Sociological Linguistics

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Nicholas and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Nicholas Widdows <nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk>
Sent: Friday, May 28, 1999 10:27 AM

> <Pat Ryan:>

> 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.

<snip>

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

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