite or Anatolian system was > more like PIE or had undergone major category losses, i.e., did > Hittite lose a PIE perfect and have only recollection of it in the > Hittite -hi conjugation, or did Hittite never get so far as creating > an inflectional perfect? Before the decipherment of Hittite, Meillet > (1908: Dialects of IE) identified peculiarities of Greek, Armenian, > and Indo-Iranian that he thought were post-PIE. Now that we have > Hittite and Tocharian, there are more reasons to believe him. I'd say the opposite: Meillet never had a good case, many conclusions being based simply on absence of data; without old data he might as well have lumped English together with Persian. The advent of Hitt. and Toch. which fit the classical picture of IE quite well makes one believe Brugmann's IE all the more. The perfect is not a separate category in Tocharian, right; but it forms a participle with reduplication and a /-w-/, that's got to be the perfect; some of the endings match the class.IE perfect exactly; and the vocalism may be from *-o- of the perfect or the *-e:- of the s-aorist which have thus merged (much as pf. and aor. have in Latin). Tocharian has a funny imperfect type with long vocalism, 'carry' representing *bher-e- in the prs., but apparently *bhe:r-e- in the ipf. The obvious explanation is by analofy with 'was' as it used to be, i.e. prs. *H1es- : ipf. *e-H1es-, i.e. with the augment which gave a long /e:/ in the ipf. if 'be'. Hitt. arhi, erweni 'come' becomes regular if the reduplication of the perfect is remembered: *H1e-H1or-/*H1e-H1r- yields *o:r-/*e:r- and sets a perfect model for other verbs. > On Hittite kuen-, I translate it 'strike', not 'kill'. In Hittite royal > annals, a king often 'strikes' the enemy with the result that sometimes the > enemy dies, sometimes he just runs away. The action type of kuen- is not > clearly transitive in any telic sense. Hittite kuen- is also a -mi verb for > which the passive is the suppletive -hi verb ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'die', which is > attested with medio-passive endings. One might have expected kuen-, if it > behaved like English 'kill' to have active -mi and medio-passive forms. [...] Not if it was replaced by ak(k)- 'die' in that meaning (thus Puhvel in the introduction to the entry ak[k]-), which incidentally only makes sense it kuen- is 'kill', at least some of the time. > Yes, Ilya Yakubovich thinks that there is a Sanskrit stative that argues > for a PIE stative. In the same volume I gave reasons for a very different > view. I stand by my reasons and would agree with Jamison's having given up > the idea. For the record: I see on re-reading that Jamison had it from Insler who is then alone to be blamed or credited. I cannot accept that e:-statives are post-PIE. Their allomorphy obeys subtle rules of IE ablaut which a late creation would not. And, of course, they turn up all over the place, in fact I don't know of a branch that does not supply examples. Your "reasons" are a guess at a functional split of 'hold' to 'take' and 'have', leaving the detailed repetition of the alleged process in different branches to chance or areal influence - and apparently disregarding the colossal evidence for *-eH1- as a PIE derivative verbal type. Your siding with Jasanoff ("no") against Watkins ("yes") in the question of antiquity of *-eH1-verbs is vitiated by the illogical conclusion drawn by Jasanoff from his - in itself sound - dismissal of Cowgill's analysis of Goth. -ai-/-a- (habaith, haband) as from "*- at 1-ye-/*- at 1-yo-", the dismissal being based on the correct observation that IE appears not to have syllabic shwa before (or indeed after) /y/; the illogical conclusion is that this does not exhaust the possibilities, not even the obvious ones: a levelled *-eH1-ye/o- works just fine, and even makes the Gothic stem formation identical with that of Latin (which latter point however may be coincidental). - Yakubovich' reasons for accepting a stative behind some Skt. verbs in -a:-ya- (oddly segmented "-a:i-a-" in the title) are possible cognates, some looking quite good to me. But even without that, there certainly is a stative in Ved. sana:ya'nt- 'being old' which must be *sen-e/o- 'old' + (zero-grade of) *-(e)H1- 'be' + prs.-forming *-ye/o-, just as Lat. sene:sco: is *sen-e/o- + *-(e)H1- + inchoative ("s-aorist) *-s- + prs.-forming *-ye/o- (with the s-aorist morpheme replaced by, or developing into, *-sk^e/o-), which latter is the durative ("prs.-stem") variant of Hitt. -es- of ingressive verbs ('become -'). And that makes the stative, no matter what its ultimate origin, a PIE derivative type. > There are many issues here, the last more interesting to me: [snip of quote and part of answer, for it's summed up by:] > The real challenge is to try to arrive at criteria for identifying the > 'nucleus for the expansion' as opposed to the layers that got added. > Contributions to this issue, however, are more likely to come in articles > than our current format. [] That's your choice which I respect. However, the list could make progress in a matter of days, while articles take decades to work. Kind regards, Jens From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 18 16:11:41 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:11:41 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <00c001beb94f$4b262aa0$de2367d1@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Robert Orr wrote: >>> Jens asked: >>>> Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of >>>> events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. > A bit of digging in South Asia could easily furnish five such examples. [] Thanks. Could you give examples, or refer me to a place where I can find some with relative ease? Jens From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 18 16:26:54 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:26:54 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Steven A. Gustafson Date: Friday, June 18, 1999 6:30 AM [snip] >(-S/uthina-. An American idiom whose origin I don't know makes 'go >south' mean 'to die.' Of course, the handy Germanic terms for the four >cardinal directions are also at least partly hard to explain [except for >perhaps 'east'] in PIE terms, and may therefore come from the non-IE >Germanic substrate. I realise that my fancy is veering into linguistic >X-Files territory here, to suggest that an Etruscan idiom made its way >into colloquial American. [And, of course, the conventional explanation >of -south- is that it represents "sun" + -th, with the /n/ dropped and >the /u/ predictably lengthened for English. But the /n/ isn't there in >Swedish -soeder-, and NGmc usually keeps it in this position (cf. >-sooth- with Sw. -sant-); nor was it there in the Frankish source of >French -sud-.]) [Ed Selleslagh] Maybe it has something to do with left-handed people being called 'southpaws', as all Americans are supposed to be looking west ;-). Remember, left is 'sinister', so much that in Castilian they considered 'siniestro' a taboo word and replaced it by a Basque loan word (ezkerra > izquierda). Ed. From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 18 16:44:08 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:44:08 +0200 Subject: Differentiation In-Reply-To: <002d01beb795$01ca5540$fb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [In reply to my - Jens' - rebelling against "differentiation" as an > explanatory strategy,] > Pat responds: > Well, I think there is another clearer example of "differentiation": present > secondary 1st sing. -m as opposed to 1st pl. -me. [] I fail to see the reason for taking them to have been ever identical. Why can't the plural form have contained an additional morpheme (expressing the plural) to which the *-e could be credited? It would have to be something either developing into non-vanishing *-e or causing some other material to take this shape. It appears to me that "differentiation" just amounts to absence of an explanation. As for the main problem of 3sg *bhe'r-e-t, the facts that (1) the second *-e- is the "thematic vowel" which was a meaningful morpheme (marking i.a. the subjunctive), and (2) that the "thematic vowel" is never lost by the working of the accent, combine to make *bhe'r-e-t quite normal. Still, it may demand an explanation that the "thematic vowel" does not vanish when unaccented - what is so special about it? I can suggest two solutions, both ad hoc: Either the position where it stands was prosodically such that it was retained: the thematic vowel is the only kind of stem-final vowels the language has as far as we know. Or it consisted of some enigmatic element which immunized the vowel against the working of the ablaut. That the "thematic vowel" is not just any old /e/ is seen from the fact that it alternates in its own way: -e- before voiceless endings (including zero), -o- before voice (incl. vowels). Since the special rules applying to the "thematic vowel" make it impossible to ascribe its existence to simple "differentiation", we may also accept the endings *-me, *-te of the 1st and 2nd plural as problems for which the material and the rules have yet to be found. I would suspect that a comparison with Proto-Uralic *-k-me-k, *-k-te-k (or *-t-me-k, *-t-te-k ?) holds some of the answer. Jens From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 18 18:58:38 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 19:58:38 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Carol said: > On Hittite kuen-, ... for > which the passive is the suppletive -hi verb ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'die', which is > attested with medio-passive endings. .... I > don't know what the system of Hittite is doing here, but I find it > fascinating to try to find out. But if Hittite was at all like PIE in this > respect, then the argument for a PIE passive of *ghwen- is hereby weakened. A parallel exists in Greek, which has a perfectly productive medio-passive (and passive some forms). The (apo-)kteino "to kill" uses the suppletive (apo-)thne:sko "to die" as its passive. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jun 18 22:26:34 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 17:26:34 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: <003601beb913$56da0b00$e302703e@edsel> Message-ID: I wasn't sure at what you were getting at. Yes, I see as mediopassive in expressions that parallel the passive voice with the exception that the subject and direct object are the same. I thought that was generally accepted. My daughter says that she had no problem with the Greek mediopassive because, to her, it's just like Spanish Given that I don't know Greek, I can only take her word >>[snip] >>>1. the expression 'estáte quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable >>>because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not >>>susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as >>>medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is >>>behind it? "be still" is inchoate; it parallels , , , , etc. in that marks the beginning of a new action or state of being [snip] >'Véndese' = 'For sale' [is] an older, more idiomatic form that >exactly parallels the Greek medio-passive. >On the other hand, 'enjuáguese el envase' is still the standard text (in >Spain, not in Latin America) on reusable glass bottles etc.('envase' is used >as a general word for >any packaging container, 'recipiente'). Just like Latin America, although it's more often used for cans and food in jars -- is used for "packing company" and "envasar" for "to can"; often used in conjunction with bottle deposits "Hay que pagar el envase" [snip] From adolfoz at tin.it Sat Jun 19 00:13:12 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 01:13:12 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Steven A. Gustafson wrote: > but it would > seem to me that this form in -ve, if it's really there (and I would not > presume to even form a personal opinion on that), would seem to me to > have a past progressive or "imperfect" meaning, rather than a past > definite. All the verbs you mention seem more plausible as past > progressives: "he held," "he ruled," "it is foretold," "he was > priest." (Then why -svalce-, "he lived?" rather than *svalve?) Three different verbal forms are present in inscriptions having an analogous structure, pertaining to the same matter (cursus honorum) and all written on sarcophagi, sometimes of the same family: ZILAXN(U)CE "gubernavit" ("praetor fuit" according to other scholars), ZILAXNVE, ZILAXNU. I then deduce that these forms are semantically equivalent and, semplifying, I consider them as preterites, although only the forms in -KE are so called by many scholars. ZILAXNU is a preterit form in -U like LUPU ( = LUPUCE) "mortuus (est)" and TENU ( = TENVE) It is remarkable that TENU is followed by EPRTHNEV-C (where -C means Lat. -que), so that the verbal function of -V < -VE is demonstrated (nobody doubts that TENU is a verb like LUPU). I think that these 3 forms have also the function of past participles and that this fact is connected with the absence of a verb "to be" (copula). I am sure (but probably I am the only one!) that AME, AMCE are not forms of the verb "to be", but mean "cum, co-, united with", given that they are accompanied only by PUIA = "mulier" (puia ame = "coniunx") and ZILATH "rector, praetor" (*co-praetor, "co-director"). I have to rectify what I said about the attested forms in -VE: just in the museum of my town (REGGIO EMILIA, Gallia Cisalpina) two twinned inscriptions of the VI B.C. have the verbs IMITVE "memoravit" and (MI) IMA AME "(ego) com-memoro". Now I do not see how this archaic form in -VE, attested in this place, could derive from Latin. Furthermore I point out that Raetic too has not only the verbal morphemes -KE and -XE (interchangeable), but also -VE in KATIAVE, EPETAV(E), PITIAVE, ZEZEVE (in very short sentences where the verbal function  3d sing. pret.  is probable  certain to my mind). Now somebody might formulate a new hypothesis on Latin perfects in -vi &c. Good work! Adolfo Zavaroni From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jun 18 23:19:04 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:19:04 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 2:55 AM > On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: Pat wrote: >> I continue to assert that complexity arises out of simplicity; Larry commented: > You may continue to assert this all you like, but what does it have to > do with ergativity, or with linguistics at all? Pat answers: Sorry to take so long to respond to your comments. I am almost sure that you will want to refine my understanding of the word "simplicity" but for whatever it may be worth, I would characterize an isolating language as simpler than a flectional one. In keeping with the schema you presented recently, I think an isolating type language, which Klimov would connect with his neutral and active "types", must have preceded agglutinating, flectional, and analytic "types". That is, of course, not to say that an analytic language might not be able to revert (is that better than "regress" or "devolve"?) to an isolating type. I assert that I conider it impossible for an inflecting type language to have been what wer should expect to see at the very earliest stage. Pat continued: >> and since I have found that the relationship between the object and >> the verb is primary, which loosely conforms to an ergative model of >> development, Larry objected: > No, it doesn't. A division between objects and non-objects is > accusativity, not ergativity. Ergativity is a division between > transitive subjects and all else. Pat responds: First, let me say that I am well aware that, your being a specialist in Basque, gives you a deep perspective on ergativity that few members of the list will share through work in the own particular specialities but still I must tentatively disagree. And, of course, it seems to me that this is another case of differening definitions. I prefer a functional one, you, I believe, prefer a formal one. For me, a passive of the form "the man is being slandered", displays an underlying object of a transitive verbal action, whatever the formal marking of "the man" may be. I will speak only of Sumerian if you do not mind. In that language, so far as I know considered by most as an ergative language, a two-element sentence of the form Noun + Verb(transitive) will, in nearly all cases, have to be interpreted as a passive. And frankly, I am not sure that this analysis is not more appropriate even to Verbs which would normally be considered intransitive or stative --- but let us not get off onto a side-topic. I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner of an intransitive verb of motion. Pat continued: >> I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must >> precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. Larry objected: > Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert > that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it > is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. Pat responds: I find it no more unlikely than to assert that a synthetic language is not going to develop "directly" from an isolating one. An adverbial phrase specificying the agent seems to me to be an integral step that must be taken before a nominative is developed. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 19 05:40:47 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 00:40:47 -0500 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Thursday, June 17, 1999 1:26 PM First, please let me remark that I have been greatly enjoying your recent very informative and well-reasoned postings. > Pat said: >> ... I do believe that all IE roots >> should be analyzable around a skeleton of CVC(V). Peter commented: > We know that an initial s- is sometimes added to these CVC- roots, giving > the structure sCVC- . What do you think about an initial H- added before > R? I believe the idea is not new. Pat asks: Do you mean as an equivalent substitute for *s-? I would be inclined to question it strongly because I believe we have a few rare examples of *s- + *R: *syu:-, which may be *s- + *yeu- but personally, I favor here *sey- + *-u. I feel that the best explanation for *s- is that it was an energeticus. *H- is most economically explained as the ha- which Sturtevant briefly mentions in his grammar on page 117, equivalent to IE *o-. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 19 04:58:26 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 23:58:26 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Thursday, June 17, 1999 5:52 AM Thank you for your interesting (to me, at least, and I do not mean that sarcastically in the slightest) response/ R-S wrote: > Again without stage-directions: > So, it would be enlightening to learn *what* the *specific* lines of > Klimov's argumentation are, you agree with. So far, we have only heard the > bottomline and the fact that Klimov was a deservedly prominent linguist. > Where's the beef ? Pat responds: Ralf-Stefan, because of your background, you are obviously going to be able to leaf through _Tipologija Jazykov Aktivnogo Stroja_ or _Printsipy Kontensivnoi Tipologij_ much more felicitously than I. My Russian is rudimentary, and though I can struggle through a passage, you can much more easily pinpoint what you may disagree with specifically. If you feel Klimov has erred grievously, let me know where and I will try my best to defend him (if I agree with that particular point). As far what I agree with, my website makes very clear that I subscribe to Klimov's idea of a progression in development in language through neutral-active-class-ergative-nominative types. Klimov believes, and I agree, that this progression is *necessary* ab origine. Pat wrote: >> I was simply pointing out, since you obviously missed my point, that >> highly qualified linguists do disagree; and so, your opinion (and even, >> occasionally, the consensus) may or may not be found ultimately correct >> even as the "consensus" once firmly rejected the laryngeal theory in any >> form. R-S responded: > That's a truism. What is interesting, is which particular things about the > synchrony and diachrony of ergative traits in observable languages > allow/force/disallow/prevent us from daring a determinist statement as > that which you brought forward. Pat writes: I have written since this posting on the reasons I consider important in judging the probability of this process. We can pick this up on another posting if you like. R-S continued: > The analogy you mention is irrelevant. While it is true enough that today's > communes opiniones once were universally rejected, the only thing which > follows is that we should use the notion of "truth" sparingly. What does > not follow is, that every communis opinio of today will of necessity be > debunked one day. But you carefully evade the task to expose Klimov's (or > your, where you differ) line of argumentation. Pat responds: I evade nothing. And why I should feel it incumbent on me to defend every last jot and tittle of Klimov's views perfectly escapes me. I have told you above where I agree with him. And the point of agreeing with him (or mentioning him), is only that he is an eminent linguist who has come to conclusions on *some* subjects similar to my own independently reached conclusions. But you cannot have it both ways. You have consistently implied that some of my views are so far from the mainstream that, a priori, they must be wrong. This takes the insufferable form of "linguists agree that ..." as if my views may be equated with those of the fishmonger you mentioned above and no linguist would hold them. Klimov is one linguist who does hold views that I share, and this effectively debunks the notion (on this idea anyhow) that it is somehow intellectually disreputable to believe that certain laguage types grow naturally out of other language types. Pat wondered aloud? >> QED. Just what do you believe your proved? R-S answered: > That Sumerian is just another split-ergative language, since you seem to > doubt my (oh, not *my*, I could refer you to *eminent* linguists ;-) Pat, aside: And why do you not if such exist? R-S continued: > assertion that, while non-split ACC-languages do exist, non-split > ERG-languages are not known. You asked for the split in Sumerian, I gave it. Pat responds: Run it by me again; your split fell into a crack. Pat complained: >> And, I would like to ask you a question in view of your snide aside about a >> "non-linguist observer". Is it your opinion that no one is entitled to be >> considered a linguist, even an amateur linguist, if he/she does not possess >> a PhD in Linguistics? R-S answered: > No, this is patently not my opinion, especially since I was an excellent > linguist even before I was handed over my PhD diploma, which rules out > this possibility ;-) ;-) (< --- see these !). Nur ein Blinder koennte sie uebersehen! R-S continued: > It is, however, true that not every scholar who took part in the advancement > of our knowledge of Sumerian, could be classified as a linguist in the modern > sense. This is perfectly OK with most of them, I'm pretty sure, no offense > intended. Linguistics would not be without the great philologers. The same > holds for other disciplines as well, where modern linguistics (especially > typological linguistics) sometimes has the right and duty to "correct" > (better: adjust) the findings of the great philologists/grammarians (or > better: not what they *found*, rather how they interpreted it). And it is > certainly true that notions of ergativity, not to speak of split-ergativity, > did not play a major role in the earlier days of Sumerology, i.e. well into > this century, let alone the cross-linguistic typology of these phenomena > (yes, I am aware of truly linguistic treatments of Sumerian, which do exist). > So, I would not be disparaging, say, A. von Gabain calling her Alttuerkische > Grammatik the work of a non-linguist. It is, and she knew it, and > nevertheless it is a gold-mine for any linguist working on Old Turkic, I know > of no linguist who could say different things about it, but the linguist's > task is different from that of the pioneer philologist and grammar-writer > (and, of course, linguistics is a discipline which sometimes makes > progresses). Hope this makes that clear. Anyway, I'm happy to accept the > label of "Non-Sumerologist" for myself. Are you a Sumerologist ? (Gonzalo, > are you still with us ?) Pat comments: Thank you for the clarification. Philologists propose, linguists dispose. I understand you perfectly, I think. Pat asked: >> As for your characterization of the Sumerian imperfective system, which >> is properly called the maru: inflection *not* imperfective, just what >> characteristics do you *believe* it has that qualify as ACC? R-S responded: > Some Japanologists of my acquaintance (and some text-book authors) promise > to kill everyone who dares to speak of a "verb" in Japanese in their > presence, since these things are, of course, "properly called" /dousi/. > What is this about ? Pat answers: Since you are writing of what Sumerian is or is not, I would think you might have understood that the point of my remark was that, although th markings of the maru: may be fairly well established, there is absolutely no agreement on what grammatical role these endings signify. R-S continued: > The idea of typological linguistics is to *compare* languages, resp. their > structural makeup. In order to be able to do this, exotistic terminology is > best avoided. Pat quips: Exostistically speaking, I would have to agree. R-S continued: > True enough, perfect matches between verbal (or other) categories among > languages in terms of their functions are rarely encountered. However, to > ensure comparability (with the usual disclaimers) a modernization of > terminology is always to be wished for. I can and will object to your > objection if, and only if, you (or someone else) will point out why this > "maru:"-inflection may, under no circumstances, be regarded as a verbal > category encoding imperfective aspect, as opposed to perfective aspect > encoded by the HamTu-inflection (you see, I am myself a great > "terminology-dropper"). Pat responds: Yes, you may have dropped something here. To make this simple, why not give me your definition of "imperfective aspect", and I will attempt to find a maru: sentence that may be interpreted non-imperfectively. Personally, I believe *most* maru: indicate a progressive nuance rather than imperfective aspect. R-S wrote: > You highlighted *believe* in your above response. Well, just as a small > philosophical aside, of course everything which we think to *know* is > really something we *believe*, but we may *believe* some things with > slightly greater confidence than others, iow., that's what science is > about. If you want to discuss this further, let's transfer this to the > radical-constructivism-list. Pat responds: Let's not and say we did. R-S continued: > What makes me *believe* this, is data like the following: while it seems to > be clear that case-marking (and some people think that ergativity is only > about case-marking; however, I think highly enough of you not to assume that > you are of this lot; moreover, after Wolfgang's postings here, noone else > should be) in Sumerian operates ergatively regardless of TAM category, verbal > cross-referenceing doesn't, it is just this which makes up for an ACC residue > in the language. To wit: > lugal-le Hi-li ib2-dim2-me. "The king fashioned the wig" > The king is case-marekd as ERG (-(l)e), and the wig is ABS, so, in terms of > case-marking a perfect ERG construction. > The verb form, here given in transliteration, is morphologically to be > analyzed: i- (conjugation prefix for maru: or imperfective (horribile > dictu), Pat interrupts: This is certainly not the interpretation of *any* Sumerologist, linguist or philologist, of whose ideas I am aware. Where did you get it? No one says i- is a conjugation prefix for maru: (or imperfective!) unless you got this from Gonzalo (?). R-S continued his analysis: > -b- "personal affix for third person *inanimate*", so patently > cross-referencing the patient here (cross-referencing the king would > require the animate PA -n-), -dim- "The Root", -e imperfective suffixe (or > maru:-suffix, now you be quiet ;-). > Now, let's look at an intransitive imperfective sentence: > lugal i3-du. (case-marking is of course not ergative, i- the maru:-marker). > In order to have an ergative organization of verbal cross-referencing of > constituents, we should expect the *patient* in the transitive sentence > above, being treated *the same way* as the intransitive agent (some prefer > "subject") in the last example, i.e. by being cross-referenced as -b-. It > isn't. Actually it isn't overtly cross-referenced at all, though some > Sumerologists prefer to insert a zero-affix cross-referencing the agent > here at the end of the suffix-chain. Bog s nimi. Pat responds: The consensus view is, indeed, that -b- in this position is supposed to reference an inanimate patient. Why you might think that lugal, which means 'king', and is probably as agentive as any noun can be, should be referenced by -b- totally escapes me. If anything, it would be referenced by -n-, which is, in the consensus view, connected with animates. Then you write: "we should expect the *patient* ... ". What typlogist has enunciated this doctrine? Why should the animate subject of an intransitive (two-element) sentence be expected to be marked the same as the *inanimate* patient of a transitive (three-element) sentence??? Where did you get this? Or do you consider yourself a typologist? The key fact that you pass by unremarked is that the subject of the second construction is in the absolutive; its ending is -0. Therefore, your "case-marking is of course not ergative" is simply incorrect. The case marking is ergative, which calls for the agent of an intransitive verb and the patient of a transitive verb to be marked with -0. Additionally, the consensus view is that du is an irregular maru: of g[~]en so it needs no special maru: inflection. Another point is that one group of Sumerologists considers various vowel to represent oral as well as nasal articulations derived from -n. i{3}-du *could*, according to them, represent *i{3}(n)-du. R-S summarized: > The bottomline, the imperfective/maru:-system shows ACC-verbal > cross-referencing by virtue of treating transitive patient and intransitive > agent/suffix *differently*, the very gist of the definition of ergativity, > which, I hope, I won't have to rehash here. > Note, for completeness' sake, that this state of affairs doesn't repeat > itself in the perfective/HamTu-conjugation. > And, being myself, a stubborn: QED. Pat responds: As might be obvious by the corrections I have made above to your "analysis" of these Sumerian constructions, I continue to question what you have demonstrated. The very facts you have detailed above have led me (but not many Sumerologists) to question whether -n- and -b- are patient/agent cross-references. If there are not cross-references, then your argument has very flat feet. Pat questioned previously: >> I am also puzzled by your idea that Sumerian pronouns "operate on a fully >> ACC basis" since , e.g. the 1st and 2nd persons ergative g[~]a[2].e and za.e >> contrast with 1st and 2nd persons absolutive g[~]a[2] and za in the same way >> nouns show an ergative in -e and an absolutive in -0. Perhaps you could >> explain your ideas in greater detail. R-S responded: > It is true that g[~]a[2].e and za.e are formally ergative cases, by virtue > of -e. However, I'm unaware of a systematic contrast between ergative and > absolutive forms (i.e. without -e) used in a clear-cut ergative way in the > language. Pat responds: That can hardly be my fault. As a matter of fact, pronouns used as objects are rarely expressed as independent morphemes though a few examples are recorded in late (or mangled) Sumerian but they are, for better or worse, there. However, your argument still fails because the consenus view is that in a sentence like g[~]a-e i-ku{4}-re-en, 'I entered' (Yes, the -e here is another problem.) the -en cross-references the intransitive subject. In the transitive sentence, the -en is supposed to cross-reference the agent: g[~]a-e sag[~] ib-zi-zi-en, 'I am raising (my) head'. R-S continued: > No doubt this reflects my superficial knowledge of it. Various > sources assure me that what seem to be "absolutive" forms g[~]a[2] and za > are late Sumerian, and explicable as phonetically expectable reflexes of > the longer (and earlier) forms. Even then, they are used in ERG and ABS > functions indiscriminately, like the longer ones before. Pat asks: And what sources are those? And why would g[~]a.e develop into g[~]a when we see this no where else where -e is employed. Your sources have seriously misinformed you. R-S continued further: > It would help your case if you could demonstrate with text examples that > g[~]a[2].e and za.e are confined to ERG function, or better, that g[~]a[2] > and za are, in Classical Sumerian (2600-2300 BCE) used in ABS function, i.e. > as intransitive subjects and patients of transitive verbs. I. for one, don't > know whether this is the case, but you seem to know, so it should be > legitimate to ask you for examples. Until they come forth (in which case I > will give this up happily), I will take this phenomenon as the second > instance of an ergativity split in Sumerian, though admittedly the first one > mentioned is the stronger one. Pat answers: Your first problem is that you want to make a distinction (transitivity and intransitivity) for Sumerian verbs that is not really appropriate; these are not categories of the Sumerian verb in a real sense. R-S sums up: > To conclude: I stand by my "belief" that there is no such thing as a fully > ERG language, i.e. one without any splits, as opposed to fully ACC > languages. Sumerian is no counter-example. Any takers ? Pat responds: I have already expressed myself on "pure" anythings. In the case of Sumerian, however, you have not demonstrated any accusative features. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 19 06:41:38 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 01:41:38 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens and Carol and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Friday, June 18, 1999 11:07 AM >> On Hittite kuen-, I translate it 'strike', not 'kill'. In Hittite royal >> annals, a king often 'strikes' the enemy with the result that sometimes >> the enemy dies, sometimes he just runs away. The action type of kuen- is not >> clearly transitive in any telic sense. Hittite kuen- is also a -mi verb for >> which the passive is the suppletive -hi verb ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'die', which is >> attested with medio-passive endings. One might have expected kuen-, if it >> behaved like English 'kill' to have active -mi and medio-passive forms. > [...] > Not if it was replaced by ak(k)- 'die' in that meaning (thus Puhvel in the > introduction to the entry ak[k]-), which incidentally only makes sense it > kuen- is 'kill', at least some of the time. While some list-members may reject this proposal out of hand, a very few may be interested to know that Egyptian Xn (bar-h, n), which corresponds to IE *2. g{w}wen- by the tables of correspondence which I have developed, means (with -j), 'to row' (beat the water(?)); Xnn.w written with the same biliteral means 'brawlers'. Therefore, I believe there is some slight evidence to regard Hittite kuen- as primarily 'to strike', but with the nuance of 'create a bruise/swelling/ripple' in view of Egyptian Xnn, 'inflamed, irritated'; Xn, 'be blistered'; and IE *1. g{w}hen-, 'swell'. As far the stative in -*H, I have reconstructed a stative in *-?A for Nostratic. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jun 19 19:31:29 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 14:31:29 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance In-Reply-To: <3F4A4874144@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I've seen this as well Given that Rumanian dialects [or languages?] Daco-Rumanian, Istro-Rumanian, Macedo-Rumanian, Megleno-Rumanian and the extinct Dalmatian and any other extinct forms are [or were] spoken from Istria to the Black Sea and from the Carphathians almost to the Aegean proto-Rumanian speakers could have been from anywhere in that area Rumanian does share a common pre-Romance substrate with Albanian which presumibly should help pinpoint the origin of Rumanian There is an argument that Albanian speakers were driven south by Slavs BUT there is also an argument that Albanian is descended from Thracian speakers who fled to the west To compound the argument, there is an argument that Albanian consists of elements of both Thracian and Illyrian I seem to remember reading that while Albanian has a strong substrate, that it is significantly lacking in Ancient or Classical Greek substrate. If this is true, then it tells us where not to look [snip] >I have seen a suggestion that:- > (1) The Romanians are not descended from the Dacians, but from Vlachs >(scattered nomadic mountain shepherds who are found over much of the Balkans) >who found what is now Romania largely empty after Central Asia finally >exhausted its supply of fresh tribes of steppe horsemen (Huns, Avars, Magyars, >Patzinaks, etc) to maraud westwards and devastate south-east Europe; > (2) The Vlachs are descended from Latinized Illyrians who fled into the >mountains when the Avars marauded in; > in which case the ancestors of the Romanians started learning Latin when >Rome invaded Illyria, not when Rome invaded Dacia, and that alters the >linguistic timetable a bit. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jun 19 20:04:57 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 15:04:57 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <376AE05C.C3A@tin.it> Message-ID: Given that it's postulated by some that the Latin root am- of amore-, amare, amicus is from Etruscan I'm wondering if ame, amce might mean "to be with, accompany, join" hence also "was companion, beloved" OR if, on the other hand Latin amore- and amare might be backformations from amicus < *am-c "to be + and/with" in which case ame might mean "to be" in sense of "to serve as" In any case, my semi [or barely]-informed opinion is that there may less distance between Adolfo's perspective and that of Pallottino & the Bonfantes than appears [snip] >I am sure (but probably I am the only one!) that AME, AMCE are not forms >of the verb "to be", but mean "cum, co-, united with", >given that they are accompanied only by PUIA = "mulier" (puia ame = >"coniunx") >and ZILATH "rector, praetor" (*co-praetor, "co-director"). [snip] From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jun 19 19:41:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 20:41:02 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Ed said: > Maybe it has something to do with left-handed people being called > 'southpaws', as all Americans are supposed to be looking west ;-). Interestingly, in Sanskrit, people apparently looked east: "the right hand" means South. Peter From adolfoz at tin.it Sat Jun 19 21:38:48 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 22:38:48 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Thanx for explaining your position re Etruscan and IE. I was a bit > mystified by your many comparisons to Germanic. > Do you see Etruscan as from Rhaetia? > Or do you suspect that Northern Italian IE was closer to [or had > more traits in common with] Germanic? > Or do you perceive a common substrate in N. Italy, the Alps and > Germany? 1) According to some sources, Etruscan and Raeti were autochthonous (let's drop the legend that Etruscans came from Lydia and the Georgiev's unreliable attempts to demonstrate that Etruscan and Hittite are cognate; I wasted two years in trying to find an Anatolian origin: it was vain, also because of my scarce knowledges). 2) Livius (I do not remember exactly the passage) says that Raeti were Etruscan who took shelter on the Alpine valleys, but it is more probable that they were there from time immemorial. 3) My interpretations starting from the hypothesis "Let's suppose that the Etruscan words are borrowing from archaic (Indo)European languages and viceversa" match many Germanish lexemes, but also Celtic (certainly 3 years ago my knowledge of Gaulish and Celtic language was lower), while the comparison with Latin and Osco-Umbrian is vitiated by the fact that in general scholars are inclined to think that the direction of the borrowing is the direction from "already-known" (Latin, Umbrian) to "unknown that has to be explained". 4) Several Venetic words (and other inscriptions of the nearest areas) are explained by means of comparisons with Germanish roots and others with Celtic roots. Conclusion: the "easiest" explanation is that a wide area of Central Europe was occupied by peoples whose languages were similar (common substrate). Most of their lexemes passed to Proto-(Indo)-European languages, of course in different quantities. One could find the roots belonging only to the ancient Italic languages, to Germanish and possibly to Celtic and then to check if they are attested in Etruscan. In this period it is above my possibilities. Adolfo From jer at cphling.dk Sun Jun 20 00:04:16 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 02:04:16 +0200 Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <003f01beb8f4$8cec9b00$6ecbac3e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, petegray wrote [in discussion with Vidhyanath Rao]: [] > My reading of the literature is that there is a fairly wide general > agreement, that at first a tenseless verb was used with endings -m, -s, -t > and so on. Pardon the intrusion, but what does "at first" mean here? That at one time the verbal system was as small as that? You still have tenseless -m, -s, -t in Vedic and the Gathas, but embedded in a system where tense can be specified whenever needed. If the tense markers such as the primary *-i and the augment *e- were once independent words, how can we know they are younger than the person markers? > The precise formation of it may be more argued, so thematic - > or especially sigmatic - aorists may be later than athematic and asigmatic. Thematic apparently yes, for they are plainly secondary and presuppose the existence of an athematic type from which they can be reformations. But there is no indication that the sigmatic aorist is an innovation; it must once have had a special function, and I suppose it was inchoative (the aorist corresponding to the sk^-presents). It became immensely productive, sure, but that does not mean that _all_ of its examples are late. The s-aor./sk^-prs. complex is simply a derived verb on a par with the causative or the desiderative. > Then the endings -mi, -si, -ti and so on develop, as part of the need to > mark present action, as a tense-based system gets going. Why could that need not have been there from the start? > Various devices > were also used to mark the stems with continuity or incohativity or various > other things, all being non-completed. One of those devices was accent on > the stem, which produce full grade. The accent rather _saves_ full grade, but perhaps that is what you mean. > Hence the appearance in Sanksrit of > root accented presents with full grade beside zero grade presents with > accented thematic vowel. The first part is true, but zero-grade thematic verbs have the same history as the thematic aorists. They are based on weak forms of an athematic paradigm (root prs. or root aor.) that lent themselves to reanalysis. Thus, the 3sg middle *wid-e' "found for himself" looked just as little like a third person as the 3sg middle prs. in *-o-r (whence, by subtraction, non-prs. *-o) which took over the personal marker *-t- from the active, thus creating *-to-r (non-prs. *-to). In like fashion, *wid-e' took *-t- from the active, but put it at the end, because there already existed a type ending in *-e-t, namely thematic formations (e.g. subjunctives) in the active. This gave 3sg *wid-e'-t, on the basis of which the paradigm was filled by adding *wid-o'-m, *wid-e'-s etc. - If such an aorist form was re-intepreted as an imperfect, as e.g. Indo-Ir. *tud-a'-t, there arose a present tud-a'-ti to go with it. The re-interpretation presupposes that aorists and imperfects could be functionally confused which is no big problem, since they were both preterites and must have been equivalent whenever the aspect parameter of punctuality vs. durativity did not matter. [] Jens From colkitto at sprint.ca Mon Jun 21 01:55:26 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 21:55:26 -0400 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: >On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Robert Orr wrote: >>>> Jens asked: >>>>> Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of >>>>> events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. >> A bit of digging in South Asia could easily furnish five such examples. >[] >Thanks. Could you give examples, or refer me to a place where I can find >some with relative ease? I don't have in front of me, but there's an article by Payne J.R. (1980). The Decay of Ergativity in Pamir Languages Lingua 51, 147-186. (with copious citiations), which is fascinating in this regard. There's also the well-known (done-to-death?) example of the history of Persian. Robert From prida at artnet.com.br Sat Jun 19 22:35:58 1999 From: prida at artnet.com.br (Priscilla de Paula) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 19:35:58 -0300 Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: Dear Sir : I belong to the indoeuropean list and I am a begining student of this matter. I would like to know about the origin of the greek classic word : "cheir" , that means hand and that has done origin to the latin word "chyrurgia". There is a sanskrit radical for the word hand ? Thanks for your attention. Adelgicius paulae. e-mail : lagos at artnet.com.br From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jun 20 12:31:49 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 13:31:49 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002c01beb9e0$f66cf060$84d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I am almost sure that you will want to refine my understanding of > the word "simplicity" but for whatever it may be worth, I would > characterize an isolating language as simpler than a flectional one. If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. > In keeping with the schema you presented recently, I think an > isolating type language, which Klimov would connect with his neutral > and active "types", must have preceded agglutinating, flectional, > and analytic "types". Why? No evidence. And what distinction are you drawing between `isolating' and `analytic' languages? The terms commonly mean the same thing. > That is, of course, not to say that an analytic language might not > be able to revert (is that better than "regress" or "devolve"?) to > an isolating type. Why not just say `change'? Nobody will object to that verb, though I still don't understand how an analytic language is different from an isolating one. > I assert that I conider it impossible for an inflecting type > language to have been what wer should expect to see at the very > earliest stage. Why? We have no data on the earliest human language(s). But we do have data on languages which have come into existence very recently. Many creoles, such as Tok Pisin, have developed grammatical inflections within a generation or two of coming into existence. Apparently the same is true of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which has only existed as a mother tongue for about one generation -- though I don't have good information on NSL. [on my objection to Pat's claim that an object/non-object distinction is tantamount to ergativity] > First, let me say that I am well aware that, your being a specialist > in Basque, gives you a deep perspective on ergativity that few > members of the list will share through work in the own particular > specialities but still I must tentatively disagree. I can't claim any special expertise in ergativity just because I work on Basque. What is true of Basque is not necessarily true of any other language exhibiting ergativity. Basque, Georgian, Hindi, Dyirbal and Nass-Gitksan all exhibit ergativity, but they differ substantially in the circumstances in which ergativity appears and in the manner in which ergativity is expressed. Apart from the trivial observation that all exhibit some measure of ergativity, there is probably nothing which is true of all five beyond what is true of languages generally. > And, of course, it seems to me that this is another case of > differening definitions. I prefer a functional one, you, I believe, > prefer a formal one. I don't see that this matters. A binary division between objects and non-objects is accusativity by definition, regardless of how it is expressed. Ergativity is a binary division between transitive subjects and all else, also by definition. Anyway, as Ralf-Stefan Georg has already pointed out at length, there is probably no language which is 100% ergative. Ergativity may be present in a language in various circumstances and to varying degrees, ranging from none at all to quite a bit. English, for example, is marginally ergative in its word-formation: certain word-forming suffixes, such as the <-ee> of `standee' and `employee', work in an ergative manner. Basque, unusually, is totally ergative in its inflectional morphology (apart from two minor wrinkles), but totally accusative in its syntax and also in its word-formation. For example, transitive and intransitive subjects exhibit identical control properties, while direct objects do not, and the agent suffixes can be added indifferently to intransitive verbs like `go' and `sleep' and to transitive verbs like `make' and `watch', producing in every case a noun denoting the performer of the action. I don't think the concept of an `ergative language' has any real value in linguistic analysis. > For me, a passive of the form "the man is being slandered", displays > an underlying object of a transitive verbal action, whatever the > formal marking of "the man" may be. I don't suppose anyone would disagree with this. > I will speak only of Sumerian if you do not mind. In that language, > so far as I know considered by most as an ergative language, a > two-element sentence of the form Noun + Verb(transitive) will, in > nearly all cases, have to be interpreted as a passive. And frankly, > I am not sure that this analysis is not more appropriate even to > Verbs which would normally be considered intransitive or stative --- > but let us not get off onto a side-topic. I know no Sumerian. But, speaking generally, the `passive' interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years ago. In very many ergative languages, it is trivial to demonstrate that transitive sentences are active, not passive. I myself have done this for Basque. > I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and > transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship > (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, > IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the > verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance > to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner > of an intransitive verb of motion. This may or may not be so in some ergative languages, but it is certainly not true for ergative languages generally. > Pat continued: >>> I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must >>> precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. > Larry objected: >> Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert >> that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it >> is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. > Pat responds: > I find it no more unlikely than to assert that a synthetic language > is not going to develop "directly" from an isolating one. Surely you mean `fusional', not `synthetic': agglutinative languages are synthetic, but can readily arise directly from isolating ones. Fusional languages do not ordinarily arise directly from isolating ones because there appears to be no possible pathway other than one leading through agglutination. > An adverbial phrase specificying the agent seems to me to be an > integral step that must be taken before a nominative is developed. If that were true, then we might expect to see children acquiring English pass through an ergative stage before they grasp accusativity. But we don't. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Mon Jun 21 03:58:59 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 23:58:59 -0400 Subject: Hands across the sea (was: indoeuropean) Message-ID: Priscilla de Paula writes: > Dear Sir : I belong to the indoeuropean list and I am a begining student > of this matter. I would like to know about the origin of the greek > classic word : "cheir" , that means hand and that has done origin to the > latin word "chyrurgia". There is a sanskrit radical for the word hand ? > Thanks for your attention. Adelgicius paulae. Greek -cheir- resembles the usual Sanskrit and Indic word for "hand," which is -hastah.- -Cheir- ultimately traces back to *ghes-r-, (cf. Hitt. -kessar-) with s > 0 as usual in this situation in Greek; while -hastah.- represents *ghes-tos. It would seem to be the same root with different suffixes. Of course, "chyrurgia" is a slightly eccentric Late Latin spelling, and that 'y' doesn't belong. Someone must have realised it was Greek, and dropped it in there on a whim. The idea, of course, is that in the ancient world a clear distinction existed between those medical men who -worked- with their -hands-, knives, and appliances; as opposed to those who worked with potions and pills. -- L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Mon Jun 21 07:09:13 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 08:09:13 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean In-Reply-To: <376C1B4E.56CBCC7C@artnet.com.br> Message-ID: >Dear Sir : I belong to the indoeuropean list and I am a begining student >of this matter. I would like to know about the origin of the greek >classic word : "cheir" , that means hand and that has done origin to the >latin word "chyrurgia". There is a sanskrit radical for the word hand ? >Thanks for your attention. Adelgicius paulae. >e-mail : lagos at artnet.com.br Gk. cheir, commonly reconstructed as going back to *ghes-r has several Indo-European cognates. That in Sanskrit is /has-ta/ (the roots match, the suffixes don`t; an interesting derivative - and if only for mnemotechnic reasons - is /hastin-/ "elephant", the handed animal); other cognates include Hittite keSSar, Tokharian Sar/tsar, Armenian jeRn, and, believe it or not (I do) Albanian /dorE/. Other languages have replaced this apparently oldest word for "hand", to wit Latin manus, Gothic handus, Baltic and Slavic *renka/ronka (from a verb meaning "to grasp", cf. Lithuanian /rinkti/. The limited distribution of this core-vocabulary item in IE has once given rise to the bromide that the early Indo-Europeans did have feet but no hands (mocking at linguistic palaeontology, of course). St.G. From edsel at glo.be Mon Jun 21 09:44:48 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 11:44:48 +0200 Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Priscilla de Paula Date: Monday, June 21, 1999 2:51 AM >Dear Sir : I belong to the indoeuropean list and I am a begining student >of this matter. I would like to know about the origin of the greek >classic word : "cheir" , that means hand and that has done origin to the >latin word "chyrurgia". There is a sanskrit radical for the word hand ? >Thanks for your attention. Adelgicius paulae. >e-mail : lagos at artnet.com.br [Ed Selleslagh] I would like to add a related question that has been bugging me for a long time: Classic Greek 'cheir' and Neo-Greek '(to) cheri' have a cognate in Kartvelian (Georgian, S. Caucasus) 'cheli' (ch = khi, ach-laut). Does any of you have an explanation? Ed. [ Moderator's comment: If it is a cognate, that *is* the explanation. Or do you mean simply that there is an *apparent* cognate (which would more properly be discussed on the Nostratic list)? --rma ] From edsel at glo.be Mon Jun 21 08:56:20 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 10:56:20 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: Monday, June 21, 1999 1:17 AM >Given that it's postulated by some that the Latin root am- of amore-, amare, >amicus is from Etruscan >I'm wondering if ame, amce might mean "to be with, accompany, join" hence also >"was companion, beloved" >OR if, on the other hand Latin amore- and amare might be backformations from >amicus < *am-c "to be + and/with" in which case ame might mean "to be" in >sense of "to serve as" >In any case, my semi [or barely]-informed opinion is that there may less >distance between Adolfo's perspective and that of Pallottino & the Bonfantes >than appears >>I am sure (but probably I am the only one!) that AME, AMCE are not forms of >>the verb "to be", but mean "cum, co-, united with", given that they are >>accompanied only by PUIA = "mulier" (puia ame = "coniunx") and ZILATH >>"rector, praetor" (*co-praetor, "co-director"). [Ed Selleslagh] May I add the following element to the data: Lat. 'amb-' ('around'), a prepositional prefix (Greek 'amphí'), and Catalan 'amb' ('with'), probably derived from the former. I think the 'b' (Grk. 'ph') is hardly a phonetic problem. Ed. From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Mon Jun 21 13:21:00 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:21:00 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <00ff01beba1a$4033b880$84d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: (> = P.R.) >Thank you for your interesting (to me, at least, and I do not mean that >sarcastically in the slightest) response/ I may add that I myself enjoy this exchange with someone who doesn't take my occasional snide personally (nor do I : polemike: me:te:r panto:n). >Ralf-Stefan, because of your background, you are obviously going to be able >to leaf through _Tipologija Jazykov Aktivnogo Stroja_ or _Printsipy >Kontensivnoi Tipologij_ much more felicitously than I. My Russian is >rudimentary, and though I can struggle through a passage, you can much more >easily pinpoint what you may disagree with specifically. If you feel Klimov >has erred grievously, let me know where and I will try my best to defend him >(if I agree with that particular point). While it is true that I do read Russian with ease, (and I did read at least the first title years ago; and it is true that Klimov has interesting and well-informed things to say on the various alignment-phenomena in the languages of the world; add his Ocherk obshchej teorii ergativnosti) I could do this job for you, but I feel disinclined to do so here and now. Reason # 1: I don't see why I should look for arguments defending a position which I find unattractive for a host of reasons, most of them having to do with an empirical-based general rejection of the idea of stadialism. The second reason is that it seems to me that you hope that Klimov advances reasons and arguments unbeknownst to you, which Larry and I won't be able to deal with no matter how hard we tried, to win the day. No way. But you say that you came to Klimov's conclusions independently, so the one thing we should discuss here is your line of argumentation, for this is the only thing which matters. >As far what I agree with, my website makes very clear that I subscribe to >Klimov's idea of a progression in development in language through >neutral-active-class-ergative-nominative types. Klimov believes, and I >agree, that this progression is *necessary* ab origine. There's a lot to disagree with here. Whether there is really a "neutral" type of alignment, seems very doubtful to me (note that this would be a language where A, S, and O [I assume that you are familiar with this convention; if not, see Dixon's publications on ergativity] are treated *always* *alike* in every respect. Neutral case-marking is OK, neutral cross-referencing properties OK, but some subsystem of such a language, and be it word-order, will always give away a definite alignment, ERG, or ACT). A "class" type is equally dubious, noun classification being a morphological technique which can do a lot of things (inter alia, it can enshrine accusative or ergative alignment, to be sure), but as such, a morphological technique, it stands outside of the core issue. The general idea of stadiality is, as I said, doubtful in itself, to say the least, moreover, as I and now Larry have repeated several times, there is no sense in the overall label of "ergative language", this being only a (sometimes, if properly understood) useful impressionistic designations for languages which show ergative features somehow "salient" for the average European eye (e.g. ergativity by case-marking, where the whole thing was first detected and named). >Pat responds: >I evade nothing. And why I should feel it incumbent on me to defend every >last jot and tittle of Klimov's views perfectly escapes me. The major lines of argumentation would do ;-) >I have told you >above where I agree with him. Yes, you agree with the bottomline ("stadiality is a fact"). But why ? >But you cannot have it both ways. You have consistently implied that some of >my views are so far from the mainstream that, a priori, they must be wrong. >This takes the insufferable form of "linguists agree that ..." as if my >views may be equated with those of the fishmonger you mentioned above and no >linguist would hold them. Klimov is one linguist who does hold views that I >share, and this effectively debunks the notion (on this idea anyhow) that it >is somehow intellectually disreputable to believe that certain laguage types >grow naturally out of other language types. This passage is hard to understand. For the record: I don't say that any views, just by virtue of being far from the mainstream, must a priori be wrong. The mainstream can be wrong (and is so very often, e.g. on the illusion that there is something like the Altaic family of languages, just to place my favourite running gag). My fishmonger-example wants to express that it doesn't matter who utters a view, but only the arguments do. And, the other way round: a position is, imho, not automatically immune to criticism just because it is held by otherwise well-reputed figures. They can do wrong. The roster of eminent scholars, asserting that Turkic and Mongolian are genetically related languages, is impressive and deservedly so. Yet they are wrong. >> That Sumerian is just another split-ergative language, since you seem to >> doubt my (oh, not *my*, I could refer you to *eminent* linguists ;-) >Pat, aside: >And why do you not if such exist? Because I don't have to, being able to defend my points on my own. If you want a reading-list on ergativity, I could give you one, of course. >Pat answers: >Since you are writing of what Sumerian is or is not, I would think you might >have understood that the point of my remark was that, although th markings >of the maru: may be fairly well established, there is absolutely no >agreement on what grammatical role these endings signify. There is hardly any overall agreement about anything in linguistics, given that a lot of journals in the field still accept anything they are handed over. If there is disagreement on this particular point on your side, state it and give your reasons. >Pat responds: >Yes, you may have dropped something here. To make this simple, why not give >me your definition of "imperfective aspect", and I will attempt to find a >maru: sentence that may be interpreted non-imperfectively. Personally, I >believe *most* maru: indicate a progressive nuance rather than imperfective >aspect. No contradiction here. No, I'm not going to expose "my" definition of aspect here (but you may with profit read, e.g., Comrie's handy book on the issue). Only so much: if a language displays a contrast in aspect, *and* possesses a systematic means of coding progressivity, then the progressive forms will either coincide with those of the imperfective aspect, *or* build upon them (i.e. they will belong, morphologically speaking, to the "imperfective" system of that language, never to the perfective system). Progressivity is functionally incompatible with perfectivity. (OK, for clarity's sake: the gist of "my" definition of aspect is that, while perfective aspect describes an action as an unstructured whole, imperfective aspect draws attention to its internal structure, i.e. having or not having beginning and end, filling a certain stretch of time, being divisable into phases, being the pragmatic background of a narration aso. for a subset of the notions which are most often associated with imperfective aspect as against perfective aspect). Note that this is not germane to my argument on an ergativity split in Sumerian, whether or not the interpretation of maru:-HamTu as aspect-coding inflections will hold water is not my issue here, nor do I regard myself competent enough to decide this issue. There is a split, and is along the line of *some* TAM-category-distinction. That's enough. The aspect-show is in a different theatre. >> lugal-le Hi-li ib2-dim2-me. "The king fashioned the wig" >> The king is case-marekd as ERG (-(l)e), and the wig is ABS, so, in terms of >> case-marking a perfect ERG construction. >> The verb form, here given in transliteration, is morphologically to be >> analyzed: i- (conjugation prefix for maru: or imperfective (horribile >> dictu), >Pat interrupts: >This is certainly not the interpretation of *any* Sumerologist, linguist or >philologist, of whose ideas I am aware. Where did you get it? No one says >i- is a conjugation prefix for maru: (or imperfective!) unless you got this >from Gonzalo (?). I see no reason to expose the scattered sources I'm using at the moment, for this will inevitably lead to a rather tiring exchange of the type: "Oh, that shoddy book, no wonder you found that drivel there". What *would* be useful though, would be if you named the sources you trust, so that I can confine my search for instances proving my point - that Sumerian is a split-ergative language, like any other one, thus removing one cornerstone of stadialism - to these. No doubt I'll find them there as well. >The consensus view is, indeed, that -b- in this position is supposed to >reference an inanimate patient. Why you might think that lugal, which means >'king', and is probably as agentive as any noun can be, should be referenced >by -b- totally escapes me. If anything, it would be referenced by -n-, which >is, in the consensus view, connected with animates. This is correct. Actually I said so a few lines above (now deleted to easy our moderator's task), but failed to pay attention a few minutes later. The center holds, though, which is about things being treated alike and things being treated differently. >Then you write: "we should expect the *patient* ... ". What typlogist has >enunciated this doctrine? Why should the animate subject of an intransitive >(two-element) sentence be expected to be marked the same as the *inanimate* >patient of a transitive (three-element) sentence??? I have certainly overlooked the animacy-category here. So, I happily accept your correction that it should be cross-referenced by -n-. But it isn't (see below). >Or do you consider yourself a typologist? With your kind permission, I do consider myself a typologist. >The key fact that you pass by >unremarked is that the subject of the second construction is in the >absolutive; its ending is -0. Therefore, your "case-marking is of course not >ergative" is simply incorrect. The case marking is ergative, which calls for >the agent of an intransitive verb and the patient of a transitive verb to be >marked with -0. Only a slightly sloppy formulation on my part this time. I should have said "S is marked by the absolutive case here, not by the ergative, as we are entitled to expect". The overall case-marking structure of this intransitive sentence is, of course "ergative", which included the "ergative-case" being precluded here. In German, I would have used "Ergativ" for the case and "ergativisch" for the construction. > Additionally, the consensus view is that du is an irregular >maru: of g[~]en so it needs no special maru: inflection. Again, this is correct and a welcome correction, but not germane to the issue. >Another point is that one group of Sumerologists considers various vowel to >represent oral as well as nasal articulations derived from -n. i{3}-du >*could*, according to them, represent *i{3}(n)-du. If this is correct, this could eventually force me to admit (no, not that Sumerian is not a split-ergative language, it is) that my chosen example was not unambiguous enough to drive my point home (since the scribe *could* have intended his from to be read /indu/). Let's, then, look at further examples. I)f you don't mind, I'll help myself to the ones you supplied yourself a few lines down in connection with the pronouns: >g[~]a-e i-ku{4}-re-en, 'I entered' >(Yes, the -e here is another problem.) >the -en cross-references the intransitive subject. >In the transitive sentence, the -en is supposed to cross-reference the >agent: >g[~]a-e sag[~] ib-zi-zi-en, 'I am raising (my) head'. I coul d be arrogant and say: sapienti sat. Sumerian shows accusative features. But I think I'll explain ;-): - en in both cases, the intransitive and the transitive one, cross-references what we latinate accusative-minded Europeans usually call a "subject"; or, iow, it cross-references *both* the agent of the intransitive, as well as that of the transitive sentence above. That's pure-vanilla accusativity, and nothing else. For, under ergative conditions, both constituents are kept apart, by whatever means, yet here they aren't, they are treated alike in terms of verbal cross-referencing, and that is what accusativity is all about. Get the message ? What it exactly is, which conditions this split in Sumerian may be discussed elsewhere (for I think we have tried the patience of this IE list enough with Sumerian, especially since I am a tiro in this field, however, tiro or not, I usually can tell an instance of split-ergativity when I see one, and here I do see one), aspect or shmaspect, the point is only that *some* split exists, as, I repeat, in *every* other "ERG-Language", the reverse not being the case for ACC-Languages, now it's your turn. >As might be obvious by the corrections I have made above to your "analysis" >of these Sumerian constructions, I continue to question what you have >demonstrated. You have corrected mistakes which show my shallow standing in Sumerian, but which concentrated on marginal issues only. Finally you presented me with the one pair of examples which saved me from some hours of digging in Sumerian boobs (though this would have been educational for me). You have my thanks, and I have, of course, now your agreement. >The very facts you have detailed above have led me (but not many >Sumerologists) to question whether -n- and -b- are patient/agent >cross-references. If there are not cross-references, then your argument has >very flat feet. Sure, but this is a definition-trick. All birds can fly. Ostrichs and penguins can't, so let's rewrite our definition of birds as to exclude the latter species and be happy with it. >> It is true that g[~]a[2].e and za.e are formally ergative cases, by virtue >> of -e. However, I'm unaware of a systematic contrast between ergative and >> absolutive forms (i.e. without -e) used in a clear-cut ergative way in the >> language. >Pat responds: >That can hardly be my fault. No, it may be the fault of the extant data, but these are the thing we have to live and work with. The same examples cited above, by means of which you demonstrated the ergative-split in terms of cross-referencing on the verb do at the same time show that, this time in terms of overt case-marking, the personal pronouns do not discriminate between transitive and intransitive agents, both being expressed by the same form (which may or may not represet *originally and formally* an ergative form in -e). >And what sources are those? And why would g[~]a.e develop into g[~]a when we >see this no where else where -e is employed. Your sources have seriously >misinformed you. No, they haven't. Everything which you had to correct in my representation of what I found, can be learned from the grammars I consulted. I take full responsibility for everthing I misread or interpreted too rashly instead of reading a few lines/pages down, as I should have. My sources are, i.a., Hayes, Thomsen, Diakonoff, Poebel, Deimel, representing different generations of Sumerologists with different backgrounds and linguistic standing, certainly also with different standings as connoisseurs of the language. However, if you dislike one or more names on this list, feel free to say so, but if the only Sumerian grammar you trust is that which you have written yourself, please share it, instead of complaining on others. The best grammar is, here as elsewhere, the text corpus itself, and I think the examples discussed so far, as long as they don't turn out to be entirely cooked up, make it perfectly clear that Sumerian is no exception to our general knowledge of "ergative languages". You will have to come up with a different one, which should not be too difficult, since you are reconstructing the mother of all languages ;-) >Your first problem is that you want to make a distinction (transitivity and >intransitivity) for Sumerian verbs that is not really appropriate; these are >not categories of the Sumerian verb in a real sense. Again you caught me red-handed using sloppy and careless language. Of course, transitivity is first and foremost a feature applicable to *constructions* (clauses, sentences), and not of verbs. Mea culpa, but again nothing to do with the fact that Sumerian is a split-ergative language. >Pat responds: >I have already expressed myself on "pure" anythings. In the case of >Sumerian, however, you have not demonstrated any accusative features. That may be right, for, strictly speaking, you have. Chapeau. Stefan From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jun 21 13:08:34 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:08:34 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <007e01beb9a7$de46a000$6201703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > Maybe it has something to do with left-handed people being called > 'southpaws', as all Americans are supposed to be looking west ;-). As far as I know -- and the OED supports me here -- the word `southpaw' derives from the American game of baseball. A baseball diamond is traditionally laid out so that the afternoon sun shines into the eyes of the fielders, and not of the batter. This means that the fielders, including the pitcher, face west, and so the south is on their left. The word `southpaw' thus came to be applied to a left-handed pitcher, and was later extended to left-handers in general. The word `southpaw' is recorded only from the 19th century, while `paw' for `hand' is recorded as early as 1605. > Remember, left is 'sinister', so much that in Castilian they > considered 'siniestro' a taboo word and replaced it by a Basque loan > word (ezkerra > izquierda). Yes, though there is a phonological problem here, since Basque `left', definite form , should not have yielded Castilian (m.), (f.). Since there is evidence that Basque once had a word-forming suffix *<-do>, meaning something like `bad thing', it is possible that an unrecorded Basque derivative * was borrowed into Castilian before being lost from Basque itself. Nobody knows. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jun 21 13:16:59 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:16:59 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <006d01beba8e$e4fd9920$03cbac3e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, petegray wrote: > Interestingly, in Sanskrit, people apparently looked east: "the right hand" > means South. As also in Welsh. Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From stevegus at aye.net Mon Jun 21 16:00:02 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 12:00:02 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: > 3) My interpretations starting from the hypothesis > "Let's suppose that the Etruscan words are borrowing > from archaic (Indo)European languages and viceversa" > match many Germanish lexemes, but also Celtic > (certainly 3 years ago my knowledge of Gaulish > and Celtic language was lower), while the comparison > with Latin and Osco-Umbrian is vitiated by the fact that > in general scholars are inclined to think that the direction > of the borrowing is the direction from "already-known" > (Latin, Umbrian) to "unknown that has to be explained". There is one big target for hunters of Celtic-seeming roots in Etruscan, in the form of -clan-, -clenar-, and a number of other variant spellings, meaning "son." This seems easy to relate to *planta or *kwlanta, a widely attested Celtic word meaning "descendant," as attested in OIr. -cland- "descendants," and Welsh -plant-, "child." And it has arrived in English from Gaelic as well. I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly convincing for several reasons. Unless the Latin word is itself a Q-Celtic or Etruscan loaner, if this is apparently a case of the p/q variable distribution, my suspicion is you'd expect to se a q- or a c- form in Latin rather than a p-. It also strikes me as relatively unlikely that the Celts would have borrowed what was in CL a technical term of horticulture, (the original meaning was "slip for grafting") given it a broadened metaphorical sense, and then applied it to a fundamental aspect of their family life that carried a large weight of native cultural baggage. If -cland- isn't from -planta-, it may be unique to Celtic. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com From ERobert52 at aol.com Mon Jun 21 18:53:10 1999 From: ERobert52 at aol.com (ERobert52 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:53:10 EDT Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Adolfo Zavaroni writes: > 1) According to some sources, Etruscan and Raeti were > autochthonous (let's drop the legend that Etruscans came > from Lydia and the Georgiev's unreliable attempts to > demonstrate that Etruscan and Hittite are cognate; > I wasted two years in trying to find an Anatolian origin: > it was vain, also because of my scarce knowledges). > 2) Livius (I do not remember exactly the passage) says > that Raeti were Etruscan who took shelter on the Alpine > valleys, but it is more probable that they were there > from time immemorial. Of course, everybody came from somewhere else originally. The Kaminia stele from Lemnos shows beyond doubt that there were speakers of an Etruscoid language situated not far from Lydia. Lydian itself does not appear closely related to Etruscan and its relatives genetically, but there may be Etruscoid substrate influence on Lydian, for example: Lydian brafra <-? IE *bhrater + influence of Etruscan ruva (brother) ce~n- <-? Etruscan zin- (dedicate?/make?) plus the usual enclitic -k, genitives in -s and -l, similar looking demonstratives, etc. that other Anatolian languages share with Etruscan. You don't have to believe the Etruscans and Raeti came from Anatolia, but Etruscoid was spoken in that area. > 3) My interpretations starting from the hypothesis > "Let's suppose that the Etruscan words are borrowing > from archaic (Indo)European languages and viceversa" > match many Germanish lexemes, but also Celtic > (certainly 3 years ago my knowledge of Gaulish > and Celtic language was lower), while the comparison > with Latin and Osco-Umbrian is vitiated by the fact that > in general scholars are inclined to think that the direction > of the borrowing is the direction from "already-known" > (Latin, Umbrian) to "unknown that has to be explained". The trouble with the interpretation of Etruscan still being an ongoing process is that if one tends to detect or imagine cognates in IE roots as part of the interpretation process, one cannot then go and point to these 'cognates' and say that they prove a relationship. That would be a bit tautological, unless the volume of the evidence was overwhelming. > 4) Several Venetic words (and other inscriptions of the > nearest areas) are explained by means of comparisons > with Germanish roots and others with Celtic roots. According to Lejeune, there are 2 Venetic words that may be explained by comparison with Germanic alone, although in general Venetic appears to be very close to Latin: .an.s'ore.s <->? Gothic 'ansts' (grace/favour) , and SSELBOISSELBOI <->? Gothic 'silba' (self) Any others in mind? > Conclusion: the "easiest" explanation is that a wide area > of Central Europe was occupied by peoples whose > languages were similar (common substrate). Most of their > lexemes passed to Proto-(Indo)-European languages, > of course in different quantities. > One could find the roots belonging only to the ancient > Italic languages, to Germanish and possibly to Celtic > and then to check if they are attested in Etruscan. > In this period it is above my possibilities. I think that the circumstances and chronology of the split of Proto-Germanic from PIE (and the breakup of Western IE generally) have not yet been satisfactorily explained as far as I know, let alone the role of pre-IE substrates in the end result. I also wonder whether the traditional locations of the Proto-Germanic homeland in S. Sweden / N.Germany are correct. The traditional view says they hadn't extended very far south even by 100BC. Yet in 222BC when the Germans emerge into recorded history in military alliance with the Celts, they appear already to be under Celtic domination. How is it that the Germans could 'expand' into the Alps yet be under Celtic domination at the same time unless some of them were already there prior to that? Another question: Assuming Etruscan and Raetic are related, any guess at a time depth for their common ancestor? Ed. Robertson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jun 22 02:24:33 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 22:24:33 EDT Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: >georg at letmail.let.leidenuniv.nl writes: >Baltic and Slavic *renka/ronka (from a verb meaning "to grasp", cf. >Lithuanian /rinkti/. -- interesting case of slang replacement, I should think. Calling it the "grasper" instead of the "hand"; rather as if we should drop "hand" in favor of "flipper" or "paw" or "the fives", or something of that nature. From stevegus at aye.net Tue Jun 22 03:22:12 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:22:12 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Ed Selleslagh writes: <> This perhaps also has a sister in Germania: OE 'ymb(e)' and Norse 'um, om', both of which are prepositions that have the basic meaning of "around" or "by." That the Greek and Latin words have an a- and the Germanic ones a u- is something I can't think of an explanation for, though. -- L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame From oeden at juno.com Tue Jun 22 06:23:34 1999 From: oeden at juno.com (Esra Oden) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:23:34 -0700 Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Jun 1999 11:44:48 +0200 "Eduard Selleslagh" writes: >[Ed Selleslagh] >I would like to add a related question that has been bugging me for a long >time: Classic Greek 'cheir' and Neo-Greek '(to) cheri' have a cognate in >Kartvelian (Georgian, S. Caucasus) 'cheli' (ch = khi, ach-laut). Does any of >you have an explanation? >Ed. >[ Moderator's comment: > If it is a cognate, that *is* the explanation. Or do you mean simply that > there is an *apparent* cognate (which would more properly be discussed on > the Nostratic list)? > --rma ] Esra Oden writes: This Kartvelian cognate may be a borrowing from the Pontic Greek spoken in S. Caucasus along the Georgian border of Turkey. From pagos at bigfoot.com Tue Jun 22 08:32:39 1999 From: pagos at bigfoot.com (pagos at bigfoot.com) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 10:32:39 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Gentlemen, I beg the Moderator's forgiveness in advance :-) for posting a topic which is not related to Indo-European. Owing to the fact the thread is getting long enough, I'd dare write a few words about the _vexata quaestio_ of the origins of the Etruscans, in the hope they will be of help in clarifying the ideas of some of the readers of this thread. The origins of no other people of the antiquity were so debated by modern historiography as in the case of the Etruscans. The reason of this situation deserves some words of explanation. In the first place we have to mention the interest awaked in ancient Greek historiographers by this nation which, although hellenized, remained so "different". In the second place the undeniable ethnic, cultural and linguistic dissimilarity of the Etruscans from the other Indoeuropean peoples of Iron Age Italy attracted the attention of the historiographers in the early 19th century. Moreover, the problem of the origins of this people often mingled with the problems of classification and hermeneutics of their language. These are the reasons that gave birth to the myth of the "Etruscan mistery", a sort of devil's kitchen or magician's shop suited for testing all kinds of irrational theories and hypotheses concerning history and linguistics. We have therefore to clear the decks and go back to the real terms of the problem. Classical historiography is unable to offer any evidence but the mention -- made by Varro -- of a work named _Tuscae Historiae_, that could have offered a key for a better comprehension of the origins of this people. Unfortunately the Etruscan literature, however great might its value have been, went completely lost in the very moment when the Etruscan language dwindled away and people terminated to copy and to hand down to posterity the works written in a dead language. According to the mentality of ancient Greeks, the origins of a _polis_ were seen as the result of a _ktisis_ (= foundation) made by a mythic _ecizer_ (= colonizer) as in the case of Theseus for Athens or Cadmus for Thebes. Much in the same way, they imagined that the origins of the single peoples were due to the migration of an _archegétes_, i.e. a mythic chieftain. According to Herodotus (I,94), the Etruscans migrated from Lydia under the leadership of the eponymic king Thyrsenos or Thyrrenos: "The Lydians have very nearly the same customs as the Greeks, with the exception that these last do not bring up their girls in the same way. So far as we have any knowledge, they were the first nation to introduce the use of gold and silver coin, and the first who sold goods by retail. They claim also the invention of all the games which are common to them with the Greeks. These they declare that they invented about the time when they colonised Tyrrhenia, an event of which they give the following account. In the days of Atys, the son of Manes, there was great scarcity through the whole land of Lydia. For some time the Lydians bore the affliction patiently, but finding that it did not pass away, they set to work to devise remedies for the evil. Various expedients were discovered by various persons; dice, and huckle-bones, and ball, and all such games were invented, except tables, the invention of which they do not claim as theirs. The plan adopted against the famine was to engage in games one day so entirely as not to feel any craving for food, and the next day to eat and abstain from games. In this way they passed eighteen years. Still the affliction continued and even became more grievous. So the king determined to divide the nation in half, and to make the two portions draw lots, the one to stay, the other to leave the land. He would continue to reign over those whose lot it should be to remain behind; the emigrants should have his son Tyrrhenus for their leader. The lot was cast, and they who had to emigrate went down to Smyrna, and built themselves ships, in which, after they had put on board all needful stores, they sailed away in search of new homes and better sustenance. After sailing past many countries they came to Umbria, where they built cities for themselves, and fixed their residence. Their former name of Lydians they laid aside, and called themselves after the name of the king's son, who led the colony, Tyrrhenians." According to Hellanikos though (apud Dion. Hal. I,28) the Etrurian Thyrrenoí should be identified with the Pelasgians, the mysterious migrating people that, after wandering in the Aegean sea, settled in Etruria. In the view of Anticlides (apud Strab. V, 2, 4) the Etruscans who arrived in Italy under the leadership of Thyrrenos were Pelasgians and they belonged to the same strain that colonized the Aegean isles of Lemnos and Imbros as well as several sites on the Anatolic seaside. This thesis is reported also in some Rhodian documents going back to the third century BC, thus partially supporting the assumption that the Etruscans might have been one of the Peoples of the Sea (the TRSH) mentioned in the Egyptian sources. As a matter of fact, the Egyptian inscriptions of Ramses III (1197-1165 BC) relate of the so-called "Peoples of the Sea", i.e. a set of peoples who came from land and sea to invade Egypt. Some of these peoples were known under the same name a couple of centuries before, since they were mentioned among the peoples that supplied mercenary troops to the Pharaoh during the rule of Amenophis III and Merneptah (1413-1220 BC). Some of the "Peoples of the Sea" can be easily identified, as in the case of the Achaei -- called Jqjwsh.w in the inscriptions -- or the Philistines -- called Prst.w. The identification of other peoples is debated, as in the case of the Siculians (Shqrsh.w) and the Sardinians (Shrdn.w). Other peoples can be identified only in a highly hypothetical way. Among the latter ones we find the Trsh.w, to be possibly identified with the Thyrsenoi mentioned by later Greek sources. These hypothetical identifications are questionable, and the question is further complicated by the forms these names assumed in the Egyptian language, thus making the identification even more complex. For example, the Egyptian name of the Siculians, i.e. Shqrsh.w, was formerly related both to the Anatolian place-name of Sagalassos and to the name of a misterious Palestinian people named Sikalayu. Even in the case of the ethnonym Trsh.w, that is the would-be name of the Etruscans in the Egyptian sources, some researchers related it to the Anatolian place-names of Tarsus and Torrebos. As we see, in the Egyptian sources there is not much to go by. Common consensus of the ancient historiographers had it that the Etruscans migrated from the Orient, the only disagreement being in the connection with the Lydians or Pelasgians. Dionysius of Halicarnassus represented an exception. He came to Rome in 30 BC and remained there to study the ancient Roman history for twenty-two years. We learn from him that the self-denomination of the Etruscans was Rasenna (cfr. the cippus of Cortona, where this name appears as Rashna). This confirms that the denomination by which the Etruscans are known in the Greek sources, that is Thyrsenoí ~ Thyrsanoí or Thyrrhenoi ~ Thyrranoí, is either a translated ethnonym or a name invented by the Greeks. The suffix -eno- is a typical ethnic suffix of the Aegean-Anatolic area. Dionysius, after examining the opinions expressed by other writers (Dion. Hal. I, 25-30), concludes by stating that the Etruscans are an autochthonous people of Italy. According to Dionysius, this is what the Etruscans themselves told him. The opinions expresses by the ancient historiographers influenced modern commentators. The ones base their theories on alleged "migratory waves", the others on the "autochthony" of the Etruscans. The supporters of the eastern origins suppose that the Etruscans came from east in connection with the "oriental" phase of their culture (VII century BC). This hypothesis is untenable from an archaeological point of view, owing to the fact that the "oriental" cultural influx affected both Greece and Etruria in the seventh century. The transition was gradual and diversified from area to area, thus excluding the process of sudden change that would be expected in the case of a migration. Moreover, all the ancient sources univocally confirm that the Etruscans lived in Italy before the historical age. Another migrationist hypothesis assumes that the Etruscans arrived from the north; this is mainly based on the fact reported by Livius (V, 33, 11), according to whom the Rhaetic population in central and eastern Alps are the relict of an Etruscan people. Yet, Livius talks of a non-migratory relict and namely he mentions the fact that the Rhaetians were separated from the Etruscans as a consequence of the arrival of the Celts. The archaeological sources, although showing a strict connection between the Etrurian iron culture and Central Europe, do not legitimate the theory of a migration from the north from the very point of view that other Italic and Mediterranean cultures entertained a more or less strict cultural relationship with Central Europe during the Iron Age. The old autochthonous hypothesis of Dionysius finds an echo in the modern theories of those scholars who think that the Etruscans are a relict of a neolitic Mediterranean people that lived in peace up to the Bronze Age, while the Italic peoples --- who spoke an Indo-European language and used cremation --- should be identified with the proto-Villanova and Villanova culture. This cannot be true though, since the area where the Villanova culture developed overlaps almost perfectly the historical borders of Etruria. In contradiction with so many theories, there are very few facts. Archaeology shows that there was a cultural continuity from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The sudden and spectacular changes that could mark the arrival of a migrating people are lacking. On the other hand, the most ancient literary sources -- as in the case of Dionysius -- do stress the peculiar relationship tying the Etruscans together with Aegean peoples (= Pelasgians) or Anatolian peoples (= Lydians) and relate them to the prae-Greek inhabitants of Lemnos and Imbros. The inscriptions of Lemnos, going back to the period antecedent the Athenian conquest (510 BC) seem to confirm that Lemnian is very similar to Etruscan. The Lemnian inscriptions raised once again the entire problem of Etruscan origins. One of the best represented tendencies in Etruscan research is to adopt the most economical thesis: the Etruscans were a non-Indo-European people native to Italy who adopted many items and styles of east Mediterranean provenience by way of trade. Yet, the similarity between Etruscan and the Lemnian inscriptions must be acknowledged and is admittedly difficult to explain. As a consequence of this, another thesis sees both Etruscan and Lemnian as remnants of a continuum of non-Indo-European "Mediterranean" languages which spanned the eastern and central Mediterranean before the intrusion of Indo-European speakers. There is no easy solution since evidence is extremely self-contradictory. In my eyes, though, the similarity between Etruscan and Lemnian is too great to be explained by anything else but a more direct and immediate historical connection. It follows from this that Etruscan shouldn't be considered an "isolated" language in the Mediterranean. As concerning the basic vocabulary of Etruscan, IMHO many words are "understandable" only because they are the results of areal contacts/borrowings that took place in the Mediterranean (and beyond). The bulk of the Etruscan words -- the meaning of which is known -- can be found in Indo-European languages NOT because Etruscan is an Indo-European language BUT because it it much easier to identify those words existing in other languages spoken in the concerned area. Once again I make amends for this long, off-topic digression. Paolo Agostini From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jun 21 19:31:59 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 20:31:59 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: I (Peter) wrote > >> ... at first a tenseless verb was used with endings -m, -s, -t >> and so on. Jens said: > ... what does "at first" mean here? I meant only "prior to the time when tense was marked morphologically." If you wish to take issue with me, you must also take issue with Friedrich Mueller (1857), Thurneysen (1885), the detailed proof by Kiparsky in Watkins' *verb* 45; Bruggman, Kieckers, Burrow, Martinet, Kurylowicz, Erhart, Wright, Brandenstein, Szemerenyi, Beekes, Baldi, and others. (I hide behind their authority because I generally respect your contributions, Jens!). There are other voices, speaking against this view, but they are few: Herbig (1896), Hattori (1970), Manczak (1980). Your posting also recognised the existence of these tenseless forms in -m -s and so on. Jens said: > If the tense markers such as the primary *-i > and the augment *e- were once independent words, how can we know they are > younger than the person markers? The formation is younger, not necessarily the elements. (I said): >> thematic - >> or especially sigmatic - aorists may be later than athematic and asigmatic. Jens replied: > Thematic yes, ... But > there is no indication that the sigmatic aorist is an innovation; Perhaps I misunderstand you. It seems to me that a formation + + is necessarily derivative, and that the primary form is + < ending>. Jens went on: > It must > once have had a special function, and I suppose it was inchoative (the > aorist corresponding to the sk^-presents). The -sk^- presents are not normally incohative in IE, except in Latin. We should not read back into PIE the situation we find in the languages with which we are most familiar. Hittite uses -sk- for an iterative/durative; Tocharian for a causative. Possibly the iterative /durative is more original, as there are traces of it in Homer as well as Tocharian. Likewise your connection of -s- aorists with -sk^- presents is not regular anywhere. Many (if not most?) in Latin have -v- perfects, suggesting the root was a vowel or a laryngeal (e.g. creH-sco, gnoH-sco). Some have reduplicated forms (disco didici). LIkewise, aorists in other IE langs do not show the connection you suggest. Then I talked of: > a tense-based system gets going. Jens said > Why could that need not have been there from the start? It seems that it was not - as in many other languages where there was no tense system at the time of European contact - e.g. Maori. Your comments on Sanskrit tud'ati I will have to reply to later Best wishes Peter From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jun 22 11:19:17 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 12:19:17 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <009a01bebbd4$3b1d7640$8603703e@edsel> Message-ID: On am-: On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > May I add the following element to the data: Lat. 'amb-' ('around'), a > prepositional prefix (Greek 'amphí'), and Catalan 'amb' ('with'), probably > derived from the former. I think the 'b' (Grk. 'ph') is hardly a phonetic > problem. > Ed. Catalan ~ [am], and Occitan ~ ~ , however, are not the original forms of the preposition meaning 'with'. This was in both languages, from Latin 'at', 'chez'. It is likely that [am] was originally a conditioned variant before nasal consonants. Since `in' had a variant [em] before labial consonants, these prepositions mutually influenced each other in form, and in part in meaning. In Catalan and are both current for `travel by plane, fly'; in spoken Valencian has replaced ~ altogether. The influence spreads to the preposition < L. `to'. Colloquial Catalan has
  • ~
  • `I said to her'; standard
  • . However, the main problem with Ed's etymology (apart from the timing) is that Lat. is not a preposition. It is rare as a prefix, and dubiously productive. And Catalan is not a prefix. But in any case, hasn't *mbhi got a perfectly good IE pedigree, nothing to do with am- of Lat. amare? Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From jrader at m-w.com Tue Jun 22 09:48:27 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 09:48:27 +0000 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: The baseball diamond theory of the origin of is almost certainly folklore. Note that the OED's first citation for the word, in the sense "blow with the left hand," is from 1848. Organized baseball was in its infancy in the 1840's and conventions for laying out diamonds were very unlikely to have existed so early that a transferred sense of the word could have arisen by 1848. Also, the Survey of English Dialects recorded meaning "left-handed" in Cumberland--suggesting that the association of south with the left hand did not originate in the U.S. Jim Rader > As far as I know -- and the OED supports me here -- the word `southpaw' > derives from the American game of baseball. [ moderator snip ] > Larry Trask From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 22 19:53:16 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 14:53:16 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Are there any etymologies out there for & ? Also, any ideas why manus is feminine? [snip]> >Other languages have replaced [*ghes-r] >apparently oldest word for "hand", to wit Latin manus, Gothic handus, [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 22 19:07:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 20:07:35 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: [re: the link between Latin amicus and the ambi- root] Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the ambhi- root has wide attestation: Latin, Greek, Armenian, Albanian and with syllabic /m/ Old Indic, and Celtic. Pokorny relates it to the ambo root. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 22 19:25:52 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 20:25:52 +0100 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: I (Peter) commented: >> an initial H- added before R? > Pat asks: > Do you mean as an equivalent substitute for *s-? No, not at all. Merely that since PIE has one fricative prefix (albeit of uncertain meaning and status) we should not rule out on ideological grounds, the suggestion of another fricative prefix in situations appropriate for its particular phonology. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 22 19:18:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 20:18:14 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Jens said: > [In Sanskrit] zero-grade thematic verbs have the same > history as the thematic aorists ... [etc, deriving them from a long chain of reformulations: middle > middle +t > (reinterpreted as active) > (extension by analogy to all other persons) > (reinterpreted as imperfect) > (re-creation of a new present).] Apart from the superficial implausibility of all this, and the fact that other aorists were not reformulated as imperfects, and did not create new present tenses, where is your evidence? Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 22 20:06:11 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 15:06:11 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <376E6182.C8FF41C2@aye.net> Message-ID: [snip] >I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly >convincing for several reasons. Unless the Latin word is itself a >Q-Celtic or Etruscan loaner, if this is apparently a case of the p/q >variable distribution, my suspicion is you'd expect to se a q- or a c- >form in Latin rather than a p-. Or it conceivably Latin may have been a borrowing from Oscan or Gaulish, etc. used with a marked meaning, in which case any original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant (which used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work in a metaphorical sense. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 22 22:19:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 17:19:19 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Sunday, June 20, 1999 7:31 AM Thank you for your timely response to my tardy answer. > On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> I am almost sure that you will want to refine my understanding of >> the word "simplicity" but for whatever it may be worth, I would >> characterize an isolating language as simpler than a flectional one. > If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or > Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian > or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. Pat responds: Actually, I think it may well be the case for Chinese. I have a copy of Chao's _Mandarin Primer_ (336 pages), which has a Chapter III - Grammar, beginning on page 33, and *ending* on page 59. I can compare this to Forbes' _Russian Grammar_, which contains 436 pages of grammar and indices. >> In keeping with the schema you presented recently, I think an >> isolating type language, which Klimov would connect with his neutral >> and active "types", must have preceded agglutinating, flectional, >> and analytic "types". > Why? No evidence. And what distinction are you drawing between > `isolating' and `analytic' languages? The terms commonly mean the same > thing. Pat responds: Even if the earliest morphemes of language werenot recoverable as you would maintain, logic tells us that monosyllables would have, at least, predominated. The syntax of these monosyllables would have had to convey whatever grammar the language had at that point; and this would certainly resemble languages which are currently termed "isolating". I prefer (though, of course, you and many others may not) to distinguish the terms: "isolating", referring to a language for which we can reconstuct no flectional or aggltuinating stage; and "analytic", for a language we can. >> That is, of course, not to say that an analytic language might not >> be able to revert (is that better than "regress" or "devolve"?) to >> an isolating type. > Why not just say `change'? Nobody will object to that verb, though I > still don't understand how an analytic language is different from an > isolating one. Pat responds: Please see above. >> I assert that I consider it impossible for an inflecting type >> language to have been what we should expect to see at the very >> earliest stage. > Why? We have no data on the earliest human language(s). But we do have > data on languages which have come into existence very recently. Many > creoles, such as Tok Pisin, have developed grammatical inflections > within a generation or two of coming into existence. Apparently the > same is true of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which has only existed as a > mother tongue for about one generation -- though I don't have good > information on NSL. Pat responds: Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same way we have no data on IE but, by analysis, we can reasonably form an opinion as to what IE must have been like. In the same way, we can analyze current linguistic data, and form an opinion as to what earliest language must have been like though, I admit, the process is much more doubtful. > [on my objection to Pat's claim that an object/non-object distinction is > tantamount to ergativity] [ moderator snip ] > I don't think the concept of an `ergative language' has any real value > in linguistic analysis. Pat responds: I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to transitive constructions: Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. I would characterize Language A as (at least, essentially "ergative"). >> I will speak only of Sumerian if you do not mind. In that language, >> so far as I know considered by most as an ergative language, a >> two-element sentence of the form Noun + Verb(transitive) will, in >> nearly all cases, have to be interpreted as a passive. And frankly, >> I am not sure that this analysis is not more appropriate even to >> Verbs which would normally be considered intransitive or stative --- >> but let us not get off onto a side-topic. > I know no Sumerian. But, speaking generally, the `passive' > interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years > ago. Pat responds: Perhaps to your satisfaction but not to mine. > In very many ergative languages, it is trivial to demonstrate that > transitive sentences are active, not passive. I myself have done this > for Basque. Pat responds: Perhaps you have done this for Basque but it is certainly not trivial to demonstrate this for Sumerian, where Thomsen characterizes: "The Sumerian verbal root is in principle neither transitive nor intransitive, but neutral in this respect". And a sentence like: . . . eg{~}er-a-ni u{3} dam dumu-ni dumu Ba.Ba.g{~]u{10}-ke{4}-ne ba-ne-sum-ma must be rendered in English by the passive: . . . that his estate and his wife and children were given to the sons of Babag{u}. >> I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and >> transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship >> (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, >> IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the >> verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance >> to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner >> of an intransitive verb of motion. > This may or may not be so in some ergative languages, but it is > certainly not true for ergative languages generally. Pat asks: Is there an 'ergative language', presuming by your definition some such exists, where this is not true? >> Pat continued: >>>> I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must >>>> precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. >> Larry objected: >>> Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert >>> that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it >>> is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. Pat asks: What evidence might that be? >> Pat responds: >> I find it no more unlikely than to assert that a synthetic language >> is not going to develop "directly" from an isolating one. > Surely you mean `fusional', not `synthetic': agglutinative languages are > synthetic, but can readily arise directly from isolating ones. Pat admits: Yes, you are absolutely correct. My error. > Fusional languages do not ordinarily arise directly from isolating ones > because there appears to be no possible pathway other than one leading > through agglutination. >> An adverbial phrase specificying the agent seems to me to be an >> integral step that must be taken before a nominative is developed. > If that were true, then we might expect to see children acquiring > English pass through an ergative stage before they grasp accusativity. > But we don't. Pat responds: I am sure you are better read on child language acquisition patterns than I. Based on what I have observed personally, I doubt your assertion but if studies have shown this (could you name one?), how can I dispute it. A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so far as I would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 22 23:20:06 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 18:20:06 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Stefan Georg Sent: Monday, June 21, 1999 8:21 AM R-S wrote: > While it is true that I do read Russian with ease, (and I did read at least > the first title years ago; and it is true that Klimov has interesting and > well-informed things to say on the various alignment-phenomena in the > languages of the world; add his Ocherk obshchej teorii ergativnosti) I > could do this job for you, but I feel disinclined to do so here and now. > Reason # 1: I don't see why I should look for arguments defending a > position which I find unattractive for a host of reasons, most of them > having to do with an empirical-based general rejection of the idea of > stadialism. > The second reason is that it seems to me that you hope that Klimov advances > reasons and arguments unbeknownst to you, which Larry and I won't be able > to deal with no matter how hard we tried, to win the day. No way. > But you say that you came to Klimov's conclusions independently, so the one > thing we should discuss here is your line of argumentation, for this is the > only thing which matters. Pat responds: You are very kind to say that my "line of argumentation . . . matters" but, in practice, most ideas which I have advanced as a result of my own attempts at applying logical analysis to the questions have been summarily dismissed --- I believe, primarily on the basis of my lack of documentable qualifications. Now, we are already straining the patience of the IEists to pursue these general matters so I propose that you read my Proto-Language essays, in which I do attempt to provide "arguments", and let us take these matters to the Nostratic list which may be glad for a little activity. Pat continued previously: >> As far what I agree with, my website makes very clear that I subscribe to >> Klimov's idea of a progression in development in language through >> neutral-active-class-ergative-nominative types. Klimov believes, and I >> agree, that this progression is *necessary* ab origine. R-S responded: > There's a lot to disagree with here. Whether there is really a "neutral" > type of alignment, seems very doubtful to me (note that this would be a > language where A, S, and O [I assume that you are familiar with this > convention; if not, see Dixon's publications on ergativity] are treated > *always* *alike* in every respect. Pat, aside: I have questioned this as well, and prefer to group the neutral and active types together. R-S continued: > Neutral case-marking is OK, neutral > cross-referencing properties OK, but some subsystem of such a language, and > be it word-order, will always give away a definite alignment, ERG, or ACT). > A "class" type is equally dubious, noun classification being a > morphological technique which can do a lot of things (inter alia, it can > enshrine accusative or ergative alignment, to be sure), but as such, a > morphological technique, it stands outside of the core issue. Pat responds: I do not believe it stands outside the core issue. But I agree that it is primarily morphological. R-S continued: > The general idea of stadiality is, as I said, doubtful in itself, to say > the least, moreover, as I and now Larry have repeated several times, there > is no sense in the overall label of "ergative language", this being only a > (sometimes, if properly understood) useful impressionistic designations for > languages which show ergative features somehow "salient" for the average > European eye (e.g. ergativity by case-marking, where the whole thing was > first detected and named). Pat responds: Please see my response to Larry Trask on the same subject. >> Pat responded: >> I evade nothing. And why I should feel it incumbent on me to defend every >> last jot and tittle of Klimov's views perfectly escapes me. R-S responded: > The major lines of argumentation would do ;-) >> I have told you above where I agree with him. > Yes, you agree with the bottomline ("stadiality is a fact"). But why ? Pat responds: Because, I believe as a matter of principle, that simplicity must precede complexity --- at least once. Pat wrote: >> But you cannot have it both ways. You have consistently implied that some of >> my views are so far from the mainstream that, a priori, they must be wrong. >> This takes the insufferable form of "linguists agree that ..." as if my >> views may be equated with those of the fishmonger you mentioned above and no >> linguist would hold them. Klimov is one linguist who does hold views that I >> share, and this effectively debunks the notion (on this idea anyhow) that it >> is somehow intellectually disreputable to believe that certain laguage types >> grow naturally out of other language types. R-S commented: > This passage is hard to understand. For the record: I don't say that any > views, just by virtue of being far from the mainstream, must a priori be > wrong. The mainstream can be wrong (and is so very often, e.g. on the > illusion that there is something like the Altaic family of languages, just > to place my favourite running gag). > My fishmonger-example wants to express that it doesn't matter who utters a > view, but only the arguments do. Pat responds: I have advanced arguments in my essays. I would be glad to take up any point mentioned therein if the list (or the Nostratic list) permits it. R-S continued: > And, the other way round: a position is, imho, not automatically immune to > criticism just because it is held by otherwise well-reputed figures. They > can do wrong. The roster of eminent scholars, asserting that Turkic and > Mongolian are genetically related languages, is impressive and deservedly > so. Yet they are wrong. Pat: Agreed. >>> That Sumerian is just another split-ergative language, since you seem to >>> doubt my (oh, not *my*, I could refer you to *eminent* linguists ;-) >> Pat, aside: >> And why do you not if such exist? R-S answered? > Because I don't have to, being able to defend my points on my own. If you > want a reading-list on ergativity, I could give you one, of course. Pat responds: Gosh, I thought we were discussing Sumerian (:-#) >> Pat answered: >> Since you are writing of what Sumerian is or is not, I would think you might >> have understood that the point of my remark was that, although the markings >> of the maru: may be fairly well established, there is absolutely no >> agreement on what grammatical role these endings signify. R-S answered: > There is hardly any overall agreement about anything in linguistics, given > that a lot of journals in the field still accept anything they are handed > over. If there is disagreement on this particular point on your side, state > it and give your reasons. Pat responds: Economically, let me refer you to the easily obtainable Thomsen, page 115-116. >> Pat responded: >> Yes, you may have dropped something here. To make this simple, why not give >> me your definition of "imperfective aspect", and I will attempt to find a >> maru: sentence that may be interpreted non-imperfectively. Personally, I >> believe *most* maru: indicate a progressive nuance rather than imperfective >> aspect. R-S responded: > No contradiction here. No, I'm not going to expose "my" definition of > aspect here (but you may with profit read, e.g., Comrie's handy book on > the issue). Only so much: if a language displays a contrast in aspect, *and* > possesses a systematic means of coding progressivity, then the progressive > forms will either coincide with those of the imperfective aspect, *or* build > upon them (i.e. they will belong, morphologically speaking, to the > "imperfective" system of that language, never to the perfective system). > Progressivity is functionally incompatible with perfectivity. Pat responds: I am not surprised that you and I disagree here since aspect seems like a topic unapproachable without Fingerspitzengefuehl and everyone's fingers are subtly different but, for the record, I believe an English sentence like: "I am/was eating up the cake" is, simultaneously "perfective" and "progressive". R-S continued: > (OK, for clarity's sake: the gist of "my" definition of aspect is that, > while perfective aspect describes an action as an unstructured whole, > imperfective aspect draws attention to its internal structure, i.e. having > or not having beginning and end, filling a certain stretch of time, being > divisable into phases, being the pragmatic background of a narration aso. > for a subset of the notions which are most often associated with > imperfective aspect as against perfective aspect). > Note that this is not germane to my argument on an ergativity split in > Sumerian, whether or not the interpretation of maru:-HamTu as aspect-coding > inflections will hold water is not my issue here, nor do I regard myself > competent enough to decide this issue. There is a split, and is along the > line of *some* TAM-category-distinction. That's enough. The aspect-show is > in a different theatre. >>> lugal-le Hi-li ib2-dim2-me. "The king fashioned the wig" >>> The king is case-marekd as ERG (-(l)e), and the wig is ABS, so, in terms of >>> case-marking a perfect ERG construction. >>> The verb form, here given in transliteration, is morphologically to be >>> analyzed: i- (conjugation prefix for maru: or imperfective (horribile >>> dictu), >>Pat interrupted: >> This is certainly not the interpretation of *any* Sumerologist, linguist or >> philologist, of whose ideas I am aware. Where did you get it? No one says >> i- is a conjugation prefix for maru: (or imperfective!) unless you got this >> from Gonzalo (?). R-S responded: > I see no reason to expose the scattered sources I'm using at the moment, > for this will inevitably lead to a rather tiring exchange of the type: "Oh, > that shoddy book, no wonder you found that drivel there". Pat responds: I would be pleased to learn of *one* source that designates the i- as a sign of maru:! R-S continued: > What *would* be useful though, would be if you named the sources you > trust, so that I can confine my search for instances proving my point - > that Sumerian is a split-ergative language, like any other one, thus > removing one cornerstone of stadialism - to these. No doubt I'll find them > there as well. Pat responds: My primary source of information is Thomsen, who rarely takes a position but outlines various competing views. Her discussion of i- (pp. 163-166) does *not* list anyone who so believes. R-S continued: >> Another point is that one group of Sumerologists considers various vowel >> to represent oral as well as nasal articulations derived from -n. i{3}-du >> *could*, according to them, represent *i{3}(n)-du. > If this is correct, this could eventually force me to admit (no, not that > Sumerian is not a split-ergative language, it is) that my chosen example > was not unambiguous enough to drive my point home (since the scribe *could* > have intended his from to be read /indu/). Pat responds: See Thomsen pp. 162-163. R-S continued: > Let's, then, look at further examples. I)f you don't mind, I'll help myself > to the ones you supplied yourself a few lines down in connection with the > pronouns: >> g[~]a-e i-ku{4}-re-en, 'I entered' >> (Yes, the -e here is another problem.) >> the -en cross-references the intransitive subject. >> In the transitive sentence, the -en is supposed to cross-reference the >> agent: > >g[~]a-e sag[~] ib-zi-zi-en, 'I am raising (my) head'. > I coul d be arrogant and say: sapienti sat. Sumerian shows accusative > features. But I think I'll explain ;-): > - en in both cases, the intransitive and the transitive one, > cross-references what we latinate accusative-minded Europeans usually call > a "subject"; or, iow, it cross-references *both* the agent of the > intransitive, as well as that of the transitive sentence above. That's > pure-vanilla accusativity, and nothing else. For, under ergative > conditions, both constituents are kept apart, by whatever means, yet here > they aren't, they are treated alike in terms of verbal cross-referencing, > and that is what accusativity is all about. Get the message ? Pat responds: Yes, that would be the consensus view of Sumerologists but, of course, this is only true of relatively Late Sumerian. I discuss these matters in the Sumerian Grammar available at my website. R-S continued: > What it exactly is, which conditions this split in Sumerian may be discussed > elsewhere (for I think we have tried the patience of this IE list enough with > Sumerian, especially since I am a tiro in this field, however, tiro or not, I > usually can tell an instance of split-ergativity when I see one, and here I > do see one), aspect or shmaspect, the point is only that *some* split exists, > as, I repeat, in *every* other "ERG-Language", the reverse not being the case > for ACC-Languages, now it's your turn. Pat asks: Could you refer me to a linguists who has sureveyed every other ergative language and determined that splits always occur? > My sources are, i.a., Hayes, Thomsen, Diakonoff, Poebel, Deimel, > representing different generations of Sumerologists with different > backgrounds and linguistic standing, certainly also with different > standings as connoisseurs of the language. However, if you dislike one or > more names on this list, feel free to say so, but if the only Sumerian > grammar you trust is that which you have written yourself, please share it, > instead of complaining on others. The best grammar is, here as elsewhere, > the text corpus itself, and I think the examples discussed so far, as long > as they don't turn out to be entirely cooked up, make it perfectly clear > that Sumerian is no exception to our general knowledge of "ergative > languages". You will have to come up with a different one, which should not > be too difficult, since you are reconstructing the mother of all languages > ;-) Pat responds: I have respect for everyone who has tried his hand at unriddling Sumerian. I am sharing a Sumerian Grammar (but still in progress) at my website. "Father of all languages": I am a sexist pig. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jun 25 03:50:02 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 23:50:02 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 2:44 AM >>I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly >>convincing for several reasons. Unless the Latin word is itself a >>Q-Celtic or Etruscan loaner, if this is apparently a case of the p/q >>variable distribution, my suspicion is you'd expect to se a q- or a c- >>form in Latin rather than a p-. > Or it conceivably Latin may have been a borrowing from >Oscan or Gaulish, etc. used with a marked meaning, in which case any >original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant >(which used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work >in a metaphorical sense. Celtic borrowed *planta from Latin, cf. Welsh "plant" - children. Straightforward. However, at the time Irish had no native *p-/-p-, and therefore "c" was often substituted. plant/clann is not the only such pair. Off the cuff, cf. cloimh < pluma Cothraiche < Patricius This is basic in Celtic studies. Robert Orr From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jun 24 08:48:25 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 09:48:25 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <13425140450213@m-w.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Jim Rader wrote: > The baseball diamond theory of the origin of is almost > certainly folklore. Note that the OED's first citation for the word, > in the sense "blow with the left hand," is from 1848. Organized > baseball was in its infancy in the 1840's and conventions for laying > out diamonds were very unlikely to have existed so early that a > transferred sense of the word could have arisen by 1848. Also, the > Survey of English Dialects recorded meaning > "left-handed" in Cumberland--suggesting that the association of south > with the left hand did not originate in the U.S. Many thanks for the correction. I had been wondering about that first OED quotation. Odd, though, that the word makes perfect sense in baseball, and not elsewhere. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jun 25 16:33:00 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 17:33:00 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [PCR] >>> I am almost sure that you will want to refine my understanding of >>> the word "simplicity" but for whatever it may be worth, I would >>> characterize an isolating language as simpler than a flectional one. [LT] >> If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or >> Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian >> or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. > Actually, I think it may well be the case for Chinese. I have a copy > of Chao's _Mandarin Primer_ (336 pages), which has a Chapter III - > Grammar, beginning on page 33, and *ending* on page 59. I can > compare this to Forbes' _Russian Grammar_, which contains 436 pages > of grammar and indices. It is hardly reasonable to adduce one small and elderly primer of Chinese and compare it with a large reference grammar of Russian. In any case, I have seen at least one very large reference grammar of Mandarin, though I can't recall who wrote it. One way of appreciating the impossibility of a language with a "simple" grammar is to browse through the Comrie-Smith questionnaire, or through one of the grammars based on it. This shows quickly that every language has a host of grammatical functions to provide grammatical forms for. A few examples of the kinds of thing that every language must provide grammatical constructions for: "That house is made of bricks." "The gum is stuck to the bottom of the chair." "These shoes are too big for me." "It's obvious that she's drunk." "The more he eats, the fatter he gets." "Two of the boys have long legs." "The train was not as late as last time." "The woman I was talking to is always complaining." "I forgot how to open the lock." And so on, and so on. Whether a given language, or does not, use inflections to do some of this work has little effect on the overall grammar: all of these zillions of things have to be expressed somehow, and grammatical devices must exist to provide for them. And, of course, a learner of the language must learn every one of those devices and learn when to use it. > Even if the earliest morphemes of language werenot recoverable as > you would maintain, logic tells us that monosyllables would have, at > least, predominated. I'm afraid that "logic" tells us no such thing. This is no more than a wild guess. > The syntax of these monosyllables would have had to convey whatever > grammar the language had at that point; and this would certainly > resemble languages which are currently termed "isolating". An isolating language is indeed isolating: no dispute there. But even a monosyllabic language need not lack inflections altogether: there exist languages with internal inflection, as in English `sing', `sang', `sung'. > I prefer (though, of course, you and many others may not) to > distinguish the terms: "isolating", referring to a language for > which we can reconstuct no flectional or aggltuinating stage; and > "analytic", for a language we can. Bizarre. What is the point of trying to classify languages on the basis of what we can reconstruct for their ancestors? > Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same > way we have no data on IE but, by analysis, we can reasonably form > an opinion as to what IE must have been like. In the same way, we > can analyze current linguistic data, and form an opinion as to what > earliest language must have been like though, I admit, the process > is much more doubtful. Hardly comparable. With PIE, we are reconstructing only 2000-3000 years earlier than our earliest substantial texts. Trying to reconstruct 50-150,000 years back is a whole nother ballgame. > I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in > linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to > transitive constructions: > Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb > will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. > Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb > will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. > However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb will be interpreted as an > activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B No, not at all. The facts vary from language to language. In Basque, for example, the absolutive is interpreted as the performer of the action if the verb is intransitive, as the patient if the verb is transitive. Same appears to be true of Dyirbal. > whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. I take it you've never come across Spanish, Italian, Russian or Latin. Spanish: `S/he has seen the film.' Latin: `S/he saw Caesar.' Accusative noun, verb, no overt subject, perfectly normal. > I would characterize Language A as (at least, essentially "ergative"). But which languages are like this? [LT] >> I know no Sumerian. But, speaking generally, the `passive' >> interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years >> ago. [PAR] > Perhaps to your satisfaction but not to mine. Not much of an answer, I'm afraid. The "passive" interpretation of ergativity was based squarely on morphology, with no attention to syntax -- even though a passive is a syntactic form. More particularly, it was based on the confused and erroneous notion that a grammatical subject must always stand in the same case. For Basque, and for other ergative languages, the "passive" view of transitive sentences can be shredded, point by devastating point. [LT] >> In very many ergative languages, it is trivial to demonstrate that >> transitive sentences are active, not passive. I myself have done this >> for Basque. > Perhaps you have done this for Basque but it is certainly not > trivial to demonstrate this for Sumerian, where Thomsen > characterizes: "The Sumerian verbal root is in principle neither > transitive nor intransitive, but neutral in this respect". I don't know any Sumerian. But what is true of Sumerian is not necessarily true of any other language. [PAR] >>> I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and >>> transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship >>> (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, >>> IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the >>> verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance >>> to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner >>> of an intransitive verb of motion. [LT] >> This may or may not be so in some ergative languages, but it is >> certainly not true for ergative languages generally. > Is there an 'ergative language', presuming by your definition some > such exists, where this is not true? Sure, taking `ergative language' to mean `language in which ergativity is prominent'. In Basque, for example, intransitive subjects (absolutive), transitive subjects (ergative) and direct objects (absolutive) are all equally optional: Gizonak mutila jo zuen. man-the-Erg boy-the-Abs hit Aux `The man hit the boy.' Gizonak jo zuen. `The man hit him.' Mutila jo zuen. `He hit the boy.' Jo zuen. `He hit him.' All perfectly normal in context. [LT] >>>> Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert >>>> that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it >>>> is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. > Pat asks: > What evidence might that be? The fact that we know of a few cases -- Indo-Iranian is one -- in which ergativity has arisen in languages which formerly lacked it, while we have hardly any examples of languages in which accusativity has arisen in languages which formerly lacked it. [on my observation that children acquiring English do not go through an ergative stage] > I am sure you are better read on child language acquisition patterns > than I. Based on what I have observed personally, I doubt your > assertion but if studies have shown this (could you name one?), how > can I dispute it. We now have a vast body of data on children acquiring English. And I know of no study, not one, which recognizes an ergative stage during acquisition. > A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so > far as I would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. Yes, sure, but a single datum proves nothing. Children at the two-word stage also say things like `Mommy get', meaning `[I want] Mommy to get the ball.' This should be impossible in an "ergative" view. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jun 25 18:00:00 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 13:00:00 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <005001bebebd$cf9caac0$28a394d1@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: I'm aware of the others and I've seen the explanation for clann < planta but I've also read other explanations claiming that it's cognate to Latin and that it's unsettled. But I have only the most superficial knowledge of Celtic, so I'd wondering if the idea of clann < planta is virtually unanimous among Celtic scholars or if there is wide disagreement or if the issue is just up in the air. >Celtic borrowed *planta from Latin, cf. Welsh "plant" - children. >Straightforward. >However, at the time Irish had no native *p-/-p-, and therefore "c" was >often substituted. plant/clann is not the only such pair. Off the cuff, >cf. >cloimh < pluma >Cothraiche < Patricius >This is basic in Celtic studies. >Robert Orr Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Mon Jun 28 16:50:33 1999 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 09:50:33 -0700 Subject: Delayed posts Message-ID: It appears that a large group of posts from 22 June 1999 did not go out; they are not present, for example, in Linguistlist.org archives. I will re-post them today. I apologize if they duplicate something you have already seen; please let me know if they do. Replies to this message will not go out to the list. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From donncha at eskimo.com Wed Jun 23 02:02:00 1999 From: donncha at eskimo.com (Dennis King) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 19:02:00 -0700 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <376E6182.C8FF41C2@aye.net> Message-ID: Steven A. Gustafson: >I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly >convincing for several reasons. [...] It also strikes me as relatively >unlikely that the Celts would have borrowed what was in CL a technical >term of horticulture, (the original meaning was "slip for grafting") >given it a broadened metaphorical sense, and then applied it to a >fundamental aspect of their family life that carried a large weight of >native cultural baggage. The fact is, however, that there are several very early examples in Irish of "cland" used to mean "plant, planting, shoot", as far back as the Milan Glosses where "plantationis" is glossed "inna clainde". The same text also shows the metaphorical development of the word, with "Abrachae semen estis" glossed as "adib cland Abrache". Further, the primary meaning of the derived verb "clannaid" is "plants, sows". Finally, hadn't "planta" gone beyond being just a technical term by the 5th or 6th century AD? Dennis King From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 07:14:05 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 08:14:05 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean In-Reply-To: <19990621.232334.3894.0.oeden@juno.com> Message-ID: >>[ Moderator's comment: >> If it is a cognate, that *is* the explanation. Or do you mean simply that >> there is an *apparent* cognate (which would more properly be discussed on >> the Nostratic list)? >> --rma ] >Esra Oden writes: >This Kartvelian cognate may be a borrowing from the Pontic Greek spoken >in S. Caucasus along the Georgian border of Turkey. As long as the question is one of borrowing, we may have our moderator's consent to discuss it here. No, I wouldn't think so. The Kartvelian word is of Proto-Kartvelian age, reflected in all K. languages including Old Georgian (reconstructable as /*qel-/, Klimov detaches the final -l in the reconstruct, but since he cannot assign a function to it, and since this detachment seems to be based on Mingrelian only, I think he may not be right here). While it is true that Old Georgian does display Greek loanwords, proto-Kartvelian is not known to do. If we, for better or worse, assume that "hand" might be a counterexample to this assertion, we would have to face the problem that there seems to be no motivation for Gk. -r being replaced by Kart. -l. We can safely, I think, exclude the alternative scenario, that of genetic cognacy on a Nostratic level, as well. No matter what we think about an ultimate genetic relationship between IE and Kartvelian, we will have to take into account that the Greek word, as demonstrated, goes back to *ghes-r, i.e. when we look at the oldest forms for both language families, we get forms more different than the attested later ones (*ghes-r : *qel- [or, if Klimov is right after all, *qe-] - cheir : xeli ), a strong indicator that the similarity observed in the later forms has been produced by chance convergence. With true cognates based on genetic relationship (which involves that the languages *diverged* from earlier unity) we should expect that the earliest recoverable forms are closer to each other than the later ones. Think that is enough to convince anybody that this is a chance resemblance only. St.G. From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 07:29:51 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 08:29:51 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Are there any etymologies out there for & ? >Also, any ideas why manus is feminine? /manus/ seems to be able to claim an IE pedigree as well, with as yet unknown semantic differences between it and *ghes-r-. One can cite Umbrian /manuv-e/ "in the hand" for the Italic part of this pedigree, and further Old English /mund/ "palm, protection", Old High German /munt/ "hand, guardian" (living on in /m"undig, M"undel, Vormund/ etc. with non-concrete semantics), the Albanian verb /marr/ "to take", Gk. /m'are:/ "hand" and some other attestations. It looks like an r/d-heteroclitic, I don't dare here a detailed reconstruction, but the cognacy of the words seems possible, and maybe even clear. Btw., the Albanian verb might point into the direction of a semantic scenario similar to the mentioned one in Baltic and Slavic (*if* the Albanian verb < *mar-ne/o- is not a denominal formation meaning "to handle" othl.). The other possibility is that the more abstract meanings (circling around "power, ability to protect athl.") are older for this etymon, *ghes-r- being the anatomical term from the beginning. I have no idea on /handus/ at the moment. St.G. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 23 06:35:09 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 01:35:09 -0500 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 1999 2:25 PM > I (Peter) commented: >>> an initial H- added before R? >> Pat asks: >> Do you mean as an equivalent substitute for *s-? > No, not at all. Merely that since PIE has one fricative prefix (albeit of > uncertain meaning and status) we should not rule out on ideological grounds, > the suggestion of another fricative prefix in situations appropriate for its > particular phonology. Actually, I think it likeliest that the initial laryngeal in these circumstances was derived from *?V-, the glottal stop though I suppose that it may have been transformed into a fricative. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Jun 23 06:54:27 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 02:54:27 EDT Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same way we >have no data on IE -- this statement is incorrect. PIE was spoken 5000 years ago and the earliest written examples of IE languages date to the 2nd millenium BCE. There is a gap of no more than a few millenia. The earliest human languages were spoken -- using a minimal estimate -- at least 50,000 years ago. Probably considerably more. This is several iterations more temporal distance than between us and PIE. From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Jun 23 07:15:39 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 02:15:39 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. Oh? So then, Latin is ergative? You can have sentences like "Marcum videt" = "[he] sees Mark", which is an accusative and a verb, and nothing else. Yet, Latin is clearly not ergative. > A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so far as I > would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. How so? Looks accusative to me, with the caviat that "Me" is used for both nominative and accusative. If children's language were truly "ergative", you'd expect to have "Me hurt", but "I did it" (that is, Me = absolutive, I = ergative), does this occur? Granted, I'm not an expert in language acquisition, but I don't believe that occurs. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Wed Jun 23 10:04:31 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 11:04:31 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: At the risk of moving ever farther from the subject of this thread: the significant point about 'clann' (to use modern spelling) is that it corresponds with Welsh 'plant', though the latter has generated also a singular form 'plentyn' with vowel affection alongside the acquisition of a standard suffix to derive a singular form from a collective, cf 'adar' [birds] -> 'aderyn' [a bird], whereas Gaelic has not. Now, Gad. 'c' in such words as 'ca/', 'co\', 'ciod', 'cuin' (and corresponding with Welsh 'pwy', &c) is for IE *'kw' (or however the current fad for representing the sound goes), not 'k'. There are some words in Gad. which have 'c' where Britt. apparently had 'p', judging from the modern descendents. Eg 'corcor' [believed to be from Latin 'purpur' via Britt.]. The hypothesis is that this occurred at a time when the correspondence Gad. 'c' = Britt. 'p' was perceived by some Irish speakers and was productive, and the rule for Celtic that IE *p -> 0 meant that there was still no 'p' in our phonetic repertoire. Somewhat later, 'p' became a part of the sound repertory of Old Irish, and is found in ecclesiastical borrowings (sometimes showing marked metathesis, and sometimes having 'b' in some modern spellings, but dialects may not recognise a voiced/voiceless distinction except by position): easpuig (bishop); peacaidh (sin); aspal (apostle, but also 'abstol'); 'pog' (kiss: 'signum _pacis_') &c. So, we assume that there was a raft of 'borrowings' at a period when we had no 'p' but assumed that where 'p' occurred in Britt. we had 'c'. We also assume that this was before the arrival of (institutional) Xtianity with Patrick in 432 CE - the words with specifically Christian usage came with/after him, though there are variations in the Gad. names from Patricius which include 'Cotruig' as well as 'Padruig'. [But that may also raise questions about the number of Patricks. the notion that the Romans never came to Ireland, and the suppression of the discovery of a Roman settlement in, I think, Meath, in recent years, among other things.] At a pinch it may simply be that British and Irish languages were sufficiently close to be perceived by their speakers as not that different, ie as mutually comprehensible dialects but with regular differences, just as there were no doubt regular differences between dialects within each island. 'Borrowing' may therefore not be am facal deas - to visit the 'right/south' thread briefly - for these words which reached us from Latin (or whatever) through Brittonic into Gadelic. Not sure about the other possibility, that CC *klanta -> Britt. *planta. But I do not recall ever seeing a proposal of such a change in British/Welsh (and I cannot think of other correspondences between Gad. (and *IE) 'c' and Britt./Welsh 'p'. But I may be wrong. Some of this reminds me of the tale of the anglophone who supposed that the vocabulary of Gaelic was impoverished and was assured that it could be used for any concept expressed in an English word. So the anglophone asked if there was a word in Gaelic for 'spaghetti', and received the reply 'certainly, but before I tell you what it is, would you tell me what the English for 'spaghetti' is? And we may have been playing with (other people's) words in a sub-Joycean manner for longer than you might think: after all, 'sprig(s)/sprog(s)' are familiar words for 'kid(s)', while 'scion' is more elevated. wbw Gordon [But with lots of ancestors &c called McAllister, -Neill, -Duff-, -Brien. &c - and written with a slight grin.] At 3:06 pm 22/6/1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >>I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly >>convincing for several reasons. Unless the Latin word is itself a >>Q-Celtic or Etruscan loaner, if this is apparently a case of the p/q >>variable distribution, my suspicion is you'd expect to se a q- or a c- >>form in Latin rather than a p-. > Or it conceivably Latin may have been a borrowing from >Oscan or Gaulish, etc. used with a marked meaning, in which case any >original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant >(which are used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work >in a metaphorical sense. >[snip] >Rick Mc Callister >W-1634 >Mississippi University for Women >Columbus MS 39701 From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Wed Jun 23 11:47:34 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 07:47:34 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: One thing I failed to note was that Peter is calling *bheret a root form (I call it class I or strong thematic class) while to me only *gh'ent is a root form. Some of the confusion is due to this misunderstanding. petegray wrote: > No present, and we call the past form an aorist. When there is a > present, we call it an imperfect. I know, and it hides an important problem: Without native speakers to guide us, we don't know if a given root form (and to some extent reduplicated forms) is really an aorist. In RV, at least, the syntactic distinction between imperfects and aorists has puzzled people (Elizerenkova claims that the difference was still developing, and Gonda accepted it, while at the same time believing that there was an aspectual difference! Watkins attributes the fuzziness to mainly the root present/aorist.) > The full grade is already a marker of something, even if it is conditioned > by presence of the accent. I was wanting to distinguish the handful of > presents which were simply the bare root, from those that carried this or > any other marker of the present. There are 40 roots, after eliminating the kars.i type and the s'ete/s'aye types, in RV and Brahmanas that use the bare root. [Since root presents disappear rather quickly in MIA, and their occurance in Classical Sans depends greatly on genre, and obviously new roots use either -aya- or in case of those that look like borrowing from Drav/Munda we see only -a- or -aya-, we must add the remaining roots of Panini's II class to this, which will bring the total to about 60.] Hittite has about 60, I think, and percentagewise, this is more than Sanskrit. This is more than a handful. > Greek uses the perfect for the present state which results from a previous > action. Tethne:ka ("I have died") actually means the present state, "I am > dead". In some parts of Sanskrit literature, it is the aorist which > carries this meaning, not the perfect. Elsewhere aorist and perfect are > in practice indistinguishable, and the perfect drops out of use. Which parts of Sans lit? Please be specific concerning times, genres etc. --- There is an important point when it comes to discussing the diachronic syntax of Sanskrit, namely Sanskrit is distinguished from MIA primarily by phonology, and ``good Sanskrit'', as opposed to ``hybrid Sanskrit'', by morphology. However, all varieties of Sanskrit from the time of Asvaghosa (~1 c. CE) show Prakrit influence in syntax. This varies both over time and genre. For example, Kavya lit uses mostly finite verbs in past tense, while drama dialog, like Prakrits, uses only the PPP (in -ta). However, Prakrits have only one way of referring to the past and this influence led to the imperfect, aorist, perfect and PPP being used interchangably as all of them would be translated into Prakrit the same way. Still, Kavyas, most of which deal with mythical/legendary themes use the perfect much of the time while the occassional exception such as Dasakumaracarita purpoting to contain fist person narratives use imperfect and aorist in such places. Epics and fables fall in between, with the parts usually considered to be latter using the different forms more interchangably. However, when we look at the older lit, whether the older upanishads or Pali, show a very different picture. In upanishads, aorist is used for recent past, perfect for narration of legends/myths while resultatives are consistantly expressed with the PPP. In Pali, the perfect has disappeared, but aorist and imperfect fell together into a preterite, and PPP is used form a resultative. But PPP based forms occur much more in direct speech. Interestingly, in the parts of Ramayana considered to be older, direct speech uses PPP virtually exclusively. I don't see any parts of Sans lit in which aorist has resultative meaning. Nor does perfect die out in Sans, only in Pali. The difference between aorist and perfect in RV is hard to pin down, but it is a jump to conclude that it did not exist. Such a conclusion is reached by appealing to variants now with aorist, now with perfect. But how do we know that the intended meaning was always the same? For pragmatic reasons, recent (relative to the time of reference) events and events with persisting results overlap. For example, Tamil has a resultative with auxillary iru and a ``completive'' with auxillary vid.u. Depending on where the emphasis is, either one is possible in many cases. I very much doubt that non-native speakers can find the difference by studying 2000 pages worth of novels. But the meaning conveyed is different and it is definitely wrong to conclude that they are equivalent. Based on variants, we can conclude (and some do) that moods did not have distinct meanings. Now, in English, ``Go'', ``You may go'', ``You can go'', ``You will go'' can all be used for issuing orders. Does that mean that they are all interchangeable? Regards -Nath From edsel at glo.be Wed Jun 23 14:48:56 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 16:48:56 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: petegray Date: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 7:44 AM >[re: the link between Latin amicus and the ambi- root] >Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the ambhi- root has wide attestation: >Latin, Greek, Armenian, Albanian and with syllabic /m/ Old Indic, and >Celtic. Pokorny relates it to the ambo root. >Peter -----Original Message----- From: Max W Wheeler Date: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 6:55 AM Subject: Re: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! >On am-: [ moderator snip ] >Catalan ~ [am], and Occitan ~ ~ , however, are >not the original forms of the preposition meaning 'with'. This was >in both languages, from Latin 'at', 'chez'. It is likely that >[am] was originally a conditioned variant before nasal consonants. Since > `in' had a variant [em] before labial consonants, these >prepositions mutually influenced each other in form, and in part in >meaning. In Catalan and are both >current for `travel by plane, fly'; in spoken Valencian has >replaced ~ altogether. The influence spreads to the >preposition < L. `to'. Colloquial Catalan has
  • ella> ~
  • `I said to her'; standard
  • ella>. [Ed] I suppose you're right about the Catalan 'amb' < Lat. 'apud'. This type of nasalization is indeed very common in all languages of the Iberian Peninsula, also in dialects (e.g. 'albóndiga' (meatball) > 'armóndiga' in Murcia). >However, the main problem with Ed's etymology (apart from the timing) is >that Lat. is not a preposition. It is rare as a prefix, and >dubiously productive. And Catalan is not a prefix. >But in any case, hasn't *mbhi got a perfectly good IE pedigree, nothing >to do with am- of Lat. amare? >Max [Ed] I said 'a prepositional prefix', i.e. a prefix with the meaning of a preposition, like 'ob-', 'ad-' etc. Anyway, its Greek counterpart, which I mentioned, IS a preposition (+ gen. +dat. or +acc.). According to my Latin dictionary, 'ambo:' ('both) is related to 'amb-' and Grk. 'amphí' ('around'). I have no problem with its IE pedigree, quite the contrary: it would mean that the Etruscan root under discussion might be of IE origin, like so many other. And I don't see why any relationship with 'amicus', 'amare', etc. should be excluded a priori: is it because of its lack of attestation in most other IE languages (except those of Latin descent of course)? Couldn't it be a double transfer: early Lat./IE 'amb(i)-' > Etr. 'am(e)-' > later Lat. 'am-'? I know of at least one more or less similar case: Lat castra > Arab al-kasr > Cast. alcázar. (and Lat. Lucentum > Ar. Al--lukant > Val. Alacant/Cast. Alicante). This happens when another culture is temporarily dominant in the same place, which was certainly the case in Rome. Ed. From mrr at astor.urv.es Wed Jun 23 15:10:10 1999 From: mrr at astor.urv.es (Macia Riutort Riutort) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 17:10:10 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Es gibt eine kleine Anzahl von Wörtern im Spanischen, die im Kastilischen -rd- aufweisen, im Katalanischen jedoch -rr-. Zum Beispiel: Katalanisch: esquerre - esquerra - Spanisch izquierdo - izquierda Katalanisch: cerra - Spanisch cerda ("Borste") Katalanisch: marrà - Spanisch mardano ("Schafbock") usw. Da dies hauptsächlich in Wörtern aus dem Substrat vorkommt, wird angenommen, dass -rd- bzw. -rr- die Anpassung an das vorkastilische bzw. vorkatalanische Lautsystem eines ihm unbekannten Lautes -oder Lautgruppe- der gebenden Substratsprache. M.R. >Yes, though there is a phonological problem here, since Basque >`left', definite form , should not have yielded Castilian > (m.), (f.). Since there is evidence that Basque >once had a word-forming suffix *<-do>, meaning something like `bad >thing', it is possible that an unrecorded Basque derivative * >was borrowed into Castilian before being lost from Basque itself. >Nobody knows. >Larry Trask [ moderator snip ] From mrr at astor.urv.es Wed Jun 23 15:26:00 1999 From: mrr at astor.urv.es (Macia Riutort Riutort) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 17:26:00 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Es tut mir leid, aber ich habe noch nie das Wort "hijos" in dieser Bedeutung gehört! Es wundert mich nur so; umgekehrt aber schon: vástago M.R. >original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant >(which used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work >in a metaphorical sense. >Rick Mc Callister [ moderator snip ] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Jun 23 15:50:06 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 10:50:06 -0500 Subject: Ergative vs. accusative Message-ID: Pat responded to Larry: >I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in >linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to >transitive constructions: [1] >Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. [2] >Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. [3] >However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified >agent on B [4] >whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. All well and good, so far as the first two sentences are concerned. However, what you said about combining this verb with the patient alone simply isn't true. Some ergative languages happily omit the agent, others do not. So what I've numbered [3] above will be legal in some ergative languages but not in others. Conversely, [4] is perfectly grammatical in many accusative languages. Couldn't think of an example good enough to convince you. But look at this post. Must've seen stuff like this before, right? Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From alderson at netcom.com Wed Jun 23 18:15:41 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 11:15:41 -0700 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> (proto-language@email.msn.com) Message-ID: On 22 Jun 1999, Patrick Ryan wrote: >I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in >linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to transitive >constructions: (1) >Language A: > Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. (2) >Language B: > Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. (3) >However, in Language A, > noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B (4) >whereas in Language B: > noun(B)+acc. verb >is *ungrammatical*. This flies in the face of reality. Let's take an example from Latin, an easy example of a language with accusative morphology *and* syntax: Amicus videt. "The friend sees." Amicum videt. "(Some unspecified one) sees the friend." Amicus videtur. "The friend is seen (by an unspecified agent)." There is nothing ungrammatical in the sentence "amicum videt". This, of course, assumes that the verbs in question are transitive. If they are *intransitive*, then your fourth example is correctly labeled as ungramma- tical, but your third is ungrammatical in the sense you assign to it; it could only mean that B is the *subject* of the verb (whether performer of the action or entity in the state) in a language with ergative morphology and syntax. Rich Alderson From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 19:20:21 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 20:20:21 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >> If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or >> Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian >> or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. >Pat responds: >Actually, I think it may well be the case for Chinese. I have a copy of >Chao's _Mandarin Primer_ (336 pages), which has a Chapter III - Grammar, >beginning on page 33, and *ending* on page 59. I can compare this to Forbes' >_Russian Grammar_, which contains 436 pages of grammar and indices. Try Li/Thompson: Grammar of Mandarin Chinese, and tell us whether you find all their observations and grammar points condensed in Chao's primer. As for primers, I have here a Russian primer of about 60. pp. To share an anecdote: a teacher of a teacher of mine used to confine his Sanskrit lectures to one (short summer) semester only "Sanskrit *ist* nicht l"anger", he used to say, and if you look at Mayrhofer's masterly condensed grammar, one gets the impression that this is true. However, it keeps nagging at me what might have ridden Wackernagel to fill his tons and tons of paper with nothing but - Sanskrit grammar ????? Please, Pat, don't tell us that the "complexity" of languages is measured by the thickness of volumes devoted to them. there are primers, phrase-books, Hippocrene drivel dictionaries, moderate textbooks, reference grammars and huge encyclopedic grammars. One can write 50 pages on Chinese as well as 600 (meaningful and relevant pages, that is). St. From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 20:04:15 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 21:04:15 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002801bebd05$c61f9fc0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >You are very kind to say that my "line of argumentation . . . matters" but, >in practice, most ideas which I have advanced as a result of my own attempts >at applying logical analysis to the questions have been summarily >dismissed --- I believe, primarily on the basis of my lack of documentable >qualifications. Come on, no fishing for compliments. I mean it: your line of argumentation matters, not whom you agree with ... >Now, we are already straining the patience of the IEists to pursue these >general matters so I propose that you read my Proto-Language essays, in >which I do attempt to provide "arguments", and let us take these matters to >the Nostratic list which may be glad for a little activity. I disagree, since the question of stadiality, resp. the discussion whether accusative languages must have of necessity passed through a (however organized) ergative stage *does* matter for Indo-European studies. And non-IE parallels or counterinstances *are* relevant for that. I can't think of any sane IEist who would disagree (for students of rhethoric: this strategy of mine is called immunization ;-), we are not discussing possible external relations of IE, are we ? Anyway, we will soon reach the end of this thread, since, without having read what follows, I'm sure I'll find there that you now fully agree with me that Sumerian is no exception to the general rule that all "ERG" languages display some signs of accusativity. >Pat, aside: >I have questioned this as well, and prefer to group the neutral and active >types together. Uh-oh ! Are you sure you know what the active type is all about ? >Pat responds: >I do not believe it stands outside the core issue. But I agree that it is >primarily morphological. The core issue is *what is done*, the morphological technique tells us *how* it is done. >Because, I believe as a matter of principle, that simplicity must precede >complexity --- at least once. I see I can't shatter this belief, but you have failed so far to demonstrate why on earth ergativity is something simpler than accusativity. >I have advanced arguments in my essays. I would be glad to take up any point >mentioned therein if the list (or the Nostratic list) permits it. If it has to do with ergativity and its synchronic and diachronic typology, I don't see why this should be inappropriate for this list. Ergativity is, after all, a phenomenon found in IE languages (some of them, at least). >> Because I don't have to, being able to defend my points on my own. If you >> want a reading-list on ergativity, I could give you one, of course. >Pat responds: >Gosh, I thought we were discussing Sumerian (:-#) Ergativity. >>> Pat answered: >>> Since you are writing of what Sumerian is or is not, I would think you >>> might have understood that the point of my remark was that, although the >>> markings of the maru: may be fairly well established, there is absolutely >>> no agreement on what grammatical role these endings signify. >R-S answered: >> There is hardly any overall agreement about anything in linguistics, given >> that a lot of journals in the field still accept anything they are handed >> over. If there is disagreement on this particular point on your side, state >> it and give your reasons. >Pat responds: >Economically, let me refer you to the easily obtainable Thomsen, page >115-116. Shoot, I just brought the copy I'm using back to the library, and by the time you read this I will be in Bonn, where the local copy has been stolen. So, you will have to quote the passege, I'm afraid. Note, however, that Thomsen is fairly positive on *split*-ergativity in Sumerian. >Pat responds: >I am not surprised that you and I disagree here since aspect seems like a >topic unapproachable without Fingerspitzengefuehl and everyone's fingers are >subtly different but, for the record, I believe an English sentence like: >"I am/was eating up the cake" >is, simultaneously "perfective" and "progressive". There may be aspect-theories on the market which would have to agree with that. In the framework I'm using, the construction would still be imperfective (by virtue of being progressive), and telicity (this construction being telic in nature) would fall outside the domain of aspect proper, but it doesn't hurt if we agree to disagree here. (Just as an aside, since I can't resist: perfective aspect is associated but does not necessarily coincide with/imply completion of the action described; what makes this example still imperfective is that it describes an action lasting for a discernable period of time during which you were at each given moment eating the cake; you were, however, not eating it *up* at each given moment during this stretch of time; you see, aspect theory is even more difficult than alignment typology ;-) >Pat responds: >I would be pleased to learn of *one* source that designates the i- as a sign >of maru:! As I said, the fault was mine alone, so I am this ominous source. >Pat responds: >My primary source of information is Thomsen, who rarely takes a position but >outlines various competing views. Her discussion of i- (pp. 163-166) does >*not* list anyone who so believes. I was the only one - for half an hour ... >> If this is correct, this could eventually force me to admit (no, not that >> Sumerian is not a split-ergative language, it is) that my chosen example >> was not unambiguous enough to drive my point home (since the scribe *could* >> have intended his from to be read /indu/). >See Thomsen pp. 162-163. No, I literally don't see this (s.a.). >Pat responds: >Yes, that would be the consensus view of Sumerologists but, of course, this >is only true of relatively Late Sumerian. I discuss these matters in the >Sumerian Grammar available at my website. Just tell us here what is true of relatively early Sumerian. Some people have a slow web-connection or even have to pay for it. >Pat asks: >Could you refer me to a linguists who has sureveyed every other ergative >language and determined that splits always occur? No, I cannot refer you to such a person, but the typological investigation of ergativity has now reached a stage where some assertions are possible (though moot points remain, to be sure). The history of the investigation of ergativity is a model history of the successive demolition of myths. First, the myth of ergative constructions being passive (and ergative-languages, if I'm allowed to use this sloppy term here, do not know such a thing as autonomous passives; some do) went overboard, then the myth that ergativity is something primeaval, something, so to speak, with a mesolithic aroma, was assigned the dustbin as its habitat, because language change may take the way from or to ergativity; finally, the idea that ergativity is something which pervades every pore of the languages where it is found got its share. No, nobody has investigated each and every "ERG-language", but ever since the phenomenon of ergativity splits (and there being more than just case-marking which is can display this phenomenon) became widely known, information keeps pouring in from all sides that split-ergativity is the norm, very probably (I'm dead sure) the exclusive state-of-affairs for all languages which show some kind of it. How can this ever be proven ? Just like any other language universal it cannot, given that we don't have and never will have access to *all* human languages of the past, the present and the time to come; it can only be *dis*proven by showing a fully ergative language (there are fully accusative languages, though). You said Sumerian has no traces of accusativity, I showed that it has. That's how the game is played. Try a different language, and I'll show you the splits. We may now safely regard the discussion of Sumerian, a perfect split-ergative language, as settled. I won. Stefan From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 23 19:00:09 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 20:00:09 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Rick asked> any ideas why manus is feminine? "Hand" is feminine (so I have heard) in a overwhelming number of languages that have grammatical gender, just as "foot" is masculine in a very large number. There might be a deep psychological thing here, about receiving and giving, which betrays an even deeper psychological thing connecting grammatical gender with biological gender. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 23 19:03:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 20:03:14 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: A side track because the discussion has turned to Chinese grammars. I have a Chinese grammar which has sections like: Cases: Chinese has no cases Subjunctive: Chinese has no subjunctive Voices: The Chinese verb does not alter for voice and so on .... Needless to say, it is an old book. Peter From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 20:10:36 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 21:10:36 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. >Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. >However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B >whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. Beats me, taedet me, menja ozhidajut ... >And a sentence like: >. . . eg{~}er-a-ni u{3} dam dumu-ni dumu Ba.Ba.g{~]u{10}-ke{4}-ne >ba-ne-sum-ma >must be rendered in English by the passive: >. . . that his estate and his wife and children were given to the sons of >Babag{u}. Having to be rendered by the passive in English is not the same thing as "being passive in nature". St. From Sunnet at worldnet.att.net Wed Jun 23 20:08:29 1999 From: Sunnet at worldnet.att.net (Eugene Kalutsky) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 16:08:29 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote: >...Other languages have replaced this >apparently oldest word for "hand", to wit Latin manus, Gothic handus, >Baltic and Slavic *renka/ronka (from a verb meaning "to grasp", cf. >Lithuanian /rinkti/. The limited distribution of this core-vocabulary item >in IE has once given rise to the bromide that the early Indo-Europeans did >have feet but no hands (mocking at linguistic palaeontology, of course). Correction: Slavic *renka/ronka means "arm", not "hand". The word for "hand" in Russian is /kist'/ - looks like it wasn't lost there after all. Gene From adolfoz at tin.it Wed Jun 23 22:17:45 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 23:17:45 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ed. Robertson wrote: > The Kaminia stele from Lemnos shows beyond doubt that there were speakers of > an Etruscoid language situated not far from Lydia. Lydian itself does not > appear closely related to Etruscan and its relatives genetically, but there > may be Etruscoid substrate influence on Lydian... > You don't have to believe the Etruscans and Raeti came from Anatolia, but > Etruscoid was spoken in that area. I do not know the Lidian. Certainly I doubt that Etruscan came from Anatolia. As for the Lemnian, Carlo de Simone, "I Tirreni a Lemno", 1996, quotes an article by R. Drews and the book "In search of the Indo-Europeans" etc. by J. P. Mallory whose conclusions are similar : 1) R. Drews: "settlers from Etruria established themselves on Lemnos (and wrote the inscription)". 2) Mallory: "The similarity between Etruscan and Lemnian is too great to be explained by anything other than a more direct and immediate historical connection, possibly involving a visit to Lemnos by Etruscan traders". 3) de Simone, p. 88: "Etruscan and Lemnian cannot be connected to the most ancient pre- or para-Hellenic linguistic stratum." The Lemnian 'Tyrrenoi' came from west (i. e. from Italy). > ... if one tends to detect or imagine cognates in IE roots > as part of the interpretation process, one cannot then go and point to > these 'cognates' and say that they prove a relationship. That would be > a bit tautological, unless the volume of the evidence was > overwhelming. I agree on the tautological aspect of the interpretations. However I think that the 'metodo calcolatorio' (and similar), used by deserving scholars like Pallottino or Rix and consisting in supposing that an Etruscan formula corresponds to a Latin or Italic or Greek formula for circumstantial reasons, is more tautological because discarding linguistic bases a priori, one has less elements at disposal (it is supposed that the circumstantial reasons must be always searched together with the linguistic etyma). > According to Lejeune, there are 2 Venetic words that may be explained > by comparison with Germanic alone, although in general Venetic appears > to be very close to Latin: > .an.s'ore.s <->? Gothic 'ansts' (grace/favour) , and > SSELBOISSELBOI <->? Gothic 'silba' (self) > Any others in mind? *mainly* by comparison with Germanic. Add: 'frivi', 'teuters', 'kvidor', 'verkvaloi' and many Personal names (Tival-, Crumelon-, Raupat-, Lem-on-, Qualt-, Ege-t-, Urkl- etc.) for which there is the circumstance of the cognominatio by synonymy (as well as in Etruscan, on my mind). As for the common ancestors of Etruscans and Rhaeti, I never formulated even the question, because I am yet too involved in gathering epigraphic data. However your suggestions on the chronologies are very interesting. Adolfo Zavaroni From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 23 21:43:10 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 23:43:10 +0200 Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <006a01bebce8$580f8800$063aac3e@ida.bt.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, petegray wrote: > Jens said: > > [In Sanskrit] zero-grade thematic verbs have the same > > history as the thematic aorists ... [etc, deriving them from a long chain > of reformulations: middle > middle +t > (reinterpreted as active) > > (extension by analogy to all other persons) > (reinterpreted as imperfect) > > (re-creation of a new present).] > Apart from the superficial implausibility of all this, and the fact that > other aorists were not reformulated as imperfects, and did not create new > present tenses, where is your evidence? > Peter Dear Peter and colleagues, I do not think the chain of reformulations is longer than many other stories generally accepted (or even as long as some known to be true). For the type _tuda'ti_, the key example itself has apparently replaced a nasal present still seen in tundate and Lat. tundo. Strunk has shown that nasal presents go with root aorists, thus we would like to derive tuda'ti from an original root aorist if that is in any way possible. And of course it is. Likewise we would like to have a root aorist beside the nasal present vinda'ti (Avest. vinasti shows the older unthematicized form), and so we have a strong motivation to derive the thematic aorist a'vidat from a root aorist. Now, the only difference between the structures tud-a- and vid-a- is that the former is synchronically a present stem while the latter is an aorist. I see little difficulty in a change from "aorist _atudan_" to "imperfect _atudan_". If "turn" can come to mean "become", why can't "strike one time" come to mean "strike in the situation at hand" which is a much smaller change? A parallel change has apparently occurred in Ved. de'hmi 'form, knead' and le'hmi 'lick' which, in view of the nasal presents seen in e.g. Lat. fingo, lingo, also look like old aorist stems. That should be no great surprise, for the functional change is quite small: it only takes the use of the aorist form as an imperfect, then the rest follows by itself. I wonder how else anybody would understand these data - except by ignoring their being just that. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 23 22:13:24 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 00:13:24 +0200 Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <001001bebc92$fc7621c0$60e6abc3@ida.bt.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, petegray wrote: > I (Peter) wrote > >>> ... at first a tenseless verb was used with endings -m, -s, -t >>> and so on. > Jens said: >> ... what does "at first" mean here? > I meant only "prior to the time when tense was marked morphologically." If > you wish to take issue with me, you must also take issue with Friedrich > Mueller (1857), Thurneysen (1885), the detailed proof by Kiparsky in > Watkins' *verb* 45; Bruggman, Kieckers, Burrow, Martinet, Kurylowicz, > Erhart, Wright, Brandenstein, Szemerenyi, Beekes, Baldi, and others. > [...] There are other voices, speaking against this view, but they are > few: Herbig (1896), Hattori (1970), Manczak (1980). Your posting also > recognised the existence of these tenseless forms in -m -s and so on. > Jens said: >> If the tense markers such as the primary *-i >> and the augment *e- were once independent words, how can we know they are >> younger than the person markers? > The formation is younger, not necessarily the elements. Bingo, I guess we agree - and so do most of the above-mentioned authorities. Watkins of course has even pointed out _what_ the augment was before it came to mark past tense in an obligatory way in some (most? all non-Anatolian?) of the daughter languages, equating the *e- as he did with the Luvian sentence opener a-. Since the Hittite opener is nu- and Old Irish has an empty preverb no- (nu-) in the imperfect doing much the same job as the augment, there is good reason in calculating with two temporal particles meaning 'now' and 'then'. But I do not think this calls for a time when the tenseless (and moodless) injunctive was _alone_ - although it does not exclude that either. But at any rate we seem to agree that the primary forms and the augmented preterits must have existed as two-word juxtapositions before they were univerbated. It looks much like the story of the determinate adjective of Baltic and Slavic which is quite parallel and would be accepted as inherited, were it not for very the different sandhi rules that reveal that the univerbation had not yet occurred in Proto-Balto- Slavic; still, the collocation is inherited as a fixed series of two separate words. > (I said): >>> thematic - >>> or especially sigmatic - aorists may be later than athematic and asigmatic. > Jens replied: >> Thematic yes, ... But >> there is no indication that the sigmatic aorist is an innovation; > Perhaps I misunderstand you. It seems to me that a formation + > + is necessarily derivative, and that the primary form is > + < ending>. But is that not like saying that a given noun is older than the plural of the same noun? Does that make much sense? Can't a speaker of a language make derivatives from stems as soon as they arise? (I grant of course that he could not do it before.) > Jens went on: >> It must >> once have had a special function, and I suppose it was inchoative (the >> aorist corresponding to the sk^-presents). > The -sk^- presents are not normally incohative in IE, except in Latin. We > should not read back into PIE the situation we find in the languages with > which we are most familiar. Hittite uses -sk- for an iterative/durative; > Tocharian for a causative. Possibly the iterative /durative is more > original, as there are traces of it in Homer as well as Tocharian. I guess the widespread iterative value of sk-formations has started with those that were reduplicated. The Lithuanian st-presents are also inchoative. > Likewise your connection of -s- aorists with -sk^- presents is not regular > anywhere. Many (if not most?) in Latin have -v- perfects, suggesting the > root was a vowel or a laryngeal (e.g. creH-sco, gnoH-sco). Some have > reduplicated forms (disco didici). LIkewise, aorists in other IE langs do > not show the connection you suggest. No, not regularly, I know, but often enough and in archaic-looking examples enough to make it, in my estimate, an archaism you cannot disregard. [...] Cheers, Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 23 21:58:22 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 16:58:22 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <006901bebce8$5702fa00$063aac3e@ida.bt.net> Message-ID: Actually, it's not unfortunate in that Etruscan am- may have been borrowed from IE and then borrowed into Latin as amicus, etc. So the IE origin of ambi- is not the point. The point is if it's possible that Etruscan am- --provided it means "to be with, accompany, etc." might be a verb based on ambi- or something similar >[re: the link between Latin amicus and the ambi- root] >Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the ambhi- root has wide attestation: >Latin, Greek, Armenian, Albanian and with syllabic /m/ Old Indic, and >Celtic. Pokorny relates it to the ambo root. >Peter Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From fortytwo at ufl.edu Sat Jun 26 03:11:24 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 22:11:24 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > Not much of an answer, I'm afraid. The "passive" interpretation of > ergativity was based squarely on morphology, with no attention to syntax > -- even though a passive is a syntactic form. More particularly, it was > based on the confused and erroneous notion that a grammatical subject > must always stand in the same case. To look at it another way, had Europeans spoken ergative languages, they might've analyzed accusativity as "antipassive". -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 26 14:54:50 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 09:54:50 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Friday, June 25, 1999 11:33 AM > On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> Even if the earliest morphemes of language were not recoverable as >> you would maintain, logic tells us that monosyllables would have, at >> least, predominated. Larry responded: > I'm afraid that "logic" tells us no such thing. This is no more than a > wild guess. Pat writes: It is an inference from the fact that all complexity in this universe is based on simplicity. Pat wrote: >> The syntax of these monosyllables would have had to convey whatever >> grammar the language had at that point; and this would certainly >> resemble languages which are currently termed "isolating". Larry responded: > An isolating language is indeed isolating: Pat interjects: Incroyable! Larry continued: > no dispute there. But even a > monosyllabic language need not lack inflections altogether: there exist > languages with internal inflection, as in English `sing', `sang', > `sung'. Pat responds: 1) English is *not* monosyllabic; 2) The variation i-a-u is *not* an internal inflection but rather a phonological response to now missing former inflections; 3) No monosyllabic language could "afford" to assign inflectional meanings to vowels in CVC syllables because the number of available monosyllables would be unreasonably and impractically reduced. 4) If you still maintain that internal inflection happens in monosyllabic languages, an example from a monosyllabic language might be more convincing. Pat wrote: >> I prefer (though, of course, you and many others may not) to >> distinguish the terms: "isolating", referring to a language for >> which we can reconstuct no flectional or agglutinating stage; and >> "analytic", for a language we can. Larry responded: > Bizarre. What is the point of trying to classify languages on the basis > of what we can reconstruct for their ancestors? Pat writes: Singularly odd! Does historical linguistics really have a point? Hmmm! Pat wrote: >> Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same >> way we have no data on IE but, by analysis, we can reasonably form >> an opinion as to what IE must have been like. In the same way, we >> can analyze current linguistic data, and form an opinion as to what >> earliest language must have been like though, I admit, the process >> is much more doubtful. Larry responded: > Hardly comparable. With PIE, we are reconstructing only 2000-3000 years > earlier than our earliest substantial texts. Trying to reconstruct > 50-150,000 years back is a whole nother ballgame. Pat writes: That is your a priori belief and, we have seen, that it cannot be reasonably supported. Pat wrote: >> I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in >> linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to >> transitive constructions: >> Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >> will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. >> Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >> will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. >> However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb will be interpreted as an >> activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B Larry commented: > No, not at all. The facts vary from language to language. In Basque, > for example, the absolutive is interpreted as the performer of the > action if the verb is intransitive, as the patient if the verb is > transitive. Same appears to be true of Dyirbal. Pat rejoinds: Comments such as these are unresponsive to the question of some "transitive constructions" being labeled *ergative*. I proposed a useful employment for the term "ergative language", the appropriateness of which you and Ralf-Stefan seem to doubt Pat continued previously: >> whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. Larry responded: > I take it you've never come across Spanish, Italian, Russian or Latin. > Spanish: `S/he has seen the film.' > Latin: `S/he saw Caesar.' > Accusative noun, verb, no overt subject, perfectly normal. Pat rejoinds: I do not see a 'funny face' so, temporarily, I will assume that you are serious about these remarks. "Overt" means 'open and observable', and the overt subject of the Spanish phrase is "he/she" indicated by -0 on [ha]; of the Latin phrase, 'he/she' indicated by -(i)t. I would think you might have understood that I was referring to languages which do not code the subject with affixes on the verb. Pat continued previously: >> I would characterize Language A as (at least, essentially "ergative"). Larry asked: > But which languages are like this? >>> I know no Sumerian. But, speaking generally, the `passive' >>> interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years >>> ago. Pat responded previously: >> Perhaps to your satisfaction but not to mine. Larry commented: > Not much of an answer, I'm afraid. The "passive" interpretation of > ergativity was based squarely on morphology, with no attention to syntax > -- even though a passive is a syntactic form. More particularly, it was > based on the confused and erroneous notion that a grammatical subject > must always stand in the same case. Pat responds: In the sentence mentioned above: "noun(B)+abs. verb", which is interpreted as an 'activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B' --- this construction perfectly meets the definition: "a construction in which an intrinsically transitive verb is construed in such a way that its underlying object as\ppears as its surface subject".; accordingly, it is "passive". Larry further commented: > For Basque, and for other ergative languages, the "passive" view of > transitive sentences can be shredded, point by devastating point. [ moderator snip ] Pat responds: Perhaps we should reopen the question of where you have "shredded, point by devastating point" the view that "for Basque(, and for other ergative languages,) the "passive" view of transitive sentences". I saw nothing that I recognized as doing this in your Basque grammar. Pat wrote previously: >>>> I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and >>>> transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship >>>> (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, >>>> IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the >>>> core verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance >>>> to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner >>>> of an intransitive verb of motion. Larry responded: >>> This may or may not be so in some ergative languages, but it is >>> certainly not true for ergative languages generally. Pat questions: And on what basis would you assert that? Larry mentioned: > In Basque, for example, intransitive subjects (absolutive), transitive > subjects (ergative) and direct objects (absolutive) are all equally > optional: > Gizonak mutila jo zuen. > man-the-Erg boy-the-Abs hit Aux > `The man hit the boy.' > Gizonak jo zuen. > `The man hit him.' > Mutila jo zuen. > `He hit the boy.' > Jo zuen. > `He hit him.' > All perfectly normal in context. Pat comments: Keine Endung ist auch eine Endung. Surely you must have run across that someplace. And your translation of "mutila jo zuen" as '(he) hit the boy' is not preferable to 'the boy was hit'. > [on my (Larry's) observation that children acquiring English do not go > through an ergative stage] Pat commented: >> I am sure you are better read on child language acquisition patterns >> than I. Based on what I have observed personally, I doubt your >> assertion but if studies have shown this (could you name one?), how >> can I dispute it. Larry responded: > We now have a vast body of data on children acquiring English. And I > know of no study, not one, which recognizes an ergative stage during > acquisition. Pat previously continued: >> A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so >> far as I would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. Larry responded: > Yes, sure, but a single datum proves nothing. Children at the two-word > stage also say things like `Mommy get', meaning `[I want] Mommy to get > the ball.' This should be impossible in an "ergative" view. Pat rejoinds: If it were "a single datum", you would not have so readily agreed. It is a common pattern of construction. I am also at a loss to see why 'Mommy get' (which I would rather interpret as 'may Mommy get *something*' is "impossible in an 'ergative' view". Zero is, after all, not zilch. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From jer at cphling.dk Sun Jun 27 23:54:36 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 01:54:36 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan quoted Larry Trask to have written on Sunday, June 20, 1999 7:31 AM: [...] >> [S]peaking generally, the `passive' >> interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years >> ago. [...] Dear discussants and List, pardon the intrusion, but this has always been a great question in my head: Has the passive interpretation of the ergative really been disproved? Does it not still provide a smooth and unproblematic answer? And are not passive circumlocutions known to underlie some of the cases of ergative structure arising in the light of historical records, as e.g. in Indic? Was the discrediting not rather aimed at making the passive understanding synchronically valid? Of course that is not sensible, for it is only when a passive periphrasis has lost its marked status as a passive that it can be perceived as the "normal" verb which is then construed with an ergative syntax. If the old normal verb disappears, and a new way of expressing the passive - used when that is meant - if created, one would presumably have to speak of an ergative structure. It is my impression that the fierce opposition against the passsive analysis of the ergative has often (mostly? - always?) been part of a semi-political crusade against the desire to explain everything in terms of linguistic history. And, of course, if one does not care about the origin of the ergative structure, there is no point in deriving it from something different from what it is in pure synchrony (actually there is no point in deriving it at all). But if one _does_ want to find out how it came into being, is the passive solution not still the best guess around - and is it not known to be true in a number of cases? A truly innocent question for information: Are there other avenues that are _known_ to have led to the creation of an ergative than the one starting from an old passive? Jens From jrader at m-w.com Mon Jun 28 08:41:50 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 08:41:50 +0000 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Charles Li and Sandra Thompson's _Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar_ (1981) is bulky (691 pages) and, as I recall, hardly touches on issues such as formation of compounds, which play a great role in Standard Chinese. Jim Rader > [Patrick Ryan:] >>> If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or >>> Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian >>> or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. >> Actually, I think it may well be the case for Chinese. I have a copy >> of Chao's _Mandarin Primer_ (336 pages), which has a Chapter III - >> Grammar, beginning on page 33, and *ending* on page 59. I can >> compare this to Forbes' _Russian Grammar_, which contains 436 pages >> of grammar and indices. > It is hardly reasonable to adduce one small and elderly primer of > Chinese and compare it with a large reference grammar of Russian. > In any case, I have seen at least one very large reference grammar of > Mandarin, though I can't recall who wrote it. > Larry Trask From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Tue Jun 29 18:00:50 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:00:50 -0700 Subject: 50% Spanish or German, 50% Chinese Message-ID: Dear Rich & IE-list subscribers: At the risk of beating an undead horse, i would very much like it reiterated that not all of us have software capable of recognizing the means by which some lucky subscribers' software can encode diacritics and other expanded character sets. And worse, some of us have software that recognizes such codes, but interprets them quite differently from the way they are intended. For instance, the software we have here at SCU automatically converts all such codes into representations of various Chinese characters. The result is that i have recently received many postings including extended and richly-exemplified discussions of Spanish vocabulary, and most of the words in question have been printed half in Spanish and half in Chinese, to the point that i have been unable to make any sense out of the posting at all, and have regretfully decided i must automatically dump & ignore the whole discussion. I've recently begun noticing similar problems with postings in German. People, i'm very happy for you if your servers can handle expanded character sets. But frankly, that sort of thing isn't as useful as some people think it is, especially when not EVERYBODY has access to such things. Please, out of compassion for your less well-endowed (or differently-endowed) colleagues, try to restrict yourselves to the basic ASCII character set when posting. Thank you! Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** [ Moderator's comment: I have pointed this out in the past, and been roundly excoriated for my point of view, taken somehow to be "English-only". I will once again suggest that we adopt a modified TeX-like accent-writing system, in which the accent (in the typographical sense, which includes umlaut/diaeresis/trema and the like) is written next to the character affected. (In TeX systems, it must precede, but I think that context can disambiguate for human readers.) Should I send out a list of the TeX conventions, for those unused to them? --rma ] From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Tue Jun 29 18:08:38 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:08:38 -0700 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World Message-ID: Pat Ryan writes: >> Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same >> way we have no data on IE To which JoatSimeon at aol.com responds: > -- this statement is incorrect. PIE was spoken 5000 years ago and the > earliest written examples of IE languages date to the 2nd millenium > BCE. > There is a gap of no more than a few millenia. > The earliest human languages were spoken -- using a minimal estimate -- > at least 50,000 years ago. Probably considerably more. > This is several iterations more temporal distance than between us and > PIE. I think this misses the point of what Pat was saying. At least, it misses the point *i read into* what hann was saying. What i understood in Pat's statement was that we have no overt, explicit, readily-available data on `the earliest human language'; but then, we don't have any such data on PIE, either; everything we have on PIE has to be starred because it's reconstructed, ergo hypothetical. Which is certainly true. There is no PIE corpus any more than there is a Proto-World corpus. I would, however, reject any suggestion that our knowledge of PIE is ipso facto on a par with our knowledge (or lack thereof) of `Proto-World'. Though i admit frankly to being little more than an amateur at this game, i am quite confident of *most* of what we claim to know about PIE. Although i'm not prepared to go as far as Calvert Watkins (i think it was?) who composed a fable in PIE, i certainly do not doubt that, in principle, it could be done with our current state of knowledge. Whereas i regard `Proto-World' as little more than an entertaining fantasy. Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 05:17:57 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 00:17:57 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 1:54 AM >> proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >> Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same way we >> have no data on IE > -- this statement is incorrect. PIE was spoken 5000 years ago and the > earliest written examples of IE languages date to the 2nd millenium BCE. > There is a gap of no more than a few millenia. > The earliest human languages were spoken -- using a minimal estimate -- at > least 50,000 years ago. Probably considerably more. > This is several iterations more temporal distance than between us and PIE. So what? It only requires us to expand our universe of applicable data. The idea that vocabulary is irretrievably lost is jejeune. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 05:20:57 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 00:20:57 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Nik and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Nik Taylor Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 2:15 AM > "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. > Oh? So then, Latin is ergative? You can have sentences like "Marcum > videt" = "[he] sees Mark", which is an accusative and a verb, and > nothing else. Yet, Latin is clearly not ergative. If you and Larry Trask believe this, be my guest. The subject is incorporated in the verb, and this objection is, at the best, naif. [ moderator snip ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jun 29 10:36:23 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:36:23 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <001c01bebfe3$d901ae40$029ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [responses to selected points only] [on my examples of languages which can delete subjects] > "Overt" means 'open and observable', and the overt subject of the > Spanish phrase is "he/she" indicated by -0 on [ha]; of the Latin > phrase, 'he/she' indicated by -(i)t. I would think you might have > understood that I was referring to languages which do not code the > subject with affixes on the verb. OK, then -- try Japanese. Japanese does not code subjects in the verb, and yet omission of the subject is perfectly normal in Japanese, but an object is still interpreted as an object. [PAR] > In the sentence mentioned above: "noun(B)+abs. verb", which is > interpreted as an 'activity is performed by an unspecified agent on > B' --- this construction perfectly meets the definition: "a > construction in which an intrinsically transitive verb is construed > in such a way that its underlying object as\ppears as its surface > subject".; accordingly, it is "passive". No, not so. See below. [LT] >> For Basque, and for other ergative languages, the "passive" view of >> transitive sentences can be shredded, point by devastating point. [PAR] > Perhaps we should reopen the question of where you have "shredded, > point by devastating point" the view that "for Basque(, and for > other ergative languages,) the "passive" view of transitive > sentences". I saw nothing that I recognized as doing this in your > Basque grammar. That's probably because I haven't written a Basque grammar. I have, however, written elsewhere on this point. [on my Basque example] >> Mutila jo zuen. >> `He hit the boy.' [PAR] > Keine Endung ist auch eine Endung. Surely you must have run across > that someplace. And your translation of "mutila jo zuen" as '(he) > hit the boy' is not preferable to 'the boy was hit'. Sorry, not so -- not so at all. In English, the utterance `He hit the boy' is *only* possible in a context in which `he' has already been identified: otherwise it's gibberish. And the same is true of Basque : it is only possible in a context in which the identity of the hitter is already known, and otherwise it's gibberish. In no context whatever could it be interpreted as `The boy was hit'. There *must* be an identified hitter in the discourse. To express `The boy was hit', Basque uses other constructions. One possibility is . This is literally `They hit the boy', and it can be used to mean this, when the identity of `they' is known. But equally it can mean `The boy was hit', in a context in which the identity of the hitters is unknown. In this case, it is functionally, though not formally, identical to English `The boy was hit'. But Basque also has an overt passive: . This means literally `The boy was hit', and it can be used with no hitter identified. Moreover, this construction does not allow the addition of an overt agent: the Basque passive permits no agent. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jun 29 12:37:57 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 14:37:57 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <001c01bebfe3$d901ae40$029ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >Pat responds: >1) English is *not* monosyllabic; >2) The variation i-a-u is *not* an internal inflection but rather a >phonological response to now missing former inflections; ????? Good heavens ! The variation i-a-u *is* an internal inflection, synchronically and diachronically, and just nothing else. What are you talking about ? >3) No monosyllabic language could "afford" to assign inflectional meanings >to vowels in CVC syllables because the number of available monosyllables >would be unreasonably and impractically reduced. >4) If you still maintain that internal inflection happens in monosyllabic >languages, an example from a monosyllabic language might be more convincing. I'm not sure what you mean by monosyllabic language. If this is a language where every *word* may consist of one and only one syllable, morphology sebsu stricto being absent from the language, your constraint does seem to make some sense; such languages, where no syllable may be regarded as functional (as opposed to autosemantic) are, however, quite rare and I'm not sure that they exist at all; if, however, monosyllabic means that every *morpheme*, lexical or grammatical, will consist of one syllable and one only (and, vice versa, every syllable will have some autonomous meaning or function), a phenomenon which does occur quite frequently, Classical Tibetan may come close; and Classical Tibetan does have ablaut. >Pat wrote: >>> I prefer (though, of course, you and many others may not) to >>> distinguish the terms: "isolating", referring to a language for >>> which we can reconstuct no flectional or agglutinating stage; and >>> "analytic", for a language we can. >Larry responded: >> Bizarre. What is the point of trying to classify languages on the basis >> of what we can reconstruct for their ancestors? >Pat writes: >Singularly odd! Does historical linguistics really have a point? Hmmm! Standard morphological (technique-) typology is strictly synchronic, and this is the way this terminology is generally used. It is not unthinkable, and possibly even useful in some respects, to introduce a new terminology here which does reflect what may be known about the diachrony of a given language. So, speaking of "isolating (but former agglutinative)" lgs., or "flectional (but formerly isolating) ones" may be useful in the context of diachronic typology. However, this is not the general use of these terms and if we want to reflect diachronic knowledge in out typological terminology we should devise new and unambiguous terms. Using the old labels with new contents is misleading and confusing, and there is already enough confusion in linguistic terminology. >>> whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. >Larry responded: >> I take it you've never come across Spanish, Italian, Russian or Latin. >> Spanish: `S/he has seen the film.' >> Latin: `S/he saw Caesar.' >> Accusative noun, verb, no overt subject, perfectly normal. >Pat rejoinds: >I do not see a 'funny face' so, temporarily, I will assume that you are >serious about these remarks. >"Overt" means 'open and observable', and the overt subject of the Spanish >phrase is "he/she" indicated by -0 on [ha]; of the Latin phrase, 'he/she' >indicated by -(i)t. I would think you might have understood that I was >referring to languages which do not code the subject with affixes on the >verb. No, it was not clear that you were referring to this kind of languages. Let's have a look at one of those, though: KhalkhaMongolian (no subject affixes on the verb): Nom chamd yavuulav. (He, she, it, someone, nobody, I, we, you and whatnot) -"book (indefinite acc.)", "to-you", "sent". (Someone) sent you the book. "Someone" is not the translation, but the dummy for every agent you wish and which can be made clear by the context; it is overtly expressed by nuffin'. The extra-syntactic context, that is. A perfectly normal sentence in context. It is true that Khalkha does use the personal pronouns in examples like this to disambiguate, but it doesn't have to. The construction is certainly not ungrammatical. Stefan Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jun 29 12:43:11 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 14:43:11 +0200 Subject: indoeuropean In-Reply-To: <001701bebdb4$362f8740$94c14d0c@com> Message-ID: >Stefan Georg wrote: >>...Other languages have replaced this >>apparently oldest word for "hand", to wit Latin manus, Gothic handus, >>Baltic and Slavic *renka/ronka (from a verb meaning "to grasp", cf. >>Lithuanian /rinkti/. The limited distribution of this core-vocabulary item >>in IE has once given rise to the bromide that the early Indo-Europeans did >>have feet but no hands (mocking at linguistic palaeontology, of course). >Correction: Slavic *renka/ronka means "arm", not "hand". The word for "hand" >in Russian is /kist'/ - looks like it wasn't lost there after all. That's a late metaphor, since the basic meaning of kist' is "tassel, brush, grape athl.", so basically sthl "the end of a lengthy object" othl. In other Slavic languages the anatomical meaning has hardly developed at all, cf. Bulgarian /kiska/ "bunch (of flowers)", Serbo-Croat /kishchica/ " a kind of brush", Slovak /kyst'/ "tassel", Polish /kiSC/ "bunch othl." Moreover, while I know Russian speakers to resort to this term when having to refer to the equivalent of English "hand" in cases of potentially harmful ambiguity (though most of the times I witnessed it /kist' ruki/ "k. of the arm" was the expression), I will be tremendously surprised to learn that this is after all the normal, unmarked, generally used Russian word for the lower part of our upper extremities. I doubt it. Ah, I see you may be playing with the idea that /kist'/ goes with *ghes-r/to- ??? Not possible, because of consonantism and vocalism (and semantics). Chance resemblance. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 29 15:13:43 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 10:13:43 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <199906231526.RAA13082@astor.urv.es> Message-ID: Lo siento, Ich spreche kein Deutsch! Se me hace que dice que no había escuchado ese uso de "hijos". Mi suegro es agricultor en Costa Rica y llama "hijos" para los retoños de plantas como el banano [que se siembra con retoños en vez de semilla]. He escuchado ese uso entre muchos latinoamericanos, por ejemplo para los "spider plants". Vástago, para mí, es la talla de cualquier planta en cualquier etapa de crecimiento. Curiosamente, en Costa Rica el vástago de maíz se llama "chingaste" --ya que en Náhuatl [según una explicación] chincaztli está relacionado con el verbo para cortar. >Es tut mir leid, aber ich habe noch nie das Wort "hijos" in dieser Bedeutung >gehört! Es wundert mich nur so; umgekehrt aber schon: vástago >M.R. >>original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant >>(which used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work >>in a metaphorical sense. >>Rick Mc Callister Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 [ moderator re-encoded (experimental) ] Lo siento, Ich spreche kein Deutsch! Se me hace que dice que no hab{\'i}a escuchado ese uso de "hijos". Mi suegro es agricultor en Costa Rica y llama "hijos" para los reto{\~n}os de plantas como el banano [que se siembra con reto{\~n}os en vez de semilla]. He escuchado ese uso entre muchos latinoamericanos, por ejemplo para los "spider plants". V{\'a}stago, para m{\'i}, es la talla de cualquier planta en cualquier etapa de crecimiento. Curiosamente, en Costa Rica el v{\'a}stago de ma{\'i}z se llama "chingaste" --ya que en N{\'a}huatl [seg{\'u}n una explicaci{\'o}n] chincaztli est{\'a} relacionado con el verbo para cortar. >Es tut mir leid, aber ich habe noch nie das Wort "hijos" in dieser Bedeutung >geh{\"o}rt! Es wundert mich nur so; umgekehrt aber schon: v{\'a}stago >M.R. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 29 15:15:51 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 10:15:51 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <006e01bebdac$53cb2780$4239ac3e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: It's an interesting metaphor I was also interested in why the "masculine" form manus and not *mana? >Rick asked> any ideas why manus is feminine? >"Hand" is feminine (so I have heard) in a overwhelming number of languages >that have grammatical gender, just as "foot" is masculine in a very large >number. There might be a deep psychological thing here, about receiving >and giving, which betrays an even deeper psychological thing connecting >grammatical gender with biological gender. >Peter Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jun 29 15:49:55 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 16:49:55 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 28 Jun 1999, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > pardon the intrusion, but this has always been a great question in > my head: Has the passive interpretation of the ergative really been > disproved? Does it not still provide a smooth and unproblematic > answer? And are not passive circumlocutions known to underlie some > of the cases of ergative structure arising in the light of > historical records, as e.g. in Indic? There are two separate issues here, the synchronic one and the diachronic one. (1) Is a particular ergative construction "really" passive in nature? (2) Does a particular ergative construction descend by reanalysis from an earlier passive? For the diachronic question (2), the answer "yes" has been defended in some particular cases, including Indo-Iranian. But a passive origin for the Indo-Iranian ergative constructions has also been disputed, and I am not aware that there exists a consensus among specialists. Since Indo-Iranian is a rare case in which we have millennia of documentation of the intervening stages, and since the right answer to the question is still not obvious, then it must be very much harder to answer the question in respect of other cases for which little history is available. At present, there appear to be few cases in which the origin of an ergative construction is fully understood and beyond controversy. It is interesting to note that, in Bob Dixon's classic 1994 book `Ergativity', the chapter on the appearance and disappearance of ergativity is the briefest and most diffident. Dixon states, on p. 189, the following: "It is certainly the case that *some* ergative constructions have arisen through reinterpretation of a passive." [emphasis in the original] He cites Indic and Iranian as cases in point, but admits, correctly, that this majority view has been seriously questioned by some scholars. Dixon also notes Polynesian, frequently also cited as an instance of passive-to-ergative, but concludes that the evidence is conflicting and that the interpretation is not secure. But Dixon also cites examples of ergative constructions which, in his view, have very clearly *not* developed from passives, but from other constructions. His examples are Hittite and Pari. For the synchronic question (1), I may again quote Dixon, arguably the leading specialist in ergativity on the planet, again from p. 189: "There are very few people who would, today, seriously promote the view that ergative constructions are `really passives'." I can endorse this statement. In all the cases I know of, there exists no evidence supporting the view that an ergative is a passive, and there is often plenty of evidence against it. > A truly innocent question for information: Are there other avenues that > are _known_ to have led to the creation of an ergative than the one > starting from an old passive? See Dixon on Hittite and Pari, and see also my article in the Frans Plank volume `Ergativity' (AP, 1979). While I'm here, I will note that Dixon also cites what he regards as clear examples of languages in which ergativity has partly or wholly disappeared after being very prominent at an earlier stage. His examples are Australian, Sino-Tibetan and Mayan (p. 193 ff.) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 29 16:54:17 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:54:17 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <37715D09.6440@tin.it> Message-ID: What are the various similarities that have been postulated between Etruscan and Anatolian languages? All I've seen so far are a couple of lexical items and one or two suffixes. I know vitually nothing about Anatolian languages, so it's not like I could spot them myself :> Lemnian DOES seem to be a different language from Etruscan, although my completely subjective reaction to side-by-side comparisons of vocabulary is that the difference is along the line of that between Spanish and Portuguese. I am not, however, taking into account the other items for which no comparison has been made. There are also some lexical items in Etruscan common to both Greek and Latin and not all these seem to be borrowings from Greek. BTW: Whatever happened to the idea by Starostin et al.[and commented on by AMR & Sheveroskin] that Etruscan might be a Caucasian language? [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 19:56:24 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:56:24 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> Jens said: >>> If the tense markers such as the primary *-i and the augment *e- were once >>> independent words, how can we know they are younger than the person >>> markers? I said: >> The formation is younger, not necessarily the elements. Jens said: > Bingo, I guess we agree Not necessarily. Other origins for the primary -i have also been suggested, such as the deictic -i found in words such as Gr. nuni (< nun) , and appearing in a range of IE langs. There has even been a suggestion that it was a locative. I said: >> Perhaps I misunderstand you. It seems to me that a formation + >> + is necessarily derivative, and that the primary form >> is + < ending>. Jens said: > But is that not like saying that a given noun is older than the plural of > the same noun? No. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 19:28:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:28:14 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I said: >> In some parts of Sanskrit literature, it is the aorist which is [the >> equivalent of Greek perfect], not the perfect. Elsewhere aorist and perfect >> are in practice indistinguishable, and the perfect drops out of use. Nath gave a full reply (for which, thank you - the details are helpful) and asked: > Which parts of Sans lit? Please be specific concerning times, genres etc. This distinction of the aorist from the imperfect and perfect as the tenses of narration is very common in the Brahmana language (including the older Upanishads and the Sutras) and is closely observed. Violation of it is very rare. Earlier, in the Vedic hymns, the same distinction is prevalent, but is both less clear and less strictly maintained. The aorist can even be used where a present would be expected. In the later language the perfect is simply a preterit or past tense equivalent with the imperfect and fully interchangeable, and sometimes co-ordinated with it. Different authors appear to prefer different tenses. Older grammars (e.g. Whitney), modern grammars by Indian linguists (e.g. Misra) and modern lingistics books (e.g. Hewson & Bubenik "Tense and aspect in IE") all say the same kind of thing. > I don't see any parts of Sans lit in which aorist has resultative meaning. An example from the RV (sorry I don't have the exact reference): putrasya na:ma grhanti praja:m eva anu sam atanat. "He gives the son's name; and thus _he has extended_ his race." I happily grant that there might be distinctions; but if there are, they are subtle, and not present in all cases. This does not weaken my argument that Sanskrit and Greek do not agree in the meaning and the function of these tenses, even if they do agree on the formation. Those books of PIE (or of IE languages, such as Baldi's recent one on Latin) which read the Greek situation back into PIE, do so on the basis of one language only, and in my opinion (which is often wrong, but seldom humble), this is an unscholarly prejudice. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 20:07:55 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 21:07:55 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: >> English `sing', `sang', `sung'. > Pat responds: > 2) The variation i-a-u is *not* an internal inflection but rather a > phonological response to now missing former inflections; Its origin does not affect how it operates today. It remains an "internal inflection" now wherever it came from. And actually, despite some text books, this pattern is indeed a direct survival of the PIE ablaut. IE roots of the kind CRC had the ablauts CeRC, CoRC, CR.C. The first appears in the Germanic present, the second in the past singular, the third in the past plural and the past participle (remember that PIE /o/ appears as /a/ in Germanic). After standardisation of the vowel of the past, we find in modern German: werfen warf geworfen helfen half geholfen beginnen, begann, begonnen and singen, sinnken, springen, trinken, rinnen, spinnen etc etc etc and in modern English: sing sang sung sink sank sunk etc etc etc etc. Some Germanic ablaut is indeed the result of "vowel harmony" with a vowel in an ending which has since been lost - but this example is not one. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 19:49:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:49:35 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Jens said: > I wonder how else anybody would understand these data - except by > ignoring their being just that. Alas, Jens, I do not see data, but hypothesis and ideology. The data is that some IE langs use nasal presents for a particular root where others do not, so your evidence from Latin cannot count for much in Sanskrit. The data is that root aorists are associated with a variety of present formations, including nasal infixes. The hypothesis which has become an ideology, is that all root aorists must have had a nasal present. For example, you said: > Strunk has shown that nasal > presents go with root aorists, thus we would like to derive tuda'ti from > an original root aorist if that is in any way possible. I see no reason to, since I do not share your ideology. You may or may not be right - the important thing is that what you offer is not data, and so you should not insult those of us who do not agree with it. You said: > Likewise we would like to have a root aorist beside the nasal present > vinda'ti ... and so we > have a strong motivation to derive the thematic aorist a'vidat from a root > aorist. Traditionally, these are taken from different roots. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 19:34:39 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:34:39 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Ed connected Latin amicus and ambo, and suggested a derivation of them both from Etruscan. Max and I both pointed that ambo has a good PIE pedigree, so this can't work. Ed then said: >And I don't see why any relationship with 'amicus', 'amare', etc. should be >excluded a priori: .... Couldn't it be a double >transfer: early Lat./IE 'amb(i)-' > Etr. 'am(e)-' > later Lat. 'am-'? Anything's possible! But it's easier to take the word we know to be IE as IE, and leave open the possibility of an Etruscan origin for amicus, if you want to explore that. Don't be mislead by the initial "am-". In ambo it derives from syllabic /m./, which cannot be the case in amicus. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 21:25:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 16:25:19 -0500 Subject: Ergative vs. accusative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 10:50 AM > Pat responded to Larry: >> I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in >> linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to >> transitive constructions: > [1] >> Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >> will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. > [2] >> Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >> will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. > [3] >> However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb >> will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified >> agent on B > [4] >> whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. > All well and good, so far as the first two sentences are concerned. However, > what you said about combining this verb with the patient alone simply isn't > true. Some ergative languages happily omit the agent, others do not. So > what I've numbered [3] above will be legal in some ergative languages but not > in others. > Conversely, [4] is perfectly grammatical in many accusative languages. > Couldn't think of an example good enough to convince you. But look at > this post. Must've seen stuff like this before, right? Well, I agree with your first comment. But *most* ergative languages treat the agentive as a missible adverbial adjunct of the verb. Perhaps there may be a question of these languages being "truly" ergative? I am unaware of any accusative language in which this contsruction is grammatical. As you know by now, Larry indicated that verbal inflections should not be considered an expression of the subject in languages like Latin. I consider this position unjustifiable. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 21:40:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 16:40:31 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Richard M. Alderson III Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 1:15 PM > This flies in the face of reality. Let's take an example from Latin, an > easy example of a language with accusative morphology *and* syntax: > Amicus videt. "The friend sees." > Amicum videt. "(Some unspecified one) sees the friend." > Amicus videtur. "The friend is seen (by an unspecified agent)." > There is nothing ungrammatical in the sentence "amicum videt". If I would have meant noun(B)+acc. verb+infl., I would surely have written that. The -t expresses the nominative subject in your sentence. > This, of course, assumes that the verbs in question are transitive. If they > are *intransitive*, then your fourth example is correctly labeled as > ungrammatical, By the logic you seem to what to employ, it would not necessarily be: Romam eo. > but your third is ungrammatical in the sense you assign to it; it could only > mean that B is the *subject* of the verb (whether performer of the action or > entity in the state) in a language with ergative morphology and syntax. Sorry, that is simply incorrect. See Thomsen, p. 186: Suku-bi u{3}-ul-gid{2}, 'after their food portions have been measured out' ... Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 22:58:12 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 17:58:12 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Stefan Georg Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 3:10 PM [ moderator snip ] > Having to be rendered by the passive in English is not the same thing as > "being passive in nature". Pat responds: How about explaining "passive in nature"? Is that a Platonic idea? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 23:16:37 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 18:16:37 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Stefan Georg > Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 2:20 PM > Try Li/Thompson: Grammar of Mandarin Chinese, and tell us whether you find > all their observations and grammar points condensed in Chao's primer. > As for primers, I have here a Russian primer of about 60. pp. > To share an anecdote: a teacher of a teacher of mine used to confine his > Sanskrit lectures to one (short summer) semester only "Sanskrit *ist* nicht > l"anger", he used to say, and if you look at Mayrhofer's masterly condensed > grammar, one gets the impression that this is true. However, it keeps > nagging at me what might have ridden Wackernagel to fill his tons and tons > of paper with nothing but - Sanskrit grammar ????? > Please, Pat, don't tell us that the "complexity" of languages is measured > by the thickness of volumes devoted to them. there are primers, > phrase-books, Hippocrene drivel dictionaries, moderate textbooks, reference > grammars and huge encyclopedic grammars. One can write 50 pages on Chinese > as well as 600 (meaningful and relevant pages, that is). Pat responds: Well, on page 40 of Chao's Mandarin Primer, are listed "Affixes": 11 are listed; of these 6 qualify as related to "inflections" : modal -m(en), phrase marker -le; completed action -le; progressive action -j(y/e); possibility or ability -de; subordination -de. Undoubtedly, a historical grammar might provide a few more but I consider this a pretty simple system. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jun 30 10:16:33 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 11:16:33 +0100 Subject: `cognate' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This posting will not be news to the linguists on this list, who may prefer to stop reading at this point, unless they want to offer criticisms of the definitions below. But I have noticed that a significant number of non-linguists on this list have apparently misunderstood the sense of our technical term `cognate': many of them appear to believe that `cognates' means something like `words of similar form and meaning in different languages' -- which, of course, it does not. I hope it may be considered appropriate and helpful, therefore, if I post the entry for `cognate' from my forthcoming dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics. This has not yet gone to press, and I am still willing to accept suggestions for revisions, though I may be unable to consider large revisions. ************* *cognate* 1. Narrowly, and most usually, one of two or more words or morphemes which are directly descended from a single common ancestral form in the single common ancestor of the languages in which the words or morphemes are found, with no borrowing. For example, English and German `father' are cognate, being descended from Proto-Germanic *, and both are more distantly cognate with Spanish , Irish and modern Greek , all `father', all of these being descended from PIE *. 2. Broadly, and less usually, one of two or more words which have a single common origin but one or more of which have been borrowed. For example, English , Old French `jail', Spanish `cage' (Old Spanish ), Basque `hut', Occitan `cage' and Basque `cage' are all ultimately descended from an unrecorded Latin * `small enclosed place', but only the French, Occitan and Spanish words are narrowly cognate: the English and Basque words have been borrowed from Old French, Old Spanish and Occitan, respectively. Note: some linguists object to the use of the word in the second sense. 3. [erroneous] A label improperly applied to items of similar form and meaning in languages not known to be related, when these are presented as candidates for possible cognation. Common among linguistic amateurs, this objectionable usage is not unknown even among linguists, but it should be avoided: items cannot be labelled "cognates" until a substantial case has been made that they genuinely *are* cognate. ************* Other entries in the dictionary, of course, stress the fallacy of regarding mere *Anklaenge* as evidence for anything. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Jun 30 14:44:14 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 16:44:14 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Let me briefly comment upon some of the recent arguments: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so far as I > would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. Thjis surely is not ERG-like! It prestent tense, we ould hvae "me hurts - Tommy does it" (or so) which shows that "me" still is in teh ACC case (without AGR on the verb - "-s" has a "dummy agent" as a trigger. The same is true with structures like German "mich friert" etc... > (3) > However, in Language A, > noun(B)+abs. verb > will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified agent-- This is true for only some ERG systems. In such cases, the verb very often gets a plural morphology to install AGR with a "hidden" agent. In many other ERG systems, the ommission of the "agent" leads to new instransitve stzrictures with the inference ABS > AGENT (cf. I-ERG boy-ABS bring > boy-ABS come etc.). Discussing the possible PASS background of ERG structures, JEns finally asks: > A truly innocent question for information: Are there other avenues that > are _known_ to have led to the creation of an ergative than the one > starting from an old passive? Sure, there are plenty such avenues! Most of them have to do with the Silverstein Hierarchy (or its expansion). The less a potiential agent in (stronger) transitive scenarios is thought to bear inherent agentive features, the more it becomes likely that this "light agent" is marked by something that strengthens its agentive role. Some options are: (alienable) genitives (which can be extended to "heavy agents" on an inalienable basis), loctives (esp. with very light (or secondarily lightened) agents or weather phenomena etc...), instrumentals that are metaphorized to "agent" markers in the context of anthropomorphization), true "agentive" markers that are grammaticalized from e.g. a deicitic source, topic markers... Another possibility (though related to the strategies mentioned so far) is the reanalysis of 'active' structures in an ergative perspective (note that I do not want to suggest any 'active' typology for IE here, see my ealier postings): the S-split would then be harmonized on an S=0 level. All these strategies are based on the semantic or functional grading of the agentive (in terms of the manipulation of "lightness" and "heaviness"). Naturally, ERG techniques can also evolve from a special 'treatment' of the objective: One of the most prominent one is that of syntactic and/or pragmatic foregrounding which means that O is syntactically referred to as an intransitive S. Such a technique may be equivalent to passive strategies, however, this is only ONE of the many possible inferences. The syntactic/lexicical interface is touched upon when causatives of intransitives form the basis for newly established ERG features: Here, the morphosyntax of the causer can be introduced in the paradigm of other 'true' agentives via analogy. Finally, agreement strategies may play an important role in the game. If, for instance, agreement is coupled with some kind of person hierarchy the presense of any SAP in a clause may condition agreement irresepctive their functional or semantic role. Hence, a scheme nSAP:A > SAP:O would necessariliy produce an erg-like AGR pattern (in case AGR becomes active), whereas SAP:A >nSAP:O would produce ACC-AGR. ERG AGR patterns may also result from the reinterpretion of clausal layers, e.g. the structure SV // AOV could be read as SV // A[OV] which means that O becomes some kind of closer attribute to the (participle-like) verb... Wolfgang [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From fabcav at adr.dk Tue Jun 1 06:40:31 1999 From: fabcav at adr.dk (Fabrice Cavoto) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 08:40:31 +0200 Subject: SV: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Has anyone given any evidence for ergativity in pre-IE yet? [Fabrice Cavoto] No, but the question has been debatted many times, already by H. Pedersen (1907). But I totally agree with you that there is no way to see in IE the features that normally are needed to claim that a lgge. is ergative, so IE, at least at its latest stage, was not ergative. The interesting question is to try to see if it ever has been, and what Pedersen (and others after him) did was to try to determine features that could be TRACES of an anterior ergative type. Of course, even if someone should find uncontroversial traces, this would not automatically mean that IE once was ergative, but it could mean that it had developped an ergative structure in specific parts, or on the contrary that it had retained those features there: we can't know. Also it might be right that just like pure ergativity is not found, pure accusativity might not be found neither, so the supposed traces of ergativity in IE should not imply that they are traces from an older stage. From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Jun 1 08:38:35 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 03:38:35 -0500 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: petegray wrote: > For example, the common (in both senses) pronunciation > of -au- as /o:/ is "extremely well attested". Yet in Romance the vowel > seems to have been not /o:/ but short /o/, Certainly not in Spanish, at any rate. causa became /ko:sa/, to /kosa/ (short /o/ became /O/), which survived as /kosa/, had it been /kosa/ in Vulgar Latin, it would've become /kOsa/ in Old Spanish, and /kwesa/ in Modern Spanish, which did not occur. *Cuesa is not a word. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Tue Jun 1 19:06:16 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 12:06:16 -0700 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically >> in which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act >> like nouns" is completely unjustified! to which Nik Taylor responded: > Not entirely so. One cannot say, for example, *the he. To the best of > my knowledge, of languages with articles, none of them use them with > pronouns. In addition, pronouns usually (always?) cannot have > non-predicate adjectives, "old man" is acceptable, "old he" is not. >From the point of view of syntactic/grammatical theory, pronouns are routinely treated not as pro-`nouns' but as pro-NPs. Hence the difficulty of collocating them with adjectives or determiners, since in constructions like `the old man' `the' and `old' are assumed to be *inside* the NP. If you mention an old man early in a discourse context and later refer to that same old man as `he', `he' is replacing the entire NP `an/the old man', not simply the noun `man'. >From this point of view, the one pronominal element that in normal English usage is literally a pro-`noun' is the indefinite `one', as in `the one i saw yesterday'; `the *old* one (as opposed to the young one)'; etc. Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From colkitto at sprint.ca Wed Jun 2 05:50:20 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 01:50:20 -0400 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: >I have not been asserting that languages "become more complex, less >ambiguous, and more expressive". I have asserted only that the >proto-language, which was simple, became more complex, less ambiguous, and >more expressive over time. R.M.W. Dixon suggests in his recent book "The Rise and fall of Languages" that once the language facility was "discovered" by humans, language would have developed rapidly, possibly in the space of a generation or two, and the end result of that development would have been quite complex, comparable to modern languages. Whether this development took place once, or several times, is currently beyond our capabilities to reconstruct. Robert Orr From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jun 1 06:00:03 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 08:00:03 +0200 Subject: Syllabicity In-Reply-To: <374DE8D9.B0113098@ufl.edu> Message-ID: >"Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically in >> which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act like nouns" >> is completely unjustified! >Not entirely so. One cannot say, for example, *the he. To the best of >my knowledge, of languages with articles, none of them use them with >pronouns. Since articles are determiners, and (personal) pronouns used for anaphora, any referent of a personal pronoun is, in discourse terms, determined by definition (the speech act participants are determined, better individualized by default), in unmarked usage. To use a determiner on an inherently determined constituent would thus be pleonastic, to use an indefinite article (an "indeterminer" ???) contradictory. >In addition, pronouns usually (always?) cannot have >non-predicate adjectives, "old man" is acceptable, "old he" is not. I forgot. Silly me. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From fabcav at adr.dk Tue Jun 1 06:13:42 1999 From: fabcav at adr.dk (Fabrice Cavoto) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 08:13:42 +0200 Subject: SV: SV: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>From yours and Larry's statements, it certainly sounds like ergativity >is a feature that you can add to and take away from any language, and >when it's not there, the language has the default type of accusative. [Fabrice Cavoto] This is certainly not what I ment. You can't 'just add or take away' ergativity from a lgge. Observing it, you see if the lgge. you are dealing with is ergative or not, or if it has some ergative features restricted to some specific parts (as the continuum to which Dr. Wolfgang Schulze refers to) or not. I know that some do consider the one or the other type as the 'default-type'. I only can agree with this when speaking of structures within the SAME lgge., f.ex. if the shift to the other type is found only as an additional marking for a specific part of speech. So I agree with you that it is not correct to say that 'when a lgge. is not ergative, it has the 'default accusative type''. From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Jun 1 06:24:44 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 01:24:44 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Nicholas Widdows wrote: > Possibly some descendants of Pre-Proto-World have by chance preserved > against all entropy some features of PPW; such as CV morpheme pattern. But CV can also be the result of CVC pattern. Chinese, for instance, lost many syllable-final consonants, altho it's by no means CV, it's close. > I'd > imagine all its descendants had an equal stake in this lottery, so why > didn't CV happen to be preserved in Inuktitut or Ge^-Pano-Carib or > Gunwingguan or Gur, rather than -- remarkable coincidence -- the two most > "ancient" languages we can read, in the jejune sense of ancient meaning a > mere 97% of the distance from PPW. Perhaps it is just co-incidence. Whatever PW was, whether it was CV (my suspicion, given that that's the simplest structure), in the time period involved between PW and Proto-Nostraic, CV could've easily become CVC, and then back to CV, among other patterns. And, of course, this is only a *reconstructed* form. We can't base proto-World on reconstructions that we're not even sure of yet. Nostraic, if it is a genuine family, still has a long way to go (from what I've seen of it) to be considered on firm ground. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 08:46:55 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 03:46:55 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Nicholas and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Nicholas Widdows Sent: Friday, May 28, 1999 10:27 AM > > languages like IE, > which have principally CVC roots, can be analyzed so that the CVC roots are > recognized to be the results of compounds of CV+CV elements in an earlier > (than Nostratic) language. Nicholas wrote: > Possibly some descendants of Pre-Proto-World have by chance preserved > against all entropy some features of PPW; such as CV morpheme pattern. I'd > imagine all its descendants had an equal stake in this lottery, so why > didn't CV happen to be preserved in Inuktitut or Ge^-Pano-Carib or > Gunwingguan or Gur, rather than -- remarkable coincidence -- the two most > "ancient" languages we can read, in the jejune sense of ancient meaning a > mere 97% of the distance from PPW. Pat comments: Only a very small number of the words in Egyptian appear as monosyllables (b, place); and most of the early Egyptian reconstructed monosyllables are inferred from the syllabic signs rather than clearly attested: e.g. *d, *hand (/ta/); *g, *basket (/nga/). In Sumerian, many of the apparent monosyllables correspond to less simple roots in IE, so that Cu may represent early *Co or *Ca/ow or *Co/uj. Simple CV roots do, perforce, have large functional loads in languages in which they are the predominant root form, with or without the mediation of additional features like tone but we have to try to distinguish between languages that are CV as a result of phonological degeneration like Chinese or arrested development like Sumerian. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 09:45:07 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 04:45:07 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Saturday, May 29, 1999 4:01 AM Pat asked: >> And, I perceive a difference between "Viele Hunde haben >> Schwa{"}nze" and "Hunde haben Schwa{"}nze" --- do you not? Ralf-Stefan answered: > Sure, but the latter could be conveyed by "Hund haben Schwanz", in > opposition to, say, "Dies Hund haben Schwanz", "Viele Hund h.S." etc. > pp.). If you need to disambiguate, you do, even if you don't have a > morphological plural in your language. Pat, rather surprised: I always thought "haben" was somehow a morphological plural. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 09:56:52 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 04:56:52 -0500 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Dear Vidhyanath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Saturday, May 29, 1999 3:34 PM > Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> Actually, if I had to summarize my argument against the consonantal nature >> of laryngeals in IE (except Hittite), I would say that the phenomena are >> reconstructable in terms of lengthened vowels so the presumption is that >> they were lengthened vowels, and the burden of proof is on those who propose >> their consonantal nature *in IE*. > Forms such as Skt aayunak suggest initial laryngeal, but it must disappear > in yugam, Lat iugum . What vowel does this? I am not knowledgeable enough about Sanskrit to really properly address your question. Why not describe the form and the point you are maing in greater detail? However, if you are suggesting that IE *yeu- should be recontructed as *Hyeu-, I believe that unlikely. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 1 08:45:22 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 10:45:22 +0200 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Nik Taylor Date: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 3:02 AM [snip] >However, that diphthongizing only resulted when it was /O/, descended >from Latin short /o/, long /o:/ evolved into /o/, which remained /o/, >thus ho:ra became hora, not *huera, while ossum (?) became hueso. /au/ >became long /o:/, so of course it wasn't diphthongized. /aurum/ became >/o:ru/, which naturally became /oro/ in Spanish and Italian. [Ed Selleslagh] Sp. hueso comes from Lat. os (gen. ossis), 'bone', not to be confounded with Lat. os (gen. oris), 'mouth'. The -o ending in Spanish is the result of blind analogy since it is normally the result of acc. -um (nom. -us) of o-stem words cf. lobo < lupus). Ed. From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 1 10:58:06 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 12:58:06 +0200 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: petegray Date: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 10:18 AM [Ed Selleslagh] I would like to add some comments even though I agree with almost everything you said: >There are several points in Steven's posting on Classical Latin which >require response. >Firstly, There is no need to suggest that Classical Latin was ever at any >stage actually spoken. It has its sources in many things, not least the >drive to produce a language as capable of great literature as Greek. We >can even trace in the literature the development of the so called Classical >Norms, as certain forms or constructions are felt to be in some way more >appropriate than others. The achievement of Vergil and Caesar (rather than >Cicero) is to write great Latin within the norms which had been established >for written literature over the previous hundred years. [Ed] Remember that Caesar usually spoke Greek with his family and friends. >We know that Caesar, Cicero and the rest spoke very differently from the way >they wrote (see Cicero's more intimate letters); and we know that the drive to >refine the language begins in earnest somewhere between Plautus (writing about >200 BC) and Terence (writing after the full impact of Greek literature has hit >Rome, and dying in 154BC). The spoken language continued as spoken language >does, with the educated people using some of the more "refined" forms in their >speech, but not all, while the less educated used few or none. >It is the connection of this spoken language to proto-Romance that is >puzzling. A simple equation of the two is not adequate, as it leaves lots of >problems. For example, the common (in both senses) pronunciation of -au- as >/o:/ is "extremely well attested". Yet in Romance the vowel seems to have >been not /o:/ but short /o/, and the original /a/ seems to have survived very >late - at least as late as the 5th century - for several reasons, not least >the French initial consonant in "chose" (co- would have given co-). [Ed] This may be somewhat less clear cut: actually, almost all French words that maintained the initial Lat. co- are Latinizing neologisms ('mots savants', some dating back to the early Middle Ages) that skipped the intermediate stages of French language development. There is an enormous lot of that in French in general (e.g. normal: mo?tier, Latinizing: monast?re). Some Lat. co- words gave c?- (cor > coeur) or cui- (coquere > cuire); an exception is Lat. coccinus > cochenille (incl. diminutivization), but that may just be dissimilation. Most original French co- words stem from Lat. cu-. >Likewise CL has sapere (short first e) but Romance points to sape:re. And >many more such examples. [Ed] Indeed. Probably the result of popular confusion and the Analogy Bulldozer. >Another problem is the remarkable uniformity of the Vulgar Latin texts from >the 3rd to the 8th centuries BC. It is scarcely conceivable that peasants in >Spain, France and Romania all spoke alike; yet they seem to have written >alike. So again, a simple equation of Vulgar Latin with proto-Romance may not >be adequate. [Ed] It is more likely that Vulgar Latin was a later written language based upon popular speech that continued to evolve throughout the Classical Latin period. There are more languages with more than one written language: e.g. New Greek (written Dhimotik? (D?motik?) = the official one since the early seventies, and Kathar?vousa, the archaicizing version used before, and still in some inscriptions: 'Ell?s, instead of Ellada), Norwegian (the story was already told here). In the Dutch speaking part of Belgium there is a tendency toward an intermediate written language, between the common denominator of the widely different dialects, and official Dutch (as determined by the Language Union of Flanders and Holland). Most politicians use it. In other words, I think Vulgar Latin may have been another attempt at unifying the language (by selection of common features in the spoken languages/dialects), but in another timeframe than CL (starting in the 3rd or 4th century A.D., when the disintegration of the classical world began). So, Proto-Romance, as the unique origin of Romance languages, may never have existed; the precursors of those languages probably were local Romance dialects, with local sub-and superstrata (e.g. in Castilian: Basque and Visigothic; in French (originally only spoken in the northern half): mainly Brythonic Celtic and some western Germanic. The example of causa > chose strangely looks like some Celtic mutation influence/contamination, which does not mean it must be). >However, the claim that Classical Latin is proto-Romance is yet more >difficult, or even far-fetched. There are too many things from >pre-classical Latin which have disappeared in the written language, but >resurface in both Vulgar Latin and Romance. The actual speech of the >Romans must have maintained these features through the classical period. [snip] > CL developed through the first century BC, and even Lucretius >(dies 55 BC) cannot be considered a model of Classical Latin. CL, properly >speaking, does have a very brief time span. This is another sign of the >fact that it is an artifical fashion, not an actual spoken language. [Ed] Actually, a language, even a written form of it, that lasts for 500 years or more without any evolution worth mentioning looks like a natural impossibility to me, especially considering the confusion of the time (migrations, mixing with people from a different language group, general illiteracy, no mass media, communications falling apart,...). So, after the 1st century A.D.it must have been a revered relic, as dead as the dodo. Ed. From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Tue Jun 1 10:54:40 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 12:54:40 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Peter wrote: > A couple of features explained by a theory of ergativity are: > (a) the identity of nominative and accusative for all neuters. > (b) the lack of a true original passive. > (c) the origin of the verbal endings (see Szemerenyi p 330 for a brief and > confusing summary) [Let me first ask the audience to excuse the format of my lasting posting [Re: accusative and ergative languages (May 28)]: I accidently hit the "send" bottom before having finished my mail and before having proof read the text [which is - viewing my bad English - a necessary step - sorry if some typos remain in THIS mail, too!]]. Now, let's turn to Peter's criteria for possible IE features of ergativity and check them with respect to what General Linguistics and Typology tell us about ergativity etc. AS I said in my last posting, a general definition of ACC vs. ERG should be based on the assumption that these phenomena do not represent categorial properties of a given language system, but reflect the behavior of certain (compatible) morphosyntactic and morphosemantic structures with respect to a) system internal relations, b) communicative conditions, and c) cognitive aspect of information processing and categorization. These parameters interact in a complex way and cannot be seen in isolation (except for analytic purposes); moreover, all of them are embedded into the historical dimension of language systems which renders a purely synchronic interpretation of such morphosyntatic features highly problematic. The general behavior of ACC and ERG can be formalizes as {S=A;O} for ACC and {S=O;A} for ERG which read: In an ACC stategy, the structures associated with the "grammatical" roles subjecective (S) and agentive (A) behave alike, wheras the objective (O) (clustered with the indirect objective (IO)) behave different. In an ERG strategy, it is S and O that behave alike, wheras A behaves different. I think, this formulation is on common ground. We should be aware of the fact that the above given formulae do not refer to a specific linguistic category such as NP or AGR. In my mind ACC and ERG strategies - often secondarily splitted up - dominate most of the the 'operating system' of a language that is those parts of grammar that control the linguistic interpretation of event experience in terms of 'sentences'. However, some of these linguistic categories are more likely to be effected by the accusative-ergatiev continumm (AEC) than others which can be explained by the assumption that the totality of grammar is prototypically organized: The more central a part of grammar is the more likely it is that it plays a crucial role with respect to the AEC. A problem of locating reconstructed paradigms on the AEC surely is that we do not deal with a homogenous 'synchronic' stratum but with different time layers: Parts of our reconstructed IE grammar may be relatively young, others much older (depending on the comparative evidence and on the time depth reached by documented sources). Let us check now some of the reconstructed paradigms of IE (we deal with some kind of internal functional reconstruction here): > (a) the identity of nominative and accusative for all neuters. It should easily come clear that this feature in itself does not have anything to do with the AEC. The only thing we can conclude from this is that true neuters rarely show up as agents (that they hardly ever played the role of a subjective (S) or agentive (A) except in a metaphorical sense). Neutral NPs hence are very likely to represents objectives (O). This is very natural - it tells us nothing about the AEC just because this feature does NOT refer to the discrimination of S, A, and O. What we get is: (1) NP[+neutral < -animate] > {O} But how NPs reflected S and A? Accrding to MY klnowledge there is NO evidence that intransitive NPs (i.e., S) ever behaved different from transitive NPs (i.e, A) with respect to CASE marking. Note that this does not touch the question of case marking itself! For nominal (!) NPs we get: (2) NP[+animate] > {S=A} [Note that I use 'animate' in a rather vague sense - I neglect a discussion of which underlying semantics of this cut-off point we should ascribe to IE] The problem of IE case inflection surely is that is seems rather atypical in a typologcal perspective (though NOT unattested elsewhere!). One point is that S and A both are marked or zero (as it is (lateron) the case for O, cf. (I neglect the dual here): (3) S [SG: O, *-s; PL: *-es] A [SG: 0, -*s; PL: *-es] 0 [SG: 0, *-m; PL: *-H2] The O-marker *-m seems to be a somewhat younger formation stemming from a directive or so that secondarily effected the neutral o-stems. The rise of O-marking via a directive (or, let us say, any 'locative') case is a typical strategy that has to be associated with the ACC strategy. Normally, it is labeled 'Differentiated Object(ive) Marking (DOM)' or simply O-split. It can be paralleled with the O-plit for instance in Spanish. In late IE, the marked variant of the O-split obviously had already been generalized (IF PL ACC *-ns stems from *-ms and this again from *-m-s, then the plural *-s-marker should be regarded as a relatively young phenomenon). For an earlier phase of IE NP inflection we can assume (I neglect the plural forms]: (4) S [O, *-s] INFER [+animate] A [0, *-s] INFER [+naimate] O [0] INFER [?animate] Evidently, this paradigm does not reflect any kind of ERG strategy. Such a strategy often has been inferred from the fact that the {S=A}-marker *-s seems to have something in common with the genitive (singular (!)) (*-es, *-os, *-s). From this some kind of 'genitivus-ergativus' had been reconstructed from Pre-IE. Naturally, a genitivus-ergativus is attested in a considerable number of languages (Yupik-Eskimo, Lak (East Caucasian), to name only two). However, again IE *-s does not behave ERG, even IF we can associate it with the genitive marker (singular): *-(e/o)s also encodes the S-function, which is ANTI ERG. I think it would be much better to propose a strategy of topicalization within the ACC (or 'neutral'?) paradigm for Pre-IE, cf.: (5) *NP[S]-s VERB < *NP[S]-s[TOP] VERB *NP[A]-s NP[O]-zero VERB < *NP[A]-s[TOP] NP[O]-zero VERB It would then be very temptive to relative *-s to the most natural means to encode topicality, namely to the *so- deixis (in {S=A}-function). Hence in Pre-IE a phrase like 'the woman went' would have been 'WOMAN(*-s) went', and 'the woman saw the tree' would read 'WOMAN(*-s) tree(-zero) saw' (lateron the transitive structure would have been changed to 'WOMAN(*-s) to-tree(*-m) saw'). Those NP that were zero-marked in {S=A} function obviously carried some kind of inherent topicality which did not necessitate an *-s-marking. To conclude this point: The noun inflection of IE does not show ANY trace of an ERG strategy, rather we have to deal with an ACC based topicalization that has its good parallel for instance in some Afro-Asiatic languages... > (b) the lack of a true original passive. This again has nothing to do with the AEC! If IE lacked a true passive the only thing we can infer from that is that IE once had been a role dominated language (see VanValin's 'Role-and Reference Grammar') that did not use fore- or backgrounding strategies. There are ACC languages with and without passives just as ERG languages with and without antipassives and/or passives... > (c) the origin of the verbal endings We have to distinguish 'origin' from 'function'! In a functional perspective, IE personal clitics ALWAYS show an ACC behavior: They are - as far as I know - NEVER conditioned by the O-role ('object', if you want). In order to clarufy this point cf. the following example from Lak (East Caucasian): (6) ta-na-l ZERO-at:-ay-s:a-ra na he-SA-ERG CLI-hit-PRES-ASS-1Sg I:ABS 'He surely hits me' [SA = stem augment, CLI = noun class I [+masc;+hum], ASS = assertive] Here, ZERO as well as -ra are triggered by the first person pronoun 'I' in objective function [note that the system of personal aggreement in LAk is much more complicated, so please do not infer from this example that Lak ALWAYS has O-AGR!). Nothing the like is known from IE. If we again look at my above given TOP-hypothesis, it comes clear, why: The clitic in the verb obviously marks the anaphoric slot produced by the TOP procedure, and this is ACC, cf.: (7) NP(S)(*-s)[TOP] VERB-AGR[TOP] NP[A](*-s)[TOP] NP[O](-zero) VERB-AGR[TOP] Note that (7) does not tell us about the formal history of the AGR-elements.If we look at the typology of the grammaticalization of AGR-paradigms, it becomes obvious that such paradigms hardly evolve at once: Rather, they start with one person (very often 1Sg) or the SAP-cluster (1Sg and 2Sg encoded by ONE morpheme) and gradually become generalized. For Pre-IE it seems probable to regard the 1Sg as a starting point: But IF the 1Sg marker is the grammaticalized form of the 1Sg personal pronoun (*-m etc.) then this does NOT force us to look for the same source regarding the other persons (esp. 2Sg.). It may well be that e.g. the 2Sg *-s stems from say a deictic paradigm... But again this is irrelevant for the AEC as long as AGR behaves in one direction, namely ACC in IE (the perfect(ive) markers do not change the picture). We could go one discussing the paradigm of personal and deicitic pronouns, traces of the discourse cohesion devices in IE, relativization strategies, word order etc. (what I won't do here). Whatever that basic strategies of IE morphosyntax and morphosematics had been: Neither its 'operating system' in its globality nor the relevant subparadigms show any convincing trace of {S=O;A} behavior [in case you know of one plase tell me!]. This does not mean that I regard ACC as being more 'natural' than ERG or so: both are two parallel options to which language systems refer to a different extent. What is surprising with respect to IE is the fact that it seems to have been quite radically ACC dominated. But explaining this finding is another story... Wolfgang -- [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From mclasutt at brigham.net Tue Jun 1 12:55:44 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 06:55:44 -0600 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Nik Taylor wrote: > "Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton" wrote: >> I'm sorry, Pat, but your statement about Evolution here shows EXACTLY why >> modern languages (and any other language we have any evidence of) are NOT >> evolving. > Actually, "evolve" is a neutral term, indicating mere change by the > accumulation of small scale changes. It is usually "survival > enhancing", at least in the short term, but can also refer to changes > that are neutral, or even harmful. But linguists should be very careful in distinguishing between the two words "evolve/evolution" and "change". We don't use the strict biological definition of "evolution" and any linguist who tries to do so is not going to be taken seriously. Linguistic "evolution" is that part of the history of language between the first human utterances and the stabilization of modern human grammar. It ended before the first recorded or reconstructed human languages. "Change" is what goes on now and has gone on throughout our recorded linguistic history. "Evolution" was the process of increasing complexity. "Change" shows no change in overall complexity, but additions and losses of different forms (words, structures, sounds). Ancient Sumerian is no more or less complex in its total grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) than is Modern English. There is a lot of change that has occurred between Proto-Indo-European and Modern English, but no evolution. John McLaughlin Utah State University From jrader at m-w.com Tue Jun 1 09:22:36 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 09:22:36 +0000 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: A minor correction to Larry's post: Mangue, the southernmost outlier of Otomanguean, was spoken in Nicaragua and Costa Rica but has been extinct for some time. Chiapanec was spoken in Chiapas but is also extinct. I don't believe any contemporary Otomanguean language is spoken east or south of Oaxaca, aside from very recent emigration. Even given the outlier Mangue, the geographical spread of Otomanguean is actually rather limited in comparison to families such as Athabaskan, Algonquian, Uto-Aztecan, and Maipurean/Arawakan--which makes the great internal diversity of Otomanguean all the more interesting. Jim Rader [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 1 16:08:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 11:08:01 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I don't know how natural alexandrine meter is. Histories of versification, which are generally written by poets or literary theorists, tend to be linguistically suspect. My understanding is that alexandrine verse can be seen as a stylization of earlier anisosyllablic epic verse which fixed the syllable count at 2 hemistychs of 7 syllables (if the last word had penultimate stress) or 6 syllables if the last word had ultimate stress (which is, of course, how French evolved). The earlier anisosyllabic epic verse, seen in Spanish cuaderna vi/a, is supposedly based on Germanic forms. As much as anything else, it seems like cramming 2 lines of ballad into one line [although the opposite is also claimed re ballad]. [snip] >Whatever the language has can indeed be used as raw material for the >culture. So the accentuation of English allows it to "naturally" fall into >iambic pentameter, French into alexandrines, Finnish into Kalevala metre, >Italian into Verdi libretti. OE and ON had their huge lists of battles, >seas, byrnies, and heroes, and used them to wonderful effect. Chinese could >be shimmeringly ambiguous, if they chose. [snip] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jun 1 18:17:56 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 14:17:56 EDT Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: >Patrick C. Ryan >I have not been asserting that languages "become more complex, less ambiguous, >and more expressive". I have asserted only that the proto-language, which was >simple, became more complex, less ambiguous, and more expressive over time. -- funny, you gave a disinct impression that you did. From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 1 17:35:31 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 18:35:31 +0100 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: Nik said: >pronouns usually (always?) cannot have > non-predicate adjectives, "old man" is acceptable, "old he" is not. English does it sometimes: do you remember the song, which I only partially recall, about "lovable you"? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 1 18:14:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 19:14:14 +0100 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: I (peter) said: > At the danger of being politically incorrect, I find different languages > differently "expressive"... Nicholas replied: > The languages do? Some prominent users do; and you get cultural traditions... > ... I don't think the _linguistic_ constraints had much of a part ... An interesting question, Nicholas. To what extent is the way a language actually works a function of the language, and to what extent is it a function of culture? It would be bizarre to pretend that nothing is lost in translation - traduttore traditore. It would be equally bizarre to pretend that all languages actually do express all ideas equally. The interesting bit is whether this difference is linguistic, or cultural. Latin which is recognisably Latin must express certain factors such as number and tense. I would say this is linguistic rather than cultural. German and French speakers are faced with the awful choice of socially marked second person pronouns; whatever the cultural origin of this, it remains a linguistic fact, albeit with entertaining and embarrassing social consequences. Of course there are also some factors in the actual use of language which are purely cultural, but to deny any linguistic factors at all seems rather to be overstating your case! Peter From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Jun 1 18:43:02 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 13:43:02 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Leo (mistakenly attributed by Pat to R-S): >> The lack of contrast between [phin] and non-existent *[pin] ([p] normal in >> _spin_) shows that aspiration is not significant in English, or in other >> words, that [ph] and [p] must be assigned to the same phoneme. Well and >> good. Knowing this, we can tell that [phaet] and [baet] are different >> words. But this does not mean that [ph] and [b], or /p/ and /b/, actually >> *have* meaning, as some of the unfortunate wording in Larry's dictionary led >> Pat to conclude. If they did, we'd have to say that /p-/ and /b-/were >> prefixes attached to the roots /aet/ and /in/. >Pat responds: >Sorry that my phrasing was such that obviously you and Leo thought that a >misinterpretation by me of the wording in Larry's dictionary had led to my >believing that phonemes have meaning. I do not believe that for any modern >human language. What does "modern" have to do with it? A human language is a human language... Leo (BTW, I'm also the one responsible for "Wir vielleicht schon...") Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Jun 1 19:34:55 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 14:34:55 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Leo spelled out one of his objections to Pat's analysis of 2.pl -te as identical with 3.sg. -t, except for stress accent: >> We both assume no more than one stress accent per word, don't we? If so, >> the problem is that it is at least *very* difficult to explain final _-e_ as >> the result of stress accent on that syllable (and you have said that more >> than once) if, at the same, *any* _e_ must be so explained (else it should >> vanish, n'est-ce pas?). And even if the augment is regarded as a prefix >> added later in some languages, *bherete must then have had three syllables >> with stress accent, else we should expect (in traditional terms) **_bhr.te_, >> with weak ("zero") grade of the root and zero grade of the thematic vowel. >> Instead, Greek _epherete_ and Skt. _abharatha_ 'ye carried' point to e-grade >> of the root and of the thematic vowel. >Pat responds: >One of the phenomena I believe I have identified in early language is that >the plural morpheme was, at one point, simply stress-accentuation. How odd then that the plural veb forms are not identical to singular ones escept for the accent. Ditto nouns. >It would make our lives easier if we could assume no more than one stress >accent per wood but I would not rule out a secondary stress-accent in a case >like _a{'}bharatha{"???}. Neither would I. >Yes, I believe that vowel retention is generally a function of stress-accent >but I find the explanation that *bherete "had three syllables with >stress-accent" ununderstandable in terms of what I think of as >stress-accent. I'm not claiming any such thing. But you have made a connection between the retention of _e_ and stress accent at whatever level. How is 2.pl. *_bherete_ possible in your theory unless it has three stress accents, quod Deus avertat? [Leo's questioning of Pat's identification of -t, -te as 'member of tribe' omitted] >Pat responds: >As to one of your points, I do not believe that earliest IE allowed a 3rd p. >inanimate subject of a non-stative verb; hence, no -*t referring to an >inanimate subject. Only animates "do things" which is not illogical if you >associate agentivity with intention. How so, if you are also claiming that PIE was ergative? In ergative languages, the morphological subject of an agent-patient sentence (barring "antipassive" or the like) is precisely the patient, not the agent. >I also believe that the IE reflexes of T{H}O properly (originally) refer >only to animate entities; a similar form, T{?}O (IE *dV) referred properly >to inanimate objects, and is the basis for neuters in -*d. We should then expect the two to be kept distinct, especially with primary endings: -ti contrasting with *-di. But it doesn't happen. >Regarding -*t and -*te, I do not believe that any grammatical morpheme in IE >can originally have had the form -*C since I believe that all grammatical >morphemes are originally grammaticalized -*Ce (at a minimum) non-grammatical >morphemes. On this basis, both -*t and -*te must derive from earlier -*tV. >In the absence of evidence to differentiate them, I assume a unitary origin. They have different meanings. The null hypothesis should therefore be that they are distinct, even if you are unable to find a phonetic distinction. Beliefs about the shape of free morphemes have nothing to do with the case. >For *te-w-to-, although we would both acknowledge -*to, I am not going to be >able to persuade you that a morpheme *te- could be the basis to which a >collective morpheme -*w was added --- in a paragraph or two because you are >unwilling to look beyond IE where *CeC roots are the general rule. It is my >belief that every IE *CeC root can potentially be analyzed into *CV + *CV, >and that these monosyllabic morphemes are recognizable is some early >languages: e.g. Egyptian , 'loaf', is cognate with IE -*dV, neuter >formant. You're right: you can't convince me. But not because I have any preconceived ideas about root shapes in PIE (not that I know of any *roots* that are that short). The problem is that your semantics are simply beyond the pale of anything that could be called linguistic *science*. Looking beyond PIE won't change that. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 03:58:40 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 22:58:40 -0500 Subject: Pronouns (was Syllabicity) Message-ID: Dear Nick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Nik Taylor Sent: Thursday, May 27, 1999 7:52 PM > "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically in >> which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act like nouns" >> is completely unjustified! > Not entirely so. One cannot say, for example, *the he. To the best of > my knowledge, of languages with articles, none of them use them with > pronouns. In addition, pronouns usually (always?) cannot have > non-predicate adjectives, "old man" is acceptable, "old he" is not. In my opinion, an IE form like *eme is analyzable as *e- + *me, where *e- is Pokorny's *3. e-. In addition, Pokorny lists forms from a reconstructed *eiso- such as Oscan eizois, presumably *ei- + so + . . . Then, of course, we have Latin iste, 'that of yours'. I cannot think of a case where "old he" would be preferred over "old one (masc.)"; that is perhaps why it is not attested. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Tue Jun 1 05:12:31 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 00:12:31 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > So you do not believe fully modern man was present 200K BP? You are > definitely in the minority here. 30K is the generally accepted value, I believe. PIE was spoken, what, about 8,000 years ago? Assuming language appeared 30K BP (and probably much earlier), PIE is still quite recent. > We do not need a time-machine to reconstruct IE, do we? Yeah, and look at this list. If PIE was unarguably reconstructed, there wouldn't be much of a list, now would there? Because of the fact that it was spoken just 8 millennia ago, or whatever, how much less certainty would there be about proto-World?! -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 1 09:35:11 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 04:35:11 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, May 28, 1999 2:42 AM >> Pat responded: >> I am well aware of this usage and terminology. Leo asked: > Is there some reason why you don't adhere to it? Some of your arguments seem > to depend on your *not* accepting it. Why don't you? Pat answered: I hope none of my arguments depend on individual usages of words (shades of Hegel!). And actually, I cannot think of a really good reason for me to continue a non-standard usage of the word 'semantic'; henceforward, unless I inadvertently regress, I will refer to lexical and grammatical differences. Pat continued: >> However, I fail to see how the points you have presented relate meaningfully >> to the point I am attempting to make. >> I claimed above that -*ter, the common component of 'father, mother, >> brother, daughter', is not coincidental but a regular component of basic >> nuclear family terminology. On the basis of words like *g{^}en6-ter- >> (procreator, father), I believe it likely that it should be interpreted >> as an agentive. But even if it were not agentive -*ter, it is beyond the >> bounds of reasonable scepticism to suppose that its multiple attestations in >> family member terminology is not analyzable as a suffix. >Leo objected: > My objection, originally, was precisely to the notion that it was an agent > suffix. I didn't mean to deny that there was a suffix, although I do wonder > whether that is the best analysis. A suffix on what? Pat answers: In these matters, it is always legitimate to "wonder". But I believe the roots can, in most cases, be plausibly identified: ye{'}n6ter is, I admit, difficult. Leo continued: > If the words were formed that way! But _papa_ ia every bit as much a > Lallwort as _mama_. Parents read amazing things into baby's babbling. Pat answered: >> And frankly, I am at a loss to see any problem with a reduced grade of >> the root preceding a suffix (agentive -*ter), which normally takes the >> stress-accent. Am I missing something? Leo countered: > I don't know. Why did you bring that up? Pat answers: Perhaps I misread something you wrote. I thought you had mentioned a difference of accent or unexpected stem-form. >> Pat, withdrawing: >> I refuse to get into another futile discussion of Lallwo{"}rter. Actually, >> one of the interesting arguments for monogenesis is the intriguing >> similarity of all over the world. Leo commented: > That say as much about babies and little about languages, or monogesis > thereof. Pat answers: I do not think 'withdrawing' is the correct characterization. I do not subscribe to the current theory of Lallwo{"}rter as I believe you do, and here we must simply agree to disagree since neither of us will be persuaded by the other. >>> Leo continued on a different topic: >>> I don't have Larry's dictionary. But I'll say this point blank: what he >>> gives is merely a characteristic of phonemes. Morphemes must consist of >>> one or more phonemes (despite the problem of "zero allomorphs"). It is >>> because of this that phonemes are the smallest units capable of *signaling* >>> meaning. But they are units of *sound*. It might be helpful if you >>> included Larry's *entire* comment, for what you're citing is simply *not* a >>> definition of a phoneme. See any manual of linguistics which actually >>> discusses the things! >> Pat, for Leo's edification: >> phoneme . . . n. In many theories of phonology, a fundamental (often *the* >> fundamental) unit of phonological structure, an abstract *segment* which is >> one of a set of such segments in the phonological system of a particular >> language or speech variety, ___often defined as 'the smallest unit which can >> make a difference in meaning'___. Leo commented: > Larry is cautious and trying to include as many theories as possible. But > "unit of phonological structure" refers precisely to the *sound* system. I > have never seen the phoneme *defined* anywhere as he does in the final > clause, although it happens to be a true statement, it's a characterization > rather than a definition. Unfortunately, it is misleading. In some of your > earlier stuff, you seem to have taken it to mean that phonemes actually > *have* meaning. And quite certainly you're wrong when you claimed that lack > of a difference in meaning must mean that the difference in sound *must* be > irrelevant. While I've quarreled enough with Lehmann, his idea that [e e: > {e}] became separate phonemes when they were no longer predictable, because > of changes in the accentual system, is good structuralist theory, and not > original with him. What happens, in a nutshell, is that the different vowels > are no longer predictable but instead signal whatever it was that the > difference in accent signaled, while it existed. Pat answers: I do believe there is a strong possibility that, in the very earliest stages of language, phonemes did have actual meanings but even by the time of CV roots, this association (if it ever existed a la sound symbolism) had been lost in terms of the basic meaning of these monosyllables (though it might linger on almost as a grace-note to the meaning in the form of nuances or emotional interpretations). Now, evidently, my early training in linguistics differed from your own since, as another wrote recently, this definition of phoneme has to be with the (once fashionable?) idea of minimal pairs. >> Leo responded re ablaut: >>> I have no idea whether it was a deliberate anything. All I know is that >>> short e alternates with short o, and that the two traditional kinds of long >>> e: alternate with long o:. The "lengthened grade" variety also alternates >>> with short e/o; the "natural long" ones deriving from vowel + laryngeal >>> alternate with traditional schwa. Once established, it could be exploited. >> Pat commented: >> And "exploited" it was, to provide a nuance. Leo responded: > Over time, often more. But that was over time. Leo, on "original" e:'s: > Indeed not. We must be talking past each other on this. But lengthened > grade does show ablaut. The word for 'foot' has Doric Greek nom. sing > _po:s_, which supposedly must reflect lengthened o: (other Gk. _pous_ can > derive from *_pod-s_. And the Germanic forms have generalized the o: form: > Gothic _fo:tus_, OE _fo:t_, OHG _fuoz_. Meanwhile, Latin has _pe:s_, which > could be from either *_ped-s_ or *pe:d-s_. Will that do? Pat, puzzled: Then how did "original" e: creep into the discussion? Do you believe that there could be two morphemes in IE, *CeC and *Ce:C, that differed **lexically** when *Ce:C is not the result of earlier *CeHC? >>>> Pat differed: >>>> IE "pronouns" in every significant way look and act like nouns --- with >>>> the sole exception that the inflections seem to be more conservative. >>>> Outside of a very few simple forms like *me, *te, *se, etc., which might >>>> slip in under the rubric of nominal, simple nominal and verbal CV-roots, >>>> which had wide semantic ranges, were *differentiated* by additional >>>> elements at a very early time --- at least in the languages from which IE >>>> derives. If we are unwilling to look beyond IE, then we must say, >>>> principally, that the simplest nominal and verbal root-form is CVC. >> Leo responded: >>> But there you have it! The IE pronouns neither look nor act like nouns! >>> Pushing it back to Nostratic doesn't change anything there, since you're >>> saying that they must have been different there too. >> Pat, hopefully not patronizingly, responded: >> A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically in >> which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act like nouns" >> is completely unjustified! Leo objected: > Not so. The morphology speaks for itself, so I'll do the syntax. If they > could, you could say: > *I want to meet the new her. > *I want to meet secretary. > *Poor he/him has to work on Saturday. Pat objected: I have heard equivalent sentences but, I admit, only in humor. Leo continued: > But you can't. Neither can you use interrogative pronouns like nouns, or > demonstratives, or indefinites -- there are a great many things called > "pronouns", and they behave differently from nouns in *many* languages. > No le veo. 'I don't see him.' *No veo le. > No veo a Carlos. I don't see Charly.' *No veo a le. > So no, pronouns need *not* have the syntax of nouns. They act different. Pat, more or less agreeing: But do you not think that where their employments differ, one of the major reasons is the typical brevity of many pronominal elements, and their encliticity? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Jun 2 09:28:38 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 04:28:38 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> -- this may be true, but it's utterly irrelevant to the languages under >> discussion here. All _extant_ languages are of the same general level of >> development, whether PIE or Esperanto. >> Any more "primitive" stage of linguistic development is lost. None of the >> languages of which we have records show any such 'simplicity'. They are all >> about the same, at the fundamental level of serving the purposes of human >> communication. > Pat responds: > "Irrelevant" must be your favorite word. What happened to your "*in any > era*"? Have you just dropped that idea without acknowledging how > wrong-headed it is? > What "extant" languages show is totally irrelevant to what they may have > been like in the far distant past. (a) Linguistics must procede under the assumption that the kinds of phenomena that we see today have always been that way. We cannot go around assuming that entirely unprecedented changes or features were the case centuries or millennia earlier. They might well have been, but, methodologicly speaking, *there is no way to prove that*. Any processes you do claim existed would be entirely lacking in empirical foundation, by definition, and thus subject to a high probability of error (here we're getting back to Aristotle's fundamental problem). (b) So, what extant languages show might well be entirely relevant, if there is no methodological means to reconstruct the protolanguage. When you are trying to describe a language, you have to know what it is first -- and when you're dealing with reconstructed languages, this is an iffy business at best. Also, if the known data about extant languages all disagree fundamentally with a hypothesis, it is the duty of the linguistic establishment not to accept that hypothesis as true unless further evidence comes along to reinforce it (which could happen). =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Jun 2 11:52:26 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 06:52:26 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Nik Taylor wrote: > "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> So you do not believe fully modern man was present 200K BP? You are >> definitely in the minority here. > 30K is the generally accepted value, I believe. PIE was spoken, what, > about 8,000 years ago? Assuming language appeared 30K BP (and probably > much earlier), PIE is still quite recent. There are about as many "generally accepted values" as there are people discussing the issue. The fact is, we (the linguistic community, the scientific establishment, whatever) don't really *know*. Sure, there are a lot of what are probably good *guesses*, but in terms of any rigorous analysis of empirical data (like trying to guess when language developed in modern man based on brain mass), no, there's not much of that. I've heard anything from a 500k years BP to what you now use, which is the most recent I've heard of any figure (not that that makes any difference in the matter). Estimates about when PIE was spoken (if we can call PIE a homogenous language at all), are similarly much debated, and with equal murkiness and generality in reasoning, often. Nonetheless, as for what I *believe* about the amtter (not what I can prove), I find it unlikely that PIE reflects much of any postulated ur-unity. >> We do not need a time-machine to reconstruct IE, do we? > Yeah, and look at this list. If PIE was unarguably reconstructed, there > wouldn't be much of a list, now would there? Because of the fact that > it was spoken just 8 millennia ago, or whatever, how much less certainty > would there be about proto-World?! Right -- I don't think anybody can honestly and believably claim that just by the methods of historical reconstruction we can actually know what speech-patterns those hunter-gatherers in the Caucasus, or in the Steppe, or wherever they were, were *actually* using sitting around their campfires. Don't get me wrong -- I think we can have a very good idea about it, but it won't be perfect. In other words, we *would* need a timemachine if we really wanted to know what they *actually* spoke, as opposed to our best guesses. =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From stevegus at aye.net Wed Jun 2 01:29:46 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 21:29:46 -0400 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the newperfect? Message-ID: > Didn't diphthongation in Spanish only affect "open /O/", not "closed /o/" > and wasn't /o/ from /au/ a "closed /o/"? My understanding is: Moving from Latin to Proto-Romance, differences in length were levelled, and in most cases they were replaced with differences in quality. Proto-Romance applied a simple rule to vowel length: each stressed vowel is long, each unstressed vowel is short. Latin /o/ and /u:/ > /aa/ in Proto-Romance [/aa/ here represents the sound of 'a' with a circle above it, or the backwards 'c' of the IPA] [ Moderator's note: Represented by [O] in (most versions of) ASCII-to-IPA transcription. --rma ] Latin /o:/ > /o/ Similar developments confounded /ai/ {ae} with /e/; /e:/ and /i/ fell together as /e/; /a/ and /u/ were unaffected. As to the fate of /au/; it seems to have survived to a late date in French, if their orthography does not mislead us, and it might. I think it survives today in Rumanian, and possibly Sardinian. Now, the point of the 'fuego' example was to show that CL -short- /o/ in -focum- gets diphthongized when it is stressed; so by the time this change was happening, it must have been treated as long. French and Spanish share a further development in the vowel that results from short /e/: -pied(e)-. Long -o-, of course, gets the same treatment when stressed, but the process seems to be unreliable even in the same words: -fortem- > -fuerte- in Spain, -fort(e)- in France and Italy. It seems to me, therefore, that this change was one that -could- at least happen sometimes to both /aa/ and /o/. The difficulty seems to me to revolve around the quality of the vowel resulting from /au/, and when the change took place. Since /au/ was always long in CL, if it became /o/ early on it seems likelier that it would have shared the fate of /o:/. On the other hand, the fate of /ai/ {ae} and the fact that it shares its fate with -short- /e/, though it too was always long in CL, might suggest the possibility that /au/ would also turn into a short vowel. At any rate, it seems likelier that the loss of /au/ occurred after the new diphthongs in Spain, Italy, and France came into being. Exceptions to the diphthongization might also come about because of reborrowing from the learned language; if the Latin-using monks were more interested in hours than Giovanni in the grapevines, their word for 'hour' might prevail over expected phonetic developments. -- Ante principium erat quaedam testudo; et sola fuit; et circumspicit, et vidit vicinam eius, quae mater sua erat. Et deposuit se super vicinam eius, et ecce: paruit ei in lacrimis quercum, quae omne die crevit, et tunc decidit, et fecit pontem. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 2 03:19:51 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 22:19:51 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Robert and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Orr Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 12:50 AM Pat wrote: >> I have not been asserting that languages "become more complex, less >> ambiguous, and more expressive". I have asserted only that the >> proto-language, which was simple, became more complex, less ambiguous, >> and more expressive over time. Robert commented: > R.M.W. Dixon suggests in his recent book "The Rise and fall of Languages" > that once the language facility was "discovered" by humans, language would > have developed rapidly, possibly in the space of a generation or two, and > the end result of that development would have been quite complex, > comparable to modern languages. Pat comments: I consider the idea that language was "discovered" absurd, and the idea that fully developed language took only a generation or two to appear: quite preposterous! What, pray tell, are the qualifications of R. M. W. Dixon? [ Moderator's reply: More than 30 years working in Australian languages, as well as other families in other parts of the world. You would do well to check out references such as this, his most recent book, before taking this tone again about *any* linguist, sir. Even those of us who disagree with his conclusions respect them, and his other accomplishments. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From Georg at home.ivm.de Wed Jun 2 07:21:03 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 09:21:03 +0200 Subject: Sociological Linguistics In-Reply-To: <005001beac13$6fba77c0$8d9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >Pat, rather surprised: >I always thought "haben" was somehow a morphological plural. Infinitive, Pidgin German (or rather: interlinear-gloss-German). I'm illustrating a language without morphological plurals expressing multitudes, remember ? Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Jun 2 08:39:29 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 03:39:29 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Nik Taylor wrote: > "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> unless, of course, you believe that God bestowed fully developed language >> on Adam, which belief would disqualify you from any rational discussion of >> the topic. > Why should that disqualify a person from "any rational discussion"? > Admittedly, it would make discussion a moot point, unless it were a > theological discussion on what kind of language God would've created. More to the point: seeing as how Mr. Ryan, convinced though he might be about the nature of early speech, has not yet provided any constructive evidence about what this might be, it seems that he is advocating something at least as rational as believing that God gave Adam human language fully developed, since there is no positive evidence for either*. Unless you can come up with some good hard soundlaws and provable cognates to show what Proto-World would be like, then it seems a little silly even to continue discussion of the matter. *(Interestingly, the Bible might actually disagree with the idea of language existing at the beginning fully formed, considering Gen 2:19, where God brings all the animals before Adam to see what he'd name them) >> I have asserted that early language, for any non-believer, would have had >> to have gone through a stage that was less expressive (more ambiguous) than >> languages of which we currently have documented information. > But, this is a moot > point. We cannot possibly reconstruct that far back. Even Nostratic, > if it is legitimate, would've been long past that point. Mr. Ryan's belief, whether or not it is correct, essentially, in its logical underpinnings, bears no qualitative difference from Aristotle's assertion that heavier things fall faster than lighter things. Aristotle's error was in not testing his proposition, in not having any empirical evidence to back up what his hypothesis claimed. Until Mr. Ryan can provide scientific evidence as to what the nature of Proto-World was like, his assertion will have as much scientific validity. (Again, this does not mean it's wrong; just that it's pointless to discuss the matter without further investigation) =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Wed Jun 2 09:12:35 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 04:12:35 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > In spoken American English final /-t/ often becomes /?/ > So can /kaen/ & can't /kaen?/ have to be distinguished by a combination of > stress & tone > I can go /aykaeGO/ with rising tone on the last syllable > I can't go /ayKAEN?go/ with rising tone on the 2nd syllable Not in any dialect of American English *I* know of... all varieties of American English feature unrelease of the stop there, which, though in some ways acousticly similar to [?], is not the same thing as [?]. The only case I know of where [?] is an allophone in American English is before syllabic nasals, as in "button". > Now, as a non-linguist, I don't know the > dynamics/inter-relationship of stress & tone but both tone and stress are > clearly involved --thereby creating a new complication. In most places, such features are not actually needed. In phrases like "I can go", the vowel is entirely eliminated, producing a syllabic nasal [ai kn, gou]. "can't" can't undergo this process of reduction, at least in my dialect. (Also, for me at least, this occurs to the extent that to use "can" with a full vowel is a mark of high stress, in which case I would likely be very clear in articulating the /n/ as opposed to the /nt/) But this doesn't really change the thrust of your point: that complexities in one area of a language, when reduced, will be compensated new complexities elsewhere. Here, morphosyntactic relationships become more complex as the former phonological distinctions become less so. =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Wed Jun 2 12:54:57 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 13:54:57 +0100 Subject: Cultural influence (was: Sociological...) Message-ID: Peter goes: >>> I find different languages differently "expressive" So I go: >>> I don't think the _linguistic_ constraints had much of a part So he goes: > Of course there are also some factors in the actual use of language which > are purely cultural, but to deny any linguistic factors at all seems rather > to be overstating your case! So I go: How curious that you read that so. I must admit that I did pause over the phrasing there, but let my second or third attempt through as reasonably unambiguous. I simply meant "I don't think they had _much_ of a part", and didn't want it to be read litotically as "I think they _didn't_ have any part". But litotes seems to be so ingrained in English that it's hard to avoid the imputation. (I'm reminded of the strange fact that in English "I don't like" means "I dislike", and that you have to labour and squirm to convey the simple meaning "it's not the case that I _like_".) Is there a bit of national character involved in this reading? Did American readers read it as litotes? So no denial intended, and no overstating. Peter quoque dicere: > Latin which is recognisably Latin must express certain factors such as > number and tense. I would say this is linguistic rather than cultural. > German and French speakers are faced with the awful choice of socially > marked second person pronouns It's rather like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: pretty and appealing like a soap bubble when you first read about it, and collapses if you touch it. What I would say is that _normally_ the specific linguistic features don't have a big influence on thought, though you can make them more important if you're shaping a cultural artefact. In English I feel myself thinking in terms of you:sg, you:du, you:pl, and T/V, and will commonly say "you two", "any of you"; I also have an almost grammatical difference between "this lady/gentleman here" (in earshot) and "that woman/man over there" that reminds me of Japanese. But I never feel the need to think of we:incl and we:excl. That is, my thought ranges over divisions that my language doesn't. If I was Indonesian I'd have and but no "we", and I'd have no grammatical tense or number; but I think I'd think about people and time and quantity much the same way I do now. Of course I'm not saying it's entirely invisible. The use of plural "you" as singular all over Europe, and even more so the proliferation of forms like and , must have been conscious on some people's part. Nicholas From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 2 20:04:40 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 21:04:40 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Wolfgang wrote a full reply to my suggestion of three places where IE might have been ergative. I appreciated the comments about the variation over time, and about the fact that languages are almost never purely ergative or accusative. I am responding to one point in particular. On the identity of nominative and accusative for all neuters, he said: > The only thing we can conclude from this is > that true neuters rarely show up as agents (that they hardly ever played > the role of a subjective (S) or agentive (A) except in a metaphorical > sense). Neutral NPs hence are very likely to represents objectives (O). > This is very natural - it tells us nothing about [where IE lies on a > continuum of ergativitiy and accusativity] Perhaps I fail to understand. Did you mean to count both subjective and agentive as "agents", and say that it was natural that inanimates should not play that role? If pre-IE had an animate / inanimate distinction, we can believe that inanimates might never or very rarely be agents, but it is more difficult to believe they were never subjects. I find it difficult to believe that in a language which produced PIE, Mr IE was unable to say to Mrs IE, "The is nice (or dangerous, or whatever)." It is precisely the use of an objective form for the subject-topic of a stative sentence which leads some people to argue that there are hints of an earlier ergative stage here. Have I missed something in your argument? Peter From edsel at glo.be Wed Jun 2 17:34:23 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 19:34:23 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Wolfgang Schulze Date: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 8:16 AM [snip] >Evidently, this paradigm does not reflect any kind of ERG strategy. Such >a strategy often has been inferred from the fact that the {S=A}-marker >*-s seems to have something in common with the genitive (singular (!)) >(*-es, *-os, *-s). From this some kind of 'genitivus-ergativus' had been >reconstructed from Pre-IE. Naturally, a genitivus-ergativus is attested >in a considerable number of languages (Yupik-Eskimo, Lak (East >Caucasian), to name only two). However, again IE *-s does not behave >ERG, even IF we can associate it with the genitive marker (singular): >*-(e/o)s also encodes the S-function, which is ANTI ERG. [snip] [Ed Selleslagh] Thank you for this illuminating contribution. May I add some thoughts? As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', which could just as well be called 'ablativus-ergativus', the genitive and the ablative both being 'pointers' to the origin of the action. Note the similarity of the Latin construction : passive + a(b) + ablative. So, it seems that the need for some (pseudo-?)ergative way of speaking is still lingering on in IE languages. In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also had an 'ablative meaning'!). Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 2 19:23:07 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 14:23:07 -0500 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? In-Reply-To: <37539C0B.7DF59CD9@ufl.edu> Message-ID: By the time became /ko:sa/, the long /o:/ vs. short /o/ dichotomy had become one of "open" /O/ vs. "closed" /o/ --hadn't it? Wouldn't /kausa, kauza, kawsa, kawza/ have gone through the intermediate step of /kowsa, kowza/ before becoming /ko:sa, ko:za/? I'm thinking of Portuguese causa /kawza/ > cousa /kowza/ > coisa /koyza/ >petegray wrote: >> For example, the common (in both senses) pronunciation >> of -au- as /o:/ is "extremely well attested". Yet in Romance the vowel >> seems to have been not /o:/ but short /o/, >Certainly not in Spanish, at any rate. causa became /ko:sa/, to /kosa/ >(short /o/ became /O/), which survived as /kosa/, had it been /kosa/ in >Vulgar Latin, it would've become /kOsa/ in Old Spanish, and /kwesa/ in >Modern Spanish, which did not occur. *Cuesa is not a word. [ Moderator's comment: Actually, it was Nik Tailor who wrote the more recent text above. --rma ] >"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father >was hanged." - Irish proverb >http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files >http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html >ICQ: 18656696 >AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 2 19:32:44 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 20:32:44 +0100 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: I said:: [Latin au > o: in "vulgar Latin", but often Romance seems to show au > O] Nik said: > Certainly not in Spanish, at any rate. causa became .../kosa/ > ...not.../kwesa/ . You could point to Old Spanish coa < cauda, too. There are cases where Romance derivatives show an original long o:, but I believe the cases of short O are more common. Note that the Latin /au/ survived in Provencal and Rumanian. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 3 00:22:11 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 19:22:11 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 2:34 PM >> Pat responded: >> One of the phenomena I believe I have identified in early language is that >> the plural morpheme was, at one point, simply stress-accentuation. Leo objected: > How odd then that the plural veb forms are not identical to singular ones > escept for the accent. Ditto nouns. Pat responds: Sometimes I believe you are merely pulling my leg. The phonomenon I think I detected in early language has nothing to do with singular or plural verbal inflections, which are much later. The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms of the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). Since early transitive verbal roots can be analyzed as *CV (object) + *CV (verbal idea), a pluralization of the verbal idea indicates repetition leading to perfectivity; the pluralization of the object indicates multiple objects leading to an interpretation of imperfectivity. Pat continued: >> Yes, I believe that vowel retention is generally a function of stress-accent >> but I find the explanation that *bherete "had three syllables with >> stress-accent" ununderstandable in terms of what I think of as >> stress-accent. Leo objected: > I'm not claiming any such thing. But you have made a connection between the > retention of _e_ and stress accent at whatever level. How is 2.pl. > *_bherete_ possible in your theory unless it has three stress accents, quod > Deus avertat? Pat responds: Then why write "had three syllables with stress-accent"? Spell out what you mean to say so that I will not have occasion to misinterpret it. There can be many explanations for the retention of the principally stress-unaccented vowels as you well know. The likeliest is that the period during which lack of stress-accent caused zero-grade stem forms had passed. Another: the necessity for differentiation of 3rd sing and 2nd pl. overrode normal patterns (if still operational). Etcetera. Leo, on another subject: > How so, if you are also claiming that PIE was ergative? In ergative > languages, the morphological subject of an agent-patient sentence (barring > "antipassive" or the like) is precisely the patient, not the agent. Pat responds: Are you just trying to create confusion? There is no law that in an ergative language any agreement markers on the verb *must* refer to the patient. Pat continued: >> I also believe that the IE reflexes of T{H}O (IE *tV) properly (originally) >> refer only to animate entities; a similar form, T{?}O (IE *dV) referred >> properly to inanimate objects, and is the basis for neuters in -*d. Leo replied: > We should then expect the two to be kept distinct, especially with primary > endings: -ti contrasting with *-di. But it doesn't happen. Pat responds: If the athematic primary and secondary endings referred to the ergative (in an ergative context) or the nominative (in an accusative context), i.e. where agentially referential, there would obviously be no need for an inanimate *-d(i). The only traces I see in IE of a reference to the patient in IE inflections is in the element *-dh(V)- occurring in the middle (PL T[?]SA, 'body, self'). Pat continued: >> Regarding -*t and -*te, I do not believe that any grammatical morpheme in >> IE can originally have had the form -*C since I believe that all grammatical >> morphemes are originally grammaticalized -*Ce (at a minimum) non-grammatical >> morphemes. On this basis, both -*t and -*te must derive from earlier -*tV. >> In the absence of evidence to differentiate them, I assume a unitary origin. Leo objected: > They have different meanings. The null hypothesis should therefore be that > they are distinct, even if you are unable to find a phonetic distinction. > Beliefs about the shape of free morphemes have nothing to do with the case. Pat rejoins: Oh, yes but they do. And please, let us not get into another sterile discussion of null hypotheses, for which five linguists evince six opinions. Pat continued: >> For *te-w-to-, although we would both acknowledge -*to, I am not going to be >> able to persuade you that a morpheme *te- could be the basis to which a >> collective morpheme -*w was added --- in a paragraph or two because you are >> unwilling to look beyond IE where *CeC roots are the general rule. It is my >> belief that every IE *CeC root can potentially be analyzed into *CV + *CV, >> and that these monosyllabic morphemes are recognizable is some early >> languages: e.g. Egyptian , 'loaf', is cognate with IE -*dV, neuter >> formant. Leo answered: > You're right: you can't convince me. But not because I have any preconceived > ideas about root shapes in PIE (not that I know of any *roots* that are that > short). The problem is that your semantics are simply beyond the pale of > anything that could be called linguistic *science*. Looking beyond PIE won't > change that. Pat responds: Semantics is in the eye of the beholder. For a look at what I believe are reasonable semantic relationships, see http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/ProtoLanguage-Monosyllables.htm#T ?O Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From ctp at germsem.uni-kiel.de Thu Jun 3 02:26:36 1999 From: ctp at germsem.uni-kiel.de (Christian Petersen) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 04:26:36 +0200 Subject: ... (dual forms) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Lieber Ralf-Stefan und Indogermanisten, unfortunately, I've not been able to pick the fruits of this list for a long time; but now I am about to move and change job, and hence have to sign off for a while. But before I do that, I'd like to tell you a brief anecdote that happened to the Icelandic IEist/Tocharologist/Balticist/Laryngealist Jvrundur Hilmarsson, who died quite untimely of cancer in his 40s. He wanted to find out about Lithuanian dual forms in order to prove that they were still productive. So he took a trip to Vilnius and went out to the countryside to ask elderly people whether they have ever encountered the (dual) forms xyz. But everyone he met was unaware of suchalike. So without having achieved anything in this matter, he gave up after a fortnight and booked the return flight. After the checkout, the passengers were driven to the plane by bus. The bus was very crowded, so that not everyone could get a seat. All of a sudden, the bus had to brake very hard, and the people standing could not keep a firm hold, and thus accidentally pushed their neighbours. Among them was an old woman with a full bag in each hand; and the young man she kicked was upset and asked her to take more care. Her reply was this: "If I had three hands, I could hold myself tight, but I only have TWO HANDS." And there it was. Those of you who are interested in Gothic might check out this site: http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/%7Ereimar/gotisch.html#verweise Everyone have a nice summer Christian From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Thu Jun 3 17:39:36 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 10:39:36 -0700 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) Message-ID: Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote: > But linguists should be very careful in distinguishing between the two > words "evolve/evolution" and "change". We don't use the strict > biological definition of "evolution" and any linguist who tries to do > so is not going to be taken seriously. Linguistic "evolution" is that > part of the history of language between the first human utterances and > the stabilization of modern human grammar. It ended before the first > recorded or reconstructed human languages. "Change" is what goes on now > and has gone on throughout our recorded linguistic history. > "Evolution" was the process of increasing complexity. "Change" shows > no change in overall complexity, but additions and losses of different > forms (words, structures, sounds). Ancient Sumerian is no more or less > complex in its total grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) than is > Modern English. There is a lot of change that has occurred between > Proto-Indo-European and Modern English, but no evolution. Really???? Is this how people are using the terminology????? Strange; i've been routinely using the word `evolve'/`evolution' to refer to the process whereby, e.g., Modern English derives from Middle English etc. Why, just yesterday i was lecturing my sophomores on the centralization of diphthongs on Martha's Vineyard, and explicitly referring to this as an example of linguistic `evolution'. Am i WAY off track here terminologically? Maybe it's time somebody (me, since i'm the one doing it) asked for a show of hands. How many historical linguists reserve the lexeme `evolve' for the restricted sense that John allows? How many would allow it for the process whereby a recognizably new language (e.g., Modern English) arises from a pre-existing language (e.g., Middle English)? And what about intermediate gradations between these extremes? Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** [ Moderator's comment: I'll start: I understand John McLaughlin's point, but I tend to use the word as Steven Schaufele does, a usage I consider a metaphorical extension of the biological sense. --rma ] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Jun 3 03:45:38 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 22:45:38 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity Message-ID: Pat promised: >henceforward, unless I >inadvertently regress, I will refer to lexical and grammatical differences. That will help clarify things greatly. A question on the use of the word morpheme: Some of use it for the smallest element of a word (i.e., either root or affix), but in some of our discussion we have tended to restrict it to grammatical morphemes (essentially, to affixes). I think all of us (including me) have to be more careful here than we have been. > >Pat answers: >I do not think 'withdrawing' is the correct characterization. I do not >subscribe to the current theory of Lallwo{"}rter as I believe you do, and >here we must simply agree to disagree since neither of us will be persuaded >by the other. I agree that there's little to be gained by pursuing the matter. I would only caution that one must be as careful of possible Lallwoerter as of onomatopoetic expressions, since either could be created anew at any time. I mean, how old is the word _cuckoo_? Since that's how the European cuckoo really sounds (even outside clocks_, it is futile to look for etymological connections, since anyone hearing it at any time could create the word anew. And that's the problem with Lallwoerter: babies do babble the same everywhere, and parents love to think that their offspring are talking to them. So etymologies of words auch as 'father' and 'mother' are riskier than normal as far as the root goes. The suffix, of course, if that's what it is, is another matter, since that's not babbling. [stuff deleted] Pat claimed: >I do believe there is a strong possibility that, in the very earliest stages >of language, phonemes did have actual meanings but even by the time of CV >roots, this association (if it ever existed a la sound symbolism) had been >lost in terms of the basic meaning of these monosyllables (though it might >linger on almost as a grace-note to the meaning in the form of nuances or >emotional interpretations). This can be interpreted several ways. The most literal reading would be that any [s], anywhere, anytime, meant the same thing. If that's what you mean, all I could say is that it's pure conjecture, and naturally there's no way to prove or disprove it. It would be a non-scientific statement and thus have no place in a serious discussion on the origins of language. There's also a phonetic problem: while vowels, nasals, [r] and [l], and fricatives could plausibly exist by themselves, stops really can't (and couldn't back then either, unless our vocal apparatus functioned very differently). Yet stops dominate in PIE roots, in the sense that there are many more of them than of the other consonant phonemes. Why would that be? Pat again: >Now, evidently, my early training in linguistics differed from your own >since, as another wrote recently, this definition of phoneme has to be with >the (once fashionable?) idea of minimal pairs. I don't quite understand this sentence, but I don't that that's the explanation for our differences. My original training was structuralist (phoneme = a class of sounds, out there in the real world); I now regard it as a psychological entity, and not necessarily the best analysis for all situations (remember what I wrote privately about the vowels of Turkish grammatical morphemes, where distinctive feature analysis works well but phonemes are clumsy). Minimal pairs, closely associated with structuralism, are still a very useful diagnostic even for the psychological analyses. The fact that [phit] and [bit] are different still tells us that their mental phonological representation must be different. [stuff omotted] >Pat, puzzled: >Then how did "original" e: creep into the discussion? Do you believe that >there could be two morphemes in IE, *CeC and *Ce:C, that differed >**lexically** when *Ce:C is not the result of earlier *CeHC? I don't know of any for *early* PIE, and there shouldn't have been any. I'll need help here from someone who knows more, but don't some scholars posit original long vowels for *late* PIE? We would be talking about either newly created roots or about borroiwings from non-IE languages. Can anyone contribute something? >Pat, more or less agreeing [that nouns and pronouns may have different syntax]: >But do you not think that where their employments differ, one of the major >reasons is the typical brevity of many pronominal elements, and their >encliticity? This is probably true for word order -- at least, if there's any truth to Behaghel's "Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder", by which words and phrases tend to get longer as the clause goes on. This "law", of course, is based on empirical observation but seems to work in a good many languages. But that won't explain why they can't be used with determiners, or with adjectives and may behave oddly when used with prepositions. (All of this, by the way, is language-specific; noun and pronoun direct objects differ much more in Spanish than in English.) Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jun 4 04:44:07 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 00:44:07 -0400 Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect? Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Date: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 2:07 AM . The example of causa > chose strangely looks like some Celtic mutation . influence/contamination Oh? Robert Orr From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Jun 3 04:33:11 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 23:33:11 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >>Evidently, this paradigm does not reflect any kind of ERG strategy. Such >>a strategy often has been inferred from the fact that the {S=A}-marker >>*-s seems to have something in common with the genitive (singular (!)) >>(*-es, *-os, *-s). From this some kind of 'genitivus-ergativus' had been >>reconstructed from Pre-IE. Naturally, a genitivus-ergativus is attested >>in a considerable number of languages (Yupik-Eskimo, Lak (East >>Caucasian), to name only two). However, again IE *-s does not behave >>ERG, even IF we can associate it with the genitive marker (singular): >>*-(e/o)s also encodes the S-function, which is ANTI ERG. To which Ed Selleslagh responded: >As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the >passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit >periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', which could just as well be >called 'ablativus-ergativus', the genitive and the ablative both being >'pointers' to the origin of the action. Note the similarity of the Latin >construction : passive + a(b) + ablative. So, it seems that the need for >some (pseudo-?)ergative way of speaking is still lingering on in IE >languages. that's pushing it a bit far. German also uses _durch_ 'through' for this purpose, mainly for less active participants. English uses _by_. Ancient Greek used _hypo_ 'under'. And so it goes. But what do these have in common? Surely not a tendency toward a combined ergative-genitive case. Rather, we have the phenomenon that languages have definite ideas about which prepositions are appropriate for non-local functions, but their choices are largely arbitrary and differ from language to language (or region to region). Most Americans wait *for* the bus, but people in Memphis can also wait *on* the bus to come. Germans wait _auf den Bus_ -- *onto* the bus. I often tell my German students: "Never trust a preposition." That's exaggerated, of course, but a useful warning to them *not* to translate English usage into German. Meanwhile, we wait for, or on, or onto, or even simply await, a better explanation of agentive _von_ in German. Leo >In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the >ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative >plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of >'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also had >an 'ablative meaning'!). >Ed. Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 3 05:24:12 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 00:24:12 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Tom and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Wier Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 3:39 AM >> "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >>> unless, of course, you believe that God bestowed fully developed >>> language on Adam, which belief would disqualify you from any rational >>> discussion of the topic. Nik Taylor wrote: > Why should that disqualify a person from "any rational discussion"? > Admittedly, it would make discussion a moot point, unless it were a > theological discussion on what kind of language God would've created. > More to the point: seeing as how Mr. Ryan, convinced though he > might be about the nature of early speech, has not yet provided any > constructive evidence about what this might be, it seems that he > is advocating something at least as rational as believing that God gave > Adam human language fully developed, since there is no positive > evidence for either*. Unless you can come up with some good hard > soundlaws and provable cognates to show what Proto-World would > be like, then it seems a little silly even to continue discussion of the > matter. > *(Interestingly, the Bible might actually disagree with the idea > of language existing at the beginning fully formed, considering > Gen 2:19, where God brings all the animals before Adam to see what > he'd name them) Pat responds: I get an average of 10 visits a day to my website, at which I attempt to provide soundlaws and cognates. If you have not visited it, why do you not? http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 Pat continued: >>> I have asserted that early language, for any non-believer, would have had >>> to have gone through a stage that was less expressive (more ambiguous) than >>> languages of which we currently have documented information. So did Nick: > But, this is a moot point. We cannot possibly reconstruct that far back. > Even Nostratic, if it is legitimate, would've been long past that point. > Mr. Ryan's belief, whether or not it is correct, essentially, in its logical > underpinnings, bears no qualitative difference from Aristotle's assertion > that heavier things fall faster than lighter things. Aristotle's error was > in not testing his proposition, in not having any empirical evidence to back > up what his hypothesis claimed. Until Mr. Ryan can provide scientific > evidence as to what the nature of Proto-World was like, his assertion will > have as much scientific validity. (Again, this does not mean it's wrong; > just that it's pointless to discuss the matter without further investigation) Pat responds: I do not go into the theory of the Proto-Language in detail because 1) I have already done it at my website; 2) much of the material is not appropriate for the Indo-European list, and some, not even for the Nostratic list; and 3) I do not believe the moderator would permit it. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 3 05:41:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 00:41:31 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Tom and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Wier Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 4:28 AM >> Pat responded: >> "Irrelevant" must be your favorite word. What happened to your "*in any >> era*"? Have you just dropped that idea without acknowledging how >> wrong-headed it is? >> What "extant" languages show is totally irrelevant to what they may have >> been like in the far distant past. Tom commented: > (a) Linguistics must procede under the assumption that the kinds of > phenomena that we see today have always been that way. We cannot > go around assuming that entirely unprecedented changes or features > were the case centuries or millennia earlier. They might well have been, > but, methodologicly speaking, *there is no way to prove that*. Any > processes you do claim existed would be entirely lacking in empirical > foundation, by definition, and thus subject to a high probability of error > (here we're getting back to Aristotle's fundamental problem). Pat responds: If you ever visit my website, you will see that nothing I hypothesize about the Proto-Language does not have similar modern parallels. Tom continued: > (b) So, what extant languages show might well be entirely relevant, if > there is no methodological means to reconstruct the protolanguage. > When you are trying to describe a language, you have to know what it > is first -- and when you're dealing with reconstructed languages, this > is an iffy business at best. Also, if the known data about extant > languages all disagree fundamentally with a hypothesis, it is the duty > of the linguistic establishment not to accept that hypothesis as true > unless further evidence comes along to reinforce it (which could > happen). Pat responds: Strange words from a man who announces "credo ergo ero (indicium non necessarium)". But, anyway, instead of generalities, take any of what you believe to be my hypotheses --- those you believe "disagree fundamentally" with "data about extant languages" --- and show me where they conflict. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 3 06:02:52 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 01:02:52 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 3:04 PM Peter wrote: > It is precisely the use of an objective form for the subject-topic of a > stative sentence which leads some people to argue that there are hints of > an earlier ergative stage here. > Have I missed something in your argument? Pat comments: Perhaps I have missed something also. In what IE language does an objective form function as the subject-topic of a stative sentence? [ Moderator's comment: The reference is, I believe, to o-stem neuter nominative/accusative which looks like o-stem non-neuter accusative. However, in other stem formations, the parallel in appearance does not exist. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From inaki.agirre at si.unirioja.es Thu Jun 3 19:16:03 1999 From: inaki.agirre at si.unirioja.es (Inaki Agirre Perez) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 20:16:03 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: > In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the > ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative > plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of > 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also had > an 'ablative meaning'!). Could you be clearer about this point, Ed? Basque ergative case is s. -AK pl. -EK, both from *-EGAK if I recall it right. Ablative is s. -TIK and partitive is -IK. They have a very close meaning in NPs like 'one of you', say ZUETARIK BAT = ZUETATIK BAT, but I don't grasp the point with ergative or nominative. Inaki From mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Jun 4 05:35:24 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 23:35:24 -0600 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Steven Schaufele wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Really???? Is this how people are using the terminology????? Strange; > i've been routinely using the word `evolve'/`evolution' to refer to the > process whereby, e.g., Modern English derives from Middle English etc. > Why, just yesterday i was lecturing my sophomores on the centralization > of diphthongs on Martha's Vineyard, and explicitly referring to this as > an example of linguistic `evolution'. Am i WAY off track here > terminologically? Maybe it's time somebody (me, since i'm the one doing > it) asked for a show of hands. How many historical linguists reserve > the lexeme `evolve' for the restricted sense that John allows? How many > would allow it for the process whereby a recognizably new language > (e.g., Modern English) arises from a pre-existing language (e.g., Middle > English)? And what about intermediate gradations between these > extremes? I'll add a few bits of evidence to this, even though my vote's been counted. Take a look at the historical linguistics textbooks. They all use the term 'change' to account for everything historical. Terry Crowley, An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, 2nd ed, 1992, Oxford. Contents headings: "Language Change", "Sound Change", "Ordering of Changes", "Phonemic Change", "Phonetic Change", etc. In looking at his chapter on subgrouping, for example, I see "changed to", "derived from", and "descended from", but never "evolved from". The only context in which he uses "evolve" is in an appropriate context of the rise of a creole from a pidgin, or of the initial rise of a pidgin. In this case "evolve" is perfectly appropriate, since a pidgin is a greatly simplified language that came from pieces of substrate and superstrate languages and a creole is a fully complex human language. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 1987, Cambridge. In section 54, Language change, the word "evolution" never occurs. Instead Crystal uses terms like "split from", "diverged from", etc. I briefly scanned half a dozen other texts on historical linguistics and found the same situation. The words "evolve/evolution" are never used with respect to the change over time from one fully modern, complex human language to another. I quote from one of my personal heroes--Mary Haas--in The Prehistory of Languages, 1969, Mouton. (pg. 13): "The 'prehistory of languages' is not to be confused with a different topic which might be called the 'prehistory of language'....This means that language may very well have been slowly evolving over hundreds of thousands of years....Our concern here, however, is with what may be called the 'prehistory of languages'." This is the last use of the term "evolve" in her book. On pg 33, she writes, "If we turn the whole thing round and look at it from the other direction we see that the daughter languages are not only different from each other but also from the protolanguage. We describe this differentiation by calling it 'linguistic change'." Recently, the now moribund Evolution of Language list came to a general consensus (Pat Ryan may have disagreed) exactly along these traditional lines, namely, that "language evolution" be reserved for the animal to human development of language and "language change" for the traditionally understood definition of "language change" as the accumulation of grammatical and lexical differences that eventually renders two speech communities unable to communicate with one another through their native tongues. John McLaughlin Utah State University From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 4 09:42:34 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 11:42:34 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 5:22 AM [ moderator snip ] >To which Ed Selleslagh responded: >>As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the >>passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit >>periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', which could just as well be >>called 'ablativus-ergativus', the genitive and the ablative both being >>'pointers' to the origin of the action. Note the similarity of the Latin >>construction : passive + a(b) + ablative. So, it seems that the need for >>some (pseudo-?)ergative way of speaking is still lingering on in IE >>languages. >That's pushing it a bit far. German also uses _durch_ 'through' for this >purpose, mainly for less active participants. English uses _by_. Ancient >Greek used _hypo_ 'under'. And so it goes. But what do these have in common? >Surely not a tendency toward a combined ergative-genitive case. Rather, we >have the phenomenon that languages have definite ideas about which >prepositions are appropriate for non-local functions, but their choices are >largely arbitrary and differ from language to language (or region to region). >Most Americans wait *for* the bus, but people in Memphis can also wait *on* >the bus to come. Germans wait _auf den Bus_ -- *onto* the bus. I often tell >my German students: "Never trust a preposition." That's exaggerated, of >course, but a useful warning to them *not* to translate English usage into >German. >Meanwhile, we wait for, or on, or onto, or even simply await, a better >explanation of agentive _von_ in German. >Leo [Ed] Generally speaking, I agree with you about the relative arbitrariness of the choice of prepositions. However, these choices are between a limited number of approaches, each with its own logic, especially in the context of the agentative cum pseudo-ergative construction. a)The German construction with 'von' and the Latin one with 'ab' follow the logic of pointing at the origin of the action, and so constitutes an 'ablative/genitive of origin' approach. It is closest to the actual ergative in Basque, at least in my view. In my opinion, this is a sufficient explanation for the agentative use of 'von'. b)The German construction with 'durch' ('door' in Dutch, 'by' in English) is an 'instrumental' approach. (Basque -z case, which I believe to be the origin of Castilian patronymics ending in -(e)z: many of them have Basque forms of Christian names preceding the ending: e.g. Ibane (Juan), Pere or Peru(Pedro), or Basque morphology when using Castilian names: JuaRez, from JuaN) c)The classical Greek with 'hyp? + genitive' denotes a 'subject-dominated' approach, something happening 'under the control, influence... of', nonetheless with a rather strong shade of the 'ablative/genitive/origin' approach contained in the use of the genitive instead of a dative or accusative. It is clear that in the case of the preposition 'hyp?' the case used with it is all-important since it fundametally affects the true meaning of 'hyp?'. No wonder, to me, that ablative, instrumental and locative fused morphologically into one 'ablativus' in Latin. >>In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the >>ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative >>plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of >>'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also had >>an 'ablative meaning'!). [Ed] See also my response to I?aki Agirre P?rez. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 4 08:57:35 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 10:57:35 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Inaki Agirre Perez Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 6:28 AM >> In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the >> ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative >> plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of >> 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also >> had an 'ablative meaning'!). >Could you be clearer about this point, Ed? Basque ergative case is s. >-AK pl. -EK, both from *-EGAK if I recall it right. Ablative is s. -TIK >and partitive is -IK. They have a very close meaning in NPs like 'one of >you', say ZUETARIK BAT = ZUETATIK BAT, but I don't grasp the point with >ergative or nominative. >I?aki [Ed] I tried to be clear by saying 'containing the ending -k' and 'a construction', but obviously failed. What I meant is that the complete, very probably composite, suffixes/endings all contain the final segment -k, which I believe has some basic ablative/genitive(of origin) meaning that manifests itself in the various grammatical cases I mentioned. It may also be present in the 'genitive' (of origin) suffix -ko; I even dare suggest that -ko might be the 'autonomous' form (i.e. not in fused composite suffixes) of -k. My point is that all the cases I mentioned have in common the fact that they point to an origin, be it of an action (ergative case), a geographical place (ablative and genitive of origin) or a group/category (partitive, (indefinite) plural). As an additional remark: it is quite remarkable that this -k and -ko also occur in Slavic languages, as derivation suffixes in very related contexts/meanings (-(j)ak, -ik, -ko). And in Greek : -(i)ak?s. Ed. From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Fri Jun 4 14:59:11 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 16:59:11 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In response to my last posting Eduard Selleslagh said: > As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the > passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit > periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', which could just as well be > called 'ablativus-ergativus', the genitive and the ablative both being > 'pointers' to the origin of the action. Note the similarity of the Latin > construction : passive + a(b) + ablative. So, it seems that the need for > some (pseudo-?)ergative way of speaking is still lingering on in IE > languages. As Leo said: "[]hat's pushing it a bit far." The constructions Ed mentioned belong to the paradigm of fore/backgrounding strategies (aka "diathesis"). Diathesis presupposes that there is a basic strategy of enconding participants in a "simple sentence", passives and/or antipassives. The way how backgrounded participants (most often semantic agents) are marked heavily depends on the individual language though some general tendencies may be observed (among them a genitivus-ablativus etc.). The most characteristic feature of most types of diathesis is that such marked NPs are normally located in the periphery of a "sentence", indicated by an appropriate oblique construction. Note that such peripheries sometimes can be secondarily splitted up, e.g. in German (cf. Leo: "German also uses _durch_ 'through' for this purpose, mainly for less active participants." [I do not in total agree with the semantics proposed by Leo's, but that does not matter here]. The question of whether or not a language system operates via diathesis depends on the general nature of role assigment in the language: We have to assume that NPs are marked by a functional cluster that covers (at least) the three domains 'semantics', 'reference', and 'pragmatics' [semantic, syntactic, and pragmatical roles, if you prefer more traditional terms]. Some languages favor a semantic-centered clustering (such as our famous Dakota), others reference-centering (many languages with classical diathesis), again others pragmatic centering (Tagalog etc.). Diathesis as a referential strategy (phrase internal as well as discourse dependent) presupposes a reference-dominated type. Many Modern IE languages are of this type (though some of them show a shift twoards pragmatic centering (among them German and Dutch), but PIE itself obviously lacked this strategy which comes clear from the fact that we cannot reconstruct a common "passive" for PIE. Diathesis is are very active feature in language change. It can come and go, and nothing allows us to propose a Passive for PIE just because a number of (modern) IE languages share this feature. If we look at the question of ERG and passive, we can sometimes observe a tendency to establish a pseudo-ergative strategy based on the passive (some modern Indo-Iranian languages, partly Cl. Armenian etc.). But this a secondary process often bound to specific (perfective) TAM forms. And: The ergativisation of passives (including shifts in word order etc.) does not argue for an earlier phase of ERG, on the contrary: Passives are typical for ACC systems (though also attested in what sometimes are (wrongly) thought to be "true" or "pure" ERG systems such as Inuit). The standard diathesis in ERG systems is the antipassive, cf. ACC PASS ERG AP S=A [A] S=O [O} O S( Perhaps I fail to understand. Did you mean to count both subjective and > agentive as "agents", and say that it was natural that inanimates should not > play that role? If pre-IE had an animate / inanimate distinction, we can > believe that inanimates might never or very rarely be agents, but it is more > difficult to believe they were never subjects. I find it difficult to > believe that in a language which produced PIE, Mr IE was unable to say to > Mrs IE, "The is nice (or dangerous, or whatever)." This surely is a problematic aspect. What we need is a better characterization of what is "subject", "subjective", "agentive" and so on. I will skip this question here because it would lead us into the deep ocean of Grammar Theory which has as many faces as researchers, I think. In short: True statives very often show an atypical behavior with respect to the AEC which in itself is a question of how the degree of transitivity of DYNAMIC actions is formalized [ERG focusses on the "effect" of an action, ACC on the "source" etc., see among MANY others Hopper/Thompson 1980, Silverstein 1976 (and Schulze 1998, if I may humbly add this reference). Sometimes, statives appear to be derived from intransitives: They are either subsumed under this strategy (as in many ACC and ERG systems) or split of there from in terms of Split-S marking ("active typology"). The fact that statives and perfective structures seem tio have been closely related in PIE indicates that PIE knew (at least in its agreement system) some kind of Split-S. IF this split was present with case marking, too, then we should assume that (in)animate statives were zero-marked, just as the old O-marker before the O-Split via *-m became effective, cf. S(inactive)-zero VERB(stative)(AGR(S(inactive))) S(active)-s VERB(AGR(S(active))) A-s O-zero/m VERB(AGR(A)) Note that I do not ascribe a general active typology to PIE (as Lehmman and others), I which I do not believe. It is just a simple S-split which is as "normal" as O-splits are. As our moderator has put it: "The reference is, I believe, to o-stem neuter nominative/accusative which looks like o-stem non-neuter accusative. However, in other stem formations, the parallel in appearance does not exist". Old neuters were zero-marked both in S and O function, whereas animates were -s-marked in S- and -m-marked in O-function, cf. Animate Inanimate S(inact) -s -0 S(act) -s --- A -s --- 0 -m -0 [A "good" acticve typology would yield: Animate Inanimate S(inact) --- -m S(act) -s --- A -s --- 0 -m -m (if we use the PPIE coding system as a symbol)] Hence, I think that PIE showed a doubled split in its case marking: S-split and O-split, before both splits were harmonized again. To make this point clear, I'd like to add what Mr. or Mrs. PIE would may have used as a scheme for case marking and agreement (I trasnlate *-s into TOP[ic], *-m in DIR[ective], and *-0 (zero) into ZERO: a) water-ZERO cold-AGR(water(inact)) S(inanim) = ZERO b) woman-TOP young(-AGR(woman(active)) S(anim) = TOP c) woman-TOP run-(AGR(woman(active)) S(anim) = TOP d) woman-TOP man-DIR see-AGR(woman) A(anim) = TOP O(anim) = DIR e) woman-TOP water-ZERO see-AGR(woman) A(anim) = TOP O(inanim) = ZERO Naturally, such as scheme is nothing but a very rough and only tentative paradigm. We have to assume that PIE knew as many (esp. metaphorical) variants as documented on other languages. Such variants may have allowed PIE spekaers to use inanimates as S in dynamic constructions or as A. Still, the overall picture remains the same: The operating system of PIE clearly showed an ACC strategy in its protypical kernel, semantically splitted according to [?animate] or so. This ACC strategy seemed to be dominated by topicalization routines with animates, a clear indices for the semantic basis of PIE "case" marking. Finally, AGR does not change this picture, even if we assign the *-H2e etc. series to statives/inactives, and the *-m etc. series to dynamics/actives: In this case, even the dichotomy [?anim] becomes irrelevant, because it does not show up in a specific set of clitics. ALL these clitics have an ACC AGR scheme... I hope, that this helps to understand my point. Wolfgang [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de |http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Jun 4 16:31:43 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 19:31:43 +0300 Subject: Sociological Linguistics In-Reply-To: <002f01bead84$2f83aec0$8a9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > If you ever visit my website, you will see that nothing I hypothesize about > the Proto-Language does not have similar modern parallels. What is the "similar modern parallel" for your supposition that a phonological distinctive feature ([+aspiration]) marks a semantic category ([+animate])? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Jun 4 16:20:29 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 17:20:29 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: > Dr. John E. McLaughlin; then Steven Schaufele; then Moderator : [snip dispute whether evolution is change] Me: Evolution is accumulation or proliferation of change. Life-forms and languages both constantly evolve, but the processes are unrelated. Darwin and Wallace didn't discover evolution of life, they discovered that natural selection is a sufficient cause of it. In language other causes are probably dominant (as it's hard to see selective advantage in most changes). One of the most recent large biological evolutionary changes in humans was the acquisition of language organs in the brain (assuming some such theory as fact...). This cleared the board for a whole new radiation of linguistic evolution, which continues. This is the only point at which the two examples of evolution meet. The equation of "evolution" with "evolution by natural selection" is common and natural, though it isn't even valid in biology, and the usage might now be so firmly established that it's unwise to use the word in any other correct sense, where there's any danger of conflict. It now sounds like either a metaphor derived from biology, or an attempt to derive conclusions by generalization of the discoveries of biology. If we're obliged to accept this common usage, we can speak literally and correctly of evolution in modern language by thinking of the organ acquisition as akin to the Cambrian invention of Baupla"ne, and everything since as an equilibrium that hasn't been punctuated, rich in neutral changes. HTH Nicholas From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Jun 4 16:44:00 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 17:44:00 +0100 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: On a non-linguistic forum recently I spotted the throwaway remark that the drink comes from an Indian word for 'five' because it has five ingredients. I immediately barged in and debunked this. But as the _OED_ is wrong about , I thought I'd ask the experts whether they can add anything to the _OED_ explanation or controvert it. In summary, it first occurs in English in 1632, and is repeatedly cited, always with and with variable ingredients; the expression then turns up in Continental languages as , , , . Clearly at this date it was pronounced with [u]. No suitable Indian language has [u] in 'five'. The first record of an [a] is also the first cited connexion with 'five': in 1698 one Fryer, who had travelled in India in 1672-81, wrote of "_Paunch_ (which is Indostan for Five) from Five Ingredients". It seems obvious to me that Fryer was indulging in or transmitting a folk-etymology, and all the years of evidence before him disallow it. The prosaic container is most likely. Does anyone have any good reason to disagree? Secondly, is there a more appropriate list around that delights in etymological niggles, as this has nothing deep to do with sigmatic aorist laryngeals? I want to ask someone their opinion of deriving the jive terms from Wolof; but not here. Nicholas From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 4 19:19:04 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 20:19:04 +0100 Subject: Cultural influence Message-ID: Nicholas accuses me of litotesising. I accept the point, and happily apologise. So we return to the primary question, where we both seem to agree, that the expressivity of a language is - at least partially - a question of balance between linguistic constraints and cultural fashion. He also says: > It's rather like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: I had intended something a little more concrete. Nicholas himself gives an example in his reply, when he says: >'I'm reminded of the strange fact that in English "I don't like" means "I >dislike", and that you have to labour and squirm to convey the simple >meaning "it's not the case that I _like_".' Perhaps there are more elegant ways of saying it in English, but here, at least, is an example of a presumably native speaker of English being aware of the linguistic constraints on his expressiveness. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 4 19:27:03 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 20:27:03 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Ed said: > As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the > passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit > periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', ... So did English once, although probably no longer. For example, John 14:21 (AV) "... he that loveth me shall be loved of my father, ..." Peter From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Fri Jun 4 21:50:50 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 16:50:50 -0500 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>> Pat responded: >>> One of the phenomena I believe I have identified in early language is that >>> the plural morpheme was, at one point, simply stress-accentuation. >Leo objected: >> How odd then that the plural veb forms are not identical to singular ones >> escept for the accent. Ditto nouns. >Pat responds: >Sometimes I believe you are merely pulling my leg. The phonomenon I think I >detected in early language has nothing to do with singular or plural verbal >inflections, which are much later. No, I'm not pulling your leg. I do wonder, though: is "early language" a distinct entity of some sort? I had not taken it that way, thinking you meant it rather as a collective for "early languages". Unless, of course, you were shifting the stress to the second syllble to indicate plurality: early lan-GUAGE. >The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms of >the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and >momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). Since early transitive verbal roots can >be analyzed as *CV (object) + *CV (verbal idea), a pluralization of the >verbal idea indicates repetition leading to perfectivity; the pluralization >of the object indicates multiple objects leading to an interpretation of >imperfectivity. Unless you posit humongous numbers of consonant and vowel phonemes, don't you then have a problem that the total number of phonetically different roots would have been (C+1)(V), i.e. the number of consonants + 1 (for no consonant at all) times the number of vowels? Awfully limiting. >Pat continued: >>> Yes, I believe that vowel retention is generally a function of >>> stress-accent but I find the explanation that *bherete "had three syllables >>> with stress-accent" ununderstandable in terms of what I think of as >>> stress-accent. > >Then why write "had three syllables with stress-accent"? Spell out what you >mean to say so that I will not have occasion to misinterpret it. You have said that V (or e/o, or ^) is dropped unless under stress accent. _bherete_ had three e's. Hence: three accents. That's what I meant. >There can be many explanations for the retention of the principally >stress-unaccented vowels as you well know. The likeliest is that the period >during which lack of stress-accent caused zero-grade stem forms had passed. But then, what happened to the expected *_bhr.te'_ from the period while the rule still operated? Such forms abound. The Germanic strong preterite, which reflects ablauting PIE perfect formations, still shows weak grades in the plural. So retention is no explanation, although a new analogical formation would work -- that is, if one could find an old form with plural e-grade to provide the analogy. >Another: the necessity for differentiation of 3rd sing and 2nd pl. overrode >normal patterns (if still operational). Etcetera. With different grade of the root, there was surely differentiation. It's the e-grade of the root and the thematic vowel that requires explanation, not that of the suffix. > >Leo, on another subject: >> How so, if you are also claiming that PIE was ergative? In ergative >> languages, the morphological subject of an agent-patient sentence (barring >> "antipassive" or the like) is precisely the patient, not the agent. >Pat responds: >Are you just trying to create confusion? There is no law that in an ergative >language any agreement markers on the verb *must* refer to the patient. [stuff omitted] >If the athematic primary and secondary endings referred to the >ergative (in an ergative context) or the nominative (in an accusative >context), i.e. where agentially referential, there would obviously be >no need for an inanimate *-d(i). The only traces I see in IE of a >reference to the patient in IE inflections is in the element *-dh(V)- >occurring in the middle (PL T[?]SA, 'body, self'). No, I'm no trying to cause confusion; I just think you don't realize the implications of what you're claiming. Some languages don't mark any NPs on the verb, a great many mark only one, and some mark more (Basque can have up to three). When only one is marked, it is almost invariably the morphological subject. Accusative languages normally make the highest-ranking noun phrase (by a hierarchy of "deep cases" of the sort proposed by Fillmore 1968) the morphological subject; for an agent-patient sentence, this will be the agent. Ergative languages normally make the patient the morphological subject. (I say "normally" because many languages can upset the process by passive or "antipassive" formations, and some verbs may make unusual choices.) When only one NP is marked on the verb, it is this morphological subject -- i.e., in ergative languages, the patient in an agent-patient sentence. I should add that there are a few languages with ergative casemarking but accusative verb agreement. So yes, there is no *law* that verb agreement markers in an ergative language will *always* refer to the patient; but overwhelmingly they do. So I'm trying to say that in suggesting that those of an ergative PIE did not, you are proposing a typologically unusual system, probably without realizing it. BTW, what do you mean by "ergative" or "accusative context"? Pat continued: >>>Regarding -*t and -*te, I do not believe that any grammatical morpheme >>>in IE can originally have had the form -*C since I believe that all >>>grammatical morphemes are originally grammaticalized -*Ce (at a >>>minimum) non-grammatical morphemes. On this basis, both -*t and -*te >>>must derive from earlier -*tV. In the absence of evidence to >>>differentiate them, I assume a unitary origin. Leo objected: >>They have different meanings. The null hypothesis should therefore be >>that they are distinct, even if you are unable to find a phonetic >>distinction. Beliefs about the shape of free morphemes have nothing to >>do with the case. Pat rejoins: >Oh, yes but they do. And please, let us not get into another sterile >discussion of null hypotheses, for which five linguists evince six >opinions. I'm not fond of "null hypotheses", and I apologize for using the jargony term, which perhaps hid the point I wanted to make. If morphemes are the smallest units capable of bearing meanings, then phonetically identical chunks with very different meanings should be assumed to be different, not the same. In other words, does a "let ball" in Tennis have anything to do with our verb _let_? Phonetically, they're identical; the meaning is different, indeed, opposite. They should therefore be assumed to be different morphemes. (Historically, this happens to be true, but that's just icing on the cake.) Only the *strongest* evidence of earlier shared meaning could then overturn this assumption. Pat continued: >>For *te-w-to-, although we would both acknowledge -*to, I am not going >>to be able to persuade you that a morpheme *te- could be the basis to >>which a collective morpheme -*w was added --- in a paragraph or two >>because you are unwilling to look beyond IE where *CeC roots are the >>general rule. It is my belief that every IE *CeC root can potentially >>be analyzed into *CV + *CV, and that these monosyllabic morphemes are >>recognizable is some early languages: e.g. Egyptian , 'loaf', is >>cognate with IE -*dV, neuter formant. Leo answered: >>You're right: you can't convince me. But not because I have any >>preconceived ideas about root shapes in PIE (not that I know of any >>*roots* that are that short). The problem is that your semantics are >>simply beyond the pale of anything that could be called linguistic >>*science*. Looking beyond PIE won't change that. Pat responds: >Semantics is in the eye of the beholder. For a look at what I believe are >reasonable semantic relationships, see >http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/ProtoLanguage-Monosyllables.htm#T ?O I will look, I promise. But I will not accept this identification. Why not? Because it depends on one dental stop + one unidentified vowel. We do not even know that either the stop or the vowel is the same in both languages. The words belong to different morphologial-syntactic categories: noun in Egyptian, gender+case marker in PIE. The only semantic correlation is that after all, loaves are things. This identification is, as I just said, beyond the pale of anything that could be called linguistic *science*. Given the limited number of phonetically distinct roots available under your proposals, the most one could say was that the two were *homonyms*. But homonyms are not identities, any more than the let ball has been let through. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Jun 4 13:22:01 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 15:22:01 +0200 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) In-Reply-To: <3756BDD8.611A@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: DR. JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN: >> Linguistic "evolution" is that part of the history of language between >> the first human utterances and the stabilization of modern human >> grammar (...) "Change" is what goes on now and has gone on throughout >> our recorded linguistic history. (...) Ancient Sumerian is no more or >> less complex in its total grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) >> than is Modern English. There is a lot of change that has occurred >> between Proto-Indo-European and Modern English, but no evolution. STEVEN SCHAUFELE: > Really???? Is this how people are using the terminology????? Strange; > i've been routinely using the word `evolve'/`evolution' to refer to the > process whereby, e.g., Modern English derives from Middle English etc. > (...) How many historical linguists reserve the lexeme `evolve' for the > restricted sense that John allows? [ moderator snip ] I admit that using the word 'evolution' may indicate that the new language has developed into something superior to its predecessor. But there are so many other parallels between the behavior of linguistic and biological development that I would not hesitate to let the two sciences share a common terminology. Adam Hyllested From fortytwo at ufl.edu Sat Jun 5 04:54:00 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 23:54:00 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) Message-ID: "Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton" wrote: > I briefly scanned half a dozen other texts on historical linguistics and > found the same situation. The words "evolve/evolution" are never used with > respect to the change over time from one fully modern, complex human language > to another. But I've frequently heard expressions like "the Evolution of English", or "Latin evolved into Spanish, French, etc." Besides which, I rather like the term. Evolution implies a general, widespread change, one which occurs by the accumulation of small-scale changes, which has certain tendencies (such as the tendency for inflections to be eroded away, or particles to be gramaticalized), while simple "change" implies none of that. -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From fortytwo at ufl.edu Sat Jun 5 04:58:29 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 23:58:29 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > What is the "similar modern parallel" for your supposition that a > phonological distinctive feature ([+aspiration]) marks a semantic > category ([+animate])? Besides which, this hypothetical proto-language would have to be spoken by beings of sub-human intelligence. People of human intelligence can quickly create fully developed languages, as in the evolution of creoles from pidgins, and the spontaneous development of sign languages such as ISN (Idioma de Signos Nicarag?ense), which literally evolved out of nothing when deaf people were placed together, and is now a fully developed language (with a small vocabulary, of course). Speech used by sub-humans is DEFINITELY had no "modern parallel" -- "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father was hanged." - Irish proverb http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-name: NikTailor From artabanos at mail.utexas.edu Sat Jun 5 09:01:26 1999 From: artabanos at mail.utexas.edu (Tom Wier) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 04:01:26 -0500 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: Nicholas Widdows wrote: > In summary, it first occurs in English in 1632, and is repeatedly cited, > always with and with variable ingredients; the expression punch> then turns up in Continental languages as , , > , . Clearly at this date it was pronounced with > [u]. No suitable Indian language has [u] in 'five'. If it were [u], why would it have been carried over into (what I presume to be) French with what looks like an [O]? It seems [U] would be a better candidate than [u], which French certainly has. =========================================== Tom Wier AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704 "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." =========================================== From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 4 19:51:26 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 20:51:26 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard said: > I had an idea that Latin perfects with a {v} inserted may have come by > contraction of a periphrastic perfect using the Latin perfect active > participle [in -vos..] J Hewson 1997 "Tense and Aspect in IE" says that the Tocharian preterite is based precisely on this formation. >...that Latin perfects with the {v} missing [... donastis, norunt etc] are >not contracted but original, Philip Baldi 1999 "Foundations of Latin" makes the same point, though from a different origin. You are not alone! Peter From edsel at glo.be Sat Jun 5 12:38:11 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 14:38:11 +0200 Subject: Fw: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: rfrank To: edsel at glo.be Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 12:54 PM Subject: Re: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity >Hi Ed, >Could you forward this to the IE-list? >Talk to you soon. >Thanks >R. >petegray escribi?: >> Wolfgang wrote a full reply to my suggestion of three places where IE might >> have been ergative. I appreciated the comments about the variation over >> time, and about the fact that languages are almost never purely ergative or >> accusative. I am responding to one point in particular. On the identity of >> nominative and accusative for all neuters, he said: >>> The only thing we can conclude from this is that true neuters rarely show >>> up as agents (that they hardly ever played the role of a subjective (S) or >>> agentive (A) except in a metaphorical sense). Neutral NPs hence are very >>> likely to represents objectives (O). This is very natural - it tells us >>> nothing about [where IE lies on a continuum of ergativitiy and >>> accusativity] >> [Peter] Perhaps I fail to understand. Did you mean to count both subjective >> and agentive as "agents", and say that it was natural that inanimates should >> not play that role? If pre-IE had an animate / inanimate distinction, we >> can believe that inanimates might never or very rarely be agents, but it is >> more difficult to believe they were never subjects. >[snip] > [Roz] Without going into a prolonged discussion of the comments above, I > would state that based on my knowledge of a historically attested ergative > language, namely, Euskera (Basque), the statements above entail several > assumptions or premises which may not be appicable to the case at hand, i.e., > to reconstructing the *ergative stage(s) of PIE. > 1) First, the comments assume that the ergative stage in question or perhaps > better stated, the ergative languages that preceeded and/or contributed the > hypothetical ergative feature(s) to PIE, had such an animate/inanimate > division (and/or tripartite division with the neuter) and further that as > such the conceptual or cognitive frame governing or defining the > animate/inanimate division was essentially identical to the one that is > employed by IE speakers today. That is an assumption. > 2) Then there is the assumption that animacy is somehow a requirement for > agency. > 3) And further that the only recourse that an ergative language has/might > have for marking the notion of agency is by means of the ergative. > If applied to the case of Euskera all three of these assumptions would be > false. >Best wishes, >Roz Frank From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jun 5 14:06:07 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 15:06:07 +0100 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: One possible explanation of punch derived from panc, is that a common pronunciation of what is written short /a/ in Hindi is rather like a back schwa vowel. Exact parallels can be found the spellings Punjab (from the same root, panc!), suttee, and pundit, all spelled with -a- vowels in Hindi. No doubt others have more detailed information. Peter From mclasutt at brigham.net Sat Jun 5 15:56:46 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 09:56:46 -0600 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Nicholas: [snip of your arguments about biology and language] Your analogy of linguistic change being analogous to the slow accumulation of change in biological organisms is, I'm sorry to say, false to a certain extent. Were you a member of the Evolution of Language list last year? If so, you'll remember that we worked on this issue for a long time and two things basically emerged from that discussion: 1) Nonlinguists were constantly trying to pigeonhole linguistic change into some hard science/evolutionary model that could be quantified and codified like biological evolution can be. 2) Linguists were equally firm in their contention that linguistic change does not fit into that model, and that every language we have records of (whether written or reconstructed) shows the same level of expressibility and complexity that every other language does, thus no "evolution" has occurred within the last 10,000 or so years. In fact, linguists tend to agree that modern language was fully developed by about 40,000 years or so (that's a terminus ad quem, not a fixed point for the conclusion as some linguists think it was finished long before that). That date is based on the peopling of Australia. Language complexity reached a point where it took about twelve years to learn it fluently and no longer. Since then it's been stable--change, but NO evolution. Basically, we look at the difference between the evolution of the system (Language versus languages), but change within the system (languages, not Language). This is a fundamental distinction which nearly all linguists make. No serious linguist is going to argue that the change from Anglo-Saxon to Modern English has somehow improved the overall nature of Language or even affected the overall nature of Language. Likewise, no serious linguist is going to argue that Modern English is any better at discussing any topic than Anglo-Saxon was. The only advantage that Modern English has is in a readily available vocabulary for some topics as opposed to others, but Anglo-Saxon had all the word-building and borrowing processes already at hand that could solve that deficiency quickly. The grammars are functionally equivalent, as is the grammar of any language in the world. I've got tapes of Timbisha speakers in Death Valley talking about the details of park administration and environmental preservation completely in their language. They've borrowed some English words ("Death Valley" refers to the national park, but "Timbisha" refers to the physical valley, for example), adapted some native words for a modern meaning ("trail" is now "road", "bow" is now "gun"), and coined some new words using old parts ("green leaf" is "money"). They didn't have any problems using their language. How long was Latin used as a medium for writing scientific papers? Newton and Bacon wrote their major scientific works in Classical Latin 1500 years after it had ceased to be anyone's native language. I have a grammar of Kutenai written in Latin in the 1920s. The author used Classical Latin grammar and had absolutely no problem dealing with modern linguistic thinking and terminology. In other words, he quite easily used a language dead for at least 2000 years in a modern setting to discuss a modern topic. That's exactly what linguists mean when they say that all languages are equivalent. The system which evolved several tens of thousands of years ago is quite stable given the time required to learn it (no more than twelve years) and the expressibility of any one of its daughters. Linguistics evolution will kick in again when the human brain takes another leap forward. If you must think in terms of an evolutionary model for language, then think in terms of Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium. Basically organisms stay in a stable state for long periods of time. That's exactly where language is right now and for the past several tens of thousands of years. Sometime in the future, some island population of humans will rapidly evolve a larger or more complex brain and language will take another evolutionary step. But until then, "language evolution" is an incorrect term to use as a substitute for "language change". Remember, in linguistics, "evolution" refers to Language and the system, "change" refers to individual languages. John McL From gd2 at is2.nyu.edu Sat Jun 5 17:29:02 1999 From: gd2 at is2.nyu.edu (Gregory {Greg} Downing) Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1999 13:29:02 -0400 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: At 05:44 PM 6/4/99 Nicholas Widdows wrote: >Secondly, is there a more appropriate list around that delights in >etymological niggles, as this has nothing deep to do with sigmatic aorist >laryngeals? I want to ask someone their opinion of deriving the jive terms > from Wolof; but not here. Try the American Dialect Society list. Subscription information is at: http://www.americandialect.org/adsl.shtml Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at is2.nyu.edu From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jun 6 13:12:47 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1999 08:12:47 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Robert and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Whiting Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 11:31 AM > On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> If you ever visit my website, you will see that nothing I hypothesize >> about the Proto-Language does not have similar modern parallels. Robert asked: > What is the "similar modern parallel" for your supposition that a > phonological distinctive feature ([+aspiration]) marks a semantic > category ([+animate])? Pat answered: Oops. 'Nothing' is a little word with a big meaning. Should have qualified to 'almost nothing'. On the feature you mention, there may be a language that employs such a device but I am not aware of any other than the Proto-Language that does. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jun 6 15:25:53 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1999 10:25:53 -0500 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 4:50 PM Leo mused: > No, I'm not pulling your leg. I do wonder, though: is "early language" a > distinct entity of some sort? I had not taken it that way, thinking you > meant it rather as a collective for "early languages". Unless, of course, > you were shifting the stress to the second syllble to indicate plurality: > early lan-GUAGE. Pat: I think he's got it! ({:-)) Pat, previously: >> The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms >> of the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and >> momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). Since early transitive verbal roots can >> be analyzed as *CV (object) + *CV (verbal idea), a pluralization of the >> verbal idea indicates repetition leading to perfectivity; the pluralization >> of the object indicates multiple objects leading to an interpretation of >> imperfectivity. Leo commented: > Unless you posit humongous numbers of consonant and vowel phonemes, don't you > then have a problem that the total number of phonetically different roots > would have been (C+1)(V), i.e. the number of consonants + 1 (for no consonant > at all) times the number of vowels? Awfully limiting. Pat answered: Yes, it certainly was limiting. It led to each of the 90 monosyllables having the strangely wide semantic ranges (by our standards) that many reserachers (like G. A. Klimov: 1977) have noticed in certain ("active") languages, like *MO = blood, juice; *FO = ear, leaf. But the process is still residually present today since how similar really are the 'limbs' of a tree and human being? These limitations were the source of the impetus for compounding: to narrow the semantic ranges of these monosyllables. Pat, on vowel retention: >> There can be many explanations for the retention of the principally >> stress-unaccented vowels as you well know. The likeliest is that the >> period during which lack of stress-accent caused zero-grade stem forms had >> passed. Leo queried: > But then, what happened to the expected *_bhr.te'_ from the period while the > rule still operated? Such forms abound. The Germanic strong preterite, > which reflects ablauting PIE perfect formations, still shows weak grades in > the plural. So retention is no explanation, although a new analogical > formation would work -- that is, if one could find an old form with plural > e-grade to provide the analogy. Pat attempts an answer: The only answer I can offer is that I believe all plural forms originated quite a bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms. Pat continued: >> Another: the necessity for differentiation of 3rd sing and 2nd pl. >> overrode normal patterns (if still operational). Etcetera. Leo objected: > With different grade of the root, there was surely differentiation. It's > the e-grade of the root and the thematic vowel that requires explanation, not > that of the suffix. Pat responds: If I am interpreting what you are saying correctly, you are asking why the present/aorist thematic inflection had no ablaut. I can only answer with Beekes (1995:235): "We can thus say nothing more about the inflection. . ." >> Leo, on another subject: >>> How so, if you are also claiming that PIE was ergative? In ergative >>> languages, the morphological subject of an agent-patient sentence >>> (barring "antipassive" or the like) is precisely the patient, not the >>> agent. Leo, on VP marking: > No, I'm no trying to cause confusion; I just think you don't realize the > implications of what you're claiming. Some languages don't mark any NPs on > the verb, a great many mark only one, and some mark more (Basque can have up > to three). When only one is marked, it is almost invariably the > morphological subject. Accusative languages normally make the > highest-ranking noun phrase (by a hierarchy of "deep cases" of the sort > proposed by Fillmore 1968) the morphological subject; for an agent-patient > sentence, this will be the agent. Ergative languages normally make the > patient the morphological subject. (I say "normally" because many languages > can upset the process by passive or "antipassive" formations, and some verbs > may make unusual choices.) When only one NP is marked on the verb, it is > this morphological subject -- i.e., in ergative languages, the patient in an > agent-patient sentence. > I should add that there are a few languages with ergative casemarking but > accusative verb agreement. So yes, there is no *law* that verb agreement > markers in an ergative language will *always* refer to the patient; but > overwhelmingly they do. So I'm trying to say that in suggesting that > those of an ergative PIE did not, you are proposing a typologically unusual > system, probably without realizing it. BTW, what do you mean by "ergative" > or "accusative context"? Pat responds: First, by "ergative" or "accusative" context, I meant nothing more sinister than simply "ergative" or "accusative(/nominative)" construction. Second, there is, as you know, no necessity for a language to have been consistent at any given time; in fact, as languages change, there must be periods of inconsistency as adjustments toward relative consistency are being made. Third, I suspect that when IE was primarily ergative, personal endings as a system had not yet been developed. Only a third person number-neutral verb form was possible. A possibility for a verbal inflection at this very early stage may be what Beekes, among others, characterizes as simply *-e as found in the third person singulars of the present/aorist thematic and the perfect; the method of differentiation being --- at least of one stage --- simply the Ablaut of the stem vowel: perfect *bho{'}re vs. present/aorist *bhe{'}re. I also speculate that IE was a mixed system, so that the ergative construction showed up in a perfective context; the patient agreement marker being *-0; while in an imperfective context, the *effective* agent agreement marker was *-y (for Beekes simple *-e). This situation, in turn, grew out of a pre-Ablaut more consistently ergative system in which only two verbal forms existed: a passive perfective: *bhere{'} (*bher- + *-He, patient marker) and a passive imperfective *bherey (*bher- + *-He, patient marker + *-y, imperfective marker), which would be almost exactly the situation I see for Sumerian. [ moderator snip ] Leo wrote: > I will look, I promise. But I will not accept this identification. Why not? > Because it depends on one dental stop + one unidentified vowel. We do not > even know that either the stop or the vowel is the same in both languages. > The words belong to different morphological-syntactic categories: noun in > Egyptian, gender+case marker in PIE. The only semantic correlation is that > after all, loaves are things. This identification is, as I just said, beyond > the pale of anything that could be called linguistic *science*. Given the > limited number of phonetically distinct roots available under your proposals, > the most one could say was that the two were *homonyms*. But homonyms are > not identities, any more than the let ball has been let through. Pat writes: I hope when you do look you will agree (but I am not holding my breath either) that the semantic ranges of the monosyllables are well within the parameters demonstrated to exist in many languages (as documented by Klimov and others). As for your other objections, let me try to address them. a) "Because it depends on one dental stop + one unidentified vowel." I believe the vowel can be identified in two ways: by the fact of in Egyptian, which can only derive from an earlier *T(H/?)O; *T(H/?)A/E shows up in Egyptian as ; for a full argument, see my Afrasian essay; and the fact that Sumerian cognates, like du{6}, 'mound, hill, lump' establish the vowel as deriving from *O (though Sumerian can *also* derive from *AV, *EV, *OV); all this is detailed in my Sumerian essays. b) "The words belong to different morphological-syntactic categories: noun in Egyptian, gender+case marker in PIE." As, I am sure you know, -t is a gender marker in Egyptian (feminine and collective) as well. In my Proto-Language essays, I try to establish that the earliest monosyllables were all essentially nominal so that all inflections are grammaticalized nouns. As for the IE case marker (I presume you mean *-d), I believe it derives from *T[?]A, 'hand', and is cognate with the Sumerian use of -da as an instrumental (for usual -ta). c) "The only semantic correlation is that after all, loaves are things. This identification is, as I just said, beyond the pale of anything that could be called linguistic *science*." I believe the ultimate reference of *T[?]O is to the human torso, which was inanimately interpreted as 'lump'. The meanings 'loaf (lump of dough)', 'hill (lump of earth)', collective ('lump of related objects'), etc. seem to me to be justifiably related. d) "Given the limited number of phonetically distinct roots available under your proposals, the most one could say was that the two were *homonyms*." If I am correct in assuming that these monosyllables constituted the earlier morphemes, then there are theoretically *no* divergent morphemes that may phonologically approximate to become homonyms. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jun 7 11:33:50 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 12:33:50 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: <003b01bead1e$3a8e9700$1f02703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative > and the ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in > the nominative plural, in my view derived from a construction > implying a kind of 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des > gens'; Lat. 'de' also had an 'ablative meaning'!). With respect, I don't think it's possible to relate any two of these three Basque inflectional endings. A native and ancient Basque lexical item never ends in a plosive, except in a few cases in which the final plosive is secondary. In Basque of the historical period, however, several inflectional suffixes end in, or consist of, /t/ or /k/. Some of these endings are clearly secondary, like first-singular /-t/ from earlier */-da/. while others are of unknown origin. Possibly all are secondary. Ergative /-k/ is universal and attested in the 9th century. There is no way of knowing if it derives from the reduction of something longer, since the ergative can never be followed by any other suffix. The ending /-tik/ is the most widespread ablative marker today, but it is clearly recent. In addition to /-tik/, we also find /-ti/ in earlier Basque (still preserved today, I think, in some regions), /-ik/ in early texts, and /-(r)ean/ in early Bizkaian. In fact, all the local case suffixes exhibit significant variation in time and space, and there seems to me little doubt that the local case-endings are generally of recent origin in Basque. The common ablative /-tik/ may well result from a combination of /-ti/ with /-ik/, though there are problems with this. In modern Basque, /-ik/ is strictly the partitive ending, but its early attestation as an ablative suggests that it may have originated as an ablative and then become specialized as a partitive after the rise of other ablative endings. Complications: old Bizkaian, which has ablative /-(r)ean/, consistently uses /-ti/ to mean `by way of', `via', which may therefore have been the earlier function of /-ti/. And both ablative /-tik/ and partitive /-ik/ have extended forms /-tika/ and /-ika/, respectively; these longer forms may well be conservative. The absolutive (not nominative) plural /-k/ is the most interesting of all. We find plural /-k/ only in the absolutive, which generally has case-marker zero, while all the oblique cases exhibit an apparent plural marker /-e-/. One possibility is that the plural marker was originally */-g/, with devoicing to /-k/ in final position in the absolutive. In this view, the addition of a further overt case-suffix of any kind triggered the automatic Basque insertion of /-e-/ to separate this */-g-/ from a following consonant, and then the medial */-g-/, being invariably intervocalic, simply dropped (as is common in Basque), leaving only the originally non-morphological /-e-/ as the apparent marker of plurality in the oblique cases. But note something curious: it is trivial to reconstruct an earlier stage of Basque in which the plural marker /-k/ (or whatever it was) occurs *nowhere* but in the three demonstratives. Even in modern Basque, this /-k/ occurs only in the three demonstratives, in the ordinary (`definite') article, which itself plainly derives from a reduction of the distal demonstrative, and (in some varieties) pleonastically after the indefinite plural suffix /-zu/. An example of the last is provided by /bat/ `one, a' (< */bade/), plural /batzu/ `some, several', extended pleonastically to /batzuk/ in some varieties. Plural /-k/ occurs nowhere else at all. Not sure what all this means, but ablative /-tik/ and ablative/ partitive /-ik/ cannot possibly be identified with either ergative /-k/ or absolutive plural /-k/, and it seems most unlikely that these last two can be identified with each other. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jrader at m-w.com Mon Jun 7 09:43:36 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 09:43:36 +0000 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: There are occasional exchanges about the etymology of slangisms on ADS-L, the e-mail list of the American Dialect Society. You can find info on how to subscribe at the ADS website (www.americandialect.org). I should point that the focus of the list is not etymology, but American speech in general (phonetics, regionalisms, usage, neologisms, dialects, etc.). Etymological discussions that do not center on Americanisms are definitely off topic. I know of no e-mail list devoted solely to etymology. As for African origins of jazz and jive terms, the locus classicus is an essay by David Dalby, "The African Element in American English," that appeared in _Rappin' and Stylin' Out: Communication in Urban Black America_, ed. Thomas Kochman, Univ. of Illinois Press, c1972. I think it not inaccurate to say that most of Dalby's proposals have not been accepted. A continual stumbling block to progress in this area is that neither specialists in African-American Vernacular English (or AAVE, as it's usually abbreviated) nor specialists in African languages take much of an interest in etymology. Jim Rader > Secondly, is there a more appropriate list around that delights in > etymological niggles, as this has nothing deep to do with sigmatic aorist > laryngeals? I want to ask someone their opinion of deriving the jive terms > from Wolof; but not here. > Nicholas From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jun 7 16:56:25 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 17:56:25 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >> Dr. John E. McLaughlin; then Steven Schaufele; then Moderator : > [snip dispute whether evolution is change] I certainly agree with Steven Schaufele that `evolution' is used in historical linguistics to mean "change within a language". A case in point is the title of M L Samuels 1972 book `Linguistic Evolution with special reference to English'. He is certainly not attempting to show that English `evolved' by natural selection or any such mechanism. Of course, back in 1972 the `evolution of language' was still a non-subject, and Samuels, even if he was aware of the ambiguity, doubtless did not foresee being misunderstood. More recently Henning Andersen has distinguished 'evolutive innovation' within languages from both `adaptive innovation' and `spontaneous innovation'. In his usage there is nothing biological, or goal-directed, implied by the use of the term. Nonetheless, I am inclined to agree that using `evolution/evolve' as a (quasi-)synonym for `change' might be better avoided. I will endeavour to avoid it from now on. `Develop' is perhaps a suitable alternative in some contexts: a) ?English has evolved from Proto-Germanic... b) *English has changed from Proto-Germanic... c) English has developed from Proto-Germanic... Max Wheeler ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Jun 7 21:53:04 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 16:53:04 -0500 Subject: punch not < panc In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The in English, of course, is /@/. English /ph at nc^/ does sound very close to Hindi . It's possible that other European languages got the word from written English BTW: I've also seen and heard that English "to hit with the fist" "one who punches, or gets punched (or worse, as in prison slang)" is from a Romany word for "five, fist" Along this line, I've wondered if --generally said to be derived from the dummy of Guy Fawkes-- is from Romany, given that Spanish gayo (said to be from Romany gaio "non-Gypsy") has the same meaning. Ditto English geeta (which I've only heard in gangster movies from the 1940s) and Spanish guita, both meaning "money" >On a non-linguistic forum recently I spotted the throwaway remark that > the drink comes from an Indian word for 'five' because it has five >ingredients. I immediately barged in and debunked this. But as the _OED_ is >wrong about , I thought I'd ask the experts whether they can add >anything to the _OED_ explanation or controvert it. >In summary, it first occurs in English in 1632, and is repeatedly cited, >always with and with variable ingredients; the expression punch> then turns up in Continental languages as , , >, . Clearly at this date it was pronounced with >[u]. No suitable Indian language has [u] in 'five'. From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Jun 8 04:02:29 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 23:02:29 -0500 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: >Nicholas Widdows wrote: >> In summary, it first occurs in English in 1632, and is repeatedly cited, >> always with and with variable ingredients; the expression > punch> then turns up in Continental languages as , , >> , . Clearly at this date it was pronounced with >> [u]. No suitable Indian language has [u] in 'five'. Tom Wier replied: >If it were [u], why would it have been carried over into (what >I presume to be) French with what looks like an [O]? It seems >[U] would be a better candidate than [u], which French certainly >has. The _pan~ca_ in question is a Sanskrit word, where so-called short is phonetically [^]. (This is a pronunciation of some antiquity. It is specified by the very last rule of Pan.ini's grammar, which cryptically states: "a a", meaning: "Instead of [a], say [^].") Need I add how the British spell [^]? The continental vowels would then be fairly standard attempts at what is (for them) one of the classic unpronounceable English vowels. I don't know any modern Indic languages (or any great amount of Sanskrit, for that matter), but I believe that a modern numeral with [^] can readily be found there. So if the standard etymology of _punch_ can be attacked, it's not on phonetic grounds. Anyone for semantics? Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Tue Jun 8 04:10:04 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 23:10:04 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: >Anthony Appleyard said: >> I had an idea that Latin perfects with a {v} inserted may have come by >> contraction of a periphrastic perfect using the Latin perfect active >> participle [in -vos..] Oddly, Peter Gray agreed. Trouble is, Latin doesn't have a perfect active participle, or any other participle that looks like this. Are we confusing the *Greek* perfect active participle? Nah; that has a stem in -ot-. What's going on? Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 8 04:35:32 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 23:35:32 -0500 Subject: Sociological Linguistics Message-ID: Dear Nik and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Nik Taylor Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 11:58 PM Nik wrote: Besides which, this hypothetical proto-language would have to be spoken by beings of sub-human intelligence. People of human intelligence can quickly create fully developed languages, as in the evolution of creoles from pidgins, and the spontaneous development of sign languages such as ISN (Idioma de Signos Nicarag|ense), which literally evolved out of nothing when deaf people were placed together, and is now a fully developed language (with a small vocabulary, of course). Speech used by sub-humans is DEFINITELY had no "modern parallel" Pat responds: Tell that to the "Wolf Boy". [ Moderator responds: These two situations are different: The "Wolf Boy", like Genie, grew up in isolation, unexposed to human communication; the Nicaraguan deaf who created ISN were placed together, and were aware of communication around them. Both in turn differ from the evolution of Language from an opened-out call system to modern-style Language, the stage which you hypothesize you can recall by examining modern languages and applying your intellect, a stage which indeed has no modern parallel. --rma ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 8 05:34:02 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 00:34:02 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Eduard, Roz, and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Eduard Selleslagh Sent: Saturday, June 05, 1999 7:38 AM -----Original Message----- From: rfrank To: edsel at glo.be Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 12:54 PM Subject: Re: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Roz wrote: > Without going into a prolonged discussion of the comments above, I > would state that based on my knowledge of a historically attested ergative > language, namely, Euskera (Basque), the statements above entail several > assumptions or premises which may not be appicable to the case at hand, > i.e., to reconstructing the *ergative stage(s) of PIE. > 1) First, the comments assume that the ergative stage in question or perhaps > better stated, the ergative languages that preceeded and/or contributed the > hypothetical ergative feature(s) to PIE, had such an animate/inanimate > division (and/or tripartite division with the neuter) and further that as > such the conceptual or cognitive frame governing or defining the > animate/inanimate division was essentially identical to the one that is > employed by IE speakers today. That is an assumption. Pat comments: It certainly is not necessary to suppose that the items in the categories animate/inanimate as conceptualized by speakers of IE languages today correspond identically to the items once held by speakers of IE to be animate or inanimate. However, the terms will have had the same conceptual basis: animate, "denoting a noun or noun phrase which is perceived as referring to a conscious, volitional entity, a human or higher animal." Inanimate, obviously, the opposite. IE: wind, +animate; English: wind, -animate. It appears to me that you are confusing the inventory of items in the category with the definition of the category. Roz continued: > 2) Then there is the assumption that animacy is somehow a requirement for > agency. Pat comments: An "agent" can be profitably defined as "the conscious instigator of an action". Animacy is the quality of a "conscious, volitional entity". Any language or human that does not assume "animacy" for "agents" is best spoken in a closed institution. I assume that you had "instrumentality" in mind when you wrote this but I think it would be desirable for you to distinguish what the proper linguistic use of "agency" and "instrumentality" are. Roz continued: > 3) And further that the only recourse that an ergative language has/might > have for marking the notion of agency is by means of the ergative. Pat commented: We all know (primarily?) ergative languages in which agency can be expressed by ergative case-endings in some contexts and by nominative or instrumental (etal.) case-endings in other contexts so I think you have misinterpreted the statements made. Roz finished: > If applied to the case of Euskera all three of these assumptions would be > false. Pat comments: I am under the impression that Basque "animate NPs form their local cases in a different manner from inanimate NPs" which seems to substantiate these categories for Basque, however idiosyncratically they may be itemized. In addition, I am under the impression that, in Basque, "the ergative case is used for the subject of a transitive verb", and that "it has no other function". Of course, I would defer to Larry Trask's opinions on Basque. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 8 10:06:04 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:06:04 +0200 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 9:09 AM [snip] > Along this line, I've wondered if --generally said to be > derived from the dummy of Guy Fawkes-- is from Romany, given that Spanish > gayo (said to be from Romany gaio "non-Gypsy") has the same meaning. > Ditto English geeta (which I've only heard in gangster movies from > the 1940s) and Spanish guita, both meaning "money" [Ed Selleslagh] In Spain I always heard non-Gypsies being called 'payos', not 'gayos'. Could these be two variants derived from a common 'guayos' ?(but in what language?) BTW, note that Roman? is a satem language - actually various languages - related to Indo-Iranian. (The Gypsies were 'imported', originally in Eastern Europe, as slaves from northern India/Pakistan or thereabout, by Turkic (Ottoman) peoples during their westbound migration from central Asia, that was stopped at the gates of Vienna, and led to the creation of the Ottoman Empire and the present state of Turkey. The Gypsies were abandoned by their masters when these were defeated in Central Europe. The migration from there through southern Germany to southern France (Saintes Maries de la Mer) and the Spanish Mediterranean coast and Andalusia is of a later date. Their English [E-gypsies] and Spanish [E-gi(p)tanos] name stems from popular belief that they came from Egypt). Ed. From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 8 10:58:07 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:58:07 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Larry Trask Date: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 8:19 AM >On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >> In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative >> and the ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in >> the nominative plural, in my view derived from a construction >> implying a kind of 'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des >> gens'; Lat. 'de' also had an 'ablative meaning'!). >With respect, I don't think it's possible to relate any two of these >three Basque inflectional endings. [Ed Selleslagh] Of course, I agree with you as far as the facts are concerned, and thank you for explaining them in a much clearer and more complete way than I ever could. But I don't see how any of the facts actually contradicts my thesis; in fact I think various of them corroborate it, as I will indicate in more detail below. >A native and ancient Basque lexical item never ends in a plosive, except >in a few cases in which the final plosive is secondary. In Basque of >the historical period, however, several inflectional suffixes end in, or >consist of, /t/ or /k/. Some of these endings are clearly secondary, >like first-singular /-t/ from earlier */-da/. while others are of >unknown origin. Possibly all are secondary. >Ergative /-k/ is universal and attested in the 9th century. There is no >way of knowing if it derives from the reduction of something longer, >since the ergative can never be followed by any other suffix. >The ending /-tik/ is the most widespread ablative marker today, but it >is clearly recent. In addition to /-tik/, we also find /-ti/ in earlier >Basque (still preserved today, I think, in some regions), /-ik/ in early >texts, [Ed] Remember I also suggested that -ko might be or have been (in the composite suffixes) the 'autonomous' form of -k, i.e. the origin of -k. >and /-(r)ean/ in early Bizkaian. In fact, all the local case >suffixes exhibit significant variation in time and space, and there >seems to me little doubt that the local case-endings are generally of >recent origin in Basque. [Ed] Yes, they probably are, but they consist of constructions based upon a series of old simple suffixes, combined in various ways, with regional variations or preferences. Some don't use -k(o). The early Biskaian case looks like a adverbial construction. >The common ablative /-tik/ may well result from a combination of /-ti/ >with /-ik/, though there are problems with this. In modern Basque, >/-ik/ is strictly the partitive ending, but its early attestation as an >ablative suggests that it may have originated as an ablative and then >become specialized as a partitive after the rise of other ablative >endings. [Ed] That is exactly one of the things I suggested. >Complications: old Bizkaian, which has ablative /-(r)ean/, consistently >uses /-ti/ to mean `by way of', `via', which may therefore have been the >earlier function of /-ti/. And both ablative /-tik/ and partitive /-ik/ >have extended forms /-tika/ and /-ika/, respectively; these longer forms >may well be conservative. [Ed] Exactly. I suggested -ko, but -ka might do as well, or be a variant or a compound of -ko and something else. >The absolutive (not nominative) plural /-k/ is the most interesting of >all. We find plural /-k/ only in the absolutive, which generally has >case-marker zero, while all the oblique cases exhibit an apparent plural >marker /-e-/. One possibility is that the plural marker was originally >*/-g/, with devoicing to /-k/ in final position in the absolutive. In >this view, the addition of a further overt case-suffix of any kind >triggered the automatic Basque insertion of /-e-/ to separate this >*/-g-/ from a following consonant, and then the medial */-g-/, being >invariably intervocalic, simply dropped (as is common in Basque), >leaving only the originally non-morphological /-e-/ as the apparent >marker of plurality in the oblique cases. [Ed] Yes, this is really the full version of the story (cf. also I?aki Agirre's posting), but I fail to see how this could contradict my thesis that the 'k' is actually an 'ablative-partitive' marker; It rather looks like an explanation why the originally present 'k/g' is now absent in all other plural cases. The alternation k-g is contextual and of no basic importantance to this matter, in my view. >But note something curious: it is trivial to reconstruct an earlier >stage of Basque in which the plural marker /-k/ (or whatever it was) >occurs *nowhere* but in the three demonstratives. Even in modern >Basque, this /-k/ occurs only in the three demonstratives, in the >ordinary (`definite') article, which itself plainly derives from a >reduction of the distal demonstrative, and (in some varieties) >pleonastically after the indefinite plural suffix /-zu/. An example of >the last is provided by /bat/ `one, a' (< */bade/), plural /batzu/ >`some, several', extended pleonastically to /batzuk/ in some varieties. >Plural /-k/ occurs nowhere else at all. [Ed] Your previous paragraph explains a lot of that. >Not sure what all this means, but ablative /-tik/ and ablative/ >partitive /-ik/ cannot possibly be identified with either ergative /-k/ >or absolutive plural /-k/, and it seems most unlikely that these last >two can be identified with each other. [Ed] I fail to see how this follows from what you said before: it seems to lead to quite the opposite. But that's my interpretation of the facts, of course. I hope the moderator and the IE-ists will forgive us this digression into Basque territory. At least it shows the problems there are comparable to the IE ones in this context. Ed. From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Tue Jun 8 12:45:55 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 13:45:55 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: Dr John McLaughlin wrote: > Your analogy of linguistic change being analogous to the slow accumulation > of change in biological organisms is, I'm sorry to say, false to a certain > extent. [snip rest] I labour to be brief, I become obscure. My previous posting was not at all meant the way you took it, and I still can't see how you read all of it and came away with the impression you did. With one exception, I agree 100% with all the facts of linguistics and biology that you cite, and have vigorously argued several times recently on this list that modern language evolved once and has not become significantly different since. My one exception is the meaning of the word "evolution". It's an English word meaning "unfolding, unrolling, development". It's not a technical term coined by biologists. Even in the biological context, it doesn't mean speciation. It doesn't mean punctuation, catastrophe, large-scale change. You're saying that it's used this way by linguists. Maybe it is by some, but clearly others on this list don't use it that way: they use it to mean "change, development". This is not to disagree about biological facts, it's to disagree about semantics. Assume for simplicity that modern language came from brain changes encoded in DNA in an evolutionary event in Africa about 50 000 years ago, as you and I believe. (Details not important.) That was a _biological_ event, and a _biological_ change in language. It was part of human DNA evolution, not part of language evolution. But once language came into existence, it too began to change, and continues to change. This change is not biological. It has no DNA counterpart, it probably has no great amount of natural selection. (And of course it's not progressive.) But many of us call it "evolution" because we use the word to refer to continuing change or development. Now it may be that we shouldn't do so, because many people think it must refer to a biological process, and a few think it must refer to large changes like speciation, and quite a few equate it with progress or increase in complexity. I disagree with all these, but the etymology and historical and technical uses of a word aren't enough to withstand popular misapprehension. If it's now hopelessly ambiguous, so be it. We should restrict the word to the biological event that began language change. I don't mind so much the restriction to one sense, the best-known example of evolution, as after all we can use synonyms like "development" for the rest. But I'm pretty sure it's wrong in biology too (in the usage of most biologists). Evolution of life is a gradual process with occasional instances of speciation, perhaps some periods of stasis with only neutral change, but evolution is always turned on, and means the whole process. So even treating the word as either literally or metaphorically biological, language is evolving right now, and has been from the start. Thus ends my public vindication. More details in a private e-mail. Nicholas From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Jun 8 12:15:34 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 08:15:34 -0400 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> Forms such as Skt aayunak suggest initial laryngeal, but it must disappear >> in yugam, Lat iugum . What vowel does this? > Why not describe the form and the point you are making in greater detail? The lengthening of the augment is usually attributed to laryngeal effects; the most well known being in the reflexes of *eHs- where the radical vowel must be lost in the weak cases. In post-RV Sanskrit, lengthening of the augment is limited to the cases where the rest of the verb begins with i/u/vocalic-r (so that the augmented forms begins ai< *a:i, au <*a:u or a:r). This must be due to leveling of laryngeal effects (from roots that began with *HVR- in PIE). But in RV, there are some cases where the augment is a: even when the root in Sanskrit begins with a liquid, such as a:yunak (<*eHyunegt/s) or a:nat. (<*eHnek't). This, again, is generally attributed to laryngeals. In case of *Hyueg, there is some support from Greek: Yoke (*Hyugom) is zugon (how should i transliterate Greek into ASCII?). Initial *y does not become z in Greek. Sihler is currently checked out of our library, but Rix makes *Hy > z a general rule for Greek. A similar thing happens in case of *Hner. Greek has a prothetic vowel. Sanskrit has only nar-/nr-, but in RV, the final vowel of a preceding word is lengthened in some compounds (e.g., su:nara). Initial laryngeal is the simplest explanation for this. As for as I know, no initial PIE vowel or vocalic liquid disappears in Indic. > However, if you are suggesting that IE *yeu- should be recontructed as > *Hyeu-, I believe that unlikely. So how do you explain Greek zugon? Regards -Nath From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Jun 8 13:50:35 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 09:50:35 -0400 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Wolfgang Schulze wrote: > If we look at the question of ERG and passive, we can sometimes observe > a tendency to establish a pseudo-ergative strategy based on the passive > (some modern Indo-Iranian languages, partly Cl. Armenian etc.). The (middle and) ModIA ergative construction in the past should not be traced to a passive. It is based on the descendent of the -to adjective, which in Indic was always >resultative<. mr.ta means dead, not killed. More tellingly, a:ru:d.ha, `mounted' had an active meaning. It is called ``past passive pariticiple'' because 19th c. grammar writers did not have better terminology. [It is not past either: s'uddha means `clean', not `cleaned'; ka:nta, `beloved' does not mean that the love is past, any more than the English word does in English. Some deny the name participle to this form on general grounds, see Bruenis, ``the nominal sentence in Sanskrit and MidIA.] There are good pragmatic reasons why resultative adjectives seem to have ergative-like agreement. If such constructions are used for general adjectives, it may seem like there are traces of ergativity. I wonder if such an explanation would work for PIE. Regards -Nath From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Jun 8 13:33:48 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 09:33:48 -0400 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan To: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: > Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 4:50 PM I seem to have deleted the message from Leo this is in reply to. I tried to find it in the archives at the Linguist page, but the archives seem to be unavailble. > Pat, previously: >>> The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms >>> of the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and >>> momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). I don't know if Leo made this point. If CCV- was the original ``perfective'', why is the thematic aorist so hard to reconstruct for PIE? *(e)videt and (e)bhuget and perhaps (e)rudhet but no others. In Indic we can see root aorists give rise to thematic ones by thematization (adars'ma gives way to adrs'a:ma, drs'ema etc). Rix sees a similar thing happening in Greek. From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Tue Jun 8 14:44:54 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 15:44:54 +0100 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: > The in English, of course, is /@/. English /ph at nc^/ > does sound very close to Hindi . It's possible that other European > languages got the word from written English > BTW: I've also seen and heard that English "to hit with the > fist" "one who punches, or gets punched (or worse, as in prison > slang)" is from a Romany word for "five, fist" The problem is timing. the drink was cited in 1632 when was the [U] allophone of the /u/ phoneme. The lowering to something in the [V] ~ [@] ~ [a] region might have been in place by 1698 when the association with the Hindi [@] allophone of /a/ was made, but not before (IMO). The continental spellings would've accurately reflected English pronunciation. as a pricking tool is attested from 1505 and as a verb 'hit with fist' from 1530, with dubious examples before 1500, when the original sense was apparently 'to prick'. is from about 1600. Same problem with the vowels. Nicholas From adahyl at cphling.dk Tue Jun 8 15:47:44 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 17:47:44 +0200 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages (was: Sociological Linguistics) In-Reply-To: <3757659C.F72CEC56@brigham.net> Message-ID: McLaughlin (I think) wrote: > Take a look at the historical linguistics textbooks.(...) > The words "evolve/evolution" are never used with respect > to the change over time from one fully modern, complex human language to > another. David Nettle in his new book 'Language Diversity' (which is, I admit, not primarily about historical linguistics) seems to use the two terms indiscriminately. He prefaces chapter II by telling us that he will now deal with "language change". But the chapter itself is called "Language evolution". Adam Hyllested From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 8 19:16:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 20:16:51 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Roz gave three interesting comments on this topic, then said: > If applied to the case of Euskera all three of these assumptions would be > false. The trouble is, we are not talking of Ergative languages in general, but of PIE, for which we do have specific information, which certainly might not apply to other languages or language groups - such as the morphology & syntax of neuters outside Hittite, and the existence of an animate/inanimate distinction within Hittite. The fact that these facts are not necessary facts in all ergative languages does not invalidate them as facts in PIE. Peter From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Jun 9 04:39:28 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 23:39:28 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: Nicholas Widdows wrote: > it probably has no great amount of natural > selection. (And of course it's not progressive.) But many of us call it > "evolution" because we use the word to refer to continuing change or > development. Natural selection doesn't make species better. It makes species *better suited for their environment*. Language is a part of culture. Culture is not constant, it changes due to contact with other cultures, among other factors. Now, as it changes, what it "wants" in a language changes. Just as subterranean animals lose their eyes, a language in a culture becoming more egalitarian will lose a formal/informal distinction. In English, this also resulted in an inadvertent loss of singular/plural distinction in 2nd person. In some dialects of Spanish, _usted_ is being lost, same phenomenon, later time-period, similar cause. Granted, not all changes can be connected with that, and probably more examples of random change exist in linguistic evolution than in biological evolution. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 9 08:37:49 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 09:37:49 +0100 Subject: punch not < panc In-Reply-To: <01JC4W8GDAAQ9WBUDA@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: >So if the standard etymology of _punch_ can be attacked, it's not on phonetic >grounds. Anyone for semantics? Now that I think the phonetic obstacles have been removed (to a degree, at least; note that in most modern Indian lgs. /pa^nch/ is specifically noted with a nasalized /a/ - an artefact of the following nasal consonant, of course - which fact may have contributed to its reflex in English). Phonetics apart, the remaining problem seems to be that - in Indian languages other than English - the meaning is "5" and only that. I fail to find a trace of any possible usage of this word with the sense of "liquor, drink" othl. Only thing which comes close is /punch-ghar/, lit. "punch-house" for "inn". Attestation in English is from roughly the same time as "punch" itself, so it may or may not be Anglo-Indian rather than autochthonous (ghar = house is OK, though). In the absence of a clear Indian native word which combines form and content of modern "punch" (at least approximately) - which we should look for, preferably in Gujarati and Marathi, for the earliest (English !) attestations seem to be associated with this region, or Bengali, where the the earliest British stronghold was - the "five" etymology, which has become unquestioned standard, may be reclassified as an educated guess. However, as it happens some time, maybe *one* Indian cook *once* presented this kind of edifying drink to *one* colonial officer and, on being asked, he may have said "I call it /punch/, because I put five things into it". This can easily give rise to the rumour that "The Indians call it like that" in some travelogue or casino talk. With a cultural/culinary term like that, this may well be the whole untold story, and every attempt to find a similar form-meaning association in one of the potential donor languages may be in vain. Such things do happen, and there are things between heaven and earth, etymologists prefer not to dream of ... From pagostini at tin.it Wed Jun 9 08:01:18 1999 From: pagostini at tin.it (pagostini at tin.it) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 10:01:18 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects In-Reply-To: <01JC4WLLIYDK9WBUDA@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: >>> I had an idea that Latin perfects with a {v} inserted may have come by >>> contraction of a periphrastic perfect using the Latin perfect active >>> participle [in -vos..] Gentlemen, Did you ever happen to think that the Etruscan (supposedly) perfective forms in -v- might come into account as a possible (areal) source for Latin v-perfects? Cheers ---- Paolo Agostini From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Wed Jun 9 10:22:32 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 06:22:32 -0400 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: I wrote: > The lengthening of the augment is usually attributed to laryngeal effects; > the most well known being in the reflexes of *eHs- I meant *Hes, augmented weak forms being *eHs- Nath. From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Jun 9 10:50:16 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 12:50:16 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Vidhyanath Rao schrieb: > Wolfgang Schulze wrote: >> If we look at the question of ERG and passive, we can sometimes observe >> a tendency to establish a pseudo-ergative strategy based on the passive >> (some modern Indo-Iranian languages, partly Cl. Armenian etc.). > The (middle and) ModIA ergative construction in the past should not be > traced to a passive. It is based on the descendent of the -to adjective, > which in Indic was always >resultative<. mr.ta means dead, not killed. More > tellingly, a:ru:d.ha, `mounted' had an active meaning. It is called ``past > passive pariticiple'' because 19th c. grammar writers did not have better > terminology. I used the term 'passive' in a functional sense which means that 'passive' refers to ANY means to background an agent and/or foreground a patient. Naturally, this function is not restricted to the technique of 'classical' passivization. The pragmatics and semantics of such a strategy are strongly language-dependent though certain universal tendencies (not universals!) can be observed. One typical effect is that of resultiveness which is especially strong with the perfective aspect and non-SAP agents (see Hopper/Thompson 1980 for details). The main point with (anti)passives is that their 'demoted' NP is located in the periphery of a clause: Normally (I don't say ALWAYS!), it can be deleted. In ERG structures it is important to note that ERG plays the role of a subject or object (depending on the other techniques relevant to accusativity/ergativity present). Demoted NPs in (anti)passives never play one of these roles. AGAIN: Even if there are secondary ergative-like structures in some IE languages (grammaticalized via some kind of 'passive' / resultative or what so ever), this does not tell us ANYTHING about ERG in PIE. One the contrary: PASS-based ergatives can only emerge from accusative strategies. So, if you find parallels for the (new) Indo-Iranian structures in PIE, this only tells us that PIE in fact WAS of the ACC type! > There are good pragmatic reasons why resultative adjectives seem to have > ergative-like agreement. If such constructions are used for general > adjectives, it may seem like there are traces of ergativity. I wonder if > such an explanation would work for PIE. Ergative-like agreement with resultatives does not stem from an 'ergative' strategy but from the fact that resultatives often behave like predicative adjectives. Their agreement structure is triggered by the appropriate NP (something like 'man-sexus dead-sexus by NP'). A 'true' ERG agreement pattern would not by confined to such resultative structures, but would be present in the whole paradigm, cf. (as an example) Chechen (East Caucasian) stag w-?l-u man(CLI):ABS I-laugh:PRES-PRES 'The man is laughing' stag-a baga y-illi-na man-ERG mouth(CLIV):ABS IV-open:PAST-INFER 'The man has opened (his) mouth' Here, the noun class marker /w-/ (class I [male humans]) is triggered by the intransitive absolutive, just as /-/ (class IV (some inanimates)) is triggered by the transitivie absolutive. If we check AGR in PIE we should stick to the reconstructed AGR system itself, but not for possible secondary AGR systems derived from pseudo-adjectival (participle-like) forms. These do not tell us anything with respect to the basic question. Finally, let me briefly refer to Pat's and Roz' discussion on animacy, ergativity etc. First we should note that the semantics of animacy is heavily depending on how people exeprience and categorize their world(s) (at least in a diachronic sense). To caracterize "animacy [as] the quality of a "conscious, volitional entity"" (Pat) surely is an option, but not a must. Especially, 'volitionality' is a very doubtful feature. In some so-called active languages 'volition' is NOT a distinctive feature, rather an inferential one. 'Animacy' is not a categorial entity but a name for the behavior of the lexcial representation of a cognitive concept with respect to a scale which often is labeled animacy hierarchy. Second, the problem of 'animacy' and 'agentivity' has - in itself - nothing to do with ergativity/accusativity. It represents nothing but a 'natural' tendency to prefer animate NPs with high-transitive contructions. This is why speech act participants often are 'neutral' with respect to the morphological part of the AEC (Silverstein hierarchy). High/Low animacy is crucial with non-SAP agents: The more 'animate' a nSAP agent is the less a specific marking of its role becomes necessary (cf. names in the role of nSAP agents in many ERG languages that are unmarked). Hence we can conclude that ONE possible semantic aspect of ergative marking is the LOW degree of inherent agentivity which necessitates its supplementory marking (there are other strategies to use ERG morphology in order to overemphasize the left side of the agentivity hierarchy, but that does not matter here). But remember that again we deal with high-transitive structures only. An ERG typology clearly demands that intransitive (or low transitive) contructions are exempted from this strategy. Hence, we cannot not talk about 'agents' and 'animacy' in general (when discussing possible ERG features), but only about those that occur with (high) transitive structures. To get back to PIE: There are no clear signs that animate 'agents' were ever differentiated according to the degree of transitivity exerted by them. This again is a hint at an even *semantic* accusativity of PIE. Wolfgang [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 9 15:48:13 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 17:48:13 +0200 Subject: "syllabicity" In-Reply-To: <002e01bea78a$3044e720$73d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Wed, 26 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [... (Discussing IE possible monovocalism:)] > I [...] used *t(V) to attempt to indicate that a -*t was > the result of a stress-accent-motivated reduction from an earlier -*tV > while *tV showed the morpheme in its fuller form under the condition of > stress-accentuation. > How would you prefer to indicate a single morpheme, *tV, that has two > realizations: unstressed -*t and stressed -*tV? You are at the core of the matter now: You are talking morphophonemics, not phonemics, but using a notation that brings in morphological knowledge. And, while it could be wise to turn the debate to this point, that was not the issue to begin with. Of course there is a lot more predictability in wordforms if you are allowed to quote them in a shape that allows you to make predictions about their alternations. That in fact is why I have been so much occupied with IE morphophonemics (of course you may not know that, but I have, and it pays off). Jens From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 9 16:13:44 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 18:13:44 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bea851$0ead2c40$4d9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [...] I would go an unpalatable to some step further, and, agree with G. > A. Klimov, that an ergative form *must* precede an accusative type. There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close to being ergative; Kurdish too; Lithuanian is well on its way; and Eskimo has accusative remains in the pronouns. Also, the "have/be" periphrasis of perfect tense in Western Europe have passed through a stage of plain ergative syntax with this part of the verb. In all of these examples that ergativ has plainly arisen from a passive transformation: The event was described from the point of view of what happened to the object, and in course of time this nuance was suppressed and the "ergative" structure generalized to the point of ousting the old finite (subject-centered) verb. This view is often criticized for being based on the analyst's inability to think in terms of foreign categories, a criticism that completely ignores the fact that the categories concerned are in this instance not at all foreign to us. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 9 16:25:27 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 18:25:27 +0200 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) In-Reply-To: <002201bea851$214463a0$4d9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote - my, did he write! > [snip] To whoever needs this information: Egyptian is not - I said NOT - an Indo-European language. And it is not - I stubbornly repeat, NOT - a magic primeval language from which Proto-Indo-European has developed. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 9 17:15:01 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 19:15:01 +0200 Subject: IE pers.pron. (dual forms) In-Reply-To: <001b01bea895$baa19e20$7f9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [Jens:] >> I meant "completely unknown for the language concerned", which of course >> is what matters. I don't believe such a compensatory lengthening rule has >> ever been known for Sanskrit. If you assume -uy > -u: in Sanskrit, it is >> your task to demonstrate that there is such a "rule", meaning that the >> same change occurs in other cases where -u- and final -y meet. It would be >> an interesting discovery if you have examples to show that (for Sanskrit, >> mind you). > Pat responds: > Gee, Jens, I thought you knew about IE *ai -> Sanskrit [e:], or is that not > a lengthened vowel? Jens objects: My, Pat, that was not the rule we aere talking about. If you want to invoke a change of uy to [u:] in Sanskrit, you should point to _that_ happening elsewhere in the language. Actualy, the regular Sanskrit realization of /CwyC/ is [CviC], and the same holds if you substitute word boundary (#) for any of the C's; examples of the former are plentiful, as all compounds with first member dvi- 'two, double', while the latter is harder to find, but cf. darvi voc. of darvi: 'wooden laddle'. Whoever holds that /wy/ combines differently, will have to produce examples - of this combination, not just change the subject to a different one. [...] >>>>> Pat responded: >>>>> Sorry, I cannot accept the idea that laryngeals still functioning in >>>>> Sanskrit made yuge{'} sandhi-resistant. [...] > Jens counters: >> But facts ought to be given explanations, and in this case it lies right >> at hand. What is simpler than assuming that a neuter dual contains the >> neuter dual ending? Now, in consonant stems the neuter dual in Sanskrit >> ends in /-i:/. The most common (in Beekes' phonology, if I understand him >> correctly, the only) source of that is a PIE sequence of i + laryngeal. >> Then, if /yuge'/ is regular, and the stem is *yugo-, we are made to posit >> *yugo-iH. That fully explains its sandhi-resistence, for before a vowel, >> the H goes to the following syllable, leaving -oi to form a diphthong in a >> syllable of their own, whence Skt. -e, even before vowel in the following >> word. > Pat, amazed again: > Gosh, Jens, does not IE *e/oi -> Sanskrit [e:] also? Besides, 99% of the > cases when will come before a vowel involve a following word the > initial of which can anciently have been presumed to be derived from IE *H. Jens objects: Blimey, Pat, other words ending in Indo-Iranian *-ai (or *-ay, same thing) do not show sandhi resistence. For instance, datives in -e always change to -a before vowel initial. Strangely perhaps, it does not matter that the following vowel-initial word has often earlier had an initial laryngeal. Historical linguistics is often a very delicate matter, and you certainly have to look at a language before making sweeping statements about it. Jens From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Jun 9 17:40:46 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 12:40:46 -0500 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: Pat wrote: >I seem to have deleted the message from Leo this is in reply to. I tried to >find it in the archives at the Linguist page, but the archives seem to be >unavailble. >> Pat, previously: >>>> The data I think that may support this hypothesis are the different forms >>>> of the (e.g.) IE verb for momentary and durative: durative *'CeC(V) and >>>> momentary *C0'CV (Lehmann 1974:186). >I don't know if Leo made this point. If CCV- was the original >``perfective'', why is the thematic aorist so hard to reconstruct for PIE? >*(e)videt and (e)bhuget and perhaps (e)rudhet but no others. In Indic we can >see root aorists give rise to thematic ones by thematization (adars'ma gives >way to adrs'a:ma, drs'ema etc). Rix sees a similar thing happening in Greek. I didn't make the point, and since I don't save most of my posts, I don't know what I said in response. But I know I didn't say anything about aorist constructions. More significantly, I have decided not to respond to your other interesting message, in which you deal with some of my objections to your proposals. I have looked at your website, and in particular at the list of monosyllabic roots. By themselves, without examples, they're hard to evaluate. I find the proposed semantics sometimes plausible, sometimes absurd. What you added about the original meaning of the PIE inanimate : Egyptian 'bread' word being 'torso' only hurt your case, in my opinion. I'm afraid I'll have to discontinue the discussion. We are doing very different things from totally different premises. We can criticize and explain all we want, but we're not going to reach anything resembling agreement on principles and procedures, much less on results. So, with no spirit of rancor or ill will, I think we'd better just let it drop. Regards Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From wirix at tin.it Wed Jun 9 17:53:36 1999 From: wirix at tin.it (Wilmer "Xelloss" Ricciotti) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 19:53:36 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects In-Reply-To: <01JC4WLLIYDK9WBUDA@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]On Behalf Of CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Sent: martedl 8 giugno 1999 06:10 >Oddly, Peter Gray agreed. Trouble is, Latin doesn't have a perfect active >participle, or any other participle that looks like this. Are we confusing >the *Greek* perfect active participle? Nah; that has a stem in -ot-. What's >going on? *Classical* Latin doesn't have a perfect active participle; nevertheless this doesn't mean that Latin never had it, and it shouldn't be much different from *amavos or perhaps *amaus (I read somewhere that the preposition 'apud' is a perfect active participle, neuter gender... can anyone confirm?). Ancient latin also had present passive participles, which sometimes survived in fossil forms like alumnus from alo. (greek perfect active participle has a stem in -wot- (masculine) -wos- (neuter) or -ws- (+ -ja) (feminine)) Actually Anthony Appleyard's explanation for latin perfects in -vi/-ui isn't bad at all: thus forms like the pluperfect 'amaveram' would come from *amavos esam. In this case the -is-/-er- element of the perfect tenses would come from the stem of the verb esse, captured from a periphrastic formation. But we found this element in greek too, in pluperfects like elely'kein < elelyk-es-m. So this element seems to be more ancient... who can guess from where it comes? Wilmer Ricciotti wirix at tin.it From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 9 19:42:06 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 20:42:06 +0100 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: PIE *Hiugom and Greek initial z There is of course a continuing debate about the origin of the apparently double reflex in Greek of PIE initial *y-. It is an attractive proposition to suggest *y- > Gk /h/, while *Hy > Gk /z/, but the evidence is rather more complicated than Nath suggested, and the idea is still debated. There are some who think the complications are too much, and the idea can't work. Secondly, I note that Philip Baldi in hie Foundations of Latin cites PIE *Hiugom without comment, as if the initial Hy cluster were a proven fact. Generally, he is happy to express everything in terms of laryngeals, when there may be still some demurring in some quarters, but at least he does provide some reputable scholarly support for the idea of an initial laryngeal in "yoke". Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 9 19:56:15 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 20:56:15 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Latin perfects with a {v} inserted ... from a putative Latin perfect active participle [in -vos..] Leo said: > Peter Gray agreed. Not entirely - I merely support the possibility - at least until it is proved impossible! Leo went on: > the *Greek* perfect active participle? Nah; that has a stem in -ot-. Not in Mycenaean. e.g. te-tu-ko-wo-a2 = tetkhwoa. Neither Iranian nor Mycenaean shows the -t- in the -w- perfect participles. Sanskrit and Greek both show it, but not in the same cases, since Sanskrit has it only in those cases that have no reflex in Greek. It appears that Sanskrit and Greek both independently developed -t- forms at a late stage. The PIE participle therefore appears to be -wo:s ~ -wos ~ us with a feminine in -us-i:. It is at least therefore possible that Latin does not show this participle because it got developed into something else, namely the -v- stems ----- especially since there is an exact parallel in Tocharian. However, the details of this development would be complex, and I would need careful persuasion, but at least I'm listening! Peter From maxdashu at LanMinds.Com Wed Jun 9 20:12:45 1999 From: maxdashu at LanMinds.Com (Max Dashu) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 13:12:45 -0700 Subject: gayo/gadje Message-ID: >> Spanish gayo (said to be from Romany gaio "non-Gypsy") >In Spain I always heard non-Gypsies being called 'payos', not 'gayos'. Could >these be two variants derived from a common 'guayos' I vote against "guayos." In eastern Europe the term is "gadje" or "gadjo." >(The Gypsies were 'imported', originally in Eastern Europe, as slaves from >northern India/Pakistan or thereabout, by Turkic (Ottoman) peoples during >their westbound migration from central Asia, that was stopped at the gates >of Vienna, and led to the creation of the Ottoman Empire and the present >state of Turkey. Not exactly. Roma migrations began around the 10th century, fleeing Turkic invaders, rather than exported by them. These were not the Ottoman Turks. They went through Iran and Armenia, where they were harried by the Seljuk Turks, and fled again toward Greece and into the Balkans. Many of these arrivals were enslaved in Rumania by the 1300s. The point is, generally they arrived in Europe on their own. Max Dashu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 9 21:09:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 16:09:01 -0500 Subject: punch not < panc In-Reply-To: <005001beb19d$d4926ba0$1405703e@edsel> Message-ID: gayo is used in the Southern Cone to mean "dude, guy, man, etc" I've seen it written as in dictionaries of [Spanish] calo/ & germani/a, so it was used in Spain in the 1500s I've seen the term in general books on Gypsies, including on British Gypsies payo, given that it means "chump, loser, clown, etc." sounds like it might be a play on words. I'm guessing that it comes from payaso < Italian pagliaccio >> Along this line, I've wondered if --generally said to be >> derived from the dummy of Guy Fawkes-- is from Romany, given that Spanish >> gayo (said to be from Romany gaio "non-Gypsy") has the same meaning. >> Ditto English geeta (which I've only heard in gangster movies from >> the 1940s) and Spanish guita, both meaning "money" >[Ed Selleslagh] >In Spain I always heard non-Gypsies being called 'payos', not 'gayos'. Could >these be two variants derived from a common 'guayos' ?(but in what >language?) BTW, note that Roman? is a satem language - actually various >languages - related to Indo-Iranian. From jer at cphling.dk Thu Jun 10 01:31:37 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 03:31:37 +0200 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity In-Reply-To: <002601beb031$09d82980$fb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Sun, 6 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [... (In discussion with Leo Connolly, Pat suggests that *bhe'rete has retained two unstressed e's because the time of deletion was over.)] > Leo queried: >> But then, what happened to the expected *_bhr.te'_ from the period while the >> rule still operated? [...] > Pat attempts an answer: > The only answer I can offer is that I believe all plural forms originated > quite a bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms. I, Jens, intrude: But secondarily created forms ought to be even more transparent than older forms. And it is a point in your reasoning that the material utilized to differentiate *bhe'ret and *bhe'rete (and **bhe'rt which does not appear to exist) was not distinctive. How, then, could it be available? [...] > A possibility for a verbal inflection at this very early stage may be what > Beekes, among others, characterizes as simply *-e as found in the third > person singulars of the present/aorist thematic and the perfect; the method > of differentiation being --- at least of one stage --- simply the Ablaut of > the stem vowel: perfect *bho{'}re vs. present/aorist *bhe{'}re. I also > speculate that IE was a mixed system, so that the ergative construction > showed up in a perfective context; the patient agreement marker being *-0; > while in an imperfective context, the *effective* agent agreement marker was > *-y (for Beekes simple *-e). > This situation, in turn, grew out of a pre-Ablaut more consistently ergative > system in which only two verbal forms existed: a passive perfective: > *bhere{'} (*bher- + *-He, patient marker) and a passive imperfective > *bherey (*bher- + *-He, patient marker + *-y, imperfective marker), which > would be almost exactly the situation I see for Sumerian. Have you any examples of a language just "differentiating" by using what must have been, up till then, non-existing phantom-variants which were suddenly invented without any model? Though often heard in attempts to explain morphological systems - no, you are not alone - this just appears impossible. And why would an older stage of the language be as in Sumerian? What if the Indo-Europeans really _meant_ what they said and intended the system to be the way we find it? Then we could have almost exactly the situation I see for Indo-European. That would be an even closer parallel - by what rule is it inferior? Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 10 01:52:34 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 20:52:34 -0500 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 7:15 AM Pat, previously: >> However, if you are suggesting that IE *yeu- should be recontructed as >> *Hyeu-, I believe that unlikely. Nath wrote: > So how do you explain Greek zugon? Pat answers: I do agree that the likeliest explanation for the [z] of zugon is that it results from an initial *Hy- but I would like to ask the following questions. 1) Obviously, *Heyew is not a canonical IE root form. 2) Would you consider the original root *Hey- and -w a root extension? 3) Would you consider the possibility that the root is *yew- and that *He is a preverb which may or may not have been present in the earliest IE? I have no answers for these questions myself, and I am only interested in your opinion. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 10 03:09:50 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 22:09:50 -0500 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 8:33 AM [ moderator snip ] > I don't know if Leo made this point. If CCV- was the original ``perfective'', > why is the thematic aorist so hard to reconstruct for PIE? *(e)videt and > (e)bhuget and perhaps (e)rudhet but no others. In Indic we can see root > aorists give rise to thematic ones by thematization (adars'ma gives way to > adrs'a:ma, drs'ema etc). Rix sees a similar thing happening in Greek. Lehmann does not consider C'CV per se perfective: he contrasts an aorist vida{'}t as +perfective, + momentary, and the perfect ve{'}da as +perfective, -momentary. You may or may not agree. But to attempt to address the idea behind your question if I understand it, the relative rarity of thematic aorists may be substantially attributable to the fact that there were two other competing aorists (or equivalents): the root aorists and s-aorists. Now, let me ask you a question in return. Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the athematic and thematic aorists? And what might that difference (if any) have been? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 10 05:54:15 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 00:54:15 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 11:25 AM [ moderator snip ] > To whoever needs this information: > Egyptian is not - I said NOT - an Indo-European language. And it is not - > I stubbornly repeat, NOT - a magic primeval language from which > Proto-Indo-European has developed. It is a complete mischaracterization of my views to imply that I believe that IE developed from Egyptian or, while we are at it, from Sumerian. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Thu Jun 10 06:24:30 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 01:24:30 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close > to being ergative; Well, what else can accusative evolve *from* if not ergative, possibly thru an intermediate active stage? And what else can ergative evolve from if not from accusative? So, it would probably be more reasonable to say that they tend to alternate, given enough time, that is ergative-->accusative-->ergative. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Thu Jun 10 08:08:31 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 09:08:31 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: <375DF000.B769FA8A@ufl.edu> Message-ID: > Now, as it changes, what it "wants" in a language >changes. Just as subterranean animals lose their eyes, a language in a >culture becoming more egalitarian will lose a formal/informal >distinction. In English, this also resulted in an inadvertent loss of >singular/plural distinction in 2nd person. With due respect, you are not really saying that English lost the number distinction here because of English society becoming (more) *egalitarian*, or are you ? Or, to stretch the argument, does anyone think that some languages innovated the category of inferentiality (Turkish as against Old Turkic, Lhasa Tibetan as against Written Tibetan, Bulgarian as against Old Church Slavonic aso. aso.) because the respective societies became , say, more *skeptical* ? Sorry, I'm not trying to make fun of you, sometimes language may indeed follow culture in certain respects, but, sorry again, I have difficulties with squaring the two notions "English" and "egalitarian". From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Thu Jun 10 10:51:24 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:51:24 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: >Nicholas Widdows wrote: >> it probably has no great amount of natural >> selection. (And of course it's not progressive.) Nik Tailor replied. > Natural selection doesn't make species better. It makes species *better > suited for their environment*. Yes. Hence my bracketed "of course": the preceding clauses were cases where biology does have a feature, and language doesn't. But I meant, of course _neither_ evolves progressively. > Just as subterranean animals lose their eyes, a language in a > culture becoming more egalitarian will lose a formal/informal > distinction. In English, this also resulted in an inadvertent loss of > singular/plural distinction in 2nd person. In some dialects of Spanish, > _usted_ is being lost, same phenomenon, later time-period, similar > cause. Almost certainly, an animal first retreats to caves, then loses sight; though it's theoretically possible that an animal could become blind and in consequence be forced to retreat to where this is no handicap. But in language the causation is much less clear. In English I think the use of for singular began as elevated address, spread to the bourgeoisie around 1600, and to the common people by about 1700. The Quakers maintained precisely for egalitarianism. My lord Foppington who minced under his jewels and pomaded wig said even to his servants. It might be true that now, when we have no choice, we do have a more egalitarian system. > Granted, not all changes can be connected with that, and > probably more examples of random change exist in linguistic evolution > than in biological evolution. Yes. I have no idea how one would quantify natural selection or assess causation. There must be some effect; there might be a big effect. I was just stressing the difference from biology. Nicholas Widdows [If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kick-boxing.] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Jun 10 12:02:45 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 07:02:45 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Leo wrote: >> Trouble is, Latin doesn't have a perfect active >>participle, or any other participle that looks like this. Wilmer replied: > >*Classical* Latin doesn't have a perfect active participle; nevertheless >this doesn't mean that Latin never had it, and it shouldn't be much >different from *amavos or perhaps *amaus (I read somewhere that the >preposition 'apud' is a perfect active participle, neuter gender... can >anyone confirm?). Ancient latin also had present passive participles, >which sometimes survived in fossil forms like alumnus from alo. Unless these forms are *attested*, *in Latin*, *as participles*, we cannot say that any kind of Latin actually *had* them. This is not to say that one Latin form or another did not derive from a participle, or to deny that these participles were still functional in Italic or in Pre-Latin. Certainly the mediopassive participles in -men- are reflected in Latin -- but did Latin still *have* them? Do we have any attestations? Sorry to be picky, but that's what I do. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From jer at cphling.dk Thu Jun 10 12:44:14 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 14:44:14 +0200 Subject: Intensive Reduplication In-Reply-To: <005501beb2b3$85c4a620$91f1abc3@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, petegray wrote: > PIE *Hiugom and Greek initial z > There is of course a continuing debate about the origin of the apparently > double reflex in Greek of PIE initial *y-. It is an attractive > proposition to suggest *y- > Gk /h/, while *Hy > Gk /z/, but the evidence is > rather more complicated than Nath suggested, and the idea is still debated. > There are some who think the complications are too much, and the idea can't > work. [...] Pardon my intruding, but I'd like to say that this still sounds attractive, if not in such a clean fashion. The matter was considered an open-and-shut case for a period of time in the mid-seventies after Martin Peters presented the analysis of Attic Greek /hi:'e:mi/ from *H1yi-H1yeH1-mi where the presence of a laryngeal could be proved. That led Peters and the rest of us to conclude that *Hy- gave Greek /h-/ and that, by contrast, Gk. /z-/ would have to be from plain *y-. Then came Rix' Historical Greek grammar containing beautiful arguments for initial laryngeals in some roots with Gk. /z-/ corresponding to Vedic y- and lengthened augment or compositional vowel. That brought the matter back where it started, except that Peters' /h-/ for *H1y- still stands. Plain IE *y- may be seen in Ved. yaj- 'to sacrifice', of which Gk. ha'gios 'holy' is a gerundive formation, cf. lack of lengthening in the desiderative i'yaks.ati. That indicates that, e.g., the relative pronoun, Gk. /ho's/, Ved. ya's, is IE plain *yo's, and that IE *y- without laryngeal gives Gk. /h-/. Then the difference between Gk. /h-/ and /z-/ is not just one of *Hy- and plain *y-, but we have to differentiate the laryngeals - after all we accept three of them. As /z-/ is also the outcome of *dy- and *gy- (with all kinds of g's), there would be very good sense in taking /z-/ to represent also *H3y-, given the phonetic character of *H3 as a voiced labiovelar spirant (or labiouvular or labiopharyngeal as some prefer on grounds I do not see). There remains only *H2y- for which /z-/ and /h-/ appear about equally likely. Phonetically *H2 was something like [x], a voiceless velar or postvelar spirant. If the coalescence of *y- and *H1y- means that *y- was devoiced to a voiceless y (much like the initial of English _huge_), then *H2y- [xy-] could well be expected to yield the same, i.e. /h-/. But if it was the stronger body of *H3y- that set it off from *H1y-, one could just as well expect *H2y- to join the "strong" series and end up as /z-/. The latter possibility, however, would mean that the y part of *H2y exerted an assimilatory influence on *H2 by voicing it, which is perhaps not very likely if *y- alone loses it voice. This brings us to the picture: IE *y- > Gk. /h-/ IE *H1y- > Gk. /h-/ IE *H2y- > Gk. /h-/ (or /z-/?) IE *H3y- > Gk. /z-/ Jens From jrader at m-w.com Thu Jun 10 09:21:48 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 09:21:48 +0000 Subject: punch not < panc Message-ID: In current Merriam-Webster dictionaries, the Indo-Aryan etymology of is prefaced by "perhaps." This amounts to saying that the etymology is an educated guess, to use Stefan's phrase, not an unquestioned standard. Hindi is given as the immediate possible source, though Gujarati, Marathi, or Bengali should probably be given more serious consideration. This, like most of the other Anglo-Indian etymologies in our dictionaries, needs re-vetting. Jim Rader > In the absence of a clear > Indian native word which combines form and content of modern "punch" (at > least approximately) - which we should look for, preferably in Gujarati and > Marathi, for the earliest (English !) attestations seem to be associated > with this region, or Bengali, where the the earliest British stronghold was > - the "five" etymology, which has become unquestioned standard, may be > reclassified as an educated guess. From alex at AN3039.spb.edu Thu Jun 10 17:35:42 1999 From: alex at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 20:35:42 +0300 Subject: Pronouns/ergative languages Message-ID: Nicholas Widdows wrote: Message-ID: Can you give examples? [snip] >There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close >to being ergative; Kurdish too; Lithuanian is well on its way; and >Eskimo has accusative remains in the pronouns. [snip] From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jun 11 01:21:59 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 20:21:59 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen >> Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 11:13 AM >>> On Thu, 27 May 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >>>> [...] I would go an unpalatable to some step further, and, agree with >>>> G. A. Klimov, that an ergative form *must* precede an accusative type. Jens objected: >>> There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close to >>> being ergative; Kurdish too; Lithuanian is well on its way; and Eskimo has >>> accusative remains in the pronouns. Also, the "have/be" periphrasis of >>> perfect tense in Western Europe have passed through a stage of plain >>> ergative syntax with this part of the verb. In all of these examples that >>> ergative has plainly arisen from a passive transformation: The event was >>> described from the point of view of what happened to the object, and in >>> course of time this nuance was suppressed and the "ergative" structure >>> generalized to the point of ousting the old finite (subject-centered) verb. >>> This view is often criticized for being based on the analyst's inability to >>> think in terms of foreign categories, a criticism that completely ignores >>> the fact that the categories concerned are in this instance not at all >>> foreign to us. I do not think you are responding to what I am saying. Your examples suggest to me that you are under the impression that I denied that ergative structure could develop from accusative structure. I did not say that nor do I believe that. I do continue to believe that any language which is presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage sometime prior to that in its development. For most transitive verbs, I believe the closest connection is between it and its object so that, at some stage of development, an unmarked verb form should represent a passive. To try to understand ergative constructions from passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me to be potentially misleading. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From fortytwo at ufl.edu Fri Jun 11 04:00:19 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 23:00:19 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote: > With due respect, you are not really saying that English lost the number > distinction here because of English society becoming (more) *egalitarian*, > or are you ? Something like that. Remember that in Middle English, the "ye" form, originally a plural, became a polite pronoun. Out of politeness, the older "thou" forms were lost. There was some degree of egalitarianism, or at least a more democratic society. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 11 09:55:54 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 11:55:54 +0200 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) In-Reply-To: <008d01beb305$ad1cb260$d29ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [In reply to a post of mine:] > It is a complete mischaracterization of my views to imply that I believe > that IE developed from Egyptian or, while we are at it, from Sumerian. I know, but you seem to have been forgetting that when forming many of your actual suggestions. They only make sense to me if Egyptian is a magic prestage of IE. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 11 10:50:45 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 12:50:45 +0200 Subject: Intensive Reduplication In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, I wrote: > [...] > [I]n the mid-seventies [...] Martin > Peters presented the analysis of Attic Greek /hi:'e:mi/ from > *H1yi-H1yeH1-mi where the presence of a laryngeal could be proved. [...] Actually, Peters said only *Hyi-HyeH1-mi with unspecified laryngeal in the initial. But as soon as Francis and Normier presented solid evidence that only /H1/ gives plain lengthening after high vowels in Greek (while iH2 iH3 yield ya:, yo:, and uH2 uH3 yield wa:, wo:), the H1 was a clear thing in the minds of those who accept this theory. Since Peters does not accept it, I should not have quoted his analysis in a shape that would suggest that he did. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jun 11 13:22:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 08:22:19 -0500 Subject: Yet again: syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 8:31 PM > On Sun, 6 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> The only answer I can offer is that I believe all plural forms originated >> quite a bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms. Jens commented: > I, Jens, intrude: But secondarily created forms ought to be even more > transparent than older forms. And it is a point in your reasoning that the > material utilized to differentiate *bhe'ret and *bhe'rete (and **bhe'rt > which does not appear to exist) was not distinctive. How, then, could it > be available? Pat responds: Jens, with the best of intentions, I cannot understand what you are asking here. Could you express it differently and more explicitly. Pat, previously: >> This situation, in turn, grew out of a pre-Ablaut more consistently ergative >> system in which only two verbal forms existed: a passive perfective: >> *bhere{'} (*bher- + *-He, patient marker) and a passive imperfective >> *bherey (*bher- + *-He, patient marker + *-y, imperfective marker), which >> would be almost exactly the situation I see for Sumerian. Jens asked: > Have you any examples of a language just "differentiating" by using what > must have been, up till then, non-existing phantom-variants which were > suddenly invented without any model? Though often heard in attempts to > explain morphological systems - no, you are not alone - this just appears > impossible. Pat responds: Sorry, Jens, again I cannot grasp what you are asking here. Cam you spell it out more explicitly? Jens continued: > And why would an older stage of the language be as in Sumerian? What if > the Indo-Europeans really _meant_ what they said and intended the system > to be the way we find it? Then we could have almost exactly the situation > I see for Indo-European. That would be an even closer parallel - by what > rule is it inferior? Pat responds: There is no reason why an older stage of IE should have the same inflectional patterns as Sumerian has, I remarked only because I found it curious. In Goettinger Beitraege zur Sprachwissenschaft, Heft 1, 1998, Gordon Whittaker has an article entitled "Traces of an early Indo-European language in southern Mesopotamia", which, I think is very interesting. Have you read it? Your final comments in this paragraph seem more an emotional release than an argument, if you will forgive my saying it. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 11 15:39:04 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 17:39:04 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Can you give examples? > asked in response to my posting:] >>There are some quite obvious counterexamples: Modern Indic is very close >>to being ergative; Kurdish too; Lithuanian is well on its way; and >>Eskimo has accusative remains in the pronouns. There are others on the list better informed than me, but I'll try, basing myself on some handbook aterial: 1. In Hindi the perfect preterite has the structure A-obl. ne O Vb-(gender/number of obj.) e.g.: lar.ke ne na:rangi: kha:i: "the boy ate the orange", where lar.ke is the oblique sg. of lar.ka: 'boy', the oblique case being obligatory before the postposition _ne_ marking the agent; and the verb is inflected in the fem.sg. ('orange' is fem.; the masc. is kha:ya:); the object is unmarked. - Intransitive verbs agree with the subject, e.g. lar.ka: a:ya: 'the boy came'. 2. Lithuanian has expressions like s^itas arklys mano pirktas 'this horse has been bought by me' (Quoted from Senn: Kleine lit. Sprachlehre, Heidelberg 1929, 107). Since gen. + nom. is also the general syntgm for 'have', this is pragmatically congruent with 'I have bought this horse'. Schmalstieg has written extensively on the subject. 3. Kurdish is much like Lithuanian. J.Blau, in Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum 331, gives the pair mirov-ek-i^ hesp di^t-0 "un homme a vu le cheval" kec,k-ek-e^ hesp di^t-in "une fille a vu les chevaux" -ek- is 'one, a'; -i^/-e^ is the izafet particle of belonging in the masc. and fem. sg., oblique case (old genitive, I take it); the object is unmarked; the verb is an old participle in -ta-, in the sg. with zero for understood 'is', the the pl. with -in 'are'. The original meaning thus appears to be "(it is) a-man-of-whom the-horse (is-)seen" and "(it is) a-girls-of-whom the-horses are-seen". Note the number concord in the auxiliary with the object (which then dispenses with plural marking itself). Intransitive verbs have agreement with the subject. 4. Eskimo at least has a concept of subject exactly like ours in their selection of reflexive as opposed to 3rd person, in that the reflexive always refers to the subject, be it of a transitive or an intransitive verb, never to the object. With certain semi-pronouns like Greenlandic tamar-ma '(I) whole', tamar-pit '(you) whole', this means that the non-reflexive 3rd sg. tama-at '(him) whole' never refers to the object, while the reflexive tamar-mi '(himself) whole' refers to the subject, irrespective of the transitivity of the verb, and so the opposition tama-at : tamar-mik is pragmatically like acc. vs. nom. - Also the variant forms of the plural of demonstrative pronouns, Greenlandic uku / uku-a 'them'/'they' are reported to have been earlier distributed according to this parameter, the longer form being nominative (while the later tendency is rather to reserve the longer form for the ergative/genitive role). The nom./acc.pl. of pronouns is no pervasive cross-dialectal opposition in Eskimo, but the reflexive selection according to subject role seems quite fundamental and certainly reveals an old thinking in terms of quite traditional categories. Jens Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 17:49:44 +0200 (MET DST) From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Subject: Re: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, I just wrote: > [T]his means that the [Greenlandic] > non-reflexive 3rd sg. tama-at '(him) whole' never refers to the object, > while the reflexive tamar-mi '(himself) whole' refers to the subject. I meant of course that the former never refers to the subject, while the latter always does that. May I add that the ergative systems exhibited by these languages, plainly based on old passive reconstructions with participles, are - when not specially marked - by virtue of their derivatory history quite naturally restricted to perfective statements. This explains the tense-split pointed out in Alexander Nikolayev's posting. Jens From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Fri Jun 11 17:22:43 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 19:22:43 +0200 Subject: PIE and ergativity Message-ID: "Alexander S. Nikolaev" schrieb: > Anyway, as far as Silverstein's hierarchy is concerned, i'd like to > put here the following idea: > As there really are some grounds to reconstruct genitivus-ergativus, > which was already mentioned in the discussion, one could throw a > glance at the typological data; the issue will be, that languages, > which possess a case, *combining* the two functions, namely ergative > and oblique, differ substantially from the languages, which are > characterized by independent ergative case. The former are, to say > roughly, less "ergative" and are very often diachronically on the way > of "accusativization" (or, vice versa, fuller "ergativization"). I cannot fully understand this point: First, we should note that case marking (if ever present in a given language system) is only ONE (possible) feature that can become relevent regarding the location of a language system on the AEC (accusative-ergative continuum). Hence, it is difficult to infer a general behavior of a language system regarding the AEC from just this feature. Second, if we include other aspects of morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic ergativity/accusativity (horribile dictu), the data demonstrate that a system with a syncretistic ergative case marker (irrelevant of how this syncretism pronounces itself) can be located either more on the middle of the AEC or on its very "edge". E.g., some East cauacsian languages have case syncretism but a strong ergative agreement pattern, whereas Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages mostly show an "independent" case marker (stemming from the deictic paradigm), but have a strong accusative AGR pattern (iwth some excceptions). > They take an intermediate position in the > continuum "ergative -- accusative"; and very often they are > characterized by the tense-split, and the ergative system in such > languages is confined to preterit tense(s). Such are Eskimo, Lach, > Burushaski, Kurdish (which, i know, is not a very good example, since > it developed a secondary ergative-like structure, but from a synchronic > point of view it will do). [There is, besides, a scanty piece of > evidence for tense-split in PIE]. Note that case syncretism in EC (East Caucasian) for instance does not correspopnd to an TAM split. Moreover, to claim that Burushaski's ergativity in restricted to preterit tense(s) seems not to be confirmed by ALL data available [ergativity in Burushaski is a very complicated matter beccause of its polypersonal agreement system, ERG-like stem suppletion in verbs and many other features]. The hypothesis that ERG is confined to preterit tense(s) in Eskimo is questionable, too [see the agreement system, some today's present tense structures clearly stem from old antipassives which presuppose ergativity, etc.]. I don't know which language you refer to by "Lach", but if you mean Lak (EC), than again the claim simply is wrong [Lak, as its presumed "sister" Dargwa, has a very sophisticated system of aspect/tense paradigms which are dominated by such factors as 'assertiveness', 'centrality' of speech act participant, residues of antipassives, doubled foregrounding strategies ('bi-absolutives') etc.]. > And in such semi-ergative or semi-accusative languages > Silverstein's hierarchy just doesn't work, being > a property of "full-ergative" languages (I apologize for my "terms", > which are not terminological at all, and, of course, i bear all the > responsibility for them). Perhaps you have missunderstood the actual instantiation of the Silverstein Hierarchy (SH). Today, SH is regarded as a a general behavior of lingustic paradigms with respect to the relationship of degree of animacy/empathy/centrality(speech act participants), degree of 'natural' agentivity, and (in)transitivity. SH accounts for both ACC and ERG strategies (there are for instance cases of languages that use ERG strategies for the most central/animate/empathetic participants (SAP pronouns) whereas the rest of the paradigm goes accusative [some kind of 'left shift' of the SH]). > Thus one can assume that it didn't > work in PIE either, and so the reasons which led Villar and Rumsey to > reject ergativity for PIE on the basis of this universal are not > important anymore, and hence one is entitled to believe that > inanimates just took the ergative marker less often, than animates. I > foresee the possible objection "but *all* the nouns with no respect > to gender are marked with genitive marker *os/*es/*s!" This i'm > inclined to explain as a consequence of tense-split structure of PIE: > this case in *os/*es/*s was common for all the nouns in present tense > and had the meaning of genitive; and the same marker performed the > functions of ergative case in preterit, and only animates could take > it, hence the examples of genitive of agent in historical IE dialects. I must admit that such a functional paradigm sounds VERY strange to me. The problem ist taht you operate on a pure functional level without having any formal indication that such a split of the {*es/*os/*s} morphology was actually active. Moreover, I do not understand how a PIE speaker would/could have discriminated both functions. In fact, case syncretism generally means that the morpheme in question establishs a functional cluster that is disambiguished (among others) by the semantics of a given NP, its position with respect to the kernel/periphery of a clause, its semantic/syntactic/pragmatic role with respect to a verbal frame etc. But such oppositions are not established by TAM (except you propose that a PIE speaker "felt" that a *s- etc. marked NP with present tenses was more genitive-like than with preterit tenses. But this is more than ad hoc!). Moreover, the history of a genitivus-ergativus (restricted per definitionem to transitive (!) structures) is often related to some kind of (alienable and/or inalienable) possessive coupling of a verbal structure with its presumed agent. Hence, it is the genitive which plays the primary functional role, from which a 'ergative' case is derived (grammaticalized). Consequently, there wouldn't be any functional difference in the two paradigmatic structures you propose, and, by consequence, no need to establish them at all. In order to substantiate your claim it would be good to have a valid typological parallel the history of which can be described with certainty. I don't know of such a system (or I did not understand yours correctly). [For an ACC interpretation of PIE case marking see my last postings, esp. that dated "Fri, 04 Jun 1999 16:59:11 +0200". Unfortunately, people from the IE list hardly did comment upon it (positively or negatively). Is it because a general ACC interpretation of PIE morphosyntax violates the overall feeling that there MUST be something ergative-like in the PIE air?]. > This intermediate stage of PIE, which, i believe, can be > reconstrructed within the framework of internal reconstruction method > and is *not* based on pure speculations, could of course be preceded > by another stage, when PIE was characterized by other structure, e.g. > active. The residues of the latter can be seen in the two-series > verbal system. Note that among typologists there is a general tendency (not to say a general agreement) that 'active' typology does NOT represent a seperate (third) type opposed to ACC and ERG in the tradition of Sapir etc. Rather, active typology is a name for a diversity of split phenomena that occur ON the AEC (S-split, A-split, O-split, IO-split etc.). Whatever the PIE morphosytax of simple clauses may have been: we have to describe it on the basis of the AEC. We don't have other (logical) options (see Schulze 1998 [http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/pkk_1abs.htm], chapter IV for an elaboration of this claim). But we should be ready to look at the 'dark side of ergativity', too, which means that we should be ready to dismiss our standard (favorite) way of interpreting morphosyntactic phenomena via ergativity, IF the data simply contradict. And that's what they do! Best wishes, Wolfgang -- [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 11 19:24:03 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 20:24:03 +0100 Subject: aorists Message-ID: Pat asked: > Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the > athematic and thematic aorists? Why should there be any difference in meaning? The difference could have been due to some other factor. Besides, we cannot really recover any difference between some of the many present formations (e.g. nasal infix versus -e- grade versus nasal suffix). There may as little difference of meaning as there is in Latin between competing perfects: such as pepigi, pe:gi, and panxi. That is to say, none! Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 11 19:58:01 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 20:58:01 +0100 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Thank you, Jens, for your analysis of PIE (H)y- and Greek /h/ ~ /z/. I want to question only the assumption that H3 was voiced. As we have seen earlier in this group, the evidence for that is very slight, if not minimal, if not based on one word in one language. It may, of course, have been voiced despite the lack of obvious and clear evidence, but I would challenge your statement of it as a proven fact. Can we approach it avoiding this assumption? Are there examples of proven H3 in words that have PIE Hy- and Greek /#z-/? Or do the phonetic conditions mean that the nature of the H is unrecoverable? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 11 19:50:41 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 20:50:41 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Leo said: > Unless these forms are *attested*, *in Latin*, *as participles*, we cannot > say that any kind of Latin actually *had* them. ... Sorry to be picky, but > that's what I do. I'm all for being picky, and think it is sometimes essential to prevent woolly speculation dressing itself as fact. Here, however, I think it misses the point, since Anthony's argument can be easily restated without the word to which you object - for example as "..Latin has reflexes of ..." I think the more interesting point is the substance of his argument. The -wos participle is widespread in IE, so we might legitimately look for reflexes of it in Latin (though the absence of an otherwise widespread feature is not in itself a problem). The absence of an active participle on the perfect stem requires an attempt at an explanation. The old view that you never say "why" of a language seems a cop-out now. Given the wide use made of the few actives from deponent verbs, we can't argue that there was no need for it. On the other hand the -to- participles do seem more securely PIE, more ancient, and more widespread. I know no Etruscan. Can anyone confirm Paolo Agostini's statement that Etruscan had a -v- perfective? Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Jun 12 03:27:53 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 23:27:53 EDT Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: >fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) >There was some degree of egalitarianism, or at least a more democratic society. -- most historians would be surprised by this. Status distinctions reached their absolute maximum in English society in the 17th and 18th centuries. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 12 05:28:25 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 00:28:25 -0500 Subject: Syllabicity (yet again) Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Friday, June 11, 1999 4:55 AM > On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> [In reply to a post of mine:] >> It is a complete mischaracterization of my views to imply that I believe >> that IE developed from Egyptian or, while we are at it, from Sumerian. > I know, but you seem to have been forgetting that when forming many of > your actual suggestions. They only make sense to me if Egyptian is a magic > prestage of IE. Pat resonds: Exercising maximum restraint: you are absolute\ly 100% incorrect in characterizing my intentions. If you (or ANY OTHERS) have read that into what I have written, may I profusely apologize? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 12 05:35:18 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 00:35:18 -0500 Subject: aorists Message-ID: Dear Peter: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Friday, June 11, 1999 2:24 PM > Pat asked: >> Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the >> athematic and thematic aorists? > Why should there be any difference in meaning? The difference could have > been due to some other factor. Besides, we cannot really recover any > difference between some of the many present formations (e.g. nasal infix > versus -e- grade versus nasal suffix). There may as little difference of > meaning as there is in Latin between competing perfects: such as pepigi, > pe:gi, and panxi. That is to say, none! Keine Antwort ist doch eine Antwort. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Jun 12 09:50:03 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 11:50:03 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <004f01beb3a8$cee75fa0$f39ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >I do not think you are responding to what I am saying. Your examples suggest >to me that you are under the impression that I denied that ergative >structure could develop from accusative structure. I did not say that nor do >I believe that. I do continue to believe that any language which is >presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage >sometime prior to that in its development. >For most transitive verbs, I believe the closest connection is between it >and its object so that, at some stage of development, an unmarked verb form >should represent a passive. To try to understand ergative constructions from >passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me >to be potentially misleading. You said twice that this is something which you *believe*, and this is OK with me, assuming that you are living in a community where you are free to believe whatever you choose to. But: this is of course without consequences for what we *know* about ergativity. First: as I think has been made clear several times here during this thread: there is no sense in the notion "ergative language", since ergativity is a phenomenon which may be present in some subsystems of a given language and absent in others, thus, while definitely showing this phenomenon to certain degrees, Georgian, Basque, Dyirbal and Thakali may be called "ergative languages", butt hey are in sometimes very different ways. What, in this respect, "going through an ergative stage" means is rather equivocal and requires special definitions, which seem to be lacking in your theory. "Ergative language" is a squishy notion. Secondly: if we take every possible manifestation of ergativity into account, we know hosts of cases where (in one, some, most subsystems of a language) a) ACC > ERG and b) ERG > ACC, as well as both construction types remaining stable through the observable history of a language. Logically, from this follows nothing more that both types can precede the other, and nothing more. The alleged necessity for ACC to be preceded by ERG at any rate is just not contradicted by *this* fact, but that is all one can derive from this. That, however, your scenario is the less likely one is confirmed by some simple observations, namely that "ergative languages" (used with the qualifications mentioned above, and loosely meaning a language with a marked dominance of ergative constructions in various subsystems, among them the alignment of the basic constituents in an unmarked transitive sentence [note that even the superficially simple term "transitivity" needs some definition before we can use it with sense; however, instead of doing this here, I may refer you to Hopper/Thompson in Lg 1980]) are globally in the minority, that they further tend to cluster in specifiable regions (I know Basque is an exception, no need to remind me), iow. that it is a phenomenon tending to areal spread aso. Furthermore, and what may be more significant, while we do know a great deal of languages without a single discernable trait of it, i.e. fully ACC languages, fully ERG languages don't seem to exist, i.e. all known languages with some ergativity display at least one subsystem which is organized on an ACC basis, the reverse not being observable (iow: there are only split-ergative languages, admittedly sometimes with less salient splits, but never without one). All this makes ergativity a more *marked* construction type than accusativity. This does not rule out the possibility of languages, for which only full accusativity is observable throughout their attested or confidently reconstructable history may not have had a (more) ERG past nevertheless, but in the absence of conclusive and specific evidence for this (the precise nature of which can, of course, be discussed) there can be no automatic rule which would force us to assume this. Finally, as Larry Trask has pointed out before, the idea of stadiality in language change has been safely laid to rest long ago, being nothing less than aprioristic ideology (if you like to stick to it nevertheless, you should be aware that you are in the fine company of, among others, N.Ja. Marr). It is no better confirmed than the notion that, e.g., feudalism precedes capitalism, which will yield to socialism eventually, or, back to linguistics, that all languages which display mostly pulmonic consonants, must have been preceded of necessity by stages which displayed a dominance of clicks in their systems. The idea of stadialism in language - which is of course a social institution - is philosophically on the same level as any other theory which tries to subject social institutions to inalterable laws of teleological development, like that of historical materialism. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Jun 12 10:14:11 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 12:14:11 +0200 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: <376089D3.B75E7501@ufl.edu> Message-ID: >> With due respect, you are not really saying that English lost the number >> distinction here because of English society becoming (more) *egalitarian*, >> or are you ? >Something like that. Remember that in Middle English, the "ye" form, >originally a plural, became a polite pronoun. Out of politeness, the >older "thou" forms were lost. There was some degree of egalitarianism, >or at least a more democratic society. It is hard to believe this, /you/ driving /thou/ out of its function until the 18th century, yet slavery being abolished in the Bristish empire in 1833 and the 13th amendment dating from 1865 (I suppose one addressed ones slaves with /you/ and not /thou/ in the 19th century, or am I mistaken here?). Of course, a wide-spread sense of egalitarianism in a society *may* lead to people *willfully* abandon politeness distinctions in their speech, but to infer that, whenever the latter occurs, the former holds as a prerequisite, is, imho, not viable. Neither the French nor the October revolution made this distinction disappear from the French and Russian languages respectively, although the sense of egalitarianism both incidents brought with them (or by which their makers were inspired) was at times hammered into the heads of the people. In more abstract terms: a linguistic community may reflect a social change A by some kind of language change B, but we may not, in the absence of unequivocal extra-linguistic data, infer A from observable B alone. St.G. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jun 12 12:23:53 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 08:23:53 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects Message-ID: Peter Gray sic ait: > I know no Etruscan. Can anyone confirm Paolo Agostini's statement that > Etruscan had a -v- perfective? My understanding is that Etruscan formed a past tense, unmarked for aspect, in -c or -ce: -turce-, (he) gave, -svalce-, lived, -lupuce-, died. L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jun 12 21:54:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 16:54:47 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects In-Reply-To: <006c01beb445$46b717e0$d53aac3e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: According to Giuiano & Larissa Bonfante The Etruscan Language. NY: NYUP, 1983: 82-85 Active preterite ended in -ce [at least 3rd person sing. & pl.] Passive preterite ended in -xe , -khe <-che> [1st persons] Past participle ending seems to be -u which is passive if the verb is transitive and active if the verb is intransitive Active past participle ended in -thas [snip] >I know no Etruscan. Can anyone confirm Paolo Agostini's statement that >Etruscan had a -v- perfective? >Peter From jer at cphling.dk Sat Jun 12 22:34:53 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 00:34:53 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <004f01beb3a8$cee75fa0$f39ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [...] I do continue to believe that any language which is > presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage > sometime prior to that in its development. Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. > [...] To try to understand ergative constructions from > passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me > to be potentially misleading. "Potentially" perhaps, but in some cases certainly in accordance with the truth of a documented development. Why it that so often disregarded in typology-based solutions? Jens From elwhitaker at FTC-I.NET Sat Jun 12 16:07:55 1999 From: elwhitaker at FTC-I.NET (Elizabeth Whitaker) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 12:07:55 -0400 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: <376089D3.B75E7501@ufl.edu> Message-ID: At 11:00 PM 6/10/99 -0500, Nik Taylor wrote: >Something like that. Remember that in Middle English, the "ye" form, >originally a plural, became a polite pronoun. Out of politeness, the >older "thou" forms were lost. There was some degree of egalitarianism, >or at least a more democratic society. The Society of Friends' (Quakers') use of "thou" and "thee" instead of "you" forms was a reason they encountered so much disapproval in various forms. In other European languages, such as French, Russian, and German, there are definite social and cultural protocols about the circumstances in which one should use intimate or formal "you" forms. Elizabeth Whitaker From jer at cphling.dk Sat Jun 12 22:56:54 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 00:56:54 +0200 Subject: Differentiation In-Reply-To: <002c01beb40d$8dc19080$a59ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: In response to a thread woven by Patrick C. Ryan Dear Pat, In some recent postings you have suggested that some IE mrophological forms, indeed categories, have arisen "by differentiation". I have spoken out against it, and you have asked me why. You wrote you would have to consider a form like 2pl *bhe'rete "quite a bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms", i.e. younger than *bhe'ret (which lives on as the 3sg). The point was that you wanted vowels to be predictable from the consonant skeleton, so you set the basic ablaut rule that deletes all unstressed short vowels in action. Actually, that should not allow *bhe'ret either, but only *bhe'rt, but no matter, let's take to have been the form, just for the sake of the argument. My objection is that if in such a language vowels only exist accented, there would be no variants containing unstressed vowels, and thus there would be no material the language could differentiate. When languages make arbitrary differentiations, they utilize existing patterns, but *bhe'rete could simply not exist in a language on which the fundamental ablaut rule had worked. Therefore either the rule or the idea of differentiation is wrong. In fact, if grammatical number is something IE has in common with the other members of the presumed Nostratic macrofamily, it does not seem very likely that it would be an IE innovation, does it? To my eyes, it even looks as if the 1st and 2nd plural forms of the IE verb have the same conglomerate endings as in Uralic. I therefore do not believe they have arisen by a preocess of secondary differentiation which looks illogical to me in the first place. Jens From alex at AN3039.spb.edu Sun Jun 13 00:20:23 1999 From: alex at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 03:20:23 +0300 Subject: Ergativity in PIE Message-ID: Dear Wolfgang and List! Thank you for your comprehensive comments; and now i shall try to present some points "in my defense": >I cannot fully understand this point: First, we should note that case >marking (if ever present in a given language system) is only ONE >(possible) feature that can become relevent regarding the location of a >language system on the AEC (accusative-ergative continuum). Hence, it is >difficult to infer a general behavior of a language system regarding the >AEC from just this feature. I'm afraid i have to disagree here. As far as i know (and you certainly know better), there're five sections of grammar regarding which the way of encoding A, S and P can be relevant, namely: 1) case marking -- no comments here 2) verbal agreement -- for ergative verbal agreement compare the following Eskimo forms: k'avag' - ak'u - n'a --- 'i'm sleeping' 'to sleep'-Pres.Intr.-1Sg.S. and aglat-ak'a - t - n'a 'they're leading me' to lead-Pres.Tr.-3PlA-1SgP 3) rules of syntactic transformation The sentence "The father kicked his son and started crying" in an accusative language can mean only 'father started crying after he kicked his son', the missing S automatically being identified with A of the first part of sentense; and e.g. in Dyirbal sentence like this could only mean 'the son started crying having been kicked by his father' [sorry for such a brutal example] 4) word order: in Dyirbal unmarked word order is S-Vi and P-A-Vtr, while in english it would be A(S)-V-P 5) the structure of compounds But: in a given ergative language it's not at all necessary for the rules of ergative encoding to be realised in ALL the sections of grammar listed above. Thus i think it's possible to claim PIE ergativity, even if only the ergative structure of nominal system is reconstructed; meanwhile all of the other language mechanisms may keep on functioning on accusative basis. Cf. Chukchee, where the ergative system of case marking is attested, but the verbal agreement is accusative. Or the Walbiri language, where in a transitive sentence the 1st actant has the marker of an ergative case, but the markers of the A in verb are the same as of S. I'm sorry for this stepping aside into the problems of typology... Message-ID: Dear Wolfgang, you have expressed your surprise that nobody from the IE quarters replied to your posting of June 4. I do have a number fo questions and comments. Some may appear silly, given my poor acquaintance with much of typological discussion. However, to make a collateral field useful for IE studies, its practitioners must argue their points in such a fashion that we can understand them. Therefore I take the liberty to ask for clarification where I am doubt. On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, Wolfgang Schulze wrote: [...] Diathesis as a referential strategy (phrase internal as well as > discourse dependent) presupposes a reference-dominated type. Many Modern > IE languages are of this type [...], but PIE itself > obviously lacked this strategy which comes clear from the fact that we > cannot reconstruct a common "passive" for PIE. Diathesis is a very > active feature in language change. It can come and go, and nothing > allows us to propose a Passive for PIE just because a number of (modern) > IE languages share this feature. I strongly disagree witht he statement that PIE had no passive. In fact it had several. One of the basic functions of the middle voice was patently to express the passive use of transitive verbs. It goes so far that causatives in the middle voice lose their causative meaning: Skt. pa:ta'yate 'is made fly, flies'; also, while nasal presents from adjectives are factitive in Hittite (tepu- -> tepnuzzi 'makes small'), they are ingressive in Balto-Slavic and Germanic (ON rodhna 'turn red') which must reflect the function of the corresponding middle-voice inflection. Alongside this, there was the "stative" morpheme //-eH1-//; this was stative with intransitive verbs, as aorist *sed-eH1- 'enter a sitting position', prs. *sed-H1-ye'- 'be in a sitting position, sit', but passive when added to transitive verbal roots, as *k^lu-eH1- 'be heard', prs. *k^lu-H1-ye'- (Skr. s'ru:ya'te). This inflection combines the Sanskrit passive and the Greek "e:n-aorist" into a PIE paradigm. The high age of the passive meaning is proved by the equation of Skt. ja:'yate 'is created' and Old Irish do-gainethar 'is born' from *g^nH1-H1-ye'-tor, passive of *g^enH1-'create'. And of course the PPP of transitive verbs was passive, as *g^nH1-to'-s 'created, born' *{kw} orr-to'-s 'made', and could be used in combination with the genitive marking the agent. On the basis of idioms from different parts of IE one can safely posit a structure like *me'dhu H2nro's {kw}rto'm (H1esti) "the mead has been made by the man" as belonging to the protolanguage. > If we look at the question of ERG and passive, we can sometimes observe > a tendency to establish a pseudo-ergative strategy based on the passive > (some modern Indo-Iranian languages, partly Cl. Armenian etc.). But this > is a secondary process often bound to specific (perfective) TAM forms. In what way is this "pseudo-ergative" different from a "real ergative" - other than by the fact - not too frequent in typology - that its prehistory is known? - Is TAM "tense-aspect-mood"? [...] > Now, IF (I say IF) you want to ascribe some ERG features to the PIE > system it would make much more sense to declare ALL transitives as old > (and generalized) antipassives [...] Would that be possible? Some IE verbs are underived, can there be such a thing as a morphologically unmarked antipassive verb in a language? But the idea of antipassive looks good for the marking of the object: could *-m be an old adverbial ("goal") case originally used with an antipassive and generalized from there? You give up the idea for other reasons: > But this does not make sense as long as we don't have substantial > evidence for ERG strategies elsewhere in the paradigm [...] I believe we do, but is that really relevant? Could not the _forms_ of the verb be the sole survivors from an old ergative system? In an aside, you then speak of: > Georgian > which has an ACC (< AP) strategy in the present/future tenses/modes, but > an ERG strategy still present in the aorist, hence Georgian mirrors say > some Iranian languages on an ergative basis[]. A burning question to the IE-ist: Why is the ergative part of the Georgian verb held to be older than the non-ergative part? And why is its accusative construction taken to be an old antipassive? You suggest a set of structural combinations for basic sentence types, allowing for variants, but insist: > [...] Still, the overall picture remains the same: The operating system > of PIE clearly showed an ACC strategy in its protypical kernel, > semantically split according to [?animate] or so. This ACC strategy > seemed to be dominated by topicalization routines with animates, a clear > indices for the semantic basis of PIE "case" marking. Finally, AGR does > not change this picture, even if we assign the *-H2e etc. series to > statives/inactives, and the *-m etc. series to dynamics/actives: In this > case, even the dichotomy [?anim] becomes irrelevant, because it does not > show up in a specific set of clitics. ALL these clitics have an ACC AGR > scheme... If I understand this correctly, you are addressing several layers of the language in one mouthful. I agree that the PIE we reconstruct was not ergative, but had the same basic syntax as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. But does that exclude the existence of an older structure? Or are older structures disqualified as ergative for some other reason? What is the "topicalization" business based upon? If animates as subjects are marked with an *-s, it would mean that this role was not self-evident for them. Could that not indicate that the whole statement was primarily about the object, which was then only minimally marked, viz. in the case of animates for which this role is not as self-evident as it is with inanimates? A patient-centered statement structure is exactly what the classical ergative is. However, I am in great doubt, as I have grave misgivings about some of the alleged evidence for an IE (better, pre-IE) ergative; thus, the two endings containing /s/, the nom.sg. (*-s) and the gen.sg. (*-os), are not at all identical if one cares to look closer. Still, since we are groping in the dark anyway, what differences we have found between them may turn out to be secondary and ultimately not relevant. In there has been a pre-IE ergative, where does that leave the reflexive? The reflexive pronoun replaces the anaphoric when referring to the _subject_, in which case the transitivity or intransitivity of the verb does not matter. Shockingly, perhaps, this is the same in Eskimo: the reflexive ("fourth person") is used whenever 3rd person reference hits the subject - be it transitive or intransitive. In this selection, there is no companionship between the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive one. That would rather indicate that the ergative constructions are later creations, just as they are in Modern Indic. Could you elaborate on the clitics you have in mind? What are you talking about here? Jens From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Jun 13 02:21:11 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 22:21:11 -0400 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > 1) Obviously, *Heyew is not a canonical IE root form. > 2) Would you consider the original root *Hey- and -w a root extension? > 3) Would you consider the possibility that the root is *yew- and that *He is > a preverb which may or may not have been present in the earliest IE? There seems to be little reason to assume the existence of preverbs that were fused with verbs in PIE. Within Benvensite's theory of root shapes, we have to consider Hyew a stage II extension from an Hey. But for late PIE, I think that extended roots need to be considered distinct lexical items anyway, to the point is moot. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sun Jun 13 02:41:15 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 22:41:15 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > Lehmann does not consider C'CV per se perfective: he contrasts an aorist > vida{'}t as +perfective, + momentary, and the perfect ve{'}da as > +perfective, -momentary. > You may or may not agree. Isn't perfective supposed to mean that the duration, if any, of the event is being ignored? I did not understand this +perf, -momentary (or +duration) business when I first heard it and I still do not. > But to attempt to address the idea behind your question if I understand > it, the relative rarity of thematic aorists may be substantially > attributable to the fact that there were two other competing aorists > (or equivalents): the root aorists and s-aorists. But s-aorists are generally considered to be a late formation too. So what kind of aorists did all the roots with root presents form, before there were thematic or s-aorists? > Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the > athematic and thematic aorists? And what might that difference (if any) > have been? I am not sure that there was an unified ``aorist'' in PIE. If I have to take a position other than ignorance, it will be that the different stem formations were not yet fully grammaticialzied. To try to find such differences of meaning will be as futile as trying to find a pattern in the changes in meaning brought about by ``prepositions'' in phrasal verbs in English. For example, *winedti (>vindati in Sans) must have meant ``is searching out'', *widet meant ``found'' while ``woida'' meant ``knows''. It is not clear to me that *(e)winedt meant >only< ``was searching out'' and never ``searched out'' (as avindat does in Sans). And without such a conclusion, perfective as a category does not make sense. From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jun 14 06:37:04 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 01:37:04 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 4:50 AM Pat wrote: >> I do not think you are responding to what I am saying. Your examples suggest >> to me that you are under the impression that I denied that ergative >> structure could develop from accusative structure. I did not say that nor do >> I believe that. I do continue to believe that any language which is >> presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage >> sometime prior to that in its development. >> For most transitive verbs, I believe the closest connection is between it >> and its object so that, at some stage of development, an unmarked verb form >> should represent a passive. To try to understand ergative constructions from >> passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me >> to be potentially misleading. R-S responds: > You said twice that this is something which you *believe*, and this is OK > with me, assuming that you are living in a community where you are free to > believe whatever you choose to. > But: this is of course without consequences for what we *know* about > ergativity. Pat comments: Your confidence amazes me. To contrast my "belief" with your "knowledge" is insufferably smug. There is not one thing which you "know" with which some other PhD has not differed at some time or some place. Unless you have somehow found Mimir's Well, your belief that you "know" is roughly on a footing with my belief (that I know). R-S continued: > First: as I think has been made clear several times here during this > thread: there is no sense in the notion "ergative language", since > ergativity is a phenomenon which may be present in some subsystems of a > given language and absent in others, thus, while definitely showing this > phenomenon to certain degrees, Georgian, Basque, Dyirbal and Thakali may be > called "ergative languages", butt hey are in sometimes very different ways. > What, in this respect, "going through an ergative stage" means is rather > equivocal and requires special definitions, which seem to be lacking in > your theory. "Ergative language" is a squishy notion. Pat responds: G. A. Klimov, which has your credentials, and who is rather highly regarded in Russia, asserts an ergative stage for language, and I subscribe to his interpretation. After having writing this, I can, in good faith, still entertain the idea that an "ergative stage" is really just a period in which ergative characteristics predominate; pure phenomena are notoriously difficult to capture under the microscope. I have no problem asserting that an "ergative stage" existed in each of the languages mentioned above at some time (in the sense described above), and that, over time, each has modified that facts of the stage in different ways and to different degrees. R-S continued: > Secondly: if we take every possible manifestation of ergativity into > account, we know hosts of cases where (in one, some, most subsystems of a > language) a) ACC > ERG and b) ERG > ACC, as well as both construction types > remaining stable through the observable history of a language. Logically, > from this follows nothing more that both types can precede the other, and > nothing more. The alleged necessity for ACC to be preceded by ERG at any > rate is just not contradicted by *this* fact, but that is all one can > derive from this. That, however, your scenario is the less likely one is > confirmed by some simple observations, namely that "ergative languages" > (used with the qualifications mentioned above, and loosely meaning a > language with a marked dominance of ergative constructions in various > subsystems, among them the alignment of the basic constituents in an > unmarked transitive sentence [note that even the superficially simple term > "transitivity" needs some definition before we can use it with sense; > however, instead of doing this here, I may refer you to Hopper/Thompson in > Lg 1980]) are globally in the minority, that they further tend to cluster > in specifiable regions (I know Basque is an exception, no need to remind > me), iow. that it is a phenomenon tending to areal spread aso. Furthermore, > and what may be more significant, while we do know a great deal of > languages without a single discernable trait of it, i.e. fully ACC > languages, fully ERG languages don't seem to exist, i.e. all known > languages with some ergativity display at least one subsystem which is > organized on an ACC basis, the reverse not being observable (iow: there are > only split-ergative languages, admittedly sometimes with less salient > splits, but never without one). All this makes ergativity a more *marked* > construction type than accusativity. This does not rule out the possibility > of languages, for which only full accusativity is observable throughout > their attested or confidently reconstructable history may not have had a > (more) ERG past nevertheless, but in the absence of conclusive and specific > evidence for this (the precise nature of which can, of course, be > discussed) there can be no automatic rule which would force us to assume > this. Pat responds: Would you mind detailing the non-ERG features you know in Sumerian? R-S further continued: > Finally, as Larry Trask has pointed out before, the idea of stadiality in > language change has been safely laid to rest long ago, being nothing less > than aprioristic ideology (if you like to stick to it nevertheless, you > should be aware that you are in the fine company of, among others, N.Ja. > Marr). It is no better confirmed than the notion that, e.g., feudalism > precedes capitalism, which will yield to socialism eventually, or, back to > linguistics, that all languages which display mostly pulmonic consonants, > must have been preceded of necessity by stages which displayed a dominance > of clicks in their systems. > The idea of stadialism in language - which is of course a social > institution - is philosophically on the same level as any other theory > which tries to subject social institutions to inalterable laws of > teleological development, like that of historical materialism. Pat responds: I continue to assert that complexity arises out of simplicity; and since I have found that the relationship between the object and the verb is primary, which loosely conforms to an ergative model of development, I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jun 14 13:15:39 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 08:15:39 -0500 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 9:21 PM > Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> 1) Obviously, *Heyew is not a canonical IE root form. >> 2) Would you consider the original root *Hey- and -w a root extension? >> 3) Would you consider the possibility that the root is *yew- and that *He is >> a preverb which may or may not have been present in the earliest IE? Nath wrote: > There seems to be little reason to assume the existence of preverbs that > were fused with verbs in PIE. Within Benvensite's theory of root shapes, we > have to consider Hyew a stage II extension from an Hey. But for late PIE, I > think that extended roots need to be considered distinct lexical items > anyway, so the point is moot. Pat comments: In order to regard *Hyew as a w-extended form of *Hey, it is necessary to demonstrate that existence of the root *Hey in the *appropriate meaning*.--- either alone or with other root extensions. Can you do it? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jun 14 13:58:56 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 08:58:56 -0500 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 9:41 PM > Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> Lehmann does not consider C'CV per se perfective: he contrasts an aorist >> vida{'}t as +perfective, + momentary, and the perfect ve{'}da as >> +perfective, -momentary. >> You may or may not agree. Nath asked: > Isn't perfective supposed to mean that the duration, if any, of the event is > being ignored? I did not understand this +perf, -momentary (or +duration) > business when I first heard it and I still do not. Pat attempts to answer: I have the feeling that this is because there are virtually as many "perfectives" as there are linguists. If one looks at Larry Trask's grammatical; dictionary, he attempts to make a distinction between "perfect aspect" and "perfective aspect"; and contrasts the "perfect" (not "perfective") aspect with the "resultative". I am not going to re-define any of these terms but I will say that what I think Lehmann meant : 'expresses an activity that continues/continued/etc. to its logical conclusion'. For example: "he is eating up the bread" (he intends to continue the activity of eating until there is no more of that bread, and that-bread-eating cannot be continued) ; obviously, by this interpretation of "perfective", it can occur in all other tenses: "he ate up the bread"; actually, my interpretation of "he ate the bread" would generally coincide with this last example, contrasting with "he ate bread" or "he is eating bread"., which leave the question open as to whether there is still bread left when he ceases the activity. Pat continued: >> But to attempt to address the idea behind your question if I understand >> it, the relative rarity of thematic aorists may be substantially >> attributable to the fact that there were two other competing aorists >> (or equivalents): the root aorists and s-aorists. Nath commented: > But s-aorists are generally considered to be a late formation too. So what > kind of aorists did all the roots with root presents form, before there were > thematic or s-aorists? Pat writes: I cannot answer that question. Pat wrote previously: >> Would you agree that there was some difference in meaning between the >> athematic and thematic aorists? And what might that difference (if any) >> have been? Nath responded: > I am not sure that there was an unified ``aorist'' in PIE. If I have to take > a position other than ignorance, it will be that the different stem > formations were not yet fully grammaticalized. To try to find such > differences of meaning will be as futile as trying to find a pattern in the > changes in meaning brought about by ``prepositions'' in phrasal verbs in > English. For example, > *winedti (>vindati in Sans) must have meant ``is searching out'', *widet > meant ``found'' while ``woida'' meant ``knows''. It is not clear to me that > *(e)winedt meant >only< ``was searching out'' and never ``searched out'' (as > avindat does in Sans). And without such a conclusion, perfective as a > category does not make sense. Pat comments: "Perfection" is in the eye of the beholder. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Mon Jun 14 15:27:52 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 10:27:52 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Dear Jens and Wolfgang, The issues of diathesis, ergativity, and reflexive pronouns under discussion here are indeed complex and in need of clarification. I comment on one really. For example: Quote from Schulze: >[...] Diathesis as a referential strategy (phrase internal as well as >> discourse dependent) presupposes a reference-dominated type. Many Modern >> IE languages are of this type [...], but PIE itself >> obviously lacked this strategy which comes clear from the fact that we >> cannot reconstruct a common "passive" for PIE. Diathesis is a very >> active feature in language change. It can come and go, and nothing >> allows us to propose a Passive for PIE just because a number of (modern) >> IE languages share this feature. Jens' response: >I strongly disagree witht he statement that PIE had no passive. In fact it >had several. One of the basic functions of the middle voice was patently >to express the passive use of transitive verbs. Let's stop here for a moment. To declare that PIE did or did not have a passive presupposes a clear definition of a passive and of a middle. Medio-passive is the compromise term, I believe. Keenan (1976 in Timothy Shopen's Language Typology and Syntactic Change: Clause Structure) defined it very clearly as a foregrounding and backgrounding device operating on the arguments of transitive VP's. In 1991 Klaiman (Grammatical Voice? Oxford UP?) then typologically distinguished between the role of a passive as derived voice in nominative-accusative languages and the role of the middle in active languages which have 'basic voice', not 'derived voice'. The role of a middle in active langauges was to move members of one verb class into the other of two verb classes, as active languages typically have two distinct verb classes: verbs such as 'sing, run, dance' (active) and 'lie, sit, stand' (stative). Such verbs are essentially intransitive. Devices also created transitive verbs. Those of you who know more about active languages may have more to say about the role of voice in those languages. I am citing here only the bare bones of Klaiman's analysis, and it really doesn't matter whether you say 'active' or 'split-ergative', if the properties are the same. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have suggested that PIE was active in type, citing the two verb classes in Hittite, the -mi and -hi conjugations, among other things. If active in type refers to having primarily intransitive verbs and derivational strategies to make them transitive, then PIE had no passive. It takes a transitive verb to be passivized. Along with primarily intransitive verbs and the lack of a passive, PIE had no transitive verb of possession, no 'have'. 'Have' entered dialectally by different paths. There are now two recent statements on the path of 'have' into attested IE languages, one in the second volume of the recently published Lehmann Fs. (Journal of IE Studies Monograph 31) and another in the Proceedings of the Xth UCLA IE Conference (JIES Monograph 32). Jens continued: >It goes so far that >causatives in the middle voice lose their causative meaning: Skt. >pa:ta'yate 'is made fly, flies'; also, while nasal presents from >adjectives are factitive in Hittite (tepu- -> tepnuzzi 'makes small'), >they are ingressive in Balto-Slavic and Germanic (ON rodhna 'turn red') >which must reflect the function of the corresponding middle-voice >inflection. Sanskrit pa:t- is the root. The suffix -aya- has made it causative, then the middle made it intransitive (with the same meaning as the root?). The middle could passivize it precisely because it first became transitive via the -aya- causative suffix. But an intransitive root *pa:t- could not be passivized. Hittite tepunzzi is transtive active by a similar process, but it does not undergo medio-passive passivization. I know of no *tepnutari. In playing around with such comparisons in fact I noticed that the *OR- root in Hittite does interesting things that differ from those in Greek. In Hittite ari 'arrives, reaches' is a -hi conjugation verb and contrasts with arta(ri) 'stands' (deponent middle), while the -mi version is a derived causative arnuzzi 'brings'. Formally comparable is Homeric Greek middle ?:rto 'sets off, starts up', transitive active ?rnumi 'arouse, urge', middle ?rnumai 'arise, start up'. One would expect a comparable Hittite *arnutari 'be brought', but it seems not to occur. What Hittite does have are pairs of suppletive active-passives. The Latin cognate oritur 'arises' is deponent. Although Latin does have some active-middle pairs comparable to those of Hittite, Greek, and Sanskrit (e.g. pascit 'nourishes', pascitur 'grazes, is nourished') beside its deponents, it otherwise has a productive passive voice. Latin derivational devices (e.g. -a:- first conjugation: novus 'new', nova:re 'renew') have created a lot of new transitive verbs. Coming back then to Jens: > Alongside this, there was the "stative" morpheme //-eH1-//; >this was stative with intransitive verbs, as aorist *sed-eH1- 'enter a >sitting position', prs. *sed-H1-ye'- 'be in a sitting position, sit', This stative was not productive in PIE (see the issue of 'have' in the Lehmann Fs.). The root 'sit' in fact is most interesting here. Hittite 'sit' is derived as middle of 'be': eszi 'is', esa(ri) 'sits'. With -za (often called a reflexive particle) in New Hittite then the combination -za esari means 'take a seat, sit down' (with sakki 'knows', -za sakki means 'acknowledges'). With the root *es- there was no need of a "stative" suffix, nor was there with middles, Greek he:stai, Sanskrit a:ste 'sits'. But the 'active' root *sed- 'sit' was another matter. In Latin the stative is very productive in its second conjugation -e:- verbs (habe:re 'have', sede:re 'sit' etc.). But its use there is part of a different verbal system, one in which there is a productive passive voice. These -e:- statives are often syntactically transitive but semantically stative, e.g. 'have': librum habet (see Bauer in HS?). This is not to deny that even Hittite had passive uses of medio-passives. The point is to look at what is productive in the system. Every language can do pretty much what any other can, but some languages do some things more naturally than others. By the time Greek and Sanskrit were productively operating with a medio-passive, it was already a bit removed from the medio-passive of Hittite. While Greek had retained quite a few athematic verbs beside the more productive thematic type, Sanskrit really didn't contrast a thematic and athematic type. And Latin had only one verb type, thematic in the present. Hittite still had two verb classes, its -mi and -hi types. Coming back then to Jens' causative suffixes in Sanskrit (-aya-) and Hittite (-nu-), I would suggest that they were two independent innovations after the breakup. They were transitivizing devices for these new nominative-accusative languages that were experimenting with a passive. The fact that -nu- occurs in both Hittite and Greek need not push it back to PIE. Achaeans and the Ahhiyawa were probably at least as well acquainted in post-PIE times as the Hittite treaties suggest Hittites were with the Ahhiyawa. There had to have been massively re-contacts early after the breakup. But linguistic systems probably kept change from moving too quickly, despite a lot of individual innovations. This is not meant as a statement about what changes can or do take place. This is part of a larger attempt to arrive a plausible solution to what did take place in one well-attested language family. Carol Justus From stevegus at aye.net Mon Jun 14 15:26:10 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 11:26:10 -0400 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Past participle ending seems to be -u > which is passive if the verb is transitive > and active if the verb is intransitive Ergativity? (Uh oh. . .) Etruscan would seem to me to be a perfect test for claims of Nostratic and other super-families. It is a prime candidate because it is a language about which we still know relatively little. It is not Indo-European, but it seems possibly related. For example, we know that Etruscan had: 1st sing. pronoun: nom. -mi-, acc. -mini-. Demonstratives -ita-, -eta- and -ica-, -eca-. Nouns seem to have had four cases. In the singular, these include a genitive which often ends in -as or -ial, a dative in -l or -al, and a locative in -thi. If there is a language that cannot be classified as Indo-European, but can be related to a reconstructed common ancestor, Etruscan would seem to be a likely candidate. In fact, if these features mentioned above were -all- we knew about Etruscan, it might have -been- classed as IE. Fortunately, we have a much larger body of texts. I've a pet crank theory that Etruscan might be related to the non-IE substrate spoken by the boat-people that seems to be present in Germanic. This is a far-fetched hypothesis. There do seem to be some vocabulary coincidences: -aisar-, Etruscan for "gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods." Both Etruscan and Germanic had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az. When borrowing Greek mythological names and other words, the Etruscans did phonetic violence to 'em that resembles the Germanic sound shift. Specifically, Greek b, d, g > p, t, k in Etruscan. Kastor stayed Castur in Etruscan, but Polydeukes became Pulutuk. (And Pulutuk became Pollux in Latin.) There does also seem to be some evidence of cultural contact between Germans and the inhabitants of Northern Italy at an early, pre-Roman date, probably around 200 BCE at latest. The Runic alphabet seems to have been created from an Etruscan or North Italian prototype. -- Amorem semel contraxi. Consanui, et morbi immunis sum. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Jun 14 17:49:04 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 13:49:04 EDT Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: In a message dated 6/14/99 12:16:52 AM Mountain Daylight Time, elwhitaker at FTC-I.NET writes: >In other European languages, such as French, Russian, and German, there are >definite social and cultural protocols about the circumstances in which one >should use intimate or formal "you" forms. -- there were in English in the 17th century as well. "Thee" corresponded exactly with French "tu" or German "du" -- it was used to intimates, social inferiors, and children. "You" was used to superiors; it was the formal/deferential mode. Parents used "thee" to children, for example, and children used "you" to their parents. For a low-status Quaker to use "thee" to a higher-status non-Quaker was socially subversive and in the context of the time, insulting. From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jun 14 18:15:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 19:15:35 +0100 Subject: aorists Message-ID: >> Pat asked: >>> ...difference in meaning between the >>> athematic and thematic aorists? Peter said: >> ..., none! Pat said: > Keine Antwort ist doch eine Antwort. Peter schriebt weiter: Wenn Sie eine klarere Antwort brauchen, sage ich, dass es keinen Grund gibt, einen Unterschied zu sehen. Peter From stevegus at aye.net Tue Jun 15 03:20:09 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 23:20:09 -0400 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: JoatSimeon writes: > -- there were in English in the 17th century as well. "Thee" corresponded > exactly with French "tu" or German "du" -- it was used to intimates, > social inferiors, and children. "You" was used to superiors; it was the > formal/deferential mode. Parents used "thee" to children, for example, > and children used "you" to their parents. Curious, how this got turned almost exactly on its head. To the extent that "thou" is still understood, it is a form of address restricted to Exalted Personages, like God, or Richard III, or the Mighty Thor. -- L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jun 15 07:55:37 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 08:55:37 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <000801beb630$547b3a40$a99ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I continue to assert that complexity arises out of simplicity; You may continue to assert this all you like, but what does it have to do with ergativity, or with linguistics at all? > and since I have found that the relationship between the object and > the verb is primary, which loosely conforms to an ergative model of > development, No, it doesn't. A division between objects and non-objects is accusativity, not ergativity. Ergativity is a division between transitive subjects and all else. > I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must > precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Jun 15 09:03:32 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 09:03:32 GMT Subject: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new pe In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I still think that one of the various threads leading to the Latin perfect with its frequent `v', was contraction of a periphrastic perfect e.g. *ama;vo:s (IE perfect active participle) + a tense of {es-} = "be", e.g. amavistis < *{amavor estes}. From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jun 15 08:09:27 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 10:09:27 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <000801beb630$547b3a40$a99ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: (without stage-directions, if I'm allowed to) >G. A. Klimov, which has your credentials, and who is rather highly regarded >in Russia, asserts an ergative stage for language, and I subscribe to his >interpretation. Appeal to authority. The least impressive way of reasoning of them all. By far. Si tacuisses. >Would you mind detailing the non-ERG features you know in Sumerian? Consistently ERG in terms of overt case marking in all TAM categories, enough to impress a non-linguist observer. However, ACC in terms of verbal cross-reference in the imperfective system, no doubt. Furthermore, the personal pronouns operate on a fully ACC basis, even in terms of case marking. Sumerian is, like all the other "ERG-lgs", really a split-ergative language. QED. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 15 09:13:05 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 11:13:05 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: Carol F. Justus Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 3:47 AM [snip] >This stative was not productive in PIE (see the issue of 'have' in the >Lehmann Fs.). The root 'sit' in fact is most interesting here. Hittite >'sit' is derived as middle of 'be': eszi 'is', esa(ri) 'sits'. With -za >(often called a reflexive particle) in New Hittite then the combination -za >esari means 'take a seat, sit down' (with sakki 'knows', -za sakki means >'acknowledges'). With the root *es- there was no need of a "stative" >suffix, nor was there with middles, Greek he:stai, Sanskrit a:ste 'sits'. >But the 'active' root *sed- 'sit' was another matter. In Latin the stative >is very productive in its second conjugation -e:- verbs (habe:re 'have', >sede:re 'sit' etc.). But its use there is part of a different verbal >system, one in which there is a productive passive voice. These -e:- >statives are often syntactically transitive but semantically stative, e.g. >'have': librum habet (see Bauer in HS?). [Ed Selleslagh] It seems to me - a non-specialist - that two Castilian constructions might be related to this. 1. the expression 'est?te quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is behind it? 2. the formally reflexive use of transitive verbs in Castilian that has exact parallels in (modern) Greek medio-passive: 'se prohibe (in older Spanish: prohibese) la entrada' (Greek: apagor?yetai he: ?isodos (pron. /apagor?vete i ?sodhos/) or 'vendese esta casa' or 'enju?guese el envase'. You also have the parallel 'encontrar / encontrarse' - 'br?sko: (/vr?sko/) / br?skomai (/vr?skome/)' . Any comments? Ed. From edsel at glo.be Tue Jun 15 10:05:39 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 12:05:39 +0200 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Steven A. Gustafson Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 4:05 AM >Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> Past participle ending seems to be -u >> which is passive if the verb is transitive >> and active if the verb is intransitive >Ergativity? (Uh oh. . .) >Etruscan would seem to me to be a perfect test for claims of Nostratic >and other super-families. It is a prime candidate because it is a >language about which we still know relatively little. It is not >Indo-European, but it seems possibly related. For example, we know that >Etruscan had: >1st sing. pronoun: nom. -mi-, acc. -mini-. >Demonstratives -ita-, -eta- and -ica-, -eca-. >Nouns seem to have had four cases. In the singular, these include a >genitive which often ends in -as or -ial, a dative in -l or -al, and a >locative in -thi. >If there is a language that cannot be classified as Indo-European, but >can be related to a reconstructed common ancestor, Etruscan would seem >to be a likely candidate. In fact, if these features mentioned above >were -all- we knew about Etruscan, it might have -been- classed as IE. >Fortunately, we have a much larger body of texts. >I've a pet crank theory that Etruscan might be related to the non-IE >substrate spoken by the boat-people that seems to be present in >Germanic. This is a far-fetched hypothesis. [Ed Selleslagh] I have mine too: contact between Anatolian forefathers of the Etruscans (before their migration by sea to Tuscany via Lemnos) and those of the (at least North-East-) Germanic peoples on the shores of the Black Sea / Pontos Euxinos (Crimea?). Note that Miguel Carrasquer once made a nice, slightly speculative, 'Stammbaum' about this pre-PIE stage, that makes a lot of sense. >There do seem to be some vocabulary coincidences: -aisar-, Etruscan for >"gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods." Both Etruscan and Germanic >had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az. >When borrowing Greek mythological names and other words, the Etruscans >did phonetic violence to 'em that resembles the Germanic sound shift. >Specifically, Greek b, d, g > p, t, k in Etruscan. Kastor stayed Castur >in Etruscan, but Polydeukes became Pulutuk. (And Pulutuk became Pollux >in Latin.) [Ed] There is even more: p, t, k > f or ph(in certain positions), th , ch , like in Neptunus > Ne(f)thuns, Polyx?ne: > phulphsna, Acaviser > Achvizr. And of course the apparently strong initial accent, held responsible for many of the peculiarities of Etruscan pronunciation of foreign names. Etruscan also shares quite a few traits of this kind with Lydian. Note also that Etruscan too has an ablative/genitive of origin -ach, e.g. Rumach = from Rome, Roman, or Velznach = from Volsinii/Bolsena (Lydian -ak; Greek analogy : adjectives with -(i)ak?s). Cfr. our recent discussion about the widespread -k(o) suffix, or part of suffixes. (Also in Slavic, as I mentioned before, and Uralic, e.g. as partitive-plural in Hungarian, which points to the same Pontic region; these are my highly personal interpretations!). [ moderator snip ] From jer at cphling.dk Tue Jun 15 15:26:03 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 17:26:03 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Carol F. Justus wrote: > Dear Jens and Wolfgang, > The issues of diathesis, ergativity, and reflexive pronouns under > discussion here are indeed complex and in need of clarification. I comment > on one really. I try and read really. [...] > Jens' response [to a correct report given by Wolfgang Schulze of what > is perhaps the most widespread view about an IE passive - Jens]: > [Jens:] >> I strongly disagree with the statement that PIE had no passive. In >> fact it had several. One of the basic functions of the middle voice >> was patently to express the passive use of transitive verbs. > Let's stop here for a moment. > [General references to people telling us what passive is in other > languages, esp.:] > In 1991 Klaiman (Grammatical Voice? Oxford UP?) then typologically > distinguished between the role of a passive as derived voice in > nominative-accusative languages and the role of the middle in active > languages which have 'basic voice', not 'derived voice'. The role of a > middle in active langauges was to move members of one verb class into > the other of two verb classes, as active languages typically have two > distinct verb classes: verbs such as 'sing, run, dance' (active) and > 'lie, sit, stand' (stative). Such verbs are essentially intransitive. > Devices also created transitive verbs. [...] > Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have suggested that PIE was active in type, citing > the two verb classes in Hittite, the -mi and -hi conjugations, among other > things. If active in type refers to having primarily intransitive verbs and > derivational strategies to make them transitive, then PIE had no passive. > It takes a transitive verb to be passivized. Well, the mi- and hi-conjugations plainly are NOT the two "basic series "they are cracked up to be, esp. in Ivanov's 1965 monograph. For one thing, there is an Anatolian mediopassive which is not a member of the hi-conjugation, so the hi-conjugation is not the flimsy "inactive" common precursor of the middle and the perfect of the other languages. On the contrary: The Anatolian hi-conjugation is the IE perfect, period. The stroy is a simple one which has been told - in perhaps not so simple terms - by Eichner and others many times. Anatolian has given up the IE distinction of verbal aspect stems, having then only one verbal stem per lexical verb. The actual stem surviving from PIE may be a "present stem" (as in es- 'be', kuen- 'kill'), an aorist stem (as in mer- 'vanish', sanh- 'seek', te- 'say', ganes- 'recognize') or a perfect stem (ishai- 'bind', ispai- 'eat one's fill', probably ar-/er- 'come' and, for semantic reasons, quite possibly sakk-/sekk- 'know'). All of these stems formed what could become a preterite, and so IE imperfects, aorists and perfects live on as Hitt. preterites, just as they do in Classical Sanskrit. On the analogy of the imperfect which had a present beside it from of old, preterites based on aorists and perfects created presents by adding the present ending enlargement -i. The 1sg prs. based on a perfect was *-ha-i, Old Hitt. -hhe > -hhi; the prt. -ha is retained in Luvian and Lycian, while Hittite adjusted the expected *-hha to the ending of the mi-conjugation -un (from syllabic *-m) thus creating -hhun. Thus, the preterite of the hi-conjugation basically continues the IE perfect (with some help from its closest friends, note esp. the 3sg -s from the s-aorist necessitated because of the lack of consonantal material in the 3sg perfect itself). The bulk of Hitt. hi-verbs, however, are intruders: Practically every verb that had the vocalism *-o- in IE has ended up being a Hitt. hi-verb, a fact that stronly indicates that the old stock of hi-verbs had that vocalism already, a demand met most easily if they were perfects. We find IE causative-iteratives, intensives, reduplicated aorists (!) in the hi-conjug., and also some for which the vocalism has not been precisely *-o-, but apparently close enough to make the verb share the fate of the perfect. Thus the denom. type newahh- is hi, although the vocalism was IE *-a- (from pre-IE laryngeal-coloured *-e-), and so is da:- 'take' based on the middle voice of *deH3- 'give' and so fairly plainly continuing *d at 3- with syllabified laryngeal. That such a crude and primitive analogy could work so well and not represent the truth would be beyond my comprehension and incompatible with normal standards of common sense. That, however, does not in itself exclude an old "active" typology for a prestage of IE, only now you have to look elsewhere for its traces, and that would of course be in the dichotomy prs. (prs./aor.) : midd./pf. (which then would show up as -mi vs. -hi in Hitt., if only indirectly). But I cannot see this looks too good either: While medium (or perfect) tantum verbs are indeed not very action-related, the opposite does not hold for the active. Naturally *H1ey- 'go' and *{gwh}en- 'kill' are good active verbs, but why is *H1es- 'be' and *k^{th}ey- 'dwell' members of the same club? My answer to that is simple: Because club membership is not at all based on an active/inactive parameter: They are active because they are not the mediopassive of anything. Has anyone in his right mind ever claimed that *{gwh}e'n-mi 'I kill' was intransitive? And what about 'eat' and 'millk'? And the many root aorists that are plainly underived too? Was {kw}e'r-t 'made' once intransitive? On what basis is THAT claimed to be known - or am I missing a point since it looks so silly? Media tantum like *k^e'y-or 'lies', "e:'s-or" 'sits' (reduplicated? simply not knowable), *we's-tor 'is dressed' and some others may be the medium part of an older two-voice system preserved with most other verbs. That would of course mean that the old function of the middle voice was not exclusively passive, for here it is not: you are not lying by being kept in a lying position (but _things_ are), this looks more like a reflexive which was then one of the meanings of the middle voice very early on (which nobody has ever denied, I guess). I would deny, however, that the reflexive (and reflexive-like) function was the ONLY function of the middle at any time, for there are too many things that demand its having a true passive force (by the unsurprising definitions you quoted) in a very remote period when some very old phonetic changes were operative. Thus, since there was no ban on transitive verbs in PIE which obviously had plenty of them, there was not THAT ban on a passive category. What a relief. > Along with primarily > intransitive verbs and the lack of a passive, PIE had no transitive verb of > possession, no 'have'. 'Have' entered dialectally by different paths. There > are now two recent statements on the path of 'have' into attested IE > languages, one in the second volume of the recently published Lehmann Fs. > (Journal of IE Studies Monograph 31) and another in the Proceedings of the > Xth UCLA IE Conference (JIES Monograph 32). I do not see the relevance of the question of how speakers of IE said 'have' for the discussion of the existence of a category expressing the passive of transitive verbs. I see the relevance of 'have' for a somewhat different discussion which seems not to have been addressed: How could a stative derivative with suffix *-eH1- from 'take' come to mean 'keep, hold, have' as it obviously did in so many instances? And if it is an areal thing as you claim (and I find no particular reason to believe), how could it happen just once so that there was a place it could spread from? This is the semantic nuance you rather expect for the perfect: 'I have taken and now hold' would be a very good way to say 'I have' in IE terms (cf. Eng. "I've got"), but that is not the way it is said, except perhaps in Slavic where OCS imamI can indeed be derived from an IE perfect. It seems the "stative" derivative verbs in *-eH1- still hold their secrets, and so I cannot exclude that they will eventually turn out to support the active/inactive idea - but neither can I exclude that they turn out to join all the other alleged indications and be simply irrelevant. [...] What you say about my description of the causative and factitive verbs that lost their transitive value (factitives then becoming ingressive) simply repeats what I said with a use of English modality as if it were an objection. If stripped of the rhetorics it appears to contain no added information and no expression of disagreement. [...] > Coming back then to Jens: >> Alongside this, there was the "stative" morpheme //-eH1-//; >> this was stative with intransitive verbs, as aorist *sed-eH1- 'enter a >> sitting position', prs. *sed-H1-ye'- 'be in a sitting position, sit', > This stative was not productive in PIE (see the issue of 'have' in the > Lehmann Fs.). The root 'sit' in fact is most interesting here. Hittite > 'sit' is derived as middle of 'be': eszi 'is', esa(ri) 'sits'. [...] If the stative formation was not productive in IE it is even better, for then it was a fossil which makes it even older. The stative has now been discovered in Indic, cf. Ilya Yakubovich in the 10th UCLA Conference volume, picking up an idea of Jamison's which she had given up herself. I may add to this the striking stem-formation of some of the forms of the root kas'- 'see', prs. ca's.t.e, aor. akhyat, formed from an apparent root-form "khya:-", as prs. khya:yate 'sees': this is simply the same stem formation as Lat. videt, i.e. from *-eH1-ye-ti/-tor. A plain middle voice of *H1es- would not give Skt. a:'ste, Gk. e:^stai with a long vowel as opposed to a'sti, esti(n) 'is'. They may be related, but not in exactly this way. > This is not to deny that even Hittite had passive uses of medio-passives. > The point is to look at what is productive in the system. [...] I hope most of us are too sophisticated to need that kind of lecturing. > Coming back then to Jens' causative suffixes in Sanskrit (-aya-) and > Hittite (-nu-), I would suggest that they were two independent innovations > after the breakup. But you have *-eye- in Hittite too (la:ki 'put lying', wasse- 'dress' frpm *logh-e'ye- and *wos-e'ye- resp., in the former with the normal passage into the hi-conjugation of a verb with o-vocalism, while the latter has resisted this analogical pressure); and you also have de-adjectival factitives in -nu- in Sanskrit (dabhno'ti, identical with tepnuzzi; dr.s.-n.o'-ti : Gk. thrasu's), as well as both of them elsewhere in diverse IE languages. Moreover, there is no obvious way they could have been created secondarily from inherited material. Both _must_ have been PIE, and theories incompatible with this inference just are no good. It seems to me that there is a basic error inherent in the frequent "explanation" of mysterious categories and forms as "late", "secondary" or "einzelsprachlich". If a morphological type is too young to belong to the protolanguage it must have been formed from material the protolanguage, indeed the particular poststage of it had, and then it should be easier, not harder, for us to discover its origins, for in that case the timespan to be bridged is shorter than in the case of very old forms. This error is very often committed when dealing with categories that have become productive, such as the thematic verbs or the s-aorist. They became productive, oh yes, and so all their examples cannot go back to the protolanguage, but some MUST, otherwise there would have been no nucleus for the expansion. [...] > This is not meant as a statement about what changes can or do take place. > This is part of a larger attempt to arrive at a plausible solution to > what did take place in one well-attested language family. My posting is meant as both. Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 15 18:01:05 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 13:01:05 -0500 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) In-Reply-To: <37651F12.CC2878C8@aye.net> Message-ID: [snip] >I've a pet crank theory that Etruscan might be related to the non-IE >substrate spoken by the boat-people that seems to be present in >Germanic. This is a far-fetched hypothesis. Adolfo Zavaroni's version of Etruscan in I documenti etruschi suggests links to Germanic --but (as I remember) he sees Etruscan as an IE language He uses linguistic comparison in a way that the Bonfantes rail against BUT his idea that Etruscan /ts/ & correspond to IE /st/ is interesting I don't know how Zavaroni situates Etruscan in IE, though I'd like to hear more about your theory, though --although I'm sure IE-list is not the place, maybe on Nostratic list >There do seem to be some vocabulary coincidences: -aisar-, Etruscan for >"gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods." Both Etruscan and Germanic >had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az. Someone pointed out to me that ON aesir was from *ansar [or something similar] >When borrowing Greek mythological names and other words, the Etruscans >did phonetic violence to 'em that resembles the Germanic sound shift. >Specifically, Greek b, d, g > p, t, k in Etruscan. Kastor stayed Castur >in Etruscan, but Polydeukes became Pulutuk. (And Pulutuk became Pollux >in Latin.) or Pultuce Zavaroni's view is that the Etruscans essentially invented folk etymologies for figures in Greek mythology As much as anything else. Etruscan's lack of voiced stops reminds me of Minoan & Cypro-Minoan scripts, which also lack these. Etruscan, however, did have aspirated stops, which [I believe] were also lacking in Minoan & Cypro-Minoan Aegean scripts [unless kh, ph & th were really unvoiced fricatives]. From donncha at eskimo.com Tue Jun 15 18:11:01 1999 From: donncha at eskimo.com (Dennis King) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 11:11:01 -0700 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: <649135e8.24969a90@aol.com> Message-ID: Ar 1:49 PM -0400 6/14/99, scr?obh JoatSimeon at aol.com: >>In other European languages, such as French, Russian, and German, there are >>definite social and cultural protocols about the circumstances in which one >>should use intimate or formal "you" forms. >-- there were in English in the 17th century as well. "Thee" corresponded >exactly with French "tu" or German "du" -- it was used to intimates, social >inferiors, and children. "You" was used to superiors; it was the >formal/deferential mode. Unlike the languages mentioned, Irish has always used "tu/" for the singular and "sibh" for the plural, and the latter has never been a formal/deferential singular. It's quite interesting, however, that Scottish Gaelic, as it emerged as a separate language, followed the more widespread European convention of using the plural pronoun "sibh" as a singular of respect. My pet theory is that the Scottish Gaelic innovation is somehow linked to the spread of Calvanism in those parts, but that's just a wild guess. Question: what was the convention among the Greeks and Romans in this regard at the height of their civilizations? Dennis King From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 15 18:06:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:06:02 +0100 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: >> Patrick has problems with the shape of a suggested root *Hyugom. I am not sure of the nature of these problems. There are several other roots with zero grade HRRC, for example Hludh (come), h2wlh2 (wool), h2mlg' (milk), h3migh (mist), h1rudh-ro (red), h1widh-eu (widow). What is your objection, Pat? Is it that you are convinced all PIE roots must originally have been diconsonantal? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 15 18:29:06 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:29:06 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative (I) Message-ID: > Pat said: > I have the feeling that ... there are virtually as many > "perfectives" as there are linguists. Even if we had a clear definition of "perfect" or "perfective", we would still be unsure if it applied to PIE. Only Greek shows a clear aorist-perfect distinction. Sanskrit, in as much as it shows it all, has the aorist playing the role of the Greek perfect. Where both formations survive in other IE languages, they are conflated in meaning (as in Celtic), or in meaning and form, as in Latin. The -o-grade + perfect endings can be reconstructed, but its precise distinction from other forms is not clear. There is a strong possibility of a link between the perfect endings, the Hittite -hi forms, and a possible stative meaning. Reduplication is strongly linked with these forms in Greek and Sanskrit, but not in other languages (never in Latin). At least 4 aorist formations can be reconstructed for PIE: athematic, thematic, reduplicating and sigmatic. If these differed in meaning, or how they differed in meaning from the perfect cannot be clearly determined, since the Greek and Sanskrit evidence is not in accord, and other languages have "merged" the two formations. It is clear proof - if it were needed - that we can reconstruct morphology much more easily than meaning. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 15 18:30:42 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:30:42 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative (II) Message-ID: > Nath commented: >> what >> kind of aorists did all the roots with root presents form, before there were >> thematic or s-aorists? It is probable that the root aorist formation (but not of course the meaning) existed before the tense system arose - and therefore before the present tenses. So your question is back to front. Secondly, we are talking of a system in the process of developing. So we may not expect that every present formation had an aorist, or even vice versa. Besides, most so-called "root" presents have an -e- vowel, which would distinguish them at least from thematic aorists, which have zero grade. Overall, I think your question is a non-question. Peter From alex at AN3039.spb.edu Tue Jun 15 21:44:10 1999 From: alex at AN3039.spb.edu (Alexander S. Nikolaev) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 00:44:10 +0300 Subject: Intensive Reduplication (Initial *y in Greek) Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > This brings us to the picture: > IE *y- > Gk. /h-/ > IE *H1y- > Gk. /h-/ > IE *H2y- > Gk. /h-/ (or /z-/?) > IE *H3y- > Gk. /z-/ I'm sorry for my intruding, too; i would like to suggest an alternative version: It can be considered proven, that intervocal and initial *y was still present in the phoneme system of Proto-Greek before the processes of palatalizations. The important fact is that palatalizations were also actual for clusters like Cy, when the two sounds were divided with a morphological boundary, and after the palatalization the boundary wasn't clear anymore, e.g. *sed-yo > hezomai And thus -z- <*dy was understood as a productive verbal suffix, (d-yo> dyo) and hence doublets arose like agapa(y)o: || agapazo: which are attested in Homer's language. And thus there was a position of morphological neutralization of y|z, which lead to their interpretation as phonetic allophones on the synchronic level. Then this variativity was transferred to the initial position (where, i remind, was no morphologically caused position of neutralization); and when *-y- was lost in intervocal position, the opposition of initial h<*y and z in some words was lexicalized. As far as i remember, words, for which the development *y->*z- could be assumed, are all somehow semantically close ----- may be this could be the case, i mean the theory of lexical diffusion. Regards, Alex From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 16 00:38:03 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 19:38:03 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 5:34 PM > On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> [...] I do continue to believe that any language which is >> presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage >> sometime prior to that in its development. Jens asked: > Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of > events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. Pat answers: The best researched language family is Indo-European. IEists cannot agree if IE went through an ergative stage preceding its accusative stage so how can any reasonable person expect that five examples can be found that display the same proposed sequence "with certainty". I think a key to these relationships is the understanding the causation of natural sequences like synthetic -> analytic along the lines of what Larry Tarsk proposed, and, IMHO, as opposed to Ralf-Stefan's denial of any mechanical inevitability of certain phenomena. Pat continued: >> [...] To try to understand ergative constructions from >> passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me >> to be potentially misleading. Jens answered: > "Potentially" perhaps, but in some cases certainly in accordance with the > truth of a documented development. Why it that so often disregarded in > typology-based solutions? Pat comments: Well, there are more passive constructions than those developed during accusative stages of languages; and any explanation of passives should include an analysis of the data from the many types of languages in which it appears. It is not that this data should be disregarded but rather that it should be weighted. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 16 01:09:28 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 20:09:28 -0500 Subject: Differentiation Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 5:56 PM Jens wrote: > In response to a thread woven by Patrick C. Ryan > Dear Pat, > In some recent postings you have suggested that some IE mrophological > forms, indeed categories, have arisen "by differentiation". I have spoken > out against it, and you have asked me why. > You wrote you would have to consider a form like 2pl *bhe'rete "quite a > bit later than singular (really, number-neutral) forms", i.e. younger than > *bhe'ret (which lives on as the 3sg). The point was that you wanted vowels > to be predictable from the consonant skeleton, so you set the basic ablaut > rule that deletes all unstressed short vowels in action. Actually, that > should not allow *bhe'ret either, but only *bhe'rt, but no matter, let's > take to have been the form, just for the sake of the argument. Pat comments: Well, I would be rather naif if I proposed a rule to explain *bhe{'}ret which did not explain *bhe{'}et. In other discussions on related subjects, I have indicated that I think it likely that a secondary stress-accent explains apparent anomalies like this (**"bhe-'re-te -> '*bheret). There may be other factors to be considered as well: what effect tone may have had in combination with stress or no stress. Jens continued: > My objection is that if in such a language vowels only exist accented, > there would be no variants containing unstressed vowels, and thus there > would be no material the language could differentiate. When languages make > arbitrary differentiations, they utilize existing patterns, but *bhe'rete > could simply not exist in a language on which the fundamental ablaut rule > had worked. Therefore either the rule or the idea of differentiation is > wrong. Pat responds: Well, I think there is another clearer example of "differentiation": present secondary 1st sing. -m as opposed to 1st pl. -me. Jens continued: > In fact, if grammatical number is something IE has in common with the > other members of the presumed Nostratic macrofamily, it does not seem very > likely that it would be an IE innovation, does it? To my eyes, it even > looks as if the 1st and 2nd plural forms of the IE verb have the same > conglomerate endings as in Uralic. I therefore do not believe they have > arisen by a preocess of secondary differentiation which looks illogical to > me in the first place. Pat responds: "Differentiation" is just one possible explanation since we do not really have a perfectly clear understanding of the circumstances under which zero-grades appear else we could agree on an explanation of *bhe{'}et. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Jun 16 02:32:56 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 22:32:56 EDT Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: In a message dated 6/15/99 8:31:53 PM Mountain Daylight Time, stevegus at aye.net writes: << Curious, how this got turned almost exactly on its head. To the extent that "thou" is still understood, it is a form of address restricted to Exalted Personages, like God, or Richard III, or the Mighty Thor. >> -- oddly enough, God was usually addressed in the familiar form as well. You certainly wouldn't call the King "thee", though. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 16 06:13:45 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 01:13:45 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 3:09 AM Pat wrote: >> G. A. Klimov, who has your credentials, and who is rather highly regarded >> in Russia, asserts an ergative stage for language, and I subscribe to his >> interpretation. R-S replied: > Appeal to authority. The least impressive way of reasoning of them all. By > far. Si tacuisses. Pat resonpds: How clever to respond in this way! As if I was asking you to subscribe to Klimov's ideas simply because he is an eminent linguist! I was simply pointing out, since you obviously missed my point, that highly qualified linguists do disagree; and so, your opinion (and even, occasionally, the consensus) may or may not be found ultimately correct even as the "consensus" once firmly rejected the laryngeal theory in any form. Pat asked: >> Would you mind detailing the non-ERG features you know in Sumerian? R-S answered: > Consistently ERG in terms of overt case marking in all TAM categories, > enough to impress a non-linguist observer. However, ACC in terms of verbal > cross-reference in the imperfective system, no doubt. > Furthermore, the personal pronouns operate on a fully ACC basis, even in > terms of case marking. Sumerian is, like all the other "ERG-lgs", really a > split-ergative language. QED. Pat responds: QED. Just what do you believe your proved? And, I would like to ask you a question in view of your snide aside about a "non-linguist observer". Is it your opinion that no one is entitled to be considered a linguist, even an amateur linguist, if he/she does not possess a PhD in Linguistics? As for your characterization of the Sumerian imperfective system, which is properly called the maru: inflection *not* imperfective, just what characteristics do you *believe* it has that qualify as ACC? I am also puzzled by your idea that Sumerian pronouns "operate on a fully ACC basis" since , e.g. the 1st and 2nd persons ergative g[~]a[2].e and za.e contrast with 1st and 2nd persons absolutive g[~]a[2] and za in the same way nouns show an ergative in -e and an absolutive in -0. Perhaps you could explain your ideas in greater detail. From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Jun 16 06:38:46 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 01:38:46 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: Dennis King wrote: > Question: what was the convention among the Greeks and Romans in this > regard at the height of their civilizations? The Romans at some point, I'm not sure when this happened, began to use _vos_ as a formal pronoun, possibly reflecting the use of _nos_ as a first person singular by high-up individuals like the Emperor. I think this may have been in post-classical times, tho. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 16 15:27:38 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 10:27:38 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: <003b01beb716$b3a74540$1804703e@edsel> Message-ID: [snip] >1. the expression 'est?te quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable >because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not >susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as >medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is >behind it? Reflexive pronouns are used for inchoate, intensive & emphatic actions as well as for reflexive, reciprocal and mediopassive. Mediopassive constructions [strictly speaking] only occur in 3rd person: Se vende pizza. Se venden pizzas. [literally: "Pizza sells itself." "Pizzas sell themselves." Se me perdieron las llaves. [literally: "My keys lost themselves on me." Mue/rate "drop dead" Due/rmete "go to sleep" Te comiste el sandwich "you scarfed down the sandwich" [comer = German essen, comerse = German fressen] Te bebiste toda la botella "you chugged the whole bottle" >2. the formally reflexive use of transitive verbs in Castilian that has exact >parallels in (modern) Greek medio-passive: 'se prohibe (in older Spanish: >prohibese) la entrada' (Greek: apagor?yetai he: ?isodos (pron. >/apagor?vete i ?sodhos/) or >'vendese [sic] esta casa' or 'enju?guese el envase'. This is non-standard usage [but it's also found in older Spanish texts up to the XX century] Standard Spanish uses the subjunctive for these, e.g. Que se venda la casa, que se enjuague el envase You can say "rinse out your mouth, gargle" in standard Spanish but you normally say enjuague el vaso "rinse the glass" From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 16 15:39:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 10:39:19 -0500 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 1:06 PM >>> Patrick has problems with the shape of a suggested root *Hyugom. > I am not sure of the nature of these problems. There are several other > roots with zero grade HRRC, for example Hludh (come), h2wlh2 (wool), h2mlg' > (milk), h3migh (mist), h1rudh-ro (red), h1widh-eu (widow). > What is your objection, Pat? Is it that you are convinced all PIE roots > must originally have been diconsonantal? In a general way, continuing the line of reasoning that seems not to sit well with some, I continue to assert that the less complex must proceed the complex --- even if the less complex forms are not recoverable. So, yes, not only formally but actually, I do believe that all IE roots should be analyzable around a skeleton of CVC(V). Whether we can plausibly perform the analysis in the case of some very old roots as above, is, of course, another question but I think we should regard them as potentially so analyzable. What do you think? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 16 15:40:42 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 10:40:42 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I've read that the use of sibh as singular formal is based on French vous and became widespread during the Stuart dynasty. But I've also seen this phrased as an apocryphal sounding story something along the lines that Bonnie Prince Charlie & his French companions insisted on being addressed as "vous", so they accomodated them by using "sibh". So the whole French connection may be apocryphal [snip] >Unlike the languages mentioned, Irish has always used "tu/" for the >singular and "sibh" for the plural, and the latter has never been a >formal/deferential singular. It's quite interesting, however, that >Scottish Gaelic, as it emerged as a separate language, followed the >more widespread European convention of using the plural pronoun >"sibh" as a singular of respect. My pet theory is that the Scottish >Gaelic innovation is somehow linked to the spread of Calvanism in >those parts, but that's just a wild guess. [snip] From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Wed Jun 16 14:16:49 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 10:16:49 -0400 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >>> 1) Obviously, *Heyew is not a canonical IE root form. >>> 2) Would you consider the original root *Hey- and -w a root extension? >>> 3) Would you consider the possibility that the root is *yew- and that *He >>> is a preverb which may or may not have been present in the earliest IE? > Nath wrote: >> There seems to be little reason to assume the existence of preverbs that >> were fused with verbs in PIE. Within Benvensite's theory of root shapes, we >> have to consider Hyew a stage II extension from an Hey. But for late PIE, I >> think that extended roots need to be considered distinct lexical items >> anyway, so the point is moot. > Pat comments: > In order to regard *Hyew as a w-extended form of *Hey, it is necessary to > demonstrate that existence of the root *Hey in the *appropriate meaning*.--- > either alone or with other root extensions. > Can you do it? No. But this is a criticism of Benveniste's theory. After all not all roots we can reconstruct for the stage of PIE just before it started breaking up can be connected to CeC shape roots. Are you proposing prefixes to account for every one of them? Once we reject Benveniste's theory, we need to add a 4) to your list above, namely that Hyew was the original simple root. That is perfectly fine with me too. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Wed Jun 16 17:43:50 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 13:43:50 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I have the feeling that this is because there are virtually as many > "perfectives" as there are linguists. That makes all discussion intolerably complicated. > I am not going to re-define any of these terms but I will say that what I > think Lehmann meant : 'expresses an activity that continues/continued/etc. > to its logical conclusion'. > For example: "he is eating up the bread" (he intends to continue the > activity of eating until there is no more of that bread, and > that-bread-eating cannot be continued) ; The almost unanimous opinion of linguists is that true presents, and a priori, progressives, are by definition imperfective. This is supposed to be the reason why there is no present of the aorist. But this won't apply anymore with the above definition, as your example illustrates. So, why is there no present of aorist? petegray wrote: > It is probable that the root aorist formation (but not of course the > meaning) existed before the tense system arose - and therefore before the > present tenses. So your question is back to front. Does this mean present tense arose only after the aorist formations, including thematic and sigmatic, became established? If so, why is the latter formation, the present, use the bare root in even one case? > Secondly, we are talking of a system in the process of developing. So we > may not expect that every present formation had an aorist, or even vice > versa. The original context of my question was the usual equation present stem = imperfective, aorist stem = perfective. If not every present formation had an aorist, this equation becomes problematic. > Besides, most so-called "root" presents have an -e- vowel, which > would distinguish them at least from thematic aorists, which have zero > grade. Why the ``so-called'' and quotation marks around root? What is the history of the forms as you see it? Anyway, I don't get what this has to do with the aspectual meaning of present and aorist. > Sanskrit, in as much as it shows it all, has > the aorist playing the role of the Greek perfect. In what way? Regards -Nath From stevegus at aye.net Wed Jun 16 20:35:21 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 16:35:21 -0400 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Adolfo Zavaroni's version of Etruscan in I documenti etruschi > suggests links to Germanic --but (as I remember) he sees Etruscan as an IE > language > He uses linguistic comparison in a way that the Bonfantes rail > against BUT his idea that Etruscan /ts/ & correspond to IE /st/ is > interesting > I don't know how Zavaroni situates Etruscan in IE, though >From the vocabulary we know, there are a number of other coincidences. A Greek gloss mentioned in Bonfante, don't have the reference handy, gives -capys- as the Etruscan word for "falcon." This would be *capu or *capus in the standard alphabet of the inscriptions. This is a possible sister to -hafoc-, OE for "hawk," with cognates in most Germanic languages. My understanding is that this too is one of those odd words in Germanic that seems to be non-IE. >> -aisar-, Etruscan for >> "gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods." Both Etruscan and Germanic >> had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az. > Someone pointed out to me that ON aesir was from *ansar [or > something similar] This is true, but my question would be: does *ansar represent a widely attested word for a deity, or is it another of those strange Germanic ones? From mahoa at bu.edu Wed Jun 16 20:27:07 1999 From: mahoa at bu.edu (Anne Mahoney) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 16:27:07 -0400 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dennis King wrote: > Question: what was the convention among the Greeks and Romans in this > regard at the height of their civilizations? In Latin tu was only singular and vos was only plural, though it was fairly common to use nos ("we") for 1st-person singular. Emperors did this (see Trajan's letters in book 10 of Pliny the Younger) but so did regular people even in the republic (e.g. Cicero). Sometimes it's mock-formal (the letter to Atticus in which Cicero says effectively "we have been increased by a son"); sometimes it doesn't seem to have any particular special tone. I think su is only singular, hueis only plural in 5th-c. Attic -- one definition of the "height of [Greek] civilization" :-) At least I am unaware of cases where hueis is used "formally" to a single person. --Anne Mahoney Boston U. From adolfoz at tin.it Wed Jun 16 23:32:19 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 00:32:19 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote > Adolfo Zavaroni's version of Etruscan in I documenti etruschi > suggests links to Germanic --but (as I remember) he sees Etruscan as an IE > language > He uses linguistic comparison in a way that the Bonfantes rail > against BUT his idea that Etruscan /ts/ & correspond to IE /st/ is > interesting > I don't know how Zavaroni situates Etruscan in IE... Peter Gray sic ait: > I know no Etruscan. Can anyone confirm Paolo Agostini's statement that > Etruscan had a -v- perfective? I cannot say that Etruscan *is* an IE language; I think that most of the attested lexicon is IE, probably because of borrowings from IE (Italic, ProtoCeltic; ProtoGermanish especially through Raetia and Alpine zones; some Greek technical names) to Etruscan and from Etruscan to some IE languages (Latin, Osko-Umbrian). Etruscan had strong contacts with close peoples for 700-800 years at least. Some morphological aspects (declension, derivatives) seem to be IE. Certainly the verbal morphology, extremely semplified (no personal conjugation; only present and past tense: but we know only texts containing short sentences) is very different from Latin, Greek, Old Indian verbal systems. Like Paolo Agostini, I too think that Etruscan had perfective forms in -v- (cf. tenve = Lat. tenuit, zilakhnve = '(he) ruled', heramve 'profatus est', eisnev < eisneve '(he) was sacerdos' etc.). The oldest of these forms (heramve) goes back to the VI B.C., while the past tense (also used as past participle) in -ke, -khe is attested already in the first inscriptions of the VII-VIII century B.C. It could not be excluded that -ve- (later -v) is due to Italic contacts. Adolfo Zavaroni From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 16 23:28:49 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 01:28:49 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002601beb790$7f68c9a0$fb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> [Pat, 10 Jun 1999:] >>> [...] I do continue to believe that any language which is presently or has >>> been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage sometime prior to >>> that in its development. > Jens asked: >> Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of >> events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. > Pat answer[ed]: > The best researched language family is Indo-European. IEists cannot agree if > IE went through an ergative stage preceding its accusative stage so how can > any reasonable person expect that five examples can be found that display > the same proposed sequence "with certainty". [...] That's precisely what I feared: I don't mean to be hairsplitting or to pick on anybody (forgive me if I have), the fact just is that I have developed a highly sensitive suspicion to general guidelines being insufficiently founded in relation to the data sets they are supposed to guide us through. Anybody who has spent most of an active lifetime in a scholarly linguistic environment being told that IE Studies ought to learn from typology, or that we should consider general linguistic tendencies more than we do, is fed up with warnings that the facts we find are not credible because they are surprising. Hell, if nothing is ever allowed to be surprising there is no point in investigating it! Our methods must be good enough to allow us to discover more than the selfevident. And I had the suspicion that the widespread claim that the IE accusative structure MUST proceed from an earlier ergative structure, contrary as it is to the few cases I can control, just might be based on arguments and observations less safe than the ones they are supposed to improve upon. If you are right in your assessment that Indo-European is the best-investigated data field of them all, then perhaps typology and general linguistics should rather bow their heads to _our_ supremacy than vice versa. Not that I'd ever act so arrogantly, but it is a nice feeling to just imagine that for a change. Jens From fortytwo at ufl.edu Thu Jun 17 02:20:39 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 21:20:39 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > -- oddly enough, God was usually addressed in the familiar form as well. You > certainly wouldn't call the King "thee", though. True, but God is the Father, and it makes sense to address ones Father familiarly, Jesus himself referred to God by the familiar word "abba". -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 17 05:05:41 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 00:05:41 -0500 Subject: Intensive Reduplication Message-ID: Dear Nath and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Vidhyanath Rao Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 1999 9:16 AM [ moderator snip ] > Once we reject Benveniste's theory, we need to add a 4) to your list above, > namely that Hyew was the original simple root. That is perfectly fine with > me too. I will commit the ultimate heresy by admitting that I think Benveniste's theory has validity not only for IE but for many languages outside of this language family. The only exceptions I see are that in some early languages, very occasionally we run into a simple CV form, such as Sumerian ta, arm' but even IE has *se, *so, *to, and *me to name a few I do think it remarkable that many simple IE CCVC "roots" seem to have a variously specified laryngeal as an initial. Do you not think that somewhat odd if we do not analyze these initials as *H{?}e-, i.e. as pre-verbs or some otherwise defined element of a compound? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jun 17 05:16:47 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 00:16:47 -0500 Subject: Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects) Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Steven A. Gustafson Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 1999 3:35 PM > This is true, but my question would be: does *ansar represent a widely > attested word for a deity, or is it another of those strange Germanic > ones? My opinion is that *ansu- is a derivative of *ans-, 'favorable'; if it is, I think it may be connected not only with other IE languages through *ans- but even with Egyptian gs-3, 'favorite'. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jun 18 05:35:18 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 01:35:18 -0400 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: > I've read that the use of sibh as singular formal is based on >French vous and became widespread during the Stuart dynasty. But I've also >seen this phrased as an apocryphal sounding story something along the lines >that Bonnie Prince Charlie & his French companions insisted on being >addressed as "vous", so they accomodated them by using "sibh". So the whole >French connection may be apocryphal Aprocryphal indeed. Bonnie Prince Charlie & his French companions knew no Gaelic. Everything had to be translated for them. Robert Orr From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jun 18 05:56:21 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 01:56:21 -0400 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator snip ] >> Jens asked: >>> Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of >>> events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. A bit of digging in South Asia could easily furnish five such examples. But does that tell us that ALL languages passed through a stage "ergative-accusative"? Robert From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Jun 17 10:52:59 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:52:59 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <003b01beb7bf$83af68a0$fb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: Again without stage-directions: >How clever to respond in this way! As if I was asking you to subscribe to >Klimov's ideas simply because he is an eminent linguist! Well, it *did* sound like that, or why pointing out Klimov's reputation so verbosely ? I mean, if I agree with someone on a particular point, it really doesn't matter whether that person is Roman Jakobson or my local fishmonger. I agree, because I do, and any consequences of this I will have to face myself. Sapere aude. So, it would be enlightening to learn *what* the *specific* lines of Klimov's argumentation are, you agree with. So far, we have only heard the bottomline and the fact that Klimov was a deservedly prominent linguist. Where's the beef ? >I was simply pointing out, since you obviously missed my point, that highly >qualified linguists do disagree; and so, your opinion (and even, >occasionally, the consensus) may or may not be found ultimately correct even >as the "consensus" once firmly rejected the laryngeal theory in any form. That's a truism. What is interesting, is which particular things about the synchrony and diachrony of ergative traits in observable languages allow/force/disallow/prevent us from daring a determinist statement as that which you brought forward. The analogy you mention is irrelevant. While it is true enough that today's communes opiniones once were universally rejected, the only thing which follows is that we should use the notion of "truth" sparingly. What does not follow is, that every communis opinio of today will of necessity be debunked one day. But you carefully evade the task to expose Klimov's (or your, where you differ) line of argumentation. >QED. Just what do you believe your proved? That Sumerian is just another split-ergative language, since you seem to doubt my (oh, not *my*, I could refer you to *eminent* linguists ;-) assertion that, while non-split ACC-languages do exist, non-split ERG-languages are not known. You asked for the split in Sumerian, I gave it. >And, I would like to ask you a question in view of your snide aside about a >"non-linguist observer". Is it your opinion that no one is entitled to be >considered a linguist, even an amateur linguist, if he/she does not possess >a PhD in Linguistics? No, this is patently not my opinion, especially since I was an excellent linguist even before I was handed over my PhD diploma, which rules out this possibility ;-) ;-) (< --- see these !). It is, however, true that not every scholar who took part in the advancement of our knowledge of Sumerian, could be classified as a linguist in the modern sense. This is perfectly OK with most of them, I'm pretty sure, no offense intended. Linguistics would not be without the great philologers. The same holds for other disciplines as well, where modern linguistics (especially typological linguistics) sometimes has the right and duty to "correct" (better: adjust) the findings of the great philologists/grammarians (or better: not what they *found*, rather how they interpreted it). And it is certainly true that notions of ergativity, not to speak of split-ergativity, did not play a major role in the earlier days of Sumerology, i.e. well into this century, let alone the cross-linguistic typology of these phenomena (yes, I am aware of truly linguistic treatments of Sumerian, which do exist). So, I would not be disparaging, say, A. von Gabain calling her Alttuerkische Grammatik the work of a non-linguist. It is, and she knew it, and nevertheless it is a gold-mine for any linguist working on Old Turkic, I know of no linguist who could say different things about it, but the linguist's task is different from that of the pioneer philologist and grammar-writer (and, of course, linguistics is a discipline which sometimes makes progresses). Hope this makes that clear. Anyway, I'm happy to accept the label of "Non-Sumerologist" for myself. Are you a Sumerologist ? (Gonzalo, are you still with us ?) >As for your characterization of the Sumerian imperfective system, which is >properly called the maru: inflection *not* imperfective, just what >characteristics do you *believe* it has that qualify as ACC? Some Japanologists of my acquaintance (and some text-book authors) promise to kill everyone who dares to speak of a "verb" in Japanese in their presence, since these things are, of course, "properly called" /dousi/. What is this about ? The idea of typological linguistics is to *compare* languages, resp. their structural makeup. In order to be able to do this, exotistic terminology is best avoided. True enough, perfect matches between verbal (or other) categories among languages in terms of their functions are rarely encountered. However, to ensure comparability (with the usual disclaimers) a modernization of terminology is always to be wished for. I can and will object to your objection if, and only if, you (or someone else) will point out why this "maru:"-inflection may, under no circumstances, be regarded as a verbal category encoding imperfective aspect, as opposed to perfective aspect encoded by the HamTu-inflection (you see, I am myself a great "terminology-dropper"). You highlighted *believe* in your above response. Well, just as a small philosophical aside, of course everything which we think to *know* is really something we *believe*, but we may *believe* some things with slightly greater confidence than others, iow., that's what science is about. If you want to discuss this further, let's transfer this to the radical-constructivism-list. What makes me *believe* this, is data like the following: while it seems to be clear that case-marking (and some people think that ergativity is only about case-marking; however, I think highly enough of you not to assume that you are of this lot; moreover, after Wolfgang's postings here, noone else should be) in Sumerian operates ergatively regardless of TAM category, verbal cross-referenceing doesn't, it is just this which makes up for an ACC residue in the language. To wit: lugal-le Hi-li ib2-dim2-me. "The king fashioned the wig" The king is case-marekd as ERG (-(l)e), and the wig is ABS, so, in terms of case-marking a perfect ERG construction. The verb form, here given in transliteration, is morphologically to be analyzed: i- (conjugation prefix for maru: or imperfective (horribile dictu), -b- "personal affix for third person *inanimate*", so patently cross-referencing the patient here (cross-referencing the king would require the animate PA -n-), -dim- "The Root", -e imperfective suffixe (or maru:-suffix, now you be quiet ;-). Now, let's look at an intransitive imperfective sentence: lugal i3-du. (case-marking is of course not ergative, i- the maru:-marker). In order to have an ergative organization of verbal cross-referencing of constituents, we should expect the *patient* in the transitive sentence above, being treated *the same way* as the intransitive agent (some prefer "subject") in the last example, i.e. by being cross-referenced as -b-. It isn't. Actually it isn't overtly cross-referenced at all, though some Sumerologists prefer to insert a zero-affix cross-referencing the agent here at the end of the suffix-chain. Bog s nimi. The bottomline, the imperfective/maru:-system shows ACC-verbal cross-referencing by virtue of treating transitive patient and intransitive agent/suffix *differently*, the very gist of the definition of ergativity, which, I hope, I won't have to rehash here. Note, for completeness' sake, that this state of affairs doesn't repeat itself in the perfective/HamTu-conjugation. And, being myself, a stubborn: QED. >I am also puzzled by your idea that Sumerian pronouns "operate on a fully >ACC basis" since , e.g. the 1st and 2nd persons ergative g[~]a[2].e and za.e >contrast with 1st and 2nd persons absolutive g[~]a[2] and za in the same way >nouns show an ergative in -e and an absolutive in -0. Perhaps you could >explain your ideas in greater detail. It is true that g[~]a[2].e and za.e are formally ergative cases, by virtue of -e. However, I'm unaware of a systematic contrast between ergative and absolutive forms (i.e. without -e) used in a clear-cut ergative way in the language. No doubt this reflects my superficial knowledge of it. Various sources assure me that what seem to be "absolutive" forms g[~]a[2] and za are late Sumerian, and explicable as phonetically expectable reflexes of the longer (and earlier) forms. Even then, they are used in ERG and ABS functions indiscriminately, like the longer ones before. It would help your case if you could demonstrate with text examples that g[~]a[2].e and za.e are confined to ERG function, or better, that g[~]a[2] and za are, in Classical Sumerian (2600-2300 BCE) used in ABS function, i.e. as intransitive subjects and patients of transitive verbs. I. for one, don't know whether this is the case, but you seem to know, so it should be legitimate to ask you for examples. Until they come forth (in which case I will give this up happily), I will take this phenomenon as the second instance of an ergativity split in Sumerian, though admittedly the first one mentioned is the stronger one. To conclude: I stand by my "belief" that there is no such thing as a fully ERG language, i.e. one without any splits, as opposed to fully ACC languages. Sumerian is no counter-example. Any takers ? St. G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From stevegus at aye.net Thu Jun 17 15:30:17 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 11:30:17 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: > Like Paolo Agostini, I too think that Etruscan > had perfective forms in -v- > (cf. tenve = Lat. tenuit, zilakhnve = '(he) ruled', > heramve 'profatus est', eisnev < eisneve '(he) was sacerdos' etc.). Without context we can also understand, it's hard to tell; but it would seem to me that this form in -ve, if it's really there (and I would not presume to even form a personal opinion on that), would seem to me to have a past progressive or "imperfect" meaning, rather than a past definite. All the verbs you mention seem more plausible as past progressives: "he held," "he ruled," "it is foretold," "he was priest." (Then why -svalce-, "he lived?" rather than *svalve?) The word -eisnev- looks to me like it is made on an adjective; the root eis- "god," which has already come up, plus the adjective suffix -(i)na, familiar from -s/uthina-, "belonging to a tomb/the dead;" plus your tense ending. This may be a clue to its distribution. Perhaps it's some kind of participle? (-S/uthina-. An American idiom whose origin I don't know makes 'go south' mean 'to die.' Of course, the handy Germanic terms for the four cardinal directions are also at least partly hard to explain [except for perhaps 'east'] in PIE terms, and may therefore come from the non-IE Germanic substrate. I realise that my fancy is veering into linguistic X-Files territory here, to suggest that an Etruscan idiom made its way into colloquial American. [And, of course, the conventional explanation of -south- is that it represents "sun" + -th, with the /n/ dropped and the /u/ predictably lengthened for English. But the /n/ isn't there in Swedish -soeder-, and NGmc usually keeps it in this position (cf. -sooth- with Sw. -sant-); nor was it there in the Frankish source of French -sud-.]) > It could not be excluded that -ve- (later -v) is due to Italic > contacts. Of course; but the Latin perfects in -vi &c. are themselves of somewhat obscure origin, and don't seem to match anything that has been preserved for us in other Italic languages; which is what got this discussion started in the first place. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Thu Jun 17 17:13:27 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:13:27 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: >[ moderator re-formatted ] >-----Original Message----- >From: Carol F. Justus >Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 3:47 AM >[snip] >>This stative was not productive in PIE (see the issue of 'have' in the >>Lehmann Fs.). The root 'sit' in fact is most interesting here. Hittite >>'sit' is derived as middle of 'be': eszi 'is', esa(ri) 'sits'. With -za >>(often called a reflexive particle) in New Hittite then the combination -za >>esari means 'take a seat, sit down' (with sakki 'knows', -za sakki means >>'acknowledges'). With the root *es- there was no need of a "stative" >>suffix, nor was there with middles, Greek he:stai, Sanskrit a:ste 'sits'. >>But the 'active' root *sed- 'sit' was another matter. In Latin the stative >>is very productive in its second conjugation -e:- verbs (habe:re 'have', >>sede:re 'sit' etc.). But its use there is part of a different verbal >>system, one in which there is a productive passive voice. These -e:- >>statives are often syntactically transitive but semantically stative, e.g. >>'have': librum habet (see Bauer in HS?). >[Ed Selleslagh] >It seems to me - a non-specialist - that two Castilian constructions might >be related to this. Dear Ed, I will intercalate some comments to interesting questions that you raise: >1. the expression 'est?te quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable >because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not >susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as >medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is >behind it? The meaning here is expressed in Hittite, and other older IE languages by uses of non-cognate verbs 'have' (Puhvel's Hittite Etym. Dict. gives examples under har(k)-, an active -mi conjugation verb with no medio-passive counterparts)! The question as to what the universal process or linguistic category is deserves careful consideration in the context of the larger system of Castilian and what sort of system it is replacing, among other things. For what it may be worth old middles, Ancient Greek kei?tai and Sanskrit s?ete 'lies, is in a lying position', lack the apparent volitionality that seems to be added with the new Hittite medio-passive in -ri and the particle -za. Spanish estar, I believe, is etymologically related to PIE *sta?- (*steH-) 'stand' which, in an Ancient Greek active root aorist had an intransitive meaning (stand, take a standing position: e?-ste?), but a transitive meaning with sigmatic aorist forms (e?-ste?-sa). I have no solution to this nor to what PIE *es- was supplemented in Spanish. My present hypothesis would wonder if it didn't have something to do with a general drift in overall structure that was taking place. Your data makes me wonder is whether there is a category that is simply being renewed with a different form or whether the form differs because the category has taken on a unique nuance to fit its niche in Castilian. >2. the formally reflexive use of transitive verbs in Castilian that has exact >parallels in (modern) Greek medio-passive: 'se prohibe (in older Spanish: >prohibese) la entrada' (Greek: apagor?yetai he: ?isodos (pron. >/apagor?vete i ?sodhos/) or 'vendese esta casa' or 'enju?guese el >envase'. You also have the parallel 'encontrar / encontrarse' - 'br?sko: >(/vr?sko/) / br?skomai (/vr?skome/)' . >Any comments? >Ed. Yes there is a similarity in meaning here with the medio-passive. In fact one of the classic definitions of the old medio-passive is 'reflexive', probably to the extent that the action involves the subject. But the fact that the Romance language reflexives are formally separate from the passives of those languages makes me hesitant to identify them as one with the old category, which could also have a passivemeaning. In Modern Greek, is there also a new separate passive? Already in Ancient Greek with some verbs in some tenses there was a new strictly passive suffix (-the:-) that often had passive meaning (The problem with the old categories was that a form might vary in function depending on the verb in question or the form of the verb. Smyth's Greek Grammar catalogs this without really offering the kinds of principled generalizations that we would now like. These issues deserve more study language-specific study in the context of the attempt to do what you suggest, give some general defintion. And the studies that we have deserve to be applied to the kinds of comparative contexts that you bring up. Thanks for the data. Carol From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Thu Jun 17 17:16:58 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:16:58 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens, Thank you for your detailed comments. The issues are those on which there has traditionally been a lot of disagreement and probably will be, perhaps as much because of differing research goals as anything. For me crosslinguistic definitions of categories are important for the explicit criteria they offer for re-evaluating received wisdom. Obviously, every language system will have its own genius, and comparisons are at best hypotheses that need constant checking as new information becomes available. The Hittite -hi conjugation is, of course, intimately related to the issue of voice. Your statemtent: "The Anatolian -hi conjugation is the IE perfect, period", however, may overstate your case! I wonder if you meant to say this in the sense 'is identical to' rather than some sense of 'corresponds to' or 'reflects'? Hittite also has a periphrastic construction with hark- 'have' plus the participle that Benveniste compared to a Latin habeo plus its past passive participle. It has been said to have 'perfect' meaning, and in function the Hittite hark- construction often had the sense of the old IE perfect. Well, that is just a note. I think you meant something more to do with formal comparison. On the formal the origin of the Hittite -hi conjugation, I feel more comfortable with Erich Neu's view that it reflects a categorial prototype of the historical Greek and Sanskrit perfect, not that category itself, and that Hittite, like the other older languages, also underwent changes from a PIE system that did not have the categorial oppositions of any of the attested languages. Yes, Hittite does have distinct -hi and medio-passive sets of endings, both sharing a PIE *-H. The derivation of Hittite -hi from older *-hai goes back to the view that an old occasional Hittite spelling -he (not the usual -hi) would argue for an *-ai after the *-H. Maybe so, but Hittite productively differentiated between the active -hi forms and the medio-passive forms, as well as active -mi forms: -mi -hi -ha(hari) -si -ti -ta(ti) -zi -i -a(ri), -ta(ri) I don't think we disagree about that. The issue seems to be the implication of these forms for the reconstruction of PIE. Some people also identify the -hi forms with thematic actives. The mappings are not one-to-one between Hittite and Greek or Sanskrit like they mostly are between Greek and Sanskrit. Another major issue is whether the Hittite or Anatolian system was more like PIE or had undergone major category losses, i.e., did Hittite lose a PIE perfect and have only recollection of it in the Hittite -hi conjugation, or did Hittite never get so far as creating an inflectional perfect? Before the decipherment of Hittite, Meillet (1908: Dialects of IE) identified peculiarities of Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian that he thought were post-PIE. Now that we have Hittite and Tocharian, there are more reasons to believe him. On Hittite kuen-, I translate it 'strike', not 'kill'. In Hittite royal annals, a king often 'strikes' the enemy with the result that sometimes the enemy dies, sometimes he just runs away. The action type of kuen- is not clearly transitive in any telic sense. Hittite kuen- is also a -mi verb for which the passive is the suppletive -hi verb ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'die', which is attested with medio-passive endings. One might have expected kuen-, if it behaved like English 'kill' to have active -mi and medio-passive forms. I don't know what the system of Hittite is doing here, but I find it fascinating to try to find out. But if Hittite was at all like PIE in this respect, then the argument for a PIE passive of *ghwen- is hereby weakened. One would like to find medio-passive forms of this root in Hittite, and I haven't. Yes, Ilya Yakubovich thinks that there is a Sanskrit stative that argues for a PIE stative. In the same volume I gave reasons for a very different view. I stand by my reasons and would agree with Jamison's having given up the idea. There are many issues here, the last more interesting to me: Jens wrote: >It seems to me that there is a basic error inherent in the frequent >"explanation" of mysterious categories and forms as "late", "secondary" or >"einzelsprachlich". If a morphological type is too young to belong to the >protolanguage it must have been formed from material the protolanguage, >indeed the particular poststage of it had, and then it should be easier, >not harder, for us to discover its origins, for in that case the timespan >to be bridged is shorter than in the case of very old forms. This error is >very often committed when dealing with categories that have become >productive, such as the thematic verbs or the s-aorist. They became >productive, oh yes, and so all their examples cannot go back to the >protolanguage, but some MUST, otherwise there would have been no nucleus >for the expansion. CFJ's view: This is precisely the challenge that faces us, to distinguish the age of a morphological form and category. Now we have the work of earlier centuries behind us and their work on basic similarities which scholars in this century like Meillet, Porzig, and others since have begun to sort out in terms of dialect groupings. We know that not all constructions go back as many thousands of years as others, and we know that one thing that languages all do is change. In the process they innovate, lose, and rearrange. What is productive at any given stage may or may not be old. And some languages had a lot longer to change before they were first written down, so it's really important to evaluate the relative archaism of a form or construction. Certainly the -s plural on English nouns enjoys a distribution that it did not centuries and millennia ago. The real challenge is to try to arrive at criteria for identifying the 'nucleus for the expansion' as opposed to the layers that got added. Contributions to this issue, however, are more likely to come in articles than our current format. Best regards, Carol From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jun 17 17:57:22 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:57:22 -0500 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In many European languages [I don't know the details of all], the king was addressed in the familiar by commoners, supposedly because he was God's representative on Earth >In a message dated 6/15/99 8:31:53 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >stevegus at aye.net writes: ><< Curious, how this got turned almost exactly on its head. To the extent >that > "thou" is still understood, it is a form of address restricted to Exalted >Personages, like God, or Richard III, or the Mighty Thor. >> >-- oddly enough, God was usually addressed in the familiar form as well. You >certainly wouldn't call the King "thee", though. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jun 17 18:23:56 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 19:23:56 +0100 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: > Dennis King wrote: >> Question: what was the convention among the Greeks and Romans in this >> regard at the height of their civilizations? I didn't speak earlier, because I was expecting others to. In neither Greek nor Latin is there any sign - at least in the Classical Languages - of the use of plural "you" for polite singular. The sole deciding factor is the number. I cannot speak for later developments. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jun 17 19:06:06 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 20:06:06 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Nath said: > Does this mean present tense arose only after the aorist formations, > including thematic and sigmatic, became established? My reading of the literature is that there is a fairly wide general agreement, that at first a tenseless verb was used with endings -m, -s, -t and so on. The precise formation of it may be more argued, so thematic - or especially sigmatic - aorists may be later than athematic and asigmatic. Then the endings -mi, -si, -ti and so on develop, as part of the need to mark present action, as a tense-based system gets going. Various devices were also used to mark the stems with continuity or incohativity or various other things, all being non-completed. One of those devices was accent on the stem, which produce full grade. Hence the appearance in Sanksrit of root accented presents with full grade beside zero grade presents with accented thematic vowel. The appearance of the accented augment in Sanskrit and Greek allows zero grade aorist stems. > If so, why is the latter formation, the present, use the bare root in even > one case? I don't quite understand your question. Zero grade presents do occur, where the accent is not on the root. Sanskrit tud'ati, or Greek grapho < *grbh-. They are very rare. Also remember that the only distinction between an aorist and an imperfect in Sanskrit, and between a second aorist and an imperfect in Greek, is whether or not a present stem of that form exists! No present, and we call the past form an aorist. When there is a present, we call it an imperfect. Does this answer your question why there are no presents from aorists? If there is a present, in Sanskrit at least, the tense is not called aorist. >> Besides, most so-called "root" presents have an -e- vowel, which >> would distinguish them at least from thematic aorists, which have zero >> grade. > Why the ``so-called'' and quotation marks around root? The full grade is already a marker of something, even if it is conditioned by presence of the accent. I was wanting to distinguish the handful of presents which were simply the bare root, from those that carried this or any other marker of the present. >> Sanskrit, in as much as it shows it all, has >> the aorist playing the role of the Greek perfect. > In what way? Greek uses the perfect for the present state which results from a previous action. Tethne:ka ("I have died") actually means the present state, "I am dead". In some parts of Sanskrit literature, it is the aorist which carries this meaning, not the perfect. Elsewhere aorist and perfect are in practice indistinguishable, and the perfect drops out of use. Hope that answers your questions Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jun 17 18:26:38 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 19:26:38 +0100 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: Pat said: > ... I do believe that all IE roots > should be analyzable around a skeleton of CVC(V). We know that an initial s- is sometimes added to these CVC- roots, giving the structure sCVC- . What do you think about an initial H- added before R? I believe the idea is not new. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jun 17 20:09:37 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 15:09:37 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37683402.7BCF@tin.it> Message-ID: Adolfo: Thanx for explaining your position re Etruscan and IE. I was a bit mystified by your many comparisons to Germanic. Do you see Etruscan as from Rhaetia? Or do you suspect that Northern Italian IE was closer to [or had more traits in common with] Germanic? Or do you perceive a common substrate in N. Italy, the Alps and Germany? What are your opinions re: Etruscan and pre-Hellenic Aegean languages and Anatolian languages? [ moderator snip ] From edsel at glo.be Thu Jun 17 20:33:08 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 22:33:08 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: Thursday, June 17, 1999 3:53 AM >[snip] >>1. the expression 'est?te quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable >>because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not >>susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as >>medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is >>behind it? > Reflexive pronouns are used for inchoate, intensive & emphatic >actions as well as for reflexive, reciprocal and mediopassive. > Mediopassive constructions [strictly speaking] only occur in 3rd >person: > Se vende pizza. Se venden pizzas. > [literally: "Pizza sells itself." "Pizzas sell themselves." > Se me perdieron las llaves. > [literally: "My keys lost themselves on me." > Mue/rate "drop dead" > Due/rmete "go to sleep" > Te comiste el sandwich "you scarfed down the sandwich" > [comer = German essen, comerse = German fressen] > Te bebiste toda la botella "you chugged the whole bottle" [Ed Selleslagh] I know, but what about my question? >>2. the formally reflexive use of transitive verbs in Castilian that has exact >>parallels in (modern) Greek medio-passive: 'se prohibe (in older Spanish: >>prohibese) la entrada' (Greek: apagor?yetai he: ?isodos (pron. >>/apagor?vete i ?sodhos/) or >>'vendese [sic] esta casa' or 'enju?guese el envase'. > This is non-standard usage [but it's also found in older Spanish >texts up to the XX century] > Standard Spanish uses the subjunctive for these, e.g. > Que se venda la casa, que se enjuague el envase > You can say "rinse out your mouth, gargle" in >standard Spanish but you normally say enjuague el vaso "rinse the glass" [Ed] There is no need for 'sic': it is not intended as a subjunctive. In fact, it used to be, until a few decades ago, the normal 'house for sale' sign in Spain, but nowadays it is becoming rare (replaced by 'Se vende...'), but slightly less so when unspecified 'V?ndese' = 'For sale'. But that wasn't the point: I mentioned it because it's an older, more idiomatic form that exactly parallels the Greek medio-passive. On the other hand, 'enju?guese el envase' is still the standard text (in Spain, not in Latin America) on reusable glass bottles etc.('envase' is used as a general word for any packaging container, 'recipiente'). It is of course a subjunctive, as it expresses a request. It is not a reflexive use of 'se' like in 'enju?guese la boca', but more like an 'impersonal pronoun' (English 'one': 'one should rinse the bottle'). Unfortunately, 'standard Spanish' is a fiction, just like 'standard English', even though M. Vargas-Llosa is doing a great job as a member of the (Spanish) Real Academia de la Lengua, to include more American vocabulary and idioms in its dictionary. Sorry for all this digression, but my question still stands. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 18 09:13:19 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 11:13:19 +0200 Subject: Origin & Evolution of Languages Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Nik Taylor Date: Friday, June 18, 1999 3:55 AM >JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> -- oddly enough, God was usually addressed in the familiar form as well. >> You certainly wouldn't call the King "thee", though. >True, but God is the Father, and it makes sense to address ones Father >familiarly, Jesus himself referred to God by the familiar word "abba". [Ed Selleslagh] I really don't believe there is any familiarity involved here: it is simply and willfully archaic and refers to the time when 'thou' was simply the 2nd person sg., before nobility started using plurals as a way to give themselves a greater weight in communication with 'lesser beings'. Our perception is heavily influenced by centuries of the latter. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 18 10:41:37 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 12:41:37 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Carol F. Justus Date: Friday, June 18, 1999 6:49 AM >Spanish estar, I believe, is etymologically related to PIE >*sta?- (*steH-) 'stand' which, in an Ancient Greek active root aorist had >an intransitive meaning (stand, take a standing position: e?-ste?), but a >transitive meaning with sigmatic aorist forms (e?-ste?-sa). I have no >solution to this nor to what PIE *es- was supplemented in Spanish. [Ed Selleslagh] In short, 'estar' is from Lat. 'stare', 'to stand, remain,...'; it means to be somewhere or in a certain condition (temporarily). Lat. 'esse' led to 'ser' = to be something (more absolute). [snip] >But the fact that the Romance language reflexives are formally separate >from the passives of those languages makes me hesitant to identify them as >one with the old category, which could also have a passive meaning. In >Modern Greek, is there also a new separate passive? [Ed] No. >Already in Ancient >Greek with some verbs in some tenses there was a new strictly passive >suffix (-the:-) that often had passive meaning (The problem with the old >categories was that a form might vary in function depending on the verb in >question or the form of the verb. Smyth's Greek Grammar catalogs this >without really offering the kinds of principled generalizations that we >would now like. [Ed] The modern Greek medio-passive can be reflexive, medio-passive or passive in meaning. Its aorist contains the /-th(i)-/ infix, both in the indicative and the subjunctive. The medio-passive is called /pathitik? f?ni/, meaning 'passive (actually: suffering) voice'! Carol, thank you for the enlightening comments. I agree with you that we should delve more into such phenomena, as they often represent, IMHO, modern manifestations of a long-standing undercurrent, deeply embedded in the underlying cognitive framework, expressed with the means available at any given time, or by innovations made 'necessary' because of the loss of older means, the awareness of them, or the feel for them. Ed. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Jun 18 14:30:53 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 14:30:53 GMT Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Stephane Goyette wrote (Re: Latin verbal system: how perfect and aorist joined in the new perfect?):- > ...its distribution matches that of Classical Latin --take Romanian AUR > "gold", LAUD "I praise" versus FOC "fire", DORM "I sleep", where the au/o > distribution corresponds perfectly to that found in AURUM, LAUDEO, FOCUM and > DORMIO. ... I have seen a suggestion that:- (1) The Romanians are not descended from the Dacians, but from Vlachs (scattered nomadic mountain shepherds who are found over much of the Balkans) who found what is now Romania largely empty after Central Asia finally exhausted its supply of fresh tribes of steppe horsemen (Huns, Avars, Magyars, Patzinaks, etc) to maraud westwards and devastate south-east Europe; (2) The Vlachs are descended from Latinized Illyrians who fled into the mountains when the Avars marauded in; in which case the ancestors of the Romanians started learning Latin when Rome invaded Illyria, not when Rome invaded Dacia, and that alters the linguistic timetable a bit. From thorinn at diku.dk Fri Jun 18 14:25:05 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 16:25:05 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <37691489.765DE510@aye.net> (stevegus@aye.net) Message-ID: > Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 11:30:17 -0400 > From: "Steven A. Gustafson" > [And, of course, the conventional explanation of -south- is that it > represents "sun" + -th, with the /n/ dropped and the /u/ predictably > lengthened for English. But the /n/ isn't there in Swedish -soeder-, > and NGmc usually keeps it in this position (cf. -sooth- with Sw. > -sant-); nor was it there in the Frankish source of French -sud-.]) ON sunnr > su?r. Danish has a doublet: "s?nder" and "syd." Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 18 16:07:13 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:07:13 +0200 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Carol F. Justus wrote: > Dear Jens, > Thank you for your detailed comments. The issues are those on which there > has traditionally been a lot of disagreement and probably will be, perhaps > as much because of differing research goals as anything. For me > crosslinguistic definitions of categories are important for the explicit > criteria they offer for re-evaluating received wisdom. Obviously, every > language system will have its own genius, and comparisons are at best > hypotheses that need constant checking as new information becomes > available. Sure, sounds pretty, and I'm all for it as formulated; in reality however old wisdom is often not checked, but simply rejected without valid reason, when a new potential facet of the picture becomes available. There is a widespread tendency among scholars to go easy on logic if there is an "exciting" point of subgrouping or, better still, a "Stammbaum paradox" to be gained. As if far-reaching conclusions needed _less_ argumentative basis than unimportant ones. > The Hittite -hi conjugation is, of course, intimately related to the issue > of voice. Your statemtent: "The Anatolian -hi conjugation is the IE > perfect, period", however, may overstate your case! I wonder if you meant > to say this in the sense 'is identical to' rather than some sense of > 'corresponds to' or 'reflects'? [...] I think you > meant something more to do with formal comparison. > On the formal the origin of the Hittite -hi conjugation, I feel more > comfortable with Erich Neu's view that it reflects a categorial prototype > of the historical Greek and Sanskrit perfect, not that category itself, and > that Hittite, like the other older languages, also underwent changes from a > PIE system that did not have the categorial oppositions of any of the > attested languages. I meant that the forms of the hi-conjugation continue those of the IE perfect. The alternative demands miracles - in the plural. It would mean that an IE undivided "inactive" (fair characteristic of the category with H2 in the 1st sg.?) split into a mediopassive and a reduplicated perfect independently in so many languages that it can later turn up in both guises - with a consistent difference in function too - in all corners of the IE linguistic area. If we derive the nucleus of the hi-conjugation from the perfect, we have the same picture all over the map. And then we have a unitary protolanguage, so that the IE language branches can really come from a common older stock just as archaeologists and other researchers of realia take for granted that they do. As a descendant of the perfect, the hi-conjugation poses no greater problems than Germanic or Latin, or even the equation of Greek and Sanskrit. The details are problems of standard size which are quite easily overcome if the will is there. [...] > -mi -hi -ha(hari) > -si -ti -ta(ti) > -zi -i -a(ri), -ta(ri) > [...] The issue seems to be the > implication of these forms for the reconstruction of PIE. Some people > also identify the -hi forms with thematic actives. The mappings are > not one-to-one between Hittite and Greek or Sanskrit like they mostly > are between Greek and Sanskrit. The mappings are fine to me: (1) *-mi, *-si, *-ti is no problem to anybody. (2) Perfect *-H2a, *-tH2a, *-e with added -i to create a present tense gives precisely Hitt. -hi, -ti, -i with no problems at all, the core elements matching the endings of Skt.-Greek etc. with great accuracy. (3) MP *-H2a (zero-grade *- at 2), *-tH2a, *-o/*-to give the endings af Skt. as'i:ya'/a'mam.s-i, -tha:s (with some extension yet to be identified, similarly OIr. -cuirther), s'a'ye/s'e'te with problems no geater than those posed by the difference between Vedic and Avestan. Are these sets presumed to be unrelated? > Another major issue is whether the Hittite or Anatolian system was > more like PIE or had undergone major category losses, i.e., did > Hittite lose a PIE perfect and have only recollection of it in the > Hittite -hi conjugation, or did Hittite never get so far as creating > an inflectional perfect? Before the decipherment of Hittite, Meillet > (1908: Dialects of IE) identified peculiarities of Greek, Armenian, > and Indo-Iranian that he thought were post-PIE. Now that we have > Hittite and Tocharian, there are more reasons to believe him. I'd say the opposite: Meillet never had a good case, many conclusions being based simply on absence of data; without old data he might as well have lumped English together with Persian. The advent of Hitt. and Toch. which fit the classical picture of IE quite well makes one believe Brugmann's IE all the more. The perfect is not a separate category in Tocharian, right; but it forms a participle with reduplication and a /-w-/, that's got to be the perfect; some of the endings match the class.IE perfect exactly; and the vocalism may be from *-o- of the perfect or the *-e:- of the s-aorist which have thus merged (much as pf. and aor. have in Latin). Tocharian has a funny imperfect type with long vocalism, 'carry' representing *bher-e- in the prs., but apparently *bhe:r-e- in the ipf. The obvious explanation is by analofy with 'was' as it used to be, i.e. prs. *H1es- : ipf. *e-H1es-, i.e. with the augment which gave a long /e:/ in the ipf. if 'be'. Hitt. arhi, erweni 'come' becomes regular if the reduplication of the perfect is remembered: *H1e-H1or-/*H1e-H1r- yields *o:r-/*e:r- and sets a perfect model for other verbs. > On Hittite kuen-, I translate it 'strike', not 'kill'. In Hittite royal > annals, a king often 'strikes' the enemy with the result that sometimes the > enemy dies, sometimes he just runs away. The action type of kuen- is not > clearly transitive in any telic sense. Hittite kuen- is also a -mi verb for > which the passive is the suppletive -hi verb ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'die', which is > attested with medio-passive endings. One might have expected kuen-, if it > behaved like English 'kill' to have active -mi and medio-passive forms. [...] Not if it was replaced by ak(k)- 'die' in that meaning (thus Puhvel in the introduction to the entry ak[k]-), which incidentally only makes sense it kuen- is 'kill', at least some of the time. > Yes, Ilya Yakubovich thinks that there is a Sanskrit stative that argues > for a PIE stative. In the same volume I gave reasons for a very different > view. I stand by my reasons and would agree with Jamison's having given up > the idea. For the record: I see on re-reading that Jamison had it from Insler who is then alone to be blamed or credited. I cannot accept that e:-statives are post-PIE. Their allomorphy obeys subtle rules of IE ablaut which a late creation would not. And, of course, they turn up all over the place, in fact I don't know of a branch that does not supply examples. Your "reasons" are a guess at a functional split of 'hold' to 'take' and 'have', leaving the detailed repetition of the alleged process in different branches to chance or areal influence - and apparently disregarding the colossal evidence for *-eH1- as a PIE derivative verbal type. Your siding with Jasanoff ("no") against Watkins ("yes") in the question of antiquity of *-eH1-verbs is vitiated by the illogical conclusion drawn by Jasanoff from his - in itself sound - dismissal of Cowgill's analysis of Goth. -ai-/-a- (habaith, haband) as from "*- at 1-ye-/*- at 1-yo-", the dismissal being based on the correct observation that IE appears not to have syllabic shwa before (or indeed after) /y/; the illogical conclusion is that this does not exhaust the possibilities, not even the obvious ones: a levelled *-eH1-ye/o- works just fine, and even makes the Gothic stem formation identical with that of Latin (which latter point however may be coincidental). - Yakubovich' reasons for accepting a stative behind some Skt. verbs in -a:-ya- (oddly segmented "-a:i-a-" in the title) are possible cognates, some looking quite good to me. But even without that, there certainly is a stative in Ved. sana:ya'nt- 'being old' which must be *sen-e/o- 'old' + (zero-grade of) *-(e)H1- 'be' + prs.-forming *-ye/o-, just as Lat. sene:sco: is *sen-e/o- + *-(e)H1- + inchoative ("s-aorist) *-s- + prs.-forming *-ye/o- (with the s-aorist morpheme replaced by, or developing into, *-sk^e/o-), which latter is the durative ("prs.-stem") variant of Hitt. -es- of ingressive verbs ('become -'). And that makes the stative, no matter what its ultimate origin, a PIE derivative type. > There are many issues here, the last more interesting to me: [snip of quote and part of answer, for it's summed up by:] > The real challenge is to try to arrive at criteria for identifying the > 'nucleus for the expansion' as opposed to the layers that got added. > Contributions to this issue, however, are more likely to come in articles > than our current format. [] That's your choice which I respect. However, the list could make progress in a matter of days, while articles take decades to work. Kind regards, Jens From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 18 16:11:41 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:11:41 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <00c001beb94f$4b262aa0$de2367d1@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Robert Orr wrote: >>> Jens asked: >>>> Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of >>>> events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. > A bit of digging in South Asia could easily furnish five such examples. [] Thanks. Could you give examples, or refer me to a place where I can find some with relative ease? Jens From edsel at glo.be Fri Jun 18 16:26:54 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:26:54 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Steven A. Gustafson Date: Friday, June 18, 1999 6:30 AM [snip] >(-S/uthina-. An American idiom whose origin I don't know makes 'go >south' mean 'to die.' Of course, the handy Germanic terms for the four >cardinal directions are also at least partly hard to explain [except for >perhaps 'east'] in PIE terms, and may therefore come from the non-IE >Germanic substrate. I realise that my fancy is veering into linguistic >X-Files territory here, to suggest that an Etruscan idiom made its way >into colloquial American. [And, of course, the conventional explanation >of -south- is that it represents "sun" + -th, with the /n/ dropped and >the /u/ predictably lengthened for English. But the /n/ isn't there in >Swedish -soeder-, and NGmc usually keeps it in this position (cf. >-sooth- with Sw. -sant-); nor was it there in the Frankish source of >French -sud-.]) [Ed Selleslagh] Maybe it has something to do with left-handed people being called 'southpaws', as all Americans are supposed to be looking west ;-). Remember, left is 'sinister', so much that in Castilian they considered 'siniestro' a taboo word and replaced it by a Basque loan word (ezkerra > izquierda). Ed. From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jun 18 16:44:08 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:44:08 +0200 Subject: Differentiation In-Reply-To: <002d01beb795$01ca5540$fb9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > [In reply to my - Jens' - rebelling against "differentiation" as an > explanatory strategy,] > Pat responds: > Well, I think there is another clearer example of "differentiation": present > secondary 1st sing. -m as opposed to 1st pl. -me. [] I fail to see the reason for taking them to have been ever identical. Why can't the plural form have contained an additional morpheme (expressing the plural) to which the *-e could be credited? It would have to be something either developing into non-vanishing *-e or causing some other material to take this shape. It appears to me that "differentiation" just amounts to absence of an explanation. As for the main problem of 3sg *bhe'r-e-t, the facts that (1) the second *-e- is the "thematic vowel" which was a meaningful morpheme (marking i.a. the subjunctive), and (2) that the "thematic vowel" is never lost by the working of the accent, combine to make *bhe'r-e-t quite normal. Still, it may demand an explanation that the "thematic vowel" does not vanish when unaccented - what is so special about it? I can suggest two solutions, both ad hoc: Either the position where it stands was prosodically such that it was retained: the thematic vowel is the only kind of stem-final vowels the language has as far as we know. Or it consisted of some enigmatic element which immunized the vowel against the working of the ablaut. That the "thematic vowel" is not just any old /e/ is seen from the fact that it alternates in its own way: -e- before voiceless endings (including zero), -o- before voice (incl. vowels). Since the special rules applying to the "thematic vowel" make it impossible to ascribe its existence to simple "differentiation", we may also accept the endings *-me, *-te of the 1st and 2nd plural as problems for which the material and the rules have yet to be found. I would suspect that a comparison with Proto-Uralic *-k-me-k, *-k-te-k (or *-t-me-k, *-t-te-k ?) holds some of the answer. Jens From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jun 18 18:58:38 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 19:58:38 +0100 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: Carol said: > On Hittite kuen-, ... for > which the passive is the suppletive -hi verb ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'die', which is > attested with medio-passive endings. .... I > don't know what the system of Hittite is doing here, but I find it > fascinating to try to find out. But if Hittite was at all like PIE in this > respect, then the argument for a PIE passive of *ghwen- is hereby weakened. A parallel exists in Greek, which has a perfectly productive medio-passive (and passive some forms). The (apo-)kteino "to kill" uses the suppletive (apo-)thne:sko "to die" as its passive. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jun 18 22:26:34 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 17:26:34 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity In-Reply-To: <003601beb913$56da0b00$e302703e@edsel> Message-ID: I wasn't sure at what you were getting at. Yes, I see as mediopassive in expressions that parallel the passive voice with the exception that the subject and direct object are the same. I thought that was generally accepted. My daughter says that she had no problem with the Greek mediopassive because, to her, it's just like Spanish Given that I don't know Greek, I can only take her word >>[snip] >>>1. the expression 'est?te quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable >>>because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not >>>susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as >>>medio-passive. But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is >>>behind it? "be still" is inchoate; it parallels , , , , etc. in that marks the beginning of a new action or state of being [snip] >'V?ndese' = 'For sale' [is] an older, more idiomatic form that >exactly parallels the Greek medio-passive. >On the other hand, 'enju?guese el envase' is still the standard text (in >Spain, not in Latin America) on reusable glass bottles etc.('envase' is used >as a general word for >any packaging container, 'recipiente'). Just like Latin America, although it's more often used for cans and food in jars -- is used for "packing company" and "envasar" for "to can"; often used in conjunction with bottle deposits "Hay que pagar el envase" [snip] From adolfoz at tin.it Sat Jun 19 00:13:12 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 01:13:12 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Steven A. Gustafson wrote: > but it would > seem to me that this form in -ve, if it's really there (and I would not > presume to even form a personal opinion on that), would seem to me to > have a past progressive or "imperfect" meaning, rather than a past > definite. All the verbs you mention seem more plausible as past > progressives: "he held," "he ruled," "it is foretold," "he was > priest." (Then why -svalce-, "he lived?" rather than *svalve?) Three different verbal forms are present in inscriptions having an analogous structure, pertaining to the same matter (cursus honorum) and all written on sarcophagi, sometimes of the same family: ZILAXN(U)CE "gubernavit" ("praetor fuit" according to other scholars), ZILAXNVE, ZILAXNU. I then deduce that these forms are semantically equivalent and, semplifying, I consider them as preterites, although only the forms in -KE are so called by many scholars. ZILAXNU is a preterit form in -U like LUPU ( = LUPUCE) "mortuus (est)" and TENU ( = TENVE) It is remarkable that TENU is followed by EPRTHNEV-C (where -C means Lat. -que), so that the verbal function of -V < -VE is demonstrated (nobody doubts that TENU is a verb like LUPU). I think that these 3 forms have also the function of past participles and that this fact is connected with the absence of a verb "to be" (copula). I am sure (but probably I am the only one!) that AME, AMCE are not forms of the verb "to be", but mean "cum, co-, united with", given that they are accompanied only by PUIA = "mulier" (puia ame = "coniunx") and ZILATH "rector, praetor" (*co-praetor, "co-director"). I have to rectify what I said about the attested forms in -VE: just in the museum of my town (REGGIO EMILIA, Gallia Cisalpina) two twinned inscriptions of the VI B.C. have the verbs IMITVE "memoravit" and (MI) IMA AME "(ego) com-memoro". Now I do not see how this archaic form in -VE, attested in this place, could derive from Latin. Furthermore I point out that Raetic too has not only the verbal morphemes -KE and -XE (interchangeable), but also -VE in KATIAVE, EPETAV(E), PITIAVE, ZEZEVE (in very short sentences where the verbal function  3d sing. pret.  is probable  certain to my mind). Now somebody might formulate a new hypothesis on Latin perfects in -vi &c. Good work! Adolfo Zavaroni From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jun 18 23:19:04 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 18:19:04 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 2:55 AM > On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: Pat wrote: >> I continue to assert that complexity arises out of simplicity; Larry commented: > You may continue to assert this all you like, but what does it have to > do with ergativity, or with linguistics at all? Pat answers: Sorry to take so long to respond to your comments. I am almost sure that you will want to refine my understanding of the word "simplicity" but for whatever it may be worth, I would characterize an isolating language as simpler than a flectional one. In keeping with the schema you presented recently, I think an isolating type language, which Klimov would connect with his neutral and active "types", must have preceded agglutinating, flectional, and analytic "types". That is, of course, not to say that an analytic language might not be able to revert (is that better than "regress" or "devolve"?) to an isolating type. I assert that I conider it impossible for an inflecting type language to have been what wer should expect to see at the very earliest stage. Pat continued: >> and since I have found that the relationship between the object and >> the verb is primary, which loosely conforms to an ergative model of >> development, Larry objected: > No, it doesn't. A division between objects and non-objects is > accusativity, not ergativity. Ergativity is a division between > transitive subjects and all else. Pat responds: First, let me say that I am well aware that, your being a specialist in Basque, gives you a deep perspective on ergativity that few members of the list will share through work in the own particular specialities but still I must tentatively disagree. And, of course, it seems to me that this is another case of differening definitions. I prefer a functional one, you, I believe, prefer a formal one. For me, a passive of the form "the man is being slandered", displays an underlying object of a transitive verbal action, whatever the formal marking of "the man" may be. I will speak only of Sumerian if you do not mind. In that language, so far as I know considered by most as an ergative language, a two-element sentence of the form Noun + Verb(transitive) will, in nearly all cases, have to be interpreted as a passive. And frankly, I am not sure that this analysis is not more appropriate even to Verbs which would normally be considered intransitive or stative --- but let us not get off onto a side-topic. I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner of an intransitive verb of motion. Pat continued: >> I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must >> precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. Larry objected: > Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert > that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it > is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. Pat responds: I find it no more unlikely than to assert that a synthetic language is not going to develop "directly" from an isolating one. An adverbial phrase specificying the agent seems to me to be an integral step that must be taken before a nominative is developed. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 19 05:40:47 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 00:40:47 -0500 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Thursday, June 17, 1999 1:26 PM First, please let me remark that I have been greatly enjoying your recent very informative and well-reasoned postings. > Pat said: >> ... I do believe that all IE roots >> should be analyzable around a skeleton of CVC(V). Peter commented: > We know that an initial s- is sometimes added to these CVC- roots, giving > the structure sCVC- . What do you think about an initial H- added before > R? I believe the idea is not new. Pat asks: Do you mean as an equivalent substitute for *s-? I would be inclined to question it strongly because I believe we have a few rare examples of *s- + *R: *syu:-, which may be *s- + *yeu- but personally, I favor here *sey- + *-u. I feel that the best explanation for *s- is that it was an energeticus. *H- is most economically explained as the ha- which Sturtevant briefly mentions in his grammar on page 117, equivalent to IE *o-. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 19 04:58:26 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 23:58:26 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Ralf-Stefan Georg Sent: Thursday, June 17, 1999 5:52 AM Thank you for your interesting (to me, at least, and I do not mean that sarcastically in the slightest) response/ R-S wrote: > Again without stage-directions: > So, it would be enlightening to learn *what* the *specific* lines of > Klimov's argumentation are, you agree with. So far, we have only heard the > bottomline and the fact that Klimov was a deservedly prominent linguist. > Where's the beef ? Pat responds: Ralf-Stefan, because of your background, you are obviously going to be able to leaf through _Tipologija Jazykov Aktivnogo Stroja_ or _Printsipy Kontensivnoi Tipologij_ much more felicitously than I. My Russian is rudimentary, and though I can struggle through a passage, you can much more easily pinpoint what you may disagree with specifically. If you feel Klimov has erred grievously, let me know where and I will try my best to defend him (if I agree with that particular point). As far what I agree with, my website makes very clear that I subscribe to Klimov's idea of a progression in development in language through neutral-active-class-ergative-nominative types. Klimov believes, and I agree, that this progression is *necessary* ab origine. Pat wrote: >> I was simply pointing out, since you obviously missed my point, that >> highly qualified linguists do disagree; and so, your opinion (and even, >> occasionally, the consensus) may or may not be found ultimately correct >> even as the "consensus" once firmly rejected the laryngeal theory in any >> form. R-S responded: > That's a truism. What is interesting, is which particular things about the > synchrony and diachrony of ergative traits in observable languages > allow/force/disallow/prevent us from daring a determinist statement as > that which you brought forward. Pat writes: I have written since this posting on the reasons I consider important in judging the probability of this process. We can pick this up on another posting if you like. R-S continued: > The analogy you mention is irrelevant. While it is true enough that today's > communes opiniones once were universally rejected, the only thing which > follows is that we should use the notion of "truth" sparingly. What does > not follow is, that every communis opinio of today will of necessity be > debunked one day. But you carefully evade the task to expose Klimov's (or > your, where you differ) line of argumentation. Pat responds: I evade nothing. And why I should feel it incumbent on me to defend every last jot and tittle of Klimov's views perfectly escapes me. I have told you above where I agree with him. And the point of agreeing with him (or mentioning him), is only that he is an eminent linguist who has come to conclusions on *some* subjects similar to my own independently reached conclusions. But you cannot have it both ways. You have consistently implied that some of my views are so far from the mainstream that, a priori, they must be wrong. This takes the insufferable form of "linguists agree that ..." as if my views may be equated with those of the fishmonger you mentioned above and no linguist would hold them. Klimov is one linguist who does hold views that I share, and this effectively debunks the notion (on this idea anyhow) that it is somehow intellectually disreputable to believe that certain laguage types grow naturally out of other language types. Pat wondered aloud? >> QED. Just what do you believe your proved? R-S answered: > That Sumerian is just another split-ergative language, since you seem to > doubt my (oh, not *my*, I could refer you to *eminent* linguists ;-) Pat, aside: And why do you not if such exist? R-S continued: > assertion that, while non-split ACC-languages do exist, non-split > ERG-languages are not known. You asked for the split in Sumerian, I gave it. Pat responds: Run it by me again; your split fell into a crack. Pat complained: >> And, I would like to ask you a question in view of your snide aside about a >> "non-linguist observer". Is it your opinion that no one is entitled to be >> considered a linguist, even an amateur linguist, if he/she does not possess >> a PhD in Linguistics? R-S answered: > No, this is patently not my opinion, especially since I was an excellent > linguist even before I was handed over my PhD diploma, which rules out > this possibility ;-) ;-) (< --- see these !). Nur ein Blinder koennte sie uebersehen! R-S continued: > It is, however, true that not every scholar who took part in the advancement > of our knowledge of Sumerian, could be classified as a linguist in the modern > sense. This is perfectly OK with most of them, I'm pretty sure, no offense > intended. Linguistics would not be without the great philologers. The same > holds for other disciplines as well, where modern linguistics (especially > typological linguistics) sometimes has the right and duty to "correct" > (better: adjust) the findings of the great philologists/grammarians (or > better: not what they *found*, rather how they interpreted it). And it is > certainly true that notions of ergativity, not to speak of split-ergativity, > did not play a major role in the earlier days of Sumerology, i.e. well into > this century, let alone the cross-linguistic typology of these phenomena > (yes, I am aware of truly linguistic treatments of Sumerian, which do exist). > So, I would not be disparaging, say, A. von Gabain calling her Alttuerkische > Grammatik the work of a non-linguist. It is, and she knew it, and > nevertheless it is a gold-mine for any linguist working on Old Turkic, I know > of no linguist who could say different things about it, but the linguist's > task is different from that of the pioneer philologist and grammar-writer > (and, of course, linguistics is a discipline which sometimes makes > progresses). Hope this makes that clear. Anyway, I'm happy to accept the > label of "Non-Sumerologist" for myself. Are you a Sumerologist ? (Gonzalo, > are you still with us ?) Pat comments: Thank you for the clarification. Philologists propose, linguists dispose. I understand you perfectly, I think. Pat asked: >> As for your characterization of the Sumerian imperfective system, which >> is properly called the maru: inflection *not* imperfective, just what >> characteristics do you *believe* it has that qualify as ACC? R-S responded: > Some Japanologists of my acquaintance (and some text-book authors) promise > to kill everyone who dares to speak of a "verb" in Japanese in their > presence, since these things are, of course, "properly called" /dousi/. > What is this about ? Pat answers: Since you are writing of what Sumerian is or is not, I would think you might have understood that the point of my remark was that, although th markings of the maru: may be fairly well established, there is absolutely no agreement on what grammatical role these endings signify. R-S continued: > The idea of typological linguistics is to *compare* languages, resp. their > structural makeup. In order to be able to do this, exotistic terminology is > best avoided. Pat quips: Exostistically speaking, I would have to agree. R-S continued: > True enough, perfect matches between verbal (or other) categories among > languages in terms of their functions are rarely encountered. However, to > ensure comparability (with the usual disclaimers) a modernization of > terminology is always to be wished for. I can and will object to your > objection if, and only if, you (or someone else) will point out why this > "maru:"-inflection may, under no circumstances, be regarded as a verbal > category encoding imperfective aspect, as opposed to perfective aspect > encoded by the HamTu-inflection (you see, I am myself a great > "terminology-dropper"). Pat responds: Yes, you may have dropped something here. To make this simple, why not give me your definition of "imperfective aspect", and I will attempt to find a maru: sentence that may be interpreted non-imperfectively. Personally, I believe *most* maru: indicate a progressive nuance rather than imperfective aspect. R-S wrote: > You highlighted *believe* in your above response. Well, just as a small > philosophical aside, of course everything which we think to *know* is > really something we *believe*, but we may *believe* some things with > slightly greater confidence than others, iow., that's what science is > about. If you want to discuss this further, let's transfer this to the > radical-constructivism-list. Pat responds: Let's not and say we did. R-S continued: > What makes me *believe* this, is data like the following: while it seems to > be clear that case-marking (and some people think that ergativity is only > about case-marking; however, I think highly enough of you not to assume that > you are of this lot; moreover, after Wolfgang's postings here, noone else > should be) in Sumerian operates ergatively regardless of TAM category, verbal > cross-referenceing doesn't, it is just this which makes up for an ACC residue > in the language. To wit: > lugal-le Hi-li ib2-dim2-me. "The king fashioned the wig" > The king is case-marekd as ERG (-(l)e), and the wig is ABS, so, in terms of > case-marking a perfect ERG construction. > The verb form, here given in transliteration, is morphologically to be > analyzed: i- (conjugation prefix for maru: or imperfective (horribile > dictu), Pat interrupts: This is certainly not the interpretation of *any* Sumerologist, linguist or philologist, of whose ideas I am aware. Where did you get it? No one says i- is a conjugation prefix for maru: (or imperfective!) unless you got this from Gonzalo (?). R-S continued his analysis: > -b- "personal affix for third person *inanimate*", so patently > cross-referencing the patient here (cross-referencing the king would > require the animate PA -n-), -dim- "The Root", -e imperfective suffixe (or > maru:-suffix, now you be quiet ;-). > Now, let's look at an intransitive imperfective sentence: > lugal i3-du. (case-marking is of course not ergative, i- the maru:-marker). > In order to have an ergative organization of verbal cross-referencing of > constituents, we should expect the *patient* in the transitive sentence > above, being treated *the same way* as the intransitive agent (some prefer > "subject") in the last example, i.e. by being cross-referenced as -b-. It > isn't. Actually it isn't overtly cross-referenced at all, though some > Sumerologists prefer to insert a zero-affix cross-referencing the agent > here at the end of the suffix-chain. Bog s nimi. Pat responds: The consensus view is, indeed, that -b- in this position is supposed to reference an inanimate patient. Why you might think that lugal, which means 'king', and is probably as agentive as any noun can be, should be referenced by -b- totally escapes me. If anything, it would be referenced by -n-, which is, in the consensus view, connected with animates. Then you write: "we should expect the *patient* ... ". What typlogist has enunciated this doctrine? Why should the animate subject of an intransitive (two-element) sentence be expected to be marked the same as the *inanimate* patient of a transitive (three-element) sentence??? Where did you get this? Or do you consider yourself a typologist? The key fact that you pass by unremarked is that the subject of the second construction is in the absolutive; its ending is -0. Therefore, your "case-marking is of course not ergative" is simply incorrect. The case marking is ergative, which calls for the agent of an intransitive verb and the patient of a transitive verb to be marked with -0. Additionally, the consensus view is that du is an irregular maru: of g[~]en so it needs no special maru: inflection. Another point is that one group of Sumerologists considers various vowel to represent oral as well as nasal articulations derived from -n. i{3}-du *could*, according to them, represent *i{3}(n)-du. R-S summarized: > The bottomline, the imperfective/maru:-system shows ACC-verbal > cross-referencing by virtue of treating transitive patient and intransitive > agent/suffix *differently*, the very gist of the definition of ergativity, > which, I hope, I won't have to rehash here. > Note, for completeness' sake, that this state of affairs doesn't repeat > itself in the perfective/HamTu-conjugation. > And, being myself, a stubborn: QED. Pat responds: As might be obvious by the corrections I have made above to your "analysis" of these Sumerian constructions, I continue to question what you have demonstrated. The very facts you have detailed above have led me (but not many Sumerologists) to question whether -n- and -b- are patient/agent cross-references. If there are not cross-references, then your argument has very flat feet. Pat questioned previously: >> I am also puzzled by your idea that Sumerian pronouns "operate on a fully >> ACC basis" since , e.g. the 1st and 2nd persons ergative g[~]a[2].e and za.e >> contrast with 1st and 2nd persons absolutive g[~]a[2] and za in the same way >> nouns show an ergative in -e and an absolutive in -0. Perhaps you could >> explain your ideas in greater detail. R-S responded: > It is true that g[~]a[2].e and za.e are formally ergative cases, by virtue > of -e. However, I'm unaware of a systematic contrast between ergative and > absolutive forms (i.e. without -e) used in a clear-cut ergative way in the > language. Pat responds: That can hardly be my fault. As a matter of fact, pronouns used as objects are rarely expressed as independent morphemes though a few examples are recorded in late (or mangled) Sumerian but they are, for better or worse, there. However, your argument still fails because the consenus view is that in a sentence like g[~]a-e i-ku{4}-re-en, 'I entered' (Yes, the -e here is another problem.) the -en cross-references the intransitive subject. In the transitive sentence, the -en is supposed to cross-reference the agent: g[~]a-e sag[~] ib-zi-zi-en, 'I am raising (my) head'. R-S continued: > No doubt this reflects my superficial knowledge of it. Various > sources assure me that what seem to be "absolutive" forms g[~]a[2] and za > are late Sumerian, and explicable as phonetically expectable reflexes of > the longer (and earlier) forms. Even then, they are used in ERG and ABS > functions indiscriminately, like the longer ones before. Pat asks: And what sources are those? And why would g[~]a.e develop into g[~]a when we see this no where else where -e is employed. Your sources have seriously misinformed you. R-S continued further: > It would help your case if you could demonstrate with text examples that > g[~]a[2].e and za.e are confined to ERG function, or better, that g[~]a[2] > and za are, in Classical Sumerian (2600-2300 BCE) used in ABS function, i.e. > as intransitive subjects and patients of transitive verbs. I. for one, don't > know whether this is the case, but you seem to know, so it should be > legitimate to ask you for examples. Until they come forth (in which case I > will give this up happily), I will take this phenomenon as the second > instance of an ergativity split in Sumerian, though admittedly the first one > mentioned is the stronger one. Pat answers: Your first problem is that you want to make a distinction (transitivity and intransitivity) for Sumerian verbs that is not really appropriate; these are not categories of the Sumerian verb in a real sense. R-S sums up: > To conclude: I stand by my "belief" that there is no such thing as a fully > ERG language, i.e. one without any splits, as opposed to fully ACC > languages. Sumerian is no counter-example. Any takers ? Pat responds: I have already expressed myself on "pure" anythings. In the case of Sumerian, however, you have not demonstrated any accusative features. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 19 06:41:38 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 01:41:38 -0500 Subject: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Jens and Carol and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen Sent: Friday, June 18, 1999 11:07 AM >> On Hittite kuen-, I translate it 'strike', not 'kill'. In Hittite royal >> annals, a king often 'strikes' the enemy with the result that sometimes >> the enemy dies, sometimes he just runs away. The action type of kuen- is not >> clearly transitive in any telic sense. Hittite kuen- is also a -mi verb for >> which the passive is the suppletive -hi verb ak(k)-/ek(k)- 'die', which is >> attested with medio-passive endings. One might have expected kuen-, if it >> behaved like English 'kill' to have active -mi and medio-passive forms. > [...] > Not if it was replaced by ak(k)- 'die' in that meaning (thus Puhvel in the > introduction to the entry ak[k]-), which incidentally only makes sense it > kuen- is 'kill', at least some of the time. While some list-members may reject this proposal out of hand, a very few may be interested to know that Egyptian Xn (bar-h, n), which corresponds to IE *2. g{w}wen- by the tables of correspondence which I have developed, means (with -j), 'to row' (beat the water(?)); Xnn.w written with the same biliteral means 'brawlers'. Therefore, I believe there is some slight evidence to regard Hittite kuen- as primarily 'to strike', but with the nuance of 'create a bruise/swelling/ripple' in view of Egyptian Xnn, 'inflamed, irritated'; Xn, 'be blistered'; and IE *1. g{w}hen-, 'swell'. As far the stative in -*H, I have reconstructed a stative in *-?A for Nostratic. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jun 19 19:31:29 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 14:31:29 -0500 Subject: Chronology of the breakup of Common Romance In-Reply-To: <3F4A4874144@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I've seen this as well Given that Rumanian dialects [or languages?] Daco-Rumanian, Istro-Rumanian, Macedo-Rumanian, Megleno-Rumanian and the extinct Dalmatian and any other extinct forms are [or were] spoken from Istria to the Black Sea and from the Carphathians almost to the Aegean proto-Rumanian speakers could have been from anywhere in that area Rumanian does share a common pre-Romance substrate with Albanian which presumibly should help pinpoint the origin of Rumanian There is an argument that Albanian speakers were driven south by Slavs BUT there is also an argument that Albanian is descended from Thracian speakers who fled to the west To compound the argument, there is an argument that Albanian consists of elements of both Thracian and Illyrian I seem to remember reading that while Albanian has a strong substrate, that it is significantly lacking in Ancient or Classical Greek substrate. If this is true, then it tells us where not to look [snip] >I have seen a suggestion that:- > (1) The Romanians are not descended from the Dacians, but from Vlachs >(scattered nomadic mountain shepherds who are found over much of the Balkans) >who found what is now Romania largely empty after Central Asia finally >exhausted its supply of fresh tribes of steppe horsemen (Huns, Avars, Magyars, >Patzinaks, etc) to maraud westwards and devastate south-east Europe; > (2) The Vlachs are descended from Latinized Illyrians who fled into the >mountains when the Avars marauded in; > in which case the ancestors of the Romanians started learning Latin when >Rome invaded Illyria, not when Rome invaded Dacia, and that alters the >linguistic timetable a bit. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jun 19 20:04:57 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 15:04:57 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <376AE05C.C3A@tin.it> Message-ID: Given that it's postulated by some that the Latin root am- of amore-, amare, amicus is from Etruscan I'm wondering if ame, amce might mean "to be with, accompany, join" hence also "was companion, beloved" OR if, on the other hand Latin amore- and amare might be backformations from amicus < *am-c "to be + and/with" in which case ame might mean "to be" in sense of "to serve as" In any case, my semi [or barely]-informed opinion is that there may less distance between Adolfo's perspective and that of Pallottino & the Bonfantes than appears [snip] >I am sure (but probably I am the only one!) that AME, AMCE are not forms >of the verb "to be", but mean "cum, co-, united with", >given that they are accompanied only by PUIA = "mulier" (puia ame = >"coniunx") >and ZILATH "rector, praetor" (*co-praetor, "co-director"). [snip] From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jun 19 19:41:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 20:41:02 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Ed said: > Maybe it has something to do with left-handed people being called > 'southpaws', as all Americans are supposed to be looking west ;-). Interestingly, in Sanskrit, people apparently looked east: "the right hand" means South. Peter From adolfoz at tin.it Sat Jun 19 21:38:48 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 22:38:48 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Thanx for explaining your position re Etruscan and IE. I was a bit > mystified by your many comparisons to Germanic. > Do you see Etruscan as from Rhaetia? > Or do you suspect that Northern Italian IE was closer to [or had > more traits in common with] Germanic? > Or do you perceive a common substrate in N. Italy, the Alps and > Germany? 1) According to some sources, Etruscan and Raeti were autochthonous (let's drop the legend that Etruscans came from Lydia and the Georgiev's unreliable attempts to demonstrate that Etruscan and Hittite are cognate; I wasted two years in trying to find an Anatolian origin: it was vain, also because of my scarce knowledges). 2) Livius (I do not remember exactly the passage) says that Raeti were Etruscan who took shelter on the Alpine valleys, but it is more probable that they were there from time immemorial. 3) My interpretations starting from the hypothesis "Let's suppose that the Etruscan words are borrowing from archaic (Indo)European languages and viceversa" match many Germanish lexemes, but also Celtic (certainly 3 years ago my knowledge of Gaulish and Celtic language was lower), while the comparison with Latin and Osco-Umbrian is vitiated by the fact that in general scholars are inclined to think that the direction of the borrowing is the direction from "already-known" (Latin, Umbrian) to "unknown that has to be explained". 4) Several Venetic words (and other inscriptions of the nearest areas) are explained by means of comparisons with Germanish roots and others with Celtic roots. Conclusion: the "easiest" explanation is that a wide area of Central Europe was occupied by peoples whose languages were similar (common substrate). Most of their lexemes passed to Proto-(Indo)-European languages, of course in different quantities. One could find the roots belonging only to the ancient Italic languages, to Germanish and possibly to Celtic and then to check if they are attested in Etruscan. In this period it is above my possibilities. Adolfo From jer at cphling.dk Sun Jun 20 00:04:16 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 02:04:16 +0200 Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <003f01beb8f4$8cec9b00$6ecbac3e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, petegray wrote [in discussion with Vidhyanath Rao]: [] > My reading of the literature is that there is a fairly wide general > agreement, that at first a tenseless verb was used with endings -m, -s, -t > and so on. Pardon the intrusion, but what does "at first" mean here? That at one time the verbal system was as small as that? You still have tenseless -m, -s, -t in Vedic and the Gathas, but embedded in a system where tense can be specified whenever needed. If the tense markers such as the primary *-i and the augment *e- were once independent words, how can we know they are younger than the person markers? > The precise formation of it may be more argued, so thematic - > or especially sigmatic - aorists may be later than athematic and asigmatic. Thematic apparently yes, for they are plainly secondary and presuppose the existence of an athematic type from which they can be reformations. But there is no indication that the sigmatic aorist is an innovation; it must once have had a special function, and I suppose it was inchoative (the aorist corresponding to the sk^-presents). It became immensely productive, sure, but that does not mean that _all_ of its examples are late. The s-aor./sk^-prs. complex is simply a derived verb on a par with the causative or the desiderative. > Then the endings -mi, -si, -ti and so on develop, as part of the need to > mark present action, as a tense-based system gets going. Why could that need not have been there from the start? > Various devices > were also used to mark the stems with continuity or incohativity or various > other things, all being non-completed. One of those devices was accent on > the stem, which produce full grade. The accent rather _saves_ full grade, but perhaps that is what you mean. > Hence the appearance in Sanksrit of > root accented presents with full grade beside zero grade presents with > accented thematic vowel. The first part is true, but zero-grade thematic verbs have the same history as the thematic aorists. They are based on weak forms of an athematic paradigm (root prs. or root aor.) that lent themselves to reanalysis. Thus, the 3sg middle *wid-e' "found for himself" looked just as little like a third person as the 3sg middle prs. in *-o-r (whence, by subtraction, non-prs. *-o) which took over the personal marker *-t- from the active, thus creating *-to-r (non-prs. *-to). In like fashion, *wid-e' took *-t- from the active, but put it at the end, because there already existed a type ending in *-e-t, namely thematic formations (e.g. subjunctives) in the active. This gave 3sg *wid-e'-t, on the basis of which the paradigm was filled by adding *wid-o'-m, *wid-e'-s etc. - If such an aorist form was re-intepreted as an imperfect, as e.g. Indo-Ir. *tud-a'-t, there arose a present tud-a'-ti to go with it. The re-interpretation presupposes that aorists and imperfects could be functionally confused which is no big problem, since they were both preterites and must have been equivalent whenever the aspect parameter of punctuality vs. durativity did not matter. [] Jens From colkitto at sprint.ca Mon Jun 21 01:55:26 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 21:55:26 -0400 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: >On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Robert Orr wrote: >>>> Jens asked: >>>>> Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of >>>>> events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all. >> A bit of digging in South Asia could easily furnish five such examples. >[] >Thanks. Could you give examples, or refer me to a place where I can find >some with relative ease? I don't have in front of me, but there's an article by Payne J.R. (1980). The Decay of Ergativity in Pamir Languages Lingua 51, 147-186. (with copious citiations), which is fascinating in this regard. There's also the well-known (done-to-death?) example of the history of Persian. Robert From prida at artnet.com.br Sat Jun 19 22:35:58 1999 From: prida at artnet.com.br (Priscilla de Paula) Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 19:35:58 -0300 Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: Dear Sir : I belong to the indoeuropean list and I am a begining student of this matter. I would like to know about the origin of the greek classic word : "cheir" , that means hand and that has done origin to the latin word "chyrurgia". There is a sanskrit radical for the word hand ? Thanks for your attention. Adelgicius paulae. e-mail : lagos at artnet.com.br From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jun 20 12:31:49 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 13:31:49 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002c01beb9e0$f66cf060$84d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I am almost sure that you will want to refine my understanding of > the word "simplicity" but for whatever it may be worth, I would > characterize an isolating language as simpler than a flectional one. If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. > In keeping with the schema you presented recently, I think an > isolating type language, which Klimov would connect with his neutral > and active "types", must have preceded agglutinating, flectional, > and analytic "types". Why? No evidence. And what distinction are you drawing between `isolating' and `analytic' languages? The terms commonly mean the same thing. > That is, of course, not to say that an analytic language might not > be able to revert (is that better than "regress" or "devolve"?) to > an isolating type. Why not just say `change'? Nobody will object to that verb, though I still don't understand how an analytic language is different from an isolating one. > I assert that I conider it impossible for an inflecting type > language to have been what wer should expect to see at the very > earliest stage. Why? We have no data on the earliest human language(s). But we do have data on languages which have come into existence very recently. Many creoles, such as Tok Pisin, have developed grammatical inflections within a generation or two of coming into existence. Apparently the same is true of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which has only existed as a mother tongue for about one generation -- though I don't have good information on NSL. [on my objection to Pat's claim that an object/non-object distinction is tantamount to ergativity] > First, let me say that I am well aware that, your being a specialist > in Basque, gives you a deep perspective on ergativity that few > members of the list will share through work in the own particular > specialities but still I must tentatively disagree. I can't claim any special expertise in ergativity just because I work on Basque. What is true of Basque is not necessarily true of any other language exhibiting ergativity. Basque, Georgian, Hindi, Dyirbal and Nass-Gitksan all exhibit ergativity, but they differ substantially in the circumstances in which ergativity appears and in the manner in which ergativity is expressed. Apart from the trivial observation that all exhibit some measure of ergativity, there is probably nothing which is true of all five beyond what is true of languages generally. > And, of course, it seems to me that this is another case of > differening definitions. I prefer a functional one, you, I believe, > prefer a formal one. I don't see that this matters. A binary division between objects and non-objects is accusativity by definition, regardless of how it is expressed. Ergativity is a binary division between transitive subjects and all else, also by definition. Anyway, as Ralf-Stefan Georg has already pointed out at length, there is probably no language which is 100% ergative. Ergativity may be present in a language in various circumstances and to varying degrees, ranging from none at all to quite a bit. English, for example, is marginally ergative in its word-formation: certain word-forming suffixes, such as the <-ee> of `standee' and `employee', work in an ergative manner. Basque, unusually, is totally ergative in its inflectional morphology (apart from two minor wrinkles), but totally accusative in its syntax and also in its word-formation. For example, transitive and intransitive subjects exhibit identical control properties, while direct objects do not, and the agent suffixes can be added indifferently to intransitive verbs like `go' and `sleep' and to transitive verbs like `make' and `watch', producing in every case a noun denoting the performer of the action. I don't think the concept of an `ergative language' has any real value in linguistic analysis. > For me, a passive of the form "the man is being slandered", displays > an underlying object of a transitive verbal action, whatever the > formal marking of "the man" may be. I don't suppose anyone would disagree with this. > I will speak only of Sumerian if you do not mind. In that language, > so far as I know considered by most as an ergative language, a > two-element sentence of the form Noun + Verb(transitive) will, in > nearly all cases, have to be interpreted as a passive. And frankly, > I am not sure that this analysis is not more appropriate even to > Verbs which would normally be considered intransitive or stative --- > but let us not get off onto a side-topic. I know no Sumerian. But, speaking generally, the `passive' interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years ago. In very many ergative languages, it is trivial to demonstrate that transitive sentences are active, not passive. I myself have done this for Basque. > I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and > transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship > (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, > IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the > verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance > to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner > of an intransitive verb of motion. This may or may not be so in some ergative languages, but it is certainly not true for ergative languages generally. > Pat continued: >>> I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must >>> precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. > Larry objected: >> Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert >> that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it >> is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. > Pat responds: > I find it no more unlikely than to assert that a synthetic language > is not going to develop "directly" from an isolating one. Surely you mean `fusional', not `synthetic': agglutinative languages are synthetic, but can readily arise directly from isolating ones. Fusional languages do not ordinarily arise directly from isolating ones because there appears to be no possible pathway other than one leading through agglutination. > An adverbial phrase specificying the agent seems to me to be an > integral step that must be taken before a nominative is developed. If that were true, then we might expect to see children acquiring English pass through an ergative stage before they grasp accusativity. But we don't. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From stevegus at aye.net Mon Jun 21 03:58:59 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 23:58:59 -0400 Subject: Hands across the sea (was: indoeuropean) Message-ID: Priscilla de Paula writes: > Dear Sir : I belong to the indoeuropean list and I am a begining student > of this matter. I would like to know about the origin of the greek > classic word : "cheir" , that means hand and that has done origin to the > latin word "chyrurgia". There is a sanskrit radical for the word hand ? > Thanks for your attention. Adelgicius paulae. Greek -cheir- resembles the usual Sanskrit and Indic word for "hand," which is -hastah.- -Cheir- ultimately traces back to *ghes-r-, (cf. Hitt. -kessar-) with s > 0 as usual in this situation in Greek; while -hastah.- represents *ghes-tos. It would seem to be the same root with different suffixes. Of course, "chyrurgia" is a slightly eccentric Late Latin spelling, and that 'y' doesn't belong. Someone must have realised it was Greek, and dropped it in there on a whim. The idea, of course, is that in the ancient world a clear distinction existed between those medical men who -worked- with their -hands-, knives, and appliances; as opposed to those who worked with potions and pills. -- L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Mon Jun 21 07:09:13 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 08:09:13 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean In-Reply-To: <376C1B4E.56CBCC7C@artnet.com.br> Message-ID: >Dear Sir : I belong to the indoeuropean list and I am a begining student >of this matter. I would like to know about the origin of the greek >classic word : "cheir" , that means hand and that has done origin to the >latin word "chyrurgia". There is a sanskrit radical for the word hand ? >Thanks for your attention. Adelgicius paulae. >e-mail : lagos at artnet.com.br Gk. cheir, commonly reconstructed as going back to *ghes-r has several Indo-European cognates. That in Sanskrit is /has-ta/ (the roots match, the suffixes don`t; an interesting derivative - and if only for mnemotechnic reasons - is /hastin-/ "elephant", the handed animal); other cognates include Hittite keSSar, Tokharian Sar/tsar, Armenian jeRn, and, believe it or not (I do) Albanian /dorE/. Other languages have replaced this apparently oldest word for "hand", to wit Latin manus, Gothic handus, Baltic and Slavic *renka/ronka (from a verb meaning "to grasp", cf. Lithuanian /rinkti/. The limited distribution of this core-vocabulary item in IE has once given rise to the bromide that the early Indo-Europeans did have feet but no hands (mocking at linguistic palaeontology, of course). St.G. From edsel at glo.be Mon Jun 21 09:44:48 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 11:44:48 +0200 Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Priscilla de Paula Date: Monday, June 21, 1999 2:51 AM >Dear Sir : I belong to the indoeuropean list and I am a begining student >of this matter. I would like to know about the origin of the greek >classic word : "cheir" , that means hand and that has done origin to the >latin word "chyrurgia". There is a sanskrit radical for the word hand ? >Thanks for your attention. Adelgicius paulae. >e-mail : lagos at artnet.com.br [Ed Selleslagh] I would like to add a related question that has been bugging me for a long time: Classic Greek 'cheir' and Neo-Greek '(to) cheri' have a cognate in Kartvelian (Georgian, S. Caucasus) 'cheli' (ch = khi, ach-laut). Does any of you have an explanation? Ed. [ Moderator's comment: If it is a cognate, that *is* the explanation. Or do you mean simply that there is an *apparent* cognate (which would more properly be discussed on the Nostratic list)? --rma ] From edsel at glo.be Mon Jun 21 08:56:20 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 10:56:20 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: Monday, June 21, 1999 1:17 AM >Given that it's postulated by some that the Latin root am- of amore-, amare, >amicus is from Etruscan >I'm wondering if ame, amce might mean "to be with, accompany, join" hence also >"was companion, beloved" >OR if, on the other hand Latin amore- and amare might be backformations from >amicus < *am-c "to be + and/with" in which case ame might mean "to be" in >sense of "to serve as" >In any case, my semi [or barely]-informed opinion is that there may less >distance between Adolfo's perspective and that of Pallottino & the Bonfantes >than appears >>I am sure (but probably I am the only one!) that AME, AMCE are not forms of >>the verb "to be", but mean "cum, co-, united with", given that they are >>accompanied only by PUIA = "mulier" (puia ame = "coniunx") and ZILATH >>"rector, praetor" (*co-praetor, "co-director"). [Ed Selleslagh] May I add the following element to the data: Lat. 'amb-' ('around'), a prepositional prefix (Greek 'amph?'), and Catalan 'amb' ('with'), probably derived from the former. I think the 'b' (Grk. 'ph') is hardly a phonetic problem. Ed. From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Mon Jun 21 13:21:00 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:21:00 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <00ff01beba1a$4033b880$84d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: (> = P.R.) >Thank you for your interesting (to me, at least, and I do not mean that >sarcastically in the slightest) response/ I may add that I myself enjoy this exchange with someone who doesn't take my occasional snide personally (nor do I : polemike: me:te:r panto:n). >Ralf-Stefan, because of your background, you are obviously going to be able >to leaf through _Tipologija Jazykov Aktivnogo Stroja_ or _Printsipy >Kontensivnoi Tipologij_ much more felicitously than I. My Russian is >rudimentary, and though I can struggle through a passage, you can much more >easily pinpoint what you may disagree with specifically. If you feel Klimov >has erred grievously, let me know where and I will try my best to defend him >(if I agree with that particular point). While it is true that I do read Russian with ease, (and I did read at least the first title years ago; and it is true that Klimov has interesting and well-informed things to say on the various alignment-phenomena in the languages of the world; add his Ocherk obshchej teorii ergativnosti) I could do this job for you, but I feel disinclined to do so here and now. Reason # 1: I don't see why I should look for arguments defending a position which I find unattractive for a host of reasons, most of them having to do with an empirical-based general rejection of the idea of stadialism. The second reason is that it seems to me that you hope that Klimov advances reasons and arguments unbeknownst to you, which Larry and I won't be able to deal with no matter how hard we tried, to win the day. No way. But you say that you came to Klimov's conclusions independently, so the one thing we should discuss here is your line of argumentation, for this is the only thing which matters. >As far what I agree with, my website makes very clear that I subscribe to >Klimov's idea of a progression in development in language through >neutral-active-class-ergative-nominative types. Klimov believes, and I >agree, that this progression is *necessary* ab origine. There's a lot to disagree with here. Whether there is really a "neutral" type of alignment, seems very doubtful to me (note that this would be a language where A, S, and O [I assume that you are familiar with this convention; if not, see Dixon's publications on ergativity] are treated *always* *alike* in every respect. Neutral case-marking is OK, neutral cross-referencing properties OK, but some subsystem of such a language, and be it word-order, will always give away a definite alignment, ERG, or ACT). A "class" type is equally dubious, noun classification being a morphological technique which can do a lot of things (inter alia, it can enshrine accusative or ergative alignment, to be sure), but as such, a morphological technique, it stands outside of the core issue. The general idea of stadiality is, as I said, doubtful in itself, to say the least, moreover, as I and now Larry have repeated several times, there is no sense in the overall label of "ergative language", this being only a (sometimes, if properly understood) useful impressionistic designations for languages which show ergative features somehow "salient" for the average European eye (e.g. ergativity by case-marking, where the whole thing was first detected and named). >Pat responds: >I evade nothing. And why I should feel it incumbent on me to defend every >last jot and tittle of Klimov's views perfectly escapes me. The major lines of argumentation would do ;-) >I have told you >above where I agree with him. Yes, you agree with the bottomline ("stadiality is a fact"). But why ? >But you cannot have it both ways. You have consistently implied that some of >my views are so far from the mainstream that, a priori, they must be wrong. >This takes the insufferable form of "linguists agree that ..." as if my >views may be equated with those of the fishmonger you mentioned above and no >linguist would hold them. Klimov is one linguist who does hold views that I >share, and this effectively debunks the notion (on this idea anyhow) that it >is somehow intellectually disreputable to believe that certain laguage types >grow naturally out of other language types. This passage is hard to understand. For the record: I don't say that any views, just by virtue of being far from the mainstream, must a priori be wrong. The mainstream can be wrong (and is so very often, e.g. on the illusion that there is something like the Altaic family of languages, just to place my favourite running gag). My fishmonger-example wants to express that it doesn't matter who utters a view, but only the arguments do. And, the other way round: a position is, imho, not automatically immune to criticism just because it is held by otherwise well-reputed figures. They can do wrong. The roster of eminent scholars, asserting that Turkic and Mongolian are genetically related languages, is impressive and deservedly so. Yet they are wrong. >> That Sumerian is just another split-ergative language, since you seem to >> doubt my (oh, not *my*, I could refer you to *eminent* linguists ;-) >Pat, aside: >And why do you not if such exist? Because I don't have to, being able to defend my points on my own. If you want a reading-list on ergativity, I could give you one, of course. >Pat answers: >Since you are writing of what Sumerian is or is not, I would think you might >have understood that the point of my remark was that, although th markings >of the maru: may be fairly well established, there is absolutely no >agreement on what grammatical role these endings signify. There is hardly any overall agreement about anything in linguistics, given that a lot of journals in the field still accept anything they are handed over. If there is disagreement on this particular point on your side, state it and give your reasons. >Pat responds: >Yes, you may have dropped something here. To make this simple, why not give >me your definition of "imperfective aspect", and I will attempt to find a >maru: sentence that may be interpreted non-imperfectively. Personally, I >believe *most* maru: indicate a progressive nuance rather than imperfective >aspect. No contradiction here. No, I'm not going to expose "my" definition of aspect here (but you may with profit read, e.g., Comrie's handy book on the issue). Only so much: if a language displays a contrast in aspect, *and* possesses a systematic means of coding progressivity, then the progressive forms will either coincide with those of the imperfective aspect, *or* build upon them (i.e. they will belong, morphologically speaking, to the "imperfective" system of that language, never to the perfective system). Progressivity is functionally incompatible with perfectivity. (OK, for clarity's sake: the gist of "my" definition of aspect is that, while perfective aspect describes an action as an unstructured whole, imperfective aspect draws attention to its internal structure, i.e. having or not having beginning and end, filling a certain stretch of time, being divisable into phases, being the pragmatic background of a narration aso. for a subset of the notions which are most often associated with imperfective aspect as against perfective aspect). Note that this is not germane to my argument on an ergativity split in Sumerian, whether or not the interpretation of maru:-HamTu as aspect-coding inflections will hold water is not my issue here, nor do I regard myself competent enough to decide this issue. There is a split, and is along the line of *some* TAM-category-distinction. That's enough. The aspect-show is in a different theatre. >> lugal-le Hi-li ib2-dim2-me. "The king fashioned the wig" >> The king is case-marekd as ERG (-(l)e), and the wig is ABS, so, in terms of >> case-marking a perfect ERG construction. >> The verb form, here given in transliteration, is morphologically to be >> analyzed: i- (conjugation prefix for maru: or imperfective (horribile >> dictu), >Pat interrupts: >This is certainly not the interpretation of *any* Sumerologist, linguist or >philologist, of whose ideas I am aware. Where did you get it? No one says >i- is a conjugation prefix for maru: (or imperfective!) unless you got this >from Gonzalo (?). I see no reason to expose the scattered sources I'm using at the moment, for this will inevitably lead to a rather tiring exchange of the type: "Oh, that shoddy book, no wonder you found that drivel there". What *would* be useful though, would be if you named the sources you trust, so that I can confine my search for instances proving my point - that Sumerian is a split-ergative language, like any other one, thus removing one cornerstone of stadialism - to these. No doubt I'll find them there as well. >The consensus view is, indeed, that -b- in this position is supposed to >reference an inanimate patient. Why you might think that lugal, which means >'king', and is probably as agentive as any noun can be, should be referenced >by -b- totally escapes me. If anything, it would be referenced by -n-, which >is, in the consensus view, connected with animates. This is correct. Actually I said so a few lines above (now deleted to easy our moderator's task), but failed to pay attention a few minutes later. The center holds, though, which is about things being treated alike and things being treated differently. >Then you write: "we should expect the *patient* ... ". What typlogist has >enunciated this doctrine? Why should the animate subject of an intransitive >(two-element) sentence be expected to be marked the same as the *inanimate* >patient of a transitive (three-element) sentence??? I have certainly overlooked the animacy-category here. So, I happily accept your correction that it should be cross-referenced by -n-. But it isn't (see below). >Or do you consider yourself a typologist? With your kind permission, I do consider myself a typologist. >The key fact that you pass by >unremarked is that the subject of the second construction is in the >absolutive; its ending is -0. Therefore, your "case-marking is of course not >ergative" is simply incorrect. The case marking is ergative, which calls for >the agent of an intransitive verb and the patient of a transitive verb to be >marked with -0. Only a slightly sloppy formulation on my part this time. I should have said "S is marked by the absolutive case here, not by the ergative, as we are entitled to expect". The overall case-marking structure of this intransitive sentence is, of course "ergative", which included the "ergative-case" being precluded here. In German, I would have used "Ergativ" for the case and "ergativisch" for the construction. > Additionally, the consensus view is that du is an irregular >maru: of g[~]en so it needs no special maru: inflection. Again, this is correct and a welcome correction, but not germane to the issue. >Another point is that one group of Sumerologists considers various vowel to >represent oral as well as nasal articulations derived from -n. i{3}-du >*could*, according to them, represent *i{3}(n)-du. If this is correct, this could eventually force me to admit (no, not that Sumerian is not a split-ergative language, it is) that my chosen example was not unambiguous enough to drive my point home (since the scribe *could* have intended his from to be read /indu/). Let's, then, look at further examples. I)f you don't mind, I'll help myself to the ones you supplied yourself a few lines down in connection with the pronouns: >g[~]a-e i-ku{4}-re-en, 'I entered' >(Yes, the -e here is another problem.) >the -en cross-references the intransitive subject. >In the transitive sentence, the -en is supposed to cross-reference the >agent: >g[~]a-e sag[~] ib-zi-zi-en, 'I am raising (my) head'. I coul d be arrogant and say: sapienti sat. Sumerian shows accusative features. But I think I'll explain ;-): - en in both cases, the intransitive and the transitive one, cross-references what we latinate accusative-minded Europeans usually call a "subject"; or, iow, it cross-references *both* the agent of the intransitive, as well as that of the transitive sentence above. That's pure-vanilla accusativity, and nothing else. For, under ergative conditions, both constituents are kept apart, by whatever means, yet here they aren't, they are treated alike in terms of verbal cross-referencing, and that is what accusativity is all about. Get the message ? What it exactly is, which conditions this split in Sumerian may be discussed elsewhere (for I think we have tried the patience of this IE list enough with Sumerian, especially since I am a tiro in this field, however, tiro or not, I usually can tell an instance of split-ergativity when I see one, and here I do see one), aspect or shmaspect, the point is only that *some* split exists, as, I repeat, in *every* other "ERG-Language", the reverse not being the case for ACC-Languages, now it's your turn. >As might be obvious by the corrections I have made above to your "analysis" >of these Sumerian constructions, I continue to question what you have >demonstrated. You have corrected mistakes which show my shallow standing in Sumerian, but which concentrated on marginal issues only. Finally you presented me with the one pair of examples which saved me from some hours of digging in Sumerian boobs (though this would have been educational for me). You have my thanks, and I have, of course, now your agreement. >The very facts you have detailed above have led me (but not many >Sumerologists) to question whether -n- and -b- are patient/agent >cross-references. If there are not cross-references, then your argument has >very flat feet. Sure, but this is a definition-trick. All birds can fly. Ostrichs and penguins can't, so let's rewrite our definition of birds as to exclude the latter species and be happy with it. >> It is true that g[~]a[2].e and za.e are formally ergative cases, by virtue >> of -e. However, I'm unaware of a systematic contrast between ergative and >> absolutive forms (i.e. without -e) used in a clear-cut ergative way in the >> language. >Pat responds: >That can hardly be my fault. No, it may be the fault of the extant data, but these are the thing we have to live and work with. The same examples cited above, by means of which you demonstrated the ergative-split in terms of cross-referencing on the verb do at the same time show that, this time in terms of overt case-marking, the personal pronouns do not discriminate between transitive and intransitive agents, both being expressed by the same form (which may or may not represet *originally and formally* an ergative form in -e). >And what sources are those? And why would g[~]a.e develop into g[~]a when we >see this no where else where -e is employed. Your sources have seriously >misinformed you. No, they haven't. Everything which you had to correct in my representation of what I found, can be learned from the grammars I consulted. I take full responsibility for everthing I misread or interpreted too rashly instead of reading a few lines/pages down, as I should have. My sources are, i.a., Hayes, Thomsen, Diakonoff, Poebel, Deimel, representing different generations of Sumerologists with different backgrounds and linguistic standing, certainly also with different standings as connoisseurs of the language. However, if you dislike one or more names on this list, feel free to say so, but if the only Sumerian grammar you trust is that which you have written yourself, please share it, instead of complaining on others. The best grammar is, here as elsewhere, the text corpus itself, and I think the examples discussed so far, as long as they don't turn out to be entirely cooked up, make it perfectly clear that Sumerian is no exception to our general knowledge of "ergative languages". You will have to come up with a different one, which should not be too difficult, since you are reconstructing the mother of all languages ;-) >Your first problem is that you want to make a distinction (transitivity and >intransitivity) for Sumerian verbs that is not really appropriate; these are >not categories of the Sumerian verb in a real sense. Again you caught me red-handed using sloppy and careless language. Of course, transitivity is first and foremost a feature applicable to *constructions* (clauses, sentences), and not of verbs. Mea culpa, but again nothing to do with the fact that Sumerian is a split-ergative language. >Pat responds: >I have already expressed myself on "pure" anythings. In the case of >Sumerian, however, you have not demonstrated any accusative features. That may be right, for, strictly speaking, you have. Chapeau. Stefan From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jun 21 13:08:34 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:08:34 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <007e01beb9a7$de46a000$6201703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > Maybe it has something to do with left-handed people being called > 'southpaws', as all Americans are supposed to be looking west ;-). As far as I know -- and the OED supports me here -- the word `southpaw' derives from the American game of baseball. A baseball diamond is traditionally laid out so that the afternoon sun shines into the eyes of the fielders, and not of the batter. This means that the fielders, including the pitcher, face west, and so the south is on their left. The word `southpaw' thus came to be applied to a left-handed pitcher, and was later extended to left-handers in general. The word `southpaw' is recorded only from the 19th century, while `paw' for `hand' is recorded as early as 1605. > Remember, left is 'sinister', so much that in Castilian they > considered 'siniestro' a taboo word and replaced it by a Basque loan > word (ezkerra > izquierda). Yes, though there is a phonological problem here, since Basque `left', definite form , should not have yielded Castilian (m.), (f.). Since there is evidence that Basque once had a word-forming suffix *<-do>, meaning something like `bad thing', it is possible that an unrecorded Basque derivative * was borrowed into Castilian before being lost from Basque itself. Nobody knows. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jun 21 13:16:59 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:16:59 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <006d01beba8e$e4fd9920$03cbac3e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, petegray wrote: > Interestingly, in Sanskrit, people apparently looked east: "the right hand" > means South. As also in Welsh. Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From stevegus at aye.net Mon Jun 21 16:00:02 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steven A. Gustafson) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 12:00:02 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: > 3) My interpretations starting from the hypothesis > "Let's suppose that the Etruscan words are borrowing > from archaic (Indo)European languages and viceversa" > match many Germanish lexemes, but also Celtic > (certainly 3 years ago my knowledge of Gaulish > and Celtic language was lower), while the comparison > with Latin and Osco-Umbrian is vitiated by the fact that > in general scholars are inclined to think that the direction > of the borrowing is the direction from "already-known" > (Latin, Umbrian) to "unknown that has to be explained". There is one big target for hunters of Celtic-seeming roots in Etruscan, in the form of -clan-, -clenar-, and a number of other variant spellings, meaning "son." This seems easy to relate to *planta or *kwlanta, a widely attested Celtic word meaning "descendant," as attested in OIr. -cland- "descendants," and Welsh -plant-, "child." And it has arrived in English from Gaelic as well. I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly convincing for several reasons. Unless the Latin word is itself a Q-Celtic or Etruscan loaner, if this is apparently a case of the p/q variable distribution, my suspicion is you'd expect to se a q- or a c- form in Latin rather than a p-. It also strikes me as relatively unlikely that the Celts would have borrowed what was in CL a technical term of horticulture, (the original meaning was "slip for grafting") given it a broadened metaphorical sense, and then applied it to a fundamental aspect of their family life that carried a large weight of native cultural baggage. If -cland- isn't from -planta-, it may be unique to Celtic. -- Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law Fox & Cotner: PHONE (812) 945 9600 FAX (812) 945 9615 http://www.foxcotner.com From ERobert52 at aol.com Mon Jun 21 18:53:10 1999 From: ERobert52 at aol.com (ERobert52 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:53:10 EDT Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Adolfo Zavaroni writes: > 1) According to some sources, Etruscan and Raeti were > autochthonous (let's drop the legend that Etruscans came > from Lydia and the Georgiev's unreliable attempts to > demonstrate that Etruscan and Hittite are cognate; > I wasted two years in trying to find an Anatolian origin: > it was vain, also because of my scarce knowledges). > 2) Livius (I do not remember exactly the passage) says > that Raeti were Etruscan who took shelter on the Alpine > valleys, but it is more probable that they were there > from time immemorial. Of course, everybody came from somewhere else originally. The Kaminia stele from Lemnos shows beyond doubt that there were speakers of an Etruscoid language situated not far from Lydia. Lydian itself does not appear closely related to Etruscan and its relatives genetically, but there may be Etruscoid substrate influence on Lydian, for example: Lydian brafra <-? IE *bhrater + influence of Etruscan ruva (brother) ce~n- <-? Etruscan zin- (dedicate?/make?) plus the usual enclitic -k, genitives in -s and -l, similar looking demonstratives, etc. that other Anatolian languages share with Etruscan. You don't have to believe the Etruscans and Raeti came from Anatolia, but Etruscoid was spoken in that area. > 3) My interpretations starting from the hypothesis > "Let's suppose that the Etruscan words are borrowing > from archaic (Indo)European languages and viceversa" > match many Germanish lexemes, but also Celtic > (certainly 3 years ago my knowledge of Gaulish > and Celtic language was lower), while the comparison > with Latin and Osco-Umbrian is vitiated by the fact that > in general scholars are inclined to think that the direction > of the borrowing is the direction from "already-known" > (Latin, Umbrian) to "unknown that has to be explained". The trouble with the interpretation of Etruscan still being an ongoing process is that if one tends to detect or imagine cognates in IE roots as part of the interpretation process, one cannot then go and point to these 'cognates' and say that they prove a relationship. That would be a bit tautological, unless the volume of the evidence was overwhelming. > 4) Several Venetic words (and other inscriptions of the > nearest areas) are explained by means of comparisons > with Germanish roots and others with Celtic roots. According to Lejeune, there are 2 Venetic words that may be explained by comparison with Germanic alone, although in general Venetic appears to be very close to Latin: .an.s'ore.s <->? Gothic 'ansts' (grace/favour) , and SSELBOISSELBOI <->? Gothic 'silba' (self) Any others in mind? > Conclusion: the "easiest" explanation is that a wide area > of Central Europe was occupied by peoples whose > languages were similar (common substrate). Most of their > lexemes passed to Proto-(Indo)-European languages, > of course in different quantities. > One could find the roots belonging only to the ancient > Italic languages, to Germanish and possibly to Celtic > and then to check if they are attested in Etruscan. > In this period it is above my possibilities. I think that the circumstances and chronology of the split of Proto-Germanic from PIE (and the breakup of Western IE generally) have not yet been satisfactorily explained as far as I know, let alone the role of pre-IE substrates in the end result. I also wonder whether the traditional locations of the Proto-Germanic homeland in S. Sweden / N.Germany are correct. The traditional view says they hadn't extended very far south even by 100BC. Yet in 222BC when the Germans emerge into recorded history in military alliance with the Celts, they appear already to be under Celtic domination. How is it that the Germans could 'expand' into the Alps yet be under Celtic domination at the same time unless some of them were already there prior to that? Another question: Assuming Etruscan and Raetic are related, any guess at a time depth for their common ancestor? Ed. Robertson From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Jun 22 02:24:33 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 22:24:33 EDT Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: >georg at letmail.let.leidenuniv.nl writes: >Baltic and Slavic *renka/ronka (from a verb meaning "to grasp", cf. >Lithuanian /rinkti/. -- interesting case of slang replacement, I should think. Calling it the "grasper" instead of the "hand"; rather as if we should drop "hand" in favor of "flipper" or "paw" or "the fives", or something of that nature. From stevegus at aye.net Tue Jun 22 03:22:12 1999 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:22:12 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Ed Selleslagh writes: <> This perhaps also has a sister in Germania: OE 'ymb(e)' and Norse 'um, om', both of which are prepositions that have the basic meaning of "around" or "by." That the Greek and Latin words have an a- and the Germanic ones a u- is something I can't think of an explanation for, though. -- L'an mil neuf sens nonante neuf sept mois Du ciel viendra grand Roy deffraieur Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois Avant apres Mars regner par bonheur. --- M. de Notre-Dame From oeden at juno.com Tue Jun 22 06:23:34 1999 From: oeden at juno.com (Esra Oden) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:23:34 -0700 Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Jun 1999 11:44:48 +0200 "Eduard Selleslagh" writes: >[Ed Selleslagh] >I would like to add a related question that has been bugging me for a long >time: Classic Greek 'cheir' and Neo-Greek '(to) cheri' have a cognate in >Kartvelian (Georgian, S. Caucasus) 'cheli' (ch = khi, ach-laut). Does any of >you have an explanation? >Ed. >[ Moderator's comment: > If it is a cognate, that *is* the explanation. Or do you mean simply that > there is an *apparent* cognate (which would more properly be discussed on > the Nostratic list)? > --rma ] Esra Oden writes: This Kartvelian cognate may be a borrowing from the Pontic Greek spoken in S. Caucasus along the Georgian border of Turkey. From pagos at bigfoot.com Tue Jun 22 08:32:39 1999 From: pagos at bigfoot.com (pagos at bigfoot.com) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 10:32:39 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Gentlemen, I beg the Moderator's forgiveness in advance :-) for posting a topic which is not related to Indo-European. Owing to the fact the thread is getting long enough, I'd dare write a few words about the _vexata quaestio_ of the origins of the Etruscans, in the hope they will be of help in clarifying the ideas of some of the readers of this thread. The origins of no other people of the antiquity were so debated by modern historiography as in the case of the Etruscans. The reason of this situation deserves some words of explanation. In the first place we have to mention the interest awaked in ancient Greek historiographers by this nation which, although hellenized, remained so "different". In the second place the undeniable ethnic, cultural and linguistic dissimilarity of the Etruscans from the other Indoeuropean peoples of Iron Age Italy attracted the attention of the historiographers in the early 19th century. Moreover, the problem of the origins of this people often mingled with the problems of classification and hermeneutics of their language. These are the reasons that gave birth to the myth of the "Etruscan mistery", a sort of devil's kitchen or magician's shop suited for testing all kinds of irrational theories and hypotheses concerning history and linguistics. We have therefore to clear the decks and go back to the real terms of the problem. Classical historiography is unable to offer any evidence but the mention -- made by Varro -- of a work named _Tuscae Historiae_, that could have offered a key for a better comprehension of the origins of this people. Unfortunately the Etruscan literature, however great might its value have been, went completely lost in the very moment when the Etruscan language dwindled away and people terminated to copy and to hand down to posterity the works written in a dead language. According to the mentality of ancient Greeks, the origins of a _polis_ were seen as the result of a _ktisis_ (= foundation) made by a mythic _ecizer_ (= colonizer) as in the case of Theseus for Athens or Cadmus for Thebes. Much in the same way, they imagined that the origins of the single peoples were due to the migration of an _archeg?tes_, i.e. a mythic chieftain. According to Herodotus (I,94), the Etruscans migrated from Lydia under the leadership of the eponymic king Thyrsenos or Thyrrenos: "The Lydians have very nearly the same customs as the Greeks, with the exception that these last do not bring up their girls in the same way. So far as we have any knowledge, they were the first nation to introduce the use of gold and silver coin, and the first who sold goods by retail. They claim also the invention of all the games which are common to them with the Greeks. These they declare that they invented about the time when they colonised Tyrrhenia, an event of which they give the following account. In the days of Atys, the son of Manes, there was great scarcity through the whole land of Lydia. For some time the Lydians bore the affliction patiently, but finding that it did not pass away, they set to work to devise remedies for the evil. Various expedients were discovered by various persons; dice, and huckle-bones, and ball, and all such games were invented, except tables, the invention of which they do not claim as theirs. The plan adopted against the famine was to engage in games one day so entirely as not to feel any craving for food, and the next day to eat and abstain from games. In this way they passed eighteen years. Still the affliction continued and even became more grievous. So the king determined to divide the nation in half, and to make the two portions draw lots, the one to stay, the other to leave the land. He would continue to reign over those whose lot it should be to remain behind; the emigrants should have his son Tyrrhenus for their leader. The lot was cast, and they who had to emigrate went down to Smyrna, and built themselves ships, in which, after they had put on board all needful stores, they sailed away in search of new homes and better sustenance. After sailing past many countries they came to Umbria, where they built cities for themselves, and fixed their residence. Their former name of Lydians they laid aside, and called themselves after the name of the king's son, who led the colony, Tyrrhenians." According to Hellanikos though (apud Dion. Hal. I,28) the Etrurian Thyrreno? should be identified with the Pelasgians, the mysterious migrating people that, after wandering in the Aegean sea, settled in Etruria. In the view of Anticlides (apud Strab. V, 2, 4) the Etruscans who arrived in Italy under the leadership of Thyrrenos were Pelasgians and they belonged to the same strain that colonized the Aegean isles of Lemnos and Imbros as well as several sites on the Anatolic seaside. This thesis is reported also in some Rhodian documents going back to the third century BC, thus partially supporting the assumption that the Etruscans might have been one of the Peoples of the Sea (the TRSH) mentioned in the Egyptian sources. As a matter of fact, the Egyptian inscriptions of Ramses III (1197-1165 BC) relate of the so-called "Peoples of the Sea", i.e. a set of peoples who came from land and sea to invade Egypt. Some of these peoples were known under the same name a couple of centuries before, since they were mentioned among the peoples that supplied mercenary troops to the Pharaoh during the rule of Amenophis III and Merneptah (1413-1220 BC). Some of the "Peoples of the Sea" can be easily identified, as in the case of the Achaei -- called Jqjwsh.w in the inscriptions -- or the Philistines -- called Prst.w. The identification of other peoples is debated, as in the case of the Siculians (Shqrsh.w) and the Sardinians (Shrdn.w). Other peoples can be identified only in a highly hypothetical way. Among the latter ones we find the Trsh.w, to be possibly identified with the Thyrsenoi mentioned by later Greek sources. These hypothetical identifications are questionable, and the question is further complicated by the forms these names assumed in the Egyptian language, thus making the identification even more complex. For example, the Egyptian name of the Siculians, i.e. Shqrsh.w, was formerly related both to the Anatolian place-name of Sagalassos and to the name of a misterious Palestinian people named Sikalayu. Even in the case of the ethnonym Trsh.w, that is the would-be name of the Etruscans in the Egyptian sources, some researchers related it to the Anatolian place-names of Tarsus and Torrebos. As we see, in the Egyptian sources there is not much to go by. Common consensus of the ancient historiographers had it that the Etruscans migrated from the Orient, the only disagreement being in the connection with the Lydians or Pelasgians. Dionysius of Halicarnassus represented an exception. He came to Rome in 30 BC and remained there to study the ancient Roman history for twenty-two years. We learn from him that the self-denomination of the Etruscans was Rasenna (cfr. the cippus of Cortona, where this name appears as Rashna). This confirms that the denomination by which the Etruscans are known in the Greek sources, that is Thyrseno? ~ Thyrsano? or Thyrrhenoi ~ Thyrrano?, is either a translated ethnonym or a name invented by the Greeks. The suffix -eno- is a typical ethnic suffix of the Aegean-Anatolic area. Dionysius, after examining the opinions expressed by other writers (Dion. Hal. I, 25-30), concludes by stating that the Etruscans are an autochthonous people of Italy. According to Dionysius, this is what the Etruscans themselves told him. The opinions expresses by the ancient historiographers influenced modern commentators. The ones base their theories on alleged "migratory waves", the others on the "autochthony" of the Etruscans. The supporters of the eastern origins suppose that the Etruscans came from east in connection with the "oriental" phase of their culture (VII century BC). This hypothesis is untenable from an archaeological point of view, owing to the fact that the "oriental" cultural influx affected both Greece and Etruria in the seventh century. The transition was gradual and diversified from area to area, thus excluding the process of sudden change that would be expected in the case of a migration. Moreover, all the ancient sources univocally confirm that the Etruscans lived in Italy before the historical age. Another migrationist hypothesis assumes that the Etruscans arrived from the north; this is mainly based on the fact reported by Livius (V, 33, 11), according to whom the Rhaetic population in central and eastern Alps are the relict of an Etruscan people. Yet, Livius talks of a non-migratory relict and namely he mentions the fact that the Rhaetians were separated from the Etruscans as a consequence of the arrival of the Celts. The archaeological sources, although showing a strict connection between the Etrurian iron culture and Central Europe, do not legitimate the theory of a migration from the north from the very point of view that other Italic and Mediterranean cultures entertained a more or less strict cultural relationship with Central Europe during the Iron Age. The old autochthonous hypothesis of Dionysius finds an echo in the modern theories of those scholars who think that the Etruscans are a relict of a neolitic Mediterranean people that lived in peace up to the Bronze Age, while the Italic peoples --- who spoke an Indo-European language and used cremation --- should be identified with the proto-Villanova and Villanova culture. This cannot be true though, since the area where the Villanova culture developed overlaps almost perfectly the historical borders of Etruria. In contradiction with so many theories, there are very few facts. Archaeology shows that there was a cultural continuity from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The sudden and spectacular changes that could mark the arrival of a migrating people are lacking. On the other hand, the most ancient literary sources -- as in the case of Dionysius -- do stress the peculiar relationship tying the Etruscans together with Aegean peoples (= Pelasgians) or Anatolian peoples (= Lydians) and relate them to the prae-Greek inhabitants of Lemnos and Imbros. The inscriptions of Lemnos, going back to the period antecedent the Athenian conquest (510 BC) seem to confirm that Lemnian is very similar to Etruscan. The Lemnian inscriptions raised once again the entire problem of Etruscan origins. One of the best represented tendencies in Etruscan research is to adopt the most economical thesis: the Etruscans were a non-Indo-European people native to Italy who adopted many items and styles of east Mediterranean provenience by way of trade. Yet, the similarity between Etruscan and the Lemnian inscriptions must be acknowledged and is admittedly difficult to explain. As a consequence of this, another thesis sees both Etruscan and Lemnian as remnants of a continuum of non-Indo-European "Mediterranean" languages which spanned the eastern and central Mediterranean before the intrusion of Indo-European speakers. There is no easy solution since evidence is extremely self-contradictory. In my eyes, though, the similarity between Etruscan and Lemnian is too great to be explained by anything else but a more direct and immediate historical connection. It follows from this that Etruscan shouldn't be considered an "isolated" language in the Mediterranean. As concerning the basic vocabulary of Etruscan, IMHO many words are "understandable" only because they are the results of areal contacts/borrowings that took place in the Mediterranean (and beyond). The bulk of the Etruscan words -- the meaning of which is known -- can be found in Indo-European languages NOT because Etruscan is an Indo-European language BUT because it it much easier to identify those words existing in other languages spoken in the concerned area. Once again I make amends for this long, off-topic digression. Paolo Agostini From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Jun 21 19:31:59 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 20:31:59 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: I (Peter) wrote > >> ... at first a tenseless verb was used with endings -m, -s, -t >> and so on. Jens said: > ... what does "at first" mean here? I meant only "prior to the time when tense was marked morphologically." If you wish to take issue with me, you must also take issue with Friedrich Mueller (1857), Thurneysen (1885), the detailed proof by Kiparsky in Watkins' *verb* 45; Bruggman, Kieckers, Burrow, Martinet, Kurylowicz, Erhart, Wright, Brandenstein, Szemerenyi, Beekes, Baldi, and others. (I hide behind their authority because I generally respect your contributions, Jens!). There are other voices, speaking against this view, but they are few: Herbig (1896), Hattori (1970), Manczak (1980). Your posting also recognised the existence of these tenseless forms in -m -s and so on. Jens said: > If the tense markers such as the primary *-i > and the augment *e- were once independent words, how can we know they are > younger than the person markers? The formation is younger, not necessarily the elements. (I said): >> thematic - >> or especially sigmatic - aorists may be later than athematic and asigmatic. Jens replied: > Thematic yes, ... But > there is no indication that the sigmatic aorist is an innovation; Perhaps I misunderstand you. It seems to me that a formation + + is necessarily derivative, and that the primary form is + < ending>. Jens went on: > It must > once have had a special function, and I suppose it was inchoative (the > aorist corresponding to the sk^-presents). The -sk^- presents are not normally incohative in IE, except in Latin. We should not read back into PIE the situation we find in the languages with which we are most familiar. Hittite uses -sk- for an iterative/durative; Tocharian for a causative. Possibly the iterative /durative is more original, as there are traces of it in Homer as well as Tocharian. Likewise your connection of -s- aorists with -sk^- presents is not regular anywhere. Many (if not most?) in Latin have -v- perfects, suggesting the root was a vowel or a laryngeal (e.g. creH-sco, gnoH-sco). Some have reduplicated forms (disco didici). LIkewise, aorists in other IE langs do not show the connection you suggest. Then I talked of: > a tense-based system gets going. Jens said > Why could that need not have been there from the start? It seems that it was not - as in many other languages where there was no tense system at the time of European contact - e.g. Maori. Your comments on Sanskrit tud'ati I will have to reply to later Best wishes Peter From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jun 22 11:19:17 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 12:19:17 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <009a01bebbd4$3b1d7640$8603703e@edsel> Message-ID: On am-: On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > May I add the following element to the data: Lat. 'amb-' ('around'), a > prepositional prefix (Greek 'amph?'), and Catalan 'amb' ('with'), probably > derived from the former. I think the 'b' (Grk. 'ph') is hardly a phonetic > problem. > Ed. Catalan ~ [am], and Occitan ~ ~ , however, are not the original forms of the preposition meaning 'with'. This was in both languages, from Latin 'at', 'chez'. It is likely that [am] was originally a conditioned variant before nasal consonants. Since `in' had a variant [em] before labial consonants, these prepositions mutually influenced each other in form, and in part in meaning. In Catalan and are both current for `travel by plane, fly'; in spoken Valencian has replaced ~ altogether. The influence spreads to the preposition < L. `to'. Colloquial Catalan has
  • ~
  • `I said to her'; standard
  • . However, the main problem with Ed's etymology (apart from the timing) is that Lat. is not a preposition. It is rare as a prefix, and dubiously productive. And Catalan is not a prefix. But in any case, hasn't *mbhi got a perfectly good IE pedigree, nothing to do with am- of Lat. amare? Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From jrader at m-w.com Tue Jun 22 09:48:27 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 09:48:27 +0000 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: The baseball diamond theory of the origin of is almost certainly folklore. Note that the OED's first citation for the word, in the sense "blow with the left hand," is from 1848. Organized baseball was in its infancy in the 1840's and conventions for laying out diamonds were very unlikely to have existed so early that a transferred sense of the word could have arisen by 1848. Also, the Survey of English Dialects recorded meaning "left-handed" in Cumberland--suggesting that the association of south with the left hand did not originate in the U.S. Jim Rader > As far as I know -- and the OED supports me here -- the word `southpaw' > derives from the American game of baseball. [ moderator snip ] > Larry Trask From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 22 19:53:16 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 14:53:16 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Are there any etymologies out there for & ? Also, any ideas why manus is feminine? [snip]> >Other languages have replaced [*ghes-r] >apparently oldest word for "hand", to wit Latin manus, Gothic handus, [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 22 19:07:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 20:07:35 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: [re: the link between Latin amicus and the ambi- root] Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the ambhi- root has wide attestation: Latin, Greek, Armenian, Albanian and with syllabic /m/ Old Indic, and Celtic. Pokorny relates it to the ambo root. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 22 19:25:52 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 20:25:52 +0100 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: I (Peter) commented: >> an initial H- added before R? > Pat asks: > Do you mean as an equivalent substitute for *s-? No, not at all. Merely that since PIE has one fricative prefix (albeit of uncertain meaning and status) we should not rule out on ideological grounds, the suggestion of another fricative prefix in situations appropriate for its particular phonology. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 22 19:18:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 20:18:14 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Jens said: > [In Sanskrit] zero-grade thematic verbs have the same > history as the thematic aorists ... [etc, deriving them from a long chain of reformulations: middle > middle +t > (reinterpreted as active) > (extension by analogy to all other persons) > (reinterpreted as imperfect) > (re-creation of a new present).] Apart from the superficial implausibility of all this, and the fact that other aorists were not reformulated as imperfects, and did not create new present tenses, where is your evidence? Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 22 20:06:11 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 15:06:11 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <376E6182.C8FF41C2@aye.net> Message-ID: [snip] >I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly >convincing for several reasons. Unless the Latin word is itself a >Q-Celtic or Etruscan loaner, if this is apparently a case of the p/q >variable distribution, my suspicion is you'd expect to se a q- or a c- >form in Latin rather than a p-. Or it conceivably Latin may have been a borrowing from Oscan or Gaulish, etc. used with a marked meaning, in which case any original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant (which used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work in a metaphorical sense. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 22 22:19:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 17:19:19 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Sunday, June 20, 1999 7:31 AM Thank you for your timely response to my tardy answer. > On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> I am almost sure that you will want to refine my understanding of >> the word "simplicity" but for whatever it may be worth, I would >> characterize an isolating language as simpler than a flectional one. > If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or > Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian > or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. Pat responds: Actually, I think it may well be the case for Chinese. I have a copy of Chao's _Mandarin Primer_ (336 pages), which has a Chapter III - Grammar, beginning on page 33, and *ending* on page 59. I can compare this to Forbes' _Russian Grammar_, which contains 436 pages of grammar and indices. >> In keeping with the schema you presented recently, I think an >> isolating type language, which Klimov would connect with his neutral >> and active "types", must have preceded agglutinating, flectional, >> and analytic "types". > Why? No evidence. And what distinction are you drawing between > `isolating' and `analytic' languages? The terms commonly mean the same > thing. Pat responds: Even if the earliest morphemes of language werenot recoverable as you would maintain, logic tells us that monosyllables would have, at least, predominated. The syntax of these monosyllables would have had to convey whatever grammar the language had at that point; and this would certainly resemble languages which are currently termed "isolating". I prefer (though, of course, you and many others may not) to distinguish the terms: "isolating", referring to a language for which we can reconstuct no flectional or aggltuinating stage; and "analytic", for a language we can. >> That is, of course, not to say that an analytic language might not >> be able to revert (is that better than "regress" or "devolve"?) to >> an isolating type. > Why not just say `change'? Nobody will object to that verb, though I > still don't understand how an analytic language is different from an > isolating one. Pat responds: Please see above. >> I assert that I consider it impossible for an inflecting type >> language to have been what we should expect to see at the very >> earliest stage. > Why? We have no data on the earliest human language(s). But we do have > data on languages which have come into existence very recently. Many > creoles, such as Tok Pisin, have developed grammatical inflections > within a generation or two of coming into existence. Apparently the > same is true of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which has only existed as a > mother tongue for about one generation -- though I don't have good > information on NSL. Pat responds: Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same way we have no data on IE but, by analysis, we can reasonably form an opinion as to what IE must have been like. In the same way, we can analyze current linguistic data, and form an opinion as to what earliest language must have been like though, I admit, the process is much more doubtful. > [on my objection to Pat's claim that an object/non-object distinction is > tantamount to ergativity] [ moderator snip ] > I don't think the concept of an `ergative language' has any real value > in linguistic analysis. Pat responds: I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to transitive constructions: Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. I would characterize Language A as (at least, essentially "ergative"). >> I will speak only of Sumerian if you do not mind. In that language, >> so far as I know considered by most as an ergative language, a >> two-element sentence of the form Noun + Verb(transitive) will, in >> nearly all cases, have to be interpreted as a passive. And frankly, >> I am not sure that this analysis is not more appropriate even to >> Verbs which would normally be considered intransitive or stative --- >> but let us not get off onto a side-topic. > I know no Sumerian. But, speaking generally, the `passive' > interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years > ago. Pat responds: Perhaps to your satisfaction but not to mine. > In very many ergative languages, it is trivial to demonstrate that > transitive sentences are active, not passive. I myself have done this > for Basque. Pat responds: Perhaps you have done this for Basque but it is certainly not trivial to demonstrate this for Sumerian, where Thomsen characterizes: "The Sumerian verbal root is in principle neither transitive nor intransitive, but neutral in this respect". And a sentence like: . . . eg{~}er-a-ni u{3} dam dumu-ni dumu Ba.Ba.g{~]u{10}-ke{4}-ne ba-ne-sum-ma must be rendered in English by the passive: . . . that his estate and his wife and children were given to the sons of Babag{u}. >> I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and >> transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship >> (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, >> IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the >> verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance >> to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner >> of an intransitive verb of motion. > This may or may not be so in some ergative languages, but it is > certainly not true for ergative languages generally. Pat asks: Is there an 'ergative language', presuming by your definition some such exists, where this is not true? >> Pat continued: >>>> I would also assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must >>>> precede any "accusative stage" or a mixed system. >> Larry objected: >>> Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert >>> that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it >>> is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. Pat asks: What evidence might that be? >> Pat responds: >> I find it no more unlikely than to assert that a synthetic language >> is not going to develop "directly" from an isolating one. > Surely you mean `fusional', not `synthetic': agglutinative languages are > synthetic, but can readily arise directly from isolating ones. Pat admits: Yes, you are absolutely correct. My error. > Fusional languages do not ordinarily arise directly from isolating ones > because there appears to be no possible pathway other than one leading > through agglutination. >> An adverbial phrase specificying the agent seems to me to be an >> integral step that must be taken before a nominative is developed. > If that were true, then we might expect to see children acquiring > English pass through an ergative stage before they grasp accusativity. > But we don't. Pat responds: I am sure you are better read on child language acquisition patterns than I. Based on what I have observed personally, I doubt your assertion but if studies have shown this (could you name one?), how can I dispute it. A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so far as I would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 22 23:20:06 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 18:20:06 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Stefan Georg Sent: Monday, June 21, 1999 8:21 AM R-S wrote: > While it is true that I do read Russian with ease, (and I did read at least > the first title years ago; and it is true that Klimov has interesting and > well-informed things to say on the various alignment-phenomena in the > languages of the world; add his Ocherk obshchej teorii ergativnosti) I > could do this job for you, but I feel disinclined to do so here and now. > Reason # 1: I don't see why I should look for arguments defending a > position which I find unattractive for a host of reasons, most of them > having to do with an empirical-based general rejection of the idea of > stadialism. > The second reason is that it seems to me that you hope that Klimov advances > reasons and arguments unbeknownst to you, which Larry and I won't be able > to deal with no matter how hard we tried, to win the day. No way. > But you say that you came to Klimov's conclusions independently, so the one > thing we should discuss here is your line of argumentation, for this is the > only thing which matters. Pat responds: You are very kind to say that my "line of argumentation . . . matters" but, in practice, most ideas which I have advanced as a result of my own attempts at applying logical analysis to the questions have been summarily dismissed --- I believe, primarily on the basis of my lack of documentable qualifications. Now, we are already straining the patience of the IEists to pursue these general matters so I propose that you read my Proto-Language essays, in which I do attempt to provide "arguments", and let us take these matters to the Nostratic list which may be glad for a little activity. Pat continued previously: >> As far what I agree with, my website makes very clear that I subscribe to >> Klimov's idea of a progression in development in language through >> neutral-active-class-ergative-nominative types. Klimov believes, and I >> agree, that this progression is *necessary* ab origine. R-S responded: > There's a lot to disagree with here. Whether there is really a "neutral" > type of alignment, seems very doubtful to me (note that this would be a > language where A, S, and O [I assume that you are familiar with this > convention; if not, see Dixon's publications on ergativity] are treated > *always* *alike* in every respect. Pat, aside: I have questioned this as well, and prefer to group the neutral and active types together. R-S continued: > Neutral case-marking is OK, neutral > cross-referencing properties OK, but some subsystem of such a language, and > be it word-order, will always give away a definite alignment, ERG, or ACT). > A "class" type is equally dubious, noun classification being a > morphological technique which can do a lot of things (inter alia, it can > enshrine accusative or ergative alignment, to be sure), but as such, a > morphological technique, it stands outside of the core issue. Pat responds: I do not believe it stands outside the core issue. But I agree that it is primarily morphological. R-S continued: > The general idea of stadiality is, as I said, doubtful in itself, to say > the least, moreover, as I and now Larry have repeated several times, there > is no sense in the overall label of "ergative language", this being only a > (sometimes, if properly understood) useful impressionistic designations for > languages which show ergative features somehow "salient" for the average > European eye (e.g. ergativity by case-marking, where the whole thing was > first detected and named). Pat responds: Please see my response to Larry Trask on the same subject. >> Pat responded: >> I evade nothing. And why I should feel it incumbent on me to defend every >> last jot and tittle of Klimov's views perfectly escapes me. R-S responded: > The major lines of argumentation would do ;-) >> I have told you above where I agree with him. > Yes, you agree with the bottomline ("stadiality is a fact"). But why ? Pat responds: Because, I believe as a matter of principle, that simplicity must precede complexity --- at least once. Pat wrote: >> But you cannot have it both ways. You have consistently implied that some of >> my views are so far from the mainstream that, a priori, they must be wrong. >> This takes the insufferable form of "linguists agree that ..." as if my >> views may be equated with those of the fishmonger you mentioned above and no >> linguist would hold them. Klimov is one linguist who does hold views that I >> share, and this effectively debunks the notion (on this idea anyhow) that it >> is somehow intellectually disreputable to believe that certain laguage types >> grow naturally out of other language types. R-S commented: > This passage is hard to understand. For the record: I don't say that any > views, just by virtue of being far from the mainstream, must a priori be > wrong. The mainstream can be wrong (and is so very often, e.g. on the > illusion that there is something like the Altaic family of languages, just > to place my favourite running gag). > My fishmonger-example wants to express that it doesn't matter who utters a > view, but only the arguments do. Pat responds: I have advanced arguments in my essays. I would be glad to take up any point mentioned therein if the list (or the Nostratic list) permits it. R-S continued: > And, the other way round: a position is, imho, not automatically immune to > criticism just because it is held by otherwise well-reputed figures. They > can do wrong. The roster of eminent scholars, asserting that Turkic and > Mongolian are genetically related languages, is impressive and deservedly > so. Yet they are wrong. Pat: Agreed. >>> That Sumerian is just another split-ergative language, since you seem to >>> doubt my (oh, not *my*, I could refer you to *eminent* linguists ;-) >> Pat, aside: >> And why do you not if such exist? R-S answered? > Because I don't have to, being able to defend my points on my own. If you > want a reading-list on ergativity, I could give you one, of course. Pat responds: Gosh, I thought we were discussing Sumerian (:-#) >> Pat answered: >> Since you are writing of what Sumerian is or is not, I would think you might >> have understood that the point of my remark was that, although the markings >> of the maru: may be fairly well established, there is absolutely no >> agreement on what grammatical role these endings signify. R-S answered: > There is hardly any overall agreement about anything in linguistics, given > that a lot of journals in the field still accept anything they are handed > over. If there is disagreement on this particular point on your side, state > it and give your reasons. Pat responds: Economically, let me refer you to the easily obtainable Thomsen, page 115-116. >> Pat responded: >> Yes, you may have dropped something here. To make this simple, why not give >> me your definition of "imperfective aspect", and I will attempt to find a >> maru: sentence that may be interpreted non-imperfectively. Personally, I >> believe *most* maru: indicate a progressive nuance rather than imperfective >> aspect. R-S responded: > No contradiction here. No, I'm not going to expose "my" definition of > aspect here (but you may with profit read, e.g., Comrie's handy book on > the issue). Only so much: if a language displays a contrast in aspect, *and* > possesses a systematic means of coding progressivity, then the progressive > forms will either coincide with those of the imperfective aspect, *or* build > upon them (i.e. they will belong, morphologically speaking, to the > "imperfective" system of that language, never to the perfective system). > Progressivity is functionally incompatible with perfectivity. Pat responds: I am not surprised that you and I disagree here since aspect seems like a topic unapproachable without Fingerspitzengefuehl and everyone's fingers are subtly different but, for the record, I believe an English sentence like: "I am/was eating up the cake" is, simultaneously "perfective" and "progressive". R-S continued: > (OK, for clarity's sake: the gist of "my" definition of aspect is that, > while perfective aspect describes an action as an unstructured whole, > imperfective aspect draws attention to its internal structure, i.e. having > or not having beginning and end, filling a certain stretch of time, being > divisable into phases, being the pragmatic background of a narration aso. > for a subset of the notions which are most often associated with > imperfective aspect as against perfective aspect). > Note that this is not germane to my argument on an ergativity split in > Sumerian, whether or not the interpretation of maru:-HamTu as aspect-coding > inflections will hold water is not my issue here, nor do I regard myself > competent enough to decide this issue. There is a split, and is along the > line of *some* TAM-category-distinction. That's enough. The aspect-show is > in a different theatre. >>> lugal-le Hi-li ib2-dim2-me. "The king fashioned the wig" >>> The king is case-marekd as ERG (-(l)e), and the wig is ABS, so, in terms of >>> case-marking a perfect ERG construction. >>> The verb form, here given in transliteration, is morphologically to be >>> analyzed: i- (conjugation prefix for maru: or imperfective (horribile >>> dictu), >>Pat interrupted: >> This is certainly not the interpretation of *any* Sumerologist, linguist or >> philologist, of whose ideas I am aware. Where did you get it? No one says >> i- is a conjugation prefix for maru: (or imperfective!) unless you got this >> from Gonzalo (?). R-S responded: > I see no reason to expose the scattered sources I'm using at the moment, > for this will inevitably lead to a rather tiring exchange of the type: "Oh, > that shoddy book, no wonder you found that drivel there". Pat responds: I would be pleased to learn of *one* source that designates the i- as a sign of maru:! R-S continued: > What *would* be useful though, would be if you named the sources you > trust, so that I can confine my search for instances proving my point - > that Sumerian is a split-ergative language, like any other one, thus > removing one cornerstone of stadialism - to these. No doubt I'll find them > there as well. Pat responds: My primary source of information is Thomsen, who rarely takes a position but outlines various competing views. Her discussion of i- (pp. 163-166) does *not* list anyone who so believes. R-S continued: >> Another point is that one group of Sumerologists considers various vowel >> to represent oral as well as nasal articulations derived from -n. i{3}-du >> *could*, according to them, represent *i{3}(n)-du. > If this is correct, this could eventually force me to admit (no, not that > Sumerian is not a split-ergative language, it is) that my chosen example > was not unambiguous enough to drive my point home (since the scribe *could* > have intended his from to be read /indu/). Pat responds: See Thomsen pp. 162-163. R-S continued: > Let's, then, look at further examples. I)f you don't mind, I'll help myself > to the ones you supplied yourself a few lines down in connection with the > pronouns: >> g[~]a-e i-ku{4}-re-en, 'I entered' >> (Yes, the -e here is another problem.) >> the -en cross-references the intransitive subject. >> In the transitive sentence, the -en is supposed to cross-reference the >> agent: > >g[~]a-e sag[~] ib-zi-zi-en, 'I am raising (my) head'. > I coul d be arrogant and say: sapienti sat. Sumerian shows accusative > features. But I think I'll explain ;-): > - en in both cases, the intransitive and the transitive one, > cross-references what we latinate accusative-minded Europeans usually call > a "subject"; or, iow, it cross-references *both* the agent of the > intransitive, as well as that of the transitive sentence above. That's > pure-vanilla accusativity, and nothing else. For, under ergative > conditions, both constituents are kept apart, by whatever means, yet here > they aren't, they are treated alike in terms of verbal cross-referencing, > and that is what accusativity is all about. Get the message ? Pat responds: Yes, that would be the consensus view of Sumerologists but, of course, this is only true of relatively Late Sumerian. I discuss these matters in the Sumerian Grammar available at my website. R-S continued: > What it exactly is, which conditions this split in Sumerian may be discussed > elsewhere (for I think we have tried the patience of this IE list enough with > Sumerian, especially since I am a tiro in this field, however, tiro or not, I > usually can tell an instance of split-ergativity when I see one, and here I > do see one), aspect or shmaspect, the point is only that *some* split exists, > as, I repeat, in *every* other "ERG-Language", the reverse not being the case > for ACC-Languages, now it's your turn. Pat asks: Could you refer me to a linguists who has sureveyed every other ergative language and determined that splits always occur? > My sources are, i.a., Hayes, Thomsen, Diakonoff, Poebel, Deimel, > representing different generations of Sumerologists with different > backgrounds and linguistic standing, certainly also with different > standings as connoisseurs of the language. However, if you dislike one or > more names on this list, feel free to say so, but if the only Sumerian > grammar you trust is that which you have written yourself, please share it, > instead of complaining on others. The best grammar is, here as elsewhere, > the text corpus itself, and I think the examples discussed so far, as long > as they don't turn out to be entirely cooked up, make it perfectly clear > that Sumerian is no exception to our general knowledge of "ergative > languages". You will have to come up with a different one, which should not > be too difficult, since you are reconstructing the mother of all languages > ;-) Pat responds: I have respect for everyone who has tried his hand at unriddling Sumerian. I am sharing a Sumerian Grammar (but still in progress) at my website. "Father of all languages": I am a sexist pig. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jun 25 03:50:02 1999 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 23:50:02 -0400 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 2:44 AM >>I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly >>convincing for several reasons. Unless the Latin word is itself a >>Q-Celtic or Etruscan loaner, if this is apparently a case of the p/q >>variable distribution, my suspicion is you'd expect to se a q- or a c- >>form in Latin rather than a p-. > Or it conceivably Latin may have been a borrowing from >Oscan or Gaulish, etc. used with a marked meaning, in which case any >original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant >(which used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work >in a metaphorical sense. Celtic borrowed *planta from Latin, cf. Welsh "plant" - children. Straightforward. However, at the time Irish had no native *p-/-p-, and therefore "c" was often substituted. plant/clann is not the only such pair. Off the cuff, cf. cloimh < pluma Cothraiche < Patricius This is basic in Celtic studies. Robert Orr From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Jun 24 08:48:25 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 09:48:25 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <13425140450213@m-w.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Jim Rader wrote: > The baseball diamond theory of the origin of is almost > certainly folklore. Note that the OED's first citation for the word, > in the sense "blow with the left hand," is from 1848. Organized > baseball was in its infancy in the 1840's and conventions for laying > out diamonds were very unlikely to have existed so early that a > transferred sense of the word could have arisen by 1848. Also, the > Survey of English Dialects recorded meaning > "left-handed" in Cumberland--suggesting that the association of south > with the left hand did not originate in the U.S. Many thanks for the correction. I had been wondering about that first OED quotation. Odd, though, that the word makes perfect sense in baseball, and not elsewhere. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jun 25 16:33:00 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 17:33:00 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [PCR] >>> I am almost sure that you will want to refine my understanding of >>> the word "simplicity" but for whatever it may be worth, I would >>> characterize an isolating language as simpler than a flectional one. [LT] >> If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or >> Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian >> or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. > Actually, I think it may well be the case for Chinese. I have a copy > of Chao's _Mandarin Primer_ (336 pages), which has a Chapter III - > Grammar, beginning on page 33, and *ending* on page 59. I can > compare this to Forbes' _Russian Grammar_, which contains 436 pages > of grammar and indices. It is hardly reasonable to adduce one small and elderly primer of Chinese and compare it with a large reference grammar of Russian. In any case, I have seen at least one very large reference grammar of Mandarin, though I can't recall who wrote it. One way of appreciating the impossibility of a language with a "simple" grammar is to browse through the Comrie-Smith questionnaire, or through one of the grammars based on it. This shows quickly that every language has a host of grammatical functions to provide grammatical forms for. A few examples of the kinds of thing that every language must provide grammatical constructions for: "That house is made of bricks." "The gum is stuck to the bottom of the chair." "These shoes are too big for me." "It's obvious that she's drunk." "The more he eats, the fatter he gets." "Two of the boys have long legs." "The train was not as late as last time." "The woman I was talking to is always complaining." "I forgot how to open the lock." And so on, and so on. Whether a given language, or does not, use inflections to do some of this work has little effect on the overall grammar: all of these zillions of things have to be expressed somehow, and grammatical devices must exist to provide for them. And, of course, a learner of the language must learn every one of those devices and learn when to use it. > Even if the earliest morphemes of language werenot recoverable as > you would maintain, logic tells us that monosyllables would have, at > least, predominated. I'm afraid that "logic" tells us no such thing. This is no more than a wild guess. > The syntax of these monosyllables would have had to convey whatever > grammar the language had at that point; and this would certainly > resemble languages which are currently termed "isolating". An isolating language is indeed isolating: no dispute there. But even a monosyllabic language need not lack inflections altogether: there exist languages with internal inflection, as in English `sing', `sang', `sung'. > I prefer (though, of course, you and many others may not) to > distinguish the terms: "isolating", referring to a language for > which we can reconstuct no flectional or aggltuinating stage; and > "analytic", for a language we can. Bizarre. What is the point of trying to classify languages on the basis of what we can reconstruct for their ancestors? > Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same > way we have no data on IE but, by analysis, we can reasonably form > an opinion as to what IE must have been like. In the same way, we > can analyze current linguistic data, and form an opinion as to what > earliest language must have been like though, I admit, the process > is much more doubtful. Hardly comparable. With PIE, we are reconstructing only 2000-3000 years earlier than our earliest substantial texts. Trying to reconstruct 50-150,000 years back is a whole nother ballgame. > I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in > linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to > transitive constructions: > Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb > will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. > Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb > will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. > However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb will be interpreted as an > activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B No, not at all. The facts vary from language to language. In Basque, for example, the absolutive is interpreted as the performer of the action if the verb is intransitive, as the patient if the verb is transitive. Same appears to be true of Dyirbal. > whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. I take it you've never come across Spanish, Italian, Russian or Latin. Spanish: `S/he has seen the film.' Latin: `S/he saw Caesar.' Accusative noun, verb, no overt subject, perfectly normal. > I would characterize Language A as (at least, essentially "ergative"). But which languages are like this? [LT] >> I know no Sumerian. But, speaking generally, the `passive' >> interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years >> ago. [PAR] > Perhaps to your satisfaction but not to mine. Not much of an answer, I'm afraid. The "passive" interpretation of ergativity was based squarely on morphology, with no attention to syntax -- even though a passive is a syntactic form. More particularly, it was based on the confused and erroneous notion that a grammatical subject must always stand in the same case. For Basque, and for other ergative languages, the "passive" view of transitive sentences can be shredded, point by devastating point. [LT] >> In very many ergative languages, it is trivial to demonstrate that >> transitive sentences are active, not passive. I myself have done this >> for Basque. > Perhaps you have done this for Basque but it is certainly not > trivial to demonstrate this for Sumerian, where Thomsen > characterizes: "The Sumerian verbal root is in principle neither > transitive nor intransitive, but neutral in this respect". I don't know any Sumerian. But what is true of Sumerian is not necessarily true of any other language. [PAR] >>> I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and >>> transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship >>> (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, >>> IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the >>> verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance >>> to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner >>> of an intransitive verb of motion. [LT] >> This may or may not be so in some ergative languages, but it is >> certainly not true for ergative languages generally. > Is there an 'ergative language', presuming by your definition some > such exists, where this is not true? Sure, taking `ergative language' to mean `language in which ergativity is prominent'. In Basque, for example, intransitive subjects (absolutive), transitive subjects (ergative) and direct objects (absolutive) are all equally optional: Gizonak mutila jo zuen. man-the-Erg boy-the-Abs hit Aux `The man hit the boy.' Gizonak jo zuen. `The man hit him.' Mutila jo zuen. `He hit the boy.' Jo zuen. `He hit him.' All perfectly normal in context. [LT] >>>> Unsubstantiated assertion. You might, with equal justification, assert >>>> that accusativity must precede ergativity in all cases. If anything, it >>>> is this last statement which is better supported by the evidence. > Pat asks: > What evidence might that be? The fact that we know of a few cases -- Indo-Iranian is one -- in which ergativity has arisen in languages which formerly lacked it, while we have hardly any examples of languages in which accusativity has arisen in languages which formerly lacked it. [on my observation that children acquiring English do not go through an ergative stage] > I am sure you are better read on child language acquisition patterns > than I. Based on what I have observed personally, I doubt your > assertion but if studies have shown this (could you name one?), how > can I dispute it. We now have a vast body of data on children acquiring English. And I know of no study, not one, which recognizes an ergative stage during acquisition. > A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so > far as I would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. Yes, sure, but a single datum proves nothing. Children at the two-word stage also say things like `Mommy get', meaning `[I want] Mommy to get the ball.' This should be impossible in an "ergative" view. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Jun 25 18:00:00 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 13:00:00 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <005001bebebd$cf9caac0$28a394d1@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: I'm aware of the others and I've seen the explanation for clann < planta but I've also read other explanations claiming that it's cognate to Latin and that it's unsettled. But I have only the most superficial knowledge of Celtic, so I'd wondering if the idea of clann < planta is virtually unanimous among Celtic scholars or if there is wide disagreement or if the issue is just up in the air. >Celtic borrowed *planta from Latin, cf. Welsh "plant" - children. >Straightforward. >However, at the time Irish had no native *p-/-p-, and therefore "c" was >often substituted. plant/clann is not the only such pair. Off the cuff, >cf. >cloimh < pluma >Cothraiche < Patricius >This is basic in Celtic studies. >Robert Orr Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Mon Jun 28 16:50:33 1999 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 09:50:33 -0700 Subject: Delayed posts Message-ID: It appears that a large group of posts from 22 June 1999 did not go out; they are not present, for example, in Linguistlist.org archives. I will re-post them today. I apologize if they duplicate something you have already seen; please let me know if they do. Replies to this message will not go out to the list. Rich Alderson list owner and moderator From donncha at eskimo.com Wed Jun 23 02:02:00 1999 From: donncha at eskimo.com (Dennis King) Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 19:02:00 -0700 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <376E6182.C8FF41C2@aye.net> Message-ID: Steven A. Gustafson: >I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly >convincing for several reasons. [...] It also strikes me as relatively >unlikely that the Celts would have borrowed what was in CL a technical >term of horticulture, (the original meaning was "slip for grafting") >given it a broadened metaphorical sense, and then applied it to a >fundamental aspect of their family life that carried a large weight of >native cultural baggage. The fact is, however, that there are several very early examples in Irish of "cland" used to mean "plant, planting, shoot", as far back as the Milan Glosses where "plantationis" is glossed "inna clainde". The same text also shows the metaphorical development of the word, with "Abrachae semen estis" glossed as "adib cland Abrache". Further, the primary meaning of the derived verb "clannaid" is "plants, sows". Finally, hadn't "planta" gone beyond being just a technical term by the 5th or 6th century AD? Dennis King From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 07:14:05 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 08:14:05 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean In-Reply-To: <19990621.232334.3894.0.oeden@juno.com> Message-ID: >>[ Moderator's comment: >> If it is a cognate, that *is* the explanation. Or do you mean simply that >> there is an *apparent* cognate (which would more properly be discussed on >> the Nostratic list)? >> --rma ] >Esra Oden writes: >This Kartvelian cognate may be a borrowing from the Pontic Greek spoken >in S. Caucasus along the Georgian border of Turkey. As long as the question is one of borrowing, we may have our moderator's consent to discuss it here. No, I wouldn't think so. The Kartvelian word is of Proto-Kartvelian age, reflected in all K. languages including Old Georgian (reconstructable as /*qel-/, Klimov detaches the final -l in the reconstruct, but since he cannot assign a function to it, and since this detachment seems to be based on Mingrelian only, I think he may not be right here). While it is true that Old Georgian does display Greek loanwords, proto-Kartvelian is not known to do. If we, for better or worse, assume that "hand" might be a counterexample to this assertion, we would have to face the problem that there seems to be no motivation for Gk. -r being replaced by Kart. -l. We can safely, I think, exclude the alternative scenario, that of genetic cognacy on a Nostratic level, as well. No matter what we think about an ultimate genetic relationship between IE and Kartvelian, we will have to take into account that the Greek word, as demonstrated, goes back to *ghes-r, i.e. when we look at the oldest forms for both language families, we get forms more different than the attested later ones (*ghes-r : *qel- [or, if Klimov is right after all, *qe-] - cheir : xeli ), a strong indicator that the similarity observed in the later forms has been produced by chance convergence. With true cognates based on genetic relationship (which involves that the languages *diverged* from earlier unity) we should expect that the earliest recoverable forms are closer to each other than the later ones. Think that is enough to convince anybody that this is a chance resemblance only. St.G. From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 07:29:51 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 08:29:51 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Are there any etymologies out there for & ? >Also, any ideas why manus is feminine? /manus/ seems to be able to claim an IE pedigree as well, with as yet unknown semantic differences between it and *ghes-r-. One can cite Umbrian /manuv-e/ "in the hand" for the Italic part of this pedigree, and further Old English /mund/ "palm, protection", Old High German /munt/ "hand, guardian" (living on in /m"undig, M"undel, Vormund/ etc. with non-concrete semantics), the Albanian verb /marr/ "to take", Gk. /m'are:/ "hand" and some other attestations. It looks like an r/d-heteroclitic, I don't dare here a detailed reconstruction, but the cognacy of the words seems possible, and maybe even clear. Btw., the Albanian verb might point into the direction of a semantic scenario similar to the mentioned one in Baltic and Slavic (*if* the Albanian verb < *mar-ne/o- is not a denominal formation meaning "to handle" othl.). The other possibility is that the more abstract meanings (circling around "power, ability to protect athl.") are older for this etymon, *ghes-r- being the anatomical term from the beginning. I have no idea on /handus/ at the moment. St.G. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Jun 23 06:35:09 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 01:35:09 -0500 Subject: Hyug- Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: petegray Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 1999 2:25 PM > I (Peter) commented: >>> an initial H- added before R? >> Pat asks: >> Do you mean as an equivalent substitute for *s-? > No, not at all. Merely that since PIE has one fricative prefix (albeit of > uncertain meaning and status) we should not rule out on ideological grounds, > the suggestion of another fricative prefix in situations appropriate for its > particular phonology. Actually, I think it likeliest that the initial laryngeal in these circumstances was derived from *?V-, the glottal stop though I suppose that it may have been transformed into a fricative. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Jun 23 06:54:27 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 02:54:27 EDT Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same way we >have no data on IE -- this statement is incorrect. PIE was spoken 5000 years ago and the earliest written examples of IE languages date to the 2nd millenium BCE. There is a gap of no more than a few millenia. The earliest human languages were spoken -- using a minimal estimate -- at least 50,000 years ago. Probably considerably more. This is several iterations more temporal distance than between us and PIE. From fortytwo at ufl.edu Wed Jun 23 07:15:39 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 02:15:39 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. Oh? So then, Latin is ergative? You can have sentences like "Marcum videt" = "[he] sees Mark", which is an accusative and a verb, and nothing else. Yet, Latin is clearly not ergative. > A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so far as I > would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. How so? Looks accusative to me, with the caviat that "Me" is used for both nominative and accusative. If children's language were truly "ergative", you'd expect to have "Me hurt", but "I did it" (that is, Me = absolutive, I = ergative), does this occur? Granted, I'm not an expert in language acquisition, but I don't believe that occurs. -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Wed Jun 23 10:04:31 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 11:04:31 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: At the risk of moving ever farther from the subject of this thread: the significant point about 'clann' (to use modern spelling) is that it corresponds with Welsh 'plant', though the latter has generated also a singular form 'plentyn' with vowel affection alongside the acquisition of a standard suffix to derive a singular form from a collective, cf 'adar' [birds] -> 'aderyn' [a bird], whereas Gaelic has not. Now, Gad. 'c' in such words as 'ca/', 'co\', 'ciod', 'cuin' (and corresponding with Welsh 'pwy', &c) is for IE *'kw' (or however the current fad for representing the sound goes), not 'k'. There are some words in Gad. which have 'c' where Britt. apparently had 'p', judging from the modern descendents. Eg 'corcor' [believed to be from Latin 'purpur' via Britt.]. The hypothesis is that this occurred at a time when the correspondence Gad. 'c' = Britt. 'p' was perceived by some Irish speakers and was productive, and the rule for Celtic that IE *p -> 0 meant that there was still no 'p' in our phonetic repertoire. Somewhat later, 'p' became a part of the sound repertory of Old Irish, and is found in ecclesiastical borrowings (sometimes showing marked metathesis, and sometimes having 'b' in some modern spellings, but dialects may not recognise a voiced/voiceless distinction except by position): easpuig (bishop); peacaidh (sin); aspal (apostle, but also 'abstol'); 'pog' (kiss: 'signum _pacis_') &c. So, we assume that there was a raft of 'borrowings' at a period when we had no 'p' but assumed that where 'p' occurred in Britt. we had 'c'. We also assume that this was before the arrival of (institutional) Xtianity with Patrick in 432 CE - the words with specifically Christian usage came with/after him, though there are variations in the Gad. names from Patricius which include 'Cotruig' as well as 'Padruig'. [But that may also raise questions about the number of Patricks. the notion that the Romans never came to Ireland, and the suppression of the discovery of a Roman settlement in, I think, Meath, in recent years, among other things.] At a pinch it may simply be that British and Irish languages were sufficiently close to be perceived by their speakers as not that different, ie as mutually comprehensible dialects but with regular differences, just as there were no doubt regular differences between dialects within each island. 'Borrowing' may therefore not be am facal deas - to visit the 'right/south' thread briefly - for these words which reached us from Latin (or whatever) through Brittonic into Gadelic. Not sure about the other possibility, that CC *klanta -> Britt. *planta. But I do not recall ever seeing a proposal of such a change in British/Welsh (and I cannot think of other correspondences between Gad. (and *IE) 'c' and Britt./Welsh 'p'. But I may be wrong. Some of this reminds me of the tale of the anglophone who supposed that the vocabulary of Gaelic was impoverished and was assured that it could be used for any concept expressed in an English word. So the anglophone asked if there was a word in Gaelic for 'spaghetti', and received the reply 'certainly, but before I tell you what it is, would you tell me what the English for 'spaghetti' is? And we may have been playing with (other people's) words in a sub-Joycean manner for longer than you might think: after all, 'sprig(s)/sprog(s)' are familiar words for 'kid(s)', while 'scion' is more elevated. wbw Gordon [But with lots of ancestors &c called McAllister, -Neill, -Duff-, -Brien. &c - and written with a slight grin.] At 3:06 pm 22/6/1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >>I have never found the derivation of -cland- from Latin -planta- wholly >>convincing for several reasons. Unless the Latin word is itself a >>Q-Celtic or Etruscan loaner, if this is apparently a case of the p/q >>variable distribution, my suspicion is you'd expect to se a q- or a c- >>form in Latin rather than a p-. > Or it conceivably Latin may have been a borrowing from >Oscan or Gaulish, etc. used with a marked meaning, in which case any >original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant >(which are used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work >in a metaphorical sense. >[snip] >Rick Mc Callister >W-1634 >Mississippi University for Women >Columbus MS 39701 From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Wed Jun 23 11:47:34 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 07:47:34 -0400 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: One thing I failed to note was that Peter is calling *bheret a root form (I call it class I or strong thematic class) while to me only *gh'ent is a root form. Some of the confusion is due to this misunderstanding. petegray wrote: > No present, and we call the past form an aorist. When there is a > present, we call it an imperfect. I know, and it hides an important problem: Without native speakers to guide us, we don't know if a given root form (and to some extent reduplicated forms) is really an aorist. In RV, at least, the syntactic distinction between imperfects and aorists has puzzled people (Elizerenkova claims that the difference was still developing, and Gonda accepted it, while at the same time believing that there was an aspectual difference! Watkins attributes the fuzziness to mainly the root present/aorist.) > The full grade is already a marker of something, even if it is conditioned > by presence of the accent. I was wanting to distinguish the handful of > presents which were simply the bare root, from those that carried this or > any other marker of the present. There are 40 roots, after eliminating the kars.i type and the s'ete/s'aye types, in RV and Brahmanas that use the bare root. [Since root presents disappear rather quickly in MIA, and their occurance in Classical Sans depends greatly on genre, and obviously new roots use either -aya- or in case of those that look like borrowing from Drav/Munda we see only -a- or -aya-, we must add the remaining roots of Panini's II class to this, which will bring the total to about 60.] Hittite has about 60, I think, and percentagewise, this is more than Sanskrit. This is more than a handful. > Greek uses the perfect for the present state which results from a previous > action. Tethne:ka ("I have died") actually means the present state, "I am > dead". In some parts of Sanskrit literature, it is the aorist which > carries this meaning, not the perfect. Elsewhere aorist and perfect are > in practice indistinguishable, and the perfect drops out of use. Which parts of Sans lit? Please be specific concerning times, genres etc. --- There is an important point when it comes to discussing the diachronic syntax of Sanskrit, namely Sanskrit is distinguished from MIA primarily by phonology, and ``good Sanskrit'', as opposed to ``hybrid Sanskrit'', by morphology. However, all varieties of Sanskrit from the time of Asvaghosa (~1 c. CE) show Prakrit influence in syntax. This varies both over time and genre. For example, Kavya lit uses mostly finite verbs in past tense, while drama dialog, like Prakrits, uses only the PPP (in -ta). However, Prakrits have only one way of referring to the past and this influence led to the imperfect, aorist, perfect and PPP being used interchangably as all of them would be translated into Prakrit the same way. Still, Kavyas, most of which deal with mythical/legendary themes use the perfect much of the time while the occassional exception such as Dasakumaracarita purpoting to contain fist person narratives use imperfect and aorist in such places. Epics and fables fall in between, with the parts usually considered to be latter using the different forms more interchangably. However, when we look at the older lit, whether the older upanishads or Pali, show a very different picture. In upanishads, aorist is used for recent past, perfect for narration of legends/myths while resultatives are consistantly expressed with the PPP. In Pali, the perfect has disappeared, but aorist and imperfect fell together into a preterite, and PPP is used form a resultative. But PPP based forms occur much more in direct speech. Interestingly, in the parts of Ramayana considered to be older, direct speech uses PPP virtually exclusively. I don't see any parts of Sans lit in which aorist has resultative meaning. Nor does perfect die out in Sans, only in Pali. The difference between aorist and perfect in RV is hard to pin down, but it is a jump to conclude that it did not exist. Such a conclusion is reached by appealing to variants now with aorist, now with perfect. But how do we know that the intended meaning was always the same? For pragmatic reasons, recent (relative to the time of reference) events and events with persisting results overlap. For example, Tamil has a resultative with auxillary iru and a ``completive'' with auxillary vid.u. Depending on where the emphasis is, either one is possible in many cases. I very much doubt that non-native speakers can find the difference by studying 2000 pages worth of novels. But the meaning conveyed is different and it is definitely wrong to conclude that they are equivalent. Based on variants, we can conclude (and some do) that moods did not have distinct meanings. Now, in English, ``Go'', ``You may go'', ``You can go'', ``You will go'' can all be used for issuing orders. Does that mean that they are all interchangeable? Regards -Nath From edsel at glo.be Wed Jun 23 14:48:56 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 16:48:56 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: petegray Date: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 7:44 AM >[re: the link between Latin amicus and the ambi- root] >Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the ambhi- root has wide attestation: >Latin, Greek, Armenian, Albanian and with syllabic /m/ Old Indic, and >Celtic. Pokorny relates it to the ambo root. >Peter -----Original Message----- From: Max W Wheeler Date: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 6:55 AM Subject: Re: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! >On am-: [ moderator snip ] >Catalan ~ [am], and Occitan ~ ~ , however, are >not the original forms of the preposition meaning 'with'. This was >in both languages, from Latin 'at', 'chez'. It is likely that >[am] was originally a conditioned variant before nasal consonants. Since > `in' had a variant [em] before labial consonants, these >prepositions mutually influenced each other in form, and in part in >meaning. In Catalan and are both >current for `travel by plane, fly'; in spoken Valencian has >replaced ~ altogether. The influence spreads to the >preposition < L. `to'. Colloquial Catalan has
  • ella> ~
  • `I said to her'; standard
  • ella>. [Ed] I suppose you're right about the Catalan 'amb' < Lat. 'apud'. This type of nasalization is indeed very common in all languages of the Iberian Peninsula, also in dialects (e.g. 'alb?ndiga' (meatball) > 'arm?ndiga' in Murcia). >However, the main problem with Ed's etymology (apart from the timing) is >that Lat. is not a preposition. It is rare as a prefix, and >dubiously productive. And Catalan is not a prefix. >But in any case, hasn't *mbhi got a perfectly good IE pedigree, nothing >to do with am- of Lat. amare? >Max [Ed] I said 'a prepositional prefix', i.e. a prefix with the meaning of a preposition, like 'ob-', 'ad-' etc. Anyway, its Greek counterpart, which I mentioned, IS a preposition (+ gen. +dat. or +acc.). According to my Latin dictionary, 'ambo:' ('both) is related to 'amb-' and Grk. 'amph?' ('around'). I have no problem with its IE pedigree, quite the contrary: it would mean that the Etruscan root under discussion might be of IE origin, like so many other. And I don't see why any relationship with 'amicus', 'amare', etc. should be excluded a priori: is it because of its lack of attestation in most other IE languages (except those of Latin descent of course)? Couldn't it be a double transfer: early Lat./IE 'amb(i)-' > Etr. 'am(e)-' > later Lat. 'am-'? I know of at least one more or less similar case: Lat castra > Arab al-kasr > Cast. alc?zar. (and Lat. Lucentum > Ar. Al--lukant > Val. Alacant/Cast. Alicante). This happens when another culture is temporarily dominant in the same place, which was certainly the case in Rome. Ed. From mrr at astor.urv.es Wed Jun 23 15:10:10 1999 From: mrr at astor.urv.es (Macia Riutort Riutort) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 17:10:10 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Es gibt eine kleine Anzahl von W?rtern im Spanischen, die im Kastilischen -rd- aufweisen, im Katalanischen jedoch -rr-. Zum Beispiel: Katalanisch: esquerre - esquerra - Spanisch izquierdo - izquierda Katalanisch: cerra - Spanisch cerda ("Borste") Katalanisch: marr? - Spanisch mardano ("Schafbock") usw. Da dies haupts?chlich in W?rtern aus dem Substrat vorkommt, wird angenommen, dass -rd- bzw. -rr- die Anpassung an das vorkastilische bzw. vorkatalanische Lautsystem eines ihm unbekannten Lautes -oder Lautgruppe- der gebenden Substratsprache. M.R. >Yes, though there is a phonological problem here, since Basque >`left', definite form , should not have yielded Castilian > (m.), (f.). Since there is evidence that Basque >once had a word-forming suffix *<-do>, meaning something like `bad >thing', it is possible that an unrecorded Basque derivative * >was borrowed into Castilian before being lost from Basque itself. >Nobody knows. >Larry Trask [ moderator snip ] From mrr at astor.urv.es Wed Jun 23 15:26:00 1999 From: mrr at astor.urv.es (Macia Riutort Riutort) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 17:26:00 +0200 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: Es tut mir leid, aber ich habe noch nie das Wort "hijos" in dieser Bedeutung geh?rt! Es wundert mich nur so; umgekehrt aber schon: v?stago M.R. >original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant >(which used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work >in a metaphorical sense. >Rick Mc Callister [ moderator snip ] From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Wed Jun 23 15:50:06 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 10:50:06 -0500 Subject: Ergative vs. accusative Message-ID: Pat responded to Larry: >I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in >linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to >transitive constructions: [1] >Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. [2] >Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. [3] >However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified >agent on B [4] >whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. All well and good, so far as the first two sentences are concerned. However, what you said about combining this verb with the patient alone simply isn't true. Some ergative languages happily omit the agent, others do not. So what I've numbered [3] above will be legal in some ergative languages but not in others. Conversely, [4] is perfectly grammatical in many accusative languages. Couldn't think of an example good enough to convince you. But look at this post. Must've seen stuff like this before, right? Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From alderson at netcom.com Wed Jun 23 18:15:41 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 11:15:41 -0700 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> (proto-language@email.msn.com) Message-ID: On 22 Jun 1999, Patrick Ryan wrote: >I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in >linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to transitive >constructions: (1) >Language A: > Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. (2) >Language B: > Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. (3) >However, in Language A, > noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B (4) >whereas in Language B: > noun(B)+acc. verb >is *ungrammatical*. This flies in the face of reality. Let's take an example from Latin, an easy example of a language with accusative morphology *and* syntax: Amicus videt. "The friend sees." Amicum videt. "(Some unspecified one) sees the friend." Amicus videtur. "The friend is seen (by an unspecified agent)." There is nothing ungrammatical in the sentence "amicum videt". This, of course, assumes that the verbs in question are transitive. If they are *intransitive*, then your fourth example is correctly labeled as ungramma- tical, but your third is ungrammatical in the sense you assign to it; it could only mean that B is the *subject* of the verb (whether performer of the action or entity in the state) in a language with ergative morphology and syntax. Rich Alderson From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 19:20:21 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 20:20:21 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >> If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or >> Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian >> or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. >Pat responds: >Actually, I think it may well be the case for Chinese. I have a copy of >Chao's _Mandarin Primer_ (336 pages), which has a Chapter III - Grammar, >beginning on page 33, and *ending* on page 59. I can compare this to Forbes' >_Russian Grammar_, which contains 436 pages of grammar and indices. Try Li/Thompson: Grammar of Mandarin Chinese, and tell us whether you find all their observations and grammar points condensed in Chao's primer. As for primers, I have here a Russian primer of about 60. pp. To share an anecdote: a teacher of a teacher of mine used to confine his Sanskrit lectures to one (short summer) semester only "Sanskrit *ist* nicht l"anger", he used to say, and if you look at Mayrhofer's masterly condensed grammar, one gets the impression that this is true. However, it keeps nagging at me what might have ridden Wackernagel to fill his tons and tons of paper with nothing but - Sanskrit grammar ????? Please, Pat, don't tell us that the "complexity" of languages is measured by the thickness of volumes devoted to them. there are primers, phrase-books, Hippocrene drivel dictionaries, moderate textbooks, reference grammars and huge encyclopedic grammars. One can write 50 pages on Chinese as well as 600 (meaningful and relevant pages, that is). St. From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 20:04:15 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 21:04:15 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002801bebd05$c61f9fc0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >You are very kind to say that my "line of argumentation . . . matters" but, >in practice, most ideas which I have advanced as a result of my own attempts >at applying logical analysis to the questions have been summarily >dismissed --- I believe, primarily on the basis of my lack of documentable >qualifications. Come on, no fishing for compliments. I mean it: your line of argumentation matters, not whom you agree with ... >Now, we are already straining the patience of the IEists to pursue these >general matters so I propose that you read my Proto-Language essays, in >which I do attempt to provide "arguments", and let us take these matters to >the Nostratic list which may be glad for a little activity. I disagree, since the question of stadiality, resp. the discussion whether accusative languages must have of necessity passed through a (however organized) ergative stage *does* matter for Indo-European studies. And non-IE parallels or counterinstances *are* relevant for that. I can't think of any sane IEist who would disagree (for students of rhethoric: this strategy of mine is called immunization ;-), we are not discussing possible external relations of IE, are we ? Anyway, we will soon reach the end of this thread, since, without having read what follows, I'm sure I'll find there that you now fully agree with me that Sumerian is no exception to the general rule that all "ERG" languages display some signs of accusativity. >Pat, aside: >I have questioned this as well, and prefer to group the neutral and active >types together. Uh-oh ! Are you sure you know what the active type is all about ? >Pat responds: >I do not believe it stands outside the core issue. But I agree that it is >primarily morphological. The core issue is *what is done*, the morphological technique tells us *how* it is done. >Because, I believe as a matter of principle, that simplicity must precede >complexity --- at least once. I see I can't shatter this belief, but you have failed so far to demonstrate why on earth ergativity is something simpler than accusativity. >I have advanced arguments in my essays. I would be glad to take up any point >mentioned therein if the list (or the Nostratic list) permits it. If it has to do with ergativity and its synchronic and diachronic typology, I don't see why this should be inappropriate for this list. Ergativity is, after all, a phenomenon found in IE languages (some of them, at least). >> Because I don't have to, being able to defend my points on my own. If you >> want a reading-list on ergativity, I could give you one, of course. >Pat responds: >Gosh, I thought we were discussing Sumerian (:-#) Ergativity. >>> Pat answered: >>> Since you are writing of what Sumerian is or is not, I would think you >>> might have understood that the point of my remark was that, although the >>> markings of the maru: may be fairly well established, there is absolutely >>> no agreement on what grammatical role these endings signify. >R-S answered: >> There is hardly any overall agreement about anything in linguistics, given >> that a lot of journals in the field still accept anything they are handed >> over. If there is disagreement on this particular point on your side, state >> it and give your reasons. >Pat responds: >Economically, let me refer you to the easily obtainable Thomsen, page >115-116. Shoot, I just brought the copy I'm using back to the library, and by the time you read this I will be in Bonn, where the local copy has been stolen. So, you will have to quote the passege, I'm afraid. Note, however, that Thomsen is fairly positive on *split*-ergativity in Sumerian. >Pat responds: >I am not surprised that you and I disagree here since aspect seems like a >topic unapproachable without Fingerspitzengefuehl and everyone's fingers are >subtly different but, for the record, I believe an English sentence like: >"I am/was eating up the cake" >is, simultaneously "perfective" and "progressive". There may be aspect-theories on the market which would have to agree with that. In the framework I'm using, the construction would still be imperfective (by virtue of being progressive), and telicity (this construction being telic in nature) would fall outside the domain of aspect proper, but it doesn't hurt if we agree to disagree here. (Just as an aside, since I can't resist: perfective aspect is associated but does not necessarily coincide with/imply completion of the action described; what makes this example still imperfective is that it describes an action lasting for a discernable period of time during which you were at each given moment eating the cake; you were, however, not eating it *up* at each given moment during this stretch of time; you see, aspect theory is even more difficult than alignment typology ;-) >Pat responds: >I would be pleased to learn of *one* source that designates the i- as a sign >of maru:! As I said, the fault was mine alone, so I am this ominous source. >Pat responds: >My primary source of information is Thomsen, who rarely takes a position but >outlines various competing views. Her discussion of i- (pp. 163-166) does >*not* list anyone who so believes. I was the only one - for half an hour ... >> If this is correct, this could eventually force me to admit (no, not that >> Sumerian is not a split-ergative language, it is) that my chosen example >> was not unambiguous enough to drive my point home (since the scribe *could* >> have intended his from to be read /indu/). >See Thomsen pp. 162-163. No, I literally don't see this (s.a.). >Pat responds: >Yes, that would be the consensus view of Sumerologists but, of course, this >is only true of relatively Late Sumerian. I discuss these matters in the >Sumerian Grammar available at my website. Just tell us here what is true of relatively early Sumerian. Some people have a slow web-connection or even have to pay for it. >Pat asks: >Could you refer me to a linguists who has sureveyed every other ergative >language and determined that splits always occur? No, I cannot refer you to such a person, but the typological investigation of ergativity has now reached a stage where some assertions are possible (though moot points remain, to be sure). The history of the investigation of ergativity is a model history of the successive demolition of myths. First, the myth of ergative constructions being passive (and ergative-languages, if I'm allowed to use this sloppy term here, do not know such a thing as autonomous passives; some do) went overboard, then the myth that ergativity is something primeaval, something, so to speak, with a mesolithic aroma, was assigned the dustbin as its habitat, because language change may take the way from or to ergativity; finally, the idea that ergativity is something which pervades every pore of the languages where it is found got its share. No, nobody has investigated each and every "ERG-language", but ever since the phenomenon of ergativity splits (and there being more than just case-marking which is can display this phenomenon) became widely known, information keeps pouring in from all sides that split-ergativity is the norm, very probably (I'm dead sure) the exclusive state-of-affairs for all languages which show some kind of it. How can this ever be proven ? Just like any other language universal it cannot, given that we don't have and never will have access to *all* human languages of the past, the present and the time to come; it can only be *dis*proven by showing a fully ergative language (there are fully accusative languages, though). You said Sumerian has no traces of accusativity, I showed that it has. That's how the game is played. Try a different language, and I'll show you the splits. We may now safely regard the discussion of Sumerian, a perfect split-ergative language, as settled. I won. Stefan From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 23 19:00:09 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 20:00:09 +0100 Subject: indoeuropean/hand Message-ID: Rick asked> any ideas why manus is feminine? "Hand" is feminine (so I have heard) in a overwhelming number of languages that have grammatical gender, just as "foot" is masculine in a very large number. There might be a deep psychological thing here, about receiving and giving, which betrays an even deeper psychological thing connecting grammatical gender with biological gender. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jun 23 19:03:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 20:03:14 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: A side track because the discussion has turned to Chinese grammars. I have a Chinese grammar which has sections like: Cases: Chinese has no cases Subjunctive: Chinese has no subjunctive Voices: The Chinese verb does not alter for voice and so on .... Needless to say, it is an old book. Peter From georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl Wed Jun 23 20:10:36 1999 From: georg at rullet.leidenuniv.nl (Stefan Georg) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 21:10:36 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. >Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. >However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb >will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B >whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. Beats me, taedet me, menja ozhidajut ... >And a sentence like: >. . . eg{~}er-a-ni u{3} dam dumu-ni dumu Ba.Ba.g{~]u{10}-ke{4}-ne >ba-ne-sum-ma >must be rendered in English by the passive: >. . . that his estate and his wife and children were given to the sons of >Babag{u}. Having to be rendered by the passive in English is not the same thing as "being passive in nature". St. From Sunnet at worldnet.att.net Wed Jun 23 20:08:29 1999 From: Sunnet at worldnet.att.net (Eugene Kalutsky) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 16:08:29 -0400 Subject: indoeuropean Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote: >...Other languages have replaced this >apparently oldest word for "hand", to wit Latin manus, Gothic handus, >Baltic and Slavic *renka/ronka (from a verb meaning "to grasp", cf. >Lithuanian /rinkti/. The limited distribution of this core-vocabulary item >in IE has once given rise to the bromide that the early Indo-Europeans did >have feet but no hands (mocking at linguistic palaeontology, of course). Correction: Slavic *renka/ronka means "arm", not "hand". The word for "hand" in Russian is /kist'/ - looks like it wasn't lost there after all. Gene From adolfoz at tin.it Wed Jun 23 22:17:45 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 23:17:45 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Ed. Robertson wrote: > The Kaminia stele from Lemnos shows beyond doubt that there were speakers of > an Etruscoid language situated not far from Lydia. Lydian itself does not > appear closely related to Etruscan and its relatives genetically, but there > may be Etruscoid substrate influence on Lydian... > You don't have to believe the Etruscans and Raeti came from Anatolia, but > Etruscoid was spoken in that area. I do not know the Lidian. Certainly I doubt that Etruscan came from Anatolia. As for the Lemnian, Carlo de Simone, "I Tirreni a Lemno", 1996, quotes an article by R. Drews and the book "In search of the Indo-Europeans" etc. by J. P. Mallory whose conclusions are similar : 1) R. Drews: "settlers from Etruria established themselves on Lemnos (and wrote the inscription)". 2) Mallory: "The similarity between Etruscan and Lemnian is too great to be explained by anything other than a more direct and immediate historical connection, possibly involving a visit to Lemnos by Etruscan traders". 3) de Simone, p. 88: "Etruscan and Lemnian cannot be connected to the most ancient pre- or para-Hellenic linguistic stratum." The Lemnian 'Tyrrenoi' came from west (i. e. from Italy). > ... if one tends to detect or imagine cognates in IE roots > as part of the interpretation process, one cannot then go and point to > these 'cognates' and say that they prove a relationship. That would be > a bit tautological, unless the volume of the evidence was > overwhelming. I agree on the tautological aspect of the interpretations. However I think that the 'metodo calcolatorio' (and similar), used by deserving scholars like Pallottino or Rix and consisting in supposing that an Etruscan formula corresponds to a Latin or Italic or Greek formula for circumstantial reasons, is more tautological because discarding linguistic bases a priori, one has less elements at disposal (it is supposed that the circumstantial reasons must be always searched together with the linguistic etyma). > According to Lejeune, there are 2 Venetic words that may be explained > by comparison with Germanic alone, although in general Venetic appears > to be very close to Latin: > .an.s'ore.s <->? Gothic 'ansts' (grace/favour) , and > SSELBOISSELBOI <->? Gothic 'silba' (self) > Any others in mind? *mainly* by comparison with Germanic. Add: 'frivi', 'teuters', 'kvidor', 'verkvaloi' and many Personal names (Tival-, Crumelon-, Raupat-, Lem-on-, Qualt-, Ege-t-, Urkl- etc.) for which there is the circumstance of the cognominatio by synonymy (as well as in Etruscan, on my mind). As for the common ancestors of Etruscans and Rhaeti, I never formulated even the question, because I am yet too involved in gathering epigraphic data. However your suggestions on the chronologies are very interesting. Adolfo Zavaroni From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 23 21:43:10 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 23:43:10 +0200 Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <006a01bebce8$580f8800$063aac3e@ida.bt.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, petegray wrote: > Jens said: > > [In Sanskrit] zero-grade thematic verbs have the same > > history as the thematic aorists ... [etc, deriving them from a long chain > of reformulations: middle > middle +t > (reinterpreted as active) > > (extension by analogy to all other persons) > (reinterpreted as imperfect) > > (re-creation of a new present).] > Apart from the superficial implausibility of all this, and the fact that > other aorists were not reformulated as imperfects, and did not create new > present tenses, where is your evidence? > Peter Dear Peter and colleagues, I do not think the chain of reformulations is longer than many other stories generally accepted (or even as long as some known to be true). For the type _tuda'ti_, the key example itself has apparently replaced a nasal present still seen in tundate and Lat. tundo. Strunk has shown that nasal presents go with root aorists, thus we would like to derive tuda'ti from an original root aorist if that is in any way possible. And of course it is. Likewise we would like to have a root aorist beside the nasal present vinda'ti (Avest. vinasti shows the older unthematicized form), and so we have a strong motivation to derive the thematic aorist a'vidat from a root aorist. Now, the only difference between the structures tud-a- and vid-a- is that the former is synchronically a present stem while the latter is an aorist. I see little difficulty in a change from "aorist _atudan_" to "imperfect _atudan_". If "turn" can come to mean "become", why can't "strike one time" come to mean "strike in the situation at hand" which is a much smaller change? A parallel change has apparently occurred in Ved. de'hmi 'form, knead' and le'hmi 'lick' which, in view of the nasal presents seen in e.g. Lat. fingo, lingo, also look like old aorist stems. That should be no great surprise, for the functional change is quite small: it only takes the use of the aorist form as an imperfect, then the rest follows by itself. I wonder how else anybody would understand these data - except by ignoring their being just that. Jens From jer at cphling.dk Wed Jun 23 22:13:24 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 00:13:24 +0200 Subject: Momentary-Durative In-Reply-To: <001001bebc92$fc7621c0$60e6abc3@ida.bt.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, petegray wrote: > I (Peter) wrote > >>> ... at first a tenseless verb was used with endings -m, -s, -t >>> and so on. > Jens said: >> ... what does "at first" mean here? > I meant only "prior to the time when tense was marked morphologically." If > you wish to take issue with me, you must also take issue with Friedrich > Mueller (1857), Thurneysen (1885), the detailed proof by Kiparsky in > Watkins' *verb* 45; Bruggman, Kieckers, Burrow, Martinet, Kurylowicz, > Erhart, Wright, Brandenstein, Szemerenyi, Beekes, Baldi, and others. > [...] There are other voices, speaking against this view, but they are > few: Herbig (1896), Hattori (1970), Manczak (1980). Your posting also > recognised the existence of these tenseless forms in -m -s and so on. > Jens said: >> If the tense markers such as the primary *-i >> and the augment *e- were once independent words, how can we know they are >> younger than the person markers? > The formation is younger, not necessarily the elements. Bingo, I guess we agree - and so do most of the above-mentioned authorities. Watkins of course has even pointed out _what_ the augment was before it came to mark past tense in an obligatory way in some (most? all non-Anatolian?) of the daughter languages, equating the *e- as he did with the Luvian sentence opener a-. Since the Hittite opener is nu- and Old Irish has an empty preverb no- (nu-) in the imperfect doing much the same job as the augment, there is good reason in calculating with two temporal particles meaning 'now' and 'then'. But I do not think this calls for a time when the tenseless (and moodless) injunctive was _alone_ - although it does not exclude that either. But at any rate we seem to agree that the primary forms and the augmented preterits must have existed as two-word juxtapositions before they were univerbated. It looks much like the story of the determinate adjective of Baltic and Slavic which is quite parallel and would be accepted as inherited, were it not for very the different sandhi rules that reveal that the univerbation had not yet occurred in Proto-Balto- Slavic; still, the collocation is inherited as a fixed series of two separate words. > (I said): >>> thematic - >>> or especially sigmatic - aorists may be later than athematic and asigmatic. > Jens replied: >> Thematic yes, ... But >> there is no indication that the sigmatic aorist is an innovation; > Perhaps I misunderstand you. It seems to me that a formation + > + is necessarily derivative, and that the primary form is > + < ending>. But is that not like saying that a given noun is older than the plural of the same noun? Does that make much sense? Can't a speaker of a language make derivatives from stems as soon as they arise? (I grant of course that he could not do it before.) > Jens went on: >> It must >> once have had a special function, and I suppose it was inchoative (the >> aorist corresponding to the sk^-presents). > The -sk^- presents are not normally incohative in IE, except in Latin. We > should not read back into PIE the situation we find in the languages with > which we are most familiar. Hittite uses -sk- for an iterative/durative; > Tocharian for a causative. Possibly the iterative /durative is more > original, as there are traces of it in Homer as well as Tocharian. I guess the widespread iterative value of sk-formations has started with those that were reduplicated. The Lithuanian st-presents are also inchoative. > Likewise your connection of -s- aorists with -sk^- presents is not regular > anywhere. Many (if not most?) in Latin have -v- perfects, suggesting the > root was a vowel or a laryngeal (e.g. creH-sco, gnoH-sco). Some have > reduplicated forms (disco didici). LIkewise, aorists in other IE langs do > not show the connection you suggest. No, not regularly, I know, but often enough and in archaic-looking examples enough to make it, in my estimate, an archaism you cannot disregard. [...] Cheers, Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jun 23 21:58:22 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 16:58:22 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! In-Reply-To: <006901bebce8$5702fa00$063aac3e@ida.bt.net> Message-ID: Actually, it's not unfortunate in that Etruscan am- may have been borrowed from IE and then borrowed into Latin as amicus, etc. So the IE origin of ambi- is not the point. The point is if it's possible that Etruscan am- --provided it means "to be with, accompany, etc." might be a verb based on ambi- or something similar >[re: the link between Latin amicus and the ambi- root] >Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the ambhi- root has wide attestation: >Latin, Greek, Armenian, Albanian and with syllabic /m/ Old Indic, and >Celtic. Pokorny relates it to the ambo root. >Peter Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From fortytwo at ufl.edu Sat Jun 26 03:11:24 1999 From: fortytwo at ufl.edu (Nik Taylor) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 22:11:24 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > Not much of an answer, I'm afraid. The "passive" interpretation of > ergativity was based squarely on morphology, with no attention to syntax > -- even though a passive is a syntactic form. More particularly, it was > based on the confused and erroneous notion that a grammatical subject > must always stand in the same case. To look at it another way, had Europeans spoken ergative languages, they might've analyzed accusativity as "antipassive". -- Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting -- Benjamin Franklin http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html ICQ #: 18656696 AIM screen-name: NikTailor From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jun 26 14:54:50 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 09:54:50 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Trask Sent: Friday, June 25, 1999 11:33 AM > On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> Even if the earliest morphemes of language were not recoverable as >> you would maintain, logic tells us that monosyllables would have, at >> least, predominated. Larry responded: > I'm afraid that "logic" tells us no such thing. This is no more than a > wild guess. Pat writes: It is an inference from the fact that all complexity in this universe is based on simplicity. Pat wrote: >> The syntax of these monosyllables would have had to convey whatever >> grammar the language had at that point; and this would certainly >> resemble languages which are currently termed "isolating". Larry responded: > An isolating language is indeed isolating: Pat interjects: Incroyable! Larry continued: > no dispute there. But even a > monosyllabic language need not lack inflections altogether: there exist > languages with internal inflection, as in English `sing', `sang', > `sung'. Pat responds: 1) English is *not* monosyllabic; 2) The variation i-a-u is *not* an internal inflection but rather a phonological response to now missing former inflections; 3) No monosyllabic language could "afford" to assign inflectional meanings to vowels in CVC syllables because the number of available monosyllables would be unreasonably and impractically reduced. 4) If you still maintain that internal inflection happens in monosyllabic languages, an example from a monosyllabic language might be more convincing. Pat wrote: >> I prefer (though, of course, you and many others may not) to >> distinguish the terms: "isolating", referring to a language for >> which we can reconstuct no flectional or agglutinating stage; and >> "analytic", for a language we can. Larry responded: > Bizarre. What is the point of trying to classify languages on the basis > of what we can reconstruct for their ancestors? Pat writes: Singularly odd! Does historical linguistics really have a point? Hmmm! Pat wrote: >> Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same >> way we have no data on IE but, by analysis, we can reasonably form >> an opinion as to what IE must have been like. In the same way, we >> can analyze current linguistic data, and form an opinion as to what >> earliest language must have been like though, I admit, the process >> is much more doubtful. Larry responded: > Hardly comparable. With PIE, we are reconstructing only 2000-3000 years > earlier than our earliest substantial texts. Trying to reconstruct > 50-150,000 years back is a whole nother ballgame. Pat writes: That is your a priori belief and, we have seen, that it cannot be reasonably supported. Pat wrote: >> I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in >> linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to >> transitive constructions: >> Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >> will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. >> Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >> will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. >> However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb will be interpreted as an >> activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B Larry commented: > No, not at all. The facts vary from language to language. In Basque, > for example, the absolutive is interpreted as the performer of the > action if the verb is intransitive, as the patient if the verb is > transitive. Same appears to be true of Dyirbal. Pat rejoinds: Comments such as these are unresponsive to the question of some "transitive constructions" being labeled *ergative*. I proposed a useful employment for the term "ergative language", the appropriateness of which you and Ralf-Stefan seem to doubt Pat continued previously: >> whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. Larry responded: > I take it you've never come across Spanish, Italian, Russian or Latin. > Spanish: `S/he has seen the film.' > Latin: `S/he saw Caesar.' > Accusative noun, verb, no overt subject, perfectly normal. Pat rejoinds: I do not see a 'funny face' so, temporarily, I will assume that you are serious about these remarks. "Overt" means 'open and observable', and the overt subject of the Spanish phrase is "he/she" indicated by -0 on [ha]; of the Latin phrase, 'he/she' indicated by -(i)t. I would think you might have understood that I was referring to languages which do not code the subject with affixes on the verb. Pat continued previously: >> I would characterize Language A as (at least, essentially "ergative"). Larry asked: > But which languages are like this? >>> I know no Sumerian. But, speaking generally, the `passive' >>> interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years >>> ago. Pat responded previously: >> Perhaps to your satisfaction but not to mine. Larry commented: > Not much of an answer, I'm afraid. The "passive" interpretation of > ergativity was based squarely on morphology, with no attention to syntax > -- even though a passive is a syntactic form. More particularly, it was > based on the confused and erroneous notion that a grammatical subject > must always stand in the same case. Pat responds: In the sentence mentioned above: "noun(B)+abs. verb", which is interpreted as an 'activity is performed by an unspecified agent on B' --- this construction perfectly meets the definition: "a construction in which an intrinsically transitive verb is construed in such a way that its underlying object as\ppears as its surface subject".; accordingly, it is "passive". Larry further commented: > For Basque, and for other ergative languages, the "passive" view of > transitive sentences can be shredded, point by devastating point. [ moderator snip ] Pat responds: Perhaps we should reopen the question of where you have "shredded, point by devastating point" the view that "for Basque(, and for other ergative languages,) the "passive" view of transitive sentences". I saw nothing that I recognized as doing this in your Basque grammar. Pat wrote previously: >>>> I assert that the relationship is closer between an object and >>>> transitive verb in an ergative language because the relationship >>>> (frequently OV) and is immediate and direct. The ergative agent, >>>> IMHO, can best be regarded as a *missible* adverbial adjunct to the >>>> core verbal phrase, consisting of the Obj + V, having no more importance >>>> to the verb than an adverbial phrase denoting the target or manner >>>> of an intransitive verb of motion. Larry responded: >>> This may or may not be so in some ergative languages, but it is >>> certainly not true for ergative languages generally. Pat questions: And on what basis would you assert that? Larry mentioned: > In Basque, for example, intransitive subjects (absolutive), transitive > subjects (ergative) and direct objects (absolutive) are all equally > optional: > Gizonak mutila jo zuen. > man-the-Erg boy-the-Abs hit Aux > `The man hit the boy.' > Gizonak jo zuen. > `The man hit him.' > Mutila jo zuen. > `He hit the boy.' > Jo zuen. > `He hit him.' > All perfectly normal in context. Pat comments: Keine Endung ist auch eine Endung. Surely you must have run across that someplace. And your translation of "mutila jo zuen" as '(he) hit the boy' is not preferable to 'the boy was hit'. > [on my (Larry's) observation that children acquiring English do not go > through an ergative stage] Pat commented: >> I am sure you are better read on child language acquisition patterns >> than I. Based on what I have observed personally, I doubt your >> assertion but if studies have shown this (could you name one?), how >> can I dispute it. Larry responded: > We now have a vast body of data on children acquiring English. And I > know of no study, not one, which recognizes an ergative stage during > acquisition. Pat previously continued: >> A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so >> far as I would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. Larry responded: > Yes, sure, but a single datum proves nothing. Children at the two-word > stage also say things like `Mommy get', meaning `[I want] Mommy to get > the ball.' This should be impossible in an "ergative" view. Pat rejoinds: If it were "a single datum", you would not have so readily agreed. It is a common pattern of construction. I am also at a loss to see why 'Mommy get' (which I would rather interpret as 'may Mommy get *something*' is "impossible in an 'ergative' view". Zero is, after all, not zilch. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From jer at cphling.dk Sun Jun 27 23:54:36 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 01:54:36 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <002101bebcfd$46ef7ac0$9fd3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan quoted Larry Trask to have written on Sunday, June 20, 1999 7:31 AM: [...] >> [S]peaking generally, the `passive' >> interpretation of ergativity, once so popular, was discredited years >> ago. [...] Dear discussants and List, pardon the intrusion, but this has always been a great question in my head: Has the passive interpretation of the ergative really been disproved? Does it not still provide a smooth and unproblematic answer? And are not passive circumlocutions known to underlie some of the cases of ergative structure arising in the light of historical records, as e.g. in Indic? Was the discrediting not rather aimed at making the passive understanding synchronically valid? Of course that is not sensible, for it is only when a passive periphrasis has lost its marked status as a passive that it can be perceived as the "normal" verb which is then construed with an ergative syntax. If the old normal verb disappears, and a new way of expressing the passive - used when that is meant - if created, one would presumably have to speak of an ergative structure. It is my impression that the fierce opposition against the passsive analysis of the ergative has often (mostly? - always?) been part of a semi-political crusade against the desire to explain everything in terms of linguistic history. And, of course, if one does not care about the origin of the ergative structure, there is no point in deriving it from something different from what it is in pure synchrony (actually there is no point in deriving it at all). But if one _does_ want to find out how it came into being, is the passive solution not still the best guess around - and is it not known to be true in a number of cases? A truly innocent question for information: Are there other avenues that are _known_ to have led to the creation of an ergative than the one starting from an old passive? Jens From jrader at m-w.com Mon Jun 28 08:41:50 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 08:41:50 +0000 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Charles Li and Sandra Thompson's _Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar_ (1981) is bulky (691 pages) and, as I recall, hardly touches on issues such as formation of compounds, which play a great role in Standard Chinese. Jim Rader > [Patrick Ryan:] >>> If this were true, then a good reference grammar of Chinese or >>> Vietnamese ought to be shorter than a good reference grammar of Russian >>> or Latin. And this does not appear to be the case. >> Actually, I think it may well be the case for Chinese. I have a copy >> of Chao's _Mandarin Primer_ (336 pages), which has a Chapter III - >> Grammar, beginning on page 33, and *ending* on page 59. I can >> compare this to Forbes' _Russian Grammar_, which contains 436 pages >> of grammar and indices. > It is hardly reasonable to adduce one small and elderly primer of > Chinese and compare it with a large reference grammar of Russian. > In any case, I have seen at least one very large reference grammar of > Mandarin, though I can't recall who wrote it. > Larry Trask From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Tue Jun 29 18:00:50 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:00:50 -0700 Subject: 50% Spanish or German, 50% Chinese Message-ID: Dear Rich & IE-list subscribers: At the risk of beating an undead horse, i would very much like it reiterated that not all of us have software capable of recognizing the means by which some lucky subscribers' software can encode diacritics and other expanded character sets. And worse, some of us have software that recognizes such codes, but interprets them quite differently from the way they are intended. For instance, the software we have here at SCU automatically converts all such codes into representations of various Chinese characters. The result is that i have recently received many postings including extended and richly-exemplified discussions of Spanish vocabulary, and most of the words in question have been printed half in Spanish and half in Chinese, to the point that i have been unable to make any sense out of the posting at all, and have regretfully decided i must automatically dump & ignore the whole discussion. I've recently begun noticing similar problems with postings in German. People, i'm very happy for you if your servers can handle expanded character sets. But frankly, that sort of thing isn't as useful as some people think it is, especially when not EVERYBODY has access to such things. Please, out of compassion for your less well-endowed (or differently-endowed) colleagues, try to restrict yourselves to the basic ASCII character set when posting. Thank you! Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** [ Moderator's comment: I have pointed this out in the past, and been roundly excoriated for my point of view, taken somehow to be "English-only". I will once again suggest that we adopt a modified TeX-like accent-writing system, in which the accent (in the typographical sense, which includes umlaut/diaeresis/trema and the like) is written next to the character affected. (In TeX systems, it must precede, but I think that context can disambiguate for human readers.) Should I send out a list of the TeX conventions, for those unused to them? --rma ] From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Tue Jun 29 18:08:38 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:08:38 -0700 Subject: PIE vs. Proto-World Message-ID: Pat Ryan writes: >> Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same >> way we have no data on IE To which JoatSimeon at aol.com responds: > -- this statement is incorrect. PIE was spoken 5000 years ago and the > earliest written examples of IE languages date to the 2nd millenium > BCE. > There is a gap of no more than a few millenia. > The earliest human languages were spoken -- using a minimal estimate -- > at least 50,000 years ago. Probably considerably more. > This is several iterations more temporal distance than between us and > PIE. I think this misses the point of what Pat was saying. At least, it misses the point *i read into* what hann was saying. What i understood in Pat's statement was that we have no overt, explicit, readily-available data on `the earliest human language'; but then, we don't have any such data on PIE, either; everything we have on PIE has to be starred because it's reconstructed, ergo hypothetical. Which is certainly true. There is no PIE corpus any more than there is a Proto-World corpus. I would, however, reject any suggestion that our knowledge of PIE is ipso facto on a par with our knowledge (or lack thereof) of `Proto-World'. Though i admit frankly to being little more than an amateur at this game, i am quite confident of *most* of what we claim to know about PIE. Although i'm not prepared to go as far as Calvert Watkins (i think it was?) who composed a fable in PIE, i certainly do not doubt that, in principle, it could be done with our current state of knowledge. Whereas i regard `Proto-World' as little more than an entertaining fantasy. Best, Steven -- Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC (886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504 fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 05:17:57 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 00:17:57 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 1:54 AM >> proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >> Of course we have no data on the earliest human language in the same way we >> have no data on IE > -- this statement is incorrect. PIE was spoken 5000 years ago and the > earliest written examples of IE languages date to the 2nd millenium BCE. > There is a gap of no more than a few millenia. > The earliest human languages were spoken -- using a minimal estimate -- at > least 50,000 years ago. Probably considerably more. > This is several iterations more temporal distance than between us and PIE. So what? It only requires us to expand our universe of applicable data. The idea that vocabulary is irretrievably lost is jejeune. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 05:20:57 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 00:20:57 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Nik and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Nik Taylor Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 2:15 AM > "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >> whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. > Oh? So then, Latin is ergative? You can have sentences like "Marcum > videt" = "[he] sees Mark", which is an accusative and a verb, and > nothing else. Yet, Latin is clearly not ergative. If you and Larry Trask believe this, be my guest. The subject is incorporated in the verb, and this objection is, at the best, naif. [ moderator snip ] Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jun 29 10:36:23 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:36:23 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <001c01bebfe3$d901ae40$029ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [responses to selected points only] [on my examples of languages which can delete subjects] > "Overt" means 'open and observable', and the overt subject of the > Spanish phrase is "he/she" indicated by -0 on [ha]; of the Latin > phrase, 'he/she' indicated by -(i)t. I would think you might have > understood that I was referring to languages which do not code the > subject with affixes on the verb. OK, then -- try Japanese. Japanese does not code subjects in the verb, and yet omission of the subject is perfectly normal in Japanese, but an object is still interpreted as an object. [PAR] > In the sentence mentioned above: "noun(B)+abs. verb", which is > interpreted as an 'activity is performed by an unspecified agent on > B' --- this construction perfectly meets the definition: "a > construction in which an intrinsically transitive verb is construed > in such a way that its underlying object as\ppears as its surface > subject".; accordingly, it is "passive". No, not so. See below. [LT] >> For Basque, and for other ergative languages, the "passive" view of >> transitive sentences can be shredded, point by devastating point. [PAR] > Perhaps we should reopen the question of where you have "shredded, > point by devastating point" the view that "for Basque(, and for > other ergative languages,) the "passive" view of transitive > sentences". I saw nothing that I recognized as doing this in your > Basque grammar. That's probably because I haven't written a Basque grammar. I have, however, written elsewhere on this point. [on my Basque example] >> Mutila jo zuen. >> `He hit the boy.' [PAR] > Keine Endung ist auch eine Endung. Surely you must have run across > that someplace. And your translation of "mutila jo zuen" as '(he) > hit the boy' is not preferable to 'the boy was hit'. Sorry, not so -- not so at all. In English, the utterance `He hit the boy' is *only* possible in a context in which `he' has already been identified: otherwise it's gibberish. And the same is true of Basque : it is only possible in a context in which the identity of the hitter is already known, and otherwise it's gibberish. In no context whatever could it be interpreted as `The boy was hit'. There *must* be an identified hitter in the discourse. To express `The boy was hit', Basque uses other constructions. One possibility is . This is literally `They hit the boy', and it can be used to mean this, when the identity of `they' is known. But equally it can mean `The boy was hit', in a context in which the identity of the hitters is unknown. In this case, it is functionally, though not formally, identical to English `The boy was hit'. But Basque also has an overt passive: . This means literally `The boy was hit', and it can be used with no hitter identified. Moreover, this construction does not allow the addition of an overt agent: the Basque passive permits no agent. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jun 29 12:37:57 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 14:37:57 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: <001c01bebfe3$d901ae40$029ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: >Pat responds: >1) English is *not* monosyllabic; >2) The variation i-a-u is *not* an internal inflection but rather a >phonological response to now missing former inflections; ????? Good heavens ! The variation i-a-u *is* an internal inflection, synchronically and diachronically, and just nothing else. What are you talking about ? >3) No monosyllabic language could "afford" to assign inflectional meanings >to vowels in CVC syllables because the number of available monosyllables >would be unreasonably and impractically reduced. >4) If you still maintain that internal inflection happens in monosyllabic >languages, an example from a monosyllabic language might be more convincing. I'm not sure what you mean by monosyllabic language. If this is a language where every *word* may consist of one and only one syllable, morphology sebsu stricto being absent from the language, your constraint does seem to make some sense; such languages, where no syllable may be regarded as functional (as opposed to autosemantic) are, however, quite rare and I'm not sure that they exist at all; if, however, monosyllabic means that every *morpheme*, lexical or grammatical, will consist of one syllable and one only (and, vice versa, every syllable will have some autonomous meaning or function), a phenomenon which does occur quite frequently, Classical Tibetan may come close; and Classical Tibetan does have ablaut. >Pat wrote: >>> I prefer (though, of course, you and many others may not) to >>> distinguish the terms: "isolating", referring to a language for >>> which we can reconstuct no flectional or agglutinating stage; and >>> "analytic", for a language we can. >Larry responded: >> Bizarre. What is the point of trying to classify languages on the basis >> of what we can reconstruct for their ancestors? >Pat writes: >Singularly odd! Does historical linguistics really have a point? Hmmm! Standard morphological (technique-) typology is strictly synchronic, and this is the way this terminology is generally used. It is not unthinkable, and possibly even useful in some respects, to introduce a new terminology here which does reflect what may be known about the diachrony of a given language. So, speaking of "isolating (but former agglutinative)" lgs., or "flectional (but formerly isolating) ones" may be useful in the context of diachronic typology. However, this is not the general use of these terms and if we want to reflect diachronic knowledge in out typological terminology we should devise new and unambiguous terms. Using the old labels with new contents is misleading and confusing, and there is already enough confusion in linguistic terminology. >>> whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. >Larry responded: >> I take it you've never come across Spanish, Italian, Russian or Latin. >> Spanish: `S/he has seen the film.' >> Latin: `S/he saw Caesar.' >> Accusative noun, verb, no overt subject, perfectly normal. >Pat rejoinds: >I do not see a 'funny face' so, temporarily, I will assume that you are >serious about these remarks. >"Overt" means 'open and observable', and the overt subject of the Spanish >phrase is "he/she" indicated by -0 on [ha]; of the Latin phrase, 'he/she' >indicated by -(i)t. I would think you might have understood that I was >referring to languages which do not code the subject with affixes on the >verb. No, it was not clear that you were referring to this kind of languages. Let's have a look at one of those, though: KhalkhaMongolian (no subject affixes on the verb): Nom chamd yavuulav. (He, she, it, someone, nobody, I, we, you and whatnot) -"book (indefinite acc.)", "to-you", "sent". (Someone) sent you the book. "Someone" is not the translation, but the dummy for every agent you wish and which can be made clear by the context; it is overtly expressed by nuffin'. The extra-syntactic context, that is. A perfectly normal sentence in context. It is true that Khalkha does use the personal pronouns in examples like this to disambiguate, but it doesn't have to. The construction is certainly not ungrammatical. Stefan Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From Georg at home.ivm.de Tue Jun 29 12:43:11 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 14:43:11 +0200 Subject: indoeuropean In-Reply-To: <001701bebdb4$362f8740$94c14d0c@com> Message-ID: >Stefan Georg wrote: >>...Other languages have replaced this >>apparently oldest word for "hand", to wit Latin manus, Gothic handus, >>Baltic and Slavic *renka/ronka (from a verb meaning "to grasp", cf. >>Lithuanian /rinkti/. The limited distribution of this core-vocabulary item >>in IE has once given rise to the bromide that the early Indo-Europeans did >>have feet but no hands (mocking at linguistic palaeontology, of course). >Correction: Slavic *renka/ronka means "arm", not "hand". The word for "hand" >in Russian is /kist'/ - looks like it wasn't lost there after all. That's a late metaphor, since the basic meaning of kist' is "tassel, brush, grape athl.", so basically sthl "the end of a lengthy object" othl. In other Slavic languages the anatomical meaning has hardly developed at all, cf. Bulgarian /kiska/ "bunch (of flowers)", Serbo-Croat /kishchica/ " a kind of brush", Slovak /kyst'/ "tassel", Polish /kiSC/ "bunch othl." Moreover, while I know Russian speakers to resort to this term when having to refer to the equivalent of English "hand" in cases of potentially harmful ambiguity (though most of the times I witnessed it /kist' ruki/ "k. of the arm" was the expression), I will be tremendously surprised to learn that this is after all the normal, unmarked, generally used Russian word for the lower part of our upper extremities. I doubt it. Ah, I see you may be playing with the idea that /kist'/ goes with *ghes-r/to- ??? Not possible, because of consonantism and vocalism (and semantics). Chance resemblance. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 29 15:13:43 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 10:13:43 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <199906231526.RAA13082@astor.urv.es> Message-ID: Lo siento, Ich spreche kein Deutsch! Se me hace que dice que no hab?a escuchado ese uso de "hijos". Mi suegro es agricultor en Costa Rica y llama "hijos" para los reto?os de plantas como el banano [que se siembra con reto?os en vez de semilla]. He escuchado ese uso entre muchos latinoamericanos, por ejemplo para los "spider plants". V?stago, para m?, es la talla de cualquier planta en cualquier etapa de crecimiento. Curiosamente, en Costa Rica el v?stago de ma?z se llama "chingaste" --ya que en N?huatl [seg?n una explicaci?n] chincaztli est? relacionado con el verbo para cortar. >Es tut mir leid, aber ich habe noch nie das Wort "hijos" in dieser Bedeutung >geh?rt! Es wundert mich nur so; umgekehrt aber schon: v?stago >M.R. >>original *klanta would have disappeared. In Spanish, shoots off a plant >>(which used to propagate) are called "hijos" [children], so it might work >>in a metaphorical sense. >>Rick Mc Callister Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 [ moderator re-encoded (experimental) ] Lo siento, Ich spreche kein Deutsch! Se me hace que dice que no hab{\'i}a escuchado ese uso de "hijos". Mi suegro es agricultor en Costa Rica y llama "hijos" para los reto{\~n}os de plantas como el banano [que se siembra con reto{\~n}os en vez de semilla]. He escuchado ese uso entre muchos latinoamericanos, por ejemplo para los "spider plants". V{\'a}stago, para m{\'i}, es la talla de cualquier planta en cualquier etapa de crecimiento. Curiosamente, en Costa Rica el v{\'a}stago de ma{\'i}z se llama "chingaste" --ya que en N{\'a}huatl [seg{\'u}n una explicaci{\'o}n] chincaztli est{\'a} relacionado con el verbo para cortar. >Es tut mir leid, aber ich habe noch nie das Wort "hijos" in dieser Bedeutung >geh{\"o}rt! Es wundert mich nur so; umgekehrt aber schon: v{\'a}stago >M.R. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 29 15:15:51 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 10:15:51 -0500 Subject: indoeuropean/hand In-Reply-To: <006e01bebdac$53cb2780$4239ac3e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: It's an interesting metaphor I was also interested in why the "masculine" form manus and not *mana? >Rick asked> any ideas why manus is feminine? >"Hand" is feminine (so I have heard) in a overwhelming number of languages >that have grammatical gender, just as "foot" is masculine in a very large >number. There might be a deep psychological thing here, about receiving >and giving, which betrays an even deeper psychological thing connecting >grammatical gender with biological gender. >Peter Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jun 29 15:49:55 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 16:49:55 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 28 Jun 1999, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > pardon the intrusion, but this has always been a great question in > my head: Has the passive interpretation of the ergative really been > disproved? Does it not still provide a smooth and unproblematic > answer? And are not passive circumlocutions known to underlie some > of the cases of ergative structure arising in the light of > historical records, as e.g. in Indic? There are two separate issues here, the synchronic one and the diachronic one. (1) Is a particular ergative construction "really" passive in nature? (2) Does a particular ergative construction descend by reanalysis from an earlier passive? For the diachronic question (2), the answer "yes" has been defended in some particular cases, including Indo-Iranian. But a passive origin for the Indo-Iranian ergative constructions has also been disputed, and I am not aware that there exists a consensus among specialists. Since Indo-Iranian is a rare case in which we have millennia of documentation of the intervening stages, and since the right answer to the question is still not obvious, then it must be very much harder to answer the question in respect of other cases for which little history is available. At present, there appear to be few cases in which the origin of an ergative construction is fully understood and beyond controversy. It is interesting to note that, in Bob Dixon's classic 1994 book `Ergativity', the chapter on the appearance and disappearance of ergativity is the briefest and most diffident. Dixon states, on p. 189, the following: "It is certainly the case that *some* ergative constructions have arisen through reinterpretation of a passive." [emphasis in the original] He cites Indic and Iranian as cases in point, but admits, correctly, that this majority view has been seriously questioned by some scholars. Dixon also notes Polynesian, frequently also cited as an instance of passive-to-ergative, but concludes that the evidence is conflicting and that the interpretation is not secure. But Dixon also cites examples of ergative constructions which, in his view, have very clearly *not* developed from passives, but from other constructions. His examples are Hittite and Pari. For the synchronic question (1), I may again quote Dixon, arguably the leading specialist in ergativity on the planet, again from p. 189: "There are very few people who would, today, seriously promote the view that ergative constructions are `really passives'." I can endorse this statement. In all the cases I know of, there exists no evidence supporting the view that an ergative is a passive, and there is often plenty of evidence against it. > A truly innocent question for information: Are there other avenues that > are _known_ to have led to the creation of an ergative than the one > starting from an old passive? See Dixon on Hittite and Pari, and see also my article in the Frans Plank volume `Ergativity' (AP, 1979). While I'm here, I will note that Dixon also cites what he regards as clear examples of languages in which ergativity has partly or wholly disappeared after being very prominent at an earlier stage. His examples are Australian, Sino-Tibetan and Mayan (p. 193 ff.) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Jun 29 16:54:17 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:54:17 -0500 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days In-Reply-To: <37715D09.6440@tin.it> Message-ID: What are the various similarities that have been postulated between Etruscan and Anatolian languages? All I've seen so far are a couple of lexical items and one or two suffixes. I know vitually nothing about Anatolian languages, so it's not like I could spot them myself :> Lemnian DOES seem to be a different language from Etruscan, although my completely subjective reaction to side-by-side comparisons of vocabulary is that the difference is along the line of that between Spanish and Portuguese. I am not, however, taking into account the other items for which no comparison has been made. There are also some lexical items in Etruscan common to both Greek and Latin and not all these seem to be borrowings from Greek. BTW: Whatever happened to the idea by Starostin et al.[and commented on by AMR & Sheveroskin] that Etruscan might be a Caucasian language? [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 19:56:24 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:56:24 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> Jens said: >>> If the tense markers such as the primary *-i and the augment *e- were once >>> independent words, how can we know they are younger than the person >>> markers? I said: >> The formation is younger, not necessarily the elements. Jens said: > Bingo, I guess we agree Not necessarily. Other origins for the primary -i have also been suggested, such as the deictic -i found in words such as Gr. nuni (< nun) , and appearing in a range of IE langs. There has even been a suggestion that it was a locative. I said: >> Perhaps I misunderstand you. It seems to me that a formation + >> + is necessarily derivative, and that the primary form >> is + < ending>. Jens said: > But is that not like saying that a given noun is older than the plural of > the same noun? No. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 19:28:14 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:28:14 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] I said: >> In some parts of Sanskrit literature, it is the aorist which is [the >> equivalent of Greek perfect], not the perfect. Elsewhere aorist and perfect >> are in practice indistinguishable, and the perfect drops out of use. Nath gave a full reply (for which, thank you - the details are helpful) and asked: > Which parts of Sans lit? Please be specific concerning times, genres etc. This distinction of the aorist from the imperfect and perfect as the tenses of narration is very common in the Brahmana language (including the older Upanishads and the Sutras) and is closely observed. Violation of it is very rare. Earlier, in the Vedic hymns, the same distinction is prevalent, but is both less clear and less strictly maintained. The aorist can even be used where a present would be expected. In the later language the perfect is simply a preterit or past tense equivalent with the imperfect and fully interchangeable, and sometimes co-ordinated with it. Different authors appear to prefer different tenses. Older grammars (e.g. Whitney), modern grammars by Indian linguists (e.g. Misra) and modern lingistics books (e.g. Hewson & Bubenik "Tense and aspect in IE") all say the same kind of thing. > I don't see any parts of Sans lit in which aorist has resultative meaning. An example from the RV (sorry I don't have the exact reference): putrasya na:ma grhanti praja:m eva anu sam atanat. "He gives the son's name; and thus _he has extended_ his race." I happily grant that there might be distinctions; but if there are, they are subtle, and not present in all cases. This does not weaken my argument that Sanskrit and Greek do not agree in the meaning and the function of these tenses, even if they do agree on the formation. Those books of PIE (or of IE languages, such as Baldi's recent one on Latin) which read the Greek situation back into PIE, do so on the basis of one language only, and in my opinion (which is often wrong, but seldom humble), this is an unscholarly prejudice. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 20:07:55 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 21:07:55 +0100 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: >> English `sing', `sang', `sung'. > Pat responds: > 2) The variation i-a-u is *not* an internal inflection but rather a > phonological response to now missing former inflections; Its origin does not affect how it operates today. It remains an "internal inflection" now wherever it came from. And actually, despite some text books, this pattern is indeed a direct survival of the PIE ablaut. IE roots of the kind CRC had the ablauts CeRC, CoRC, CR.C. The first appears in the Germanic present, the second in the past singular, the third in the past plural and the past participle (remember that PIE /o/ appears as /a/ in Germanic). After standardisation of the vowel of the past, we find in modern German: werfen warf geworfen helfen half geholfen beginnen, begann, begonnen and singen, sinnken, springen, trinken, rinnen, spinnen etc etc etc and in modern English: sing sang sung sink sank sunk etc etc etc etc. Some Germanic ablaut is indeed the result of "vowel harmony" with a vowel in an ending which has since been lost - but this example is not one. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 19:49:35 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:49:35 +0100 Subject: Momentary-Durative Message-ID: Jens said: > I wonder how else anybody would understand these data - except by > ignoring their being just that. Alas, Jens, I do not see data, but hypothesis and ideology. The data is that some IE langs use nasal presents for a particular root where others do not, so your evidence from Latin cannot count for much in Sanskrit. The data is that root aorists are associated with a variety of present formations, including nasal infixes. The hypothesis which has become an ideology, is that all root aorists must have had a nasal present. For example, you said: > Strunk has shown that nasal > presents go with root aorists, thus we would like to derive tuda'ti from > an original root aorist if that is in any way possible. I see no reason to, since I do not share your ideology. You may or may not be right - the important thing is that what you offer is not data, and so you should not insult those of us who do not agree with it. You said: > Likewise we would like to have a root aorist beside the nasal present > vinda'ti ... and so we > have a strong motivation to derive the thematic aorist a'vidat from a root > aorist. Traditionally, these are taken from different roots. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jun 29 19:34:39 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:34:39 +0100 Subject: Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! Message-ID: Ed connected Latin amicus and ambo, and suggested a derivation of them both from Etruscan. Max and I both pointed that ambo has a good PIE pedigree, so this can't work. Ed then said: >And I don't see why any relationship with 'amicus', 'amare', etc. should be >excluded a priori: .... Couldn't it be a double >transfer: early Lat./IE 'amb(i)-' > Etr. 'am(e)-' > later Lat. 'am-'? Anything's possible! But it's easier to take the word we know to be IE as IE, and leave open the possibility of an Etruscan origin for amicus, if you want to explore that. Don't be mislead by the initial "am-". In ambo it derives from syllabic /m./, which cannot be the case in amicus. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 21:25:19 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 16:25:19 -0500 Subject: Ergative vs. accusative Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 10:50 AM > Pat responded to Larry: >> I do believe that the term 'ergative language' has a real value in >> linguistic analysis --- to differentiate two basic approaches to >> transitive constructions: > [1] >> Language A: Noun(A)+erg. noun(B)+abs. verb >> will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. > [2] >> Language B: Noun(A)+nom. noun(B)+acc. verb >> will be interpreted as A performs an activity on B. > [3] >> However, in Language A, noun(B)+abs. verb >> will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified >> agent on B > [4] >> whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*. > All well and good, so far as the first two sentences are concerned. However, > what you said about combining this verb with the patient alone simply isn't > true. Some ergative languages happily omit the agent, others do not. So > what I've numbered [3] above will be legal in some ergative languages but not > in others. > Conversely, [4] is perfectly grammatical in many accusative languages. > Couldn't think of an example good enough to convince you. But look at > this post. Must've seen stuff like this before, right? Well, I agree with your first comment. But *most* ergative languages treat the agentive as a missible adverbial adjunct of the verb. Perhaps there may be a question of these languages being "truly" ergative? I am unaware of any accusative language in which this contsruction is grammatical. As you know by now, Larry indicated that verbal inflections should not be considered an expression of the subject in languages like Latin. I consider this position unjustifiable. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 21:40:31 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 16:40:31 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Richard M. Alderson III Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 1:15 PM > This flies in the face of reality. Let's take an example from Latin, an > easy example of a language with accusative morphology *and* syntax: > Amicus videt. "The friend sees." > Amicum videt. "(Some unspecified one) sees the friend." > Amicus videtur. "The friend is seen (by an unspecified agent)." > There is nothing ungrammatical in the sentence "amicum videt". If I would have meant noun(B)+acc. verb+infl., I would surely have written that. The -t expresses the nominative subject in your sentence. > This, of course, assumes that the verbs in question are transitive. If they > are *intransitive*, then your fourth example is correctly labeled as > ungrammatical, By the logic you seem to what to employ, it would not necessarily be: Romam eo. > but your third is ungrammatical in the sense you assign to it; it could only > mean that B is the *subject* of the verb (whether performer of the action or > entity in the state) in a language with ergative morphology and syntax. Sorry, that is simply incorrect. See Thomsen, p. 186: Suku-bi u{3}-ul-gid{2}, 'after their food portions have been measured out' ... Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 22:58:12 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 17:58:12 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Stefan Georg Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 3:10 PM [ moderator snip ] > Having to be rendered by the passive in English is not the same thing as > "being passive in nature". Pat responds: How about explaining "passive in nature"? Is that a Platonic idea? Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jun 29 23:16:37 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 18:16:37 -0500 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Stefan Georg > Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 2:20 PM > Try Li/Thompson: Grammar of Mandarin Chinese, and tell us whether you find > all their observations and grammar points condensed in Chao's primer. > As for primers, I have here a Russian primer of about 60. pp. > To share an anecdote: a teacher of a teacher of mine used to confine his > Sanskrit lectures to one (short summer) semester only "Sanskrit *ist* nicht > l"anger", he used to say, and if you look at Mayrhofer's masterly condensed > grammar, one gets the impression that this is true. However, it keeps > nagging at me what might have ridden Wackernagel to fill his tons and tons > of paper with nothing but - Sanskrit grammar ????? > Please, Pat, don't tell us that the "complexity" of languages is measured > by the thickness of volumes devoted to them. there are primers, > phrase-books, Hippocrene drivel dictionaries, moderate textbooks, reference > grammars and huge encyclopedic grammars. One can write 50 pages on Chinese > as well as 600 (meaningful and relevant pages, that is). Pat responds: Well, on page 40 of Chao's Mandarin Primer, are listed "Affixes": 11 are listed; of these 6 qualify as related to "inflections" : modal -m(en), phrase marker -le; completed action -le; progressive action -j(y/e); possibility or ability -de; subordination -de. Undoubtedly, a historical grammar might provide a few more but I consider this a pretty simple system. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 and PROTO-RELIGION: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jun 30 10:16:33 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 11:16:33 +0100 Subject: `cognate' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This posting will not be news to the linguists on this list, who may prefer to stop reading at this point, unless they want to offer criticisms of the definitions below. But I have noticed that a significant number of non-linguists on this list have apparently misunderstood the sense of our technical term `cognate': many of them appear to believe that `cognates' means something like `words of similar form and meaning in different languages' -- which, of course, it does not. I hope it may be considered appropriate and helpful, therefore, if I post the entry for `cognate' from my forthcoming dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics. This has not yet gone to press, and I am still willing to accept suggestions for revisions, though I may be unable to consider large revisions. ************* *cognate* 1. Narrowly, and most usually, one of two or more words or morphemes which are directly descended from a single common ancestral form in the single common ancestor of the languages in which the words or morphemes are found, with no borrowing. For example, English and German `father' are cognate, being descended from Proto-Germanic *, and both are more distantly cognate with Spanish , Irish and modern Greek , all `father', all of these being descended from PIE *. 2. Broadly, and less usually, one of two or more words which have a single common origin but one or more of which have been borrowed. For example, English , Old French `jail', Spanish `cage' (Old Spanish ), Basque `hut', Occitan `cage' and Basque `cage' are all ultimately descended from an unrecorded Latin * `small enclosed place', but only the French, Occitan and Spanish words are narrowly cognate: the English and Basque words have been borrowed from Old French, Old Spanish and Occitan, respectively. Note: some linguists object to the use of the word in the second sense. 3. [erroneous] A label improperly applied to items of similar form and meaning in languages not known to be related, when these are presented as candidates for possible cognation. Common among linguistic amateurs, this objectionable usage is not unknown even among linguists, but it should be avoided: items cannot be labelled "cognates" until a substantial case has been made that they genuinely *are* cognate. ************* Other entries in the dictionary, of course, stress the fallacy of regarding mere *Anklaenge* as evidence for anything. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Jun 30 14:44:14 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 16:44:14 +0200 Subject: accusative and ergative languages Message-ID: Let me briefly comment upon some of the recent arguments: "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: > A sequence like: "Me hurt. Tommy did it" is a virtual ergative so far as I > would judge. I have heard children speak in this way. Thjis surely is not ERG-like! It prestent tense, we ould hvae "me hurts - Tommy does it" (or so) which shows that "me" still is in teh ACC case (without AGR on the verb - "-s" has a "dummy agent" as a trigger. The same is true with structures like German "mich friert" etc... > (3) > However, in Language A, > noun(B)+abs. verb > will be interpreted as an activity is performed by an unspecified agent-- This is true for only some ERG systems. In such cases, the verb very often gets a plural morphology to install AGR with a "hidden" agent. In many other ERG systems, the ommission of the "agent" leads to new instransitve stzrictures with the inference ABS > AGENT (cf. I-ERG boy-ABS bring > boy-ABS come etc.). Discussing the possible PASS background of ERG structures, JEns finally asks: > A truly innocent question for information: Are there other avenues that > are _known_ to have led to the creation of an ergative than the one > starting from an old passive? Sure, there are plenty such avenues! Most of them have to do with the Silverstein Hierarchy (or its expansion). The less a potiential agent in (stronger) transitive scenarios is thought to bear inherent agentive features, the more it becomes likely that this "light agent" is marked by something that strengthens its agentive role. Some options are: (alienable) genitives (which can be extended to "heavy agents" on an inalienable basis), loctives (esp. with very light (or secondarily lightened) agents or weather phenomena etc...), instrumentals that are metaphorized to "agent" markers in the context of anthropomorphization), true "agentive" markers that are grammaticalized from e.g. a deicitic source, topic markers... Another possibility (though related to the strategies mentioned so far) is the reanalysis of 'active' structures in an ergative perspective (note that I do not want to suggest any 'active' typology for IE here, see my ealier postings): the S-split would then be harmonized on an S=0 level. All these strategies are based on the semantic or functional grading of the agentive (in terms of the manipulation of "lightness" and "heaviness"). Naturally, ERG techniques can also evolve from a special 'treatment' of the objective: One of the most prominent one is that of syntactic and/or pragmatic foregrounding which means that O is syntactically referred to as an intransitive S. Such a technique may be equivalent to passive strategies, however, this is only ONE of the many possible inferences. The syntactic/lexicical interface is touched upon when causatives of intransitives form the basis for newly established ERG features: Here, the morphosyntax of the causer can be introduced in the paradigm of other 'true' agentives via analogy. Finally, agreement strategies may play an important role in the game. If, for instance, agreement is coupled with some kind of person hierarchy the presense of any SAP in a clause may condition agreement irresepctive their functional or semantic role. Hence, a scheme nSAP:A > SAP:O would necessariliy produce an erg-like AGR pattern (in case AGR becomes active), whereas SAP:A >nSAP:O would produce ACC-AGR. ERG AGR patterns may also result from the reinterpretion of clausal layers, e.g. the structure SV // AOV could be read as SV // A[OV] which means that O becomes some kind of closer attribute to the (participle-like) verb... Wolfgang [Please note new phone number (office) :+89-2180 5343] ___________________________________ | Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze | Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen | Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 | D-80539 Muenchen | Tel: +89-21802486 (secr.) | +89-21805343 (office) NEW ! NEW ! | Fax: +89-21805345 | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________