From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 1 00:11:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 00:11:07 GMT Subject: Danube homeland. In-Reply-To: <199902101641.KAA10413@orion.means.net> Message-ID: "Mark Odegard " wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal holds for an earlier Danubian homeland. I >have not yet read anything from him indicating why he believes this That's strange. I believe I have given quite a few arguments here and elsewhere over the years. Maybe the problem is that most of the time the arguments are over details and not about the big picture. Of course, arguing about the big picture is something I don't usually have the time for, as it would require writing something like a book-size essay to do it properly. A short summary will have to do. If we look at the archaeological and genetical facts, it's clear that the most significant event in European prehistory, in terms of population, was the relatively slow advance of farming people from Anatolia north-west across the heart of the continent to the North Sea, something which happened between 7000 and 4000 BC. Of course it does not necessarily follow that the same event is also responsible for the fact that Indo-European languages are spoken over most of Europe, but it makes it the best candidate by default, and any alternative theories should offer a pretty good case for why the IE homeland should be located elsewhere, and what happened to the languages of these "Anatolian farmers" or "Old Europeans". The most popular alternative model, developed by Gimbutas and Mallory, puts the homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 4000 BC. The way I see it, there are two fundamental weaknesses in that theory, one "pre-4000" the other "post-4000": how can be be sure that formative steppe cultures such as Dniepr-Donets and Sredny Stog did not originate in the west (Balkan or LBK zones) and were not in fact linguistically derived from the Old European cultures? And how can we be sure that North and Central European cultures such as Corded Ware and Bell-Beaker originated from the steppe and do not in fact ethnically and linguistically represent continuations from "Old European" cultures such as TRB and Michelsberg? That being said, I do believe that the "Kurgan" model represents something real, and that IE languages did spread from the steppe zone both East (Indo-Iranian) and West (Greek, Albanian). There is enough archaeological evidence for steppe influence in the Balkans and subsequently Greece and Anatolia, and enough historical precedents from the age of Mediaeval steppe incursions to make such a scenario likely. There is no archaeological evidence, however, nor are there historical parallels for direct steppe influence beyond Hungary, as Mallory himself admits in "In Search of the Indo-Europeans". Most importantly, the "Kurgan" model cannot adequately explain the linguistic facts. The gap between Anatolian and the rest of IE is too large to be fitted into the limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements into SE Europe. The unique features of Western languages like Germanic, and to a lesser degree Celtic and Italic, also remain largely unexplained. My conclusion is that the Kurgan movements represent the spread of the "Indo-Greek" branch of Indo-European, not the initial spread of IE itself. It's too little, too late. Returning to the Anatolian farmers model, one problem remains: a date of 7000 BC for PIE is too old, and the exact match between the area of exclusively Indo-European languages and the area of agricultural spread 7000-4000 BC is broken in one area, namely the point of entry in the Aegean, where we have records of non-IE languages like Lemnian, and possibly non-IE languages like Minoan. Clearly, Renfrew's model is far too simplistic ("too much, too soon"). But if we imagine instead that Lemnian and the related Etruscan (also originally from the Aegean area) are more distantly related to IE (linguistic arguments for which can be given), then it's perfectly imaginable that PIE developed after 7000 BC somewhere in the Balkans or Hungary, and spread across the rest of the continent (C., N. and E. Europe) in the LBK/Danubian phase, c. 5500 BC, as well as to the steppe zone (Dnepr-Donets [>Tocharian?] before 5000 and Sredny-Stog [>Indo-Greek?] c. 4500). I could go on, but I hope this gives an impression of why I hold for an earlier "Danubian" homeland. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 09:35:47 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 09:35:47 +0000 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Here's the first batch. I know there have to be more out there. I > included Watkin's remarks re words he sees as IE. I didn't go too > far into Theo Vennemann's explanations because his work is > accessible. I would appreciate corrections since I read Theo's > German works with a dictionary and may have missed some things. A few comments on the Basque comparanda: > aduso:/n, adusso:/n > adesa [OE] > adze > [?rel. to Basque haitz "stone, rock", aitzur "adze"] > [< ?Vasconic *aDiz < *anitsa < *kanis; aDiz-to "flint knife"] > [mcv3/97--cit. Michelena] In modern Basque, means `crag', though there is good evidence from compounds that it formerly meant `stone'. The word means `mattock', not `adze'. The strictly Roncalese word ~ `knife' (*not* `flint knife'), like and a couple of other tool names, *may* contain , but this is not certain. > aecse [OE] > ax, axe > [< ?Vasconic"; see Basque aizkora "axe, hatchet"] [tv95, tv97] I think everyone agrees that Basque `ax' is a loan from Latin `hatchet'. The Latin word would have been borrowed as *; the [h] is a suprasegmental feature in Basque; the */l/ would have undergone the categorical early medieval change of intervocalic /l/ to /r/; and the diphthongization of /a/ to /ai/ in an initial syllable is a familiar though sporadic in Basque: compare `sacred, holy', from some Romance development of Latin . > aithei "mother" [Gothic] [< ?Vasconic"] [tv97] Basque `mother' is and nothing else. > aliso/eliso > *alisa: [Celtic], *alisa [Gothic] > Erle f., aller > alder; > ?aliso [Spanish]; > [< Vasconic?, e.g. Basque altza] > [acc. cw < IE *ei- "red, brown"] [g&i, tv1/99] > [?rel to ellen, ellaern [OE] > elder? cw] It is widely suspected that Basque shares a common origin with the IE `alder' word, but nothing can be concluded. > ang-ra-m "pasture, grassland" > Anger "pasture-ground" > [< ?Vasconic"; see Basque angio, angi, angia "meadow"; > rel. rejected by Trask] [lt, tv97] Indeed, and by most others. Basque has a very odd form for a native word, with that final /io/; it doesn't look native, and a Celtic origin is widely suspected, though nothing can be established with confidence. > ankle, Enkel < anka "Hinterhaupt, blied" [OHG]; hanka [Germanic] > ?Romance > hancha "hip", > > haunch > [< ?Vasconic; > see Basque anka, hanka "foot, lower extremity of animal"] [tv95] No. This word derives ultimately from Frankish * `haunch', a western Germanic word preserved today in Dutch as `haunch'. The Frankish word (or a cognate Germanic word) was borrowed into Gallo-Romance, where it is the source of Old French and modern French (itself the source of English `haunch'), and of Spanish `haunch, rump' and of Italian `haunch, hip'. The Romance word was borrowed into Basque; in French Basque today it means `haunch, rump'; in one corner of the French Basque Country it has acquired the additional sense of `leg'; south of the Pyrenees it variously means `rump', `leg, foot, paw'. I consider this decisive. > arnuz, aro:/n > Aar, earn "eagle" [OE] > [< ?Afro-Asiatic "Atlantic"; > see Akk. arû; > but see also Basque arrano] [tv97] Indeed, but the Basque word must derive from * -- that is, *. > athnam "year [dat. pl.] [Gothic], annus [Latin] > [< ?Vasconic"] [tv97] Eh? The universal Basque word for `year' is . > Eidam, a*um "son-in-law" [< ?Vasconic"] [tv97] Mysterious. The Basque for `son-in-law' is ~ , safely reconstructible as *. > Eisvogel "kingfisher" [OE i:searn "ice eagle"] > [< Vasconic?, rel. to Halcyon?; > < root similar to *iz-arano "water eagle", An illusion. The putative Basque * `water' does not exist. This was a fantasy propagated by Azkue nearly a century ago but demolished by Michelena. The universal Basque word for `water' is . > *izar-arno "star bird"] [mcv, tv1/99] Well, is `star', all right, but what's this ""? The `eagle' word again? > *i:sarno [Celtic, Germanic] > iron, Eisen n. > [< ?Vasconic *isar "star"; > see Basque izar "star"] [mcv2/98, tv2/98] No comment. > i:sa > Eis, ice > [< ?Vasconic", e.g. Basque izoz- "frost, ice"] [tv97] But Basque `frost, ice' almost certainly contains `cold' as its second element. Best guess for the first is ~ `dew', from *. Compare western Basque `hoarfrost', which *appears* to be (but may not be) western `dew' plus western `dry'. (Basque compounds are head-final, except that an adjective follows a head noun.) > oak, Eiche > [< ?Vasconic; see Basque agin "evergreen oak"] Well, the most widespread Basque name for this tree is . Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 10:13:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 10:13:14 +0000 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/b In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > If I've missed any citations, please advise me. I still need to see > the the OED has to say about the English words. Our library doesn't > own any German or other etymological dictionaries, so if anyone > wants to help out, I'd apopreciate it. Only one Basque comparandum here. > birch, Birke > [< ?Vasconic; see Basque burkhi, urki] [tv95] A connection has often been suspected between Basque ~ `birch' and the Germanic word, but nothing can be established. Vasconists have been inclined to see the Basque word as borrowed from IE, but there appears to be no plausible direct source: no single secure case is known of a Germanic loan directly into Basque (as opposed to via Romance). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 10:19:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 10:19:20 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/f In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > flise, vlise "stone slab, floor-stone" [MLG] > Fliese "floor-stone, paving > tile" > [< ?Vasconic] [Vennemann considers it "weak"] [tv97] I'm not surprised. Pre-Basque had no */f/; it had no word-initial */p/; and it had no word-initial consonant clusters. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 14:24:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 14:24:20 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/g In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > garbo:n "sheaf" [pre-Germanic] > Garbe "sheaf"; > garwa [W Germanic] > garwo:n [W Germanic] > yarrow > [< ?Vasconic < pre-Basque *gerwa < *gerba; > see Basque garba "bundle, sheaf", gerba "catkin", Spanish garfa "hook, > claw", grapa "staple"] > [tv95, tv97] > [?rel. to *gar- in sense of "to assemble, collect"] Basque `sheaf' is strictly confined to the French Basque Country. I think everybody accepts that this is a borrowing from the synonymous Bearnais , itself of Germanic origin and cognate with French . The other word is more commonly , with a variant , and it doesn't mean `catkin', but rather the kind of flower found on a cornstalk -- that is, a "sheaf-like" flower, I suppose. Everybody seems to agree that this is merely a transferred sense of the preceding item. > gersto: [pre-Germanic] > Gerste "barley" > [< ?Vasconic"; > see Basque gar-i "grain, wheat", gargarr "barley"] [tv95, tv97] Basque means `wheat' everywhere, and also `bread' in one part of the country, but I don't think it means `grain' anywhere. Since its combining form is invariably in its numerous compounds, we reconstruct *, with the categorical Basque shift of intervocalic */l/ to /r/ in the medieval period. The word for `barley', correctly , appears to be some kind of reduplication of the preceding. I've no idea what that asterisked * is meant to denote: the Basque for `assemble, collect, gather' is . Nor am I any too sure what the Spanish words are doing in here, but I don't have Corominas handy. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 14:42:07 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 14:42:07 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > hakan-, ha:kon, ho:ka "hook, peg, crook" > [< ?Vasconic; > see Basque gako "key", kako "hook, peg, crook"] > [acc. cw, < ? IE *keg- "hook, tooth"] [cw, tv97] > hake "hook" [MLG] > harquebus [cw, tv97] > haki "hook" [ON] > hake [cw, tv97] > hakila- > hekel "hatchel, flax comb with hooklike teeth' [M Dutch] > heckle > [cw, tv97] > hakkiyan > haccian [OE] > to hack [cw, tv97] > ho:c [OE] > hook; [cw, tv97] > Haken "hook, peg, crook/ed" [cw, tv97] Basque ~ `hook' (and other senses) is a puzzle. A form is, at best, very unusual for a native lexical item, and the variant is impossible for a native word unless it results from voicing assimilation in the plosives. The word has been much discussed, and it is strongly suspected of being a loan, but no known Romance form provides a satisfactory source. > haltha- "slope, slant, incline" > Halde "slope, hillside", heald [OE] > "hillside" > [< ?Vasconic; > see Basque halde, alde, ualde < ?*kalde "face, side, flank"] [tv95, tv97] The Basque word is in the eastern dialects but everywhere else, as a result of the categorical voicing of plosives after /l/ in all but the eastern dialects. No such form as * is known to me. Lhande's 1926 dictionary cites and attributes it solely to the 17th-century writer Oihenart, but Oihenart in fact used , and so I suspect an error here. (Lhande is full of errors.) The form is an error: this must be the compound with initial `water', which appears as ~ , and means literally `waterside'. The central meaning of the Basque word is everywhere `side', with transferred senses like `flank' and `region'. I don't think it really means `face', and it certainly doesn't mean `slope'. > Harn "bladder" > [< ?Vasconic"; > see Basque garnur "bladder" < *kernu] [tv95, tv97] The Basque word for `urine' is , with a typical western variant . This word, with its almost unique /rn/ cluster, has been much discussed, but its origin is unknown. The alleged Basque * `bladder' is unknown to me and to the lexicographers, and I query its existence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Mon Mar 1 15:55:57 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 16:55:57 +0100 Subject: Caucasian languages and Asia Minor Message-ID: Glen Gordon schrieb: > It would be really stupid for someone to propose that NEC is related to > some hypothetical language that I shall name "Mumu" for comedic sake > that magically disappeared without a single trace. Remember that it is just this "comedy" which we play when doing internal reconstruction. It's a mere problem of labeling whether I call an earlier stage of PIE Pre-PIE or "Mumu". But that's not the problem! The problem is that people do not accept language isolates. What is an isolate? It's a language that obviously has no documented relatives. Relatives are established by means of regular sound correspondencies based on lexical *words* (and not *stems*) as well as on morphological correspondencies that match established sound correspondencies. These correspondencies should reveal to us a systematic structure that serves as a symbol of both the lexical and grammatical system of an ancestor common to the languages that are thought to be related. That's common ground though very often neglected in methodology. Now, an isolate means that the language in question does not behave in the sense described above. It simply is an orphan with unknown parents. It may well have been that its parents, now dead only had this isolate as a descendant, nothing more. And it may well have been that the parents did not have had sisters, no aunts, no cousins, nothing... I think that's just what the situation is like with respect to East Caucasian. Perhaps things will change if (I say IF) we will be able to describe Proto-East Caucasian (PEC) both with respect to grammar AND lexicon. This enterprise hasn't been undertaken yet. We simply don't know enough about PEC in order to relate its system to anything else "in the world". Additionally I ask everybdody who deals with "distant" relationship incorporating East Caucasian languages: PLEASE, don't just look up Nikolayev/Starostin 1994! It's hardly a reliable source! It is much better to get into the single languages, understand their systems and then to do comparative work within this assumed language family! The niveau we have reached with respect to PEC isn't much better yet than that IE standards have reached in 1820. And those standards surely weren't a good basis for any speculation on distant relationship. > Maybe there's no need scientifically (it won't give us a cure for cancer > I suppose), but without doing something like this, we'll never answer > all the nagging questions about our pre-history. It must be done (but > done better of course). These nagging questions are quite trendy, but that does not mean that they are on safe grounds with respect to method and language theory... But paradigms [hopefully] change, as Kuhn told us.... _____________________________________________________ | 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.) | +89-21802485 (office) | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 16:02:45 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 16:02:45 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/k/q In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > kalh- > callow [< ?Vasconic"] [tv97] Why? > kante [Celtic, Germanic, Italic non IE] > Kante "edge" > [< ?Vasconic; see Basque kantu "slice, angle, rocks", > common in Iberian toponymy] [tv97, tv95] There are at least two different Basque words tangled up here, unrelated and both of Romance origin. The first is represented by Roncalese `slice', Zuberoan `side, edge, vicinity', `angle', `slice'. An extended form of this is represented by Lapurdian and Low Navarrese `slice', `piece', `corner, angle', Zuberoan (with a nasal vowel) `slice', and by a hapax `slice', of uncertain provenance. The second is represented by Lapurdian `rock, boulder'. The first derives ultimately from a late Latin , which yields Castilian `extremity, side, point, corner', `crust, slice'. This has an extended form `corner', which probably derives from earlier *. Latin or Romance suffices to explain the first Basque word perfectly, Its Romance extension , or an antecedent *, suffices to explain the Basque forms in <-oin>, <-oi> and <-u~> perfectly, since these are the regular developments of Romance <-one>. (Compare ~ ~ Zuberoan `right, reason', from Old Castilian *, modern .) The word meaning `rock' is straight from the common Ibero-Romance word represented by Spanish `stone', of unknown but very likely Celtic origin. The Basque words cannot possibly be ancient in that language, because plosives were categorically voiced after /n/ in early medieval Basque, save only in Zuberoan and Roncalese. > knife, knyft "pocketknife" [W Fries], > kni:fr [Scandinavian], > Kneif/Kneip "pocketknife", > canivet [O Fr], > canif "large pocketknife" [Fr], > Basque ganibet, kanibet "pocket knife" > [< ?Vasconic] [tv95] Basque ~ just means `knife' in general, specifically a knife which has neither a sheath nor a folding handle, such as a table knife. It is perfectly clear that this is borrowed from Old Gascon (modern Gascon ), related to Old Aragonese , Old Castilian (and still regional Spanish) , and to the cited Old French . All these are derived by adding a Romance diminutive suffix to the word represented by modern French `penknife, pocketknife', which in turn unquestionably is borrowed from the Germanic word which is the ancestor of English `knife'. The word cannot possibly be ancient in Basque. First, a native word does not exhibit fluctuation in the voicing of an initial plosive: this is a typical characteristic of loan words. Second, earlier intervocalic /n/ was categorically lost in the early medieval period, and could not have survived into the historical period. Third, a native and monomorphemic word does have a plosive in the onset of the third syllable. Fourth, a native word cannot end in /t/ -- or in any plosive -- except where that plosive is secondary. This is a "solution" to a problem which does not exist. > k'rimp'an "tense, cramped" > krapfo "hook, claw" > cramp, Krampf; krapfen > "fritters, donut" > [< ?Vasconic; > see pre-Basque *garba "broke, junk", *krapo "claw, clip, junk"] > [acc. cw < ? IE *ger-] [cw, tv95, tv97] Er -- what? What on earth is meant by this "pre-Basque *"? No such form can be reconstructed for Pre-Basque. Moreover, if it could be, it should appear unchanged in modern Basque as * -- but I know of no evidence for any such word. > ku:z/e [HG 15th c.] > Kauz [type of owl] > [?< Vasconic *kuwonts/a > *k^u:nts > *k^u:ts, > see Basque hutz, ontz] [tv97] The Basque word is ~ ~ ; I don't know of a variant *. The word is of unknown origin, but is suspected of being imitative, like some of the neighboring Romance words for `owl'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 16:12:16 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 16:12:16 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Moos, mousse "foam" [Fr < Germanic] [tv84] > moraine, Moräne "moraine", > Mur[e] "pile of rocks [Bavarian] > [?< Vasconic; > see Basque murru "hill"] [tv97] The form can hardly be ancient in Basque. There exists a sizeable number of severely localized Basque words of the form , with very diverse meanings, but `hill' is not one of them. The most widespread sense (throughout the French Basque Country) is `wall'. The closest to `hill' in sense is `pile, heap', reported nowhere but in the Baztan valley. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 3 04:34:13 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 23:34:13 EST Subject: St Jerome Message-ID: In a message dated 3/2/99 8:55:49 PM, John McLaughlin wrote: << No matter one's religious affiliation or attitudes, this has got nothing to do with language.>> This is so patently not true it is... amazing. We are talking about written words and mass translations of words here from one language to another. How could it not be about language? And once again in the historical context, it is actually occuring at the borderline between two different phases of a language, when a decision is to be made between staying with the old or going with the new. It is about nothing else but language. Jerome's translation was faced with the fact that the Latin language was going through serious disruption in grammar, sound and meaning at the time. Donatus, by tradition Jerome's teacher, catalogued these changes not many years before the Vulgate was written. Donatus specifically mentions "changing and transposing of letters, syllables, tones and aspiration. (...transmutatio litterae, syllabae, temporis, toni, adspirationis.) The long /i/ in "Italian" has already made its apperance by Jerome's time, Donatus warning that we must "pronounce Italiam with a short first vowel;..." He notes shifts in "sound to conjugation" - "since 'fervere' is of the second conjugation and should be pronounced long". And he notes the following regarding 'aspiration' - "which some ascribe to writing, some to pronunciation, because of h, which, as you know, some consider to be a letter, some the sign of aspiration." (... quem quidam scripto, quidam pronunciationi iudicant adscribendum, propter "h" scilicet, quam alii litteram, alii adspirationis notam putant.) In fact, Donatus may even have given us the true derivation of the word 'salmon' which the OED ascribes to "salere", to leap, but which Donatus describes as being the result of the sudden dropping of syllables in the "new Latin" of his day: "in loss...of syllable, as 'salmentum' for 'salsamentum' (fish sauce, marinated fish)" (ut salmentum pro salsamentum). What Jerome was talking about in the passages quoted by Sheila was a choice he decided in adopting this "new language" instead of adhering to Classical, which was no longer really being spoken by the people. This decision (the one which St Augustine also claimed to make) meant that he was dealing with a live language whose meanings and forms were shifting and not "good language" in the sense of the "grammarians." And as has been said for a long time, Jerome abandoned both Donatus and Old Rome in the Vulgate. The result was that Erasmus, who documents many of the "barbarisms" Jerome adopted in "correcting" Jerome's grammar, specifically is aware of what Jerome has done and calls his language "Italian." The influence exerted by Jerome's choice of course will powerfully affect the language of court and of written legal documents in all of Europe for centuries to come. To say this is not about language is a little preposterous. Unless one possibly has an axe to grind with Jerome based on "one's religious affiliation or attitudes." <> It seems John McLaughlin has changed POV in mid-post here. Perhaps that nun he mentions got to him and cleared his mind about things. Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's note: I was reminded today that things we Americans take light-heartedly are rather more seriously regarded elsewhere. I apologize to those who were offended by the original joke (and possibly by this rejoinder), and will remind everyone that we are all writing for an international audience here. We should adopt the strictures of a formal dinner, where politics and religion are recognized as topics not to be discussed. --rma ] From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Mar 3 06:12:43 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 01:12:43 -0500 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > arimanno "warrior" [It < Germanic] [tv84] Isn't this a compound, *harja- 'army' + *manna- 'man'? The first at least doesn't seem peculiarly Germanic, to judge by the cognates given in Buck's dictionary. (I don't have ready access to the Vennemann reference, I'm afraid, so I don't know what argument he makes.) Brian M. Scott From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 06:13:02 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 00:13:02 -0600 Subject: Greek question Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Wednesday, March 03, 1999 10:45 PM [ moderator snip ] >[ Moderator's response: > If the Nostratic evidence independently requires 4 series of stops which > oppose voicing and aspiration, and it can be shown that in Indo-European > the Nostratic voiceless aspirates collapse together with the voiceless > plains, well and good: Cite the etymologies which support this claim. If you want me to cite individual etymologies, I will be glad to do so but I have collected a great number of them, illustrating this relationship, in my Afrasian essay at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3.htm [ Moderator's response: I want to see not only individual etymologies, I want to see an exposition of the sound laws which drive them. I want to see not only "the roots of verbs" but "the forms of grammar", such that "no philologer could examine them ... without believing them to be sprung from some common source." --rma ] > Otherwise, > the Nostratic evidence has nothing to offer for the reconstruction of a > series of voiceless aspirates in Indo-European; the few which are claimed > are the result of clusters of voiceless plain+laryngeal (specifically, > *H_2), although there are those who see the Skt. voiceless aspirates as > evidence of Prakrit interference (as the development of *sC to CCh in the > Prakrits would provide a source for a hypercorrection of Skt. **sC to the > attested sCh, where represents any voiceless plain stop) and do not even > accept this laryngeal development while otherwise fully accepting > laryngeals. I could grant that all occurrences of aspirated voiceless stops in Sanskrit were the result of voiceless stops + H, and still assert that voiceless aspirated stops should be reconstructed for earliest IE. Actually, what I have found is that most Sanskrit aspirated voiceless stops *do* correspond to Afrasian affricates, which is what Egyptian ', D, H, x, and some b, started out being. Pat [ Moderator's response: You could assert it, but you have not proven it. Please remember that this is the Indo-European list, and that a relationship with Egyptian cannot be *assumed* for your argument, but rather must be demonstrated using accepted comparative methodology which addresses the standard model of Indo-European. --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 06:26:59 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 00:26:59 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Glen Gordon Date: Wednesday, March 03, 1999 11:42 PM >...but IE laws must be obeyed first and foremost. Odd reconstructions >with a voiced aspirate must first be fully supportable internally within >the IE data before pulling Nostratic into this. I think you are a little behind the discussion. I know of no one, including myself, who is suggesting *nekhw-. Alexis and I have suggested *negh-w-(to-). >If we maintain the traditional IE reconstruction of the sort *nekwt, >this may not necessarily disobey any Nostratic sound correspondances. It >all depends on what external cognates you bring into the ante. It is not necessary to being Nostratic cognates into the discussion to suggest negh- rather than nek-. Hittite nekuz should be good evidence for negh- unless you want to maintain that Sturtevant incorrectly assumed that voiceless consonants were intervocalically indicated by doubling. If it was nek, it should be Hittite **nekkuz. >I've seen >Bomhard's *nitl- for instance which I personally would re-reconstruct as >Nostratic *nukw (with trailing labiovelar). I have a hard time accepting >something that evolves so strangely as *tl seems to, in context with the >fact that more straightforward sound correspondances seem to still offer >difficulty in this budding Nostratic field. What's more, the scantily >attested *tl can evolve into a plethora of different ways and makes it >too easy for anyone to say anything about the etymology especially since >this phoneme doesn't seem to survive in any reconstructed Nostratic >daughter language, let alone a written one. I disagree with Bomhard's [tl] also. >As Nostraticists seem to accept for the most part, a form like *nukw >would uneventfully become IE *nekw- as indeed we have in *nekwt with >additional neuter ending. Perhaps, the form exists in Uralic of the form >*nuk- although all I have seen is Finnish nukkua. [ moderator snip ] >I think IS or Dogolpolsky had a similar reconstructed item, one with an >Altaic language with */negu"/? I'll have to verify my info. >Note: Under Bomhard's *nitl, there is a Dravidian cognate *nik- that >would, if valid, seem to show a vowel shift of *u > *i like the one I >mentioned for the pronouns (cf. Nostratic *?u > *i-n > ya:n/yan-). What *nik- would indicate is that Nostratic *negh-w- did not pass the -w- into the preceding syllable. [e] to [i] would be a simple raising of the front vowel, a much commoner and likelier change. >Sorry, Dr. Krisnamurti, Dravidian may have laryngeals (ie yaHn) but I am >still not sure that they can explain every instance of long vowel. >At any rate, back to IE, IE *nekwt could come from earlier *nukw with no >insult to Nostraticists and yet no odd comparisons with Egyptian and >other unlike languages. *nukw in what language. If IE, it could only be *nekw or *nokw. [u] is not part of the apophonic variations. >A labial MUST be posited for both IE AND Nostratic (if we are to include IE >*nekwt in a Nostratic cognate series). Even when positing a form with *gh, we >still can't hide from the labial and in Nostratic terms, this means a labial >must be posited in some way (in my case, a velar labialized by preceding *u >which evolved to *e in IE but left behind the labial quality). A rather farfetched development. Pat From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Thu Mar 4 09:10:54 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:10:54 +0000 Subject: St Jerome In-Reply-To: <36D2C72B.8D728603@brigham.net> Message-ID: [ moderator snip ] Peter and or Graham said that Jerome wrote 'bad Latin'. Well, I suppose as Indo-Europeanists they don't feel obliged to know anything about sociolinguistics. I responded to say that Jerome was aware that his Latin fell short of Ciceronian standards, but that he had another agenda than writing good Latin, i.e. writing a good biblical translation which would be comprehensible and appealing to a lot of people. Maybe Peter and or Graham think you can apply abstract prescriptivist standards to texts written in the past, but I thought this was an attitude we had all agreed to leave behind in the 19th century. In those days editors used to 'correct'the language of medieval native speakers because of their (the editors') own theories about what was right or wrong. What Peter and or Graham _meant_ to say, I hope, was that Jerome's Latin, dating from the 4th century, gives us some insights into how the language was changing at that time, in that it does not conform to the standards of the classical language. Language change - something to do with language - something we're interested in on this list, or am I wrong? Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 4 11:46:41 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 03:46:41 PST Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay Message-ID: DLW: With regard to reconstructing 1sg pronouns, there is (or so I seem to recall) a cross-linguistic tendency for these to be formed with /m-/, probably from a weaker variant of what might be called the "mama syndrome": sounds that babies tend to make early tend to be pressed into service as words that mamas and babies might use to relate to each other, like "mama" and "me". So seeing a 1sg in /m-/ does not necessarily mean much. A "cross-linguistic tendency"?! Where is this drudged up from? I'm sorry but I can't possibly accept this. Ever considered that the "cross-linguistic tendency" is in fact hinting at genetic relationship? I have never heard of a language that suddenly drops its first person plural in favor of the "mama syndrome". Do you? I don't see how that could possibly be entertained to any sane degree. There are PLENTY of languages I could name off the top of my head that DO NOT have /m/ or even anything like this sound. Do Athapascans have special language genes that give them immunity to the "mama syndrome"? What about Abkhaz? Ingush? Chechen? Ket? Tligit? Tamil? Telugu? Mandarin? Cantonese? Chaozhou? Georgian? Svan? Yucatec? Ojibway? Cree? Does /n/ and /n,/ count too?? What about /t/? Hell let's be really mean and point to the fact that IE has *eg^oh (which in a Nostratic context would mean that in fact IE had replaced what used to be a pronoun with *m- as is found in the enclitic *me. [ moderator snip ] what I'm talking about involves an entire SET of pronouns, not just 1rst person and I'm obviously not saying that every language in the whole world that happens to contain /m/ in 1rst person is related (and in fact I can't think of a language, outside the realms of Nostratic, a language group that restricts itself mostly around Eurasia and Middle East, that has /m/ in first person!) Keep this in context with the other pronouns and don't dilute the topic with focus on a rare if not impossible language phenomenon. Although pronouns can change, they aren't easily replaced. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From jrader at m-w.com Thu Mar 4 09:06:25 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:06:25 +0000 Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: Nearly twenty years ago I heard Eric Hamp give an account of Georgiev's lecture. As I recall Hamp telling it, Georgiev thought that Etruscan practically WAS Hittite, i.e., that Etruscan was an Anatolian language. The audience didn't contest his thesis out of sheer stupefaction, not because they agreed. Gueterbock walked out of the lecture shaking his head and saying "Very interesting, very interesting!" Jim Rader > Vladimir Georgiev [Sofia] held that Etruscan was early IE and related to > Hittite. > He presented his data to a meeting of linguists at the University of Chicago > around 1968: > nobody contested his data nor his thesis. > j p maher [ moderator snip ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 14:50:43 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 08:50:43 -0600 Subject: Greek question Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Miguel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Date: Thursday, March 04, 1999 1:46 AM >"Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >>I agree that *nokt- is not satisfactory. But, on the basis of *neuk-, >>'dark', I believe it likeliest that there were two basically equivalent >>roots: *negh- and *neugh-. >I fail to understand. If you can get *neugh- "on the basis of" >*neuk-, just like that, then what has this whole discussion, >starting with the problem of Greek nukh-, been about? I have changed my opinion some time ago since this was written. I am now proposing *nnegh-w-. >What's the problem, if *gh and *k, *kw and *gwh are all interchangeable >anyway? Yes, that is the problem. I feel that Hittite nekuz rather decisively indicates either *negh-w- or *neg[w]-. For me, but perhaps not for others, Egyptian nHzi tips the balance in favor of *negh-; also, there are the divergent Greek forms with -kh-. >*neuk- "dark", apart from having the wrong vowel and the wrong >second consonant in the context of whether "night" comes from >*nekw-t- or *negwh-t-, is hardly credible as a PIE root, at least >based on the flimsy evidence given for it in Pokorny (Baltic and >one doubtful Latin word). Probably just irregular reflexes of >*leuk- (or maybe *ne-leuk-?) I doubt that it is an irregular reflex of (ne-)leuk- though I had not thought of that as a possibility. As I previously wrote on this list, I believe that *neuk- started out as *negh-w- also, and that the root-extension -s devoiced the -gh in it, just as the -t, devoiced the -gh in *nek[w]-(t)-. As for its reconstruction and flimsy attestation, if *negh-w- were the basis for both, as I think likely, Pokorn's entry should be emended to *negh-(w)-, 'dark', with root extensions -t, 'night', and -s, 'dark'. Pat From manaster at umich.edu Thu Mar 4 14:59:09 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:59:09 -0500 Subject: Greek question In-Reply-To: Message-ID: That's correct. On Tue, 23 Feb 1999 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance, but all examples of > Bartholomae's Law that I am aware involve a morpheme boundary, where, if > assimilation had gone in the other way, information from the root would > have been lost. So perhaps it is not simply a sound-change, and would not > necessarily apply internally. > Just a suggestion ... From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 15:00:03 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:00:03 -0600 Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Thursday, March 04, 1999 1:54 AM [ moderator snip ] >>Bomhard mentions an IE *e- 1rst person pronoun that I don't recall >>actually attested. >This is the demonstrative H4V, 'here', but because H4 did not inhibit >apophony, it appears in the IE dictionary as e-; H1V, 'there', would also >have yielded e-, and so the distinction between proximal and distal was >lost. >[ Moderator's comment: > *H_4 is the "a-coloring" laryngeal that does *not* appear as in > Hittite, so would not lead to *e- in any dictionary. > --rma ] Sorry about that. I have also since been told that H4 is not generally accepted as a "laryngeal". So please let me explain it this way, and you tell me how it it should be notated. Nostratic ?a, 'here'; ?e, 'there'; both lead to IE *e-. Pat [ Moderator's response: One of the problems I have in accepting Nostratic is the vowel system, which does not provide for the Indo-European vowel system which we reconstruct. I cannot tell you what notation to use, therefore, in a Nostratic context. I will insist that when you use Indo-European notations, you use them correctly to avoid confusion. --rma ] From manaster at umich.edu Thu Mar 4 15:06:02 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 10:06:02 -0500 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Surely not in terms of basic vocabulary. On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [ moderator snip ] > But before 1500, Spanish & Portuguese were farther apart than they are now. From manaster at umich.edu Thu Mar 4 14:59:57 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:59:57 -0500 Subject: Greek question In-Reply-To: <006201be5f9a$d5d10440$38d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: For once I agree with the moderator. On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [ moderator snip ] >I have found that Egyptian k corresponds to IE g(g^) and k(k^); ditto T >(bar-t) for g and k only; but Egyptian H (dot-h) corresponds to IE gh(g^h) >and k(h)(k^(h)); ditto x (hook-h) for gh and k(h) only. [ moderator snip ] >[ Moderator's response: > If the Nostratic evidence independently requires 4 series of stops which > oppose voicing and aspiration, and it can be shown that in Indo-European the > Nostratic voiceless aspirates collapse together with the voiceless plains, > well and good: Cite the etymologies which support this claim. Otherwise, > the Nostratic evidence has nothing to offer for the reconstruction of a > series of voiceless aspirates in Indo-European; the few which are claimed are > the result of clusters of voiceless plain+laryngeal (specifically, *H_2), > although there are those who see the Skt. voiceless aspirates as evidence of > Prakrit interference (as the development of *sC to CCh in the Prakrits would > provide a source for a hypercorrection of Skt. **sC to the attested sCh, > where represents any voiceless plain stop) and do not even accept this > laryngeal development while otherwise fully accepting laryngeals. > --rma ] From manaster at umich.edu Thu Mar 4 15:08:10 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 10:08:10 -0500 Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <002401be60bd$520e31e0$5c9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I do not believe that there is anything which the current "laryngeal" theory > explains that tis re-formulation of it will not equally well explain. This is what you have not even begun to demonstrate, as you well know from our pruivate discussions, so it does not seem right to me to make this claim. [ moderator snip ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 15:11:44 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:11:44 -0600 Subject: gender Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Thursday, March 04, 1999 6:03 AM >[ Moderator's response: > What does your version of the laryngeal theory have to say about the Greek > anatyptic vowels? How does it deal with the Indo-Iranian data (Skt. -i-, > Iranian -0-)? For that matter, how does it explain the other ablaut data > that led Saussure to his formulation in the first place? > --rma ] I am trying to put together a better exposition of the idea now; and when I have, I will make it available on a page at my website. However, if you want to outline one particular "problem", I will attempt to address it on the list. Pat [ Moderator's response: Let us know when you have written it up. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 17:34:36 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 17:34:36 GMT Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word In-Reply-To: <19990224115854.12484.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >Hello, It's Glenny again, >Now that I have the source before me... Under Allan Bomhard's >"208. nitl[h]-/netl[h]- 'to rise, to arise; to lift, to raise; to >move'", there is: >IE *nek-/*nok- "to bear, to carry, to convey" > (I've never seen this root. Does anyone know? I can only think > of Latin nex and nocere - different things altogether. "To > convey"? Isn't that conveyed with *g^no-s(k)-?) *nek^ => Slavic nes- etc. (See Pokorny under *enek^-, *nek^-, *enk^-, *nk^- "reichen, erreichen, erlangen", Grk, BS: "tragen"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 4 17:56:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 11:56:12 -0600 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word In-Reply-To: <19990224115854.12484.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: If I may throw in my semi-informed 2 cents/pence/pfennig/hundredths of a Euro, etc. There's a classic case in Romance phonology that included /tl/ vetus > vetulus > *vEtlu > *vEklu > *vEkyu [> Italian vecchio /vEkkyo/], *velyu [> French vielle (fem.) /vyiey, vyiey@/, Portuguese velho /vELo/, Spanish viejo /ByeHo, Byexo/] The masculine form of vielle, of course, is vieux, which, on the face of it, seems to come from *vEkyu, rather than *vElyu If this case is typical, wouldn't such a form as *netl also evolve with a palatal? If not, please explain [snip] >Now that I have the source before me... Under Allan Bomhard's >"208. nitl[h]-/netl[h]- 'to rise, to arise; to lift, to raise; to >move'", there is: > [snip] >Taking out AA (the only one with *tl), we're left with a clearer view. >However, I would go out on a limb and say that rather than the IE >cognate attested above, I would throw in IE *nekwt instead and possibly >Finnish nukkua "to sleep" (There's got to be a relation somehow with >nukkua) and that it all points to *nukw "to sleep" ("to sleep" -> "to >awaken"; "to sleep" -> "to sleep over" -> "to migrate"). Any Uralicists >in the house? > >In all, I haven't personally verified the reconstructions yet, so anyone >is open to suspicions but so far this is my idea on the origin of IE >*nekwt. > >-------------------------------------------- >Glen Gordon >glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's response: There is a serious mixing of levels here, in that a Romance-specific development is being projected back to Nostratic, although other Indo- European languages do not have this phonotactic constraint, e. g. Greek. Before we can even accept it as a parallel, we have to determine what the digraph represents in Bomhard, a unit phoneme or a cluster. --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 4 18:01:42 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 12:01:42 -0600 Subject: Salmon. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It's been pointed out by various people that words now used for salmon could have referred to trout or any other such fish. So, you might want to superimpose a map for trout. > This stuff about the supposed distribution of salmon has been >bothering me for a while (15 yrs?). I do not happen to have Grzimek's >Encyclopedia of Animal Life (or whatever it is called) on me right now, >but I could have sworn it states that there are salmon (non-spawning, >perhaps?) in the Danube. So perhaps there is something to this /lak/ >stuff after all. > > DLW From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 17:57:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 17:57:07 GMT Subject: Trojan and Etruscan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > As for the occurence of /s/, /sk/, /sh/ (English value), and /y/ >(again English value) to represent the third consonant, these are for the >most part various efforts to represent /sh/ in languages that did not have >that sound. (Egyptian did.) We see various apsects of /sh/ conveyed in >any one of the other renderings: sibilance in /s/, palatality in /y/, >retraction from /s/ in /sk/. The problem is that you're mixing up various reflexes from various languages here. The Latin forms with -sc- (Tusci, Tuscania/Toscana, Etrusci) are simply extensions of the roots Tu(r)s- and Etrus- with the Latin adjectival suffix -cus (*-ko-). Now assuming Greek Trooa is from the same root, it can be derived from *Trosia, with Greek loss of intervocalic -s-, just like Latin Etruria < *Etrusia with intervocalic -s- > -r-. Again the suffix -ia is Latin and Greek, not necessarily Tyrrhenian. Which reminds me, there is also Greek Tyrrhe:n- < *turse:n-. > For the vowel, it is difficult to decide between /o/ or /u/, but >as /a/ occurs in some words that might be additional variants >(tarhuntassa, tauros, tarsus, tarquin), with lowering before /r/ being the >culprit in these, I favor /o/. Thus the original form would be /trosha/. Etruscan didn't have /o/, and Lemnian (close to Troy) didn't have /u/, so Etruscan *Trusia would correspond to Lemnian *Trosia. What keeps bugging me is whether there is any relationship between *turs(en)- ~ *trus- and the Etruscan name for themselves < *rasenna. Something like *tu-rasenna- might work, but what are we to do with a prefix *tu- in a suffixing language like Etruscan? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 4 18:18:41 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 12:18:41 -0600 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: <93726038.36d4e353@aol.com> Message-ID: Actually, it's much easier for Portuguese & Spanish speakers to speak about sophisticated subjects because the vocabulary is even closer. When people speak about simple subjects, they tend to use slang or --at the least-- more idiomatic. I'd say the difference is pretty much like the difference between a standard version of English and a patois version, or between American & a local British dialect or non-standard Jamaican English. There is no such language as "Gallego-Spanish". There is, however, galego or Galician, called gallego in Spanish. It is closer to Portuguese than to Spanish and, in my experience, is more difficult to understand than Brazilian Portuguese or standard Continental Portuguese. The Galician literary standard, however, is a bit easier to read. But Galician is a series of spoken dialects. Note: Spanish lobo /loBo/ Portuguese lobo /loBu, lobu/ Galician /tsoBu, shoBu, LoBu/ >-- good point. Portugese and Castillian are -still- mutually comprehensible, >in the sense that speakers of each can, if they speak slowly and on simple >subjects, understand each other. (Personal experience.) >And if you use Gallego-Spanish rather than Castillian, the resemblance is even >closer. >It's comparable to the distance between Netherlandic and German. From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 19:19:25 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 19:19:25 GMT Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I may have missed someoneelse's response but I've seen several >cases where Hittite is from from /t/. So wouldn't there be a fair >chance that nek(uz) is from *nek(ut)? And that *nek(ut) < *nekwt Hittite can come from palatalized /t/ + /i/ or /e/, as in the 3rd.p.sg. ending -zzi (< *-ti). In this case, however, it's from /t/ + nominative /s/. The spelling stands for /nekwt-s/. The problem is that we would expect if the word is to be derived from PIE *nekwt- ~ *nokwt-. The single suggests PIE *g(h)w. > BTW: is Hittite /dz, z^/, /ts,c/ or /z/? >[By /z^/ I mean a sound similar to of English >or the "soft" voiced in Italian. Hittite spelling does not distinguish voiced and voiceless consonants, but it does distinguish (in medial position at least) C from CC, where usually the single consonant etymologically derives from a PIE voiced one and the geminate from a PIE voiceless consonant. Whether this means that was /ts/ and /dz/, or that we must take Hittite spelling literally and read as /tts/ and as /ts/ is a matter of interpretation. I favour the latter view. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 20:03:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 20:03:07 GMT Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia In-Reply-To: <36BECAC9.342D918F@mail.lrz-muenchen.de> Message-ID: Due to the interruption of mailing list traffic and my impression that this message was addressed to me only, I answered privately to Wolfgang Schulze' message close to a month ago. Here is another response. wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal schrieb: >> I tend think of North Caucasian (NEC/NWC) as the >> primary candidate for the original language of the steppe lands. >> The Northern Caucasus is a "residual zone", in Johanna Nichols' >> terminology. It contains the linguistic residue of the peoples >> that were once dominant in the neighbouring "spread zone" (the >> steppe). >Do you have any LINGUISTIC proof or at least some indications that would >justify such an assumption? My argument was not specifically linguistic, but historico-geographical. It is a matter of simple observation that the North Caucasian zone harbours the linguistic residues of what once were the predominant populations in the steppe zone to the north of it. The predominant language now is Slavic, but we find Mongolian (Kalmuck) and Turkic (Nogai, Balkar etc.) enclaves in the North Caucasus zone. Ossetic remains as the residue of the Scytho-Sarmatian predominance in the steppe zone before the coming of the Turks. The logical next step is to think that NWC and NEC are also North Caucasian remnants of populations that were once predominant in the steppe *before* the coming of Iranian and Indo-European. Especially so if one, like me, rejects the notion of a steppe homeland for PIE. Of course, if one accepts the steppe homeland hypothesis, the thought that NWC and NEC might also be "residual" pre-IE populations never crosses one's mind, which is why Johanna Nichols herself ("The Epicentre of the IE Linguistic Spread" [in: Blench/Spriggs, "Archaeology and Language", 1997]) uses NWC and NEC linguistic data (borrowings from ANE languages) as a *fixed* reference point to measure the distance of "mobile" PIE and PKartv from the Near East, as if it were a given that PWC and PEC had been in their present positions "forever". That being said, what LINGUISTIC evidence would we expect to find for a former presence of NEC and/or NWC in the Pontic-Caspian steppe? I don't think the "horse" word is relevant: horses were domesticated in the steppe by Indo-European speakers after the supposed replacement of PEC and PWC speakers by IE speakers. This replacement would have been one by (Sub-)Neolithic pastoralists/agriculturalists (IE) of prior Mesolithic (PWC/PEC) populations, which requires very little contact between the two groups (the Mesolithic population just gets instantly outnumbered), so I wouldn't expect PWC/PEC toponyms surviving or a significant amount of PWC/PEC borrowings into Eastern IE. The only linguistic arguments would be if NWC or NEC could be linked up to languages to the north and east of the Pontic-Caspian steppe. In that sense, Starostin's Sino-Caucasian interests me for the consequences it may have for the PIE homeland. I don't know enough about Caucasian and Sino-Tibetan linguistics to evaluate the proposals, even if I had seen all of them. However, my mind was somewhat prepared to consider Sino-Caucasian as a possibility because, before I had ever heard of Sino-Caucasian or Starostin, I had discovered for myself some interesting parallels between NWC, NEC and ST numerals. For instance: Tib Lak Lezg Ubyx Adyghe 1. g-cig ca sa za z@ 2. g-nis [k.i q.we tq.wa t.w@] 3. g-sum s^an [pu] ssa s^@ 4. b-zhi [muq. q.u] pL'@ pL'@ 5. l-nga [xxyu wa s^x'@ tf@] 6. d-rug ryax rugu [f@ x'@] 7. b-dun [arul iri bl@ bL@] 8. br-gyad myay mu"z^u" g'w@ y@ 9. d-gu urc^. k.u" bg'@ bg'w@ 10. b-cu ac. c.u z^w@ ps.'@ There may be something there. Not that this, if true, proves a genetic connection (numerals are easily borrowed), but it may at least suggest ancient contacts between the NC groups and (S)Tib, and the only logical place for this to have happened is the Central Asian steppe. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam [ Moderator's note: This is moving away from Indo-European; perhaps a shift to the Nostratic list is indicated for follow-ups other than to the IE portions above. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 4 20:16:04 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 15:16:04 EST Subject: IE and Substrates Message-ID: I think we should keep in mind that the European linguistic situation in historical times is probably much simpler than it was in the Mesolithic or early Neolithic. Reasoning by analogy from the situation in New Guinea or eastern pre-Columbian North America, there were probably _many_ more languages and language-families in Europe before the Indo-European expansion. Not just one or a few non-IE families which were then replaced by Indo-European. The IE expansion would then represent a massive linguistic simplification, a "reformatting" of a previously crowded scene. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 4 20:11:20 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 20:11:20 -0000 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word Message-ID: Glen Gordon said: >IE *nek-/*nok- "to bear, to carry, to convey" > (I've never seen this root. Does anyone know? Try: Avestan fra-nas- = to bring; (nas = to reach) Vedic naSa:mi = to reach Greek e:negkon, ene:nokha, etc all < e-nek- (aorist and perfect forms of) to carry Old Norse nest = provisions for a journey OCS nesti etc to carry, bear, bring Lithuanian neSu etc. Latvian nesu etc. I don't have a Pokorny, but I suspect this is one of the cognates not to be found in him. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 4 20:23:12 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 20:23:12 -0000 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: > BTW: is Hittite /dz, z^/, /ts,c/ or /z/? No doubt someone will prove me wrong, but I believe Hittite was deciphered at first by German speakers - so z was used as in German, which is a great pain. It = /ts/. Peter From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 20:25:24 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 20:25:24 GMT Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > With regard to reconstructing 1sg pronouns, there is (or so I seem >to recall) a cross-linguistic tendency for these to be formed with /m-/, >probably from a weaker variant of what might be called the "mama >syndrome": sounds that babies tend to make early tend to be pressed into >service as words that mamas and babies might use to relate to each other, >like "mama" and "me". I don't think so. > So seeing a 1sg in /m-/ does not necessarily mean much. This is true (although seeing 1sg in /m-/ AND 2sg. in /t-/, or 1sg. in /n-/ AND 2sg. in /k-/ may definitely mean more). There is, I think, a cross-linguistic tendency for (personal) pronouns to be short forms. For instance, in PIE they show a pattern CV where verbal and nominal roots have at least CVC. The same thing is true for many other language families, although I have not made a study of this. In that sense, seeing a 1sg. form apparently based on *mV- doesn't mean much in itself, especially given the fact that /m/ is a phoneme that is present and common in the overwhelming majority of the world's languages. I also haven't made a study of phoneme frequencies the world over, but my impression is that the general monosyllabicity of pronominal stems and the relatively high frequency of the phoneme /m/, plus "number of pronominal stems to be distinguished" versus "number of phonemes in the language" are sufficient to explain the number of languages that have 1p.sg. *mV- (which really isn't *that* large, I'd say 10-20%). No need for a "mama-effect". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de Thu Mar 4 21:02:45 1999 From: w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de (WB (in Frankfurt today)) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 22:02:45 +0100 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: At 13:30 25.02.99 -0500, Alexis wrote: AMR| I have yet to AMR| see any real debate of the SC hypothesis. If there is any AMR| competent comment on this hypothesis, pro or con, I would AMR| appreciate references. Well, take a look at Alexander Vovin's excellent review article on WSY Wang ed. (1995), _The ancestry of the Chinese language_ (_Journal of CHinese Linguistics 25[1997]2: 308-336) for starts. Sasha demon- strates that Starostin's SC reconstruction rests on multiple correspon- dances not showing any trace of phonological conditioning (ST *-t, for instance, has no less than 17 PNC correspondances!), that "there is anything but regularity", that SC "with its 150 or 180 consonants does not even remotely resemble a human language", and that Starostin introduces rather dubious rules of root reduction (a la Paul King Benedict), which are even contradicted by his own etymologies. Vovin concludes (fair enough, I must say!), "In my opinion, the Sino-Cua- casian theory in the shape as it is presented is better placed on the back burner, until more regular and phonologically motivated corres- pondances can be offered." If I remember things correctly, there will be a workshop on SC in Cambridge (at the McDonald Institute of Archeo- logy) sometime this year, so maybe we will see a convincing defense of Starostin before long ??? Cheers, Wolfgang ps, re: AMR| I don't know what Miguel views of Sino-Caucasian are, but I AMR| do know that these kinds of speculations are precisely grist AMR| to the mill of those, like Wolfgang, who are perhaps all AMR| too eager to dismiss the SC theory w/o a proper evaluation. Oh well... for Wolfgang Schulze's _very proper_ evaluation of the C-part of SC, cf. his review of Starostin & Nikolayev in _Diachronica_ 1997.1: 149-161. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 4 21:41:20 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 13:41:20 PST Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: >>>Etruscan is non-Indo-European. Hell, we can't even read it! >>Oh, but we can! There is general agreement on the values of the >>letters and a large proportion of the inscriptions can be >>translated without much difficulty. >There are also words in Latin said to be of Etruscan origin [e.g. >satelles, persona, etc.] as well non-IE substrate common to Latin & >Greek that may from Etruscan and/or a congener [I think form-/morph- >are among them] While there are things like "grandson" which look much like loans from Latin, when you find enormous coincidences that couldn't possibly have been borrowed into Etruscan from Latin or Greek such as "in front of" with the initial laryngeal or "build, found", you really have to start wondering about a genetic relationship of some kind with IE, especially when there is a pattern of unique sound correspondances to boot. Even Anatolian borrowings don't cut it because of those pesky grammatical elements that won't go away. So amidst all this data I would personally say that anyone that doesn't agree that IE and Etruscan are genetically related by now are the ones that are truly gaga. So get ye to a library! :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Mar 5 05:19:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 00:19:57 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/99 8:32:31 AM, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: <> Returning my question about Why *p>f?: The answer most commonly given related either to social causes or in a certain case to some tendency towards aspiration. There is another explanation however. It suggests that Germanic seems "archaic" not because it split-off early as Miquel suggests above, but because it emerged very late. And it explains p>f not as a "sound shift," but as a fundamental part of the conversion from a non-IE to an IE language by German speakers. John Hawkins in Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages (1987) (p.70-71) puts the general case for this, using a migration theory: "At least two facts suggest that the pre-Germanic speakers migrated to their southern Scandanavian location sometime before 1000BC and that they encountered a non-IE speaking people from whom linguistic features were borrowed that were to have a substantial impact on the developement of Proto-Germanic." Hawkins goes on to mention the 30% non-IE vocabulary that is being documented on this list. He also goes to another piece of evidence: "...the consonantal changes of the First Sound Shift are unparalleled in their extent elsewhere in Indo-European and suggest that speakers of a fricative-rich language with no voiced stops made systematic conversions of Indo-European sounds into their own nearest equivalents..." Both Hawkins and Comrie assumed, of course, that there was a migration - which we now have strong reason to believe did not occur, given both Cavalli-Sforza's evidence and the recent mDNA findings that show even less evidence of any meaningful migration. And - and this is key - if there was no migration, then the change that Hawkins speaks about - conversion of IE sounds to a fricative-rich language with no voiced stops - MUST HAVE HAPPENED right from the beginning of German. It makes no sense to think that Germanic speakers first adopted proper IE sounds and then returned to their former non-IE accents. This means the First Germanic Sound Shift ACTUALLY reflects the presrvation of prior non-IE sounds during conversion to an IE language. AND it would mean that the First Sound Shift must have happened at the time the IE language was first introduced. In other words, there was no Germanic *p> Germanic f. There was no proto-Germanic *pemke (five). Because the non-IE speakers had no reason to drop the /f/ in adopting the IE word and then go back later and sound shift back to it. And, BTW, this explanation of how the First "Sound Shift" happened is far more reasonable than postulating a massive arbitrary later adoption of those sound changes. Or an unexplainable impulse to fricatives, etc. Germanic as IE "with an accent" explains the "shift" with a consistent underlying reason (a partial conversion from non-IE) that works across the board for all former speakers of that earlier language rather than being a later "trend" that coincidentally got picked up by all Germanic speakers but somehow was rejected by all non-Germanic speakers. That kind of subtle consensus is improbable. (Because he is postulating a mass migration, Hawkins uses the words "systematic conversion" to IE, which seems to postulate some Proto-Germanic Academy of Language. An non-IE accent is much more plausible for the universality of the sound change in German-speakers and total non-adoption by any others IE speaking group.) If the First "Sound Shift" actually marks the conversion of a non-IE language into IE Germanic, then it was only completed around 500BC (according to Hawkins and Comrie.) And this would have many implications for our understanding of the history and spread of IE languages. For one thing it would not make sense to talk about "proto-Germanic" branching off a "proto-IndoEuropean" core. There would have been no PIE at this point in time. Germanic would have had to have been acquired from a SPECIFIC existing IE language or languages. (I even think I have a candidate for that language and somewhat documented historical circumstances.) And there is nothing inconsistent with this archaeologically. I don't think I need to repeat the often repeated dictum that we have no reason to think Corded Ware/Battle Axe cultural evidence tells us in any way what language was spoken by those who left it behind. Or that any change in language from non-IE to IE would be marked by any noticeable change in that material evidence, since it was preliterate. Finally, as a reality check, it should be remembered that we have no solid evidence of Germanic before 300ace. If IEGermanic was finally formed some short time before 500bce, then that would mean 800 years passed before the Gothic Bible was written down. 800 years was sufficient for Gallic to be replaced entirely by the new language of French. Yet less remains of Gallic among the contiguous population of France then remains of non-IE among the Germans. There is really no need and no evidence that would necessarily extend the emergence of an IE proto-Germanic much before 500bce. Respectfully, Steve Long [ Moderator's comment: And what of the very similar, though completely separate, Armenian shift? --rma ] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 5 11:29:34 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 11:29:34 +0000 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > But before 1500, Spanish & Portuguese were farther apart than they are now. > Rick Mc Callister Oh yeah? Who says? It wouldn't take long to list some significant changes in Spanish since 1500 which have moved it away from Portuguese. But it won't be worth it without a good reason to believe the claim made above. 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 maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 5 14:18:29 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 14:18:29 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Many thanks to Rick McCallister for these interesting lists (only recently received, since forwarded by our moderator from Nostratic, which I'm not on. One thing is not clear to me. What is the significance of the presence in the list of Romance borrowings from Germanic (?all from Vennemann 1984)? Is it because the etyma are not themselves attested in Germanic? This might be the case for Fr heraut (> Eng herald) < Frk *herialt, or Fr honte < Frk *haunitha. In which case, is it being suggested that these words don't have plausible etymologies within Germanic, or IE cognates? [according to Onions, ODEE, herald is orig from Gc *xariwald- < *xarjaz `army' + *wald- `rule'.] But this wouldn't seem to apply to the entries like It. guatare, in connection with which Meyer-Lübke, Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, cites Frk wahta (REW 9477c) and Langobardic wahtari (REW 9478), without asterisks. [And Onions, ODEE gives OHG wahten, s.v. wait.] (And as Germanic words, the entries with Romance guV- belong under w-, and the French with e'c(h)- belong under sk-.) 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 ERobert52 at aol.com Fri Mar 5 16:43:16 1999 From: ERobert52 at aol.com (ERobert52 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 11:43:16 EST Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: jpmaher at neiu.edu wrote: > Vladimir Georgiev [Sofia] held that Etruscan was early IE and > related to Hittite. > ... > nobody contested his data nor his thesis. > ERobert52 at aol.com wrote: >> No sensible person thinks Etruscan is IE, and most people who say >> it is are pretty wacky, A comparison of Etruscan with Hittite and the other Anatolian languages shows some similar features such as noun declension endings and the role of clitics, indeed some of the clitics are the same. Some possible cognate lexical items have also been pointed to. These are either due to chance, Sprachbund, borrowing, a substrate, or a genetic relationship. However, all other things being equal, the common ancestor of such a genetic relationship would need to be at a date prior to the break-up between Proto-Anatolian and the rest of IE because Etruscan is less similar to the rest of IE than the Anatolian languages are. What is clear is that Etruscan cannot constitute a branch of IE on a par with, say, Celtic or Albanian, let alone be a member of such a branch, despite repeated efforts to prove the contrary over the years by e.g. Mayani, Gruamach etc. by attempting to look up Etruscan words in a modern dictionary for the relevant language group that they want to claim a relationship with. Sometimes similar suggestions even involve throwing in some inscriptions that are actually Umbrian or Venetic and lo and behold, Etruscan is suddenly IE. I would describe these approaches as not sensible. I discovered another website today where somebody's "research" had led them to the conclusion that Etruscan was actually Ukrainian (not even Proto-Slav, nor OCS, but Ukrainian). This I call wacky. This should be contrasted with points of view such as the idea that Etruscan forms part of a longer range construct including but prior to IE (Kretschmer), or has some sort of affinity with certain Anatolian languages (Stoltenberg), which are points of view that deserve to be treated seriously, although their linguistic evidence is, understandably, a bit slim. I believe Georgiev was saying something perfectly reasonable similar to this. On a related matter, there is obviously some sort of connection between Etruscan and western Anatolia given the historical references from several sources linking the Etruscans to Lydia. Frank Rossi speculated recently (on historical grounds) that there might be an Etruscan substrate in Lydian. However as far as I can see there is no more linguistic evidence that would link Etruscan with Lydian than would link Etruscan with Hittite. Or am I missing something? Ed. Robertson From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Mar 8 18:07:11 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 10:07:11 -0800 Subject: Salmon. Message-ID: >salmon in the Danube. Salmon trout are found in the Danube according to Mallory - but not the other kind of salmon. Peter From xdelamarre at siol.net Sat Mar 6 00:31:27 1999 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 01:31:27 +0100 Subject: Non IE words in early Celtic Message-ID: Reply to Rick Mc Callister : 1/ *abol- (*a:b- with Lex Winter) "apple" : Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, possibly Thracian or Dacian (the gloss dinupula < *k'un-a:bo:la:). Enough to have IE status. Considered as non-IE because of -b-, itself considered as non-IE, circular. 2/ *aliso "alder": add Slavic jelicha, Russ. _ol'cha_, lithuanian _alksnis_, Latin _alnus_ (*alisnos). Enough to have IE status. 3/ Gaulish _bra:ca_ : latin _suffra:go:_ "jarret" (<*bhra:g- "cul"), cf after Schrader, O. Szemenenyi (An den Quellen des lateinischen Wortschatzes, 117-18). 4/ Gaulish _bri:ua_ "bridge" (cf place names Caro-briua, Briuo-duron etc.), germanic *bro:wo: & *bruwwi: (> bridge etc.), OCS _bruvuno_ "poutre, rondin", Serbian _brv_ "passerelle" (prob. the original meaning). 5/ Germanic _bukkaz_, clearly an expressive gemination of *bhug'o- (Avestic _buza_) etc. 6/ Gaulish _dunum_ "enclosed place", Germanic *tu:na- (> town, Zaun etc.) ; C. Watkins, Select. Writ. 2, 751-53, has related Hittite _tuhhusta_ "finish, come to an end, come full circle" (cf Latin _fu:-nes-_ < *dhu:-). A possibility : I am a bit suspicious because it is a root-etymology. 7/ *gwet- "resin" : not only Celtic-Germanic, (Latin _bitu-men_, may come also from Osco-Umbrian), but O.Ind. _jatu-_ "Lack, Gummi", Mayrhofer EWAia 1, 565. 8/ Gaulish (& Celtic) _i:sarno_ "iron" : explained convincingly by W. Cowgill as the regular reflex of IE _*e:sr-no-_ "the bloody (red) metal" (Idg Gramm. 1,1). 9/ Gaulish canto- "edge, circle" : explained by O. Szemerenyi, Scrip. Min. 4, 2036-38, as _*kmto-_ from a root _*kem-_ 'cover'. A possibility. 10/ "lake" : add Greek _lakkos_ <*_lakwos_ "cisterna", OCS _loky_ "id." ; for the alternance a / o (as for the word 'sea' *mori/*mari), JE Rasmussen, Studien zur Morphophonemik der idg Spr. 239-40, has proposed an explanation. I hope to be able to present a more detailed account of these etymologies in my "Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise", to appear in the coming years. I do not believe very much in "Nordwestblock" theories (Hamp, Huld, recently Beekes, who does not think that *ab- "water" and *teuta: "people" are IE), taken from Meillet's "vocabulaire du nord-ouest" (by the way) : you can prove the antiquity of a designation (by a set of correspondences), but not draw conclusions in reason of its absence (argumentum e silentio) in a given dialect. The old problem of dialectology. A good example has been given recently : a lot of speculation, with sociological consequences, had been produced from the fact the Celtic had no representant of the canonic IE words for son & daughter (*su:nus, *dhugHte:r). The later word is now attested in the Plomb du Larzac as _duxtir_ ; by pure chance. the same is true of _lubi_ "love" (no trace of this IE root in insular Celtic) or _deuoxtonion_ gen. plur. "of Gods & Men" (no trace of dvandva compositum in ins. C.). etc. Xavier Delamarre Ljubljana From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 6 03:29:58 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 03:29:58 GMT Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: >Would your outline would be something like this? >Outliers are marked with * >I.IE to c. 5500 BCE >A. *Anatolian c. 5500 BCE >B. Non-Anatolian IE 5500 BCE > 1. *Tocharian c. 5000 BCE > 2. Eastern [Steppe] IE c. 5000/4500 BCE > a. Indo-Iranian 3200 BC > b. Greco-Armenian [Thracian?] 3200 BC > i. Hellenic > ii. *Armenian > iii. Thracian-Phrygian Too little is known about Thracian and Phrygian to call them. I've also grown rather dubious about Greco-Armenian. The similarities between Greek and Armenian (mainly in vocabulary) must be secondary, resulting from interaction in the Balkans, but Armenian must've split off from the main body of IE containing Greek earlier. > 3. Central/Western [LBK] IE c. 5000/4500 BCE > a. Germano-Balto-Slavic 4500-4000? BCE > i. Balto-Slavic 4000 BCE [GBS Sprachbund 3K-1K BCE] > ii. *Germanic 4000 BCE [GBS Sprachbund 3K-1K BCE] Same doubts about GBS as about Armeno-Greek. Secondary interactions. > b. Celto-Italic-Venetic-etc. [Illyrian?] 4500-2000 BCE? > i. Celtic 2000 BCE > ii. Italic 2000 BCE > iii. Venetic 2000 BCE > iv. ?Illyrian? 2000 BCE? > v. Lusitanian? 2000 BCE? Nothing is known about Illyrian, little about Venetic or Lusitanian. > And there the question of what Albanian is/was. > Is it the remains of whatever Balkan IE language was there before >Greco-Armenian? My feeling is that it's somewhat intermediate between Greek and Balto-Slavic, maybe leaning more towards the BS side. Although it also has some things in common with Italo-Celtic in the verbal system. It seems much more logical that it would be descended from Illyrian rather than from Thracian (much more Latin than Greek borrowings), and I can say that with impunity, as *nothing* is known about Illyrian (not even if it was a single language group). The diagram as I posted it some time ago: Stage 1. Anatolian splits off (actually, PIE (LBK) splits off: 5500). Anatolian <-- PIE Stage 2. Tocharian splits off (c. 5000 ?). Anatolian ; PIE --> Tocharian Stage 3. Germanic and Armenian split off (4000?). Anatolian ; Germanic <-- PIE --> Armenian ; Tocharian Stage 4/5. Final break-up of PIE (3500). Anatolian; Germanic ; Italo-Celtic <-- Greek-Indo-Iranian --> Balto-Slavic , Albanian ; Armenian ; Tocharian So the original tree would be: PIE / \ Anatolian /\ / \ /\ Tocharian / \ /\ /\ / | | \ Germanic | | Armenian | |\ Italo-Celtic | \ / \ Albanian / \ /\ Balto-Slavic / \ Greek Indo-Iranian After that, the situation was slightly complicated by secondary interactions between Germanic and Balto-Slavic, and Greek/Albanian/Armenian. Stage 6. Balkan and Baltic interaction spheres (3000-2500). Anatolian [Greece/Anatolia]; Greek/Albanian/Armenian [Balkan]; Italo-Celtic [Bell Beaker]; Germanic/Balto-Slavic [Corded Ware]; Indo-Iranian [(pre-)Andronovo]; Tocharian [Yenisei/Sinkiang] Stage 7. Further interactions (2000-1000). Anatolian/Armenian [Anatolia]; Greek/Albanian/Italic [Mediterranean]; Celtic/Germanic [NW Europe]; Balto-Slavic/Iranian [E Europe/C Asia/Iran]; Indic [India]; Tocharian[/Iranian] [Sinkiang] ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 6 03:50:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 03:50:55 GMT Subject: /Anatolian /-nt-/ and Greek /-nth-/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > Perhaps I am missing something here, but why should Anatolian >place-names with /-nt-/ (or for that matter /-nd-/) be borowed into Greek >with /-nth-/? Probably because Anatolian t was aspirated, or sounded aspirated to the Greeks. >I suppose we could say that the form was originally >/-ndh-/, but the Anatolian forms in /-nt/ are generally considered older. The IE etymon is *-nt- (probably identical to the Luwian/Slavic/Tocharian collective (plural) suffix *-(e/o)nt-). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 6 05:36:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 05:36:13 GMT Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >We know Renfrew's 7000 BCE is too early for PIE >because of the absence of the late-Neolithic innovations recorded in PIE in >7000 BCE. However, that vocabulary _is_ there in Anatolian. Let's take a closer look at this. What are these late Neolithic innovations? Mallory claims that such words as "wool", "milk", "plough" and "yoke" belong here, as central parts of the new vocabulary associated with the "Secondary Products Revolution" (Sherrat) of the late Neolithic. But surely there's no reason to think that words such as "milk" and "wool" didn't exist in the vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times. In the early Neolithic, sheep, goats and cattle were domesticated, and there is evidence for dairying of cattle in Northern European LBK sites. The plough was also used since the very beginning of the Neolithic, if only in the form of a branch or stick (Irish ce:cht, Gothic ho:ha, Slavic soxa; Skt. hala-). That leaves only "yoke", with the undoubted Hittite reflex as a possible candidate for being a late Neolithic innovation. I've been unable to find a reference to the first archaeological evidence for the yoke, and I gather that Sherrat's inclusion of the yoke in the "Secondary Products Revolution" toolset is mainly based on Sumerian depictions of it (Johanna Nichols compares PIE *yugom with PKartv. *uG-el- and PEC *r=u(L')L' (*r=u(k')k')). Another undoubted Late Neolithic innovation is metal working, but here the Hittite vocabulary is completely unrelated to the main IE one (except maybe the word for "white, silver" harki-). Finally, the principal lexical argument revolves around the horse and horse technology. The Hittite word for "horse" is unknown (aways written Sumerograpically as AN$E.KUR.RA), but there is a Luwian attestation: asuwa. This looks very much like an Indo-Iranian borrowing (Skt. as'va < PIE *ek^wos), were it not for the fact that Luwian "dog" is (PIE *k^won-). So either there was a satem-like Luwian sound law *k^w > sw, or Luwian borrowed both words from Mitanni-Aryan. Borrowing of the horse word is not surprising (the Hittite archives at Boghazko"y yielded a treatise on horses, containing a number of words of Indo-Iranian origin, written by a Mitannian called Kikkuli). Borrowing of the dog word seems less plausible (although Slavic sobaka is of course borrowed from Iranian as well). The other words related to horse technology yield no Hittite cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but , related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), except for two curious items: "shaft/pole", Hittite hissa ~ Skt. i:s.a:, Grk. oie:ks, Slav. oje(s)- and "(to) harness", Hittite turiia- ~ Skt. dhu:r-. It is, I believe, no coincidence that these are Hittite-Sanskrit isoglosses (if we discard the Greek and Slavic words for having different Ablaut). Again, the most likely explanation is that these are Mitanni-Aryan loanwords. After all, it would be rather strange to find the exact same inherited words for cultural items such "shaft" and "harness" when Hittite doesn't even share its basic kinship terminology with Indo-European and has a different word for "four". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 12:58:42 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 12:58:42 -0000 Subject: /Anatolian /-nt-/ and Greek /-nth-/ Message-ID: DLW asks: >why should Anatolian >place-names with /-nt-/ (or for that matter /-nd-/) be borowed into Greek >with /-nth-/? (a) a phonetic explanation: Hittite (as you probably know) shows only the voiceless stops. If there is no phonemic distinction between aspirate and unaspirated, or between voiced and voiceless in Hittite (although there may be between geminate and non-geminate), then we know nothing about the actual articulation. So perhaps the Greek borrowings, if they were borrowings, are genuine reflections of the actual phonetic value. (b) a non-phonetic explanation We should also note that borrowings into other languages from English sometimes have results that are odd to our eyes, and may be done for morphophonemic reasons, e.g. the Hebrew use of /q/ for English /k/, which prevents fricativisation in certain contexts. So perhaps we should leave open the idea that the borrowing as Hittite written -nt- as an aspirate or a voiced consonant might have had some non-phonetic explanation. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 13:09:26 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 13:09:26 -0000 Subject: Celtic and English Again Message-ID: On the lack of influence from Celtic in English: Perhaps a comparable situation can be found in Egypt, which was Egyptian-speaking for yonks, then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand years, but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either "substrate". Does this suggest that languages can indeed be replaced without great effect on the invading language, if other circumstances are right, and that the lack of influence from Celtic on English is not really so remarkable? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 13:17:21 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 13:17:21 -0000 Subject: Cowgill's Law Message-ID: Our Moderator said: >Cowgill's Law ... >I see that it does not appear in Collinge, It would not be in Collinge since he deliberately excludes those laws which are specific to one language group. Peter [ Moderator's comment: Of course! I wasn't thinking when I flipped it open to check. Thanks! --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 13:04:32 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 13:04:32 -0000 Subject: Germanic and Balto-Slavic Cases in /m/ Message-ID: DLW suggested: /bhi/ being added to the accusative (in /-m/) This in itself would be an enormous innovation, which no other IE language group shows for any of its cases. (The only exception might be the unproven development of the accusative plural from accusative singular +s). So alas, even if true, (which it isn't), it would still remain "diagnostic". Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 13:01:09 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 13:01:09 -0000 Subject: Chariots Message-ID: "true cavalry". This has to do with the development of a horse strong enough to be ridden. I think there has been discussion of this in this group before, with inconclusive results about when horses were strong enough to carry a person on their back. Peter From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 7 03:37:01 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 19:37:01 PST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: While I would prefer not to discuss this here when it is an on-going topic on HistLing, I can't in good conscience not post it and then post other items to which it has something to say. So since it started out on the IE list, I'm posting it to the IE list rather than Nostratic (where I'd not be any happier to see it, really :-). --rma ] Hi y'all, I have transfered this N-word topic over to the NOSTRATIC list from the INDO-EUROPEAN List. It really belongs in both but the IE world and the moderator, stubborn as they both are :), are not ready yet for this kind of discussion in the latter list. Sadly its likeliest pre-history and those of the language groups it interacts with, is very important in the discussion of IE and the geographical position of its range that we eventually find: ME (GLEN): >>If we accept (as we should) that IE is genetically tied to languages >>like Uralic and Altaic JOATSIMEON: >-- frankly, I think relationships at that time-depth are >unrecoverable with any degree of confidence. This illustrates one of my frustrations about debates on these lists (and don't get me wrong, I'm glad that they exist and they are necessary). You see, I'm trying to understand the logic that some employ to deny external relationships with IE and I often find it gnawing at my nerves because of its senselessness. (I know, even on the Nostratic list, there are some who fight long-range genetic relationships in favor of the Valley Girl's NULL hypothesis). Now, I can fully understand that one can have the legitimate view that _AT PRESENT TIME_, such things are not recoverable to a _strong degree_ as JS points out. This is a matter of opinion. However, should this stop one from thinking and conjecturing beyond what we know in order to even vaguely answer these questions of genetic relationship? How can a study progress if one doesn't strive to progress with new ideas and to stretch all that is known to its fullest volume? This is how any science in general works and conjecture is a necessary component in good research. Many will agree that IE is now reconstructable to a decent degree (at least in terms of general vocab). So is that it? We just stop, fly our hands up in the air and quit? Well, unless we have grown old of our research, we take what we know and expand it, conjecture, find more evidence, etc., so that we can reach a new level of understanding about the field we're working with. Therefore, why is it then that we have many on this list and others with this illogical agnostic/defeatist attitude? Can we really place a limit on what we can find out or learn at any given time? Again, no. We ironically don't know enough to begin to calculate such a limit unless we profess divinity of ourselves. We simply don't know what we will discover or can discover and I hope no one will argue with that bit of intuitive reasoning. This problem fits the topic of external IE genetic relationship as good as any. Do we know 100% that IE is related to Uralic? No. Do we know 100% that IE is NOT related to Uralic? No. Do we know 100% that IE existed as we expect it does? No. Maybe 25%, 80%, maybe 95% or even 99% but we can't say that it's proven for all time or without foundation of "evidence" and wipe one's hands clean of it. The questions remain to be answered, not ignored carelessly. Thus it should be fairly apparent to people already what I'm getting at. Until those wacky nuclear physicists back at the science lab discover how to warp space-time back to the time of a given proto-language, comparative linguistics will always be _pure theory_. Since this is theory, Alexis' opinion is off-center. There can be no unanimous distinction on what is dismissable "conjecture" and what isn't. Ideally and preferably, to make a conjecture more probable, a theory should be based on relevant evidence of some kind. Many times, because this is a topic of linguistics, linguistical evidence is supplied to validate a theory. Sometimes it's archaeoligical in nature, or even (gasp!) genetic. Despite the type of evidence, though, "proof" as such is really a matter of logic and relative probability. "Proof" is defined by the degree of likelihood an idea has to overcome the barrier of insignificance of its beholder and to stick it out from other competing theories. So here's my conjecture and let it's proof be Reason at last: IE is more closely related to Uralic, Altaic and other "Eurasiatic" languages than anything else. What do IEists often say to this? "Can't be proven", "I don't think it can be recoverable", "Pure hogwash" and that's that. This is where my sense of logic starts paining me because here we find such a defeatist attitude at work deceiving many into an ultra-conservative, anti-research frame of mind that denies answers to questions simply because the answers are purely probabilistic, not boolean. "Maybe" instead of "is, without a doubt". Probability, however, is the vary nature of comparative linguistics! Surely IE is most likely related to something. No self-professed linguist could possibly pretend that IE invented its own language (aside from Pat in re of his Sumerian idea). So we go beyond that, we conjecture, we allow ourselves to step beyond the obvious and fight for more knowledge. We search for the most probable external links with IE. We can't prove without a trace of uncertainty that IE is related to Uralic and Altaic. We may not be able to prove it with a 25% probability, a 5% probability, or even a 0.00001% probability. We can't even measure the probability in realistic terms. The probability of the theory on its own is not the point. The point is: in regards to any other competing theories out there on IE external links (from NWC to Benue-Congo), what is the MOST probable? What has the most weight? Is this probability large enough over the other possibilities. Well, given that language groups like Algic or other "Amerind" langauges have to be an exceedingly low probability on this list of possibilities, we thus CAN create a list of language groups ordered by their degree of probability and, to the very least, answer vaguely the question of IE genetic relationships (ie: "It's very, very, very unlikely that IE is related to Amerind languages within the past 10,000 years"). The probability may appear "small" (a relative term to the beholder) but in relation to all other theories possible in terms of genetic relationship with IE, Eurasiatic languages are set miles apart from the rest. If you disagree, don't just say "dunno". Agnosticism is blatantly illogical. What is the most probable answer in all in your view? What is your basis? Answer it, even if it is a vague and probabilistic answer. Dare to have an opinion. It's reasonable to have one as long as you understand that it has less weight over theories with large amounts of evidence. Even someone who thinks that we will never know for absolute surity, must with any degree of sanity agree this hypotheses is the best possible one we can have. I really would like to crack the "can't-do-it-so-why-bother" reasoning and talk realistically about these external relationships. I would prefer to do it on the IE group where this discussion would be all the more meaningful amongst those staunchly opposed to long-range comparison but alas... -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Mar 6 14:13:25 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 08:13:25 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Friday, March 05, 1999 10:14 PM >I know of no reflex that suggests a palatal (^) + labial combination. Are you >suggesting that I am considering g[^]h-w-? I am not. I think -gh-w- is still >the likeliest termination. >[ Moderator's comment: > Perhaps I am confused about what you mean when you write : To me, > this suggests a segment *gh followed by a segment *w, especially when you > write about the latter being "carried over into the first syllable". Yes, this is exactly what I meant: *negh(V)w-. > My point is that the symbol used in all Indo-Europeanist literature which is > not limited to ASCII has a superscript , which in my TeX-influenced way > I would write as *g{^w}h (or less preferably *gh{^w}). Rich, I never write anything as because I frequently am switching from email to .html and whatever is between the < and > is treated as an instruction rather than copy in .html. [ Moderator's comment: Old habit: If square brackets indicate phonetic values, and slashes indicate phonemic values, then angle brackets indicate *graphemic* values, that is, how something is spelled in the orthography under discussion. Much older than HTML, so I'm going to claim priority for it. ;-] I have tried to indicated the labiovelars as g[w], k[w], and the palatalized versions g[^][w], k[^][w]. [ Moderator continues: See above: That is extremely confusing--either mixing phonetics in, or if taken as in syntax, indicating something optional. --rma ] > I'm afraid that the sloppy manner in which labiovelars get written has > misled you into thinking that the -u- of the Greek word _nuks, nuktos_ is > metathesized from after a palatal (or simple velar, if you allow three > series of dorsals). Well, I might not have it right, but that is what I favor at the moment. *negh(V)w- -> *neugh- + s/t -? neuk(h)s/t-. [ Moderator's response: It may be what you favor, but it flies in the face of the data: Sanskrit *requires* a labiovelar, or the accusative would be **nas.t.am rather than the attested _naktam_. And what is represented by that "*s/t -?" ? --rma ] >But, let me ask a question: are you saying that Hittite does *not* suggest >that the final element before the [w], glide or extension, was voiced? That >is a perfectly legtimate position but I was not aware it was very >well-represented these days. >[ Moderator's response: > I've not addressed this issue before. Sturtvant himself noted a *tendency* > for single vs. double writing of (mostly voiceless) stops to correspond to > a voiced vs. voiceless distinction in the rest of Indo-European (or, as he > would have it, in Indo-European proper). However, as I remember what he > said about Hittite _nekuz_, he considered the spelling to represent a > labiovelar which could not otherwise be written in cuneiform--and since it > thus appears before another consonant, the single/double writing tendency > would not be germane. [ Moderator's comment on previous response: I have since looked in Sturtevant's _Comparative Grammar of Hittite_ (2nd, 1951) and his _Indo-Hittite Laryngeals_, and find that I have mis-stated his views: He clearly reads the syllable as such. I cannot for the life of me remember where I learned the other interpretation. --rma ] Yes, I believe that must have been Sturtevant's view with a modification. On pg. 43 of "A Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Langauge), he indicates Indo-Hittite *nekwts. But then on p. 59, contradictorily, he indicates *neg'wty; and goes on to say: ". . . such forms as nukha . nuktor (Hesych.), ennukhos 'of night', pannukhios, autonnnukhi 'in the same night', whose aspirate proves that the second consonant of the IH word was g' ". On the previous page, he defines IH g' as "IE gh, g[^]h, or the velar part of ghw". Finally, on page 181, Sturtevant lists "ne-ku-uz . . . . . . neguts", which is the "Suggested phonetic interpretation". Now, this all suggests to me that Sturtevant believed (at least as of the writing of this book) that the IE stem was *negh(V)w-. [ Moderator's response: You are correct, this does appear to be what he believed. However, I think he was wrong. The argument I first cited was not Sturtevant's, but it was nevertheless the right interpretation, based on readings of other lexical items such as the interrogatives. --rma ] Pat From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 6 15:48:56 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 09:48:56 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <01J8HNK0Q6UE90W1AY@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu> Message-ID: Yes, I agree there is seemingly Celtic (grammatical) influence in most of Western Romance, most notably French. It is just a little more difficult to nail down, without actual knowledge of the Celtic languages in question. For example we may note the "two BE verbs" syndrome in Iberian. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 6 16:02:45 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 10:02:45 -0600 Subject: Feminines in Neuter Plurals Message-ID: What exactly is the argument here? That if the feminine had been a recent development from the masculine, the masculine plural rather than the neuter would be used for mixed M/F plurals, therefore the feminine cannot be a recent development from the masculine? What if the feminine is a recent development from the neuter/inanimate? Very un-PC, I know, but stranger (and more un-PC) things have happened. And is it not true the Conventional Wisdom has the feminine developing from the neuter/inanimate anyway? Perhaps I am missing something, but I find it difficult to understand what is being alledged. DLW From dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu Sat Mar 6 17:19:10 1999 From: dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu (Dan Tompkins) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 12:19:10 -0500 Subject: Mallory Message-ID: On pastoralism, I'm no expert. And I have not followed the discussion closely. Here are two comments that may or may not be appropriate: if they are not, I apologize. The situation of the Plains Indians sounds in any case anomalous, doesn't it, in that there were two big exogenous variables at work: getting forced out of areas like Wisconsin, and then getting the horse. On pastoralism in the Greek world, Jens Erik Skydsgaard, 'Transhumance in the Greek Polis,' in C.R. Whittaker (ed), Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 1988) argued (as I recall: can't find the book right now) that 'pure' pastoralism did not exist, that in general agriculture took place at the same time. Without the essay in front of me I can't tell what time frame he put on this. Anyhow, the discussion is interesting! Dan Tompkins Faculty Fellow for Learning Communities Associate Professor, Greek, Hebrew & Roman Classics Conwell Hall, Temple University 1801 North Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19122-6096 215 204-4900 (phone) 215 204-5735 (fax) dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu [ moderator snip ] From dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu Sat Mar 6 17:48:16 1999 From: dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu (Dan Tompkins) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 12:48:16 -0500 Subject: Error on pastoralism Message-ID: On consulting some notes I realize I had it wrong on Skydsgaard. There are two essays in the Whittaker volume dealing with transhumance. Here is my summary of the one by Stephen Hodkinson: Hodkinson, S. (1988). Animal husbandry in the Greek polis. C. R. Whittaker (editor), Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge Philological Society Supplementary Volume 14, (pp. 35- 74). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Argues that pastoralism and agriculture were integrated more than standard view holds. (As I recall, SH was opposing the standard view as a form of "environmental determinism" based on departure of flocks from valleys in summer due to heat, and consequent lack of manure in fields). Skydsgaard in same volume opposes this view; Spurr in his review JRS 79 (1989) also has reservations. Spurr says small farmers could devise ways to keep flocks on farm all yr round, and himself opposes environmental determinism. Jameson in "Agric. Labor in Ancient Greece" in Berit Wells (ed) Agriculture in Ancient Greece (Stockholm, 1992) finds the notion that animal husbandry on small scale was an "integral part of mixed agriculture" convincing. Dan Tompkins From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 7 02:06:17 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 21:06:17 EST Subject: Chariots Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 3/5/99 7:31:44 PM Mountain Standard Time, iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >But if this is true, it has implications (however circumstiantial) for the >development of true cavalry, for as of about 2000 BC chariot cavalry was >evidently regarded as the latest most terrifying thing by all concerned (as >various nomads burst out of various steppes employing it) and so this would >suggest that the development of true cavalry must have been later. >> -- depends what you mean by "cavalry", which is not the same thing as "riding horses". Chariots were generally used as mobile missile platforms for archers. Developing the proper type of bow for use from horseback, and the techniques for employing it, took time. Shock action from horseback needed developments in weapons and horse-harness. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 7 02:14:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 21:14:00 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: In other words, French has about 200 words borrowed from Gaulish -- including many very common items of everyday speech -- while OE has 12 from Brythonic. Furthermore, the emergence of a standardized written form of OE (based on the Wessex dialect) took place centuries _after_ the Anglo-Saxon settlements in Britain. For the first 200 years and more, the Saxons were illiterate. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 7 06:59:11 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 06:59:11 GMT Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >> aecse [OE] > ax, axe >> [< ?Vasconic"; see Basque aizkora "axe, hatchet"] [tv95, tv97] >I think everyone agrees that Basque `ax' is a loan from Latin > `hatchet'. The Latin word would have been borrowed as >*; the [h] is a suprasegmental feature in Basque; the */l/ would >have undergone the categorical early medieval change of intervocalic /l/ >to /r/; and the diphthongization of /a/ to /ai/ in an initial syllable >is a familiar though sporadic in Basque: compare `sacred, >holy', from some Romance development of Latin . Might the word not have been borrowed directly as , with metathesis of the /i/ (especially if Latin already had a degree of allophonic palatalization)? That, or analogy with the other tool words in (h)ai(t)z-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 7 08:15:49 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 02:15:49 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Glen Gordon Date: Saturday, March 06, 1999 9:16 PM >PATRICK: >>In any case, I have subsequently revised my reconstruction to >>*negh-w-. >First, we will assume that you mean *negh-, where is superscript, >as the moderator validly keeps pointing out but that you blatantly >ignore. I am sorry that you do not understand what a root extension is. In previous postings, I have identified the -w- as a root extension. This has nothing to do with g[w], which is the method I use to indicate the so-called labiovelar. [ Moderator's note: I had also noted your use of the term "root extension", which I understood perfectly (Petersson's _Wurzeldeterminativ_, for example), but assumed that it was part of your misanalysis of the ASCII string "neghw-" as a palatal + a labial rather than a badly written labiovelar. So lay off Mr. Gordon. --rma ] >This means that the labial element is _fused_ to the velar. >There is no suffixing whatsoever. The phoneme *ghw is ONE element in >this case, otherwise we should expect -v- in Sanskrit . We don't, >so that's it. I have also written that I believe that possibly two roots were in use: *negh- and *negh-w-. Do you not comprehend what you read? [ Moderator's comment: Since I did not comprehend it, either, I see no need to pursue this line of insult any further. --rma ] >Third, re Hittite's doubled consonants, are you sure that when a medial >consonant is doubled that it means "un-voiced"? That is what Sturtevant thought. [ Moderator's comment: It is indeed the standard theory, though there are some who see rather lenis- fortis than voiced/voiceless. --rma ] >I could have sworn it >was meant to be the other way around which would mean that Hitt. >comes from *nekwt as expected and all you have to work with is Greek to >keep the (and I'll say it again) "flimsy" Nostratic theory afloat. If you ever read Sturtevant, and a few other appropriate manuals, you might be in a much better position to usefully discuss Nostratic. [ Moderator's comment: Sturtevant did not address the Nostratic theory of his day; he was instead denying that the Anatolian languages were part of Indo-European proper. That is, he fully accepted a Neogrammarian reconstruction of PIE, and was trying to explain how Anatolian differed, rather than taking the Anatolian data as calling for a different interpretation of the IE data already at hand. So a reading of Sturtevant, while instructive for a budding laryngealist as to the extremes to which it can be taken, has nothing to offer to Nostratic. --rma ] >The theory is flimsy because you use localized phenomena in a single IE >language (in this case, Greek) as a means to create an unsupported IE >reconstruction so that you can then casually link IE directly to >Egyptian of all things. I have also used Hittite. [ Moderator's comment: But you still haven't explained the rest of the Indo-European data, which at the very least call for a labiovelar (cf. Sanskrit) and not a determinative *-w-. --rma ] >You seem to forget that not only does Egyptian come from Afro-Asiatic first >off from which many, many millenia seperate these two stages but that on top >of it, IE and Afro-Asiatic would be seperated by a good 10,000 years or more >by even the most right-wing Nostraticist. That does not change a thing. Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 7 08:40:43 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 02:40:43 -0600 Subject: Greek question Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Sunday, March 07, 1999 2:27 AM >Dear Rich and IEists: [ moderator snip ] >If you want me to cite individual etymologies, I will be glad to do so but >I have collected a great number of them, illustrating this relationship, in >my Afrasian essay at >http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3.htm >[ Moderator's response: > I want to see not only individual etymologies, I want to see an exposition > of the sound laws which drive them. I want to see not only "the roots of > verbs" but "the forms of grammar", such that "no philologer could examine > them ... without believing them to be sprung from some common source." > --rma ] Perhaps you did not notice the Table of Correspondences. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison-AFRASIAN-3-table.htm [ moderator snip ] >[ Moderator's response: > You could assert it, but you have not proven it. Please remember that this > is the Indo-European list, and that a relationship with Egyptian cannot be > *assumed* for your argument, but rather must be demonstrated using accepted > comparative methodology which addresses the standard model of Indo-European. > --rma ] I have demonstrated it using accepted comparative methodology. Pat [ Moderator's response: No, I submit that you have suggested a line of inquiry at most. You have yet to demonstrate it to the satisfaction of J. Random Linguist. And your con- tinued assertion that your version of Proto-World is directly ancestral to PIE weakens your credibility greatly. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Mar 9 17:55:22 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 09:55:22 -0800 Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>Renfrew's 7000 BC is too early [for PIE], Mallory's 4000 BC is >>too late [for Anatolian]. >-- nope to the latter. We know Renfrew's 7000 BCE is too early for PIE >because of the absence of the late-Neolithic innovations recorded in PIE in >7000 BCE. However, that vocabulary _is_ there in Anatolian. Such as? >Eg., the First Vowel Shift in Germanic can be >securely dated to after 700 BCE, because Celtic ironworking loan-words in >Proto-Germanic underwent the shift. You must mean the First Consonant Shift. But there's no such thing. There's no reason to assume, and some rather good reasons to reject the notion that Grimm's Laws worked all simultaneously and in one go, or even that such a thing as Grimm's ever took place. It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, *dh is typologically unacceptable. The original Proto-Germanic phonological system must have been similar to the Armenian one, with *t = *th, *d = *t['], *dh = *d, yet another archaic feature of Germanic, though not quite as archaic as Hittite and Tocharian. But Verner's Law *is* as archaic as that, as we can equate it with the Baltic-Finnic consonant mutation tt ~ t under the influence of stress/syllable structure [see Vennemann, "Hochgermanisch und Niedergermanisch", sorry can't find the exact ref. now Theo?], so it must have worked in Germanic at a period when (partial) voicing had not yet taken place, and the opposition was (as in Hittite) between fortis *tt (=*t) and lenis *t' (=*d) and *th (=*dh). The final stage, aspirate > fricative (*th > *T, *kh > *x) was probably much more recent and in fact rather trivial. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Mar 7 16:46:00 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 16:46:00 -0000 Subject: St Jerome Message-ID: >Peter and or Graham said that Jerome wrote 'bad Latin'. My original posting was so long ago I have forgotten both the content and the context. If I did really say that, I apologise deeply to the group! But I suspect I am being misquoted! Peter From jer at cphling.dk Sun Mar 7 18:22:36 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 19:22:36 +0100 Subject: PIE *gn- > know/ken In-Reply-To: <36f37c46.344889770@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sat, 27 Feb 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [...] > The most acceptable solution from my point of view is that PIE > did not have any voiced stops at all. Instead it made a > distinction between fortis and lenis stops (as in Finnish, Danish > or Hittite), where the fortis (tense) stops (*t etc.) were always > voiceless and pronounced longer/with more energy ([t:] or [tt]). > The lenis (lax) stops (*d and *dh, etc.) were less energetic/ > shorter, and had voiced allophones. They came in two kinds, one > aspirated (*dh = [th]), the other not (*d = [t]). Or, > equivalently, one glottalized (*d = [t']), the other not (*dh = > [t]). Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask this: Is a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? If so, where? If it is not part of general experience I do not see the commending simplicity in choosing "lenis t" as the origin of Latin, Greek and Indic plain voiced d. Where "d" and "dh" merged, they are voiced, as in Balto-Slavic, Celtic and Albanian - why derive this from a basically voiceless protoform? - Isn't the only thing "wrong" with the IE system that the aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh ...) have not been accepted? Then, if we have SOME evidence for asp.ten., but not enough to guarantee reconstruction of an overwhelming number of etymologies, but without them the system as such becomes a truly overwhelming mess, isn't the easiest solution then to accept that SOME etymologies containing ph, th, kh are correct and that the PIE system was as in Sanskrit? Is it not a very strong claim that ALL cases of asp.ten. are in last analysis based on mistakes? For some I could understand this right away, even for many, perhaps most, but for each single item?? Jens E.R. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 7 20:15:01 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 15:15:01 EST Subject: Danube homeland. Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >but it makes it the best candidate by default, and any alternative theories >should offer a pretty good case for why the IE homeland should be located >elsewhere, and what happened to the languages of these "Anatolian farmers" or >"Old Europeans". -- same thing that happened to the languages of the Elamo-Dravidians who were the first farmers throughout Iran and North India. The area between Iraq, Central Asia and Central India is just as large as Europe and got agriculture just as early, earlier in fact. It's also historically demonstrable that the IE languages were intrusive in this area, and virtually completely replaced the previous language-families; with a few minor exceptions like Brahui, comparable to Basque. >The gap between Anatolian and the rest of IE is too large to be fitted into >the limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements into SE Europe. -- nope. The speed of linguistic change is not even remotely consistent. Eg., Lithuanian and Sanskrit, both about equally distant from PIE, one spoken in the 2nd millenium BCE, one spoken in the 2nd millenium CE. >Why shouldn't Anatolian simply have changed quickly?then it's perfectly >imaginable that PIE developed after 7000 BC somewhere in the Balkans or >Hungary, and spread across the rest of the continent (C., N. and E. Europe) >in the LBK/Danubian phase, c. 5500 BC, as well as to the steppe zone >(Dnepr-Donets Tocharian?] before 5000 and Sredny-Stog [>Indo-Greek?] c. 4500). -- nonsensical. The PIE vocabulary is full of items which just weren't around before 4000 BCE. This alone completely rules out such a hypothesis. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 8 00:41:29 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 16:41:29 PST Subject: Caucasian languages and Asia Minor Message-ID: DR WOLFGANG SCHULZE: >The problem is that people do not accept language isolates. What is an >isolate? It's a language that obviously has no documented relatives. Yes there is a problem but it's not the definition of "isolates". I fully understand that this means that a given language MIGHT have relationships but that the language is difficult to relate to others, pure and simple. This could be for many reasons, one of them being that there may be only very distant siblings that survive to be analysed, as you say. However, I have trouble with the idea that seems to arise on this subject that because a language group can't be 100% proven to be related to another language group that we should take up the NULL hypothesis in place of it, ignoring the question completely of genetic relationship and the probabilities and uncertainties inheirant in its answer (whether this be NEC or IE). There still remains the most likely relationships and I would be concerned of the reasoning skills of anyone who considers the possibility of IE being closely related to Uralic as equal as the possibility, say, of a strong relationship with Algic, half-way 'cross the world. There remain high probabilities and low probabilities despite lack of what you would accept as certain "proof". This is the probabilistic nature of comparative linguistics. The idea that IE is the ancestor language of the languages we find in Europe and India now (as well as the ubiquitous English), is all based on probability too. We don't find actual, _physical proof_ of people speaking this supposed IE language but it is highly probable that one existed in some form at least 5,000 years ago based on a damn good theory that has been refined better as we learn more, a theory that, because of alot of speculation beyond what we had known in the past, has moved forward. >Relatives are established by means of regular sound correspondencies >based on lexical *words* (and not *stems*) as well as on morphological >correspondencies that match established sound correspondencies. And wouldn't it be wonderful in an ideal world? However, in the case of IE, (and I suspect similarily in NEC) much of the recoverable language is verb roots, whether that be nouns or adjectives based on verb roots or extended verbs built on the more basic ones. Atomic nouns are not all that common in the IE language and inevitably due to declension and the nominative *-s, are ALL "stems" save those 1% who have no marker in the nominative. Thus, morphological correspondances by your criteria must hold most of the weight of the proof. So how much proof is proof enough to make it credible? This is a very subjective thing. What we SHOULD be concerned about is finding the relative probability of a hypothesis, based not only on the data that one can supply for it but on the probabilities of other possible theories of relationship in comparison to it. At that, we can conclude very apparent things such as Algic's relationship with IE is extremely remote in comparison with a Uralic relationship (as we should be concluding intuitively!) as well as more opaque concepts such as the most likely pre-IE interactions with neighbouring languages. Unfortunately, we can't even begin to fathom answers to these questions, not because we don't know enough, but because we've gotten stuck in a rut over the impossible-to-attain "100% probability" and not on "the BEST probability that we can achieve at present". >[An isolate] simply is an orphan with unknown parents. [...] >I think that's just what the situation is like with respect to East >Caucasian. Unless you're saying that NEC invented its own language, it's related to something (even if it is remote as I suspect similarly). So there must be some candidates that stick out amongst the random chaos of world language groups like Benue-Congo, Austronesian, Ainu, etc. I'm willing to wager that NWC is one of those better candidates even lacking your absolute "proof". And because I know that IE is likely to be related to something for the same reason as NEC above, I'm willing to wager that IE (and Etruscan) are more closely affiliated with languages like Uralic and Altaic as opposed to things like Basque (Larry will agree :), Ainu, NEC (you'll even agree), etc. This is just common sense and taking the NULL position on this subject isn't. >These nagging questions are quite trendy, but that does not mean that >they are on safe grounds with respect to method and language theory... >But paradigms [hopefully] change, as Kuhn told us.... Humans answering nagging questions has been trendy for millions of years. It's all logic and probability with a hint of imagination. Hopefully this is a paradigm that will never change. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 7 17:58:03 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 11:58:03 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] As Mao Ze Dong once said, "Don't match pearls with the God of the Deep Blue Sea." So I'll correct the Basque spellings and meanings. >> haltha- "slope, slant, incline" > Halde "slope, hillside", heald [OE] >> "hillside" >> [< ?Vasconic; >> see Basque halde, alde, ualde < ?*kalde "face, side, flank"] [tv95, tv97] >The Basque word is in the eastern dialects but everywhere >else, as a result of the categorical voicing of plosives after /l/ in >all but the eastern dialects. No such form as * is known to me. >Lhande's 1926 dictionary cites and attributes it solely to the >17th-century writer Oihenart, but Oihenart in fact used , and so I >suspect an error here. (Lhande is full of errors.) >The form is an error: this must be the compound with initial > `water', which appears as ~ , and means literally >`waterside'. >The central meaning of the Basque word is everywhere `side', with >transferred senses like `flank' and `region'. I don't think it really >means `face', and it certainly doesn't mean `slope'. This word resembles Spanish falda "skirt, flank"--which unaccountably begins with /fV/; which, as anyone who was studied Ibero-Romance knows, is a no-no. Is there an Old Castilian, Gasco'n or Aragone's form /*alda, *alde/ ? >> Harn "bladder" >> [< ?Vasconic"; >> see Basque garnur "bladder" < *kernu] [tv95, tv97] >The Basque word for `urine' is , with a typical western variant >. This word, with its almost unique /rn/ cluster, has been much >discussed, but its origin is unknown. The alleged Basque * >`bladder' is unknown to me and to the lexicographers, and I query its >existence. This is my error and is what predictably happens when you try to read a language you've never studied, German, with a cheapo dictionary. My dictionary gave "urine & bladder". I made the wrong choice. My apologies to Theo and everyone else. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 7 18:08:40 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 12:08:40 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] I was also thinking of Spanish muro, Latin murus [sp?] "wall" or Spanish moro'n "hillock, rise of land" except that the double /rr/ of murru screws things up --and then there's Spanish morro, "a small promontory on a neck of land jutting out into the water [where forts were often built]" Maybe Celtic offers more clues [or enigmas] to this set of words >> moraine, Moräne "moraine", >> Mur[e] "pile of rocks [Bavarian] >> [?< Vasconic; >> see Basque murru "hill"] [tv97] >The form can hardly be ancient in Basque. There exists a >sizeable number of severely localized Basque words of the form , >with very diverse meanings, but `hill' is not one of them. The most >widespread sense (throughout the French Basque Country) is `wall'. >The closest to `hill' in sense is `pile, heap', reported nowhere but in >the Baztan valley. >Larry Trask Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 7 18:12:04 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 12:12:04 -0600 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <36DCD2DB.64DB@stratos.net> Message-ID: Yes, it is a compound of *harja- 'army' + *manna- 'man' AFAIK it's from a list of Germanic [and other] non-IE words in Romance et al. The article was in German and I may have missed something No explanation was given >Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> arimanno "warrior" [It < Germanic] [tv84] >Isn't this a compound, *harja- 'army' + *manna- 'man'? The first at >least doesn't seem peculiarly Germanic, to judge by the cognates given >in Buck's dictionary. (I don't have ready access to the Vennemann >reference, I'm afraid, so I don't know what argument he makes.) >Brian M. Scott Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 7 17:44:52 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 11:44:52 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/g In-Reply-To: Message-ID: *gar- is a Germanic root. Thanks for pointing out the need for labeling here. The Romance lexicon includes words of Germanic origin [or believed to be so, in some cases], as well as words believed to have cognates to modern Basque in a few cases [snip] >I've no idea what that asterisked * is meant to denote: the Basque >for `assemble, collect, gather' is . Nor am I any too sure what >the Spanish words are doing in here, but I don't have Corominas handy. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Mar 8 02:27:26 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 21:27:26 EST Subject: IE and Uralic pronouns Message-ID: I have been present when solid competent linguists admitted that the field is "not ready" to deal with the pronoun patterns which are the subject of recent discussion. (For a completely traditional approach to some pronoun matches, please see near the end of this message.) In other words, it is likely that something genetic is going on in these pronouns, our sound-symbolism approach is not adequate to the data distributions, and our tools for historical reconstruction can't handle it either. So what do we do? Hide our heads! Shame. Rather appear to be knowing the answers, and hide the questions we don't know the answers to? Or declare them off-limits? In a business firm, that would be a recipe for near-immediate bankruptcy, failing to act positively and strongly in moving towards the future. Better to ADMIT to students that we need more powerful tools for penetrating the noise of centuries and even millennia, to set more and more students to this task, to studying how deeply, and against which kinds of noise, each tool we have can penetrate (estimates in all cases are fine), and to estimate in as many situations as possible how much residue should still be detectable despite the noise of historical change, WITHOUT the assumptions that the sample used as controls ARE IN FACT UNRELATED. That is the fallacy in all such approaches I have read. Because if the supposed controls ARE related, even very distantly, it may distort our estimates of what background noise is. Rather we need GRAPHS of the degree of noise present, and our ability to penetrate it, across the full range of cases we can estimate time depths for, then extrapolate beyond that to those cases like Afro-Asiatic where the pronoun system, for example, preserves "distinctive oppositions in distantly related languages" (the title of a Gene Schramm paper, if I remember). In that case, there is a known relationship, though not well known, it is a distant one, the pronoun sound correspondences do not follow the normal sound laws for these families, yet they ARE related. Because there is a pattern with its own laws. The palatal / labial opposition which is in the consonants in one family is in the vowels in the other. I don't remember details of the data, but approximately this: hi vs. hu in one family (NW Semitic?) sa vs. fa in another family (Egyptian?) Now if our standard tools for historical reconstruction cannot deal with that, then we need to extend those tools slightly, a little bit at a time, go back and test the change of tools against the various things we know the answers to, and see whether the new tools manage to extract a slightly cleaner set of data that makes a known relationship clearer. If it does, then we may perhaps apply that newly refined tool to cases where we do NOT know the answer or only suspect it, and see what happens. Another example of this which came to my attention in the past year or two is this, which I will pose as a question. Why is the second comparison (b) better than the first (a) if we are looking for potential cognates? (a) sepo in one language teka in the second language (b) sepa in one language teko in the second language I don't think most historical linguists have an IMMEDIATE recognition that these are two wildly different proposals for cognates. That means we are not making the best possible use of our tools. (The conclusion is not a certain one, just like any other historical inference, but it is a reasonable one that (b) is a better comparison thatn (a).) We are never dealing with "clean" or "dirty" data. We are always dealing with "slightly more clean" or "slightly more dirty" data. If slightly cleaner data makes a language relationship look more solid, that is perhaps an indication (not a proof) that we may be on the track of a real relationship. ***** If you want to try to use traditional tools on Eurasian pronouns, here is an example from my paper Grammatical-Meaning Universals and Proto-Language Reconstruction, or: "Proto-World Now", in Papers of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 1975. p.15 of the paper, or Fig.(26). I am sure that paper contains a lot of wrong things and some right things. I only expected to find truth statistically, not certainly. A second example follows below. Here is what I was able at that time to find for a standard approach to reconstructing IE-Uralic pronoun systems. Of course borrowing or contact may have created a false temptation here, but such an escape from the obvious interpretation of the data would itself require considerable work to prove: I was discussing a relic IE alternation /m/ in plural vs. /w/ in dual. It is matched in Uralic, and an -n- "with,and" is present in the plural, which I hypothesized caused the assimilation. -va-s dual 1st person Sanskrit -ma-s plural -tha-s dual 2nd person Sanskrit -tha(-na) plural Now compare Ziryene (Uralic), EARLY plural forms: -m-ny-m 1st person -d-ny-d 2nd person. Selkup had these forms of the first person: -mi-y dual -my-n plural So my conclusions: Selkup leveled the person-marker, while IE leveled the markers of dual/plural, and kept the originally allophonic variants of the person. Uralic shows in EARLY Ziryene the structure of the paradigm from which this could have arisen. I'm not sure one could get more traditional in approach. ***** Here is the second item in that 1975 paper which really calls out for work. The rotation of the vowel space makes these more than mere identities, and suggests hypotheses for further work. (ng for the velar nasal phoneme) ple:-nus 'full' Latin, IE *pling 'full', Tibeto-Burman pla:-nus 'flat' Latin, IE *pleng 'straight' Tibeto-Burman Lloyd Anderson From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 04:21:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 04:21:29 GMT Subject: IE and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <13594592151901@m-w.com> Message-ID: "Jim Rader" wrote: >Nearly twenty years ago I heard Eric Hamp give an account of >Georgiev's lecture. As I recall Hamp telling it, Georgiev thought >that Etruscan practically WAS Hittite, i.e., that Etruscan was an >Anatolian language. The audience didn't contest his thesis out of >sheer stupefaction, not because they agreed. Gueterbock walked out >of the lecture shaking his head and saying "Very interesting, very >interesting!" Another Indo-Europeanist arguing for Etruscan as an Anatolian language is Francisco Adrados of the Spanish Academy: Adrados, Francisco R., "Etruscan as an IE Anatolian (but not Hittite) Language," Journal of Indo-European Studies 17 (Proceedings of the Second Conference on the Transformation of European and Anatolian Culture 4500-2500 B.C. (Part I) September 15-19, 1989, Dublin, Ireland), (1989) 363-383. Adrados, Francisco R., "More on Etruscan as an IE-Anatolian Language," Historische Sprachforschung 107/1 (1994) 54-76. Has anybody read these? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Mar 8 06:19:35 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 00:19:35 -0600 Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: Good old G-bock was honest. Privately -- to me --Hamp only said: VG's data seem to work, but oughta have more. pete Jim Rader wrote: > Nearly twenty years ago I heard Eric Hamp give an account of > Georgiev's lecture. As I recall Hamp telling it, Georgiev thought > that Etruscan practically WAS Hittite, RIGHT: this is what I remember. > i.e., that Etruscan was an > Anatolian language. The audience didn't contest his thesis out of > sheer stupefaction, not because they agreed. Gueterbock walked out > of the lecture shaking his head and saying "Very interesting, very > interesting!" > > Jim Rader [ moderator snip ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 8 06:27:19 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 01:27:19 EST Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/7/99 9:42:14 PM, "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: <<...if *negh-w- were the basis for both, as I think likely,... *negh-(w)-, 'dark', with root extensions -t, 'night',...>> Am I correct in this meaning that the reconstruction here is *negh-w-t > "night?" Why would that /-t be there? In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" besides Germanic or Modern French? Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's response: Greek _nuks, nuktos_, Latin _nox, noctis_, Sanskrit _nak (IIRC), naktam_, Hittite _nekuz = nek{^w}t+s_, ... --rma ] From iglesias at axia.it Mon Mar 8 17:25:28 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Rossi Francesco Luigi) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:25:28 PST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: Further to Shilpi M. Badra's message on Saturday, 27 February 1999 on Celtic loanwords in Romance, I would like to contribute the following on Italian, and especially the Northern Italian dialects (Gallo-Italic) and Friulan. 1) Place-names in Northern Italy (former Cisalpine Gaul): Milan (Mediolanum), Bologna (Bononia, Etruscan: Felsina), and many others. 2) Latinized -dunum (Irish dun -`fortress'): Duno (Varese), Induno (Varese), Comenduno (Bergamo), Verduno (Cuneo), ... and others 3) Formations ending in -ac : Arsago, Barzago, Cadorago, Dalrago, ... Sumirago, Tregnago, Urago, in Lombardy alone. This ending in common all over Northern Italy. In the Friulan area, the ending is rendered in standard Italian as -acco: e.g., Premariacco (Udine). 4) Terminology: Lat. camisiam > It. camicia, Lat. caballam > It. cavallo; Lat carrum > It. carro and the Lat verb cambiare > It. cambiare 5) Celtic survivals of northern and central Iberia: Sp., Port.alamo `poplar', Cf. It. olmo Sp., Port. gancho `hook', Cf. It. gancio 6) Sound change from Latin u to French y: All gallo-italic dialects except that of Romagna and certain mountain areas, e.g., Piedmontese, Emilian, Lombard: myr This sound does not occur in Friulan (despite the presumable Celtic substrate: Carnii), but it does occur in other forms of Rhaeto-Romance, e.g. Vallader (Lower Engadine). The sound does not occur in Venetian and related dialects (with IE Venetic substrate). 7) Consonantal groups: Piedmontese, Emilian, Lombard: factum > fait, fat, fac ("c" pron. "ch" as in English or Spanish) Piedmontese, Emilian, Lombard: noctem > neuit (read "eu" as in French), not, noc ("c" pron. "ch" as in English or Spanish): 8) Nasal consonants: pan, man, bon, ... with pure nasalisation in some areas, Emilia for example, and varying degrees of nasalisation elsewhere. Bibliography: Giovan Battista Pellegrini, Toponomastica italiana. MIlan: Hoepli. 1990 Maurizio Dardano, Manueletto di linguistica italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1991 Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 08:28:30 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:28:30 GMT Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >[ Moderator's response: > There is a serious mixing of levels here, in that a Romance-specific > development is being projected back to Nostratic, although other Indo- > European languages do not have this phonotactic constraint, e. g. Greek. > Before we can even accept it as a parallel, we have to determine what > the digraph represents in Bomhard, a unit phoneme or a cluster. > --rma ] A unit phoneme, probably a lateral affricate (> Semitic *s', a lateral fricative). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 08:31:38 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:31:38 GMT Subject: Trojan and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <36fbc467.224073295@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >Now assuming Greek Trooa is from the same root Sorry, I was being 8-bitty again. That's Troi"a, with i-diaeresis. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 8 09:19:39 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 01:19:39 PST Subject: PIE gender Message-ID: ALEXIS RAMER: >>There has been some discusion here of the (assumed) fact that >>the feminine gender is an innovation, and one not shared by >>the Anatolian lgs. WR SCHMIDT: >[...] I'd like to suggest that linguistic gender may have once been >more related to biological gender than - AFAIK - has heretofore been >thought A rich, cerebral dessert, I might say. :) But, how does one know that IE's view of the world was based on animism to start with? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 10:04:11 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 10:04:11 GMT Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <3701d9f5.229589205@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >The spelling stands for >/nekwt-s/. The problem is that we would expect if the >word is to be derived from PIE *nekwt- ~ *nokwt-. The single >suggests PIE *g(h)w. But I must agree with Rich's "moderator comment" elsewhere that in this case the spelling may reflect all of PIE *kw, *gw or *ghw [*gwh if you prefer]. After all, if the etymon were *kw, the geminate spelling should not be but , and there is no way of writing that in cuneiform (nor in ASCII, as the recurrent confusions about labiovelars show). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 10:45:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 10:45:32 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates In-Reply-To: <66321737.36deea04@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >I think we should keep in mind that the European linguistic situation in >historical times is probably much simpler than it was in the Mesolithic or >early Neolithic. >Reasoning by analogy from the situation in New Guinea or eastern pre-Columbian >North America, there were probably _many_ more languages and language-families >in Europe before the Indo-European expansion. Not just one or a few non-IE >families which were then replaced by Indo-European. The IE expansion would >then represent a massive linguistic simplification, a "reformatting" of a >previously crowded scene. True, except that this "reformatting" clearly had already happened in the *early* Neolithic, and at least for the broad continental area from Greece to Holland, with its two large historically connected cultural areas (the Balkans and the LBK/TRB zone), we can expect a single or at most two linguistic substrates. While the late Neolithic "Secondary Products Revolution" (use of more intensive mixed farming techniques) may have caused a doubling or tripling or so of the population density, along with a number of social changes, that's all small potatoes compared with the Mesolithic/Early Neolithic transition (fiftyfold increase in population densities). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 12:52:40 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 12:52:40 GMT Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <010b01be667d$6104c400$c93963c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >> BTW: is Hittite /dz, z^/, /ts,c/ or /z/? >No doubt someone will prove me wrong, but I believe Hittite was deciphered >at first by German speakers - so z was used as in German, which is a great >pain. It = /ts/. OK, I'll prove you wrong :-) Hittite was deciphered by a Czech, Hrozny', the in whose name is /z/. The derives from the conventions used for Akkadian cuneiform. Akkadian was deciphered by Germans. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Mar 8 13:51:44 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 07:51:44 -0600 Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns In-Reply-To: <19990304114643.23771.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Please try to remain calm, Mr. Gordon. Actually the study I am thinking of showed, as I now recall, a tendency for 1st person pronouns to have nasals. The matter of /m/ or /n/ was not, and to my knowledge has not been, adressed. My "mama" thing is just a guess at what lies behind the facts. It does not imply that all languages have 1st person pronouns with /m/, and more than recognizing the "mama" syndrome implies that in all languages the word for 'mother' has /m/. Nor does it imply anything about "borrowing" of pronouns, a notion I am quite unkeen on. DLW From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Mon Mar 8 14:36:58 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 06:36:58 PST Subject: gender Message-ID: Hello, Over the past months this thread on questions of gender in (P)IE has provided different opinions on the issue. Would it be possible for someone to: 1) list several of the most well-known bibliographic references on this particular topic; and 2) perhaps summarize the *current* thinking on the issue. I may the second request because discussions groups tend to "discuss" but often in the process the overall outlines of what is standard in the current (canonical??) debate get somewhat blurred. Also, it's possible that I may have missed some of the early contributions by list members. Currently I am preparing a paper for the upcoming ICLC '99 conference in Stockholm. In it I briefly discuss the problem of gender in Euskera. (Bai, badakit euskaraz hitz egiten... Kaixo Larry eta Miguel!) Because of my interest in this particular question, I wonder if anyone could speculate on when (along a rough time continuum) gender entered IE languages, i.e., when (P)IE acquired gender. And finally, has anyone contemplated the possibility that there might have been an even earlier stage that needs to be reconstructed (e.g. perhaps in the case of Euskera) that eventually gave rise to a animate/inanimate dichotomy (e.g., as it is found today in Euskera)? Any ideas on that, Larry? This would imply that cognitively speaking, there could have been an earlier structure that was not based on an "animate/inanimate" contrast but on another ontological type or definition of "being." Best regards, Roz Frank March 8, 1999 Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 U.S.A. e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [currently on-leave in Panama] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Mar 8 14:54:20 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:54:20 -0600 Subject: Trojan and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <36fbc467.224073295@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > The problem is that you're mixing up various reflexes from > various languages here. The Latin forms with -sc- (Tusci, > Tuscania/Toscana, Etrusci) are simply extensions of the roots > Tu(r)s- and Etrus- with the Latin adjectival suffix -cus (*-ko-). This is probably true, but it is also possible that the use of such suffixes could have been suggested by the nature of the sound, which the Egyptian evidence indicates was /sh/, not /s/. > Now assuming Greek Trooa is from the same root, it can be derived > from *Trosia, with Greek loss of intervocalic -s-, just like > Latin Etruria < *Etrusia with intervocalic -s- > -r-. Again the > suffix -ia is Latin and Greek, not necessarily Tyrrhenian. Again, it could be as above. > Which reminds me, there is also Greek Tyrrhe:n- < *turse:n-. > > For the vowel, it is difficult to decide between /o/ or /u/, but > >as /a/ occurs in some words that might be additional variants > >(tarhuntassa, tauros, tarsus, tarquin), with lowering before /r/ being the > >culprit in these, I favor /o/. Thus the original form would be /trosha/. I take this opportunity to note that the forms with /u/ are all western, so that the use of /u/ could conceivably be merely from the Greek change of /ou/ to /u/, carried westward by colonists. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 9 12:55:31 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 06:55:31 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 6 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > In other words, French has about 200 words borrowed from Gaulish -- including > many very common items of everyday speech -- while OE has 12 from Brythonic. Both still overwhelmingly non-Celtic, as noted before. That is the forest, regardless of the trees. > Furthermore, the emergence of a standardized written form of OE (based on the > Wessex dialect) took place centuries _after_ the Anglo-Saxon settlements in > Britain. For the first 200 years and more, the Saxons were > illiterate. Class dialects have little to do with literacy, especially the very marginal kind of literacy of early medieval Europe. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Mar 8 14:59:48 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:59:48 -0600 Subject: Salmon. In-Reply-To: <010a01be667d$5e09d380$c93963c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > >salmon in the Danube. > Salmon trout are found in the Danube according to Mallory - but not the > other kind of salmon. I think I'll break down and actually go look at Grzimek again. DLW From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 9 13:50:13 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 08:50:13 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 3/8/99 08:49:13 AM, rma wrote: <<[ Moderator's comment: And what of the very similar, though completely separate, Armenian shift? --rma ]>> Once again, I'm just following through on the commentary made in Bernard Comrie's book that attributes the "First Sound Shift" in German to the conversion of IE sounds into "the nearest equivalents" of a prior non-IE language. It is interesting to see where it goes. (I am aware that there is a "reconstructed obstruent system" based on a breakdown of glottalized/voiced and unvoiced stops that explains the Germanic/Armenian shifts as "archaisms" rather than innovations.) If the Germanic consonant "shift" is due to conversion from a non-IE language, then how can the Armenian shift can be explained?: 1. An obvious explanation that comes to mind is that Armenian was another language that "converted" to IE from a similiar non-IE language with roughly the same sound shifts. Mallory in "In search of the Indo-Europeans" summarizes the case for Armenian originating in the Balkans. Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology show a clear lines of continuity from the mouth of the Elbe to the mouth of the Danube with evidence of such material cultures as "Globular Amphora". Strabo, the Greek geographer of the 1st Century AD, tells us that tradition says Armenia was founded out of Thessaly (a town called Armenium); and that Armenians continue to follow Thessalian habits in clothes, etc. If non-IE speakers occupied a corridor running from the mouth of the Danube up past the gap west of the Carpathians and up to Jutland "sometime before 1000 BC" - then the Armenian shift might represent a conversion of some of those non-IE speakers to IE just as it did - perhaps later on - in Germanic. The result was however more proximate to and therefore more "Greek." When Armenian migrated it managed to preserve the shift because it became isolated from the IE mainstream that would have removed those vestiges of the old sound system - just as Germanic remained relatively isolated. Or became isolated when the eastward spread of the Celts cut off the NW-SE routes across the eastern midsection of Europe. 2. Perhaps another explanation is that Armenian - in its Balkan form - represented a Greekified German, already converted to IE but heavily influenced by Greek and later on tranformed by Urartian and Iranian influences. Although it has always been contested by certain historians, the "Getae", who lived north of the Danube were explicitly identified by Strabo and others as being neither Thracian nor Kelts. Strabo obviously identified the Getae with Germanic tribes: "As for the southern part of Germany beyond the Albis, the portion which is just contiguous to that river is occupied by the Suevi; then immediately adjoining this is the land of the Getae,... who occupy the whole plain from north of the Danube to Germany..." (Geo 7.3.1 et seq) The Getae are identified as "Dacians" occasionally, but what this tells us about them I don't know since Dacian is hardly pin-point identifiable. Oddly, the "Massagetae" are located in the Caucasus region by Herodotus, 400 years earlier, on the far side of the Scythians. This puts them relatively close by the Armenians. If Phrygian is descended from Thracian, as the classical historians suggest and Mallory notes, then the Armenian connection with the Pontus and the western shore of the Black Sea could explain proto-Germanic settlers coming along with that migration. Strabo states that Thracian and Getae intermarried, an apparent variant on the "Basternak" identity later mentioned by Tacitus and Ptolemy for the inhabitants of the Danube Delta, the "Peucini" - also often associated with the Chernyakovian material culture which by the first century BC had strong Gothic elements. In connection with this, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal has written in past post: <> And... <> Note that in the above analysis Greek is already a separate language. If we shorten the dates - so that Greek appears in Greece roughly at the same time Linear B makes its appearance - than Armenian is an independent language with strong affinities to German but in a position to make strong lexical borrowings from Greek. Or that the conversion from non-IE itself was the result of Greek or a closely related language. The reality check says that no written evidence of Armenian exists before 200BC and that the Armenians (per Mallory) date their own origins to 800 BC. Finally, are there any IE languages that have closer early syntactic similarities to German/Armenian than Greek? Regards, Steve Long From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Mar 8 15:08:09 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:08:09 -0600 Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay In-Reply-To: <3706e72d.232972509@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > > With regard to reconstructing 1sg pronouns, there is (or so I seem > >to recall) a cross-linguistic tendency for these to be formed with /m-/, > >probably from a weaker variant of what might be called the "mama > >syndrome": sounds that babies tend to make early tend to be pressed into > >service as words that mamas and babies might use to relate to each other, > >like "mama" and "me". > I don't think so. See coming response to Glenny. Both /m/ and /n/ tend to occur in words for female care-givers, with /n/ typically referring to more secondary ones, as in "nanny". 1st pronouns do show a statistically significant tendency to use nasals, which appears to me to be a sort of opposite side of the coin phenemenon. If a mother is going to imagine that her baby, who is in fact only babbling, is talking to her, then "mama" and "me" are the words she will want to hear the baby say. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 8 17:31:53 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 11:31:53 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >One thing is not clear to me. What is the significance of the presence >in the list of Romance borrowings from Germanic (?all from Vennemann >1984)? [ moderator snip ] >Max W. Wheeler I have to admit to scrounging around and using Theo Vennemann's lists --which are just lists of words he believes to be of non-IE origin borrowed from Germanic languages. I have not finished yet. Among other things, I need to track down more sources and check them out with the Oxford Dictionary. As for guV-, you're absolutely correct, but I wanted to wait until I had the correct form of the original. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 8 15:47:15 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:47:15 -0600 Subject: gender Message-ID: Dear Alexis and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: manaster at umich.edu Date: Sunday, March 07, 1999 11:50 PM >On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> I do not believe that there is anything which the current "laryngeal" theory >> explains that this re-formulation of it will not equally well explain. >This is what you have not even begun to demonstrate, as you >well know from our private discussions, so it does not >seem right to me to make this claim. Yes, it is premature. I said this because I have surveyed the theory many times in the past, and found it poorly formulated --- although I did not put these criticisms down on paper. I am in the process of doing that now. Pat From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 8 17:43:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 11:43:47 -0600 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Max W. Wheeler >On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> But before 1500, Spanish & Portuguese were farther apart than they are now. >Oh yeah? Who says? It wouldn't take long to list some significant >changes in Spanish since 1500 which have moved it away from Portuguese. >But it won't be worth it without a good reason to believe the claim made >above. You missed the context. I was speaking about lexical items. Yes-- Spanish has dropped future subjunctive and has reduced /sh, zh/ > /x, h/ /s, z/ > /s, S/ /dz, ts/ > /s, th/ and pretty much mutated /L/ > /j, zh, Y, sh/ BUT lexically, Spanish and Portuguese are more alike grammatically, some Spanish and Portuguese dialects are replacing condicional with imperfect & imperfect subjunctive Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 8 17:06:25 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 17:06:25 +0000 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > There is no such language as "Gallego-Spanish". There is, however, > galego or Galician, called gallego in Spanish. It is closer to Portuguese > than to Spanish and, in my experience, is more difficult to understand than > Brazilian Portuguese or standard Continental Portuguese. The Galician > literary standard, however, is a bit easier to read. But Galician is a > series of spoken dialects. > Note: > Spanish lobo /loBo/ > Portuguese lobo /loBu, lobu/ > Galician /tsoBu, shoBu, LoBu/ But these so-called Galician forms are not Galician but (Asturo-)Leonese. See A. Zamora Vicente, Dialectologia Espan~ola, 1967, 122-130. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Mar 9 15:00:36 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 09:00:36 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 2:05 AM >[ Moderator's response: > It may be what you favor, but it flies in the face of the data: Sanskrit > *requires* a labiovelar, or the accusative would be **nas.t.am rather than > the attested _naktam_. And what is represented by that "*s/t -?" ? > --rma ] Not at all. I am suggesting that the IE accusative was *nektom for those branches which either derived from forms without the w-extension or deleted it. *negh(-w)-t- -> *nek(h)t-. As for the *-s/t-, I believe that Pokorny has erred in reconstructing *neuk-, 'dark'. This looks like a set of derivatives of the *negh-w- stem I postulate plus *-s, which had the same effect on the *-gh- as *-t- did: *negh-w-s -> *neugh-s- -> *neuk(h)s-. Pat [ Moderator's response: I give up. I will not argue the question with someone who does not see that the question exists; I do not have the time. --rma ] From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Mon Mar 8 09:11:28 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:11:28 GMT Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <13432994926.18.ALDERSON@mathom.xkl.com> Message-ID: For the Nostratic and/or Indoeuropean lists as you think suitable:- .................................... "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote (Subject: Re: Laryngeal symbols) replying to nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk:- >>> I believe that the "laryngeals" in IE stem from earlier /?,h,?,H/, ... >> ... use another symbol for ayin, Patrick! It's throwing everybody >> off. Suggestion: /`/ or /3/ >Well, I plead in my defense that the upside down question-mark is generally >used in print for 'ayin, and, before I changed to MSN 2.5, it came through >when produced by Alt-168. And this should go in the FAQ: High-order characters (= with code values over 127) in email are the Chaos Bringer, don't use them; DOS and Windows and Mac etc all are liable to display or corrupt them differently; some emailers transmit them modulo 128, e.g. turning DOS e-umlaut into tabulate. > How about [2] and [3] for the pharyngals, from the Arabic letters? I agree, particularly as I believe also that the H2 laryngeal was the {h.} sound as in Arabic {h2aram} = "sacred, forbidden", (Muh2ammad}, and H3 was the ayin (e.g.root H3-D-W in Arabic {h3aduuw} = "enemy" and Greek {odussomai}). I believe that the usual H1 was the glottal stop. If anyone needs a second different H1, it was likely the ordinary {h} sound. And we need a reasonably compact name for the {h.} sound, like we have for its voiced counterpart `ayin'. > In view of the fact that [3] is used for the Egyptian vulture, which was > really an /r/, .I am reluctant to adopt that suggestion. I thought that the Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) was the glottal stop. The 3-like sign that Egyptologists use for that sign is specific to Egyptology. The Egyptian letter sign for {r} was the mouth or the lion. (Distinguish from the `Gyps fulvus' vulture hieroglyph, which has another use.) Likely also the reason why single-reed is sometimes glottal stop and sometimes {y} is that it used to me always {y}, but some time in predynastic or Old Kingdom times in Egyptian initial {y} became silent like it did in the Old Norse branch of Common Germanic. In emailing we are restricted to the standard 95 reliably emailable ascii characters and may need to adjust usage accordingly. >>The X-SAMPA symbols for fricatives are: >>palatal [C] [j\] ... >> and [H] is the semivowel in [French] . > I sure do not like that one. I don't either. This `H' probably got in because whoever invented the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) had (in those days of hand typesetting) much more consideration for printers than many maths and nuclear science etc men did, and e.g. for this sound chose `h' set upside-down because it looked rather like `y'. It would have helped linguists if Microsoft Word etc had had an option "set next character upside down". From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 8 17:14:36 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 11:14:36 -0600 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> But before 1500, Spanish & Portuguese were farther apart than they are now. >Surely not in terms of basic vocabulary. In some cases, yes. Both modern Spanish & Portuguese have /familya/ which SHOULD have evolved as *hameja /amexa/ in Spanish *famia /famia/ in Portuguese Latinate relexification did affect a fair share of basic words. The development of literary standards affected lexical choice, with the Latinate words or words from Ibero-Romance literary standards often winning out. In certain domains, one language became dominant. Spanish borrowed a large percentage of sailing terms from Portuguese, etc. Most basic vocabulary is pretty much the same as it was but a fair share of it has spilled from one language to the other --especially in regional dialects, which with mass communication have become generally known. So Mexican giz [from Portuguese], instead of standard tiza "chalk" is understood. Argentine Spanish shares a lot of terms for food, plants and animals [as well as slang] with Brazilian Portuguese --and these are known to any school kid who has read Borges & Quiroga. In some cases, the words have acquired limited meanings Spanish mun~eca /muN~eka/ "doll, pretty girl" [also wrist, originally from a word for "bump, lump"] is cognate with Portuguese boneca /bunek@/ "doll, pretty girl" BUT since in Rio, this word is applied to transvestites who have a beauty contest and "escola de samba" at Carnaval, in Latin American slang it means "transvestite, transexual" Thanx to TV, movies, radio, cassettes/CDs and immigration, even more vocabulary is flowing between the languages and some words get relexified In Brazil, the linguistic center has shifted to the South, and now is moving from Rio to Sa~o Paulo, which has a large --if not huge-- Spanish speaking population. Argentina, Cuba & Puerto Rico have large Galician populations. Buenos Aires is the largest Galician city in the world. Although Galician is a separate language, it is much closer to Portuguese than Spanish. Given that it is essentially a series of rural dialects, western Galician would be [or would have been] closer to Old Portuguese. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 8 20:12:06 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 12:12:06 PST Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word Message-ID: ME (GLEN): >>IE *nek-/*nok- "to bear, to carry, to convey" >> (I've never seen this root. Does anyone know? PETER: >Try: >Avestan fra-nas- = to bring; (nas = to reach) >Vedic naSa:mi = to reach >Greek e:negkon, ene:nokha, etc all < e-nek- (aorist and perfect > forms of) to carry >Old Norse nest = provisions for a journey >OCS nesti etc to carry, bear, bring >Lithuanian neSu etc. >Latvian nesu etc. Hmm, thanx alot Miguel and Peter. Gee, I could be looney but wouldn't a reconstruction of *?nek^- be in order rather than just *nek^- based on the Greek form? Why the long /e/ for augment? If *?nek^- is correct, then a connection with a Nostratic *nitl- becomes more and more unlikely (as I should expect). -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 15:57:42 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 09:57:42 -0600 Subject: Celtic and English Again In-Reply-To: <005e01be67d4$a93c94c0$af3fac3e@niywlxpn> Message-ID: I've been told by Egytians that colloquial Egyptian Arabic has a fair share of Coptic "influence". I don't know if they were referring to lexicon, morphology or both. Standard Arabic, of course, does have some Greek lexical substrate, although what I've seen are mainly learned words. [snip] >Perhaps a comparable situation can be found in Egypt, which was >Egyptian-speaking for yonks, then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand >years, but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either >"substrate". [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Mar 8 20:37:22 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 20:37:22 -0000 Subject: Hittite spelling Message-ID: >Hittite spelling ... distinguish[es] (in medial position at least) >C from CC, where usually the single consonant etymologically >derives from a PIE voiced one and the geminate from a PIE >voiceless consonant. What is actually the state of play with this? It began as a hypothesis, with some evidence in its favour, and some against. Is it turning into one of those things that everyone agrees on because it's tidy, or is the emerging agreement soundly based? Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 16:06:48 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 10:06:48 -0600 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <36ee14d2.34384206@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator correction: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: ] >Larry Trask wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>I think everyone agrees that Basque `ax' is a loan from Latin >> `hatchet'. The Latin word would have been borrowed as >>*; the [h] is a suprasegmental feature in Basque; the */l/ would >>have undergone the categorical early medieval change of intervocalic /l/ >>to /r/; and the diphthongization of /a/ to /ai/ in an initial syllable >>is a familiar though sporadic in Basque: compare `sacred, >>holy', from some Romance development of Latin . >Might the word not have been borrowed directly as , with >metathesis of the /i/ (especially if Latin already had a >degree of allophonic palatalization)? That, or analogy with the >other tool words in (h)ai(t)z-. And in the case of saindu, much the same would have happened in that sanctu /sanktu/ > *santyu which in Spanish from the Basque region became the common name Sancho [it became common name Santo, noun/adjective santo everywhere else] and in Basque *santyu > *sayntu > saindu /sayndu/ [or is it /san~du/?] My reconstruction is probably missing something but the same metathesis of /y/ is there, right? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 8 20:59:10 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 20:59:10 +0000 Subject: IE and Substrates Message-ID: JoatSimeon writes: >I think we should keep in mind that the European linguistic situation in >historical times is probably much simpler than it was in the Mesolithic or >early Neolithic. >Reasoning by analogy from the situation in New Guinea or eastern pre-Columbian >North America, there were probably _many_ more languages and language-families >in Europe before the Indo-European expansion. Not just one or a few non-IE >families which were then replaced by Indo-European. The IE expansion would >then represent a massive linguistic simplification, a "reformatting" of a >previously crowded scene. I endorse this absolutely. I think it's probably right, and I think the modest amount of evidence we have supports it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 16:12:55 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 10:12:55 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Italian also has essere & stare; although it uses them a bit different from Spanish & Portuguese. French seems to have merged them --e^tre is from stare but its conjugated forms are from the Latin root of essere. > Yes, I agree there is seemingly Celtic (grammatical) influence in >most of Western Romance, most notably French. It is just a little more >difficult to nail down, without actual knowledge of the Celtic languages >in question. For example we may note the "two BE verbs" syndrome in >Iberian. > > DLW Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 8 21:05:06 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 21:05:06 +0000 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Wolfgang Behr writes: > If I remember things correctly, there will > be a workshop on SC in Cambridge (at the McDonald Institute of Archeo- > logy) sometime this year, so maybe we will see a convincing defense > of Starostin before long ??? Not this year, I'm afraid. The proposed Cambridge symposium on S-C has been postponed, pending the production of a monograph by Starostin on S-C which is to serve as a basis of discussion. Maybe next year. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 16:22:21 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 10:22:21 -0600 Subject: /Anatolian /-nt-/ and Greek /-nth-/ In-Reply-To: <36e4a3c9.9014271@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: So this would be the same root as the 3rd Singular verb ending -nt- ? e.g. Latin ama-nt "love-they all" >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>I suppose we could say that the form was originally >>/-ndh-/, but the Anatolian forms in /-nt/ are generally considered older. >The IE etymon is *-nt- (probably identical to the >Luwian/Slavic/Tocharian collective (plural) suffix *-(e/o)nt-). >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 16:27:37 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 10:27:37 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <004a01be67db$a2b62f60$ca9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: [snip] >-----Original Message----- >From: Patrick C. Ryan >Date: Friday, March 05, 1999 10:14 PM [mucho snip] Then write <X> :> I mean :> >Rich, I never write anything as because I frequently am switching from >email to .html and whatever is between the < and > is treated as an >instruction rather than copy in .html. [gran esnipo] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 9 02:19:47 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 20:19:47 -0600 Subject: Results of Researches into Salmonids Message-ID: No, the thing I was vaguely remembering is not the "salmon trout" (salmo trutta). It is the so-called "Danube salmon", or "huchen" (hucho hucho) which is not actually a salmon, or even a trout, but a very close relative of these. Pictures (p. 49 of "The Encyclopedia of Aquatic Life") show something that looks sort of like a monster salmon or trout (weights of over one hundred pounds have been reported). The fish is big enough that in the Volga it gets confused with sturgeon. (Go figure: it does not actually look anything like a sturgeon.) There are two kinds, the European and the Asian. The European kind lives only in the Danube system, while the Asian kind is described as living "from the Volga to the Amur", whatever that means (presumably centrqal and northern Asia). Turning to Malory, and to Diebold as reported by Malory, it seems that somebody has screwed up, for it is said that huchen do not occur in "the Pontic-Caspian steppe". As the Volga flows into the Caspian, I find it difficult to see how this can be right. Perhaps Diebold was not aware of the Asian species? But if Diebold is right that no PIE word for this fish can be reconstructed, then the Caspian part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe would be excluded as a possible homeland, by the usual arguments (which are necessarily decisive.) Speaking of the Caspian, there is (or was) a sub-species of tiger called the Caspian tiger. Though in recent times it has been restricted to the mountains (Elburz?) south of Teheran, it was formerly found along some of the rivers of the Eastern steppe (the Oxus and all that), as were pigs, its main prey. This too seems negative (thought not necessarily decisively so) for this region having been the much-discussed homeland. DLW From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 9 17:14:10 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 12:14:10 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/8/99 6:14:14 AM, you wrote: <> This seems to me to be very important to any analysis of how IE diffused in Europe. 1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations? What glue would hold IE together ESPECIALLY if you take the view that PIE entered or expanded in Europe before 4000BC along with agriculture? This gives us a huge period of time for PIE speaking settlers to sit in their own local areas throughout Europe and somehow maintain "a massive linguistic simplification" instead of breaking down into a whole patchwork of PIE descendents. The theory that says that either PIE or the standard IE protolanguages were being spoken in Europe in even 2500BC requires a very small number of language groups to put a hold on localization for a millenium while Hittite, Sanskrit and Mycenean were just getting ready to rear their heads as the first historically identifiable IE languages. What was holding them together as one language or perhaps a set of no more than what?, four or five proto-languages for a thousand years? 2. You analogize the coming of PIE to the coming of the European languages to the patchwork of pre-Columbian American languages. But it took European languages no more than two centuries in most places in America to displace the prior languages in a much greater mass of land. Compare this to the Renfrew or even the Mallory hypotheses that have PIE (as a contiguous language) cross Europe a few square miles per year over as much as 3000 years. The time of conversion is not the point here, it is rather the amount of time intervening afterwards. 3. A critical question this raises seems to me to be how these languages were standardized. The idea of a proto-IE or even a proto-Keltic throughout Europe before say 1800 BC gives us a language being spoken mainly by illiterate sedentary farmers who would have no knowledge if their language had varied from those of their neighbors a hundred miles away. An yet it has them all having spoken fundamentally the same language for as much as 2000 years before hand. If a sound shift did arise out of nowhere because of some sudden predisposition or fashion towards fricatives or aspirates, how was that shift passed on? The English, Spanish and French of the 1600's all had core institutions for regularizing speech and grammar. The hornbook, the Bible, the priest or preacher, the Castilian or Etonian administrator or cleric, the school teacher and of course the itinerant merchant were all instruments of both continuity and change for such a large displacement of language. The written word itself - our only direct evidence of languages and dialects no longer spoken and syntacts no longer used - is something totally absent from the PIE scene in Europe before 1300 BC. What standardized those PIE speakers in Europe so that they didn't turn into the "the situation in New Guinea" over the course of thousands of years? I think one viable answer is that they didn't. The solution is time - to reduce the amount of time they would have to develope thousands of different IE daughter languages in every nook and cranny of the European continent. And it also brings us closer in time to recognizable standardizing influences - like merchants, priests, manufacturing specialists and urban centers. This would also give us a much faster process of conversion to IE, much closer to the analogy given above to the conversion of the American languages - "a massive linguistic simplification." Regards, Steve Long From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Wed Mar 10 00:17:05 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 16:17:05 -0800 Subject: Anatolians Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > ... > It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, > *dh is typologically unacceptable. What about a stop system distinguishing between voiceless, voiced, and aspirated (unmarked for voicing)? Or am i being naive? 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 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 19:38:03 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:38:03 EST Subject: Anatolians Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >that "wool" didn't exist in the vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times. -- sheep didn't develop wool, as we know it, until well after domestication. Use of wool as a fabric is comparatively late -- well after the beginning of the neolithic. >The plough was also used since the very beginning of the Neolithic, -- no, nyet, not true. Not unless you redefine "plough" to suit the argument and include wooden shovels and digging sticks. No animal traction, no plow. The ard, the earliest true plow, is 4th millenium BCE (same period as wheeled vehicles) and this is well-attested achaeological fact. >That leaves only "yoke", with the undoubted Hittite reflex as a >possible candidate for being a late Neolithic innovation. -- this is a rather drastic case of attacking the evidence rather than trying to work with it. Evidence primary, hypothesis secondary, please. >but there is a Luwian attestation: asuwa. This looks very much like an Indo- >Iranian borrowing (Skt. as'va < PIE *ek^wos), were it not for the fact that >Luwian "dog" is -- the obvious, parsimonious explanation is that the Anatolian languages used ordinary IE terminology for the horse. >yielded a treatise on horses, containing a number of words of Indo-Iranian >origin, written by a Mitannian called Kikkuli). -- and the English terminology for formal riding is largely French and Spanish in origin, although English-speakers have been riding horses as long as there's been an English language (or proto-Germanic, come to that). Meaningless. >Hittite cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), -- and having cognates in Tocharian and Hittite is about as secure a way to put a word into the PIE category as I can think of. Two unrelated IE language families widely separated in time and space -- what do you want, an egg in your beer? The only plausible argument for that is that this is an archaic term, since both Tocharian and Anatolian separated from PIE early. >"shaft" and "harness" when Hittite doesn't even share its basic kinship >terminology with Indo-European and has a different word for "four". -- excuse me, but kinship terminology has some bearing on horse harness technology? Run that one by me again? From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Tue Mar 9 08:52:37 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 08:52:37 +0000 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <010b01be667d$6104c400$c93963c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: >No doubt someone will prove me wrong, but I believe Hittite was deciphered >at first by German speakers - so z was used as in German, which is a great >pain. It = /ts/. I am frankly appalled by this level of ethnocentricity. What's the idea, we shouldn't allow non-English speakers to decipher ancient languages because we can only handle orthography that reads like English? If anyone is working in linguistics who finds it a problem when an orthographical symbol has different phonetic value in different languages, he or she should get out fast and try maths instead. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 9 08:44:25 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 08:44:25 GMT Subject: Celtic and English Again Message-ID: Peter &/or Graham wrote:- > On the lack of influence from Celtic in English: > ... Egypt, which was Egyptian-speaking for yonks, > then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand years The upperclass may well have learned Greek, but the mass of the population may have stuck to the late form of Egyptian called Coptic. For example, the modern Arabic placename Aswan continues Ancient Egyptian `Suan' (or similar) and ignores the Greekized name `Elephantine'. (That and the Egyptian name referred to big round rocks in the Nile there, that looked like elephants wallowing in the water.) > but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either "substrate". There are at least these carry-overs from Ancient Egyptian into Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) (as distinct from educated speech):- (1) Unstressed vowels becoming the same as adjacent stressed vowels, and dropping when possible, e.g. standard Arabic {kabiir} = "big", but ECA {kibiir) = "big", {wa kbiir} = "and big". (2) Initial glottal stop + unstressed vowel often dropping when the previous word ends in a vowel, whether or not in standard Arabic that glottal stop was a {hamzat al was.l}. > Does this suggest that languages can indeed be replaced without great effect > on the invading language, if other circumstances are right, and that the lack > of influence from Celtic on English is not really so remarkable? Anglo-Saxon diphthongizes short front vowels before {r} and {l} or if the next vowel is a back vowel. That occurs also in Old Norse; but where did the Anglo-Saxons pick it up from? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 19:46:59 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:46:59 EST Subject: Chariots Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >with inconclusive results about when horses were strong enough to carry a >person on their back. -- Horses were always strong enough to carry a person on their back _for a while_. Zebras, wild horses, and ponies no larger than the neolithic/Bronze Age chariot pony could all do this. The question actually relates to how long they could be ridden and how much gear the rider could carry. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Mar 9 09:07:48 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 01:07:48 PST Subject: Lenis and Fortis in IE Message-ID: MIGUEL (on the topic of potential Greek borrowings of Anatolian): >Probably because Anatolian t was aspirated, or sounded aspirated >to the Greeks. Alright so Anatolian *t was /t/? I've been thinking about your idea on fortis and lenis stops existing in IE (which is eerily similar to an idea I had about Pre-IE which has been evolving for six monthes or more now). I'm already prone to accept your idea in some form. About Pre-IE, I was considering a while back that although it seems unlikely to me that IE had ejectives (since their glottalic quality seems conveniently to disappear with almost no trace), I considered an alternative idea - that Pre-IE in fact had lenis and fortis stops that were the result of a shift from earlier ejectives (This is in connection with Uralic actually but I will digress). However, I figure that the _fortis_ stops are what Gam. call the "glottalic" and would thus correspond to the *d/*g series. The lenis consonants are the voiced aspirate (*dh) and voiceless plain stops (*t) of old, all of which I had interpreted as voiceless and I believe I mentioned this earlier on the list. Pre-IndoEtruscan (Stage 1) *t *t? *t Pre-IndoEtruscan (Stage 2) *t *t: *t IndoEtruscan *t *t *tT Etruscan t t th IE *t *t *tT Traditional t d dh In this scenario, Hittite medial geminates would correspond to the aspirate stops in opposition to a merged set corresponding to both the voiceless affricates (*dh, *gh, *bh) and the voiceless inaspirates (*d, *g). Maybe fortis/lenis distinctions in IE proper might have validity but I suspect a more evolved situation from this distinction (cf *t > IE *tT (*dh)). Sanskrit voiced aspirates would have evolved from voiceless affricates as are found in original voiceless form after mobile *s- and in all environments in Greek. The original voicelessness of the "voiced inaspirates" can be found in Germanic and in the Latin initial stops for example. What I like about this idea is that the "fortis" consonants correspond exactly to an earlier "ejective" set that thus explains the lack of *b (which would have been *p? > *p: and then uniquely merging with *p - I guess lips are too weak to make the distinction :) The glottalic theory therefore still supplies the best explanation so far of lack of *b but there is no need for supporting ejectives in actual IE proper. [ Moderator's comment: Modern Estonian has a three-way opposition in the obstruents, lenis ~ fortis ~ geminate (fortis) (traditionally "short" ~ "long" ~ "overlong"). According to Ilse Lehiste, a native speaker, the word for "Help!" is [ap:i]--and the obstruent may be held for some time. --rma ] Optionally, assuming only that you accept Etruscan and IE relationship, a correspondance can be seen between the two as shown above. Note if Etruscan matches IE *bhi then it suggests to me that a loss of *p: was very early and affects both languages. Suggestion: Pre-IEtr [*t, *t, *tT] > [*t/*t, *tT] > Etr [t, th] BUT... Pre-IEtr [*p, -, *pf] > [*p, *p, -] > <--- !!! [*p/*p, NIL] > Etr [p, NIL] (I'm aware Etr has already :) Ist es cool? I'm sleepy right now so when you respond, be gentle. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From adolfoz at tin.it Tue Mar 9 10:52:48 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni (Reggio Emilia, Italia)) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 11:52:48 +0100 Subject: *p>f Revisited (+: IE and Etruscan) Message-ID: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 00:19:57 EST Steve Long wrote, > Returning my question about Why *p>f?: > The answer most commonly given related either to social > causes or in a certain case to some tendency towards aspiration. > There is another explanation however. It suggests that Germanic > seems "archaic" not because it split-off early as Miquel suggests > above, but because it emerged very late. And it explains p>f not as > a "sound shift," but as a fundamental part of the conversion > from a non-IE to an IE language by German speakers. > John Hawkins in Bernard Comrie's The World's Major > Languages (1987) (p.70-71) puts the general case for this, > using a migration theory: > "At least two facts suggest that the pre-Germanic speakers > migrated to their southern Scandanavian location sometime before > 1000BC and that they encountered a non-IE speaking people > from whom linguistic features were borrowed that > were to have a substantial impact on the developement > of Proto-Germanic." Who is interested in the shift p > f has also to take into consideration the usual variance or exchange p / ph / f in Etruscan (from the VII century B.C.) and in its cognate Raetic (no far from Germany!). The connection with the Lautverschiebung (p > f) was already seen by G. Bonfante in "Studi Etruschi" 51, 1983. As I doubt that this is the place where it is possible to discuss if Etruscan and IE are "genetically related", I just say that I will send GRATIS my (heavy: 440 pages including wide notes apparatus) work I DOCUMENTI ETRUSCHI (in Italian, 1996) to them who request it to me. I tried to interpret the Etruscan inscriptions supposing a root alliance with German, Latin and Italic IE ancient dialects, while the link with Celtic languages appears to be minor (no lexical link with the Hittites of V. Georgev, but some likeness in using clitics and noun declension endings: e. g. see F. R. Adrados, "Etruscan as an ie. anatolian (but not hittite) language", in `Journal of Indo-europeans Studies', 1989, p. 363 ff. and, more convincing, F. Bader, "Comparaison typologique de l'itrusque et des langues indo-europiennes", in "Studi Etruschi" 56, 1989-1990). However Etruscologists as Helmut Rix and Carlo de Simone could not accept most of these interpretations. Adolfo Zavaroni adolfoz at tin.it From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 9 11:13:18 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 11:13:18 +0000 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <36ee14d2.34384206@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [on Basque from Latin ] > Might the word not have been borrowed directly as , with > metathesis of the /i/ (especially if Latin already had a > degree of allophonic palatalization)? That, or analogy with the > other tool words in (h)ai(t)z-. All of these things are possible, and the contamination view has been put forward. The direct-borrowing view has not been favored, because we know of no good parallel, while the sporadic change of /a/ to /ai/ in a first syllable is well documented. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 9 12:48:22 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 06:48:22 -0600 Subject: Celtic and English Again In-Reply-To: <005e01be67d4$a93c94c0$af3fac3e@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Sat, 6 Mar 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > On the lack of influence from Celtic in English: > Perhaps a comparable situation can be found in Egypt, which was > Egyptian-speaking for yonks, then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand > years, but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either > "substrate". > Does this suggest that languages can indeed be replaced without great effect > on the invading language, if other circumstances are right, and that the > lack of influence from Celtic on English is not really so remarkable? Yes, except that what we have in English is lack of lexical influence. Whether grammatical influences would occur depends to a large extent on the nature of the two languages in question. By the way, did Greek ever really replace Egyptian? DLW From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 19:44:46 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:44:46 EST Subject: Celtic and English Again Message-ID: In a message dated 3/8/99 11:11:49 PM Mountain Standard Time, petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Perhaps a comparable situation can be found in Egypt, which was >Egyptian-speaking for yonks, then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand years -- Not so. Greek never replaced demotic Egyptian as the popular language -- Coptic was the majority tongue in Egypt down to the 13th century CE. Greek was never more than a minority tongue, spoken by Greek immigrants and their descendants and a rather thin layer of Hellenized locals. It was mainly urban, as well. Comparable to Norman French in England. >but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either "substrate". -- Greek, as explained above, isn't a "substrate", and Egyptian Arabic is extremely different from that of say, Syria or Saudi Arabia or Morocco. Furthermore, Arabic arrived in Egypt with a written standard. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 19:59:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:59:08 EST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: >glengordon01 at hotmail.com writes: >Now, I can fully understand that one can have the legitimate view that > _AT PRESENT TIME_, such things are not recoverable to a _strong degree_ >as JS points out. -- and probably never will be, because we don't have time machines. Linguistic reconstruction is done by 'triangulation'. Once you're back beyond the neolithic, roughly, even the language families with the most and earliest written sources just don't provide enough data points. And we're never going to get any more data, failing the discovery of the archives of Atlantis. >conjecture is a necessary component in good research. -- not conjecture without evidence. If we couldn't see beyond the orbit of the Moon, astronomy would be impossible and all conjecture about it would be fantasy, pointless word-games, a waste of time. >Can we really place a limit on what we can find out or learn at any given >time? -- yes; it's called "no evidence available". The unwritten languages of prehistory are _lost_. The data is _gone_, vanished into entropy. >how to warp space-time back to the time of a given proto-language, >comparative linguistics will always be _pure theory_. -- this is not a license to speculate without evidence; otherwise, we'll just bring in near-miss moons, von Daniken aliens, etc. "Theory" is not the same as "groundless supposition". >probability... nature of comparative linguistics! -- a great enough difference in degree is a difference in kind. >Surely IE is most likely related to something. -- yes; and we can probably never know what it was related to. The information is gone. >The point is: in regards to any other competing theories out there on IE >external links (from NWC to Benue-Congo), what is the MOST probable? -- the difference between 0.000002% and 0.000001% is not meaningful. The point is that there simply isn't enough evidence to build _any_ plausible theory. Carl Popper's "Non-falsifiable hypothesis" fits here. If it can't be tested, it can't be meaningful. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 20:07:09 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 15:07:09 EST Subject: Mallory Message-ID: What we refer to as "pastoralism" is generally thought of as the type practiced in areas of the Eurasian steppe that weren't ecologically suitable for agriculture. Grazing, including transhumant grazing, was part of agricultural systems everywhere in the area, but that's not the same thing as being primarily dependent on the herds of the grasslands. Pastoral nomads usually had a routine of movements, summer-winter, or altitudinal ones in areas with mountains, to take advantage of ecological variations. However, the Eurasian semi-arid and arid steppe zone is ecologically marginal -- and so is subject to unpredictable shifts; severe and long-lasting droughts, for example, which can abruptly reduce the carrying capacity of the pastures. The more purely pastoral and nomadic the economy, the more vulnerable it was to such shifts; and the general human tendency to gradually breed up to and slightly beyond the carrying capacity of the environment was also relevant. Since the Eurasian nomads become more specialized in pastoralism over the millenia, they became at once more efficient users of this marginal environment (and more able to exploit all of it), and at the same time more vulnerable to its instability. Not coincidentally, the violence and scale of population movements in the steppe zone also increased over time, building up to the all-time climax of the 13th and 14th centuries, when single steppe- based empires could span the whole area from Hungary to Manchuria and invade places as far away as Burma and India. The situation in early PIE times, when the _first_ semi-pastoralists were expanding through the _margins_ of the steppe zone (the forest-steppe and river valley areas, for instance), and doing so with populations of humans and livestock well below the maxima, was historically unique. Never again would this territory be so 'open' (inhabited only by very thinly scattered hunter- gatherers). From manaster at umich.edu Tue Mar 9 20:40:44 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 15:40:44 -0500 Subject: Greek question In-Reply-To: <004901be6876$51441ac0$5a9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I have demonstrated it using accepted comparative methodology. This strains credulity. "Accepted" by whom? From ewb2 at cornell.edu Wed Mar 10 16:07:20 1999 From: ewb2 at cornell.edu (Wayles Browne) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 11:07:20 -0500 Subject: Greek question (night?) In-Reply-To: <38bfba66.36e36dc7@aol.com> Message-ID: > In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" >besides Germanic or Modern French? >Regards, >Steve Long >[ Moderator's response: > Greek _nuks, nuktos_, Latin _nox, noctis_, Sanskrit _nak (IIRC), naktam_, > Hittite _nekuz = nek{^w}t+s_, ... > --rma ] Also Slavic: Russian noch', Old Church Slavonic nosht' etc. go back to Common Slavic *nokt-. Let me take this opportunity to thank everybody for their thoughts about my original question about Greek nyx ~ -nykh-. Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics Department of Linguistics Morrill Hall 321, Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A. tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h) fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE) e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu From iglesias at axia.it Thu Mar 11 02:33:39 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 18:33:39 PST Subject: Trojan and Etruscan Message-ID: Another addition to the list of names of the Etruscans, which I read in an article by Massimo Pallottino: Umbrian: Turskus = Latin: Tu(r)sci Regards F. Rossi From yoel at mindspring.com Wed Mar 10 02:54:22 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 21:54:22 -0500 Subject: IE and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <36E36BF7.8D21BD78@neiu.edu> Message-ID: In the intervening time Adrados has written up his theory of how Etruscan fits as an Anatolian language, but one that breaks off from Proto-Common-Anatolian long, long before what we normally call the Anatolian Languages break off. That is that from Proto-Anatolian, first Etruscan branches off, representing this early stage of PA, much later Common Anatolian (Hittite, the Luwic Languages, Palaic, the ancestor of Lydian, etc.) break off. Neu has written a different conceptualization of the position of Anatolian within such a possible perspective. Adrados's article is in JIES and Neu's in ZVS/KZ/HS. I can look up the dates, but don't have them at hand. And just recently, based on no morphology whatsoever, Renfrew has Minoan breaking off from this Mythic Proto-Common-Anatolian 7,000 B.C.E. Yoel At 12:19 AM 3/8/99 -0600, you wrote: >Good old G-bock was honest. Privately -- to me --Hamp only said: VG's data >seem to work, but oughta have more. > >pete > >Jim Rader wrote: > >> Nearly twenty years ago I heard Eric Hamp give an account of >> Georgiev's lecture. As I recall Hamp telling it, Georgiev thought >> that Etruscan practically WAS Hittite, > >RIGHT: this is what I remember. > >> i.e., that Etruscan was an >> Anatolian language. The audience didn't contest his thesis out of >> sheer stupefaction, not because they agreed. Gueterbock walked out >> of the lecture shaking his head and saying "Very interesting, very >> interesting!" From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Mar 10 18:05:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 18:05:02 -0000 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Thanks for the correction, Miguel. The trouble with my being half right, is that it's usually the wrong half. Peter From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 10 03:57:58 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 03:57:58 GMT Subject: PIE *gn- > know/ken Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask this: Is >a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? I think so. English and Danish (fortis-lenis) vs. Dutch (voiceless-voiced), for instance. Or East Armenian vs. West Armenian. Finnish vs. Estonian (or is that just the spelling?). >If it is not part of general experience I do not see the commending >simplicity in choosing "lenis t" as the origin of Latin, Greek and Indic >plain voiced d. Where "d" and "dh" merged, they are voiced, as in >Balto-Slavic, Celtic and Albanian - why derive this from a basically >voiceless protoform? Hittite and Tocharian appear not to have voicing contrast. Parts of Germanic and Armenian don't have it. In Germanic and Armenian *d is voiceless, in Greek and Proto-Italic *dh is, so voicedness is not a necessary characteristic of *d and *dh (whereas *t is always voiceless/fortis). >- Isn't the only thing "wrong" with the IE system >that the aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh ...) have not been accepted? Murmured stops are extremely uncommon. There's also the matter of *b. A labial series *p, *bh simply doesn't make any sense, not even if you add a teaspoon of *ph's. >Then, >if we have SOME evidence for asp.ten., but not enough to guarantee >reconstruction of an overwhelming number of etymologies, but without them >the system as such becomes a truly overwhelming mess, isn't the easiest >solution then to accept that SOME etymologies containing ph, th, kh are >correct and that the PIE system was as in Sanskrit? Is it not a very >strong claim that ALL cases of asp.ten. are in last analysis based on >mistakes? Not mistakes, but stop+laryngeal, I think. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam [ Moderator's comment: I think the reference to "mistakes" is to my comment regarding the idea that Skt. voiceless aspirates are a hypercorrection in the language as transmitted by Prakrit speakers. --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Mar 10 23:25:50 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:25:50 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I wonder about the mechanics of this one In Spanish a'lamo = "poplar" BUT olmo = "elm" >5) >Celtic survivals of northern and central Iberia: >Sp., Port.alamo `poplar', Cf. It. olmo From yoel at mindspring.com Wed Mar 10 04:37:58 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 23:37:58 -0500 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word In-Reply-To: <36fc8921.129714302@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] It is suggested that you look in any of Bomhard's three books: Towards Proto-Nostratic (CILT 27, 1984), The Nostratic Macrofamily (Mouton, 1994, co-authored with John A. Kerns and dealing also with morphology and syntax). On p.380ff. his unitary phoneme TL is dealt with. It is a reconstruct whose appearence in his sub-Nostratic languages are quite different. The third book is Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (Signum, 1996). Yoel At 08:28 AM 3/8/99 GMT, you wrote: >>[ Moderator's response: >> There is a serious mixing of levels here, in that a Romance-specific >> development is being projected back to Nostratic, although other Indo- >> European languages do not have this phonotactic constraint, e. g. Greek. >> Before we can even accept it as a parallel, we have to determine what >> the digraph represents in Bomhard, a unit phoneme or a cluster. >> --rma ] > >A unit phoneme, probably a lateral affricate (> Semitic *s', a >lateral fricative). > >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 11 01:09:15 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:09:15 PST Subject: PIE *gn- - know/ken Message-ID: MIGUEL: The most acceptable solution from my point of view is that PIE did not have any voiced stops at all. JENS E.R.: Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask this: Is a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? So far I prefer the "opposite" to Miguel - that *d is really the fortis stop and the rest are lenis. The fortis would be derivative from the earlier Pre-IE ejective as Gamr. proposed for Common IE *d in the first place. JENS E.R.: [...] why derive this from a basically voiceless protoform? Well, I think Miguel has many reasons for his idea but I'll speak for myself on why I believe the same thing. The voiceless aspirates *ph, *kh, *th are not supportable in common IE and seem to be very much isolated to IIr. Yet, if this is true, we of course run into the problem of why *bh, *gh and *dh exist without voiceless contrasts (big no-no). On top of this problem, *b does not exist as well in IE and there has never been acceptable evidence of this phoneme. These two main things violate our understanding of how world languages are supposed to operate. Hence, since the problems in traditional IE phonology are voice-oriented, the simpler solution is to accept that IE did not have voiced stops and then we don't run into problems at all. Germanic then is seen to hold some phonological archaicisms. Voiceless systems can often develop voicing contrasts from such a system (Sumerian for one) and this voicing would have to exist AFTER IE had spread out enough and the archaic Germanic (with IE *d = *t) had lost some contact. Perhaps while some IE dialects were still in contact with each other, an isogloss spread across a certain region, making the voiceless *d a voiced plain. Note however Greek voiceless th, ph and kh in all environments, thus we can't say the same thing for *dh. The voicing of *dh, *gh, and *bh would have been even later than this. When voicing finally occured, sometimes it merged with the now "voiced plain". It should come to no surprise that the language that has voiceless ph, th and kh in contrast with bh, dh, and gh (Sanskrit) is the same one that DIDN'T merge the phonemes together and maintained the aspiration. This caused a necessity for the development of voiceless counterparts. Voiceless th, ph and kh are still found in Sanskrit after the voiceless mobile *s-. Laryngeals, voiceless as well, apparently create other examples of these phonemes. This would appear to be a simpler solution since we finally don't have to apologize for an imbalanced phonological system in IE or create extra "band-aid" phonemes that lack proper evidence. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 10 04:41:59 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 04:41:59 GMT Subject: Danube homeland. In-Reply-To: <1e2eadaa.36e2de45@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>but it makes it the best candidate by default, and any alternative theories >>should offer a pretty good case for why the IE homeland should be located >>elsewhere, and what happened to the languages of these "Anatolian farmers" or >>"Old Europeans". >-- same thing that happened to the languages of the Elamo-Dravidians They survived? But that's *my* theory :-) >who were >the first farmers throughout Iran and North India. You're sweeping close to 200 million people speaking Dravidian languages in Southern India under the rug. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 11 01:34:23 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:34:23 PST Subject: Danube homeland. Message-ID: JOATSIMEON: -- nonsensical. The PIE vocabulary is full of items which just weren't around before 4000 BCE. This alone completely rules out such a hypothesis. This whole question is about who's talking about what when they say IE. It's somewhat confusing. As far as I understand now, Miguel is pushing for the so-far aggravatingly difficult-to-fight idea that the Satem dialects alone arrived in the Pontic-Caspian region early and IE proper was in the Balkans. Although I intuitively know this can't be right, I haven't seen a good disproval come way yet. We have to get organized here and succinct to make sure the debate doesn't runaway out of control. What terminology shows undenyably that the _entire_ IE (from Anatolian to Armenian) should be found both in the Pontic-Caspian region AND a time of 4000-3500 BCE as most of us expect. Is there inheirited 4000-3000 BCE terminology in Anatolian that anyone knows of? Actually what about *sweks, *septm and other Semitic-related terms? Isn't this supposed to have come from West Semitic as we seem to have accepted? How does this word enter so early into IE? It would have had to occur before 6000 BCE then, no? When/where is West Semitic supposed to have existed? Or Semitic? Isn't this a little early? There must be a strict time limit. Something tells me there's a big loophole here somewhere. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs From yoel at mindspring.com Wed Mar 10 04:55:24 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 23:55:24 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <37029e7a.135179387@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: The question is dealt with thoroughly in H. Craig Melchert Anatolian Historical Phonology, both as to the verbal root neku- "become twilight" and nekut- "night"/ Yoel At 10:04 AM 3/8/99 GMT, you wrote: >mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: > >>The spelling stands for >>/nekwt-s/. The problem is that we would expect if the >>word is to be derived from PIE *nekwt- ~ *nokwt-. The single >>suggests PIE *g(h)w. > >But I must agree with Rich's "moderator comment" elsewhere that >in this case the spelling may reflect all of PIE *kw, *gw or >*ghw [*gwh if you prefer]. After all, if the etymon were *kw, >the geminate spelling should not be but , and there is >no way of writing that in cuneiform (nor in ASCII, as the >recurrent confusions about labiovelars show). > >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 11 02:13:10 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 18:13:10 PST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: I had a wonderfully long response ready to send you guys but luckily Hotmail Timed out on me and I was given the opportunity to write a more focused email in the end... ME (GLEN): Now, I can fully understand that one can have the legitimate view that _AT PRESENT TIME_, such things are not recoverable to a _strong degree_ as JS points out. JOATSIMEON: -- and probably never will be, because we don't have time machines. Linguistic reconstruction is done by 'triangulation'. Once you're back beyond the neolithic, roughly, even the language families with the most and earliest written sources just don't provide enough data points. You are going to have to decide what kind of terminology you are going to use: absolute or vague. The vague phrase "back beyond the neolithic, roughly" doesn't go well with the absolute term "impossible" as in "it's impossible to reconstruct beyond the neolithic". The word "roughly" automatically admits to the possibility of long-range comparison because you appear to certify that _some_ evidence is obtainable for these hypotheses. Further, triangulation has no absolute limits of distance. It is used for distances on Earth as well as in space. You have successfully proved my point. Thank you. :) ME (GLEN): conjecture is a necessary component in good research. JOATSIMEON: -- not conjecture without evidence. [...] Carl Popper's "Non-falsifiable hypothesis" fits here. If it can't be tested, it can't be meaningful. Conjecture IS BY DEFINITION "guesswork". Look it up in a dictionary and come back to me. What makes good conjecture from bad conjecture is the amount of likelihood a hypothesis has and how much it explains. This is how we can logically dismiss theories such as Pat's Sumerian Invention Process against the likelier scenario that Sumerian evolved like any other language from an earlier form. Or do you accept this as a credible possibility?! Do you realise that you're completely dismissing the field of cosmology and quantum mechanics because of lack of "evidence". We can't take a picture of a particle to tell whether it's a wave or a particle or both (cf. Wave-Particle Duality) yet it's just accepted that sometimes it behaves as one or the other. Tachyon particles aren't verified only surmised. Gravitons, wimps, superstring theory and a 10-dimensional universe. Are these "wild conjectures"? These theories are NECESSARY in order to explain the world we live in and I maintain that these conjectures (in the sense that there cannot be physical evidence of being so) are science. Of course, they have "evidence" in the form of mathematical equations and the like but there isn't any undeniable physical proof. Again, we're talking about relative probability - how much does it explain with the least amount of effort and the most elegant simplicity (Occhim's Rasor). ME (GLEN): Can we really place a limit on what we can find out or learn at any given time? JOATSIMEON: -- yes; it's called "no evidence available". The unwritten languages of prehistory are _lost_. The data is _gone_, vanished into entropy. This statement is only meaningful once you succinctly define "evidence". Is IE futile then? What makes IE different? It would appear that IE is "lost" too yet we seem to know an awful lot about it despite it's disappearance. How funny. ME (GLEN): The point is: in regards to any other competing theories out there on IE external links (from NWC to Benue-Congo), what is the MOST probable? JOATSIMEON: -- the difference between 0.000002% and 0.000001% is not meaningful. Yes, true, only if you can measure the difference as such. You have not. Start calculating. This is where "relative probability" is necessary. No measurements are required. It's simply a reasoning process, weighing how much two different hypotheses explain the data best - comparing likelihoods. This seems to suggest that you actually accept Amerind languages as being as likely to be closely related to IE as Uralic. The fact that IE and Etruscan are honestly being considered to be genetically related appears to push the time-frame of reasonable reconstruction little by little. There are no absolutes. I wholly question your reasoning. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Mar 10 05:52:32 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 23:52:32 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Date: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 10:40 PM >mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >But I must agree with Rich's "moderator comment" elsewhere that >in this case the spelling may reflect all of PIE *kw, *gw or >*ghw [*gwh if you prefer]. After all, if the etymon were *kw, >the geminate spelling should not be but , and there is >no way of writing that in cuneiform (nor in ASCII, as the >recurrent confusions about labiovelars show). This is interesting speculation but not borne out by the data. See Sturtevant p. 56: durative of 'drink' = ak-k{.}u-uS-ki-iz-zi; however the basic form is written with one -k- upon which S. remarks: "The consistent use of single k between vowels in the primary verb is difficult, but note -kk- in the durative". Pat From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Wed Mar 10 07:49:12 1999 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 08:49:12 +0100 Subject: PIE *gn- > know/ken Message-ID: Thanks to Jens & Miguel for their responses to parts of my question concerning the reflexes in English of PIE *gen- 'to know'. I'd still be most grateful for any opinions as to : a) at what stage in linguistic history the initial voiced consonant in PIE roots such as *gno- "know/ken/can" or *gen- "knife", etc. became devoiced (esp. in respect of Grimm's Law), and b) whether it is correct to state that the form 'know' is derived from the zero grade of *gen- (*gno-), whilst the forms 'ken (dial.)/can' are derived from the full (e) grade (*gen-)? Best Wishes, Dennis. [ Moderator's comments: 1. Please be aware that the root is *gneH3-, with the o-coloring laryngeal. The form 'know' is derived from the full grade *gneH3-w-; forms such as 'can' are derived from the zero grade *gn.H3-. 2. The unrelated *gen- is not "knife", but rather the hypothetical basis for a large number of Germanic stems referring to knobs, lumps, sharp blows, and the like. 3. It may be that the initial *g was never voiced, but rather a glottalic /k{^?}/, which lost its glottalic articulation. However, that aside, it appears that Germanic was a standard IE language in the first half of the 1st millenium BCE, so not before 1000 BCE and not (much) later than 500 BCE. --rma ] From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 09:15:16 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 09:15:16 GMT Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote:- > *i:sarno [Celtic, Germanic] > iron, Eisen n. > [< ?Vasconic *isar "star"; > see Basque izar "star"] [mcv2/98, tv2/98] Larry Trask replied:- > No comment. Also, Greek `side:ros' = "iron", Latin `sidus' (gen `sideris') = "star". This semantic association was quite possible in early times when Man had not yet found how to smelt iron and iron was a precious rarity available only as natural nickel-iron alloy in meteorites. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Wed Mar 10 09:29:55 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 03:29:55 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: It's even more fun: Hrozny', a Czech, indeed, was in the Austro-Hungarian army and was assigned to Turkey [allied with the Central powers]. A-H, as France even today, had compulsory national service, which could be satisfied, not only by soldiering, but also in teaching and scholarship. And the scholar who recognized Saussure's "laryngeals" in Hrozny''s deciphrmnet, was also an A-H officer, Jerzy Kurylowicz, a Pole, whose name indicates Belo-Russian origins. jp maher Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Hittite was deciphered by a Czech, Hrozny', the in whose name > is /z/. The derives from the conventions used for Akkadian > cuneiform. Akkadian was deciphered by Germans. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 09:49:23 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 09:49:23 +0000 Subject: Castilian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [on Basque ~ `side'] > This word resembles Spanish falda "skirt, flank"--which > unaccountably begins with /fV/; which, as anyone who was studied > Ibero-Romance knows, is a no-no. Is there an Old Castilian, Gasco'n or > Aragone's form /*alda, *alde/ ? Castilian is commonly glossed `skirt', but in fact it denotes more generally `any part of a garment which hangs loosely and freely away from the body'. In addition to `skirt(s)', the word can translate English `fold', `drape', `train', with reference to garments. In the Middle Ages, the word is recorded frequently as both and , the second exhibiting the categorical Castilian shift of /f/ to /h/ in initial position before most following sounds. The form eventually won out in the standard language. Corominas sees the word as descending from Frankish * `fold', cognate with English `fold'; the word is found throughout continental Germanic, including in Gothic. The predominance of /f/ is certainly puzzling; Corominas rejects a semi-learned origin, on the ground that this is not the sort of word likely to have such an origin, and prefers to assume that was re-borrowed into Castilian from a neighboring Romance variety which had not undergone the Castilian shift of /f/ to /h/, probably Occitan or Catalan. The Castilian word has a transferred sense of `lower part of a slope', and this, or a related Romance form, is thought to be the source of Basque `slope', which can hardly be native. I know of no Castilian, Gascon or Aragonese word of the form suggested, but cannot assert with confidence that no such form exists. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 10:13:45 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 10:13:45 +0000 Subject: IE and Uralic pronouns In-Reply-To: <6d937280.36e3358e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: [on pronoun comparisons] > Rather appear to be knowing the answers, > and hide the questions we don't know the answers to? > Or declare them off-limits? Nobody I know of is doing any such thing. We merely admit that there are many things we don't know, and quite a few things we are unlikely ever to know. But no historical linguist declares any field of investigation "off limits". > In a business firm, that would be a recipe > for near-immediate bankruptcy, > failing to act positively and strongly in moving towards the future. This is the first time I have seen HL compared to a business. HL is not a commercial enterprise. It cannot be run like a business or judged like a business. Our late unlamented Conservative government in Britain attempted to introduce business procedures into such institutions as schools, hospitals, universities. the police and the BBC, all of which were burdened with layers of managers and bureaucrats, and assessed as business enterprises instead of as public-service institutions. The results have generally been catastrophic. And I don't think business attitudes would be any more rewarding in my subject. > Better to ADMIT to students that we need more powerful > tools for penetrating the noise of centuries and even millennia, > to set more and more students to this task, to studying how deeply, > and against which kinds of noise, each tool we have can > penetrate (estimates in all cases are fine), and to estimate > in as many situations as possible how much residue should > still be detectable despite the noise of historical change, > WITHOUT the assumptions that the sample used as controls > ARE IN FACT UNRELATED. That is the fallacy in all such > approaches I have read. Because if the supposed controls > ARE related, even very distantly, it may distort our estimates > of what background noise is. With respect, this sounds to me like a hopelessly unrealistic program. A number of linguists are already attempting to develop mathematical methods which might be used to push our investigations further back in time, but the difficulties are formidable, and no proposal has yet won widespread acceptance. I don't think it's realistic to try to estimate the degree of background noise for languages generally: there are just too many complicating factors. For one thing, languages with similar phoneme systems, similar phonotactic patterns and similar morpheme-structure constraints are likely to show a higher proportion of chance resemblances than arbitrary languages. For another, no general approach to background noise can hope to distinguish between common inheritance and borrowing; this is something that has to be done by painstaking and hard-nosed linguistic investigation, and sometimes it can hardly be done at all. As for the supposed "fallacy", I might draw attention to the Oswalt shift test, a simple but ingenious -- though time-consuming -- way of estimating the degree of background noise for any languages we happen to be interested in. After all, if we're interested in comparing, say, Burushaski and Ainu, it's only the background noise for those languages that is relevant, and not the background noise for other languages, which may be quite different in nature and magnitude. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 12:05:27 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 12:05:27 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [ moderator snip ] > This word resembles Spanish falda "skirt, flank"--which > unaccountably begins with /fV/; which, as anyone who was studied > Ibero-Romance knows, is a no-no. Is there an Old Castilian, Gasco'n or > Aragone's form /*alda, *alde/ ? Sp. falda is a Germanic borrowing into Romance (It., Oc., Cat., Ptg, falda). Coromines suggests from Frankish *falda `fold', cf OHG falt. ME fald, related to Goth falthan, OHG faldan, OE fealdan, ON falda `to fold'; related by Onions to PIE *pel/*pl- with a *-t- extension; cf. Gk dipaltos, diplasios `twofold', haploos `simple'; Lat plicare `to fold'. Perhaps if we want to advance this 'research programme' we should impose on ourselves a self-denying ordinance against etymologizing off the cuff. 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 iglesias at axia.it Wed Mar 10 21:19:50 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 13:19:50 PST Subject: Rate of change Message-ID: Concerning the Galician language, my wife is from La Corun~a and with her assistance I would like to give the following input: 1) Galician is quite distinct from Castillian. 2) Whether it is distinct from Portuguese is a matter of opinion. The Portuguese (nationalistically ?) consider it a "co-dialecto". 3) The pronunciation of Galician is very different from the standard Portuguese of Lisbon, but if we consider the dialects of Northern Portugal the distance is much less. (For example no difference between "b" and "v"). The dialects differ mainly as a result of the influence of the official languages. The dialects in Galicia are very much alive. 4) My wife's language is Castillian, as she grew up under Franco's regime in a large city, and the use of Galician was, shall we say, strongly discouraged. However, her family in the country continued to use Galician and she can understand the language with no problems. Subjectively, my wife has no problem in communicating with Northern Portuguese speaking in her version of Castillian, but with a friend from Lisbon they have to speak very slowly. However, this person's father is from Minho (Portuguese Galicia), so that helps. With Brazilians, it depends on the person. Some kinds of Brazilian seem closer to Galician. 5) Galician may sound like Castillian, but in fact its sounds including the lisped "s" were a local development parallel to that of Castille. (See "Grama'tica Portuguesa" by Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, Ed. Gredos, Madrid, chapter on "El Gallego") The south of Galicia uses "seseo". 6) There is another phenomenon known as "geada", which is the pronunciation of velar "g" similar to the Spanish "j", e.g. "lujo" for "Lugo", but this is not considered "correct", although many other Spaniards consider it the very essence of Galician as they find it funny, e.g. "jato" for "gato". 7) Galician has been recognised as an official language alongside Castillian, on the same level as Catalan and Basque in their respective areas. Like Basque, Galician had to develop a modern written standard over the last few decades. There is currently a debate between the Autonomous Government of Galicia, which has adopted a Spanish-like orthography, and those who would prefer a Portuguese-style orthography, e.g. Espanha, rather than Espan~a. Un sau'do carin~oso a todos da lista indo-europea. Boa tarde. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 10 12:44:43 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 06:44:43 -0600 Subject: Celtic Influence in English Message-ID: Last I heard, most of what I say about this was supported by Hamp, so whether or not it is wrong, it is not ridiculous. Of course no one could believe that there is Celtic (grammatical) influence in English without also believing that the features in question were suppressed as sub-standard during the OE period. By the way, personal communication with Hamp on this matter got me (so I guess) a full-tuition graduate scholarship to the University of Chicago, which I first took up then abandoned when I decided I would rather be a rock star. (I'm the one who looks like a cross between Sting and Mick Jagger.) Here is a copy of a rather impromptu abstract I recently (and rapidly) composed on the subject. (On re-reading, it does not seems as good as it once did. Alas for its chances of acceptance.) Celtic Influence as a Major Force in the Development of English During the Middle English period, written English becomes progressivley more similar (in syntax) to the Celtic languages, especially those in the Brittonic half of the family. The innovations in question arise in the West (in the sense of a "Greater West") and North, where Celtic influence is historically plausible. If this is not a coicidence, it is clear the these innovations must have been suppressed as sub-standard during the Old English period, only to surface during the unmasking of former peasant dialects characteristic of the ME period. The innovations in question fall into two categories: 1) reduction of nominal morphology, and 2) introduction of periphrasis (and progressives) into the verbal system. But these two types do not appear in the same area. Nominal innovations appear in the North, and verbal innovations appear in the West. Norse influence explains this pattern, for Norse influence tended to reduce nominal morphology, as is generally recognized, but would also have tended to disfavor characteristically Celtic verbal constructions. As Norse influence occurred in the North and East, this means that the North would have two external causes to reduce nominal morphology, Celtic and Norse, whereas the West and East would each have only its characteristic one. This also explains something that has long puzzled more thoughtful Anglists: if Norse influence is the reason for reductions in nominal morphology, why are these so much stronger in the North than in the East, and why is the West as receptive to them as is the East? The answer is that Norse influence is not all that is going on: there is also Celtic influence. The theory advanced explains both why the innovations in question occur early in English and only later or not at all in other Germanic, and why the innovations is question occur where (and when) they do in England. The traditional interpretation can only offer coincidence in "explanation". The subject also offers opportunites for interesting observations on secondary language acquisition and the sociolinguistics of dialects that are in origin foreign "accents". Striking parallels with more modern "Celtic Englishes" are adduced, but the main conclusion is that to a surprising extent modern English is itself a Celtic English from an earlier time. That innovations evidently of Celtic provenance should have been adopted into the London Standard, where they are not native by geography and can only have been introduced by migration, shows that the Celtic element in the population even in the Midlands must have been substantial, thus lending linguistic support to the revisionist view of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest recently advanced, on entirely non-linguistic grounds, by Higham, that there was substantial "Celtic survival" in all but the East and Southeast of England. [End of Abstract] I must stress that "the theory advanced" explains what the Conventional Wisdom cannot explain, save by throwing up its hands and crying "coincidence": 1) Why Middle English diverges from the rest of Germanic and seemingly converges with (British) Celtic, and 2) (together with Norse influence) why the innovations in question show the geographic pattern that they do. So I do hereby officially issue what I call the Bickerton challenge: if you don't like it, come up with something better. And "coincidence" does not count. DLW From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Mar 10 13:03:40 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 15:03:40 +0200 Subject: Who deciphered what (was Re: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt) In-Reply-To: <3704c716.145575922@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: > >No doubt someone will prove me wrong, but I believe Hittite was deciphered > >at first by German speakers - so z was used as in German, which is a great > >pain. It = /ts/. > OK, I'll prove you wrong :-) > Hittite was deciphered by a Czech, Hrozny', the in whose name > is /z/. The derives from the conventions used for Akkadian > cuneiform. Akkadian was deciphered by Germans. Germans like Henry Rawlinson and Edward Hincks? Strictly speaking, Hittite was not deciphered at all. The script was already known. It was Hrozny' who made the first steps in interpreting the language and who suggested that it was IE, but the decipherment phase of cuneiform had long been over. The adaptations of the script for the writing of Hittite had to be worked out, but this is not the same thing as starting with an unknown script. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 13:25:37 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 13:25:37 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > [snip] > I was also thinking of Spanish muro, Latin murus [sp?] "wall" or > Spanish moro'n "hillock, rise of land" except that the double /rr/ of murru > screws things up --and then there's Spanish morro, "a small promontory on a > neck of land jutting out into the water [where forts were often built]" > Maybe Celtic offers more clues [or enigmas] to this set of words > >> moraine, Moräne "moraine", > >> Mur[e] "pile of rocks [Bavarian] > >> [?< Vasconic; > >> see Basque murru "hill"] [tv97] Right. Here goes with Meyer-Lübke, REW. 5673a. *mora "Steinhaufe" [cairn] Tosk., kors. mora. -- Ablt.: venez., truent. morelo de luganegeta "Stück Wurst", de bizato "Stück Aal", morena de kasten~e "Schnur Kastanien", ladin. morena "Kette" Prati, AGl. 18,336, log. moderina für *moredina "Haufe", ammoderinare "anhäufen", moro'ttulu "Auswuchs" Guarnerio, RIL. 48,966; sp. moro'n "Hügel" Jud, BDR. 3,11,2. Ob alle diese Wörter zusammengehören, ist fraglich; Ursprung vorröm. (Zusammenhang mit 5762 [murru] oder mit 5369 [marra] ist ausgeschlossen; sav. mordzi "Steinhaufe["] s. 5758 [*muricarium]) Note M-L's caution about whether these words belong together at all, and his judgement that murru is not connected. (Onions ODEE does relate moraine to Rom *murrum, but without argument.) 5762 murru (Schallwort [onomatopoeia]) "Schnauze", "Maul" Log. murru, auch "Rüssel", südostfrz. mur, prov., kat. morre [recte kat. morro]; sp. morro "dicke, hervorstehende Lippe", "runder Kiesel", "kleiner runder Fels", morra "Schädel", vgl piazz. murra "Felsstück", kalabr., irp., agnon. auch "Viehherde", südfrz. auch "Berggipfel"...[derivatives]... Wohl Schallwort, vgl. einerseits hd. murre "verdriessliches Gesicht" Braune, Zs. 21, 217, andererseits sp. morra "Schnurren der Katze", morro "schnurrend". Die geographische Verbreitung (Südfrankreich und Spanien) kann auch auf westgot. Ursprung hinweisen. -- Mussafia 80. (...sp. moro'n "Hügel" kann begrifflich hierher gehören, fällt aber mit -r- statt -rr- auf; zu bask. muru "Haufen", "Hügel" Diez 470 ist wegen -u- zweifelhaft, auch dürfte diese muru mit dem aus dem Lat. entlehnten muru "Mauer" identsich sein.) All the "murru" words are reviewed in some detail in Coromines's Catalan Etymological Dictionary s.v. morro; he concludes, like Meyer-Lübke, that we have here parallel onomatopoeic creations of the type *morr- `muzzle, snout' (also `purr'), then applied metaphorically to other objects resembling a muzzle or snout. But that leaves the *mora word. Is this the same as Bavarian Mure, and is it the root of moraine? 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 glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 4 07:34:01 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 23:34:01 PST Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: >[ Moderator query: > Neuter ending? This is not a neuter in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit or > Germanic. > What neuter ending do you have in mind? > --rma ] Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Germanic are all coincidentally non-IndoAnatolian languages who all agree with the concept of feminine gender. I'm sure you must have come across the idea that the feminine is not archaic but derivative from the previous animate/inanimate distinctions found in Anatolian lgs. I know Hittite cannot be feminine since it doesn't have this gender thing. This is the neuter *-t/*-d found in words like *kwi-d "what" and the heteroclitic declension: [nom-acc] **yekwn-d > *yekwr "liver". Thus: **nekw-d > *nekw-t TADAAAA!!! I call it progressive devoicing. You like? Ah, well, it might be a bunch of "crap" in the end but it's my idea and I'm stickin' with it for now ;) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- [ Moderator's response: Hittite does not have a separate feminine, but it does have an opposition of common vs. neuter (or animate vs. inanimate). Hittite _nekuz_ is of common gender, so I repeat the question: What neuter? --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 11 03:00:29 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 21:00:29 -0600 Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: Dear Steve and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Wednesday, March 10, 1999 3:43 PM >In a message dated 3/8/99 08:49:13 AM, rma wrote: ><<[ Moderator's comment: > And what of the very similar, though completely separate, Armenian shift? > --rma ]>> I do not want to actively enter this discussion but, for whatever it may be worth, I believe the Germanic sound system was developed in the IE homeland, in close proximity to Semitic, as the correspondences I have developed between Germanic and Semitic seem to suggest --- after other IE branches had struck for the west. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3_germanic.htm Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 12 20:00:33 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:00:33 -0800 Subject: LIST MASTER In-Reply-To: <36E6375B.B02CE0CF@ifn.net> Message-ID: Rich: I'm getting doubles of somethings --or maybe I'm seeing double :> [ While trying to improve the efficiency of delivery to the Indo-European list, a few Nostratic postings got sent out twice, and a few Nostratic subscribers (but not all) received one or two Indo-European postings. I hope no one was too greatly inconvenienced. I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that the backlog caused by the meltdown in February is finally all caught up, and postings to both lists will once again come out in a timely manner. Thank you all for continuing to make both of these lists interesting to read and to moderate. Rich Alderson ] From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 05:45:51 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 05:45:51 GMT Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <491C911E0F@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: >And we need a reasonably compact name for the {h.} sound, like we have for >its voiced counterpart `ayin'. h.eth? >> In view of the fact that [3] is used for the Egyptian vulture, which was >> really an /r/, .I am reluctant to adopt that suggestion. > I thought that the Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) was the glottal >stop. The 3-like sign that Egyptologists use for that sign is specific to >Egyptology. The sound had developed to a glottal stop in later Egyptian (where it functions much like Semitic alef to mark the vowel /a/ in "syllabic" writing). In Old Egyptian it probably was a uvular fricative or trill /R/, and it usually derives from etymological (PAA) *r. The Egptian /r/ usually comes from PAA *l. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 11 05:47:32 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 23:47:32 -0600 Subject: Chariots Message-ID: on raiding: in Bulgaria/1966 I saw a long-legged man "riding" a donkey: He sat, feet dragging, not amidships, but back on the animal's hip [pardon: I'm a city kid]. jpm JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: [ moderator snip ] > -- Horses were always strong enough to carry a person on their back _for a > while_. Zebras, wild horses, and ponies no larger than the neolithic/Bronze > Age chariot pony could all do this. > The question actually relates to how long they could be ridden and how much > gear the rider could carry. From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 06:28:22 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 06:28:22 GMT Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: <36E5BA01.5D0C@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: Steven Schaufele wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, >> *dh is typologically unacceptable. >What about a stop system distinguishing between voiceless, voiced, and >aspirated (unmarked for voicing)? Or am i being naive? Well, that's exactly the Greek/Proto-Italic system *t=/t/, *d=/d/, *dh=/th/. It's also one way of interpreting the Armenian/Proto-Germanic system, with *t=/th/, *d=/t/ and *dh=/d/. But it cannot be the original PIE system, as we can't derive the "Greek" from the "Armenian" system, nor vice-versa, nor the "Sanskrit" system from either. The problem is that "aspirated (unmarked for voicing)", just like "ejective [glottalized] (unmarked for voicing)", are purely theoretical constructs. Aspirated and ejective stops are voiceless by definition: adding voice turns them into very differently articulated phones, namely murmured /d"/ and implosive /d'/. In fact, that's exactly what may have brought about the Greek/Italic and Armenian/Germanic systems. If we imagine an earlier system that distinguished lenis (but not voiced) ejective *d from aspirated *dh, then phonetically the opposition may have been realized as: 1) plain [t] vs. aspirated [th] ("aspirating dialects"); 2) ejective [t'] vs. plain [t] ("glottalizing dialects"); 3) ejective [t'] vs. aspirated [th] ("aspirating-glottalizing dialects"). If the fortis-lenis opposition then tended to develop into voiceless-voiced (fortis *t [tt] > [t]), aspirating dialects would have developed a "Greek" system (because of the resistance of aspirated [th] to become voiced/murmured), and glottalizing dialects would have developed an "Armenian" system (because of the resistance of ejective [t'] to become voiced/implosive). "Aspirating-glottalizing" dialects would have developed, with the aid of stop + laryngeal clusters, a new 4-way opposition /t/ ~ /th/ ~ /d'/ ~ /d"/ (with implosive /d'/ as in Sindhi and murmured [half-voiced] /d"/ which develops into [t] + low tone or high tone + [d] in Punjabi). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From roborr at uottawa.ca Thu Mar 11 06:32:17 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 01:32:17 -0500 Subject: PIE gender Message-ID: I seem to remember that at the Paris International Conf of Linguists that Calvert Watkins adduced evidence that Anatolian actually had a feminine gender, and that the animate/inanimate system apparently adduced in Hittite would not be archaic, but rather a later development. Anyone seen any references? Robert Orr From roborr at uottawa.ca Thu Mar 11 06:36:47 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 01:36:47 -0500 Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns Message-ID: Borrowing of pronouns is rare, but NOT impossible: 1) R.M.W Dixon mentions an instance of an Australian aboriginal language where the Englsih first person pronoun has been borrowed for reasons of taboo. (Languages of Australia, 1980) 2) Eric Hamp has an intriguing suggestion for OCS azu. (IJSLP 1983). 3) And cf. the Muppets. Miss Piggy would often use "moi" as the first person singular pronoun while purportedly speaking English. Robert Orr From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 09:02:55 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 09:02:55 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [on Basque `ax' and `sacred' > And in the case of saindu, much the same would have happened in that > sanctu /sanktu/ > *santyu which in Spanish from the Basque region > became the common name Sancho [it became common name Santo, > noun/adjective santo everywhere else] > and in Basque *santyu > *sayntu > saindu /sayndu/ [or is it > /san~du/?] My reconstruction is probably missing something but the > same metathesis of /y/ is there, right? Debatable. The form is Spanish. The medieval Basque form of the name is , which must derive from * by dissimilatory loss of the first sibilant. And I don't see why this form would develop from a palatalized coronal (/ts/ notates an apical affricate). There is no need to appeal to a Romance palatal to account for the Basque /ai/. For example, the word for `fast, quick, soon' was mostly in the 16th century but is mostly today. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 09:15:39 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 09:15:39 +0000 Subject: PIE plosives In-Reply-To: <36E5BA01.5D0C@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, > *dh is typologically unacceptable. Perhaps not so generally. A number of languages have turned up which have voiced aspirates but no voiceless aspirates. For example, the Indonesian language Madurese has a /p/ series, a /b/ series and a /bh/ series, but no /ph/ series, exactly like the standard reconstruction of PIE. Several other Indonesian languages have more or less the same system, and I think I've read that a couple of African languages do as well. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 09:28:45 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 09:28:45 GMT Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: "WB (in Frankfurt today)" wrote:- > Well, take a look at Alexander Vovin's excellent review article on > WSY Wang ed. (1995), _The ancestry of the Chinese language_ (_Journal > of CHinese Linguistics 25[1997]2: 308-336) for starts. Sasha demon- > strates that Starostin's SC reconstruction rests on multiple correspon- > dances not showing any trace of phonological conditioning (ST *-t, ... If Sino-Tibetan and Caucasian were ancestral languages for all their history (and were never learned from conquerors or cultural contacts), then their common ancestor would have been spoken by their speakers' common ancestors, i.e. before the European and Mongoloid races evolved their distinctive physical features. (I came across a theory that the distinctive features of the Mongoloid race started as physical adaptations to withstand extreme cold in Central Asia in the Ice Age.) If so, is there an anthropologist on channel who could tell us how long ago that likely was? If this was very long ago, the two languages would have changed so much meanwhile that no clear sign of common ancestry would remain distinguishable from `noise' such as accidental resemblances (e.g. Greek {theos} = Nahuatl {teotl} = "god"), and imitating the same natural sound (e.g. Latin {papilio} = Nahuatl {papalotl} = "butterfly"). IE *{kuon} (likely *{kewon} before zero-grading started) = Modern Chinese {chu"an} (Wade-Giles spelling), Ancient Chinese *{kywan} (1 syllable) = "dog". But when and where was the dog domesticated? Did this word travel along with the animal from whoever first domesticated it, rather than being a sign of language cognateness? From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 09:40:11 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 09:40:11 +0000 Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Once again, I'm just following through on the commentary made in Bernard >Comrie's book that attributes the "First Sound Shift" in German to the >conversion of IE sounds into "the nearest equivalents" of a prior non-IE >language. I'm a great fan of Bernard Comrie's, and he's the author of quite a few books. Could you tell us which one this is, please? Thanks, Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 11:49:12 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 11:49:12 +0000 Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <19990308143659.15685.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: > And finally, has anyone contemplated the possibility that there > might have been an even earlier stage that needs to be reconstructed > (e.g. perhaps in the case of Euskera) that eventually gave rise to > a animate/inanimate dichotomy (e.g., as it is found today in > Euskera)? Any ideas on that, Larry? This would imply that > cognitively speaking, there could have been an earlier structure > that was not based on an "animate/inanimate" contrast but on another > ontological type or definition of "being." Basque generally lacks gender and noun-classes, but there is a wrinkle: animate NPs typically construct their local case-forms differently from inanimate NPs. Inanimate NPs just take the case-endings. But animate NPs use an extra morph which is, or probably once was, a postposition. The facts vary according to region. In the west, the additional morph is <-gan>, which appears to be a fossilized postposition. This is usually attached to the genitive case of the animate NP, categorically so in some circumstances, but the rules differ from variety to variety. In the east, the equivalent item is usually , which is variously attached to the genitive or to the absolutive of the animate NP. (But <-gan> is also used to varying extents in eastern varieties.) In both cases, the local case-suffix is added to this extra morph. A further difference is that the use of <-gan> is generally categorical with animate NPs in the west, while the use of is not categorical with animate NPs in the east: in the east, we sometimes find the local case-suffixes attached directly to animate NPs, though the rules governing this usage are obscure. The origin of <-gan> is unknown, though it may possibly be a reduced variant of `top', which itself serves to form postpositions in the language. The origin of is likewise unknown, though this in its locative form is frequently used in the older literature to mean specifically `at the house of', as opposed to merely `in, on, at' -- something which is not true of <-gan>, so far as I know. This has induced speculation that may once have been a word for `house', but there exists no evidence to support such an interpretation. The majority view is that both elements are native in Basque and of some antiquity. We may therefore surmise that the special treatment of animate NPs in the local cases is also of some antiquity, but we can't say how much, for lack of data. It is perhaps curious that two different formations exist in the same function, but maybe we are just seeing the remnants of an earlier, and unrecorded, state of affairs in which the language offered several resources for the purpose, and some degree of selection has taken place -- a common kind of historical development in languages. As to what happened in Basque before the 16th century, it's impossible to say. But I have two observations. First, animate NPs are not distinguished from inanimate NPs in any other way: in particular, all the non-local cases are formed identically for all NPs. Second, it seems clear to me that the local cases of the modern language -- with the likely exception of locative <-n> -- are of recent formation. We find substantial variation in the formation of the local cases, both in time and in space. So, if the modern local case-endings are in general not very old, it hardly seems likely that the distinctive formations used with animate NPs can be very old, either. That leaves open the question of how long Basque has been distinguishing animate and inanimate NPs at all. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 12:11:03 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 12:11:03 GMT Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <19990308143659.15685.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "roslyn frank" wrote: >Because of my interest in this particular question, I wonder if anyone >could speculate on when (along a rough time continuum) gender entered IE >languages, i.e., when (P)IE acquired gender. The lack of feminine gender in Hittite (Anatolian) suggests that the PIE three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter) is datable to the time between the split-off of Anatolian and the break-up of the rest of IE (beginning with Tocharian). Of course before that time, PIE also had gender: animate vs. inanimate. We cannot reconstruct a genderless stage of PIE. >And finally, has anyone contemplated the possibility that there might >have been an even earlier stage that needs to be reconstructed (e.g. >perhaps in the case of Euskera) that eventually gave rise to a >animate/inanimate dichotomy (e.g., as it is found today in Euskera)? The Basque case is very different from the case of (P)IE, where gender distinctions (inanimate / animate => masculine/feminine) were quite central to the entire (pro)nominal system (nominative/ accusative cases, adjective agreement, verbal agreement, etc.) The animate/inanimate distinction in Basque is heavily "localized". Pun intended: the only place in Basque grammar where animacy plays a role is in the formation of the local cases [locative, allative, ablative etc.], where animate NP's add the local suffixes to the genitive + -gan-/-baita-, e.g. "to the house" etxe-(r)a, "to the man" gizon-aren-gan-a. This has always reminded me of something that I was inculcated as a child. Growing up in a Spanish family in Holland, certain Dutchisms tended to creep into our (my siblings and mine's) speech, which my father was constantly combatting. One of them was saying "Voy a Juan" [I go to John] (Dutch "Ik ga naar Jan toe"), which my father always corrected to "Voy a ver a Juan" [I'm going to see John] or "Voy a casa de Juan" [I'm going to John's house]. It seems that Castilian also doesn't normally allow a locative/directional preposition followed directly by an animate noun (phrase). The masculine/feminine distinction in Basque is even more restricted and mysterious: it only applies to the ergative/dative pronominal suffixes of the verb in the second person singular (-k/-ga- "you (masc)", -n/-na- "you (fem)"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 12:55:48 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 12:55:48 GMT Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: <904d0e61.36e5789b@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>that "wool" didn't exist in the vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times. >-- sheep didn't develop wool, as we know it, until well after domestication. >Use of wool as a fabric is comparatively late -- well after the beginning of >the neolithic. But sheep had hair. The root for "wool" applies to all kinds of "animal hair". >>The plough was also used since the very beginning of the Neolithic, >-- no, nyet, not true. Not unless you redefine "plough" to suit the argument >and include wooden shovels and digging sticks. But I can. I gave a couple of clear cases of a semantic development "stick" > "plough". >>That leaves only "yoke", with the undoubted Hittite reflex as a >>possible candidate for being a late Neolithic innovation. >-- this is a rather drastic case of attacking the evidence rather than trying >to work with it. Evidence primary, hypothesis secondary, please. >>but there is a Luwian attestation: asuwa. This looks very much like an Indo- >>Iranian borrowing (Skt. as'va < PIE *ek^wos), were it not for the fact that >>Luwian "dog" is >-- the obvious, parsimonious explanation is that the Anatolian languages used >ordinary IE terminology for the horse. Not so obvious if you know something about Hittite vocabulary. >>yielded a treatise on horses, containing a number of words of Indo-Iranian >>origin, written by a Mitannian called Kikkuli). >-- and the English terminology for formal riding is largely French and Spanish >in origin, although English-speakers have been riding horses as long as >there's been an English language (or proto-Germanic, come to that). >Meaningless. Why? The facts are that the Mitanni played an important part in the introduction of horse-drawn chariotry to Anatolia and used Indo-Iranian technical vocabulary to talk about it. We have two clear cases of a Hittite/Sanskrit isogloss related to chariotry, and an apparently satem word for horse in Luwian. >>Hittite cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >>, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), >-- and having cognates in Tocharian and Hittite is about as secure a way to >put a word into the PIE category as I can think of. Two unrelated IE language >families widely separated in time and space -- what do you want, an egg in >your beer? The point is PIE had words for round and turning things (*Hwer-, *kwel- etc.) long before the wheel was invented or vehicles drawn by oxen and later horses came into use. But it only had so much words that could be pressed into service. Hittite and Tocharian opted for *Hwer-K-, others for *kwe-kwel- (cf. the exact same procedure in Sumerian gi-gir, from gir "to turn, to roll"), which in turn may have been borrowed at a later stage by Tocharian to denote "wagon" (Toch A. kuka"l, B. kukale). That's the whole problem with linguistic palaeontology. Words undergo reasonably predictable semantic shifts when geographical locales change ("salmon", "beech/oak", "robin") or when new technologies are invented ("animal hair" > "wool", "stick" > "plough", "to join" > "yoke") and such words may be borrowed or calqued by neighbouring languages as the technology expands, further confusing the picture (especially if the languages are closely related to begin with). By a curious coincidence, I had just acquired Blench/Spriggs "Archaeology and Language II", containing an article by Kathrin S. Krell: "Gimbutas' Kurgan-PIE homeland hypothesis: a linguistic critique". I've not yet had the time to read it in depth, but I note one of the conclusions (based on arguments similar to the ones I gave in the preceding paragraph) is: "The old, pliable crutch of linguistic palaeontology should certainly be abandoned, at least until the theoretical uses and limitations of the PIE lexicon have been more precisely defined". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 11 17:13:22 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 11:13:22 -0600 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: /tsoBu, LoBu/ are found in E. Galicia according to Galician speakers I've talked and /shoBu/, I believe is found elsewhere. One problem is that spoken Galician is largely rural and fragmented. There is, evidently a "neo-Galician" which amounts to a Castillian pronunciation of written Galician. And, I'm told, this is used by Castillian speakers in Galicia with nationalist leanings. The difference between the two is probably like that between Catalan and Valencian --which sounds like Catalan being spoken by a Castillian. In any case, rural Galician is definitely more difficult for a Spanish speaker to understand than Portuguese. >On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> There is no such language as "Gallego-Spanish". There is, however, >> galego or Galician, called gallego in Spanish. It is closer to Portuguese >> than to Spanish and, in my experience, is more difficult to understand than >> Brazilian Portuguese or standard Continental Portuguese. The Galician >> literary standard, however, is a bit easier to read. But Galician is a >> series of spoken dialects. >> Note: >> Spanish lobo /loBo/ >> Portuguese lobo /loBu, lobu/ >> Galician /tsoBu, shoBu, LoBu/ >But these so-called Galician forms are not Galician but >(Asturo-)Leonese. See A. Zamora Vicente, Dialectologia Espan~ola, 1967, >122-130. >Max W. Wheeler [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 12:57:31 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 12:57:31 GMT Subject: /Anatolian /-nt-/ and Greek /-nth-/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: >So this would be the same root as the 3rd Singular verb ending -nt- ? >e.g. Latin ama-nt "love-they all" >>iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: >[ moderator snip ] >>>I suppose we could say that the form was originally >>>/-ndh-/, but the Anatolian forms in /-nt/ are generally considered older. >>The IE etymon is *-nt- (probably identical to the >>Luwian/Slavic/Tocharian collective (plural) suffix *-(e/o)nt-). The verbal ending, and the -nt- of the present/active participle may well be related. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 11 17:42:55 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 11:42:55 -0600 Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: <904d0e61.36e5789b@aol.com> Message-ID: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>that "wool" didn't exist in the vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times. >-- sheep didn't develop wool, as we know it, until well after domestication. >Use of wool as a fabric is comparatively late -- well after the beginning of >the neolithic. Not true. Hunter-gatherers gathered wool snagged on brush to make garments. This is where the wool used by pre-Columbian North American Indians came from >>Hittite cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >>, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), and *kwekwlo- [a reduplication *kwel-] could be easily be cognate if /kw/ > /wh, h/ & /l/ > /r/; both of which are common changes If the phonology doesn't correspond to the expected evolution, it would be because it was a wanderword Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 13:04:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 13:04:10 GMT Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >In connection with this, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal has written in past post: ><the Armenian one, with *t = *th, *d = *t['], *dh = *d, yet another archaic >feature of Germanic, though not quite as archaic as Hittite and Tocharian.>> >And... ><between Greek and Armenian (mainly in vocabulary) must be secondary, resulting >from interaction in the Balkans, but Armenian must've split off from the main >body of IE containing Greek earlier.>> >Note that in the above analysis Greek is already a separate language. Not really. I use "Greek" here loosely as "pre-Greek", or "a group of dialects, one of which later became Greek as we know it". I'm dubious about Armeno-Greek, but I can see nothing much in favour of Armeno-German, except for the phonology and maybe another couple of shared archaisms. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From lpechor at yahoo.com Thu Mar 11 20:49:31 1999 From: lpechor at yahoo.com (Lena Pechorina) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 12:49:31 -0800 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > 1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the > non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations? That's a very good question. > The theory that says that either PIE or the standard IE protolanguages were > being spoken in Europe in even 2500BC requires a very small number of > language groups to put a hold on localization for a millenium while Hittite, > Sanskrit and Mycenean were just getting ready to rear their heads as the > first historically identifiable IE languages. > What was holding them together as one language or perhaps a set of no more > than what?, four or five proto-languages for a thousand years? It strikes me that the Indo-European-speaking peoples must have had some advantage in terms of time or resources to have become so dominant on the European continent. If they arrived relatively late and from the steppe, would they have had the numbers to colonize (conquer) all of Europe in the subsequent 1000 years? I think the view (I think it's one of the traditional views) that IE matured in the Danube Valley makes a lot of sense and may partially answer your question regarding linguistic integrity. The Danube River Valley is a fairly extensive region, but it is semi-steppe with excellent lines of communication. If the Neolithic and Copper Age really did take root here at an early period (7000-4000BC), then the area might have supported a fairly large and advanced culture by the time the first horsemen arrived from the steppe. The population of the Danube River would have been disproportionately large compared to the rest of Europe, thus providing mass for later migrations. Suppose the Indo-Europeans arrived around 3000 BC, with horses, and were able to conquer this proto-civilization. Even if the arrival of horses meant greater instability and the subsequent decline of Danube culture, the conditions would have been in place to maintain a single language (or at least related dialects), and pass it on to a much larger population. Factors favoring linguistic stability would include natural geographical borders of the Danube Valley itself, extensive trade, and the common ancestry of the ruling elites. Some satellite Indo-European tribes might have maintained their nomadic existence both in and off the Danube Valley. These might have included such groups as the Indo-Aryans. With horses, they could have easily crossed the entire Ukrainian Steppe to Asia in one generation or even in one year. Wide-ranging mobility has always been a fact of horse-raising steppe cultures, and steppe chronologies which show gradual movements over thousands of years do not convince me either. Their incentive to do so might have been the gradual breaking up of the Danube proto-civilization. The same could be true for other migrations: rising competition for resources in the overpopulated and increasingly violent Danube Valley could have been responsible for many of the subsequent migrations which established new cultures in Asia Minor, Greece and the Alps. I'm not a linguist or an archaeologist, so if something I said seems far-fetched, I'd be interested to hear why. Steven Zettner From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 13:17:38 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 13:17:38 GMT Subject: Lenis and Fortis in IE In-Reply-To: <19990309090749.23616.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: Just a few loose comments: >However, I figure that the _fortis_ stops are what Gam. call the >"glottalic" and would thus correspond to the *d/*g series. The lenis >consonants are the voiced aspirate (*dh) and voiceless plain stops (*t) >of old But the internal PIE evidence, if you want to introduce the notions of lenis and fortis at all, is that *t is consistently fortis/unvoiced, and it's even written in Hittite. >Optionally, assuming only that you accept Etruscan and IE relationship, >a correspondance can be seen between the two as shown above. Note if >Etruscan matches IE *bhi then it suggests to me that a loss of *p: >was very early and affects both languages. Two things about Etruscan: spellings with plain (p, t, c) and aspirate (ph, th, ch) stops often occur for what are apparently the same lexical items (which may depend on dialect and/or period). The other thing is the existence of the fricatives , /ts/ and , which must also be accounted for. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 14:30:55 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 14:30:55 +0000 Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: <36E5BA01.5D0C@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Steven Schaufele wrote: > What about a stop system distinguishing between voiceless, voiced, and > aspirated (unmarked for voicing)? Or am i being naive? Perhaps. If aspirated means `with delayed voice onset time (relative to stop release)', then an aspirated consonant `unmarked for voicing', i.e. without contrastive voicing, is likely to have been phonetically voiceless, certainly in initial position, and perhaps everywhere else too perceptually. If aspirated does not mean `with delayed voice onset time', then we're back with considering various possible states of the glottis. The fact is, it's hard to see what 'state of glottis' could plausibly give rise to all of [dh] (murmured voiced), [d] ~ [d-] ("edh"), and [th]. Maybe the answer lies in N*******c, or maybe we'll never know :-( 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 11 20:56:55 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 14:56:55 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ Message-ID: On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very early, evidently), it would seem unlikely that the /t/ was aspirated. Such a notion, would also have broader implications: that every IE-Anatolian /p-t-k/ that was wound up in Greek should appear as /ph-th-kh/. Is this true? DLW From thorinn at diku.dk Thu Mar 11 14:15:42 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 15:15:42 +0100 Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <19990308143659.15685.qmail@hotmail.com> (roslynfrank@hotmail.com) Message-ID: From: "roslyn frank" Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 06:36:58 PST And finally, has anyone contemplated the possibility that there might have been an even earlier stage that needs to be reconstructed (e.g. perhaps in the case of Euskera) that eventually gave rise to a animate/inanimate dichotomy (e.g., as it is found today in Euskera)? Any ideas on that, Larry? This would imply that cognitively speaking, there could have been an earlier structure that was not based on an "animate/inanimate" contrast but on another ontological type or definition of "being." This line of inquiry seems to imply that the conceptual category of gender only arose in the minds of PIE speakers with the rise of the grammatical categories that are reflected in the daughter languages. But grammatical categories appear and disappear through the history of languages. In modern Scandinavian languages, for instance, a common gender has replaced the masculine and the feminine (the neuter remains separate). But it's still possible to indicate the sex of people and animals by using different lexical words, by compounds, noun phrases, or pragmatically. (Just as it is in English, come to think of it). What I'm trying to get at is this: there may not be a need for any different cognitive structure to explain the state of PIE before the reconstructed morphology for marking animacy and/or gender arose. The cognitive structure may very well have been exactly the same, but the language had means of expressing it that cannot now be reconstructed. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From alderson at netcom.com Thu Mar 11 21:10:37 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 13:10:37 -0800 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: Steve Long raises the question of the length of time it would take for speakers of a generic Indo-European to lose the ability to interact (in conjunction with the issue of the splintering of the IE Ursprache into a large number of small languages). First, let me note that in, for example, the Italian peninsula, we find at the time of our earliest records a number of languages, all with recognizable dia- lect differences from place to place within the language areas, or in the Greek world a couple of dozen widely diverging dialects with literary traditions till the koinization brought on by the Alexandrian conquests and their aftermath. The same thing we would expect to hold in the Celtic and Germanic regions of Europe. This picture of small languages across Europe was wiped out in a relatively short time by the spread of Latin dialects--which diverged noticeably in short order, as witnessed by Catullus' insults--which replaced the native languages over time. The replacements still show much the same kind of chaining. Second, let me point out the anecdotal evidence that speakers of Spanish and Italian can, with some difficulty, communicate with each other successfully, and my own personal experience with a group of speakers of several different Slavic languages (Polish, both Warsaw and Krakow; Ukrainian; and Serbian, Croatian and Moslem speakers), who communicated fairly well with each other for business and personal purposes. So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years for them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one party to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if both are members of the same general speech community. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 11 21:16:10 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 15:16:10 -0600 Subject: Fortis Consonants Message-ID: The term "fortis" is not really one which has a clear and objective phonetic meaning. According to Catford, "the terms tense/lax, strong/weak, fortis/lenis, and so on should never be loosely and carelessly used without precise phonetic specification." Ironically though Catford does "believe in" a fortis/lenis distinction, which he finds in some languages of the Caucasus, I must agree with Ladefoged and Maddieson that in the cases Catford points to (at least the one I have heard) the distinction seems to be primarily long/short. Other sounds, such as those in Korean, which have been described as "fortis" have turned out on closer examination to be laryngealized to some degree. Overall I would agree with Ladefoged and Maddieson, who say (if I have understood them correctly) that the term "fortis" should have a language-specific application, referring to a distinction that is more phonological than phonetic. The meaning I would assign is more or less "long and/or laryngealized", but it is only these terms that have true phonetic meaning, at a level of salience high enough to have phonemic significance. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 11 21:29:54 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 15:29:54 -0600 Subject: Feminine Gender Message-ID: Well, actually I have been unable to nail down anybody saying that the IE feminine is supposed to be from the former inanimate, though the fact that it does not show /-s/ might be taken as implying this. Oh ye Keepers of the Conventional Wisdom, what is it? I must say however that interrogatives (like Latin "quem" used as a feminine) have nothing to do with anything. Here the lack of a full set of distinctions comes from the fact that speakers cannot necessarily know the gender (or number) of the referrent (which has something to do with why they are asking, duh). In Old English there is no distinction of number (or gender) in interrogatives, and a plural form ("hwa") is used for the nominative. This does not mean that an earlier form of the language had no distinction of singular/plural (though for PIE we might think that for other (i.e. good) reasons). It means nothing more than what has been stated above. On other aspects of this issue I await enlightenment. DLW From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 11 21:19:10 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 21:19:10 -0000 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word Message-ID: Glen said > >Gee, I could be looney Then he said: >wouldn't a >reconstruction of *?nek^- be in order rather than just *nek^- based on >the Greek form? Why the long /e/ for augment? Point taken. But we must not and may not assume that every Greek word with long augment or the so-called "Attic" reduplication began with a laryngeal. Alongside inherited initial laryngeals which develop to prothetic vowels, (and do other stuff in Greek), there is sufficient evidence that Greek added a non-inherited vocalic element before some initial resonants. We need cross-language proof to establish that there really was a laryngeal here. Greek may provide a clue to it, but not proof. Though you may well be able to find the other evidence somewhere out there! Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 11 21:37:12 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 21:37:12 -0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Steve said: >1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the >non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations? You're making an assumption that doesn't fit the facts. Some non-IE languages splinter, some don't. New Guinea is very mountainous and a tradition developed of warfare between small local tribes. Compare that Polynesia, a vast area, where different languages have indeed developed, but it is remarkably homogenous linguistically. Some of the languages are mutually comprehensible, with willing listeners. We cannot extrapolate from New Guniea and assume all the world followed that model. And in Polynesia, or course there are indeed thousands of years with slow language change. One might think of Lithuanian... Not all languages change rapidly! Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 11 23:13:31 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 17:13:31 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A while back I had threatened Larry, Miguel & Theo with this list Like the list for Germanic, these are only possibilities well, some are more possible than others some arrive via other languages, e.g. Latin Some will make Larry see red :> BUT I'm sure he will again be kind enough to send me corrections Some will be obvious errors to everyone but me :> Please excuse my typos This one will take much longer to prepare than the pre-IE Germanic but I did read through Corominas [1980] I've included everything that he either lists as non-IE or unknown but have excluded known Arabic roots and other known adstrate Again, I'd like your suggestions, comments and contributions I've included Spanish & English because I'd like to eventually post this in both languages Possible non-IE etymologies in Ibero-Romance /pre-1600 abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] rel. con vasco abarka; raíz de alpargata [sandal] [c] pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] abril < Latin aprilis < Etruscan aprun [lrp] abrir from same root? [rmcc] acnua Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [wje] ademán "gesture" c. 1290, originalmente "falsedad, ficción", [c] después "gesto afectado" [affected gesture] < ¿? [c] -aecu > -ecu > -iego [pre-Roman suffix] [abi] agalla "gill" [of fish, etc.], "gall" [of tree] c. 1400 "branquia de pez" [fish gill], 1495 "amígdala" [adenoid]; [c] galla "costado de la cabeza del ave" [side of a bird's head], "testículo", "ánimo esforzado" ["gung-ho, enthusiastic"], < ¿?; [c] rel. con gallego garla, [c] cat. ganya, [c] sardo ganga "branquia, glándula" [gill, gland]< ¿latín glándula? [c] ?rel. to Eng. gall "lump on tree, leaf" [rmcc] agavanzo "wild rose' [PL] c. 1100 gabânso < pre-rom; [c] rel. con vasco gaparra, kaparra "zarza, chaparro" & gavarra, [c] aragonés garrabera, [c] gascón gabarro & gabardero [c] rel. to alcaparra [caper]? [rmcc] álabe "paddle of a water wheel", "branch fallen to the ground" [PL] s. XIII "ala o lado del tejado de una tienda de campaña" romance < ¿?; [c] v. rumano áripâ [c] álamo "poplar tree" 1218, [c] port. álemo < pre-rom. < ¿celta *almo?; [c] ¿rel. con olmo [elm]? [c] alano "mastiff" s. XV "lebrel grande y feroz" [large fierce mastiff], [c] alán 1200-50 < ¿gótico alans "crecido, grande"? [c] alarido "yell, lament" < ¿? [c] aliso "alder" 976, 1330 < pre-rom, pre-celta [c] almeja "clam" 1423, [c] port. amêijoa s. XIII < ¿? [c] alud "mudslide" 1880 pre-rom; [c] rel. con vasco luta, lurte "desmoronamiento de tierras", [c] v. lur "tierra", elur "nieve" [c] amar, amigo, amor < Latin amare, amore-, amicus < Etruscan [cw, pb] amelga "strip of land denoted to cast the seed equally" [sic] s. XIII "faja de terreno que el labrador señala para esparcir la simiente con igualdad" [strip of land denoted by the farmer to cast the seed equally] enbelga, [c] leonés ambelga "foso de límites que rodea un terreno" [ditch around a field] s. XIII < ¿celta *ambelica? [c] amma Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [cw, wje] -anca pre-Roman suffix [wje] andén "platform" 1406 Iberia , Francia, Italia < *andagine < ¿? [c] ángel < Latin angelus < Greek angelos "messenger," akin to Greek angaros "mounted courier," both from unknown source [cw] añicos "pieces into which something is torn" [PL] c. 1600 ibero-romance < *ann- ¿?; [c] v. galêgo & port anaco, naco "pedazo", [c] cat. anyoa "racimo, mazo" [c] naco "dirt clod, hick, nerd" in Mexico [rmcc] aparia Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [wje] apitascus Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [wje] arándano "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ¿?, [c] compara con vasco arán "endrino" [c] pre-rom. raíz de arán [c] archivo, archi-, etc. < Greek arhein, "To begin, rule, command." Greek verb of unknown origin; with derivatives arkhé, "rule, beginning" and arkhos "ruler." [cw] ardilla "squirrel" 1620 < harda s. XIII, found in cast. beréber, hispanoárabe, vasco v. beréber 'aghárda "ratón campestre" [c] cast. garduña c. 1330 < pre-rom. [c] ardite "small coin" 1400 "moneda de poco valor" [c] gascón ardit < ¿? [c] rel. to Basque [wje] argamasa "type of rustic cement" 1190 "mezcla de cal, arena y agua" [mixture of lime, sand & water] Iberia < ¿? + latín masa; [c] v. asturiano argayo "terreno al pie del monte" [field at the foot of the mountain] [c] cat. ant. aragall "barranco" c. 990. cat. xaragall [c] árgoma "type of thorny leguminous plant fed to cattle" [PL] s. XIV "tipo de aliaga" pre-rom del norte y noreste [c] arisco "rough, harsh" c. 1330 < ¿?, v. port. areisco "arenisco" [c] ?rel. to arena "sand", in the sense of "sandpaper" or "sanding" [rmcc] aro "hoop" s. XIII arrabal [suburb], [c] port. 1258. occ. 883 < ¿pre-rom IE *aros "rueda, círculo? [c] -arra, -arro, arda-, ardo- pre-Roman suffix [rl, wje] "Western Mediterranean" also found in Sardinian also in Sicilian geonyms Ukkara, Indara, Aipára, perhaps in Latin words such as acerra "incense box," subarra & vacerra "post, log." [lrp] arrancar "to crank, rip from" c. 1140, [c] cat. ant. renc, ant. fr. ranc < ¿germ.? [c] ?rel. to renco "lame, crippled"? [rmcc] arroyo "stream" 775 < arrugia pre-rom "galería de mina donde circula agua" [c, rl] < rôgia, rûgia [wje] see Fr. ruisseau "stream" [wje] Friulan roie "stream" [wje] Piedmontese roia [wje] Italian rugia "watercourse" < "Alpine," Ligurian or Rhaetic [bm] artesa "type of box" 1330 "cajón cuadrilongo de madera que es más angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] arto "cambronera" < Basque arte "scrub oak." [rl] -asca, -ascu pre-Roman suffix [rl] Ligurian suffix; abundant in NC Spain, Mediterranian France, Northern Italy and the Rhone valley < -sk- [abi, jr, lrp, wje] also found in Lepontic [lrp] ascua "live coal" 1251 "brasa viva" < ¿?, [c] v. vasco ausko-a < huats "ceniza" < pre-rom [c] Pre-Roman [wje] asno "jackass" < Latin asinus < Mediterranean substrate [rc] Latin asinus < Greek onos, "ass" [source of onagro "onager"] probably < source of Sumerian anshe "ass" asturco Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [wje] atracar "to hoard, raise prices, rip off"; [c] in Portuguese "to come"1587 "arrimar", Iberia, occ., genovés < ¿árabe? [c] autumnal [Latinate form], see otoño < Latin autumnus < Etruscan autu [lrp] avería "breakdown" also "damage caused to merchanise at sea" 1494, [c] cat. 1258. genovés 1200, [c] antes "contribución pública para compensar un prejuicio comercial" < ¿? [c] avetoro "type of heron" < fr. butor < ¿? [c] avión "airplane" c. 1330 "vencejo" < ¿gavión c. 1250? < ¿? [c] rel to Latin apis? [rmcc] -az pre-Roman suffux [rl] azcona "dart" 1200-50 Iberia, occ. & vasco < ¿?, [c] v. vasco azkon, antes aucona s. XII [c] Sources: Anderson, James M. Ancient Languages of the Hispanic Peninsula. Lanham MD: UP America, 1988. [jma] Baldi, Philip. An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983. [pb] Bolaño e Isla, Amancio. Manual de historia de la lengua española. México: Porrúa, 1971. [abi] Bruneau, Charles. Petite histoire de la langue française, 3me ed. Paris: Armand Colin, 1962, 2 tomes. [cb] Chadwick, John. The Decipherment of Linear B. NY: Random House, 1958. [jc/58] ---Linear B and Related Scripts. CAL, 1987. [jc/87] Claiborne, Robert. The Roots of English. NY: Random, 1989. [rc] Comrie, Bernard. The World's Major Languages. NY: Oxford UP, 1987. [bc] Corominas,Juan [Joan Coromines] Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 2a. ed. Madrid: Gredos, 1980. [c] Elcock, W. D. The Romance Languages. NY: Macmillan, 1960. Entwistle, William J. The Spanish Language. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. [wje] Green, John N. "Spanish" Martin and Vincent 79-130. [jng] Hall Jr. Robert A. External History of the Romance Languages. NY: Elsevier, 1974. [rah] Haiman, John. "Rhaeto-Romance," 351-390. [jh] Harris, Martin and Nigel Vincent, eds. The Romance Languages. London: Croom Helm, 1988. [h&v] Harris, Martin. "French," Martin and Vincent 209-245. [mh] Lapesa, Rafael. Historia de la lengua española, 5a ed. Madrid: Escelicer, 1962. [rl] Mallinson, Graham. "Rumanian," Martin and Vincent 391-419. [gm] Mallory, J. P. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.[jpm] Migliorini, Bruno. The Italian Language. NY: Barnes and Noble, 1966. [bm] Pallotino, Massimino. History of Earliest Italy. Ann Arbor: UMP, 1991. [mp] Palmer L. R. The Latin Language. London: Faber, 1954. [lrp] Parkinson, Stephen. "Portuguese," Martin and Vincent 131-169. [sp] Pequeño Larrouse [PL] Redfern, James. A Lexical Study of Raeto-Romance and Contiguous Italian Dialect Areas The Hague: Mouton, 1971. [jr] Rosetti, A. Brève histoire de la langue roumaine des origines à nos jours. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Spaulding, Robert K. How Spanish Grew. Berkeley: CAL, 1943. [rks] Stamm, James R. A Short History of Spanish Literature. NY: NYUP, 1979. [jrs] Vincent, Nigel. "Latin," Martin and Vincent 26-78. [nv] Watkins, Calvert ed. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, rev. ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1985. [cw] From jer at cphling.dk Thu Mar 11 23:40:11 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 00:40:11 +0100 Subject: lenis and glottalic In-Reply-To: <36f4ed80.80496727@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, [Quoting Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen for]: > > Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask > > this: Is a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > I think so. English and Danish (fortis-lenis) vs. Dutch > (voiceless-voiced), for instance. Or East Armenian vs. West > Armenian. Finnish vs. Estonian (or is that just the spelling?). JER (now): Do you mean that the Dutch voiced d comes from a voiceless lenis d - how can that be known? And that English lenes are voiceless?? [Quoting JER:] > >- Isn't the only thing "wrong" with the IE system > >that the aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh ...) have not been accepted? >[MCV replied:] > Murmured stops are extremely uncommon. There's also the matter of > *b. A labial series *p, *bh simply doesn't make any sense, not > even if you add a teaspoon of *ph's. JER (now:) But if bh dh ... are so uncommon, aren't they very unlikely to arise secondarily out of any other system which must, by implication, be more stable? [Quoting JER:] > > Is it not a very > >strong claim that ALL cases of asp.ten. are in last analysis based on > >mistakes? >[MCV replied:] > Not mistakes, but stop+laryngeal, I think. JER (now): That's what I mean by "mistakes". How can we KNOW that ALL cases of ph, th, kh are from p t k + laryngeal? The truth is we cannot know. Then, why do some take this for granted and rush out and change the system so that their arbitrary choice does not compromise the system then emerging? Why not simply make the opposite arbitrary choice and assume that SOME words had aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh) all along (i.e. even before plain p/t/k + H created some more) and there never was any trouble with the system? What's the point in looking for trouble? --- I know about the scarcity of /b/ and the ban on roots of the type deg-/ged-, and I accept the glottalic theory as the best explanation of these details, but only for the relevant period: Roots weren't created (or, recreated) the day before the IE unity broke up. If the lack of *deg- means that it was once *t'ek'- with TWO glottalics one of which changed into something else, that change can have any age. We only know that its RESULT was present in the IE protolanguage, not that its CAUSE remained: there are comparable holes in the daughter languages (say, Latin) for which glottalics are not assumed to be synchronically present. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Mar 12 00:21:17 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 18:21:17 -0600 Subject: Greek question Message-ID: Dear Alexis and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: manaster at umich.edu Date: Thursday, March 11, 1999 2:41 PM >On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> I have demonstrated it using accepted comparative methodology. >This strains credulity. "Accepted" by whom? The short answer is: by all of you in any other context than the Proto-Language. The more complete answer is: I compare appropriate segments of words in two languages utilizing a table of correspondence from which I diverge only with explanation, utilizing what I believe is allowable semantic latitude. Perhaps I am not doing it well but that is what I am attempting to do. The Proto-Language reconstructions included in each comparison are a tool I am using to form some idea of what the larger relationships might be but, in no case, do they have the slightest bearing on whether the two words compared are appropriately compared or not. If anyone has a specific criticism, such as actually happened when I published the Japanese essay (it had to do mostly with loanwords), I will be glad to consider it and make changes where I agree it is appropriate. Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Mar 12 00:53:28 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 18:53:28 -0600 Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Glen Gordon Date: Thursday, March 11, 1999 5:51 PM >Conjecture IS BY DEFINITION "guesswork". Look it up in a dictionary and >come back to me. What makes good conjecture from bad conjecture is the >amount of likelihood a hypothesis has and how much it explains. This is >how we can logically dismiss theories such as Pat's Sumerian Invention >Process against the likelier scenario that Sumerian evolved like any >other language from an earlier form. Or do you accept this as a credible >possibility?! "Pat" has never proposed a "Sumerian Invention Process" or anything vaguely like it --- ever. I assume that "Sumerian evolved like any other language from an earlier form". Does the name Halloran ring a bell by any chance? Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Mar 12 01:51:48 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 19:51:48 -0600 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word Message-ID: Dear Yoel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Yoel L. Arbeitman Date: Thursday, March 11, 1999 5:56 PM > It is suggested that you look in any of Bomhard's three books: Towards >Proto-Nostratic (CILT 27, 1984), The Nostratic Macrofamily (Mouton, 1994, >co-authored with John A. Kerns and dealing also with morphology and >syntax). On p.380ff. his unitary phoneme TL is dealt with. It is a >reconstruct whose appearence in his sub-Nostratic languages are quite >different. The third book is Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis >(Signum, 1996). I do have Bomhard's work, and, though I believe he is essentially on the right track, I believe his reconstruction of a lateralized affricate is, first of all, probably unjustified; but secondly, typologically unacceptable. Of course, it is difficult to judge from the way he presents his cognates. For example, his #200, PN *tl~{h}i/er-, 'highest point', is rendered in PIE as *k{h}e/or-/*k{h}R-, which is fine, but for PAA as *tl~{h}a/6r-. This is almost certainly related to Arabic qarn-un, 'horn', and so I do not believe there is any justification for a PAA *tl~{h} underlying it. Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Mar 12 01:58:39 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 19:58:39 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Yoel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Yoel L. Arbeitman Date: Thursday, March 11, 1999 6:08 PM >The question is dealt with thoroughly in H. Craig Melchert Anatolian >Historical Phonology, both as to the verbal root neku- "become twilight" >and nekut- "night"/ > Yoel For those of us who do not have immediate access to the book, what does he posit as the IE root? Pat From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 12 03:03:58 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:03:58 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: In a message dated 3/10/99 1:57:10 PM Mountain Standard Time, iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >Class dialects have little to do with literacy, especially the very marginal kind of literacy of early medieval Europe.> -- and you still have absolutely no evidence that OE was a class dialect. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 12 03:33:01 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:33:01 EST Subject: Standard Languages Message-ID: Standard national languages are just dialects themselves, and our experience with them tends to lead us to expect unrealistically sharp and definite "edges" to language areas. All languages are dialect clusters; this is particularly obvious with the Romance languages, which (apart from Romanian) have plenty of "bridge" dialects. If you set out from Huelva in say 1500 and zigzaged your way across the Iberian peninsula and through southern France and down Itay to Sicily, there would be few places (execpt where you ran into unrelated tongues like Basque) that you could say "This village speaks X, and the next one speaks Y". They'd merge imperceptibly. I suspect that towards the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE, you could have made a similar journey from the Rhine delta to the Tarim basin, and found a series of overlapping IE dialects all the way. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 12 03:40:43 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:40:43 EST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: >glengordon01 at hotmail.com writes: >The word "roughly" automatically admits to the possibility of long-range >comparison -- let's interject some common sense here. "Agnis" and "Ignis" admit of long- range comparison, especially since they both mean "fire". But for comparisons of this obvious and indisputible nature, the period around 4000 BCE is a _terminus ad quem_. Beyond this there are dust-devils, mirages, and wheel-spinning. Basque probably had lots of relatives at one time. It would be nice to know, but we never will. >What makes good conjecture from bad conjecture is the amount of likelihood a >hypothesis has -- which can only be determined if it can be tested. An explanation attributing everything before 4000 BCE to a playful God who created the world in 4004 BCE with ready-made fossils and potsherds is explains everything, and can't be 'disproved'. That's what makes it a semantic null set; no possible way of disproving it. >Do you realise that you're completely dismissing the field of cosmology >and quantum mechanics because of lack of "evidence". -- they're testable. >it's just accepted that sometimes it behaves as one or the other. -- that can be demonstrated experimentally, and has been repeatedly, as has action at a distance, etc. >but there isn't any undeniable physical proof. -- plenty of it, right there on the laboratory bench. From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Mar 14 03:17:06 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:17:06 -0800 Subject: PIE stops Message-ID: Steven wrote: >What about a stop system distinguishing between voiceless, voiced, and >aspirated (unmarked for voicing)? It's been tried, of course (references here if you want them). The trouble is that it does not explain the evidence so easily. Both the D series and the DH series explain more phenomena if they are voiced. Also devoicing is easier to explain than voicing, especially if the system were indeed unstable. Though of course it may have been glottalic... Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 14 03:17:30 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:17:30 -0800 Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/11/99 3:34:25 PM, you wrote: <<[ Moderator's response: > Greek _nuks, nuktos_, Latin _nox, noctis_, Sanskrit _nak (IIRC), naktam_, > Hittite _nekuz = nek{^w}t+s_, ... > --rma ]>> Does it matter that /t/ does not appear in most of the nom. singulars? I also saw nocz in Polish, nos in Welsh, but was not given declension. It seems the /t/ only makes its appearance in the nom sing in German, French and Sanskrit. Please forgive my ignorance, but sometimes in analysis on this list, this base morphology makes a difference. Why is the /t/ not regarded as just a fairly common stem that sometimes emerges in root and sometimes doesn't? I hope this doesn't sound terribly stupid. Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's response: In those languages in which it does not appear, other processes are at work, usually word structure constraints. Greek and Latin, for example, restrict the inventory of phonemes which can appear word-finally (Greek much more so than Latin); Latin reduces final *-ss to -s (including the results of the more development of *ts > ss); Sanskrit will allow nearly any voiceless stop to appear in final position, but radically reduces final clusters to their first member; and so on. --rma ] From yoel at mindspring.com Fri Mar 12 04:20:31 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 23:20:31 -0500 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <17933459C0@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: While I cannot comment on any "Vasconic"/Greek comparison, the conceptual analogy between that proposed there for "Iron" and "star" does not work by IE Lautgesetz in the parallel Greek "iron": Latin "star" word. The Latin word is generally considered to derive from an IE root *sweid- "shine". This initial consonant sequence would become in Greek *h(e)id-. as the w disappears in "Standard Greek" (remains in some dialects, written with a digamma, is restorable in Homer by meter and is mostly extant in Mycenaean). But even in +w dialects, we would then expect *hwid= in Greek as initial *s- > h in Greek. The alternation sid-us/ sid-er- (nom. nt. vs. stem) in Latin means that the suffix is IE *-os/-es- and that intervocalically the -s- in sideris (genitive) is the product of rhotacism. The same -r- in the Greek word for "iron", sideros, cannot be the product of rhotacism. Thus (1) the initial s- is wrong and the "suffix" -r- is wrong if we are to deem the Greek and Latin words as cognates. The only remaining possibility is to conceptualize the Gk. word as a Wanderwort (from Latin????) or to consider both Gk. sideros and Latin sider- as borrowed from elsewhere. But this is impossible for Latin sid-us. Yoel At 09:15 AM 3/10/99 GMT, you wrote: >Rick Mc Callister wrote:- >> *i:sarno [Celtic, Germanic] > iron, Eisen n. >> [< ?Vasconic *isar "star"; >> see Basque izar "star"] [mcv2/98, tv2/98] >Larry Trask replied:- >> No comment. >Also, Greek `side:ros' = "iron", Latin `sidus' (gen `sideris') = "star". This >semantic association was quite possible in early times when Man had not yet >found how to smelt iron and iron was a precious rarity available only as >natural nickel-iron alloy in meteorites. From yoel at mindspring.com Fri Mar 12 04:44:45 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 23:44:45 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <00f401be6aba$523ddd80$f79ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: At 11:52 PM 3/9/99 -0600, you wrote: >Dear Miguel and IEists: > -----Original Message----- >From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >Date: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 10:40 PM >>mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: > >>But I must agree with Rich's "moderator comment" elsewhere that >>in this case the spelling may reflect all of PIE *kw, *gw or >>*ghw [*gwh if you prefer]. After all, if the etymon were *kw, >>the geminate spelling should not be but , and there is >>no way of writing that in cuneiform (nor in ASCII, as the >>recurrent confusions about labiovelars show). The question of what was the form of Hittite and Anatolian "drink" has progressed greatly since Sturtevant's time. In 1980 Morpurgo-Davies showed that the cognate in Hieroglyphic Luwian was /u:/ and since *gw disappears in HL, but *kw does not, the problem is solved. Proto-Anatolian had the verb *e/agw-, known so well in that famed sentence deciphered by Hrozny' nu NINDA adanzi nu watar akwanzi "And they eat bread and they drink water" . It was long thought that here was the cognate, as a verb, of Latin aqua "water". But now it is certain that the iterative-durative form cited represents /akw=skizzi/ with regressive voice assimilation. And, long before the 1980 discovery W. Winter proposed the cognation of Latin ebrius "drunk"/ sobrius "sober" (with -b- < *-gwh-) as well as Greek ne:phalos "sober" with -ph- < only *-gwh-. Thus, far from being cognate with Latin aqua, Anatolian *a/egw- is cognate with Latin ebrius "drunk", Gk. ne:phalos "sober" and the long ago proposed Tocharian yok- "to drink". All argument has been closed by the Hiero. Luw. verb which is reduced to a mere /u:/ and is not open to argument. YOEL >This is interesting speculation but not borne out by the data. See >Sturtevant p. 56: >durative of 'drink' = ak-k{.}u-uS-ki-iz-zi; however the basic form is >written with one -k- upon which S. remarks: "The consistent use of single k >between vowels in the primary verb is difficult, but note -kk- in the >durative". >Pat From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 12 06:05:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 06:05:55 GMT Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <19990304073402.16372.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >I know Hittite cannot be >feminine since it doesn't have this gender thing. This is the neuter >*-t/*-d found in words like *kwi-d "what" and the heteroclitic >declension: [nom-acc] **yekwn-d > *yekwr "liver". Thus: > **nekw-d > *nekw-t TADAAAA!!! >[ Moderator's response: > Hittite does not have a separate feminine, but it does have an opposition of > common vs. neuter (or animate vs. inanimate). Hittite _nekuz_ is of common > gender, so I repeat the question: What neuter? > --rma ] Or, put differently, what's the nominative -s doing in nekut-s? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 12 07:52:31 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 07:52:31 GMT Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <17933459C0@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: >Rick Mc Callister wrote:- >> *i:sarno [Celtic, Germanic] > iron, Eisen n. >> [< ?Vasconic *isar "star"; >> see Basque izar "star"] [mcv2/98, tv2/98] >Larry Trask replied:- >> No comment. >Also, Greek `side:ros' = "iron", Latin `sidus' (gen `sideris') = "star". The Latin word is an s-stem *sidos-/*sides-, so there is no connection with Greek sida:ros (Attic side:ros), unless one assumes the word was borrowed directly from Latin. It might be more interesting to compare the Grk. word with Basque zilar ~ zirar ~ zidar ~ zildar "silver" (< *sidar ?). >This >semantic association was quite possible in early times when Man had not yet >found how to smelt iron and iron was a precious rarity available only as >natural nickel-iron alloy in meteorites. Meteoric iron is indeed the earliest source for the metal, as seen for instance in Sumerian AN.BAR "[lit. sky silver] iron". That's what makes a Celtic *i:sar-no- derived from "Vasconic" *isar "star" semantically plausible. Unfortunately, there is zero evidence from Basque itself for the use of in a metallurgical context. Basque for "iron" is (maybe originally "ore", if compounds like burdin-gorri [=red] "copper" and burdin-(h)ori [=yellow] "brass" are not recent coinages). For completeness, the native Basque metal names are: GOLD urr(h)e SILVER zilar ~ zirar ~ zildar ~ zidar LEAD berun ~ beraun IRON burdin(a) ~ burdun~a ~ burni(a) ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From yoel at mindspring.com Fri Mar 12 13:44:27 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 08:44:27 -0500 Subject: PS: Re: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: >Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 23:44:45 -0500 >To: Indo-European at xkl.com >From: "Yoel L. Arbeitman" >Subject: Re: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt >In-Reply-To: <00f401be6aba$523ddd80$f79ffad0 at patrickcryan> In re my message of last night, more precision was needed in the statement that *gw(h) disappears, *kw(h) doesn't in change from PA to Common Luwian: In PA *e/agw-, IE *e/agwh- > Common Luw. u:, the -g- component of he -gw- cluster (the labio-velars are clusters, not unitary phonemes in Anatolian) disappears. This leaves Pre-Luw. *e/au which, in turn > u: "to drink". Thus we have Hittite /agwantsi/ "they drink", /eguteni/ "you [pl.] drink", but Cun. and Hiero.. Luw. /u:tis/ "you (sg.) drink" < *a/e(g)w-tis. Yoel Yoel From iglesias at axia.it Fri Mar 12 23:57:05 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 15:57:05 PST Subject: Celtic Influence Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote on 10 March 1999: >I wonder about the mechanics of this one >In Spanish a'lamo = "poplar" >BUT olmo = "elm" >>5) >>Celtic survivals of northern and central Iberia: >>Sp., Port.alamo `poplar', Cf. It. olmo I think this is in reply to my posting on Celtic influence on Italian and in particular on the North Italian dialects (it looks like my message, but I'm not sure, because I never received a copy back of my message,as my provider made some "enhancements" to the system over the weekend !!!). My apologies to everyone. I misquoted my Spanish source ("Diccionario de Uso del Espan~ol, Mari'a Moliner, Ed. Gredos, Madrid), which sometimes gives etymologies and sometimes it doesn't. The mistake arose as follows. I looked up Spanish "olmo" (etymology given as Lat. "ulmus") = Italian "olmo" (also from Lat. "ulmus") = English "elm" I then looked up "a'lamo" and my eye fell on "Ulmus", but in fact this word (with capital U !) was part of the definition :( "The name of various species of trees of the "Ulmus" genus of the Salicaceae family..."), the etymology was not given... A (silly) mistake on my part and a good example of bad use of dictionaries! Sorry, Rick and everyone else. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 12 15:00:05 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:00:05 -0600 Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: > ... the idea that > Etruscan forms part of a longer range construct including but prior > to IE (Kretschmer), just for the record: Kretchmer was Vl. Georgiev's teacher, if memory serves... jpm From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 12 18:05:13 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:05:13 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Would you like to explain what your point is? falda in Spanish is "skirt" or "flank" [of a mountain]. Skirt is obviously the basic meaning As I pointed out, it can't be a native word in Spanish BUT I was asking whether the form /alda, alde, halda/ might exist in Old Spanish, Aragonese or Gascon. As you know, like Spanish, Gascon also changed initial /fVC/ > /hVC/. Aragonese sometimes does this; although descriptions of Aragonese sound pretty lame. If such a form did indeed exist, either of these COULD have provided a source for Basque "alde, alte". Now, what's YOUR point? >On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> This word resembles Spanish falda "skirt, flank"--which >> unaccountably begins with /fV/; which, as anyone who was studied >> Ibero-Romance knows, is a no-no. Is there an Old Castilian, Gasco'n or >> Aragone's form /*alda, *alde/ ? >Sp. falda is a Germanic borrowing into Romance (It., Oc., Cat., Ptg, >falda). Coromines suggests from Frankish *falda `fold', cf OHG falt. ME >fald, related to Goth falthan, OHG faldan, OE fealdan, ON falda `to >fold'; related by Onions to PIE *pel/*pl- with a *-t- extension; cf. Gk >dipaltos, diplasios `twofold', haploos `simple'; Lat plicare `to fold'. >Perhaps if we want to advance this 'research programme' we should impose >on ourselves a self-denying ordinance against etymologizing off the >cuff. >Max W. Wheeler From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Fri Mar 12 18:01:51 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:01:51 -0600 Subject: "Unbalanced" Stop Systems In-Reply-To: <19990311010918.889.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: I don't know that these are so bad. Korean has a three-way contrast, which medially seems to based upon two oppositions 1) long/short, and 2) aspirated/unaspirated, with no short aspirated series existing. (In initial position it appears to be more a matter of voice onset time, with some weak laryngealization figuring in somehow.) But I think such unblanced systems are more offensive to notions of elegance current among some theoretical linguists than to actual users of human language. DLW From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 12 18:20:09 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:20:09 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >But that leaves the *mora word. Is this the same as Bavarian Mure, and >is it the root of moraine? I wonder if they're not possibly loanwords from Romance, like Mauer. Is there a French-Provençal or Swiss French dialect word that Mora"ne, moraine could have been borrowed from? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 12 19:58:03 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 14:58:03 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: >msn.com writes: >I do not want to actively enter this discussion but, for whatever it may be >worth, I believe the Germanic sound system was developed in the IE homeland, >in close proximity to Semitic, as the correspondences I have developed >between Germanic and Semitic seem to suggest --- after other IE branches had >struck for the west. >> -- gee, that sure makes them acrobatic travellers -- bouncing all around the map, getting from somewhere in the Middle East to Jutland, crossing all sorts of other linguistic territory on the way... From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 12 23:53:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 23:53:10 GMT Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns In-Reply-To: <199903110636.BAA64228@cliff.Uottawa.Ca> Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: >2) Eric Hamp has an intriguing suggestion for OCS azu. (IJSLP 1983). Iranian? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 13 01:30:07 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 19:30:07 -0600 Subject: PIE Plosive System Message-ID: (I don't much like the term "stop". Wright's "explosive" conjures lovely images, but it seems better to drop the "ex-".) There are three facts that any posited system must explain: 1) The absence of roots of the form /DeD/. 2) The absence of roots of the forms /TeDH/ and /DHeT/. 3) The absence of/b/. In traditional terms, D, T, and DH stand for any instance of voiced, voiceless, and voiced aspirated plosives respectively. So I would like to know how a fortis/lenis system (with these terms defined in such a way as to be meaningful) does this. DLW From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Sat Mar 13 18:35:28 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 10:35:28 -0800 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: > Borrowing of pronouns is rare, but NOT impossible: [a couple of examples given] Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had become indistinguishable from sing. forms. > 3) And cf. the Muppets. Miss Piggy would often use "moi" as the first > person singular pronoun while purportedly speaking English. And which has since spread to the speech of a great many Americans, many of whom [e.g. my wife] have at best an extremely limited knowledge of French. 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 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 13 02:47:09 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 20:47:09 -0600 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Debatable. The form is Spanish. Of course it is, BUT it's a Spanish name commonly associated in Spanish literature and culture with the Basques [despite Sancho Panza], along with In~igo [vs. Ignacio, with which it is correctly or incorrectly associated]. That's why I qualified it as "Spanish spoken by Basques". Elsewhere in Spanish, the proper name developed as Santo or, more often, Santos. In Latin America, I've only come across Sancho as a dog's name. >The medieval Basque form of >the name is , which must derive from * by dissimilatory >loss of the first sibilant. And I don't see why this form would develop >from a palatalized coronal (/ts/ notates an apical affricate). >There is no need to appeal to a Romance palatal to account for the >Basque /ai/. For example, the word for `fast, quick, soon' was mostly > in the 16th century but is mostly today. Then what's the reason? Is it an analogy to words with /ay/ --which underwent this change previously because of metathesis of palatal, etc. Is it part of a regional phenomenon? --as in Portuguese, in which stressed /a/ often > /ay/ among certain speakers, e.g. the proper name Bras, which is often /brayz, brayzh, braysh/ Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Mar 13 03:06:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 22:06:57 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: In a message dated 3/12/99 7:30:14 PM, Sheila Watts wrote: <> The large and somewhat disquieting 'The World's Major Languages' (Oxford Univ Press 1987). Actually Comrie was the editor and did the section on Russian. The part I quoted (p.71), connecting the first sound shift in German with the earlier non-IE language, was by John A. Hawkins (also from USC), who did the sections on Germanic Languages and on German. Philip Baldi did the section on Indo-European. Regards, Steve Long From yoel at mindspring.com Sat Mar 13 04:32:47 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 23:32:47 -0500 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: <199903112110.NAA26993@netcom.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 01:10 PM 3/11/99 -0800, you wrote: >Steve Long raises the question of the length of time it would take for >speakers of a generic Indo-European to lose the ability to interact (in >conjunction with the issue of the splintering of the IE Ursprache into a large >number of small languages). The point as a whole is well taken. Yet the implied analogy between the differing languages of non-Greek Italy before its Latinization with the dialects of Greek in Magna Graecia and with the Germanic and Celtic languages is inadequate. Osco-Umbrian, at the earliest attested stage is not at all dialectal to Latin as e.g. the Greek dialects are one to another. Furthermore, the foremost authority on Venetic wrote in 1981 (Gs J. Alexander Kerns, CILT) that after 50 years of full time devoting himself to the question, he could not conclude whether or not Venetic was a genetically Italic Language. The other recently worked on lE languages of pre-Latinized Italy, e.g. South Picenean (sp.?) are available only to the specialists at the present. So Italy was already by the time of its first literacy so divided as to allow no communication amongst Latin, Osco-Umbrian, and Venetic, and other languages of which we know little. The question of Etruscan, which is most likely not Italic, if IE, is another matter. But how long then do we ascribe the presence of these IE languages in Italy? YLA >First, let me note that in, for example, the Italian peninsula, we find at the >time of our earliest records a number of languages, all with recognizable >dialect differences from place to place within the language areas, or in the >Greek world a couple of dozen widely diverging dialects with literary >traditions till the koinization brought on by the Alexandrian conquests and >their aftermath. The same thing we would expect to hold in the Celtic and >Germanic regions of Europe. From yoel at mindspring.com Sat Mar 13 04:47:45 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 23:47:45 -0500 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: We cannot ignore the famed example of Sapir's. Hittite /kubaGi/ (/G/ - voiced pharyngeal, ghain) has a double representation in Biblical Hebrew: qoba'' ('' = ayin) and koba''. From this Sapir concluded that whereas Hebrew is aspirated phonetically and Hebrew /q/ is non-aspirated, but glottalized or pharyngealized (emphatic), the Hittite which was phonetically [k] i.e. [-aspiration, -emphaticness], could not adequately be represented by either Hebrew grapheme. So the alternating writings. As for the cluster /nt/ in Anatolian into Greek, this is a special combination. Witness its pronunciation in Modern Greek. One cannot extrapolate from how a /nt/ would be transcribed into Greek to how any non prenasalized unvoiced obstruent would be realized phonetically and/ or graphemically. Yoel At 02:56 PM 3/11/99 -0600, you wrote: > On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very >early, evidently), it would seem unlikely that the /t/ was aspirated. >Such a notion, would also have broader implications: that every >IE-Anatolian /p-t-k/ that was wound up in Greek should appear as >/ph-th-kh/. Is this true? > > DLW From obaumann at stud.uni-frankfurt.de Fri Mar 12 23:32:27 1999 From: obaumann at stud.uni-frankfurt.de (Oliver Baumann) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 00:32:27 +0100 Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: > In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" >besides Germanic or Modern French?Wayles Browne wrote: > Also Slavic: Russian noch', Old Church Slavonic nosht' etc. go back to Common > Slavic *nokt-. but see also Polish _noc_ notice Rumanian _noapte_ and Catalan _nit_ -- Oli From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 13 08:36:21 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 08:36:21 GMT Subject: lenis and glottalic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >JER (now): Do you mean that the Dutch voiced d comes from a voiceless >lenis d - how can that be known? In theory, it's also possible that only Dutch maintains the original situation and all the other Germanic languages have changed the voiceless/voiced opposition to fortis/lenis or aspirated/non-aspirated. But that would be no help at all in explaining phenomena like the High German consonant shift. I believe the evidence from the Dutch dialects also indicates that the loss of aspirated stops in standard Dutch is secondary. >And that English lenes are voiceless?? They are in initial and final position, and generally whenever preceded _or_ followed by voicelessness. They are fully voiced only when preceded _and_ followed by voicedness (e.g. intervocalically). The defining characteristic of the English lenes (and I believe that goes for Scandinavian and High/Low German as well) is not voice, but lack of aspiration. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 13 08:44:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 08:44:10 GMT Subject: Anatolian /nt/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very >early, evidently), What evidence? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 14 00:32:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 00:32:10 GMT Subject: PIE plosives In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, >> *dh is typologically unacceptable. >Perhaps not so generally. A number of languages have turned up which >have voiced aspirates but no voiceless aspirates. For example, the >Indonesian language Madurese has a /p/ series, a /b/ series and a /bh/ >series, but no /ph/ series, exactly like the standard reconstruction of >PIE. Good point (but Madurese has /b/). I had always kind of assumed without looking that Madurese voiced aspirates must be due to Sanskrit influence, but I see that Mad. has dhu(wa') "2", so that's presumably the Madurese reflex of PAN *Duwa, where *D is what? Retroflex? And where do the other Madurese voiced aspirates come from? Ross? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 13 09:43:18 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 09:43:18 GMT Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > /tsoBu, LoBu/ are found in E. Galicia according to Galician >speakers I've talked and /shoBu/, I believe is found elsewhere. According to Zamora Vicente "Dialectologi'a espan~ola", there is a small area of Galician speech where the Asturian palatalization of initial l- is found. To be precise, the valley of the Navia river. Administratively, however, this area as well as some more territory to the west of it (until Ribadeo), belongs to Asturias. Obviously, it depends on how one defines "Galician" vs. "Asturian". Usually, the defining isogloss is taken to be that of diphthongization of e (>ie) and o (>ue). West of that isogloss, it's Galician and Portuguese, east of it it's Asturian, Leonese and Castilian. The l- > ll- (> tS-, ts-, d.-) isogloss runs a bit west of that, at least in the north. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 01:02:28 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 17:02:28 PST Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay Message-ID: DLW: See coming response to Glenny. Both /m/ and /n/ tend to occur in words for female care-givers, with /n/ typically referring to more secondary ones, as in "nanny". So what. You haven't demonstrated a link between relationship-words and pronouns nor proof that your "mama" theory is attributable to pronouns. DLW: 1st pronouns do show a statistically significant tendency to use nasals, [...] If a mother is going to imagine that her baby, who is in fact only babbling, is talking to her, then "mama" and "me" are the words she will want to hear the baby say. Which can be caused by anything, including mass linguistic relationships. That languages can be related is ubiquitously demonstrated throughout linguistics. The "mama syndrome" in relation to pronouns is not in the least. I am terminating the discussion. Again, you're being Eurocentric. Imagine an Abkhaz mother whose word for "me" is , if the baby is practicing the /m/ sound, she will never hear "me" at all in her baby's babbling nor will the baby grow up saying instead, unless the baby is wrought with dysphasia. Please cease this blatantly moronic topic. If I seem angry again, it's because I can't believe that someone, who evidently has a reasonable command of the English language, can honestly persue such an intuitively bad theory. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From iglesias at axia.it Sat Mar 13 19:33:10 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 11:33:10 PST Subject: Rate of change Message-ID: Rick Mc Calister wrote on 11 March: >/tsoBu, LoBu/ are found in E. Galicia according to Galician speakers I've talked and /shoBu/, I believe is found elsewhere. E. Galicia (!nos gustari'a!) could mean what the Galician nationalists call la "Franxa exterior" (Cast. "Franja exterior"), i.e. the transition areas of Asturias and Leon that speak Galego and/or Asturo-Leonese, depending on who's judging. The two strongest iso-glosses are: initial L palatised in AL and not in Galician, e.g. Gal. "lobo", Ast. "llobu", Cast. "lobo": Latin short "o" and "e" as dipthongs in AL and not in Galician, e.g. Gal. "ollo" (= Port. "olho"), Ast. "uello", Cast. "ojo". In Asturias, the local dialects as far as the river Navia are officially called "a nosa fala", to avoid using the word Galego! (Somewhat like not using the N word on the IE list FR) !Ay, ay, ay! (see, as suggested by Max W. Wheeler, A. Zamora Vicente, Dialectologia Espan~ola, 1967, map on page 84). To call the rest of Asturias "Galicia" is like calling Arizona "Sonora Norte" or Ontario "Que'bec Ouest"! >One problem is that spoken Galician is largely rural and fragmented. True >There is, evidently a "neo-Galician" which amounts to a Castillian >pronunciation of written Galician. And, I'm told, this is used by >Castillian speakers in Galicia with nationalist leanings. Not quite. It's also used by those who, like me (Pilar) were deprived of their language. For example, in my schooldays in the 40's under the Franco regime we were made to kneel on rocks if we used Galego words or expressions in our Castillian. We Galicians, whether Castillian or Galician speaking, have always valued our identity, even those of us who are not (ultra) Galician nationalists. Franco himself, although he persecuted Galician nationalists, made no attempt to play down his Galician origins (El Ferrol), and he frequently came to Galicia during the summer, where he had a residence known as the "Pazo" (Cast. "Palacio"). The Galicians are famous for their "retranca", which means answering a question with another question. There is a story that Hitler after meeting Franco at Hendaye said: "Rather than meet that man again, I prefer to go the dentist!" >The difference between the two is probably like that between Catalan and >Valencian --which sounds like Catalan being spoken by a Castillian. Galego sounds like Castillian, e.g. "theta", etc., because it followed a parallel path of development (see Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, Ed. Gredos, Madrid, in particular the chapter on "El Gallego"). If anything it was Portuguese that changed with the Reconquista of Lisbon with its Mozarabic population (ibid.). The "Portuguese Galician" of Minho, for example, is still close to, although different from, "Spanish Galician". The socio-linguistic situation in Galicia is indeed very similar to Valencia, where the cities and the upper classes speak Castillian. There is a story in Valencia that if you go to the market early in the morning, the people speak Valencian and the language becomes gradually more Castillian as the day goes on. The same applies to La Corun~a or Vigo. In Barcelona, on the other hand, an immigrant from southern Spain, who worked on the construction of the subway, was recorded as saying: "Very few people spoke Catalan, when we built the subway. The people who spoke Catalan worked in the offices". >In any case, rural Galician is definitely more difficult for a >Spanish speaker to understand than Portuguese. Probably. Joint message from Frank Rossi and Pilar Iglesias Lo'pez, Galega Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 01:23:19 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 17:23:19 PST Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: ANTHONY APPLEYARD: I agree, particularly as I believe also that the H2 laryngeal was the {h.} sound as in Arabic {h2aram} = "sacred, forbidden", (Muh2ammad}, and H3 was the ayin (e.g.root H3-D-W in Arabic {h3aduuw} = "enemy" and Greek {odussomai}). I believe that the usual H1 was the glottal stop. I agree with *H1 = /?/ and *H2 = /h./ but I don't think that a simple voicing of *H2 to make *H3 is adequate to explain the apparent "rounding" effect that *H3 has on vowels. A labial quality must be added to explain this - thus *H3 = /h./ and it is a labial *H2. I believe both *H2 and *H3 had the potential for voicing and I don't think there is any evidence that would suggest that *H2 and *H3 differed in voicing. Anatolian languages treat both phonemes the same. Additionally, in this interpretation, we have a laryngeal series that is quite similar to the velars, except that, to my knowledge, no evidence exists for a palatal counterpart. *H1 = /?/ *H2 = /h./ or /3/ *H3 = /h./ or /3/ -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's comment: The evidence adduced in favour of voicing of *H3 is Skt. pibati, Latin bibit "he drinks", a reduplicated present from a root reconstructed as *peH3-, in combination with Sturtevant's Rule. A tad thin, I admit. --rma ] From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Fri Mar 12 22:20:55 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 17:20:55 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Sheila Watts wrote: >If anyone is working in linguistics who finds it a problem when an >orthographical symbol has different phonetic value in different languages, >he or she should get out fast and try maths instead. As a mathematician, I resent that remark, especially since I have finally gotten used to z being used for palatal sibilant in the Harvard-Kyoto convention for Sanskrit e-texts and zh for the final consonant in ``Tamil'':-) Actually context dependent meaning is rife everywhere. Math papers in different specialties use the same grapheme in very different meanings. However, we don't have amateurs trying to read math papers, they just write and try to publish them :-) From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 03:30:31 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:30:31 PST Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns Message-ID: ROBERT ORR: Borrowing of pronouns is rare, but NOT impossible: Yes, that's great but no amount of evidence drudged up from popular 70/80's TV shows can make the borrowing of an entire set of pronouns any more likely than it really is. :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's comment: Or less... --rma ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 04:28:02 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:28:02 PST Subject: lenis and glottalic Message-ID: JENS: If the lack of *deg- means that it was once *t'ek'- with TWO glottalics one of which changed into something else, that change can have any age. We only know that its RESULT was present in the IE protolanguage, not that its CAUSE remained: Which is the precise reason why I'm afraid of reconstructing ejectives in IE proper. However, I don't think that it is better to just reconstruct *ph, *kh, *th in absence of strong evidence just to balance the stop system. That appears lazy in my view. IE lgs seem to only support three types of stops. On the subject of lenis/fortis, Miguel seems to be suggesting that lenis stops (or "long stops") tend to voice more often than fortis stops. So might I ask, is this true? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's comment: "Long" stops are more often treated as "fortis" than as "lenis", in my experience. Voicing of intervocalic stops is usually considered a lenition, of course, so one might expect lenis stops to be more subject to voicing. --rma ] From lmfosse at online.no Sat Mar 13 12:16:16 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 13:16:16 +0100 Subject: SV: Standard Languages Message-ID: Joat Simeon wrote: > All languages are dialect clusters; this is particularly obvious with the > Romance languages, which (apart from Romanian) have plenty of "bridge" > dialects. > I suspect that towards the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE, you could have > made a similar journey from the Rhine delta to the Tarim basin, and found a > series of overlapping IE dialects all the way. This situation is certainly true about the Sami dialects of Arctic Norway. A Sami speaker once explained to me that he could understand the dialects "to the left and to the right" without problems, the dialects beyond them with more difficulty and the dialects beyond those again hardly at all. There are a total of some 40,000 Sami speakers in North of the Arctic circle, and this should give a perspective on such things as dialects and numbers of speakers. South Sami, which is now practically extinct, is/was a different language altogether. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 04:32:04 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:32:04 PST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: PATRICK RYAN: "Pat" has never proposed a "Sumerian Invention Process" or anything vaguely like it --- ever. I assume that "Sumerian evolved like any other language from an earlier form". Does the name Halloran ring a bell by any chance? Come to think of it, you may be right. An apology to Ryan-Halloran. I get you two easily confused :) From jer at cphling.dk Sat Mar 13 14:48:24 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 15:48:24 +0100 Subject: PIE stops In-Reply-To: <007e01be6c09$6197db00$f83763c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > [...] Both the D series and > the DH series explain more phenomena if they are voiced. Also devoicing is > easier to explain than voicing, especially if the system were indeed > unstable. Though of course it may have been glottalic... Listen up, everybody! That was a word of reason to be heeded by all who are currently losing their heads. Jens From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 04:48:43 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:48:43 PST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>The word "roughly" automatically admits to the possibility of >>long-range comparison >-- let's interject some common sense here. "Agnis" and "Ignis" admit of >long-range comparison, especially since they both mean "fire". But for >comparisons of this obvious and indisputible nature, the period around 4000 >BCE is a _terminus ad quem_. 4000 BCE is a completely arbitrary point of time and can't be used as a barrier of knowledge without question. >Basque probably had lots of relatives at one time. It would be nice to >know, but we never will. >>What makes good conjecture from bad conjecture is the amount of >>likelihood a hypothesis has >-- which can only be determined if it can be tested. An explanation >attributing everything before 4000 BCE to a playful God who created the world >in 4004 BCE with ready-made fossils and potsherds is explains everything, and >can't be 'disproved'. That's what makes it a semantic null set; no possible >way of disproving it. >>it's just accepted that sometimes it behaves as one or the other. >-- that can be demonstrated experimentally, and has been repeatedly, as >has action at a distance, etc. >>but there isn't any undeniable physical proof. >-- plenty of it, right there on the laboratory bench. _Physical_ proof of the nature of particles?? I don't think so. It is based on observation. Experiments can only tell us a pattern. It can't tell us the actual form of a particle. Don't be daft. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 13 16:26:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 10:26:12 -0600 Subject: Rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Concerning the Galician language, my wife is from La Corun~a and with her >assistance I would like to give the following input: >1) Galician is quite distinct from Castillian. Very true >2) Whether it is distinct from Portuguese is a matter of opinion. The >Portuguese (nationalistically ?) consider it a "co-dialecto". And Galicians tell me that Portuguese is a dialect of Galician :> Which has a grain of truth in that the Portuguese literary language began in Galician in the Middle Ages >3) The pronunciation of Galician is very different from the standard >Portuguese of Lisbon, but if we consider the dialects of Northern Portugal >the distance is much less. (For example no difference between "b" and "v"). But that depends on the dialect of Galician, right? Some are virtually the same as northern Portuguese while others are pretty close to bable, spoken in Asturias > The dialects differ mainly as a result of the influence of the official >languages. The dialects in Galicia are very much alive. [snip] >Subjectively, my wife >has no problem in communicating with Northern Portuguese speaking in her >version of Castillian, but with a friend from Lisbon they have to speak >very slowly. People from Lisbon that I've met tend to swallow their vowels but I can understand them better than the northerners. And I can understand northern Portuguese better than Galician. >However, this person's father is from Minho (Portuguese >Galicia), so that helps. >With Brazilians, it depends on the person. Some >kinds of Brazilian seem closer to Galician. But I think this may be due to Spanish influence in "urban" Galician and in southern Brazilian --as well as the million or so Galicians in southern Brazil. >5) Galician may sound like Castillian, but in fact its sounds including the >lisped "s" were a local development parallel to that of Castille. (See >"Grama'tica Portuguesa" by Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, Ed. Gredos, Madrid, >chapter on "El Gallego") The south of Galicia uses "seseo". How about intervocalic , final & among your wife's family? >6) There is another phenomenon known as "geada", which is the pronunciation >of velar "g" similar to the Spanish "j", e.g. "lujo" for "Lugo", but this >is not considered "correct", although many other Spaniards consider it the >very essence of Galician as they find it funny, e.g. "jato" for "gato". I've heard Galicians who pronounce & "soft g" [/zh/ in Portuguese] as /sh/ >7) Galician has been recognised as an official language alongside >Castillian, on the same level as Catalan and Basque in their respective >areas. Like Basque, Galician had to develop a modern written standard over >the last few decades. There is currently a debate between the Autonomous >Government of Galicia, which has adopted a Spanish-like orthography, and >those who would prefer a Portuguese-style orthography, e.g. Espanha, rather >than Espan~a. >Un sau'do carin~oso a todos da lista indo-europea. Boa tarde. So, how does your wife pronounce this? southern Brazilian Portuguese would be --more or less, with some local differences, etc.- something like /u~ saudu c at riNozu a toduz da lishta indu-eurupe@ bO@ tahji/ I've also heard /lIshta/ as well as /lista/ and /taRji/ as well as /taRdi/ [R = velar] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 14 05:53:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 00:53:51 EST Subject: IE Technological lexicon: Linguistic Archaeology Alive and Well Message-ID: We should note that there are PIE roots not only for "wheel" (several different words) but for a whole series of related terms -- axle, nave of a wheel, wheeled vehicle/wagon, yoke, 'to make a journey by wagon', etc. There are also terms for wool, woven cloth, sewing, spinning, and weaving. The above are unambiguously 4th-millenium, no earlier. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sat Mar 13 11:43:01 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 06:43:01 -0500 Subject: Chariots Message-ID: maher, johnpeter wrote: >in Bulgaria/1966 I saw a long-legged man "riding" a donkey: He sat, feet >dragging, not amidships, but back on the animal's hip [pardon: I'm a city kid]. Actually this is said to be the right way to ride a donkey because donkeys have carry their necks low. In the earliest representations from the Ancient Near East, people ride horses too this way. But it is bad for the horse. [That is why Littauer and Crowell object to the idea that the horse was introduced to the ANE by horse riding people. and not by trade.] -Nath From DRC at antnov1.auckland.ac.nz Mon Mar 15 05:08:32 1999 From: DRC at antnov1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 00:08:32 -0500 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Peter wrote: > Steve said: > >1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the > >non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations? > You're making an assumption that doesn't fit the facts. Some non-IE > languages splinter, some don't. New Guinea is very mountainous and a > tradition developed of warfare between small local tribes. Compare that > Polynesia, a vast area, where different languages have indeed developed, but > it is remarkably homogenous linguistically. Some of the languages are > mutually comprehensible, with willing listeners. We cannot extrapolate > from New Guniea and assume all the world followed that model. > And in Polynesia, or course there are indeed thousands of years with slow > language change. One might think of Lithuanian... Not all languages > change rapidly! Whoa! Let's keep the time scale in mind if we're using this comparison. Polynesia: not much more than 2,000 years since Proto-PN, 35 languages. Still a pretty clear family resemblance throughout, but time has not stood still. Comparable to Romance? New Guinea: 40,000 years since first human colonization, several hundred languages in several distinct families. Foley in his Cambridge Green Book on Papuan points out that at a very modest rate of differentiation this amount of time would have been enough to produce 10^12 languages from a single ancestor. Geographical factors have certainly contributed, but people tend to exaggerate their importance. We could throw in for further comparison Vanuatu: 3,500 years since first human occupation, 100+ languages, much more diverse than Polynesian, but all related. Probably at least 90 of these are from a single ancestor. A group of medium-to-small islands, most within sight of each other, no major geographical barriers. This looks like the New Guinea pattern at a much earlier stage. Foley and others mention Melanesian attitudes as placing a positive value on local linguistic distinctiveness while freely borrowing linguistic and cultural items from neighbours. Is this a peculiarly Melanesian ethos? Or is it typical of human life before centralized states take over? To return to IE -- how soundly based are linguists' assumptions about what life was like in pre-state Eurasian societies, particularly non-material factors like language attitudes? Ross Clark From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 13 16:38:22 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 10:38:22 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <4a8ef738.36e8841e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > -- and you still have absolutely no evidence that OE was a class dialect. Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages of stratified societies are always class dialects. DLW From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 13 17:52:28 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 12:52:28 EST Subject: Chariots Message-ID: In a message dated 3/12/99 2:11:17 PM Mountain Standard Time, jpmaher at neiu.edu writes: >In Bulgaria/1966 I saw a long-legged man "riding" a donkey: He sat, feet dragging, >not amidships, but back on the animal's hip [pardon: I'm a city kid]. >> -- there was a Viking chief who was so tall he had that problem with horses -- he was known as "Hrolf Granger", "Hrolf the Walker". Incidentally, many early Middle Eastern inscriptions show men riding horses in that position, over the rump. From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Sun Mar 14 07:17:04 1999 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 08:17:04 +0100 Subject: Reconstructing *sH- for PIE Message-ID: I'd be interested in learning of any studies on Indo-European laryngeals after word-initial S-. I'm only aware of Henry M. Hoenigswald's 1993 article at present (Comparative-Historical Linguistics (Papers in Honor of O. Szemerenyi III), J. Benjamins). Is anyone working on this topic at the moment? Many thanks, Dennis. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 14 08:12:12 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 03:12:12 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: I wrote: <<1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations?>> In a message dated 3/13/99 12:20:16 AM, petegray at btinternet.com replied: <> The rest of my post that you quoted would have clarified some things. My points were with regard to the idea that PIE accompanied the introduction of agriculture into Europe or across Europe. First, with regard to New Guinea/Polynesian comparison, the difference between the two is fairly easy to understand. New Guinea is striking for its lack of centralized market systems. The speakers of the various languages, before outside incursions, simply had no way to interact and standardize or maintain continuity of language. Geography and relations no doubt had much to do with this - although in similar terrain, market systems do arise. What matters however is that this is in marked contrast to the Polynesian situation, where the first migrations were actually in part a promulgation of a market network (as evidenced by the large inventory of innovations and transplantations that would follow those first migrations.) < I've just received my copy of "The Mummies of Urumchi" by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. She's primarily an expert in the history of textiles, and is fascinating on that subject -- here, mainly the characteristics of the textiles buried with the mummies and the technology used to produce them. She's also been closely involved with the recent investigations of the Tarim Basin mummies (generally agreed to be Tocharians and proto-Tocharians) and is very interesting on the more general aspects of the area as well. In particular, the unique characteristics of the Tarim Basin -- its isolation, the natural phenomena which make mummification so prevalent, and the absence of any substantial population before the arrival of the population which produced the mummies around 2000 BCE -- give us a fascinating insight into an early IE-speaking group. In fact, if we accept that the proto-Tocharians moved off from the PIE core very early (which the linguistic evidence would seem to indicate) and then stayed isolated in the Tarim Basin for a long time (which the linguistic and archaeological evidence would seem to indicate), then we may be getting a glimpse at what the earliest Indo-Europeans actually looked like and what clothes they wore. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 14 08:12:30 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 03:12:30 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/12/99 10:54:07 PM, our moderator wrote: <> I believe this is true. But the situation in Neolithic Europe should have been different. The languages you mention have been subject to strong standardizing agents that froze them to some degree against diverging far from their common ancestors. And of course there is the open and constant lines of communication and commerce between the different languages that permit borrowing and mutual understanding in other ways. We don't have evidence of such influences that hold up in the Neolithic - except for the slow spread of agriculture. And agriculture tends to create localization. (Aside from the notion that one would need to adopt a new language whole cloth in order to adopt farming.) The fact is that when we've seen an internally stable language suddenly covering large distances and populations, it has happened quickly - so the language doesn't have time to splinter. How long did it take an insignificant dialect in a corner of Italy to suddenly become the primary language of half of Europe. Start Roman expansion at about 300bce and it took about 500 years. Mallory has a chart in his book about the spread of Turkish, which is even more phenomenal and happens in something like 300 years. For PIE to have stayed one thing or even a group of similair languages, it should have moved faster than 3 or 4000 years. I think that the agricultural hypothesis is the result of us having nothing much else to go by that far back. It's the one singularity that passes through Europe before the Bronze Age. But trying to correlate it to the spread of IE leads us to make language do things it just doesn't do. And creates impossibly distant dates for the prolonged unity of PIE. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 13 18:38:45 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 13:38:45 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi (2) Message-ID: Barber also notes, of course, that there are indications of contact between early IE-speakers (Indo-Iranian, proto-Tocharian, and "just IE") and the early Chinese. The Old Chinese vocabulary for wheeled transport (chariot, axle hub, etc.), and for some elements of magic and divination contains many IE loanwords. This isn't really surprising -- it wasn't likely that the chariot was independently invented in China, after all. The remaining question (likely unsolvable) is whether the Shang Chinese simply borrowed these elements, or whether they were transported there by IE-speakers who were subsequently absorbed -- rather like the situation in Mitanni in the Near East. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 13 18:45:50 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 13:45:50 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >lpechor at yahoo.com writes: >It strikes me that the Indo-European-speaking peoples must have had some >advantage in terms of time or resources -- the main determinant of advantage in intergroup relations is what might be called "cultural software" -- skills, habits, attitudes of mind, institutions. These are, by their nature, very difficult to recover. They leave little or no trace in the archaeological record and can only be teased out of the linguistic one with extreme effort and to a limited extent. Eg., if one culture is egalitarian and closed to outsiders, while another has a mechanism for integrating outsiders as individuals into its social/household structure, then the second culture will have a tremendous advantage over the long run. On the basis of "what's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable". There's only one end to an interaction like that. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 14 10:30:54 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 10:30:54 GMT Subject: "Unbalanced" Stop Systems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: >Korean has a three-way >contrast, which medially seems to based upon two oppositions 1) >long/short, and 2) aspirated/unaspirated, with no short aspirated series >existing. (In initial position it appears to be more a matter of voice >onset time, with some weak laryngealization figuring in somehow.) Indeed, as Theo Vennemann suggested, before the fricativization of the long/aspirated series (*ph > *f etc.), Proto-Germanic must have had a system exactly like the Korean one. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 13 18:50:43 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 13:50:43 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/12/99 8:54:07 PM Mountain Standard Time, alderson at netcom.com writes: >So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required >for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years >for them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one >party to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if >both are members of the same general speech community. -- in general, but not necessarily in particular. Drastic modification is possible in a fairly short time -- the Netherlands/Afrikaans divergence, for instance, or that between Old and Middle English. Or the way Lithuanian can be read as a proto-language for Latvian. I think 'punctuated equlibrium' is a useful model here. Instead of a steady gradual series of changes, long periods of relative stasis with short periods of rapid change interspersed. Eg., the restructuring of Insular Celtic in the first few centuries CE, or what apparently happed to proto-Germanic in the first millenium BCE. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sun Mar 14 12:47:11 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 06:47:11 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: In addition, there are many Americans using "moi" who not only do not know French, but who never directly saw/heard Miss Piggy'. In addition, Casdtilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; and Italian "Lei" is a calque of sorts on the latter. Steven Schaufele wrote: > Robert Orr wrote: [ moderator snip ] > > 3) And cf. the Muppets. Miss Piggy would often use "moi" as the first > > person singular pronoun while purportedly speaking English. > > And which has since spread to the speech of a great many Americans, many > of whom [e.g. my wife] have at best an extremely limited knowledge of > French. [ moderator snip ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Mar 13 19:38:58 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 14:38:58 EST Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/13/99 7:41:51 AM, you wrote: <<[ Moderator's response: > In those languages in which it does not appear, other processes are at work, > usually word structure constraints. Greek and Latin, for example, restrict > the inventory of phonemes which can appear word-finally (Greek much more so > than Latin); Latin reduces final *-ss to -s (including the results of the > more development of *ts > ss); Sanskrit will allow nearly any voiceless stop > to appear in final position, but radically reduces final clusters to their > first member; and so on. > --rma ]>> So, if I understand correctly, the nominative sing form in Latin and Greek reflect the dropping of the -t due to the internal rules of those languages regarding "the inventory of phonemes which appear word-finally." Does this also account for the loss of the -t in Welsh and Polish for example? Does Celtic prohibit the ending of a word in /t/? Can any of these t-less nominatives be explained as a borrowing? Does that make any sense? Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's response: For Polish and Welsh, presumably so; I am not versed in the histories or the synchronic phonologies of those languages. Word-final *-t > Proto-Celtic *-d if I remember correctly, but the *t in the word for "night" is not word-final in PIE. And why should we bother with borrowing when there are perfectly good explanations for the forms encountered that do not require an outside influence? --rma ] From yoel at mindspring.com Sun Mar 14 12:56:30 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 07:56:30 -0500 Subject: IE and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <36E92BF5.4A29138E@neiu.edu> Message-ID: Dear J Peter and Fellows: And this work of Kretschmer, "Kretschmerian perspective", has been vigorously carried on for the last 30 years by the Belgian "amateur" in the good sense, scholar J. Faucounau who has published a host of "tirades" on the Gospel of Kretschmer and the Etruscan connection. Three of them are in the Gsen Kerns (CILT), Schwatz (Louvain), and Carter (Peeters, forthcoming), all ed. by Yoel L. Arbeitman (the first with Allan R. Bomhard) and in journals, both scientific and popular. At 09:00 AM 3/12/99 -0600, you wrote: >> ... the idea that >> Etruscan forms part of a longer range construct including but prior >> to IE (Kretschmer), >just for the record: >Kretchmer was Vl. Georgiev's teacher, if memory serves... >jpm From jer at cphling.dk Sat Mar 13 15:12:51 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 16:12:51 +0100 Subject: Gender In-Reply-To: <3703ab0c.194569195@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > [...] > The lack of feminine gender in Hittite (Anatolian) suggests that > the PIE three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter) is > datable to the time between the split-off of Anatolian and the > break-up of the rest of IE (beginning with Tocharian). > [...] I don't think this can be true, because: (1) How could the feminine marker *-yeH2-/*-iH2- have been hit by the working of ablaut if it only arose after the split-off when the process must have been over? (2) Adjectives like dankuis 'dark' appear to have the same background as Lat. svavis, viz. the feminine in *-w-iH2- of u-stem adjectives (Skt. sva:du'-s, fem. sva:d-v-i:'). (3) The allative of 'one' is sa-ni-ya in the Anitta text, rather obviously based on *s(V)m-iH2- (Gk. m¡a fem. 'one'), conflated with some form where the /m/ was word-final and so changed to /n/ (cf. Gk. ntr. he'n from IE *se'm). All in all, it looks like a two-bit reduction of the system of three genders to two, whereby masc. and fem. formed a "common gender" opposed to the surviving neuter just as in Dutch, Danish and Swedish. Jens From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sun Mar 14 12:56:46 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 06:56:46 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ Message-ID: -- some data from Greek and Greek-English bilinguals to render more concrete Yoel A's incisive point: '5' can be pronounced PENDE or PEDE; PENTE is not heard in modern Greek. The same mutatis mutandis for OLIMBIKOS and OLIBIKOS. 'Hsmburger' on signs sometimes appears as HABURGER Homophones BED/BEND. MUDDY/MONDAY "...the FIGURES/FINGERS of speets" "She has a nice FIGURE/FINGER" "how do you ADDRESS/UNDRESS a LADY/LAINDY?" jpm ........................ "Yoel L. Arbeitman" wrote: > We cannot ignore the famed example of Sapir's. Hittite /kubaGi/ > (/G/ - voiced pharyngeal, ghain) has a double representation in Biblical > Hebrew: qoba'' ('' = ayin) and koba''. From this Sapir concluded that > whereas Hebrew is aspirated phonetically and Hebrew /q/ is > non-aspirated, but glottalized or pharyngealized (emphatic), the Hittite > which was phonetically [k] i.e. [-aspiration, -emphaticness], could not > adequately be represented by either Hebrew grapheme. So the alternating > writings. As for the cluster /nt/ in Anatolian into Greek, this is a > special combination. Witness its pronunciation in Modern Greek. One cannot > extrapolate from how a /nt/ would be transcribed into Greek to how any non > prenasalized unvoiced obstruent would be realized phonetically and/ or > graphemically. > Yoel [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 13 05:07:58 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 23:07:58 -0600 Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <3703ab0c.194569195@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Growing up in a Spanish family in Holland, certain Dutchisms >tended to creep into our (my siblings and mine's) speech, which >my father was constantly combatting. One of them was saying "Voy >a Juan" [I go to John] (Dutch "Ik ga naar Jan toe"), which my >father always corrected to "Voy a ver a Juan" [I'm going to see >John] or "Voy a casa de Juan" [I'm going to John's house]. It >seems that Castilian also doesn't normally allow a >locative/directional preposition followed directly by an animate >noun (phrase). You don't say "Voy donde Juan"? [lit. "go-I where John"] "I'm going to John's" It's very common in Central American Spanish and shows up in a few places in South America but not, evidently, in Mexico or the Caribbean and I've wondered what part of Spain it came from They also use "cuando" similarly "?Vos recorda's cuando Franco?" "Do you remember back in the days of Franco?" Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From thorinn at diku.dk Sat Mar 13 22:11:39 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 23:11:39 +0100 Subject: STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS In-Reply-To: <004b01be6218$4028b7a0$aed3fed0@patrickcryan> (proto-language@email.msn.com) Message-ID: From: "Patrick C. Ryan" Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 00:12:13 -0600 Thank you for a lucid explanation of probabilities for all of us. I agree with everything you have written with the exception that the situation in historical linguistics is so problematic. But, why do you not explain in detail why you think it is --- not based on a priori asssumptions but on analysis of data? I'll tell you what would be needed for a probabilistic test of language relatedness to be valid. First, you must decide on a protocol to follow which will provide an objective measure of the similarity between two languages. The important thing is that this measurement must not depend on the researcher's knowledge of the languages --- on the contrary, it should be repeatable with consistent results by different people. NOTE: this measure of similarity is your experimental result --- any conclusions about relatedness would only follow after statistical analysis. One possible protocol might be to simply hand out dictionaries to a few undergraduates that never even heard the names of the languages before, and letting them find as many similarities as they can. Your experimental result is the median number of entries in their lists. Another would be to let an expert in each language supply the best word for each node in one of the `semantic networks' that are being promoted, expressing it in IPA. The researchers must work separately, neither knowing the identity of the other language. You could then let a computer program compare the lists, using a fixed algorithm to look for inexact semantic and phonological matches, and giving points for each according to the exactness. Next, you must apply this experimental method to a large number of language pairs where there is already general agreement about their degree of relatedness (by descent and borrowing). Large probably means a few hundred to a thousand. Draw up charts of your experimental score against the known degree of relatedness, and see if something statistically significant emerges. But even if you find a significant correlation, it's quite possible that it is not strong enough to predict anything. For that you need a result like '90% of language pairs related at a depth of less than 500 years scored more than 82 points', which will allow you to assert that a new pair of languages that scores less than 82 points is probably not related at a depth of less than 500 years. For your purposes, a last problem remains. There _is_ no agreement on language relatedness at the time depths of Nostratic, much less Proto- World, so you would have to extrapolate your data. Even if a trend could be identified by proper statistical analysis, extrapolation will lessen the credibility of the final results. Once you have done this work, you can run Igbo and Inuit through your measurement process and see if the number you get tells you anything besides 'not discernably related'. And if it does, you can claim to have statistical evidence of their relationship. This is something like the standard social scientists have to live up to if they do not want their results to be dismissed out of hand. But, to borrow a phrase, you must surely agree that this is not the way historical linguistics are done today, by you or anybody else, and therefore any attempt to use statistics to defend your hypotheses is just so much hot air. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From yoel at mindspring.com Sun Mar 14 13:21:13 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 08:21:13 -0500 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EAAFF0.3730@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 10:35 AM 3/13/99 -0800, you wrote: >Robert Orr wrote: >Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, >borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had >become indistinguishable from sing. forms. But the entire paradigm of the 3rd pl in NE is "they, them (acc.-dat.) and their". So it might be less hyperbolic to say the "the-" stem for the 3rd pl. This kind of pidgin is not unlike Pseudo- (movie) American "ME wanna take white man's scalp" or such. Additionally, French does use the disjunctive emphatic as in "Moi, je prefere parler le pidgin" or such where English would not naturally say: *"Me/ As for me, I prefere to speak pidgin". This may be contributory, take it from one who has NEVER seen the Muppets. YLA (see the end). >> 3) And cf. the Muppets. Miss Piggy would often use "moi" as the first >> person singular pronoun while purportedly speaking English. >And which has since spread to the speech of a great many Americans, many >of whom [e.g. my wife] have at best an extremely limited knowledge of >French. >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 >http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html > ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** > ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** I finally got to look up obex the word I didn't know. O.K. "O syntagms of human tongues, free yourselves. You can lose nothing except your barriers". Or is the construction (with rare gen. in this function) "O Syntagms, free yourselves of human tongues/ languages. You can lose nothing but your barriers"? From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 00:31:23 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 16:31:23 PST Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns Message-ID: DLW: Please try to remain calm, Mr. Gordon. Actually the study I am thinking of showed, as I now recall, a tendency for 1st person pronouns to have nasals. The matter of /m/ or /n/ was not, and to my knowledge has not been, adressed. My "mama" thing is just a guess at what lies behind the facts. I'm sorry if I seemed wrought with hypertension, but I just do not think that this is an idea that should be considered. It is logically flawed from the get-go. There couldn't possibly be any way for this hypothesis to be realistically tested in a scientific way and amounts to nothing more than a fantasy concocted by linguists who are not good at what they do. Can you explain to me how this could be credibly tested? No? I thought not :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Mar 14 13:24:33 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 13:24:33 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > A while back I had threatened Larry, Miguel & Theo with this list > Like the list for Germanic, these are only possibilities > well, some are more possible than others > some arrive via other languages, e.g. Latin > Some will make Larry see red :> Oh, I never see red. ;-) > BUT I'm sure he will again be kind enough to send me corrections > Some will be obvious errors to everyone but me :> > Please excuse my typos Just a few comments on the Basque items. > Possible non-IE etymologies in Ibero-Romance /pre-1600 > abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] > rel. con vasco abarka; raíz de alpargata [sandal] [c] > pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] Basque denotes a kind of rustic sandal, traditionally a soft leather moccasin held on by a cord passed through holes in the sandal and wrapped around the calf. The word is very probably native, but cannot be monomorphemic, with that plosive in the third syllable. The favorite guess sees it as a formation involving `branch(es)' and a noun-forming suffix <-ka>. This is semantically awkward, and seems to require that ancestral abarkas were made of foliage -- not very comfortable, I would have thought. Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from Romance or from Basque. > agavanzo "wild rose' [PL] > c. 1100 gabânso < pre-rom; [c] > rel. con vasco gaparra, kaparra "zarza, chaparro" & gavarra, [c] > aragonés garrabera, [c] > gascón gabarro & gabardero [c] > rel. to alcaparra [caper]? [rmcc] The Basque word is actually ~ , with the form in /k-/ predominating, though , at least, is also recorded. There is yet another form, , which has a very sparsely recorded variant . There are also some other somewhat similar forms with vaguely similar meanings, but these are thought to represent one or more distinct words. The word has been much discussed. Lots of people would like to see it as native Basque, but there are problems. First, fluctuation in the voicing of an initial plosive is usually a reliable guide to borrowed status. Unfortunately, there is one exception, and it's relevant here: in Basque, a word-initial voiced plosive sporadically assimilates in voicing to a voiceless plosive in the second syllable -- so might derive from by just such voicing assimilation. But then itself is very odd: there are very few native and monomorphemic Basque lexical items of the form CVC- in which both consonants are plosives, and, in those that exist, both plosives are normally voiced. There are just three apparent exceptions in the clearly native vocabulary: `full', `always' and , originally `small' but today `few, little'. The third has a simple explanation: it's probably bimorphemic. The other two are puzzles which we've debated for years. Accordingly, an original Basque * is suspect on phonological grounds. And that still leaves the problem of ~ , for which the only available explanation is somewhat tortuous. > alud "mudslide" 1880 pre-rom; [c] > rel. con vasco luta, lurte "desmoronamiento de tierras", [c] > v. lur "tierra", elur "nieve" [c] Basque ~ ~ `landslide, mudslide' is real enough, and is obviously a derivative of `earth'. This has the regular combining form in old formations, so the variants in are probably recent re-formations. It's not clear to me how the Basque word would give rise to Romance . As for Basque `snow', this is hardly likely to be related to : there are major problems with the phonology, with the morphology, and with the semantics. > arándano "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ¿?, [c] > compara con vasco arán "endrino" [c] > pre-rom. raíz de arán [c] Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . > ardite "small coin" 1400 "moneda de poco valor" [c] > gascón ardit < ¿? [c] > rel. to Basque [wje] Basque is indisputably borrowed from a medieval Romance word, in a perfectly regular way. There is no evidence that the Basques used coins before they encountered these in use among the Iberians and the Romans, and every single Basque word pertaining to money is either borrowed from Latin or Romance or calqued upon these languages. > artesa "type of box" 1330 "cajón cuadrilongo de madera que es más angosto > hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] > v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] Basque has various senses, most of them denoting various kinds of cracks or fissures on human or animal bodies. The word is suspected of being a derivative of the common word `interval, gap', but, if so, the second element is obscure. The Basque word does not denote any kind of container. > arto "cambronera" < Basque arte "scrub oak." [rl] Actually, `holm oak', `holly oak', `evergreen oak'. > ascua "live coal" 1251 "brasa viva" < ¿?, [c] > v. vasco ausko-a < huats "ceniza" < pre-rom [c] > Pre-Roman [wje] Basque means `bellows', and it is very likely derived from (thus) `dust, powder, ash'. I don't have Corominas handy, but this etymology looks a trifle hopeful. > avión "airplane" c. 1330 "vencejo" < ¿gavión c. 1250? < ¿? [c] > rel to Latin apis? [rmcc] No Basque here, but I'm certainly startled to see a word for `airplane' figuring in a discussion of supposedly pre-Roman words. > azcona "dart" 1200-50 Iberia, occ. & vasco < ¿?, [c] > v. vasco azkon, antes aucona s. XII [c] The word is puzzling and much discussed. The fact that the word is reported as in the 12th century (by Picaud, a French pilgrim) is even more baffling. Picaud's other transcriptions are mostly pretty accurate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Bomhard at aol.com Sun Mar 14 16:10:17 1999 From: Bomhard at aol.com (Bomhard at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:10:17 EST Subject: Indo-European Phonology Message-ID: Since there has been some discussion on this list regarding the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop System and of the glottalic reinterpretation of Indo-European consonantism, it might be helpful to review the history of the reconstruction of that system and the reasons why the glottalic reinterpretation was proposed in the first place. 1. August Schleicher Although the comparative-historical study of the Indo-European languages did not begin with August Schleicher, he was the first to attempt, in the first volume (1861 [4th edition 1876]) of his (in English translation) "Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages," to reconstruct the phonological system of the Indo-European parent language. Earlier scholars -- especially Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm -- had worked out the fundamental sound correspondences between the various daughter languages, and the need to reconstruct the phonological system of the parent language had been recognized as early as 1837 by Theodor Benfey, but no one prior to Schleicher had actually undertaken the task. 2. The Neogrammarian Period Schleicher's reconstruction remained the accepted standard until the late 1870's, when a series of brilliant discoveries were made in rapid succession: 1. First, there was the discovery of "The Law of Palatals" (Das Palatalgesetz), which established the antiquity of the vowel systems found in Greek and Latin and recognized, for the first time, that the Sanskrit vowel system was an innovation. 2. The next major discovery was that Proto-Indo-European had syllabic nasals and liquids. 3. Following these discoveries, the system of vowel gradation (Ablaut) became clear, and the original patterning was worked out in precise detail. 4. Finally, Verner's Law explained several annoying exceptions to the expected developments of the earlier voiceless stops in Proto-Germanic. First, the voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives in Proto-Germanic. Then, at a later date, these voiceless fricatives became voiced fricatives except (A) initially and (B), in some cases, medially between vowels. The problem was that both voiceless and voiced fricatives appeared medially between vowels, and the choice between voiceless fricatives, on the one hand, and voiced fricatives, on the other hand, appeared to be entirely random. What Verner figured out was that the patterning was tied to the original position of the accent -- the voiceless fricatives appeared medially between vowels when the accent had originally fallen on the contiguous preceding syllable. If the accent had originally fallen on any other syllable, however, voiced fricatives appeared. By the end of the nineteenth century, the phonological system reconstructed by the Neogrammarians was widely accepted as being a fairly accurate representation of what had existed in Proto-Indo-European. To this day, the Neogrammarian system, or slightly modified versions thereof, commands a great deal of respect and has many defenders. The Neogrammarian reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European phonological system, which was arrived at through strict adherence to the principle that sound laws admit no exceptions, was notable for its large inventory of stops and its extremely small inventory of fricatives. The stop system consists of a four-way contrast of (A) plain voiceless stops, (B) voiceless aspirated stops, (C) plain voiced stops, (D) voiced aspirated stops. This system is extremely close to the phonological system of Old Indic. Actually, there were two competing versions of the Proto-Indo-European phonological system at this time: (A) the German system (as exemplified in the works of Karl Brugmann, for example), which was phonetically based, and (B) the French system (as exemplified, in particular, in the works of Antoine Meillet), which was phonologically based. It must be pointed out that, in spite of its wide acceptance, a small group of scholars has, from time to time, questioned the validity of the Neogrammarian reconstruction, at least in part. Brugmann, in particular, reconstructed five short vowels and five long vowels plus a reduced vowel, the so-called "schwa indogermanicum", which was written with an upside down e and which alternated with so-called "original" long vowels. A full set of diphthongs was posited as well. Finally, the system contained the semivowels *y and *w, a series of plain and aspirated spirants, several nasals, and the liquids *l and *r. The nasals and liquids were unique in their ability to function as syllabics or nonsyllabics, depending upon their environment. They were nonsyllabic (A) when between vowels or initially before vowels, (B) when preceded by a vowel and followed by a consonant, and (C) when preceded by a consonant and followed by a vowel. The syllabic forms arose in early Indo-European when the stress-conditioned loss of former contiguous vowels left them between two nonsyllabics. It should be noted here that the Proto-Indo-European vowels were subject to various alternations that were partially correlated with the positioning of the accent within a word. These vowel alternations served to indicate different types of grammatical formations. The most common alternation was the interchange between the vowels *e and *o in a given syllable. There was also an alternation among lengthened-grade vowels, normal-grade vowels, and reduced-grade and/or zero-grade vowels. Meillet's reconstruction differs from that of Brugmann in several important respects. First, Meillet reconstructs only two tectal (guttural) series, namely, palatals and labiovelars -- he does not recognize a separate pure velar series. Brugmann posited a separate series of voiceless aspirates for Proto-Indo- European on the basis of an extremely small, and somewhat controversial, set of correspondences from Indo-Iranian, Armenian, and Greek. In the other daughter languages, the voiceless aspirates and plain voiceless stops have the same treatment, except that *kh appears to have became x in a small number of examples in Slavic -- however, these examples are better explained as borrowings from Iranian rather than as due to regular developments in Slavic. As early as 1891, in a paper read before the Societe de Linguistique de Paris, the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure suggested that the voiceless aspirates might have had a secondary origin, arising from earlier clusters of plain voiceless stop plus a following "coefficient sonantique". This idea was taken up by Meillet, who pointed out the great rarity of the voiceless aspirates, noting in particular that the dental voiceless aspirate *th often appears to be the result of aspiration of a plain voiceless dental by a following *H: *t + *H > *th, at least in Sanskrit. Current thinking on the part of a great many linguists is that the series of voiceless aspirates reconstructed by Brugmann and other Neogrammarians for the Indo-European parent language should be removed, being secondarily derived in the individual daughter languages. The main opponent of this view has been Oswald Szemerényi, who has argued for the reinstatement of the voiceless aspirates and, consequently, for a return to the four-stop system (plain voiceless, voiceless aspirated, plain voiced, voiced aspirated) of the Neogrammarians. Particularly noteworthy is Meillet's treatment of the resonants. Here, he considers *i and *u to be the syllabic allophones of *y and *w respectively and classes them with the resonants, thus: *i/*y, *u/*w, *m/*m, *n/*n, *r/*r, *l/*l (the first member is syllabic, the second non-syllabic), that is to say that he does not consider *i and *u to be independent phonemic entities. The diphthongs are analyzed by Meillet as clusters of (A) vowel plus nonsyllabic resonant and (B) nonsyllabic resonant plus vowel. 3. The Twentieth Century to 1970 In 1878, the young Ferdinand de Saussure attempted to show that so-called "original" long vowels were to be derived from earlier sequences of short vowel plus a following "coefficient sonantique". In 1927, Jerzy Kurylowicz demonstrated that reflexes of de Saussure's "coefficients sonantiques" were preserved in Hittite. On this basis, a series of consonantal phonemes, commonly called "laryngeals", was then posited for Proto-Indo-European. Jerzy Kurylowicz, in particular, set up four laryngeals. The overwhelming majority of scholars currently accept some form of this theory, though there is still no general agreement on the number of laryngeals to be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European or on their probable phonetic values. With the reduction of the gutturals to two series, the removal of the traditional voiceless aspirates, the reanalysis of the diphthongs as clusters of vowel plus nonsyllabic resonant and nonsyllabic resonant plus vowel, and the addition of laryngeals, we arrive at the system of Winfred P. Lehmann, which consists of the contrast (A) plain voiceless stops, (B) plain voiced stops, and (C) voiced aspirates. Now, the removal of the traditional voiceless aspirates creates a problem from a typological point of view. Data collected from the study of a great number of the world's languages have failed to turn up any systems in which voiced aspirates are added to the pair plain voiceless stop / plain voiced stop unless there are also corresponding voiceless aspirated stops in the system. This is an important point, affecting the entire structure of the traditional reconstruction. In order to rectify this imbalance, several scholars have sought typological parallels with systems such as those found, for example, in Javanese. In these rare systems, there is a three-way contrast, sometimes described as (A) plain (unaspirated) voiceless, (B) voiced, (C) "voiced aspirated": /T/, /D/, /Dh/. However, this interpretation is based upon a lack of understanding of the phonetics involved. Series (C) in such systems is, in reality, voiceless with breathy release and not "voiced aspirated". As we have seen from the preceding discussion, Lehmann's reconstruction is problematical from a typological point of view. However, from a structural point of view, it presents an accurate analysis of Proto-Indo-European phonological patterning. Several scholars have proposed various solutions in an attempt to eliminate the problems caused by the removal of the traditional voiceless aspirates. For example, in 1964, Kurylowicz tried to show that the voiced aspirates were not phonemically voiced. However, this interpretation seems unlikely in view of the fact that the daughter languages are nearly unanimous in pointing to some sort of voicing in this series in the Indo-European parent language. The main exceptions are Tocharian and possibly Hittite (at least according to some scholars). In each case, however, it is known that the voicing contrast was eliminated and that the reflexes found in these daughter languages do not represent the original state. The Greek and Italic developments are a little more complicated: in these daughter languages, the traditional voiced aspirates were devoiced, thus becoming voiceless aspirates. Then, in Italic, the resulting voiceless aspirates became voiceless fricatives. According to Eduard Prokosch (in 1938), on the other hand, the voiced aspirates of traditional grammar were really voiceless fricatives. This interpretation seems unlikely for two reasons: (A) as noted above, the daughter languages point to voicing in this series in Proto-Indo-European, and (B) the daughter languages point to stops as the original mode of articulation and not fricatives. This latter objection may also be raised against the theory -- advocated by Alois Walde (in 1897) and Johann Knobloch (in 1965) -- that the voiced aspirates may have been voiced fricatives. Next, there is the theory put forth by Louis Hammerich (in 1967) that the voiced aspirates may have been emphatics. Hammerich does not define what he means by the term "emphatics" but implies that they are to be equated with the emphatics of Semitic grammar. Now, in Arabic, the emphatics have been described as either uvularized or pharyngealized. Such sounds are always accompanied by backing of adjacent vowels. In Proto-Indo-European, all vowels were found in the neighborhood of the voiced aspirates, and there is no indication that any of these sounds had different allophones here than when contiguous with other sounds. Had the voiced aspirates been emphatics such as those found in Arabic, they would have caused backing of contiguous vowels, and this would be reflected in the daughter languages in some manner. However, this is not the case. If, on the other hand, the emphatics had been ejectives such as those found in the Modern South Arabian languages, the Semitic languages of Ethiopia, and several Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects (such as, for instance, Urmian Nestorian Neo-Aramaic and Kurdistani Jewish Neo- Aramaic), the question arises as to how these sounds could have developed into the voiced aspirates needed to explain the developments in Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, and Armenian. Oswald Szemerényi was one of the first (in 1967) to bring typological data to bear on the problem of reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European phonological system. Taking note of Roman Jakobson's famous remark that "...no language adds to the pair /t/ ~ /d/ a voiced aspirate /dh/ without having its voiceless counterpart /th/," Szemerényi reasoned that since Proto-Indo-European had voiced aspirates, it must also have had voiceless aspirates. Though on the surface this reasoning appears sound, it puts too much emphasis on the typological data and too little on the data from the Indo-European daughter languages. As mentioned above, there are very cogent reasons for removing the traditional voiceless aspirates from Proto-Indo-European, and these reasons are not easily dismissed. Szemerényi also tried to show that Proto-Indo- European had only one laryngeal, namely, the voiceless glottal fricative /h/. Szemerényi does not include diphthongs in his reconstruction since their "phonemic status is disputed". Szemerényi's reconstruction is in fact typologically natural, and he defended it strongly right up to his dying day (1996). His system -- as well as that of the Neogrammarians, it may be added -- is merely a projection backward in time of the Old Indic phonological system. In certain dialects of "Disintegrating Indo-European" (specifically, in the early development of Pre- Indo-Iranian, Pre-Greek, and Pre-Italic), such a system no doubt existed in point of fact. Next, there are the proposals put forth by Joseph Emonds (in 1972). According to Emonds, the plain voiced stops of traditional Proto-Indo-European are to be reinterpreted as plain lax voiceless stops, while the traditional plain voiceless stops are taken to have been tense and aspirated. Emonds regards the voicing of the lax stops as common to a Central innovating area and the appearance of voiceless stops in Germanic, Armenian, and Hittite as relics. Similar proposals were put forth by Toby D. Griffen (in 1988). According to Griffen, Proto-Indo-European had a three-member stop system, which he represents as (using the dentals for illustration) *[d], *[t], *[th] (media, tenuis, aspirata). While this system was maintained in Germanic with only minor changes, a series of sound-shifts in the other Indo-European daughter languages completely restructured the inherited system. Thus, Germanic emerges as the most conservative daughter language in its treatment of the Indo-European stop system. There are other problems with the traditional reconstruction besides the typological difficulties caused by the removal of the voiceless aspirates. Another problem, noted in most of the standard handbooks, is the statistically low frequency of occurrence -- perhaps total absence -- of the traditional voiced labial stop *b. The marginal status of *b is difficult to understand from a typological viewpoint and is totally unexplainable within the traditional framework. This problem was investigated by the Danish scholar Holger Pedersen (in 1951). Pedersen noted that, in natural languages having a voicing contrast in stops, if there is a missing member in the labial series, it is /p/ that is missing and not /b/. This observation led Pedersen to suggest that the traditional plain voiced stops might originally have been plain voiceless stops, while the traditional plain voiceless stops might have been plain voiced stops. Later shifts would have changed the earlier plain voiced stops into the traditional plain voiceless stops and the earlier plain voiceless stops into the traditional plain voiced stops. In a footnote in his 1953 BSL article entitled "Remarques sur le consonantisme semitique", Andre Martinet objected to this "musical chairs" rearrangement. "Since there are extremely few examples of the Common Indo-European phoneme reconstructed 'analogically' as *b, it is tempting to diagnose a gap there as well, as did the late Holger Pedersen... But, instead of assuming, as did Pedersen, the loss of a Pre-Indo-European *p followed by a musical-chairs [rearrangement] of mediae and tenues, one should be able to see in the series *d, *g, *gw the result of evolution from an earlier series of glottalics, without labial representative." This appears to be the first time that anyone had proposed reinterpreting the plain voiced stops of traditional Proto-Indo-European as glottalics. Martinet's observation, however, seems to have influenced neither Gamkrelidze and Ivanov nor Hopper, each of whom arrived at the same conclusion independently of Martinet as well as independently of each other. In the preceding discussion, only the more well-known counterproposals were mentioned, and only the briefest of explanations were given. More details could easily have been given. Insights gained from typological studies, for example, could have been used to strengthen the arguments: no phoneme stands alone; it is, rather, an integral part of the total system. Each and every phoneme is tied to the other phonemes in the system by discrete interrelationships -- to disturb one phoneme is to disturb (at least potentially) the entire system. This is basically the message that Jakobson and Martinet were trying to bring home. All too often, this message is ignored. Moreover, the interrelationships are not only synchronic, they are diachronic as well. 4. The Glottalic Theory Discovery -- perhaps "rediscovery" would be a better term since Martinet's insightful remarks first appeared in 1953 -- of what has come to be known as the "Glottalic Theory" came from two separate sources, each working independently. On the one-hand, the British-born American Germanist Paul J. Hopper hit upon the notion that Proto-Indo-European may have had a series of glottalized stops while he was a student at the University of Texas and taking a course in Kabardian from Aert Kuipers. Hopper went on about other business after graduation, waiting five years before putting his ideas into writing. On the other hand, the Georgian Indo-Europeanist Thomas V. Gamkrelidze, a native speaker of a language containing glottalics (Georgian), had been investigating the typological similarities between Proto-Kartvelian and Proto- Indo-European. It did not take Gamkrelidze long to realize the possibility that Proto-Indo-European might also have had glottalized stops. Gamkrelidze, in a joint article with the now-immigrated Russian Indo-Europeanist Vjacheslav V. Ivanov, was the first to make it into print (in 1972). Hopper might have beat them into print had his paper on the subject not been rejected by the journal Language. He was then obliged to search for another journal willing to publish his views, which finally happened in 1973. Then, in 1973, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov published a German language version of their 1972 paper. In his 1973 paper, Hopper proposed reinterpreting the plain voiced stops of traditional Proto-Indo-European (*b, *d, *g, *gw) as glottalized stops (ejectives), that is, (*p'), *t', *k', *k'w respectively, because the traditional plain voiced stops "show many of the typological characteristics of glottalized stops (ejectives), e.g. they are excluded from inflectional affixes, they may not cooccur with another in the same root, etc." Hopper also reinterpreted the traditional voiced aspirates as murmured stops. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov also reinterpret the traditional plain voiced stops as ejectives, but, unlike Hopper, they reinterpret the traditional plain voiceless stops as voiceless aspirates. They make no changes to the traditional voiced aspirates. They point out, however, that the feature of aspiration is phonemically irrelevant in a system of this type. In an article published in 1981, Gamkrelidze claims that such a system exists in several modern Eastern Armenian dialects (however, this is challenged by the Armenian scholar Gevork B. Jahukyan in a 1990 rebuttal). Many of the points discussed above by Gamkrelidze were also noted by Hopper, in particular the root structure constraint laws. Hopper also discusses possible trajectories of the new system in various Indo-European daughter languages. The system of Gamkrelidze, Hopper, and Ivanov has several clear advantages over the traditional reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop system: 1. Their reinterpretation of the traditional plain voiced stops as glottalics (ejectives) makes it easy to account for the fact that the phoneme traditionally reconstructed as *b was highly marked in the system, being characterized by an extremely low frequency of occurrence (if it even existed at all). Such a low frequency distribution is not characteristic of the patterning of the voiced labial stop /b/ in natural languages having a voicing contrast in stops, but it is fully characteristic of the patterning of the labial ejective /p'/. 2. Not only does the reinterpretation of the traditional voiced stops as ejectives easily account for the frequency distribution of these sounds, it also explains the fact that they were used only very infrequently in inflectional affixes and pronouns, since this type of patterning is characteristic of the way ejectives behave in natural languages having such sounds. 3. For the first time, the root structure constraint laws can be credibly explained. These constraints turn out to be a simple voicing agreement rule with the corollary that two glottalics cannot cooccur in a root. Hopper cites Hausa, Yucatec Mayan, and Quechua as examples of natural languages exhibiting a similar constraint against the cooccurrence of two glottalics. Akkadian may be added to this list as well if we take Geers' Law to be a manifestation of such a constraint. 4. The so-called Germanic and Armenian "consonant shifts" (in German, "Lautverschiebungen"), which can only be accounted for very awkwardly within the traditional framework, turn out to be mirages. Under the revised reconstruction, these branches (along with the poorly-attested Phrygian as well) turn out to be relic areas. In 1984, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov published their monumental joint monograph (an English translation of this work has since been published by Mouton de Gruyter [in 1995]). As is to be expected, this massive work (2 volumes, 1,328 pages) contains the most detailed discussion of the Glottalic Theory that has yet appeared. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's book also contains trajectories of the revised Proto-Indo-European phonological system in the various Indo-European daughter languages, original proposals concerning the morphological structure of the Indo-European parent language, an exhaustive treatment of the Proto- Indo-European lexicon, and a new theory about the homeland of the Indo- Europeans (they argue that the Indo-European homeland was located in eastern Anatolia in the vicinity of Lake Van). One of the most novel proposals put forth in the book is that Proto-Indo-European may have had labialized dentals and a labialized sibilant. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov also posit postvelars for Proto-Indo-European. The Glottalic Theory has attracted a good deal of attention over the past two decades and has gained widespread -- though not universal -- acceptance. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sun Mar 14 13:36:01 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 07:36:01 -0600 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u Message-ID: The following is not taken as a refutation, but a complication: The term METEORITE is a 19th century coinage, according to the OED. An astronomer at the Chicago Planetarium told me some twenty years ago, if memory serves, that the ancients did not know the source of meteorites. Are we being anachronistic? Is another principle involved. Cf. STAR SAPPHIRE: Reichelt adduced that in support of his thesis of "der steinerne Hiimmel". jpm ................................... Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Meteoric iron is indeed the earliest source for the metal, as > seen for instance in Sumerian AN.BAR "[lit. sky silver] iron". > > That's what makes a Celtic *i:sar-no- derived from "Vasconic" > *isar "star" semantically plausible. Unfortunately, there is > zero evidence from Basque itself for the use of in a > metallurgical context. Basque for "iron" is (maybe > originally "ore", if compounds like burdin-gorri [=red] "copper" > and burdin-(h)ori [=yellow] "brass" are not recent coinages). [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 14 17:31:34 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:31:34 -0600 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <3715c794.267388840@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: As Yoel Arbeitman points out, --and others have pointed out before-- the initial /s-/ in Greek is unexpected Is there any possible explanation other than as a loanword? [btw: we had the beginnings of an interesting discussion about s- initial words in Greek a while back, that I wish would continue] Could Latin sidus be a back-formation based on a loanword? Or is this reaching too far? [snip] >>Also, Greek `side:ros' = "iron", Latin `sidus' (gen `sideris') = "star". >The Latin word is an s-stem *sidos-/*sides-, so there is no >connection with Greek sida:ros (Attic side:ros), unless one >assumes the word was borrowed directly from Latin. >It might be more interesting to compare the Grk. word with Basque >zilar ~ zirar ~ zidar ~ zildar "silver" (< *sidar ?). [snip] If I remember, you had proposed a possible Semitic source for this Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Mar 14 14:35:07 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 16:35:07 +0200 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <36E9A40B.A4198426@stud.uni-frankfurt.de> Message-ID: On Sat, 13 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/11/99 3:34:25 PM, you wrote: ><<[ Moderator's response: >> Greek _nuks, nuktos_, Latin _nox, noctis_, Sanskrit _nak >> (IIRC), naktam_, Hittite _nekuz = nek{^w}t+s_, ... >> --rma ]>> >Does it matter that /t/ does not appear in most of the nom. >singulars? I also saw nocz in Polish, nos in Welsh, but was not >given declension. It seems the /t/ only makes its appearance in >the nom sing in German, French and Sanskrit. Please forgive my >ignorance, but sometimes in analysis on this list, this base >morphology makes a difference. Why is the /t/ not regarded as >just a fairly common stem that sometimes emerges in root and >sometimes doesn't? I hope this doesn't sound terribly stupid. >[ Moderator's response: > In those languages in which it does not appear, other processes > are at work, usually word structure constraints. > --rma ] What has been pointed out here is another pitfall of using dictionaries to do comparative linguistics without knowing anything about the languages that are being compared. Dictionaries traditionally give the nominative singular as the lexical entry. In many instances the nominative singular is the linguistically least-marked form. Many times features of the root that are important for comparative work are suppressed in the nominative singular because of the phonotactics of the language, but will still be found in the stem (the form to which other case endings are added). Thus using a dictionary without being aware of the phonotactical rules of the language is a recipe for disaster when doing comparative work. Not only can you get false positives by comparing two similar looking forms that may have resulted from the suppression of entirely different elements from the stem, but you can also get false negatives from words where one language has suppressed or mutated a stem element and another hasn't (e.g., Lat. - Ger. ). Similarly, if you don't know that the stem of Fin. vesi (the dictionary entry) 'water' is vete- you are likely to miss the connection with IE *wat-/*w at t-. So doing comparative work by looking words up in a dictionary is just a matter of collecting "lookalikes" that have similar meanings. Some may be valid comparisons and some not; but if they are, it is more a matter of luck rather than skill since most dictionaries simply don't tell you everything that you need to know to do comparative linguistics beyond this simplistic level. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 14 17:54:19 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:54:19 -0600 Subject: Greek question (night?) In-Reply-To: <36E9A40B.A4198426@stud.uni-frankfurt.de> Message-ID: >> In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" >>besides Germanic or Modern French?Wayles Browne wrote: >> Also Slavic: Russian noch', Old Church Slavonic nosht' etc. go back to >>Common >> Slavic *nokt-. >but see also Polish _noc_ It goes back to Common Slavic [see above] >notice Rumanian _noapte_ and Catalan _nit_ both are from Latin nocte- intervocalic velars get labialized in Rumanian, someone else can explain the exact details and conditions the Catalan form palatalized the /k/ to /y/; which is normal in /kt/ clusters inherited by Ibero-Romance from Latin, someone else can elaborate on the transformation of the vowel >-- >Oli Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From neander97 at yahoo.com Sun Mar 14 18:16:51 1999 From: neander97 at yahoo.com (Hal Neumann) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 10:16:51 -0800 Subject: Chariots Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: [ moderator snip ] Horses were always strong enough to carry a person on their back_for a while_. Zebras, wild horses, and ponies no larger than the neolithic/Bronze Age chariot pony could all do this. The question actually relates to how long they could be ridden and how much gear the rider could carry. ------------------------------------- Both the Tarpan (Equus ferus ferus Boddaert) and Przewalskis horse Equus ferus przewalski Poliakof) fall within the size range of "modern" ponies such as the Celtic, Devonshire, Exmoor, Iceland, and Shetland--all of which can carry a rider and saddle for some time and some distance. [A pony is commonly defined as a horse which stands less than 14 hands at the withers/shoulder--a hand equals 10.16 cm.] For those who doubt the endurance of ponies carrying a rider and gear, consider the North American mustang, which average 14 hands(140.2 cm.) at the withers, with a range from 13 to 14.2 (132.08 to 144.27 cm). Mustangs proved quite capable of bearing Native American warriors, impedimenta and all, over long distances. These ponies likewise served to bear "cowboys," complete with Texas-style saddles and personal gear, for long periods of time. Some say that the horse when first domesticated would not have had the muscular and skeletal strength to bear a rider on their backs. Even if this were the case, evidence exists (as late as the third millennium) of horsemen riding seated over the hind quarters of their mounts the so-called "donkey seat" (Moorey 1970). The horse remains uncovered at Dereivka on the Dnieper (a late Neolithic site) fall within the range of 132-144 cm. Telegin 1986, Levine 1990, Anthony 1991, Anthony and Brown 1991) These ponies fall well within the parameter of what could be considered a "riding pony." It is my understanding that Anthony (1991) and Anthony and Brown (1991) believe that horses were "kept" (if not "domesticated") at Dereivka for hundreds of years. As a child, my family raised horse on the high plains of eastern Montana (both gentled and free-ranging stock), I fail to see how it would be possible to raise horses without being mounted. Unlike livestock such as cattle and goats, it would be impossible, I believe, to herd horses on foot. It just seems a given that if you raise horses in any number beyond the occasional pet/oddity, then you must ride horses. --Hal W Neumann From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Mar 14 18:34:54 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 18:34:54 -0000 Subject: k and q Message-ID: Joel draws phonetic conclusions from the representation of Hittite /k/ in Biblical Hebrew as or . Modern Hebrew routinely represents English /k/ as even though it is phonetically closer to Hebrew /k/. The reason is morphophonemic, not phonetic. The written is subject to fricativisation in certain conditions, whereas the written is not. Writing the loan sound as prevents inappropriate fricativisation. This indicates that the logic behind Joel's argument may not necessarily follow. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 14 20:52:53 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 14:52:53 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Yoel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Yoel L. Arbeitman Date: Saturday, March 13, 1999 11:16 PM > The question of what was the form of Hittite and Anatolian "drink" has >progressed greatly since Sturtevant's time. In 1980 Morpurgo-Davies showed >that the cognate in Hieroglyphic Luwian was /u:/ and since *gw disappears >in HL, but *kw does not, the problem is solved. Proto-Anatolian had the >verb *e/agw-, known so well in that famed sentence deciphered by Hrozny' nu >NINDA adanzi nu watar akwanzi "And they eat bread and they drink water" . >It was long thought that here was the cognate, as a verb, of Latin aqua >"water". But now it is certain that the iterative-durative form cited >represents /akw=skizzi/ with regressive voice assimilation. You seem to be saying, if I understand you correctly, that ak-k{.}u-uS-ki-iz-zi [akuSkitsi] is derived from /akw+sk+izzi/, representing [aguSkitsi]. Do you have other examples of devoicing a stop before /sk/ in Hittite since, of course, it is, to my knowledge, unknown in IE? >And, long >before the 1980 discovery W. Winter proposed the cognation of Latin ebrius >"drunk"/ sobrius "sober" (with -b- < *-gwh-) as well as Greek ne:phalos >"sober" with -ph- < only *-gwh-. Thus, far from being cognate with Latin >aqua, Anatolian *a/egw- is cognate with Latin ebrius "drunk", Gk. ne:phalos >"sober" and the long ago proposed Tocharian yok- "to drink". All argument >has been closed by the Hiero. Luw. verb which is reduced to a mere /u:/ and >is not open to argument. Thomas reconstructs IE *eg{w}- for Tocharian yok-; while IE g{w} normally corresponds to Latin [v] and Greek [b/d/g], even IE g{w}h does not yield the required Latin [b] either though it *might* yield Greek [ph]. We are being asked to accept an IE root, *eg{w}h-, which appears *without* the expected Latin reflex [v] for IE *g{w}h, and with a *-ri formant; and to equate that with Greek *ne + *eg{w}h with a *-l(o) formant. While this may be correct, I do not think that the data is so conclusive as to foreclose argument. Also, are you asserting that IE g{w}h like g{w} appears as HL /u:/? Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 14 21:06:44 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 15:06:44 -0600 Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: Sunday, March 14, 1999 3:22 AM >>msn.com writes: >>I do not want to actively enter this discussion but, for whatever it may be >>worth, I believe the Germanic sound system was developed in the IE homeland, >>in close proximity to Semitic, as the correspondences I have developed >>between Germanic and Semitic seem to suggest --- after other IE branches had >>struck for the west. >> >-- gee, that sure makes them acrobatic travellers -- bouncing all around the >map, getting from somewhere in the Middle East to Jutland, crossing all sorts >of other linguistic territory on the way... Yes, acrobats just like the Huns. Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 15 04:36:16 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 22:36:16 -0600 Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Glen Gordon Date: Sunday, March 14, 1999 7:16 PM >DLW: > See coming response to Glenny. Both /m/ and /n/ tend to occur in > words for female care-givers, with /n/ typically referring to more > secondary ones, as in "nanny". >So what. You haven't demonstrated a link between relationship-words and >pronouns nor proof that your "mama" theory is attributable to pronouns. >DLW: > 1st pronouns do show a statistically significant tendency to use > nasals, [...] If a mother is going to imagine that her baby, who is > in fact only babbling, is talking to her, then "mama" and "me" are > the words she will want to hear the baby say. >Which can be caused by anything, including mass linguistic >relationships. That languages can be related is ubiquitously >demonstrated throughout linguistics. The "mama syndrome" in relation to >pronouns is not in the least. I am terminating the discussion. >Again, you're being Eurocentric. Imagine an Abkhaz mother whose word for >"me" is , if the baby is practicing the /m/ sound, she will never >hear "me" at all in her baby's babbling nor will the baby grow up saying > instead, unless the baby is wrought with dysphasia. Glen, you are really in trouble now because both Mark Hubey and I agree with you (`:--|) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comment-Baby-Talk.htm Pat From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Mar 15 06:57:09 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 23:57:09 -0700 Subject: lenis and glottalic Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Glen Gordon wrote: > On the subject of lenis/fortis, Miguel seems to be suggesting that lenis > stops (or "long stops") tend to voice more often than fortis stops. So > might I ask, is this true? In the Numic languages of Uto-Aztecan, this is a cold, hard fact: Short voiceless plosives are voiced and become [+cont] between vowels absolutely and in casual speech in initial position as well (but not [+cont]). Long voiceless plosives are not even shortened in intervocalic position, but remain voiceless and [-cont]. John McLaughlin Utah State University From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Mon Mar 15 07:03:20 1999 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 08:03:20 +0100 Subject: PIE Plosive System Message-ID: Part of original message : > There are three facts that any posited system must explain: > 1) The absence of roots of the form /DeD/. > 2) The absence of roots of the forms /TeDH/ and /DHeT/. > 3) The absence of/b/. Based on Benveniste (Origines...1935:170), surely posited systems must be able to explain the absence of *any* /CeC/ root where C is identical? In the canonical root form, B. states that "C can be any consonant provided that C- is *different* from -C" (translation and emphasis mine). Benveniste goes on to say that the only combination not found in PIE is /voiceless + (e) + voiced aspirated/, but he does not explain why. One hypothesis might be that this is because other than just phonological constraints are at work here. Dennis. From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 15 09:12:44 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:12:44 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <40c19da0.36eb6f5c@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Yet the premise is that PIE somehow crossed the continent in this plodding >manner over thousands of years, not due to migration or trade, but following a >technology that created not mobility (as with the Polynesians) but sedentary >local populations. >JS has written on this list of a kind of gradient of dialects spreading from a >core. Renfrew mentions that the Polynesian migration can (to some degree) be >traced linguistically. Where is the gradient of language variation across >Europe from the core? A lot has happened in Europe since the Neolithic. Whether IE began to spread across Europe from the Balkans in the mid sixth millennium, as I claim, or from the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the early fourth millennium, as claimed by the Kurgan theory, any initial dialect gradients that came into being have been destroyed by later language spreads. Celtic has been largely swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern Europe with new dialect gradients. Etcetera. >Mallory in In Search of the Indo-Europeans writes (for another reason) that >generally, "before the emergence of major state languages we encounter most >linguistic entities in the world occupying areas that range from the extremely >small up to 1,000,000 sq kilometres." That rather high top number is an area >about 380 miles on each side. The figures on North America in 1492 Mallory >gives has each language of the estimated 350 with 64000sq km - about 150 miles >on a side. At that rate Europe would have about150 different languages. That's a pretty meaningless number. Where does one draw the line between language and dialect, especially when dialect gradients are involved? What are the geographical conditions? What are the social and technological conditions? What is the recent history? All we can say with confidence is that the number of languages has been going down on average since the Paleolithic. >The idea that PIE could have avoided this splintering outcome, without an >extraordinary standardizing agent (like Mallory's "state languages" or strong >central markets), just simply goes against anything we know about the >neolithic period in Europe. In fact it even goes against all we know about >the behavior of pre-standardized languages themselves. Nobody is denying that PIE *has* splintered. The extent of the splintering is somewhat obscured by the fact that many of the splinters have not survived at all and are not known to us, or only very marginally. There is a large number of real or hypothesized IE languages that have been swallowed up by later migrations and language replacements: "Nordwestblock", "Alteuropa"isch", Lusitanian, Siculan, Elymaean, Messapian, Illyrian, Venetic, Daco-Thracian, Phrygian, Cimmerian, "D-Baltic", etc. And there's no reason to think that this process of language spread, followed by differentiation (dialect gradients), followed by yet another spread of one or more of the dialects, obscuring the gradient, etc. hasn't been going on since the very beginning of the Indo-European expansion. In fact, it *is* the IE expansion. At any given time, IE languages have expanded mainly at the expense of other IE languages and dialects. Only at the edges of the area, IE expanded at the expense of other language groups. This is what makes the subgrouping of IE such a difficult matter. Transitional dialects between one variety and the other have been wiped out, and languages from different dialect gradients have later come into contact with each other, drawing closer together again after an initial differentiation. As I have stated, I think there's evidence that this has happened with Germanic and Balto-Slavic, and with Greek and Armenian. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 15 09:32:05 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:32:05 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EBAFCF.1BE5EA8@neiu.edu> Message-ID: "maher, johnpeter" wrote: >In addition, Casdtilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; Surely not. Usted < vuestra merced. >and Italian "Lei" is a calque of sorts on the latter. Lei = "she" (namely, "eccelenza", "maesta`" and other such feminine abstract nouns). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 09:42:57 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:42:57 GMT Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: Glen Gordon wrote:- > I agree with *H1 = /?/ and *H2 = /h./ but I don't think that a simple > voicing of *H2 to make *H3 is adequate to explain the apparent > "rounding" effect that *H3 has on vowels. A labial quality must be added > to explain this - thus *H3 = /h./ and it is a labial *H2. ... The moderator commented:- > The evidence adduced in favour of voicing of *H3 is Skt. pibati, Latin bibit > "he drinks", a reduplicated present from a root reconstructed as *peH3-, in > combination with Sturtevant's Rule. A tad thin, I admit. --rma In my mouth at least, I find that the /e/ in /h.a/ tries to acquire a distinct flavour of /a/, and the /e/ in /3e/ (where /3/ is ayin) tries to acquire a distinct flavour of /o/. It seems that having to nearly close the pharynx at the epiglottis to produce /h./ or /3/ interferes with the mechanism that moves the arytenoid cartilages to make the vocal cords operate or not, so that voicing or devoicing /h./ or /3/ affects the timbre of nearby vowels. The root H3-D-W = "enemy" or similar meaning occurs in in Greek "odussomai", and in Arabic "H3aduuw" = "enemy". [ Moderator's response: There exist in the phoneme inventories of several NW Caucasian languages both voiceless and voiced labialized pharyngals, which cause rounding in adjacent vowels; thus, "o-coloring" need not imply voicing in *H3. --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Mar 15 19:08:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:08:02 -0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: I accept Ross's comment about the difference in time scale between Polynesia and Melanesia (Ross says about 2,000 and 40,000 years respectively). However, if PIE is roughly 4500 - 2500, and the attested languages appear from roughly 1500, we do seem to be more in the "ballpark" of Polynesia than Melanesia, so a comparison with the degree of differentiation in New Guinea may still be misleading. Peter From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Mon Mar 15 22:00:36 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 22:00:36 +0000 Subject: new book on insular 'celts' Message-ID: This is not directly linguistic, but possibily relevant to the input from Brittonic into English. An archaeologist called Simon James, now at Durham but formerly at the British Museum, has written a book called 'Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?', which was discussed on BBC Radio 4 today in 'Start the Week'. Enquiries at Blackwells show that the BM/Thames and Hudson are the publishers and that they have the book on order, but with an expected publication date in September. I am seeking more info. Gordon Selway Message-Id: Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 22:27:07 +0000 To: Indo-European at xkl.com From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Subject: new book on insular 'celts' - PS The BBC say that the book is being published on April 8th by British Museum Publications. No price or ISBN - the information from Blackwells was GBP 6.99. Gordon Selway From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 11:24:53 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 11:24:53 +0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: <199903112110.NAA26993@netcom.com> Message-ID: >So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required >for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years >for them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one >party to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if >both are members of the same general speech community. This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful way. A lot depends on exposure: in Scandinavia, for instance, some Swedes understand Danish rather well, and others find it very difficult, mostly depending on how close they live to Denmark and whether they are within range of Danish TV. Some Germans understand Dutch reasonably well without learning it, others don't - and vice versa. Again, this is at least partly regionally dependent, partly dependent on the degree of communicative need felt by the speakers. Some Swiss dialects are wholly impenetrable to German speakers from Germany or Austria. Yet these languages have all been separate for less than 1000 years (I mean, in each pairing I describe, not the whole group). The ancestors of English and German were probably mutually comprehensible less then 2000 years ago, yet now they aren't even close. The Normans have a lot to answer for. It seems to me that trained linguists tend to overemphasise wildly the ease with which ordinary people will understand a spoken language in real time - not a written document over which they can pore, but an utterance at which you only get one chance. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 [ Moderator's response: As I mentioned in the preamble comments before the suggestion quoted above, I have myself seen communication among a mixed group of speakers of Slavic languages, none of them trained linguists and most with high school level educations. It is not a matter of instant understanding, but of working at understanding by all parties. I do not mean to imply that a Gael and a Turfanian of c. 700 AD could have understood each other in this fashion, but that 3500 years or so earlier, speakers of the easternmost and westernmost IE dialects might, with a will, have done so. I certainly do not think we should reject the latter notion out of hand. --rma ] From henryh at ling.upenn.edu Mon Mar 15 23:35:03 1999 From: henryh at ling.upenn.edu (Henry M. Hoenigswald) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:35:03 -0600 Subject: Reconstructing *sH- for PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >I'd be interested in learning of any studies on Indo-European laryngeals >after word-initial S-. I'm only aware of Henry M. Hoenigswald's 1993 >article at present (Comparative-Historical Linguistics (Papers in Honor of >O. Szemerenyi III), J. Benjamins). Is anyone working on this topic at the >moment? >Many thanks, >Dennis. Thanks! You'll find my main argument in Lg. 28 (1952) 182-5 (minus the final peroration). Sincerely, HMH Henry M. Hoenigswald 908 Westdale Avenue Swarthmore PA 19081-1804 Tel: 1-610 543-8086 From yoel at mindspring.com Mon Mar 15 13:00:09 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 08:00:09 -0500 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Point well taken. But, dictionaries of "Classical Languages", Lat. and Gk., will always give both the nom. citation form AND the stem, usually in the form of the genitive sg. Case under discussion: Lat. nox, noctis will always be the listing from which one knows that the nom. nox /noks/ represents a reduced stem /nok-/ + the desisence -s. And OIndic (Skt.) dictionaries give for noun and verb the stem rather than either resp. the nom. sg. or the third sg. active present. For the verb Classical Dictionaries give first sg. act. present. In Semitic the verb is given in the past/perfect(ive) 3 sg. masc., etc. Thus there is variation in what is given as the basic datum. Probably what is here said about Finnish I am sure is true irrespective of whether or not I want to compare it to the hypothetical IE cited. And this is probably true for most modern language dictionaries. The Classical, OIndic, Hebrew, Arabic, etc., cases I am most familiar with, have a very long grammatical tradition. Yoel Bob Whiting wrote: >What has been pointed out here is another pitfall of using >dictionaries to do comparative linguistics without knowing >anything about the languages that are being compared. >Dictionaries traditionally give the nominative singular as the >lexical entry. In many instances the nominative singular is the >linguistically least-marked form. Many times features of the >root that are important for comparative work are suppressed in >the nominative singular because of the phonotactics of the >language, but will still be found in the stem (the form to which >other case endings are added). Thus using a dictionary without >being aware of the phonotactical rules of the language is a >recipe for disaster when doing comparative work. Not only can >you get false positives by comparing two similar looking forms >that may have resulted from the suppression of entirely different >elements from the stem, but you can also get false negatives from >words where one language has suppressed or mutated a stem element >and another hasn't (e.g., Lat. - Ger. ). Similarly, >if you don't know that the stem of Fin. vesi (the dictionary >entry) 'water' is vete- you are likely to miss the connection >with IE *wat-/*w at t-. >So doing comparative work by looking words up in a dictionary is >just a matter of collecting "lookalikes" that have similar >meanings. Some may be valid comparisons and some not; but if >they are, it is more a matter of luck rather than skill since >most dictionaries simply don't tell you everything that you need >to know to do comparative linguistics beyond this simplistic >level. From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Mar 15 13:18:55 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 13:18:55 -0000 Subject: k and q Message-ID: We cannot ignore the famed example of Sapir's. Hittite /kubaGi/ (/G/ - voiced pharyngeal, ghain) has a double representation in Biblical Hebrew: qoba'' ('' = ayin) and koba''. From this Sapir concluded that whereas Hebrew is aspirated phonetically and Hebrew /q/ is non-aspirated, but glottalized or pharyngealized (emphatic), the Hittite which was phonetically [k] i.e. [-aspiration, -emphaticness], could not adequately be represented by either Hebrew grapheme. So the alternating writings. Modern Hebrew routinely represents English /k/ as even though it is phonetically closer to Hebrew /k/. The reason is morphophonemic, not phonetic. The written is subject to fricativisation in certain conditions, whereas the written is not. Writing the loan sound as prevents inappropriate fricativisation. This indicates that the logic behind Joel's argument may not necessarily follow. Not necessarily, but it's pretty good. Modern Hebrew is inapplicable; it has two phonemes /k/ and /x/; the first is written with qoph or (initial/double) kaph, the second with heth or (postvocalic) kaph. Modern Hebrew has been through a European mangle and lost its Semitic phonetics. (I don't know any Modern Hebrew and maybe non-European Jews did preserve [q], but I believe I'm describing the standard modern language.) Biblical Hebrew had /q/ and /h./ and /k/. At the time it was borrowing from Hittite these would have been like the Arabic. (Okay, the batteries on my tape-recorder ran out that day.) The three consonants /q/ and /s./ and /t./ (qoph, sadhe, teth) were emphatic and didn't have a voicing contrast. Whereas /k/ was part of the series /p b t d k g/: and at a much, _much_ later time (Masoretic pointing is about as close to us in time as it was to the Hittite period) these had fricative allophones (entangled with morphology but not depending on it), suggesting that at an earlier time the voiceless members either had aspirated allophones or were aspirated. I don't know what the evidence is for when the fricatives came in, but my pedantic old Hebrew teacher saw no good evidence for them in the Biblical language. The point about Hittite /k/ falling between the available [kh] and [q'] is reasonable. Nicholas Widdows [Disclaimer: If another disclaimer appears below this one, it isn't one of mine, it's Trace PLC in Big Brother overdrive.] Disclaimer This email is confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Trace Computers PLC. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this email in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this mail is strictly prohibited From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 15 22:36:51 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 22:36:51 GMT Subject: PIE Plosive System In-Reply-To: Message-ID: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) wrote: >Part of original message : >> There are three facts that any posited system must explain: >> 1) The absence of roots of the form /DeD/. >> 2) The absence of roots of the forms /TeDH/ and /DHeT/. >> 3) The absence of/b/. >Based on Benveniste (Origines...1935:170), surely posited systems must be able >to explain the absence of *any* /CeC/ root where C is identical? That too, although I don't think the answer lies necessarily in phonological constraints. It would have been less confusing to state the above as: 1) The absence of roots of the form /DeG/. 2) The absence of roots of the forms /TeGH/ and /DHeK/. 3) The absence of /b/. >Benveniste goes on to >say that the only combination not found in PIE is /voiceless + (e) + voiced >aspirated/ Even less confusing: 1) The near absence of roots of the form /DeG/. 2) The near absence of roots of the forms /TeGH/ and /DHeK/. 3) The near absence of /b/. The vast majority of roots are of the form DHeGH or TeK. DeG, TeGH, DHeK are extremely rare to non-existent. DeK, TeG and DheG are medium fequency (probably because of the relatively low frequency of *d and *g and (near) absence of *b). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From lmfosse at online.no Mon Mar 15 09:34:28 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 10:34:28 +0100 Subject: SV: Reconstructing *sH- for PIE Message-ID: Dennis Philps wrote: > I'd be interested in learning of any studies on Indo-European laryngeals > after word-initial S-. I'm only aware of Henry M. Hoenigswald's 1993 > article at present (Comparative-Historical Linguistics (Papers in Honor of > O. Szemerenyi III), J. Benjamins). Is anyone working on this topic at the > moment? You may find useful information in the following book, which is a general treatment of the L. T.: Fredrik Otto Lindeman, "Introduction to the 'Laryngeal Theory'", Norwegian University Press, Oslo 1987. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From iglesias at axia.it Mon Mar 15 22:29:54 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 14:29:54 PST Subject: Rate of change Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote on 13 March: >Galicians tell me that Portuguese is a dialect of Galician :> Yes, that's exactly how (anachronistically ?) most Galicians view the matter. Otherwise, why bother with the Reconquista? :) The similarity between modern official Galician and Portuguese is highest for morphology, followed by lexicon, syntax and pronunciation, which is the most divergent. The situation is bit like British and American English. Sometimes Galician has preserved the archaic feature and Portuguese has innovated, and vice versa. But here we are speaking of twice the time span of separation of the official languages, since the 15th century. And this brings us back to the topic of the thread. >>3) The pronunciation of Galician is very different from the standard >>Portuguese of Lisbon, but if we consider the dialects of Northern Portugal >>the distance is much less. (For example no difference between "b" and "v"). >But that depends on the dialect of Galician, right? Yes, but nobody in Galicia pronounces "b" and "v" differently. >Some are virtually the same as northern Portuguese while others are >pretty close to bable, spoken in Asturias Yes and no. All Galician is similar to northern Portuguese, although perhaps in different ways, i.e., one dialect shares one feature and another dialect another, but only the Galician bordering on Asturias is similar to Asturian. >But I think this may be due to Spanish influence in "urban" >Galician and in southern Brazilian --as well as the million or so Galicians >in southern Brazil. That may be. >>5) Galician may sound like Castillian, but in fact its sounds including the >>lisped "s" were a local development parallel to that of Castille. (See >>"Grama'tica Portuguesa" by Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, Ed. Gredos, Madrid, >>chapter on "El Gallego") The south of Galicia uses "seseo". >How about intervocalic , final & among your wife's family? The Galician silibants: "z", as in Castilian (= Eng. "th"); "s", as in Castillian or Basque; "x" as in Port. (=Eng. "sh"), are all unvoiced, including those in the intervocalic position. Also, those in southern Galicia who use "seseo" use the Castillian "s", not the Eng. "s" or Basque "z". And this kind of "seseo" is considered incorrect by the Castillians, but obviously not by the Galicians! Final "s" is very distinct, like the Mexicans and unlike the southern Spaniards! is /sC/ Some northern portuguese dialects have both the voiced and unvoiced series. See in addition to the book by Pilar Va'zquez, Celso Cunha, Lindley Cintra, "Grama'tica do Portugue^s contempora^neo", Ed. J. Sa' da Costa, Lisboa, 1985, pages 6 to 12. >I've heard Galicians who pronounce & "soft g" [/zh/ in >Portuguese] as /sh/ Yes, that's standard, as /zh/ doesn't exist in Galician. Port. Janeiro = Gal. Xaneiro, with final "o" as in Castillian, not as in Port. or Asturian /u/. >>Un sau'do carin~oso a todos da lista indo-europea. Boa tarde. I (Pilar) pronounce this as follows: /u~ Saudu cariNoSo a todoS da liSta indo-europeo. boa tarde/ S = Castillian and Basque "s". You will say shockingly Castillian, but that's the way Galician developed. (Possibly speakers of country dialects would have more exotic pronunciations). But Galicia has been linked to Castille and even more to Leo'n for centuries and has been separated from Portugal by lines of castles and forts with rusty canons pointing at each other, and yet the dialects, the food ("o caldo galego"/"o caldo ... verde" /b/), the wine "vin~o do Ribeiro" / "vinho ... verde" /b/),, the maize stores ("ho'rreos"), the music and the dances, and the folk dress and even the physical appearance of the people, many of whom have light skin, hair and eyes, in, particularly, Minho ("A Costa ... verde" /b/), and Galicia still remain remarkably similar. It should be added finally that Castilian as spoken by Galicians (offensively called "Castrapo") is distinctive, and the other Spaniards say it is less harsh and more "dulce y carin~oso" than Castilian as spoken by natives of Castille. Extensive use is also made of the diminutive "-in~o, -in~a", e.g. "despacin~o" = slowly. Joint message from Frank Rossi and Pilar Iglesias Lo'pez Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 15 22:56:15 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 16:56:15 -0600 Subject: STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS Message-ID: Dear Lars and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Lars Henrik Mathiesen Date: Monday, March 15, 1999 3:16 AM [ moderator snip ] >I'll tell you what would be needed for a probabilistic test of >language relatedness to be valid. >First, you must decide on a protocol to follow which will provide an >objective measure of the similarity between two languages. The >important thing is that this measurement must not depend on the >researcher's knowledge of the languages --- on the contrary, it should >be repeatable with consistent results by different people. NOTE: this >measure of similarity is your experimental result --- any conclusions >about relatedness would only follow after statistical analysis. I could not agree more. No one attempting comparison among very disparate language families is ever going to be able to achieve the expertness of a Larry Trask in Basque or a Sasha Vovin in Altaic, men who have devoted their lives to such study, and, as a consequence, the depth of knowledge of whom cannot be matched in *multiple* disciplines. >But, to borrow a phrase, you must surely agree that this is not the >way historical linguistics are done today, by you or anybody else, and >therefore any attempt to use statistics to defend your hypotheses is >just so much hot air. I have never tried to use statistics to "defend" my hypothesis but perhaps I should. Excellent contribution! Pat From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 15 23:35:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:35:30 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: >> abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] >> rel. con vasco abarka; raíz de alpargata [sandal] [c] >> pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] >Basque denotes a kind of rustic sandal, traditionally a soft >leather moccasin held on by a cord passed through holes in the sandal >and wrapped around the calf. The word is very probably native, but >cannot be monomorphemic, with that plosive in the third syllable. >The favorite guess sees it as a formation involving `branch(es)' >and a noun-forming suffix <-ka>. This is semantically awkward, and >seems to require that ancestral abarkas were made of foliage -- not very >comfortable, I would have thought. maybe from cord made from pliable bark of branches? would that work? >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from >Romance or from Basque. The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, doesn't exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian Arabic may have allowed it or not. There are words, though, with al-p- associated with Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras [sp?] and others that escape me now. Maybe someone else can help explain this From yoel at mindspring.com Mon Mar 15 13:46:21 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 08:46:21 -0500 Subject: k and q In-Reply-To: <001801be6e4a$d0256720$c1eaabc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: Dear Peter, There is a name miscalling involved and a prime point missed: (1) I am Yoel, the Hebrew name that comes into English as Joel, but I am not Joel. Joel Arbeitman is a cousin of mine, I believe. You'll find him elsewhere on the WWW. (2) What is said about Modern Hebrew is largely true. But the pattern of transliterating alien , , goes back to early Post-Biblical Hebrew times when the spirantization for b,g.d, k, p, t post vocalic rule was flourishing. It was likely not flouring or existant at the time that Anatolian entered Biblical Hebrew (via the Philistines is one main theory). Modern Hebrew writes both emphatic k. and emphatic t. (there is no emphatic *p.) for alien /k/, /t/ and such., while reserving t for transcribing Gk. theta, k for Greek khi. I do not really see that your exposition of PBH clarifies or in any way diminishes Sapir's magisterial demonstration. BTW, k. is also transliterated often as q. t., on the other hand, has no such luxury in the Greco-Latin-English alphabet. And b, g, and d in Hebrew have no emphatic counterparts (d. does in other Semitic languages). The Hebrew transliteration of the -h- in Hittite (Anatolian) kupahi as an ayin confirms the pronunciation of this singularly written intervocalic laryngeal as a voiced velar laryngeal as at this early period Hebrew ayin represented both phonemes ayin and ghain. Yoel At 06:34 PM 3/14/99 -0000, you wrote: >Joel draws phonetic conclusions from the representation of Hittite /k/ in >Biblical Hebrew as or . >Modern Hebrew routinely represents English /k/ as even though it is >phonetically closer to Hebrew /k/. The reason is morphophonemic, not >phonetic. The written is subject to fricativisation in certain >conditions, whereas the written is not. Writing the loan sound as >prevents inappropriate fricativisation. This indicates that the logic >behind Joel's argument may not necessarily follow. >Peter From yoel at mindspring.com Mon Mar 15 14:05:04 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:05:04 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <000801be6e5c$e2563660$2e54fad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: Dear Pat and Colleagues, In a word the answer is YES. The durative-iterative, same morpheme involved, of Hittite dai- (< IE *dhe:) "to place, etc." is written which represnts /t-skizzi/ where the root d(ai-) is reduced to its minimum and the iterative -ski- is added with retrogressive assimilitation of radical d to t. [Answers continued below]. At 02:52 PM 3/14/99 -0600, you wrote: >Dear Yoel and IEists: >-----Original Message----- >From: Yoel L. Arbeitman >Date: Saturday, March 13, 1999 11:16 PM >> The question of what was the form of Hittite and Anatolian "drink" has >>progressed greatly since Sturtevant's time. In 1980 Morpurgo-Davies showed >>that the cognate in Hieroglyphic Luwian was /u:/ and since *gw disappears >>in HL, but *kw does not, the problem is solved. Proto-Anatolian had the >>verb *e/agw-, known so well in that famed sentence deciphered by Hrozny' nu >>NINDA adanzi nu watar akwanzi "And they eat bread and they drink water" . >>It was long thought that here was the cognate, as a verb, of Latin aqua >>"water". But now it is certain that the iterative-durative form cited >>represents /akw=skizzi/ with regressive voice assimilation. >You seem to be saying, if I understand you correctly, that >ak-k{.}u-uS-ki-iz-zi [akuSkitsi] is derived from /akw+sk+izzi/, >representing [aguSkitsi]. Do you have other examples of devoicing a stop >before /sk/ in Hittite since, of course, it is, to my knowledge, unknown in >IE? >>And, long >>before the 1980 discovery W. Winter proposed the cognation of Latin ebrius >>"drunk"/ sobrius "sober" (with -b- < *-gwh-) as well as Greek ne:phalos >>"sober" with -ph- < only *-gwh-. Thus, far from being cognate with Latin >>aqua, Anatolian *a/egw- is cognate with Latin ebrius "drunk", Gk. ne:phalos >>"sober" and the long ago proposed Tocharian yok- "to drink". All argument >>has been closed by the Hiero. Luw. verb which is reduced to a mere /u:/ and >>is not open to argument. >Thomas reconstructs IE *eg{w}- for Tocharian yok-; while IE g{w} normally >corresponds to Latin [v] and Greek [b/d/g], even IE g{w}h does not yield the >required Latin [b] either though it *might* yield Greek [ph]. We are being >asked to accept an IE root, *eg{w}h-, which appears *without* the expected >Latin reflex [v] for IE *g{w}h, and with a *-ri formant; and to equate that >with Greek *ne + *eg{w}h with a *-l(o) formant. While this may be correct, I >do not think that the data is so conclusive as to foreclose argument. >Also, are you asserting that IE g{w}h like g{w} appears as HL /u:/? To the last question, the IE labio-velar and aspirated labio-velars as part of the general obstruents and aspirated obstruents had merged in Pre-Anatolian. So the outcome is the same. For the earlier question, the Greek and Latin outcomes are discussed in detail in e.g. Ernount-Meillet, Chantraine, etc., the standard Latin and Greek etym. dictionaries. The connection actually goes back to Juret. Sorry I can't quote the details,which are convinicing,off the the top of my head, and I don't generally go to ref. books for these postings. BTW, Latin outcome of IE *gwous should be *vos, but it is, like the Greek bous, bos. Contributory here are both dialect forms and the convergence with Latin vos "you (pl.)" hat would have resulted. W. Winter's article in in the '50's Journal of the LSA. The refs. are for sure in Tischler's Hittitisches eymologisches Glossar. YLA From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Mar 16 02:44:12 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:44:12 -0800 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Pat said: >Do you have other examples of devoicing a stop >before /sk/ in Hittite since, of course, it is, to my knowledge, unknown in >IE? Devoicing before s is regular in IE, of course, so why should we question devoicing before /sk/? Peter From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Mar 15 14:32:00 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 14:32:00 -0000 Subject: Fortis Consonants Message-ID: > The term "fortis" is not really one which has a clear and > objective phonetic meaning. According to Catford, "the terms tense/lax, > strong/weak, fortis/lenis, and so on should never be loosely and > carelessly used without precise phonetic specification." Thank for that. It's not just me then. I was never taught those terms, and whenever I read them I'm thinking What? What? I don't want a theatre critic's opinion of the sound. Tell me which bits of my mouth to move! Using terms like this that (as far as I can tell) don't accurately describe the physiology is often a source of misunderstanding. These "aspirated" voiced stops, is anyone really suggesting they were aspirated, with breathy voice on the onset of the following vowel, or were they murmured the way modern Indian ones (I think) are? It could make quite a difference to the glottalic theory. English [sp] is compared to Danish or Icelandic [sb] because the [b] fits the rest of their phonology, and I've heard it said that our choice of [p] is (phonetically) arbitrary. But voiceless [p] is not the same as devoiced [b]. The arytenoid cartilages are held and are moving differently. That's where the tenseness and weakness partly are, but I would prefer to see them described in (laryngal)phonation terms: voiced, devoiced, voiceless, breathy, creaky, etc. A sound law might be more easily expressed if the right structural features were chosen. I've seen a book on Arabic say that English vowel-initial words also begin with hamza. But the larynx can presumable make plosive, implosive, or ejective stops; most of us have one, Arabic and German have the other, Maltese contrasts them (if I read it right). Phonation: Cinderella's kid sister. Nicholas Widdows (probably) Disclaimer This email is confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Trace Computers PLC. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this email in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this mail is strictly prohibited From jrader at m-w.com Mon Mar 15 10:40:16 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 10:40:16 +0000 Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: Some wild stabs in the dark, so to speak, here. Am I the only one who would be too embarrassed to post guesses without looking in the standard handbooks of historical phonology for Slavic or Celtic? At any rate, Polish and all the cognate words for "night" in Slavic show regular development of <-kti(:)->. There is no dropping of . Welsh is the outcome of a derivative, <*nokt-stu->, according to Pedersen. The regular outcome of intervocalic <-kt-> in Welsh is <-th->, a voiceless interdental fricative. The base shows up regularly in Welsh in the word "last night." The outcome of <-kt-> in Irish is <-cht->, which shows up in Old Irish "tonight," Modern Irish . Jim Rader > In a message dated 3/13/99 7:41:51 AM, you wrote: [ moderator snip ] > So, if I understand correctly, the nominative sing form in Latin and Greek > reflect the dropping of the -t due to the internal rules of those languages > regarding "the inventory of phonemes which appear word-finally." Does this > also account for the loss of the -t in Welsh and Polish for example? Does > Celtic prohibit the ending of a word in /t/? Can any of these t-less > nominatives be explained as a borrowing? Does that make any sense? > Regards, > Steve Long >[ Moderator's response: > For Polish and Welsh, presumably so; I am not versed in the histories or the > synchronic phonologies of those languages. Word-final *-t > Proto-Celtic > *-d if I remember correctly, but the *t in the word for "night" is not > word-final in PIE. And why should we bother with borrowing when there are > perfectly good explanations for the forms encountered that do not require an > outside influence? > --rma ] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 16:45:22 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 16:45:22 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > artesa "type of box" 1330 "cajón cuadrilongo de madera que es más angosto > hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] > v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] Coromines, Onomasticon Cataloniae, s.v. Artesa (de Segre) glosses the Spanish word `pastera, conca de fe`nyer pa etc.' [kneading trough] and suggests the toponym may be a metaphorical application of the (pre-Romance) common noun seen in Spanish (otherwise absent from Catalan). S.v. Artana he lists several other pre-Romance toponyms in -esavfrom Catalan territory: Olesa, Albesa, Manresa, Ardesa, Utxesa, Montesa, Anesa. Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 16:49:51 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 16:49:51 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 12 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [LT] > >Debatable. The form is Spanish. > Of course it is, BUT it's a Spanish name commonly associated in > Spanish literature and culture with the Basques [despite Sancho Panza], > along with In~igo [vs. Ignacio, with which it is correctly or incorrectly > associated]. Yes, the personal name `Sancho' is associated above all with the medieval Kingdom of Navarre, which was predominantly Basque-speaking at the time. The most famous bearers of the name were the Kings of Navarre, who were certainly Basques. In all likelihood, we are looking at a Basque name, though not necessarily one of ultimately Basque origin. This name is totally opaque in Basque, and I am aware of no plausible etymology for it. It should be borne in mind that medieval Romance names which were taken into Basque often developed very distinctive Basque forms. For example, it is hardly obvious that is merely the Basque form of the medieval Spanish given name , or that is a vernacular form of the name which appears in French as . And you might like to puzzle over how it is that the traditional Basque form of `Jim' is -- the etymology is straightforward if you know one or two things about Spanish personal names. > That's why I qualified it as "Spanish spoken by Basques". Elsewhere > in Spanish, the proper name developed as Santo or, more often, > Santos. In Latin America, I've only come across Sancho as a dog's > name. And I have never encountered anybody called in Spain -- I gather that the name is no longer conferred. However, or is still a vernacular form of in the French Basque Country, though the southern Basques prefer as their equivalent of . The first French Basque woman I ever met was called in French, in Basque, and I've more recently come across another French Basque with the same two names. My little 1972 dictionary of French Basque reports that is a possible male name equivalent to French , but I have never encountered anybody with either name. By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? [LT] > >The medieval Basque form of > >the name is , which must derive from * by dissimilatory > >loss of the first sibilant. And I don't see why this form would develop > >from a palatalized coronal (/ts/ notates an apical affricate). > >There is no need to appeal to a Romance palatal to account for the > >Basque /ai/. For example, the word for `fast, quick, soon' was mostly > > in the 16th century but is mostly today. > Then what's the reason? Is it an analogy to words with /ay/ > --which underwent this change previously because of metathesis of > palatal, etc. Is it part of a regional phenomenon? --as in > Portuguese, in which stressed /a/ often > /ay/ among certain > speakers, e.g. the proper name Bras, which is often /brayz, brayzh, > braysh/ Nobody knows what the reason is. All I can report is that /a/ in the first syllable of a polysyllable sometimes develops into /ai/, in a purely sporadic manner. But I *think* this only ever happens before a coronal consonant, which may be relevant. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 15 17:04:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:04:13 GMT Subject: Gender In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> [...] >> The lack of feminine gender in Hittite (Anatolian) suggests that >> the PIE three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter) is >> datable to the time between the split-off of Anatolian and the >> break-up of the rest of IE (beginning with Tocharian). >> [...] >I don't think this can be true, because: >(1) How could the feminine marker *-yeH2-/*-iH2- have been hit by the >working of ablaut if it only arose after the split-off when the process >must have been over? >(2) Adjectives like dankuis 'dark' appear to have the same background as >Lat. svavis, viz. the feminine in *-w-iH2- of u-stem adjectives (Skt. >sva:du'-s, fem. sva:d-v-i:'). >(3) The allative of 'one' is sa-ni-ya in the Anitta text, rather obviously >based on *s(V)m-iH2- (Gk. m!a fem. 'one'), conflated with some form where >the /m/ was word-final and so changed to /n/ (cf. Gk. ntr. he'n from IE >*se'm). >All in all, it looks like a two-bit reduction of the system of three >genders to two, whereby masc. and fem. formed a "common gender" >opposed to the surviving neuter just as in Dutch, Danish and Swedish. Supposing the two examples above are correctly analyzed as containing *-iH2, it only follows that Anatolian had nouns and adjectives ending in *-iH2. As it probably (had) had *-eH2 and *-uH2. The question is whether it can be shown that these suffixes (if suffixes they are) at one stage served to denote feminine gender in (Pre-)Proto-Anatolian. Now, if the neuter of dankuis were danku, you would have a case, but I believe it's dankui. We also have *-(e)H2 in Anatolian to mark the neuter plural, but no trace of it as a feminine marker. By the same token, I cannot prove that such forms are *not* relics of what once were feminine markers in Anatolian, instead of what I believe they are: merely root endings or extensions which were grammaticalized into feminine markers in non-Anatolian IE. There are indications even outside of Anatolian that the feminine gender is of relatively recent origin. The lack of formal marking in many common nouns (Beekes mentions dhugH2te:r, snusos), the adjectival classes that do not distinguish a separate feminine form. The general impression one gets of Hittite is that of an "active language" in Klimov's terms (see Lehmann, G & I), with a central role played by the opposition animate ~ inanimate. The use of the "ergative" suffix -ant(s) (inanimate --> animate when the subject of transitive sentence), the mi- (active) and hi-/-ha (stative/middle) conjugations. There is no sign or trace of feminine gender, no 3rd. person feminine pronominal forms [tell-tale sign in Dutch, Swedish and Danish that these languages once had a feminine gender; but of course also absent in e.g. Armenian], the lack of any formal marker for feminine nouns (except suffixed -sara) and the lack of feminine agreement in the adjective. In view of this, I prefer the more parsimonious explanation that Hittite maintains the ancient state of affairs (active/inactive nouns and verbs) and the other languages have developed a 3-gender system out of an earlier animate ~ inanimate one, than to suppose that Hittite once had a feminine gender, then lost it, and reverted exactly to the state PIE must have had in the first place before feminine gender developed. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 17:10:02 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:10:02 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > arrancar "to crank, rip from" c. 1140, [c] > cat. ant. renc, ant. fr. ranc < ¿germ.? [c] > ?rel. to renco "lame, crippled"? [rmcc] Coromines, in his Catalan Etymological Dictionary, rejects the suggested Germanic etymology he had proposed in DECH, preferring a non-Celtic but IE etymon (sorota`ptic o li'gur [Sorothaptic or Ligurian]), citing Lith, rin~kti [pick, collect], paranka` [gleaning], OPruss ra~nk-twei [steal], isrankeis [let go!, deliver!], Germ wrankjan [> Eng wrench], BSl *wranka: [hand, leg]. This or a similar root is the source by a different route of Romance BRANCA [leg, paw], [branch]. The verb certainly extends to Oc. and NW Italian dialects, and less surely to the rest of Italy. Coromines's discussion of the etymology extends to 4 columns, where in part he's arguing that this word's distribution is typical of the IE dialect-type he calls Sorothaptic (lexically and geographically between Celt, BSl, Illyrian-Venetic and Germanic), though he agrees that variation in treatment of *wr- is problematic. Max From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 15 23:53:27 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:53:27 -0600 Subject: Indo-European Phonology Message-ID: Dear Allan and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Bomhard at aol.com Date: Monday, March 15, 1999 3:56 AM Thank you for an excellent summary of the work that has been done on IE phonology. For the record, I subscribe to the Glottalic Theory. I believe that IE [b/d/g] can best be explained as a result of (pre-)Nostratic [?p/?t/?k], with pre-glottalization of the voiceless stops. But I also reconstruct glottalized affricates [?pf/?ts/?kx], which, I believe, on the strength of the AA reflexes, became IE [bh/dh/gh]. I think you have done better than anyone else I know in properly reconstructing affricates for Nostratic. But to your [ts], I would add [pf/kx]. It is the merger of this series of voiceless and aspirated affricates into plain voiceless aspirated stops [ph/th/kh] which has unbalanced the system typologically. Of course, I also agree with you that it is perfectly legitimate to reconstruct palatalized varieties in each stop or affricate configuration but I do not believe that velarized stops are reflected in the daughter languages as allophones of the simple stop and affricate series. IE g{w} and k{w} are the missing dorsal fricatives ([x/x{h}]) that should be reconstructed for Nostratic since they show up in AA as fricatives (Arabic S; Egyptian S and X). Thus, I believe the plan of glottalized and aspirated stops and affricates + representive fricatives in all positions ([f,v ->w; s,z ->s; G,x -> g{w}/k{w}]) represents a typologically balanced system that alows for all developments in the derived languages. Pat From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 00:19:55 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:19:55 EST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: >In a message dated 3/14/99 9:06:56 PM Mountain Standard Time, >glengordon01 at hotmail.com writes: >_Physical_ proof of the nature of particles?? I don't think so. It is based on >observation. -- that is physical proof -- experimental validation. All humans can do is observe. >It can't tell us the actual form of a particle. -- yes it can, insofar as "form" is meaningful when speaking of say, an electron, which is best described in terms of probability shells. >Don't be daft. -- right back at you. [ Moderator's note: This has drifted beyond the scope of linguistics, Indo-European or otherwise. No further discussion on this branch of the discussion will be posted to the list; please take it to private e-mail if you wish to continue. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 00:37:26 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:37:26 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Agriculture appears in Greece between 7000 and 6000 bce. It reaches Denmark >about 3900 bce. It is truly adopted on the North European Plain about 3500 >bce. And there is evidence that dirt farming (versus husbandry) did not take >hold in the British Isles until the early bronze age. -- these dates are out of date, I'm afraid, apart from the one on Greece. And that should be "Greece and the southern Balkans"; they received agriculture at about the same time. Agriculture reached the Hungarian plain in the 6th millenium BCE (5000's) and spread across Europe in the late 6th and early 5th millenium with the Linear Pottery culture. Agriculture was established in Britain in the centuries after 4000 BCE and the plow was already employed there in the 4th millenium. (Dates from the OXFORD PREHISTORY OF EUROPE, chs. 4&5). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 00:28:05 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:28:05 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages of stratified societies are always class dialects.> -- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- based. "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, and they have no correlation to class at all. The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a very rare phenomenon. Standard languages are usually simply a regional dialect Eg., the Border ballads show laird and crofter speaking the same dialect... because that's exactly what they did. Prior to the 18th century, squire and tenant in England also spoke the same regional dialects. There's absolutely no reason to assume that the situation was different in Anglo-Saxon times; thegn and peasant and thrall (unless imported) all spoke various regional dialects of Old English; nor is there any reason to suppose that the standardized written tongue of the Wessex kings' scribes was much different from the spoken language. Perhaps a bit more conservative, but then, contemporary written English is more conservative than the spoken language as well. From lmfosse at online.no Tue Mar 16 09:34:18 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:34:18 +0100 Subject: SV: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Sheila Watts [SMTP:sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk] skrev 15. mars 1999 12:25: > This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful > way. A lot depends on exposure: in Scandinavia, for instance, some Swedes > understand Danish rather well, and others find it very difficult, mostly > depending on how close they live to Denmark and whether they are within > range of Danish TV. .... It would seem that the three standard languages of Denmark, Norway and Sweden do not present many problems as far as mutual comprehensibility is concerned, at least not to educated speakers. (Typically, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian newsreaders would present few problems to speakers of other Scandinavian languages). However, non-educated speech and dialects pose problems, not only to speakes of a different language, but sometimes even to speakers of the same language. There are Norwegian dialects that I find hard to undestand, and a Danish colleague of mine complained about not understanding certain Jutland dialects. Particularly spoken Danish seems to move away fast from the "comprehensible version" that Norwegians could dechifre without too many difficulties. Danes seem to begin having a similar problem with Norwegians. At least I have noticed that some Danes simply switch to English when talking to me, as that apparently feels more comfortable. Admittedly, these observations are based on random personal experience, but may still have some validity. Thus, when we discuss the ability to understand closely related languages, we should not forget that there is a difference between societies with educated, literate elites and standard languages on the one hand and societies without such things on the other. It would be interesting to know how Germans relate to their various highly different dialects. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From jpmaher at neiu.edu Tue Mar 16 00:51:45 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:51:45 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: "Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; > 1. Surely ... Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or homework. Spell out the phonetic developments and refute the ascription to Arabic > 2. Lei = "she" (namely, "eccelenza", "maesta`" and other such > feminine abstract nouns). Certainly [i.e. I would suppose that] a feminine pronoun presupposes a feminine noun, real OR IMAGINED. jpm From jpmaher at neiu.edu Tue Mar 16 10:21:02 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 04:21:02 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A Message-ID: a parallel in Slavic: "koryto" 'trough' is also used as a toponym. Cf. German "Kessel, Sattel"... ................................... Max W Wheeler wrote: > On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> artesa "type of box" 1330 "cajón cuadrilongo de madera que es más >> angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] >> v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] > Coromines, Onomasticon Cataloniae, s.v. Artesa (de Segre) glosses the > Spanish word `pastera, conca de fe`nyer pa etc.' [kneading trough] and > suggests the toponym may be a metaphorical application of the > (pre-Romance) common noun seen in Spanish (otherwise absent from > Catalan). S.v. Artana he lists several other pre-Romance toponyms in > -esavfrom Catalan territory: Olesa, Albesa, Manresa, Ardesa, Utxesa, > Montesa, Anesa. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 00:49:10 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:49:10 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >Yes, acrobats just like the Huns. -- who left so little trace of their language that we're not even completely sure if it was Turkic. They certainly didn't succeed in imposing their language on any area -- it became extinct within a century of their entry into Europe. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Mar 16 10:26:47 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:26:47 GMT Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >Nobody knows what the reason is. All I can report is that /a/ in the >first syllable of a polysyllable sometimes develops into /ai/, in a >purely sporadic manner. But I *think* this only ever happens before a >coronal consonant, which may be relevant. Are there any examples before a single (coronal) consonant? Unless I'm overlooking something, all the examples seem to be before sibilant+stop or nasal+stop clusters. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Mar 16 00:59:53 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:59:53 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Peter &/or Graham Date: Monday, March 15, 1999 6:23 PM >Pat said: >>Do you have other examples of devoicing a stop before /sk/ in Hittite since, >>of course, it is, to my knowledge, unknown in IE? >Devoicing before s is regular in IE, of course, so why should we question >devoicing before /sk/? If one assumes that [k-ku] is not k + u but a mere "grapheme" for [k{w}], then, of course, there would be no question. Pat [ Moderator's comment: What exactly are you asking? You appear to be back-pedalling on several issues you have argued over the past weeks. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Mar 16 11:07:37 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 11:07:37 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sheila Watts wrote: >>So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required >>for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years >>for them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one >>party to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if >>both are members of the same general speech community. >This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful >way. A lot depends on exposure > [...] > It seems to me that trained linguists tend to overemphasise wildly the >ease with which ordinary people will understand a spoken language in real >time - not a written document over which they can pore, but an utterance at >which you only get one chance. But this works both ways. An unintelligible written document does not rephrase itself, while an interlocutor will try again until he's understood (if it's in his own interest, of course). A lot indeed depends on exposure, but the interesting cases from a historical linguistic point of view are by definition the cases where a lot of mutual exposure is involved. In the case of late OE / late ON it's often said that the two languages were "very close" and mutually intelligible. My own exposure to ON is negligible (and I can't say I'm fluent in OE), but it seems to me that such claims are exaggerated. West and North Germanic had already been diverging for quite some time a thousand years ago. But if those claims are made, it's not because the people making them are trained linguists, but it's because the *evidence* shows a degree of interaction between the two languages that can only be explained if there was indeed a fair amount of mutual intelligibility. But this mutual intelligibilty was probably not "automatic" as in the case of two dialects of teh same language, but the result of lots of exposure. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 01:04:36 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 20:04:36 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In fact, Scandinavian, German and Old English were probably mutually comprehensible as recently as 1000 CE -- at least on an elementary level. Hmmm. Well, perhaps we should limit that to Old English, Scandinavian, and Low German. From martinez at eucmos.sim.ucm.es Tue Mar 16 11:23:00 1999 From: martinez at eucmos.sim.ucm.es (Javier Martinez) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 12:23:00 +0100 Subject: `Sancho' < Sanctius; Panza < lat. pantex Message-ID: LT wrote > at a Basque name, though not necessarily one of ultimately Basque > origin. This name is totally opaque in Basque, and I am aware of no > plausible etymology for it. < lat. Sanctius? > I gather that the name is no longer conferred. However, or > is still a vernacular form of in the French Basque > Country, Pancho belongs like Paco or Curro to Francisco, like Pepe to Jose. But Sancho Panza has his name because his potbelly, viz. Panza < lat. "pantex" Javier Martínez García ~ Dpto. Filología Griega y Ling. Indoeuropea Facultad de Filología ~ Universidad Complutense ~ E-28040 Madrid Fax: +34- 9131 49023 ~ Tlf. +34- 91314 4471 ~ (secret.) -91394 5289 http://www.ucm.es/info/griego/ ~ TITUS-Projekt: Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft ~ Postfach 111932 Universität Frankfurt ~ D-60054 Frankfurt http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 02:28:09 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 20:28:09 -0600 Subject: alud In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Could be from Iberian Arabic? Is there such a form as al-lud? Could it be related to lodo? i.e. deformed by passing through Iberian Arabic? My wife uses for "mudslide" [which dictionaries agree with] --also no snow in Costa Rica -- so a question for Miguel or whoever-- is it ever used in any part of Spain for [snow] avalanches? >> alud "mudslide" 1880 pre-rom; [c] >> rel. con vasco luta, lurte "desmoronamiento de tierras", [c] >> v. lur "tierra", elur "nieve" [c] >Basque ~ ~ `landslide, mudslide' is real enough, >and is obviously a derivative of `earth'. This has the regular >combining form in old formations, so the variants in are >probably recent re-formations. It's not clear to me how the Basque word >would give rise to Romance . As for Basque `snow', this is >hardly likely to be related to : there are major problems with the >phonology, with the morphology, and with the semantics. But if had a different origin, I could see how, in the Pyrenees, and ~ ~ could have influenced one another in the minds of bilingual speakers--but that's supposing a lot OR the possibility that ~ ~ could be a "folk etymology" of by Basque speakers --or is that too far out? From jpmaher at neiu.edu Tue Mar 16 13:38:54 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 07:38:54 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Compare: “... in October 1913, the Balkan League of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Monte Negro, encouraged by Russia, declared war on Turkey. In Belgrade, Trotsky watched the 18th Serbian Infantry marching off to war in uniforms of the new khaki color. They wore bark sandals and a sprig of green in their caps .” Barbara W. Tuchman. 1966. The Proud Tower. A Portrait of the World before the War. 1890-1914.Page 536. Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] > >> rel. con vasco abarka; raíz de alpargata [sandal] [c] > >> pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] > > >Basque denotes a kind of rustic sandal, traditionally a soft > >leather moccasin held on by a cord passed through holes in the sandal > >and wrapped around the calf. The word is very probably native, but > >cannot be monomorphemic, with that plosive in the third syllable. > >The favorite guess sees it as a formation involving `branch(es)' > >and a noun-forming suffix <-ka>. This is semantically awkward, and > >seems to require that ancestral abarkas were made of foliage -- not very > >comfortable, I would have thought. > > maybe from cord made from pliable bark of branches? would that work? > > >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and > >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all > >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic > >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from > >Romance or from Basque. > > The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, doesn't > exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian Arabic may have > allowed it or not. There are words, though, with al-p- associated with > Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras [sp?] and others that escape > me now. > Maybe someone else can help explain this From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 02:34:11 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 20:34:11 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > arándano [ara/ndano] "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ¿?, [c] > compara con vasco arán [ara/n] "endrino" [c] > pre-rom. raíz de arán [rai/z de ara/n] [c] Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . Could aran be from an original form *agran-? btw: what are the other forms in Romance & Celtic? Maybe Dennis "Donncha" King might have some insights on the Celtic forms From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 15:47:31 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 09:47:31 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> artesa "type of box" 1330 "cajón cuadrilongo de madera que es más >> angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] >> v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] >Coromines, Onomasticon Cataloniae, s.v. Artesa (de Segre) glosses the >Spanish word `pastera, conca de fe`nyer pa etc.' [kneading trough] and >suggests the toponym may be a metaphorical application of the >(pre-Romance) common noun seen in Spanish (otherwise absent from >Catalan). S.v. Artana he lists several other pre-Romance toponyms in >-esa from Catalan territory: Olesa, Albesa, Manresa, Ardesa, Utxesa, >Montesa, Anesa. [snip] I'm trying to imagine what a kneading trough looks like --in conjunction with . In Pequeño Larrouse, I seem to remember accompanying a picture of a basket-like contraption with 2 rectangular rims [both rounded off] and no bottom; the upper rim was about twice the size of the lower one. There was no indication of size or use. Now I'm trying imagine how this can relate to a toponym, could it be a box canyon? From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 02:47:31 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 20:47:31 -0600 Subject: avio/n In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > avión "airplane" c. 1330 "vencejo" < ¿gavión [gavio/n] c. 1250? < ¿? > [c] rel to Latin apis? [rmcc] >No Basque here, but I'm certainly startled to see a word for `airplane' >figuring in a discussion of supposedly pre-Roman words. It means "airplane" now but it does go back a ways. vencejo --acc. to Velásquez dictionary-- means "swift, black martin, martlet, martinet [Hirundo apis]. Not a word I've come across in Latin America gavi- appears as the first element of a couple of birds: gaviota "gull" & gavila/n "small hawk" but I seem to remember seeing somewhere used to mean "bumblebee" or some sort of large bee I also seem to remember seeing somewhere that the use of avio/n as "airplane" comes from French --that whoever the French claim as the inventor of the airplane called his contraption an "avion", is that right? From yoel at mindspring.com Tue Mar 16 15:49:20 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:49:20 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: >Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:46:04 -0500 >To: proto-language at email.msn.com >From: "Yoel L. Arbeitman" >Subject: PersonalResponse: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt >Dear Pat, >I have not been able to work through Melchert's explanation and summarize >it until now. In general I avoid doing research for these postings and only >give what I know off the top of my head. And Melchert's book is one of >constant crossreferencing for each word, by segmentable phenomena of said >word. >So here directly to you and then to the List (to save time to you) is the >best I can do with complicated argumentation: > (1) PA has [a] a retrogressive voicing law which disappears before >[b] the PA rule of medial */kw/ to */gw/ change. > (2) By [1b], IE *nekw-t- > PA *negw-t(+s), /negu-t+s/ 'evening, >twilight'; /negu-/ 'become twiglight'. > (3) It was canonized decades ago by Sturtevant that 'night', as 'the >time of undressing', was cognate with the IE word for "naked" in Hittite >. But this < *PA negw-mo- (for IE or Pre-PA *negw-no-) as shown by >non-Hittite cognates. > Watkins AHDIER gives the root as *nogw- 'naked', with suffix -e/oto- >English (Germanic) "naked", with suffix -edo- > Latin nudus, and with >suffix *--mo- > Gk. gymno-. > Thus 'night' is IE *nekw-, 'naked' IE *negw-. > Melchert operates on the principle of finding the Anatolian word, >comparing what we can of cognate IE matches and then ordering rule >operations. It's complex, but the best we have around. > Yoel [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 03:17:13 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 21:17:13 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EBAFCF.1BE5EA8@neiu.edu> Message-ID: >In addition, there are many Americans using "moi" who not only do not know >French, but who never directly saw/heard Miss Piggy'. >In addition, Casdtilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; and ustad/ustaz "sir, maestro" definitely looks like usted but most other Spanish professors I run into swear that it's from vuste/ a corruption of "vuesa/vuestra merced" >Italian "Lei" is a calque of sorts on the latter. I've been told that Mussolini encouraged Italians to use by explaining that was from Spanish and was from French and so, was the "national" form Did he really say that? From jer at cphling.dk Tue Mar 16 15:50:24 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:50:24 +0100 Subject: Gender In-Reply-To: <3702333b.72098857@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Supposing the two examples above [Hitt. dankui-s 'dark' and sani- 'one, > same' - JER] are correctly analyzed as > containing *-iH2, it only follows that Anatolian had nouns and > adjectives ending in *-iH2. As it probably (had) had *-eH2 and > *-uH2. The question is whether it can be shown that these > suffixes (if suffixes they are) at one stage served to denote > feminine gender in (Pre-)Proto-Anatolian. Now, if the neuter of > dankuis were danku, you would have a case, but I believe it's > dankui. We also have *-(e)H2 in Anatolian to mark the neuter > plural, but no trace of it as a feminine marker. What would (pre-)Anatolian have these forms for, if not for the feminine? What is the common indication of < + >? By normal standards that is . Comparing Icelandic _widh_ 'we' and _thidh_ 'you' with extra-Norse Germanic one will immediately guess that they match the duals, OE wit, git (especially since hvadh matches hwaet), the 2nd person with /th-/ from the sg. thu. But you could object saying, No it only means there were FORMS of the shape matching the duals of the other languages, not that they WERE ever duals themselves - they may instead proceed from an older system from which the duals also come, but - unfortunately - have lost their mysterious but interesting original function. Now, in this case older Icelandic does restrict these forms to dual function, so here we know. The only difference I see between this easy example and that of the fem. morphemes lying around in Hittite is that, in the latter case, we have no direct attestation of the stage where the morphemes were still fem. markers. > There are indications even outside of Anatolian that the feminine > gender is of relatively recent origin. Sure, but there are more than two stages in pre-IE. There is ample time for a "relatively recent" feminine marker to lose its gender-distinguishing function and just become an occasional stem enlargement of individual adjectives. That is a process we know and understand and one that would lead to the picture we find. > The general impression one gets of Hittite is that of an "active > language" in Klimov's terms (see Lehmann, G & I), with a central > role played by the opposition animate ~ inanimate. The use of > the "ergative" suffix -ant(s) (inanimate --> animate > when the subject of transitive sentence), the mi- > (active) and hi-/-ha (stative/middle) conjugations. There is no > sign or trace of feminine gender, no 3rd. person feminine > pronominal forms [tell-tale sign in Dutch, Swedish and Danish > that these languages once had a feminine gender; but of course > also absent in e.g. Armenian], the lack of any formal marker for > feminine nouns (except suffixed -sara) and the lack of feminine > agreement in the adjective. The "ergative" extension of neuters is post-Old Hittite according to Kammenhuber (Fs. Winter 1986), but that is of no relevance to the gender question. There is ergative in Kurdish, and Proto-Iranian did have three genders. > In view of this, I prefer the more parsimonious explanation that > Hittite maintains the ancient state of affairs (active/inactive > nouns and verbs) and the other languages have developed a > 3-gender system out of an earlier animate ~ inanimate one, than > to suppose that Hittite once had a feminine gender, then lost it, > and reverted exactly to the state PIE must have had in the first > place before feminine gender developed. I do not see the parsimony - or even the good sense - in assuming that dankuis contains a suffix of "some-other-function-just-for-heaven's-sake-not-feminine" and has used it in a place where a feminine marker would have made sense and it is indeed used in the other languages - as opposed to the very simple assumption that this IS the feminine marker that has lost its meaning, just as it has in many adjectives of later individual languages. Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 03:30:52 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 21:30:52 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <001a01be6d43$aa4c0de0$3671fe8c@raol.lucent.com> Message-ID: How would you describe that sound? a voiced apical sibilant lateral? [if that makes sense] I've had Tamil friends and it's a sound that stands out Are there any non-Dravidian languages that have it? [snip] >zh for the final consonant in ``Tamil'' [snip] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 15:55:19 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 15:55:19 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ snip note to moderator ] On Fri, 12 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Would you like to explain what your point is? > falda in Spanish is "skirt" or "flank" [of a mountain]. Skirt is > obviously the basic meaning > As I pointed out, it can't be a native word in Spanish > BUT I was asking whether the form /alda, alde, halda/ might exist > in Old Spanish, Aragonese or Gascon. As you know, like Spanish, Gascon also > changed initial /fVC/ > /hVC/. Aragonese sometimes does this; although > descriptions of Aragonese sound pretty lame. If such a form did indeed > exist, either of these COULD have provided a source for Basque "alde, alte". > Now, what's YOUR point? > >Sp. falda is a Germanic borrowing into Romance (It., Oc., Cat., Ptg, > >falda). Coromines suggests from Frankish *falda `fold', cf OHG falt. ME > >fald, related to Goth falthan, OHG faldan, OE fealdan, ON falda `to > >fold'; related by Onions to PIE *pel/*pl- with a *-t- extension; cf. Gk > >dipaltos, diplasios `twofold', haploos `simple'; Lat plicare `to fold'. > >Max W. Wheeler In his 7th March post Rick Mc C mentioned a resemblance between the Basque forms _halde_. _alde_, etc. `side' mentioned in his _haltha_ entry (On-line dictionary ... non-IE/Germanic) and the Spanish word _falda_ `skirt, etc'. Since Larry Trask (01/03/99) had already pointed out that the Basque evidence pointed to _alte_ as the earliest recoverable form of the word in Basque, I understood Rick to be speculating on whether the Basque word (in one of its forms) might be the source of Spanish _falda_. My reply was intended to rebut this speculation by mentioning the well-known, and to my mind pretty convincing, etymology of _falda_, showing it to be of good IE stock, and therefore out of place in the context of substrate vocabulary. It seems he meant rather to suggest that the Romance word might be a source of the Basque. But quite apart from the semantic problems, there are 3 phonological mismatches, each of which would need an ad hoc account, viz. f- > h-/0- (very rare shift, except before /o/; Michelena, Fonetica Historica Vasca para. 13.3), -d- > -t-, and -a > -e. This is not greatly improved by searching out a Spanish form _halda_ (though this is apparently attested). Gascon _hauta_ would be a marginally better bet, formally. But Larry had already cast doubt on the reliability of the supposed Basque form with initial _h-. Anyway, it's not quite true that _falda_ 'can't be a native word in Spanish'. According to Penny, History of the Spanish Language, once the contrast between [f-] and [h-] became phonemic, there was a fair amount of lexical diffusion. Other 'native words' with retained /f-/ are: _fiero_ `proud', _feo_ `ugly', _faltar_ `to lack', _fallar_ `to fail', _fiesta_ `festival', _fiel_ `faithful', _fin_ `end', and, among Germanisms, _feudo_ `fief', _forro_ `lining'. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Mar 16 05:16:16 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 23:16:16 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Yoel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Yoel L. Arbeitman Date: Monday, March 15, 1999 8:47 PM >Dear Pat and Colleagues, > In a word the answer is YES. The durative-iterative, same morpheme >involved, of Hittite dai- (< IE *dhe:) "to place, etc." is written > which represnts /t-skizzi/ where the root d(ai-) is reduced to >its minimum and the iterative -ski- is added with retrogressive >assimilitation of radical d to t. [Answers continued below]. Although the word is written zi-ik-ki-iz-zi according to Sturtevant, I understand your point. However in view of te-ih-hi, I am more more inclined to interpret this as tsikitsi, with a simple metathesis of the -s- because we have no reason to think zero-grade of tei- should be simply t-. Before metathesis took place, we should have expected **ti'skitsi. Thank you for your informative answer otherwise. Pat From MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 16:13:05 1999 From: MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:13:05 GMT Subject: Vocalic /r/ and /l/ in Mycenean Greek Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] For those who think that vocalic /r/ and /l/ persisted from IE into Mycenean Greek (as some Greek dialects present IE vocalic /r/ as {ar}, {ra} and others present it as {or}, {ro}, e.f. {stratos} / {strotos} = "army": there is evidence from Homer. In Homer several times a line ends in the standard formula {li/pous' andro/te:ta kai /he:be:n} = "[when he was slain, his soul fled] leaving manhood and youth": the / / mark the ends of the metrical feet. The foot /pous' andro/ is not valid for dactylic meter. As with many metrical faults in Homer, this fault may have been caused by a language change after the text was composed: if {androte:ta} was pronounced {a-nr-ta:-ta} with a vocalic /r/ (from the root {H2-n-r} = "man") when this formula was invented, it scans correctly. From BMScott at stratos.net Tue Mar 16 07:54:08 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 02:54:08 -0500 Subject: `Sancho' Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? In strictly onomastic sources I have usually seen them ascribed to Latin and respectively. In the Castilian and Aragonese citations that I've seen from the period 900-1300, is by far the most common form, followed by . Others include , , , , , , , and . Brian M. Scott From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 16:37:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:37:47 -0600 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Yes, the personal name `Sancho' is associated above all with the >medieval Kingdom of Navarre, which was predominantly Basque-speaking at >the time. The most famous bearers of the name were the Kings of >Navarre, who were certainly Basques. In all likelihood, we are looking >at a Basque name, though not necessarily one of ultimately Basque >origin. This name is totally opaque in Basque, and I am aware of no >plausible etymology for it. [my editing] >By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? Not quite, they are cognate, both are from /sanktu-/ shows up in Old Spanish for "holy, saint" and does conform to a greater degree to the usual treatment of Latin /-kt-/, which normally becomes /ch/ in Spanish words inherited from Latin --as opposed to Latinate loanwords e.g. leche < lacte-, hecho < factu-, dicho < dictu- , etc. Taking this into acount, looks more like a loan word. But Antso < Santso, while it definitely looks cognate to , , looks a bit askew given that Basque does have /ch/ yet we don't see *Santxo /sancho/. So it didn't come from . And Old Spanish had /ts/ but we don't see *Sanzo /santso > sanso or Santho/. So, is Old Basque Santso from some other Romance language, i.e. Gascon or a dialect of Aragonese or directly from Latin? >It should be borne in mind that medieval Romance names which were taken >into Basque often developed very distinctive Basque forms. For example, >it is hardly obvious that is merely the Basque form of the >medieval Spanish given name , or that is a vernacular >form of the name which appears in French as . And you might like >to puzzle over how it is that the traditional Basque form of `Jim' is > -- the etymology is straightforward if you know one or two >things about Spanish personal names. Sure, Xanti looks like Santiago but the others are straight from hell :> [snip] >However, or > is still a vernacular form of in the French Basque >Country, though the southern Basques prefer as their equivalent >of . The first French Basque woman I ever met was called > in French, in Basque, and I've more recently come >across another French Basque with the same two names. So Pantxika is not just a Basque spelling of Spanish Panchica? Then can we blame Pancho and Paco on the Basques? [snip] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 16:30:36 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:30:36 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 12 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >But that leaves the *mora word. Is this the same as Bavarian Mure, and > >is it the root of moraine? > I wonder if they're not possibly loanwords from Romance, like Mauer. Is > there a French-Provençal or Swiss French dialect word that Mora"ne, moraine > could have been borrowed from? I'm not the person to ask about Bavarian Mure. Ger. Mora"ne is clearly a straight borrowing from Fr moraine, which according to Meyer-Lu"bke (s.v. murru) is from sav. morena (i.e. Franco-Provencal). Also Oc. mor(r)ena, which may also be borrowed rather than cognate. Before the spread of geological knowledge, moraines were, I suspect, associated only with visible glaciers. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 16 07:55:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 02:55:41 EST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, Bob Whiting wrote: <> I think I should explain that I was well aware that languages that have dropped case systems and case endings generally don't use the nominative as the surviving form. (The example I had in front of me was Latin "infans"(nom) > Old French "enfes" (nom.) but "infantem" (accusative)> Mod French "enfant.") If you look at my original post, however, I was stumbling towards a slightly different question. What I asked was why the nominative singular (in those languages in which they occur) was not in considered in reconstruction. The answer that both you and our moderator have given is that they are I guess "truncated" forms, not revealing or mutating the stems. (Part of the "phonotactics" - interesting word.) As you say, the nominative is "linguistically the least marked form." But that was of course the reason I choose the nominative singular, precisely because it was the least marked form. I don't think its that hard to see why one might naturally go to the form stripped even of stems to get to the elemental form of the word. Not that one should, but that one might. After all, to say that only the "ablative" form survived is to suggest that the word now carries the additional grammatical baggage of the ablative. Or, to go further, the notion that some stems might be nothing more than phonetically dictated walls, separating sounds in the roots that cannot be adjacent to the sounds of regular case endings. They could even survive as such in daughter languages where the endings no longer exists. Or that the stem served no other function than to signal the user that a particular word followed a peculiar or dialectical case-ending system. In that light, I hope the question why the nominatives were not considered in the reconstruction of the word doesn't sound that ludicrous. I wasn't for a moment doubting the reconstruction (of "night.") And the explanation of word-ending rules is good enough for me. (But I wonder why e.g. Latin couldn't have solved the problem the way it did in forming the rather regular-looking adjective - nocturnus.) So I'll take a chance and ask the question anyway - can a stem ever be seen as something like a vestigal case ending in reconstructing PIE - not part of the original word, but a compounded form that produced a universal "stem" in the daughter languages? <> Well actually the dictionary did give me some nominative singulars - which is what my question was about. And as far as the languages go, I'm still not bad at Greek or Latin, though I've forgotten a bit. And (but only if you insist of course) I can give a number of instances where prominent native speakers of both tongues expressed the notion that the nominative was "the true form of words." By the way probably just as serious a problem with dictionaries appears to be on the "semantic" side. 3000 year old words are often defined with a precision that - if you know your Homer, so to speak - can be as perilous as assuming that the nominative is worth talking about. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 16 16:32:04 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 11:32:04 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 5:21:05 PM, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: <> I don't want to give the impression that much of what you've said about this isn't plausible or compelling. The question I think it does not address is: What is the latest that PIE could have emerged from a local homeland and expanded to where we find it when the evidence gets direct? (I.e., written evidence) This is a natural governor - a reality check - on the tendency to keep back- dating PIE to the point to alleviate the very ungradiated jumble of IE languages. <> I don't think that is an answer in itself. Because the later languages you mention fall into Mallory's category of "state languages." Whether the exact term is right or not, the meaning is that there is a standardizing agent or agents that prevents splintering. Whether it's trade or the school marm or the Academie or the Latin grammarian or the mass media or even a dictionary, you have a strong force working against splintering and gradients. Without this standardizing force, epecially among sedentary populations, like sedentary farmers separated by thousands of years from one another, one should not even expect PIE to have been PIE a relatively short distance from the place of origin. Especially, if one follows Renfrew's "a few square miles per year" rate of expansion for agrnts of PIE suddenly pick up and "swallow up" another gradient of PIE? Did PIE follow the spread of agriculture all the way through to its outer fringes and then suddenly some of those dialects start moving and replacing other dialects? Did the first PIE converts wait 3 or 4000 years till the whole European gradient process was completed before they started mucking it up by moving around? Or did they move ahead of agriculture by trade or war, converting before agriculture got there? In the 5000 years that separates first agriculture from direct evidence of the languages of Europe (aside from Mycenaean), there should have been dozens of "swallow-uppers" that preceded Celtic or German or Romance. And these might have moved back and forth all across the continent in a way that would put many ancestors between the first historical IE languages and PIE. There might be many proto's between Proto-German and PIE. <> But you know, Mallory's expert on the North American tribes says the exact opposite. That the number of languages and language families actually substantially increased over time and with the coming of agriculture. The reason is obvious. Farming causes stabilization of location and localization promotes local diversity in language. Standardization is only something that happens with centralization - a very different event. I wrote: <> You wrote: <> But we have the answer to those question. The only singularity we have in late Neolithic Europe is the final conversions to agriculture. Otherwise we have a tremendous patchwork of cultural groups with some regionalized pockets that show evidence of common material cultures. And once again there is no historical evidence that one needs to adopt a language in order to adopt agriculture. Some of the existing cultures were doing materially better before agriculture, so the appeal is questionable. There is quite a bit of current literature that points out that the adoption of agriculture does not always make sense and does not necessarily increase population. <> But when we speak of the initial spread of PIE, we are talking about nothing but expansion at the expense of non- IE languages. By definition, the "edges of the area" would be right next to the core. At this point - if agriculture is spreading IE - we should expect that splintering should have started taking place very early - as you say. And wouldn't that mean that further out from the core, the source of expansion would not have been PIE but a dialect or language that was already an ancestor. And the next expansion would have been descended from a descendent. While nothing was keeping the original parent particularly stable. The whole scheme sends us to diversity and not uniformity. But the unique thing about IE languages is not their diversity but their commonality, something that makes the reconstruction of the proto language at all plausible. I think when you look for the latest possible date for a unity you get closer to the truth. PIE gives evidence of having been a standardized language in some way early on. The kurgans may explain it. Agriculture doesn't - not by itself. It creates the opposite effect without a standardizing agent. If Latin had been PIE, for example, it accomplished a lot of what it did in less than 600 years. And it did it without mandating conversion - in comparison for example to the German laws against speaking Wendish in the middle ages. I don't think elite dominance describes the Latin phenomena either. Whatever the Romans did, it seems to be one of the best historical model we have for what happened in the days when PIE was just another local dialect BUT on its way to turning into "the first ancestor" of a whole new family of languages. Regards, Steve Long From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 08:11:10 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 08:11:10 GMT Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: Glen Gordon wrote:- >... A labial quality must be added to explain this - thus *H3 = /h./ >and it is a labial *H2. ... The moderator commented:- >The evidence adduced in favour of voicing of *H3 is Skt. pibati, Latin bibit >"he drinks", a reduplicated present from a root reconstructed as *peH3-, in >combination with Sturtevant's Rule. A tad thin, I admit. --rma Anthony Appleyard replied:- >In my mouth at least, I find that the /e/ in /h.a/ tries to acquire a distinct >flavour of /a/, and the /e/ in /3e/ (where /3/ is ayin) tries to acquire a >distinct flavour of /o/. ... The moderator commented:-: >There exist in the phoneme inventories of several NW Caucasian languages both >voiceless and voiced labialized pharyngals, which cause rounding in adjacent >vowels; thus, "o-coloring" need not imply voicing in *H3. --rma If H3 was /h.w/ or similar, with a labial component, surely in at least one of PIE's many descendant languages we would find H3 presenting as /w/? [ Moderator's comment: Why? What would privilege any such language to be preserved? (Remember that the evidence we have for any reconstruction of any protolanguage results from the historical accident of preservation.) We might indeed find such evidence at a future date--but we cannot demand it _a priori_. --rma ] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 16:49:43 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:49:43 +0000 Subject: Greek question (night?) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" > >>besides Germanic or Modern French?Wayles Browne wrote: Not actually Modern French where is [nhi]. Add MGk /nixta/ (or is only word-final -t sought?). According to Morris Jones, Welsh _nos_ is from *noss from the nominative *not-s < *nok{w}t-s; the oblique stem is seen in (tra-)noeth `the next day', OWelsh henoid [-] `tonight'. NB in _nos da_ `goodnight' we seem to have radical /d-/ preserved after /-s/, instead of lenited as is normal after a feminine noun. 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 mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 08:31:02 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 08:31:02 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Someone wrote:- > So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required > for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years > for them to be so large as to prevent communications ... Sheila Watts replied:- > This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful way. > ... and others have written about the amount of change since dispersion in e.g. Polynesian compared with Melanesian. I read a theory that there is one mechanism whereby a massive change in a language, or even a completely unrelated language, can develop quickly: in some natural environments where living is easy: very rarely but in theory it could happen, some children too young to have learned much of their parents' language could stray, or be the only members of their tribe to survive an enemy attack in a tribal war, manage to survive uncontacted to adulthood, and start a new tribe. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 17:07:19 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 11:07:19 -0600 Subject: arrancar In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Corominas/Coromines sounds like he had a bit of a split personality but this does happen when we switch languages How does fit in here? Or does it? Semantically it might fit providing it's from Romance Watkins's chart in his Dict. of IE Roots matches Germanic /hw/ with Latin /qu/ But can we have /QUr-/ & /hwr/? But then Watkins goes and says that is from IE *wer- and he leaves out . So Silent Cal is no help. And then there's renco BTW: what else is known about Sorothaptic? And the Sorothapts? [ moderator snip ] >Coromines, in his Catalan Etymological Dictionary, rejects the >suggested Germanic etymology he had proposed in DECH, preferring a >non-Celtic but IE etymon (sorota`ptic o li'gur [Sorothaptic or >Ligurian]), citing Lith, rin~kti [pick, collect], paranka` [gleaning], >OPruss ra~nk-twei [steal], isrankeis [let go!, deliver!], Germ wrankjan >[> Eng wrench], BSl *wranka: [hand, leg]. This or a similar root is the >source by a different route of Romance BRANCA [leg, paw], [branch]. >The verb certainly extends to Oc. and NW Italian dialects, and less >surely to the rest of Italy. Coromines's discussion of the etymology >extends to 4 columns, where in part he's arguing that this word's >distribution is typical of the IE dialect-type he calls Sorothaptic >(lexically and geographically between Celt, BSl, Illyrian-Venetic and >Germanic), though he agrees that variation in treatment of *wr- is >problematic. >Max From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 09:28:54 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 09:28:54 +0000 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [on the proposed derivation of Basque `sandal' from `branch(es)'] > maybe from cord made from pliable bark of branches? would that > work? Quite possibly. Even though I grew up in a very rural area, my knowledge of rustic crafts is severely limited. By the way, my sources tell me that a certain Zamacola, who is unknown to me, once actually defined as `a kind of shoe made of small branches', but I have to wonder about the reliability of this isolated and obscure source. The 18th-century writer Astarloa also defined as `thing made of branches', but Astarloa was just about the craziest etymologist in the solar system, and nothing he says can be taken at face value. [LT] > >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and > >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all > >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic > >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from > >Romance or from Basque. > The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, > doesn't exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian > Arabic may have allowed it or not. There are words, though, with > al-p- associated with Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras > [sp?] and others that escape me now. > Maybe someone else can help explain this According to Agud and Tovar, the Arabic word in question is recorded both as and as , with a dot over the whose significance is unknown to me. I too am surprised by that second form, but maybe /p/ was possible in the Arabic of Spain. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Mar 16 18:47:56 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 13:47:56 -0500 Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) Message-ID: I meant to respond to this, but had other things to attend to. But I would like to resurrect this thread. wrote, (eons ago) >Exactly, the fact that the imperative has the secondary (short) >endings shows that these were the unmarked, neutral ones. >Present (Non-past) = neutral + ``here and now''. The forms >without the -i extension then become past forms (aorist or >imperfect) by default. But the distinction was already in >Anatolian (-mi present vs. -m past). According studies of contemporary language, present vs non-present distinction is rare to non-existent (Comrie says the latter in his ``Tense''). Zero past does not seem to occur among languages with forms restricted to past that is obligatory. It seems better to assume that SE marked only person and number and could indicate past only when implied by context or by inference. But then there must have been some way (particles?) of overtly marking past when needed. Now, there is some evidence for augment outside Gr.Arm.I-Ir (Rasmussen indicated some in a post to the previous incarnation of this list). It is possible that the augment disappeared as the past became overtly marked otherwise (we can see this in progress in Pali). It may even be that the augment was grammaticized independently in Gr. and I-Ir: I don't know if the patterns of Myc., Homer and Avestan have been fully explained. In fact the zero past vs marked non-past of Hittite seems quite unusual. (i.e., Hiittite has its weirdness :-) I am not well read on the role of sentence particles in Hittite. Do they have any role in this? [I remember some work arguing that -kan marked perfectivity.] >Some features that are unique to the "Indo-Greek" verbal system are: >- the perfect as a separate "aspect", besides present (impfv.) >and aorist (pfv.). This is precisely what I objected to in the first place. There is no morphologically marked aspect in Vedic or any stage of Sanskrit. The so-called imperfect is the usual tense of narration and does not indicate non-attainment of result or non-total event etc. If PIE had no perfective vs imperfective contrast and I-Ir did not either, then why posit it for Gr-I-Ir? The `perfect' is just a resultative. The pluperfect and moods of the perfect do not carry any particular `aspectual' meaning. To put it bluntly: The usual morphological classification of Vedic verb forms found in grammar books has no syntactic justification, but is due to 19 c. prejudices. It is a serious methodological error to base syntactic comparisons on the mere names. > In Hittite, the perfect is still simply the past tense of the stative > (hi) conjugation. There are examples of resultative > `present perfect' > (perfective) past. But ``past state'' > resultative? IMHO, it would be better to assume that Hittite extended its use of -i for present into the `stative' by analogy, while the rest of IE extended the stative into resultative with further evolution into (a kind of) past in individual languages at different times. [Looking at some old messages, I found that I have asked this before and you agreed that PIE `perfect' was tenseless. In that case, Hittie -hi is an innovation.] >- the imperfect as a simple past tense of the present ((augment >+) present stem + secondary endings). What does `simple past tense of present' mean? If it means aspectually unmarked past, how does that indicate closer relationship with Greek? If it means ``present (imperfective) in the past'', the claim is wrong. And Armanian aorist has `eber' which is usually traced to `ebheret'. Slavic aorist and Baltic preterit also have forms which seem to be from present stem + secondary endings. so such a form is not just Gr-I-Ir. >- the subjunctive (conjunctive) as a thematic (of athematic >verbs) or doubly thematic (of thematic verbs) formation, without >additional markers. The only parallel is I think Latin ero:, the >future tense of "to be". I thought that there were other examples of Latin futures that can be traced to the root subjunctive and that there are a few Celtic traces as well. That leaves only the present subjunctive. But in Vedic, we see the present subjunctive (and moods generally) replace the root forms. So these may have started as analogical creations. >- The augment for past tenses. Also found in Armenian (3rd.p.sg. >of monosylabic verbs only). See above. >sigmatic aorist and future forms, Opinion seems to be mixed about the sigmatic future of Sanskrit: the -s- may be that of the sigmatic aorist or of the desiderative. General opinion seems to prefer the latter. The only reason to even suggest the former is the limitation of the -sya future to proximate future. But then that very fact begs for an explanation if try to connect it to other IE futures. Furthermore, why was the -sya future rare in RV with its place seemly often taken by subjunctives? And when it did become common, why was its domain restricted to proximate future, with periphrastic future used for predictions? > Italic, Celtic and Albanian ... but their forms are best described > as s-preterites. So what is the difference between s-preterite and s-aorist? But be sure to make the case for Vedic aspect before appealing to perfectivity. >And if the Armenian imperfect is indeed derived from the optative, >that's a remarkable Armenian-Tocharian (and Italo-Celtic?) isogloss. Past habitual is indicated in Avestan and Old Persian by the optative (sometimes augmented). I believe that Greek optative, in relative clauses can be ~ past habitual (cf English ``would''). If you want to change the picture of the IE verb because of the difficulties in explaining the syntactic evolution of various languages, you must explain the syntactic evolution of the Vedic verb as well, before connecting it ore closely to the Greek verb. What is sauce for the goose ... -Nath From yoel at mindspring.com Wed Mar 17 03:48:55 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:48:55 -0500 Subject: Vocalic /r/ and /l/ in Mycenean Greek In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 04:13 PM 3/16/99 GMT, you wrote: TWO COMMENTS BELOW, ONE LIGHT AND ONE SERIOUS. >For those who think that vocalic /r/ and /l/ persisted from IE into Mycenean >Greek (as some Greek dialects present IE vocalic /r/ as {ar}, {ra} and others >present it as {or}, {ro}, e.f. {stratos} / {strotos} = "army": there is >evidence from Homer. In Homer several times a line ends in the standard >formula >{li/pous' andro/te:ta kai /he:be:n} = "[when he was slain, his soul fled] >leaving manhood and youth": the / / mark the ends of the metrical feet. The >foot /pous' andro/ A LITTLE FUN, PLEASE. IN SAYING "THE FOOT /POUS' ANDRO/", YOU MADE AN INVOLUNTARY PUN. YES, WHILE -POUS' HERE IS THE SECOND SYLLABLE OF LIPOUS(A) "LEAVING", I READ IT FIRST AS THE NOM. OF GREEK POUS "FOOT" AND UNDERSTOOD YOU TO BE SAYING "FOOT /(greek POUS/!!!! >is not valid for dactylic meter. As with many metrical faults in Homer, this >fault may have been caused by a language change after the text was composed: >if {androte:ta} was pronounced {a-nr-ta:-ta} with a vocalic /r/ (from the root >{H2-n-r} = "man") when this formula was invented, it scans correctly. WE HAVE IN OUR HOMERIC TEXT THE UNCONTRACTED FORMS, E.G. ANEROS "OF THE MAN" AND THE CONTRACTED FORMS ANDROS, WHERE- ONCE CONTRACTION OF THE E HAS BROUGH THE N AND THE R INTO IMMEDIATE PROXIMITY-, THE HOMORGANIC STOP TO THE DENTAL NASAL, VIZ. -D- IS EPENTHESIZED, WITH THE RESULT ANDRO-. WE HAVE NO STAGE OF GREEK ATTESTED EVER WHERE NASAL AND R MEET WITHOUT THE EPENTHESIS OF HOMORGANIC STOP. E.G. *MROTOS "MORTAL" > *MBROTOS > ATTESTED BROTOS. SO, WHILE WHAT YOU PROPOSE MAKES GOOD SPECULATION AND ACCORDS WITH THE THE RESTITUTION OF E.G. DIGAMMA IN HOMER, WE HAVE EVIDENCE FOR DIGAMMA IN OTHER GK., BOTH DIALECTALLY AND IN LINEAR B. FOR YOUR PROPOSAL, THERE SIMPLY IS NO EVIDENCE UNLESS WE SAY THAT THE HOMERIC METER IS THE EVIDENCE. YLA From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 16 18:48:59 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 12:48:59 -0600 Subject: "mama" Syndrome in 1st Person In-Reply-To: <00e001be6e9d$5e28b700$2e54fad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: > >So what. You haven't demonstrated a link between relationship-words and > >pronouns nor proof that your "mama" theory is attributable to pronouns. Nor have you demonstrated the contrary. All we have is a fact, that 1st person pronouns show a statistically significant tendency to use nasals, which is the same thing that happens with female care-givers. I have one guess at why this might be. If you have another one, let's hear it. But the main thing is to realize that, contrary to what might be expected, the distribution of sounds in 1st person pronouns is not in fact random, so that finding "Nostratic" forms with nasals does not mean much. > ...including mass linguistic > >relationships. That languages can be related is ubiquitously > >demonstrated throughout linguistics. The "mama syndrome" in relation to > >pronouns is not in the least. I am terminating the discussion. I don't think so. So your explanation is effectively "Proto-World"? You do indeed have more in common with Pat Ryan than you may be pleased to contemplate. > > >Again, you're being Eurocentric. Again, I am not. To note that a tendency is statistically significant is not to assert that it is universal. The survey which revealed the anomaly was of languages of the world, not of IE languages or languages of Europe. (Oh where is that reference, someone out there must know ...) DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 16 18:53:16 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 12:53:16 -0600 Subject: IE Plosive System In-Reply-To: <36f088ed.13984101@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Even less confusing: > 1) The near absence of roots of the form /DeG/. > 2) The near absence of roots of the forms /TeGH/ and /DHeK/. > 3) The near absence of /b/. Most of us would agree that "near absence" as well as absolute absence requires some explaining. (Not that anyone has denied this, I am just "moving right along". > So if there is an explanation, what is it? DLW From TomHeffernan at utk.edu Wed Mar 17 03:54:04 1999 From: TomHeffernan at utk.edu (Thomas Heffernan) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:54:04 -0500 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Although I teach Old English, I do not profess to be a practicing linguist rather more of a textual scholar. However, I am somewhat skeptical of the degree of intelligibility claimed for Old Norse, Old English and Old High German. If one looks at a very familiar text -- a text we know was preached in the churches on Sundays in the vernacular -- like that of the Parable of the Sower and the Seed in the three languages the differences seem considerable enough to preclude immediate intelligibility. I would have thought in places like Yorkshire in the late 9th century and 10th centuries that long association would more likely account for intelligibility. I have selected a line that although it shows a number of obvious cognates would still I think present problems for the non-native speakers. Old Norse reads " En sumt fellr i [th]urra jor[th] ok grjotuga...; Old English reads " Sum feoll ofer stanscyligean...; Old High German reads: "Andaru fielun in steinahti lant...." Yours, Tom Heffernan From alderson at netcom.com Tue Mar 16 22:22:01 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 14:22:01 -0800 Subject: [linguist@linguistlist.org: 10.393, Jobs: Historical ... ] Message-ID: For those on the mailing list who do not read LINGUIST: Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:05:54 -0500 From: LINGUIST Network Subject: 10.393, Jobs: Historical, Phonetics, Semantics, Computational LINGUIST List: Vol-10-393. Mon Mar 15 1999. ISSN: 1068-4875. Subject: 10.393, Jobs: Historical [ moderator snip ] -------------------------------- Message 1 ------------------------------- Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 16:09:17 -0500 From: Wayles Browne Subject: Historical, Phonetics, Semantics; Visiting Prof at Cornell Cornell University: The Department of Linguistics will be seeking to fill a tenure-track position for a historical linguist specializing in Indo-European to begin July 1, 2000. In the interim, the department has been authorized to appoint a visitor (rank open) to teach courses in historical and Indo-European linguistics either for the entire academic year 1999-2000 or for the spring semester only. For further information, contact Alan Nussbaum (ajn8 at cornell.edu). To ensure full consideration, candidates should send application statements, vitae, three letters of recommendation, and (no more than three) representative publications by April 16, 1999 to: IE Visitor Search Committee, Department of Linguistics, 227 Morrill Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701 USA. Cornell is an AA/EO Employer. [ moderator snip ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-10-393 From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 03:51:32 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 19:51:32 PST Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: ME (GLEN): A labial quality must be added to explain this - thus *H3 = /h./ and it is a labial *H2. ... MODERATOR: The evidence adduced in favour of voicing of *H3 is Skt. pibati, Latin bibit "he drinks", a reduplicated present from a root reconstructed as *peH3-, in combination with Sturtevant's Rule. A tad thin, I admit. --rma It does seem kind of thin. APPLEYARD: In my mouth at least, I find that the /e/ in /h.a/ tries to acquire a distinct flavour of /a/, and the /e/ in /3e/ (where /3/ is ayin) tries to acquire a distinct flavour of /o/. Well, certainly *H2 and *H3 appear to lower IE vowels. As far as I understand, both *a and *o are low vowels (an important thing to keep in mind), *a being unrounded front and *o being rounded back. If both *H2e and *H3e become Anatolian *ha in sharp contrast to the result of IE *H1e, then we must conclude that there is something special about both *H2 and *H3 that makes it quite different from *H1 which shows up with virtually no trace in later IE lgs. Thus the logical choice for *H1 has to be /?/. Since *H2 and *H3 both agree on lowering vowels and since laryngeals are known to do such a thing, */h./ might be a logical choice. Yet *H2 and *H3 are different in that *H3 in addition to lowering, rounds vowels, thus the labial */h./ for *H3. Voicing doesn't necessarily accomplish this feat as the moderator points out. Labials are a more direct choice. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Tue Mar 16 22:41:13 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:41:13 +0000 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: At 7:28 pm 15/3/1999, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >>Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages >>of stratified societies are always class dialects. >-- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- >based. "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland >dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, >and they have no correlation to class at all. >The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a >class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a very >rare phenomenon. The English upper classes in the earlier part of the 19th century spoke regionally (Lord Derby, with a base outside Liverpool in Lancashire, served as a Tory and then as a Liberal cabinet minister in the 1860s to 1880s, and is credited with having a Lancashire sound to his voice). Earlier this was even more so (and Gladstone is also reputed to have had a Liverpudlian tinge to his speech). But their vocabulary &c was another thing (and that may have been the case in other places and times). And were not the French aristos in the tumbrils reputed to be identifiable by their speech? The English case (and it may be found in certain strata in Ireland and Scotland) probably arose from the railways, the great extension of the boarding system of "public" schools, and the need for many more people to staff the empire. >Standard languages are usually simply a regional dialect >Eg., the Border ballads show laird and crofter speaking the same dialect... >because that's exactly what they did. Prior to the 18th century, squire and >tenant in England also spoke the same regional dialects. But was not the first standard late middle/early modern English the result of a government civil service standard? There was a standard Gaelic at the same time, but that was established by bards and the like. >There's absolutely no reason to assume that the situation was different in >Anglo-Saxon times; thegn and peasant and thrall (unless imported) all spoke >various regional dialects of Old English; nor is there any reason to suppose >that the standardized written tongue of the Wessex kings' scribes was much >different from the spoken language. Perhaps a bit more conservative, but >then, contemporary written English is more conservative than the spoken >language as well. But in late AS times, of course, there was an importation of Normans and others, such as Richard who set up his Castle where I used to live under the aegis of the Confessor in the 1050s. And at 7:37 pm 15/3/1999, JoatSimeon at aol.com also wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> >>And there is evidence that dirt farming (versus husbandry) did not take >>hold in the British Isles until the early bronze age. > >Agriculture was established in Britain in the centuries after 4000 BCE and the >plow was already employed there in the 4th millenium. >(Dates from the OXFORD PREHISTORY OF EUROPE, chs. 4&5). There is evidence to suggest that not only was agriculture in place in this part of the Severn Valley (Worcestershire) in the fifth millenium BCE, but that some at least of the bones of the present road and field systems were in place then. Gordon Selway From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 04:39:16 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 20:39:16 PST Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: ANTHONY APPLEYARD: If H3 was /h.w/ or similar, with a labial component, surely in at least one of PIE's many descendant languages we would find H3 presenting as /w/? This is not necessarily so since we don't find even the "unlabial" *H2 in non-Anatolian languages. It should be noted that /h./ doesn't mean /h.w/. The latter is a consonant cluster whereupon we would expect such a thing as you say. The phoneme /h./ means that the labial superscript denotes a _quality_ of the phoneme. An example is English "ship" which has automatic rounding of "sh". This is pronounced in contrast to "shwip" yet most English speakers don't pay attention to the contrast. However, I have been wondering about things like Sanskrit da-u (1rst person singular). It almost looks like *-H3 (*-h) had become *-w in this instance. I'll let others respond to its validity however. I may be wrong. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 22:54:09 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:54:09 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <7460dd16.36eda595@aol.com> Message-ID: >In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >>Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages >of stratified societies are always class dialects.> >-- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- >based. "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland >dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, >and they have no correlation to class at all. There are very strong class accents in many parts of the US. Here in Mississippi and in much, if not most of the South, the middle and upper classes [at least those under 50 or so] speak a dialect very similar to Midwestern English but they still use "y'all". Older upper class white women around here tend to drop final -r and speak very differently from lower class white women. Lower class whites speak a dialect similar to Appalachian English [with final /-r/ and leveling of /ae/ & /E/ to /ey/]. Have you heard "Burghese" in and around Pittsburgh? Have you noticed that on the East Coast that in the suburbs people tend to sound like they're more from the Midwest than from the East Coast? My friends in college from Moorestown NJ & Bucks Co PA didn't sound anything like Rocky. Very few of my daughters' friends in her MA prep school who are from Boston sound anything like Will Hunting. The only ones who do are from ethnic families who moved out to the suburbs. Have you noticed that in much of the Midwest, the West and the Northwest, working class whites often sound like they're from Appalachia? Have you noticed that upper-class African-Americans often have a distinctively class-based accent that is recognizable as African-American --e.g. the older woman in the Disney commercial. Friends of mine have referred to this as an "AME accent". There is a very definite class diglossia in the US in which regional accents tend to be much stronger among the lower classes. It is not a sharp divide but it's noticeable. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 17 04:50:16 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 23:50:16 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (dates) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/16/99 4:14:11 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> That's fine. The Balkans then too. Again my whole point was that it took multiple millenia for agriculture to move across Europe. And that if we identify PIE or spin-offs with the spread of agriculture, the language is moving incredibly slow. And btw it looks like we both might be out-of-date. I just received a post that says that dirt farming may have been practiced periodically in Greece even before 7000 bce: See, though I haven't read it: S. Andreou, M. Fotiadis, and K. Kotsakis, "Review of Aegean Prehistory V: The Neolithic and Bronze Age of Northern Greece," American Journal of Archaeology 100 (1996) 537-97. <> That seems about right. Two thousand years to go about 600-800 miles. Just about slow enough. <<..and spread across Europe in the late 6th and early 5th millenium with the Linear Pottery culture.>> Linear Ware Culture raced ahead of agriculture. "In physical extent, the LBK in its early phase began in Hungary, reaching Holland in two to three centuries,..." In fact, T.D. Price in "Affluent foragers of Mesolithic southern Scandinavia,"(1995) claims that LBK culture spread five and a half times as fast as Ammerman and Cavalli- Sforza's model of demic advance predicted. And of course there were whole sections of Europe (including Greece) where Linear Ware (LBK) did not go at all. <> This is where I think some of our problem arises. Evidence of agriculture is not evidence of the adoption of agriculture. Iron fragments have been found in Scandinavia dating to 1200 bce, but iron usage came much later. Bogucki (Forest Farmers and Stockherders: Early Agriculture and its Consequences in North-Central Europe, Cambridge Univ Press1995) showed how the transition to farming on the northern plain took nearly a thousand years AFTER the arrival of the first signs of agriculture. The evidence has continued to suggest that early dates reflect availability without acquisition. (see Zvelebil and Rowley-Conwy's work.) As of 1996, the date I had consistently seen for TRB farming in Denmark is 3900 bce and I'd love to know if anything much earlier has been found. Otherwise let's just say it takes another 1000 years for farming to go another what 800 miles? <> The evidence in Britain is even more telling. Although husbandry clearly comes to Britain early, it looks like that plough was strictly ornamental. This is the first news brief from British Archeaology March 1996, and I've seen nothing that contradicts these first findings: <<...bones of about 23 Neolithic people from ten sites in central and southern England, suggests that these `first farmers' relied heavily on animal meat for food, or on animal by-products such as milk and cheese, and that plant foods in fact formed little importance in their diet. The bones date from throughout the Neolithic, c 4100BC - c 2000BC. ... There are a number of ways of tracing the original food source of some of our tissues, and one way is to look at the relative ratios of certain elements, known as `stable isotopes', in bone protein. One particular isotope gives evidence of whether humans were getting most of their food from plant or animal sources.... Human bones from the Iron Age and from Romano-British sites were also tested, and their isotope values were a little higher than those of herbivores. This is as we might expect, as there is little doubt that in these periods people practised relatively intense cereal agriculture, and only supplemented their diet with meat.... The Neolithic results, however, were surprisingly different. They were as high, and sometimes even higher, than stable isotope values of carnivores. This suggests these Neolithic people had relatively little plant food in their diet and instead were consuming large amounts of meat.... Grain and agricultural implements have, of course, been found at Neolithic sites in Britain. The isotope results do not rule out some limited grain production and consumption; but they suggest it did not form a significant portion of the diet. The sites where grain has been found generally seem to have been used mainly for ritual purposes, and it is possible (as archaeologists such as Richard Bradley and Julian Thomas have argued) that in Britain,... grain was grown, or even imported from the continent, only for ritual purposes. Agricultural implements may also have assumed a largely ritual significance...." So I don't think my dates, given my meaning, are all that bad. 7000 bce to about 3500, a little later in some corners. About 3-4000 years, from Greece (and the southern Balkans) to Trafalger Square. Much longer than any pre-literate language could stand itself, much less stay even remotely stay the same from one end to the other. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Mar 16 23:12:03 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:12:03 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: Dear Joat amd IEists: -----Original Message----- From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: Tuesday, March 16, 1999 3:57 PM >In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >>Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages >>of stratified societies are always class dialects. >-- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- >based. "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland >dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, >and they have no correlation to class at all. [ moderator snip of remainder of long article ] There is no way, of which I am aware, to really prove this but I will relate my experiences to you for whatever it may be worth. I have lived on both coasts of the United States, in the Midwest, and currently in the South. My experience has been that professional managers, with whom I have principally dealt in business, speak a standard English with very few regional differences, in every part of the country. Sometimes the business owners, if they are first generation nouveau riche, speak the local dialect --- in fact, sometimes exaggerate it (for psychological reasons, I believe) but the second generation of rich shed the regionalisms, and join the managerial classes of the rest of America in speech if not in anything else. Pat From DRC at antnov1.auckland.ac.nz Thu Mar 18 03:54:02 1999 From: DRC at antnov1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 22:54:02 -0500 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard wrote: > Someone wrote:- >>So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required >>for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years >>for them to be so large as to prevent communications ... > Sheila Watts replied:- >>This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful way. >> ... >and others have written about the amount of change since dispersion in e.g. >Polynesian compared with Melanesian. I read a theory that there is one >mechanism whereby a massive change in a language, or even a completely >unrelated language, can develop quickly: in some natural environments where >living is easy: very rarely but in theory it could happen, some children too >young to have learned much of their parents' language could stray, or be the >only members of their tribe to survive an enemy attack in a tribal war, manage >to survive uncontacted to adulthood, and start a new tribe. I've seen a reference to this theory recently -- I'll see if I can find the source, but I believe it was attributed to Horatio Hale, in a paper I haven't seen. Since I have great respect for Hale as a linguist, I am reluctant to associate him with a theory that sounds to me like fantasyland. I believe Hale had in mind the striking linguistic diversity of California, compared to areas further east. Ross Clark From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 16 23:41:11 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:41:11 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <7460dd16.36eda595@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, > iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: > >Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages > of stratified societies are always class dialects.> > -- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- > based. It's both. I hear lower-class dialect fairly frequnetly. > "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland > dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, > and they have no correlation to class at all. > The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a > class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a very > rare phenomenon. Not that rare. Classical Latin was also a class dialect. In general anything that leads to lessened contact will lead to divergence, and that includes class barriers, gender barriers, even (dare I say it) mountains. > > Standard languages are usually simply a regional dialect Of an upper class. > Eg., the Border ballads show laird and crofter speaking the same dialect... > because that's exactly what they did. Prior to the 18th century, squire and > tenant in England also spoke the same regional dialects. The situation in England of that time is a little anomalous, because the previous standard had been destroyed by the Norman Conquest. As a new one emerged, for a time everyone spoke his local dialect, because there was nothing else. Thus the class barriers in English at that time were relatively recent, and there had not been much time for much divergence to occur. > There's absolutely no reason to assume that the situation was different in > Anglo-Saxon times; thegn and peasant and thrall (unless imported) all spoke > various regional dialects of Old English; nor is there any reason to suppose > that the standardized written tongue of the Wessex kings' scribes was much > different from the spoken language. Perhaps a bit more conservative, but > then, contemporary written English is more conservative than the spoken > language as well. Yes, and various sub-standard features, such as the accumulative ("double") negative and Black English "be", despite being old, are suppressed. DLW From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 09:03:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:03:14 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' < Sanctius; Panza < lat. pantex In-Reply-To: <36EE3F13.B693C0D9@eucmos.sim.ucm.es> Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Javier Martinez wrote: > LT wrote > > at a Basque name, though not necessarily one of ultimately Basque > > origin. This name is totally opaque in Basque, and I am aware of no > > plausible etymology for it. > < lat. Sanctius? Oops -- I meant to write "no plausible etymology for it *in Basque*", since I haven't looked at any attempts to find Romance etymologies. I don't know whether a Latin * would be a plausible source for Spanish . In any case, should have been taken into Basque as *. Since the observed points to an earlier *, we would have to suppose that the unrecorded * was interprteted by the Basques as a diminutive, and that * was created from this by back-formation. The point of this last is that Basque forms diminutives by palatalization. Hence, for example, `Joseph' --> `Joe'; `Martin' --> `Marty'; and so on. There exist apparent parallels for such back-formation. For example, the widespread word `lopped off, stubby, short' has an attested variant , and appears to have been borrowed from the synonymous Castilian , with resulting from back-formation. (Both and palatalize to , so a back-formation might give either result. In the case of *, though, only * could be formed, and not *, since Basque has sibilant harmony: a word may contain only apical sibilants () or only laminal sibilants (), and not both.) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 17 00:12:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 00:12:35 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EDAB21.6322E788@neiu.edu> Message-ID: "maher, johnpeter" wrote: >"Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. No. >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> "maher, johnpeter" wrote: >> >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; >> 1. Surely ... >Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly >vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or >homework. I'd say absence of homework is rather exemplified by (1) getting the Arabic word ('usta:dh) wrong, (2) claimimg that Italian is "a calque of sorts" (?) on <'usta:dh>. Surely. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 09:11:02 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:11:02 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> arándano [ara/ndano] "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ¿?, [c] >> compara con vasco arán [ara/n] "endrino" [c] >> pre-rom. raíz de arán [rai/z de ara/n] [c] [LT] > Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, > but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. > According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words > require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither > of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . > Could aran be from an original form *agran-? In borrowings taken into Basque from the Roman period onward, a medial plosive-liquid cluster (intolerable in Basque) is normally resolved by the insertion of an epenthetic echo vowel, and hence * would be expected to surface in Basque as *. But, if the word was borrowed earlier, perhaps different strategies were in use for resolving such clusters. > btw: what are the other forms in Romance & Celtic? The only forms I have handy are these: Aragonese Irish Welsh , singulative Other forms can be found in the standard etymological dictionaries. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 01:04:27 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:04:27 PST Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: ME (GLEN): I know Hittite cannot be feminine since it doesn't have this gender thing. This is the neuter *-t/*-d found in words like *kwi-d "what" and the heteroclitic declension: [nom-acc] **yekwn-d > *yekwr "liver". Thus: **nekw-d > *nekw-t TADAAAA!!! MODERATOR: Hittite does not have a separate feminine, but it does have an opposition of common vs. neuter (or animate vs. inanimate). Hittite _nekuz_ is of common gender, so I repeat the question: What neuter? MIGUEL: Or, put differently, what's the nominative -s doing in nekut-s? Yes, I'm in deep error. I was starting to realise this when the Anatolian form was spoken of like it was an animate noun. Whoops. There goes my theory, down, down, CRASH! -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 09:45:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:45:53 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [LT] > >By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? > Not quite, they are cognate, both are from /sanktu-/ > shows up in Old Spanish for "holy, saint" and does > conform to a greater degree to the usual treatment of Latin /-kt-/, which > normally becomes /ch/ in Spanish words inherited from Latin --as opposed to > Latinate loanwords e.g. leche < lacte-, hecho < factu-, dicho < dictu- , > etc. > Taking this into acount, looks more like a loan word. > But Antso < Santso, while it definitely looks cognate to , > , looks a bit askew given that Basque does have /ch/ yet we don't > see *Santxo /sancho/. So it didn't come from . And Old Spanish had > /ts/ but we don't see *Sanzo /santso > sanso or Santho/. > So, is Old Basque Santso from some other Romance language, i.e. > Gascon or a dialect of Aragonese or directly from Latin? I don't know. But the first Romance variety I would look at is Navarrese Romance, since this was the Romance variety used in Navarre by non-Basque-speakers, and the second is Gascon, since Gascon, or at least some variety of Occitan, was widely used in the early days of the Kingdom of Navarre as the language of polite society. (Basque was *never* used in this function, even though it was the majority language in the larger part of Navarre.) Unfortunately, there exists no comprehensive and reliable reference work on Basque personal names. (Surnames, yes, but not given names.) Observations about possible etymologies for given names are scattered widely through the specialist literature. Since I've read just about all of this literature, I ought to know if a proposal exists, but I can't recall one. However, it may be that I've just forgotten it. [LT] > >It should be borne in mind that medieval Romance names which were taken > >into Basque often developed very distinctive Basque forms. For example, > >it is hardly obvious that is merely the Basque form of the > >medieval Spanish given name , or that is a vernacular > >form of the name which appears in French as . And you might like > >to puzzle over how it is that the traditional Basque form of `Jim' is > > -- the etymology is straightforward if you know one or two > >things about Spanish personal names. > Sure, Xanti looks like Santiago but the others are straight from > hell :> Yes, it is Spanish `Saint James' which is the source of Basque , with both the usual Basque clipping of long names and the usual palatalization to create a diminutive. Assuming that the orthographic in Spanish genuinely represents [f] and not [h], I would surmise, without checking, that we might be looking at an original Romance *, which would regularly yield Basque * --> * --> * --> * --> . As for , the direct source would be something similar to the well-recorded Basque form `John', of transparent origin and commonly pronounced as two syllables, roughly [jwanes]. Conversion of an initial consonant to /m/ is another Basque process for forming diminutives, and palatalization of the sibilant is, of course, normal. [LT] > >However, or > > is still a vernacular form of in the French Basque > >Country, though the southern Basques prefer as their equivalent > >of . The first French Basque woman I ever met was called > > in French, in Basque, and I've more recently come > >across another French Basque with the same two names. > So Pantxika is not just a Basque spelling of Spanish Panchica? Oh, it very likely is, since that final <-ika> is not normal in Basque in forming diminutives. But, curiously, is common only in the French Basque Country. I've never encountered anybody with this name south of the Pyrenees. > Then can we blame Pancho and Paco on the Basques? Maybe, but I doubt it, especially for , which does not at all conform to the usual Basque patterns for forming diminutives. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 01:30:32 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:30:32 PST Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: >> Borrowing of pronouns is rare, but NOT impossible: ROBERT ORR: Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had become indistinguishable from sing. forms. Yes, yes, and I don't think anyone is disputing that it happens from time to time, here and there, nth person by nth person, but so far people have been citing tidbits of scattered factoids to pettily ignore something that is blunt and obvious, trying desperately to derail the topic perhaps because some think that "debate" equals "arguement". It doesn't change anything. The probability remains likelier that languages that show evidence of a specific ENTIRE paradigm and an ENTIRE (as in WHOLE) set of pronouns are genetically related somehow until such time as proof showing that it IS the result of borrowing is found. (I'm stressing ENTIRE so that people understand what I'm talking about when I say ENTIRE as in WHOLE). We can't say that the similarities found between IE and Uralic are in fact 100% borrowed. We can only dilude ourselves into thinking that our precious and pure IE can't be genetically related to anything which is irrational. In the absence of evidence either way, we must accept that genetic ties between IE and Uralic are the best possibility above all else and all the examples in the world of pronominal borrowing aren't going to change that because borrowing of an ENTIRE set of pronouns or an ENTIRE paradigm is rare, rare, rare. It happens but it's rare. Rare, I say. Did I say "rare" yet? We should put these insignificant thoughts in the far reaches of our mind until such time as they are warranted. Are they warranted? No. Nothing much more will be gained in IE studies until people in general bravely address these kinds of issues with honesty instead of with a purely opposition frame of mind. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 09:59:26 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:59:26 +0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: <36f53280.57403725@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: >But this works both ways. An unintelligible written document >does not rephrase itself, while an interlocutor will try again >until he's understood (if it's in his own interest, of course). This is true, of course, and a good point. But see below. (snip) >In the case of late OE / late ON it's often said that the two >languages were "very close" and mutually intelligible. My own >exposure to ON is negligible (and I can't say I'm fluent in OE), >but it seems to me that such claims are exaggerated. West and >North Germanic had already been diverging for quite some time a >thousand years ago. >But if those claims are made, it's not because the people making >them are trained linguists, but it's because the *evidence* shows >a degree of interaction between the two languages that can only >be explained if there was indeed a fair amount of mutual >intelligibility. But this mutual intelligibilty was probably not >"automatic" as in the case of two dialects of teh same language, >but the result of lots of exposure. Roger Lass and I once had an interesting discussion on the question of mutual intelligibility of OE and ON, which neither of us thought was likely in any widespread sense. There are textual references to interactions in whichOE and ON speakers seem each to have spoken his own language (e.g. in 'The battle of Maldon'), but these are works of literature rather than history. Even if we take them at face value, we cannot know whether such exchanges really occurred, how much each party understood of what the other said, whether they had interpretative help and indeed, how much contact each had had with the language of the other before the events descirbed in the text. I think the problem I had with Rich Alderson's original posting was that I thought it posited rather too undifferentiated a view of what mutual intelligibility means. We need to distinguish between 'so intelligible that tow speakers can just hold a conversation straight off', 'intelligible enough for speakers to make themselves understood if they really want to' 'intelligible enough for speakers to convey very simple messages when there is a very high degree of need.' And the boundary between language acquisition through contact and language learning also seems to me to be a fuzzy one. In conclusion, I still think it's an oversimplification to try to talk about time depths at which mutual intellgibility can be predicted. Modern related language and dialects show us that this is a very complex issue. Best wishes SheilaWatts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 [ Moderator's comment: I agree with what Sheila Watts has to say on the subject. What I originally responded to was the notion that such communication must be rejected based on a relatively short time frame, which I hope we can agree is also simplistic. --rma ] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 02:19:49 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 20:19:49 -0600 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > In fact, Scandinavian, German and Old English were probably mutually > comprehensible as recently as 1000 CE -- at least on an elementary level. > Hmmm. Well, perhaps we should limit that to Old English, Scandinavian, and > Low German. I actually find myself agreeing with Joat ... what a concept. DLW From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 10:13:29 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 10:13:29 +0000 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: <36EE5EEE.A08968C1@neiu.edu> Message-ID: >“... in October 1913, the Balkan League of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and >Monte Negro, encouraged by Russia, declared war on Turkey. In Belgrade, >Trotsky watched the 18th Serbian Infantry marching off to war in uniforms of >the new khaki color. They wore bark sandals and a sprig of green in their >caps. These were perhaps sandals made of a substance called bast, traditionally used for a kind of basketwork in Russia (to my knowlegde) and quitte possibly also in other Slav countries. My Cahmbers dictionary says it is 'inner bark, esp. of lime' (also 'phloem' (?), 'fibre' and ',matting'), though it looks rather like woven rushes or reeds. Russian folktales frequently refer to peasants wearing this kind of footgear. According to Chambers also, it rhymes with gas, not with mast, in RP. Sorry everyone, this is an answer to a question Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen asked me nearly 15 years ago. In my variety of English all the -as words rhyme with each other (gas, gassed, past, mast, mass etc.), so I couldn't answer Jens' question at the time. Best wishes Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 02:32:25 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 18:32:25 PST Subject: PIE plosives Message-ID: MIGUEL: Good point (but Madurese has /b/). I had always kind of assumed without looking that Madurese voiced aspirates must be due to Sanskrit influence, but I see that Mad. has dhu(wa') "2", so that's presumably the Madurese reflex of PAN *Duwa, where *D is what? Retroflex? I assumed so. Tagalog has dalawa. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 17 13:29:35 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 08:29:35 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/16/99 7:09:19 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> And that of course brings up the whole issue of "the second language." In some cases, we just mean exposure to a foreign language. But in others, we are talking about bi-lingualism - presumably a critical stage in the PIE- related situation where a non-IE speaker might be adopting IE. Are there tendencies in such situation that might affect the phonological structure of the adopted language? BTW, there is on the web, a neat site called Enthnologue put up by the SIT that is a catalogue of world languages (I think it is UN info.) There one learns for example such things as: "ALLEMANNISCH (ALEMANNISCH, ALLEMANNIC, ALEMANNIC, SCHWYZERDÜTSCH, ALSATIAN) [GSW] (300,000 in Austria; 1991 Annemarie Schmid; 4,225,000 in Switzerland; 1986). Southwestern. Also in Alsace, France. Indo-European, Germanic, West, Continental, High. Approximately 40% inherent intelligibility with Standard German. Speakers are bilingual in Standard German. Called 'Schwyzerdütsch' in Switzerland, 'Alsatian' in southeastern France. Similar to Swabian. Differs from most other German varieties in not having undergone the second lautverschiebung, or vowel shift. NT 1984. Bible portions 1936-1986." The URL is: http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/Germ.html And finally it is odd to hear two speakers of different languages using two languages to speak back and forth. If they have any sense of accomodation between them, for example, they do tend to make concessions - e.g., if the topic is a dog, it is odd to use the different words to refer to the dog. This is why a third neutral language is as much a matter of etiquette as it is a matter of understanding. Lingua Franca's however also help to get past all that. Regards, Steve Long From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 03:49:11 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (David L. White) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:49:11 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Yoel L. Arbeitman wrote: > We cannot ignore the famed example of Sapir's. Hittite /kubaGi/ > (/G/ - voiced pharyngeal, ghain) has a double representation in Biblical > Hebrew: qoba'' ('' = ayin) and koba''. From this Sapir concluded that > whereas Hebrew is aspirated phonetically and Hebrew /q/ is > non-aspirated, but glottalized or pharyngealized (emphatic), the Hittite > which was phonetically [k] i.e. [-aspiration, -emphaticness], could not > adequately be represented by either Hebrew grapheme. So the alternating > writings. As for the cluster /nt/ in Anatolian into Greek, this is a > special combination. Witness its pronunciation in Modern Greek. One cannot > extrapolate from how a /nt/ would be transcribed into Greek to how any non > prenasalized unvoiced obstruent would be realized phonetically and/ or > graphemically. I think it is not unreasonable to suppose that Greek would probably have borrowed [nt] as /nt/ and [nd] as /nd/. I note as well that if Greek /depas/ is a borrowing from an Anatolian word with /-p-/, the the fact that we do not find */dephas/ suggests that the Anatolian voiceless plosives were not aspirated. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 03:49:18 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (David L. White) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:49:18 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > > On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very > >early, evidently), > What evidence? I have no idea. Whatever Palmer was using .... From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 13:42:49 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:42:49 +0000 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] > >> rel. con vasco abarka; raíz de alpargata [sandal] [c] > >> pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] > >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and > >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all > >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic > >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from > >Romance or from Basque. > The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, doesn't > exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian Arabic may have > allowed it or not. There are words, though, with al-p- associated with > Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras [sp?] and others that escape > me now. > Maybe someone else can help explain this Coromines mentions, to explain Hispano-Arabic . possible contamination with some (unidentified) oriental word [i.e. some hand-waving by Coromines]. The plural is the source of Sp. . The cognates in Cat., Port, have the form . 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 03:49:23 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (David L. White) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:49:23 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Steven Schaufele wrote: > Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, > borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had > become indistinguishable from sing. forms. That's only borrowing (in the usual sense) if the languages were mutually incomprehensible. That it occurred at all suggests that they were not. DLW From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 14:02:12 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 14:02:12 +0000 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EDAB21.6322E788@neiu.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > "Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > > >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; > > 1. Surely ... > Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly > vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or > homework. > Spell out the phonetic developments and refute the ascription to Arabic Well, part of the argument involves, would you believe it?, some comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has , and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only but also , , , , ; and in mod. Sp dialects (including America) . With all those, alongside, of course, of the perfectly well attested Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp and Ar begins to look rather less interesting. I go along with Miguel CV on this, and the accusation that he hadn't done his homework is gratuitously offensive. If JPM had done his, he'd have known the sort of facts I mention in the previous paragraph. 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 03:49:28 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (David L. White) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:49:28 -0600 Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns Message-ID: Glen Gordon wrote: > I'm sorry if I seemed wrought with hypertension, but I just do not think > that this is an idea that should be considered. It is logically flawed > from the get-go. There couldn't possibly be any way for this hypothesis > to be realistically tested in a scientific way and amounts to nothing > more than a fantasy concocted by linguists who are not good at what they > do. Can you explain to me how this could be credibly tested? No? I > thought not :) A good part of what we do in historical linguistics cannot be tested, as researchers in ther fields would use that term. But if what I am suggesting is true, then 1st person pronouns in /m/ should be more common than those in /n/. As far as I know, nothing has been done on this. By the way, how can "the mama syndrome" be tested? DLW From iglesias at axia.it Wed Mar 17 20:30:33 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:30:33 PST Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Lei e Loro in italian were apparently copied from the Spanish usage at the height of Spanish power in Italy and stand for "Signoria" = my Lord, my Lady (source Giacomo Devoto). Yes, Mussolini did try to impose Voi instead of Lei, but he was unsuccessful. Today, people still use Lei, but Loro in the plural is often replaced with Voi, without necessarily implying familiarity which singular "tu" implies. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 02:53:02 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 18:53:02 PST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >>So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is >>required for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and >>more than 2000 years for them to be so large as to prevent >>communications, >-- in general, but not necessarily in particular. Drastic >modification is possible in a fairly short time Ain't that the truth! Ever listened to rap lately?? Does anyone REALLY understand Shakespeare anymore? "Whan thaet April with his showres soote..." What the &*@#???! [ Moderator's comment: Chaucer, of course. Shakespeare is easy. --rma ] Yet another reason why Miguel's arguements, about how "different" IE languages have become over a seemingly short interval to substantiate a different locale for IE, don't sway me either. And if you think about it, there's no reason not to think that IE had differentiated BEFORE these dialects had spread out. Thus differences between Anatolian and Greek after a millenium or so don't get me in a big tizzy. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 16:03:22 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 16:03:22 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > > arándano [ara/ndano] "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ¿?, [c] > > compara con vasco arán [ara/n] "endrino" [c] > > pre-rom. raíz de arán [rai/z de ara/n] [c] > Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, > but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. > According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words > require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither > of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . > btw: what are the other forms in Romance & Celtic? High Aragonese , ; Catalan (var. , , , , , ; Oc gascon/lengadocian (var. , , , ), Oc gasc (Aran) , Oc , , , ; all `sloe'. Mozarabic ? OIr , W `plum', W (pl.) 'fruits, berries'; MBret NBret `sloe' Coromines suggests three base forms: *agri:nia, *agranio. *agrena; and mentions that Pokorny related the Celtic forms with Goth `fruit', OE `acorn' CSl <(j)a'goda> `small fruit, berry' Lit id., 'cherry'. He suggests that Biskaian `plum' may be < *okran < *akran < *agranio, influenced by `bunch of fruits' and other words in where is < `bread'. (How does that grab you, Larry, Miguel?) He doubts a connection between Basque and Sp , Ptg 'bilberry' beyond the possibility of (a cognate of) the latter having influenced the transformation of *agranio > . Coromines's account of *agr- > in the Aragonese, Cat., WOc etc. forms, while not without parallels, is somewhat ad hoc. Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 16:10:19 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 16:10:19 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> artesa "type of box" 1330 "cajón cuadrilongo de madera que es más > >> angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] > >> v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] [snip] > In Pequeño Larrouse, I seem to remember accompanying a > picture of a basket-like contraption with 2 rectangular rims [both rounded > off] and no bottom; the upper rim was about twice the size of the lower > one. There was no indication of size or use. > Now I'm trying imagine how this can relate to a toponym, could it > be a box canyon? Tell us what a box canyon is. Are there such things in Europe? Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 16:45:07 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 16:45:07 +0000 Subject: alud In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [LT] > >Basque ~ ~ `landslide, mudslide' is real enough, > >and is obviously a derivative of `earth'. This has the regular > >combining form in old formations, so the variants in are > >probably recent re-formations. It's not clear to me how the Basque word > >would give rise to Romance . As for Basque `snow', this is > >hardly likely to be related to : there are major problems with the > >phonology, with the morphology, and with the semantics. > But if had a different origin, I could see how, in the Pyrenees, > and ~ ~ could have influenced one another > in the minds of bilingual speakers--but that's supposing a lot > OR the possibility that ~ ~ could be a "folk > etymology" of by Basque speakers --or is that too far out? Interesting question. I've done a little digging, and it turns out that there is a substantial literature on these words, with varying views. Here's a brief summary. First, the Basque word is confined entirely to the four eastern dialects Low Navarrese, Zuberoan, Salazarese and Roncalese; it is unrecorded elsewhere. All four of these dialects are spoken in or next to the Pyrenees. Second, the Basque word appears variously as , , , with a variant also recorded without provenance, and two further variants recorded only in Roncalese, and . Roncalese is the easternmost dialect, deepest into the Pyrenees, and it often exhibits Romance words and forms unknown in other varieties of Basque, as well as a number of idiosyncrasies of its own. At this point, my guess would be that the odd represents a cross between the Basque word and the Romance word, but see below. Third, `earth' has the regular combining form in old formations, but in newer ones. The noun-forming suffix <-te> is common in Basque, and semantically appropriate in this formation. But <-ta> is another matter: save only in Roncalese, where <-te> itself has the variant <-ta>, no such noun-forming suffix as <-ta> is known in Basque. Fourth, the following Romance forms are reported from the area in the sense of `landslide': Castilian Bielsa (sorry; don't know what this is) Bearnais , (I presume is a palatal lateral) Bearnais , , , Aragonese Gascon , Now, how to interpret this? The Romanist Gerhard Rohlfs sees the Romance forms, or at least some of them, as borrowed from Basque, and he sees the Basque word as a derivative of `earth'. The Romanist Joan Coromines sees the word as being of "pre-Roman" origin, with the Basque word and the Castilian word (at least) independently continuing the pre-Roman source. He proposes a prehistoric word *, contaminated in some cases by Basque and/or by Basque `snow'. But he also believes that not all the Romance forms can be traced to a single etymon, and he therefore concludes that we must be looking at at least two distinct original formations. The Vasconist and Romanist Gerhard Baehr likewise believes that the data represent two distinct prehistoric words, with one continued as Basque (and as some Romance forms), and the other continued as Basque (and other Romance forms). The Vasconists Agud and Tovar, in contrast, prefer to see only a single pre-Roman source as accounting for all the Basque and Romance words; they propose * ~ * ~ *. Well, you pays your money... As a postscript, the Romanist Hubschmid suspects that the place name mentioned by Pliny, and the place names and , mentioned in Roman sources, may contain the word or words under discussion. And Corominas wants to include also the place name in Andorra. (Andorra is Catalan-speaking today, but was probably Basque-speaking once.) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 18 19:28:37 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 11:28:37 -0800 Subject: Gender In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >What would (pre-)Anatolian have these forms for, if not for the feminine? It looks like an adjectival suffix to me (parku-i, danku-i), maybe *-iH, but might very well be just *-i (does Hittite have thematic *-io-?). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 17:18:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 17:18:08 +0000 Subject: avio/n In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [on Spanish ] > It means "airplane" now but it does go back a ways. > vencejo --acc. to Velásquez dictionary-- means "swift, black martin, > martlet, martinet [Hirundo apis]. Not a word I've come across in Latin > America > gavi- appears as the first element of a couple of birds: gaviota "gull" & > gavila/n "small hawk" Most interesting. Without ever really thinking about it, I'd always vaguely assumed that the word was `big bird' plus the augmentative suffix <-o'n> -- hence `really big bird', or some such. OK; it's dumb, but it's cute. A propos of nothing much, the Basque verb for `fly' is , which is `wing' plus <-z> instrumental plus `do, make' -- hence, literally, `make with the wings', I guess. Reminds me of the slang expression `make with the feet' for `walk', which was prominent in my childhood but which I don't think I've heard for over 30 years. The Basque for `airplane' is the neologism , from plus <-gin> `maker, doer', and hence literally `flyer', or, even more literally, `thing that makes with the wings'. Who says those Basques don't have a sense of humor? > but I seem to remember seeing somewhere used to mean > "bumblebee" or some sort of large bee > I also seem to remember seeing somewhere that the use of avio/n as > "airplane" comes from French --that whoever the French claim as the > inventor of the airplane called his contraption an "avion", is that right? Well, certainly *is* the French for `airplane', but I confess I've no idea what its origin might be. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Mar 17 17:58:25 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 11:58:25 -0600 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: <36EE0E20.580C@stratos.net> Message-ID: This definitely makes sense re: the name Sancho. But there's also Old Spanish and non-standard Spanish , used instead of . >Larry Trask wrote: >> By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? >In strictly onomastic sources I have usually seen them ascribed to Latin > and respectively. In the Castilian and Aragonese >citations that I've seen from the period 900-1300, is by far >the most common form, followed by . Others include , >, , , , , , and >. >Brian M. Scott From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Mar 17 17:58:55 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 11:58:55 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: That would be ghayn For the form alpargata, I'd also wonder if it ended in ta marbuta--which is /h/ in Levantine Arabic but was once /t/ If I can remember to trudge to the library to check Wehr, I'll see if there's anything like b-r-gh or b-r-gh-t [ta marbuta] [snip] >According to Agud and Tovar, the Arabic word in question is recorded >both as and as , with a dot over the whose >significance is unknown to me. [snip] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 17:47:52 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 11:47:52 -0600 Subject: "mama" Syndrome Message-ID: So, Mr. Gordon, exactly which of the following propositions is "blatantly moronic"? 1) That languages of the world do show a striking tendency to have words for 'mother' that begin with /m-/". (Counting "nursery words", probably something close to 100 percent.) 2) That this is not due to common descent from "Proto-World". 3) That this is not due to words that are [+ primary care-giver] being marked as [+ /m-/] as part of "Universal Grammar". 4) That it is an artifact of babbling and the mother/infant relationship, in that mothers tend to attribute the meaning 'mother' to things that the infant is merely babbling. 5) That if mere babbbles can be given a meaning that applies to one party in the mother/infant relationship, they can be given a meaning that applies to the other party. If the infant is to be regarded as speaking, this other party would have to be what we call "1st person. I note as well that what we have here (apart from the usual failure to communicate) is one linguist who reconstructs Nostratic 1st person pronouns without being aware that the distribution of sounds in these is not in fact random (which is to say that the critical leverage we get in other cases from the idea that "it can't be a coincidence" is lacking) and another who points out the problem with this. So here is another question: which of these two is more properly described as "not doing his job"? If you are going to start using expresions like "blatantly moronic" and "not doing his job", then you will have to start answering questions like these. DLW From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 17 18:07:39 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 18:07:39 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <6105f8bc.36ee8784@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I don't want to give the impression that much of what you've said about this >isn't plausible or compelling. The question I think it does not address is: >What is the latest that PIE could have emerged from a local homeland and >expanded to where we find it when the evidence gets direct? (I.e., written >evidence) Given the enormous variations in rate of change, that's not easy to answer. We have Mycenaean Greek, Vedic Sanskrit and Hittite attested c. 1500 BC, and comparing those three, one doesn't get the impression that the split had been very recent. Even Greek and Sanskrit, which are reasonably close to each other within the whole of IE, are more divergent than any Romance or Slavic language, maybe roughly comparable to West Germanic and North Germanic now, so somewhere between 2000 and 3000 years of separation would be a fair guesstimate. Give or take, your mileage may vary, etc. That would take us back to 3500 ~ 4500 BC, which is a good match for the Kurgan expansions into the Balkans. The distance between Hittite and the other two is doubtlessly greater. But it's even harder to put a date on that. One, two millennia more? My own theories call for a date of 5500 BC. ><destroyed by later language spreads. Celtic has been largely >swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian >spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern >Europe with new dialect gradients. >> >I don't think that is an answer in itself. Because the later languages you >mention fall into Mallory's category of "state languages." Slavic too? >Whether the exact >term is right or not, the meaning is that there is a standardizing agent or >agents that prevents splintering. Whether it's trade or the school marm or >the Academie or the Latin grammarian or the mass media or even a dictionary, >you have a strong force working against splintering and gradients. Part of the "state" effect is optical. Dialects still exist, but people write in the official language. Of course the Roman Empire had a unifying effect for quite a long time. Whether the rate of change of Latin itself was affected (other than optically) is a different matter. I doubt it. So the "state effect" means we have less variation in space, but probably the same variation in time. >Without this standardizing force, epecially among sedentary populations, like >sedentary farmers separated by thousands of years from one another, one should >not even expect PIE to have been PIE a relatively short distance from the >place of origin. Especially, if one follows Renfrew's "a few square miles per >year" rate of expansion The "wave of expansion" model is just a model. What I like about it is that it explains how a language group might have spread across a whole continent without anybody actually setting out to do so (no Anatolian farmer said: "let's invade Europe"). But the model is too imprecise to accurately reproduce what really happened. The process was not so gradual and uniform: farming quickly spread from Anatolia to Greece and the Balkans (7000-6000), but then the advance completely stopped for more than a millennium, until a new wave (LBK) spread rapidly from Hungary across most of temperate Europe (5500-5000). >In the 5000 years that separates first agriculture from direct evidence of the >languages of Europe (aside from Mycenaean), there should have been dozens of >"swallow-uppers" that preceded Celtic or German or Romance. And these might >have moved back and forth all across the continent in a way that would put >many ancestors between the first historical IE languages and PIE. There might >be many proto's between Proto-German and PIE. Yes, I think so. ><languages has been going down on average since the Paleolithic.>> >But you know, Mallory's expert on the North American tribes says the exact >opposite. That the number of languages and language families actually >substantially increased over time and with the coming of agriculture. The >reason is obvious. Farming causes stabilization of location and localization >promotes local diversity in language. Standardization is only something that >happens with centralization - a very different event. I don't know much about agriculture in North America, but I would have thought that the linguistic map of Northeastern North America, with wide-spread language families like Algonquian, Iroquoian and Siouan, shows very little diversity compared with places like California (hunter-gatherers) or NW Coast (sedentary salmon fishers). Isn't that the consequence of a relatively recent spread of agriculture up the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio? Of course, with time, these more or less sedentary farmers would have developed as much diversity as the Pacific NW people. Standardization (in the sense of little divergence) is something that happens with centralization or with expansion. Divergence is the result of decentralization and just time. >But the unique thing about IE languages is not their diversity but their >commonality, something that makes the reconstruction of the proto language at >all plausible. The unique thing about IE is the amount of data that we have. There's nothing unique about being able to reconstruct a proto-language. Given enough data, we can do that for any group of languages that stem from a common ancestor. >I think when you look for the latest possible date for a unity you get closer >to the truth. PIE gives evidence of having been a standardized language in >some way early on. The kurgans may explain it. Agriculture doesn't - not by >itself. It creates the opposite effect without a standardizing agent. >If Latin had been PIE, for example, it accomplished a lot of what it did in >less than 600 years. And it did it without mandating conversion - in >comparison for example to the German laws against speaking Wendish in the >middle ages. I don't think elite dominance describes the Latin phenomena >either. Whatever the Romans did, it seems to be one of the best historical >model we have for what happened in the days when PIE was just another local >dialect BUT on its way to turning into "the first ancestor" of a whole new >family of languages. I disagree completely. The mechamism(s) by which PIE and its daughter languages (Latin excepted) expanded was nothing like the Roman Empire, and given the time-frame, it couldn't have. PIE was not a "standardized language" in any way. It was just a language like any other, and it fell apart into different dialects like any other. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 17 18:09:21 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 18:09:21 GMT Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >According to Agud and Tovar, the Arabic word in question is recorded >both as and as , with a dot over the whose >significance is unknown to me. Arabistic transcription of ghayn, teh voiced velar fricative (/G/). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 18:10:24 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:10:24 -0600 Subject: Dating of Anatolian /nt/ vs. /nd/ Message-ID: The idea that /nt/ is earlier is from Kretschmer(1896) "Einleitung in die Geschict der Griechischen Sprache". Whether his views are based on anything more than the observation that a change of /nt/ -> /nd/ is more probable than the other way around I have, once again, no idea. I am just parroting Palmer ... I take this opportunity to note that the same suffix, /-nth-/, also occurs in Pre-Greek words like "asaminthos" 'bathtub' "me:rinthos" 'thread' "erebinthos" 'pea' "olunthos" 'unripe fig' "Huakinthos" 'Hyacinth' where a meaning 'collective' seems improbable. It is also true that the element /parna-/ in "Parnassos", which occurs on both sides of the Aegean, is recognized as pre-IE, so if the first element in such words can be from a common substrate, why can't the second element also be from a common substrate? But the main thing is that there is no sound-sequence in Anatolian which we would expect to be borrowed into Greek as /-nth-/. DLW From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 18 14:55:55 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 08:55:55 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: 1. No, no, a 1000x no = no argument. As an argument from authority is no argument. 2. <'usta:dh> ~ "ustaeth" are both transcriptions; I doubt if the net has an Arabic font. Spaniards didn't hear the /´/ [glottal stop/ alif, anymore than French and Italians "hear" /h/, glottal continuant, in English etc.. And English speakers don't hear the glottal stop onset when they pronounce the names of the letters A E I O. 3. If is the source of was there, in the early period of the usage, gender concord in complement adjectives? . E.g. "!Vd. está viva! " [I lack Castilian font: please invert first /!/.] When did the masculine adjectives achieve acceptance, if was ever = ? ...................................... Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > >"Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. > No. > >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >> "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > >> >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; > >> 1. Surely ... > > >Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly > >vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or > >homework. > I'd say absence of homework is rather exemplified by (1) getting > the Arabic word ('usta:dh) wrong, (2) claimimg that Italian > is "a calque of sorts" (?) on <'usta:dh>. Surely. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 18:33:18 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:33:18 -0600 Subject: IE Plosive System: DLW Explains It All For You Message-ID: The Javanese system (it is relevant, bear with me) has recently been re-analyzed as being one of, in L&M's terms, plosives with "stiff voice" versus plosives with "slack voice". These two are basically just weaker versions of larngealization and murmur, respectively. The two series might also be termed "fortis' and "lenis". (Thus I am in effect agreeing with MCV after all, after much baring of teeth that would have seemed to presage the oppostite.) But these distinctions, which are of course a matter of phonation (states of the glottis and all that), are necessarily realized in the associated vowels. Not surprisingly, there are languages, for example Bruu, that have the same distinction but regard it as part of the vowels. Thus they have what might be called stiff-voiced/semi-laryngealized/"fortis" vowels versus slack-voiced/semi-murmured/"lenis" vowels. If PIE has such a thing, which it later re-analyzed as belonging to the Cs, that might explain a few things. In an original TVT(not followed by V) syllable, a fortis vowel if reanalyzed in such a way could only lead to a newly "modal" vowel flanked by two fortis plosives, and likewise a lenis vowel could only lead to two lenis plosives. Thus mixing of the two types in one root could wind up effectively (though accidentally) illegal, if the restrictions originaly proper to the closed syl type were generalized. Before going on to the next part of my brilliant "tour de force", I need someone to answer for me a very basic question: does Semitic permit consecutive pharngealized ("emphatic") consonants in its roots? DLW From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 18 15:12:55 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:12:55 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: BAST, LIME etc. 1. North Americans, Aussies etc. might take LIME as the citrus. They know the fragrant tree as LINDEN is the usual term in USA/Canada. 2. Bast, soft inner bark, is good for confection of a lot of household objects. It is turned into a verb in German: translates as 'build [model airplanes etc.]' Shops that sell do-it-yourself supplies bear the sign ,Bastelbedarf. 3. The bastwood tree in the USA Midwest, lost the /t/ in sandhi; came out as . In early summer, when the tree are putting out pollen, this is like cotton fibers, hence also the name . 4. Birch bark, everyone knows, was used for canoes by N. American Indians; the large birch in question was nearly exterminate by Europeans, who used the wood for industrially made thread spools. [I have forgotten the British term for the latter.] 5. Beech was much used of yore in Europe. Both have paper-like, easy to peal bark. Early Russian writings often are on birch, the "papyrus" off the North. 6. Note bark cloth in Africa... .................................................... Sheila Watts wrote: [ moderator snip ] > These were perhaps sandals made of a substance called bast, traditionally > used for a kind of basketwork in Russia (to my knowlegde) and quitte > possibly also in other Slav countries. My Cahmbers dictionary says it is > 'inner bark, esp. of lime' (also 'phloem' (?), 'fibre' and ',matting'), > though it looks rather like woven rushes or reeds. Russian folktales > frequently refer to peasants wearing this kind of footgear. [ moderator snip ] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 18:38:26 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:38:26 -0600 Subject: Bartholomae's Law and Greek 'night' Message-ID: So if B's Law would not (necessarily) apply save across a (productive) morpheme boundary, what is wrong with /-ght/? (Labialized or not, as appropriate.) DLW [ Moderator's response: I was heavily influenced by reading Kuryl~owicz as an undergraduate; his version of Bartholomae's Law obviously stuck with me for a long time. If it would not apply except across morpheme boundaries, nothing but Occam's Razor is wrong with **nog^wht- as the stem: All the unambiguous languages attest a cluster *-k^wt-, so without external evidence why postulate **-g^wht-? I'm sorry, but I am not convinced by the Greek and Hittite evidence (yet). --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 15:42:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:42:12 -0600 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Navarrese is usually considered a form of Aragonese and I've read in some places that Navarra is now the only place where "Aragonese" is now spoken. Similarly, Asturias is about the only place where "Leonese" is now spoken --although its speakers generally call it "bable". >I don't know. But the first Romance variety I would look at is >Navarrese Romance, since this was the Romance variety used in Navarre by >non-Basque-speakers, and the second is Gascon, since Gascon, or at least >some variety of Occitan, was widely used in the early days of the >Kingdom of Navarre as the language of polite society. (Basque was >*never* used in this function, even though it was the majority language >in the larger part of Navarre.) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 17 18:46:53 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:46:53 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >In the case of late OE / late ON it's often said that the two languages were >"very close" and mutually intelligible. >> -- they were intelligible at the level of pointing at a house and saying "house" and both parties understanding the word. Saying the equivalent of "Me burn house." would also probably get across. Roughly the situation with Swedish and Danish today, in other words. It would be difficult to have an actual conversation, but you could get basic concepts across. Not the same language, but not the sort of total incomprehension that monoglot speakers of say, English and Polish would face. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 18 15:26:10 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:26:10 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] 1. The formulation "looks less appealing" does not amount to a demonstration or refutation, but is an initial call to reconsider, verify or disprove the proposition. Go to it, muchachos! 2. It has been sagely noted that dictionary entry forms are a only convenient way to access lexical items in books, but, given the particular traditions of entering nominatives stems or whatever, it is necessary to consider forms that give more information. It is just as wise to remember that we do not walk around uttering isolated words, and to be aware that that words are for the most part extracted from syntax, that most or our word are back-formations from experienced syntagmata. Hence: 3. What is the history of gender concord between these feminine head nouns and accompanying adjectives? ............................................. Max W Wheeler wrote: > On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > > "Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. > > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > > "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > > > >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; > > > 1. Surely ... > > Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly > > vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or > > homework. > > Spell out the phonetic developments and refute the ascription to Arabic > Well, part of the argument involves, would you believe it?, some > comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has , > and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only > but also , , , , ; and > in mod. Sp dialects (including America) . With all those, > alongside, of course, of the perfectly well attested > Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp and Ar > begins to look rather less interesting. > I go along with Miguel CV on this, and the accusation that he hadn't > done his homework is gratuitously offensive. If JPM had done his, he'd > have known the sort of facts I mention in the previous paragraph. > 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 17 18:57:38 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:57:38 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Without this standardizing force, epecially among sedentary populations, like >sedentary farmers separated by thousands of years from one another, one >should not even expect PIE to have been PIE a relatively short distance from >the place of origin PIE Lithuanian *wlkwos vilkas -- that's a pretty emphatic resemblance, seeing as it's at least 4000 years, and probably about 5000, since PIE arrived in the East Baltic area. Myself, I'd say sometime around 3500 BCE makes a sensible date for the spread of PIE into Europe. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 15:47:18 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:47:18 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >According to Chambers also, it rhymes with gas, not with mast, in RP. In my English gas & mast rhyme. Why ain't they a-larnin' folks good English over thar? Sorry >everyone, this is an answer to a question Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen asked me >nearly 15 years ago. In my variety of English all the -as words rhyme with >each other (gas, gassed, past, mast, mass etc.), As they should :> [snip] From xdelamarre at siol.net Wed Mar 17 23:41:22 1999 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 00:41:22 +0100 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote : >Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, >but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. >According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words >require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither >of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . >Could aran be from an original form *agran-? >btw: what are the other forms in Romance & Celtic? >Maybe Dennis "Donncha" King might have some insights on the Celtic forms 1/ Romance :Provençal _agreno_, Catalan _aranyó_, Aragon. _arañon_ point to an original Gaulish _*agranio(ne-)_ 2/ Insular Celtic : O.Ir. _áirne_ 'wild plum' is from _*agrinia:_, W. _eirin_ 'plums' < _*agri:no-_, _aeron_ 'fruits, berries' < _*agra:n(i)o-, Bret. _irinenn_ 'prunelle' is _*agri:no-_, LEIA A-48, Meyer-Lübke n. 294. 3/ The root is possibly the one of Latin _agrestis_, Greek _agrios_ 'wild' ("sauvage, des champs, non cultivé") 4/ Further connections : Goth. _akran_ 'fruit', O.Icel. _akarn_ 'fruit of trees in wild' etc. (<_*akranan <_*agro(no)-) and (possibly)the group of Lithuan. _uoga_, O.Slav. _jagoda_ etc. 'berry' (<_*o:ga:_ < _*og-_, Lex Winter), IEW 773, Lehmann GED 24. 5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental Celtic *agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, gereta, mando_ etc. are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, mandu,_ . X. Delamarre Ljubljana From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 16:07:34 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 10:07:34 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I checked Wehr for b-r-gh, b-r-q, b-r-j, b-r-k, b-r-3 I even tried with alif, w & y there's nothing even close but Wehr only has standard Arabic Even if it were an "Oriental" word, if it passed through Arabic, it would still show /p > b/. And even if Spanish Arabic had /p/, which I don't know, it's a far ways off from the "Orient". It sounds like he's fudging this one [snip] >Coromines mentions, to explain Hispano-Arabic . possible >contamination with some (unidentified) oriental word [i.e. some >hand-waving by Coromines]. The plural is the source of Sp. >. By , does Corominas/es means standard /j, zh/ [from /g/]? or /gh/? >The cognates in Cat., Port, have the form . [snip] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 18 02:44:55 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:44:55 -0600 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Thomas Heffernan wrote: > Although I teach Old English, I do not profess to be a practicing > linguist rather more of a textual scholar. However, I am somewhat > skeptical of the degree of intelligibility claimed for Old Norse, Old > English and Old High German. If one looks at a very familiar text -- a > text we know was preached in the churches on Sundays in the vernacular -- > like that of the Parable of the Sower and the Seed in the three languages > the differences seem considerable enough to preclude immediate > intelligibility. I would have thought in places like Yorkshire in the late > 9th century and 10th centuries that long association would more likely > account for intelligibility. I have selected a line that although it shows > a number of obvious cognates would still I think present problems for the > non-native speakers. > Old Norse reads " En sumt fellr i [th]urra jor[th] ok grjotuga...; > Old English reads " Sum feoll ofer stanscyligean...; > Old High German reads: "Andaru fielun in steinahti lant...." Yes, but this "Old Norse" you are using is actually contemporaneous with Middle English, not Old English. That is a gap of about four hundred years, which was probably enough to convert "semi-mutually intelligible" into "mutually unintelligible". DLW From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 18 16:00:00 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 10:00:00 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: More: 1. In northern Italy there was dislike for the southern etiquette with instead of vs. . A driver stopped by the Polizia Stradale -- cops, typically serve far from home, where they might sympathize with the locals -- could be toyed with, given the pronominal sociology. The northern speeder could address the cop, in full compliance with the Mussolinian etiquette, with , with both parties knowing full well that the northerner scorned both the usage and the cop from the south. 2. As of 1960, in the Veneto, dialect speakers were uncomfortable with the feminine pronoun in addressing a man. They address a man with their masculine pronoun . jpm .......................................... Frank Rossi wrote: > Lei e Loro in italian were apparently copied from the Spanish usage at the > height of Spanish power in Italy and stand for "Signoria" = my Lord, my > Lady (source Giacomo Devoto). > Yes, Mussolini did try to impose Voi instead of Lei, but he was > unsuccessful. > Today, people still use Lei, but Loro in the plural is often replaced with > Voi, without necessarily implying familiarity which singular "tu" implies. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 18 02:49:03 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:49:03 -0600 Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <19990317035132.6645.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > > Well, certainly *H2 and *H3 appear to lower IE vowels. As far as I > understand, both *a and *o are low vowels (an important thing to keep in > mind), No, /o/ is a mid vowel and a front low vowel (unrounded, which would be the expectation) would be /ae/ (the vowel of "cat"), not /a/. DLW [ Moderator's note: The usual ASCII IPA transcription for the front low unrounded vowel is [&]. I have stated in the past that I think we should adopt this transcription until we can start using real IPA fonts, so that we all know what is meant by a form in someone else's posting. -rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 16:24:22 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 10:24:22 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: But Corominas proposed such a link in 1980 What is this? A case of a man with two brains? Corominas says ara/n is "sloe" "ara/ndano" is "blueberry" in Latin America my cheapo office dictionary has "cranberry, blueberry" for ara/ndano but AFAIK cranberries are unknown in Latin America and in Europe, cranberries are something different from what Americans call cranberries, I have know idea what they look like --just that, like American cranberries, that they're reputed to taste like crap I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? [snip] >[Coromines] doubts a connection between Basque and Sp , Ptg > 'bilberry' beyond the possibility of (a cognate of) the latter >having influenced the transformation of *agranio > . >Coromines's account of *agr- > in the Aragonese, Cat., WOc etc. >forms, while not without parallels, is somewhat ad hoc. [snip] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 18 04:22:49 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 22:22:49 -0600 Subject: Addenda/Corrigenda to Recent Missives Message-ID: It occurs to me I was not clear about what PIE series I was saying was "lenis". It is the "voiced aspirate" series, not the voiced series, so my agreement with MCV is only partial. It also ocurs to me that the Greek words in /-thos/ that I gave may well be plausible as colectives, but I must ask: where is this Anatolian "collective" coming from? I have never heard of collective /-nt/ in other IE (which does not necessarily mean much). DLW From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 16:36:50 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 10:36:50 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> >> artesa "type of box" 1330 "cajón cuadrilongo de madera que es más >> >> angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] >> >> v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] >[snip] >> In Pequeño Larrouse, I seem to remember accompanying a >> picture of a basket-like contraption with 2 rectangular rims [both rounded >> off] and no bottom; the upper rim was about twice the size of the lower >> one. There was no indication of size or use. >> Now I'm trying imagine how this can relate to a toponym, could it >> be a box canyon? >Tell us what a box canyon is. Are there such things in Europe? In Spanish, it's called a [which also means garbage can/truck, among other things], hence the town of El Cajo/n. Box canyons figured in most westerns filmed in Arizona, so if you've seen John Wayne movies, you've seen plenty of them. They're the places where the bad guys are usually holed up in. At least in the films, they're canyons that have only one entrance, which is narrow with steep walls. They widen out inside and often have a bit of a flood plain where farming is possible. I'd imagine there'd be quite a few of them in parts of southern and eastern Spain where smaller streams flow down from the plateau. From DFOKeefe at aol.com Thu Mar 18 07:22:11 1999 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 02:22:11 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: Hello I-E-ists, One nation with both a class and a regional based system of dialects used to be pre-Revolutionary China. The Classical Chinese of the early 1900s was quite different from ordinary speech. It contained many older features which were difficult for less educated folks to learn, and which separated educated people from uneducated people. This isn't to say that many of the local dialects had older features of their own, too. Add numerous local dialects, often with millions of speakers, and you have a class & regional based system of dialects. The Beijing tongue is now the standard. The standardized "PuTongHua" now used by the professional Chinese is the same as ordinary speech. For many Chinese, simplified characters and PinYin promote a standard national language, which still permits regional accents. Traditional characters are still used by many millions of overseas Chinese and in Taiwan. In Taiwan, Mandarin is the professional language and Fujian (or Fukien) the actual major spoken language. Literacy is universal on Taiwan, so that the traditional characters are not symbolic of class differences. Add to this the fact that Mandarin and Fujian both use the same characters and class differences are somewhat lessened. Hope this promotes the discussion at hand. Regards, David O'Keefe [ Moderator's comment: I'm not sure that it does, but thanks for trying. It appears to me that the discussion has come to an impasse, with neither interlocutor likely to change point of view, so I am going to suggest that we discontinue this thread on this list. --rma ] From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Mar 18 09:23:23 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:23:23 GMT Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Frank Rossi wrote:- > Lei e Loro in italian were apparently copied from the Spanish usage at the > height of Spanish power in Italy and stand for "Signoria" = my Lord, my Lady > (source Giacomo Devoto). ... The same seems to have happened in Dutch. Spain got possession of Holland (not by conquest but by the chances of marriage and birth and death and inheritance among noble and royal families, and Holland got free afterwards in a long savage religious war.) In Dutch originally: {du} = "thou", {jij} = "ye", {uwe}?= "your (pl)", or similar (I think). Later:- {jij} used as polite singular as in French and English. {Uwe Edelheid} = "Your Nobility" used as polite "you" sg & pl, later abbreviated in writing and then in speech to (U E} and then {U} (by imitating Spanish {usted}?) {jij} no longer used as plural. (du} fell completely out of use :: in the 16th century it was a literary rarity. (But I have seen {dou wilde se} = "thou wild sea" in a poem in modern Frisian.) The present situation is (I think: my Dutch has got a bit stale; I learned it for 2 holidays motorcycling around Holland around 1980):- nom gen jij & je jouw you (sg) (intimate / condescending, like French {tu}) gij & ge thou (sg) (religious / dialectal / poetical) jullie van jullie you (pl) (familiar) (< "you people") u uw you (sg & pl) (polite) Anthony Appleyard, UMIST, Manchester, UK; http://www.buckrogers.demon.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 17:32:26 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 11:32:26 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] > The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a >> class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a >>very >> rare phenomenon. [snip] In every Spanish-speaking country I've been in, including Cuba, class dialects are very noticeable. Although Cuba is a communist country, you can tell someone's class origins or professional status by his/her accent --whether someone is a blue collar or white collar worker. In Latin America, just as in the US, the upper and upper middle classes speak a dialect that, on the whole, transcends national boundaries, while regionalisms tend to persist in the lower and lower middle classes. Even in countries that have very distinctive national accents such as Mexico and Argentina, people from the upper classes speak a much more standardized version of the language. Among Spanish-speaking cities, Madrid, Buenos Aires and Mexico City are well known for their lower class accents. As in the US, class differences can be found among members of the same family living in the same town. My guess is that class accents are the norm and that they are eradicated only when social classes are eradicated. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Mar 18 09:38:39 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:38:39 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Max W Wheeler wrote:- >... comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has > , and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only > but also , , , , ; and in > mod. Sp dialects (including America) . ... perfectly well attested > Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp > and Ar begins to look rather less interesting. (1) Ar. still could have played a part in it. Perhaps, once {usta:d> had got into Spanish, it sounded like a collapsed form of and coalesced with it. (2) Re borrowing a pronoun of one language into some other use in another language: etymological dictionaries say that US English "bozo" = "fool" < Spanish "vosotros": could it also be that the US English slang term of address and then nickname "buster" came from the abovementioned Spanish dialect ?, and not the English for "one who busts (= breaks) things". Anthony Appleyard, UMIST, Manchester, UK :: http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 18:06:03 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 12:06:03 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This one's hard to prove either way. That usted looks like ustadh is obvious but forms based on vuesa merced, vuestras mercedes DO come close to usted. BUT if usted is documented before the other forms, I'd say it is very possible that usted is from Arabic and that the other forms are folk etymologies. Conversely, one could argue that usted is the folk etymology --provided that one could show that the other forms predated it. The problem lies in that one has to wonder why usted didn't appear in Old Spanish when Arabic influence was much strong. I'd guess that the only possible way to argue that Usted is from Arabic would be to try to maintain that's it's a loanword from Mozarabe that spread from the South. But you'd have to document that. [snip] >Well, part of the argument involves, would you believe it?, some >comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has , Voce^ is more often said to stem from vossa excelencia, at least according to the Portuguese professors and Brazilian linguistics students I knew in grad school. >and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only > but also , , , , ; and >in mod. Sp dialects (including America) . I've never come across vuste', ect., anywhere in Latin America but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But I'd wonder if it wasn't heard from a Spanish immigrant. >With all those, >alongside, of course, of the perfectly well attested Vuestra merced is technically wrong in that vuestra is used to address more than one person. The corresponding singular form is vuesa merced. >Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp and Ar > begins to look rather less interesting. >I go along with Miguel CV on this, and the accusation that he hadn't >done his homework is gratuitously offensive. If JPM had done his, he'd >have known the sort of facts I mention in the previous paragraph. [snip] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 18 17:52:21 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 17:52:21 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Max W Wheeler wrote: > Coromines suggests three base forms: *agri:nia, *agranio. *agrena; and > mentions that Pokorny related the Celtic forms with Goth > `fruit', OE `acorn' CSl <(j)a'goda> `small fruit, berry' Lit > id., 'cherry'. > He suggests that Biskaian `plum' may be < *okran < *akran < > *agranio, influenced by `bunch of fruits' and other words in > where is < `bread'. (How does that grab you, Larry, > Miguel?) It strikes me as pretty fanciful, I'm afraid. The combining form of `bread' is , not *, and there is absolutely no parallel in Basque for the steps involved in the proposed derivation of , except that a putative * would indeed be borrowed into Basque in the form *. Moreover, the strictly eastern word `bunch' (of fruit) is not attested at all in the western dialect Bizkaian, or even in its neighbour Gipuzkoan, and, in the east, so far as I can tell, only ever appears as the final element in a compound, and never as the first element. This is reasonable, since plus in that order would have to mean `bunch-plum' -- presumably a distinctive kind of plum that grows in bunches. Noun-noun compounds are always head-final in Basque. I agree that, in the face of common `plum', the common Bizkaian form is a puzzle. Agud and Tovar discuss this last item briefly, but fail to make any suggestions beyond the obvious: it's related to . But I have a suggestion. The very frequent Basque word `woods, wilderness' is very commonly used as the first element in compound nouns to denote the equivalent of English `wild'. In this position, exhibits both the combining forms (regular in old formations) and (more usual in newer formations). For example, from `lord, gentleman', we have both and for `the Old Man of the Woods', a character in Basque folklore. Among the numerous formations are ~ `wild boar' ( `pig'), `wildflower' ( `flower'), `wild leek, asphodel' ( `leek'), `deer' ( `goat'), `wild grapes' ( `grapes') and , today `farmhouse' but formerly `remote village' ( `settlement, habitation'). Now, the Basque word for `sloe' is in most varieties , literally `wild plum'. This word is the direct source of , the name of a favourite Basque beverage made by soaking anisette in sloes. But there also exists a derivative of , , which as an adjective means `wild' (of fruits and apparently only of fruits) and as a noun means `wild fruit' (in general) in most places, but in one locality means specifically `sloe'. The possible variant * does not appear to be recorded as such. However, a certain unidentified manuscript uses the interesting word for `sloe', strongly implying that the variant * must once have existed. But, whether it did or not, I can see here an obvious origin for the Bizkaian . Given the recorded `sloe', we have a simple four-part analogy, where the word for `hen' is chosen somewhat arbitrarily: `wild hen' : `hen :: `wild plum' : X And solving for X yields the required `plum'. Don't know if this is right, but I'll back it against Coromines's contortions. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Thu Mar 18 13:45:21 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 13:45:21 +0000 Subject: mutual intelligibility of OE with ON, &c Message-ID: A couple of thoughts to do with OE/ON/OLG/OHG/Frisian &c mutual intelligibility (which I may have mentioned long ago on a different but related thread): there are reports that LG/Flemish and some versions of OE or MiddE had a degree of mutual intelligibility, or at least of recognition of consistent differences (a 'shibboleth' case for example to do with 12th century settlements by traders from the Low Countries - 'he says 'keyse' for 'cheyse' and 'brode' for 'brede' - which led to murder); there are also reports of internal non-intelligibility in insular Germanic - 'eggys' -v- 'eyer' - but what the level of direct contact between SW and NE was then, and the dates, and whether this is by inference rather than written contemporary evidence I do not know; of course, mutual lack of comprehension (demotic Glaswegian, of which I have a passive understanding and a limited ability to deploy, against standard British English; or Northumbrian, or East Anglian, or the more rustic forms of south-western/western English [or Black Country] with an RP speaker) may not yet be dead. Though how far it is a class thing against a local thing I am not sure: my knowledge of Glasgow comes from childhood and hearing respectable Glaswegian speech from people born 120 years ago, so that I noticed a certain difference, down to parental speech first acquired 80-90 years ago, and I have a similar knowledge of rustic SW English. Oddly in Glasgow, it can be thought that I have a tinge of Edinburgh, though I am understood readily enough. But I digress; experience suggests that, with a little attention and understanding of how languages work on both sides (which is almost proverbially not to be found in the native English speaker), there could still be some degree of mutual intelligibility between spoken Scandinavian and spoken English, but the context would have to be right. it could be similar to the proposition made to us when I was a schoolboy that we did not need to learn Italian in order to read and understand Dante, because we all had a thorough grounding in Latin. Gordon Selway From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 18 17:58:40 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 17:58:40 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Max W Wheeler wrote: > Tell us what a box canyon is. Are there such things in Europe? My dictionary asserts that a box canyon, in the western US, is a canyon with vertical walls. But that's not quite what it means to me (an easterner): for me, a box canyon is a canyon enclosed on three sides and open only at one end. Box canyons in this sense are numerous in Hollywood westerns of the 1940s. Just how many there might be in any part of the world, I can't tell you. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Thu Mar 18 14:27:37 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 06:27:37 PST Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: From: Larry Trask Subject: Re: non-IE/Germanic/h Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 14:42:07 +0000 (BST) On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: {RMC] > haltha- "slope, slant, incline" > Halde "slope, hillside", heald [OE] > "hillside" > [< ?Vasconic; > see Basque halde, alde, ualde < ?*kalde "face, side, flank"] [tv95, tv97] [LT] The Basque word is in the eastern dialects but everywhere else, as a result of the categorical voicing of plosives after /l/ in all but the eastern dialects. No such form as * is known to me. Lhande's 1926 dictionary cites and attributes it solely to the 17th-century writer Oihenart, but Oihenart in fact used , and so I suspect an error here. (Lhande is full of errors.) The form is an error: this must be the compound with initial `water', which appears as ~ , and means literally `waterside'. The central meaning of the Basque word is everywhere `side', with transferred senses like `flank' and `region'. I don't think it really means `face', and it certainly doesn't mean `slope'. [RF] Part I , and There are several aspects of in Euskera that are not immediately apparent from the discussion above. For example, it is commonly used in conjunction with the derivational allative suffixing element <-era> (as are other root-stems in Euskera) in its directional meaning of "toward." Hence, "We are going toward the mountain" can be converted into a spatially understood "noun-like" notion, namely, one that refers to "the place that is ." That spatial notion is not directly equivalent to "mountain-slope". But it certainly does approach it in the sense that you are moving through a space identified as "[the part] toward (the) mountain." In many senses the referentiality of would correspond, in terms of the spatially grounded notion it comprises, what is understood in spatial terms to be "a slope" or "mountain-side" in English. Similarly, the verbalized form means either "to approach" or "to go away from" depending on the positionality of the speaker's frame. Furthermore, in the case of spatial content of expressions such as when they are used more abstractly, they come to be understood as a close equivalent of the Spanish word . In Euskera (or more explicitly ) can be glossed as "the space/side near you" and is used as an equivalent for "cercanma, regisn" and consequently, in given contexts is equivalent to (Sp.) in its application as a "hamlet". In other contexts, <-alde> can be used in a more collective (spatial) sense, e.g., "family property; household" from "house" ; ) "flock of sheep"; beitalde (< bei "cow" <-(t)-alde>" "herd of cows'. When the definite article (actually an old demonstrative) is added, the resultant geographical/spatially oriented expressions take on meanings close to those of "hamlet, village", e.g., "the area/location/community of Aranzazu," with a similar sort of semantic extension as in the items cited previously meaning "collective." Moreover, the frequency of such compounds in the language have given rise to the phonological variant -talde, now understood by many speakers only to mean "group, collective". For anyone bilingual in Euskera and Spanish, the phonological correspondences between and "la ladera del monte" are striking. I take no position concerning the role played by as a possible candidate inherited by Euskera and IE from some earlier (pre-Rom.) linguistic substrate (substrata). I only want to indicate that things are a bit less clear cut than they might appear at first glance. Also, I'd mention that Azkue I:28 lists (BN-baig, L-ain) and (BN, Sal.), the latter with the following definition: "faldsn, parte inferior de una casaca, saya, levita o levitsn"/ "pan, basque, partie infirieur d'un habit, d'une robe, d'une redingote." In Euskera one of the meanings of is "reverse, reverse side", specifically Azkue I: 29 includes the following definition: "anverso, cara de un objeto"/"face, endroit d'un objet." From the point of view of sewing, it would be the "facing" of the garment or its "inner/under-liner." Not exactly the same meaning as "skirt" but close, particularly if one keeps in mind that (Sp.) has a very similar definition in sewing terminology: it's the "(inside) flap, fold." One would need to look more closely at the context of the Romance item in Medieval writings, e.g., in Berceo or El conde Lucanor. Part II. (Eusk) vs. (Sp.) Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] > >> rel. con vasco abarka; ramz de alpargata [sandal] [c] > >> pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] [LT] > >Basque denotes a kind of rustic sandal, traditionally a soft > >leather moccasin held on by a cord passed through holes in the sandal > >and wrapped around the calf. The word is very probably native, but > >cannot be monomorphemic, with that plosive in the third syllable. > >The favorite guess sees it as a formation involving `branch(es)' > >and a noun-forming suffix <-ka>. This is semantically awkward, and > >seems to require that ancestral abarkas were made of foliage -- not very > >comfortable, I would have thought. > maybe from cord made from pliable bark of branches? would that work? > >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and > >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all > >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic > >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from > >Romance or from Basque. > The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, doesn't > exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian Arabic may have > allowed it or not. There are words, though, with al-p- associated with > Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras [sp?] and others that escape > me now. X Maybe someone else can help explain this [RF] Although I've lost track of who said what in the exchanges above, the following is one model for explaining the concern raised : In reference to the other ongoing discussion concerning (Eusk) and (Sp.), the suffixed expression aldaketa (Eusk) is also of interest. In it the common ending <-keta> is encountered. The root-stem in compounds becomes . In Euskera and especially the phonologically altered also carry the meaning of "change, alteration." In the case of the aforementioned it can be understood to mean "to change place(s)," i.e., "to move to one side." Similarly, the meaning of can be expanded to by adding the derivational suffix <-ka>. In many contexts the suffix <-ka> conveys a verbal notion of reiterative movement, i.e., somewhat like a gerundive, whereas in others the reiterative force of <-ka> can be reprocessed cognitively so that it produces a type of concept more like a verbal noun. Indeed, <-ka> even can be suffixed to conjugated verb forms themselves to create emphatic expressions such as ( "yes, [they insisted that] it certainly is there!" Thus, we have the compound which can be translated simply as "side" or "change" while it carries a hidden verbal charge of reiterative movement that is not apparent in the translation. The same root-stem is brought into play in the compound which again would translate simply as "change" but because of the presence of <-keta> the compound refers to "change" in terms of the notion of the "(concrete) operation/action of changing." However, since <-keta> does not refer necessarily to the actual action (in process). Rather its referentiality is to the notion of "action" as a (concrete individuated) abstraction. Perhaps because of the meanings circulating in the underlying structure of the suffix <-keta) (<*-ke-eta>), compounds in <-keta> are commonly used to refer to a sort of verbal noun. In addition, it is frequently used to refer to a collection, conglomeration, or quantity of the same substance/thing, e.g., beiketa "a bunch of cows." There are also other nuances of <-keta> that could be discussed. However, for our purposes let it suffice to say that <-keta> is a common suffix and one understood to be indigenous to Euskera. Furthermore, as I'm certain Larry can demonstrate with a long list of examples, the ending is found in many place-names and therefore is not considered an innovation in the language. At this point we can turn to the other Euskeric root-stem that of late has been mentioned frequently on this list: . First, I would like to ask Larry what those involved in reconstructions of Euskera say about the possible relationship between the forms and . Certainly their meanings are quite close as well as their phonology. It would seem that -if this is the innovative phonological form- has become more specialized in its meaning, while continues to refer to both a tree "branch" and/or "other branch-like protuberances," e.g., "horns" Indeed, the meaning of "horns" may well be the dominant one in today's usage. If I'm not mistaken has been compared to forms in Celtic (sorry I have almost no reference books where I am here in Panama). A strong point in favor of the root-stem Being a phonological innovation is the fact that it has produced no compounds that do not have their direct phonological counterpart in derivational forms in , e.g., , with the same identical meaning. The only compound of whose meaning is not encountered among those derived from is precisely , a point that I will return to in the latter part of this mailing. Finally, we have the form that Eduardo Etxegaray recorded in his Diccionario etimolsgico (cited by Azkue I: 6) as a genuine Euskeric compound meaning (Sp.). Whether this is a correct assumption I do not know. But what is clear is that at least a few speakers of Euskera must have heard (Sp.) and reprocessed it as . Moreover, from the point of view of Euskera's derivational rules, the alleged meaning of the compound , i.e., as equivalent to (Sp.) and (Sp.), has always bothered me. It never has felt right to me. In other words from the point of view of derivational forms in Euskera, the type of referentiality conferred by simply doesn't match what would be needed to speak of "shoes made out of bark, branches." For example, one would have expected to encounter the use of the compound derivational ending in <-z-ko> in which the instrumental suffixing element of material, <-z > would be functioning, e. g., arrizko (< arri-z-ko>) "something made of stone." In contrast, * could refer to something that the branches (or perhaps the bark of the branches) had done or produced. For instance, from "snow" we have "snow-fall." In contrast, the referenitality of the compound is more like "to go about branching" or perhaps "to branch about,." or perhaps even "to stick out one branch after another", none of which make much sense, not even in Euskera, although maybe one could imagine a scenario in which the speaker was trying to portray a scene in which the movement of a tree was portrayed with it "rapidly sprouting one branch after branch." In contrast, the root-stem with its strong meaning of can easily be turned into a verbal noun or gerundive as "repeatedly striking blows with its/one's horns." In the case of the word's other meaning "branch" is suppressed in interpreting the compound's referentiality since there would appear to be no logical counterpart for type of referentiality in question. For this reason I have always held a rather heretical position, although I've never put it into print: that the borrowed form is , i.e., that it is a reflex of the Castillian forms of . As far as I'm concerned, the original form, the one that does make more sense in Euskera, would have been (although perhaps in its original phonological shape *). In this simulation * or would have passed into Castillian in the Middle Ages through mechanisms not clear to us today, perhaps together with the object itself, something seen as a unique type of shoe. There it would have undergone phonological reduction to and/or undergone further modification to in some environments (the variant would have emerged through some sort of popular analogy to Arabic works beginning with what sounded like the same initial vowel/consonant cluster). Nonetheless, the longer form of the compound would have survived in Ibero-Romnce as . And in this simulation of events, eventually the apocapated form was borrowed back by Euskera as if it were one of its own because of the fact that the speakers recognized the root-stem in it. In these wanderings, one should not underestimate the possible role of Mozarabic speakers in converting the * to . I leave the questions of the phonological likelihood of such changes having taken place in Ibero-Romance and Arabic and the hands of those on this list who have far more expertise than I do in those fields. This is one explanation for the data. There are probably many others. Izan untsa, Roz March 17, 1999 Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 U.S.A. e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [Currently on leave in Panama] From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Mar 18 18:01:24 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 19:01:24 +0100 Subject: Mummies of Urumchi In-Reply-To: <7458c234.36eaafec@aol.com> Message-ID: >She's also been closely involved with the recent investigations of the Tarim >Basin mummies (generally agreed to be Tocharians and proto-Tocharians) generally accepted on which kind of evidence, if I may humbly ask ? Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 18 23:48:46 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 23:48:46 GMT Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <19990317043917.15292.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >However, I have been wondering about things like Sanskrit da-u (1rst >person singular). And 3rd. person (dadau). >It almost looks like *-H3 (*-h) had become *-w in >this instance. All laryngeal stems do this: dadhau with H1, yayau with H2. Also the duals in -au. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 18 19:17:44 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 11:17:44 PST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >[ Moderator's comment: > Chaucer, of course. Shakespeare is easy. > --rma ] Certainly, Shakespeare is more understandable than Chaucer and it may be easy for one who dabbles into languages and linguistics, however there are jokes and such in Shakespeare that are lost amongst the contemporary laymen. The degree of comprehension depends too on what modern dialect you compare it to. For all intents and purposes, Early Modern English is different enough from Modern English to make comprehension difficult after only 400 years or so. By comparing even Shakespeare's English to Chaucer shows how much things can change in an even shorter period. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's response: There are jokes and such understandable to members of my generation (1951) that are lost on those born 10 years later, but the language is such that the jokes can be explained--as with Shakespeare. Before the jokes in the _Canterbury Tales_ can be explained, the language itself must be explicated. I do agree that the changes between 1400 and 1600 appear more radical than those between 1600 and 1999--though the Great English Vowel Shift is obscured by the orthography, so how do we measure the difference? --rma ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Mar 19 00:03:55 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 19:03:55 EST Subject: Indo-European Phonology Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 4:53:39 AM, Bomhard at aol.com wrote: <<4. The so-called Germanic and Armenian "consonant shifts" (in German, "Lautverschiebungen"), which can only be accounted for very awkwardly within the traditional framework, turn out to be mirages. Under the revised reconstruction, these branches (along with the poorly-attested Phrygian as well) turn out to be relic areas.>> First, thanks for the terrific summary that you've given us here. As to the reconstructed obstruents as applied to the German/Armenian "shift," Philip Baldi explained and endorsed it in Comrie's "The World's Major Languages" not 40 pages from where Hawkins postulated that shift might be due to "the speakers of a fricative-rich language with no voiced stops making systematic conversions of IE into their own nearest equivalent..." in a prior nonIE tongue. Of course, he also mentioned the usual 30% non-IE lexical substrate. Baldi states that the retention of the German/Armenian archaism is the logical result if we "recognize the uneveness of the records and the fact that some of the languages split off from Proto-Indo-European long before others did,..." citing Bomhard (1984). My question is can the archaism only represent a early split-off? Aren't there other explanations for the retention of the glottalized stops? One that comes to mind is that German and Armenian were languages that were not split-off but cut-off from at the time PIE was somewhat cohesive. Historically this would mean that that for example Germanic did not move ("split-off") but rather that it stayed in place but was not in contact with changes that were happening in the rest of IE. The linguistic split would have happened afterward over time as development proceeded that created the other IE languages. And if dropping glottalizing was "an innovation" that was transferred from one IE language to another (let's say as a fashion) then we would not necessarily say that German split-off earlier, but that it was never exposed to the spreading innovation. I'd think archaic speech doesn't only happen because of an early split-off. It could happen because innovations could not reach isolated areas. The older English that has been found on isolated islands of the Atlantic Coast in America have not always happened because of the earliness of these settlements, but because subsequent changes did not reach these outposts. As to what could have cut Germanic or Armenian off from the mainstream, there may be some candidates. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 02:03:02 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 02:03:02 GMT Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) In-Reply-To: <001601be6fdd$9b4e2d40$d370fe8c@raol.lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >>Exactly, the fact that the imperative has the secondary (short) >>endings shows that these were the unmarked, neutral ones. >>Present (Non-past) = neutral + ``here and now''. The forms >>without the -i extension then become past forms (aorist or >>imperfect) by default. But the distinction was already in >>Anatolian (-mi present vs. -m past). >According studies of contemporary language, present vs non-present >distinction is rare to non-existent (Comrie says the latter in his >``Tense''). Zero past does not seem to occur among languages with forms >restricted to past that is obligatory. I don't know, maybe the -i originally marked something else (imperfective?). For PIE, all we can recover is that it marked the present. Compare Akkadian, where the unmarked form (iprus: -C1 C2 V C3) was the simple past, versus marked perfective [perfect] (ip-ta-ras: -C1 ta C2 V C3) and imperfective [durative] (ipar-r-as: -C1 a C2C2 V C3) forms. >It seems better to assume that SE >marked only person and number and could indicate past only when implied >by context or by inference. But then there must have been some way >(particles?) of overtly marking past when needed. Now, there is some >evidence for augment outside Gr.Arm.I-Ir (Rasmussen indicated some in a >post to the previous incarnation of this list). It is possible that the >augment disappeared as the past became overtly marked otherwise (we can >see this in progress in Pali). It may even be that the augment was >grammaticized independently in Gr. and I-Ir: I don't know if the >patterns of Myc., Homer and Avestan have been fully explained. >In fact the zero past vs marked non-past of Hittite seems quite unusual. >(i.e., Hiittite has its weirdness :-) I am not well read on the role of >sentence particles in Hittite. Do they have any role in this? [I >remember some work arguing that -kan marked perfectivity.] >>Some features that are unique to the "Indo-Greek" verbal system are: >>- the perfect as a separate "aspect", besides present (impfv.) >>and aorist (pfv.). >This is precisely what I objected to in the first place. There is no >morphologically marked aspect in Vedic or any stage of Sanskrit. I'm not sure what you're saying here. Vedic and Sanskrit have categories called (using the Greek terminology) "imperfect", "aorist" and "perfect", which are morphologically marked in different ways (root/reduplicated/-i-/-sk-(cch)/nasal presents, root/reduplicated/thematic/sigmatic aorists, reduplicated perfects [with special personal endings]). These three categories are found in Greek and Sanskrit/Avestan, and only there do we find all three categories (marked in almost exactly the same ways). The fact that the Vedic, Sanskrit and Avestan imperfect, aorist and perfect are not used in the same way as the corresponding Greek categories is interesting, underpublicized and also needs to be explained, but doesn't in any way affect the obvious close genetic connection between the two systems. At the PIE, or "Indo-Greek" level, the three categories can be described conveniently as "aspects", since they are all "past" in terms of tense. >To put it bluntly: The usual morphological classification of Vedic verb >forms found in grammar books has no syntactic justification, but is due >to 19 c. prejudices. It is a serious methodological error to base >syntactic comparisons on the mere names. The comparison is based on the forms rather than the names. >> In Hittite, the perfect is still simply the past tense of the stative >> (hi) conjugation. >There are examples of resultative > `present perfect' > (perfective) >past. But ``past state'' > resultative? IMHO, it would be better to >assume that Hittite extended its use of -i for present into the >`stative' by analogy, while the rest of IE extended the stative into >resultative with further evolution into (a kind of) past in individual >languages at different times. [Looking at some old messages, I found >that I have asked this before and you agreed that PIE `perfect' was >tenseless. In that case, Hittie -hi is an innovation.] The 1p. sg. thematic in -oH shows that a stative present was not limited to Anatolian, although the addition of -i may have been an Anatolian innovation. In fact, the morphologically marked form here seems to be the past, with -e suffix (*-H2-e, *-tH2-e, *-0-e). >>- the imperfect as a simple past tense of the present ((augment >>+) present stem + secondary endings). >What does `simple past tense of present' mean? If it means aspectually >unmarked past, how does that indicate closer relationship with Greek? >If it means ``present (imperfective) in the past'', the claim is wrong. >And Armanian aorist has `eber' which is usually traced to `ebheret'. >Slavic aorist and Baltic preterit also have forms which seem to be >from present stem + secondary endings. so such a form is not >just Gr-I-Ir. The point is that neither the Armenian nor the Baltic and Slavic *imperfect* are simply made from the present stem + secondary endings. Only Greek and Indo-Iranian make the imperfect that way. Slavic does have some root *aorists*. The Armenian aorist, apart from the 3rd.p.sg., cannot be derived from either root imperfects or aorists. >> Italic, Celtic and Albanian ... but their forms are best described >> as s-preterites. >So what is the difference between s-preterite and s-aorist? Italic, Celtic and Albanian "preterites", as a category, are a mix of aorist and perfect forms. There is no difference between Latin dixi (formally an s-aorist) and pependi (formally a reduplicated perfect), etc. There *is* a difference between pf. nina:ya and aor. anais.i:t (and impf. anayat). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Mar 18 20:08:42 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 22:08:42 +0200 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19990315080009.006a8e90@pop.mindspring.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Yoel L. Arbeitman wrote: > Point well taken. But, dictionaries of "Classical Languages", Lat. and > Gk., will always give both the nom. citation form AND the stem, usually > in the form of the genitive sg. Case under discussion: Lat. nox, noctis > will always be the listing from which one knows that the nom. nox /noks/ > represents a reduced stem /nok-/ + the desisence -s. And OIndic (Skt.) > dictionaries give for noun and verb the stem rather than either resp. > the nom. sg. or the third sg. active present. Yes, dictionaries of different languages and different kinds of dictionaries will give different information both with respect to types and tokens. But the primary point was that regardless of how much information the dictionaries provide with respect to lexicon, they usually provide either limited or no systematic information on phonology or morphology. And the real point behind it all, which I was making rather obliquely, is that for comparative work you want to have the best philological information available and that dictionaries only provide a part of this. > For the verb Classical Dictionaries give first sg. act. present. In > Semitic the verb is given in the past/perfect(ive) 3 sg. masc., etc. True for West Semitic, but dictionaries of East Semitic give the so-called "infinitive" (nomen actionis) as the lemma for verbs. The Akkadians themselves generally used this form in their lexical lists so this is a lexicographical tradition with a very long history. But using this form hides information about the stem vowel of the verb from the user and this information has to be given separately in the header or excavated from the article by the user. > Thus there is variation in what is given as the basic datum. Probably > what is here said about Finnish I am sure is true irrespective of > whether or not I want to compare it to the hypothetical IE cited. And > this is probably true for most modern language dictionaries. The > Classical, OIndic, Hebrew, Arabic, etc., cases I am most familiar with, > have a very long grammatical tradition. All true, but I expect that all dictionaries anticipate that the user is familiar with the mechanics of the language involved and therefore focus on lexical usage rather than morphophonology. But in raising the point that "using a dictionary without being aware of the phonotactical rules of the language is a recipe for disaster when doing comparative work" on this list I was hoping that I was preaching to the converted, and that such a comment would be more appropriate on something like sci.language. Surely no one with linguistic training would base language comparison solely on dictionary entries without a knowledge of the morphophonology of the language. But we have all seen the results of doing just that. A good example can be found at http://members.aol.com/IrishWord/akkadian.htm which presents a comparison between Akkadian and Irish words and shows no knowledge whatsoever of the Akkadian language. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 02:07:49 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 02:07:49 GMT Subject: Anatolian /nt/ In-Reply-To: <36EF263E.8AD66407@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu> Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >> iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > >> > On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very >> >early, evidently), > >> What evidence? > > I have no idea. Whatever Palmer was using .... But what was Palmer saying? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Mar 18 20:19:43 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 22:19:43 +0200 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, Bob Whiting wrote: > > < linguistically least-marked form. Many times features of the > root that are important for comparative work are suppressed in > the nominative singular because of the phonotactics of the > language, but will still be found in the stem (the form to which > other case endings are added). >> > > I think I should explain that I was well aware that languages that have > dropped case systems and case endings generally don't use the nominative > as the surviving form. (The example I had in front of me was Latin > "infans"(nom) > Old French "enfes" (nom.) but "infantem" (accusative)> > Mod French "enfant.") This is a different principle, but is part of the explanation of why part of the stem that is not found in the nom. sing. of the parent language may turn up in the daughter languages. > If you look at my original post, however, I was stumbling towards a > slightly different question. Yes, and I must admit that I was not responding to your question, but taking the opportunity to make a different but not entirely unrelated point. But I must also admit that part of the reason that I didn't respond to your question was that I found it difficult to understand what was being asked. As I remember your question, it was "Does it matter that /t/ does not appear in most of the nom. singulars? ... Why is the /t/ not regarded as just a fairly common stem that sometimes emerges in root and sometimes doesn't?" The answer to the first part is no, as long as we know why it doesn't appear. To be able to answer the second part, I need to know how you are using "stem" and "root." This problem is not necessarily your fault, but 'stems' from the fact that different linguists use the terms in various ways. > What I asked was why the nominative singular (in those languages in > which they occur) was not in considered in reconstruction. The answer is that they are. The fact that the segment in question has disappeared in the nominative singular does not affect the reconstruction as long as the reason is known. The problem is that most dictionaries don't give the reason for the disappearance. But if you don't see it in the dictionary entry you don't have any right to assume that it wasn't (isn't) there. > The answer that both you and our moderator have given is that they are > I guess "truncated" forms, not revealing or mutating the stems. (Part > of the "phonotactics" - interesting word.) "Truncated" is not really the right term. The disappearance of /t/ in this position in both Greek /nuks/ and Latin /noks/ is simply the result of a phonotactical rule: A dental stop + s is assimilated [note assimilated from ad+similated] to ss, which is further simplified to s after a consonant, long vowel, or diphthong, and when final in both Greek and Latin. C. D. Buck, _Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_, p. 145 So the reconstructed forms of the Greek and Latin nominatives are simply */nukt-s/ and */nokt-s/, respectively, with */ts/ > */ss/ > /s/ by a normal phonological rule. This makes more sense than assuming that the nominative is the "basic" form and the genitive et cetera have some miscellaneous garbage thrown it that has nothing to do with the root. > As you say, the nominative is "linguistically the least marked form." Not "is" but "in many instances is." There is no rule that says it has to be. There is rather a tendency for languages to use the least-marked form for the most frequently used form. This is a simple rule of economy. > But that was of course the reason I choose the nominative singular, > precisely because it was the least marked form. I don't think its that > hard to see why one might naturally go to the form stripped even of > stems to get to the elemental form of the word. Not that one should, > but that one might. Again, your use of "stems" here is not transparent. > After all, to say that only the "ablative" form survived is to suggest > that the word now carries the additional grammatical baggage of the > ablative. Sorry, but huh? > Or, to go further, the notion that some stems might be nothing more than > phonetically dictated walls, separating sounds in the roots that cannot > be adjacent to the sounds of regular case endings. They could even > survive as such in daughter languages where the endings no longer > exists. Or that the stem served no other function than to signal the > user that a particular word followed a peculiar or dialectical > case-ending system. Ah, are you using "stem" in the sense of "root consonant" or "root augment/extension"? > In that light, I hope the question why the nominatives were not > considered in the reconstruction of the word doesn't sound that > ludicrous. > > I wasn't for a moment doubting the reconstruction (of "night.") And the > explanation of word-ending rules is good enough for me. (But I wonder > why e.g. Latin couldn't have solved the problem the way it did in > forming the rather regular-looking adjective - nocturnus.) The phonotactical rules that produce are not operative for . It's not a question of "solving the problem"; it's a matter of what happens in a language when certain sounds (or classes of sounds) come in contact. The answer wasn't worked out by a committee or an academy. It is a matter of a tradeoff between ease of articulation and the level of morphological differentiation needed to disambiguate meaning that the users of the language resolve with even thinking about it. > So I'll take a chance and ask the question anyway - can a stem ever be > seen as something like a vestigal case ending in reconstructing PIE - > not part of the original word, but a compounded form that produced a > universal "stem" in the daughter languages? If by "stem" you mean "root augment" this is a very complex question that has been discussed extensively without reaching any particular conclusion. There is an extensive literature on this, not only for PIE but for other language families as well. The problem is that "root extensions" don't behave mathematically. > < of the language is a recipe for disaster when doing comparative work.>> > > Well actually the dictionary did give me some nominative singulars - > which is what my question was about. And as far as the languages go, > I'm still not bad at Greek or Latin, though I've forgotten a bit. And > (but only if you insist of course) I can give a number of instances > where prominent native speakers of both tongues expressed the notion > that the nominative was "the true form of words." Prominent native speakers of Greek and Latin knew more about Greek and Latin than any of us ever will. But they didn't know much about historical linguistics. Have a read through the Cratylus to get an idea of the level of historical linguistics of the time. > By the way probably just as serious a problem with dictionaries appears > to be on the "semantic" side. 3000 year old words are often defined > with a precision that - if you know your Homer, so to speak - can be as > perilous as assuming that the nominative is worth talking about. When you get right down to it, nobody really knew his Homer except Homer. Contrary to popular opinion, dictionaries do not define words (Academies do that, or try to) but only record usage (or at least they are supposed to). As A. Leo Oppenheim (for many years Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary) was often heard to mutter "I know what it says, but what does it *mean*?" Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Mar 18 20:47:17 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 15:47:17 EST Subject: Using Dictionaries: Pros and Cons Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 4:13:07 AM, thorinn at diku.dk wrote in a note titled "Re: STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS:" <> In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote in a message titled " Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?))": <> What a comparison of the two points-of-view given above might suggest is that Statistics and Linguistics may not be precisely on the same track. My own experience (obviously) is that even dictionaries will not inform you of the complete "phonotactics" of a language. (Although I DID know something about some of the languages involved in the "night" discussion, I sure didn't know how perverse the inventors of the nominative case could be.) Dictionaries also may not give you an accurate idea of the phonology or the comparative phonology between two languages. (Especially in dictionaries with generalist pronounciation guides where look-alikes versus sound-alikes don't always separate - Irish/Welsh can really do you in if you are not careful.) And even phonetic or historical linguistic dictionaries can REALLY ask too much when it comes to the supposed meaning of old words. However, the new digital dictionaries (such as the Perseus Project which incorporates Lidell-Scott) do have one strong advantage that they share with concordances, but perhaps do one better. And that is they report the number of incidences and give phonetic, syntactic, contextual and actual usage for the meanings they report. The incidences especially can be surprising when compared with standard dictionaries, which not only may lack "phonotactics" but also can assume usages and standardizations of words that don't always stand up to a number count in text or context. This kind of approach is I suspect where STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS might becomes meaningful. And also it does not call for the abandoning of all comparative expertise while handing out dictionaries to undergrads. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Mar 18 21:17:22 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 16:17:22 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: In a message dated 3/14/99 4:19:24 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> --gee, that sure makes them acrobatic travellers -- bouncing all around the map, getting from somewhere in the Middle East to Jutland, crossing all sorts of other linguistic territory on the way...>> Just to be fair: East Gothic pulled off close to the same trick by ending up in the eastern Ukraine in the 1700's. Armenian certainly needs to account for how it got where it ended up, jumping languages by whatever route (except, come to think of it, if it took the Black Sea line.) And I understand the until the 1930's the Amish were essentially unilingual German speakers out there among those Pennsylvania English. The Germans have seemed to hopped before. In frontier worlds, group migrants don't really have to assimilate every language they cross. The 49'ers did not arrive in California speaking Sioux. And just to give the other POV, Cavalli-Sforza's premise with regard to that genetic information was partly I think to suggest a migration of Middle Easteners up through the heart of Europe. German being "archaic", we hear, it might have retained the memories of that visit more intact than the more "innovative cores." Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Mar 18 21:27:04 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 16:27:04 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/17/99 8:06:51 PM, TomHeffernan at utk.edu wrote: <<...I am somewhat skeptical of the degree of intelligibility claimed for Old Norse, Old English and Old High German. If one looks at a very familiar text -- a text we know was preached in the churches on Sundays in the vernacular -- like that of the Parable of the Sower and the Seed in the three languages the differences seem considerable enough to preclude immediate intelligibility.... Old Norse reads " En sumt fellr i [th]urra jor[th] ok grjotuga...; Old English reads " Sum feoll ofer stanscyligean...; Old High German reads: "Andaru fielun in steinahti lant....">> My question of course would be how long did it take to see this kind of divergence and why it would not apply to PIE as it "spread" from the Danube over a period of thousands of years. A similar thing did not happen in the Latin version of that parable, of course, because something was keeping it from happening. And from the things I understand those old missionaries went through out among those pagans, it was not "elitism." Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Mar 19 04:44:37 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 23:44:37 EST Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/17/99 5:29:48 PM, you wrote: <> Now slow this down for me, if you would. I see three reconstructions there, but the second one is from the nominative. Is that *not-s supposed to be Celtic? Regards, Steve Long [ Yes. -rma ] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 14:34:26 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:34:26 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? A bilberry is a blueberry, or a kind of blueberry. It appears to be more or less the same thing we call a huckleberry back home. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 19 08:09:58 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 02:09:58 -0600 Subject: "mama" Syndrome Message-ID: A note of levity, which is not intended to mock the discussion: The Latin for "teat" is . The Italian is POPPA. Then there was the Rock Group "The Mommas and the Poppas". [Hope I spelt 'em write: i hate Rottenroll] [ moderator snip of long DLW post ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 14:36:59 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:36:59 GMT Subject: Borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: >The same seems to have happened in Dutch. Spain got possession of Holland (not >by conquest but by the chances of marriage and birth and death and inheritance >among noble and royal families, and Holland got free afterwards in a long >savage religious war.) In Dutch originally: {du} = "thou", {jij} = "ye", >{uwe}?= "your (pl)", or similar (I think). Later:- > {jij} used as polite singular as in French and English. > {Uwe Edelheid} = "Your Nobility" used as polite "you" sg & pl, later >abbreviated in writing and then in speech to (U E} and then {U} (by imitating >Spanish {usted}?) 19th c. spelling /y'We/ > /'yW@/ > /y/. > {jij} no longer used as plural. > (du} fell completely out of use :: in the 16th century it was a literary >rarity. (But I have seen {dou wilde se} = "thou wild sea" in a poem in >modern Frisian.) Yes, Frisian is different: 1. ik mij/my 2. do/du^ dij/dy (fam.) jo jo (form.) 3. hij/hy him (masc.) sij/sy/hja har (fem.) 1. wij/wy u's 2. jim(me) jim(me) 3. sij/sy/hja har > The present situation is (I think: my Dutch has got a bit stale; I >learned it for 2 holidays motorcycling around Holland around 1980):- > nom gen > jij & je jouw you (sg) (intimate / condescending, like French {tu}) > gij & ge thou (sg) (religious / dialectal / poetical) > jullie van jullie you (pl) (familiar) (< "you people") > u uw you (sg & pl) (polite) nom acc gen jij jou jouw (unstressed: je - je - je) gij u uw (unstressed: ge - u - u) jullie jullie jullie (unstressed: jullie - je - jullie) U U Uw In Southern dialects, there is a single 2nd. person form (no familiar, formal; singular, plural distinctions) gij/u/uw, much as in English. Jij/gij and jou(we)/u(we) are phonetic variants (the first northern, the second southern). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 19 08:28:20 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 02:28:20 -0600 Subject: IE Technological lexicon: Linguistic Archaeology Alive and Well Message-ID: good Do you know Piggott's Ancient India [Penguin]? good discussion of same. p. s. aNNus / milleNNium JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > We should note that there are PIE roots not only for "wheel" (several > different words) but for a whole series of related terms -- axle, nave of a > wheel, wheeled vehicle/wagon, yoke, 'to make a journey by wagon', etc. > There are also terms for wool, woven cloth, sewing, spinning, and weaving. > The above are unambiguously 4th-millenium, no earlier. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 19 14:43:40 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 08:43:40 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Let's say I was gratuitously offensive. MCV was gratuitously dismissive. Don't pepper your prose with "clearly, surely, perhaps", and -- shifting metaphors -- your balloon won't get pricked. I knew about both etymologies. He didn't, or he did not deign to show why the Arabic etymology should be excluded. It is beyond question that generations of Castilians and foreigner have been taught that is a compression of . Which doesn't make it true. Now, if should be the source of , was there, in the early period of the usage, gender concord in complement adjectives? E.g., spoken to a man: "!Vd. está viva! " [I lack Castilian font: please invert first /!/.] And, when did the masculine adjectives achieve acceptance, if was ever = ? IE Etymology needs not only Cognates, Sound Laws, and Analogy, but also syntax and morphology. jpm ...................................... Rick Mc Callister wrote: > This one's hard to prove either way. > That usted looks like ustadh is obvious but forms based on vuesa > merced, vuestras mercedes DO come close to usted. > BUT if usted is documented before the other forms, I'd say it is > very possible that usted is from Arabic and that the other forms are folk > etymologies. Conversely, one could argue that usted is the folk etymology > --provided that one could show that the other forms predated it. > The problem lies in that one has to wonder why usted didn't appear > in Old Spanish when Arabic influence was much strong. I'd guess that the > only possible way to argue that Usted is from Arabic would be to try to > maintain that's it's a loanword from Mozarabe that spread from the South. > But you'd have to document that. [ moderator snip of remainder of long RMcC post ] From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 09:29:40 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 09:29:40 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >OIr , W `plum', W (pl.) 'fruits, berries'; >MBret NBret `sloe' The Irish one, like the Breton, means 'sloe'. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 14:50:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:50:07 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick: > I've never come across vuste', ect., anywhere in Latin America but >that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But I'd wonder if it wasn't heard >from a Spanish immigrant. Coromines (DEiCCat): "vuste' en el Nord d'Equador (Lemos, Prov. ecuatoriano, $54); buste' en boca d'un venec,ola` amazo`nic (Eust. Rivera, La Vora'gine, p. 194); a zones colombianes: Cuervo, Obra Ine'd., p. 160, i n. 50, a la Gram. de Bello, tambe' ho cita en valls del Sud de Col.; i en una <> oi"da cap a Bogota`: <> (Cuervo, Apunt. Bog.7, 587). Doesn't Corominas mention 'usta:dh in DCEC/DCEH? I seem to recall that he does, but I don't have either at hand. In DEiCC, he just says: "Com e's ben sabut, voste` resulta` d'una contraccio' de vostra merce`". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 19 09:24:58 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 03:24:58 -0600 Subject: "mama" Syndrome Message-ID: Dear DLW, I posted a note on Latin MAMMA, Italian POPPA to the net. I'm unsure if it will appear. [ Moderator's note: It will have, by the time this one goes out. --rma ] You probably know Roman Jakosbsons's Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine Lautgesetze. jpm [ moderator snip of long DLW post ] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 14:53:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:53:01 +0000 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > (2) Re borrowing a pronoun of one language into some other use in > another language: etymological dictionaries say that US English > "bozo" = "fool" < Spanish "vosotros": Odd. The several sources in my office all describe `bozo' as being of unknown origin, and some of them offer speculations which are all utterly different from this one and from one another. The word is recorded from 1920, and all the early citations appear to place the word in urban use and in urban contexts in the east -- not what I'd expect for a borrowing from Spanish. > could it also be that the US > English slang term of address and then nickname "buster" came from > the abovementioned Spanish dialect ?, and not the English > for "one who busts (= breaks) things". The OED regards `buster', as a term of address for a man, as derived from the earlier, and well-attested, slang use of the word to denote `a roistering blade, a dashing fellow', a sense recorded from about 1850 -- rather early for a loan from Spanish, I'd hazard, and apparently itself derived from an earlier use of `buster' to mean `something impressive'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 09:37:29 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 09:37:29 +0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >BTW, there is on the web, a neat site called Enthnologue put up by the SIT >that is a catalogue of world languages (I think it is UN info.) There one >learns for example such things as: >"ALLEMANNISCH (ALEMANNISCH, ALLEMANNIC, ALEMANNIC, SCHWYZERDÜTSCH, >ALSATIAN) [GSW] (300,000 in Austria; 1991 Annemarie Schmid; 4,225,000 in >Switzerland; 1986). Southwestern. Also in Alsace, France. Indo-European, >Germanic, West, Continental, High. Approximately 40% inherent >intelligibility with Standard German. Speakers are bilingual in Standard >German. Called 'Schwyzerdütsch' in Switzerland, 'Alsatian' in >southeastern France. Similar to Swabian. Differs from most other German >varieties in not having undergone the second lautverschiebung, or vowel >shift. NT 1984. Bible portions 1936-1986." I _do_ hope this is not the UN's info. Though it could be a good reason to persuade them to hire some linguists at large salaries. Just a few things: - 'speakers are bilingual in Standard German' - not necessarily, most of the Alsatian ones speak French as their standard language. - 'similiar to Swabian'. Facile. They're German dialects. You could add 'similar to Bavarian, not unlike Franconian etc.'. - 'not having undergone the second lautverschiebung or vowel shift'. Wow! Swiss German has more second Lautverschiebung than most, e.g. kchind. It doesn't have anything to do with vowels. What they probably mean is 'the NHG Diphthongisation', which really is absent in that southwestern corner. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 15:21:44 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 15:21:44 GMT Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Max W Wheeler wrote: >> Coromines suggests three base forms: *agri:nia, *agranio. *agrena; and >> mentions that Pokorny related the Celtic forms with Goth >> `fruit', OE `acorn' CSl <(j)a'goda> `small fruit, berry' Lit >> id., 'cherry'. >> He suggests that Biskaian `plum' may be < *okran < *akran < >> *agranio, influenced by `bunch of fruits' and other words in >> where is < `bread'. (How does that grab you, Larry, >> Miguel?) >It strikes me as pretty fanciful, I'm afraid. The combining form of > `bread' is , not *, and there is absolutely no parallel >in Basque for the steps involved in the proposed derivation of , >except that a putative * would indeed be borrowed into Basque in >the form *. It seems to me that Corominas is suggesting that was borrowed from Gothic , and --> under the influence of . Whether has anything to do with is another question (but ot- + g- or k- > ok-, as in okin "baker"). >Given the recorded `sloe', we have a simple >four-part analogy, where the word for `hen' is chosen somewhat >arbitrarily: > > `wild hen' : `hen :: `wild plum' : X > >And solving for X yields the required `plum'. Sounds plausible. Better than a Gothic loan in any case. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 11:24:03 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:24:03 +0000 Subject: `spool' In-Reply-To: <36F117F6.71E7DF0C@neiu.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > 4. Birch bark, everyone knows, was used for canoes by N. American > Indians; the large birch in question was nearly exterminate by > Europeans, who used the wood for industrially made thread spools. [I > have forgotten the British term for the latter.] It's `reel', generally confined in the US to things around which films, tapes and fishing lines are wound. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 15:27:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 15:27:10 GMT Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Xavier Delamarre wrote: >5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental Celtic >*agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, gereta, mando_ etc. >are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, mandu,_ . You forgot the Gaul. for azkoin ("badger")? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 11:32:12 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:32:12 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Navarrese is usually considered a form of Aragonese Yes, this is correct. > and I've read in some places that Navarra is now the only place > where "Aragonese" is now spoken. Interesting, but I haven't come across such a report. Outside the Basque-speaking region, I've only ever encountered Castilian in Navarre, but then I don't suppose many people would try to speak Aragonese to me even if they knew it. Interestingly, the larger cities of Navarre all contain significant numbers of Basque-speakers today, thanks to immigration from the Basque-speaking area to the north. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 15:50:02 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 15:50:02 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Xavier Delamarre wrote: > 5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental > Celtic *agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, > gereta, mando_ etc. are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, > mandu,_ . Well, I'd be a bit cautious about asserting that these items are "obviously" of Celtic origin. In fact, only one of them appears to be indisputably of Celtic origin. The problem with deriving `plum' from * is that this would violate the usual rules for adapting loan words to Basque phonology: we would have expected something like * in Basque, not the observed . Basque `lady' has long been suspected of being borrowed from Celtic, given the existence of a possible Celtic source represented by Old Irish `young (woman)'. But there is another possibility, pointed out a few years ago by Joaquin Gorrochategui. G notes that the Aquitanian ancestor of Basque exhibits both a female name ANDERE and a male name ANDOSSUS, with ANDOS(S)- also appearing as a first element in other male names. He proposes that the second represents a Pre-Basque word * with a Latin ending, and he proposes to derive both and * from a stem *(and->, with a female suffix *<-ere> in one case and the attested male suffix <-(d)ots> in the other. If is `lady', then this * must be `lord'. Support for this idea comes from the observation that, while `lady' is down to the present day, the word for `lord' in the historical period is . Now, this word has a very strange form for a noun in Basque: normally we find initial /j/ only in non-finite forms of verbs, and nowhere else. As it happens, looks for all the world like the perfective participle of a verb, and so we may surmise that might derive from the participle * of an otherwise lost verb, meaning perhaps `exalted' or something similar, and having displaced the earlier word for `lord'. All this sounds more than plausible to me. Basque `badger', with *many* regional variants, is a puzzle, but few have suspected a Celtic origin. Most of the variants point to an original *, and many commentators have been quick to suppose a borrowing from Late Latin `badger', itself reportedly of Germanic origin. Admittedly, though, the borrowing of as * would be somewhat unusual phonologically. A complication is the Zuberoan variant , which appears to point to an earlier *. This leads some observers to suggest a derivative of native <(h)artz> `bear', with an unidentifiable second element. It is true that a badger somewhat resembles a bear cub. As for a putative Celtic origin, I can find no suggestion beyond that of Wagner, who wants the Basque word to derive from a Celtic *, the source of regional English `brock', but just how this is supposed to yield * beats me. The strictly Bizkaian Basque `habit, custom' has sometimes been derived from a supposed Celtic *, but most specialists from Schuchardt on have rejected this, not least because it appears that no such Celtic word exists. Schuchardt and Michelena prefer to see the word as deriving from some Romance reflex of Latin `fault, defect', which develops the sense of `habit, custom' rather widely in western Romance. Basque `salmon' is widely suspected of being *ultimately* of Celtic origin, but not *directly*: instead, a Celtic loan into Late Latin is favored by most commentators as the direct source of the Basque word. Basque (and variants) `rustic gate' (and other senses) is likewise suspected of being ultimately from Celtic, but probably directly from a Late Latin *, whose reflexes are prominent in western Romance. A puzzle here is the form of the Basque word, since, by the usual rules, * should yield a Basque *, and not the observed ; it may be that a Romance development * has intervened, since this would yield the attested Basque form straightforwardly. If not, then the word has developed somewhat irregularly, though not wildly so. Finally, `mule' is the one word here which is more or less universally believed to be diectly from Celtic. The word is reportedly found widely in IE languages to denote various equine animals, but the sense of `mule' is said to be specifically Celtic. The paucity of direct Celtic loans into Basque is a puzzle, since we know that an ancestral form of Basque was in contact with Celtic for centuries before and after the Roman conquest. Michelena once hazarded the suggestion that more Celtic loanwords into Basque must have existed once, but that many were either displaced by Latino-Romance loans or simply re-formed under Latino-Romance influence. A Celtic origin has also been suggested for ~ `oar', pointing to earlier *, possibly to be identified with the word represented by Old Irish `oar'. Don't know if there's anything much behind this, especially since the nasal appears to be wrong. Finally, `beloved' has been thought for a century to have been borrowed from the Celtic word represented by Old Irish `good'. The semantics requires some fancy footwork, but the Basque word has an anomalous form for a native word, and is surely borrowed from somewhere. I should add that Vasconists and Romanists have at times been rather eager to see Celtic solutions for problematic words, but that a Celticist colleague has pointed out to me that some of the convenient Celtic solutions put forward do not appear to have existed in Celtic. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 11:41:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:41:53 +0000 Subject: `bast' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >According to Chambers also, it rhymes with gas, not with mast, in RP. Interesting and curious. Both my Collins dictionary and John Wells's Longman Pronouncing Dictionary recognize the pronunciation with /-st/ as the only possibility for RP, though Collins notes that `bass', so spelled and so pronounced, is a variant of `bast'. My copy of Chambers is at home. I might note, though, that the Chambers dictionary is Scottish, not English, and that it is traditionally somewhat eccentric from an English point of view. Its rather distinctive approach is evident in all the numerous editions with red covers, but, sadly, in its most recent edition, the one with a black cover, Chambers has gone mainstream and abandoned its traditional foibles. An example: try looking up the word `eclair' in any of the red editions, and then compare the entry in the new black edition. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Mar 19 11:53:24 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:53:24 +0200 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36F113FA.6CDAA0B5@neiu.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > 1. No, no, a 1000x no = no argument. > As an argument from authority is no argument. An argument from authority can be quite valid. There are a number of rules that have to be observed to qualify an argument from authority, but if they are met then the argument can be accepted. Anything that you have knowledge of that you have not verified personally is an argument from authority. The reason that I know that the moon is not made out of green cheese (or Normandy brie) is that reasonable people who have been trained to investigate the matter and who have no reason to lie have told me so. It is an argument from authority. Do not confuse expert authority with institutional authority. The two are quite different an a logical context. Any time you look up a word in a dictionary or check out something in an encylopaedia it is an argument from authority. Now if you wish to say that such references are invalid because an argument from authority is no argument, then the only arguments that you can use are ones that you have personally verified. Therefore we can assume that your connection of Arabic <'usta:dh> and Spanish is based on your personal knowledge of the two languages and the histories of the words in those languages. In which case it would seem more useful to share this information with the rest of us than to shout down "arguments from authority." It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a non-native word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, argument from authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your own knowledge why the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that the same word exists in Persian (<'usta:d>). > 2. <'usta:dh> ~ "ustaeth" are both transcriptions; So are ~ "duh". But one is standardized and one is personal. Is it your point that <'usta:dh> is invalid because it is an argument from authority while "ustaeth" is based on your own personal experience? > I doubt if the net has an Arabic font. Strictly speaking, the net doesn't have any fonts at all. What you see on your screen is what you tell your terminal to show you. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Fri Mar 19 15:53:33 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 09:53:33 -0600 Subject: Celtic Influence Revisited Message-ID: Or re-conceptualized, so as to break out of the recent "is not / is too" cycle ... The proposition that OE was a class dialect is to some extent more assumption than conclusion. No, this does not make the argument circular. There is evidence, such as the forms and usages found in ME texts, that allow it to break out of itself, so to speak. The basic idea is that if we assume certain things about socio-linguistics, secondary languageu acquisition, and the nature of the two languages in contact, the evidence found in ME becomes in a sense predictable rather than simply random. The main assumptions are: 1) That OE was a class dialect. That is to say that suppression of sub-standard features would not surprising, until the Norman Conquest made old notions meaningless. 2) That secondary language-acquirers tend to model their use of the secondary language upon a primary language. (This is not controversial, I include it only for clarity). This modeling DOES extend to non-sound features. 3) That the Celtic language that the Anglo-Saxons found in England a) had severely reduced nominal morphology, and b) made extensive use of periphrasis in its verbal system. 4) The the language the Anglo-Saxons brought wih them was of the familiar Old Germanic type. 5) That there was extensive "Celtic survival" in what might be called "the Greater North and West", a term which I mean to include much of the Midlands. 6) That there was extensive Norse influence in the North and East (East Anglia), which would have tended to produce both something superficially similar to creolization and, less obviously, to suppress the use of periphrasis in the verbal system, as such usages were alien to Norse. With these assumptions, the pattern of non-sound innovations seen in the ME dialects pretty well falls out, as has been noted. (I am not going to say things that might be prefaced by "Let me reiterate ..") So the question becomes, since it works to explain something which has not previously been explained, is it falsified, or even made improbable, by anything else? Since we are dealing with the Dark Ages after all, which are not called dark for nothing, to demand direct "proof" one way or another would be unreasonable. It is only be using such indirect evidence as is provided by the ME dialects, our general knowledge of socio-linguistics and secondary language acquisition, Higham's non-linguistic arguments in favor of substantial Celtic survival, etc., that the darkness can be lifted at all. Anyway ... I wrote about a hundred pages worth of material on this subject over ten years ago, and I do not think anybody (including me) wants anything close to a repeat performance here and now. Yes, more could be said ... DLW From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Mar 19 11:49:33 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:49:33 -0000 Subject: IE Plosive System: DLW Explains It All For You Message-ID: [ note to moderator snipped ] DLW wrote: > Before going on to the next part of my brilliant "tour de force", > I need someone to answer for me a very basic question: does Semitic permit > consecutive pharngealized ("emphatic") consonants in its roots? Someone who looked at this less than ten years ago and/or who has dictionaries to hand, or who just knows more than I do, is probably better equipped to answer this, but I like seeing my name in print, so here goes. My recollection is that the main restriction is that consecutive velars didn't co-occur, and that emphatics (but not q) counted as velar(ized). So you don't get *ks~C or *Ct~g or t~s~C or the like as Hebrew roots. In Arabic it's slightly disguised: [j^] comes from earlier [g], so you don't get *kj^ or *j^t~ or *kz~. But [q] collocates freely, as in [qas~r] 'castle', [qit~3ah] 'piece'. Another complication is that [x] and [G] don't count as velar, presumably because they derived from something more guttural in the restriction period. So you do get [s~aGi:r] 'small', [xit~a:b] 'letter', [?axd~ar] 'green'. The archaeo-velars [k j^ s~ z~ t~ d~] happily co-occur with other gutturals: [2is~a:n] 'horse', [2uj^rah] 'room', [t~a:?ir] 'bird', [qat~a3a] 'he cut'. I can't remember whether the restriction is across the whole root or just neighbouring consonants, but I can't think of any words like *[t~alas~a] or *[j^abaka]. Nicholas Widdows (using [2] and [3] for the pharyngals) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:26:16 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:26:16 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (dates) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Linear Ware Culture raced ahead of agriculture. -- nyet. LBK spread rapidly, and so did agriculture -- all the way from Hungary to northern France in a few centuries. That left a lot of uncultivated ground in between, and of course hunting continued right down to historic times as a supplement, gradually decreasing in importance. Bottom line: they were farmers. It took less than 500 years for farmers to colonize the entire loess soil belt. This shouldn't be surprising. A human population faced with an open land frontier doubles every 25 years or so. 1,000 2,000 4,000 8,000 16,000 32,000 -- and that's in only 150 years and starting from a very low base. >This is where I think some of our problem arises. Evidence of agriculture is >not evidence of the adoption of agriculture. -- walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. They were cultivating crops, using the plow, and herding domesticated livestock. The pollen samples register both grain pollen and indications of forest clearance. That's agriculture in my book. Agriculture includes livestock, by the way. We're an agricultural civilization, and we eat a lot of meat. So did our ancestors, in periods when there wasn't much population pressure -- post Black Death, for example, northern Europeans ate over 2 pounds a day, on average. >that in Britain,... grain was grown, or even imported from the continent, >only for ritual purposes. -- maybe they gave it to the Saucer People in return for pyramidic sharpening of razor blades. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:34:15 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:34:15 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >Iiffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >The situation in England of that time is a little anomalous, -- normal. >for a time everyone spoke his local dialect -- as virtually everyone in Europe did prior to the emergence of the modern State and standardized languages in post-Renaissance times. Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. >Thus the class barriers in English at that time were relatively recent, and >there had not been much time for much divergence to occur. -- nice try but it won't work. Lowland Scotland, which spoke a Northumbrian dialect, was never conquered by the Normans, and the court and nobility there used Lallans right down to the late 17th century. Same dialect as the farmers, with some Latinate words thrown into the court poetry for effect. Awa' wi' it. Substantial class differences in accent are a rare phenomenon, and vanishingly rare in preliterate societies. Remember, an Anglo-Saxon landowner's main social contacts would be with his social inferiors, not his peers. Everything from his nursmaid to his groom. Those are the people he'd spend most time talking to. Note the similarities of black and white English in the antebellum Southern plantation belt -- every traveller noted how the planters and their families "talked like Negroes". That was because they spent most of their time talking _to_ Negroes. From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 12:08:14 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:08:14 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: <10d71913.36eff89d@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>In the case of late OE / late ON it's often said that the two languages were >>"very close" and mutually intelligible. >> >-- they were intelligible at the level of pointing at a house and saying >"house" and both parties understanding the word. Saying the equivalent of "Me >burn house." would also probably get across. Roughly the situation with >Swedish and Danish today, in other words. No, *much* further apart. More in the neighbourhood of French and Spanish, English and German. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 12:32:03 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:32:03 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36F113FA.6CDAA0B5@neiu.edu> Message-ID: "maher, johnpeter" wrote: >3. If is the source of was there, in the early period >of the usage, gender concord in complement adjectives? > >. E.g. "!Vd. esta viva! " [I lack Castilian font: please invert first /!/.] In the early period, i.e. when fully pronounced "vuestra merced", such concord might occasionally have been used. Cf. "Vuestra majestad esta' viva / vivo". But the usual concord would have applied otherwise, exactly the same as in the case of "vos": "... pide verbo en plural, pero concierta en singular con el adjetivo aplicado a la persona a quien se dirige: vos, don Pedro, sois docto; vos, Juana, sois caritativa" (Dicc. de la Lengua) ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Mar 19 12:42:29 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:42:29 +0200 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <19990317013032.7830.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Yoel L. Arbeitman wrote: >>Robert Orr wrote: >>Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, >>borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had >>become indistinguishable from sing. forms. >But the entire paradigm of the 3rd pl in NE is "they, them (acc.-dat.) >and their". So it might be less hyperbolic to say the "the-" stem for the >3rd pl. One might throw in "theirs" which is actually the pronoun (gen.), "their" being an adjective ('these books are theirs' ~ 'these are their books'). One could also note that the old form of the oblique (acc.-dat.) has not been completely replaced but the form 'em (dat.-acc. pl. of OE he:) continues to be used ("stick 'em up; up and at 'em; head 'em up, move 'em out; give 'em hell, Harry") informally; most people, however, think that 'em is just an abbreviation of 'them' without realizing its origin. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Mar 19 13:44:33 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:44:33 +0100 Subject: lenis and glottalic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, > [Quoting Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen for]: > > > Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask > > > this: Is a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > I think so. English and Danish (fortis-lenis) vs. Dutch > > (voiceless-voiced), for instance. Or East Armenian vs. West > > Armenian. Finnish vs. Estonian (or is that just the spelling?). Concerning Estonian: Yes, it is just the spelling. The letters , and represent the phonemes /p/, /t/ and /k/ respectively, i.e. short voiceless plosives, whereas

, , represent /pp/, /tt/, /kk/ respectively, i.e. geminated voiceless plosives. In addition, the digraphs , , represent the three overlong voiceless plosives, which we may notate here as /ppp/, /ttt/ and /kkk/ respectively. Adam Hyllested From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 13:49:40 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:49:40 GMT Subject: Dating of Anatolian /nt/ vs. /nd/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > I take this opportunity to note that the same suffix, /-nth-/, >also occurs in Pre-Greek words like > "asaminthos" 'bathtub' > "me:rinthos" 'thread' > "erebinthos" 'pea' > "olunthos" 'unripe fig' > "Huakinthos" 'Hyacinth' > where a meaning 'collective' seems improbable. Quoting Friedrich's Hittite grammar: Das Suffix -ant- ist in verscheidenen, noch nicht restlos klaren, Verwendungen belegt [...]: a) Es bildet Substantiva, hinter denen man 1. Kollektiva vermutet: utne:- "Land" und utne:yant- "Land (in seinem Gesamtfassung)", tuzzi- "Heer" und tuzziyant- "Heeresmasse", antuhsatar "Menschheit" und antuhsannant- [..] "Bevoelkerung", parn- "Haus" und parnant- "Hauswesen" [..] Anm.: Laroche [..] sieht in dieser Gruppe vielmehr Singulative [..] 2. Eine besonder Gruppe bilden Zeitbestimmungen, vor allem Bezeichnungen von Jahreszeiten: hamesh(a)- un hameshant- "Fruehjahr", gim- und gimmant- "Winter" [..]. Goetze sieht in den Formen auf -ant- Bezeichnungen der Zeitdauer (wie in frz. anne'e, journe'e neben an und jour). 3. In vielen Faellen unterscheiden sich Gruntwort und Ableitung auf -ant- bedeutungsmaessig gar nicht von einander: sankunni- und sankunniyant- "Priester", huhha- und huhhant- "Grossvater", hilammar und hilamnant "Torbau", eshar und eshanant- "Blut", uttar und uddanant "Wort, Sache", kast- und kistant- "Hunger". Anm.: Innerhalb dieser Gruppe koennen eine Anzahl Koerperteilnamen besonders zusammengefaesst werden: kalulupa- und kalulupant- "Finger", tapuwas- und tapuwassant- "Rippe, Seite", hasta:i- und hastiyant- "Knochen", sankuwai- und sankuwayant- "Fingernagel" [..] b) Auch von Adjektiven gibt es mit dem Grundwort gleichbedeutende Weiterbildungen auf -ant-: assu- und assuwant- "gut", irmala- und irmalant- "krank", suppi- und suppiyant- "rein", dapiya- und dapiyant- "ganz" [..] 2. Vielleicht sind aber auch adjektivische Ableitungen auf -ant- von substantivischen Grundwoertern anzuerkennen: perunant- "felsig" von peruna- "Fels", kaninant- "durstig" von kanint- "durst" [..] Anm.: Hierher oder zu $49 d [-want-]: akuwant- "steinig" von aku- "Stein". [Some of the words mentioned under point 3. may be showing the "ergative" suffix -ant-, used when an inanimate (neuter) noun is used as subject of a transitive verb]. [The suffix -want- means "having, provided with": samankurwant- "bearded" (zamankur "beard") kistuwant- "hungry" (kast- "hunger"), also esharwant- "blood red" (eshar "blood")] Under (Cuneiform) Luwian, Friedrich notes: "-(a)nt- und -(a)nti- ist zur Bildung von Ableitungen ebenso haeufig wie im Heth.: parnant- "Haus", tiyammanti- "Erde", tappasanti- "Himmel", apparanti- "Zukunft", urant- "gross". The general Luwian plural suffix -nzi (acc./dat. -nza, abl./ins. -nzati, gen. -nzan (?)) is also derived from *-nt (Friedrich compares Tocharian and Slavic [Russ. kotenok, kotjata < *-enta]) > It is also true that the element /parna-/ in "Parnassos", which >occurs on both sides of the Aegean, is recognized as pre-IE, so if the >first element in such words can be from a common substrate, why can't the >second element also be from a common substrate? I don't happen to think that parna- is necessarily non-IE. In Hittite it's an irregular noun (pir < *perr < *pern, parnas < *porn-os), which doesn't fit the loanword theory too well. And the only external source I've ever seen mentioned is Egyptian which doesn't seem appropriate either geographically or phonetically (no -n in Egyptian, and Eg. /r/ < *l. Why not pick on Grk. ?) > But the main thing is that there is no sound-sequence in Anatolian >which we would expect to be borrowed into Greek as /-nth-/. Whether Hittite was /ntt/ (/nt/) or /nt/ (/nd/) is not recoverable in any way from the orthography. Maybe Lycian and Lydian spellings a millennium later show /nd/ (is that what Palmer is going on?), but that doesn't prove much about the situation as it was when pre-Greek borrowed these words from some Anatolian-like language spoken in Greece. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 13:51:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:51:52 GMT Subject: IE Plosive System: DLW Explains It All For You In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > Before going on to the next part of my brilliant "tour de force", >I need someone to answer for me a very basic question: does Semitic permit >consecutive pharngealized ("emphatic") consonants in its roots? Yes. I have the impression that Semitic rather encourages them (or at least that pharyngeal /H/ and /3/ sometimes cause neighbouring etymologically non-emphatic consonants to become emphatic). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 14:20:36 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:20:36 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? Small mountain fruit called 'fraughan' in Ireland (in English, so to speak). They grow on low scrubby bushes and attain about the size of a blackcurrant. They are junior cousins of the US blueberry, which we don't have. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 14:18:41 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:18:41 GMT Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Navarrese is usually considered a form of Aragonese and I've read >in some places that Navarra is now the only place where "Aragonese" is now >spoken. The original Aragonese fabla is spoken in Upper (Pyrinean) Aragon. Jaca and thereabouts. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:41:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:41:00 EST Subject: Bilingualism Message-ID: Here in Santa Fe, one will often hear people switching back and forth from Spanish to English in the middle of sentences. "His pay is (spanish phrase) but he never thinks to (spanish phrase) the dirty (spanish phrase). Goddamned hijo de puta!" (Recently overheard.) That's mainly among the older generation. The younger seems to largely speak English to each other and Spanish to older people; of course, local English is full of Spanish loan-words and occasional turns of phrase. From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sat Mar 20 04:45:24 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 23:45:24 -0500 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (dates) Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > >Linear Ware Culture raced ahead of agriculture. > -- nyet. LBK spread rapidly, and so did agriculture -- all the way from > Hungary to northern France in a few centuries. That left a lot of > uncultivated ground in between, and of course hunting continued right down to > historic times as a supplement, gradually decreasing in importance. > Bottom line: they were farmers. It took less than 500 years for farmers to > colonize the entire loess soil belt. This shouldn't be surprising. A human > population faced with an open land frontier doubles every 25 years or so.  > 1,000 > 2,000 > 4,000 > 8,000 > 16,000 > 32,000 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 25*64=1,600 years. Starting with Adam and Eve, and doubling every 25, after 64 doublings is 1,600 years and the population is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 because that is what 2^64 is computed to be. > -- and that's in only 150 years and starting from a very low base. Can't get much lower than Adam and Eve. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 18:43:56 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 18:43:56 GMT Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > In Spanish, it's called a [which also means garbage >can/truck, among other things], hence the town of El Cajo/n. > Box canyons figured in most westerns filmed in Arizona, so if >you've seen John Wayne movies, you've seen plenty of them. They're the >places where the bad guys are usually holed up in. At least in the films, >they're canyons that have only one entrance, which is narrow with steep >walls. They widen out inside and often have a bit of a flood plain where >farming is possible. > I'd imagine there'd be quite a few of them in parts of southern and >eastern Spain where smaller streams flow down from the plateau. As to Artesa de Segre, and as one who nearly drowned there once [I must have been 10 or so], I must say it's not really a box canyon in my recollection, but the river (Segre) does flow through mountainous territory there. Indeed the fact that the waterlevel rose so quickly on the particular day of my near-drowning (some bozo must have opened the floodgates of the Oliana reservoir upstream), suggests that the valley is rather narrow, I think. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From donncha at eskimo.com Sat Mar 20 05:33:39 1999 From: donncha at eskimo.com (Dennis King) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 21:33:39 -0800 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sheila Watts: >>I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? > >Small mountain fruit called 'fraughan' in Ireland (in English, so to >speak). fraughan < Irish "fraocha/n" (< "fraoch" (= heather) + dim. suffix) = vaccinium myrtilis = whortleberry Dennis King From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:51:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:51:51 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >DFOKeefe at aol.com writes: << One nation with both a class and a regional based system of dialects used to be pre-Revolutionary China. >> -- many Chinese "dialects" are actually separate languages, as distinct as Spanish and French. I've personally seen Mandarin and Cantonese speakers try to communicate, give up, and drop into English instead. Of course, the _written_ Chinese language, being largely ideographic, was standard everywhere. That's one reason why it's of limited value in reconstructing earlier stages of Chinese, of course, except for poetry. [ Moderator's note: One for two: The Chinese writing system is not ideographic, but logographic. This is a source of endless discussions on various newsgroups; the DejaNews search engine can aid anyone interested in following up on the point. --rma ] From donncha at eskimo.com Sat Mar 20 05:56:33 1999 From: donncha at eskimo.com (Dennis King) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 21:56:33 -0800 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: <371f6c44.258300489@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal: >You forgot the Gaul. for azkoin ("badger")? >From Continental Celtic *tazgo-, attested in the Gaulish names "Tasgilllus" and "Moritasgus", and in the Irish name "Tadhg"?? Dennis King From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:55:36 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:55:36 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >In every Spanish-speaking country I've been in, including Cuba, class >dialects are very noticeable. >> -- that's odd, because my mother grew up in Lima, Peru, and when we were travelling in Spain in the 1950's, if she didn't tell the locals about it people were repeatedly puzzled as to _where_ she came from, and thought she had a rather old-fashioned way of speaking (like some remote village), but the question of social class didn't come up. From iglesias at axia.it Sat Mar 20 02:48:42 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 18:48:42 PST Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: JPM wrote: >2. As of 1960, in the Veneto, dialect speakers were uncomfortable with the >feminine pronoun in addressing a man. They address a man with their >masculine pronoun . The same applies to Lombardy today. Dialect speakers who don't speak Italian well (and there are still many around), address strangers as Lui, which is considered quite incorrect in Standard Italian. In MIlanese Lombard dialect, the correct term is "Sciorlu" (shurly), i.e. "o" = Italian "u", "u" = French "u". In Bergamasco Lombard dialect, which usually differs considerably from Milanese in its phonetics, the same term is used with the same pronunciation. Milanese may have borrowed this usage directly from Spanish, as Milan was under Spanish domination for 200 years, but in Bergamo this cannot have been the case, as Bergamo was under Venice. Today, as I was out walking with my wife, we were addressed as "Loro" by an old lady, and it struck us as this form is rapidly losing ground in the plural as I said in my earlier posting. Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:58:05 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:58:05 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >generally accepted on which kind of evidence, if I may humbly ask ? -- I'll refer you to the JIES and the volume of monographs that Mair edited. It's also common sense. There population in question abruptly appears in the (previously virtually uninhabited) Tarim basin in the 2nd millenium BCE. There's no abrupt discontinuity in the record after that until the arrival of the Uighurs in historic times, and we have records that the people there prior to the Uighurs were Tocharian-speaking. It's not in serious dispute. From iglesias at axia.it Sat Mar 20 16:33:02 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 08:33:02 PST Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Although similar, this post *is* different from Mr. Rossi's previous posting on the topic. --rma ] JPM wrote: >2. As of 1960, in the Veneto, dialect speakers were uncomfortable with the feminine pronoun in addressing a man. They address a man with their masculine pronoun . The same applies to Lombardy today. Dialect speakers who don't speak Italian well (and there are still many around), address strangers as Lui, which is considered quite incorrect in Standard Italian. In MIlanese Lombard dialect, the rules of which are codified, the polite forms of address are: Lu (French "u") for men, Lee (long closed "e") for women, Lor ("o" = Italian "u") plural both sexes; familiar singular "ti" = Italian "tu", plural "vialter" = Italian "voi", cf. Cast. "vosotros", Fr. "vous autres". The long / short vowel contrast is typical of Western Lombard and may derive from the influence of the Germanic Longobard superstrate (as also in Friulan). By way of contrast, in Bergamasco (Eastern Lombard), the terms are: .Lu: (French "u") for men, Le' (closed "e" no length difference), Lur plural both sexes; familiar singular "te" = Italian "tu", plural "voter"/"oter" = Italian "voi", Cast. "vosotros", Fr. "vous autres". Milanese may have borrowed the usage of the 3rd person for the 2nd directly from Spanish, as Milan was under Spanish domination for 200 years, but in Bergamo this cannot have been the case, as Bergamo was under Venice. So probably both were influenced by what was then the Tuscan literary language, which as sustained by Devoto and most others, borrowed the usage from Spanish. Yesterday, as I was out walking with my wife, we were addressed as "Loro" by an old lady, and we were (pleasantly) struck by this, as this form is rapidly losing ground in the plural as I said in my earlier posting. Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From mantzou at compulink.gr Fri Mar 19 11:01:39 1999 From: mantzou at compulink.gr (George A Mantzoukis) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:01:39 +0200 Subject: gender Message-ID: Dear Glen Gordon and IE-ists, The opinion that "Originally, (P)IE distinguished between animate/inanimate gender" appears to be quite popular and it has been expressed by list members in the past. On Sat, 23 May 1998, Peter Whale wrote > 6. Grammatical gender itself may be a development within early PIE, > perhaps from a yet earlier animate / inanimate distinction. and On Thursday, 04 Feb 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote > Originally, PIE distinguished between animate and inanimate > (neuter) gender. The split of the animate gender into masculine > and feminine is a later development, which e.g. Hittite did not > participate in. On the other hand someone might argue that "in PIE no gender distinction existed at all" or as you (Glen Gordon) put it some time ago ( on Sat, 23 May 1998 ) > ................................................... I would argue that IE > originally started out with no gender distinction at all, like Uralic. On Thursday, 04 March 1999, you (Glen Gordon) wrote > ... I'm sure you must have come across the idea that the feminine is > not archaic but derivative from the previous animate/inanimate > distinctions found in Anatolian lgs. If I am interpreting you right, Glen, you think that 1) IE originally started out with no gender distinction at all 2) Animate/inanimate distinctions developed sometime "later". When do you think these distincions developed? Was it within PIE and the Anatolian group inherited it, or was it within Proto-Anatolian? The animate/inanimate distinction does not appear to apply to Greek. Greek nouns are classified according to g r a m m a t i c a l gender in three "genders" or "classes" ie., masculine, feminine and neutral. Because of the coincidence of masculine and feminine endings, masculine and feminine are classified together in a common class. The neuter forms its own class with its own endings. This classification of Greek nouns in two classes is not based on animate/inanimate distinctions. Both classes contain very large numbers of animate as well as inanimate nouns. The "common gender" contains probably more inanimate than animate nouns. The neuter contains animate nouns like the third declension tek-os (offspring ) or the second declension tek-n-on (offspring) or plas-ma (creature) or thy-ma (victim) or zo:-on (animal) or kte:-n-os (beast) or ...... All these are of indifferent (or irrelevant) natural gender. It is very difficult to associate the "animate gender" with the "common gender" and the "inanimate gender" with the "neuter". The same arguments apply to Latin. ( It is probably worth noticing that even the Latin word "a n i m a l" does not belong to the Latin common class but to the neuter) Are there any good arguments in favor of animate/inanimate distinctions in Greek or Latin? [ Moderator's note: A language that distinguishes animate/inanimate may also distinguish gender --the two are not mutually exclusive. The claim for an animacy distinction in PIE is based on lexical distinctions such as *egnis "fire (animate)" vs. *pur "fire (inanimate)", *ak^wa "water (a.)" vs. *wodr/wednes "water (in.)". The distinction of common vs. neuter gender in Hittite is defined by the presence of distinct endings for neuter nouns in some cases, unrelated to the issues in Latin and Greek (where there are different endings associated with the "masculine" and "feminine" genders, shown by adjective concord of o-stem adjectives when modifying non-o-stem nouns, and there is no common gender). I think your question arises from a confusion of these various systems as being somehow interchangeable. They are not. --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Mar 19 21:00:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 21:00:51 -0000 Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: Re the note on laryngeals and -u, what about laryngeals and i (outside the Sanskrit reflex of syllabic laryngeals)? 1. Sanskrit forms such as de- from da: (before y- in some forms) 2. The number of laryngeal roots which appear with -i forms in some languages: (s)terH(i), (s)perH(i), treH(i) and a number of others. (3. Does the Hittite -i- in dai have an explanation within Hittite?) Is there a connection, or is this a chimaera? Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Mar 20 09:34:56 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 04:34:56 EST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, Bob Whiting wrote: <<...But I must also admit that part of the reason that I didn't respond to your question was that I found it difficult to understand what was being asked. As I remember your question, it was "Does it matter that /t/ does not appear in most of the nom. singulars? ... Why is the /t/ not regarded as just a fairly common stem that sometimes emerges in root and sometimes doesn't?".... The answer is that they are....>> This is one of those unusual times when the question I asked was not remembered, not understood, misquoted and then quoted back verbatim and answered, all in the same post. I do appreciate you taking the time to address these things and I learned quite a bit from your explanations. But my question was specifically about the way the word was being reconstructed in the posts on the list. I looked back again and for the most part the nominative (in those languages where it occurs) was not mentioned. I now attribute that to the knowledge of those involved who all knew but did not say that (in the case of this "night") the nominative form was irrelevant - based on the phototactics of the various languages mentioned. I wrote: <> You replied: <<"Truncated" is not really the right term. The disappearance of /t/ in this position in both Greek /nuks/ and Latin /noks/ is simply the result of a phonotactical rule:..>> On closer consideration - with regard to "nos"(Welsh), "noc"(Pol), "nux"(Greek) and "nox"(Latin) - whatever the process, the result are all truncated. No doubt about it. I looked up "truncated" in the dictionary and it hits the nail on the head. < are not operative for .>> came out of */nokt-s/> */ts/ > */ss/ > /s/ "by a normal phonological rule" - how is (adj) reconstructed? <> Sounds like classic problem-solving to me. "Disambiguating" is definitely problem-solving. I wrote: <> You replied: <> In Romance languages like modern French, it is said that "in all but a few cases, the oblique – often the ablative – form survived the loss of Latin inflectional morphology,...while the nominative did not..." I don't think I need to remind you that the nominative is "often" the least marked form. The markings you refers to includes those related to the ablative as a "grammatical case expressing relations of separation, source, cause or instrumentality,... not found in the nominative." Voila. The ablative's extra grammatical baggage. In letter (and verse, if need be.) <> Time to send an angry letter to Noah Webster. In the absence of an Academie, of course, dictionaries can and have "defined words according to their proper usage" or their common usage. Contrary to non-popular opinion, dictionaries have had a powerful effect on usage and definition - as Mr. Webster's did. There should be NO question that "usage" overwhelmingly says that the "definition" of a word is the "dictionary definition." And the dictionary says that the "definition" of a word is the "meaning of the word." If you think "dictionaries do not define words..." your usage is so uncommon it has not been recorded in Webster's. Being an American, I tend to go by Webster's. <> And when you get right down to it, nobody really knows your posted message but you. Although I occasionally appreciate Zen and the aloneness of oneness and all that, this is obviously a bit too much. We do know what Homer meant most of the time, and his intention was to be understood. Language's #1 function is communication and Homer was damn good at. <<"I know what it says, but what does it *mean*?">> But that is a whole different can of worms, isn't it? Since the changing meaning or function of words can be quite independent of their structural linguistics. When I read the word "gay" in an old novel, I am reminded that phonology cannot tell me how or why it came to mean what it means today. I wrote: <<...can a stem ever be seen as something like a vestigal case ending in reconstructing PIE - not part of the original word, but a compounded form that produced a universal "stem" in the daughter languages?>> You wrote: <> So the answer is: ...maybe. Regards, Steve Long From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Mar 20 09:14:45 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 10:14:45 +0100 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>BTW, there is on the web, a neat site called Enthnologue put up by the SIT SI*L* (The Summer Institute of Linguistics) >>that is a catalogue of world languages (I think it is UN info.) UN ? Heaven forbid. The moment the SIL takes over the UN I'm going to change planets. Seriously, the SIL is a private organisation, founded by Kenneth Pike (also known as language theoretician, the founder of Tagmemic Grammar). Its members are field linguists who over the decades have produced some very fine pieces of work on a great deal of hitherto undescribed languages of the world, mostly in Central America, Africa and the Pacific. I respect their linguistic output very much, use it regularly and wouldn't want to be without it. At the same time it should not be overlooked that the prime object of SIL's activity is not so much linguistics (this is a necessary side-effect), but rather Bible translation and straightforward mission, hence my initial sentence (and that's why they got kicked out of some countries, where any field-linguist may now have a hard time explaining that s/he is not one of them, as it happened to me). The Ethnologue is a language catalogue which is remarkably detailed and complete (if there can be such a thing as a complete language catalogue at all). Unlike other works of the kind, it is regularly updated and web-accessible. The information found there on language classification, though, is not always the result of original research and should be read with a critical eye (as the Alemannic part demonstrates, inter alia). But if you encounter a language/dialect name you've never heard of before, you are more likely to find it mentioned in this book than anywhere else, and at least you'll find a rather precise localisation for the lg. (that is the one most important piece of information for a missionary ;-). St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From BMScott at stratos.net Fri Mar 19 21:37:06 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 16:37:06 -0500 Subject: mutual intelligibility of OE with ON, &c Message-ID: Gordon Selway wrote: > there are also reports of internal non-intelligibility in insular Germanic > - 'eggys' -v- 'eyer' - but what the level of direct contact between SW and > NE was then, and the dates, and whether this is by inference rather than > written contemporary evidence I do not know; Caxton, Prologue to Eneydos (1490), writing of an occurrence 'in my days': 'And one of theym named sheffelde a mercer cam in to an hows and axed for mete. and specyally he axyd after eggys And the goode wyf answerde. that she coulde speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry. for he also could speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges/ and she vnderstode hym not/ And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren/ then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel/ Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte. egges or eyren/ certaynly it is harde to playse euery man/ by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage.' Brian M. Scott From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sat Mar 20 02:46:34 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 21:46:34 -0500 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > > It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a non-native > word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, argument from > authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your own knowledge why > the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that the same word exists > in Persian (<'usta:d>). IT is most likely Turkic, yes Turkic. Look at internal evidence; Us (top of, above), UstUn (superior, above others), oz (to surpass, to overtake, to be above others), ozghun (someone who is excessive), usta (an expert in something), ustalik (expertise). Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 19 23:18:05 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 17:18:05 -0600 Subject: avio/n In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Most interesting. Without ever really thinking about it, I'd always >vaguely assumed that the word was `big bird' plus the augmentative >suffix <-o'n> -- hence `really big bird', or some such. >OK; it's dumb, but it's cute. [snip] It definitely makes sense at a superficial level but if avión originally applied to swifts then it couldn't fit, given that these are rather than From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Mar 20 14:34:14 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 16:34:14 +0200 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36F30C0A.62E3355F@montclair.edu> Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: >Robert Whiting wrote: >> It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a >> non-native word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, >> argument from authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your >> own knowledge why the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that >> the same word exists in Persian (<'usta:d>). > IT is most likely Turkic, yes Turkic. Look at internal evidence; > Us (top of, above), UstUn (superior, above others), oz (to surpass, > to overtake, to be above others), ozghun (someone who is excessive), > usta (an expert in something), ustalik (expertise). Ah, yes, Turkic. Sorry, Mark, but Turkish slipped my mind. But if a word appears in both Arabic and Persian then it is usually a pretty safe bet that it appears in Turkish also (unless it has be purged as a foreign word). Sure enough the word is there: Ustat 'Meister', 'meisterhaft'; Ustadane 'meisterhaft' (all I have at home is a Turkish-German dictionary published in 1931). Ustaz is given as a variant of Ustat and is presumably based on the Arabic pronunciation (/dh/ realized as [z]). Leaving Spanish usted out of the picture for the moment, we now have what is obviously the same word in three languages belonging to three different families. The question would seem to be, which language is it native to? Or did it originally come from yet another language? Now Turkic would seem to have a good claim because of Turkish usta 'Meister', 'Handwerksmeister'; ustalIk 'Meister-Sein', 'Geschicklichkeit eines Meisters'; and ustalIklI 'meisterhaft', and because of Ust 'Oberseite', 'Oberflache'; UstUn 'ueber', 'ueberlegen'; UstUne 'auf ihn, sie, es'. The only problem would seem to be the variation between u- and U- (U for u with dieresis, I for undotted i) in usta and Ustat (and of course the occurrence of U and a together in Ustat, Ustaz, and Ustadane) which someone with more knowledge of Turkish than I have will have to explain. My lack of knowledge doubtless is the basis of the fact that I find Mark's lexical information somewhat confusing. My dictionary gives Us (Mark: 'top of, above') as 'Grundlage', 'Basis' while Ust (not given by Mark) seems to correspond to the meaning he gives for Us. And my dictionary does not give oz or ozghun at all so I suppose that they belong to a different branch of Turkic. I am surprised, though, that Mark did not come up with Ustat (Ustaz) and Ustadane, but perhaps these have been expunged from the language as being seen as having been borrowed from Persian or Arabic. But since Mark knows more about Turkish and Turkic than I ever will, I expect that there is a simple explanation. It does, however, reinforce the point about doing comparisons with only a dictionary and a very limited knowledge of the language involved. And I have a question of Mark: Is the term Ustat used an an honorific in Turkish as 'usta:dh is generally in Arabic? Coming back to Spanish usted, since we can be fairly sure that the word 'usta:dh is not native to Arabic, and since Arabic is the only one of the three languages where we have noted it to have been in close contact with Spanish, the question becomes whether the word could have come into Arabic early enough for it to be passed on to Spanish before the end of the 15th century. Or is the question whether 'usta:dh didn't come into Arabic from Spanish usted and then pass to Persian and Turkish? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 19 23:24:46 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 17:24:46 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: <36F117F6.71E7DF0C@neiu.edu> Message-ID: >BAST, LIME etc. >1. North Americans, Aussies etc. might take LIME as the citrus. They know the >fragrant tree as LINDEN is the usual term in USA/Canada. [snip] >3. The bastwood tree in the USA Midwest, lost the /t/ in sandhi; came out as >. In early summer, when the tree are putting out pollen, this is >like cotton fibers, hence also the name . Basswood where I grew up in Ohio was a type of linden that had triangular or heart shaped leaves, soft wood, smooth bark and "helicopter" seeds. Older people called all lindens "basswoods". Cottonwood was a completely different tree, although the shape of the leaves was similar From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 20 14:35:22 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 08:35:22 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /-ant/ In-Reply-To: <37154cdb.250259954@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > I don't happen to think that parna- is necessarily non-IE. In > Hittite it's an irregular noun (pir < *perr < *pern, parnas < > *porn-os), which doesn't fit the loanword theory too well. And > the only external source I've ever seen mentioned is Egyptian > which doesn't seem appropriate either geographically or > phonetically (no -n in Egyptian, and Eg. /r/ < *l. Why not pick > on Grk. ?) Because theres is also Hurrian "purni". Perhaps the observed instability in vowels comes from different ways of rendering (or phonologizing) a syllabic /r/. > > But the main thing is that there is no sound-sequence in Anatolian > >which we would expect to be borrowed into Greek as /-nth-/. > Whether Hittite was /ntt/ (/nt/) or /nt/ (/nd/) is not > recoverable in any way from the orthography. Maybe Lycian and > Lydian spellings a millennium later show /nd/ (is that what > Palmer is going on?), but that doesn't prove much about the > situation as it was when pre-Greek borrowed these words from some > Anatolian-like language spoken in Greece. Since we are both saying that the Anatolian form was in /nt/, not /nd/, I do not see why you care about whether a later change of /nt/ -> /nd/ is posited to account for Palmer/Kretschmer's Mystery Evidence. Note that "huakinth-" is yet another word where an Anatolian voicless plosive was borrowed into Greek as a voiceless plosive _without_ aspiration. We've got three of those now, without any serious digging. So why should /t/ after /n/, where even in a language that did have aspiration this would be lessened or absent, be borrowed as /th/? It is also true that the /-ant/ suffix has /a/, not /o/, so the same sort of question arises: why would the Greeks not borrow /a/ as /a/? The obvious answer here is that the borrowing predates the change of /o/ to /a/ in Anatolian, but is there any other reason to date this change so late, and are there no reasons not to date it earlier? Falling together of /a/ and /o/ is not exactly rare in PIE-to-IE (occurring in about half the family), and is generally considered (as far as I know) quite ancient where it occurs. Finally, is this /-ant/ thing securely established for PIE? It does not seem so, on the basis of one or two stray forms in Slavic and Tocharian, which might be from something else. Welsh and Gothic have plurals in /-n-/ that come from things entirely different. For a pre-IE derivational suffix to be borrowed would not be that odd, where many pre-IE words were borrowed. Compare how English has in effect borrowed many Latin (and some Greek) derivational suffixes merely as a side-effect of borrowing lots of Latin and Greek words. More to the point, American English might be said to have borrowed German /-burg/ as a toponymic suffix, merely by having a lot of toponyms in /-burg/. Any American would recognixe any "X-burg" as a toponym. DLW [ Moderator's comment: Isn't this last Anglo-Saxon rather than a German borrowing? Cf. Edinburg (a calque on Dunedin). --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 19 23:34:39 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 17:34:39 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] Thanx for the info on Celtic >5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental Celtic >*agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, gereta, mando_ etc. >are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, mandu,_ . I'd like to hear Larry Trask's opinion on the other words. It's my understanding that "lady" may NOT be from Celtic in that in Aquitanian, there seems to be a corresponding masculine form --something like , from something like *. Is that correct? If so, is and- from the same root as ? Presumibly the other morphemes mean "male, man" & "female, woman." Now, if this is so, could Celtic andera: be the reason that survived and [sp?] didn't? [snip] From iglesias at axia.it Sat Mar 20 22:04:22 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 14:04:22 PST Subject: Sancho Message-ID: MCV wrote: >The original Aragonese fabla is spoken in Upper (Pyrinean) >Aragon. Jaca and thereabouts. The Spanish census data for Aragon (1981) was: Province of Huesca: Castilian 76.36% Catalan 11.92% Aragonese 11.72% Province of Zaragoza: Cast. 95.58% Cat. 3.05% Arag. 1.37% Province of Teruel: Cast. 90.60% Cat. 9.09% Arag. 0.31% The maximum number of people involved is about 18,000. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From Bomhard at aol.com Fri Mar 19 23:35:23 1999 From: Bomhard at aol.com (Bomhard at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 18:35:23 EST Subject: Indo-European Phonology Message-ID: Dear Steve, Thanks for your comments. Yes, indeed, Germanic and Armenian could have retained an earlier system with glottalics. Allan From TomHeffernan at utk.edu Sat Mar 20 16:12:49 1999 From: TomHeffernan at utk.edu (Thomas Heffernan) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 11:12:49 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Someone wrote: > We're an agricultural >civilization, and we eat a lot of meat. So did our ancestors, in periods when >there wasn't much population pressure -- post Black Death, for example, >northern Europeans ate over 2 pounds a day, on average. It is true that agricultural Europeans ate a considerable amount of meat post Plague. However, the increse in meat consumption is a direct response to the exegencies of the Plague and is not reflective of the situation pre 1340's. It does not seem to be the case that pre-Plague European society consumed nearly as much meat as after the Plague. It appears that the diminished population caused the increased consumption in meat and meat products after the Plague of the mid-14th century. Less population meant less land necessary for cultivation amd less cereal grains necessary. Marginal lands were no longer necessary for cropping as was the case before the 1340's. Herding as practiced then was less labor intensive than cropping. Hence with fewer people and more available land there was an economic advantage to herding that had not previously existed. Yours, Tom Heffernan From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 19 23:57:41 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 17:57:41 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I seem to remember that Gaidhlig [Scots Gaelic] calqued French by using "you all" [sp?] for formal 2nd person singular [snip] In Dutch originally: {du} = "thou", {jij} = "ye", >{uwe}?= "your (pl)", or similar (I think). Later:- > {jij} used as polite singular as in French and English. > {Uwe Edelheid} = "Your Nobility" used as polite "you" sg & pl, later >abbreviated in writing and then in speech to (U E} and then {U} (by imitating >Spanish {usted}?) > {jij} no longer used as plural. > (du} fell completely out of use :: in the 16th century it was a literary >rarity. (But I have seen {dou wilde se} = "thou wild sea" in a poem in >modern Frisian.) > The present situation is (I think: my Dutch has got a bit stale; I >learned it for 2 holidays motorcycling around Holland around 1980):- > nom gen > jij & je jouw you (sg) (intimate / condescending, like French >{tu}) > gij & ge thou (sg) (religious / dialectal / poetical) > jullie van jullie you (pl) (familiar) (< "you people") > u uw you (sg & pl) (polite) [snip] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 20 17:33:05 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 11:33:05 -0600 Subject: Stigmatization and Celtic Influence Message-ID: Some have objected 1) that the amount of Celtic borrowings in English is too low, and 2) that the time that alledged Celticisms appear is too late. Actually a high level of stigmatization could well explain both. Apart from pragmatic consderations ("Do we have a word for this?"), the main thing that controls borrowing is the reaction that the would-be borrower expects: will I get laughed at?, etc. The higher the level of stigmatization of a subject (i.e. conquered) language, the less likely a would-be borrower is to think that the reaction he would get from using a word from the subject language would be good. Also, the higher the level of stigmatization, the more resistance there will be to characteristic features of a stigmatized dialect being accepted as standard, which is to say the longer it will take. (Of course these are both "ceteris paribus" things, but that's life.) So a high level of stigmatization (one may compare how the Irish were called "white apes") can be said to predict (in the atemporal sense of 'imply') both of the supposedly surprising things that cause some to reject the notion that there has been significant Celtic influence in English. DLW P.S. I also take this opportunity to note that Norman (or Anglo-Norman) French was for a time the high prestige language of Scotland. Scottish English did not really get on its feet there till the Stuarts, which is to say that English became official and high prestige and all that in Scotland at about the same time it did in England. Thus the difference that Joat alledges is a non-difference. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sat Mar 20 01:18:49 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 19:18:49 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: alternative: can't lay my hands on the source right now, but in the last wo years I saw a piece about some do-gooder Venetian monk, whose name got transmogrified to the name of a circus clown. A Chicago TV station WGN [World's Greatest Newspaper] has long had a popular show, "Bozo's Circus". 1900ca. A popular US comic strip was "Buster Brown";.a Little Lord Fauntleroy clone. A "BB collar" linen, starched, worn with a satin ribbon, was standard choirboy regalia. My sisters 1930s would invert it, wear it as a cap, when playing nurse... jpm [ moderator snip: It is unnecessary to quote entire posts that have just gone out to the list. ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sat Mar 20 18:52:20 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 10:52:20 PST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: ME (GLEN): For all intents and purposes, Early Modern English is different enough from Modern English to make comprehension difficult after only 400 years or so. By comparing even Shakespeare's English to Chaucer shows how much things can change in an even shorter period. MODERATOR: [...] the language is such that the jokes can be explained--as with Shakespeare. Before the jokes in the _Canterbury Tales_ can be explained, the language itself must be explicated. Well, as far as I understand, Early Modern English has slang terms and such like for instance the rather rude "to die", that mean nothing other than "to cease to exist" in Contemporary English. In some cases, the language still needs to be "explained". MODERATOR: so how do we measure the difference? ...which is of course a matter of interpretation and in effect, we're both right/wrong about Shakespeare's English. Oh well. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sat Mar 20 01:39:57 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 19:39:57 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Is it your point that <'usta:dh> is invalid because it is an argument >from authority while "ustaeth" is based on your own personal experience? Not at all. I intended only that ideally we should work with authentic scripts to back up transcriptions. For classical Latin e.g. there are problems that are solved only when working with majuscules/capitals, and which are concealed or worse, by writing in Carolingian minuscules. jpm Robert Whiting wrote: > On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > > 1. No, no, a 1000x no = no argument. > > As an argument from authority is no argument. > An argument from authority can be quite valid. There are a number of > rules that have to be observed to qualify an argument from authority, but > if they are met then the argument can be accepted. Anything that you have > knowledge of that you have not verified personally is an argument from > authority. The reason that I know that the moon is not made out of > green cheese (or Normandy brie) is that reasonable people who have been > trained to investigate the matter and who have no reason to lie have told > me so. It is an argument from authority. Do not confuse expert authority > with institutional authority. AGREED. good point. > The two are quite different in a logical > context. Any time you look up a word in a dictionary or check out > something in an encylopaedia it is an argument from authority. Now if > you wish to say that such references are invalid because an argument from > authority is no argument, then the only arguments that you can use are > ones that you have personally verified. Therefore we can assume that your > connection of Arabic <'usta:dh> and Spanish is based on your > personal knowledge of the two languages and the histories of the words > in those languages. In which case it would seem more useful to share > this information with the rest of us than to shout down "arguments from > authority." AGREED. It would seem useful, as well, to consider that I referred to bald, without argument. --But didn't you hear the shouted "NO" that provoked my counter-shout? > It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a non-native > word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, argument from > authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your own knowledge why > the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that the same word exists > in Persian (<'usta:d>). I DON'T KNOW, whether from percept or precept. Can you perhaps tell us? > > 2. <'usta:dh> ~ "ustaeth" are both transcriptions OF ______ ? I meant, not a "transcription/1" from speech, but a "transcription/2" from one script to another. And I don not mean "transliteration". > So are ~ "duh". ? -- from what is transcribed? > Is it your point that <'usta:dh> is invalid because it is an argument > from authority while "ustaeth" is based on your own personal experience? NOPE. Why would you want to say that? From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 20 19:34:27 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 13:34:27 -0600 Subject: DLW's Final Missive Message-ID: It occurs to me that before desubscribing I did not finish what I was saying about the PIE plosive system. I think the voiced series was pharyngealized. This would predict both a labial gap and a labio-velar gap, which does not occur, but if the labio-velars were at some point uvulars, and only later developed into labio-velars (where they did), this is not a problem. Whether such a theory/notion predicts the abence/rarity of roots of the form /DED/ is another matter. It might. If both Cs were pharyngealized, then the nature of the gesture in question is such that it would almost certainly have to be carrried across the V. So if for some reason, some folks did not much like this, that would work. That reason might be either 1) that pharyngealization would alter the character of the V, moving it in the direction of [o], or 2) that pharyngealization might somehow interfere with a distinction of fortis/lenis (in MCVs terms, "stiff voice vs. slack voice" might be better), that was being made in the Vs. I suspect the second is more likely to be true, though I am not enough a phonetician to know how. Anyway, now that I am gone feel free to go ahead and call me "all sorts of perfectly true and applicable names", as Tolkien might say, or pehaps to send me emissives of praise extolling my manifest and manifold virtues, or whatever. My great swan-dive into the Flames of Well-Merited Oblivion officially begins now: down, down, down, CRASH (not to mention screams of agony, etc.). DLW From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sat Mar 20 01:42:58 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 19:42:58 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano Message-ID: a nice Slavic cognate in e.g. Polish , Serbian ljiva>, and derivative ljivovica> 'plumb brandy. Sheila Watts wrote: > >OIr , W `plum', W (pl.) 'fruits, berries'; > >MBret NBret `sloe' > > The Irish one, like the Breton, means 'sloe'. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 20 20:08:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 15:08:00 EST Subject: Celtic Influence Revisited Message-ID: >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >The proposition that OE was a class dialect is to some extent more assumption >than conclusion. No, this does not make the argument circular. -- actually, it does. >There is evidence, such as the forms and usages found in ME texts -- a hypothesis that the nobility were speaking OE and the commonality ME is, to put it mildly, a wild violation of Occam's Razor. >1) That OE was a class dialect. -- no evidence. >our general knowledge of socio-linguistics and secondary language acquisition, -- small populations of preliterate conquerors do not successfully impose their speech. Or the French, Spanish and Italian populations would be speaking Germanic languages. What did the Anglo-Saxons have that the Franks, Vandals, and Goths didn't? From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sat Mar 20 02:00:04 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 20:00:04 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was > nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of > the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Not quite. The Upper Silesian dialect had a wide currency in many courts outside its own region as Kanzleisprache before Luther. That's why he used it. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 20 20:13:36 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 15:13:36 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >No, *much* further apart. More in the neighbourhood of French and Spanish, >English and German. -- not at all. There's no basic intercommunicabilty of that sort between modern English and German. OE and ON are structurally much more similar -- they're both highly inflected, for instance. OE and ON are also much closer in time than modern English and modern German. English began diverging from the other western Germanic dialects during the Migration Period, 1500 years ago. 1500 years before 1000 CE takes you back to 500 BCE -- Proto-Germanic period, _early_ proto-Germanic at that, pretty well complete linguistic unity, less divergence than among English dialects today. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 20 02:40:04 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 20:40:04 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <6ea4f1e7.36f298a7@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Fri, 19 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Iiffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >>The situation in England of that time is a little anomalous, >-- normal. No. The general rule, as some others have noted, is that where there are classes, there are class dialects. >>for a time everyone spoke his local dialect >-- as virtually everyone in Europe did prior to the emergence of the modern >State and standardized languages in post-Renaissance times. No. >Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was >nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of >the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Regional _class_ dialects. I grow weary of this. >>Thus the class barriers in English at that time were relatively recent, and >>there had not been much time for much divergence to occur. >-- nice try but it won't work. Yes it will. The kingdom of Scotland had been Gaelic-using till shortly (as linguistic time is measured) before. Thus, just as in England, there had been little time for divergence to evolve. >Lowland Scotland, which spoke a Northumbrian dialect, was never conquered by >the Normans, and the court and nobility there used Lallans right down to the >late 17th century. >Substantial class differences in accent are a rare phenomenon, and vanishingly >rare in preliterate societies. Accent, which in popular usage is generally taken to refer only to sound features, is not the same as dialect, a point you repeatedly fail to appreciate. Thus Southern Senators like Ernest Hollings and Strom Thurmond have a southern accent, and in acordance with custom speak in a regional dialect (as British lords used to), but they do not speak a lower class dialect. The lower class dialect of the regions they are from is appreciably different. >Remember, an Anglo-Saxon landowner's main social contacts would be with his >social inferiors, not his peers. Everything from his nursmaid to his groom. >Those are the people he'd spend most time talking to. >Note the similarities of black and white English in the antebellum Southern >plantation belt -- every traveller noted how the planters and their families >"talked like Negroes". >That was because they spent most of their time talking _to_ Negroes. So your theory then enables us to confidently (or should I say immodestly) predict that Southern aristocrats speak Black English. As someone once recently said: 1) Nice try but it won't work 2) QED The travellers in question must not have been from that region, and must have been mistaking the shared similaritiies of Southern American English and Black English (which is of course a Southern dialect) as identity. But rather than engage in this all too good imitation of a Monty Python skit (argument, or is that just contradiction), let us return to the Bickerton challenge. If you've got something that explains 1) why ME diverges from the rest of Germanic and converges with Celtic, and 2) why the geographical pattern of innovations is as it is, let's hear it. If not .. [use your imagination]. DLW From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 20 20:56:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 20:56:02 -0000 Subject: Sanskrit Tense & Aspect Message-ID: Miguel said of imperfect, aorist, and perfect in Skt and Greek: >the three categories can be described >conveniently as "aspects", since they are all "past" in terms of >tense. I wonder if Miguel is bending the meaning of "aspect" beyond its usual function here. They would be "aspects" (in its usual meaning) if there were something about the way in which the action were done, quite apart from the time of them, which distinguished these three forms. Miguel also said: >There is no difference between >Latin dixi (formally an s-aorist) and pependi (formally a >reduplicated perfect), etc. There *is* a difference between pf. >nina:ya and aor. anais.i:t (and impf. anayat). The difference in Sanskrit is slight, at best. I quote Stenzler, (1997): "In Classical Sanskrit the aorist is used in narrative as a past tense alongside the imperfect and perfect, without any distinct function." There is a slight difference in time of reference, (recent or more remote past) but this is not aspect. Perhaps it is different in Vedic, although my Vedic grammar tells me the names refer to the formation, and not to the use of the tenses. It is Latin and Greek which show the aspectual distinction of continuative / punctative. Sanskrit has no tense at all like the imperfect in Latin or Greek. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 20 21:10:56 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 21:10:56 -0000 Subject: no standard German? Message-ID: Joat said:> >Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was >nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of >the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Rubbish, I'm afraid. (a) There was a substantial literature in Middle High German, in a form which avoided the more obvious local peculiarities. (b) Saxony Chancery German was wide spread as a precise language, needed for legal use over a wide German speaking area. (c) Luther himself says that he uses "the common German language which both High and Low Germans understand ... that is to say, the Saxon Chancery language ... which all princes and kings in Germany use." (My translation - I'll give you Luther's German if you want it.) Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 04:28:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 22:28:30 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] > (2) Re borrowing a pronoun of one language into some other use in another >language: etymological dictionaries say that US English "bozo" = "fool" < >Spanish "vosotros": That sounds pretty farfetched. More likely it came from baboso "drooling idiot, drooling drunken idiot, etc." could it also be that the US English slang term of address >and then nickname "buster" came from the abovementioned Spanish dialect >?, and not the English for "one who busts (= breaks) things". I always heard buster was from "ballbuster" From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Mar 20 23:50:32 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 18:50:32 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a post dated Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Sheila Watts wrote: <> To be more accurate, I only saw that UN data was cited and the UN probably has nothing to do with this site. I don't know anything about "the Summer Institute of Linguistics" or what kind of organization they are, though I did note that the year of the first translation of the Bible is included in most of the language descriptions. Also, Alsatian is called a distinct dialect in Comrie and certainly deserves a separate historical and political identity. And yes I think they are referring to the retaining of dipthongs in Upper German, calling the shift towards monophthlongs in High German a "vowel shift" (and perhaps confusing it with the Second Consonant Shift.) Can't say that other information isn't also off. But it is at least interesting that someone tried to catalogue the world's lanuages in this way and put some emphasis on cross-"intelligibility" in many of their descriptions. If this is perhaps a guide for religious missionaries (I don't know that) maybe its based on reports from the field or something. And perhaps it's of some small use in that way. I just hope I haven't referred everyone to a cult site or something like that. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 04:39:59 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 22:39:59 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <371d615c.255509055@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Okay, La vora/gine was published around 1920 and written a few years earlier and the plot centers on the rubber boom of the 1880s. We're going pretty far back in time. Bello wrote about 180 years ago. Cuervo is also about as old as dinosaur poop. That's leaves a peon heard in Colombia --which may originally be from Spain or God knows where. That's scraping the bottom of the barrel. >Coromines (DEiCCat): >"vuste' en el Nord d'Equador (Lemos, Prov. ecuatoriano, $54); >buste' en boca d'un venec,ola` amazo`nic (Eust. Rivera, La >Vora'gine, p. 194); a zones colombianes: Cuervo, Obra Ine'd., p. >160, i n. 50, a la Gram. de Bello, tambe' ho cita en valls del >Sud de Col.; i en una <> oi"da cap a Bogota`: <un cuartillo 'e chicha / ... / ya vuste' me entendera' / ... >> >(Cuervo, Apunt. Bog.7, 587). >Doesn't Corominas mention 'usta:dh in DCEC/DCEH? I seem to >recall that he does, but I don't have either at hand. In DEiCC, >he just says: "Com e's ben sabut, voste` resulta` d'una >contraccio' de vostra merce`". >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 03:40:11 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 21:40:11 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Basque `salmon' is widely suspected of being *ultimately* of >Celtic origin, but not *directly*: instead, a Celtic loan into Late >Latin is favored by most commentators as the direct source of the Basque >word. I seem to remember a Spanish dialect form esoqui/n [maybe Asturian] Wasn't the Latin form something like esox? The ending -i/n, of course, is diminutive in Spanish --with similar forms in just about all Romance languages. [snip] >A Celtic origin has also been suggested for ~ `oar', >pointing to earlier *, possibly to be identified with the word >represented by Old Irish `oar'. Don't know if there's anything >much behind this, especially since the nasal appears to be wrong. Spanish for "oar" is "remo." So a form similar to Irish was floating around the area. >Finally, `beloved' has been thought for a century to have been >borrowed from the Celtic word represented by Old Irish `good'. >The semantics requires some fancy footwork, but the Basque word has an >anomalous form for a native word, and is surely borrowed from somewhere. I've heard it said quite a few times that Maite is a "nickname" for "Mari/a Teresa." And indeed, I've Maites whose legal "Spanish name" was "Mari/a Teresa." [snip] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Mar 21 12:47:18 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 12:47:18 +0000 Subject: Ethnologue In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Sheila Watts wrote: [somebody else] > >BTW, there is on the web, a neat site called Enthnologue put up by > >the SIT that is a catalogue of world languages (I think it is UN > >info.) [snip sample] > I _do_ hope this is not the UN's info. Though it could be a good > reason to persuade them to hire some linguists at large salaries. The Ethnologue volume is compiled and published by a division of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). As far as I know, it has no connection with the UN. The information contained in it is derived from an almost limitless variety of sources, of quite variable nature and quality, and there are lots and lots of errors. The book is updated every few years. The most recent paper edition, I think, is still the 12th (1992), but a new edition is in preparation and should be out soon, or it may even be out already, though I haven't seen it yet. I haven't checked the Website lately; maybe that has already been updated. The editors of Ethnologue actively encourage specialists to write in with corrections, which they are happy to incorporate in their next edition. I've done this myself, and anybody who finds misinformation on the site or in the paper edition should consider sending in corrections. Ethnologue is the most serious attempt I know of at assembling comprehensive information about the world's languages (signed as well as spoken) in one place, and it deserves support. Incidentally, the 1992 edition reports just over 6500 spoken languages as currently in use, plus some dozens of sign languages. This is probably the most accurate count we have. Strangely, though, a recent survey based in Wales and carried out by an organization called (I think; might have this wrong) the Observatoire Linguistique, which seems to have some kind of link to UNESCO, has apparently reported the astounding total of over 10,000 languages -- a number which I will take with a grain of salt until I see the data. This was reported in the newspaper a year or two ago, but, since then, I've heard nothing further. Has anybody else? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Mar 21 12:50:27 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 12:50:27 +0000 Subject: Basque `plum' In-Reply-To: <371e69a1.257625625@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > It seems to me that Corominas is suggesting that was > borrowed from Gothic , and --> under the > influence of . OK; but I've already pointed out some serious difficulties with this. > Whether has anything to do with is another question (but > ot- + g- or k- > ok-, as in okin "baker"). Yes, plus a * would indeed yield * by the usual rules, but I know of no evidence for any *. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 20:27:26 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 14:27:26 -0600 Subject: Dating of Anatolian /nt/ vs. /nd/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Most of those words look like they could be collectives to me. A tub is a collective of water Thread comes in a spool, skein, etc. Peas come in a pod. The flower my wife calls a "jacinta" comes in a cluster. [I don't know what a Greek hyacinth looks like] And I don't know about unripe figs other than if you open them too early, you'll get of a collective of maggots Are there any known meanings for asam-, me:r-, ereb-, etc.? Ereb- does superficially resemble Spanish arveja, erveja, alverja, etc. a few of the many words for "pea" [snip] > I take this opportunity to note that the same suffix, /-nth-/, >also occurs in Pre-Greek words like > "asaminthos" 'bathtub' > "me:rinthos" 'thread' > "erebinthos" 'pea' > "olunthos" 'unripe fig' > "Huakinthos" 'Hyacinth' > where a meaning 'collective' seems improbable. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 20:29:48 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 14:29:48 -0600 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <94403f06.36effb22@aol.com> Message-ID: So, you believe it was in Anatolia or Central Asia before that? [snip] >I'd say sometime around 3500 BCE makes a sensible date for the spread >of PIE into Europe. From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Mar 21 23:02:10 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 18:02:10 EST Subject: background noise Message-ID: In a message dated 3/11/99 9:56:17 PM, Larry Trask wrote: >I don't think it's realistic to try to estimate the degree of background >noise for languages generally: there are just too many complicating >factors. Agreed, that was a part of my point. >For one thing, languages with similar phoneme systems, similar >phonotactic patterns and similar morpheme-structure constraints are >likely to show a higher proportion of chance resemblances than arbitrary >languages. If that is true, then we need to introduce a correction factor into our tools, in other words, we have recognized a distortion imposed by our tools, and we can attempt to counteract that distortion. >For another, no general approach to background noise can >hope to distinguish between common inheritance and borrowing; this is >something that has to be done by painstaking and hard-nosed linguistic >investigation, and sometimes it can hardly be done at all. Once borrowed, words become part of common inheritance relative to later descendents. Lloyd Anderson From sidonian at ggms.com Mon Mar 22 15:38:40 1999 From: sidonian at ggms.com (sidonian) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 10:38:40 -0500 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Very interesting thread: Although I'm more of an historian than a linguist I *do* think it plausible that English was much influenced by the Celtic of pre Saxon Britain. It can certainly explain some of the features in English that are non-typical of Germanic languages. iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > Accent, which in popular usage is generally taken to refer only to > sound features, is not the same as dialect, a point you repeatedly fail to > appreciate. Thus Southern Senators like Ernest Hollings and Strom > Thurmond have a southern accent, and in acordance with custom speak in a > regional dialect (as British lords used to), but they do not speak a lower > class dialect. The lower class dialect of the regions they are from is > appreciably different. Good point. I do agree with you that in almost every language there are formal and vulgar modes. The upper classes invariably have better acquaintance with, and more occasion to use, formal language while the lower classes sometimes always speak in a "slang" version of the language. Even in "classless" America we have this. Whether someone is from New York or Atlanta he or she will often switch back and forth between formal and vulgar depending on social context. (q.v. I speak to clients one way but quite another way to buddies) but I would expect that if one people conquer another people and the conquered are pressured into using the conqueror's language that there would be a much larger influence on the sound features of the conqueror's language than on the lexicon or grammar. One of the most difficult tasks for someone when learning a foreign language is learning how to properly make unfamiliar sounds. Even after learning to speak a foreign language fluently, many speakers are still unable to pronounce all of its sounds properly. It is reasonable to assume that when the Anglo-Saxons conquered Britain that they intermarried quite a bit with some of the indigenous inhabitants? (I know it's dreadful to suggest this about the ancestors of the English, but the kill all of the men and make concubines of the women method of conquest was pretty standard up until this century.) It's plausible to suggest that much of the population of the early Anglo-Saxon regions in Britain were celtic in background (far more plausible than the idea that every single celt was either killed or tossed into the fringe. Wouldn't the accent and idiosyncratic use of the conqueror's tongue by those whose mothers or nurses spoke with thick accents have greatly influenced the speech patterns of subsequent generations? > So your theory then enables us to confidently (or should I say > immodestly) predict that Southern aristocrats speak Black English. As > someone once recently said: > 1) Nice try but it won't work > 2) QED > The travellers in question must not have been from that region, > and must have been mistaking the shared similaritiies of Southern American > English and Black English (which is of course a Southern dialect) as > identity. I don't think this is at all an unreasonable theory. As someone who _is_ from the American south I am intimately acquainted with the dialects here and, with eyes closed or over the telephone it is often impossible to tell the difference between a "black" dialect and a "thick" southern accent. Furthermore, in "The Story of English," the authors point out that the similarities between southern American dialect and black dialect stem from the fact that even the most wealthy had black nannies and lived very closely with their black house servants. They also point out how this similarity is even more marked among the women who, at that time, spent most of their time at home while many of the men were sent away to schools where they learned to speak in a more formal dialect. This same book also states that prior to the 17th century that many English dialects shared many common sound features with the Irish dialect of English today. Although they suggest that this is because the older pronunciations were better preserved in Ireland and America it could just as easily be proposed that these features stemmed from a celtic substrate that was partially purged (in England) through public education. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 21 23:09:42 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 15:09:42 PST Subject: `spool' Message-ID: LARRY TRASK: >It's `reel', generally confined in the US to things around which >films, tapes and fishing lines are wound. US, US, US! Nothing but US! What about Canada?! We ain't just maple-syrup eatin' inuit, you know! The term "reel" is confined to the sense of "films, tapes and fishing lines" in ALL of North America, even amongst us much-neglected Canadians. :P -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 15:45:31 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 09:45:31 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36F30C0A.62E3355F@montclair.edu> Message-ID: >Robert Whiting wrote: >> It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a non-native >> word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, argument from >> authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your own knowledge why >> the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that the same word exists >> in Persian (<'usta:d>). >IT is most likely Turkic, yes Turkic. Look at internal evidence; >Us (top of, above), UstUn (superior, above others), oz (to surpass, >to overtake, to be above others), ozghun (someone who is excessive), >usta (an expert in something), ustalik (expertise). Ustadh/Ustad/Ustaz exists in a number of Muslim countries [perhaps nearly all]. It's applied in Pakistan and Bangladesh to master musicians, e.g. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. But re: Turkish, it doesn't have /dh/, does it? If not, the term can't be Turkish. Yes, there are a lot of Turkish expressions used in certain local Arabic dialects/languages but there's a lot more Arabic vocabulary in Turkish From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 23:37:14 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 17:37:14 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: <37239ac8.270204894@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: >Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> In Spanish, it's called a [which also means garbage >>can/truck, among other things], hence the town of El Cajo/n. >> Box canyons figured in most westerns filmed in Arizona, so if >>you've seen John Wayne movies, you've seen plenty of them. They're the >>places where the bad guys are usually holed up in. At least in the films, >>they're canyons that have only one entrance, which is narrow with steep >>walls. They widen out inside and often have a bit of a flood plain where >>farming is possible. >> I'd imagine there'd be quite a few of them in parts of southern and >>eastern Spain where smaller streams flow down from the plateau. >As to Artesa de Segre, and as one who nearly drowned there once >[I must have been 10 or so], I must say it's not really a box >canyon in my recollection, but the river (Segre) does flow >through mountainous territory there. Indeed the fact that the >waterlevel rose so quickly on the particular day of my >near-drowning (some bozo must have opened the floodgates of the >Oliana reservoir upstream), suggests that the valley is rather >narrow, I think. Okay, maybe ravine or possibly what my folks call a "holler" ["hollow"]--they live about 2 miles up the holler on Cobb's Creek where they grow taters and maters :> In any case, the v-shaped valley walls resemble the picture I saw of an . As to -esa. Could it be "valley," "wadi," "arroyo"? Any ideas? From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 16:01:21 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 10:01:21 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] > Yes it will. The kingdom of Scotland had been Gaelic-using till >shortly (as linguistic time is measured) before. Thus, just as in >England, there had been little time for divergence to evolve. I'd strongly suspect that in much of Scotland that class differences were based on language rather than dialect differences. The Edinburgh region, AFAIK, never spoke Gaelic and I'd imagine that in Glasgow, Briton was the language of lower classes for a few centuries. And then around the time the lower class Glaswegians learned Gaelic, the nobility settled on Lallans. Does this sound right? >>Lowland Scotland, which spoke a Northumbrian dialect, was never conquered by >>the Normans, and the court and nobility there used Lallans right down to the >>late 17th century. [snip] > Accent, which in popular usage is generally taken to refer only to >sound features, is not the same as dialect, a point you repeatedly fail to >appreciate. Thus Southern Senators like Ernest Hollings and Strom >Thurmond have a southern accent, and in acordance with custom speak in a >regional dialect (as British lords used to), but they do not speak a lower >class dialect. The lower class dialect of the regions they are from is >appreciably different. And younger middle and upper class Whites now tend to speak with an accent that is much closer to Midwestern English. Although Lowland South Carolina is one of the places where a Southern accent is hanging on to a greater degree than most areas of the South. From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 22 16:38:06 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 16:38:06 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > But Antso < Santso, while it definitely looks cognate to > , , looks a bit askew given that Basque does have > /ch/ yet we don't see *Santxo /sancho/. So it didn't come from > . And Old Spanish had /ts/ but we don't see *Sanzo /santso > > sanso or Santho/. We do have the surname Sanz, however, /san/ < /sants/. In the 9-10th centuries Sanctus, and Sanctius (f. Sanctia) seem to have been reasonably common given names in Catalonia (Bolo's and Moran, Repertori d'Antropo`nims Catalans, 1994). Spellings for the male name(s) are Sanc, Sanca, Sanccio, Sanci, Sancii, Sancio, Sancione, Sancius, Sanctio, Sanctius, Sanco, Sancone, Sancto, Sanctus. Sanga, Sango, Santio, Santioni, Santo, Santus, Sanxo, Sanzi, Sanzio, Sanzione, Sanzo, Sanzoni This range of forms suggest to me that at least /santo/, /santso/, /santSo/, /santson(e)/ were current in Romance as given names. That is to say, there's nothing specially Basque about Sancho. 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 glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 22 03:24:56 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 19:24:56 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: ME (GLEN): First off, I had the funny notion that the 1rst person perfective was *-H3 not *-H2 [...] The fact that non-Anatolian languages seem to have either -o or both -o AND -a (like Greek) suggests to me that -o is archaic and -a is not. MIGUEL: How can /a/ be a derivative of *(e)H3? We *can* derive /o(:)/ from *(e)H2 (O-Stufe). [...] Huh? Which -o are you talking about? Which langauge has -o in the 1sg. perfect? Alright, I'll listen. I'm curious: How do we obtain /o(:)/ out of *(e)H2 then? [ Moderator's comment: As MCV parenthetically noted, it has been hypothesized that **oH2 (that is, "apophonic *o which alternates with *e") > *o: rather than *a:. It has its attractions. --rma ] MIGUEL: Tocharian shows how easy it would have been to newly develop a conjugation based on the personal pronouns [...] But the fact is that all other IE languages have stubbornly held on to *-m, *-s, *-t, which must have a different origin. ME (GLEN): Must have? Alright, what is that "different origin"? MIGUEL: Who knows? I can offer all kinds of speculations: an earlier stage where the pronominal elements *so and *to were distinguished by having 2nd and 3rd person deixis respectively, [...] Which is more involved a theory than to say that they derive from the personal endings (which seems the simpler conclusion). Please don't say "must have" unless you really mean it. MIGUEL: [...]a connection with 2d.p. plural su-mes/su-wes, etc. In any case, the PIE *-m, *-s, *-t system is independent of the PIE pronominal *m-, *t-, [*s-] pattern. It cannot be otherwise. Really. You're being cleverly distractive now. There's nothing that should have us conclude anything stranger than that Tocharian endings derive from IE endings. You've shown us nothing that fortifies this assertion. ME (GLEN): I still maintain that some instances of IE *-s derive from a previous **-t. Examples of this besides the 2nd person singular *-s would be *-mes "we" (**-mit), *-tes "you" (**-tit) and the plural *-es (**-it). MIGUEL: Well, I maintain that **-t > *-H1. Witness the Hittite instr. -it > PIE *-(e)H1 [Beekes]. Also **-ent > **-erH1 > -e:r. But are we assured that Hittite -it can only derive from a form like *-eH1, as opposed to endings like *-od [ablative] or *-dhi that would follow a more oft-seen sound correspondance? You've had this idea for a while now and no doubt, being that you strike me as a good chess player, you've contemplated firm answers long ago to the questions I'm going to pose but here we go... This would mean that IE *-H1 becomes Hittite -t? Why does one need to posit something so strange? The heteroclitic can be explained as *-nD > *-r (D being a dental stop), as I've been saying without the need for positing "stealth" suffixes. If we accept your proposal of *H1 > Hittite and **n>*r (I'm assuming you mean in final position only, not mediofinal), we first have a sparsely attestable suffix *-H1 for instrumental that would often end up as a long vowel in non-Anat lgs that could be derivable from anything within the confines of our tiny universe. Second, why is the heteroclitic so special, lacking a nominative suffix the way it does? That on top of an odd IE *H1 > Hittite sound change to begin with, that hasn't been shown to be necessary. How often does a final glottal stop become a final dental? I've heard of the reverse. If it does happen in real languages, it ain't too common at all, you'll have to agree. If you can accept those kinds of rarities, I fail to see why you've bothered to rearrange the IE stops due to the rarity of its system. This is alot of g'fuffle for very little. I think the more direct sound changes that I propose are still more reasonable and doubly provide more correlations between IE and Uralic in the process: *- < **-n *-s < **-t *-r < **-nt/**-nd/**-ndh (This one's from Joachim-Alscher, btw) *-r < **-rC *-n < **-nV *-t/*-d < **-tV *-C < **-CV It even shows a pwetty pattern. They can be split into two: sound changes arising from final phonemes laxing up & simplifying, and sound changes arising from the loss of final syllable. It's basically a reshuffling of final consonants. *H1 > is a plug-hole theory that explains too little. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 22 17:18:55 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 17:18:55 +0000 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > Max W Wheeler wrote:- > >... comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has > > , and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only > > but also , , , , ; and in > > mod. Sp dialects (including America) . ... perfectly well attested > > Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp > > and Ar begins to look rather less interesting. > (1) Ar. still could have played a part in it. Perhaps, once > {usta:d> had got into Spanish, it sounded like a collapsed form of merced> and coalesced with it. But there's no evidence that did get into Spanish. By the 16th century when Sp. usted arose, Spaniards were into ethnic cleansing of Arabic speakers, not into borrowing high-status words from them. Max From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 22 04:06:05 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 04:06:05 GMT Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In Romance languages like modern French, it is said that "in all but a few >cases, the oblique -- often the ablative -- form survived the loss of Latin >inflectional morphology,...while the nominative did not..." I don't think I >need to remind you that the nominative is "often" the least marked form. The >markings you refers to includes those related to the ablative as a >"grammatical case expressing relations of separation, source, cause or >instrumentality,... not found in the nominative." It was rather the accusative forms that survived. You can't tell the difference in the Western Romance singular (-am > -a, -a: > -a; -um > -o, -o: > -o; -em > -e, -e > -e), but Romanian and Sardo have -u (< acc. -um) not -o, and the plurals are clearly accusatives [but nominatives in Eastern Romance -e, -i]: -as, -os, -es. The ablatives would've given -is, -is, -ivos. A form like Sp. quie'n "who?" < quem also betrays its accusative roots. What did happen was that the ablative took over the genitive case (Gen. > de: + Abl.), as it already had taken over locative (in + Abl) and instrumental (cum + Abl) functions, while the dative case was replaced by ad + Acc. This left only the nominative, accusative and ablative. But given the phonetic merger (except partially in Romanian and Sardo) of the Acc.sg. and Abl.sg., accusative and ablative merged into a general oblique case, used whenever a noun was preceded by a preposition or the object of the verb. The nominative, as the subject case, became the marked form, and was eventually discontinued in Western Romance. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Mar 22 19:22:19 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 20:22:19 +0100 Subject: Ethnologue In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Mar 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > The book is updated every few years. The most recent paper edition, I > think, is still the 12th (1992), but a new edition is in preparation and > should be out soon, or it may even be out already, though I haven't seen > it yet. The 13th paper edition *is* indeed out (1996). Adam Hyllested From Osmantul at aol.com Mon Mar 22 04:54:24 1999 From: Osmantul at aol.com (Osmantul at aol.com) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 23:54:24 EST Subject: Arabic /usta:dh/ Persian /usta:d/ Span /ustedh/ Message-ID: I want to propose that Vuestra Merced of Spanish was the origin of the /ustadh/ form in Arabic and Farsi. The Spanish word "usted" can be traced to the abbreviation of "vuestra merced". It's clearly documented in Spanish etymological dictionaries. I propose that the original diglossic situation in Spain had Spanish as the hi code and Arabic as the low code, and during this time we would expect to see a lot of borrowing of Spanish vocab into Arabic. Many non-arab clothing items have Spanish names..... Span / camisa/ Arabic /xamis/ span /pantalones/ Arabic / bantalon/ Span /zapato/ dialectical Arabic /zab ba/ Span / banyo/ arabic /banyo/ Span /balco:n/ Arabic /balco:n/ Perhaps the Moors were the first people in Spain to pronounce the abbreviation Vsted as /usted/. At a time when Arabic was the low code it would have been very acceptable to borrow the form from Spanish. Then as Arabic rose in importance the Spanish may have absorbed the Arabic usage of the Vsted form. I wish I had more time to include some documentation, but I have to prepare for classes tomorrow. Timothy Goad Mark Hubey writes: IT is most likely Turkic, yes Turkic. Look at internal evidence; Us (top of, above), UstUn (superior, above others), oz (to surpass, to overtake, to be above others), ozghun (someone who is excessive), usta (an expert in something), ustalik (expertise). From thorinn at diku.dk Mon Mar 22 19:29:59 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 20:29:59 +0100 Subject: Using Dictionaries: Pros and Cons In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 15:47:17 EST In a message dated 3/15/99 4:13:07 AM, thorinn at diku.dk wrote in a note titled "Re: STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS:" <> [Quote from Bob Whiting about the uselessness of dictionaries]. What a comparison of the two points-of-view given above might suggest is that Statistics and Linguistics may not be precisely on the same track. I agree completely that this experimental procedure --- you elided the better one --- will probably give random results in nearly all cases. If the control experiments and statistical analysis I described --- and you also elided --- is done properly, the lack of correlation with `reality' (or anything else) will be painfully evident, and the whole thing will be written off as an exercise in futility. Come to think of it, it might be a good result to have, as proof that dictionary comparisons are in fact worthless. Then Larry T would not have to spend so much time correcting `data' about Basque. But the real point of my post was not the use of dictionaries, but the use of an unbiased `mechanism' to compare languages, with control experiments on known cases to calibrate it. [...] Dictionaries also may not give you an accurate idea of the phonology or the comparative phonology between two languages. That's exactly why my other suggested procedure was to have experts in each single language produce lists of words in IPA, to be compared by a computer program. At shallow time depths, this might actually have a chance of producing results that fit tolerably well with accepted views --- while still producing nonsense for longer range comparisons, I would expect. [...] And even phonetic or historical linguistic dictionaries can REALLY ask too much when it comes to the supposed meaning of old words. [...] And why I was talking only about comparing modern languages. (But I may have forgotten to write that). Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Mar 22 05:36:35 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 00:36:35 -0500 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > My lack of knowledge doubtless is the basis of the fact that I > find Mark's lexical information somewhat confusing. My > dictionary gives Us (Mark: 'top of, above') as 'Grundlage', > 'Basis' while Ust (not given by Mark) seems to correspond to the > meaning he gives for Us. And my dictionary does not give oz or > ozghun at all so I suppose that they belong to a different branch > of Turkic. yes, Karachay-Balkar. >I am surprised, though, that Mark did not come up > with Ustat (Ustaz) and Ustadane, but perhaps these have been > expunged from the language as being seen as having been borrowed > from Persian or Arabic. But since Mark knows more about Turkish I did not find these in Redhouse. I think ustat is there. > and Turkic than I ever will, I expect that there is a simple > explanation. It does, however, reinforce the point about doing > comparisons with only a dictionary and a very limited knowledge > of the language involved. Well, a dictionary of the Turkic languages would/could have easily been used (especially if in electronic form) to find all these VC forms quite easily. In fact, I often do wish that electronic dictionaries were available for all the IE and AA languages (and others too). Writing a java program to do this would have been lots of fun :-) My reasoning says that the root/stem of this word has to do with us, Us, or es, Os, or even oz (U is u-umlaut and O is o-umlaut). us is archaic Turkish for 'mind, intelligence' etc. KB for 'us' is 'es' Us is KB for 'on top of' as in UsUnde. Ust is the Turkish version so it would be 'UstUnde'. The word 'oz' means 'to surpass, overtake' in KB, and shows up in Turkish as 'az' (as in 'to be excessive'). In KB Os (o-umlaut) means "to grow, grow high". Many words are derived from these as in UstUn (superior), ozghun (someone who is excessive), azgIn (ditto), usta (expert), uslu (well-behaved), usul (method), esle (to remember), eskertme (memorial). In fact, it goes even further I think, and it could be related to Or (high), Orle (climb), Orge (upwards), etc or even uch (to fly (high)), uca (Azeri for 'great' whose Turkish version is yUce), uc (end), uz (?) uzun (long), uzak (far), etc. I'd think that 'us' means nothing useful in Farsi or Arabic, and if it did, neither has probably as many words derived from it. The root/stem has been in Turkic for a very long time apparently even if it is borrowed which I find unlikely. > And I have a question of Mark: Is > the term Ustat used an an honorific in Turkish as 'usta:dh is > generally in Arabic? Usta means 'master craftsman, expert', and is used to refer to people, so it could be used as an honorific. ustad itself is also used, actually it is more like Ustad. I believe that most Turks themselves believe that it is from Farsi because it is probably written that way in some dictionary. Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 19:39:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 13:39:30 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /-ant/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >American >English might be said to have borrowed German /-burg/ as a toponymic >suffix, merely by having a lot of toponyms in /-burg/. Any American >would recognixe any "X-burg" as a toponym. > DLW >[ Moderator's comment: > Isn't this last Anglo-Saxon rather than a German borrowing? Cf. Edinburg > (a calque on Dunedin). > --rma ] A bit of both BUT as I understand it Anglo-Saxon had /burx/, hence . The story that I've heard is that Pittsburgh was laid out and named by a Scot, who pronounced it /pItsb at r@/ --or something to that effect. But others saw the spelling and assumed it was /pItsb at rg/ --with <-burg> from German. And from then on, there was a slew of burgs, especially in Midwest with all of its settlers of German origin. OR so I've been told. BTW: I've also seen the argument that Dunedin is a calque of "Edwin's burh". From DRC at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz Mon Mar 22 07:55:37 1999 From: DRC at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 19:55:37 +1200 Subject: avio/n Message-ID: Dauzat and Robert credit the invention of Fr avion "airplane" to someone named Ader, in 1875. It is said to be based on Latin avis, with, I guess, the same suffix. In the absence of mention of any other language I would have to assume that this Ader person was French. Ross Clark >>> Rick Mc Callister 03/20 12:18 PM >>> [snip] >Most interesting. Without ever really thinking about it, I'd always >vaguely assumed that the word was `big bird' plus the augmentative >suffix <-o'n> -- hence `really big bird', or some such. >OK; it's dumb, but it's cute. [snip] It definitely makes sense at a superficial level but if avión originally applied to swifts then it couldn't fit, given that these are rather than From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 22 19:39:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:39:41 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> The issue then once again comes down to how one turns the difference in language into a separation in time. When you've discussed this in the past, an important difference you've often noted is verb tense systems, particularly the way these languages handle the aorist/perfective aspect (although you mention others.) A breakdown you once gave went: <<1) no -s or *-s is a 3rd.p.sg. personal marker: Hittite, Tocharian, Germanic. 3) *-(i)sk-: Armenian. 4) s-preterite: Italic, Celtic, Albanian. 5) s-aorist: Greek, Indo-Iranian, Slavic(-Baltic).>> I'm impressed by this method of dividing IE languages because it strikes me as the kind of changes that clearly take a bit of time and work. One doesn't transfer a perceptual system of time-stream and events into language overnight. The serious problems created by semantics and borrowings and dialects are considerably reduced. (In contrast, lexical comparisons seem unacceptibly unreliable in separating IE languages through time. The glottochronological approach, for example, really suffers from the fact that differences in vocabulary are just not regular or predicatible or transparent when it comes to either borrowings or lost meanings or small changes in sounds. The similarity or dissimilarity between basic words just involve too many factors to justify many conclusions about time of separation. And the true downfall is the "semantic" shifts which make our modern references to ancient entities demonstrably unreliable. E.g., there was no word for color in Homer.) Assuming that these differences in verb tense structure do reflect real differences in time, is there a logical way to explain how such differences came about? This would seem to be a clear way of tracking both time and location. For example, was the aorist/perfective aspect a borrowing? I'm totally unaware of its history in other language groups. Was it sui generis? You mention <> I have some reason to believe that a simple change in locale and neighbors can account for the lexical or basic phonological differences between Greek and Sanskrit in a relatively short time (much shorter than the 2000-3000 years you've estimated.) Ancient German and Latin traveled a much shorter distance to become modern English and French in a much shorter time. But subtleties like the aorist do ask for a change in thinking that must always take more time. Is there a historical or geographical correlation that you've made that accounts for the differences you mention? And how do you arrive at a number like 2000 to 3000 years to account for the differences? Could this whole aspect thing have developed and travelled (in wagons or on horseback) as late as 2500-2000 bce? And finally is it possible that the archaism of German/Hittite actually reflects an innovation? Could it be a more modern simplification to make the language easier to assimilate among non-speakers? Like possibly the loss of inflection? Regards, Steve Long From iglesias at axia.it Mon Mar 22 16:22:19 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 08:22:19 PST Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: My apologies to you all for sending a duplicate message. The second message was intended to be the final version, but my system betrayed me and sent both! The first message, in which I referred to Milanese "Sciorlu" (= hypothetical Italian *Signor Lui), was based on my own personal observations, but talking to other people I came to the conclusion that this form of address is now very, very rare, as anyone speaking that formally would use Italian and, therefore, Lei. However, I know a person (a bulder) who uses precisely this form and all his customers are very flattered! The content of the second message was based on published grammars of Milanese and Bergamasco respectively. Thanks to the moderator for pointing out that the two messages were similar but not identical. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Mon Mar 22 19:18:55 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:18:55 -0500 Subject: no standard German? Message-ID: >From: IN%"Indo-European at xkl.com" 22-MAR-1999 02:17:09.03 >Subj: RE: no standard German? >Joat said:> >>Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was >>nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of >>the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Peter said: >Rubbish, I'm afraid. >(a) There was a substantial literature in Middle High German, in a form >which avoided the more obvious local peculiarities. Perfectly true. But the scribes of the next few centuries felt no compunction whatsoever about introducing more modern forms (especially in the vowel system) which had been adopted in their dialects. And even Middle HIgh German lit isn't anywhere near as uniform as the normalized printed editions would suggest -- check out the manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied. Some of the poets did *not* avoid their local peciliarities. Also, when German began to be used for civil records (mainly from 1250 on), we find something resembling, if not necessarily identical with, the local dialects. The scribes did *not* follow the literary tongue found in the epics of Hartmann von Aue or Gottfried von Strassburg. Their influence (and it seems to have been great) was primarily on the literary works. >(b) Saxony Chancery German was wide spread as a precise language, needed for >legal use over a wide German speaking area. Saxon chancery German was widely used. But it was not identical with imperial chancery German, which was also widely used. Indeed, the imperial form, also known as "das gemaine deutsch" (note _ai_ for Saxon _ei_), persisted into the start of the 18th century as a written medium. And then there was Low German... >(c) Luther himself says that he uses "the common German language which both >High and Low Germans understand ... that is to say, the Saxon Chancery >language ... which all princes and kings in Germany use." (My translation - >I'll give you Luther's German if you want it.) You know, of course, that Luther, at the same spot, also credited the chancery of Emperor Maximilian for helping develop this tongue. Not that this is strictly true, or that all the rulers actually used one of these standards. And it is hard to believe that all Low Germans would have understood his language -- his Bible was even translated into Low German for the use of northerners! I'm afraid both of you have misstated the situation. There certainly were written forms which were used and acknowledged even in places where people talked differently. There had been some in earlier times as well, at least in the sense that manuscripts written in one place sometimes used the (apparently more prestigious) dialect of another. There were also attempts at standardization (Notker's usage was even imitated). But even if Luther's language eventually came to be the standard, this process took a good long time, during which many continued to write, wie ihnen der Schnabel (die Feder?) gewachsen war. I should also add that "minstrel" misstates the position of the medieval poets and singers. The word comes from Lat. _ministerialis_ 'court official', or even one kind of knight. Hartmann actually was a knight of this sourt -- and proud of it. A poet like Walther von der Vogelweide could eventually boast in one song: "Ich ha^n mi^n le^hen!" -- 'I have my fief!' He must have been rather more than a poor wandering minstrel! It is a matter of dispute whether anyone but these poets actually used their language -- the only candidates are the court nobles and officials, who certainly appreciated it but did not necessarily use it themselves. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 22 09:18:42 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 09:18:42 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [LT] > >Basque `salmon' is widely suspected of being *ultimately* of > >Celtic origin, but not *directly*: instead, a Celtic loan into Late > >Latin is favored by most commentators as the direct source of the Basque > >word. > I seem to remember a Spanish dialect form esoqui/n [maybe > Asturian] Wasn't the Latin form something like esox? The ending > -i/n, of course, is diminutive in Spanish --with similar forms in > just about all Romance languages. Yes, and yes. The Asturian form, ~ `young salmon', is suspected of being a loan from Basque. Tovar wanted to see the Basque word as borrowed directly from Celtic, but Michelena takes that ending as pointing rather to a Romance origin. [LT] > >A Celtic origin has also been suggested for ~ `oar', > >pointing to earlier *, possibly to be identified with the word > >represented by Old Irish `oar'. Don't know if there's anything > >much behind this, especially since the nasal appears to be wrong. > Spanish for "oar" is "remo." So a form similar to Irish was > floating around the area. Possibly. [LT] > >Finally, `beloved' has been thought for a century to have been > >borrowed from the Celtic word represented by Old Irish `good'. > >The semantics requires some fancy footwork, but the Basque word has an > >anomalous form for a native word, and is surely borrowed from somewhere. > I've heard it said quite a few times that Maite is a > "nickname" for "Mari/a Teresa." And indeed, I've Maites whose legal > "Spanish name" was "Mari/a Teresa." Yes, it is true that the female given name is the conventional Basque equivalent of the Spanish . However, the adjective `beloved' has existed in the language for as long as we have records. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 22 23:47:37 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 15:47:37 PST Subject: gender Message-ID: GEORGE MANTZOUKIS: Dear Glen Gordon and IE-ists, [...] Zzzz, zz, huh? Oh-oh, my name is being mentioned. I guess that means I have to respond... :) GEORGE MANTZOUKIS: If I am interpreting you right, Glen, you think that 1) IE originally started out with no gender distinction at all 2) Animate/inanimate distinctions developed sometime "later". Yes to both. GEORGE MANTZOUKIS: When do you think these distincions developed? Was it within PIE and the Anatolian group inherited it, or was it within Proto-Anatolian? Both Miguel and I, at least, think that Indo-European and Etrusco-Lemnian are related and part of a larger language group (in other words a kind of Early PIE or Pre-IE). I personally call it Indo-Etruscan but I think I've heard Miguel mention "Indo-Tyrrhenian". When we examine Etruscan or Lemnian, we don't really find any evidence of grammatical gender distinctions at all whether that be masculine-feminine-neuter or animate-inanimate, of course this may be due to the scarcity of linguistic material to examine. Getting out of Indo-Etruscan and into Indo-Anatolian IE, we find a common system of animate-inanimate distinctions but no trace of use of any suffixes for purposes of feminine like the ones we find in non-Anatolian languages. Mind you, there are nouns with "feminine suffixes" but they are nonetheless declined as "animate" nouns. The feminine grammatical gender as we know it in non-Anatolian languages simply isn't there in Anatolian. This combined with the fact that other grammatical systems appear lesser developed in Anatolian compared to the non-Anatolian languages makes it very likely that Anatolian preserves a simpler state of affairs. It's hard to uphold the arguement that features like the feminine had been simply lost because, as I say, we really can find no trace at all of an earlier feminine gender and we should expect such a feature to still have been preserved in some way if this were the case. Lastly and most superficially, I take a possible genetic relationship between Indo-Etruscan and Uralic as being most probable. We don't find any trace of gender distinction at all in Uralic. If you're asking about when I think gender distinctions of any kind developed in IE, I would wager sometime between 4,500 and 3,500 BCE as a vague guess. GEORGE MANTZOUKIS: Are there any good arguments in favor of animate/inanimate distinctions in Greek or Latin? Words like "farmer" is a usual one. Of course, you really can't beat "mother" with the *-ter ending that marks the masculine word *pHter. Eventually, everyone must succumb to the idea that there was once only an animate-inanimate grammatical contrast. Resistance is futile. :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Mon Mar 22 11:24:42 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 03:24:42 -0800 Subject: pre-modern standard languages Message-ID: maher, johnpeter wrote: > The Upper Silesian dialect had a wide currency in many courts > outside its own region as Kanzleisprache before Luther. That's why he > used it. Wasn't it also his native language/dialect? Not that this necessarily makes a great deal of difference (if it were already a lingua franca in at least part of 15th-cent. Germany, that would probably have been reason enough), but i seem to remember being told that -- by fortuitous circumstance -- Luther happened to be a native speaker thereof. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 23 01:55:31 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 20:55:31 EST Subject: Stigmatization and Celtic Influence Message-ID: >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >Apart from pragmatic consderations ("Do we have a word for this?"), >the main thing that controls borrowing is the reaction that the would-be >borrower expects: will I get laughed at?, etc. -- unlikely in a community of peasants most of whom, allegedly, are speaking Brythonic themselves. Who is going to be doing the laughing? Other Brythonic-speaking farmers? Where is there any indication of such an Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the Celtic languages? >The higher the level of stigmatization of a subject (i.e. conquered) >language, the less likely a would-be borrower is to think that the reaction >he would get from using a word from the subject language would be good. -- this did not prevent hundreds of Celtic loan-words in Gallo-Romance. This whole argument is circular, ludicrous, and a non-falsifiable hypothesis; ie., a meaningless semantic null set. From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Mar 22 10:05:55 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 11:05:55 +0100 Subject: Mummies of Urumchi In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>generally accepted on which kind of evidence, if I may humbly ask ? >-- I'll refer you to the JIES and the volume of monographs that Mair edited. The JIES does not publish exclusively first-rate papers, but that's of course only my personal opinion ;-) >It's also common sense. There population in question abruptly appears in the >(previously virtually uninhabited) Tarim basin in the 2nd millenium BCE. >There's no abrupt discontinuity in the record after that until the arrival of >the Uighurs in historic times, and we have records that the people there prior >to the Uighurs were Tocharian-speaking. > >It's not in serious dispute. Well, I would dispute it. What we have here is basically the fault of argumentum e silentio. Tokharian preceded Uighur in Turkestan (right, but so did Iranian languages), but our Tokharian texts are from the early Middle ages, and the mummies are *millennia* earlier. It is true that between the Mummies and Tokharian we don't have really much in the way of records which would tell us anything about the ethnolinguistic makeup of any population there, but isn't the simple identification of those two entities (the mummies - Tokharians) an oversimplification ? It is like claiming that the Similaun man was an Italian (OK, I'm drawing a caricature, but is it very far from the issue here ?). I cannot help suspecting that the whole business of identification of the mummies with Tokharians (or sometimes Celts) is mainly based on the fact that the mummies were palefaces (and thus, for some people, could only have been Indo-Europeans of some kind). By allowing this we repeat age-old mistakes of confusion of race and language over and over again. I prefer to stand by a position which says simply and painfully: we don't know (whether any Tokharian was spoken in the region as early as the mummies' days and whether these very bodies are anything in the way of evidence fo that). Next step will be that I read in some textbook that the presence of Tokharian in Turkestan is secured for this early time (in fact I don't have the shred of a doubt that this is precisely what is going to happen). It isn't. Those mummies could have spoken anything (ignoramus ignorabimus). Of course it could have been sthl. Tokharian or Indo-European, but there is no way to *know* this. Wor"uber man nicht reden kann, dar"uber muss man schweigen, if you allow for yet another rehearsal of this very popular Wittgenstein-quote. The phenomenon which is unfolding here yet another time is that, whenever we *don't know* and cannot possibly hope to *know* one day (in the strictest sense of the word), people talk possibilities. OK with that. But after some time these possibilities develop into "secure knowledge" by virtue of being repated over and over again (and appeals to "common sense", whatever that may be) and, voilà, we have a new and intriguing fact for the tabloid press. Come to think of the story of Troy being Luwian-speaking. Could well be, I'm not doubting this here on principle, but the *only* piece of evidence for this so far is *one* tiny little Luwian seal unearthed on a site in Troy. Could have got there by zillions of ways, but no, Troy was Luwian-speaking, a major breakthrough in ancient Anatolian studies. Although sad, it's not the main point that the popular press brings it across like that, the sad thing is that healthy skepticism in the scientific community dwindles away so easily and quickly. For who wants to be a spoilsport nowadays ? So, I take the freedom to call both stories ("Tokharian" mummies and Luwian Troy) hypes. Possibilities, yes, possibilities are both, but we should not mistake (even plausible) possibilities for established facts. St.G. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 23 02:05:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 21:05:00 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >So, you believe it was in Anatolia or Central Asia before that?> -- somewhere in the Ukraine-Kazahkstan area. Of course, it was probably already _spreading_ before that, perhaps at the expense of related languages of the same family. We can't recover those, of course. [snip] >I'd say sometime around 3500 BCE makes a sensible date for the spread >of PIE into Europe. From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Mon Mar 22 11:56:40 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 03:56:40 -0800 Subject: just what is it about written Chinese anyway? (was: Celtic influence) Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > -- many Chinese "dialects" are actually separate languages, as distinct > as Spanish and French. I've personally seen Mandarin and Cantonese > speakers try to communicate, give up, and drop into English instead. > Of course, the _written_ Chinese language, being largely ideographic, > was standard everywhere. That's one reason why it's of limited value > in reconstructing earlier stages of Chinese, of course, except for > poetry. > [ Moderator's note: > One for two: The Chinese writing system is not ideographic, but > logographic. This is a source of endless discussions on various > newsgroups; the DejaNews search engine can aid anyone interested in > following up on the point. We're getting a little off subject (topic?) here, but just for the sake of scholarly nit-picking i would note that even the Chinese written language isn't as general as it is commonly cracked up to be. One of my students, in her term paper last semester, raised the issue of the claim that written Chinese is equally intelligible to all literate Chinese people, but then noted that she, a native speaker of Mandarin and Taiwanese and about as well-educated as one can reasonably expect of a university undergraduate, found herself unable to read a Cantonese newspaper printed in Hong Kong. When i asked her for further particulars, she said that (1) there were characters in the text that she didn't recognize at all and, more importantly (2) there were a lot of sentences in which she could recognize each individual character but the combinations made no sense to her as a Mandarin-speaker. From which she concluded that the grammar of Cantonese was sufficiently different from that of Mandarin that the writers/editors of the newspaper were combining the morphemes she recognized in ways that would have been impossible in Mandarin. For what it's worth ... 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 23 02:03:20 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 21:03:20 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >Yes it will. The kingdom of Scotland had been Gaelic-using till shortly (as >linguistic time is measured) before. Thus, just as in England, there had >been little time for divergence to evolve. -- Lothian was settled by Angles at the same time as the settlements further south. The Lowlands were Lallans-speaking by the early medieval period. The line of division with Gaelic then remained fairly stable until the early modern period. >So your theory then enables us to confidently (or should I say immodestly) >predict that Southern aristocrats speak Black English. -- "spoke". A closely related dialect. They've diverged since 1865, as social distance grew. >1) why ME diverges from the rest of Germanic -- languages diverge. >and converges with Celtic -- there are a limited number of ways they can change. Why does Frisian share most of the English innovations? Are Celts prowling the Frisian swamps? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 22 11:02:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 11:02:14 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [somebody else] > >5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental Celtic > >*agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, gereta, mando_ etc. > >are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, mandu,_ . > I'd like to hear Larry Trask's opinion on the other words. I've already posted some comments on the Basque words. > It's my understanding that "lady" may NOT be from Celtic > in that in Aquitanian, there seems to be a corresponding masculine form > --something like , from something like *. Is that > correct? As I pointed out earlier, it is possible that and * contain a stem *. Bot `cold' cannot be present in *. > If so, is and- from the same root as ? Presumibly the other > morphemes mean "male, man" & "female, woman." Michelena once suggested `big, great' as the stem of the Aquitanian personal name ANDOSSUS. It is still possible that might be the stem of both and *, though I myself am troubled by the fact that is strictly an adjective in the historical period. It is, at best, somewhat unusual for a personal name in Basque to be based on an adjective, but there are nonetheless a handful of certain or possible examples, so I can't rule it out. Gorrochategui sees his * as containing the attested suffix <-(d)ots>, which does indeed appear to mean `male' in one formation. He needs a female suffix *<-ere> for which there exists no independent evidence. > Now, if this is so, could Celtic andera: be the reason that > survived and [sp?] didn't? Don't see how. Celtic seems to have died out in Gaul within a few centuries of the Roman conquest. The historical Basque word for `lord', is first recorded in the 14th century -- plenty of time for the Basques to replace a few words for strictly internal reasons. But who knows? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 09:40:12 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 09:40:12 +0000 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: <19990318142742.24301.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: > Part I , and > There are several aspects of in Euskera that are not > immediately apparent from the discussion above. For example, it is > commonly used in conjunction with the derivational allative > suffixing element <-era> (as are other root-stems in Euskera) in its > directional meaning of "toward." Actually, <-ra>, I think. > Hence, > "We are going toward the mountain" can be converted into a spatially > understood "noun-like" notion, namely, one that refers to "the place > that is ." That spatial notion is not directly > equivalent to "mountain-slope". But it certainly does approach it in > the sense that you are moving through a space identified as "[the > part] toward (the) mountain." In many senses the referentiality of > would correspond, in terms of the spatially grounded > notion it comprises, what is understood in spatial terms to be "a > slope" or "mountain-side" in English. Yes; as I mentioned earlier, means not only `the mountains' but also `the place near or toward the mountains'. It is true that commonly means `toward the mountain(s)', since has become a common postposition in the sense of `toward'. Roz appears to be suggesting that a reanalysis of as <[mendialde]-ra> has led to the creation of as a noun meaning `place near or toward the mountain(s)', and I think this is reasonable. But I've never heard used to mean specifically `slope', which in my experience is most commonly expressed as , or . However, since the Basque Country is anything but flat, any journey toward the mountains, assuming you're starting in a valley, must inevitably take you uphill pretty quickly. Unless you're following a valley toward the sea, there aren't many places where you can travel much more than 100 meters without going uphill. Croquet is never going to catch on in the Basque Country. ;-) [snip] > For anyone bilingual in Euskera and Spanish, the phonological > correspondences between and "la ladera del monte" are > striking. I take no position concerning the role played by > as a possible candidate inherited by Euskera and IE from some earlier > (pre-Rom.) linguistic substrate (substrata). I only want to indicate > that things are a bit less clear cut than they might appear at first > glance. It is certain that eastern is the conservative form of the Basque word, and that common is secondary, resulting from the medieval voicing of plosives after /l/. Compare eastern , central , `altar', from Latin (though here the west also has ~ , possibly by reborrowing from Spanish). And compare `height', borrowed from Spanish , which has everywhere this form (except where it's been folk-etymologized to ), while * is unrecorded. Since the voicing of plosives after /l/ has never occurred in Castilian (though it *has* occurred in some Pyrenean varieties of Romance), no inherited Castilian form in * can be cognate with the Basque word. > Also, I'd mention that Azkue I:28 lists (BN-baig, L-ain) and > (BN, Sal.), the latter with the following definition: "faldsn, > parte inferior de una casaca, saya, levita o levitsn"/ "pan, basque, > partie infirieur d'un habit, d'une robe, d'une redingote." Yes, but I think averyone agrees that ~ is borrowed from medieval Spanish , the word which appears today in Castilian as , and which we discussed a few days ago. This Basque word is surely the direct source of Basque ~ `slope', with the common suffix <-pe> `below', and vowel assimilation in the more widespread variant . > In Euskera > one of the meanings of is "reverse, reverse side", specifically > Azkue I: 29 includes the following definition: "anverso, cara de un > objeto"/"face, endroit d'un objet." From the point of view of sewing, it > would be the "facing" of the garment or its "inner/under-liner." Not > exactly the same meaning as "skirt" but close, particularly if one > keeps in mind that (Sp.) has a very similar definition in sewing > terminology: it's the "(inside) flap, fold." One would need to look more > closely at the context of the Romance item in Medieval writings, e.g., > in Berceo or El conde Lucanor. My knowledge of sewing terminology is not comprehensive in *any* language, so I can't usefully comment here, except to point out that Basque ~ clearly cannot be related to Spanish . Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Mar 22 13:02:01 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 06:02:01 -0700 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Rick Mc Callister wrote: > > (2) Re borrowing a pronoun of one language into some other use in another > >language: etymological dictionaries say that US English "bozo" = "fool" < > >Spanish "vosotros": > That sounds pretty farfetched. More likely it came from baboso > "drooling idiot, drooling drunken idiot, etc." > could it also be that the US English slang term of address > >and then nickname "buster" came from the abovementioned Spanish dialect > >?, and not the English for "one who busts (= breaks) things". > I always heard buster was from "ballbuster" I'm only a casual observer in this particular thread and haven't read every post. That said, I'm a little curious about "bozo". OED says, 'origin unknown' and cites the earliest occurrences as in the 1920s. That surprised me. As a baby boomer, I always assumed (like everyone else born after 1950), that the origin is in the TV clown's name. I guess that's folk etymology? John McLaughlin Utah State University From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 12:48:25 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 12:48:25 +0000 Subject: `bast' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> >According to Chambers also, it rhymes with gas, not with mast, in RP. >Interesting and curious. Both my Collins dictionary and John Wells's >Longman Pronouncing Dictionary recognize the pronunciation with /-st/ as >the only possibility for RP, though Collins notes that `bass', so >spelled and so pronounced, is a variant of `bast'. Sorry, I didn't make myself clear here (the first snip was a quotation by Rick McAllister from a mail of mine). I wasn't referring to the presence or absence of the t in the pronunication, but to the character of the vowel. In RP, there are two possible pronunciation of the vowel spelt in words of this type (and elsewhere, but let's not spread this net too wide), one more raised and fronted than the other. The pronunciation difference is noted in Alan Ross's essay on 'U and Non-U' where he refers to whether people pronouce 'mass to rhyme with pass instead of gas'. All three rhyme for me, and for many years I believed that this reference was a rather jokey thing connected solely with people so upper-class that they had died out. But not so! Now that I live in Britain I find that most people here do not allow, say 'gassed' and 'past' to be a rhyme, as they have different vowels. I find by asking such speakers that they have no way of knowing which group new vocabulary items belong to, so my native-speaker informants can't tell me about bast, as for most of them it is an unknown vocabulary item. What Chambers' source is, I don't know. By the way, in Ireland too we say 'spool of thread', whereas here they say 'reel of cotton' - cotton, in Ireland, is the raw material or the fabric, not the stuff you sew with. Best wishes, Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Mar 22 13:10:02 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 13:10:02 -0000 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > In Romance languages like modern French, it is said that "in all but a few > cases, the oblique - often the ablative - form survived the loss of Latin > inflectional morphology,...while the nominative did not..." I don't think I > need to remind you that the nominative is "often" the least marked form. The > markings you refers to includes those related to the ablative as a > "grammatical case expressing relations of separation, source, cause or > instrumentality,... not found in the nominative." This common claim about the ablative is misleading. In modern Italian or Spanish the noun ends in or or and thus has an almost identical form to the Latin ablative. But the Latin accusative ended in a nasal vowel [a~] or [e~] or [u~], written <-am> etc. As Latin changed to proto-Romance these nasal vowels became oral and final [u] became [o] in most descendants; and vowel length was lost. Thus the accusative and ablative became indistinguishable. As prepositions took on more of the case load, it would be more accurate perhaps to say that the ablative was absorbed into the accusative. Its grammatical baggage was lost; it became less marked. The test is in those neuter words where the early Romance reflexes of the two cases did not phonetically fall together: and since the likes of and turn out as , it looks as if it was the accusative, not the ablative, that gave rise to the later caseless forms. In terms of semantic "baggage", this is more understandable. Of course the nominatives in <-us, -a, -um> also fell together with their other cases. But there are many words in the athematic declension, where the nominative ending [s] caused phonetic change, so nominative and oblique remained different, as in [noks ~ nokte]. I think you're right that there is a genuine question here, of why the stem was generalized rather than what was felt to be the citation form. Is it that there was still palpably a case-ending [s] on the nominative, so it was not truly "unmarked"? Nicholas Widdows From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 13:59:38 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 13:59:38 +0000 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: <19990318142742.24301.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: > Part II. (Eusk) vs. (Sp.) [snip quotes] > Although I've lost track of who said what in the exchanges above, > the following is one model for explaining the concern raised : > In reference to the other ongoing discussion concerning > (Eusk) and (Sp.), the suffixed expression aldaketa > (Eusk) is also of interest. In it the common ending <-keta> is > encountered. The root-stem in compounds becomes . > In Euskera and especially the phonologically altered > also carry the meaning of "change, alteration." In the case of the > aforementioned it can be understood to mean "to change > place(s)," i.e., "to move to one side." Similarly, the meaning of > can be expanded to by adding the derivational suffix > <-ka>. In many contexts the suffix <-ka> conveys a verbal notion of > reiterative movement, i.e., somewhat like a gerundive, whereas in > others the reiterative force of <-ka> can be reprocessed cognitively > so that it produces a type of concept more like a verbal noun. > Indeed, <-ka> even can be suffixed to conjugated verb forms > themselves to create emphatic expressions such as > ( "yes, [they insisted that] it certainly is there!" I agree with most of this. The noun `side' exhibits the expected combining form in word-formation, and hence the verb `change' (and other senses). The localized noun `moving (house)' (and other senses) is clearly related and is likely a back-formation from the verb. I would describe the suffix <-ka> as adverbial in nature, though I agree it often forms adverbs with iterative senses, though not always: `on horseback', from `horse', for example, is not iterative. The adverb is unremarkable. Adverbs in <-ka> do indeed sometimes get reinterpreted as nouns, a fine example being `speaking to someone with the familiar pronoun ', which is now a noun for many speakers. Finally, the noun `(a) change, transformation' is unremarkable, being formed with the remarkably productive suffix <-(k)eta>. [snip] > Perhaps because of the meanings circulating > in the underlying structure of the suffix <-keta) (<*-ke-eta>), I don't think <-keta> is *: I think it's just a variant of <-eta>, exhibiting the frequent, if rather puzzling, Basque pattern of variant forms with and without initial /k/. > compounds in <-keta> are commonly used to refer to a sort of verbal > noun. In addition, it is frequently used to refer to a collection, > conglomeration, or quantity of the same substance/thing, e.g., > beiketa "a bunch of cows." There are also other nuances of <-keta> > that could be discussed. However, for our purposes let it suffice to > say that <-keta> is a common suffix and one understood to be > indigenous to Euskera. Furthermore, as I'm certain Larry can > demonstrate with a long list of examples, the ending is found in > many place-names and therefore is not considered an innovation in > the language. Agreed. The suffix <-(k)eta> is exceedingly common, both in common nouns and in place names, and is clearly of some antiquity. But its indigenous status is questionable. It may possibly derive from Latin <-eta>, the plural of the collective suffix <-etum> and the etymon of the Castilian collective suffix <-eda>, but we are not sure about this. (Spanish also use <-edo>, from singular <-etum>, of course.) The Castilian suffix is chiefly used with plant names; the Basque one is widely used with plant names but has other uses, as Roz points out. > At this point we can turn to the other Euskeric root-stem that of > late has been mentioned frequently on this list: . First, I > would like to ask Larry what those involved in reconstructions of > Euskera say about the possible relationship between the forms > and . Certainly their meanings are quite close as well as > their phonology. This is a celebrated vexed question. The next three specialists you ask will probably give you three different answers. But let's look at the evidence. The word is attested from the 12th century, or about as early as anything is attested in Basque. The very first attestation, in Picaud's famous glossary, *appears* to mean `horn' (the musical instrument), though the context is not totally clear. An early Spanish chronicle, for which I have no date, also reports the word as denoting a kind of trumpet, apparently used for calling attention, not for music. The word's first appearance in a Basque text comes in 1545 (Detxepare), where it means `horn (of an animal)'. From 1562 it is attested in Basque texts as `horn' (the musical instrument); from 1692 as `drinking horn'; from 1745 (Larramendi's dictionary) as `horn' (the material). However, from 1571 (Leizarraga), it is attested as `major branch of a tree, one growing from the trunk'. Finally, from 1664, it is recorded as `branch' in the extended English sense: `branch of a river', `branch of a road', and so on. The word appears to be old, but the evidence points somewhat toward the conclusion that `horn' (of an animal) is the original sense. The word does not appear to exist in any neighboring Romance variety. Note also that the existence of Old Irish `horn' and of related Celtic words has led most Vasconists to see the Basque word as borrowed from Celtic, though the IEist C. D. Buck interestingly prefers to see the Celtic word as borrowed from Basque, an interpretation which requires a certain amount of fancy footwork to account for that final plosive. Any comments here from IEists? The word , interestingly, is nowhere recorded before Araquistain's 1746 supplement to Larramendi's 1745 dictionary. The earliest sense is `branch (of any size) of a tree or bush', `branches, foliage'. Especially in the plural, it is also well recorded from an unspecified later date as both `branches collected for firewood' and `remains, residue'. In the form , what appears to be the same word appears in several neighboring Romance varieties, with senses like `long, thin branch' and `firewood'. We may surmise a loan from the Basque definite form . Now, what the hell does all this mean? There are several views, but pretty much everyone believes that and are unrelated words which have become to some extent tangled up because of their chance resemblance in form, and probably because `horn' has developed extended senses overlapping with those of `branch'. Only van Eys and Gabelentz have dissented here, but Gabelentz was no Vasconist, while van Eys, who was, was just about the worst etymologist that Basque historical linguistics has ever seen, save only for the outright loonies. An interesting proposal, put forward several times, sees as deriving from . This word commonly means `pillar, column' today, but its earliest recorded sense is simply `tree'. The key here is that Basque has a number of two-syllable nouns ending in a morph <-ar>, most of which denote things commonly encountered in bunches, and not individually, like `tears', `star', `apple', `sand', `remains', `peas', and others. We have long suspected that this <-ar> might represent a fossilized collective suffix, and the suggestion here is that might derive from `tree' plus this *<-ar>. Anyway, the absence of early attestations of is curious, since the word is common enough today. But I might note that a word `hailstorm' is recorded in 1571. Here the first element is clearly `stone', but what on earth is the force of ? Suggestions on a postcard, please. > It would seem > that -if this is the innovative phonological form- has become > more specialized in its meaning, while continues to refer to both > a tree "branch" and/or "other branch-like protuberances," e.g., "horns" > Indeed, the meaning of "horns" may well be the dominant one in today's > usage. If I'm not mistaken has been compared to forms in Celtic > (sorry I have almost no reference books where I am here in Panama). A > strong point in favor of the root-stem I think it's the other way round: two unrelated words which have become entangled, with `animal horn' being the original sense of . > Being a phonological innovation is the fact that it has produced no > compounds that do not have their direct phonological counterpart in > derivational forms in , e.g., , with the same > identical meaning. The only compound of whose meaning is not > encountered among those derived from is precisely , a > point that I will return to in the latter part of this mailing. > Finally, we have the form that Eduardo Etxegaray recorded in > his Diccionario etimolsgico (cited by Azkue I: 6) as a genuine Euskeric > compound meaning (Sp.). Whether this is a correct > assumption I do not know. But what is clear is that at least a few > speakers of Euskera must have heard (Sp.) and reprocessed > it as . Interesting. According to Sarasola, does not have the same meaning as : rather, denotes a leather moccasin tied up with laces, while denotes a rope-soled fabric sandal. The word is recorded only from 1893, while is recorded in the 11th century. It is possible that represents a folk-etymology of Spanish , but the phonological resemblance is sufficiently vague to make me cautious about such a view. > Moreover, from the point of view of Euskera's > derivational rules, the alleged meaning of the compound , i.e., > as equivalent to (Sp.) and (Sp.), has always bothered > me. It never has felt right to me. In other words from the point of view > of derivational forms in Euskera, the type of referentiality conferred > by simply doesn't match what would be needed to speak of > "shoes made out of bark, branches." For example, one would have > expected to encounter the use of the compound derivational ending in > <-z-ko> in which the instrumental suffixing element of material, <-z > > would be functioning, e. g., arrizko (< arri-z-ko>) "something made of > stone." In contrast, * could refer to something that the > branches (or perhaps the bark of the branches) had done or produced. For > instance, from "snow" we have "snow-fall." I broadly agree, but is the form -- though bear in mind that its derivation from is not certain. [snip] Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Mar 22 13:43:06 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 06:43:06 -0700 Subject: Ethnologue Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > The Ethnologue volume is compiled and published by a division of the > Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). As far as I know, it has no > connection with the UN. The information contained in it is derived from > an almost limitless variety of sources, of quite variable nature and > quality, and there are lots and lots of errors. One problem is that they have a separate entry for each language in each country in which it is found, so an entry for, say, Blackfoot in the USA will differ slightly (or sometimes majorly) from the entry for Blackfoot in Canada. If one is looking for complete information on a language spoken in the border region of five small west African countries, one must look at five separate (and sometimes differing) entries. There are a high number of typos and since they use an electronic data base for creating their language classification trees, there are a few places where the ancestry for a given language has been entered (by typo) incorrectly and thus shows up at an odd place in the classification. There are more errors that one might expect to find in a thoroughly edited work, but the level of error doesn't obviate its exceptional usefulness. > The book is updated every few years. The most recent paper edition, I > think, is still the 12th (1992), but a new edition is in preparation and > should be out soon, or it may even be out already, though I haven't seen > it yet. I haven't checked the Website lately; maybe that has already > been updated. The 13th edition (1996) is the current one on the shelf and the web. The website is www.sil.org/ethnologue. It's easier to use on the web. > The editors of Ethnologue actively encourage specialists to write in > with corrections, which they are happy to incorporate in their next > edition. I've done this myself, and anybody who finds misinformation on > the site or in the paper edition should consider sending in corrections. > Ethnologue is the most serious attempt I know of at assembling > comprehensive information about the world's languages (signed as well as > spoken) in one place, and it deserves support. I completely agree. I've sent in corrections and the editors are quite pleased and friendly about it. There is a form on the web site that makes sending in corrections electronic and easy. This is arguably the best single site for defining and listing the languages of the world (including population data). The Summer Institute of Linguistics has been heavily involved in the Americas and New Guinea for decades and has an exceptional handle on these most difficult regions. Some linguists never look at the site (or at Ethnologue) because SIL's primary mission is to translate the Bible and some scholars scoff at that, but that should not dissuade any scholar from using it as a primary source for languages of the world information. (If you're offended, just don't read the last line of each entry which often includes the history of Bible translation in that language.) Ethnologue (1996), Voegelin & Voegelin (1977), Ruhlen (1991), and the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (1992) tend to be our main sources for worldwide coverage of languages. I rely on the first three (the fourth is a bit too pricy to have in my personal library). Ethnologue's coverage of extinct languages is very sketchy. It excludes most of them, but includes some that are still used in formal and literary communication, such as Standard Arabic and Latin, and a few other odd ones (such as the four extinct "Gulf" languages--Tunica, Natchez, Atakapa, and Chitimacha and the extinct "Coahuiltecan" language Tonkawa). I rely on Ruhlen and Voegelin for extinct tongues (the Encyclopedia also excludes them from its classifications--most of its living language information comes from Ethnologue). As far as the classification scheme goes, Ethnologue tends to use the most recent classification for each group that seems to be accepted by specialists. "Indo-Pacific" is out, "Amerind" is out, "Nostratic" is out, "Austric" is out. But some groupings which haven't been completely demonstrated, but are of longstanding interest, are included such as Hokan and Penutian. It is superior to Ruhlen's classification system and more current than Voegelin & Voegelin's > Incidentally, the 1992 edition reports just over 6500 spoken languages > as currently in use, plus some dozens of sign languages. This is > probably the most accurate count we have. The 13th edition raises that number to 6690. That's probably more than most of you ever wanted to know about Ethnologue. John McLaughlin Utah State University From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 15:03:22 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 15:03:22 +0000 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <36F30124.546C075A@neiu.edu> Message-ID: >JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was >>nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of >>the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Then John Peter Maher replied: >Not quite. The Upper Silesian dialect had a wide currency in many courts >outside its own region as Kanzleisprache before Luther. That's why he used it. It was Saxon, not Upper Silesian. And both of these statements are pretty wild simplifications. But I'm going to be pompous and say that this has nothing to do with Indo-European (admittedly like many topics discussed here, included ones on which I've contributed). Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 [ Moderator's comment: I am in agreement with Dr. Watts that this has drifted very far from the discussion of Celtic substrate influence in the development of English, where it began. Please take any further discussion to private e-mail. --rma ] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 17:05:29 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 17:05:29 +0000 Subject: Greek question (night?) In-Reply-To: <8d449416.36f1d635@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > < *not-s < *nok{w}t-s;>> > Now slow this down for me, if you would. I see three reconstructions there, > but the second one is from the nominative. Is that *not-s supposed to be > Celtic? > Regards, > Steve Long > [ Yes. -rma ] > Not three alternative reconstructions, but rather one source, viz. PIE nominative *nok{w}t-s, with some suggested intermediate forms to get you to W _nos_. Whether the sound changes involved are independently supported, or are just offered as phonologically plausible, I am not knowledgeable enough to say. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 22 13:59:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 13:59:07 GMT Subject: Sanskrit Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <005801be7316$44a9b540$38f0abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Miguel said of imperfect, aorist, and perfect in Skt and Greek: >>the three categories can be described >>conveniently as "aspects", since they are all "past" in terms of >>tense. >I wonder if Miguel is bending the meaning of "aspect" beyond its usual >function here. Of course. I was talking about PIE, or at least a portion of it, an unattested language. >They would be "aspects" (in its usual meaning) if there >were something about the way in which the action were done, quite apart from >the time of them, which distinguished these three forms. The question isn't *if* there was something distinguishing the three forms. Of course there was, or we wouldn't have three *forms*. The question is *what* distinguished them. The imperfect vs. aorist distinction was one of (im)perfective aspect, that much is clear from the way it is formed (present stem vs. aorist stem) and the attested uses in Greek. I'm not sure if the Greek perfect qualifies as an "aspect" (I guess that depends on your definition of "aspect"). Would Aktionsart be better? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Mon Mar 22 14:01:20 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:01:20 +0000 Subject: esox and -i/n [was: Re: ara/ndano] Message-ID: '-i/n is of course also a common diminutive/affectionate/uncomplimentary &c ending in Gaelic: eg Sea/nai/n ['Johnnie', but also a 'shawneen' = 's.o. not agin the ('Brits') govt'] caili\n ['young woman', and cf 'cail(l)eag' = girl] [NB Scots, not Irish usage here: 'caili/n' in Ireland may have a slightly different semantic range; but 'cailleach' = old woman, witch, hag, nun (and the odd mountain (Sc) - de Bhaldraithe (?sp) is not to hand for a fuller range of Irish usages] No idea if there is a 'brada\nain/brada\ini\n' or Irish equivalent :-). Is -in- in this sense a more generalised IE diminutive, &c? Gordon On Sat, 20 Mar 1999 at 21:40:11 -0600 Rick Mc Callister wrote: >I seem to remember a Spanish dialect form esoqui/n [maybe Asturian] Wasn't >the Latin form something like esox? The ending -i/n, of course, is >diminutive in Spanish --with similar forms in just about all Romance >languages. From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 22 14:23:15 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:23:15 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>No, *much* further apart. More in the neighbourhood of French and Spanish, >>English and German. >-- not at all. There's no basic intercommunicabilty of that sort between >modern English and German. OE and ON are structurally much more similar -- >they're both highly inflected, for instance. OK, highly inflected. Anything else to support your bizarre assertion that Old English and Old Norse were as close as modern Danish and Swedish? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Mar 22 14:16:53 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:16:53 -0000 Subject: Using Dictionaries Message-ID: > < do that, or try to) but only record usage...>> > Time to send an angry letter to Noah Webster. In the absence of an Academie, > of course, dictionaries can and have "defined words according to their proper > usage" or their common usage. Contrary to non-popular opinion, dictionaries > have had a powerful effect on usage and definition - as Mr. Webster's did. > There should be NO question that "usage" overwhelmingly says that the > "definition" of a word is the "dictionary definition." And the dictionary > says that the "definition" of a word is the "meaning of the word." If you > think "dictionaries do not define words..." your usage is so uncommon it has > not been recorded in Webster's. Being an American, I tend to go by > Webster's. Tsk tsk, these American dictionaries. My British one resolves the confusion, even if it is Chambers's and (as Larry Trask rightly says) eccentrically Scottish. Under "define" we have among others "to determine with precision: to describe accurately: to fix the meaning of". The colons indicate they are three distinct meanings. Recording the common usage is "describing accurately", which is what all dictionaries do (well, _dormitat Websterus_); but "fixing the meaning of" is what _no_ good dictionary these days does, though most people still think they should. Or think they still should. To complete the triolet, "determining with precision" is what I'm doing now. Nicholas Widdows From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Mar 22 14:39:53 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 08:39:53 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] calquing in pronouns: Modern Greek uses the apparently French system, with old singular and plural further specialized to indicate not number alone, but relative status: /esi/ /esis/ [ECY ECEIC]. --Byzantinist lettering in Greece today often uses the lunate sigma, which was adopted in Cyrillic. In the Balkans, it is anecdotal that if, instead of old singular , a [polite] stranger employs the polite (old plural) to a solitary farmer, the latter will turn around to see who else is there. In Poland 'sir, Mister, Lord; lady, madame' are used as '[your] majesty, worship, highness' etc. Only members of the communist Party deviated from this, using the Russian model of . --In days of yore, the Tsar was addressed with , not . --Cf. French, where Catholics pray to God with , Protestants with , an exception being the Angelic Salutation (Ave Maria), which Catholics recite as "Je Vous salue, Marie...". In German, which as is well known opposes and , old second singular and third plural, augments the etiquette in a restaurant setting: the waiter or waitress addresses a group at table with <... die Herrschaften> 'the lordships'. So, it seems pronouns are as exportable as etiquette, because of the social climbing gene. In Carinthian (Austria) the German dialect (there is also Slovene) has polite , or . Initial consonants are neutralized re voicing. (See Issatschenko in Trubeckoi on that.) j p maher Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I seem to remember that Gaidhlig [Scots Gaelic] calqued French > by using "you all" [sp?] for formal 2nd person singular [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 15:10:08 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 09:10:08 -0600 Subject: Sancho In-Reply-To: Message-ID: So then what is the "Aragonese" spoken in the mountains of Navarra that I've read about? [ moderator snip ] >The Spanish census data for Aragon (1981) was: [ moderator snip ] >Frank Rossi >Bergamo, Italy >iglesias at axia.it From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 15:38:43 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 09:38:43 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <8b45b9c0.36f29da8@aol.com> Message-ID: Educated Peruvians have an accent corresponding to a Midwest accent in American English or to the BBC accent in the UK. In Peru, class differences are more often based on language than dialect. The middle and upper classes speak Spanish and the lower classes generally speak Runa [AKA Quechua/Qheshwa] or Spanish with a strong indigenous accent. There is also an Afro-Peruvian minority that has its own accent as well. Speaking Spanish "perfectly" is essential to social advancement in the Andean countries. As I said, differences in accent among people of the upper classes are often less than the difference between upper and lower classes in the same country. I have the same experience as your mother when I go to Spanish speaking countries. My wife is from Costa Rica, which has a rather "neutral" accent --there are some peculiarities but they generally involve familiar expressions which you wouldn't use with strangers. But Spaniards knew that your mother was not from there. Which is the experience I usually have in Latin America. In Mexico, people asked me if I was Cuban. In Cuba, people asked if I was Mexican. And given that Mexican and Cuban Spanish sound about as different as Ross Perot and Rocky Balboa, this was a strange experience. In Honduras, people did ask why I sounded like I was from there given that they had never seen me before [it's a small country with an even smaller educated middle/upper class] but as soon as I explained that my was Costa Rican, they realized why. Besides social accents, Latin American Spanish also tends to have stronger sex-based accents than contemporary American English. This is often related to social class in that women are more likely to marry upward in the social hierarchy than men. Among the lower middle classes and working classes in some countries, women are more likely to attend college as well and move into white collar professions while their brothers work in the factory or on the farm. >>rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >>In every Spanish-speaking country I've been in, including Cuba, class >>dialects are very noticeable. >> >-- that's odd, because my mother grew up in Lima, Peru, and when we were >travelling in Spain in the 1950's, if she didn't tell the locals about it >people were repeatedly puzzled as to _where_ she came from, and thought she >had a rather old-fashioned way of speaking (like some remote village), but the >question of social class didn't come up. From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Mar 24 05:05:59 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 22:05:59 -0700 Subject: background noise Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/11/99 9:56:17 PM, Larry Trask wrote: >>For one thing, languages with similar phoneme systems, similar >>phonotactic patterns and similar morpheme-structure constraints are >>likely to show a higher proportion of chance resemblances than arbitrary >>languages. >If that is true, then we need to introduce a correction factor into our tools, >in other words, we have recognized a distortion imposed by our tools, >and we can attempt to counteract that distortion. I did some random language generation and comparison on computer based on known phonological inventories and frequencies. The results were published in the most recent Mid-America Linguistics Conference Proceedings and are also available on Pat Ryan's web site (where he graciously notes that I don't agree with hardly any of his findings)--although without the tables yet. Computer-controlled comparison revealed that the closer two phonologies were to one another the higher the frequency of random lookalikes and the smaller the phonological inventories the higher the frequency of random lookalikes. John McLaughlin Utah State University From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 07:13:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 02:13:41 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, you wrote: <> The fact that Latin was or wasn't optical is irrelevant in the context of my original point. WHATEVER keeps a language from splintering either phonetically or grammatically is a standardizing agent - and that must include writing. Someone quoted the passage from Caxton about eggs - note that Caxton spelled the two dialectical forms differently, showing a standard for pronouncing either form. In fact the primary reason we can feel confident about how for example the OE alphabet was pronounced is because of our confidence about how the borrowed Roman letters were pronounced. And one only needs to see something like the bilingually glossed text (OE and Latin) in an 11th Century manuscript (reproduced in D. Crystal - The Cambridge Encyl. of the Eng. Lang) to understand the spoken nature of Latin 600 years after the Empire fell. ('We boys ask you, master, to teach us to speak Latin correctly, because we are ignorant and speak ungrammatically,') It is quite clear that Latin remained a spoken language well into second millenium, and it is difficult to believe there would not have been a rather high degree of comprehension between a 1st Century bce and a 15th Century ace speaker of the language. Again, the notion of a "state" language is inadequate to describe the full spectrum of language standardizing agents. The American experience provides a very good example of how normative standards in word pronounciation, definition and acceptible vocabulary were created by forces outside both government and officialdom. George Philip Krapp's 'The English Language in America' (1925) is filled with hundreds of cited examples of standardization (also including Webster's) that came from the likes of Baptist ministers, Yankee pedlars and Irish politicians. Lingua francas are not "state" languages, but their effectiveness rests entirely upon a self-enforced standardization of pronounciation, syntax and reference - and of course these languages were not optical. The three agents that Mallory cites as the bringer of new languages (the merchant, cleric and soldier) just as logically continue as agents of standardization after a language is adopted. And there are obviously others - not the least of which in modern times are radio, film and tv. The Hittite, Sanskrit and Mycenaean texts that are all we know about those languages are all optical. The very fact that those languages were written tells us that standardization was possible before the 1700's when "state" languages became "official." A logical question regarding PIE was whether it was a "standardized" language and how that would affect our analysis. Would it suggest PIE was spread through the adoption of agricultural technology? Conversion to agriculture in itself does not seem to be a standardizing situation. In fact, the sedentary and spread out form of neolithic settlement would suggest the opposite. It would seem to encourage splintering and localization. And finally I have searched in vain for ANY historical instance where the adoption of agriculture resulted in a change of language in an indigenous population. And remember that even under C-S's formula, the ancestors of the majority of modern northern European were already there when agriculture began to be adopted. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 07:14:12 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 02:14:12 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Farmers) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: << What I like about it is that it explains how a language group might have spread across a whole continent without anybody actually setting out to do so (no Anatolian farmer said: "let's invade Europe"). I do too. But even in historical times we can't see a uniform langauge crossing that much ground without someone getting the notion to do something to Europe or some other continent. Whether convert or invade or civilize or settle or trade to, the historical result has always come more quickly than slow, random migration. <> Not most of temperate Europe. Not between 5500-5000. That surge you're describing for LBK does not cover anything but a corridor that for some reason headed towards Holland (chocolate?). And LBK's movement is not the "one kilometer per year" (in all directions) movement of agriculture, but closer to Zvelebil's often repeated comparison to it sweeping across Europe "in the manner of German panzer divisions." Even as LBK expands and then disappears about 3700bce, the northern European landscape is described as a "mosaic." Some areas are definitely quickly "colonized." Others are definitely not. The appearance of domesticated animals does not necessarily correlate with grain agriculture, suggesting that the domestication appearing in LBK was closely tied to grain-feeding as opposed to pastural methods. And finally it has become clear that it wasn't all that keen an idea to adopt agriculture. This was the subject of keynote by Clark Spencer Larsen at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences held at Williamsburg, Virginia last year. For some time now, there's been strong evidence that "hunter-gatherers typically do less work for the same amount of food, are healthier, and are less prone to famine than primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, 1989)." More recent research indicates that neolithic agriculture was particularly susceptible to Biblical-style patterns of famine and disease. And mesolithic settlements like Biskupin and coastal fishery settlements in the north show population concentrations could reach Late Neolithic levels but with stronger trade advantages and sophisticated building techniques. Why some prosperous "hunter/gatherers" would adopt grain farming is an open question and there is evidence that many did not, except in a superficial way for thousands of years after grain agriculture was introduced. And there is evidence in many areas that the introduction of grain agriculture actually caused a reduction in average population - only partially because mesolithic settlements had to spread out to farm. All this had led some scientist to conjecture that it wasn't agriculture but some very inviting by-product that fostered the conversion. See 'The origins of agriculture – a biological perspective and a new hypothesis' Greg Wadley & Angus Martin, University of Melbourne, in Australian Biologist June 1993. (Was fermentation the real secret of LBK? In which case was PIE the language of neolithic brewers?) The paradigm for agriculture's spread in Europe still remains "one kilometer per year" despite LBK. And that suggests that PIE must have somehow traveled thousands of years intact or disappeared well before northern Europe was finally "agriculturalized." The kind of splintering and "swallowing up" that might have gone on at this time, not excluding by non-IE speakers, would make it all but impossible to accurately reconstruct a PIE. But the fact that IE languages are so closely related in so many ways over much greater distances also suggests that this whole scenario can't account for IE. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 07:17:07 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 02:17:07 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Slavic too?>> Church Slavonic was designed specifically to give "all Slavia one tongue to worship with" and it provides the earliest records preserved of Slavic. That is planned standardization. But even before that Slavic may have been standardized by traders as the lingua franca of the northeastern trade routes - this is pretty much Dolukhanov's theory for the enormous ground Slavic already covers when it first appears in history. Conversely, the greatest diversity (least standardization) among early Slavs is said to appear between the Elbe and Vistula, where agriculture is attested to have been more intense and productive than even among the northern Germans and Church Slavonic never reaches due to persistent paganism. <> But there is no data before 1500bce. Putting PIE at 7000bce or 5500bce means no data for 5500-4000 years. Finding a common ancestor dating back that far is like reconstructing a trip from NY to LA based on information that the travellers were at one time in Salt Lake City. When I read that "Kurylowicz demonstrated that Hittite preserved laryngeal-like sounds precisely in those positions where Sassure had theorized they had existed in PIE" (aside from being amazed) I was struck by the fact that it wasn't PIE but Hittite. Somewhere around Kansas City. Once again can PIE origins possibly found a bit closer than those long ago dates? <> Please be patient with me here. I'd ask you to temporarily suspend these conclusions, if only to do a small thought experiment. If IE was a Latin, at an earlier, probably pre-literate time, how would that change the outcome of what you find starting 1500 bce? Would the linguistic distance between PIE and its daughter languages be more or less than the distance between Latin and French or Romanian? Could PIE like Latin have turned something like a Gallic into a French? Perhaps more importantly if PIE affected distantly related languages the way Latin affected English, would we be able to spot it? If PIE was like Latin, could it have persisted like Latin did, as a language of court and law and international relations - and thereby have continued to influence its daughter languages and others long after it was the official language of a specific group? Did Greek grammarians in Rome in 200 ace or at Oxford in 1880 preserve Attic Greek so that we could have lots of borrowed words to use - remembering that we chroma-key and sync and morph and hexacolor and put an audio-stripe on video-tape today not because these procedures were invented by Greeks or Romans? Or did they preserve it because it was a model tongue - the way that PIE may have been preserved and constantly returned to for new uses? Why does it say e pluribus unum on every American dollar? Didn't modern English, Spanish, Russian and French spread pretty much like Latin did? Finally, what would have prevented PIE from even being a "state" language in its own right, like Egyptian or Minoan or Akkadian or a Hittite? LBK or Kurgan are as much unified cultural entities as we find later on in history. Why couldn't PIE represent a language preserved by kings or priest or the requirements of trade? Thanks for your patience, Steve Long [ Moderator's comment: The only reason that Latin or Attic Greek or Sanskrit is available to us is writing. Grammars of Attic and Sanskrit were created by near-native speakers because they were no longer commonly spoken, and important texts would be lost if the knowledge of the languages themselves was lost (Homer on the one hand, the Vedas on the other); grammars of Latin were created because it was culturally important to the Romans to emulate what the Greeks did. Note that being written had no effect on language change in the long run. The only way for the Indo-European Ursprache to have survived to fill the role you suggest is writing--and as we have seen in history, even a written language will change out from under the written form. Since there was never a written form of Indo-European, I think your final questions are answered. --rma ] From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Mar 24 08:35:44 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 03:35:44 -0500 Subject: Anatolian /-ant/ Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > BTW: I've also seen the argument that Dunedin is a calque of > "Edwin's burh". In that case wouldn't the Old Welsh (or Cumbric?) form be something like rather than ? There's also an Old Irish , I believe. I don't think that you get forms like and until the early 12th c. or so. Brian M. Scott From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Wed Mar 24 09:53:08 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 09:53:08 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Somebody else: >>>I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? Sheila Watts >>Small mountain fruit called 'fraughan' in Ireland (in English, so to >>speak). >fraughan < Irish "fraocha/n" (< "fraoch" (= heather) + dim. suffix) >= vaccinium myrtilis = whortleberry >Dennis King Whortleberries and bilberries are the same thing - both vaccinium myrtillus. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 24 09:57:31 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 09:57:31 +0000 Subject: `spool' In-Reply-To: <19990321230943.20293.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Mar 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > LARRY TRASK: > >It's `reel', generally confined in the US to things around which > >films, tapes and fishing lines are wound. > US, US, US! Nothing but US! What about Canada?! We ain't just > maple-syrup eatin' inuit, you know! The term "reel" is confined to the > sense of "films, tapes and fishing lines" in ALL of North America, even > amongst us much-neglected Canadians. > :P Sorry, pal -- no offense intended. Or should that be `no offence'? ;-) It's just that I didn't know what the facts were in Canada, so I said nothing. I personally have never neglected a Canadian in my life. Actually, I come from so far north that I'm practically an honorary Canadian. I even have Canadian Raising in my speech. And, when I was a kid, we used to make our own maple syrup. I watched ice hockey on TV when the NHL had only six teams, Maurice "the Rocket" Richard was Top Player, and Wayne Gretzky wasn't even a twinkle in his father's eye. However, I do *not* have the `cot'/`caught' merger, and I *never* start a sentence with `as well'. I gotta have *some* standards. By the way, are you sure the Inuit eat all that much maple syrup? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jpmaher at neiu.edu Wed Mar 24 11:23:17 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 05:23:17 -0600 Subject: avio/n Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] French <-on>, Italian <-one> : Etymologically from the same source, it us usual for this suffix in French to indicate diminutive, in Italian augmentative. This seeming contradiction parallels the use of English and , as in "you big sissy" and "you little sissy">, as opposed to , . -- The common thread is better known in French linguistics than in English as "morphème affectif". It is left to the interlocutor to infer if the AFFECT is positive or negative. Thus would be a wry term for a little thing that soars. Swallows are above all maneuvrable. Saul Levin pointed out, personal communication ca. 1969, that urban folk were more familiar with sparrows, little fluttering birds, , rather than big, soaring birds, /; cf. Italian , from Latin , diminutive of . --Airplanes should soar, be maneuvrable, but not flutter. Then note good French diminutive sense in v , v the Italianism hall, big room'. j p maher [ moderator snip ] From iglesias at axia.it Wed Mar 24 21:20:20 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 13:20:20 PST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <372abac1.474935274@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: MCV wrote: > It was rather the accusative forms that survived ... in Western Romance languages In this connection, I recently read that in the early North Italian and Rhaeto-Romance dialects, like Old French and Old Provencal, there was a two case declination (nominative and accusative). With the collapse of this two-case system, the accusative forms usually became generalised in the singular (e.g., mort, caval), while in the masculine plural there was a long struggle between the two variants. The Gallo-Italic and Venetian dialects opted for the nominative plurals (e.g., morti, cavai), possibly under the influence of Tuscan, while Romantsch and Ladin in Switzerland opted for the accusative (e.g. morts, cavals), and Dolomitic Ladin and Friulan opted for a compromise solution (.e.g., muarts, cavai). There is also a parallel in the Provencal dialect of Occitan, with the creation of a plural ending -ei or -i for pronouns and adjectives: i for als, di for dels or de las, polidi(s) for polidas. However, these developments in Provencal apparently took place much later. Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Wed Mar 24 12:16:18 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 12:16:18 -0000 Subject: `bast' Message-ID: Sheila Watts wrote: > In RP, there are two possible pronunciation of the vowel spelt in words > of this type (and elsewhere, but let's not spread this net too wide), one > more raised and fronted than the other. The pronunciation difference is > noted in Alan Ross's essay on 'U and Non-U' where he refers to whether > people pronouce 'mass to rhyme with pass instead of gas'. There was a change in London/SE speech of [&] as in 'cat' to [A:] as in 'father' in the environments before [s], [f], and [T], but not before [S]. It applied to familiar words, so we use [A:] in glass, pass, past, castle, master, plaster, ask, mask, laugh, half, chaff, raft, shaft, bath, path, and many others. But it generally stayed [&] in (even slightly) learned or foreign words, so we say [&] in bass (fish), gas, vassal, pastel, castanet, mastiff, masculine, Mafia. Also b&ffle: and always m&ss for 'amount; weight' and almost always for 'church service', [mA:s] being extremely antiquated or pretentious. I vacillate on graph, say photogrAph but (photo)gr&phic, stick to [&] for pathos or blastocyst or chloroplast. In unfamiliar but old-looking words like lath and bast I automatically go for [A:]. All in all, one simple rule with complicated ramifications. It's now a regional thing rather than class. It must antedate the settlement of Australia, where they always use [A:], except uniquely in the regionally/class varying 'castle'. Yet as late as the 1890s it was castigated as a Cockney vulgarism: writers made their characters say . The [A:] among modern Cockneys is very slightly further back. The same change also happened before [ns] and [nt], as in dance and plant, but here Australia retains [&]. I find it odd to say two [A:] syllables, so I tend to say tr&nsplAnt and Afterm&th. By the way, my Chambers's shows 'bast' with a-circumflex, which is their symbol for "& or A:, your choice". This eccentric dictionary tries to cover Scottish, Northern English, and Southern English with a single transcription. Nicholas Widdows From DFOKeefe at aol.com Wed Mar 24 12:43:00 1999 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 07:43:00 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: Good Morning I-E-ists, As to the ethnic background of the mummies of Urumchi, how about giving the researchers time to do some dna-rna tests. Won't that settle the argument? They'll get to it one of these days when they have an extra $50,000 worth of research grants to have hair sample checked at a scientific laboratory. Best regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas [ Moderator's response: No, I doubt that genetic testing could possibly settle "ethnic" questions-- there is no way to assign a culture to a gene. It might help to localize their genetic provenance, though. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 24 14:34:26 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:34:26 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990322032457.12045.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >MIGUEL: > Well, I maintain that **-t > *-H1. Witness the Hittite instr. > -it > PIE *-(e)H1 [Beekes]. Also **-ent > **-erH1 > -e:r. >But are we assured that Hittite -it can only derive from a form like >*-eH1, as opposed to endings like *-od [ablative] or *-dhi that would >follow a more oft-seen sound correspondance? You've had this idea for a >while now and no doubt, being that you strike me as a good chess player, >you've contemplated firm answers long ago to the questions I'm going to >pose but here we go... >This would mean that IE *-H1 becomes Hittite -t? No. -t becomes -H1. We have **-et (Hitt. -it) > *-eH1, but **-od (Hitt. -az < *-od-s) remains as *-od. In the secondary verbal endings -(e)t and -(e)nt, -t has probably been restored analogically from -(e)ti, -(e)nti, but we also have lautgesetzlich -e:r < **-ent. And maybe (this just occurred to me, so bear with me) **-t > *-H1 can explain some of the lengthened grade preterites around. Final -s remains after a vowel, but **-Cs also becomes the equivalent of *-H1C (lengthened nominatives). While some traces of *-t have remained, we have no trace at all of *-k and *-p in PIE. It is tempting to reason by analogy and hypothesize that if **-t > *-H1, then **-p > *-H3 and **-k > *-H2. In the case of *k ~ *H2 we have just a few interesting clues, such as Grk. gune:, pl. gunaikes "women". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 15:45:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 10:45:24 EST Subject: Using Dictionaries Message-ID: On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, Nicholas Widdows wrote <> I know Steve Jones and he has no opinion on dictionaries. <> This gentle condescension is still delighful after all these years. <<...but "fixing the meaning of" is what _no_ good dictionary these days does, though most people still think they should. Or think they still should. To complete the triolet, "determining with precision" is what I'm doing now.>> And of course the "better" modern American dictionaries do awkwardly attempt to affect this semblence of propriety. But it's a facade, revealed in the definitions themselves ("dictionary definition") and blissfully disregarded on the ground floor in everything from the Dictionaries of Sports Terms to translating dictionaries. "Glossaries" and "Vocabularies" are by tradition not something you buy, but rather are bonuses found in the back of books. Needless to say, there were few other ways or no other ways to "fix the meaning" of words in America than going to the dictionary. As to why meanings, spellings (or, later, pronounciations) had to be "fixed" - even arbitrarily by the dictionary editor as language umpire - well, that goes to the whole issue of standardization. (I was surprised - why I don't know - when a while back I saw a "Dictionary of the Speech of the American South" from the 1850's or 60's give a pronunciation of "rights" as "rats.") Despite these opinions on what the proper role of the dictionary should be, such a statement of policy does not provide any alternative to get the "definitive" meaning of a word - which on game shows and in arguments about meanings or spellings are always settled by the final and official authority - a dictionary (sometimes in exchange for promotional considerations.) Standardization has many vehicles. It may be inappropriate for dictionaries to "fix the meaning" of words in terms of scholarship. But it is inaccurate for scholars not to recognize that dictionaries do fix the meaning, spelling and sounds of words for many, many users - including for several non-English speakers I know. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 24 16:25:21 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:25:21 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Assuming that these differences in verb tense structure do reflect real >differences in time, is there a logical way to explain how such differences >came about? This would seem to be a clear way of tracking both time and >location. For example, was the aorist/perfective aspect a borrowing? I'm >totally unaware of its history in other language groups. Was it sui generis? The categories perfective/imperfective are quite common in verbal systems all over the world. But the distinctions between present and aorist stem in IE are absolutely "sui generis", and it's out of the question that they were borrowings. >I have some reason to believe that a simple change in locale and neighbors can >account for the lexical or basic phonological differences between Greek and >Sanskrit in a relatively short time (much shorter than the 2000-3000 years >you've estimated.) Ancient German and Latin traveled a much shorter distance >to become modern English and French in a much shorter time. What has distance traveled to do with it? The dialect of Lazio didn't travel at all, and it's still very different from Latin. I don't think you need external causes at all to account for language change. It just happens. The distance, or rather the amount of mutual contact, only determines whether two dialects will change in the same direction or not. >Is there a historical or geographical correlation that you've made that >accounts for the differences you mention? And how do you arrive at a number >like 2000 to 3000 years to account for the differences? Just an informed guess. Greek and Sanskrit are not mutually intelligible, and neither are Mycenaean and Vedic of a millennium earlier. Looking at everything, lexicon, grammar, phonology, syntax, I just "know", holistically, that the separation must be greater than a thousand years. The Slavic lgs. split up some 1500 years ago, and the differences between Greek and Sanskrit and even Mycenaean/Vedic are bigger than that (now Vedic-Avestan does feel like somewhere in the 500-1500 year range). Two millennia is more like it: something like French and Romanian. Maybe a bit more: German and Swedish. Greek-Hittite is more difficult, because it feels like more than German-Swedish, but I have no other known time ranges to compare it with. Russian and Latvian? Persian and Hindi? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 24 16:44:49 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:44:49 GMT Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <00f001be724b$d8fc9c60$d3ebabc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Re the note on laryngeals and -u, what about laryngeals and i (outside the >Sanskrit reflex of syllabic laryngeals)? > 1. Sanskrit forms such as de- from da: (before y- in some forms) > 2. The number of laryngeal roots which appear with -i forms in some >languages: (s)terH(i), (s)perH(i), treH(i) and a number of others. Also Skt. a:-stems (e.g. voc. in -e < *-ai < *-H2[i]). > (3. Does the Hittite -i- in dai have an explanation within Hittite?) Yes, it's the normal 3rd.p.sg ending -i of the hi-conjugation (-(h)hi, -(t)ti, -i). There is no -i- in the stem of da(:)i "he takes" (*deh3-): da:hhi, da:tti, da:i, tumeni/da:weni, datteni, da:nzi (but there is loss of the laryngeal). But if you meant the other da(:)i, "he puts" (*dheh1-), then there is an -i-: tehhi, daiti, da:i, tiiaweni, taitteni/taisteni, tianzi. Also in tiiami "I stand up" if from *(s)teh2-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 17:13:40 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 12:13:40 EST Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, jpmaher at neiu.edu wrote: < 'sir, Mister, Lord; lady, madame' are used as '[your] majesty, worship, highness' etc.... In German, ...the waiter or waitress addresses a group at table with <... die Herrschaften> 'the lordships'... So, it seems pronouns are as exportable as etiquette, because of the social climbing gene.>> Or, from the other perspective, the great leveling gene. Plurality became associated with status for a very apparent conceptual reason. The person of a king or a lord was not him alone, but also represented his people. This idea is older than feudalism but runs through it. The Pharaoh is Eygpt. "Ceasar is Rome." "L'etat c'est moi" - Louis XIV. Therefore when Victoria says "we are not amused" she is speaking as England. This concept also applied to the nobility of course - where smaller flocks were still represented by a single body. The shake-up in the concept of status was signaled by such ideas as the English Leveler John Lilburne's "every man his own king and every woman his lady." By the time this attitude erupted in America (where in the early days accepting a foreign title would automatically strip you of your citizenship), every man was a "sir" or a "mister." "Ladies and gentlemen" was the expected address (sometimes sarcastically) to the most ungentlemenly and unladylike of crowds. Of course, 'sir' as in 'dear sir' is no longer a vested title. <> is inaccurate. 'Pan' does not mean majesty any more. <... die Herrschaften> does not really mean 'the lordships'. These vested titles and indicia of title were usurped and re-distributed in the adoption of the concept of natural rights into the language. "You" in English replaced "thou." On the other hand, there was also the conscious adoption of the familiar singular in those subgroups where religious humility seasoned the leveling. E.g., the American Quaker's persistent use of "thou." <. --In days of yore, the Tsar was addressed with , not ... In Carinthian (Austria) the German dialect (there is also Slovene) has polite , or . Initial consonants are neutralized re voicing.>> Maybe these are the humility approach. Maybe they are some other gene. Regards, Steve Long From jrader at m-w.com Wed Mar 24 13:41:23 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 13:41:23 +0000 Subject: Etymology of bozo (Was: Borrowing pronouns] Message-ID: This is pretty far off comparative and historical Indo-European, but as long as the subject has been broached: The history of as a clown name has never been thorougly researched (as far as I know), though it's certain there has been more than one Bozo in the clown world. Commercially, was introduced in 1940 when Capitol Records began a series of childrens' records using this name. In 1949 Capitol hired an actor named Larry Harmon to create a character for television. Harmon bought the licensing rights to the name from Capitol in the early 1950's and has been associated with Bozo the Clown ever since (I believe he's still alive), most notably in a long-running children's television show initiated by WGN-TV in Chicago in 1960. The original Bozo of the Capitol recordings seems to have been an actual circus clown named Edwin Cooper, who performed with Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Brothers. When he died in August, 1961, at the age of 41, newspaper accounts claimed that both his father and grandfather performed as --which would push the name back into the 19th century. Determining whether this claim is true would require digging in circus archival material--something I have never attempted. Other than the clown name, there have been lots of imaginative hypotheses about the origin of the American slangism. The earliest cite given in Jonathan Lighter's _Historical Dictionary of American Slang_ is 1916, though the bibliography to Lighter's work is yet to be published, and I'll believe the dates when I've checked the cites out personally. The earliest cite I've actually seen is from the Dec. 11, 1920, issue of _Collier's_ magazine. I believe that (with , not ) has been used as a Serb or Croat male given name--there are people on this list, such as Alemko Gluhak, who could readily confirm this--but has never been used as an ethnic slur, to my knowledge. Its meaning is something like "oaf" or "lout" or "fool." Probably more than anybody wanted to know. Jim Rader [ Moderator's comment: And probably all that needs to be said. No further commentary on the etymology of _bozo_ will be entertained unless it provides insight into the workings of Indo-European society. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:29:07 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:29:07 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >sidonian at ggms.com writes: >I don't think this is at all an unreasonable theory. As someone who _is_ >from the American south I am intimately acquainted with the dialects here >and, with eyes closed or over the telephone it is often impossible to tell >the difference between a "black" dialect and a "thick" southern accent. -- this was exactly my point. It is _impossible_ for a minority not to be profoundly affected by the speech of the majority among whom they live. The process is unconscious (like most linguistic change) and irresistable. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:37:33 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:37:33 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >sidonian at ggms.com writes: >(I know it's dreadful to suggest this about the ancestors of the English, but >the kill all of the men and make concubines of the women method of conquest >was pretty standard up until this century.) -- well, no. People learn their mother-tongue from their mothers. A group of predominantly male invaders who rely on local women for their offspring will be assimilated and lose their own language in a single generation. Men -- particularly high-status warrior males -- don't spend much time around small children. Even if it's only the nursemaids who are all local, the next generation of the invaders will be completely bilingual from infancy and this will inevitably "slop over" into their own formally dominant language. There's a very good study of this (and other issues) in a monograph, "White Farmers and Black Labor-Tenants", on a small rural community in Natal. The white landowners are formally English-speaking, but live among a very much more numerous community of black Zulu-speakers, who furnish their servants, including nursemaids. By the time of the monograph (a century after the British settlement of Natal) the white farmers used Zulu not only to communicate with their underlings (who were effectively serfs) but often with each other. The English they actually spoke was also thickly larded with Zulu loanwords. And this is in a setting where Standard English has tremendous social prestige and is the sole official language, backed up by universal education, literacy, and mass media. Likewise, a minority so small that their _household interactions_ are with speakers of another language will probably be assimilated in a few generations. To successfully impose their language (especially in a preliterate setting) the incomers have to have more than political and economic dominance. They have to bring intact family units (meaning women), and they have to be numerically significant in relation to the locals. It also helps if they smash the local social structure very thoroughly, disrupting communities and families. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:46:25 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:46:25 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >but our Tokharian texts are from the early Middle ages, and the mummies are >*millennia* earlier. -- no, the mummies are _continuous_ from millenia earlier up until attested Tocharian. The physical type remains constant, and the material culture shows a smooth development over time. When a new language comes in (Uighur) so does a new physical type. The material culture (textiles, etc.) also shows clear links further west. Old Chinese also has a fund of early Indo-European loanwords, some of them identifiably Tocharian (or proto-Tocharian, to be picky). And Tocharian demonstrably separated from the IE mainstream rather early, and shows no close affinities with Indo-Iranian. It doesn't even have many early loanwords from Indo-Iranian. This means that Tocharian had to be isolated from the otherwise-predominant Indo-Iranian linguistic environment. Do you have a better place in mind to be isolated _in_ than the Bronze Age Tarim Basin? >isn't the simple identification of those two entities (the mummies - >Tokharians) an oversimplification? -- no. Not by the usual standards of the field. From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 24 16:44:51 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:44:51 GMT Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >Anyway, the absence of early attestations of is curious, since >the word is common enough today. But I might note that a word > `hailstorm' is recorded in 1571. Here the first element is >clearly `stone', but what on earth is the force of ? >Suggestions on a postcard, please. I'm all out of postcards, but I note that Azkue also gives a variant (BN-s, R) "pedrisco", and for "horn; branch" also the glosses "borrasca" and "manga de agua". Neither harriabar nor arri-adar look like ancient formations, or else the -i of would have been dropped. So is this yet another etymologically unconnected word that has become entangled with "horn/branch" /? Or should we perhaps compare with two cases (neither of them very clear) in IE of association of "tree" and "horn" with stormy weather: Grk. "thunderbolt", possibly connected with *k^er-Hw- "horn", and Lith. "thunder(bolt)", connected by Gamqrelidze and Ivanov with *perkw- "oak"? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:50:14 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:50:14 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Anything else to support your bizarre assertion that Old English and Old >Norse were as close as modern Danish and Swedish? >> -- speakers of those languages tell me that they can, with considerable difficulty, by concentrating hard and repeating often, understand basic phrases, but can't really carry on a conversation. That seems to have been roughly the situation with OE and ON by the 11th century. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:56:16 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:56:16 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >The middle and upper classes speak Spanish and the lower classes generally >speak Runa [AKA Quechua/Qheshwa]> -- it's geographical, actually. There aren't many Quechua speakers on the coast, except recent migrants from the highlands. In the 1930's, when my mother was growing up there, nearly everyone locally born spoke Spanish. My mother tells me that apart from more slang and a less educated vocabulary, the people she met in the streets spoke pretty much the same variety of Spanish as she acquired in her convent school and among upper-class Peruvians. Things were different in the highlands, of course. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 23:59:58 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 18:59:58 EST Subject: background noise Message-ID: >mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >The results were published in the most recent Mid-America Linguistics >Conference Proceedings and are also available on Pat Ryan's web site >> -- could you post the URL, please? [ Moderator's note: Pat Ryan's home page is at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 from which you should be able to find the paper in question. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 25 02:13:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 02:13:32 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) In-Reply-To: <55e69866.36f890a5@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, you wrote: ><people write in the official language. Of course the Roman >Empire had a unifying effect for quite a long time. Whether the >rate of change of Latin itself was affected (other than >optically) is a different matter. I doubt it. So the "state >effect" means we have less variation in space, but probably the >same variation in time.>> >The fact that Latin was or wasn't optical is irrelevant in the context of my >original point. Not the language, the lack of change and variation is "optical". The Romance languages seem to pop up practically ex nihilo because of the masking effect of the standard language. >And finally I have searched in vain for ANY historical instance where the >adoption of agriculture resulted in a change of language in an indigenous >population. What about Bantu and Austronesian? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 25 03:21:16 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 03:21:16 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Farmers) In-Reply-To: <3741844e.36f890c4@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >Not most of temperate Europe. Not between 5500-5000. That surge you're >describing for LBK does not cover anything but a corridor that for some reason >headed towards Holland (chocolate?). And LBK's movement is not the "one >kilometer per year" (in all directions) movement of agriculture, but closer to >Zvelebil's often repeated comparison to it sweeping across Europe "in the >manner of German panzer divisions." Whether it was the occupation of most of temperate Europe or just the initial "pincer movement" between 5500 an 5000, the effect is historically the same: LBK becomes the dominant culture and population from the Netherlands to Poland. The most likely linguistic outcome would have been a single dialect continuum (with increasingly rare pre-LBK Mesolithic enclaves). This is comparable to the Bantu advance in Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, which also looks like a pincer movement on the map (but Bantu technology was Iron Age, so more advanced). >Even as LBK expands and then disappears about 3700bce, Disappears or mutates? The decentralized nature of LBK culture first results in a number of subdivisions (Roessen, Lengyel, SBK, Tisza) after 500 years or so, and then some 500 years later most of the northern part of the area (but extended now to Denmark and the Baltic) is again united archaeologically as the TRB culture, which might have resulted from a "merger" of (post-)LBK agriculturalists, ultimately from Hungary, with indigenous people, like the Ertebo/lle-Ellerbek "shellfish eaters" (and if the LBK people were IE-speakers, as I maintain, that suggests a convenient source for the famous "30% non-IE lexicon" in Germanic). >the northern European landscape is described as a "mosaic." >Some areas are definitely quickly "colonized." Others are definitely not. >The appearance of domesticated animals does not necessarily correlate with >grain agriculture, suggesting that the domestication appearing in LBK was >closely tied to grain-feeding as opposed to pastural methods. Yes. >And finally it has become clear that it wasn't all that keen an idea to adopt >agriculture. This was the subject of keynote by Clark Spencer >Larsen at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological >Sciences held at Williamsburg, Virginia last year. For some time now, there's >been strong evidence that "hunter-gatherers typically do less work for the >same amount of food, are healthier, and are less prone to famine than >primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, 1989)." More recent >research indicates that neolithic agriculture was particularly susceptible to >Biblical-style patterns of famine and disease. And mesolithic settlements >like Biskupin and coastal fishery settlements in the north show population >concentrations could reach Late Neolithic levels but with stronger trade >advantages and sophisticated building techniques. A lot depends on climate and environment. The nuclear LBK zone was not very populated before the Neolithic. At least very few Mesolithic remains have been found. The introduction of agriculure and livestock really did produce a population explosion there. The coastal areas around Denmark, on the other hand, resisted the adoption of agriculture for more than a millennium, and must have sustained population densities comparable to or even higher than in the LBK area. >All this had led some scientist to conjecture that it wasn't agriculture but >some very inviting by-product that fostered the conversion. See 'The origins >of agriculture  a biological perspective and a new hypothesis' Greg Wadley & >Angus Martin, University of Melbourne, in Australian Biologist June 1993. >(Was fermentation the real secret of LBK? In which case was PIE the language >of neolithic brewers?) Quite possibly. >The paradigm for agriculture's spread in Europe still remains "one kilometer >per year" despite LBK. And that suggests that PIE must have somehow traveled >thousands of years intact or disappeared well before northern Europe was >finally "agriculturalized." The kind of splintering and "swallowing up" that >might have gone on at this time, not excluding by non-IE speakers, would make >it all but impossible to accurately reconstruct a PIE. But the fact that IE >languages are so closely related in so many ways over much greater distances >also suggests that this whole scenario can't account for IE. But the actual LBK scenario can. We have a fairly rapid expansion originating from a fairly small area in Hungary: that's your fairly uniform proto-language and its initial spread. After 500 years, cultural differences (and no doubt dialectal differences) begin to appear. Additionally, "LBK people" might have diffused into areas outside the LBK zone proper, to Poland, Bielorussia and the Ukraine, where "sub-Neolithic" communities appear c. 5000 BC (livestock, pottery, but little agriculture), eventually developing into the steppe cultures of the 5th and 4th millennia. Meanwhile a northwestern group (LBK-Roessen) fuses with the local Mesolithic (Ertebo/lle-Ellerbek) population, providing a historical basis for the non-IE element still discernible in Germanic. Later still (c. 3500 BC), this pre-proto-Germanic and some of the Eastern groups (pre-proto-Balto-Slavic) interact in the Corded Ware culture, which extends from Holland to Moscow, while a southern branch (proto-Italo-Celtic) starts the Indo-Europeanization of South-Western Europe. The role played by the Tripolye culture (5000-3000 BC), at the crossroads between the Balkans, the steppe and the "LBK/TRB zone", must also have been of great importance. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From G.Halliday at xtra.co.nz Thu Mar 25 05:04:31 1999 From: G.Halliday at xtra.co.nz (G Halliday) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:04:31 +1200 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: wrote Subject: Re: Celtic influence > -- Lothian was settled by Angles at the same time as the settlements further > south. The Lowlands were Lallans-speaking by the early medieval period. The > line of division with Gaelic then remained fairly stable until the early > modern period. This is incorrect. Gaelic was widely used south of the Highland line in the middle ages particularly in Galloway and it would seem, Fife. Nicolaisen's "Gaelic Place-names in Southern Scotland" Studia Celtica V is a good place to start for understanding a complex linguistic situation. He claims that only in parts of Lothian was there a "mere sprinkiling of Gaelic speakers". Areas of "full-scale settlement of Gaelic speakers for a long period" include Kirkudbright, parts of Ayrshire, Dumfries, Dumbarton, Stirling, West Lothian. There is some evidence that there was still some Gaelic in Carrick in Burns' time. There have been recent claims that the glottal stop which has become widespread in Britain this century in lower class speech spread originally from west central Scotland. A case could be made for influence from the (former) neighbouring Argyll Gaelic dialects that were spoken the other side of the Clyde which are characterised by this feature ;-). George Halliday From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 25 07:05:12 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 23:05:12 PST Subject: just what is it about written Chinese anyway? (was: Celtic influence) Message-ID: JOATSIMEON at AOL.COM: [ Moderator's note: Actually, Steven Schaufele . --rma ] >One of my students, in her term paper last semester, raised the issue >of the claim that written Chinese is equally intelligible to all >literate Chinese people, but then noted that she, a native speaker of >Mandarin and Taiwanese and about as well-educated as one can >reasonably expect of a university undergraduate, found herself unable >to read a Cantonese newspaper printed in Hong Kong. Yes, exactly. There ARE symbols specific to Cantonese as opposed to Mandarin. A good example is the word in Cantonese, meaning "to not have, to lack, isn't there". The word is actually a contraction of the negative plus the affirmative . In Mandarin, doesn't exist but rather is equivalent to _two_ words . So in Mandarin, two words are printed. Step into Hong Kong or Taiwan however, where Cantonese is more popular, only a single character is printed, an invented character which is the sign for minus a few lines to convey "emptiness" and hence . You yisi ma? I guess this is un-IE though... ;( -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's note: Yes, and we've moved too far from the topic. Those interested should take the discussion to private e-mail, please. --rma ] From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 25 08:14:47 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 02:14:47 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, jpmaher at neiu.edu wrote: > In Poland 'sir, Mister, Lord; lady, madame' are used as '[your] > majesty, worship, highness' etc.... In German, ...the waiter or waitress > addresses a group at table with <... die Herrschaften> 'the lordships'... > . < are used as '[your] majesty, worship, highness' etc. >> is inaccurate. 'Pan' > does not mean majesty any more. I didn't say it does, bu that i.e "like". I did not say that is used LIKE those terms. > <... die Herrschaften> does not really mean > 'the lordships'. I didn't offer that as a gloss, but as a parallel archaism, a fossil. The waiters' usage is [+restaurant], as opposed to "Meine Damen and Herren" , which is [+podium]. [ Moderator's comment: In a strict sense, the meanings are as noted by Mr. Maher; the pragmatics are what make us say that they "do not really mean" what they seem to. It is of course conceivable that these forms could develop into unmarked 2nd person pronouns, but such speculation is beyond the scope of the Indo-European list. I think we have shown that pronouns can be borrowed or created anew, as needs warrant, and can bring this discussion to a close. --rma ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 25 08:15:01 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 00:15:01 PST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: STEVE LONG: Finally, what would have prevented PIE from even being a "state" language in its own right, like Egyptian or Minoan or Akkadian or a Hittite? LBK or Kurgan are as much unified cultural entities as we find later on in history. Why couldn't PIE represent a language preserved by kings or priest or the requirements of trade? MODERATOR: The only way for the Indo-European Ursprache to have survived to fill the role you suggest is writing--and as we have seen in history, even a written language will change out from under the written form. Since there was never a written form of Indo-European, I think your final questions are answered. No, a state language is pushing it because IE-speakers wouldn't have had the level of organisation that Romans and Greeks later had. IE would always have been split into dialectal regions. However, I don't see why IE couldn't be thought of as a kind of disorganized "language of commerce" whose popularity had spread out of the Pontic-Caspian (or Balkans, to appease Miguel). -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 25 09:02:14 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 01:02:14 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MIGUEL: Well, I maintain that **-t > *-H1. ME (GLEN): This would mean that IE *-H1 becomes Hittite -t? MIGUEL: No. -t becomes -H1. We have **-et (Hitt. -it) > *-eH1, but **-od (Hitt. -az < *-od-s) remains as *-od. Ah, I think I understand now. This means that IE (IndoAnatolian) *-t > CentumSatem *-H1. Hmmm. Alright, that's a little better. I can live with that peacefully. MIGUEL: In the secondary verbal endings -(e)t and -(e)nt, -t has probably been restored analogically from -(e)ti, -(e)nti, but we also have lautgesetzlich -e:r < **-ent. Yes, thus justifying **-nD becoming *-r, not **-n > *-r. If I have this right, **-ent would first become **-e:n before becoming *-e:r because according to you **-n > *-r. So, the change of **-VCs to **V:C (such as **-Vns to *-V:n) must occur later: 1. *-n > *-r 2. *-ns > *-:n (: indicates lengthening of prec. vwl) *-rs > *-:r Wait a minute, how do *-ter endings react in Hittite nominative then?? Why would **-nC (in this case, **-nt) be simplified to *-:n FIRST before the *-n>*-r change? This would mean that the simplification of the cons. plus neuter *-d/*-t occured well before the cons. plus animate *-s changes instead of concurrently! Thus: 1. **-nD > *-:n (inanimate simplification) 2. **-n > *-r (heteroclitic) 3. **-ns > *-:n (animate simplification) **-rs > *-:r Saying that **-nD > *-r and **-n > *-n is much simpler because you have this scenario instead: 1. **-Cs > *-:C (inanimate/animate simplification) **-nD > *-:r See? Animate, inanimate AND heteroclitic can be explained in one big swoop. MIGUEL: Final -s remains after a vowel, but **-Cs also becomes the equivalent of *-H1C (lengthened nominatives). Alright we basically agree on this change here. MIGUEL: While some traces of *-t have remained, we have no trace at all of *-k and *-p in PIE. It is tempting to reason by analogy and hypothesize that if **-t > *-H1, then **-p > *-H3 and **-k > *-H2. In the case of *k ~ *H2 we have just a few interesting clues, such as Grk. gune:, pl. gunaikes "women". I don't find it so tempting. I think there's a very good reason why *-k and *-p don't exist in IE. Simply put, words either end with pronominal endings of some kind or with a declensional suffix - none of these possible suffixes have *-p or *-k and exposed roots are non-existant as well. Words would have originally ended with *-k and *-p before the nominative endings were established many millenia before Common IE. Verbs would have been free to be made into nouns by taking extensions like **-k and **-p without nominative endings (gee, kind of like Uralic as in *tumte-pa "knowing" and the *-ka "non-past"-ending). If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE *-k > CS *-H2 and IE *-p > CS *-H3. This means that we should see Anatolian languages with a cornucopia of *-k's and *-p's. Is this what we find? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Mar 25 14:14:13 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 09:14:13 EST Subject: background noise Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 3/24/99 7:58:55 PM, John McLaughlin wrote: >I did some random language generation and comparison on computer based on >known phonological inventories and frequencies. The results were published >in the most recent Mid-America Linguistics Conference Proceedings and are >also available on Pat Ryan's web site (where he graciously notes that I don't >agree with hardly any of his findings)--although without the tables yet. >Computer-controlled comparison revealed that the closer two phonologies were >to one another the higher the frequency of random lookalikes and the smaller >the phonological inventories the higher the frequency of random lookalikes. Good. Now if we were doing radiocarbon dating, what would we do? Introduce a "corrected" radiocarbon date. In this case, "corrected" by some factor based on simplicity of phoneme inventory, and based on similarity of two phonologies. (The last of these seems to imply that human judgements are influenced by superficial similarities, or that some mechanical formula was done in such a way that it is influenced by such superficial similarities. It is not clear from the quotation above whether the "comparison" part was by human or machine.) So here, what we can do is introduce a "corrected" measure of similarity, with an appendix to any work which uses such methods, indicating exactly what the corrections are, because these corrections will be continually modified over time, and will vary from user to user, based on their judgement of what corrections should be used. Gradually, as a field of historical lingusitics, our measures should converge on some asymptotes (though with additional discontinuities never excluded, as we learn more of what influences judgements of random lookalikes). It would be important that the data of any such studies of randomness, and the exact computations used, should be in public view at all times and electronically available, so anyone with a more refined formula for counting things as "alike", or better, degree-of-similarity, can see the result of such definitional changes on the computations. That way we can refine our ideas of what we can look for in seeking similarities which are less likely to be due to chance. And as I have urged a number of times, this should ALSO be tested against cases where languages are known to be related, to see whether degree of relationship can be estimated (of course given different degrees of intensity of change, it cannot be exactly a measure of time, but on average it could be. We can have a two-dimensional graph of similarity-computations on one axis versus ranked but not precisely quantified (ordinal not necessarily interval) categories of intensity of exposure to outside forces on the other axis. I am not naive enough to think that a mechanistic approach can substitute for good historical linguistics and philology. I am simply advocating that when we use any tool, including statistical estimates, that we A propos of Don Ringe's work recently, it strikes me that by using all of the knowledge of sound changes and etc. done previously, it can readily be said to build in its results through the choice of the data used. This may be unfair, and I have not read extensively in Ringe's work. But his claims in at least one presentation that his results came out very similar to what historical linguistics has done, coupled with comments that the previous historical linguistics work was not done carefully or scientificially, strike me as very very odd in several respects. It tempts reactions like "of course it came out very much like what historical linguists had done, if it did not we would be inclined to doubt it", and "if a supposedly more scientific method comes out with nearly the same results as produced by historical linguists, then their work cannot be all that bad". My point here is the difficulty of finding any absolute mechanistic approach. Ringe could not have done his work without the prior extensive work of the historical linguists. Lloyd Anderson From jer at cphling.dk Thu Mar 25 14:26:32 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 15:26:32 +0100 Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <00f001be724b$d8fc9c60$d3ebabc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > Re the note on laryngeals and -u, what about laryngeals and i (outside the > Sanskrit reflex of syllabic laryngeals)? > 1. Sanskrit forms such as de- from da: (before y- in some forms) > 2. The number of laryngeal roots which appear with -i forms in some > languages: (s)terH(i), (s)perH(i), treH(i) and a number of others. > (3. Does the Hittite -i- in dai have an explanation within Hittite?) There is between 2 and 3. For 1, the optative stem deya:- of da:- is a commonplace case of levelling; the original form *diya:-, retained in Avestan, from *dH3-ieH1-, took over *daH- from the (predecessor of) the aorist *daH- > da:-, thereby becoming *daH-iyaH- whence *da.iya:- > deya:-. 2. IE had some roots in -Hy, even some in -RHy. I have treated their alternation rules in a book from 1989 (Studien zur Morphophonemik der indogermanischen Grundsprache, Innsbruck), finding i.a. that -VHy is reduced to -VH before a tautosyllabic consonantism, and that the zero-grade of -VRHy is metathesized to -RiH (> -Ri:) before a consonant (the same thing applies to -CRHu/-RuH). 3. The Hitt. inflection of IE *dheH1- as if it were *dheH1y- must be analogical on other roots that ended in -VHy ("long-diphthong roots) from of old (as, ispa:i 'eats his fill' based on a perfect *spe-spoH1y-e, whence stem /spa:y-/). The long-diphthong structure had the advantage of providing a buffer consonant before the vocalic ending of the 3sg of the perfect (> hi-conjugation); no such adjustment was needed for the same root in the meaning 'say', tezzi, 3sg prt tet from the aorist *dheH1-t 'put (forward)'. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Thu Mar 25 17:34:46 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 11:34:46 -0600 Subject: JIES Index online Message-ID: The Index of JIES is now available on the Linguistics Research Center's website at http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc under the further rubric Journal of Indo-European Studies. The Index can be searched alphbetically by author or numerically by issue number. We owe this electronic version to Tracy Smart (tsmart at mail.utexas.edu) and the Diebold Foundation. The Monographs are also listed in a separate file. CFJ From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 25 17:27:01 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:27:01 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) In-Reply-To: <6475eab0.36f89173@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: ><There's nothing unique about being able to reconstruct a >proto-language. Given enough data, we can do that for any group >of languages that stem from a common ancestor.>> >But there is no data before 1500bce. Which means that we have 3,500 years worth of data more than we would otherwise have had. >When I read that "Kurylowicz >demonstrated that Hittite preserved laryngeal-like sounds precisely in those >positions where Sassure had theorized they had existed in PIE" (aside from >being amazed) I was struck by the fact that it wasn't PIE but Hittite. Unfortunately, reality is not as nice as it's pictured to be. Hittite fails to have laryngeals where we would expect them to be, hence the need for H4 etc. We can infer a lot about PIE, but a lot of things remain obscure. You won't find two scholars in complete agreement about the reconstruction of PIE. The discovery of Hittite, apart from conforming some things, like the laryngeal theory, has also cast doubts on other aspects of reconstructed PIE that had previously been taken for granted. Talking about PIE as a "standardized" language strikes me as premature. Every reconstruction creates its own "standard PIE" (that's how reconstruction works), but all the reconstructions are different. >Please be patient with me here. I'd ask you to temporarily suspend these >conclusions, if only to do a small thought experiment. If IE was a Latin, at >an earlier, probably pre-literate time, how would that change the outcome of >what you find starting 1500 bce? Less subgroups, same "distances". >Could PIE like Latin have turned something like a Gallic >into a French? Yes, PIE-speakers undoubtedly assimilated non-IE populations. >Perhaps more importantly if PIE affected distantly related >languages the way Latin affected English, would we be able to spot it? It depends. I don't think we know enough about PIE and its immediate successors to be sure. >If PIE >was like Latin, could it have persisted like Latin did, as a language of court >and law and international relations - and thereby have continued to influence >its daughter languages and others long after it was the official language of a >specific group? PIE wasn't written, there were no "courts", no written laws, so the comparison completely breaks down here. >Finally, what would have prevented PIE from even being a "state" language in >its own right, like Egyptian or Minoan or Akkadian or a Hittite? LBK or >Kurgan are as much unified cultural entities as we find later on in history. But without writing. >Why couldn't PIE represent a language preserved by kings or priest or the >requirements of trade? Kings and tradesmen are usually concerned with the here and now, and all they require is a language that is flexible (and thus changes). Priests and poets are a different matter. The only (remote) possibility for PIE or any other pre-literate language to have been preserved more or less unchanged beyond its "natural lifespan" is if it was the vehicle of something like the Vedas or the Homeric poems. It cannot be excluded that something like that happened to PIE, but it's not a necessary condition (we DON'T NEED a "standardized" language to reconstruct a proto-language), and I'm not aware of any evidence for it. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 25 17:31:46 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:31:46 GMT Subject: Mummies of Urumchi In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>but our Tokharian texts are from the early Middle ages, and the mummies are >>*millennia* earlier. >-- no, the mummies are _continuous_ from millenia earlier up until attested >Tocharian. The physical type remains constant, and the material culture shows >a smooth development over time. When a new language comes in (Uighur) so does >a new physical type. In the case of Iranian too? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 25 18:10:02 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:10:02 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >WHATEVER keeps a language from splintering either phonetically or >grammatically is a standardizing agent -- the point made here was that a standard written form doesn't keep a language from splintering; it just disguises the process. Latin had a standard form, but nevertheless went right on splintering into regional dialects, and eventually into separate languages. >It is quite clear that Latin remained a spoken language well into second >millenium -- on the contrary. Nobody actually spoke it as a first language; it had become a "learned" tongue, used only for scholarly and religious purposes. Medieval churchmen and scholars used Latin as a written language, but spoke early versions of French, German, Italian, and so forth. >The Hittite, Sanskrit and Mycenaean texts that are all we know about those >languages are all optical. -- you're confusing the standardization of poetic or administrative languages with effects on what people actually speak. Incidentally, Sanskrit wasn't written down until over a millenium after the composition of the Rig-Veda; it was preserved orally. Meanwhile, the actual spoken language continued to change, becoming the Prakrits and eventually the modern Indo-Aryan languages of Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Orissian, etc. >language change -- people change which language they speak for political and social reasons, generally. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 25 18:15:34 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:15:34 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Farmers) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >That surge you're describing for LBK does not cover anything but a corridor >that for some reason headed towards Holland (chocolate?). -- it follows, quite closely, the distribution of light, fertile, easily cleared loess (wind-deposited soils. LBK agricultural methods were specialized for that environment. >For some time now, there's been strong evidence that "hunter-gatherers >typically do less work for the same amount of food, are healthier, and are >less prone to famine than primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, >1989) -- true but irrelevant. Farming supports a much denser population than hunting and gathering in the main areas of LBK settlement -- it was largely confined to the interior of the continent, away from the seacoasts. Therefore farmers can displace hunter-gatherers, usually without much effort. The hunter-gatherers either have to adopt agriculture themselves, or be driven off their ranges. And the LBK farmers weren't IE speakers, in any case. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 25 18:18:32 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:18:32 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Could PIE like Latin have turned something like a Gallic into a French?> -- Latin didn't "turn Gallic into French". It _replaced_ the Gallic language(s). People stopped speaking Celtic and started speaking Latin, over a period of some centuries. All that was left of Gallic was some loan words and possibly a few grammatical influences. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 25 18:30:47 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:30:47 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >The Slavic lgs. split up some 1500 years ago, and the differences between >Greek and Sanskrit and even Mycenaean/Vedic are bigger than that -- true, but the Germanic languages have a similar time-depth (perhaps slightly more) and they're far more diverse. The Slavic languages are unusually uniform, given the degree of spread. There's still a high degree of mutual intelligibility. Mycenaean and Vedic aren't mutually comprehensible, true, but they're transparently very similar. Even some stock poetic phrases are still pretty much the same; Homeric "heiron menos" and Vedic "ishiram manas", for instance. 1000-1500 years seems more than ample. Sometime between 3000 and 2500 BCE, in other words. >(now Vedic-Avestan does feel like somewhere in the 500-1500 year range). -- far too long. They're virtually the same language. Eg., Avestan: tam amavantam yazatem Sanskrit: tam amavantam yajatam surem damohu sevistem suram dhamasu savistham mithrem yazai zaothrabyo mitram yajai hotrabyah From thorinn at diku.dk Thu Mar 25 19:50:46 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 20:50:46 +0100 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: (JoatSimeon@aol.com) Message-ID: From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:50:14 EST >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Anything else to support your bizarre assertion that Old English and Old >Norse were as close as modern Danish and Swedish? >> -- speakers of those languages tell me that they can, with considerable difficulty, by concentrating hard and repeating often, understand basic phrases, but can't really carry on a conversation. That seems to have been roughly the situation with OE and ON by the 11th century. That probably depends on the speakers. People with some sort of higher education may have an easier time of it, simply because they have been exposed to foreign languages in general; but of course that would not apply to 11th century Vikings and English farmers. Anyway, I have had occasion to try this out in the course of my real life as an IT consultant. For me it works reasonably well, even for technical subjects, if I speak Danish to a single Swede or Norwegian, and they reply in their own language. The `stress level' of doing that is about the same as if both parties speak English. It's doable, but more stressful, with three people; larger groups fall back on English immediately. (Note: this is among IT specialists, who all have English as their second language, and are good at it). Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 25 20:47:47 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 20:47:47 -0000 Subject: Tense & Aspect Message-ID: Miguel said: >The question isn't *if* there was something distinguishing the >three forms. Of course there was, or we wouldn't have three >*forms*. The logic of this is open to dispute. A language may have more than one way of saying something without also having a formal distinction of meaning between the various "forms". Miguel continued: > The question is *what* distinguished them. >The imperfect vs. aorist distinction was one of (im)perfective >aspect, that much is clear from the way it is formed (present >stem vs. aorist stem) and the attested uses in Greek. In general you are right, but different formation does not guarantee any distinction whatever - for example the Latin perfects based on o-grade (PIE perfect, singular) or on reduplication+zero grade (PIE perfect plural, or aorist) or on +s- (PIE Aorist) are indistinguishable in meaning and function. Furthermore, the distinction in Greek is classical. In Homer the differences are much less clear. Palmer (speaking of Homer) says "The imperfect and the aorist are indistinguishable in function" and he gives examples where aorist and imperfect are used in the same place in a phrase, sometimes in the same line, sometimes within two or three lines of each other, without any distinction of meaning. He also quotes a couple of places in Homer where the aorist is "almost indistinguishable from the perfect". He points to Iliad 14:178ff where he calls the alternation of tenses "bewildering". Even in classical Greek prose there are surprises. Plato (Phaedo) uses an imperfect to say "we caught sight of ..." How can that in any sense be continuative? (The usual explanation is that it is "infective" - that is to say, it shows the beginning of the action.) There are also cases where the aorist indicative is used timelessly (as are the other non-indicative forms). This can point to a distinction not of aspect but of time marked and non-time marked. That may or may not be true, but my point is that the distinction of imperfect / aorist / perfect, which is often so tidy and pleasing in the books, is occasionally much muddier in the reality of actual usage. This might in turn indicate that it is a late development - hence its restricted occurrence in IE languages. Peter From xdelamarre at siol.net Thu Mar 25 22:02:02 1999 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 23:02:02 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I confess that the celticity of _*andera_ 'woman' (found in French dialects) is extremely uncertain.Moreover there is another Gaulish _andero-_ in the inscription of Chamalière : _brixtia anderon_ "by the magic of the infernals" (anderon : genitive plur.), which is, for sure, IE and Celtic, making an exact phonetic equation with Latin _inferus_ O.Ind. _adhara-_ < IE _*ndhero-_ "d'en-bas, d'en-dessous, infernal". But words like _izokin_ < _eso:ks_ "salmon", _mando_ < _mandu-_ (Mandu-essedum, Mandu-bracius) "mule", and most probably, with unexplained loss of initial, _azkoin_ < _tasgo-_ "badger" (on which see the beautiful article by Joshua Katz in a recent issue of HS), show the early contacts between continental Celts and (proto-)Basques. X. Delamarre Ljubljana From nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu Fri Mar 26 00:59:24 1999 From: nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu (Barbara Need) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 18:59:24 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: I have noticed that, in this discussion on the possible sources of Spanish Usted (Vuestra Merced vs. an Araboc word for 'teacher'), nothing has been said about the fact that, at least in Modern Spanish, the pronoun occurs with _third_ person forms, not second person forms. Having only just read the proposal that the form is from Arabic, I accepted that Vuestra Merced, like Your Majesty in English, would occur with third person verbs. Is it equally likely that the Arabic Teacher would also have occurred with third person verbs? Barbara Need University of Chicago--Linguistics From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 26 18:29:38 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 10:29:38 -0800 Subject: `bast' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have no intuitive knowledge of the pronunciation of this word, but as I native speaker of RP I observe that <-ast> in a final syllable under primary stress always has /A:st/ for me: cast, last, mast, aghast, repast, etc/. Not necessarily secondary stressed, however: gymnast, pederast, bombast have /&/. 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 mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Mar 26 12:22:51 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 05:22:51 -0700 Subject: background noise Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/24/99 7:58:55 PM, John McLaughlin wrote: >>I did some random language generation and comparison on computer based on >>known phonological inventories and frequencies. The results were published >>in the most recent Mid-America Linguistics Conference Proceedings and are >>also available on Pat Ryan's web site (where he graciously notes that I don't >>agree with hardly any of his findings)--although without the tables yet. >>Computer-controlled comparison revealed that the closer two phonologies were >>to one another the higher the frequency of random lookalikes and the smaller >>the phonological inventories the higher the frequency of random lookalikes. > Good. > (The last of these seems to imply that human judgements are influenced by > superficial similarities, or that some mechanical formula was done in such a > way that it is influenced by such superficial similarities. It is not clear > from the quotation above whether the "comparison" part was by human or > machine.) The comparison was based on a table of correspondences constructed by me. The computer then slavishly matched according to this table. I also did one run where the computer only accepted exact matches. The table of correspondences is located with the paper at Pat Ryan's web site so you can see what I was comparing. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/1998_MALC_PAPER.htm In the case of the "similar phonologies", I'll explain what happened. I used the phonological inventories of eight languages and determined the frequencies of each of the phonemes by doing some counting in dictionaries. For the smallest phonology and the largest phonology, I simply used them twice. That gave me ten sets of rules that the computer used to construct random vocabulary. So when I stated "similar phonologies", the phonological patterns were identical. > It would be important that the data of any such studies of randomness, > and the exact computations used, should be in public view at all times > and electronically available, so anyone with a more refined formula > for counting things as "alike", or better, degree-of-similarity, can > see the result of such definitional changes on the computations. > That way we can refine our ideas of what we can look for in > seeking similarities which are less likely to be due to chance. I'm working on a revised version of my original simple program that will do a variety of different kinds of comparison. For the published version, what kinds of "data and...exact computations" would you like to see in the paper? (NOTE: I'm not a mathematician or computer theorist so please don't use words that are highly specialized in meaning.) > And as I have urged a number of times, this should ALSO be tested > against cases where languages are known to be related, to see whether > degree of relationship can be estimated (of course given different > degrees of intensity of change, it cannot be exactly a measure of time, > but on average it could be. Because of the semantic assumptions that I program into the computer-generated languages, this is exceptionally difficult to do. Additionally, the results would not really match the results of computer-generation because a complete pattern may not be possible between any two natural languages, let alone between five related languages. In addition, we are always stuck with holes in the data. However, I've developed a method to simulate it in the program. When constructing the random language data, to replicate relatedness, the computer takes languages X-Y (when I tell it to) and makes them related by (depending on the time depth that I tell it to simulate) taking a certain percentage of forms in L1 and copying them directly into L2 (sound change is taken into account). As L3 is constructed, the same procedure is used. Different percentages are used in a formulaic way to simulate different distances from L1 (sort of a lexicostatistic method of subgrouping). > I am not naive enough to think that a mechanistic approach can substitute > for good historical linguistics and philology. Nor am I. When one looks at Sir Jones' original assumptions about Indo-European, there was far more there than simple lexical comparison and Bob Rankin reminded me of this when I read the paper at the Mid-America Linguistics Conference. Language families that have been widely accepted as proven have rule-governed morphological, syntactic, and semantic similarities on a large scale as well. The computer program simply gives us a feel for how close lexical similarity should be before we get excited enough to do the other comparisons. Thanks for the input John McLaughlin From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 26 13:55:25 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 13:55:25 +0000 Subject: Borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <199903260059.SAA12047@harper.uchicago.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 25 Mar 1999, Barbara Need wrote: > I have noticed that, in this discussion on the possible sources > of Spanish Usted (Vuestra Merced vs. an Araboc word for 'teacher'), > nothing has been said about the fact that, at least in Modern > Spanish, the pronoun occurs with _third_ person forms, not second > person forms. Having only just read the proposal that the form > is from Arabic, I accepted that Vuestra Merced, like Your Majesty > in English, would occur with third person verbs. Is it equally > likely that the Arabic Teacher would also have occurred with > third person verbs? Indeed not; which is yet another reason not to take this `look-alike' as a serious etymology. And why anyway take a word for `teacher' to do general duty for persons of superior status? There's no evidence I know of to separate , or , , etc., from that general range of items alluding to the superior person's qualities: `grace', `excellence', `majesty', `honour', `gentitlity',etc. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 14:22:15 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 14:22:15 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <5f377e51.36fa80d7@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>The Slavic lgs. split up some 1500 years ago, and the differences between >>Greek and Sanskrit and even Mycenaean/Vedic are bigger than that >-- true, but the Germanic languages have a similar time-depth (perhaps >slightly more) Definitely *much* more. West Germanic started to split up c. 500 BC (Mallory's Jastorf Iron Age), which still makes West Germanic, as we would expect, older than Slavic or Romance. The split with North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that, possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age). >and they're far more diverse. The Slavic languages are unusually uniform, >given the degree of spread. There's still a high degree of mutual >intelligibility. I don't see anything particularly unusual about it. Most Romance languages (time depth c. 2000 years) are also mutually intelligible, although with a little more effort than in the case of Slavic. >Mycenaean and Vedic aren't mutually comprehensible, true, but they're >transparently very similar. Even some stock poetic phrases are still pretty >much the same; Homeric "heiron menos" and Vedic "ishiram manas", for >instance. >1000-1500 years seems more than ample. Sometime between 3000 and 2500 BCE, >in other words. >>(now Vedic-Avestan does feel like somewhere in the 500-1500 year range). >-- far too long. They're virtually the same language. Eg., >Avestan: tam amavantam yazatem >Sanskrit: tam amavantam yajatam > surem damohu sevistem > suram dhamasu savistham > mithrem yazai zaothrabyo > mitram yajai hotrabyah Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are similar, but they're not in any way "virtually the same language". The differences are far greater than between Swedish and Danish. [ Moderator's comment: I'm not sure that the attested differences are much greater than between, for example, the forms of Spanish spoken today in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Mexico DF. --rma ] ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 15:11:06 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 15:11:06 GMT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Xavier Delamarre wrote: >I confess that the celticity of _*andera_ 'woman' (found in French >dialects) is extremely uncertain.Moreover there is another Gaulish >_andero-_ in the inscription of Chamalihre : _brixtia anderon_ "by the >magic of the infernals" (anderon : genitive plur.), which is, for sure, IE >and Celtic, making an exact phonetic equation with Latin _inferus_ O.Ind. >_adhara-_ < IE _*ndhero-_ "d'en-bas, d'en-dessous, infernal". >But words like _izokin_ < _eso:ks_ "salmon", _mando_ < _mandu-_ >(Mandu-essedum, Mandu-bracius) "mule", and most probably, with unexplained >loss of initial, _azkoin_ < _tasgo-_ "badger" (on which see the beautiful >article by Joshua Katz in a recent issue of HS), show the early contacts >between continental Celts and (proto-)Basques. There are more possible examples. Classics are Bq. hartz "bear" ~ Celtic *artos, Bq. adar "horn" ~ OIr. adarc "id." and Bq. harri "stone" ~ OIr carrac "rock". Also interesting are the Gaulish "intensive" prefix ande- (Ande-roudus "the very red one", *ande-bannos "big horn") and Bq. handi "big". Bq. orein "deer" (*olein ~ *oleni) ~ We. elain (*el at ni:) "Hirschkuh". Further, with loss of initial t-/k- (besides *karr- and *tasg- above), Bq. ahuntz "goat" (*anuns < *kamuns?) and Alpine pre-Latin (Celtic?) camox (*kamo:ss) "chamois". Celtic *teg- "house" ~ Bq. -(t)egi "place" (e.g. ardan-tegi (ardandegi) "wine place/house, tavern, cellar"), maybe also Bq. etxe "house" < egi, et- + dim. -xe. Finally, in view of the discussion we had here about a possible Celtic origin of English "dog" (dag-cu: > daggu: "good dog"), and considering my theory that the absence of Basque initial d- is due to a development d- > z-, I have this crazy notion that Bq. zakur "dog" (besides [older?] "dog") might be from *daggur. [For d- > z- cf. also Bq. zaldi "horse", Pliny t(h)ieldones "Cantabrian ambling horses", German Zelter "ambling horse", PIE *del-t-]. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 16:09:06 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 16:09:06 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990325090215.17071.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >MIGUEL: > In the secondary verbal endings -(e)t and -(e)nt, -t has probably > been restored analogically from -(e)ti, -(e)nti, but we also have > lautgesetzlich -e:r < **-ent. >Yes, thus justifying **-nD becoming *-r, not **-n > *-r. If I have this >right, **-ent would first become **-e:n before becoming *-e:r because >according to you **-n > *-r. So, the change of **-VCs to **V:C (such as >**-Vns to *-V:n) must occur later: > 1. *-n > *-r > 2. *-ns > *-:n (: indicates lengthening of prec. vwl) > *-rs > *-:r >Wait a minute, how do *-ter endings react in Hittite nominative then?? I don't think there are any. Non-neuter r-stems go: Nom. sakuwassar-as, Acc. sakkuwassar-an. The word kessar "hand" is neuter in Old Hittite, or at least doesn't distinguish nom. from acc. (kessar), later it has Nom. kessaras, Acc. kessaran. >Why would **-nC (in this case, **-nt) be simplified to *-:n FIRST before >the *-n>*-r change? This would mean that the simplification of the cons. >plus neuter *-d/*-t occured well before the cons. plus animate *-s >changes instead of concurrently! Thus: > 1. **-nD > *-:n (inanimate simplification) > 2. **-n > *-r (heteroclitic) > 3. **-ns > *-:n (animate simplification) > **-rs > *-:r >Saying that **-nD > *-r and **-n > *-n is much simpler because you have >this scenario instead: > 1. **-Cs > *-:C (inanimate/animate simplification) > **-nD > *-:r >See? Animate, inanimate AND heteroclitic can be explained in one big >swoop. But you seem to imply that inanimate nouns (always?) had an ending -d/-t, which I cannot agree with. The *-d is pronominal only. We do have cases like Skt. yakrt "liver" (as well as asrk "blood", with unexplained -k), and generalized Greek -at- < *-nt- (onoma, onomatos etc.). But except for the n and n/r stems, all other neuters have a zero ending [or *-m in the o-stems]. Surely the neuter nom.acc. was unmarked. What happened was that there were neuter stems in -nt (and -nk?), as well as plain -n (and -r?). Just like we have m/f stems in -n(s), -nt(s) and -r(s). In absolute auslaut (because of -0 ending), these developed to -r (-n, -r) and -:r (-nt, -nk) and tended to merge into a single r/n heteroclitic paradigm. One might object that there *are* a number of neuter n-stems, but most of them end in -m(e)n, where the preceding nasal consonant may have prevented the regular development of -n > -r. >MIGUEL: > While some traces of *-t have remained, we have no trace at all > of *-k and *-p in PIE. It is tempting to reason by analogy and > hypothesize that if **-t > *-H1, then **-p > *-H3 and **-k > > *-H2. In the case of *k ~ *H2 we have just a few interesting > clues, such as Grk. gune:, pl. gunaikes "women". >I don't find it so tempting. I think there's a very good reason why *-k >and *-p don't exist in IE. Simply put, words either end with pronominal >endings of some kind or with a declensional suffix - none of these >possible suffixes have *-p or *-k and exposed roots are non-existant as >well. The neuter nom/acc (and sometimes the loc. of all nouns) had an exposed root. Furthermore, isn't it rather odd [not that that proves anything, but still...] that neither *-k nor *-p (nor *-t, verbal 3rd.p.sg. secondary and Hittite instr. excepted) occur at all in grammatical endings, while *-H1 and *-H2 abound? >If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE *-k >> CS *-H2 and IE *-p > CS *-H3. This means that we should see Anatolian >languages with a cornucopia of *-k's and *-p's. Is this what we find? No. We must simply assume that the loss of **-p was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-k, and the loss of **-k was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-t. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Fri Mar 26 16:41:32 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 08:41:32 PST Subject: Fwd: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >From: Xavier Delamarre >Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 23:02:02 +0100 [XD] >I confess that the celticity of _*andera_ 'woman' (found in French >dialects) is extremely uncertain.Moreover there is another Gaulish >_andero-_ in the inscription of Chamalihre : _brixtia anderon_ "by the >magic of the infernals" (anderon : genitive plur.), which is, for >sure, IE and Celtic, making an exact phonetic equation with Latin _inferus_ >O.Ind. _adhara-_ < IE _*ndhero-_ "d'en-bas, d'en-dessous, infernal". [RF] I'm curious what your opinion is of Theo Vennemann's lengthy discussion of this root, _*andera_ 'woman', in his recent article in the JIES Monograph Series No. 28 (1998), especially pp. 12-17. The article is called "Andromeda and the Apples of the Hesperides" (pp. 1-68). I have my own opinions as I'm certain Larry and Miguel do, but I'd first like to understand the reasons, if any, why the item cannot belong to a common lexical heritage (pre-IE) that passed it onto IE and Euskera. Also, in reference to the second item, has anyone thought of its possible relationship to _andiron_ (Mod. Eng.) for which the AHD (171: 49) lists the following entry: "One of a pair of metal supports for holding up logs in a fireplace. Also called 'firedog.' [Middle English _aundiren_, variant of Old French _andier_, firedog, from Gaulish _andero-_ (unattested), young bull (andirons were often decorated with heads of animals at the top).]" The origin of the expression "firedog" is quite obvious since in times past, i.e., in the Middle Ages and beyond, in the Pyrenean region a small dog was kept in a revolving squirrel-type cage at the side of the hearth. The cage's construction was such that it forced the dog to walk in order to keep its balance and that walking movement was transmitted by means of a simple gear mechanism to the iron rod or spit that turned the carcass of meat empaled on it above the fire. That way those who tended the fire were, indeed, actually dogs. The gear mechanism slowly rotated so that the piece of meat didn't burn and those in the house didn't have to sit next to the fire all day turning the spit. The practice was probably widespread throughout Europe, but I'm speaking of drawings that I've seen with pictures from the Pyrenean region showing this breed of dog. Evidently, there were small dogs especially bred to fit into the cages and capable of tolerating the onerous nature of the task. In fact, one writer mentioned that in the house where she stayed when the dog would awake, it often tried to escape, before it was locked up in its cage for the day's work. However, in the Pyrenees it wasn't always a dog that ended up tending the fires, particularly in the case of the fires for communal ovens used to make bread. There the woman who was in charge was called the _labandere_, a compound in Euskera derived from _labe_ with the phonological reduction to _lab(e)_ or _laba_ in composition and, of course, . It would translate as something like "oven-woman". Could the French term cited above, namely, _andiere_, be nothing more than _(labe)andere_. If one were to try to carry the comparison further, it might be necessary to speak of some sort of palatalization of the /d/ which is not at all unusual in Euskera, and perhaps even more common in northern dialects of the language. What do you think, Larry? Miguel? In conclusion, I have no idea whether there is any connection between any of the above and your earlier remarks on the Gaullish item _andero-_ which I gather from the AHD entry someone thought meant "young bull". I do recall once reading that there was some Celtic form with the meaning "young cow, heifer" or something like that which was listed as cognate with the Euskeric work /. Larry, do you remember the citation? >But words like _izokin_ < _eso:ks_ "salmon", _mando_ < _mandu-_ >(Mandu-essedum, Mandu-bracius) "mule", and most probably, with unexplained >loss of initial, _azkoin_ < _tasgo-_ "badger" (on which see the beautiful >article by Joshua Katz in a recent issue of HS), show the early contacts >between continental Celts and (proto-)Basques. At present I'm working on a response for the list concerning a probably eytmology of in Euskera. Would you be able to send me the full reference to Katz's article (off the list) and/or a short summary of it. If you have his email address that, also, would be much appreciated, again off the list. Agur t'erdi, Roz Frank Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [currently on leave in Panama] Contribution # 2 March 26, 1999 From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 17:07:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 17:07:52 GMT Subject: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <007e01be7701$997aff40$cb3863c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Miguel said: >>The question isn't *if* there was something distinguishing the >>three forms. Of course there was, or we wouldn't have three >>*forms*.  >The logic of this is open to dispute. A language may have more than one >way of saying something without also having a formal distinction of meaning >between the various "forms". Accepted. I might object that such a stage is always transitory (different meanings have merged, new distinct meanings will develop, or distinct forms will disappear), but then everything is transitory in language. >Furthermore, the distinction in Greek is classical. In Homer the >differences are much less clear. Palmer (speaking of Homer) says "The >imperfect and the aorist are indistinguishable in function" and he gives >examples where aorist and imperfect are used in the same place in a phrase, >sometimes in the same line, sometimes within two or three lines of each >other, without any distinction of meaning. He also quotes a couple of >places in Homer where the aorist is "almost indistinguishable from the >perfect". He points to Iliad 14:178ff where he calls the alternation of >tenses "bewildering". Interesting. Of course, the fact that the Iliad is poetry does play a part (if an impf. doesn't fit the metre, maybe an aorist does?). >Even in classical Greek prose there are surprises. Plato (Phaedo) uses an >imperfect to say "we caught sight of ..." How can that in any sense be >continuative? (The usual explanation is that it is "infective" - that is >to say, it shows the beginning of the action.) There are also cases where >the aorist indicative is used timelessly (as are the other non-indicative >forms). This can point to a distinction not of aspect but of time marked >and non-time marked. >That may or may not be true, but my point is that the distinction of >imperfect / aorist / perfect, which is often so tidy and pleasing in the >books, is occasionally much muddier in the reality of actual usage. This >might in turn indicate that it is a late development - hence its restricted >occurrence in IE languages. It's interesting to compare the situation in Spanish Spanish, which also has three past tenses (imperfect: , "aorist" (preterit): , (periphrastic) perfect: [there's also the pluperfect ]). In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect (used for past action within the same time frame as when the speaking is done, implicitly "today", explicitly "this year" or "this century", for instance), has been abandoned in favour of the preterit. Spain: "la he visto" (I saw her [today]), "la vi" (I saw her [not today]) == Argentina: "la vi". In Portuguese, surprisingly, the periphrastic perfect (ter + vb.) denotes a kind of past iterative ("a repetic,a~o de um acto ou a sua continuidade ate' o presente em que falamos", Cunha/Cintra "Breve gram'atica do portugue^s contemporaneo"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 17:41:19 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 17:41:19 GMT Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Frank Rossi" wrote: >There is also a parallel in the Provencal dialect of Occitan, with the >creation of a plural ending -ei or -i for pronouns and adjectives: >i for als, di for dels or de las, polidi(s) for polidas. >However, these developments in Provencal apparently took place much later. But Occitan and French hung on to the nominative case longer than other West Romance languages (from memory, "(h)alt sunt li pui" in the Chanson de Roland, with nom. pl. in -i). There is also a theory [which I do not subscribe to], that the Italian plurals in -i and -e are also accusatives, resulting from a development -s > -i (undeniable in monosyllables like noi < nos, voi < vos, crai < cras, poi < pos(t), sei < sex, dai < das, stai < stas, etc.) and further reduction of unstressed -oi, -ei > -i and -ai > -e [but apparently -i in 2sg. canti "you sing"]. One might further object that if this were true, we'd expect It. *andiami instead of (< *-mos < -mus). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 26 21:22:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 16:22:08 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >In the case of Iranian too?> -- yes, actually. Pamir-Ferghana type in the southwestern part of the Tarim basin, related to but distinct from the more pronouncedly Europoid type of the earlier mummies, and which persisted in those areas (later known to be Tocharian-speaking) in the rest of the area. From adolfoz at tin.it Fri Mar 26 21:32:02 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 22:32:02 +0100 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: I think that Etruscan /z/ in most cases corresponds to IE /st/ both at the beginning and in the middle of a word. According to this suggestion the shift should be attested in words of the VIII-VII BC, so that it was presumably actual some centuries before the first Etruscan writings. I do not want to say that Etruscan is an IE language, but just to fix a correspondence, since undoubtly the Etruscans, if they were not cognate, had to borrow many words from the IE peoples during their secular touch (e. g., all the 7-8 etruscan names of vases are borrowed from Greek and Italic dialects, according to a common agreement). I should want to know if : 1) the shift "st > z > s" is attested in other old languages, besides Celtic (Stirona > Zirona > Sirona, Bret. sterenn, W. seren "star" etc. and Italic words (Lat. satelles, saucio, sileo etc.); 2) or my hypothesis is unreliable for some reason. Thanks Adolfo Zavaroni From jer at cphling.dk Sat Mar 27 01:30:20 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 02:30:20 +0100 Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: <36ff05b7.61874288@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > [...] The dialect of Lazio > didn't travel at all, and it's still very different from Latin. > I don't think you need external causes at all to account for > language change. It just happens. The distance, or rather the > amount of mutual contact, only determines whether two dialects > will change in the same direction or not. [...] I'll make an exception to my policy of only replying to statements when I disagree: This is simply too good and too important to pass unnoticed. In Finno-Ugric linguistics it was for a long time a matter of hot debate which Finnish sound changes were due to Germanic influence - and which ones to Baltic. It may have dawned on the field since then that any language can change by itself, but simple things just need to be said once in a while. Jens From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 27 03:24:27 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 22:24:27 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Definitely *much* more. West Germanic started to split up c. 500 BC >(Mallory's Jastorf Iron Age) -- This is a strange statement, given the virtual uniformity of West Germanic until the Migrations period. The Jastorf Iron Age culture also shows a high degree of uniformity. The first runic inscriptions, from the 3rd-4th century on, are still virtually proto-Germanic. >The split with North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that, >possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age). -- hell, in 1500 BCE there probably wasn't much difference between proto- Germanic and the other northwestern IE languages, much less within proto- Germanic. >Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are similar, but >they're not in any way "virtually the same language". The differences are >far greater than between Swedish and Danish. -- apparently not with any profit. The languages (or, better, dialects) are clearly mutually intelligible; the differences are comparable to those between English dialects. Broad Yorkshire and Deep Texas are considerably more distinct. Or don't you think that "tam amavantem yazatem" is similar to "tam amavantam yajatam"? You don't think two people speaking these dialects would get the meaning? >[ Moderator's comment: I'm not sure that the attested differences are much >greater than between, for example, the forms of Spanish spoken today in >Madrid, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Mexico DF. --rma ] -- agreement there. From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 27 17:04:31 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:04:31 -0000 Subject: Tense & Aspect Message-ID: Miguel said: >In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect has been abandoned in favour of >the preterit. Interesting - it seems the opposite of what we see in the sprach-bund of France, South Germany, Northern Italy, where the preterit is being abandoned in favour of the periphrastic perfect. What does North American Spanish do, and what does Canadian French do? Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 22:00:06 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:00:06 -0600 Subject: Arabic /usta:dh/ Persian /usta:d/ Span /ustedh/ In-Reply-To: <98aa9e4d.36f5cd00@aol.com> Message-ID: >I want to propose that Vuestra Merced of Spanish was the origin of the >/ustadh/ form in Arabic and Farsi. The Spanish word "usted" can be traced to >the abbreviation of "vuestra merced". It's clearly documented in Spanish >etymological dictionaries. Are you sure it has "vuestra merced"? Because if it does, then it means that the entry in question is unreliable. "Vuestra merced" is a hypercorrect form of "vuesa merced". Given that vuestra/o/s is the possesive form of the PLURAL vosotros/as, the form betrays an ignorance of grammar. Vos is the corresponding singular form of vosotros [as well as tu/, of course]. The possessive form of vos in the era we're speaking of is vuesa/o/s [now tu is used instead in countries that still use vos]. In Old Spanish, vos was the plural form and seems to have gradually conformed to the same usage as French vous, given that vosotros later arose to distinguish the plural form. So, "vuestra merced" is about as logical as addressing the British royal family as "thy highnesses". Spanish etymological dictionaries have a fair share of errors and often betray the authors's prejudices in favor or against arabicisms, etc. Corominas is generally regarded as the best of the lot and even he has an occasional howler [snip] >Perhaps the Moors were the first people in Spain to pronounce the abbreviation >Vsted as /usted/. At a time when Arabic was the low code it would have been >very acceptable to borrow the form from Spanish. Then as Arabic rose in >importance the Spanish may have absorbed the Arabic usage of the Vsted form. >I wish I had more time to include some documentation, but I have to prepare >for classes tomorrow. > >Timothy Goad [snip] My suspicion is that there very likely was a conflation of folk forms of "vuesa merced" & usta:dh --provided that usta:dh was used, say, in Mozarabe. A lot of "mozarabisms" entered Spanish in the 1500s for various reasons: the 1st Spanish dictionary was written in Sevilla in 1492; with the "discovery" of the Americas, Andalusia was the most vibrant region in cultural terms; much of the literature of the time focuses on Sevilla and often features its slang. As Miguel and others have pointed out, Arabic was a spent force in cultural terms in regard to the rest of Spain. Any arabicisms that entered Spanish around this time were most likely picked up via mozarabe or directly from North Africa --where a series of "crusades" alternated with trade. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 22:15:23 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:15:23 -0600 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <372abac1.474935274@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: HMMMM. Portuguese also has /-u/ but spells it <-o> True, it does have /ke~, kay~/ "who" [snip] >It was rather the accusative forms that survived. You can't tell >the difference in the Western Romance singular (-am > -a, -a: > >-a; -um > -o, -o: > -o; -em > -e, -e > -e), but Romanian and >Sardo have -u (< acc. -um) not -o, and the plurals are clearly >accusatives [but nominatives in Eastern Romance -e, -i]: -as, >-os, -es. The ablatives would've given -is, -is, -ivos. A form >like Sp. quie'n "who?" < quem also betrays its accusative roots. [snip] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 22:46:33 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:46:33 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Does Basque -ar have a connection with Spanish -ar/-al? <-al> --on the whole-- is a dialect form [e.g. Central American ], as well as an allophonic form /-al/ in dialects where final /-r > -l/ although there are certain forms that use /-al/ everywhere /-ar/ is the more common form Spanish -ar/-al is commonly used for groves of certain trees e.g. pinar, pinal "pine grove" mazanar "apple grove" [no apple trees in Central America, so no *manzanales] naranjal "orange grove" but oddly, a pear tree is a other usages are dineral "a shitload of money" polvazal "dust devil, cloud of dust, pile of dust, dusty place, etc." >[snip] >An interesting proposal, put forward several times, sees as >deriving from . This word commonly means `pillar, column' today, >but its earliest recorded sense is simply `tree'. The key here is that >Basque has a number of two-syllable nouns ending in a morph <-ar>, most >of which denote things commonly encountered in bunches, and not >individually, like `tears', `star', `apple', > `sand', `remains', `peas', and others. We have long >suspected that this <-ar> might represent a fossilized collective >suffix, and the suggestion here is that might derive from >`tree' plus this *<-ar>. [snip] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 23:09:16 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:09:16 -0600 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) In-Reply-To: <6475eab0.36f89173@aol.com> Message-ID: I've heard/read that Old Macedonian/Bulgarian was the Slavic dialect in closest proximity to Byzantium and therefore, the most convenient Slavic language for Byzantine monks to learn. So in that sense, standardization was really serendipitous. [snip] >Church Slavonic was designed specifically to give "all Slavia one tongue to >worship with" and it provides the earliest records preserved of Slavic. That >is planned standardization. But even before that Slavic may have been >standardized by traders as the lingua franca of the northeastern trade routes >- this is pretty much Dolukhanov's theory for the enormous ground Slavic >already covers when it first appears in history. Conversely, the greatest >diversity (least standardization) among early Slavs is said to appear between >the Elbe and Vistula, where agriculture is attested to have been more intense >and productive than even among the northern Germans and Church Slavonic never >reaches due to persistent paganism. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 23:13:48 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:13:48 -0600 Subject: avio/n In-Reply-To: <36F8CB25.C7EF6930@neiu.edu> Message-ID: In Spanish, this kind of word play with bird names tends to be phallic rather than avian >French <-on>, Italian <-one> : >Etymologically from the same source, it us usual for this suffix in French to >indicate diminutive, in Italian augmentative. This seeming contradiction >parallels the use of English and , as in "you big sissy" and >"you little sissy">, as opposed to , little doll>. -- The common thread is better known in French linguistics than >in English as "morphème affectif". It is left to the interlocutor to infer >if the AFFECT is positive or negative. [ moderator snip ] >j p maher From roborr at uottawa.ca Sat Mar 27 23:06:09 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 18:06:09 -0500 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: A question: >IE *{kuon} (likely *{kewon} before zero-grading started) = Modern Chinese >{chu"an} (Wade-Giles spelling), Ancient Chinese *{kywan} (1 syllable) = "dog". >But when and where was the dog domesticated? Did this word travel along with >the animal from whoever first domesticated it, rather than being a sign of >language cognateness? Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku - "herd(?)". While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., "wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. forms would be a desideratum. Any references? Robert Orr For IE *kuon < *pekuon, see Hamp, Eric P. 1980. "IE *()kuon - dog". Indogermanische Forschungen 85.35-42. Knobloch, Johann. 1971. "Die indogermanische Benennung des Hundes", Donum Indogermanicum. ed. by Robert Schmitt-Brandt, 39-40. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Osthoff, Hermann. 1901. Etymologische Parerga, Erster Teil, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 23:39:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:39:01 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <23cff69.36f94360@aol.com> Message-ID: >>rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >>The middle and upper classes speak Spanish and the lower classes generally >>speak Runa [AKA Quechua/Qheshwa]> >-- it's geographical, actually. There aren't many Quechua speakers on the >coast, except recent migrants from the highlands. Who are now possibly a majority of the population of Lima given the rapid growth of the shanty towns. But in Lima, so I'm told, highland immigrants have by and large given up Runa In the 1930's, when my have >mother was growing up there, nearly everyone locally born spoke Spanish. My >mother tells me that apart from more slang and a less educated vocabulary, the >people she met in the streets spoke pretty much the same variety of Spanish as >she acquired in her convent school and among upper-class Peruvians. I went to grad school with limen~os of different social backgrounds and the difference in accent between upper class and lower class limen~os was very noticeable. The lower class limen~os from "barrios populares" had a different pronunciation --which actually sounded a bit more standard in that the males from Miraflores and Barranca tended to drop final /-s/ and pronounced <-ado> as /ao/ in colloquial speech. Lower class pronunciation was more "tense" and the vowels a bit more hightened and fronted. The lower class speakers all knew slang from Runa >Things were different in the highlands, of course. From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 27 23:56:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 23:56:29 GMT Subject: Fwd: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990326164136.86816.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "roslyn frank" wrote: >>From: Xavier Delamarre >>Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 23:02:02 +0100 >[XD] >>I confess that the celticity of _*andera_ 'woman' (found in French >>dialects) is extremely uncertain.Moreover there is another Gaulish >>_andero-_ in the inscription of Chamalihre : _brixtia anderon_ "by the >>magic of the infernals" (anderon : genitive plur.), which is, for >>sure, IE and Celtic, making an exact phonetic equation with Latin _inferus_ >>O.Ind. _adhara-_ < IE _*ndhero-_ "d'en-bas, d'en-dessous, infernal". >[RF] >I'm curious what your opinion is of Theo Vennemann's lengthy discussion >of this root, _*andera_ 'woman', in his recent article in the JIES >Monograph Series No. 28 (1998), especially pp. 12-17. The article is >called "Andromeda and the Apples of the Hesperides" (pp. 1-68). I have >my own opinions as I'm certain Larry and Miguel do, but I'd first like >to understand the reasons, if any, why the item cannot belong to a >common lexical heritage (pre-IE) that passed it onto IE and Euskera. What exactly does that mean? A common language, say Nostratic, from which both IE and Basque are descended? Or a common (substrate) language from which both IE and Basque have borrowed? The latter solution raises more questions than it answers, as it's hard to imagine any prehistoric language that would have been in contact with both PIE and Pre-Basque, at a time when linguistic diversity must have been much greater than it became after the IE expansion. >Also, in reference to the second item, has anyone thought of its >possible relationship to _andiron_ (Mod. Eng.) for which the AHD (171: >49) lists the following entry: "One of a pair of metal supports for >holding up logs in a fireplace. Also called 'firedog.' [Middle English >_aundiren_, variant of Old French _andier_, firedog, from Gaulish >_andero-_ (unattested), young bull (andirons were often decorated with >heads of animals at the top).]" >The origin of the expression "firedog" is quite obvious since in times >past, i.e., in the Middle Ages and beyond, in the Pyrenean region a >small dog was kept in a revolving squirrel-type cage at the side of the >hearth. The cage's construction was such that it forced the dog to walk >in order to keep its balance and that walking movement was transmitted >by means of a simple gear mechanism to the iron rod or spit that turned >the carcass of meat empaled on it above the fire. That way those who >tended the fire were, indeed, actually dogs. The gear mechanism slowly >rotated so that the piece of meat didn't burn and those in the house >didn't have to sit next to the fire all day turning the spit. The >practice was probably widespread throughout Europe, but I'm speaking of >drawings that I've seen with pictures from the Pyrenean region showing >this breed of dog. Evidently, there were small dogs especially bred to >fit into the cages and capable of tolerating the onerous nature of the >task. In fact, one writer mentioned that in the house where she stayed >when the dog would awake, it often tried to escape, before it was locked >up in its cage for the day's work. Can't blame the poor beast. Interesting, but it doesn't explain Catalan "fire horse" or German "fire goat", nor the alleged connection with Celtic words for "bull". >However, in the Pyrenees it wasn't always a dog that ended up tending >the fires, particularly in the case of the fires for communal ovens used >to make bread. There the woman who was in charge was called the >_labandere_, a compound in Euskera derived from _labe_ with the >phonological reduction to _lab(e)_ or _laba_ in composition and, of >course, . It would translate as something like "oven-woman". >Could the French term cited above, namely, _andiere_, be nothing more >than _(labe)andere_. If one were to try to carry the comparison further, >it might be necessary to speak of some sort of palatalization of the /d/ >which is not at all unusual in Euskera, and perhaps even more common in >northern dialects of the language. What do you think, Larry? Miguel? According to my information, the French word is (misanalyzed from ), with the usual French development of *E > ie. Pokorny glosses as "Feuerbock" (firedog), "Widder" (ram), and also "Mohn" (poppy, but my French dictionary says: "furze, gorse"), comparing this to It. madonna, fantina "poppy" < "young girl". (But Pokorny lists all this under PIE *andh- "to bloom, sprout", Greek anthos "flower"). >In conclusion, I have no idea whether there is any connection between >any of the above and your earlier remarks on the Gaullish item _andero-_ >which I gather from the AHD entry someone thought meant "young bull". I >do recall once reading that there was some Celtic form with the meaning >"young cow, heifer" or something like that which was listed as cognate >with the Euskeric work /. Welsh anner "young cow", OWelsh enderic "calf", Welsh enderig "bull, ox", Breton ounner, annouar, annoer "young cow" (besides MIr. ainder, aindir "young woman"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 27 23:59:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 23:59:35 GMT Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ In-Reply-To: <36FBFCD2.179B@tin.it> Message-ID: Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: >I think that Etruscan /z/ in most cases corresponds to IE /st/ both at >the beginning and in the middle of a word. Why? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 28 03:26:21 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 19:26:21 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Let's try this again. This isn't a good week for sending messages for me. Hopefully this one will get through to yous... ME (GLEN): See? Animate, inanimate AND heteroclitic can be explained in one big swoop. MIGUEL: But you seem to imply that inanimate nouns (always?) had an ending -d/-t, which I cannot agree with. The *-d is pronominal only. We do have cases like Skt. yakrt "liver" (as well as asrk "blood", with unexplained -k), and generalized Greek -at- < *-nt- (onoma, onomatos etc.). But except for the n and n/r stems, all other neuters have a zero ending [or *-m in the o-stems]. "We may have this, we may have that but aside from even more evidence on your side..." - this is basically what you're saying. It's much simpler to say that the neuter was generally marked with *-d unless the word already ended with another declensional suffix, isn't it? The *-d suffix IS being used for things other than pronouns later in IE languages so there's nothing to make us think that IE itself didn't use *-d similarly and more extensively, especially if it derives from an affixed *to meaning simply "this, that (inanimate)". It's simply perfect for an all-purpose inanimate marker. There is loss of *-d after consonant-ending roots (hence the heteroclitic) so of course there are a bunch of "zero-ending" neuter nouns - half of them are from a *-d that disappeared and the other half of the neuters are formed on OTHER declensional suffixes that didn't mix with *-d. [ Moderator's query: What happened to your proposed *-d ending in neuter i- and u-stems? --rma ] MIGUEL: Surely the neuter nom.acc. was unmarked. In Pre-IE, it was. It can be seen that there was originally only a contrast of animate/inanimate made in the accusative where animate took *-m and inanimate took *-ZERO. When the nominative *-s and nomino-accusative *-d came along, it became a different story. The consistent use of *-s and *-d forms in the nominative (whether just in the pronominal forms or not) MUST be a recent innovation if they are to be linked with Etruscan grammar. Etruscan has no *-d, period. [ Moderator's query: Where did they come from? Endings do not just jump up out of the grass of the steppes, do they? --rma ] MIGUEL: What happened was that there were neuter stems in -nt (and -nk?), as well as plain -n (and -r?). Just like we have m/f stems in -n(s), -nt(s) and -r(s). In absolute auslaut (because of -0 ending), these developed to -r (-n, -r) and -:r (-nt, -nk) and tended to merge into a single r/n heteroclitic paradigm. One might object that there *are* a number of neuter n-stems, but most of them end in -m(e)n, where the preceding nasal consonant may have prevented the regular development of -n > -r. Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. Endings of the sort *-n(s), *-nt(s) and *-r(s) all end in *-s (very badly done). Similarly, the heteroclitic and pronominal forms with *-d derive from *-d. Simple, no? We don't have to posit **-nk and other forms that aren't there. Everything can be generalised into a few simple cases. Finally, there ARE forms in *-mer and *-wer (thus deriving from **-men-d and **-wen-d). Let me ask you something: Why do we find endings like -ant-s in Hittite? Doesn't it look like *-nt + nominative *-s to you? Don't endings like *-m(e)n look kind of like *-m-(e)nt-d? See? More wonderful simplification - *-men and forms with -ants are the same suffix *-nt-[s/d]. MIGUEL: While some traces of *-t have remained, we have no trace at all of *-k and *-p in PIE. It is tempting to reason by analogy and hypothesize that if **-t > *-H1, then **-p > *-H3 and **-k > *-H2. In the case of *k ~ *H2 we have just a few interesting clues, such as Grk. gune:, pl. gunaikes "women". ME (GLEN): I don't find it so tempting. I think there's a very good reason why *-k and *-p don't exist in IE. Simply put, words either end with pronominal endings of some kind or with a declensional suffix - none of these possible suffixes have *-p or *-k and exposed roots are non-existant as well. MIGUEL: The neuter nom/acc (and sometimes the loc. of all nouns) had an exposed root. Furthermore, isn't it rather odd [not that that proves anything, but still...] that neither *-k nor *-p (nor *-t, verbal 3rd.p.sg. secondary and Hittite instr. excepted) occur at all in grammatical endings, while *-H1 and *-H2 abound? You're right - it proves nothing. Mandarin has no *-p, *-k, *-t, *-m, *-l or *-st. So? I told you the reason. All IE stems end with a suffix of some kind and take from a limited number of endings which happen to not have *-k or *-p. It's not the end of the world. ME (GLEN): If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE *-k CS *-H2 and IE *-p > CS *-H3. This means that we should see Anatolian languages with a cornucopia of *-k's and *-p's. Is this what we find? MIGUEL: No. We must simply assume that the loss of **-p was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-k, and the loss of **-k was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-t. What did you say? "No"? Thank you, that'll be all, your honor. [ Moderator's comment: Nonsense. One postulated development does not require any others. Thus, the fact that we do not find the developments you postulate simply means that no such developments took place; the lack of such developments has no bearing on the existence of others which *did* take place. --rma ] -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sun Mar 28 06:26:32 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 00:26:32 -0600 Subject: avio/n Message-ID: Italian "bird" phallic as well: cf. , Veneto dialect ; cf. English ... Rick Mc Callister wrote: > In Spanish, this kind of word play with bird names tends to be > phallic rather than avian [ moderator snip ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 28 08:12:12 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 02:12:12 -0600 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Dear Robert and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Orr Sent: Saturday, March 27, 1999 5:06 PM > A question: >> IE *{kuon} (likely *{kewon} before zero-grading started) = Modern Chinese >> {chu"an} (Wade-Giles spelling), Ancient Chinese *{kywan} (1 syllable) = >> "dog". But when and where was the dog domesticated? Did this word travel >> along with the animal from whoever first domesticated it, rather than being >> a sign of language cognateness? > Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a > zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku - "herd(?)". > While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., > "wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the > extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely > nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. > forms would be a desideratum. Two of the elements I work with frequently are IE *k{^}e/o(i)-, 'grey', and *wa(:i)-, 'wolf/predator, wail'; I have not have the pleasure of reading the references provided but in the absence of that knowledge, I would like to propose an analysis of *k{^}won- as simply consisting of these elements plus individualizing -*n: 'the grey-wolf/predator-one', similarly patterned to 'lion': *le:/o:-, 'spring, jump (?)'. This analysis is supported by another related root: *1. k{^}e:u-, 'wag', a characteristic supremely idiosyncratic to 'dogs'. However, if someone would be kind enough to summarize the argument for *pekwon-, I would be interested in learning its basic points. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Mar 28 08:46:29 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 09:46:29 +0100 Subject: Mummies of Urumchi In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>but our Tokharian texts are from the early Middle ages, and the mummies are >>*millennia* earlier. >-- no, the mummies are _continuous_ from millenia earlier up until attested >Tocharian. The physical type remains constant, and the material culture shows >a smooth development over time. When a new language comes in (Uighur) so does >a new physical type. So we have a) a continuous record of mummies from the earliest times down to the times of the Tocharian texts (with a clear and foolproof indication that the most recent ones were Tocharian speaking - I mean an indication other than their being palefaces ?), b) it is common knowledge that the people who wrote/read/used the Tocharian texts *were* palefaces in the first place and c) the identification of race and language is correct and the one thing to do after all ? >The material culture (textiles, etc.) also shows clear links further west. What does that tell us about the Tocharians ? West = Indo-European seems to be a hazardous equation, though west = palefaces is of course slightly less hazardous. The Tocharian language (and the *only* meaningful way to use the designation "Tocharian" is in connection with *language*) is only known from the *East*; if the mummies show material items which point to the (far) west, this could equally be taken as pointing *away* from Tocharian, rather than the opposite. >Old Chinese also has a fund of early Indo-European loanwords, some of them >identifiably Tocharian (or proto-Tocharian, to be picky). Yes, such a body of loans has been pointed to, but this is a matter of ongoing debate rather than one of established fact. I don't take issue with the fact here, but it could be interesting to discuss the Proto-Tocharian/Old Chinese evidence here to see what there is really to it. >And Tocharian >demonstrably separated from the IE mainstream rather early, Please, demonstrate this, if it is demonstrable. Doing this, please identify the IE mainstream and its common traits (which then would have to be identifiable as common innovations not shared by Tocharian), and name the features of Tocharian which are so archaic that the language occupies such a special place in the family due to them. I'm not denying that a lot of things underwent great changes in Tocharian, but it remains to show how far this justifies atributing it an Anatolian-like position in the family. >and shows no close >affinities with Indo-Iranian. It doesn't even have many early loanwords from >Indo-Iranian. OK >This means that Tocharian had to be isolated from the otherwise-predominant >Indo-Iranian linguistic environment. Do you have a better place in mind to be >isolated _in_ than the Bronze Age Tarim Basin? Sorry, I'm not questioning the fact as such, I'm questioning the methods used to establish this as proven. Certainly a question like "do you have a better idea ? No ? So, here we are" is not the kind of reasoning much confidence should be built upon, or is it (e.g. I don't have a "better idea" for the genetic affiliation of Turkic, yet I'm sure that - beyond the shadow of a doubt - the "Altaic" hypothesis, linking it with Mongolian is wrong and misleading; by this logic this wrong idea should be taken as the current state-of-the-art until a "better idea" is found. I, for one, regard the formulation "I don't know" as enough of a "better idea"). >>isn't the simple identification of those two entities (the mummies - >>Tokharians) an oversimplification? >-- no. Not by the usual standards of the field. If these are the usual standards of the field, then - to relieve you personally from my attack - it is the field which tends to oversimplifications and has, if true, adopted standards which might well be regarded as appalling (especially the language = race bit, which should be rotting in the most forgotten section of linguists' cellar of embarrassing ideas). A different case: come to think of the Baltic. "The physical type remains constant, and the material culture shows >a smooth development over time" is exactly what archaeologists tell us >about people there. No indication of the arrival of different people from >somewhere else over a considerable span of millennia. This can only mean >(and it has been said by Balticists !) that the Baltic region is simply >the Urheimat der Indogermanen. Now do we follow this ? We have to, by the >"usual standards of the field" ... That this says *nothing* about how the Baltic *language* came to the region, because a change/spread of language does *not* imply a change/spread of different people, let alone of a different physical type, is my humble idea of a valid standard of the field. But the field is bored by this, saying hell, we cannot identify race and language and that's bad. We could have such a tremendous number of positive hypotheses if we could, so why don't we (tacitly, if need be) declare this procedure possible after all ? Regards, St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 28 11:33:46 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 06:33:46 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> But don't you see where this approach gets you? What evidence is there that this view of Medieval Latin is any different from the texts we have in Hittite, Mycenaean, Sanskrit, Homeric Greek, etc.? We know that "Attic" Greek was not the majority language of either Greece or perhaps even that small part of Greece. You mention early runes as proof of the unity of Germanic, but why wouldn't those runes be written in some ancient and specialized runic liturgical language just like Latin? - runes were not used for real text writing probably for that very reason. First of all, Latin stayed a spoken as well as written language for well over a thousand years. It was elitist, but it was SPOKEN and not just by churchman and scholars. CC Love in the intro to "Five Sixteeth Century Latin Plays" writes "Latin, of course, was necessary for the educated, that is, the nobility and the upper classes, because it had become the language of diplomacy, of the law, medicine and commerce, as well as continuing to be the language of the church, and it seemed that Latin would probably become the standard European language. ...the learning of Latin was not left to chance. Most of the (English) schools included in their statutes that boys must speak Latin to each other "as well in the school as coming to and from it" (Oundle 1556), and Rivington (1566) decreed "in the School they that can must speak nothing but Latin." In most schools the boys were birched if they were caught speaking English. Similar rules were enforced on the Continent, where it is reported that Montaigne at the age of six spoke Latin at his school in Bordeaux and in his teens acted in the Latin play Baptistes,..." Toynbee; "Sir Philip Sidney at Shrewsbury School spoke Latin and regularly, as part of his school work, acted with his classmates in parts of plays every week..." And so forth. Long before that it had been established that one could not even speak at many western European royal and baronical courts without speaking Latin or using a translator that did. The canonical courts and courts of equity - often the most powerful across Europe during most of the middle Ages - required that all testimony be taken in Latin. The Teutonic Knights only spoke Latin at the their ccouncils and the Hanseatic League would distinguish and favor merchants at foreign ports according to whether they spoke Latin or not. The major trials and treaties of the whole period were all heard or negotiated in spoken Latin. Martin Irvine wrote: "Latin was the language of power and prestige, of law and learning, of religion and official culture." S. Coates in an NYT on modern Latin as a language of international science wrote: " in the Middle Ages..., Latin thrived in Europe as a lingua franca for international scholarship, diplomacy and commerce." The "vernaculars" (the "state languages" and other dominant local dialects) fought Latin through the likes of Chaucer and Dante and Luther throughout this time and eventually prevailed. But what prevailed was not the thousand and one dialects that would have been forever turning up on the level of the villiages or towns or backstreets of the city. EB White wrote: "Long after Charlemagne, scholars, clerics, merchants, lawyers and diplomats throughout Europe continued to write and converse fluently in Latin, many of them perhaps exclusively or nearly so. That this can be said only of a cultural elite is true enough. But the same view can be taken of the rise of any official modern vernacular, such as Italian, which in its 'official' form was spoken by only a tiny fraction of the total population of Italy until late in the last century." The fact that Latin was a second language during this time really means nothing in the context of the early data that is used to reconstruct PIE. Precisely because that written data could very well also reflect the elite language of the scribes or the elite. In fact, that would make the most sense, because the regular dialects mutated too fast from generation to generation and so were therefore too unreliable for writing records or other important information. That is why Latin persisted for so long with so little change. It was meant to be conservative. And that is why 80% of all the records we have from Northern and Western Europe in the Middle Ages are written in Latin. Writing aids this process but is not necessary to it. Oral tradition will perserve a language along with the information that is being preserved. We call such languages archaic or administrative or poetic without recognizing that it was meant to be independent of the vagaries of local dialects and changes they would go through. And it is the basis of what we really know about early IE. <> Nyet. Latin did both. It stayed a standard languages while it also splintered into other dialects and languages. <<-- you're confusing the standardization of poetic or administrative languages with effects on what people actually speak. Incidentally, Sanskrit wasn't written down until over a millenium after the composition of the Rig-Veda; it was preserved orally.>> You are confusing the evidence. All we have until relatively recent times are the poetic and administrative and other standardizing languages. We have no idea how Hittite mothers spoke. Sanskrit is a perfect example. One reconstructs PIE from standardized languages, not how people actually spoke. <<-- people change which language they speak for political and social reasons, generally.>> People change which language they speak when they have a good reason to. See Mallory ISIE about p257 or 259. Those reasons change constantly. One good reason to speak a standarsized language is to preserve information accurately - the same reason one uses writing. Imprecise or changing languages or dialects defeat that purpose - preserving information, dependable understanding, commonality of hearing and meaning, recognition over time. And that is why people will sometimes KEEP some languages they speak from changing. That is why they will standardize. And that may be why we have any solid evidence of IE ancestral languages at all. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 28 11:34:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 06:34:54 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 3/25/99 2:00:39 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> But this is aside from the point being made. The point was that the difference between Greek and Vedic Sanskrit and their common ancestor could be explained geographically. I was saying was that when speakers of a common language go to different geographical locations, their languages will predictably lose commonality. This is rather obvious and I'm sure you are making some other point, but I'll address it just to be clear. Distance in terms of geography will predictably have an effect on the way two languages diverge from a common ancestor. Otherwise we'd have to think that, say, the differences between Low and Upper German had nothing to do with geographical difference. From the names themselves - geographical distinctions - distance did split these dialects. Would the split between Low and Upper German have occurred if all the earlier speakers have stayed in the same location? Are we to think that the difference between Norweigan and Danish would have developed anyway, even if they were not geographically separated? In an old post re "the Danube Homeland" dated 3/6/99, you wrote: <> Aren't you suggesting that the "Kurgan" model - in terms of time and distance -needs to "explain the linguistics facts" here? Isn't "the limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements" a function of distance? And what about "peripheral conservatism?" Isn't that really a matter of distance or what is peripheral about? <> And this is so obviously untrue that I can only think that I've misunderstood you here, once again. [ Moderator's comment: Modern Icelandic has, until very recently, been unaffected by linguistic externals, yet it has changed radically in pronunciation from Old Norse. You have obviously misunderstood MCV's point: Languages change, and they do so without external cause. The existence of external forces in some kinds of linguistic change do not necessitate their existence in all forms of change. --rma ] You've mentioned the possible 30% non-IE in German vocabulary. If you accept that possibility, the only way you can account for it is "external causes." You mentioned that the way B-S may have obscured elements of Germanic or Greek may have done the same to Armenian. These are causes external to the languages themselves. Conversely, if you mention the fact that German retains "archaic" features, it assumes that change in this case DID NOT "just happen," but in fact failed to happen. If you don't attribute some external cause for this, then why is the archaism in German so singular? Chance? Or isn't it more likely that Germanic was either cut-off, isolated or geographically distant from the "innovative core" - all external factors. It may be valuable for methodological purposes to suspend consideration of external causes in linguistics, but it cannot be correct to say that you don't "need external causes at all to account for language change. It just happens" - especially if you are drawing general historical conclusions based on those language changes. If the linguistic evidence is going to assume no external causes for change, then it can tell us nothing about external events. <> This goes back to the original point, if Sanskrit or any of its proto- predecessors "travelled," than the separation of distance would not only reduce "mutual contact" with Greek or its predecessors, it would also explain why they are different. If nothing else, lack of mutual contact caused by distance would have been enough for the languages not to change "in the same direction." But there are other things that happen to languages when they travel and that is also obvious. (E.g., Germanic in Britain becomes exposed to Danish and Norman invasions that will influence English in ways that did not affect continental Germanic.) Finally, the statement that change "just happens" inverts the question really, doesn't it? If change is so inevitable, then why should there be any commonalities left to find in IE languages? Obviously, the key to this whole thing is not what changed but what didn't. It's not that when you give a "holistic" sense of difference between Greek and Vedic, it does not carry weight. But it also seems worthwhile to take a closer look at some of the pieces that make up that holism. The degree of continuity that you found in Greek/Sanskrit aorist may reflect a shorter difference in time between the languages than 2500 years. It is a subtle and apparently unique feature for both languages to have and one that would seem easy to lose. And it may be more compelling as a continuity than the differences between the languages that may have "just happened." Regards, Steve Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Mar 28 12:23:18 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 15:23:18 +0300 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Sat, 20 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, Bob Whiting wrote: >But my question was specifically about the way the word was being >reconstructed in the posts on the list. I looked back again and >for the most part the nominative (in those languages where it >occurs) was not mentioned. I now attribute that to the knowledge >of those involved who all knew but did not say that (in the case >of this "night") the nominative form was irrelevant - based on >the phototactics of the various languages mentioned. >I wrote: ><they are I guess "truncated" forms,...>> >You replied: ><<"Truncated" is not really the right term. The disappearance >of /t/ in this position in both Greek /nuks/ and Latin /noks/ is >simply the result of a phonotactical rule:..>> >On closer consideration - with regard to "nos"(Welsh), >"noc"(Pol), "nux"(Greek) and "nox"(Latin) - whatever the process, >the result are all truncated. No doubt about it. I looked up >"truncated" in the dictionary and it hits the nail on the head. Truncated generally means "cut off" but usually not "cut out" so whether these forms are "truncated" or not depends on how one views the process. The two possible views more or less correspond to the difference between synchronic and diachronic grammar (or generative versus historical). Given the stem nokt-, the generativist would say that the nominative ending -s is added to a truncated stem *nok-; the historical linguist would say that when the nominative ending -s was added to nokt-, the resulting cluster was simplified by assimilation followed by degemination. In both cases the result is the same: the nominative form is noks. But whether the historical reconstruction corresponds to any kind of reality depends on whether there was ever a stage of the language where *nokts was an acceptable form. If this form was never allowed to exist then the historical reconstruction is just an abstraction, because the generativist knows that no speaker of the language creates a form *nokts and then simplifies it to noks. Noks is the first form of the nominative that the speaker calls up even though the same speaker knows that the stem is nokt-. >< are not operative >for .>> > came out of */nokt-s/> */ts/ > */ss/ > /s/ "by a normal >phonological rule" - how is (adj) reconstructed? Nocturnus is created from the stem nokt- plus a suffix -urnus, an adjectival formative relating to time. No cluster reduction rules apply. ><matter of a tradeoff between ease of articulation and the level >of morphological differentiation needed to disambiguate meaning >that the users of the language resolve with even thinking about >it.>> >Sounds like classic problem-solving to me. "Disambiguating" is >definitely problem-solving. This is too big a can of worms to open here. It is more of a philosophical problem than a linguistic one. It revolves around whether you can call it problem solving if you don't realize that there is a problem to be solved. >I wrote: ><suggest that the word now carries the additional grammatical >baggage of the ablative.>> >You replied: ><> >In Romance languages like modern French, it is said that "in all >but a few cases, the oblique ^Ö often the ablative ^Ö form >survived the loss of Latin inflectional morphology,...while the >nominative did not..." I don't think I need to remind you that >the nominative is "often" the least marked form. The markings >you refers to includes those related to the ablative as a >"grammatical case expressing relations of separation, source, >cause or instrumentality,... not found in the nominative." >Voila. The ablative's extra grammatical baggage. In letter (and >verse, if need be.) I'm beginning to get the idea: this is some kind of free association test. If you say stems are removed I have to understand that you mean that affixes are removed from the stem. If you say that the word now carries the additional grammatical baggage of the ablative you mean that the ablative form now has the additional grammatical baggage of all of the other cases plus the ablative. But you are not looking at the process of development, only the end point. And you are not taking all the developments into consideration. If we consider Latin with five cases (leaving the vocative out), then the nominative is likely to be the most frequently used case. Most sentences will have at least one nominative. They may or may not have genitives, datives, accusatives or ablatives. So the simplest case marker (-s) gets used for the nominative. Adding this ending to the stem often creates final consonant clusters that are usually resolved by the removal of a consonant which often turns out to be an affix to the root. Now as the language develops, genitives and datives tend to be replaced by prepositional expressions with the object of the preposition being in the accusative or ablative. Finally the accusative and ablative merge leaving only one oblique case. Whether the surviving form is the accusative or the ablative is not really important. What is important is that there is now only one oblique case and this is now the most frequently occurring case (all of the four original oblique cases which were individually less common than the nominative have now been combined into a single case which is more common). Furthermore the case ending has usually developed into a short vowel so that the oblique form is usually the full stem plus a short vowel which is often no more heavily marked than the nominative (or another way of looking at it is that as the most common form it becomes the unmarked form by default). So when case distinctions are finally dropped, it is the oblique case (both as the most common form and potentially the least marked) that survives. WARNING: This is an extremely simplistic explanation of a large number of extremely complex developments. Do not try this at home. :) ><(Academies do that, or try to) but only record usage...>> >Time to send an angry letter to Noah Webster. In the absence of >an Academie, of course, dictionaries can and have "defined words >according to their proper usage" or their common usage. Contrary >to non-popular opinion, dictionaries have had a powerful effect >on usage and definition - as Mr. Webster's did. Gee, I hate being quoted out of context.:) My remark was a comment to your statement that 3000 year old words are often defined with a precision that - if you know your Homer, so to speak - can be as perilous as assuming that the nominative is worth talking about. With dead languages there are only two clues to meaning: usage and etymology. Of these two, usage is the more reliable, but if the word only occurs in limited contexts, etymology may be important as well. But there are no native informants to ask about the meaning or usage. Conversely the "dictionary definition" cannot be considered prescriptive for speakers of a dead language. And a philologist is under no obligation to accept the "dictionary definition" (many often do not) in her translation. So the precision with which such a word can be defined is a function of how widespread and varied its usage is and how well its etymology is known (and understood). I will freely admit that Webster's is a prescriptive dictionary and has arrogated to itself the function of an American Academy. The prescriptions of Noah Webster are why Americans spell the verbal suffix -ize rather than -ise and write favor rather than favour, etc. I find that Webster's is also prescriptively trying to block the natural development of "all right" in some usages to "alright." It also sometimes simply ignores usage that is incorrect according to its standards. As an example, many people use the adjective "fulsome" to mean 'tending to be complete' considering the root of the word to be "ful(l)-." But the meaning of the word actually is influenced by ME "fu:l", the ancestor of modern "foul." So the word "fulsome" actually means 'disgusting', which is the only meaning that will be found in Webster's despite the widespread folk-etymologized usage. >There should be NO question that "usage" overwhelmingly says >that the "definition" of a word is the "dictionary definition." So why do you not use the "dictionary definition" of words like "cognate" or "stem"? I can find nothing in my dictionary that says that "cognate" means 'synonym' or that "stem" means 'root affix'. If you so firmly believe that the "definition" of a word is the "dictionary definition," why do you ignore it and make up your own? >And the dictionary says that the "definition" of a word is the >"meaning of the word." If you think "dictionaries do not define >words..." your usage is so uncommon it has not been recorded in >Webster's. There are lots of things that are not recorded in Webster's. The f-word is one of them. This does not mean that things that are not recorded in Webster's do not exist. >Being an American, I tend to go by Webster's. I go by Webster's too, unless I want the answer to something particularly difficult and then I use Chamber's. But let me offer you a quotation from Otto Jespersen, _Language. Its Nature, Development and Origin_ (London and New York, 1922) [old, but still useful], p. 25: The vocabulary, too, was treated from the same point of view [as grammar]. This is especially evident in the case of the dictionaries issued by the French and Italian Academies. They differ from dictionaries as now usually compiled in being not collections of all and any words their authors could get hold of within the limits of the language concerned, but in being selections of words deserving the recommendations of the best arbiters of taste and therefore fit to be used in the highest literature by even the most elegant or fastidious writers. Dictionaries thus understood were less descriptions of actual usage than prescriptions for the best usage of words. So I will stick by the intent of my original statement: Dictionaries should be descriptive of usage. This of course leads to a cycle. If one doesn't know how the word is used (whether one is a native speaker or not), one looks it up in a dictionary to find out, and then uses it accordingly and thus the dictionary becomes prescriptive. The dictionary becomes an "authority." Hence the popular opinion that dictionaries define words, held by those who haven't thought the process through. But the word doesn't mean what it does because the dictionary says so. It means that because that is the way it is used. When a new usage becomes widespread enough, it will be recorded in the dictionary. Webster's now lists a meaning of "gay" as 'a homosexual person'. Is the word used that way because Webster's defined it so? No. Usage came first, then the dictionary entry. That is the way that words change meaning. ME "nice" meant 'ignorant, foolish' (comes through French from Latin ne-sci:re 'not to know'). Today the word has almost exactly the opposite meaning. The same thing will eventually happen to "fulsome" as the ful- part (rightly or wrongly) becomes more firmly identified with "full" rather than "foul." ><except Homer.>> >And when you get right down to it, nobody really knows your >posted message but you. Precisely. And when you say "... one might naturally go to the form stripped even of stems to get to the elemental form of the word," you are the only one who knows that you are using "stems" to mean "root affixes." Now being a trained philologist, if you use it that way in enough different contexts, I can eventually figure out what you mean. And this is precisely the way that one defines 3000 year old words. >Although I occasionally appreciate Zen and the aloneness of >oneness and all that, this is obviously a bit too much. We do >know what Homer meant most of the time, and his intention was to >be understood. Language's #1 function is communication and Homer >was damn good at. Now when I compare this statement with your earlier quoted 3000 year old words are often defined with a precision that - if you know your Homer, so to speak - can be as perilous as assuming that the nominative is worth talking about. I have a hard time figuring out whether your point that there is no way to define 3000 year old words with any precision or that Homer was so good at communicating that we know exactly what he meant and his words can be defined with precision. Which position are you actually supporting? ><<"I know what it says, but what does it *mean*?">> >But that is a whole different can of worms, isn't it? Not at all. Writers, especially of poetry, often use words in unusual ways both for expressive effect and because they are constrained to a certain number of syllables or to a stress pattern by meter and foot. What the words say and what they mean can often be two entirely different things. Irony and sarcasm often invert or shift meanings in ways that are difficult to detect. To illustrate this, I have a few examples that I have gleaned from my experience with discussion lists of the difference between what people say and what they often mean: What the writer says: What the writer means: in my humble opinion I know more about this than you do, so listen up and learn something everyone's entitled to their you don't have a clue what own opinion you're talking about I don't mind constructive mind your own business and criticism, but what do you know about it, anyway I must have gotten it wrong I'm sure I'm right, but I don't want to argue with due respect thinking as little of your argument as I do you and I both know you don't know, but I'm telling you you will appreciate that you won't like this at all I really hate to say this, but I am really enjoying pointing out this simple fact that you obviously don't know >Since the changing meaning or function of words can be quite >independent of their structural linguistics. Change "can be" to "is" and you have a basic principle of language. It is called "duality of patterning" and was listed by Hockett as one of his design features of language. In fact it is probably the most important single one of these features. Spoken language communicates meaning through sound, but the individual sounds do not have any meaning themselves. The sounds are combined to created morphemes that do have meaning. This means that the myriad words of a language (all languages that we know of) are built up by varying arrangements of a limited number of sound units, themselves meaningless in isolation. Thus a language can have tens of thousands of words built from a remarkably small number of sound units (almost always less than 100, usually less than 50). >When I read the word "gay" in an old novel, I am reminded that >phonology cannot tell me how or why it came to mean what it means >today. Duality of patterning, especially the fact that the individual sound units do not have any meaning themselves, is what allows a word to change its meaning without changing its phonology or to change its phonology without changing its meaning or change both without the new meaning or new phonology necessarily being predictable. On the other hand, there is something called "sound symbolism" which does hold that there is meaning associated with individual sounds (universally), but investigations have yet to turn up generally applicable principles. Sound symbolism is of course connected with onomatopoeia, but it may also go deeper than this. Investigations are continuing, but far more descriptive data as well as experimental investigations into speakers' intuitions about the relationships between sounds and meanings are needed. >I wrote: ><<...can a stem ever be seen as something like a vestigal case >ending in reconstructing PIE - not part of the original word, but >a compounded form that produced a universal "stem" in the >daughter languages?>> >You wrote: ><question that has been discussed extensively without reaching any >particular conclusion....The problem is that "root extensions" >don't behave mathematically.>> >So the answer is: ...maybe. Definitely. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 28 17:27:20 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 17:27:20 GMT Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: >HMMMM. >Portuguese also has /-u/ but spells it <-o> The spelling is historical. Portuguese reduces unstressed /o/ to /u/ (in Brazilian Port. this applies only to posttonic final position -o > /u/, in Portugal to all unstressed /o/'s, except absolute initial o-, some learned words, and cases where /o/ derives from oo < *ono, olC, ou). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From xdelamarre at siol.net Sun Mar 28 17:39:38 1999 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 19:39:38 +0200 Subject: IE & Celtic badger : literature In-Reply-To: <19990326164136.86816.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: For Roslyn Frank and others interested in lexicography, some recent literature on the words for "Badger" in IE & Celtic : - Joshua T. Katz : 'Hittite _taSku-_ and the Indo-European Word for "Badger"', _Historische Sprachforshung_ 111. Band (1998), 1. Heft, 61-82. [adduces Hittite cognate ; the article, erudite and convincing, full of humor, received an award, I think] - Julie Bonner Bellquist : '"Badger" in Indo-European', _Journal of Indo-European Studies_ 21 (1993), 331-46. [Concludes, wrongly in vue of J. Katz' article, in the bizarre absence of designation for badger in IE]. - John T. Koch : 'Gallo-Brittonic _Tasc(i)ouanos_ "Badger-slayer" and the Reflex of Indo-European _gwh_', _Journal of Celtic Linguistics_, 1 (1992), 101-118. [Important as it establishes definitly the outcome of IE _gwh-_ in Gaulish (> w), after the _uediumi_ (>_*gwhedio:-mi_) "I pray, I invoque" of Chamaliere]. - Alan Mac an Bhaird : 'Tadhg mac Cein and the Badgers', _Eriu_ 31 (1980), 150-55. [Irish stuff : _tadg_ "poet" and the PN _Tadg_, meant initially "badger") - Joseph Vendryes & Alii : _Lexique étymologique de l'Irlandais Ancien_, TU, 5-6. Paris-Dublin (1978). Entry _tadg_. [Yet no mention of "Badger"] >From the preceding literature, it shows that the semantic shift of the original IE _*tasKu/o-_ "badger", ranged from "poet" (Irish) to "anus" (Hittite) ! X. Delamarre Ljubljana (where the noise of the Nato bombers in route to Serbia to defend Civilisation can be heard). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 28 18:10:13 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 13:10:13 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] And Old Church Slavonic was comprehensible to "all Slavia", at the time. Not surprising, given the fairly high degree of mutual comprehensibility among Slavic languages now, more than a millennium later. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 28 18:18:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 18:18:32 GMT Subject: Arabic /usta:dh/ Persian /usta:d/ Span /ustedh/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Are you sure it has "vuestra merced"? > Because if it does, then it means that the entry in question is >unreliable. "Vuestra merced" is a hypercorrect form of "vuesa merced". >Given that vuestra/o/s is the possesive form of the PLURAL vosotros/as, the >form betrays an ignorance of grammar. Vos is the corresponding singular >form of vosotros [as well as tu/, of course]. The possessive form of vos in >the era we're speaking of is vuesa/o/s [now tu is used instead in countries >that still use vos]. In Old Spanish, vos was the plural form and seems to >have gradually conformed to the same usage as French vous, given that >vosotros later arose to distinguish the plural form. There is no special connection between nuestro/vuestro and nosotros/vosotros as opposed to nos/vos. The Latin possessives for 1&2pl. were [nos:] noster, nostr- and [vos:] vester, vestr- (OLat/VLat. voster, vostr-). Sp. nuestro and vuestro descend directly from these Latin forms. Besides nostro and vostro, Vulgar Latin also had the reduced variants *nosso and *vosso > Spa. nues(s)o, vues(s)o, but there never was a difference in meaning. , is thought to be derived from because of the -st-, which is difficult to explain if the form came from . *is* the source of the variants , , and forms with , not , are also the source of (, ) <-- , or (, , ) <-- . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iglesias at axia.it Sun Mar 28 16:54:18 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 08:54:18 PST Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: However, in the area around the city of Rome itself, unlike the country districts of Lazio, the language has changed even more due to the outside influence of Tuscan, itself a descendant of Latin, but with an Etruscan substrate. The pre-modern "romanesco" dialect, as spoken for example in the last century, was not a pure local dialect of Lazio, descended without interruption from Latin, but was strongly influenced by Tuscan, cf. Corsican. Secondly, the present spoken language in the city of Rome is the Roman version of the Italian language, itself based on the Florentine dialect of Tuscan, and of course influenced by the "romanesco" substrate. ---------- [ moderator snip ] > I'll make an exception to my policy of only replying to statements when I > disagree: This is simply too good and too important to pass unnoticed. In > Finno-Ugric linguistics it was for a long time a matter of hot debate > which Finnish sound changes were due to Germanic influence - and which > ones to Baltic. It may have dawned on the field since then that any > language can change by itself, but simple things just need to be said once > in a while. > Jens From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 28 18:59:41 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 18:59:41 GMT Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia In-Reply-To: <199903272306.SAA28828@cliff.Uottawa.Ca> Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: >Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a >zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku - "herd(?)". >While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., >"wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the >extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely >nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. >forms would be a desideratum. >Any references? Illich-Svitych's "Opyt" of course contains the entries #238 (vol. I) *K.u"jnA "wolf, dog" (PAA *k(j)n/*k(j)l, *k(w)l "dog, wolf", PIE *k^wo:n-/*k^un- "dog", PU *ku"jna" "wolf") and #375 (vol. III) *p`ok.we "livestock" (PAA *bk.r "cattle, ox", PIE *pek^u- "livestock", Alt. *p`oke-r^ "ox, cattle"). I haven't seen Hamp on *pek^u ~ *k^uon, but the only evidence for a connection I can think of is Slavic pIsU "dog" (*pik^-, from *pek^-?). What else is there? Any theory about the PIE "dog" word should deal with the irregular Latin form canis (*k^an-). All I can suggest about it is that there may be an alternation Lat. a ~ *aw, as is also seen in Lat. caput ~ Pre-Gmc. *kawput? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 28 20:25:20 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:25:20 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <42074505.36fc4f6b@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>Definitely *much* more. West Germanic started to split up c. 500 BC >>(Mallory's Jastorf Iron Age) >-- This is a strange statement, given the virtual uniformity of West Germanic >until the Migrations period. I don't think we have any attestation of any West Germanic language before c. AD 700, so I wonder what this "virtual uniformity" is based on. >The Jastorf Iron Age culture also shows a high degree of uniformity. But apparently, it didn't extend to Scandinavia, where East and North Germanic were spoken. >The >first runic inscriptions, from the 3rd-4th century on, are still virtually >proto-Germanic. Debatable. Enc.Brit. : "The scantiness of the material (fewer than 300 words) makes it impossible to be sure of the relationship of this language to Germanic and its daughter languages. It is traditionally known as Proto-Scandinavian but shows few if any distinctively North Germanic features and may reflect a stage, sometimes called Northwest Germanic, prior to the splitting of North and West Germanic (but after the separation of Gothic)." It should be noted that this so-called "Northwest Germanic" phase postdates the "Gotho-Nordic" phase, which accounts for the similarities between North and East Germanic. We have: Proto-Germanic / \ West Germanic North-East Germanic \ / \ ("North-West Germanic") East Germanic / \ West Germanic North Germanic >>The split with North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that, >>possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age). >-- hell, in 1500 BCE there probably wasn't much difference between proto- >Germanic and the other northwestern IE languages, much less within proto- >Germanic. I don't think so. >>Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are similar, but >>they're not in any way "virtually the same language". The differences are >>far greater than between Swedish and Danish. >-- apparently not with any profit. The languages (or, better, dialects) are >clearly mutually intelligible; the differences are comparable to those between >English dialects. Broad Yorkshire and Deep Texas are considerably more >distinct. >Or don't you think that "tam amavantem yazatem" is similar to "tam amavantam >yajatam"? Of course it is. But the fragment was chosen deliberately to stress the similarities between Gatha Avestan and Vedic. I suggest you compare the Sanskrit and Avestan entries in C.D. Buck's dictionary to get a more balanced impression of the similarities and differences between the two languages (admittedly, Buck's entries are mostly Classical Sanskrit and later Avestan). A direct comparison between Gathic and Vedic verbs is found in Beekes' "A Grammar of Gatha-Avestan", pp. 200-216: "17.1. In the following pages the Gathic verbal system will be compared with that of the Rigveda. This is important, because Gathic has the same system as Vedic, whereas in Late Avestan the aorist is moribund [...] 17.2. Results We find the following numbers: 159 verbal roots in Gatha-Avestan; 36 roots have no corresponding root in Sanskrit; 7 roots have a doubtful correspondence in Sanskrit; 116 roots remain that have a corresponding form in Sanskrit; [...] 78 roots remain that have an exactly corresponding formation in Sanskrit for all their stems (often only one stem is known in Gathic)" This stresses both the similarities (the verbal systems are virtually identical) and the differences (almost 25% of the Gathic verbal roots are not etymologically connected to Vedic verbal roots). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 28 20:51:43 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 14:51:43 -0600 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <36fe91a6.87869981@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>Avestan: tam amavantam yazatem >>Sanskrit: tam amavantam yajatam >> surem damohu sevistem >> suram dhamasu savistham >> mithrem yazai zaothrabyo >> mitram yajai hotrabyah >Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are >similar, but they're not in any way "virtually the same >language". The differences are far greater than between Swedish >and Danish. >[ Moderator's comment: > I'm not sure that the attested differences are much greater than between, > for example, the forms of Spanish spoken today in Madrid, Buenos Aires, > Caracas, and Mexico DF. > --rma ] HMMM. Those forms of Spanish are pretty close. Each has a distinguishing feature or two but other than that, they're virtually identical. You can "fish" out contrasting features to make them look more different than they are. And, of course, working class dialects will be more diverse. The intonation and rhythm are what really distinguishes those forms. [ Moderator's reply: There are of course extremely noticeable phonological differences among the four forms I named, as well as lexical distinctions. If these were written in a broad phonetic transcription, rather than the standardized spelling of Madrid, we might think them more different than they are. My point, really. --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 28 21:00:13 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 15:00:13 -0600 Subject: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <002c01be7874$70f69420$36f0abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: My wife, who is from Costa Rica, uses the periphrastic perfect pretty much like English present perfect as well as an emphatic form of the preterite corresponding to English "did you?" "have you ever?" And this is the usage I've run into among most people. >Miguel said: >>In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect has been abandoned in favour of >>the preterit. >Interesting - it seems the opposite of what we see in the sprach-bund of >France, South Germany, Northern Italy, where the preterit is being abandoned >in favour of the periphrastic perfect. >What does North American Spanish do, and what does Canadian French do? >Peter From jorna at web4you.dk Sun Mar 28 18:30:03 1999 From: jorna at web4you.dk (Carol Jensen) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:30:03 +0200 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <36fe91a6.87869981@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: At 14:22 26-03-1999 GMT, you wrote: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are >similar, but they're not in any way "virtually the same >language". The differences are far greater than between Swedish >and Danish. I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic and Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then like virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and Danish. Now Norwegian, one variety, is virtually the same as Danish, for political reasons. Carol Jensen From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 29 01:10:24 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 17:10:24 PST Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: FROM SOMEBODY (I forgot who, sorry): A question: IE *{kuon} (likely *{kewon} before zero-grading started) = Modern Chinese {chu"an} (Wade-Giles spelling), Ancient Chinese *{kywan} (1 syllable) = "dog". ROBERT ORR: Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku- "herd(?)". While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., "wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. forms would be a desideratum. I'm not sure what "evidence" Robert is refering to but this proposed etymology of *k^won from *pekuon has always given me upset stomach. Until we find a *p- before that word in some attested language, it's all but one of many possibilities (Probably the unlikeliest possibility too). I find the original concept the most reasonable - *k^won has been reduced from a longer form **kewon. It explains the palatalization of the velar without positing an arbitrary consonant that conveniently disappears even though there is little evidence for such a thing happening in IE besides the *d- in *dekm (which I have an alternative explanation for). As well, such a reduction due to stress accent is less awkward. Allan Bomhard reconstructs a Nostratic item, #652 *k[h]uwan-/*khuw at n- "dog", to account for both IE *k^won and AfroAsiatic with similar forms. Illych-Svitych's earlier Nostratic reconstruction of #238 *K.u"jnA "wolf, dog" (? AA *k(j)n/*k(j)l, *k(w)l "dog, wolf"; IE *k^uo:n/k^un- "dog"; Uralic *ku"jna" "wolf") is mentioned and is also based on Uralic forms like Lapp "wolf"; Mordvin/Udmurt "wolf"; Cheremis/Komi "wolf", all of which Bomhard had trouble finding at the time of his publication of "Studia Nostratica, 1 - Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis" by Signum Desktop Publishing, Charleston, SC (1996) Not knowing alot of detail behind the forms sited for AA, it looks intriguing but IE and AA are very far apart. I'd be interested to know if others have found these forms in Uralic that Illych-Svitych mentions and if so, could they simply be borrowed from IE? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 29 01:22:07 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 17:22:07 PST Subject: Tense & Aspect Message-ID: PETER: Interesting - it seems the opposite of what we see in the sprach-bund of France, South Germany, Northern Italy, where the preterit is being abandoned in favour of the periphrastic perfect. What does North American Spanish do, and what does Canadian French do? In French, I'm aware of only two past tenses being commonly spoken (as opposed to written). One is for ongoing actions such as "I was going" and the other for actions that are sudden or that happen once as in "I have gone". I can't think of much else. There're other past forms, like the pluperfect for instance, but they're pretty much restricted to literature and aren't heard much. Mais, ch'ais po, ch'uis anglo. :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Mon Mar 29 02:46:02 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 18:46:02 PST Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: >From: Rick Mc Callister >Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:46:33 -0600 >Does Basque -ar have a connection with Spanish -ar/-al? ><-al> --on the whole-- is a dialect form >[e.g. Central American ], >as well as an allophonic form /-al/ >in dialects where final /-r > -l/ >although there are certain forms that use /-al/ everywhere >/-ar/ is the more common form >Spanish -ar/-al is commonly used for groves of certain trees e.g. >pinar, pinal "pine grove" >mazanar "apple grove" [no apple trees in Central America, so no *manzanales] >naranjal "orange grove" > >but oddly, a pear tree is a [ moderator snip ] Rick, I don't know what the answer is to your question. Nor do I know how this ending is explained in Romance languages (I assume it appears in other ones). But I would like to ask Larry the following. In reference to what you say above, do you mean to infer, therefore, that there are/were once two suffixes in Euskera both spelled <-ar> but with different meanings? Or that they might be (have been) related? I am referring to the fact that the suffixing particle <-ar/-tar> is alive and well in Euskera. However, to my knowledge its meaning is not precisely that of a "collective suffix" and it clearly is not "fossilized" in any sense of the word. I'm thinking of the <-ar> of expressions like (from "on the verge of death" or the common use of <-ar/-tar> to refer to "someone or something from a given place (with no gender or animacy/inanimacy specified), "oriundo de", e.g., "someone from Bilbao." Certainly the same particle also seems to shows up occasionally as a suffix on free-standing root-stems, in contrast to the examples that you give where (at least today) there is no free-standing root-stem. At the moment none of the former examples come to mind (I don't have my files here), but, as I recall, their referentiality might be closer to what you are trying to get at with the above. Nonetheless, to my knowledge, in Euskera this last ending is never used to create collective abstractions of the type "apple-grove". As you well know, to construct those abstractions the suffix regularly used (today) is <-di/-ti>. Since we already have the suffixing element <-ar> "male" occupying this slot, to add a third member would make for a pretty crowded closet.... In other words, do you see the possibility that <-ar/-tar> mentioned above might be connected in some way to the "fossilized" ending you are discussing? Beste bat arte, Roz March 28, 1999 From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Mon Mar 29 03:05:49 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 19:05:49 PST Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: >From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) >Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 15:11:06 GMT Miguel Carrasquer Vidal said: [snip] >There are more possible examples. Classics are Bq. hartz "bear" >~ Celtic *artos, This is a particularly interesting example. Can anyone give me a synopsis of Karalinuunas' article on "Reflexes of IE *h2rtko- "bear" in Baltic" (JIES Vol. XX1, num. 3-4)? Just curious. Are any of the reflexes diminutives? Also, any other recent bibliography on this specific topic would be most welcome. I already have the reference to Paveluescu's "The Name of the 'Great Bear'" (JIES XVI, num 1 & 2), although I haven't read it yet. Roz Frank March 28, 1999 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 04:07:59 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 23:07:59 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/25/99 9:32:03 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> I understand that I misuderstood "optical." I don't think I'm way out of line in seeing this "masking effect" as an everyday occurence. Dominant languages and dialects have their run of the media - pre-printing press writing in particular - that makes them "optical" to later observers. Governments, merchants, religions, military, scholars, scribes, bards and skalds all need a language that stays stable in time, sound, form and meaning. Various methods are used to create that stability - by standardizing language. This need to standardize fights the natural tendency to change and splinter. In those areas and layers of society where the power to standardize becomes minimal, the dominant language speakers and dialectical speakers are not subject to the controls that are meant to prevent change. Standardized languages, of course, tend to become archaic or specialized because they generally cannot keep up with external changes (new ideas, new things, new borrowings) as well as looser disciplined languages or dialects. In the meantime, non-standardized versions become more vital and are picked up by emerging social forces. But because the dominant standardized tongue still has control of the preserving media (writing, bards, clerics, etc.) during the process, the newly emerging dialects and languages will in some circumstances appear full blown - as it did in the case of the Romance languages. In Comrie's TWMLs, the commentator notes that Italian only appears for the first time in the official records (otherwise Latin) as a piece of verbatim testimony by a witness in a legal case in the 1200's. This is a rather predictable way for a non- standardized language to sneak into written records. The interesting corrolary question to this is what is standardizing the non- literate underlanguages and dialectics before they can get into writing. This is relevant because it might indicate what could have standardized *PIE or its immediate daughter languages - if they were standardized, which they should have been. In pre-literate standardized languages, we see writing emerge as pretty much a function of commercial and governmental record keeping (e.g., Linear B) or diplomacy (e.g., stelae inscriptions, Rosetta stones, Hittite epistles). However, broader textual examples seem to arise out of oral traditions that preserve the language and meaning of cultural/religious matters (e.g., Homeric Greek, Gothic Skeireins, the Eddas, Sanskrit, Church Slavonic, Gilgamesh, etc.) It would seem that there are two different veins of standardization, and the cultural/religious vein has a claim to stronger standardization because it is more amenable to preservation by oral tradition than commercial or governmental language. In fact, the oral traditions are so strong that the languages are already becoming "archaic" when they come into writing. (Meter, a memory aiding tool, also specializes these language examples.) I wrote: <> mcv at wxs.nl replied: <> Both suggest - from what I understand - much more than at work than agriculture. Both seem to have carried a bundle of new technology with them, along with strong new trade ties and population advantages from the start. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 29 04:34:40 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 04:34:40 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990328032623.17159.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >MIGUEL: > But you seem to imply that inanimate nouns (always?) had an > ending -d/-t, which I cannot agree with. The *-d is pronominal > only. We do have cases like Skt. yakrt "liver" (as well as asrk > "blood", with unexplained -k), and generalized Greek -at- < *-nt- > (onoma, onomatos etc.). But except for the n and n/r stems, all > other neuters have a zero ending [or *-m in the o-stems]. >"We may have this, we may have that but aside from even more evidence on >your side..." - this is basically what you're saying. It's much simpler >to say that the neuter was generally marked with *-d unless the word >already ended with another declensional suffix, isn't it? It's much simpler, but unfortunately the neuter was *never* marked with *-d in nouns and adjectives. >MIGUEL: > What happened was that there were neuter stems in -nt (and -nk?), as > well as plain -n (and -r?). Just like we have m/f stems in -n(s), > -nt(s) and -r(s). In absolute auslaut (because of -0 ending), these > developed to -r (-n, -r) and -:r (-nt, -nk) and tended to merge into > a single r/n heteroclitic paradigm. One might object that there > *are* a number of neuter n-stems, but most of them end in -m(e)n, > where the preceding nasal consonant may have prevented the regular > development of -n > -r. >Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx). >Endings of >the sort *-n(s), *-nt(s) and *-r(s) all end in *-s (very badly done). >Similarly, the heteroclitic and pronominal forms with *-d derive from >*-d. Simple, no? Simple, but again there *are* no heteroclitic forms with *-d. What we have is a couple of *-t's (from neuter nt-stems, I say). I haven't got the time to check all the facts, but on p. 176 of Beekes Comparative IE, there's an interesting table, listing the possible PIE consonant/sonorant stems: n. -s -r/n -l/n -n -i -u mf. -s -r -l -n -i -u -k -t -nt -m -H1 -H2 (Where neuter l/n-stems consist of one word only, and n-stems are mostly -mn). There is not a shred of evidence that the neuter nom/acc. forms should be derived from *-sd, *-rd/*-nd/*-ld, *-id or *-ud. On the other hand, it *is* interesting to speculate about what might have caused the heteroclitics, what happened to neuter -k, -t, -nt, -m stems, and what the laryngeal stems are all about. I like JER's suggestion of -n > -r (and I would add -nt > -r(t), to explain yakrt etc., and -mn > -mn to explain the neuter n-stems), and I like (of course) my own suggestion of -t > -H1, -k > -H2 (which would make the feminines in -H2 (-H1?) originally neuters, which is good). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam [ Moderator's comment: I'm a little confused: If *-t# > *-H_1# and *-k# > *-H_2#, what do you mean by *-t and *-k in your table above? Or are all of those to be read as *-t-, *-k-, ktl.? --rma ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 05:38:44 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 00:38:44 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/27/99 11:46:34 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> Not serendipitous by a long shot. The fact that they were using a local Slavic dialect in no way changes the strong historical evidence that Church Slavonic was developed as a missionary tool for converting Slavs to eastern Christianity and thereby bringing them within its sphere of political influence. Emperor Micheal says as much. The creation of a uniform Slavic liturgical language also permitted a uniform language of mission and diplomacy. This use of the vernacular for liturgy however ran right up against the German and Italian bishops who were introducing the same vernacular in Latin, and would get Cyril and Methodius's Greek clergy kicked out of Bohemia. Also, the Greeks may not have realized that assuming a uniform Slavic dialect would already create difficulty in the far northwest - Richard Fletcher mentions this in The Barbarian Conversions. The tradition that the Serbs were orginally from the Sorbs who lived on the Elbe presumed a common language that may not exactly have been there. And this may have accounted for why the German bishops were able to prevail against the Greeks in the Slavic west, despite the Greek trump card of being able to transmit the religion in the vernacular. BTW, the story is that when Emperor Micheal III sends Cyril and Methodius to Moravia (the lower Moravia), he says "You two are from Thesslonica, and all Thessalonians speak the [Slavic] tongue well." This mission is in evidence and tradition the first appearance of Glagolitic (before the adoption of Cyrillic) and Old Church Slavonic. Cyril preaches and trains other missionaries in OCS and these will be successful in Serbia, Bulgaria and Russia. But the Slavs of Thessaly end up worshiping in and speaking Greek. In STANDARD LANGUAGE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CULTURE AND THE PRODUCT OF NATIONAL HISTORY by Pavle Ivic (Porthill Publ 1995) the author write: <>. In reading pieces of the above, one gets an unshakeable impression that the old saw that Slavic was pretty much a unitary language in 500ace is partly an artifact of the subsequent standardization accomplished by OCS (as well as the rise of the western Slavic states.) Southern and eastern Slavic may have in fact been more fractured before that, though we have no direct evidence either way before OCS. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 29 06:49:43 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 06:49:43 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >The point was that the difference between Greek and Vedic Sanskrit and their >common ancestor could be explained geographically. Not "geographically". The main factor is time. >I was saying was that when speakers of a common language go to different >geographical locations, their languages will predictably lose commonality. >This is rather obvious and I'm sure you are making some other point, but I'll >address it just to be clear. Distance in terms of geography will predictably >have an effect on the way two languages diverge from a common ancestor. It's not a function of distance. If we compare Greek and Sanskrit the actual distance does not matter one bit. What matters is contact, and no contact is no contact, no matter if there's 100, 1,000 or 10,000 km in between. Conversely, English borrowings are entering almost all languages of the world at this time, without there being _geographical_ contact with any English speaking region. >In an old post re "the Danube Homeland" dated 3/6/99, you wrote: <importantly, the "Kurgan" model cannot adequately explain the linguistic >facts. The gap between Anatolian and the rest of IE is too large to be fitted >into the limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements into SE Europe. The >unique features of Western languages like Germanic,... also remain largely >unexplained.>> Aren't you suggesting that the "Kurgan" model - in terms of >time and distance -needs to "explain the linguistics facts" here? Isn't "the >limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements" a function of distance? >And what about "peripheral conservatism?" Isn't that really a matter of >distance or what is peripheral about? It's about location. There are indeed cases where location (geography) matters. We expect "archaisms" to turn up in peripheral, or mountainous areas, where isogloss waves do not travel so fast or so often. But that doesn't mean that "peripheral" languages don't change: they do, and the changes often look very striking (odd, bizarre), precisely because they are shared by no-one else. And it doesn't mean that archaisms cannot survive in central areas. They do. ><language change. It just happens.>> >And this is so obviously untrue that I can only think that I've misunderstood >you here, once again. >[ Moderator's comment: > Modern Icelandic has, until very recently, been unaffected by linguistic > externals, yet it has changed radically in pronunciation from Old Norse. > You have obviously misunderstood MCV's point: Languages change, and they > do so without external cause. The existence of external forces in some > kinds of linguistic change do not necessitate their existence in all forms > of change. > --rma ] Precisely. There are all kinds of external factors: borrowings, sub-, super- and adstrates, Sprachbunde, etc. There are also geographical factors: peripheralisms, innovative cores, etc. But change itself just happens (for one thing it's an inevitable result of the language learning process). If there's something external that can be used as a trigger or source, it may well be utilized, but then again it may not and instead some new and completely random change will take place. Or no change takes place, for no reason. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 08:26:55 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 03:26:55 EST Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: In a message dated 3/27/99 9:10:56 PM, jer at cphling.dk wrote: <> But the question was slightly different: Assuming two daughter languages (Greek/Sanskrit) of a parent tongue are separated by distance, does the amount of distance make a difference? The original point was that there is enough geographical distance between the two to account for differences even in the short term, even given the ordinary natural changes each would go through on its own. The answer given was that lack of "mutual contact" would at least account for why they don't develop in the same direction. As far as the even more original point - the similarity of the aorist in Greek and Sanskrit and whether that says something about time and descent of the two languages - I thought that was such a striking common feature that perhaps it deserved some special attention. If the aorist is found nowhere in the world but in this little corner of IE, then the possibility that both languages developed it independently would seem a little bit unlikely. But who's to say. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 09:04:34 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 04:04:34 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/29/99 2:09:37 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I've been looking for the historical source for that idea for awhile, specifically with regard to the northwestern Slavs (the Wends), Czechs and Poles, etc. But I haven't found it. The problem with this assertion about OCS and that group is that it is difficult to find instances where many western Slavic speakers would have been even exposed to OCS. Developed in the mid 9th century, OCS and Greek Orthodoxy were pretty much one and the same. The Wilczi, Obrodorites, Pomeranians, etc. were fundamentally abject pagans circled on all sides by Latin-speaking Christians from the 600's to the late 1100's and would have had little contact, much less need for OCS. The Poles and Czechs were also Latin Christians from very shortly after or before the beginnings of OCS. In another post, I quoted a historian who seems to say that OCS consolidated the languages of the Serbs, Bulgars and Russians - so I'm not sure that the comprehensibility didn't to some degree come from OCS rather than being a reflection of it. <> Well, in the meantime, there has been a high degree of mutual contact too. The teaching of Polish was banned for example for a time under the Tsarist occupation and Polish speakers would have been exposed to Russian as the dominant language. Czechs also have heard a fair amount of Russian in the last 50 years. Some western Slavic speakers do nevertheless have a bit of difficulty with Serbian except on the basic level. The standardizing function of OCS is nevertheless something worth considering: "During... the ninth century, two educated Byzantines from Salonica, the brothers Constantine (later known as Cyril from his monastic life) and Methodius, with their knowledge of the Slavonic language spoken [in Thessaly], translated the most important Orthodox religious books into Slavonic by order of the Byzantine emperor Michael. By the end of the tenth century, the language of those translations had become the liturgical and literary language of most Slavs in the area encompassing the Adriatic and Aegean seas and all the way to northern Russia... Old Church Slavonic... thus entered the family of great universal languages of Christian Europe, parallel to Greek and Latin. Beyond the borders of the Christian world, similar roles were played by Hebrew, classical Arabic and Sanskrit.>> - Pavle Ivic, STANDARD LANGUAGE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CULTURE AND THE PRODUCT OF NATIONAL HISTORY (Porthill Publ 1995) Regards, Steve Long From adolfoz at tin.it Mon Mar 29 09:14:40 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 10:14:40 +0100 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: > >I think that Etruscan /z/ in most cases corresponds to IE /st/ both at > >the beginning and in the middle of a word. > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal (mcv at wxs.nl) asked: > Why? I add that the southern Etr. (SAN) = northern is a fricative dental (likely weaker than /z/). In Raetic too and mark a fricative. This explains a lot of words that allow a reliable interpretation of the sentences: Etr. zam- < *stembh- Etr. zan- < *stan- 'stand, statue' etc. Etr. zat- < *stat- (Lat. statuo, satelles) Etr. zarf- < *sterbh- Etr. s/aukh- < *stakhuk- 'wound' (lat. saucio) Etr. sa/t- < *stakhat- 'to prick, afflict' Etr. zec, s/ec < *steg- 'mark, sign' (Lat. signo) Etr. s/ikh- 'to sign; to investigate' Etr. zar-, s/ar, s/er- 'rigid, stiff, solid' (Lat. sterilis) Etr. s/ert- 'star, bright' < *stered- Etr. zia < *stigha- (lat. si/ca) Etr. zik(h)u- < *steig(h)- 'incide, write' Etr. zeri < *zeheri < *steig(h)- 'incision, writing' Etr. zil- and s/el- < *stel- 'order, govern' Etr. zip- < *stip- (lat. sti/po) Etr. zivas < *stew- (lat. sti/va) 'to assist, direct' Etr. ziz- < *stist- (Lat. sisto) Etr. zuk, s/uk- < *stuk- 'stock, piece, part' (Lat. socius) Etr. zus- < *stus- < *stu(n)d-s- (Lat. studeo, ON stunda 'streben') Etr. zut(h), s/uth- < *studh- (ON. OE. sto/dh) Etr. s/ure < *staur- (lat. su/rus, restauro) Etr. supri = lat. stupendus (-ri gerundive morph.) Etr. s/ep- < *step- Etr. caz- < *cast- < *kwedh-t- 'sharp, acute' Etr. vez- < *vest- < *khwedh-t- (see above) I could continue; but likely it would be useless. As I don't know to explain why this happened, I asked if the same result is known in other languages. In the middle of the word an original -th-t- ( > IE. -st- ) may be supposed (cf. Celt. ss < -dh-t-). According to Helmut Rix, "Raetisch und Etrusckisch", 1998, p. 52, the letters , , , in both languages (which are cognate) mark "im Anlaut ... stimmlosen Spiranten /f/, /kh/, /th/", but in Etruscan , could mark also "palatisierte /p'/ und /t'/". Then a particular emphasis could give s+th' > s+z > z. The equivalence = is attested in Raetic where the word is written also , while the interchange between initial and mean

and is attested too. In Etruscan

, and alternate in every position of the word, but and in general alternate in the middle and at the end of a word only. I should like to know other suggestions. Adolfo Zavaroni From lmfosse at online.no Mon Mar 29 14:42:16 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 16:42:16 +0200 Subject: SV: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: Carol Jensen [SMTP:jorna at web4you.dk] skrev 28. mars 1999 20:30: > I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic > and Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then > like virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and > Danish. Now Norwegian, one variety, is virtually the same as Danish, for > political reasons. Ahem.... As a Norwegian, I must protest. The variety of Norwegian called Bokmaal is certainly in its written form very similar to Danish, but the spoken language is a different matter. However, tests show that Norwegian has a kind of intermediate position between Danish and Swedish, so that Danes and Swedes are better able to understand Norwegian than each other. Otherwise, communication may influenced by the fact that Danes and Norwegians love each other, whereas noone loves the Swedes. (Sorry, Swedes.....) Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 MobilSvar: 914 03 654 From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 15:13:31 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 10:13:31 EST Subject: Sw, Dan and Nor Message-ID: In a message dated 3/29/99 4:40:40 AM, you wrote: <> Apparently, the differences between Sw, Dan and Nor (NN and BN) are a bit complex and in some ways recent. The commonalities and differences have created a situation along phonologic and lexical lines where it has been said that "Norweigan is Danish spoken in Swedish." A late developing difference is in southern scandinavian to voice "short fortis stops p, t, k to b, d, g after vowels," and going even further in Danish proper, "turning d and g into spirants or even vocalic glides" - though this apparently has not been reflected in spelling. It is said that this and "a general devoicing of lenis consonants" makes Danish word endings "difficult for other Scandinavians to hear correctly." Also the accentual system in Nor and Sw use of "tonemes" is observably different in Danish where the 'stod' or thrust sometimes takes the place of the "rising or falling melodies" one hears in the other two languages. One can sometimes distinctly hear the difference between Swedish and Danish even if it is hard to hear what is being spoken. Conversely, I'm told Norweigans and Swedes speaking may recognize or hear each other's words relatively easily, but not understand what the words mean. This once again brings up what the measure of difference between languages, especially if those differences are supposed to tell us about the time since separation of languages with presumed common ancestry. The recent Danish phonological development mentioned above is an example where current lack of mutual comprehension is not due to any early split and therefore perhaps does not tell us much about the matter of time of separation. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Mar 29 17:39:25 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 18:39:25 +0100 Subject: Latin /a/ Message-ID: Miguel spoke of >the >irregular Latin form canis (*k^an-). And gave a connection to explain the /a/. I would be interested in other suggestions. There are a number of words where Latin has an /a/ which does not appear to be from a syllabic laryngeal (e.g. where it corresponds to Sanskrit /a/ rather than Skt /i/), and where it does not appear to be from h2e (e.g. where it does not correspond to /a/ in Greek). Some occur before /n/, so may be from syllabic /n./ somehow, although the reason for the syllabicity escapes me at times (e.g. madeo & mando = to chew [not man-do = to command]; pando, prandeo, scando, langueo). Others occur near /v/ (e.g. faveo, lavo, caveo, paveo). Others do not occur near a resonant (e.g. capio, scabo). Any ideas? Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 17:59:35 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 12:59:35 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >So we have a) a continuous record of mummies from the earliest times down to >the times of the Tocharian texts (with a clear and foolproof indication that >the most recent ones were Tocharian speaking - I mean an indication other than >their being palefaces ? -- yes. The texts show that in historic times Tocharian was being spoken in those areas. b) it is common knowledge that the people who wrote/read/used the Tocharian texts *were* palefaces in the first place and -- yes; their own art depicts them as of the same type as the mummies, the chinese chronicles record them as pale, big-nosed and with peculiar light- colored eyes and hair. c) the identification of race and language is correct and the one thing to do after all ? -- as Cavalli-Sforza points out, while there's no one-to-one correpsondence between genes and language, there are consistent links. Language barriers tend to correspond with genetic clines, at least in the Old World. (Areas of post-Renaissance European expansion are another matter.) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 18:06:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:06:51 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >But the field is bored by this, saying hell, we cannot identify race and >language and that's bad. We could have such a tremendous number of positive >hypotheses if we could, so why don't we (tacitly, if need be) declare this >procedure possible after all ? -- taboos eventually wear out and die. This one had nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with the political/cultural repercussions of WWII. That's receeding into history now. You should bone up on Cavalli-Sforza's work, using genetic analysis to trace prehistoric migrations. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 18:05:07 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:05:07 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >a smooth development over time" is exactly what archaeologists tell us >about people there. No indication of the arrival of different people from >somewhere else over a considerable span of millennia. This can only mean >(and it has been said by Balticists !) that the Baltic region is simply >the Urheimat der Indogermanen. Now do we follow this ? We have to, by the >"usual standards of the field" ... >> -- actually, there's one clear disruption in the archaeological continuity of the area; the Corded Ware/Battle Axe expansion of the late 4th and early 3rd millenia. The extreme conservatism of the Baltic IE languages would support this; no significant outside contact (except peripherally with Finno-Ugrian speakers) since then. In point of fact, since the introduction of the Corded Ware material complex coincided with the beginnings of agriculture in much of that area, implying (as in the Tarim Basin) the absence of a large substratum population, you could make a very good case for the Balts being the other 'pole' indicating of the type of the early IE-speakers. And they do, of course, look much like the Tarim Basin mummies; or the Tarim Basin mummies share many characteristics with Lithuanians, to put it in reverse. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 18:22:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:22:00 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >What evidence is there that this view of Medieval Latin is any different from >the texts we have in Hittite, Mycenaean, Sanskrit, Homeric Greek, etc.? -- try proving a negative. This is silly beyond words. I need merely point out that when Mycenaean Greek was decyphered in the early 1950's, it contained exactly the sound patterns which reconstructive linguistics had predicted. (Eg., 'gwous' rather than 'bous' for "cattle") >First of all, Latin stayed a spoken as well as written language for well over >a thousand years. It was elitist, but it was SPOKEN -- you're confused as to the definition of "spoken". This generally means a natural language, one learned by children from their mothers and used for everyday communication. Latin was not a spoken language in this sense after the Migrations period. As early as the 4th century AD authors were commenting on the gap between the 'vulgar' tongue and the written form, which was mutating into the various Romance languages. The written form merely maintained the polite spoken form of the late Republic and early Empire, somewhat popularized in early Church writings. >In fact, that would make the most sense, because the regular dialects mutated >too fast from generation to generation and so were therefore too unreliable >for writing records or other important information. -- this statement is incoherent and incomprehensible. Incidentally, most preliterate cultures aren't even aware that language changes over time. They have no sense of historic time; they see the past as very much like the present. Even medieval Europeans thought this way. That's why Chaucer has Trojans dressing, speaking and acting like his contemporaries, and why the chanson du gest have King David and Alexander the Great as medieval-style knights. They just didn't know any different. >It was meant to be conservative. -- once a language is no longer used and learned by children from their parents, it fossilizes because it's not subject to the usual pressures of linguistic change. The pace of change in it slows down dramatically. Meanwhile, the actual day-to-day language changes right on, unaffected. Moreoever, no language starts out this way. Vedic Sanskrit was a living language when the first of the Vedas was composed (albeit it was a rather flowery, poetic form). It became fossilized later. >Nyet. Latin did both. It stayed a standard languages while it also >splintered into other dialects and languages. -- nope. It died as a living tongue and was replaced by the Romance languages. By the eight-ninth century AD, it was dead as the dodo, learned only by the literate in schools. Repeated "renaissances" (the Carolingian, etc.) were required to keep it from disappearing altogether. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 18:29:50 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:29:50 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >jorna at web4you.dk writes: >I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic and >Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then like >virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and Danish. -- exactly. If we put the earliest Avestan around 1000 BCE or a little earlier, and the earliest of the Vedas around 1200-1500 BCE, which seems generally accepted... ... then the date for Indo-Iranian unity would be around 2000 BCE. At which point all the Indo-Iranians were still in Central Asia and points north, apparently. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 29 23:35:58 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 17:35:58 -0600 Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Frank: Can you elaborate? I've read several in several places that the fricativazation of medial stops is said to be from Etruscan but in others that this phenomenon only dates back to the 1500s or so. But given that Etruscan died out around the time of Caesar, it could not have had too much of an effect on local Italian What I notice about Roman speech is /-L- > 0/ e.g. figlio > "fio" /-nd- > -nn-/ e.g. andiamo > "annamo" >However, in the area around the city of Rome itself, unlike the country >districts of Lazio, the language has changed even more due to the outside >influence of Tuscan, itself a descendant of Latin, but with an Etruscan >substrate. >The pre-modern "romanesco" dialect, as spoken for example in the last >century, was not a pure local dialect of Lazio, descended without >interruption from Latin, but was strongly influenced by Tuscan, cf. >Corsican. >Secondly, the present spoken language in the city of Rome is the Roman >version of the Italian language, itself based on the Florentine dialect of >Tuscan, and of course influenced by the "romanesco" substrate. From roborr at uottawa.ca Tue Mar 30 06:42:27 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 01:42:27 -0500 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Hamp's article in IF 1980 deals with all the questions raised in this e-mail. At 06:59 PM 3/28/99 GMT, you wrote: >Robert Orr wrote: >>Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a >>zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku - "herd(?)". >>While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., >>"wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the >>extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely >>nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. >>forms would be a desideratum. >>Any references? >Illich-Svitych's "Opyt" of course contains the entries #238 (vol. >I) *K.u"jnA "wolf, dog" (PAA *k(j)n/*k(j)l, *k(w)l "dog, wolf", >PIE *k^wo:n-/*k^un- "dog", PU *ku"jna" "wolf") and #375 (vol. >III) *p`ok.we "livestock" (PAA *bk.r "cattle, ox", PIE *pek^u- >"livestock", Alt. *p`oke-r^ "ox, cattle"). >I haven't seen Hamp on *pek^u ~ *k^uon, but the only evidence for >a connection I can think of is Slavic pIsU "dog" (*pik^-, from >*pek^-?). What else is there? >Any theory about the PIE "dog" word should deal with the >irregular Latin form canis (*k^an-). All I can suggest about it >is that there may be an alternation Lat. a ~ *aw, as is also seen >in Lat. caput ~ Pre-Gmc. *kawput? >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From iglesias at axia.it Sun Mar 28 16:39:46 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 08:39:46 PST Subject: Sancho In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick McCallister wrote: >So then what is the "Aragonese" spoken in the mountains of Navarra that >I've read about? The only census data I have (1995) on Navarra-Nafarroa indicates only: Basque speakers (Euskaldunes-Euskaldunak) bilinguals 10.22% partial bilinguals 16.40% and non Basque speakers (Erdaldunes-Erdaldunak). 83.44% Also, Alonso Zamora Vicente in "Dialectologi'a espan~ola", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1979, shows the language frontier as coinciding with the Navarra-Arago'n border. I have no other information. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From iglesias at axia.it Mon Mar 29 03:21:56 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 19:21:56 PST Subject: R: Re: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <002c01be7874$70f69420$36f0abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: > Miguel said: > >In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect has been abandoned in > >favour of the preterit. 1) In the Castilian spoken in *Galicia* ("Castrapo"), the usage is as in Argentinian Spanish See Pilar Va'quez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1971, p. 95, who speaks of "..the preference for the "pret. indefinido" instead of the "perfecto compuesto", i.e. "vi" instead of "he visto". Also, Alonso Zamora Vicente , "Dialectologia espan~ola", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1979, p. 208, says that in some *Asturian* regions, the periphrastic perfect is not used and that even in the cultured speech of some families, in Castilian, the use of the composed forms is rejected, e.g. " ? oiste lo que digo? "; " hoy llovio' todo el di'a ". North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, is considered, rightly or wrongly, the most Celtic area of Spain. Question 1: Could the enormous number of Galician emigrants have influenced the Spanish of Argentina? I also read elsewhere (Bertil Malmberg, "La Ame'rica hispanohablante", ISTMO, Madrid, 1966, p. 196) that the Argentinian usage is not considered correct elsewhere, for example in Mexico. Peter wrote: > Interesting - it seems the opposite of what we see in the sprach-bund of > France, South Germany, Northern Italy, where the preterit is being > abandoned in favour of the periphrastic perfect. 2) a) The predominant substrate of Latin (and Latin later replaced by High German) in all these areas is Celtic, associated with speakers of La Te'ne iron age culture. b) In Occitan, the language of southern France, the preterit is (or was, considering the present state of the language) still used alongside the periphrastic perfect.. However, as far as I know, the substrate of Southern France was less uniformly and less unquestionably Latenian Gallic, and I have read somewhere that there was probably only a dominant Gallic element co-existing with pre-Gallic (Ligurian?, Iberian?, Vasconic? Aquitanian?) subject masses. Question 2: Could there be a parallel influence of the Celtic substrate both in North-West Spain and in the Sprachbund area in the sense of a rejection of two forms for the past tense, i.e. either the preterit or the periphrastic perfect, but not both? What do the Celtic experts think? Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 30 16:01:19 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:01:19 -0600 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <370e64da.176457374@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: >Rick Mc Callister wrote: >>HMMMM. >>Portuguese also has /-u/ but spells it <-o> >The spelling is historical. Portuguese reduces unstressed /o/ to >/u/ (in Brazilian Port. this applies only to posttonic final >position -o > /u/, in Portugal to all unstressed /o/'s, except >absolute initial o-, some learned words, and cases where /o/ >derives from oo < *ono, olC, ou). This is true but I'm wondering whether Portuguese ever did pronounce unstressed and if the spelling might be a convention derived from Spanish From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 30 16:15:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:15:01 -0600 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <37118038.183464124@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [snip] >It should be noted that this so-called "Northwest Germanic" phase >postdates the "Gotho-Nordic" phase, which accounts for the >similarities between North and East Germanic. We have: > Proto-Germanic > / \ > West Germanic North-East Germanic > \ / \ > ("North-West Germanic") East Germanic > / \ > West Germanic North Germanic >>>The split with North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that, >>>possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age). [snip] I've read in some places that the languages formerly spoken in present Jutland, Schleswig & Holstein were "in between" North Germanic & West Germanic and that when the Angles migrated to England, that a gradual linguistic frontier was replaced by a barrier of non-mutually comprehensible languages. On one level this has a certain logic but on the other hand, English & Frisian do seem much closer to Low German. I can appreciate that Frisian may have been affected by Low German and Dutch but English wasn't. Another contradiction that I've seen are charts that list East Germanic with North Germanic. Why all the confusion? Has all of this been straightened out? From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 17:55:48 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 09:55:48 -0800 Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MODERATOR: What happened to your proposed *-d ending in neuter i- and u-stems? What examples do you have in mind? And are you sure they aren't derived from other case forms? I'm interested. List them. [ Moderator's response: You are the one who is claiming that all neuters at one time had a final -d. It is up to you to explain where it went in words such as *peku "herd", *doru "tree", *gonu "knee", and the like. The simpler explanation is that it never existed in those forms. --rma ] ME (GLEN) in response to MIGUEL: In Pre-IE, it was. It can be seen that there was originally only a contrast of animate/inanimate made in the accusative where animate took *-m and inanimate took *-ZERO. When the nominative *-s and nomino-accusative *-d came along, it became a different story. The consistent use of *-s and *-d forms in the nominative (whether just in the pronominal forms or not) MUST be a recent innovation if they are to be linked with Etruscan grammar. Etruscan has no *-d, period. MODERATOR: Where did they come from? Endings do not just jump up out of the grass of the steppes, do they? Funny, I thought I explained this already. The *-s and *-d are from affixed demonstratives. Is this a problem? Maybe you can ask questions with a less arrogant tone next time and read what I write thouroughly before responding too soon. Hostility isn't doing any of us any good, especially the list in general. ME (GLEN): If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE *-k CS *-H2 and IE *-p > CS *-H3. This means that we should see Anatolian languages with a cornucopia of *-k's and *-p's. Is this what we find? MIGUEL: No. We must simply assume that the loss of **-p was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-k, and the loss of **-k was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-t. ME (GLEN): What did you say? "No"? Thank you, that'll be all, your honor. MODERATOR: Nonsense. One postulated development does not require any others. Thus, the fact that we do not find the developments you postulate simply means that no such developments took place; the lack of such developments has no bearing on the existence of others which *did* take place. Mr. Moderator, I hope this is not in reference to my first quote above that starts "If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE..." because this would prove that you are not paying attention to the discussions that are taking place. That quote is referencing an even earlier quote by Miguel where he in fact seems to be positing such a thing. I was simply rephrasing to make absolutely certain that I understood what he was saying and to make it clearer (in terms of time-frames such as Indo-Anatolian vs. Centum-Satem) for my further arguements. Please re-read the archived discussions and get back to me. The fact that Hittite which is suppose to precede these sound changes does not abound with -p's and -k's is very relevant to Miguel's assertions. He might be able to say that Indo-Anatolian *-t becomes a later *-H1 and get away with it but if no evidence exists of *-p to *-H3 as he has stated then this is pure speculation. In terms of Greek and evidence for a -k- (which really shouldn't be there in the first place if *-k became *-H2 in Centum-Satem), I question whether Greek's -k- is archaic or whether this is simply an intrusive phoneme serving to mark the boundaries between vowel-final root and vowel-initial suffix. No doubt the ka-perfect is weaved into this. [ Moderator's deepest apologies: I am sorry. I had missed MCV's claims regarding the possibility of *-p and *-k developing into laryngeals in non-Anatolian Indo-European, and believed that you were setting up a straw man argument against his *-t > *-H_1. I remain agnostic on the latter claim, but like you see no evidence for the former. --rma ] -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 09:09:57 1999 From: MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 09:09:57 GMT Subject: April foolery Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: The following was submitted early for posting in the spirit of the season. Enjoy! --rma ] (1) New evidence has come in about the etymology of the English word "morning": it seems to come from the same root as the Anglo-Saxon verb {ginnian} = "yawn", i.e. "m-yawn-ing", a point likely appreciated by many down the ages. Another theory is that "morning" is a haplologized form of "manure-ning", as (in the time before motor vehicles) the first thing to do in the morning, whatever the weather and how grotty you feel that early, was to go down and across the stable yard and muck the horse out. (2) The usual purpose for keeping cats in the old days being what it was, a connection between "miaow" and "mouse" and "mouth" is obvious. Anthony Appleyard, UMIST, Manchester, UK :: http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 30 23:15:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:15:24 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypopothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/30/99 05:12:40 PM, I wrote: <> This record actually dates from the 10th Century ace. My apologies. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 30 23:53:09 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:53:09 EST Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: In a message dated 3/26/99 04:30:24 AM, xdelamarre at siol.net wrote: <> I've been confused as to why none of the replies mention a possible Greek connection. I'm may be missing something very obvious again. Please forgive me ahead of time. The old Celtic-Greek contact point in the south of France is well established. "Aner, andr-" is man (versus female, as opposed to "anthropos" - man versus beast.) "Androo", to become a man or raise to be a man, in Classical Greek was sometimes generalized to the feminine. "Andris" in later Greek I believe came to be used as woman. And in such terms as "anandria" (want of manhood, eunuch, unmarried woman) the term was extended beyond the male. Couldn't this be the Greek word with a Romance feminine ending dropped on it? What have I missed? Regards, Steve Long From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Mar 30 16:30:24 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 11:30:24 -0500 Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > I don't know, maybe the -i originally marked something else > (imperfective?). For PIE, all we can recover is that it marked > the present. Compare Akkadian, where the unmarked form (iprus: > -C1 C2 V C3) was the simple past, versus marked perfective > [perfect] (ip-ta-ras: -C1 ta C2 V C3) and imperfective [durative] > (ipar-r-as: -C1 a C2C2 V C3) forms. I am completely ignorant of Akkadian. But it seems that the durative/imperfective can also be used in the past. Then the simple past may have been a perfective limited to the past (according to Dahl, Tense and Aspect Systems, this is quite common) and that being zero is found in a few places. But that is not what you are proposing for PIE, if I understand you right. [I have edited things out to save bandwidth. Hopefully those interested can go to the archives if necessary.] > The point is that neither the Armenian nor the Baltic and Slavic > *imperfect* are simply made from the present stem + secondary > endings. Only Greek and Indo-Iranian make the imperfect that > way. What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made from Indo-Greek present stem? If you mean that these are aorist in Arm/Slavic, then aren't you comparing apples and oranges here? If Vedic imperfect was not imperfective, how can we compare it to Armenian, Slavic or Baltic imperfects (the last of which is said to be past frequentative)? This is what I meant by basing comparisons on names rather than syntactical roles. [BTW, note that Vedic has a past habitual (pura: [sma] saca:vahe) based on the present (not the present >stem<) and asacat does not carry this meaning.] Thus, my questions is, if present stem did not carry imperfective meaning by itself in a stage that included these languages, why should be posit it for a stage that includes Vedic when Vedic `imperfect' is >the< tense of narration? > Slavic does have some root *aorists*. The Armenian aorist, apart > from the 3rd.p.sg., cannot be derived from either root imperfects > or aorists. But the forms Szemerenyi cites are not root forms. Turning now to the perfect: If resutative > past is known from elsewhere, but past > resultative is unknown, then the languages in which the reflex of the perfect is a (perfective) past have to be considered as showing a later stage than those in which the perfect is a resultative. Unless the direction of evolution can be challenged, the use of perfect outside Indo-Greek has to be taken to be secondary. --- From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 31 00:17:48 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 19:17:48 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Church Slavonic was developed as a missionary tool for converting Slavs to >eastern Christianity -- Old Church Slavonic is simply what was spoken by the Slavs with whom the Byzantines were most familiar. At that point the Slavic peoples all spoke dialects of one language. >This use of the vernacular for liturgy however ran right up against the >German and Italian bishops who were introducing the same vernacular in Latin -- the Roman Church did not use a vernacular liturgy; it used Latin, which was equally foreign to everybody. >And this may have accounted for why the German bishops were able to prevail >against the Greeks in the Slavic west, despite the Greek trump card of being >able to transmit the religion in the vernacular. -- try being closer to Germany and more exposed to the military and political power of the German rulers. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Mar 31 01:14:04 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 19:14:04 -0600 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Sent: Sunday, March 28, 1999 12:59 PM > Any theory about the PIE "dog" word should deal with the > irregular Latin form canis (*k^an-). All I can suggest about it > is that there may be an alternation Lat. a ~ *aw, as is also seen > in Lat. caput ~ Pre-Gmc. *kawput? I believe the preferable explanation is that Latin canis is from a slightly different IE root, namely *^w'niH-. Whether or not this zero-grade *k^w- could result in Latin ca- rather than the more usual cu- is a question others will address more competently than I can. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 31 01:39:14 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:39:14 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: << If there's something external that can be used as a trigger or source, it may well be utilized, but then again it may not and instead some new and completely random change will take place. Or no change takes place, for no reason. >> -- good point. It's a chaotic process. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 31 01:42:27 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:42:27 EST Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Assuming two daughter languages (Greek/Sanskrit) of a parent tongue are >separated by distance, does the amount of distance make a difference? -- the relative intensity and frequency of contact is what matters, because lack of contact leads to innovations not being shared. Conversely, where innovations are shared one can postulate contact. Linguistic separation may be a function of distance, or of geography (mountains, rivers, etc.), or environment, or politics (the creation of Netherlandish as a separate language is almost entirely due to the political history) or whatever. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 01:50:03 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 17:50:03 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: ME (GLEN): "We may have this, we may have that but aside from even more evidence on your side..." - this is basically what you're saying. It's much simpler to say that the neuter was generally marked with *-d unless the word already ended with another declensional suffix, isn't it? MIGUEL: It's much simpler, but unfortunately the neuter was *never* marked with *-d in nouns and adjectives. You can't assert that. I'm objecting to your abuse of absolute terms like "never" - some kind of logical proof is needed. ME (GLEN): Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. MIGUEL: Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx). Come on, Miguel. First, why does it end in -nx instead of **-nk? Are y'sure it's not from IE *-nk-s? Second, even if we can say that the *-s is not there (now), how do we know that it couldn't have underwent the same process as *-rs > *-r? Third, I thought you were trying to tell me that _inanimate_ nouns are zero-marked. This idea creates more problems than it solves. Doesn't Occhim's Rasor hold weight anymore? ME (GLEN): Endings of the sort *-n(s), *-nt(s) and *-r(s) all end in *-s (very badly done). Similarly, the heteroclitic and pronominal forms with *-d derive from *-d. Simple, no? MIGUEL: Simple, but again there *are* no heteroclitic forms with *-d. What we have is a couple of *-t's (from neuter nt-stems, I say). I haven't got the time to check all the facts, but on p. 176 of Beekes Comparative IE, there's an interesting table, listing the possible PIE consonant/sonorant stems: n. -s -r/n -l/n -n -i -u mf. -s -r -l -n -i -u -k -t -nt -m -H1 -H2 (Where neuter l/n-stems consist of one word only, and n-stems are mostly -mn). There is not a shred of evidence that the neuter nom/acc. forms should be derived from *-sd, *-rd/*-nd/*-ld, *-id or *-ud. I've obviously confused everyone a little. First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). Second, to make very clear, I'm not saying that ALL inanimate forms end in *-d. This seems to be the interpretation of the moderator as well as you, Miguel. I'm saying that much can be explained with *-d but some of the inanimate forms happen to end in other declensional suffixes, in which case the *-d is not added because that would put the nominative endings together with other declensional suffixes (bad!). Thus here's my explanation so far of the inanimate: -s, -i, -u - declensional suffixes, no *-d added -r/n, -l/n - n-stem with *-d (*-nd > *-r) -n - non-existant And of the animate: -s - animate *-s (duh!) -r, -l, -n, -H2, -t, -nt - originally -Cs -m, -i, -u - declensional suffixes, no *-s added -k - non-existant -H1 - non-existant and probably impossible I currently have a hunch that mediofinal *H1, a glottal stop, had become *H2/H3 long ago as in this possible case: *-?u > IE *-h [1ps perfective] MIGUEL: On the other hand, it *is* interesting to speculate about what might have caused the heteroclitics, what happened to neuter -k, -t, -nt, -m stems, and what the laryngeal stems are all about. A neuter *-k is not reconstructable. All there are are fragments here and there like your isolated examples of (Hittite eshar, no -k at all) and . AFAIK, there's no need to reconstruct *-k at an IE level. MODERATOR: I'm a little confused: If *-t# > *-H_1# and *-k# > *-H_2#, what do you mean by *-t and *-k in your table above? Or are all of those to be read as *-t-, *-k-, ktl.? So am I. The time-frame doesn't seem to be properly laid out. If the Greek -k-'s as in are suppose to be Miguel's evidence for an Indo-Anatolian *-k that on the other hand is supposed to have changed to a later *-H2 that Greek is descendant from, I think we should all be thouroughly confused by this point. If Greek /k/ is just some kind of reflex of *H2 then all we have is evidence for *-H2 (or even *-H3) which says nothing in the end (but then why was it mentioned...?). -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 31 01:47:56 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:47:56 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I've been looking for the historical source for that idea for awhile, >specifically with regard to the northwestern Slavs (the Wends), Czechs and >Poles, etc. But I haven't found it. -- there isn't enough difference between the Slavic languages even now for there to have been any significant distinction at that time. Also, the extreme archaism of OCS (and of the Slavic languages generally) argues powerfully that they were quite uniform then. Except where they are separated by other languages (such as Magyar or Rumanian) the Slavic tongues all have bridge-dialects; they melt into each other rather seamlessly. Analysis also indicates that before the intrusion of the Magyars, this was true of Czech and Slovene. This is a classic case of rapid language spread from a relatively small nuclear area promoting relative linguistic uniformity. >The teaching of Polish was banned for example for a time under the Tsarist >occupation and Polish speakers -- sigh. We have written records of Polish and Russian from the 11th century on. Take a look. They were extremely similar back then, too. Much more so than now, in fact. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 02:00:04 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:00:04 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MODERATOR: What happened to your proposed *-d ending in neuter i- and u-stems? ME (GLEN): What examples do you have in mind? And are you sure they aren't derived from other case forms? I'm interested. List them. MODERATOR: You are the one who is claiming that all neuters at one time had a final -d. False. I never said anything of the kind. Please re-re-read the archives and you'll get a better picture. I use it to explain both heteroclitic and pronominal... and that's it! -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 31 04:24:23 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 23:24:23 EST Subject: Lithuanians looking like Tarim Mummies Message-ID: In a message dated 3/30/99 10:11:46 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<>> <<-- taboos eventually wear out and die. This one had nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with the political/cultural repercussions of WWII.>> Well, it certainly had something to do with certain people interpreting the evidence in some pretty nefarious ways. And definitely reflected an overconfidence in the what is reliable genetic evidence to say the least. Caution about this kind of evidence is totally justified. For a long time, what showed up as genetic evidence has often been unsound and self-fulfilling. <> A good example. Sykes and Richards MtDNA studies cast a serious doubt on Cavalli-Sforza's work. What seems like conclusive science today becomes inconclusive or Saucer people stuff tommorrow. There are some who still race to Cavalli-Sforza to support conclusions unsupported by quite possibly the more valid scientific evidence supplied by mtDNA and isotope analysis of bone and hair fragments. The mtDNA evidence strongly suggests that the vast majority of the present population in Europe arrived during the Paleolithic (@10,000bce), and therefore that the population has remained relatively genetically constant ever since. Although Sykes has upped his estimate of Neolithic and post-Neolithic incursions and there have been challenges based on some kind of accelerated rate of mutation theory, the work has yielded highly reproducible results that can't be honestly disregarded. The Tocharian situation, being on a frontier of sorts, may be a valid identification of a specific people with a language. But generalizing from it is probably uncalled for. In the arena of genes and language, there's been plenty of reason to watch out for such "evidence" as Lithuanians looking "much like the Tarim Basin mummies." Obviously if there are enough Lithuanians, sooner or later, some of them will like like Egyptian mummies. This is the kind of evidence that caused so many wrong conclusions in the past. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 30 23:43:20 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:43:20 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This need to standardize fights the natural tendency to change and splinter. -- no, it doesn't. That goes right on happening. Think "optical illusion". From richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 31 07:39:26 1999 From: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Richard Coates) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 08:39:26 +0100 Subject: `bast' Message-ID: _Bast_ and so on: For the little that it's worth, I am a native speaker of an English that has /&/ in _past_, _laugh_, and so on, but heavily overlaid with the /A:/ type which I now use in practically all circumstances. My childhood home was biaccentual in this respect. I learned the word _bast_ long after the overlay was complete, but nevertheless pronounce it /b&st/, possibly analogically through early knowledge of the place-name _Woodbastwick_ (Norfolk), /wud'b&stik/. I therefore have a near-minimal pair /b&st/, /'bA:st(@d)/; except that I have an occasional tendency to use /&/ in the latter in its earlier historical sense (i.e. not as an insult). I have a quasi-minimal pair also in /mA:st/ `fruit of the beech', learned relatively late in my development, vs. /m at st/ `pole for sails, etc.'. This latter was a familiar word from my earliest childhood as I was brought up in a port town. I still have quite serious difficulty in pronouncing it /mA:st/ in most contexts, and it's clear to me that to pronounce /mA:st/ I have to more or less consciously apply a phonological transformation. (I don't appear to have the same difficulty with other words of the same lexical set.) I sometimes have a fudged pronunciation /mast/. Just a reminder that real phonology shouldn't be easy - and possibly that I have a screwed-up idiolect. Richard Richard Coates School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK > I have no intuitive knowledge of the pronunciation of this word, but as > a native speaker of RP I observe that <-astin a final syllable under > primary stress always has /A:st/ for me: cast, last, mast, aghast, > repast, etc/. Not necessarily secondary stressed, however: gymnast, > pederast, bombast have /&/. > Max W. Wheeler [ moderator snip ] Richard Coates School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains) Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 31 10:38:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 11:38:20 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990329030550.76785.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [Miguel C V] > >There are more possible examples. Classics are Bq. hartz "bear" > >~ Celtic *artos, > This is a particularly interesting example. It has been debated for generations whether Basque `bear' might be borrowed from Celtic * or from a related IE form (this `bear' word is certainly IE). The Celtic source is phonologically awkward, though: we would have expected * to be borrowed as *<(h)artotz>, not as the observed -- assuming, of course, that it was the nominative that was borrowed, but the accusative would be even less suitable. One or two people have suggested an IE source other than Celtic, but no IE language with an even vaguely suitable form of the word is known to have been in contact with Basque. Just to complicate matters, it is very unusual for a Basque lexical item to end in a consonant cluster. Save only for `black', which we have good reason to suppose is a syncopated form of earlier *, all seemingly native words which end in a cluster end in <-rtz>, like `bear' and `five'. There are some grounds for supposing that these clusters too are secondary and result from some kind of vowel loss, but the evidence is not sufficient to support this view securely. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 31 05:50:33 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 00:50:33 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <<>What evidence is there that this view of Medieval Latin is any different >from the texts we have in Hittite, Mycenaean, Sanskrit, Homeric Greek, etc.? In a message dated 3/30/99 10:46:25 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: -- try proving a negative. This is silly beyond words.>> It's not proving a negative. It's proving a difference. As far as silly goes - I refer you to Tasim Basin Mummies who look like Lithuanians. <> Which proves absolutely nothing and if I remember the Ventris story right it wasn't exact at all. But the real question is what rate of change we see in Mycenaean. A standardize language should change slowly. A non-standardized language should show all the variation that non-standardized languages show. <<-- you're confused as to the definition of "spoken". This generally means a natural language, one learned by children from their mothers and used for everyday communication. Latin was not a spoken language in this sense after the Migrations period.>> What can I say? Only languages learned from your mother are "spoken?" Let's get this clear. Latin was spoken. No if's, and's and but's. Latin was used for everyday communication by a whole layer of European society. Deals were made, jokes were told, treaties were made and lovers talked, all in spoken Latin. "Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, etc." Spoken means spoken. Plain English. <> I'm pretty sure the difference was between spoken Latin and the spoken vulgar dialects. That's what Donatus talks about and that's what Dante talks about. I don't think you'll find anyone pointing out that people were not speaking written Latin. And Latin did not mutate. It gave birth to daughter languages. But it did not die in child birth. <<-- this statement is incoherent and incomprehensible.>> For your benefit, I'll write it slowly. Non-standardized languages don't get into writing as often as standardized languages. Non-standardized languages can change too fast to be pinned down in written form. <> This makes no sense. The most primitive people normalize their language and will correct anthropologists who misspeak it. They know that spoken words have to be standardized when communication is important because otherwise meaning will be lost. And besides, this has nothing to do with any early IE language we know about. Every single one of them knew they had a past. And everyone of them was literate. Herodutus tells about a pharaoh isolating two new-born children to find out what language was the oldest based on what words they first said - early Chomskism. And pre-literate bards of the IE languages were all about preserving history. You don't need writing to enforce standardization in a language. But the need for standardization is a darn good reason to invent writing. <> You've got to be kidding. Do you really think that Chaucer, trained in Latin and the Classics, didn't know that Trojans didn't speak English. This may be a surprise, but the filmmakers of the Ten Commandments didn't really think that Moses spoke English. Anachronisms are for the benefit of the audience. They may fill in holes about what we don't know about. But the purpose is dramatization, not reconstruction. <<-- once a language is no longer used and learned by children from their parents, it fossilizes because it's not subject to the usual pressures of linguistic change. The pace of change in it slows down dramatically.>> Look what you are saying here. If kids learn language from their parents, then that language changes. All of creation disagrees with you. Getting it passed on from your parents is supposed to be what passes it on unchanged. "Learning it from your parents" has no application for generations of Americans who did no such thing but nevertheless acquired a second-language that was scorching hot with change - and that they often contributed to. <<-- nope. It died as a living tongue and was replaced by the Romance languages. By the eight-ninth century AD, it was dead as the dodo, learned only by the literate in schools. Repeated "renaissances" (the Carolingian, etc.) were required to keep it from disappearing altogether. Latin was a powerful language for all those centuries – much more effective at communication and affecting the course of history than many of the "living" languages you are talking about. Like Chaucer you are anachronizing. Because Latin wasn't a national language or spoken among the common folk (actually it was, but that's another matter), you are arbitrarily eliminating it. The test of a language is whether it works like a language. And Latin did that in spades. (Walks like a duck...) You are under the impression that a disciplined language of limited distribution is not an language. The distinction you are making isn't rational. Regards, Steve Long From ERobert52 at aol.com Wed Mar 31 12:10:32 1999 From: ERobert52 at aol.com (ERobert52 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 07:10:32 EST Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Adolfo Zavaroni writes: > could give s+th' > s+z > z. The equivalence = is attested in > Raetic where the word is written also , I don't think you should rely too heavily on this for your argument. I presume you are referring to the Steinberg inscriptions, which alone of the Raetic inscriptions are outdoor rock inscriptions. They contain a number of difficulties in reading. Z differs from T by the addition of one horizontal stroke. Z occurs nowhere else in Raetic except one of the Magre' inscriptions and many writers transcribe it as a kind of T. Also we do not know how to apportion Etruscan and Venetic influence on the Raetic writing system(s). If the latter, it is a D, not a Z. Without doubt words supposed to be cognate written with Z in Etruscan are written with this or one of the four other kinds of T in Raetic. But what can be made of these different letters phonologically is not clear. BTW, am I the only person whose mail system messes up when people put things in that could be construed as HTML commands? Ed. Robertson From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 12:31:58 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 04:31:58 PST Subject: R: Re: Tense & Aspect Message-ID: >From: "Frank Rossi" >Date: Sun, 28 Mar 99 19:21:56 PST [big snip] Frank Rossi said: >b) In Occitan, the language of southern France, the preterit is (or was, >considering the present state of the language) still used alongside the >periphrastic perfect.. >However, as far as I know, the substrate of Southern France was less >uniformly and less unquestionably Latenian Gallic, and I have read >somewhere that there was probably only a dominant Gallic element >co-existing with pre-Gallic (Ligurian?, Iberian?, Vasconic? Aquitanian?) >subject masses. Some years ago I was told by Andolin Eguzkitza, a Basque linguist, that in Euskal Herria the preference for the periphrastic perfect in Spanish (and/or French) was influenced by Euskera's insistence on distinguishing between what has happened in the same "day" and what took place in the time period(s) before. However, a difficulty arises in reconstructing the cognitive background of this usage in Euskera since there is clear evidence that in the not too recent past, it was a "night count" rather than a "day count" that governed the 24 hr. period in question. The count went from "sunset" to "sunset" or if you wish from "night-to-night." Euskaldunak have told me that the periphrastic perfect needs to be used to talk about what's happened since "you woke up this morning." Larry would be able to give us more information on this phenomenon as well as the rules set forth by Euskaltzaindia (the Basque Academy of the Language) for its "proper usage." My impression is that today there is significant variation in usage among native-speakers of Euskera. There also seems to be evidence of a kind of "narrative style" that uses the periphrastic perfect for stylistic effect when speaking about actions in the (remote) past. But I'm a bit out of my depth in this particular issue. [snip] Izan untsa, Roz Frank From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 31 13:17:25 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 14:17:25 +0100 Subject: Basque <-ar>, <-(t)ar> In-Reply-To: <19990329024605.27720.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [Rick Mc] > >Does Basque -ar have a connection with Spanish -ar/-al? [ moderator snip ] > I don't know what the answer is to your question. Nor do I know how this > ending is explained in Romance languages (I assume it appears in other > ones). But I would like to ask Larry the following. In reference to what > you say above, do you mean to infer, therefore, that there are/were once > two suffixes in Euskera both spelled <-ar> but with different meanings? > Or that they might be (have been) related? OK. First, Basque has a very frequent suffix <-(t)ar>, which is attested, I think, in only one function: the creation of ethnonymics. As a rule, we find <-tar> after a consonant and <-ar> after a vowel, but there are exceptions. Examples: `(person) from Donostia' (a city); `(person) from Zarautz' (a town). In the usual Basque fashion, the form is <-dar> after /n/ or /l/: hence `(person) from Irun' (a town). We also find <-tiar> or <-liar> on occasion, somewhat curiously. It is widely suspected, but not established, that this suffix derives from one or both of the Latin suffixes <-aris> and <-arius> -- more likely the first, if anything, since <-arius> appears clearly to be the source of the Basque professional suffix <-ari> (and variants), as in `merchant', from `market', and `jai-alai player', from `jai-alai'. The development of the variant <-tar> from <-ar> would not be unusual in Basque. A complication is that <-(t)ar> appears to be present in the compound suffix <-(t)arzun>, which corresponds to English `-ness', and whose second element appears to be shared with the noun-forming suffix <-kizun>. This <-(t)arzun> remains in the east, but has developed regularly to <-(t)asun> in the west, as in `beauty', from `beautiful'. It is far from clear what an ethnonymic should be doing in a suffix forming abstract nouns. > I am referring to the fact that the suffixing particle <-ar/-tar> is > alive and well in Euskera. However, to my knowledge its meaning is not > precisely that of a "collective suffix" and it clearly is not > "fossilized" in any sense of the word. I'm thinking of the <-ar> of > expressions like (from "on the verge of death" or > the common use of <-ar/-tar> to refer to "someone or something from a > given place (with no gender or animacy/inanimacy specified), "oriundo > de", e.g., "someone from Bilbao." Certainly the same particle > also seems to shows up occasionally as a suffix on free-standing > root-stems, in contrast to the examples that you give where (at least > today) there is no free-standing root-stem. At the moment none of the > former examples come to mind (I don't have my files here), but, as I > recall, their referentiality might be closer to what you are trying to > get at with the above. The <-ar> that appears in `on the point of death', from `death', is functionally distinct from all other suffixes, and it is of unknown origin. Nobody knows if it has any connection with any other suffix of similar form. The item I was talking about is functionally and formally distinct from all the others, and its reality is not certain. The point is that Basque has a sizeable number of nouns which end in a morph <-ar> and which denote things commonly encountered in bunches. This has led some people to suggest that *<-ar> might be an ancient collective suffix, now fossilized in some nouns, like `star' and `tears'. Only in a couple of cases is there a plausible attested source for such a derivative: `tree' and `branch(es)', `residue' and `residue'. We simply don't know whether the proposed collective *<-ar> is real or merely a chimaera. In any case, this *<-ar>, if it ever existed, never seems to surface as *<-tar>. > Nonetheless, to my knowledge, in Euskera this last ending is never used > to create collective abstractions of the type "apple-grove". As you well > know, to construct those abstractions the suffix regularly used (today) > is <-di/-ti>. Agreed, of course: in the historical period, <-di> has been the productive suffix for constructing collective nouns for plant-names. The proposed *<-ar>, if it ever existed, must have been far earlier, and there is no evidence that such a morph was ever used with plant-names in any systematic way. > Since we already have the suffixing element <-ar> "male" occupying this > slot, to add a third member would make for a pretty crowded closet.... > In other words, do you see the possibility that <-ar/-tar> mentioned > above might be connected in some way to the "fossilized" ending you are > discussing? Yes, `male', whose existence is beyond dispute, frequently functions as a final element in compounds, as in `tomcat', from `cat'. But I see no reason to relate this item to any of the preceding. On the whole, I can't see any reason to suppose that our hypothetical collective suffix *<-ar> is related to the ethnonymic <-(t)ar>. It should be pointed out that Pre-Basque had a modest phoneme inventory, with severe restrictions on phonotactics and on morpheme structure. There were relatively few forms which were well-formed (pronounceable) in Pre-Basque, and the typically monosyllabic suffixes exhibit little variety of form. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 16:30:22 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 08:30:22 PST Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: [snip] > But I might note that a word > `hailstorm' is recorded in 1571. Here the first element is >clearly `stone', but what on earth is the force of ? >Suggestions on a postcard, please. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal replied: >I'm all out of postcards, but I note that Azkue also gives a >variant (BN-s, R) "pedrisco", and for "horn; >branch" also the glosses "borrasca" and "manga de agua". Neither >harriabar nor arri-adar look like ancient formations, or else the >-i of would have been dropped. >So is this yet another etymologically unconnected word that has >become entangled with "horn/branch" /? Or should we >perhaps compare with two cases (neither of them very clear) in IE >of association of "tree" and "horn" with stormy weather: Grk. > "thunderbolt", possibly connected with *k^er-Hw- >"horn", and Lith. "thunder(bolt)", connected by >Gamqrelidze and Ivanov with *perkw- "oak"? [RF] Interesting cognitive analogy, Miguel. What you you think about the image schemata behind these last items, i.e., the metaphoric traditions, being related to the backgrounded figure of an axis mundi/World Tree? Any ideas, Xavier? Agur t'erdi, Roz March 31, 1999 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu From iglesias at axia.it Wed Mar 31 15:44:37 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 07:44:37 PST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In this discussion it should be kept in mind that Old Portuguese and Old Galician, spoken in the NW corner of the Iberian peninsula, were *the same language*, from the time when the South of Portugal with Lisbon was still under the Moors and the local people there spoke a Mozarabic dialect until quite some time after the independence of Portugal. So the question is did Portuguese /u/ preserve the older pronunciation or did modern Galician /o/, (which is described as "very closed" by phoneticians). Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy igleasis at axia.it ---------- > >Rick Mc Callister wrote: [ moderator snip ] > This is true but I'm wondering whether Portuguese ever did > pronounce unstressed and if the spelling might be a convention derived > from Spanish From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Mar 31 19:55:04 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 20:55:04 +0100 Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: Stev asked about the aorist >. If the aorist is found nowhere in the world >but in this little corner of IE, then the possibility that both languages >developed it independently would seem a little bit unlikely. Do you mean form or function? If form, then aorists are found scattered over the IE languages. There are root aorists, reduplicated aorists, thematic aorists, sigmatic aorists, and aorists in -eh1. Outside Greek & Ind-Ir we can find reduplicated aorist formations and sigmatic aorist formations in Latin; we find aorists in -eh1 in BS, root aorists are found in Armenian, sigmatic aorists in Slavic, and so on. If you are talking of function, then you need a little bit caution: the aorist in Sanskrit is certainly not the beast it is in Greek. In Greek the indicative is a past tense contrasting with the imperfect; and the forms outside the indicative (generally) are timeless, contrasting with forms on the present stem. In Sanskrit the indicative is merely one way of making a past tense, and no real distinction between imperfect, aorist, and perfect is recoverable from the actual usage in the texts (I use Whitney and others for this). The grammarians make a fine distinction, but in practice it does not exist. The word "aorist" in Sanskrit refers to the formation only, not to any aspect. So the languages have not developed "the aorist" independently, since (a) the forms are inherited, and (b) the function is different. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Mar 31 20:05:38 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 21:05:38 +0100 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Miguel asked about the Latin canis with its irregular /a/ I read Peter Schrijver's vast book today on the reflexes of PIE laryngeals in Latin. He suggests a delabialisation of *o to a in Latin in certain contexts, including after /u/. His suggestion for canis is therefore: Accusative PIE *k'uon-m > *kuonem > *kuanem > kanem. The /a/ forms then generalise throughout the paradigm, just as /k/ generalised, replacing /kw/ in vox, vocare etc. He also notes the PIE word (s)kenH "young dog" (I haven't had time to check it) This would give the Latin form can-. Not totally convincing, but food for thought! Peter From edsel at glo.be Wed Mar 31 19:25:14 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 21:25:14 +0200 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Adolfo Zavaroni Date: woensdag 31 maart 1999 3:54 >> Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: >> >I think that Etruscan /z/ in most cases corresponds to IE /st/ both at >> >the beginning and in the middle of a word. [ moderator snip ] >I add that the southern Etr. (SAN) = northern is a fricative dental >(likely weaker than /z/). In Raetic too and mark a fricative. [ moderator snip of remainder of very long post. Please don't do this. ] [Ed Selleslagh] My suggestion, without any pretense: I think z in Etruscan, certainly when written with Latin characters, was actually a rendering of Greek zeta, pronounced dz (or maybe ts in certain contexts) at the time (nowadays it is just English z). So, st > Etruscan z could be just a metathesis. Would this be valid? Ed. From edsel at glo.be Wed Mar 31 19:31:38 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 21:31:38 +0200 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: woensdag 31 maart 1999 7:54 [ moderator snip ] > I've read in some places that the languages formerly spoken in >present Jutland, Schleswig & Holstein were "in between" North Germanic & >West Germanic and that when the Angles migrated to England, that a gradual >linguistic frontier was replaced by a barrier of non-mutually >comprehensible languages. > On one level this has a certain logic but on the other hand, >English & Frisian do seem much closer to Low German. I can appreciate that >Frisian may have been affected by Low German and Dutch but English wasn't. > Another contradiction that I've seen are charts that list East >Germanic with North Germanic. > Why all the confusion? Has all of this been straightened out? [Ed Selleslagh] Some comments: Around here (Flanders) it is - more or less - generally believed that the Frisian people and the closely related West-Flemings (not just linguistically) are descendants of probably southern Danish or other more or less Scandinavian tribes that migrated south over the coastal sand bars/islands, the last remains of which are the Dutch and German 'Waddeneilanden' and part of Sylt. Don't forget that even as late as in J. Caesar's time the geography of the coastline of the Low Countries was very different: it consisted of 'lido's' separated from the mainland by shallow sea/lagoon/marshland, similar to the lagoon of Venice. This lagoon and its marshes stretched from the hills of Picardy to the IJsselmeer and the Waddenzee and part of inland Friesland. It seems almost obvious that modern Frisian has a Scandinavian sounding base, but was profoundly influenced by Dutch/Low German. West-Flemish dialect is by far the most archaic Dutch dialect. The early inhabitants of these coastal islands and peninsulae were pretty separated from those of the mainland (first the Brythonic Belgae, then the Gallo-Romans, and finally the Salic Franks). Tacitus called the Germanic people of the coastal areas Ingaevones, who lived 'proximi Oceano'. I am not sure at all that you can say English wasn't influenced by Dutch/Low German, albeit in a somewhat convoluted way: Saxon itself is - or was - a (collection of) Dutch/Low German dialect(s), while Anglian may be considered to have been something in between Danish and Low German. Anyway, Old English (pre-1066) and Old Dutch (which lacks almost entirely equally old texts, say pre-1100) are remarkably close. In Eastern Holland, there are still Saxon dialects. Finally, there are only a few tens of nautical miles between English and Dutch, and both have a long seagoing tradition (Don't forget that the earliest cultural center of Dutch was in the southernmost part of the domain, in mainland West-Flanders). As to 'northwestern Germanic', I am very, very skeptical about that idea. The least you can say, is that it is not a necessary hypothesis. Postulating mutual (or one-way west > east?) influence between east- and west Germanic seems sufficient to explain the observed phenomena. There was ample opportunity for it to occur after the split of northeast into north and east Germanic Ed. From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 31 23:43:05 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 23:43:05 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <3718fe36.215719489@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >I haven't got the time to check all the facts, but on p. 176 of >Beekes Comparative IE, there's an interesting table, listing the >possible PIE consonant/sonorant stems: >n. -s -r/n -l/n -n -i -u >mf. -s -r -l -n -i -u -k -t -nt -m -H1 -H2 >[ Moderator's comment: > I'm a little confused: If *-t# > *-H_1# and *-k# > *-H_2#, what do you mean > by *-t and *-k in your table above? Or are all of those to be read as *-t-, > *-k-, ktl.? > --rma ] The dash is indeed confusing (Beekes does not use it here). I meant masc/fem. s-stems, r-stems etc., which in the nominative sg. end either in -s or a lengthened vowel before the final stem consonant (-:s, -:r, -is etc.). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Mar 17 03:29:38 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:29:38 -0500 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Words like fiero "beast, wild animal" fiesta "party" & fiel begin with /fy-/, so they fall into the same category as other /fC-/ words The same is true of /fw-/ words such as fuego /fwego/ I can only guess that words such as feo, falla, falta, etc. are from a dialect that retained initial /f/ or are loanwords from other Romance languages However, rural dialects often change all initial /f-/ > /h-, x-/ and retain /h-, x-/ in words where initial /f-/ of Latin > /h-/ > /0/. My father-in-law says /hlor/ for standard & /hwego/ for standard /fuego/. In Central America Peninsular /alar/ is /halar, Halar/. You also have doublets such as "stinky" and "stanky" [which in Southern US English is a lot worse than mere "stinky"]. Although textbooks don't mention it [at least as far as I remember], I've wondered if there was a /ph/ stage, given that standard /f/ is often pronounced /ph/ and it would balance out /bh/. So maybe it was /f > ph > h > 0/. I can only guess that words such as feo, falla, falta, etc. are from a dialect that retained initial /f/ or are loanwords from other Romance languages. Given that the Medieval literary language was "galaico-portugue/s" [the term used in literary history] and that the during the Renaissance, salmantino [a stylized form of Leonese close to Castillian] was the predominant literary language, it's very possible such words could have snuck in. Other 'native words' with retained /f-/ are: >_fiero_ `proud', _feo_ `ugly', _faltar_ `to lack', _fallar_ `to fail', >_fiesta_ `festival', _fiel_ `faithful', _fin_ `end', and, among >Germanisms, _feudo_ `fief', _forro_ `lining'. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 1 00:11:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 00:11:07 GMT Subject: Danube homeland. In-Reply-To: <199902101641.KAA10413@orion.means.net> Message-ID: "Mark Odegard " wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal holds for an earlier Danubian homeland. I >have not yet read anything from him indicating why he believes this That's strange. I believe I have given quite a few arguments here and elsewhere over the years. Maybe the problem is that most of the time the arguments are over details and not about the big picture. Of course, arguing about the big picture is something I don't usually have the time for, as it would require writing something like a book-size essay to do it properly. A short summary will have to do. If we look at the archaeological and genetical facts, it's clear that the most significant event in European prehistory, in terms of population, was the relatively slow advance of farming people from Anatolia north-west across the heart of the continent to the North Sea, something which happened between 7000 and 4000 BC. Of course it does not necessarily follow that the same event is also responsible for the fact that Indo-European languages are spoken over most of Europe, but it makes it the best candidate by default, and any alternative theories should offer a pretty good case for why the IE homeland should be located elsewhere, and what happened to the languages of these "Anatolian farmers" or "Old Europeans". The most popular alternative model, developed by Gimbutas and Mallory, puts the homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe around 4000 BC. The way I see it, there are two fundamental weaknesses in that theory, one "pre-4000" the other "post-4000": how can be be sure that formative steppe cultures such as Dniepr-Donets and Sredny Stog did not originate in the west (Balkan or LBK zones) and were not in fact linguistically derived from the Old European cultures? And how can we be sure that North and Central European cultures such as Corded Ware and Bell-Beaker originated from the steppe and do not in fact ethnically and linguistically represent continuations from "Old European" cultures such as TRB and Michelsberg? That being said, I do believe that the "Kurgan" model represents something real, and that IE languages did spread from the steppe zone both East (Indo-Iranian) and West (Greek, Albanian). There is enough archaeological evidence for steppe influence in the Balkans and subsequently Greece and Anatolia, and enough historical precedents from the age of Mediaeval steppe incursions to make such a scenario likely. There is no archaeological evidence, however, nor are there historical parallels for direct steppe influence beyond Hungary, as Mallory himself admits in "In Search of the Indo-Europeans". Most importantly, the "Kurgan" model cannot adequately explain the linguistic facts. The gap between Anatolian and the rest of IE is too large to be fitted into the limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements into SE Europe. The unique features of Western languages like Germanic, and to a lesser degree Celtic and Italic, also remain largely unexplained. My conclusion is that the Kurgan movements represent the spread of the "Indo-Greek" branch of Indo-European, not the initial spread of IE itself. It's too little, too late. Returning to the Anatolian farmers model, one problem remains: a date of 7000 BC for PIE is too old, and the exact match between the area of exclusively Indo-European languages and the area of agricultural spread 7000-4000 BC is broken in one area, namely the point of entry in the Aegean, where we have records of non-IE languages like Lemnian, and possibly non-IE languages like Minoan. Clearly, Renfrew's model is far too simplistic ("too much, too soon"). But if we imagine instead that Lemnian and the related Etruscan (also originally from the Aegean area) are more distantly related to IE (linguistic arguments for which can be given), then it's perfectly imaginable that PIE developed after 7000 BC somewhere in the Balkans or Hungary, and spread across the rest of the continent (C., N. and E. Europe) in the LBK/Danubian phase, c. 5500 BC, as well as to the steppe zone (Dnepr-Donets [>Tocharian?] before 5000 and Sredny-Stog [>Indo-Greek?] c. 4500). I could go on, but I hope this gives an impression of why I hold for an earlier "Danubian" homeland. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 09:35:47 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 09:35:47 +0000 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Here's the first batch. I know there have to be more out there. I > included Watkin's remarks re words he sees as IE. I didn't go too > far into Theo Vennemann's explanations because his work is > accessible. I would appreciate corrections since I read Theo's > German works with a dictionary and may have missed some things. A few comments on the Basque comparanda: > aduso:/n, adusso:/n > adesa [OE] > adze > [?rel. to Basque haitz "stone, rock", aitzur "adze"] > [< ?Vasconic *aDiz < *anitsa < *kanis; aDiz-to "flint knife"] > [mcv3/97--cit. Michelena] In modern Basque, means `crag', though there is good evidence from compounds that it formerly meant `stone'. The word means `mattock', not `adze'. The strictly Roncalese word ~ `knife' (*not* `flint knife'), like and a couple of other tool names, *may* contain , but this is not certain. > aecse [OE] > ax, axe > [< ?Vasconic"; see Basque aizkora "axe, hatchet"] [tv95, tv97] I think everyone agrees that Basque `ax' is a loan from Latin `hatchet'. The Latin word would have been borrowed as *; the [h] is a suprasegmental feature in Basque; the */l/ would have undergone the categorical early medieval change of intervocalic /l/ to /r/; and the diphthongization of /a/ to /ai/ in an initial syllable is a familiar though sporadic in Basque: compare `sacred, holy', from some Romance development of Latin . > aithei "mother" [Gothic] [< ?Vasconic"] [tv97] Basque `mother' is and nothing else. > aliso/eliso > *alisa: [Celtic], *alisa [Gothic] > Erle f., aller > alder; > ?aliso [Spanish]; > [< Vasconic?, e.g. Basque altza] > [acc. cw < IE *ei- "red, brown"] [g&i, tv1/99] > [?rel to ellen, ellaern [OE] > elder? cw] It is widely suspected that Basque shares a common origin with the IE `alder' word, but nothing can be concluded. > ang-ra-m "pasture, grassland" > Anger "pasture-ground" > [< ?Vasconic"; see Basque angio, angi, angia "meadow"; > rel. rejected by Trask] [lt, tv97] Indeed, and by most others. Basque has a very odd form for a native word, with that final /io/; it doesn't look native, and a Celtic origin is widely suspected, though nothing can be established with confidence. > ankle, Enkel < anka "Hinterhaupt, blied" [OHG]; hanka [Germanic] > ?Romance > hancha "hip", > > haunch > [< ?Vasconic; > see Basque anka, hanka "foot, lower extremity of animal"] [tv95] No. This word derives ultimately from Frankish * `haunch', a western Germanic word preserved today in Dutch as `haunch'. The Frankish word (or a cognate Germanic word) was borrowed into Gallo-Romance, where it is the source of Old French and modern French (itself the source of English `haunch'), and of Spanish `haunch, rump' and of Italian `haunch, hip'. The Romance word was borrowed into Basque; in French Basque today it means `haunch, rump'; in one corner of the French Basque Country it has acquired the additional sense of `leg'; south of the Pyrenees it variously means `rump', `leg, foot, paw'. I consider this decisive. > arnuz, aro:/n > Aar, earn "eagle" [OE] > [< ?Afro-Asiatic "Atlantic"; > see Akk. ar?; > but see also Basque arrano] [tv97] Indeed, but the Basque word must derive from * -- that is, *. > athnam "year [dat. pl.] [Gothic], annus [Latin] > [< ?Vasconic"] [tv97] Eh? The universal Basque word for `year' is . > Eidam, a*um "son-in-law" [< ?Vasconic"] [tv97] Mysterious. The Basque for `son-in-law' is ~ , safely reconstructible as *. > Eisvogel "kingfisher" [OE i:searn "ice eagle"] > [< Vasconic?, rel. to Halcyon?; > < root similar to *iz-arano "water eagle", An illusion. The putative Basque * `water' does not exist. This was a fantasy propagated by Azkue nearly a century ago but demolished by Michelena. The universal Basque word for `water' is . > *izar-arno "star bird"] [mcv, tv1/99] Well, is `star', all right, but what's this ""? The `eagle' word again? > *i:sarno [Celtic, Germanic] > iron, Eisen n. > [< ?Vasconic *isar "star"; > see Basque izar "star"] [mcv2/98, tv2/98] No comment. > i:sa > Eis, ice > [< ?Vasconic", e.g. Basque izoz- "frost, ice"] [tv97] But Basque `frost, ice' almost certainly contains `cold' as its second element. Best guess for the first is ~ `dew', from *. Compare western Basque `hoarfrost', which *appears* to be (but may not be) western `dew' plus western `dry'. (Basque compounds are head-final, except that an adjective follows a head noun.) > oak, Eiche > [< ?Vasconic; see Basque agin "evergreen oak"] Well, the most widespread Basque name for this tree is . Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 10:13:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 10:13:14 +0000 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/b In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > If I've missed any citations, please advise me. I still need to see > the the OED has to say about the English words. Our library doesn't > own any German or other etymological dictionaries, so if anyone > wants to help out, I'd apopreciate it. Only one Basque comparandum here. > birch, Birke > [< ?Vasconic; see Basque burkhi, urki] [tv95] A connection has often been suspected between Basque ~ `birch' and the Germanic word, but nothing can be established. Vasconists have been inclined to see the Basque word as borrowed from IE, but there appears to be no plausible direct source: no single secure case is known of a Germanic loan directly into Basque (as opposed to via Romance). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 10:19:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 10:19:20 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/f In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > flise, vlise "stone slab, floor-stone" [MLG] > Fliese "floor-stone, paving > tile" > [< ?Vasconic] [Vennemann considers it "weak"] [tv97] I'm not surprised. Pre-Basque had no */f/; it had no word-initial */p/; and it had no word-initial consonant clusters. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 14:24:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 14:24:20 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/g In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > garbo:n "sheaf" [pre-Germanic] > Garbe "sheaf"; > garwa [W Germanic] > garwo:n [W Germanic] > yarrow > [< ?Vasconic < pre-Basque *gerwa < *gerba; > see Basque garba "bundle, sheaf", gerba "catkin", Spanish garfa "hook, > claw", grapa "staple"] > [tv95, tv97] > [?rel. to *gar- in sense of "to assemble, collect"] Basque `sheaf' is strictly confined to the French Basque Country. I think everybody accepts that this is a borrowing from the synonymous Bearnais , itself of Germanic origin and cognate with French . The other word is more commonly , with a variant , and it doesn't mean `catkin', but rather the kind of flower found on a cornstalk -- that is, a "sheaf-like" flower, I suppose. Everybody seems to agree that this is merely a transferred sense of the preceding item. > gersto: [pre-Germanic] > Gerste "barley" > [< ?Vasconic"; > see Basque gar-i "grain, wheat", gargarr "barley"] [tv95, tv97] Basque means `wheat' everywhere, and also `bread' in one part of the country, but I don't think it means `grain' anywhere. Since its combining form is invariably in its numerous compounds, we reconstruct *, with the categorical Basque shift of intervocalic */l/ to /r/ in the medieval period. The word for `barley', correctly , appears to be some kind of reduplication of the preceding. I've no idea what that asterisked * is meant to denote: the Basque for `assemble, collect, gather' is . Nor am I any too sure what the Spanish words are doing in here, but I don't have Corominas handy. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 14:42:07 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 14:42:07 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > hakan-, ha:kon, ho:ka "hook, peg, crook" > [< ?Vasconic; > see Basque gako "key", kako "hook, peg, crook"] > [acc. cw, < ? IE *keg- "hook, tooth"] [cw, tv97] > hake "hook" [MLG] > harquebus [cw, tv97] > haki "hook" [ON] > hake [cw, tv97] > hakila- > hekel "hatchel, flax comb with hooklike teeth' [M Dutch] > heckle > [cw, tv97] > hakkiyan > haccian [OE] > to hack [cw, tv97] > ho:c [OE] > hook; [cw, tv97] > Haken "hook, peg, crook/ed" [cw, tv97] Basque ~ `hook' (and other senses) is a puzzle. A form is, at best, very unusual for a native lexical item, and the variant is impossible for a native word unless it results from voicing assimilation in the plosives. The word has been much discussed, and it is strongly suspected of being a loan, but no known Romance form provides a satisfactory source. > haltha- "slope, slant, incline" > Halde "slope, hillside", heald [OE] > "hillside" > [< ?Vasconic; > see Basque halde, alde, ualde < ?*kalde "face, side, flank"] [tv95, tv97] The Basque word is in the eastern dialects but everywhere else, as a result of the categorical voicing of plosives after /l/ in all but the eastern dialects. No such form as * is known to me. Lhande's 1926 dictionary cites and attributes it solely to the 17th-century writer Oihenart, but Oihenart in fact used , and so I suspect an error here. (Lhande is full of errors.) The form is an error: this must be the compound with initial `water', which appears as ~ , and means literally `waterside'. The central meaning of the Basque word is everywhere `side', with transferred senses like `flank' and `region'. I don't think it really means `face', and it certainly doesn't mean `slope'. > Harn "bladder" > [< ?Vasconic"; > see Basque garnur "bladder" < *kernu] [tv95, tv97] The Basque word for `urine' is , with a typical western variant . This word, with its almost unique /rn/ cluster, has been much discussed, but its origin is unknown. The alleged Basque * `bladder' is unknown to me and to the lexicographers, and I query its existence. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Mon Mar 1 15:55:57 1999 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 16:55:57 +0100 Subject: Caucasian languages and Asia Minor Message-ID: Glen Gordon schrieb: > It would be really stupid for someone to propose that NEC is related to > some hypothetical language that I shall name "Mumu" for comedic sake > that magically disappeared without a single trace. Remember that it is just this "comedy" which we play when doing internal reconstruction. It's a mere problem of labeling whether I call an earlier stage of PIE Pre-PIE or "Mumu". But that's not the problem! The problem is that people do not accept language isolates. What is an isolate? It's a language that obviously has no documented relatives. Relatives are established by means of regular sound correspondencies based on lexical *words* (and not *stems*) as well as on morphological correspondencies that match established sound correspondencies. These correspondencies should reveal to us a systematic structure that serves as a symbol of both the lexical and grammatical system of an ancestor common to the languages that are thought to be related. That's common ground though very often neglected in methodology. Now, an isolate means that the language in question does not behave in the sense described above. It simply is an orphan with unknown parents. It may well have been that its parents, now dead only had this isolate as a descendant, nothing more. And it may well have been that the parents did not have had sisters, no aunts, no cousins, nothing... I think that's just what the situation is like with respect to East Caucasian. Perhaps things will change if (I say IF) we will be able to describe Proto-East Caucasian (PEC) both with respect to grammar AND lexicon. This enterprise hasn't been undertaken yet. We simply don't know enough about PEC in order to relate its system to anything else "in the world". Additionally I ask everybdody who deals with "distant" relationship incorporating East Caucasian languages: PLEASE, don't just look up Nikolayev/Starostin 1994! It's hardly a reliable source! It is much better to get into the single languages, understand their systems and then to do comparative work within this assumed language family! The niveau we have reached with respect to PEC isn't much better yet than that IE standards have reached in 1820. And those standards surely weren't a good basis for any speculation on distant relationship. > Maybe there's no need scientifically (it won't give us a cure for cancer > I suppose), but without doing something like this, we'll never answer > all the nagging questions about our pre-history. It must be done (but > done better of course). These nagging questions are quite trendy, but that does not mean that they are on safe grounds with respect to method and language theory... But paradigms [hopefully] change, as Kuhn told us.... _____________________________________________________ | 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.) | +89-21802485 (office) | Email: W.Schulze at mail.lrz-muenchen.de | http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ _____________________________________________________ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 16:02:45 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 16:02:45 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/k/q In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > kalh- > callow [< ?Vasconic"] [tv97] Why? > kante [Celtic, Germanic, Italic non IE] > Kante "edge" > [< ?Vasconic; see Basque kantu "slice, angle, rocks", > common in Iberian toponymy] [tv97, tv95] There are at least two different Basque words tangled up here, unrelated and both of Romance origin. The first is represented by Roncalese `slice', Zuberoan `side, edge, vicinity', `angle', `slice'. An extended form of this is represented by Lapurdian and Low Navarrese `slice', `piece', `corner, angle', Zuberoan (with a nasal vowel) `slice', and by a hapax `slice', of uncertain provenance. The second is represented by Lapurdian `rock, boulder'. The first derives ultimately from a late Latin , which yields Castilian `extremity, side, point, corner', `crust, slice'. This has an extended form `corner', which probably derives from earlier *. Latin or Romance suffices to explain the first Basque word perfectly, Its Romance extension , or an antecedent *, suffices to explain the Basque forms in <-oin>, <-oi> and <-u~> perfectly, since these are the regular developments of Romance <-one>. (Compare ~ ~ Zuberoan `right, reason', from Old Castilian *, modern .) The word meaning `rock' is straight from the common Ibero-Romance word represented by Spanish `stone', of unknown but very likely Celtic origin. The Basque words cannot possibly be ancient in that language, because plosives were categorically voiced after /n/ in early medieval Basque, save only in Zuberoan and Roncalese. > knife, knyft "pocketknife" [W Fries], > kni:fr [Scandinavian], > Kneif/Kneip "pocketknife", > canivet [O Fr], > canif "large pocketknife" [Fr], > Basque ganibet, kanibet "pocket knife" > [< ?Vasconic] [tv95] Basque ~ just means `knife' in general, specifically a knife which has neither a sheath nor a folding handle, such as a table knife. It is perfectly clear that this is borrowed from Old Gascon (modern Gascon ), related to Old Aragonese , Old Castilian (and still regional Spanish) , and to the cited Old French . All these are derived by adding a Romance diminutive suffix to the word represented by modern French `penknife, pocketknife', which in turn unquestionably is borrowed from the Germanic word which is the ancestor of English `knife'. The word cannot possibly be ancient in Basque. First, a native word does not exhibit fluctuation in the voicing of an initial plosive: this is a typical characteristic of loan words. Second, earlier intervocalic /n/ was categorically lost in the early medieval period, and could not have survived into the historical period. Third, a native and monomorphemic word does have a plosive in the onset of the third syllable. Fourth, a native word cannot end in /t/ -- or in any plosive -- except where that plosive is secondary. This is a "solution" to a problem which does not exist. > k'rimp'an "tense, cramped" > krapfo "hook, claw" > cramp, Krampf; krapfen > "fritters, donut" > [< ?Vasconic; > see pre-Basque *garba "broke, junk", *krapo "claw, clip, junk"] > [acc. cw < ? IE *ger-] [cw, tv95, tv97] Er -- what? What on earth is meant by this "pre-Basque *"? No such form can be reconstructed for Pre-Basque. Moreover, if it could be, it should appear unchanged in modern Basque as * -- but I know of no evidence for any such word. > ku:z/e [HG 15th c.] > Kauz [type of owl] > [?< Vasconic *kuwonts/a > *k^u:nts > *k^u:ts, > see Basque hutz, ontz] [tv97] The Basque word is ~ ~ ; I don't know of a variant *. The word is of unknown origin, but is suspected of being imitative, like some of the neighboring Romance words for `owl'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 1 16:12:16 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 16:12:16 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Moos, mousse "foam" [Fr < Germanic] [tv84] > moraine, Mor?ne "moraine", > Mur[e] "pile of rocks [Bavarian] > [?< Vasconic; > see Basque murru "hill"] [tv97] The form can hardly be ancient in Basque. There exists a sizeable number of severely localized Basque words of the form , with very diverse meanings, but `hill' is not one of them. The most widespread sense (throughout the French Basque Country) is `wall'. The closest to `hill' in sense is `pile, heap', reported nowhere but in the Baztan valley. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 3 04:34:13 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 23:34:13 EST Subject: St Jerome Message-ID: In a message dated 3/2/99 8:55:49 PM, John McLaughlin wrote: << No matter one's religious affiliation or attitudes, this has got nothing to do with language.>> This is so patently not true it is... amazing. We are talking about written words and mass translations of words here from one language to another. How could it not be about language? And once again in the historical context, it is actually occuring at the borderline between two different phases of a language, when a decision is to be made between staying with the old or going with the new. It is about nothing else but language. Jerome's translation was faced with the fact that the Latin language was going through serious disruption in grammar, sound and meaning at the time. Donatus, by tradition Jerome's teacher, catalogued these changes not many years before the Vulgate was written. Donatus specifically mentions "changing and transposing of letters, syllables, tones and aspiration. (...transmutatio litterae, syllabae, temporis, toni, adspirationis.) The long /i/ in "Italian" has already made its apperance by Jerome's time, Donatus warning that we must "pronounce Italiam with a short first vowel;..." He notes shifts in "sound to conjugation" - "since 'fervere' is of the second conjugation and should be pronounced long". And he notes the following regarding 'aspiration' - "which some ascribe to writing, some to pronunciation, because of h, which, as you know, some consider to be a letter, some the sign of aspiration." (... quem quidam scripto, quidam pronunciationi iudicant adscribendum, propter "h" scilicet, quam alii litteram, alii adspirationis notam putant.) In fact, Donatus may even have given us the true derivation of the word 'salmon' which the OED ascribes to "salere", to leap, but which Donatus describes as being the result of the sudden dropping of syllables in the "new Latin" of his day: "in loss...of syllable, as 'salmentum' for 'salsamentum' (fish sauce, marinated fish)" (ut salmentum pro salsamentum). What Jerome was talking about in the passages quoted by Sheila was a choice he decided in adopting this "new language" instead of adhering to Classical, which was no longer really being spoken by the people. This decision (the one which St Augustine also claimed to make) meant that he was dealing with a live language whose meanings and forms were shifting and not "good language" in the sense of the "grammarians." And as has been said for a long time, Jerome abandoned both Donatus and Old Rome in the Vulgate. The result was that Erasmus, who documents many of the "barbarisms" Jerome adopted in "correcting" Jerome's grammar, specifically is aware of what Jerome has done and calls his language "Italian." The influence exerted by Jerome's choice of course will powerfully affect the language of court and of written legal documents in all of Europe for centuries to come. To say this is not about language is a little preposterous. Unless one possibly has an axe to grind with Jerome based on "one's religious affiliation or attitudes." <> It seems John McLaughlin has changed POV in mid-post here. Perhaps that nun he mentions got to him and cleared his mind about things. Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's note: I was reminded today that things we Americans take light-heartedly are rather more seriously regarded elsewhere. I apologize to those who were offended by the original joke (and possibly by this rejoinder), and will remind everyone that we are all writing for an international audience here. We should adopt the strictures of a formal dinner, where politics and religion are recognized as topics not to be discussed. --rma ] From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Mar 3 06:12:43 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 01:12:43 -0500 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > arimanno "warrior" [It < Germanic] [tv84] Isn't this a compound, *harja- 'army' + *manna- 'man'? The first at least doesn't seem peculiarly Germanic, to judge by the cognates given in Buck's dictionary. (I don't have ready access to the Vennemann reference, I'm afraid, so I don't know what argument he makes.) Brian M. Scott From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 06:13:02 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 00:13:02 -0600 Subject: Greek question Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Wednesday, March 03, 1999 10:45 PM [ moderator snip ] >[ Moderator's response: > If the Nostratic evidence independently requires 4 series of stops which > oppose voicing and aspiration, and it can be shown that in Indo-European > the Nostratic voiceless aspirates collapse together with the voiceless > plains, well and good: Cite the etymologies which support this claim. If you want me to cite individual etymologies, I will be glad to do so but I have collected a great number of them, illustrating this relationship, in my Afrasian essay at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3.htm [ Moderator's response: I want to see not only individual etymologies, I want to see an exposition of the sound laws which drive them. I want to see not only "the roots of verbs" but "the forms of grammar", such that "no philologer could examine them ... without believing them to be sprung from some common source." --rma ] > Otherwise, > the Nostratic evidence has nothing to offer for the reconstruction of a > series of voiceless aspirates in Indo-European; the few which are claimed > are the result of clusters of voiceless plain+laryngeal (specifically, > *H_2), although there are those who see the Skt. voiceless aspirates as > evidence of Prakrit interference (as the development of *sC to CCh in the > Prakrits would provide a source for a hypercorrection of Skt. **sC to the > attested sCh, where represents any voiceless plain stop) and do not even > accept this laryngeal development while otherwise fully accepting > laryngeals. I could grant that all occurrences of aspirated voiceless stops in Sanskrit were the result of voiceless stops + H, and still assert that voiceless aspirated stops should be reconstructed for earliest IE. Actually, what I have found is that most Sanskrit aspirated voiceless stops *do* correspond to Afrasian affricates, which is what Egyptian ', D, H, x, and some b, started out being. Pat [ Moderator's response: You could assert it, but you have not proven it. Please remember that this is the Indo-European list, and that a relationship with Egyptian cannot be *assumed* for your argument, but rather must be demonstrated using accepted comparative methodology which addresses the standard model of Indo-European. --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 06:26:59 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 00:26:59 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Glen Gordon Date: Wednesday, March 03, 1999 11:42 PM >...but IE laws must be obeyed first and foremost. Odd reconstructions >with a voiced aspirate must first be fully supportable internally within >the IE data before pulling Nostratic into this. I think you are a little behind the discussion. I know of no one, including myself, who is suggesting *nekhw-. Alexis and I have suggested *negh-w-(to-). >If we maintain the traditional IE reconstruction of the sort *nekwt, >this may not necessarily disobey any Nostratic sound correspondances. It >all depends on what external cognates you bring into the ante. It is not necessary to being Nostratic cognates into the discussion to suggest negh- rather than nek-. Hittite nekuz should be good evidence for negh- unless you want to maintain that Sturtevant incorrectly assumed that voiceless consonants were intervocalically indicated by doubling. If it was nek, it should be Hittite **nekkuz. >I've seen >Bomhard's *nitl- for instance which I personally would re-reconstruct as >Nostratic *nukw (with trailing labiovelar). I have a hard time accepting >something that evolves so strangely as *tl seems to, in context with the >fact that more straightforward sound correspondances seem to still offer >difficulty in this budding Nostratic field. What's more, the scantily >attested *tl can evolve into a plethora of different ways and makes it >too easy for anyone to say anything about the etymology especially since >this phoneme doesn't seem to survive in any reconstructed Nostratic >daughter language, let alone a written one. I disagree with Bomhard's [tl] also. >As Nostraticists seem to accept for the most part, a form like *nukw >would uneventfully become IE *nekw- as indeed we have in *nekwt with >additional neuter ending. Perhaps, the form exists in Uralic of the form >*nuk- although all I have seen is Finnish nukkua. [ moderator snip ] >I think IS or Dogolpolsky had a similar reconstructed item, one with an >Altaic language with */negu"/? I'll have to verify my info. >Note: Under Bomhard's *nitl, there is a Dravidian cognate *nik- that >would, if valid, seem to show a vowel shift of *u > *i like the one I >mentioned for the pronouns (cf. Nostratic *?u > *i-n > ya:n/yan-). What *nik- would indicate is that Nostratic *negh-w- did not pass the -w- into the preceding syllable. [e] to [i] would be a simple raising of the front vowel, a much commoner and likelier change. >Sorry, Dr. Krisnamurti, Dravidian may have laryngeals (ie yaHn) but I am >still not sure that they can explain every instance of long vowel. >At any rate, back to IE, IE *nekwt could come from earlier *nukw with no >insult to Nostraticists and yet no odd comparisons with Egyptian and >other unlike languages. *nukw in what language. If IE, it could only be *nekw or *nokw. [u] is not part of the apophonic variations. >A labial MUST be posited for both IE AND Nostratic (if we are to include IE >*nekwt in a Nostratic cognate series). Even when positing a form with *gh, we >still can't hide from the labial and in Nostratic terms, this means a labial >must be posited in some way (in my case, a velar labialized by preceding *u >which evolved to *e in IE but left behind the labial quality). A rather farfetched development. Pat From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Thu Mar 4 09:10:54 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:10:54 +0000 Subject: St Jerome In-Reply-To: <36D2C72B.8D728603@brigham.net> Message-ID: [ moderator snip ] Peter and or Graham said that Jerome wrote 'bad Latin'. Well, I suppose as Indo-Europeanists they don't feel obliged to know anything about sociolinguistics. I responded to say that Jerome was aware that his Latin fell short of Ciceronian standards, but that he had another agenda than writing good Latin, i.e. writing a good biblical translation which would be comprehensible and appealing to a lot of people. Maybe Peter and or Graham think you can apply abstract prescriptivist standards to texts written in the past, but I thought this was an attitude we had all agreed to leave behind in the 19th century. In those days editors used to 'correct'the language of medieval native speakers because of their (the editors') own theories about what was right or wrong. What Peter and or Graham _meant_ to say, I hope, was that Jerome's Latin, dating from the 4th century, gives us some insights into how the language was changing at that time, in that it does not conform to the standards of the classical language. Language change - something to do with language - something we're interested in on this list, or am I wrong? Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 4 11:46:41 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 03:46:41 PST Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay Message-ID: DLW: With regard to reconstructing 1sg pronouns, there is (or so I seem to recall) a cross-linguistic tendency for these to be formed with /m-/, probably from a weaker variant of what might be called the "mama syndrome": sounds that babies tend to make early tend to be pressed into service as words that mamas and babies might use to relate to each other, like "mama" and "me". So seeing a 1sg in /m-/ does not necessarily mean much. A "cross-linguistic tendency"?! Where is this drudged up from? I'm sorry but I can't possibly accept this. Ever considered that the "cross-linguistic tendency" is in fact hinting at genetic relationship? I have never heard of a language that suddenly drops its first person plural in favor of the "mama syndrome". Do you? I don't see how that could possibly be entertained to any sane degree. There are PLENTY of languages I could name off the top of my head that DO NOT have /m/ or even anything like this sound. Do Athapascans have special language genes that give them immunity to the "mama syndrome"? What about Abkhaz? Ingush? Chechen? Ket? Tligit? Tamil? Telugu? Mandarin? Cantonese? Chaozhou? Georgian? Svan? Yucatec? Ojibway? Cree? Does /n/ and /n,/ count too?? What about /t/? Hell let's be really mean and point to the fact that IE has *eg^oh (which in a Nostratic context would mean that in fact IE had replaced what used to be a pronoun with *m- as is found in the enclitic *me. [ moderator snip ] what I'm talking about involves an entire SET of pronouns, not just 1rst person and I'm obviously not saying that every language in the whole world that happens to contain /m/ in 1rst person is related (and in fact I can't think of a language, outside the realms of Nostratic, a language group that restricts itself mostly around Eurasia and Middle East, that has /m/ in first person!) Keep this in context with the other pronouns and don't dilute the topic with focus on a rare if not impossible language phenomenon. Although pronouns can change, they aren't easily replaced. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From jrader at m-w.com Thu Mar 4 09:06:25 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:06:25 +0000 Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: Nearly twenty years ago I heard Eric Hamp give an account of Georgiev's lecture. As I recall Hamp telling it, Georgiev thought that Etruscan practically WAS Hittite, i.e., that Etruscan was an Anatolian language. The audience didn't contest his thesis out of sheer stupefaction, not because they agreed. Gueterbock walked out of the lecture shaking his head and saying "Very interesting, very interesting!" Jim Rader > Vladimir Georgiev [Sofia] held that Etruscan was early IE and related to > Hittite. > He presented his data to a meeting of linguists at the University of Chicago > around 1968: > nobody contested his data nor his thesis. > j p maher [ moderator snip ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 14:50:43 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 08:50:43 -0600 Subject: Greek question Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Miguel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Date: Thursday, March 04, 1999 1:46 AM >"Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: >>I agree that *nokt- is not satisfactory. But, on the basis of *neuk-, >>'dark', I believe it likeliest that there were two basically equivalent >>roots: *negh- and *neugh-. >I fail to understand. If you can get *neugh- "on the basis of" >*neuk-, just like that, then what has this whole discussion, >starting with the problem of Greek nukh-, been about? I have changed my opinion some time ago since this was written. I am now proposing *nnegh-w-. >What's the problem, if *gh and *k, *kw and *gwh are all interchangeable >anyway? Yes, that is the problem. I feel that Hittite nekuz rather decisively indicates either *negh-w- or *neg[w]-. For me, but perhaps not for others, Egyptian nHzi tips the balance in favor of *negh-; also, there are the divergent Greek forms with -kh-. >*neuk- "dark", apart from having the wrong vowel and the wrong >second consonant in the context of whether "night" comes from >*nekw-t- or *negwh-t-, is hardly credible as a PIE root, at least >based on the flimsy evidence given for it in Pokorny (Baltic and >one doubtful Latin word). Probably just irregular reflexes of >*leuk- (or maybe *ne-leuk-?) I doubt that it is an irregular reflex of (ne-)leuk- though I had not thought of that as a possibility. As I previously wrote on this list, I believe that *neuk- started out as *negh-w- also, and that the root-extension -s devoiced the -gh in it, just as the -t, devoiced the -gh in *nek[w]-(t)-. As for its reconstruction and flimsy attestation, if *negh-w- were the basis for both, as I think likely, Pokorn's entry should be emended to *negh-(w)-, 'dark', with root extensions -t, 'night', and -s, 'dark'. Pat From manaster at umich.edu Thu Mar 4 14:59:09 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:59:09 -0500 Subject: Greek question In-Reply-To: Message-ID: That's correct. On Tue, 23 Feb 1999 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance, but all examples of > Bartholomae's Law that I am aware involve a morpheme boundary, where, if > assimilation had gone in the other way, information from the root would > have been lost. So perhaps it is not simply a sound-change, and would not > necessarily apply internally. > Just a suggestion ... From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 15:00:03 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:00:03 -0600 Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Thursday, March 04, 1999 1:54 AM [ moderator snip ] >>Bomhard mentions an IE *e- 1rst person pronoun that I don't recall >>actually attested. >This is the demonstrative H4V, 'here', but because H4 did not inhibit >apophony, it appears in the IE dictionary as e-; H1V, 'there', would also >have yielded e-, and so the distinction between proximal and distal was >lost. >[ Moderator's comment: > *H_4 is the "a-coloring" laryngeal that does *not* appear as in > Hittite, so would not lead to *e- in any dictionary. > --rma ] Sorry about that. I have also since been told that H4 is not generally accepted as a "laryngeal". So please let me explain it this way, and you tell me how it it should be notated. Nostratic ?a, 'here'; ?e, 'there'; both lead to IE *e-. Pat [ Moderator's response: One of the problems I have in accepting Nostratic is the vowel system, which does not provide for the Indo-European vowel system which we reconstruct. I cannot tell you what notation to use, therefore, in a Nostratic context. I will insist that when you use Indo-European notations, you use them correctly to avoid confusion. --rma ] From manaster at umich.edu Thu Mar 4 15:06:02 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 10:06:02 -0500 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Surely not in terms of basic vocabulary. On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [ moderator snip ] > But before 1500, Spanish & Portuguese were farther apart than they are now. From manaster at umich.edu Thu Mar 4 14:59:57 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:59:57 -0500 Subject: Greek question In-Reply-To: <006201be5f9a$d5d10440$38d3fed0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: For once I agree with the moderator. On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: [ moderator snip ] >I have found that Egyptian k corresponds to IE g(g^) and k(k^); ditto T >(bar-t) for g and k only; but Egyptian H (dot-h) corresponds to IE gh(g^h) >and k(h)(k^(h)); ditto x (hook-h) for gh and k(h) only. [ moderator snip ] >[ Moderator's response: > If the Nostratic evidence independently requires 4 series of stops which > oppose voicing and aspiration, and it can be shown that in Indo-European the > Nostratic voiceless aspirates collapse together with the voiceless plains, > well and good: Cite the etymologies which support this claim. Otherwise, > the Nostratic evidence has nothing to offer for the reconstruction of a > series of voiceless aspirates in Indo-European; the few which are claimed are > the result of clusters of voiceless plain+laryngeal (specifically, *H_2), > although there are those who see the Skt. voiceless aspirates as evidence of > Prakrit interference (as the development of *sC to CCh in the Prakrits would > provide a source for a hypercorrection of Skt. **sC to the attested sCh, > where represents any voiceless plain stop) and do not even accept this > laryngeal development while otherwise fully accepting laryngeals. > --rma ] From manaster at umich.edu Thu Mar 4 15:08:10 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 10:08:10 -0500 Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <002401be60bd$520e31e0$5c9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I do not believe that there is anything which the current "laryngeal" theory > explains that tis re-formulation of it will not equally well explain. This is what you have not even begun to demonstrate, as you well know from our pruivate discussions, so it does not seem right to me to make this claim. [ moderator snip ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 4 15:11:44 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 09:11:44 -0600 Subject: gender Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Thursday, March 04, 1999 6:03 AM >[ Moderator's response: > What does your version of the laryngeal theory have to say about the Greek > anatyptic vowels? How does it deal with the Indo-Iranian data (Skt. -i-, > Iranian -0-)? For that matter, how does it explain the other ablaut data > that led Saussure to his formulation in the first place? > --rma ] I am trying to put together a better exposition of the idea now; and when I have, I will make it available on a page at my website. However, if you want to outline one particular "problem", I will attempt to address it on the list. Pat [ Moderator's response: Let us know when you have written it up. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 17:34:36 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 17:34:36 GMT Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word In-Reply-To: <19990224115854.12484.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >Hello, It's Glenny again, >Now that I have the source before me... Under Allan Bomhard's >"208. nitl[h]-/netl[h]- 'to rise, to arise; to lift, to raise; to >move'", there is: >IE *nek-/*nok- "to bear, to carry, to convey" > (I've never seen this root. Does anyone know? I can only think > of Latin nex and nocere - different things altogether. "To > convey"? Isn't that conveyed with *g^no-s(k)-?) *nek^ => Slavic nes- etc. (See Pokorny under *enek^-, *nek^-, *enk^-, *nk^- "reichen, erreichen, erlangen", Grk, BS: "tragen"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 4 17:56:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 11:56:12 -0600 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word In-Reply-To: <19990224115854.12484.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: If I may throw in my semi-informed 2 cents/pence/pfennig/hundredths of a Euro, etc. There's a classic case in Romance phonology that included /tl/ vetus > vetulus > *vEtlu > *vEklu > *vEkyu [> Italian vecchio /vEkkyo/], *velyu [> French vielle (fem.) /vyiey, vyiey@/, Portuguese velho /vELo/, Spanish viejo /ByeHo, Byexo/] The masculine form of vielle, of course, is vieux, which, on the face of it, seems to come from *vEkyu, rather than *vElyu If this case is typical, wouldn't such a form as *netl also evolve with a palatal? If not, please explain [snip] >Now that I have the source before me... Under Allan Bomhard's >"208. nitl[h]-/netl[h]- 'to rise, to arise; to lift, to raise; to >move'", there is: > [snip] >Taking out AA (the only one with *tl), we're left with a clearer view. >However, I would go out on a limb and say that rather than the IE >cognate attested above, I would throw in IE *nekwt instead and possibly >Finnish nukkua "to sleep" (There's got to be a relation somehow with >nukkua) and that it all points to *nukw "to sleep" ("to sleep" -> "to >awaken"; "to sleep" -> "to sleep over" -> "to migrate"). Any Uralicists >in the house? > >In all, I haven't personally verified the reconstructions yet, so anyone >is open to suspicions but so far this is my idea on the origin of IE >*nekwt. > >-------------------------------------------- >Glen Gordon >glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's response: There is a serious mixing of levels here, in that a Romance-specific development is being projected back to Nostratic, although other Indo- European languages do not have this phonotactic constraint, e. g. Greek. Before we can even accept it as a parallel, we have to determine what the digraph represents in Bomhard, a unit phoneme or a cluster. --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 4 18:01:42 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 12:01:42 -0600 Subject: Salmon. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: It's been pointed out by various people that words now used for salmon could have referred to trout or any other such fish. So, you might want to superimpose a map for trout. > This stuff about the supposed distribution of salmon has been >bothering me for a while (15 yrs?). I do not happen to have Grzimek's >Encyclopedia of Animal Life (or whatever it is called) on me right now, >but I could have sworn it states that there are salmon (non-spawning, >perhaps?) in the Danube. So perhaps there is something to this /lak/ >stuff after all. > > DLW From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 17:57:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 17:57:07 GMT Subject: Trojan and Etruscan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > As for the occurence of /s/, /sk/, /sh/ (English value), and /y/ >(again English value) to represent the third consonant, these are for the >most part various efforts to represent /sh/ in languages that did not have >that sound. (Egyptian did.) We see various apsects of /sh/ conveyed in >any one of the other renderings: sibilance in /s/, palatality in /y/, >retraction from /s/ in /sk/. The problem is that you're mixing up various reflexes from various languages here. The Latin forms with -sc- (Tusci, Tuscania/Toscana, Etrusci) are simply extensions of the roots Tu(r)s- and Etrus- with the Latin adjectival suffix -cus (*-ko-). Now assuming Greek Trooa is from the same root, it can be derived from *Trosia, with Greek loss of intervocalic -s-, just like Latin Etruria < *Etrusia with intervocalic -s- > -r-. Again the suffix -ia is Latin and Greek, not necessarily Tyrrhenian. Which reminds me, there is also Greek Tyrrhe:n- < *turse:n-. > For the vowel, it is difficult to decide between /o/ or /u/, but >as /a/ occurs in some words that might be additional variants >(tarhuntassa, tauros, tarsus, tarquin), with lowering before /r/ being the >culprit in these, I favor /o/. Thus the original form would be /trosha/. Etruscan didn't have /o/, and Lemnian (close to Troy) didn't have /u/, so Etruscan *Trusia would correspond to Lemnian *Trosia. What keeps bugging me is whether there is any relationship between *turs(en)- ~ *trus- and the Etruscan name for themselves < *rasenna. Something like *tu-rasenna- might work, but what are we to do with a prefix *tu- in a suffixing language like Etruscan? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 4 18:18:41 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 12:18:41 -0600 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: <93726038.36d4e353@aol.com> Message-ID: Actually, it's much easier for Portuguese & Spanish speakers to speak about sophisticated subjects because the vocabulary is even closer. When people speak about simple subjects, they tend to use slang or --at the least-- more idiomatic. I'd say the difference is pretty much like the difference between a standard version of English and a patois version, or between American & a local British dialect or non-standard Jamaican English. There is no such language as "Gallego-Spanish". There is, however, galego or Galician, called gallego in Spanish. It is closer to Portuguese than to Spanish and, in my experience, is more difficult to understand than Brazilian Portuguese or standard Continental Portuguese. The Galician literary standard, however, is a bit easier to read. But Galician is a series of spoken dialects. Note: Spanish lobo /loBo/ Portuguese lobo /loBu, lobu/ Galician /tsoBu, shoBu, LoBu/ >-- good point. Portugese and Castillian are -still- mutually comprehensible, >in the sense that speakers of each can, if they speak slowly and on simple >subjects, understand each other. (Personal experience.) >And if you use Gallego-Spanish rather than Castillian, the resemblance is even >closer. >It's comparable to the distance between Netherlandic and German. From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 19:19:25 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 19:19:25 GMT Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I may have missed someoneelse's response but I've seen several >cases where Hittite is from from /t/. So wouldn't there be a fair >chance that nek(uz) is from *nek(ut)? And that *nek(ut) < *nekwt Hittite can come from palatalized /t/ + /i/ or /e/, as in the 3rd.p.sg. ending -zzi (< *-ti). In this case, however, it's from /t/ + nominative /s/. The spelling stands for /nekwt-s/. The problem is that we would expect if the word is to be derived from PIE *nekwt- ~ *nokwt-. The single suggests PIE *g(h)w. > BTW: is Hittite /dz, z^/, /ts,c/ or /z/? >[By /z^/ I mean a sound similar to of English >or the "soft" voiced in Italian. Hittite spelling does not distinguish voiced and voiceless consonants, but it does distinguish (in medial position at least) C from CC, where usually the single consonant etymologically derives from a PIE voiced one and the geminate from a PIE voiceless consonant. Whether this means that was /ts/ and /dz/, or that we must take Hittite spelling literally and read as /tts/ and as /ts/ is a matter of interpretation. I favour the latter view. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 20:03:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 20:03:07 GMT Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia In-Reply-To: <36BECAC9.342D918F@mail.lrz-muenchen.de> Message-ID: Due to the interruption of mailing list traffic and my impression that this message was addressed to me only, I answered privately to Wolfgang Schulze' message close to a month ago. Here is another response. wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal schrieb: >> I tend think of North Caucasian (NEC/NWC) as the >> primary candidate for the original language of the steppe lands. >> The Northern Caucasus is a "residual zone", in Johanna Nichols' >> terminology. It contains the linguistic residue of the peoples >> that were once dominant in the neighbouring "spread zone" (the >> steppe). >Do you have any LINGUISTIC proof or at least some indications that would >justify such an assumption? My argument was not specifically linguistic, but historico-geographical. It is a matter of simple observation that the North Caucasian zone harbours the linguistic residues of what once were the predominant populations in the steppe zone to the north of it. The predominant language now is Slavic, but we find Mongolian (Kalmuck) and Turkic (Nogai, Balkar etc.) enclaves in the North Caucasus zone. Ossetic remains as the residue of the Scytho-Sarmatian predominance in the steppe zone before the coming of the Turks. The logical next step is to think that NWC and NEC are also North Caucasian remnants of populations that were once predominant in the steppe *before* the coming of Iranian and Indo-European. Especially so if one, like me, rejects the notion of a steppe homeland for PIE. Of course, if one accepts the steppe homeland hypothesis, the thought that NWC and NEC might also be "residual" pre-IE populations never crosses one's mind, which is why Johanna Nichols herself ("The Epicentre of the IE Linguistic Spread" [in: Blench/Spriggs, "Archaeology and Language", 1997]) uses NWC and NEC linguistic data (borrowings from ANE languages) as a *fixed* reference point to measure the distance of "mobile" PIE and PKartv from the Near East, as if it were a given that PWC and PEC had been in their present positions "forever". That being said, what LINGUISTIC evidence would we expect to find for a former presence of NEC and/or NWC in the Pontic-Caspian steppe? I don't think the "horse" word is relevant: horses were domesticated in the steppe by Indo-European speakers after the supposed replacement of PEC and PWC speakers by IE speakers. This replacement would have been one by (Sub-)Neolithic pastoralists/agriculturalists (IE) of prior Mesolithic (PWC/PEC) populations, which requires very little contact between the two groups (the Mesolithic population just gets instantly outnumbered), so I wouldn't expect PWC/PEC toponyms surviving or a significant amount of PWC/PEC borrowings into Eastern IE. The only linguistic arguments would be if NWC or NEC could be linked up to languages to the north and east of the Pontic-Caspian steppe. In that sense, Starostin's Sino-Caucasian interests me for the consequences it may have for the PIE homeland. I don't know enough about Caucasian and Sino-Tibetan linguistics to evaluate the proposals, even if I had seen all of them. However, my mind was somewhat prepared to consider Sino-Caucasian as a possibility because, before I had ever heard of Sino-Caucasian or Starostin, I had discovered for myself some interesting parallels between NWC, NEC and ST numerals. For instance: Tib Lak Lezg Ubyx Adyghe 1. g-cig ca sa za z@ 2. g-nis [k.i q.we tq.wa t.w@] 3. g-sum s^an [pu] ssa s^@ 4. b-zhi [muq. q.u] pL'@ pL'@ 5. l-nga [xxyu wa s^x'@ tf@] 6. d-rug ryax rugu [f@ x'@] 7. b-dun [arul iri bl@ bL@] 8. br-gyad myay mu"z^u" g'w@ y@ 9. d-gu urc^. k.u" bg'@ bg'w@ 10. b-cu ac. c.u z^w@ ps.'@ There may be something there. Not that this, if true, proves a genetic connection (numerals are easily borrowed), but it may at least suggest ancient contacts between the NC groups and (S)Tib, and the only logical place for this to have happened is the Central Asian steppe. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam [ Moderator's note: This is moving away from Indo-European; perhaps a shift to the Nostratic list is indicated for follow-ups other than to the IE portions above. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 4 20:16:04 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 15:16:04 EST Subject: IE and Substrates Message-ID: I think we should keep in mind that the European linguistic situation in historical times is probably much simpler than it was in the Mesolithic or early Neolithic. Reasoning by analogy from the situation in New Guinea or eastern pre-Columbian North America, there were probably _many_ more languages and language-families in Europe before the Indo-European expansion. Not just one or a few non-IE families which were then replaced by Indo-European. The IE expansion would then represent a massive linguistic simplification, a "reformatting" of a previously crowded scene. From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 4 20:11:20 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 20:11:20 -0000 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word Message-ID: Glen Gordon said: >IE *nek-/*nok- "to bear, to carry, to convey" > (I've never seen this root. Does anyone know? Try: Avestan fra-nas- = to bring; (nas = to reach) Vedic naSa:mi = to reach Greek e:negkon, ene:nokha, etc all < e-nek- (aorist and perfect forms of) to carry Old Norse nest = provisions for a journey OCS nesti etc to carry, bear, bring Lithuanian neSu etc. Latvian nesu etc. I don't have a Pokorny, but I suspect this is one of the cognates not to be found in him. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 4 20:23:12 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 20:23:12 -0000 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: > BTW: is Hittite /dz, z^/, /ts,c/ or /z/? No doubt someone will prove me wrong, but I believe Hittite was deciphered at first by German speakers - so z was used as in German, which is a great pain. It = /ts/. Peter From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 4 20:25:24 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 20:25:24 GMT Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > With regard to reconstructing 1sg pronouns, there is (or so I seem >to recall) a cross-linguistic tendency for these to be formed with /m-/, >probably from a weaker variant of what might be called the "mama >syndrome": sounds that babies tend to make early tend to be pressed into >service as words that mamas and babies might use to relate to each other, >like "mama" and "me". I don't think so. > So seeing a 1sg in /m-/ does not necessarily mean much. This is true (although seeing 1sg in /m-/ AND 2sg. in /t-/, or 1sg. in /n-/ AND 2sg. in /k-/ may definitely mean more). There is, I think, a cross-linguistic tendency for (personal) pronouns to be short forms. For instance, in PIE they show a pattern CV where verbal and nominal roots have at least CVC. The same thing is true for many other language families, although I have not made a study of this. In that sense, seeing a 1sg. form apparently based on *mV- doesn't mean much in itself, especially given the fact that /m/ is a phoneme that is present and common in the overwhelming majority of the world's languages. I also haven't made a study of phoneme frequencies the world over, but my impression is that the general monosyllabicity of pronominal stems and the relatively high frequency of the phoneme /m/, plus "number of pronominal stems to be distinguished" versus "number of phonemes in the language" are sufficient to explain the number of languages that have 1p.sg. *mV- (which really isn't *that* large, I'd say 10-20%). No need for a "mama-effect". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de Thu Mar 4 21:02:45 1999 From: w.behr at em.uni-frankfurt.de (WB (in Frankfurt today)) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 22:02:45 +0100 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: At 13:30 25.02.99 -0500, Alexis wrote: AMR| I have yet to AMR| see any real debate of the SC hypothesis. If there is any AMR| competent comment on this hypothesis, pro or con, I would AMR| appreciate references. Well, take a look at Alexander Vovin's excellent review article on WSY Wang ed. (1995), _The ancestry of the Chinese language_ (_Journal of CHinese Linguistics 25[1997]2: 308-336) for starts. Sasha demon- strates that Starostin's SC reconstruction rests on multiple correspon- dances not showing any trace of phonological conditioning (ST *-t, for instance, has no less than 17 PNC correspondances!), that "there is anything but regularity", that SC "with its 150 or 180 consonants does not even remotely resemble a human language", and that Starostin introduces rather dubious rules of root reduction (a la Paul King Benedict), which are even contradicted by his own etymologies. Vovin concludes (fair enough, I must say!), "In my opinion, the Sino-Cua- casian theory in the shape as it is presented is better placed on the back burner, until more regular and phonologically motivated corres- pondances can be offered." If I remember things correctly, there will be a workshop on SC in Cambridge (at the McDonald Institute of Archeo- logy) sometime this year, so maybe we will see a convincing defense of Starostin before long ??? Cheers, Wolfgang ps, re: AMR| I don't know what Miguel views of Sino-Caucasian are, but I AMR| do know that these kinds of speculations are precisely grist AMR| to the mill of those, like Wolfgang, who are perhaps all AMR| too eager to dismiss the SC theory w/o a proper evaluation. Oh well... for Wolfgang Schulze's _very proper_ evaluation of the C-part of SC, cf. his review of Starostin & Nikolayev in _Diachronica_ 1997.1: 149-161. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 4 21:41:20 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 13:41:20 PST Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: >>>Etruscan is non-Indo-European. Hell, we can't even read it! >>Oh, but we can! There is general agreement on the values of the >>letters and a large proportion of the inscriptions can be >>translated without much difficulty. >There are also words in Latin said to be of Etruscan origin [e.g. >satelles, persona, etc.] as well non-IE substrate common to Latin & >Greek that may from Etruscan and/or a congener [I think form-/morph- >are among them] While there are things like "grandson" which look much like loans from Latin, when you find enormous coincidences that couldn't possibly have been borrowed into Etruscan from Latin or Greek such as "in front of" with the initial laryngeal or "build, found", you really have to start wondering about a genetic relationship of some kind with IE, especially when there is a pattern of unique sound correspondances to boot. Even Anatolian borrowings don't cut it because of those pesky grammatical elements that won't go away. So amidst all this data I would personally say that anyone that doesn't agree that IE and Etruscan are genetically related by now are the ones that are truly gaga. So get ye to a library! :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Mar 5 05:19:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 00:19:57 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: In a message dated 1/26/99 8:32:31 AM, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: <> Returning my question about Why *p>f?: The answer most commonly given related either to social causes or in a certain case to some tendency towards aspiration. There is another explanation however. It suggests that Germanic seems "archaic" not because it split-off early as Miquel suggests above, but because it emerged very late. And it explains p>f not as a "sound shift," but as a fundamental part of the conversion from a non-IE to an IE language by German speakers. John Hawkins in Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages (1987) (p.70-71) puts the general case for this, using a migration theory: "At least two facts suggest that the pre-Germanic speakers migrated to their southern Scandanavian location sometime before 1000BC and that they encountered a non-IE speaking people from whom linguistic features were borrowed that were to have a substantial impact on the developement of Proto-Germanic." Hawkins goes on to mention the 30% non-IE vocabulary that is being documented on this list. He also goes to another piece of evidence: "...the consonantal changes of the First Sound Shift are unparalleled in their extent elsewhere in Indo-European and suggest that speakers of a fricative-rich language with no voiced stops made systematic conversions of Indo-European sounds into their own nearest equivalents..." Both Hawkins and Comrie assumed, of course, that there was a migration - which we now have strong reason to believe did not occur, given both Cavalli-Sforza's evidence and the recent mDNA findings that show even less evidence of any meaningful migration. And - and this is key - if there was no migration, then the change that Hawkins speaks about - conversion of IE sounds to a fricative-rich language with no voiced stops - MUST HAVE HAPPENED right from the beginning of German. It makes no sense to think that Germanic speakers first adopted proper IE sounds and then returned to their former non-IE accents. This means the First Germanic Sound Shift ACTUALLY reflects the presrvation of prior non-IE sounds during conversion to an IE language. AND it would mean that the First Sound Shift must have happened at the time the IE language was first introduced. In other words, there was no Germanic *p> Germanic f. There was no proto-Germanic *pemke (five). Because the non-IE speakers had no reason to drop the /f/ in adopting the IE word and then go back later and sound shift back to it. And, BTW, this explanation of how the First "Sound Shift" happened is far more reasonable than postulating a massive arbitrary later adoption of those sound changes. Or an unexplainable impulse to fricatives, etc. Germanic as IE "with an accent" explains the "shift" with a consistent underlying reason (a partial conversion from non-IE) that works across the board for all former speakers of that earlier language rather than being a later "trend" that coincidentally got picked up by all Germanic speakers but somehow was rejected by all non-Germanic speakers. That kind of subtle consensus is improbable. (Because he is postulating a mass migration, Hawkins uses the words "systematic conversion" to IE, which seems to postulate some Proto-Germanic Academy of Language. An non-IE accent is much more plausible for the universality of the sound change in German-speakers and total non-adoption by any others IE speaking group.) If the First "Sound Shift" actually marks the conversion of a non-IE language into IE Germanic, then it was only completed around 500BC (according to Hawkins and Comrie.) And this would have many implications for our understanding of the history and spread of IE languages. For one thing it would not make sense to talk about "proto-Germanic" branching off a "proto-IndoEuropean" core. There would have been no PIE at this point in time. Germanic would have had to have been acquired from a SPECIFIC existing IE language or languages. (I even think I have a candidate for that language and somewhat documented historical circumstances.) And there is nothing inconsistent with this archaeologically. I don't think I need to repeat the often repeated dictum that we have no reason to think Corded Ware/Battle Axe cultural evidence tells us in any way what language was spoken by those who left it behind. Or that any change in language from non-IE to IE would be marked by any noticeable change in that material evidence, since it was preliterate. Finally, as a reality check, it should be remembered that we have no solid evidence of Germanic before 300ace. If IEGermanic was finally formed some short time before 500bce, then that would mean 800 years passed before the Gothic Bible was written down. 800 years was sufficient for Gallic to be replaced entirely by the new language of French. Yet less remains of Gallic among the contiguous population of France then remains of non-IE among the Germans. There is really no need and no evidence that would necessarily extend the emergence of an IE proto-Germanic much before 500bce. Respectfully, Steve Long [ Moderator's comment: And what of the very similar, though completely separate, Armenian shift? --rma ] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 5 11:29:34 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 11:29:34 +0000 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > But before 1500, Spanish & Portuguese were farther apart than they are now. > Rick Mc Callister Oh yeah? Who says? It wouldn't take long to list some significant changes in Spanish since 1500 which have moved it away from Portuguese. But it won't be worth it without a good reason to believe the claim made above. 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 maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 5 14:18:29 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 14:18:29 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Many thanks to Rick McCallister for these interesting lists (only recently received, since forwarded by our moderator from Nostratic, which I'm not on. One thing is not clear to me. What is the significance of the presence in the list of Romance borrowings from Germanic (?all from Vennemann 1984)? Is it because the etyma are not themselves attested in Germanic? This might be the case for Fr heraut (> Eng herald) < Frk *herialt, or Fr honte < Frk *haunitha. In which case, is it being suggested that these words don't have plausible etymologies within Germanic, or IE cognates? [according to Onions, ODEE, herald is orig from Gc *xariwald- < *xarjaz `army' + *wald- `rule'.] But this wouldn't seem to apply to the entries like It. guatare, in connection with which Meyer-L?bke, Romanisches etymologisches W?rterbuch, cites Frk wahta (REW 9477c) and Langobardic wahtari (REW 9478), without asterisks. [And Onions, ODEE gives OHG wahten, s.v. wait.] (And as Germanic words, the entries with Romance guV- belong under w-, and the French with e'c(h)- belong under sk-.) 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 ERobert52 at aol.com Fri Mar 5 16:43:16 1999 From: ERobert52 at aol.com (ERobert52 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 11:43:16 EST Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: jpmaher at neiu.edu wrote: > Vladimir Georgiev [Sofia] held that Etruscan was early IE and > related to Hittite. > ... > nobody contested his data nor his thesis. > ERobert52 at aol.com wrote: >> No sensible person thinks Etruscan is IE, and most people who say >> it is are pretty wacky, A comparison of Etruscan with Hittite and the other Anatolian languages shows some similar features such as noun declension endings and the role of clitics, indeed some of the clitics are the same. Some possible cognate lexical items have also been pointed to. These are either due to chance, Sprachbund, borrowing, a substrate, or a genetic relationship. However, all other things being equal, the common ancestor of such a genetic relationship would need to be at a date prior to the break-up between Proto-Anatolian and the rest of IE because Etruscan is less similar to the rest of IE than the Anatolian languages are. What is clear is that Etruscan cannot constitute a branch of IE on a par with, say, Celtic or Albanian, let alone be a member of such a branch, despite repeated efforts to prove the contrary over the years by e.g. Mayani, Gruamach etc. by attempting to look up Etruscan words in a modern dictionary for the relevant language group that they want to claim a relationship with. Sometimes similar suggestions even involve throwing in some inscriptions that are actually Umbrian or Venetic and lo and behold, Etruscan is suddenly IE. I would describe these approaches as not sensible. I discovered another website today where somebody's "research" had led them to the conclusion that Etruscan was actually Ukrainian (not even Proto-Slav, nor OCS, but Ukrainian). This I call wacky. This should be contrasted with points of view such as the idea that Etruscan forms part of a longer range construct including but prior to IE (Kretschmer), or has some sort of affinity with certain Anatolian languages (Stoltenberg), which are points of view that deserve to be treated seriously, although their linguistic evidence is, understandably, a bit slim. I believe Georgiev was saying something perfectly reasonable similar to this. On a related matter, there is obviously some sort of connection between Etruscan and western Anatolia given the historical references from several sources linking the Etruscans to Lydia. Frank Rossi speculated recently (on historical grounds) that there might be an Etruscan substrate in Lydian. However as far as I can see there is no more linguistic evidence that would link Etruscan with Lydian than would link Etruscan with Hittite. Or am I missing something? Ed. Robertson From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Mar 8 18:07:11 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 10:07:11 -0800 Subject: Salmon. Message-ID: >salmon in the Danube. Salmon trout are found in the Danube according to Mallory - but not the other kind of salmon. Peter From xdelamarre at siol.net Sat Mar 6 00:31:27 1999 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 01:31:27 +0100 Subject: Non IE words in early Celtic Message-ID: Reply to Rick Mc Callister : 1/ *abol- (*a:b- with Lex Winter) "apple" : Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, possibly Thracian or Dacian (the gloss dinupula < *k'un-a:bo:la:). Enough to have IE status. Considered as non-IE because of -b-, itself considered as non-IE, circular. 2/ *aliso "alder": add Slavic jelicha, Russ. _ol'cha_, lithuanian _alksnis_, Latin _alnus_ (*alisnos). Enough to have IE status. 3/ Gaulish _bra:ca_ : latin _suffra:go:_ "jarret" (<*bhra:g- "cul"), cf after Schrader, O. Szemenenyi (An den Quellen des lateinischen Wortschatzes, 117-18). 4/ Gaulish _bri:ua_ "bridge" (cf place names Caro-briua, Briuo-duron etc.), germanic *bro:wo: & *bruwwi: (> bridge etc.), OCS _bruvuno_ "poutre, rondin", Serbian _brv_ "passerelle" (prob. the original meaning). 5/ Germanic _bukkaz_, clearly an expressive gemination of *bhug'o- (Avestic _buza_) etc. 6/ Gaulish _dunum_ "enclosed place", Germanic *tu:na- (> town, Zaun etc.) ; C. Watkins, Select. Writ. 2, 751-53, has related Hittite _tuhhusta_ "finish, come to an end, come full circle" (cf Latin _fu:-nes-_ < *dhu:-). A possibility : I am a bit suspicious because it is a root-etymology. 7/ *gwet- "resin" : not only Celtic-Germanic, (Latin _bitu-men_, may come also from Osco-Umbrian), but O.Ind. _jatu-_ "Lack, Gummi", Mayrhofer EWAia 1, 565. 8/ Gaulish (& Celtic) _i:sarno_ "iron" : explained convincingly by W. Cowgill as the regular reflex of IE _*e:sr-no-_ "the bloody (red) metal" (Idg Gramm. 1,1). 9/ Gaulish canto- "edge, circle" : explained by O. Szemerenyi, Scrip. Min. 4, 2036-38, as _*kmto-_ from a root _*kem-_ 'cover'. A possibility. 10/ "lake" : add Greek _lakkos_ <*_lakwos_ "cisterna", OCS _loky_ "id." ; for the alternance a / o (as for the word 'sea' *mori/*mari), JE Rasmussen, Studien zur Morphophonemik der idg Spr. 239-40, has proposed an explanation. I hope to be able to present a more detailed account of these etymologies in my "Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise", to appear in the coming years. I do not believe very much in "Nordwestblock" theories (Hamp, Huld, recently Beekes, who does not think that *ab- "water" and *teuta: "people" are IE), taken from Meillet's "vocabulaire du nord-ouest" (by the way) : you can prove the antiquity of a designation (by a set of correspondences), but not draw conclusions in reason of its absence (argumentum e silentio) in a given dialect. The old problem of dialectology. A good example has been given recently : a lot of speculation, with sociological consequences, had been produced from the fact the Celtic had no representant of the canonic IE words for son & daughter (*su:nus, *dhugHte:r). The later word is now attested in the Plomb du Larzac as _duxtir_ ; by pure chance. the same is true of _lubi_ "love" (no trace of this IE root in insular Celtic) or _deuoxtonion_ gen. plur. "of Gods & Men" (no trace of dvandva compositum in ins. C.). etc. Xavier Delamarre Ljubljana From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 6 03:29:58 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 03:29:58 GMT Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: >Would your outline would be something like this? >Outliers are marked with * >I.IE to c. 5500 BCE >A. *Anatolian c. 5500 BCE >B. Non-Anatolian IE 5500 BCE > 1. *Tocharian c. 5000 BCE > 2. Eastern [Steppe] IE c. 5000/4500 BCE > a. Indo-Iranian 3200 BC > b. Greco-Armenian [Thracian?] 3200 BC > i. Hellenic > ii. *Armenian > iii. Thracian-Phrygian Too little is known about Thracian and Phrygian to call them. I've also grown rather dubious about Greco-Armenian. The similarities between Greek and Armenian (mainly in vocabulary) must be secondary, resulting from interaction in the Balkans, but Armenian must've split off from the main body of IE containing Greek earlier. > 3. Central/Western [LBK] IE c. 5000/4500 BCE > a. Germano-Balto-Slavic 4500-4000? BCE > i. Balto-Slavic 4000 BCE [GBS Sprachbund 3K-1K BCE] > ii. *Germanic 4000 BCE [GBS Sprachbund 3K-1K BCE] Same doubts about GBS as about Armeno-Greek. Secondary interactions. > b. Celto-Italic-Venetic-etc. [Illyrian?] 4500-2000 BCE? > i. Celtic 2000 BCE > ii. Italic 2000 BCE > iii. Venetic 2000 BCE > iv. ?Illyrian? 2000 BCE? > v. Lusitanian? 2000 BCE? Nothing is known about Illyrian, little about Venetic or Lusitanian. > And there the question of what Albanian is/was. > Is it the remains of whatever Balkan IE language was there before >Greco-Armenian? My feeling is that it's somewhat intermediate between Greek and Balto-Slavic, maybe leaning more towards the BS side. Although it also has some things in common with Italo-Celtic in the verbal system. It seems much more logical that it would be descended from Illyrian rather than from Thracian (much more Latin than Greek borrowings), and I can say that with impunity, as *nothing* is known about Illyrian (not even if it was a single language group). The diagram as I posted it some time ago: Stage 1. Anatolian splits off (actually, PIE (LBK) splits off: 5500). Anatolian <-- PIE Stage 2. Tocharian splits off (c. 5000 ?). Anatolian ; PIE --> Tocharian Stage 3. Germanic and Armenian split off (4000?). Anatolian ; Germanic <-- PIE --> Armenian ; Tocharian Stage 4/5. Final break-up of PIE (3500). Anatolian; Germanic ; Italo-Celtic <-- Greek-Indo-Iranian --> Balto-Slavic , Albanian ; Armenian ; Tocharian So the original tree would be: PIE / \ Anatolian /\ / \ /\ Tocharian / \ /\ /\ / | | \ Germanic | | Armenian | |\ Italo-Celtic | \ / \ Albanian / \ /\ Balto-Slavic / \ Greek Indo-Iranian After that, the situation was slightly complicated by secondary interactions between Germanic and Balto-Slavic, and Greek/Albanian/Armenian. Stage 6. Balkan and Baltic interaction spheres (3000-2500). Anatolian [Greece/Anatolia]; Greek/Albanian/Armenian [Balkan]; Italo-Celtic [Bell Beaker]; Germanic/Balto-Slavic [Corded Ware]; Indo-Iranian [(pre-)Andronovo]; Tocharian [Yenisei/Sinkiang] Stage 7. Further interactions (2000-1000). Anatolian/Armenian [Anatolia]; Greek/Albanian/Italic [Mediterranean]; Celtic/Germanic [NW Europe]; Balto-Slavic/Iranian [E Europe/C Asia/Iran]; Indic [India]; Tocharian[/Iranian] [Sinkiang] ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 6 03:50:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 03:50:55 GMT Subject: /Anatolian /-nt-/ and Greek /-nth-/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > Perhaps I am missing something here, but why should Anatolian >place-names with /-nt-/ (or for that matter /-nd-/) be borowed into Greek >with /-nth-/? Probably because Anatolian t was aspirated, or sounded aspirated to the Greeks. >I suppose we could say that the form was originally >/-ndh-/, but the Anatolian forms in /-nt/ are generally considered older. The IE etymon is *-nt- (probably identical to the Luwian/Slavic/Tocharian collective (plural) suffix *-(e/o)nt-). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 6 05:36:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 05:36:13 GMT Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >We know Renfrew's 7000 BCE is too early for PIE >because of the absence of the late-Neolithic innovations recorded in PIE in >7000 BCE. However, that vocabulary _is_ there in Anatolian. Let's take a closer look at this. What are these late Neolithic innovations? Mallory claims that such words as "wool", "milk", "plough" and "yoke" belong here, as central parts of the new vocabulary associated with the "Secondary Products Revolution" (Sherrat) of the late Neolithic. But surely there's no reason to think that words such as "milk" and "wool" didn't exist in the vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times. In the early Neolithic, sheep, goats and cattle were domesticated, and there is evidence for dairying of cattle in Northern European LBK sites. The plough was also used since the very beginning of the Neolithic, if only in the form of a branch or stick (Irish ce:cht, Gothic ho:ha, Slavic soxa; Skt. hala-). That leaves only "yoke", with the undoubted Hittite reflex as a possible candidate for being a late Neolithic innovation. I've been unable to find a reference to the first archaeological evidence for the yoke, and I gather that Sherrat's inclusion of the yoke in the "Secondary Products Revolution" toolset is mainly based on Sumerian depictions of it (Johanna Nichols compares PIE *yugom with PKartv. *uG-el- and PEC *r=u(L')L' (*r=u(k')k')). Another undoubted Late Neolithic innovation is metal working, but here the Hittite vocabulary is completely unrelated to the main IE one (except maybe the word for "white, silver" harki-). Finally, the principal lexical argument revolves around the horse and horse technology. The Hittite word for "horse" is unknown (aways written Sumerograpically as AN$E.KUR.RA), but there is a Luwian attestation: asuwa. This looks very much like an Indo-Iranian borrowing (Skt. as'va < PIE *ek^wos), were it not for the fact that Luwian "dog" is (PIE *k^won-). So either there was a satem-like Luwian sound law *k^w > sw, or Luwian borrowed both words from Mitanni-Aryan. Borrowing of the horse word is not surprising (the Hittite archives at Boghazko"y yielded a treatise on horses, containing a number of words of Indo-Iranian origin, written by a Mitannian called Kikkuli). Borrowing of the dog word seems less plausible (although Slavic sobaka is of course borrowed from Iranian as well). The other words related to horse technology yield no Hittite cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but , related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), except for two curious items: "shaft/pole", Hittite hissa ~ Skt. i:s.a:, Grk. oie:ks, Slav. oje(s)- and "(to) harness", Hittite turiia- ~ Skt. dhu:r-. It is, I believe, no coincidence that these are Hittite-Sanskrit isoglosses (if we discard the Greek and Slavic words for having different Ablaut). Again, the most likely explanation is that these are Mitanni-Aryan loanwords. After all, it would be rather strange to find the exact same inherited words for cultural items such "shaft" and "harness" when Hittite doesn't even share its basic kinship terminology with Indo-European and has a different word for "four". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 12:58:42 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 12:58:42 -0000 Subject: /Anatolian /-nt-/ and Greek /-nth-/ Message-ID: DLW asks: >why should Anatolian >place-names with /-nt-/ (or for that matter /-nd-/) be borowed into Greek >with /-nth-/? (a) a phonetic explanation: Hittite (as you probably know) shows only the voiceless stops. If there is no phonemic distinction between aspirate and unaspirated, or between voiced and voiceless in Hittite (although there may be between geminate and non-geminate), then we know nothing about the actual articulation. So perhaps the Greek borrowings, if they were borrowings, are genuine reflections of the actual phonetic value. (b) a non-phonetic explanation We should also note that borrowings into other languages from English sometimes have results that are odd to our eyes, and may be done for morphophonemic reasons, e.g. the Hebrew use of /q/ for English /k/, which prevents fricativisation in certain contexts. So perhaps we should leave open the idea that the borrowing as Hittite written -nt- as an aspirate or a voiced consonant might have had some non-phonetic explanation. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 13:09:26 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 13:09:26 -0000 Subject: Celtic and English Again Message-ID: On the lack of influence from Celtic in English: Perhaps a comparable situation can be found in Egypt, which was Egyptian-speaking for yonks, then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand years, but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either "substrate". Does this suggest that languages can indeed be replaced without great effect on the invading language, if other circumstances are right, and that the lack of influence from Celtic on English is not really so remarkable? Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 13:17:21 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 13:17:21 -0000 Subject: Cowgill's Law Message-ID: Our Moderator said: >Cowgill's Law ... >I see that it does not appear in Collinge, It would not be in Collinge since he deliberately excludes those laws which are specific to one language group. Peter [ Moderator's comment: Of course! I wasn't thinking when I flipped it open to check. Thanks! --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 13:04:32 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 13:04:32 -0000 Subject: Germanic and Balto-Slavic Cases in /m/ Message-ID: DLW suggested: /bhi/ being added to the accusative (in /-m/) This in itself would be an enormous innovation, which no other IE language group shows for any of its cases. (The only exception might be the unproven development of the accusative plural from accusative singular +s). So alas, even if true, (which it isn't), it would still remain "diagnostic". Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 6 13:01:09 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 13:01:09 -0000 Subject: Chariots Message-ID: "true cavalry". This has to do with the development of a horse strong enough to be ridden. I think there has been discussion of this in this group before, with inconclusive results about when horses were strong enough to carry a person on their back. Peter From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 7 03:37:01 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 19:37:01 PST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: While I would prefer not to discuss this here when it is an on-going topic on HistLing, I can't in good conscience not post it and then post other items to which it has something to say. So since it started out on the IE list, I'm posting it to the IE list rather than Nostratic (where I'd not be any happier to see it, really :-). --rma ] Hi y'all, I have transfered this N-word topic over to the NOSTRATIC list from the INDO-EUROPEAN List. It really belongs in both but the IE world and the moderator, stubborn as they both are :), are not ready yet for this kind of discussion in the latter list. Sadly its likeliest pre-history and those of the language groups it interacts with, is very important in the discussion of IE and the geographical position of its range that we eventually find: ME (GLEN): >>If we accept (as we should) that IE is genetically tied to languages >>like Uralic and Altaic JOATSIMEON: >-- frankly, I think relationships at that time-depth are >unrecoverable with any degree of confidence. This illustrates one of my frustrations about debates on these lists (and don't get me wrong, I'm glad that they exist and they are necessary). You see, I'm trying to understand the logic that some employ to deny external relationships with IE and I often find it gnawing at my nerves because of its senselessness. (I know, even on the Nostratic list, there are some who fight long-range genetic relationships in favor of the Valley Girl's NULL hypothesis). Now, I can fully understand that one can have the legitimate view that _AT PRESENT TIME_, such things are not recoverable to a _strong degree_ as JS points out. This is a matter of opinion. However, should this stop one from thinking and conjecturing beyond what we know in order to even vaguely answer these questions of genetic relationship? How can a study progress if one doesn't strive to progress with new ideas and to stretch all that is known to its fullest volume? This is how any science in general works and conjecture is a necessary component in good research. Many will agree that IE is now reconstructable to a decent degree (at least in terms of general vocab). So is that it? We just stop, fly our hands up in the air and quit? Well, unless we have grown old of our research, we take what we know and expand it, conjecture, find more evidence, etc., so that we can reach a new level of understanding about the field we're working with. Therefore, why is it then that we have many on this list and others with this illogical agnostic/defeatist attitude? Can we really place a limit on what we can find out or learn at any given time? Again, no. We ironically don't know enough to begin to calculate such a limit unless we profess divinity of ourselves. We simply don't know what we will discover or can discover and I hope no one will argue with that bit of intuitive reasoning. This problem fits the topic of external IE genetic relationship as good as any. Do we know 100% that IE is related to Uralic? No. Do we know 100% that IE is NOT related to Uralic? No. Do we know 100% that IE existed as we expect it does? No. Maybe 25%, 80%, maybe 95% or even 99% but we can't say that it's proven for all time or without foundation of "evidence" and wipe one's hands clean of it. The questions remain to be answered, not ignored carelessly. Thus it should be fairly apparent to people already what I'm getting at. Until those wacky nuclear physicists back at the science lab discover how to warp space-time back to the time of a given proto-language, comparative linguistics will always be _pure theory_. Since this is theory, Alexis' opinion is off-center. There can be no unanimous distinction on what is dismissable "conjecture" and what isn't. Ideally and preferably, to make a conjecture more probable, a theory should be based on relevant evidence of some kind. Many times, because this is a topic of linguistics, linguistical evidence is supplied to validate a theory. Sometimes it's archaeoligical in nature, or even (gasp!) genetic. Despite the type of evidence, though, "proof" as such is really a matter of logic and relative probability. "Proof" is defined by the degree of likelihood an idea has to overcome the barrier of insignificance of its beholder and to stick it out from other competing theories. So here's my conjecture and let it's proof be Reason at last: IE is more closely related to Uralic, Altaic and other "Eurasiatic" languages than anything else. What do IEists often say to this? "Can't be proven", "I don't think it can be recoverable", "Pure hogwash" and that's that. This is where my sense of logic starts paining me because here we find such a defeatist attitude at work deceiving many into an ultra-conservative, anti-research frame of mind that denies answers to questions simply because the answers are purely probabilistic, not boolean. "Maybe" instead of "is, without a doubt". Probability, however, is the vary nature of comparative linguistics! Surely IE is most likely related to something. No self-professed linguist could possibly pretend that IE invented its own language (aside from Pat in re of his Sumerian idea). So we go beyond that, we conjecture, we allow ourselves to step beyond the obvious and fight for more knowledge. We search for the most probable external links with IE. We can't prove without a trace of uncertainty that IE is related to Uralic and Altaic. We may not be able to prove it with a 25% probability, a 5% probability, or even a 0.00001% probability. We can't even measure the probability in realistic terms. The probability of the theory on its own is not the point. The point is: in regards to any other competing theories out there on IE external links (from NWC to Benue-Congo), what is the MOST probable? What has the most weight? Is this probability large enough over the other possibilities. Well, given that language groups like Algic or other "Amerind" langauges have to be an exceedingly low probability on this list of possibilities, we thus CAN create a list of language groups ordered by their degree of probability and, to the very least, answer vaguely the question of IE genetic relationships (ie: "It's very, very, very unlikely that IE is related to Amerind languages within the past 10,000 years"). The probability may appear "small" (a relative term to the beholder) but in relation to all other theories possible in terms of genetic relationship with IE, Eurasiatic languages are set miles apart from the rest. If you disagree, don't just say "dunno". Agnosticism is blatantly illogical. What is the most probable answer in all in your view? What is your basis? Answer it, even if it is a vague and probabilistic answer. Dare to have an opinion. It's reasonable to have one as long as you understand that it has less weight over theories with large amounts of evidence. Even someone who thinks that we will never know for absolute surity, must with any degree of sanity agree this hypotheses is the best possible one we can have. I really would like to crack the "can't-do-it-so-why-bother" reasoning and talk realistically about these external relationships. I would prefer to do it on the IE group where this discussion would be all the more meaningful amongst those staunchly opposed to long-range comparison but alas... -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Mar 6 14:13:25 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 08:13:25 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Friday, March 05, 1999 10:14 PM >I know of no reflex that suggests a palatal (^) + labial combination. Are you >suggesting that I am considering g[^]h-w-? I am not. I think -gh-w- is still >the likeliest termination. >[ Moderator's comment: > Perhaps I am confused about what you mean when you write : To me, > this suggests a segment *gh followed by a segment *w, especially when you > write about the latter being "carried over into the first syllable". Yes, this is exactly what I meant: *negh(V)w-. > My point is that the symbol used in all Indo-Europeanist literature which is > not limited to ASCII has a superscript , which in my TeX-influenced way > I would write as *g{^w}h (or less preferably *gh{^w}). Rich, I never write anything as because I frequently am switching from email to .html and whatever is between the < and > is treated as an instruction rather than copy in .html. [ Moderator's comment: Old habit: If square brackets indicate phonetic values, and slashes indicate phonemic values, then angle brackets indicate *graphemic* values, that is, how something is spelled in the orthography under discussion. Much older than HTML, so I'm going to claim priority for it. ;-] I have tried to indicated the labiovelars as g[w], k[w], and the palatalized versions g[^][w], k[^][w]. [ Moderator continues: See above: That is extremely confusing--either mixing phonetics in, or if taken as in syntax, indicating something optional. --rma ] > I'm afraid that the sloppy manner in which labiovelars get written has > misled you into thinking that the -u- of the Greek word _nuks, nuktos_ is > metathesized from after a palatal (or simple velar, if you allow three > series of dorsals). Well, I might not have it right, but that is what I favor at the moment. *negh(V)w- -> *neugh- + s/t -? neuk(h)s/t-. [ Moderator's response: It may be what you favor, but it flies in the face of the data: Sanskrit *requires* a labiovelar, or the accusative would be **nas.t.am rather than the attested _naktam_. And what is represented by that "*s/t -?" ? --rma ] >But, let me ask a question: are you saying that Hittite does *not* suggest >that the final element before the [w], glide or extension, was voiced? That >is a perfectly legtimate position but I was not aware it was very >well-represented these days. >[ Moderator's response: > I've not addressed this issue before. Sturtvant himself noted a *tendency* > for single vs. double writing of (mostly voiceless) stops to correspond to > a voiced vs. voiceless distinction in the rest of Indo-European (or, as he > would have it, in Indo-European proper). However, as I remember what he > said about Hittite _nekuz_, he considered the spelling to represent a > labiovelar which could not otherwise be written in cuneiform--and since it > thus appears before another consonant, the single/double writing tendency > would not be germane. [ Moderator's comment on previous response: I have since looked in Sturtevant's _Comparative Grammar of Hittite_ (2nd, 1951) and his _Indo-Hittite Laryngeals_, and find that I have mis-stated his views: He clearly reads the syllable as such. I cannot for the life of me remember where I learned the other interpretation. --rma ] Yes, I believe that must have been Sturtevant's view with a modification. On pg. 43 of "A Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Langauge), he indicates Indo-Hittite *nekwts. But then on p. 59, contradictorily, he indicates *neg'wty; and goes on to say: ". . . such forms as nukha . nuktor (Hesych.), ennukhos 'of night', pannukhios, autonnnukhi 'in the same night', whose aspirate proves that the second consonant of the IH word was g' ". On the previous page, he defines IH g' as "IE gh, g[^]h, or the velar part of ghw". Finally, on page 181, Sturtevant lists "ne-ku-uz . . . . . . neguts", which is the "Suggested phonetic interpretation". Now, this all suggests to me that Sturtevant believed (at least as of the writing of this book) that the IE stem was *negh(V)w-. [ Moderator's response: You are correct, this does appear to be what he believed. However, I think he was wrong. The argument I first cited was not Sturtevant's, but it was nevertheless the right interpretation, based on readings of other lexical items such as the interrogatives. --rma ] Pat From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 6 15:48:56 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 09:48:56 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <01J8HNK0Q6UE90W1AY@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu> Message-ID: Yes, I agree there is seemingly Celtic (grammatical) influence in most of Western Romance, most notably French. It is just a little more difficult to nail down, without actual knowledge of the Celtic languages in question. For example we may note the "two BE verbs" syndrome in Iberian. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 6 16:02:45 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 10:02:45 -0600 Subject: Feminines in Neuter Plurals Message-ID: What exactly is the argument here? That if the feminine had been a recent development from the masculine, the masculine plural rather than the neuter would be used for mixed M/F plurals, therefore the feminine cannot be a recent development from the masculine? What if the feminine is a recent development from the neuter/inanimate? Very un-PC, I know, but stranger (and more un-PC) things have happened. And is it not true the Conventional Wisdom has the feminine developing from the neuter/inanimate anyway? Perhaps I am missing something, but I find it difficult to understand what is being alledged. DLW From dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu Sat Mar 6 17:19:10 1999 From: dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu (Dan Tompkins) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 12:19:10 -0500 Subject: Mallory Message-ID: On pastoralism, I'm no expert. And I have not followed the discussion closely. Here are two comments that may or may not be appropriate: if they are not, I apologize. The situation of the Plains Indians sounds in any case anomalous, doesn't it, in that there were two big exogenous variables at work: getting forced out of areas like Wisconsin, and then getting the horse. On pastoralism in the Greek world, Jens Erik Skydsgaard, 'Transhumance in the Greek Polis,' in C.R. Whittaker (ed), Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 1988) argued (as I recall: can't find the book right now) that 'pure' pastoralism did not exist, that in general agriculture took place at the same time. Without the essay in front of me I can't tell what time frame he put on this. Anyhow, the discussion is interesting! Dan Tompkins Faculty Fellow for Learning Communities Associate Professor, Greek, Hebrew & Roman Classics Conwell Hall, Temple University 1801 North Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19122-6096 215 204-4900 (phone) 215 204-5735 (fax) dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu [ moderator snip ] From dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu Sat Mar 6 17:48:16 1999 From: dtompkin at thunder.ocis.temple.edu (Dan Tompkins) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 12:48:16 -0500 Subject: Error on pastoralism Message-ID: On consulting some notes I realize I had it wrong on Skydsgaard. There are two essays in the Whittaker volume dealing with transhumance. Here is my summary of the one by Stephen Hodkinson: Hodkinson, S. (1988). Animal husbandry in the Greek polis. C. R. Whittaker (editor), Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge Philological Society Supplementary Volume 14, (pp. 35- 74). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Argues that pastoralism and agriculture were integrated more than standard view holds. (As I recall, SH was opposing the standard view as a form of "environmental determinism" based on departure of flocks from valleys in summer due to heat, and consequent lack of manure in fields). Skydsgaard in same volume opposes this view; Spurr in his review JRS 79 (1989) also has reservations. Spurr says small farmers could devise ways to keep flocks on farm all yr round, and himself opposes environmental determinism. Jameson in "Agric. Labor in Ancient Greece" in Berit Wells (ed) Agriculture in Ancient Greece (Stockholm, 1992) finds the notion that animal husbandry on small scale was an "integral part of mixed agriculture" convincing. Dan Tompkins From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 7 02:06:17 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 21:06:17 EST Subject: Chariots Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 3/5/99 7:31:44 PM Mountain Standard Time, iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >But if this is true, it has implications (however circumstiantial) for the >development of true cavalry, for as of about 2000 BC chariot cavalry was >evidently regarded as the latest most terrifying thing by all concerned (as >various nomads burst out of various steppes employing it) and so this would >suggest that the development of true cavalry must have been later. >> -- depends what you mean by "cavalry", which is not the same thing as "riding horses". Chariots were generally used as mobile missile platforms for archers. Developing the proper type of bow for use from horseback, and the techniques for employing it, took time. Shock action from horseback needed developments in weapons and horse-harness. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 7 02:14:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1999 21:14:00 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: In other words, French has about 200 words borrowed from Gaulish -- including many very common items of everyday speech -- while OE has 12 from Brythonic. Furthermore, the emergence of a standardized written form of OE (based on the Wessex dialect) took place centuries _after_ the Anglo-Saxon settlements in Britain. For the first 200 years and more, the Saxons were illiterate. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 7 06:59:11 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 06:59:11 GMT Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >> aecse [OE] > ax, axe >> [< ?Vasconic"; see Basque aizkora "axe, hatchet"] [tv95, tv97] >I think everyone agrees that Basque `ax' is a loan from Latin > `hatchet'. The Latin word would have been borrowed as >*; the [h] is a suprasegmental feature in Basque; the */l/ would >have undergone the categorical early medieval change of intervocalic /l/ >to /r/; and the diphthongization of /a/ to /ai/ in an initial syllable >is a familiar though sporadic in Basque: compare `sacred, >holy', from some Romance development of Latin . Might the word not have been borrowed directly as , with metathesis of the /i/ (especially if Latin already had a degree of allophonic palatalization)? That, or analogy with the other tool words in (h)ai(t)z-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 7 08:15:49 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 02:15:49 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Glen Gordon Date: Saturday, March 06, 1999 9:16 PM >PATRICK: >>In any case, I have subsequently revised my reconstruction to >>*negh-w-. >First, we will assume that you mean *negh-, where is superscript, >as the moderator validly keeps pointing out but that you blatantly >ignore. I am sorry that you do not understand what a root extension is. In previous postings, I have identified the -w- as a root extension. This has nothing to do with g[w], which is the method I use to indicate the so-called labiovelar. [ Moderator's note: I had also noted your use of the term "root extension", which I understood perfectly (Petersson's _Wurzeldeterminativ_, for example), but assumed that it was part of your misanalysis of the ASCII string "neghw-" as a palatal + a labial rather than a badly written labiovelar. So lay off Mr. Gordon. --rma ] >This means that the labial element is _fused_ to the velar. >There is no suffixing whatsoever. The phoneme *ghw is ONE element in >this case, otherwise we should expect -v- in Sanskrit . We don't, >so that's it. I have also written that I believe that possibly two roots were in use: *negh- and *negh-w-. Do you not comprehend what you read? [ Moderator's comment: Since I did not comprehend it, either, I see no need to pursue this line of insult any further. --rma ] >Third, re Hittite's doubled consonants, are you sure that when a medial >consonant is doubled that it means "un-voiced"? That is what Sturtevant thought. [ Moderator's comment: It is indeed the standard theory, though there are some who see rather lenis- fortis than voiced/voiceless. --rma ] >I could have sworn it >was meant to be the other way around which would mean that Hitt. >comes from *nekwt as expected and all you have to work with is Greek to >keep the (and I'll say it again) "flimsy" Nostratic theory afloat. If you ever read Sturtevant, and a few other appropriate manuals, you might be in a much better position to usefully discuss Nostratic. [ Moderator's comment: Sturtevant did not address the Nostratic theory of his day; he was instead denying that the Anatolian languages were part of Indo-European proper. That is, he fully accepted a Neogrammarian reconstruction of PIE, and was trying to explain how Anatolian differed, rather than taking the Anatolian data as calling for a different interpretation of the IE data already at hand. So a reading of Sturtevant, while instructive for a budding laryngealist as to the extremes to which it can be taken, has nothing to offer to Nostratic. --rma ] >The theory is flimsy because you use localized phenomena in a single IE >language (in this case, Greek) as a means to create an unsupported IE >reconstruction so that you can then casually link IE directly to >Egyptian of all things. I have also used Hittite. [ Moderator's comment: But you still haven't explained the rest of the Indo-European data, which at the very least call for a labiovelar (cf. Sanskrit) and not a determinative *-w-. --rma ] >You seem to forget that not only does Egyptian come from Afro-Asiatic first >off from which many, many millenia seperate these two stages but that on top >of it, IE and Afro-Asiatic would be seperated by a good 10,000 years or more >by even the most right-wing Nostraticist. That does not change a thing. Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 7 08:40:43 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 02:40:43 -0600 Subject: Greek question Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Sunday, March 07, 1999 2:27 AM >Dear Rich and IEists: [ moderator snip ] >If you want me to cite individual etymologies, I will be glad to do so but >I have collected a great number of them, illustrating this relationship, in >my Afrasian essay at >http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3.htm >[ Moderator's response: > I want to see not only individual etymologies, I want to see an exposition > of the sound laws which drive them. I want to see not only "the roots of > verbs" but "the forms of grammar", such that "no philologer could examine > them ... without believing them to be sprung from some common source." > --rma ] Perhaps you did not notice the Table of Correspondences. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison-AFRASIAN-3-table.htm [ moderator snip ] >[ Moderator's response: > You could assert it, but you have not proven it. Please remember that this > is the Indo-European list, and that a relationship with Egyptian cannot be > *assumed* for your argument, but rather must be demonstrated using accepted > comparative methodology which addresses the standard model of Indo-European. > --rma ] I have demonstrated it using accepted comparative methodology. Pat [ Moderator's response: No, I submit that you have suggested a line of inquiry at most. You have yet to demonstrate it to the satisfaction of J. Random Linguist. And your con- tinued assertion that your version of Proto-World is directly ancestral to PIE weakens your credibility greatly. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Mar 9 17:55:22 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 09:55:22 -0800 Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>Renfrew's 7000 BC is too early [for PIE], Mallory's 4000 BC is >>too late [for Anatolian]. >-- nope to the latter. We know Renfrew's 7000 BCE is too early for PIE >because of the absence of the late-Neolithic innovations recorded in PIE in >7000 BCE. However, that vocabulary _is_ there in Anatolian. Such as? >Eg., the First Vowel Shift in Germanic can be >securely dated to after 700 BCE, because Celtic ironworking loan-words in >Proto-Germanic underwent the shift. You must mean the First Consonant Shift. But there's no such thing. There's no reason to assume, and some rather good reasons to reject the notion that Grimm's Laws worked all simultaneously and in one go, or even that such a thing as Grimm's ever took place. It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, *dh is typologically unacceptable. The original Proto-Germanic phonological system must have been similar to the Armenian one, with *t = *th, *d = *t['], *dh = *d, yet another archaic feature of Germanic, though not quite as archaic as Hittite and Tocharian. But Verner's Law *is* as archaic as that, as we can equate it with the Baltic-Finnic consonant mutation tt ~ t under the influence of stress/syllable structure [see Vennemann, "Hochgermanisch und Niedergermanisch", sorry can't find the exact ref. now Theo?], so it must have worked in Germanic at a period when (partial) voicing had not yet taken place, and the opposition was (as in Hittite) between fortis *tt (=*t) and lenis *t' (=*d) and *th (=*dh). The final stage, aspirate > fricative (*th > *T, *kh > *x) was probably much more recent and in fact rather trivial. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Mar 7 16:46:00 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 16:46:00 -0000 Subject: St Jerome Message-ID: >Peter and or Graham said that Jerome wrote 'bad Latin'. My original posting was so long ago I have forgotten both the content and the context. If I did really say that, I apologise deeply to the group! But I suspect I am being misquoted! Peter From jer at cphling.dk Sun Mar 7 18:22:36 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 19:22:36 +0100 Subject: PIE *gn- > know/ken In-Reply-To: <36f37c46.344889770@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sat, 27 Feb 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [...] > The most acceptable solution from my point of view is that PIE > did not have any voiced stops at all. Instead it made a > distinction between fortis and lenis stops (as in Finnish, Danish > or Hittite), where the fortis (tense) stops (*t etc.) were always > voiceless and pronounced longer/with more energy ([t:] or [tt]). > The lenis (lax) stops (*d and *dh, etc.) were less energetic/ > shorter, and had voiced allophones. They came in two kinds, one > aspirated (*dh = [th]), the other not (*d = [t]). Or, > equivalently, one glottalized (*d = [t']), the other not (*dh = > [t]). Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask this: Is a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? If so, where? If it is not part of general experience I do not see the commending simplicity in choosing "lenis t" as the origin of Latin, Greek and Indic plain voiced d. Where "d" and "dh" merged, they are voiced, as in Balto-Slavic, Celtic and Albanian - why derive this from a basically voiceless protoform? - Isn't the only thing "wrong" with the IE system that the aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh ...) have not been accepted? Then, if we have SOME evidence for asp.ten., but not enough to guarantee reconstruction of an overwhelming number of etymologies, but without them the system as such becomes a truly overwhelming mess, isn't the easiest solution then to accept that SOME etymologies containing ph, th, kh are correct and that the PIE system was as in Sanskrit? Is it not a very strong claim that ALL cases of asp.ten. are in last analysis based on mistakes? For some I could understand this right away, even for many, perhaps most, but for each single item?? Jens E.R. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 7 20:15:01 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 15:15:01 EST Subject: Danube homeland. Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >but it makes it the best candidate by default, and any alternative theories >should offer a pretty good case for why the IE homeland should be located >elsewhere, and what happened to the languages of these "Anatolian farmers" or >"Old Europeans". -- same thing that happened to the languages of the Elamo-Dravidians who were the first farmers throughout Iran and North India. The area between Iraq, Central Asia and Central India is just as large as Europe and got agriculture just as early, earlier in fact. It's also historically demonstrable that the IE languages were intrusive in this area, and virtually completely replaced the previous language-families; with a few minor exceptions like Brahui, comparable to Basque. >The gap between Anatolian and the rest of IE is too large to be fitted into >the limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements into SE Europe. -- nope. The speed of linguistic change is not even remotely consistent. Eg., Lithuanian and Sanskrit, both about equally distant from PIE, one spoken in the 2nd millenium BCE, one spoken in the 2nd millenium CE. >Why shouldn't Anatolian simply have changed quickly?then it's perfectly >imaginable that PIE developed after 7000 BC somewhere in the Balkans or >Hungary, and spread across the rest of the continent (C., N. and E. Europe) >in the LBK/Danubian phase, c. 5500 BC, as well as to the steppe zone >(Dnepr-Donets Tocharian?] before 5000 and Sredny-Stog [>Indo-Greek?] c. 4500). -- nonsensical. The PIE vocabulary is full of items which just weren't around before 4000 BCE. This alone completely rules out such a hypothesis. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 8 00:41:29 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 16:41:29 PST Subject: Caucasian languages and Asia Minor Message-ID: DR WOLFGANG SCHULZE: >The problem is that people do not accept language isolates. What is an >isolate? It's a language that obviously has no documented relatives. Yes there is a problem but it's not the definition of "isolates". I fully understand that this means that a given language MIGHT have relationships but that the language is difficult to relate to others, pure and simple. This could be for many reasons, one of them being that there may be only very distant siblings that survive to be analysed, as you say. However, I have trouble with the idea that seems to arise on this subject that because a language group can't be 100% proven to be related to another language group that we should take up the NULL hypothesis in place of it, ignoring the question completely of genetic relationship and the probabilities and uncertainties inheirant in its answer (whether this be NEC or IE). There still remains the most likely relationships and I would be concerned of the reasoning skills of anyone who considers the possibility of IE being closely related to Uralic as equal as the possibility, say, of a strong relationship with Algic, half-way 'cross the world. There remain high probabilities and low probabilities despite lack of what you would accept as certain "proof". This is the probabilistic nature of comparative linguistics. The idea that IE is the ancestor language of the languages we find in Europe and India now (as well as the ubiquitous English), is all based on probability too. We don't find actual, _physical proof_ of people speaking this supposed IE language but it is highly probable that one existed in some form at least 5,000 years ago based on a damn good theory that has been refined better as we learn more, a theory that, because of alot of speculation beyond what we had known in the past, has moved forward. >Relatives are established by means of regular sound correspondencies >based on lexical *words* (and not *stems*) as well as on morphological >correspondencies that match established sound correspondencies. And wouldn't it be wonderful in an ideal world? However, in the case of IE, (and I suspect similarily in NEC) much of the recoverable language is verb roots, whether that be nouns or adjectives based on verb roots or extended verbs built on the more basic ones. Atomic nouns are not all that common in the IE language and inevitably due to declension and the nominative *-s, are ALL "stems" save those 1% who have no marker in the nominative. Thus, morphological correspondances by your criteria must hold most of the weight of the proof. So how much proof is proof enough to make it credible? This is a very subjective thing. What we SHOULD be concerned about is finding the relative probability of a hypothesis, based not only on the data that one can supply for it but on the probabilities of other possible theories of relationship in comparison to it. At that, we can conclude very apparent things such as Algic's relationship with IE is extremely remote in comparison with a Uralic relationship (as we should be concluding intuitively!) as well as more opaque concepts such as the most likely pre-IE interactions with neighbouring languages. Unfortunately, we can't even begin to fathom answers to these questions, not because we don't know enough, but because we've gotten stuck in a rut over the impossible-to-attain "100% probability" and not on "the BEST probability that we can achieve at present". >[An isolate] simply is an orphan with unknown parents. [...] >I think that's just what the situation is like with respect to East >Caucasian. Unless you're saying that NEC invented its own language, it's related to something (even if it is remote as I suspect similarly). So there must be some candidates that stick out amongst the random chaos of world language groups like Benue-Congo, Austronesian, Ainu, etc. I'm willing to wager that NWC is one of those better candidates even lacking your absolute "proof". And because I know that IE is likely to be related to something for the same reason as NEC above, I'm willing to wager that IE (and Etruscan) are more closely affiliated with languages like Uralic and Altaic as opposed to things like Basque (Larry will agree :), Ainu, NEC (you'll even agree), etc. This is just common sense and taking the NULL position on this subject isn't. >These nagging questions are quite trendy, but that does not mean that >they are on safe grounds with respect to method and language theory... >But paradigms [hopefully] change, as Kuhn told us.... Humans answering nagging questions has been trendy for millions of years. It's all logic and probability with a hint of imagination. Hopefully this is a paradigm that will never change. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 7 17:58:03 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 11:58:03 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] As Mao Ze Dong once said, "Don't match pearls with the God of the Deep Blue Sea." So I'll correct the Basque spellings and meanings. >> haltha- "slope, slant, incline" > Halde "slope, hillside", heald [OE] >> "hillside" >> [< ?Vasconic; >> see Basque halde, alde, ualde < ?*kalde "face, side, flank"] [tv95, tv97] >The Basque word is in the eastern dialects but everywhere >else, as a result of the categorical voicing of plosives after /l/ in >all but the eastern dialects. No such form as * is known to me. >Lhande's 1926 dictionary cites and attributes it solely to the >17th-century writer Oihenart, but Oihenart in fact used , and so I >suspect an error here. (Lhande is full of errors.) >The form is an error: this must be the compound with initial > `water', which appears as ~ , and means literally >`waterside'. >The central meaning of the Basque word is everywhere `side', with >transferred senses like `flank' and `region'. I don't think it really >means `face', and it certainly doesn't mean `slope'. This word resembles Spanish falda "skirt, flank"--which unaccountably begins with /fV/; which, as anyone who was studied Ibero-Romance knows, is a no-no. Is there an Old Castilian, Gasco'n or Aragone's form /*alda, *alde/ ? >> Harn "bladder" >> [< ?Vasconic"; >> see Basque garnur "bladder" < *kernu] [tv95, tv97] >The Basque word for `urine' is , with a typical western variant >. This word, with its almost unique /rn/ cluster, has been much >discussed, but its origin is unknown. The alleged Basque * >`bladder' is unknown to me and to the lexicographers, and I query its >existence. This is my error and is what predictably happens when you try to read a language you've never studied, German, with a cheapo dictionary. My dictionary gave "urine & bladder". I made the wrong choice. My apologies to Theo and everyone else. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 7 18:08:40 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 12:08:40 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] I was also thinking of Spanish muro, Latin murus [sp?] "wall" or Spanish moro'n "hillock, rise of land" except that the double /rr/ of murru screws things up --and then there's Spanish morro, "a small promontory on a neck of land jutting out into the water [where forts were often built]" Maybe Celtic offers more clues [or enigmas] to this set of words >> moraine, Mor?ne "moraine", >> Mur[e] "pile of rocks [Bavarian] >> [?< Vasconic; >> see Basque murru "hill"] [tv97] >The form can hardly be ancient in Basque. There exists a >sizeable number of severely localized Basque words of the form , >with very diverse meanings, but `hill' is not one of them. The most >widespread sense (throughout the French Basque Country) is `wall'. >The closest to `hill' in sense is `pile, heap', reported nowhere but in >the Baztan valley. >Larry Trask Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 7 18:12:04 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 12:12:04 -0600 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <36DCD2DB.64DB@stratos.net> Message-ID: Yes, it is a compound of *harja- 'army' + *manna- 'man' AFAIK it's from a list of Germanic [and other] non-IE words in Romance et al. The article was in German and I may have missed something No explanation was given >Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> arimanno "warrior" [It < Germanic] [tv84] >Isn't this a compound, *harja- 'army' + *manna- 'man'? The first at >least doesn't seem peculiarly Germanic, to judge by the cognates given >in Buck's dictionary. (I don't have ready access to the Vennemann >reference, I'm afraid, so I don't know what argument he makes.) >Brian M. Scott Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 7 17:44:52 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 11:44:52 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/g In-Reply-To: Message-ID: *gar- is a Germanic root. Thanks for pointing out the need for labeling here. The Romance lexicon includes words of Germanic origin [or believed to be so, in some cases], as well as words believed to have cognates to modern Basque in a few cases [snip] >I've no idea what that asterisked * is meant to denote: the Basque >for `assemble, collect, gather' is . Nor am I any too sure what >the Spanish words are doing in here, but I don't have Corominas handy. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From ECOLING at aol.com Mon Mar 8 02:27:26 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 21:27:26 EST Subject: IE and Uralic pronouns Message-ID: I have been present when solid competent linguists admitted that the field is "not ready" to deal with the pronoun patterns which are the subject of recent discussion. (For a completely traditional approach to some pronoun matches, please see near the end of this message.) In other words, it is likely that something genetic is going on in these pronouns, our sound-symbolism approach is not adequate to the data distributions, and our tools for historical reconstruction can't handle it either. So what do we do? Hide our heads! Shame. Rather appear to be knowing the answers, and hide the questions we don't know the answers to? Or declare them off-limits? In a business firm, that would be a recipe for near-immediate bankruptcy, failing to act positively and strongly in moving towards the future. Better to ADMIT to students that we need more powerful tools for penetrating the noise of centuries and even millennia, to set more and more students to this task, to studying how deeply, and against which kinds of noise, each tool we have can penetrate (estimates in all cases are fine), and to estimate in as many situations as possible how much residue should still be detectable despite the noise of historical change, WITHOUT the assumptions that the sample used as controls ARE IN FACT UNRELATED. That is the fallacy in all such approaches I have read. Because if the supposed controls ARE related, even very distantly, it may distort our estimates of what background noise is. Rather we need GRAPHS of the degree of noise present, and our ability to penetrate it, across the full range of cases we can estimate time depths for, then extrapolate beyond that to those cases like Afro-Asiatic where the pronoun system, for example, preserves "distinctive oppositions in distantly related languages" (the title of a Gene Schramm paper, if I remember). In that case, there is a known relationship, though not well known, it is a distant one, the pronoun sound correspondences do not follow the normal sound laws for these families, yet they ARE related. Because there is a pattern with its own laws. The palatal / labial opposition which is in the consonants in one family is in the vowels in the other. I don't remember details of the data, but approximately this: hi vs. hu in one family (NW Semitic?) sa vs. fa in another family (Egyptian?) Now if our standard tools for historical reconstruction cannot deal with that, then we need to extend those tools slightly, a little bit at a time, go back and test the change of tools against the various things we know the answers to, and see whether the new tools manage to extract a slightly cleaner set of data that makes a known relationship clearer. If it does, then we may perhaps apply that newly refined tool to cases where we do NOT know the answer or only suspect it, and see what happens. Another example of this which came to my attention in the past year or two is this, which I will pose as a question. Why is the second comparison (b) better than the first (a) if we are looking for potential cognates? (a) sepo in one language teka in the second language (b) sepa in one language teko in the second language I don't think most historical linguists have an IMMEDIATE recognition that these are two wildly different proposals for cognates. That means we are not making the best possible use of our tools. (The conclusion is not a certain one, just like any other historical inference, but it is a reasonable one that (b) is a better comparison thatn (a).) We are never dealing with "clean" or "dirty" data. We are always dealing with "slightly more clean" or "slightly more dirty" data. If slightly cleaner data makes a language relationship look more solid, that is perhaps an indication (not a proof) that we may be on the track of a real relationship. ***** If you want to try to use traditional tools on Eurasian pronouns, here is an example from my paper Grammatical-Meaning Universals and Proto-Language Reconstruction, or: "Proto-World Now", in Papers of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 1975. p.15 of the paper, or Fig.(26). I am sure that paper contains a lot of wrong things and some right things. I only expected to find truth statistically, not certainly. A second example follows below. Here is what I was able at that time to find for a standard approach to reconstructing IE-Uralic pronoun systems. Of course borrowing or contact may have created a false temptation here, but such an escape from the obvious interpretation of the data would itself require considerable work to prove: I was discussing a relic IE alternation /m/ in plural vs. /w/ in dual. It is matched in Uralic, and an -n- "with,and" is present in the plural, which I hypothesized caused the assimilation. -va-s dual 1st person Sanskrit -ma-s plural -tha-s dual 2nd person Sanskrit -tha(-na) plural Now compare Ziryene (Uralic), EARLY plural forms: -m-ny-m 1st person -d-ny-d 2nd person. Selkup had these forms of the first person: -mi-y dual -my-n plural So my conclusions: Selkup leveled the person-marker, while IE leveled the markers of dual/plural, and kept the originally allophonic variants of the person. Uralic shows in EARLY Ziryene the structure of the paradigm from which this could have arisen. I'm not sure one could get more traditional in approach. ***** Here is the second item in that 1975 paper which really calls out for work. The rotation of the vowel space makes these more than mere identities, and suggests hypotheses for further work. (ng for the velar nasal phoneme) ple:-nus 'full' Latin, IE *pling 'full', Tibeto-Burman pla:-nus 'flat' Latin, IE *pleng 'straight' Tibeto-Burman Lloyd Anderson From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 04:21:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 04:21:29 GMT Subject: IE and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <13594592151901@m-w.com> Message-ID: "Jim Rader" wrote: >Nearly twenty years ago I heard Eric Hamp give an account of >Georgiev's lecture. As I recall Hamp telling it, Georgiev thought >that Etruscan practically WAS Hittite, i.e., that Etruscan was an >Anatolian language. The audience didn't contest his thesis out of >sheer stupefaction, not because they agreed. Gueterbock walked out >of the lecture shaking his head and saying "Very interesting, very >interesting!" Another Indo-Europeanist arguing for Etruscan as an Anatolian language is Francisco Adrados of the Spanish Academy: Adrados, Francisco R., "Etruscan as an IE Anatolian (but not Hittite) Language," Journal of Indo-European Studies 17 (Proceedings of the Second Conference on the Transformation of European and Anatolian Culture 4500-2500 B.C. (Part I) September 15-19, 1989, Dublin, Ireland), (1989) 363-383. Adrados, Francisco R., "More on Etruscan as an IE-Anatolian Language," Historische Sprachforschung 107/1 (1994) 54-76. Has anybody read these? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Mar 8 06:19:35 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 00:19:35 -0600 Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: Good old G-bock was honest. Privately -- to me --Hamp only said: VG's data seem to work, but oughta have more. pete Jim Rader wrote: > Nearly twenty years ago I heard Eric Hamp give an account of > Georgiev's lecture. As I recall Hamp telling it, Georgiev thought > that Etruscan practically WAS Hittite, RIGHT: this is what I remember. > i.e., that Etruscan was an > Anatolian language. The audience didn't contest his thesis out of > sheer stupefaction, not because they agreed. Gueterbock walked out > of the lecture shaking his head and saying "Very interesting, very > interesting!" > > Jim Rader [ moderator snip ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 8 06:27:19 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 01:27:19 EST Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/7/99 9:42:14 PM, "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote: <<...if *negh-w- were the basis for both, as I think likely,... *negh-(w)-, 'dark', with root extensions -t, 'night',...>> Am I correct in this meaning that the reconstruction here is *negh-w-t > "night?" Why would that /-t be there? In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" besides Germanic or Modern French? Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's response: Greek _nuks, nuktos_, Latin _nox, noctis_, Sanskrit _nak (IIRC), naktam_, Hittite _nekuz = nek{^w}t+s_, ... --rma ] From iglesias at axia.it Mon Mar 8 17:25:28 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Rossi Francesco Luigi) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:25:28 PST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: Further to Shilpi M. Badra's message on Saturday, 27 February 1999 on Celtic loanwords in Romance, I would like to contribute the following on Italian, and especially the Northern Italian dialects (Gallo-Italic) and Friulan. 1) Place-names in Northern Italy (former Cisalpine Gaul): Milan (Mediolanum), Bologna (Bononia, Etruscan: Felsina), and many others. 2) Latinized -dunum (Irish dun -`fortress'): Duno (Varese), Induno (Varese), Comenduno (Bergamo), Verduno (Cuneo), ... and others 3) Formations ending in -ac : Arsago, Barzago, Cadorago, Dalrago, ... Sumirago, Tregnago, Urago, in Lombardy alone. This ending in common all over Northern Italy. In the Friulan area, the ending is rendered in standard Italian as -acco: e.g., Premariacco (Udine). 4) Terminology: Lat. camisiam > It. camicia, Lat. caballam > It. cavallo; Lat carrum > It. carro and the Lat verb cambiare > It. cambiare 5) Celtic survivals of northern and central Iberia: Sp., Port.alamo `poplar', Cf. It. olmo Sp., Port. gancho `hook', Cf. It. gancio 6) Sound change from Latin u to French y: All gallo-italic dialects except that of Romagna and certain mountain areas, e.g., Piedmontese, Emilian, Lombard: myr This sound does not occur in Friulan (despite the presumable Celtic substrate: Carnii), but it does occur in other forms of Rhaeto-Romance, e.g. Vallader (Lower Engadine). The sound does not occur in Venetian and related dialects (with IE Venetic substrate). 7) Consonantal groups: Piedmontese, Emilian, Lombard: factum > fait, fat, fac ("c" pron. "ch" as in English or Spanish) Piedmontese, Emilian, Lombard: noctem > neuit (read "eu" as in French), not, noc ("c" pron. "ch" as in English or Spanish): 8) Nasal consonants: pan, man, bon, ... with pure nasalisation in some areas, Emilia for example, and varying degrees of nasalisation elsewhere. Bibliography: Giovan Battista Pellegrini, Toponomastica italiana. MIlan: Hoepli. 1990 Maurizio Dardano, Manueletto di linguistica italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1991 Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 08:28:30 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:28:30 GMT Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >[ Moderator's response: > There is a serious mixing of levels here, in that a Romance-specific > development is being projected back to Nostratic, although other Indo- > European languages do not have this phonotactic constraint, e. g. Greek. > Before we can even accept it as a parallel, we have to determine what > the digraph represents in Bomhard, a unit phoneme or a cluster. > --rma ] A unit phoneme, probably a lateral affricate (> Semitic *s', a lateral fricative). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 08:31:38 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:31:38 GMT Subject: Trojan and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <36fbc467.224073295@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >Now assuming Greek Trooa is from the same root Sorry, I was being 8-bitty again. That's Troi"a, with i-diaeresis. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 8 09:19:39 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 01:19:39 PST Subject: PIE gender Message-ID: ALEXIS RAMER: >>There has been some discusion here of the (assumed) fact that >>the feminine gender is an innovation, and one not shared by >>the Anatolian lgs. WR SCHMIDT: >[...] I'd like to suggest that linguistic gender may have once been >more related to biological gender than - AFAIK - has heretofore been >thought A rich, cerebral dessert, I might say. :) But, how does one know that IE's view of the world was based on animism to start with? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 10:04:11 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 10:04:11 GMT Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <3701d9f5.229589205@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >The spelling stands for >/nekwt-s/. The problem is that we would expect if the >word is to be derived from PIE *nekwt- ~ *nokwt-. The single >suggests PIE *g(h)w. But I must agree with Rich's "moderator comment" elsewhere that in this case the spelling may reflect all of PIE *kw, *gw or *ghw [*gwh if you prefer]. After all, if the etymon were *kw, the geminate spelling should not be but , and there is no way of writing that in cuneiform (nor in ASCII, as the recurrent confusions about labiovelars show). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 10:45:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 10:45:32 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates In-Reply-To: <66321737.36deea04@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >I think we should keep in mind that the European linguistic situation in >historical times is probably much simpler than it was in the Mesolithic or >early Neolithic. >Reasoning by analogy from the situation in New Guinea or eastern pre-Columbian >North America, there were probably _many_ more languages and language-families >in Europe before the Indo-European expansion. Not just one or a few non-IE >families which were then replaced by Indo-European. The IE expansion would >then represent a massive linguistic simplification, a "reformatting" of a >previously crowded scene. True, except that this "reformatting" clearly had already happened in the *early* Neolithic, and at least for the broad continental area from Greece to Holland, with its two large historically connected cultural areas (the Balkans and the LBK/TRB zone), we can expect a single or at most two linguistic substrates. While the late Neolithic "Secondary Products Revolution" (use of more intensive mixed farming techniques) may have caused a doubling or tripling or so of the population density, along with a number of social changes, that's all small potatoes compared with the Mesolithic/Early Neolithic transition (fiftyfold increase in population densities). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 8 12:52:40 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 12:52:40 GMT Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <010b01be667d$6104c400$c93963c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >> BTW: is Hittite /dz, z^/, /ts,c/ or /z/? >No doubt someone will prove me wrong, but I believe Hittite was deciphered >at first by German speakers - so z was used as in German, which is a great >pain. It = /ts/. OK, I'll prove you wrong :-) Hittite was deciphered by a Czech, Hrozny', the in whose name is /z/. The derives from the conventions used for Akkadian cuneiform. Akkadian was deciphered by Germans. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Mar 8 13:51:44 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 07:51:44 -0600 Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns In-Reply-To: <19990304114643.23771.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: Please try to remain calm, Mr. Gordon. Actually the study I am thinking of showed, as I now recall, a tendency for 1st person pronouns to have nasals. The matter of /m/ or /n/ was not, and to my knowledge has not been, adressed. My "mama" thing is just a guess at what lies behind the facts. It does not imply that all languages have 1st person pronouns with /m/, and more than recognizing the "mama" syndrome implies that in all languages the word for 'mother' has /m/. Nor does it imply anything about "borrowing" of pronouns, a notion I am quite unkeen on. DLW From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Mon Mar 8 14:36:58 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 06:36:58 PST Subject: gender Message-ID: Hello, Over the past months this thread on questions of gender in (P)IE has provided different opinions on the issue. Would it be possible for someone to: 1) list several of the most well-known bibliographic references on this particular topic; and 2) perhaps summarize the *current* thinking on the issue. I may the second request because discussions groups tend to "discuss" but often in the process the overall outlines of what is standard in the current (canonical??) debate get somewhat blurred. Also, it's possible that I may have missed some of the early contributions by list members. Currently I am preparing a paper for the upcoming ICLC '99 conference in Stockholm. In it I briefly discuss the problem of gender in Euskera. (Bai, badakit euskaraz hitz egiten... Kaixo Larry eta Miguel!) Because of my interest in this particular question, I wonder if anyone could speculate on when (along a rough time continuum) gender entered IE languages, i.e., when (P)IE acquired gender. And finally, has anyone contemplated the possibility that there might have been an even earlier stage that needs to be reconstructed (e.g. perhaps in the case of Euskera) that eventually gave rise to a animate/inanimate dichotomy (e.g., as it is found today in Euskera)? Any ideas on that, Larry? This would imply that cognitively speaking, there could have been an earlier structure that was not based on an "animate/inanimate" contrast but on another ontological type or definition of "being." Best regards, Roz Frank March 8, 1999 Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 U.S.A. e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [currently on-leave in Panama] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Mar 8 14:54:20 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:54:20 -0600 Subject: Trojan and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <36fbc467.224073295@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > The problem is that you're mixing up various reflexes from > various languages here. The Latin forms with -sc- (Tusci, > Tuscania/Toscana, Etrusci) are simply extensions of the roots > Tu(r)s- and Etrus- with the Latin adjectival suffix -cus (*-ko-). This is probably true, but it is also possible that the use of such suffixes could have been suggested by the nature of the sound, which the Egyptian evidence indicates was /sh/, not /s/. > Now assuming Greek Trooa is from the same root, it can be derived > from *Trosia, with Greek loss of intervocalic -s-, just like > Latin Etruria < *Etrusia with intervocalic -s- > -r-. Again the > suffix -ia is Latin and Greek, not necessarily Tyrrhenian. Again, it could be as above. > Which reminds me, there is also Greek Tyrrhe:n- < *turse:n-. > > For the vowel, it is difficult to decide between /o/ or /u/, but > >as /a/ occurs in some words that might be additional variants > >(tarhuntassa, tauros, tarsus, tarquin), with lowering before /r/ being the > >culprit in these, I favor /o/. Thus the original form would be /trosha/. I take this opportunity to note that the forms with /u/ are all western, so that the use of /u/ could conceivably be merely from the Greek change of /ou/ to /u/, carried westward by colonists. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 9 12:55:31 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 06:55:31 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 6 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > In other words, French has about 200 words borrowed from Gaulish -- including > many very common items of everyday speech -- while OE has 12 from Brythonic. Both still overwhelmingly non-Celtic, as noted before. That is the forest, regardless of the trees. > Furthermore, the emergence of a standardized written form of OE (based on the > Wessex dialect) took place centuries _after_ the Anglo-Saxon settlements in > Britain. For the first 200 years and more, the Saxons were > illiterate. Class dialects have little to do with literacy, especially the very marginal kind of literacy of early medieval Europe. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Mar 8 14:59:48 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:59:48 -0600 Subject: Salmon. In-Reply-To: <010a01be667d$5e09d380$c93963c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > >salmon in the Danube. > Salmon trout are found in the Danube according to Mallory - but not the > other kind of salmon. I think I'll break down and actually go look at Grzimek again. DLW From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 9 13:50:13 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 08:50:13 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 3/8/99 08:49:13 AM, rma wrote: <<[ Moderator's comment: And what of the very similar, though completely separate, Armenian shift? --rma ]>> Once again, I'm just following through on the commentary made in Bernard Comrie's book that attributes the "First Sound Shift" in German to the conversion of IE sounds into "the nearest equivalents" of a prior non-IE language. It is interesting to see where it goes. (I am aware that there is a "reconstructed obstruent system" based on a breakdown of glottalized/voiced and unvoiced stops that explains the Germanic/Armenian shifts as "archaisms" rather than innovations.) If the Germanic consonant "shift" is due to conversion from a non-IE language, then how can the Armenian shift can be explained?: 1. An obvious explanation that comes to mind is that Armenian was another language that "converted" to IE from a similiar non-IE language with roughly the same sound shifts. Mallory in "In search of the Indo-Europeans" summarizes the case for Armenian originating in the Balkans. Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology show a clear lines of continuity from the mouth of the Elbe to the mouth of the Danube with evidence of such material cultures as "Globular Amphora". Strabo, the Greek geographer of the 1st Century AD, tells us that tradition says Armenia was founded out of Thessaly (a town called Armenium); and that Armenians continue to follow Thessalian habits in clothes, etc. If non-IE speakers occupied a corridor running from the mouth of the Danube up past the gap west of the Carpathians and up to Jutland "sometime before 1000 BC" - then the Armenian shift might represent a conversion of some of those non-IE speakers to IE just as it did - perhaps later on - in Germanic. The result was however more proximate to and therefore more "Greek." When Armenian migrated it managed to preserve the shift because it became isolated from the IE mainstream that would have removed those vestiges of the old sound system - just as Germanic remained relatively isolated. Or became isolated when the eastward spread of the Celts cut off the NW-SE routes across the eastern midsection of Europe. 2. Perhaps another explanation is that Armenian - in its Balkan form - represented a Greekified German, already converted to IE but heavily influenced by Greek and later on tranformed by Urartian and Iranian influences. Although it has always been contested by certain historians, the "Getae", who lived north of the Danube were explicitly identified by Strabo and others as being neither Thracian nor Kelts. Strabo obviously identified the Getae with Germanic tribes: "As for the southern part of Germany beyond the Albis, the portion which is just contiguous to that river is occupied by the Suevi; then immediately adjoining this is the land of the Getae,... who occupy the whole plain from north of the Danube to Germany..." (Geo 7.3.1 et seq) The Getae are identified as "Dacians" occasionally, but what this tells us about them I don't know since Dacian is hardly pin-point identifiable. Oddly, the "Massagetae" are located in the Caucasus region by Herodotus, 400 years earlier, on the far side of the Scythians. This puts them relatively close by the Armenians. If Phrygian is descended from Thracian, as the classical historians suggest and Mallory notes, then the Armenian connection with the Pontus and the western shore of the Black Sea could explain proto-Germanic settlers coming along with that migration. Strabo states that Thracian and Getae intermarried, an apparent variant on the "Basternak" identity later mentioned by Tacitus and Ptolemy for the inhabitants of the Danube Delta, the "Peucini" - also often associated with the Chernyakovian material culture which by the first century BC had strong Gothic elements. In connection with this, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal has written in past post: <> And... <> Note that in the above analysis Greek is already a separate language. If we shorten the dates - so that Greek appears in Greece roughly at the same time Linear B makes its appearance - than Armenian is an independent language with strong affinities to German but in a position to make strong lexical borrowings from Greek. Or that the conversion from non-IE itself was the result of Greek or a closely related language. The reality check says that no written evidence of Armenian exists before 200BC and that the Armenians (per Mallory) date their own origins to 800 BC. Finally, are there any IE languages that have closer early syntactic similarities to German/Armenian than Greek? Regards, Steve Long From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Mon Mar 8 15:08:09 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:08:09 -0600 Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay In-Reply-To: <3706e72d.232972509@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > > With regard to reconstructing 1sg pronouns, there is (or so I seem > >to recall) a cross-linguistic tendency for these to be formed with /m-/, > >probably from a weaker variant of what might be called the "mama > >syndrome": sounds that babies tend to make early tend to be pressed into > >service as words that mamas and babies might use to relate to each other, > >like "mama" and "me". > I don't think so. See coming response to Glenny. Both /m/ and /n/ tend to occur in words for female care-givers, with /n/ typically referring to more secondary ones, as in "nanny". 1st pronouns do show a statistically significant tendency to use nasals, which appears to me to be a sort of opposite side of the coin phenemenon. If a mother is going to imagine that her baby, who is in fact only babbling, is talking to her, then "mama" and "me" are the words she will want to hear the baby say. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 8 17:31:53 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 11:31:53 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >One thing is not clear to me. What is the significance of the presence >in the list of Romance borrowings from Germanic (?all from Vennemann >1984)? [ moderator snip ] >Max W. Wheeler I have to admit to scrounging around and using Theo Vennemann's lists --which are just lists of words he believes to be of non-IE origin borrowed from Germanic languages. I have not finished yet. Among other things, I need to track down more sources and check them out with the Oxford Dictionary. As for guV-, you're absolutely correct, but I wanted to wait until I had the correct form of the original. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 8 15:47:15 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:47:15 -0600 Subject: gender Message-ID: Dear Alexis and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: manaster at umich.edu Date: Sunday, March 07, 1999 11:50 PM >On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> I do not believe that there is anything which the current "laryngeal" theory >> explains that this re-formulation of it will not equally well explain. >This is what you have not even begun to demonstrate, as you >well know from our private discussions, so it does not >seem right to me to make this claim. Yes, it is premature. I said this because I have surveyed the theory many times in the past, and found it poorly formulated --- although I did not put these criticisms down on paper. I am in the process of doing that now. Pat From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 8 17:43:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 11:43:47 -0600 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Max W. Wheeler >On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> But before 1500, Spanish & Portuguese were farther apart than they are now. >Oh yeah? Who says? It wouldn't take long to list some significant >changes in Spanish since 1500 which have moved it away from Portuguese. >But it won't be worth it without a good reason to believe the claim made >above. You missed the context. I was speaking about lexical items. Yes-- Spanish has dropped future subjunctive and has reduced /sh, zh/ > /x, h/ /s, z/ > /s, S/ /dz, ts/ > /s, th/ and pretty much mutated /L/ > /j, zh, Y, sh/ BUT lexically, Spanish and Portuguese are more alike grammatically, some Spanish and Portuguese dialects are replacing condicional with imperfect & imperfect subjunctive Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 8 17:06:25 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 17:06:25 +0000 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > There is no such language as "Gallego-Spanish". There is, however, > galego or Galician, called gallego in Spanish. It is closer to Portuguese > than to Spanish and, in my experience, is more difficult to understand than > Brazilian Portuguese or standard Continental Portuguese. The Galician > literary standard, however, is a bit easier to read. But Galician is a > series of spoken dialects. > Note: > Spanish lobo /loBo/ > Portuguese lobo /loBu, lobu/ > Galician /tsoBu, shoBu, LoBu/ But these so-called Galician forms are not Galician but (Asturo-)Leonese. See A. Zamora Vicente, Dialectologia Espan~ola, 1967, 122-130. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Mar 9 15:00:36 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 09:00:36 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Rich and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Patrick C. Ryan Date: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 2:05 AM >[ Moderator's response: > It may be what you favor, but it flies in the face of the data: Sanskrit > *requires* a labiovelar, or the accusative would be **nas.t.am rather than > the attested _naktam_. And what is represented by that "*s/t -?" ? > --rma ] Not at all. I am suggesting that the IE accusative was *nektom for those branches which either derived from forms without the w-extension or deleted it. *negh(-w)-t- -> *nek(h)t-. As for the *-s/t-, I believe that Pokorny has erred in reconstructing *neuk-, 'dark'. This looks like a set of derivatives of the *negh-w- stem I postulate plus *-s, which had the same effect on the *-gh- as *-t- did: *negh-w-s -> *neugh-s- -> *neuk(h)s-. Pat [ Moderator's response: I give up. I will not argue the question with someone who does not see that the question exists; I do not have the time. --rma ] From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Mon Mar 8 09:11:28 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:11:28 GMT Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <13432994926.18.ALDERSON@mathom.xkl.com> Message-ID: For the Nostratic and/or Indoeuropean lists as you think suitable:- .................................... "Patrick C. Ryan" wrote (Subject: Re: Laryngeal symbols) replying to nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk:- >>> I believe that the "laryngeals" in IE stem from earlier /?,h,?,H/, ... >> ... use another symbol for ayin, Patrick! It's throwing everybody >> off. Suggestion: /`/ or /3/ >Well, I plead in my defense that the upside down question-mark is generally >used in print for 'ayin, and, before I changed to MSN 2.5, it came through >when produced by Alt-168. And this should go in the FAQ: High-order characters (= with code values over 127) in email are the Chaos Bringer, don't use them; DOS and Windows and Mac etc all are liable to display or corrupt them differently; some emailers transmit them modulo 128, e.g. turning DOS e-umlaut into tabulate. > How about [2] and [3] for the pharyngals, from the Arabic letters? I agree, particularly as I believe also that the H2 laryngeal was the {h.} sound as in Arabic {h2aram} = "sacred, forbidden", (Muh2ammad}, and H3 was the ayin (e.g.root H3-D-W in Arabic {h3aduuw} = "enemy" and Greek {odussomai}). I believe that the usual H1 was the glottal stop. If anyone needs a second different H1, it was likely the ordinary {h} sound. And we need a reasonably compact name for the {h.} sound, like we have for its voiced counterpart `ayin'. > In view of the fact that [3] is used for the Egyptian vulture, which was > really an /r/, .I am reluctant to adopt that suggestion. I thought that the Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) was the glottal stop. The 3-like sign that Egyptologists use for that sign is specific to Egyptology. The Egyptian letter sign for {r} was the mouth or the lion. (Distinguish from the `Gyps fulvus' vulture hieroglyph, which has another use.) Likely also the reason why single-reed is sometimes glottal stop and sometimes {y} is that it used to me always {y}, but some time in predynastic or Old Kingdom times in Egyptian initial {y} became silent like it did in the Old Norse branch of Common Germanic. In emailing we are restricted to the standard 95 reliably emailable ascii characters and may need to adjust usage accordingly. >>The X-SAMPA symbols for fricatives are: >>palatal [C] [j\] ... >> and [H] is the semivowel in [French] . > I sure do not like that one. I don't either. This `H' probably got in because whoever invented the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) had (in those days of hand typesetting) much more consideration for printers than many maths and nuclear science etc men did, and e.g. for this sound chose `h' set upside-down because it looked rather like `y'. It would have helped linguists if Microsoft Word etc had had an option "set next character upside down". From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 8 17:14:36 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 11:14:36 -0600 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >> But before 1500, Spanish & Portuguese were farther apart than they are now. >Surely not in terms of basic vocabulary. In some cases, yes. Both modern Spanish & Portuguese have /familya/ which SHOULD have evolved as *hameja /amexa/ in Spanish *famia /famia/ in Portuguese Latinate relexification did affect a fair share of basic words. The development of literary standards affected lexical choice, with the Latinate words or words from Ibero-Romance literary standards often winning out. In certain domains, one language became dominant. Spanish borrowed a large percentage of sailing terms from Portuguese, etc. Most basic vocabulary is pretty much the same as it was but a fair share of it has spilled from one language to the other --especially in regional dialects, which with mass communication have become generally known. So Mexican giz [from Portuguese], instead of standard tiza "chalk" is understood. Argentine Spanish shares a lot of terms for food, plants and animals [as well as slang] with Brazilian Portuguese --and these are known to any school kid who has read Borges & Quiroga. In some cases, the words have acquired limited meanings Spanish mun~eca /muN~eka/ "doll, pretty girl" [also wrist, originally from a word for "bump, lump"] is cognate with Portuguese boneca /bunek@/ "doll, pretty girl" BUT since in Rio, this word is applied to transvestites who have a beauty contest and "escola de samba" at Carnaval, in Latin American slang it means "transvestite, transexual" Thanx to TV, movies, radio, cassettes/CDs and immigration, even more vocabulary is flowing between the languages and some words get relexified In Brazil, the linguistic center has shifted to the South, and now is moving from Rio to Sa~o Paulo, which has a large --if not huge-- Spanish speaking population. Argentina, Cuba & Puerto Rico have large Galician populations. Buenos Aires is the largest Galician city in the world. Although Galician is a separate language, it is much closer to Portuguese than Spanish. Given that it is essentially a series of rural dialects, western Galician would be [or would have been] closer to Old Portuguese. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 8 20:12:06 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 12:12:06 PST Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word Message-ID: ME (GLEN): >>IE *nek-/*nok- "to bear, to carry, to convey" >> (I've never seen this root. Does anyone know? PETER: >Try: >Avestan fra-nas- = to bring; (nas = to reach) >Vedic naSa:mi = to reach >Greek e:negkon, ene:nokha, etc all < e-nek- (aorist and perfect > forms of) to carry >Old Norse nest = provisions for a journey >OCS nesti etc to carry, bear, bring >Lithuanian neSu etc. >Latvian nesu etc. Hmm, thanx alot Miguel and Peter. Gee, I could be looney but wouldn't a reconstruction of *?nek^- be in order rather than just *nek^- based on the Greek form? Why the long /e/ for augment? If *?nek^- is correct, then a connection with a Nostratic *nitl- becomes more and more unlikely (as I should expect). -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 15:57:42 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 09:57:42 -0600 Subject: Celtic and English Again In-Reply-To: <005e01be67d4$a93c94c0$af3fac3e@niywlxpn> Message-ID: I've been told by Egytians that colloquial Egyptian Arabic has a fair share of Coptic "influence". I don't know if they were referring to lexicon, morphology or both. Standard Arabic, of course, does have some Greek lexical substrate, although what I've seen are mainly learned words. [snip] >Perhaps a comparable situation can be found in Egypt, which was >Egyptian-speaking for yonks, then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand >years, but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either >"substrate". [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Mar 8 20:37:22 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 20:37:22 -0000 Subject: Hittite spelling Message-ID: >Hittite spelling ... distinguish[es] (in medial position at least) >C from CC, where usually the single consonant etymologically >derives from a PIE voiced one and the geminate from a PIE >voiceless consonant. What is actually the state of play with this? It began as a hypothesis, with some evidence in its favour, and some against. Is it turning into one of those things that everyone agrees on because it's tidy, or is the emerging agreement soundly based? Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 16:06:48 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 10:06:48 -0600 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <36ee14d2.34384206@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator correction: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: ] >Larry Trask wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>I think everyone agrees that Basque `ax' is a loan from Latin >> `hatchet'. The Latin word would have been borrowed as >>*; the [h] is a suprasegmental feature in Basque; the */l/ would >>have undergone the categorical early medieval change of intervocalic /l/ >>to /r/; and the diphthongization of /a/ to /ai/ in an initial syllable >>is a familiar though sporadic in Basque: compare `sacred, >>holy', from some Romance development of Latin . >Might the word not have been borrowed directly as , with >metathesis of the /i/ (especially if Latin already had a >degree of allophonic palatalization)? That, or analogy with the >other tool words in (h)ai(t)z-. And in the case of saindu, much the same would have happened in that sanctu /sanktu/ > *santyu which in Spanish from the Basque region became the common name Sancho [it became common name Santo, noun/adjective santo everywhere else] and in Basque *santyu > *sayntu > saindu /sayndu/ [or is it /san~du/?] My reconstruction is probably missing something but the same metathesis of /y/ is there, right? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 8 20:59:10 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 20:59:10 +0000 Subject: IE and Substrates Message-ID: JoatSimeon writes: >I think we should keep in mind that the European linguistic situation in >historical times is probably much simpler than it was in the Mesolithic or >early Neolithic. >Reasoning by analogy from the situation in New Guinea or eastern pre-Columbian >North America, there were probably _many_ more languages and language-families >in Europe before the Indo-European expansion. Not just one or a few non-IE >families which were then replaced by Indo-European. The IE expansion would >then represent a massive linguistic simplification, a "reformatting" of a >previously crowded scene. I endorse this absolutely. I think it's probably right, and I think the modest amount of evidence we have supports it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 16:12:55 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 10:12:55 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Italian also has essere & stare; although it uses them a bit different from Spanish & Portuguese. French seems to have merged them --e^tre is from stare but its conjugated forms are from the Latin root of essere. > Yes, I agree there is seemingly Celtic (grammatical) influence in >most of Western Romance, most notably French. It is just a little more >difficult to nail down, without actual knowledge of the Celtic languages >in question. For example we may note the "two BE verbs" syndrome in >Iberian. > > DLW Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 8 21:05:06 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 21:05:06 +0000 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Wolfgang Behr writes: > If I remember things correctly, there will > be a workshop on SC in Cambridge (at the McDonald Institute of Archeo- > logy) sometime this year, so maybe we will see a convincing defense > of Starostin before long ??? Not this year, I'm afraid. The proposed Cambridge symposium on S-C has been postponed, pending the production of a monograph by Starostin on S-C which is to serve as a basis of discussion. Maybe next year. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 16:22:21 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 10:22:21 -0600 Subject: /Anatolian /-nt-/ and Greek /-nth-/ In-Reply-To: <36e4a3c9.9014271@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: So this would be the same root as the 3rd Singular verb ending -nt- ? e.g. Latin ama-nt "love-they all" >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: [ moderator snip ] >>I suppose we could say that the form was originally >>/-ndh-/, but the Anatolian forms in /-nt/ are generally considered older. >The IE etymon is *-nt- (probably identical to the >Luwian/Slavic/Tocharian collective (plural) suffix *-(e/o)nt-). >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 9 16:27:37 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 10:27:37 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <004a01be67db$a2b62f60$ca9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: [snip] >-----Original Message----- >From: Patrick C. Ryan >Date: Friday, March 05, 1999 10:14 PM [mucho snip] Then write <X> :> I mean :> >Rich, I never write anything as because I frequently am switching from >email to .html and whatever is between the < and > is treated as an >instruction rather than copy in .html. [gran esnipo] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 9 02:19:47 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 20:19:47 -0600 Subject: Results of Researches into Salmonids Message-ID: No, the thing I was vaguely remembering is not the "salmon trout" (salmo trutta). It is the so-called "Danube salmon", or "huchen" (hucho hucho) which is not actually a salmon, or even a trout, but a very close relative of these. Pictures (p. 49 of "The Encyclopedia of Aquatic Life") show something that looks sort of like a monster salmon or trout (weights of over one hundred pounds have been reported). The fish is big enough that in the Volga it gets confused with sturgeon. (Go figure: it does not actually look anything like a sturgeon.) There are two kinds, the European and the Asian. The European kind lives only in the Danube system, while the Asian kind is described as living "from the Volga to the Amur", whatever that means (presumably centrqal and northern Asia). Turning to Malory, and to Diebold as reported by Malory, it seems that somebody has screwed up, for it is said that huchen do not occur in "the Pontic-Caspian steppe". As the Volga flows into the Caspian, I find it difficult to see how this can be right. Perhaps Diebold was not aware of the Asian species? But if Diebold is right that no PIE word for this fish can be reconstructed, then the Caspian part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe would be excluded as a possible homeland, by the usual arguments (which are necessarily decisive.) Speaking of the Caspian, there is (or was) a sub-species of tiger called the Caspian tiger. Though in recent times it has been restricted to the mountains (Elburz?) south of Teheran, it was formerly found along some of the rivers of the Eastern steppe (the Oxus and all that), as were pigs, its main prey. This too seems negative (thought not necessarily decisively so) for this region having been the much-discussed homeland. DLW From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 9 17:14:10 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 12:14:10 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/8/99 6:14:14 AM, you wrote: <> This seems to me to be very important to any analysis of how IE diffused in Europe. 1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations? What glue would hold IE together ESPECIALLY if you take the view that PIE entered or expanded in Europe before 4000BC along with agriculture? This gives us a huge period of time for PIE speaking settlers to sit in their own local areas throughout Europe and somehow maintain "a massive linguistic simplification" instead of breaking down into a whole patchwork of PIE descendents. The theory that says that either PIE or the standard IE protolanguages were being spoken in Europe in even 2500BC requires a very small number of language groups to put a hold on localization for a millenium while Hittite, Sanskrit and Mycenean were just getting ready to rear their heads as the first historically identifiable IE languages. What was holding them together as one language or perhaps a set of no more than what?, four or five proto-languages for a thousand years? 2. You analogize the coming of PIE to the coming of the European languages to the patchwork of pre-Columbian American languages. But it took European languages no more than two centuries in most places in America to displace the prior languages in a much greater mass of land. Compare this to the Renfrew or even the Mallory hypotheses that have PIE (as a contiguous language) cross Europe a few square miles per year over as much as 3000 years. The time of conversion is not the point here, it is rather the amount of time intervening afterwards. 3. A critical question this raises seems to me to be how these languages were standardized. The idea of a proto-IE or even a proto-Keltic throughout Europe before say 1800 BC gives us a language being spoken mainly by illiterate sedentary farmers who would have no knowledge if their language had varied from those of their neighbors a hundred miles away. An yet it has them all having spoken fundamentally the same language for as much as 2000 years before hand. If a sound shift did arise out of nowhere because of some sudden predisposition or fashion towards fricatives or aspirates, how was that shift passed on? The English, Spanish and French of the 1600's all had core institutions for regularizing speech and grammar. The hornbook, the Bible, the priest or preacher, the Castilian or Etonian administrator or cleric, the school teacher and of course the itinerant merchant were all instruments of both continuity and change for such a large displacement of language. The written word itself - our only direct evidence of languages and dialects no longer spoken and syntacts no longer used - is something totally absent from the PIE scene in Europe before 1300 BC. What standardized those PIE speakers in Europe so that they didn't turn into the "the situation in New Guinea" over the course of thousands of years? I think one viable answer is that they didn't. The solution is time - to reduce the amount of time they would have to develope thousands of different IE daughter languages in every nook and cranny of the European continent. And it also brings us closer in time to recognizable standardizing influences - like merchants, priests, manufacturing specialists and urban centers. This would also give us a much faster process of conversion to IE, much closer to the analogy given above to the conversion of the American languages - "a massive linguistic simplification." Regards, Steve Long From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Wed Mar 10 00:17:05 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 16:17:05 -0800 Subject: Anatolians Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > ... > It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, > *dh is typologically unacceptable. What about a stop system distinguishing between voiceless, voiced, and aspirated (unmarked for voicing)? Or am i being naive? 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 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 19:38:03 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:38:03 EST Subject: Anatolians Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >that "wool" didn't exist in the vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times. -- sheep didn't develop wool, as we know it, until well after domestication. Use of wool as a fabric is comparatively late -- well after the beginning of the neolithic. >The plough was also used since the very beginning of the Neolithic, -- no, nyet, not true. Not unless you redefine "plough" to suit the argument and include wooden shovels and digging sticks. No animal traction, no plow. The ard, the earliest true plow, is 4th millenium BCE (same period as wheeled vehicles) and this is well-attested achaeological fact. >That leaves only "yoke", with the undoubted Hittite reflex as a >possible candidate for being a late Neolithic innovation. -- this is a rather drastic case of attacking the evidence rather than trying to work with it. Evidence primary, hypothesis secondary, please. >but there is a Luwian attestation: asuwa. This looks very much like an Indo- >Iranian borrowing (Skt. as'va < PIE *ek^wos), were it not for the fact that >Luwian "dog" is -- the obvious, parsimonious explanation is that the Anatolian languages used ordinary IE terminology for the horse. >yielded a treatise on horses, containing a number of words of Indo-Iranian >origin, written by a Mitannian called Kikkuli). -- and the English terminology for formal riding is largely French and Spanish in origin, although English-speakers have been riding horses as long as there's been an English language (or proto-Germanic, come to that). Meaningless. >Hittite cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), -- and having cognates in Tocharian and Hittite is about as secure a way to put a word into the PIE category as I can think of. Two unrelated IE language families widely separated in time and space -- what do you want, an egg in your beer? The only plausible argument for that is that this is an archaic term, since both Tocharian and Anatolian separated from PIE early. >"shaft" and "harness" when Hittite doesn't even share its basic kinship >terminology with Indo-European and has a different word for "four". -- excuse me, but kinship terminology has some bearing on horse harness technology? Run that one by me again? From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Tue Mar 9 08:52:37 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 08:52:37 +0000 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <010b01be667d$6104c400$c93963c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: >No doubt someone will prove me wrong, but I believe Hittite was deciphered >at first by German speakers - so z was used as in German, which is a great >pain. It = /ts/. I am frankly appalled by this level of ethnocentricity. What's the idea, we shouldn't allow non-English speakers to decipher ancient languages because we can only handle orthography that reads like English? If anyone is working in linguistics who finds it a problem when an orthographical symbol has different phonetic value in different languages, he or she should get out fast and try maths instead. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 9 08:44:25 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 08:44:25 GMT Subject: Celtic and English Again Message-ID: Peter &/or Graham wrote:- > On the lack of influence from Celtic in English: > ... Egypt, which was Egyptian-speaking for yonks, > then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand years The upperclass may well have learned Greek, but the mass of the population may have stuck to the late form of Egyptian called Coptic. For example, the modern Arabic placename Aswan continues Ancient Egyptian `Suan' (or similar) and ignores the Greekized name `Elephantine'. (That and the Egyptian name referred to big round rocks in the Nile there, that looked like elephants wallowing in the water.) > but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either "substrate". There are at least these carry-overs from Ancient Egyptian into Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) (as distinct from educated speech):- (1) Unstressed vowels becoming the same as adjacent stressed vowels, and dropping when possible, e.g. standard Arabic {kabiir} = "big", but ECA {kibiir) = "big", {wa kbiir} = "and big". (2) Initial glottal stop + unstressed vowel often dropping when the previous word ends in a vowel, whether or not in standard Arabic that glottal stop was a {hamzat al was.l}. > Does this suggest that languages can indeed be replaced without great effect > on the invading language, if other circumstances are right, and that the lack > of influence from Celtic on English is not really so remarkable? Anglo-Saxon diphthongizes short front vowels before {r} and {l} or if the next vowel is a back vowel. That occurs also in Old Norse; but where did the Anglo-Saxons pick it up from? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 19:46:59 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:46:59 EST Subject: Chariots Message-ID: >petegray at btinternet.com writes: >with inconclusive results about when horses were strong enough to carry a >person on their back. -- Horses were always strong enough to carry a person on their back _for a while_. Zebras, wild horses, and ponies no larger than the neolithic/Bronze Age chariot pony could all do this. The question actually relates to how long they could be ridden and how much gear the rider could carry. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Tue Mar 9 09:07:48 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 01:07:48 PST Subject: Lenis and Fortis in IE Message-ID: MIGUEL (on the topic of potential Greek borrowings of Anatolian): >Probably because Anatolian t was aspirated, or sounded aspirated >to the Greeks. Alright so Anatolian *t was /t/? I've been thinking about your idea on fortis and lenis stops existing in IE (which is eerily similar to an idea I had about Pre-IE which has been evolving for six monthes or more now). I'm already prone to accept your idea in some form. About Pre-IE, I was considering a while back that although it seems unlikely to me that IE had ejectives (since their glottalic quality seems conveniently to disappear with almost no trace), I considered an alternative idea - that Pre-IE in fact had lenis and fortis stops that were the result of a shift from earlier ejectives (This is in connection with Uralic actually but I will digress). However, I figure that the _fortis_ stops are what Gam. call the "glottalic" and would thus correspond to the *d/*g series. The lenis consonants are the voiced aspirate (*dh) and voiceless plain stops (*t) of old, all of which I had interpreted as voiceless and I believe I mentioned this earlier on the list. Pre-IndoEtruscan (Stage 1) *t *t? *t Pre-IndoEtruscan (Stage 2) *t *t: *t IndoEtruscan *t *t *tT Etruscan t t th IE *t *t *tT Traditional t d dh In this scenario, Hittite medial geminates would correspond to the aspirate stops in opposition to a merged set corresponding to both the voiceless affricates (*dh, *gh, *bh) and the voiceless inaspirates (*d, *g). Maybe fortis/lenis distinctions in IE proper might have validity but I suspect a more evolved situation from this distinction (cf *t > IE *tT (*dh)). Sanskrit voiced aspirates would have evolved from voiceless affricates as are found in original voiceless form after mobile *s- and in all environments in Greek. The original voicelessness of the "voiced inaspirates" can be found in Germanic and in the Latin initial stops for example. What I like about this idea is that the "fortis" consonants correspond exactly to an earlier "ejective" set that thus explains the lack of *b (which would have been *p? > *p: and then uniquely merging with *p - I guess lips are too weak to make the distinction :) The glottalic theory therefore still supplies the best explanation so far of lack of *b but there is no need for supporting ejectives in actual IE proper. [ Moderator's comment: Modern Estonian has a three-way opposition in the obstruents, lenis ~ fortis ~ geminate (fortis) (traditionally "short" ~ "long" ~ "overlong"). According to Ilse Lehiste, a native speaker, the word for "Help!" is [ap:i]--and the obstruent may be held for some time. --rma ] Optionally, assuming only that you accept Etruscan and IE relationship, a correspondance can be seen between the two as shown above. Note if Etruscan matches IE *bhi then it suggests to me that a loss of *p: was very early and affects both languages. Suggestion: Pre-IEtr [*t, *t, *tT] > [*t/*t, *tT] > Etr [t, th] BUT... Pre-IEtr [*p, -, *pf] > [*p, *p, -] > <--- !!! [*p/*p, NIL] > Etr [p, NIL] (I'm aware Etr has already :) Ist es cool? I'm sleepy right now so when you respond, be gentle. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- From adolfoz at tin.it Tue Mar 9 10:52:48 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni (Reggio Emilia, Italia)) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 11:52:48 +0100 Subject: *p>f Revisited (+: IE and Etruscan) Message-ID: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 00:19:57 EST Steve Long wrote, > Returning my question about Why *p>f?: > The answer most commonly given related either to social > causes or in a certain case to some tendency towards aspiration. > There is another explanation however. It suggests that Germanic > seems "archaic" not because it split-off early as Miquel suggests > above, but because it emerged very late. And it explains p>f not as > a "sound shift," but as a fundamental part of the conversion > from a non-IE to an IE language by German speakers. > John Hawkins in Bernard Comrie's The World's Major > Languages (1987) (p.70-71) puts the general case for this, > using a migration theory: > "At least two facts suggest that the pre-Germanic speakers > migrated to their southern Scandanavian location sometime before > 1000BC and that they encountered a non-IE speaking people > from whom linguistic features were borrowed that > were to have a substantial impact on the developement > of Proto-Germanic." Who is interested in the shift p > f has also to take into consideration the usual variance or exchange p / ph / f in Etruscan (from the VII century B.C.) and in its cognate Raetic (no far from Germany!). The connection with the Lautverschiebung (p > f) was already seen by G. Bonfante in "Studi Etruschi" 51, 1983. As I doubt that this is the place where it is possible to discuss if Etruscan and IE are "genetically related", I just say that I will send GRATIS my (heavy: 440 pages including wide notes apparatus) work I DOCUMENTI ETRUSCHI (in Italian, 1996) to them who request it to me. I tried to interpret the Etruscan inscriptions supposing a root alliance with German, Latin and Italic IE ancient dialects, while the link with Celtic languages appears to be minor (no lexical link with the Hittites of V. Georgev, but some likeness in using clitics and noun declension endings: e. g. see F. R. Adrados, "Etruscan as an ie. anatolian (but not hittite) language", in `Journal of Indo-europeans Studies', 1989, p. 363 ff. and, more convincing, F. Bader, "Comparaison typologique de l'itrusque et des langues indo-europiennes", in "Studi Etruschi" 56, 1989-1990). However Etruscologists as Helmut Rix and Carlo de Simone could not accept most of these interpretations. Adolfo Zavaroni adolfoz at tin.it From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 9 11:13:18 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 11:13:18 +0000 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <36ee14d2.34384206@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [on Basque from Latin ] > Might the word not have been borrowed directly as , with > metathesis of the /i/ (especially if Latin already had a > degree of allophonic palatalization)? That, or analogy with the > other tool words in (h)ai(t)z-. All of these things are possible, and the contamination view has been put forward. The direct-borrowing view has not been favored, because we know of no good parallel, while the sporadic change of /a/ to /ai/ in a first syllable is well documented. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 9 12:48:22 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 06:48:22 -0600 Subject: Celtic and English Again In-Reply-To: <005e01be67d4$a93c94c0$af3fac3e@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Sat, 6 Mar 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > On the lack of influence from Celtic in English: > Perhaps a comparable situation can be found in Egypt, which was > Egyptian-speaking for yonks, then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand > years, but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either > "substrate". > Does this suggest that languages can indeed be replaced without great effect > on the invading language, if other circumstances are right, and that the > lack of influence from Celtic on English is not really so remarkable? Yes, except that what we have in English is lack of lexical influence. Whether grammatical influences would occur depends to a large extent on the nature of the two languages in question. By the way, did Greek ever really replace Egyptian? DLW From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 19:44:46 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:44:46 EST Subject: Celtic and English Again Message-ID: In a message dated 3/8/99 11:11:49 PM Mountain Standard Time, petegray at btinternet.com writes: >Perhaps a comparable situation can be found in Egypt, which was >Egyptian-speaking for yonks, then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand years -- Not so. Greek never replaced demotic Egyptian as the popular language -- Coptic was the majority tongue in Egypt down to the 13th century CE. Greek was never more than a minority tongue, spoken by Greek immigrants and their descendants and a rather thin layer of Hellenized locals. It was mainly urban, as well. Comparable to Norman French in England. >but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either "substrate". -- Greek, as explained above, isn't a "substrate", and Egyptian Arabic is extremely different from that of say, Syria or Saudi Arabia or Morocco. Furthermore, Arabic arrived in Egypt with a written standard. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 19:59:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:59:08 EST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: >glengordon01 at hotmail.com writes: >Now, I can fully understand that one can have the legitimate view that > _AT PRESENT TIME_, such things are not recoverable to a _strong degree_ >as JS points out. -- and probably never will be, because we don't have time machines. Linguistic reconstruction is done by 'triangulation'. Once you're back beyond the neolithic, roughly, even the language families with the most and earliest written sources just don't provide enough data points. And we're never going to get any more data, failing the discovery of the archives of Atlantis. >conjecture is a necessary component in good research. -- not conjecture without evidence. If we couldn't see beyond the orbit of the Moon, astronomy would be impossible and all conjecture about it would be fantasy, pointless word-games, a waste of time. >Can we really place a limit on what we can find out or learn at any given >time? -- yes; it's called "no evidence available". The unwritten languages of prehistory are _lost_. The data is _gone_, vanished into entropy. >how to warp space-time back to the time of a given proto-language, >comparative linguistics will always be _pure theory_. -- this is not a license to speculate without evidence; otherwise, we'll just bring in near-miss moons, von Daniken aliens, etc. "Theory" is not the same as "groundless supposition". >probability... nature of comparative linguistics! -- a great enough difference in degree is a difference in kind. >Surely IE is most likely related to something. -- yes; and we can probably never know what it was related to. The information is gone. >The point is: in regards to any other competing theories out there on IE >external links (from NWC to Benue-Congo), what is the MOST probable? -- the difference between 0.000002% and 0.000001% is not meaningful. The point is that there simply isn't enough evidence to build _any_ plausible theory. Carl Popper's "Non-falsifiable hypothesis" fits here. If it can't be tested, it can't be meaningful. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 9 20:07:09 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 15:07:09 EST Subject: Mallory Message-ID: What we refer to as "pastoralism" is generally thought of as the type practiced in areas of the Eurasian steppe that weren't ecologically suitable for agriculture. Grazing, including transhumant grazing, was part of agricultural systems everywhere in the area, but that's not the same thing as being primarily dependent on the herds of the grasslands. Pastoral nomads usually had a routine of movements, summer-winter, or altitudinal ones in areas with mountains, to take advantage of ecological variations. However, the Eurasian semi-arid and arid steppe zone is ecologically marginal -- and so is subject to unpredictable shifts; severe and long-lasting droughts, for example, which can abruptly reduce the carrying capacity of the pastures. The more purely pastoral and nomadic the economy, the more vulnerable it was to such shifts; and the general human tendency to gradually breed up to and slightly beyond the carrying capacity of the environment was also relevant. Since the Eurasian nomads become more specialized in pastoralism over the millenia, they became at once more efficient users of this marginal environment (and more able to exploit all of it), and at the same time more vulnerable to its instability. Not coincidentally, the violence and scale of population movements in the steppe zone also increased over time, building up to the all-time climax of the 13th and 14th centuries, when single steppe- based empires could span the whole area from Hungary to Manchuria and invade places as far away as Burma and India. The situation in early PIE times, when the _first_ semi-pastoralists were expanding through the _margins_ of the steppe zone (the forest-steppe and river valley areas, for instance), and doing so with populations of humans and livestock well below the maxima, was historically unique. Never again would this territory be so 'open' (inhabited only by very thinly scattered hunter- gatherers). From manaster at umich.edu Tue Mar 9 20:40:44 1999 From: manaster at umich.edu (manaster at umich.edu) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 15:40:44 -0500 Subject: Greek question In-Reply-To: <004901be6876$51441ac0$5a9ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: > I have demonstrated it using accepted comparative methodology. This strains credulity. "Accepted" by whom? From ewb2 at cornell.edu Wed Mar 10 16:07:20 1999 From: ewb2 at cornell.edu (Wayles Browne) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 11:07:20 -0500 Subject: Greek question (night?) In-Reply-To: <38bfba66.36e36dc7@aol.com> Message-ID: > In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" >besides Germanic or Modern French? >Regards, >Steve Long >[ Moderator's response: > Greek _nuks, nuktos_, Latin _nox, noctis_, Sanskrit _nak (IIRC), naktam_, > Hittite _nekuz = nek{^w}t+s_, ... > --rma ] Also Slavic: Russian noch', Old Church Slavonic nosht' etc. go back to Common Slavic *nokt-. Let me take this opportunity to thank everybody for their thoughts about my original question about Greek nyx ~ -nykh-. Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics Department of Linguistics Morrill Hall 321, Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A. tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h) fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE) e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu From iglesias at axia.it Thu Mar 11 02:33:39 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 18:33:39 PST Subject: Trojan and Etruscan Message-ID: Another addition to the list of names of the Etruscans, which I read in an article by Massimo Pallottino: Umbrian: Turskus = Latin: Tu(r)sci Regards F. Rossi From yoel at mindspring.com Wed Mar 10 02:54:22 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 21:54:22 -0500 Subject: IE and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <36E36BF7.8D21BD78@neiu.edu> Message-ID: In the intervening time Adrados has written up his theory of how Etruscan fits as an Anatolian language, but one that breaks off from Proto-Common-Anatolian long, long before what we normally call the Anatolian Languages break off. That is that from Proto-Anatolian, first Etruscan branches off, representing this early stage of PA, much later Common Anatolian (Hittite, the Luwic Languages, Palaic, the ancestor of Lydian, etc.) break off. Neu has written a different conceptualization of the position of Anatolian within such a possible perspective. Adrados's article is in JIES and Neu's in ZVS/KZ/HS. I can look up the dates, but don't have them at hand. And just recently, based on no morphology whatsoever, Renfrew has Minoan breaking off from this Mythic Proto-Common-Anatolian 7,000 B.C.E. Yoel At 12:19 AM 3/8/99 -0600, you wrote: >Good old G-bock was honest. Privately -- to me --Hamp only said: VG's data >seem to work, but oughta have more. > >pete > >Jim Rader wrote: > >> Nearly twenty years ago I heard Eric Hamp give an account of >> Georgiev's lecture. As I recall Hamp telling it, Georgiev thought >> that Etruscan practically WAS Hittite, > >RIGHT: this is what I remember. > >> i.e., that Etruscan was an >> Anatolian language. The audience didn't contest his thesis out of >> sheer stupefaction, not because they agreed. Gueterbock walked out >> of the lecture shaking his head and saying "Very interesting, very >> interesting!" From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Mar 10 18:05:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 18:05:02 -0000 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Thanks for the correction, Miguel. The trouble with my being half right, is that it's usually the wrong half. Peter From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 10 03:57:58 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 03:57:58 GMT Subject: PIE *gn- > know/ken Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask this: Is >a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? I think so. English and Danish (fortis-lenis) vs. Dutch (voiceless-voiced), for instance. Or East Armenian vs. West Armenian. Finnish vs. Estonian (or is that just the spelling?). >If it is not part of general experience I do not see the commending >simplicity in choosing "lenis t" as the origin of Latin, Greek and Indic >plain voiced d. Where "d" and "dh" merged, they are voiced, as in >Balto-Slavic, Celtic and Albanian - why derive this from a basically >voiceless protoform? Hittite and Tocharian appear not to have voicing contrast. Parts of Germanic and Armenian don't have it. In Germanic and Armenian *d is voiceless, in Greek and Proto-Italic *dh is, so voicedness is not a necessary characteristic of *d and *dh (whereas *t is always voiceless/fortis). >- Isn't the only thing "wrong" with the IE system >that the aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh ...) have not been accepted? Murmured stops are extremely uncommon. There's also the matter of *b. A labial series *p, *bh simply doesn't make any sense, not even if you add a teaspoon of *ph's. >Then, >if we have SOME evidence for asp.ten., but not enough to guarantee >reconstruction of an overwhelming number of etymologies, but without them >the system as such becomes a truly overwhelming mess, isn't the easiest >solution then to accept that SOME etymologies containing ph, th, kh are >correct and that the PIE system was as in Sanskrit? Is it not a very >strong claim that ALL cases of asp.ten. are in last analysis based on >mistakes? Not mistakes, but stop+laryngeal, I think. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam [ Moderator's comment: I think the reference to "mistakes" is to my comment regarding the idea that Skt. voiceless aspirates are a hypercorrection in the language as transmitted by Prakrit speakers. --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Mar 10 23:25:50 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:25:50 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I wonder about the mechanics of this one In Spanish a'lamo = "poplar" BUT olmo = "elm" >5) >Celtic survivals of northern and central Iberia: >Sp., Port.alamo `poplar', Cf. It. olmo From yoel at mindspring.com Wed Mar 10 04:37:58 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 23:37:58 -0500 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word In-Reply-To: <36fc8921.129714302@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] It is suggested that you look in any of Bomhard's three books: Towards Proto-Nostratic (CILT 27, 1984), The Nostratic Macrofamily (Mouton, 1994, co-authored with John A. Kerns and dealing also with morphology and syntax). On p.380ff. his unitary phoneme TL is dealt with. It is a reconstruct whose appearence in his sub-Nostratic languages are quite different. The third book is Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (Signum, 1996). Yoel At 08:28 AM 3/8/99 GMT, you wrote: >>[ Moderator's response: >> There is a serious mixing of levels here, in that a Romance-specific >> development is being projected back to Nostratic, although other Indo- >> European languages do not have this phonotactic constraint, e. g. Greek. >> Before we can even accept it as a parallel, we have to determine what >> the digraph represents in Bomhard, a unit phoneme or a cluster. >> --rma ] > >A unit phoneme, probably a lateral affricate (> Semitic *s', a >lateral fricative). > >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 11 01:09:15 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:09:15 PST Subject: PIE *gn- - know/ken Message-ID: MIGUEL: The most acceptable solution from my point of view is that PIE did not have any voiced stops at all. JENS E.R.: Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask this: Is a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? So far I prefer the "opposite" to Miguel - that *d is really the fortis stop and the rest are lenis. The fortis would be derivative from the earlier Pre-IE ejective as Gamr. proposed for Common IE *d in the first place. JENS E.R.: [...] why derive this from a basically voiceless protoform? Well, I think Miguel has many reasons for his idea but I'll speak for myself on why I believe the same thing. The voiceless aspirates *ph, *kh, *th are not supportable in common IE and seem to be very much isolated to IIr. Yet, if this is true, we of course run into the problem of why *bh, *gh and *dh exist without voiceless contrasts (big no-no). On top of this problem, *b does not exist as well in IE and there has never been acceptable evidence of this phoneme. These two main things violate our understanding of how world languages are supposed to operate. Hence, since the problems in traditional IE phonology are voice-oriented, the simpler solution is to accept that IE did not have voiced stops and then we don't run into problems at all. Germanic then is seen to hold some phonological archaicisms. Voiceless systems can often develop voicing contrasts from such a system (Sumerian for one) and this voicing would have to exist AFTER IE had spread out enough and the archaic Germanic (with IE *d = *t) had lost some contact. Perhaps while some IE dialects were still in contact with each other, an isogloss spread across a certain region, making the voiceless *d a voiced plain. Note however Greek voiceless th, ph and kh in all environments, thus we can't say the same thing for *dh. The voicing of *dh, *gh, and *bh would have been even later than this. When voicing finally occured, sometimes it merged with the now "voiced plain". It should come to no surprise that the language that has voiceless ph, th and kh in contrast with bh, dh, and gh (Sanskrit) is the same one that DIDN'T merge the phonemes together and maintained the aspiration. This caused a necessity for the development of voiceless counterparts. Voiceless th, ph and kh are still found in Sanskrit after the voiceless mobile *s-. Laryngeals, voiceless as well, apparently create other examples of these phonemes. This would appear to be a simpler solution since we finally don't have to apologize for an imbalanced phonological system in IE or create extra "band-aid" phonemes that lack proper evidence. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 10 04:41:59 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 04:41:59 GMT Subject: Danube homeland. In-Reply-To: <1e2eadaa.36e2de45@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>but it makes it the best candidate by default, and any alternative theories >>should offer a pretty good case for why the IE homeland should be located >>elsewhere, and what happened to the languages of these "Anatolian farmers" or >>"Old Europeans". >-- same thing that happened to the languages of the Elamo-Dravidians They survived? But that's *my* theory :-) >who were >the first farmers throughout Iran and North India. You're sweeping close to 200 million people speaking Dravidian languages in Southern India under the rug. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 11 01:34:23 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:34:23 PST Subject: Danube homeland. Message-ID: JOATSIMEON: -- nonsensical. The PIE vocabulary is full of items which just weren't around before 4000 BCE. This alone completely rules out such a hypothesis. This whole question is about who's talking about what when they say IE. It's somewhat confusing. As far as I understand now, Miguel is pushing for the so-far aggravatingly difficult-to-fight idea that the Satem dialects alone arrived in the Pontic-Caspian region early and IE proper was in the Balkans. Although I intuitively know this can't be right, I haven't seen a good disproval come way yet. We have to get organized here and succinct to make sure the debate doesn't runaway out of control. What terminology shows undenyably that the _entire_ IE (from Anatolian to Armenian) should be found both in the Pontic-Caspian region AND a time of 4000-3500 BCE as most of us expect. Is there inheirited 4000-3000 BCE terminology in Anatolian that anyone knows of? Actually what about *sweks, *septm and other Semitic-related terms? Isn't this supposed to have come from West Semitic as we seem to have accepted? How does this word enter so early into IE? It would have had to occur before 6000 BCE then, no? When/where is West Semitic supposed to have existed? Or Semitic? Isn't this a little early? There must be a strict time limit. Something tells me there's a big loophole here somewhere. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs From yoel at mindspring.com Wed Mar 10 04:55:24 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 23:55:24 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <37029e7a.135179387@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: The question is dealt with thoroughly in H. Craig Melchert Anatolian Historical Phonology, both as to the verbal root neku- "become twilight" and nekut- "night"/ Yoel At 10:04 AM 3/8/99 GMT, you wrote: >mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: > >>The spelling stands for >>/nekwt-s/. The problem is that we would expect if the >>word is to be derived from PIE *nekwt- ~ *nokwt-. The single >>suggests PIE *g(h)w. > >But I must agree with Rich's "moderator comment" elsewhere that >in this case the spelling may reflect all of PIE *kw, *gw or >*ghw [*gwh if you prefer]. After all, if the etymon were *kw, >the geminate spelling should not be but , and there is >no way of writing that in cuneiform (nor in ASCII, as the >recurrent confusions about labiovelars show). > >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 11 02:13:10 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 18:13:10 PST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: I had a wonderfully long response ready to send you guys but luckily Hotmail Timed out on me and I was given the opportunity to write a more focused email in the end... ME (GLEN): Now, I can fully understand that one can have the legitimate view that _AT PRESENT TIME_, such things are not recoverable to a _strong degree_ as JS points out. JOATSIMEON: -- and probably never will be, because we don't have time machines. Linguistic reconstruction is done by 'triangulation'. Once you're back beyond the neolithic, roughly, even the language families with the most and earliest written sources just don't provide enough data points. You are going to have to decide what kind of terminology you are going to use: absolute or vague. The vague phrase "back beyond the neolithic, roughly" doesn't go well with the absolute term "impossible" as in "it's impossible to reconstruct beyond the neolithic". The word "roughly" automatically admits to the possibility of long-range comparison because you appear to certify that _some_ evidence is obtainable for these hypotheses. Further, triangulation has no absolute limits of distance. It is used for distances on Earth as well as in space. You have successfully proved my point. Thank you. :) ME (GLEN): conjecture is a necessary component in good research. JOATSIMEON: -- not conjecture without evidence. [...] Carl Popper's "Non-falsifiable hypothesis" fits here. If it can't be tested, it can't be meaningful. Conjecture IS BY DEFINITION "guesswork". Look it up in a dictionary and come back to me. What makes good conjecture from bad conjecture is the amount of likelihood a hypothesis has and how much it explains. This is how we can logically dismiss theories such as Pat's Sumerian Invention Process against the likelier scenario that Sumerian evolved like any other language from an earlier form. Or do you accept this as a credible possibility?! Do you realise that you're completely dismissing the field of cosmology and quantum mechanics because of lack of "evidence". We can't take a picture of a particle to tell whether it's a wave or a particle or both (cf. Wave-Particle Duality) yet it's just accepted that sometimes it behaves as one or the other. Tachyon particles aren't verified only surmised. Gravitons, wimps, superstring theory and a 10-dimensional universe. Are these "wild conjectures"? These theories are NECESSARY in order to explain the world we live in and I maintain that these conjectures (in the sense that there cannot be physical evidence of being so) are science. Of course, they have "evidence" in the form of mathematical equations and the like but there isn't any undeniable physical proof. Again, we're talking about relative probability - how much does it explain with the least amount of effort and the most elegant simplicity (Occhim's Rasor). ME (GLEN): Can we really place a limit on what we can find out or learn at any given time? JOATSIMEON: -- yes; it's called "no evidence available". The unwritten languages of prehistory are _lost_. The data is _gone_, vanished into entropy. This statement is only meaningful once you succinctly define "evidence". Is IE futile then? What makes IE different? It would appear that IE is "lost" too yet we seem to know an awful lot about it despite it's disappearance. How funny. ME (GLEN): The point is: in regards to any other competing theories out there on IE external links (from NWC to Benue-Congo), what is the MOST probable? JOATSIMEON: -- the difference between 0.000002% and 0.000001% is not meaningful. Yes, true, only if you can measure the difference as such. You have not. Start calculating. This is where "relative probability" is necessary. No measurements are required. It's simply a reasoning process, weighing how much two different hypotheses explain the data best - comparing likelihoods. This seems to suggest that you actually accept Amerind languages as being as likely to be closely related to IE as Uralic. The fact that IE and Etruscan are honestly being considered to be genetically related appears to push the time-frame of reasonable reconstruction little by little. There are no absolutes. I wholly question your reasoning. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Mar 10 05:52:32 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 23:52:32 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Date: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 10:40 PM >mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >But I must agree with Rich's "moderator comment" elsewhere that >in this case the spelling may reflect all of PIE *kw, *gw or >*ghw [*gwh if you prefer]. After all, if the etymon were *kw, >the geminate spelling should not be but , and there is >no way of writing that in cuneiform (nor in ASCII, as the >recurrent confusions about labiovelars show). This is interesting speculation but not borne out by the data. See Sturtevant p. 56: durative of 'drink' = ak-k{.}u-uS-ki-iz-zi; however the basic form is written with one -k- upon which S. remarks: "The consistent use of single k between vowels in the primary verb is difficult, but note -kk- in the durative". Pat From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Wed Mar 10 07:49:12 1999 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 08:49:12 +0100 Subject: PIE *gn- > know/ken Message-ID: Thanks to Jens & Miguel for their responses to parts of my question concerning the reflexes in English of PIE *gen- 'to know'. I'd still be most grateful for any opinions as to : a) at what stage in linguistic history the initial voiced consonant in PIE roots such as *gno- "know/ken/can" or *gen- "knife", etc. became devoiced (esp. in respect of Grimm's Law), and b) whether it is correct to state that the form 'know' is derived from the zero grade of *gen- (*gno-), whilst the forms 'ken (dial.)/can' are derived from the full (e) grade (*gen-)? Best Wishes, Dennis. [ Moderator's comments: 1. Please be aware that the root is *gneH3-, with the o-coloring laryngeal. The form 'know' is derived from the full grade *gneH3-w-; forms such as 'can' are derived from the zero grade *gn.H3-. 2. The unrelated *gen- is not "knife", but rather the hypothetical basis for a large number of Germanic stems referring to knobs, lumps, sharp blows, and the like. 3. It may be that the initial *g was never voiced, but rather a glottalic /k{^?}/, which lost its glottalic articulation. However, that aside, it appears that Germanic was a standard IE language in the first half of the 1st millenium BCE, so not before 1000 BCE and not (much) later than 500 BCE. --rma ] From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 09:15:16 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 09:15:16 GMT Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote:- > *i:sarno [Celtic, Germanic] > iron, Eisen n. > [< ?Vasconic *isar "star"; > see Basque izar "star"] [mcv2/98, tv2/98] Larry Trask replied:- > No comment. Also, Greek `side:ros' = "iron", Latin `sidus' (gen `sideris') = "star". This semantic association was quite possible in early times when Man had not yet found how to smelt iron and iron was a precious rarity available only as natural nickel-iron alloy in meteorites. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Wed Mar 10 09:29:55 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 03:29:55 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: It's even more fun: Hrozny', a Czech, indeed, was in the Austro-Hungarian army and was assigned to Turkey [allied with the Central powers]. A-H, as France even today, had compulsory national service, which could be satisfied, not only by soldiering, but also in teaching and scholarship. And the scholar who recognized Saussure's "laryngeals" in Hrozny''s deciphrmnet, was also an A-H officer, Jerzy Kurylowicz, a Pole, whose name indicates Belo-Russian origins. jp maher Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Hittite was deciphered by a Czech, Hrozny', the in whose name > is /z/. The derives from the conventions used for Akkadian > cuneiform. Akkadian was deciphered by Germans. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 09:49:23 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 09:49:23 +0000 Subject: Castilian In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [on Basque ~ `side'] > This word resembles Spanish falda "skirt, flank"--which > unaccountably begins with /fV/; which, as anyone who was studied > Ibero-Romance knows, is a no-no. Is there an Old Castilian, Gasco'n or > Aragone's form /*alda, *alde/ ? Castilian is commonly glossed `skirt', but in fact it denotes more generally `any part of a garment which hangs loosely and freely away from the body'. In addition to `skirt(s)', the word can translate English `fold', `drape', `train', with reference to garments. In the Middle Ages, the word is recorded frequently as both and , the second exhibiting the categorical Castilian shift of /f/ to /h/ in initial position before most following sounds. The form eventually won out in the standard language. Corominas sees the word as descending from Frankish * `fold', cognate with English `fold'; the word is found throughout continental Germanic, including in Gothic. The predominance of /f/ is certainly puzzling; Corominas rejects a semi-learned origin, on the ground that this is not the sort of word likely to have such an origin, and prefers to assume that was re-borrowed into Castilian from a neighboring Romance variety which had not undergone the Castilian shift of /f/ to /h/, probably Occitan or Catalan. The Castilian word has a transferred sense of `lower part of a slope', and this, or a related Romance form, is thought to be the source of Basque `slope', which can hardly be native. I know of no Castilian, Gascon or Aragonese word of the form suggested, but cannot assert with confidence that no such form exists. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 10:13:45 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 10:13:45 +0000 Subject: IE and Uralic pronouns In-Reply-To: <6d937280.36e3358e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999 ECOLING at aol.com wrote: [on pronoun comparisons] > Rather appear to be knowing the answers, > and hide the questions we don't know the answers to? > Or declare them off-limits? Nobody I know of is doing any such thing. We merely admit that there are many things we don't know, and quite a few things we are unlikely ever to know. But no historical linguist declares any field of investigation "off limits". > In a business firm, that would be a recipe > for near-immediate bankruptcy, > failing to act positively and strongly in moving towards the future. This is the first time I have seen HL compared to a business. HL is not a commercial enterprise. It cannot be run like a business or judged like a business. Our late unlamented Conservative government in Britain attempted to introduce business procedures into such institutions as schools, hospitals, universities. the police and the BBC, all of which were burdened with layers of managers and bureaucrats, and assessed as business enterprises instead of as public-service institutions. The results have generally been catastrophic. And I don't think business attitudes would be any more rewarding in my subject. > Better to ADMIT to students that we need more powerful > tools for penetrating the noise of centuries and even millennia, > to set more and more students to this task, to studying how deeply, > and against which kinds of noise, each tool we have can > penetrate (estimates in all cases are fine), and to estimate > in as many situations as possible how much residue should > still be detectable despite the noise of historical change, > WITHOUT the assumptions that the sample used as controls > ARE IN FACT UNRELATED. That is the fallacy in all such > approaches I have read. Because if the supposed controls > ARE related, even very distantly, it may distort our estimates > of what background noise is. With respect, this sounds to me like a hopelessly unrealistic program. A number of linguists are already attempting to develop mathematical methods which might be used to push our investigations further back in time, but the difficulties are formidable, and no proposal has yet won widespread acceptance. I don't think it's realistic to try to estimate the degree of background noise for languages generally: there are just too many complicating factors. For one thing, languages with similar phoneme systems, similar phonotactic patterns and similar morpheme-structure constraints are likely to show a higher proportion of chance resemblances than arbitrary languages. For another, no general approach to background noise can hope to distinguish between common inheritance and borrowing; this is something that has to be done by painstaking and hard-nosed linguistic investigation, and sometimes it can hardly be done at all. As for the supposed "fallacy", I might draw attention to the Oswalt shift test, a simple but ingenious -- though time-consuming -- way of estimating the degree of background noise for any languages we happen to be interested in. After all, if we're interested in comparing, say, Burushaski and Ainu, it's only the background noise for those languages that is relevant, and not the background noise for other languages, which may be quite different in nature and magnitude. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 12:05:27 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 12:05:27 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [ moderator snip ] > This word resembles Spanish falda "skirt, flank"--which > unaccountably begins with /fV/; which, as anyone who was studied > Ibero-Romance knows, is a no-no. Is there an Old Castilian, Gasco'n or > Aragone's form /*alda, *alde/ ? Sp. falda is a Germanic borrowing into Romance (It., Oc., Cat., Ptg, falda). Coromines suggests from Frankish *falda `fold', cf OHG falt. ME fald, related to Goth falthan, OHG faldan, OE fealdan, ON falda `to fold'; related by Onions to PIE *pel/*pl- with a *-t- extension; cf. Gk dipaltos, diplasios `twofold', haploos `simple'; Lat plicare `to fold'. Perhaps if we want to advance this 'research programme' we should impose on ourselves a self-denying ordinance against etymologizing off the cuff. 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 iglesias at axia.it Wed Mar 10 21:19:50 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 13:19:50 PST Subject: Rate of change Message-ID: Concerning the Galician language, my wife is from La Corun~a and with her assistance I would like to give the following input: 1) Galician is quite distinct from Castillian. 2) Whether it is distinct from Portuguese is a matter of opinion. The Portuguese (nationalistically ?) consider it a "co-dialecto". 3) The pronunciation of Galician is very different from the standard Portuguese of Lisbon, but if we consider the dialects of Northern Portugal the distance is much less. (For example no difference between "b" and "v"). The dialects differ mainly as a result of the influence of the official languages. The dialects in Galicia are very much alive. 4) My wife's language is Castillian, as she grew up under Franco's regime in a large city, and the use of Galician was, shall we say, strongly discouraged. However, her family in the country continued to use Galician and she can understand the language with no problems. Subjectively, my wife has no problem in communicating with Northern Portuguese speaking in her version of Castillian, but with a friend from Lisbon they have to speak very slowly. However, this person's father is from Minho (Portuguese Galicia), so that helps. With Brazilians, it depends on the person. Some kinds of Brazilian seem closer to Galician. 5) Galician may sound like Castillian, but in fact its sounds including the lisped "s" were a local development parallel to that of Castille. (See "Grama'tica Portuguesa" by Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, Ed. Gredos, Madrid, chapter on "El Gallego") The south of Galicia uses "seseo". 6) There is another phenomenon known as "geada", which is the pronunciation of velar "g" similar to the Spanish "j", e.g. "lujo" for "Lugo", but this is not considered "correct", although many other Spaniards consider it the very essence of Galician as they find it funny, e.g. "jato" for "gato". 7) Galician has been recognised as an official language alongside Castillian, on the same level as Catalan and Basque in their respective areas. Like Basque, Galician had to develop a modern written standard over the last few decades. There is currently a debate between the Autonomous Government of Galicia, which has adopted a Spanish-like orthography, and those who would prefer a Portuguese-style orthography, e.g. Espanha, rather than Espan~a. Un sau'do carin~oso a todos da lista indo-europea. Boa tarde. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 10 12:44:43 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 06:44:43 -0600 Subject: Celtic Influence in English Message-ID: Last I heard, most of what I say about this was supported by Hamp, so whether or not it is wrong, it is not ridiculous. Of course no one could believe that there is Celtic (grammatical) influence in English without also believing that the features in question were suppressed as sub-standard during the OE period. By the way, personal communication with Hamp on this matter got me (so I guess) a full-tuition graduate scholarship to the University of Chicago, which I first took up then abandoned when I decided I would rather be a rock star. (I'm the one who looks like a cross between Sting and Mick Jagger.) Here is a copy of a rather impromptu abstract I recently (and rapidly) composed on the subject. (On re-reading, it does not seems as good as it once did. Alas for its chances of acceptance.) Celtic Influence as a Major Force in the Development of English During the Middle English period, written English becomes progressivley more similar (in syntax) to the Celtic languages, especially those in the Brittonic half of the family. The innovations in question arise in the West (in the sense of a "Greater West") and North, where Celtic influence is historically plausible. If this is not a coicidence, it is clear the these innovations must have been suppressed as sub-standard during the Old English period, only to surface during the unmasking of former peasant dialects characteristic of the ME period. The innovations in question fall into two categories: 1) reduction of nominal morphology, and 2) introduction of periphrasis (and progressives) into the verbal system. But these two types do not appear in the same area. Nominal innovations appear in the North, and verbal innovations appear in the West. Norse influence explains this pattern, for Norse influence tended to reduce nominal morphology, as is generally recognized, but would also have tended to disfavor characteristically Celtic verbal constructions. As Norse influence occurred in the North and East, this means that the North would have two external causes to reduce nominal morphology, Celtic and Norse, whereas the West and East would each have only its characteristic one. This also explains something that has long puzzled more thoughtful Anglists: if Norse influence is the reason for reductions in nominal morphology, why are these so much stronger in the North than in the East, and why is the West as receptive to them as is the East? The answer is that Norse influence is not all that is going on: there is also Celtic influence. The theory advanced explains both why the innovations in question occur early in English and only later or not at all in other Germanic, and why the innovations is question occur where (and when) they do in England. The traditional interpretation can only offer coincidence in "explanation". The subject also offers opportunites for interesting observations on secondary language acquisition and the sociolinguistics of dialects that are in origin foreign "accents". Striking parallels with more modern "Celtic Englishes" are adduced, but the main conclusion is that to a surprising extent modern English is itself a Celtic English from an earlier time. That innovations evidently of Celtic provenance should have been adopted into the London Standard, where they are not native by geography and can only have been introduced by migration, shows that the Celtic element in the population even in the Midlands must have been substantial, thus lending linguistic support to the revisionist view of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest recently advanced, on entirely non-linguistic grounds, by Higham, that there was substantial "Celtic survival" in all but the East and Southeast of England. [End of Abstract] I must stress that "the theory advanced" explains what the Conventional Wisdom cannot explain, save by throwing up its hands and crying "coincidence": 1) Why Middle English diverges from the rest of Germanic and seemingly converges with (British) Celtic, and 2) (together with Norse influence) why the innovations in question show the geographic pattern that they do. So I do hereby officially issue what I call the Bickerton challenge: if you don't like it, come up with something better. And "coincidence" does not count. DLW From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Mar 10 13:03:40 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 15:03:40 +0200 Subject: Who deciphered what (was Re: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt) In-Reply-To: <3704c716.145575922@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: > >No doubt someone will prove me wrong, but I believe Hittite was deciphered > >at first by German speakers - so z was used as in German, which is a great > >pain. It = /ts/. > OK, I'll prove you wrong :-) > Hittite was deciphered by a Czech, Hrozny', the in whose name > is /z/. The derives from the conventions used for Akkadian > cuneiform. Akkadian was deciphered by Germans. Germans like Henry Rawlinson and Edward Hincks? Strictly speaking, Hittite was not deciphered at all. The script was already known. It was Hrozny' who made the first steps in interpreting the language and who suggested that it was IE, but the decipherment phase of cuneiform had long been over. The adaptations of the script for the writing of Hittite had to be worked out, but this is not the same thing as starting with an unknown script. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 10 13:25:37 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 13:25:37 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > [snip] > I was also thinking of Spanish muro, Latin murus [sp?] "wall" or > Spanish moro'n "hillock, rise of land" except that the double /rr/ of murru > screws things up --and then there's Spanish morro, "a small promontory on a > neck of land jutting out into the water [where forts were often built]" > Maybe Celtic offers more clues [or enigmas] to this set of words > >> moraine, Mor?ne "moraine", > >> Mur[e] "pile of rocks [Bavarian] > >> [?< Vasconic; > >> see Basque murru "hill"] [tv97] Right. Here goes with Meyer-L?bke, REW. 5673a. *mora "Steinhaufe" [cairn] Tosk., kors. mora. -- Ablt.: venez., truent. morelo de luganegeta "St?ck Wurst", de bizato "St?ck Aal", morena de kasten~e "Schnur Kastanien", ladin. morena "Kette" Prati, AGl. 18,336, log. moderina f?r *moredina "Haufe", ammoderinare "anh?ufen", moro'ttulu "Auswuchs" Guarnerio, RIL. 48,966; sp. moro'n "H?gel" Jud, BDR. 3,11,2. Ob alle diese W?rter zusammengeh?ren, ist fraglich; Ursprung vorr?m. (Zusammenhang mit 5762 [murru] oder mit 5369 [marra] ist ausgeschlossen; sav. mordzi "Steinhaufe["] s. 5758 [*muricarium]) Note M-L's caution about whether these words belong together at all, and his judgement that murru is not connected. (Onions ODEE does relate moraine to Rom *murrum, but without argument.) 5762 murru (Schallwort [onomatopoeia]) "Schnauze", "Maul" Log. murru, auch "R?ssel", s?dostfrz. mur, prov., kat. morre [recte kat. morro]; sp. morro "dicke, hervorstehende Lippe", "runder Kiesel", "kleiner runder Fels", morra "Sch?del", vgl piazz. murra "Felsst?ck", kalabr., irp., agnon. auch "Viehherde", s?dfrz. auch "Berggipfel"...[derivatives]... Wohl Schallwort, vgl. einerseits hd. murre "verdriessliches Gesicht" Braune, Zs. 21, 217, andererseits sp. morra "Schnurren der Katze", morro "schnurrend". Die geographische Verbreitung (S?dfrankreich und Spanien) kann auch auf westgot. Ursprung hinweisen. -- Mussafia 80. (...sp. moro'n "H?gel" kann begrifflich hierher geh?ren, f?llt aber mit -r- statt -rr- auf; zu bask. muru "Haufen", "H?gel" Diez 470 ist wegen -u- zweifelhaft, auch d?rfte diese muru mit dem aus dem Lat. entlehnten muru "Mauer" identsich sein.) All the "murru" words are reviewed in some detail in Coromines's Catalan Etymological Dictionary s.v. morro; he concludes, like Meyer-L?bke, that we have here parallel onomatopoeic creations of the type *morr- `muzzle, snout' (also `purr'), then applied metaphorically to other objects resembling a muzzle or snout. But that leaves the *mora word. Is this the same as Bavarian Mure, and is it the root of moraine? 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 glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 4 07:34:01 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 23:34:01 PST Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: >[ Moderator query: > Neuter ending? This is not a neuter in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit or > Germanic. > What neuter ending do you have in mind? > --rma ] Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Germanic are all coincidentally non-IndoAnatolian languages who all agree with the concept of feminine gender. I'm sure you must have come across the idea that the feminine is not archaic but derivative from the previous animate/inanimate distinctions found in Anatolian lgs. I know Hittite cannot be feminine since it doesn't have this gender thing. This is the neuter *-t/*-d found in words like *kwi-d "what" and the heteroclitic declension: [nom-acc] **yekwn-d > *yekwr "liver". Thus: **nekw-d > *nekw-t TADAAAA!!! I call it progressive devoicing. You like? Ah, well, it might be a bunch of "crap" in the end but it's my idea and I'm stickin' with it for now ;) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com Kisses and Hugs -------------------------------------------- [ Moderator's response: Hittite does not have a separate feminine, but it does have an opposition of common vs. neuter (or animate vs. inanimate). Hittite _nekuz_ is of common gender, so I repeat the question: What neuter? --rma ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Mar 11 03:00:29 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 21:00:29 -0600 Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: Dear Steve and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Wednesday, March 10, 1999 3:43 PM >In a message dated 3/8/99 08:49:13 AM, rma wrote: ><<[ Moderator's comment: > And what of the very similar, though completely separate, Armenian shift? > --rma ]>> I do not want to actively enter this discussion but, for whatever it may be worth, I believe the Germanic sound system was developed in the IE homeland, in close proximity to Semitic, as the correspondences I have developed between Germanic and Semitic seem to suggest --- after other IE branches had struck for the west. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comparison.AFRASIAN.3_germanic.htm Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 12 20:00:33 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:00:33 -0800 Subject: LIST MASTER In-Reply-To: <36E6375B.B02CE0CF@ifn.net> Message-ID: Rich: I'm getting doubles of somethings --or maybe I'm seeing double :> [ While trying to improve the efficiency of delivery to the Indo-European list, a few Nostratic postings got sent out twice, and a few Nostratic subscribers (but not all) received one or two Indo-European postings. I hope no one was too greatly inconvenienced. I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that the backlog caused by the meltdown in February is finally all caught up, and postings to both lists will once again come out in a timely manner. Thank you all for continuing to make both of these lists interesting to read and to moderate. Rich Alderson ] From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 05:45:51 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 05:45:51 GMT Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <491C911E0F@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: >And we need a reasonably compact name for the {h.} sound, like we have for >its voiced counterpart `ayin'. h.eth? >> In view of the fact that [3] is used for the Egyptian vulture, which was >> really an /r/, .I am reluctant to adopt that suggestion. > I thought that the Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) was the glottal >stop. The 3-like sign that Egyptologists use for that sign is specific to >Egyptology. The sound had developed to a glottal stop in later Egyptian (where it functions much like Semitic alef to mark the vowel /a/ in "syllabic" writing). In Old Egyptian it probably was a uvular fricative or trill /R/, and it usually derives from etymological (PAA) *r. The Egptian /r/ usually comes from PAA *l. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 11 05:47:32 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 23:47:32 -0600 Subject: Chariots Message-ID: on raiding: in Bulgaria/1966 I saw a long-legged man "riding" a donkey: He sat, feet dragging, not amidships, but back on the animal's hip [pardon: I'm a city kid]. jpm JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: [ moderator snip ] > -- Horses were always strong enough to carry a person on their back _for a > while_. Zebras, wild horses, and ponies no larger than the neolithic/Bronze > Age chariot pony could all do this. > The question actually relates to how long they could be ridden and how much > gear the rider could carry. From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 06:28:22 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 06:28:22 GMT Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: <36E5BA01.5D0C@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: Steven Schaufele wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, >> *dh is typologically unacceptable. >What about a stop system distinguishing between voiceless, voiced, and >aspirated (unmarked for voicing)? Or am i being naive? Well, that's exactly the Greek/Proto-Italic system *t=/t/, *d=/d/, *dh=/th/. It's also one way of interpreting the Armenian/Proto-Germanic system, with *t=/th/, *d=/t/ and *dh=/d/. But it cannot be the original PIE system, as we can't derive the "Greek" from the "Armenian" system, nor vice-versa, nor the "Sanskrit" system from either. The problem is that "aspirated (unmarked for voicing)", just like "ejective [glottalized] (unmarked for voicing)", are purely theoretical constructs. Aspirated and ejective stops are voiceless by definition: adding voice turns them into very differently articulated phones, namely murmured /d"/ and implosive /d'/. In fact, that's exactly what may have brought about the Greek/Italic and Armenian/Germanic systems. If we imagine an earlier system that distinguished lenis (but not voiced) ejective *d from aspirated *dh, then phonetically the opposition may have been realized as: 1) plain [t] vs. aspirated [th] ("aspirating dialects"); 2) ejective [t'] vs. plain [t] ("glottalizing dialects"); 3) ejective [t'] vs. aspirated [th] ("aspirating-glottalizing dialects"). If the fortis-lenis opposition then tended to develop into voiceless-voiced (fortis *t [tt] > [t]), aspirating dialects would have developed a "Greek" system (because of the resistance of aspirated [th] to become voiced/murmured), and glottalizing dialects would have developed an "Armenian" system (because of the resistance of ejective [t'] to become voiced/implosive). "Aspirating-glottalizing" dialects would have developed, with the aid of stop + laryngeal clusters, a new 4-way opposition /t/ ~ /th/ ~ /d'/ ~ /d"/ (with implosive /d'/ as in Sindhi and murmured [half-voiced] /d"/ which develops into [t] + low tone or high tone + [d] in Punjabi). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From roborr at uottawa.ca Thu Mar 11 06:32:17 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 01:32:17 -0500 Subject: PIE gender Message-ID: I seem to remember that at the Paris International Conf of Linguists that Calvert Watkins adduced evidence that Anatolian actually had a feminine gender, and that the animate/inanimate system apparently adduced in Hittite would not be archaic, but rather a later development. Anyone seen any references? Robert Orr From roborr at uottawa.ca Thu Mar 11 06:36:47 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 01:36:47 -0500 Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns Message-ID: Borrowing of pronouns is rare, but NOT impossible: 1) R.M.W Dixon mentions an instance of an Australian aboriginal language where the Englsih first person pronoun has been borrowed for reasons of taboo. (Languages of Australia, 1980) 2) Eric Hamp has an intriguing suggestion for OCS azu. (IJSLP 1983). 3) And cf. the Muppets. Miss Piggy would often use "moi" as the first person singular pronoun while purportedly speaking English. Robert Orr From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 09:02:55 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 09:02:55 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [on Basque `ax' and `sacred' > And in the case of saindu, much the same would have happened in that > sanctu /sanktu/ > *santyu which in Spanish from the Basque region > became the common name Sancho [it became common name Santo, > noun/adjective santo everywhere else] > and in Basque *santyu > *sayntu > saindu /sayndu/ [or is it > /san~du/?] My reconstruction is probably missing something but the > same metathesis of /y/ is there, right? Debatable. The form is Spanish. The medieval Basque form of the name is , which must derive from * by dissimilatory loss of the first sibilant. And I don't see why this form would develop from a palatalized coronal (/ts/ notates an apical affricate). There is no need to appeal to a Romance palatal to account for the Basque /ai/. For example, the word for `fast, quick, soon' was mostly in the 16th century but is mostly today. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 09:15:39 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 09:15:39 +0000 Subject: PIE plosives In-Reply-To: <36E5BA01.5D0C@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, > *dh is typologically unacceptable. Perhaps not so generally. A number of languages have turned up which have voiced aspirates but no voiceless aspirates. For example, the Indonesian language Madurese has a /p/ series, a /b/ series and a /bh/ series, but no /ph/ series, exactly like the standard reconstruction of PIE. Several other Indonesian languages have more or less the same system, and I think I've read that a couple of African languages do as well. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 09:28:45 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 09:28:45 GMT Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: "WB (in Frankfurt today)" wrote:- > Well, take a look at Alexander Vovin's excellent review article on > WSY Wang ed. (1995), _The ancestry of the Chinese language_ (_Journal > of CHinese Linguistics 25[1997]2: 308-336) for starts. Sasha demon- > strates that Starostin's SC reconstruction rests on multiple correspon- > dances not showing any trace of phonological conditioning (ST *-t, ... If Sino-Tibetan and Caucasian were ancestral languages for all their history (and were never learned from conquerors or cultural contacts), then their common ancestor would have been spoken by their speakers' common ancestors, i.e. before the European and Mongoloid races evolved their distinctive physical features. (I came across a theory that the distinctive features of the Mongoloid race started as physical adaptations to withstand extreme cold in Central Asia in the Ice Age.) If so, is there an anthropologist on channel who could tell us how long ago that likely was? If this was very long ago, the two languages would have changed so much meanwhile that no clear sign of common ancestry would remain distinguishable from `noise' such as accidental resemblances (e.g. Greek {theos} = Nahuatl {teotl} = "god"), and imitating the same natural sound (e.g. Latin {papilio} = Nahuatl {papalotl} = "butterfly"). IE *{kuon} (likely *{kewon} before zero-grading started) = Modern Chinese {chu"an} (Wade-Giles spelling), Ancient Chinese *{kywan} (1 syllable) = "dog". But when and where was the dog domesticated? Did this word travel along with the animal from whoever first domesticated it, rather than being a sign of language cognateness? From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 09:40:11 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 09:40:11 +0000 Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Once again, I'm just following through on the commentary made in Bernard >Comrie's book that attributes the "First Sound Shift" in German to the >conversion of IE sounds into "the nearest equivalents" of a prior non-IE >language. I'm a great fan of Bernard Comrie's, and he's the author of quite a few books. Could you tell us which one this is, please? Thanks, Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 11:49:12 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 11:49:12 +0000 Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <19990308143659.15685.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: > And finally, has anyone contemplated the possibility that there > might have been an even earlier stage that needs to be reconstructed > (e.g. perhaps in the case of Euskera) that eventually gave rise to > a animate/inanimate dichotomy (e.g., as it is found today in > Euskera)? Any ideas on that, Larry? This would imply that > cognitively speaking, there could have been an earlier structure > that was not based on an "animate/inanimate" contrast but on another > ontological type or definition of "being." Basque generally lacks gender and noun-classes, but there is a wrinkle: animate NPs typically construct their local case-forms differently from inanimate NPs. Inanimate NPs just take the case-endings. But animate NPs use an extra morph which is, or probably once was, a postposition. The facts vary according to region. In the west, the additional morph is <-gan>, which appears to be a fossilized postposition. This is usually attached to the genitive case of the animate NP, categorically so in some circumstances, but the rules differ from variety to variety. In the east, the equivalent item is usually , which is variously attached to the genitive or to the absolutive of the animate NP. (But <-gan> is also used to varying extents in eastern varieties.) In both cases, the local case-suffix is added to this extra morph. A further difference is that the use of <-gan> is generally categorical with animate NPs in the west, while the use of is not categorical with animate NPs in the east: in the east, we sometimes find the local case-suffixes attached directly to animate NPs, though the rules governing this usage are obscure. The origin of <-gan> is unknown, though it may possibly be a reduced variant of `top', which itself serves to form postpositions in the language. The origin of is likewise unknown, though this in its locative form is frequently used in the older literature to mean specifically `at the house of', as opposed to merely `in, on, at' -- something which is not true of <-gan>, so far as I know. This has induced speculation that may once have been a word for `house', but there exists no evidence to support such an interpretation. The majority view is that both elements are native in Basque and of some antiquity. We may therefore surmise that the special treatment of animate NPs in the local cases is also of some antiquity, but we can't say how much, for lack of data. It is perhaps curious that two different formations exist in the same function, but maybe we are just seeing the remnants of an earlier, and unrecorded, state of affairs in which the language offered several resources for the purpose, and some degree of selection has taken place -- a common kind of historical development in languages. As to what happened in Basque before the 16th century, it's impossible to say. But I have two observations. First, animate NPs are not distinguished from inanimate NPs in any other way: in particular, all the non-local cases are formed identically for all NPs. Second, it seems clear to me that the local cases of the modern language -- with the likely exception of locative <-n> -- are of recent formation. We find substantial variation in the formation of the local cases, both in time and in space. So, if the modern local case-endings are in general not very old, it hardly seems likely that the distinctive formations used with animate NPs can be very old, either. That leaves open the question of how long Basque has been distinguishing animate and inanimate NPs at all. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 12:11:03 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 12:11:03 GMT Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <19990308143659.15685.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "roslyn frank" wrote: >Because of my interest in this particular question, I wonder if anyone >could speculate on when (along a rough time continuum) gender entered IE >languages, i.e., when (P)IE acquired gender. The lack of feminine gender in Hittite (Anatolian) suggests that the PIE three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter) is datable to the time between the split-off of Anatolian and the break-up of the rest of IE (beginning with Tocharian). Of course before that time, PIE also had gender: animate vs. inanimate. We cannot reconstruct a genderless stage of PIE. >And finally, has anyone contemplated the possibility that there might >have been an even earlier stage that needs to be reconstructed (e.g. >perhaps in the case of Euskera) that eventually gave rise to a >animate/inanimate dichotomy (e.g., as it is found today in Euskera)? The Basque case is very different from the case of (P)IE, where gender distinctions (inanimate / animate => masculine/feminine) were quite central to the entire (pro)nominal system (nominative/ accusative cases, adjective agreement, verbal agreement, etc.) The animate/inanimate distinction in Basque is heavily "localized". Pun intended: the only place in Basque grammar where animacy plays a role is in the formation of the local cases [locative, allative, ablative etc.], where animate NP's add the local suffixes to the genitive + -gan-/-baita-, e.g. "to the house" etxe-(r)a, "to the man" gizon-aren-gan-a. This has always reminded me of something that I was inculcated as a child. Growing up in a Spanish family in Holland, certain Dutchisms tended to creep into our (my siblings and mine's) speech, which my father was constantly combatting. One of them was saying "Voy a Juan" [I go to John] (Dutch "Ik ga naar Jan toe"), which my father always corrected to "Voy a ver a Juan" [I'm going to see John] or "Voy a casa de Juan" [I'm going to John's house]. It seems that Castilian also doesn't normally allow a locative/directional preposition followed directly by an animate noun (phrase). The masculine/feminine distinction in Basque is even more restricted and mysterious: it only applies to the ergative/dative pronominal suffixes of the verb in the second person singular (-k/-ga- "you (masc)", -n/-na- "you (fem)"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 12:55:48 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 12:55:48 GMT Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: <904d0e61.36e5789b@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>that "wool" didn't exist in the vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times. >-- sheep didn't develop wool, as we know it, until well after domestication. >Use of wool as a fabric is comparatively late -- well after the beginning of >the neolithic. But sheep had hair. The root for "wool" applies to all kinds of "animal hair". >>The plough was also used since the very beginning of the Neolithic, >-- no, nyet, not true. Not unless you redefine "plough" to suit the argument >and include wooden shovels and digging sticks. But I can. I gave a couple of clear cases of a semantic development "stick" > "plough". >>That leaves only "yoke", with the undoubted Hittite reflex as a >>possible candidate for being a late Neolithic innovation. >-- this is a rather drastic case of attacking the evidence rather than trying >to work with it. Evidence primary, hypothesis secondary, please. >>but there is a Luwian attestation: asuwa. This looks very much like an Indo- >>Iranian borrowing (Skt. as'va < PIE *ek^wos), were it not for the fact that >>Luwian "dog" is >-- the obvious, parsimonious explanation is that the Anatolian languages used >ordinary IE terminology for the horse. Not so obvious if you know something about Hittite vocabulary. >>yielded a treatise on horses, containing a number of words of Indo-Iranian >>origin, written by a Mitannian called Kikkuli). >-- and the English terminology for formal riding is largely French and Spanish >in origin, although English-speakers have been riding horses as long as >there's been an English language (or proto-Germanic, come to that). >Meaningless. Why? The facts are that the Mitanni played an important part in the introduction of horse-drawn chariotry to Anatolia and used Indo-Iranian technical vocabulary to talk about it. We have two clear cases of a Hittite/Sanskrit isogloss related to chariotry, and an apparently satem word for horse in Luwian. >>Hittite cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >>, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), >-- and having cognates in Tocharian and Hittite is about as secure a way to >put a word into the PIE category as I can think of. Two unrelated IE language >families widely separated in time and space -- what do you want, an egg in >your beer? The point is PIE had words for round and turning things (*Hwer-, *kwel- etc.) long before the wheel was invented or vehicles drawn by oxen and later horses came into use. But it only had so much words that could be pressed into service. Hittite and Tocharian opted for *Hwer-K-, others for *kwe-kwel- (cf. the exact same procedure in Sumerian gi-gir, from gir "to turn, to roll"), which in turn may have been borrowed at a later stage by Tocharian to denote "wagon" (Toch A. kuka"l, B. kukale). That's the whole problem with linguistic palaeontology. Words undergo reasonably predictable semantic shifts when geographical locales change ("salmon", "beech/oak", "robin") or when new technologies are invented ("animal hair" > "wool", "stick" > "plough", "to join" > "yoke") and such words may be borrowed or calqued by neighbouring languages as the technology expands, further confusing the picture (especially if the languages are closely related to begin with). By a curious coincidence, I had just acquired Blench/Spriggs "Archaeology and Language II", containing an article by Kathrin S. Krell: "Gimbutas' Kurgan-PIE homeland hypothesis: a linguistic critique". I've not yet had the time to read it in depth, but I note one of the conclusions (based on arguments similar to the ones I gave in the preceding paragraph) is: "The old, pliable crutch of linguistic palaeontology should certainly be abandoned, at least until the theoretical uses and limitations of the PIE lexicon have been more precisely defined". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 11 17:13:22 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 11:13:22 -0600 Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: /tsoBu, LoBu/ are found in E. Galicia according to Galician speakers I've talked and /shoBu/, I believe is found elsewhere. One problem is that spoken Galician is largely rural and fragmented. There is, evidently a "neo-Galician" which amounts to a Castillian pronunciation of written Galician. And, I'm told, this is used by Castillian speakers in Galicia with nationalist leanings. The difference between the two is probably like that between Catalan and Valencian --which sounds like Catalan being spoken by a Castillian. In any case, rural Galician is definitely more difficult for a Spanish speaker to understand than Portuguese. >On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> There is no such language as "Gallego-Spanish". There is, however, >> galego or Galician, called gallego in Spanish. It is closer to Portuguese >> than to Spanish and, in my experience, is more difficult to understand than >> Brazilian Portuguese or standard Continental Portuguese. The Galician >> literary standard, however, is a bit easier to read. But Galician is a >> series of spoken dialects. >> Note: >> Spanish lobo /loBo/ >> Portuguese lobo /loBu, lobu/ >> Galician /tsoBu, shoBu, LoBu/ >But these so-called Galician forms are not Galician but >(Asturo-)Leonese. See A. Zamora Vicente, Dialectologia Espan~ola, 1967, >122-130. >Max W. Wheeler [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 12:57:31 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 12:57:31 GMT Subject: /Anatolian /-nt-/ and Greek /-nth-/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: >So this would be the same root as the 3rd Singular verb ending -nt- ? >e.g. Latin ama-nt "love-they all" >>iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: >[ moderator snip ] >>>I suppose we could say that the form was originally >>>/-ndh-/, but the Anatolian forms in /-nt/ are generally considered older. >>The IE etymon is *-nt- (probably identical to the >>Luwian/Slavic/Tocharian collective (plural) suffix *-(e/o)nt-). The verbal ending, and the -nt- of the present/active participle may well be related. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 11 17:42:55 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 11:42:55 -0600 Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: <904d0e61.36e5789b@aol.com> Message-ID: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>that "wool" didn't exist in the vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times. >-- sheep didn't develop wool, as we know it, until well after domestication. >Use of wool as a fabric is comparatively late -- well after the beginning of >the neolithic. Not true. Hunter-gatherers gathered wool snagged on brush to make garments. This is where the wool used by pre-Columbian North American Indians came from >>Hittite cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but >>, related only to Tocharian "circle, wheel"), and *kwekwlo- [a reduplication *kwel-] could be easily be cognate if /kw/ > /wh, h/ & /l/ > /r/; both of which are common changes If the phonology doesn't correspond to the expected evolution, it would be because it was a wanderword Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 13:04:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 13:04:10 GMT Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >In connection with this, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal has written in past post: ><the Armenian one, with *t = *th, *d = *t['], *dh = *d, yet another archaic >feature of Germanic, though not quite as archaic as Hittite and Tocharian.>> >And... ><between Greek and Armenian (mainly in vocabulary) must be secondary, resulting >from interaction in the Balkans, but Armenian must've split off from the main >body of IE containing Greek earlier.>> >Note that in the above analysis Greek is already a separate language. Not really. I use "Greek" here loosely as "pre-Greek", or "a group of dialects, one of which later became Greek as we know it". I'm dubious about Armeno-Greek, but I can see nothing much in favour of Armeno-German, except for the phonology and maybe another couple of shared archaisms. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From lpechor at yahoo.com Thu Mar 11 20:49:31 1999 From: lpechor at yahoo.com (Lena Pechorina) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 12:49:31 -0800 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > 1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the > non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations? That's a very good question. > The theory that says that either PIE or the standard IE protolanguages were > being spoken in Europe in even 2500BC requires a very small number of > language groups to put a hold on localization for a millenium while Hittite, > Sanskrit and Mycenean were just getting ready to rear their heads as the > first historically identifiable IE languages. > What was holding them together as one language or perhaps a set of no more > than what?, four or five proto-languages for a thousand years? It strikes me that the Indo-European-speaking peoples must have had some advantage in terms of time or resources to have become so dominant on the European continent. If they arrived relatively late and from the steppe, would they have had the numbers to colonize (conquer) all of Europe in the subsequent 1000 years? I think the view (I think it's one of the traditional views) that IE matured in the Danube Valley makes a lot of sense and may partially answer your question regarding linguistic integrity. The Danube River Valley is a fairly extensive region, but it is semi-steppe with excellent lines of communication. If the Neolithic and Copper Age really did take root here at an early period (7000-4000BC), then the area might have supported a fairly large and advanced culture by the time the first horsemen arrived from the steppe. The population of the Danube River would have been disproportionately large compared to the rest of Europe, thus providing mass for later migrations. Suppose the Indo-Europeans arrived around 3000 BC, with horses, and were able to conquer this proto-civilization. Even if the arrival of horses meant greater instability and the subsequent decline of Danube culture, the conditions would have been in place to maintain a single language (or at least related dialects), and pass it on to a much larger population. Factors favoring linguistic stability would include natural geographical borders of the Danube Valley itself, extensive trade, and the common ancestry of the ruling elites. Some satellite Indo-European tribes might have maintained their nomadic existence both in and off the Danube Valley. These might have included such groups as the Indo-Aryans. With horses, they could have easily crossed the entire Ukrainian Steppe to Asia in one generation or even in one year. Wide-ranging mobility has always been a fact of horse-raising steppe cultures, and steppe chronologies which show gradual movements over thousands of years do not convince me either. Their incentive to do so might have been the gradual breaking up of the Danube proto-civilization. The same could be true for other migrations: rising competition for resources in the overpopulated and increasingly violent Danube Valley could have been responsible for many of the subsequent migrations which established new cultures in Asia Minor, Greece and the Alps. I'm not a linguist or an archaeologist, so if something I said seems far-fetched, I'd be interested to hear why. Steven Zettner From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 11 13:17:38 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 13:17:38 GMT Subject: Lenis and Fortis in IE In-Reply-To: <19990309090749.23616.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: Just a few loose comments: >However, I figure that the _fortis_ stops are what Gam. call the >"glottalic" and would thus correspond to the *d/*g series. The lenis >consonants are the voiced aspirate (*dh) and voiceless plain stops (*t) >of old But the internal PIE evidence, if you want to introduce the notions of lenis and fortis at all, is that *t is consistently fortis/unvoiced, and it's even written in Hittite. >Optionally, assuming only that you accept Etruscan and IE relationship, >a correspondance can be seen between the two as shown above. Note if >Etruscan matches IE *bhi then it suggests to me that a loss of *p: >was very early and affects both languages. Two things about Etruscan: spellings with plain (p, t, c) and aspirate (ph, th, ch) stops often occur for what are apparently the same lexical items (which may depend on dialect and/or period). The other thing is the existence of the fricatives , /ts/ and , which must also be accounted for. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 11 14:30:55 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 14:30:55 +0000 Subject: Anatolians In-Reply-To: <36E5BA01.5D0C@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Steven Schaufele wrote: > What about a stop system distinguishing between voiceless, voiced, and > aspirated (unmarked for voicing)? Or am i being naive? Perhaps. If aspirated means `with delayed voice onset time (relative to stop release)', then an aspirated consonant `unmarked for voicing', i.e. without contrastive voicing, is likely to have been phonetically voiceless, certainly in initial position, and perhaps everywhere else too perceptually. If aspirated does not mean `with delayed voice onset time', then we're back with considering various possible states of the glottis. The fact is, it's hard to see what 'state of glottis' could plausibly give rise to all of [dh] (murmured voiced), [d] ~ [d-] ("edh"), and [th]. Maybe the answer lies in N*******c, or maybe we'll never know :-( 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 11 20:56:55 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 14:56:55 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ Message-ID: On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very early, evidently), it would seem unlikely that the /t/ was aspirated. Such a notion, would also have broader implications: that every IE-Anatolian /p-t-k/ that was wound up in Greek should appear as /ph-th-kh/. Is this true? DLW From thorinn at diku.dk Thu Mar 11 14:15:42 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 15:15:42 +0100 Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <19990308143659.15685.qmail@hotmail.com> (roslynfrank@hotmail.com) Message-ID: From: "roslyn frank" Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 06:36:58 PST And finally, has anyone contemplated the possibility that there might have been an even earlier stage that needs to be reconstructed (e.g. perhaps in the case of Euskera) that eventually gave rise to a animate/inanimate dichotomy (e.g., as it is found today in Euskera)? Any ideas on that, Larry? This would imply that cognitively speaking, there could have been an earlier structure that was not based on an "animate/inanimate" contrast but on another ontological type or definition of "being." This line of inquiry seems to imply that the conceptual category of gender only arose in the minds of PIE speakers with the rise of the grammatical categories that are reflected in the daughter languages. But grammatical categories appear and disappear through the history of languages. In modern Scandinavian languages, for instance, a common gender has replaced the masculine and the feminine (the neuter remains separate). But it's still possible to indicate the sex of people and animals by using different lexical words, by compounds, noun phrases, or pragmatically. (Just as it is in English, come to think of it). What I'm trying to get at is this: there may not be a need for any different cognitive structure to explain the state of PIE before the reconstructed morphology for marking animacy and/or gender arose. The cognitive structure may very well have been exactly the same, but the language had means of expressing it that cannot now be reconstructed. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From alderson at netcom.com Thu Mar 11 21:10:37 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 13:10:37 -0800 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: Steve Long raises the question of the length of time it would take for speakers of a generic Indo-European to lose the ability to interact (in conjunction with the issue of the splintering of the IE Ursprache into a large number of small languages). First, let me note that in, for example, the Italian peninsula, we find at the time of our earliest records a number of languages, all with recognizable dia- lect differences from place to place within the language areas, or in the Greek world a couple of dozen widely diverging dialects with literary traditions till the koinization brought on by the Alexandrian conquests and their aftermath. The same thing we would expect to hold in the Celtic and Germanic regions of Europe. This picture of small languages across Europe was wiped out in a relatively short time by the spread of Latin dialects--which diverged noticeably in short order, as witnessed by Catullus' insults--which replaced the native languages over time. The replacements still show much the same kind of chaining. Second, let me point out the anecdotal evidence that speakers of Spanish and Italian can, with some difficulty, communicate with each other successfully, and my own personal experience with a group of speakers of several different Slavic languages (Polish, both Warsaw and Krakow; Ukrainian; and Serbian, Croatian and Moslem speakers), who communicated fairly well with each other for business and personal purposes. So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years for them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one party to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if both are members of the same general speech community. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 11 21:16:10 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 15:16:10 -0600 Subject: Fortis Consonants Message-ID: The term "fortis" is not really one which has a clear and objective phonetic meaning. According to Catford, "the terms tense/lax, strong/weak, fortis/lenis, and so on should never be loosely and carelessly used without precise phonetic specification." Ironically though Catford does "believe in" a fortis/lenis distinction, which he finds in some languages of the Caucasus, I must agree with Ladefoged and Maddieson that in the cases Catford points to (at least the one I have heard) the distinction seems to be primarily long/short. Other sounds, such as those in Korean, which have been described as "fortis" have turned out on closer examination to be laryngealized to some degree. Overall I would agree with Ladefoged and Maddieson, who say (if I have understood them correctly) that the term "fortis" should have a language-specific application, referring to a distinction that is more phonological than phonetic. The meaning I would assign is more or less "long and/or laryngealized", but it is only these terms that have true phonetic meaning, at a level of salience high enough to have phonemic significance. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 11 21:29:54 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 15:29:54 -0600 Subject: Feminine Gender Message-ID: Well, actually I have been unable to nail down anybody saying that the IE feminine is supposed to be from the former inanimate, though the fact that it does not show /-s/ might be taken as implying this. Oh ye Keepers of the Conventional Wisdom, what is it? I must say however that interrogatives (like Latin "quem" used as a feminine) have nothing to do with anything. Here the lack of a full set of distinctions comes from the fact that speakers cannot necessarily know the gender (or number) of the referrent (which has something to do with why they are asking, duh). In Old English there is no distinction of number (or gender) in interrogatives, and a plural form ("hwa") is used for the nominative. This does not mean that an earlier form of the language had no distinction of singular/plural (though for PIE we might think that for other (i.e. good) reasons). It means nothing more than what has been stated above. On other aspects of this issue I await enlightenment. DLW From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 11 21:19:10 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 21:19:10 -0000 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word Message-ID: Glen said > >Gee, I could be looney Then he said: >wouldn't a >reconstruction of *?nek^- be in order rather than just *nek^- based on >the Greek form? Why the long /e/ for augment? Point taken. But we must not and may not assume that every Greek word with long augment or the so-called "Attic" reduplication began with a laryngeal. Alongside inherited initial laryngeals which develop to prothetic vowels, (and do other stuff in Greek), there is sufficient evidence that Greek added a non-inherited vocalic element before some initial resonants. We need cross-language proof to establish that there really was a laryngeal here. Greek may provide a clue to it, but not proof. Though you may well be able to find the other evidence somewhere out there! Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 11 21:37:12 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 21:37:12 -0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Steve said: >1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the >non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations? You're making an assumption that doesn't fit the facts. Some non-IE languages splinter, some don't. New Guinea is very mountainous and a tradition developed of warfare between small local tribes. Compare that Polynesia, a vast area, where different languages have indeed developed, but it is remarkably homogenous linguistically. Some of the languages are mutually comprehensible, with willing listeners. We cannot extrapolate from New Guniea and assume all the world followed that model. And in Polynesia, or course there are indeed thousands of years with slow language change. One might think of Lithuanian... Not all languages change rapidly! Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 11 23:13:31 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 17:13:31 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A while back I had threatened Larry, Miguel & Theo with this list Like the list for Germanic, these are only possibilities well, some are more possible than others some arrive via other languages, e.g. Latin Some will make Larry see red :> BUT I'm sure he will again be kind enough to send me corrections Some will be obvious errors to everyone but me :> Please excuse my typos This one will take much longer to prepare than the pre-IE Germanic but I did read through Corominas [1980] I've included everything that he either lists as non-IE or unknown but have excluded known Arabic roots and other known adstrate Again, I'd like your suggestions, comments and contributions I've included Spanish & English because I'd like to eventually post this in both languages Possible non-IE etymologies in Ibero-Romance /pre-1600 abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] rel. con vasco abarka; ra?z de alpargata [sandal] [c] pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] abril < Latin aprilis < Etruscan aprun [lrp] abrir from same root? [rmcc] acnua Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [wje] adem?n "gesture" c. 1290, originalmente "falsedad, ficci?n", [c] despu?s "gesto afectado" [affected gesture] < ?? [c] -aecu > -ecu > -iego [pre-Roman suffix] [abi] agalla "gill" [of fish, etc.], "gall" [of tree] c. 1400 "branquia de pez" [fish gill], 1495 "am?gdala" [adenoid]; [c] galla "costado de la cabeza del ave" [side of a bird's head], "test?culo", "?nimo esforzado" ["gung-ho, enthusiastic"], < ??; [c] rel. con gallego garla, [c] cat. ganya, [c] sardo ganga "branquia, gl?ndula" [gill, gland]< ?lat?n gl?ndula? [c] ?rel. to Eng. gall "lump on tree, leaf" [rmcc] agavanzo "wild rose' [PL] c. 1100 gab?nso < pre-rom; [c] rel. con vasco gaparra, kaparra "zarza, chaparro" & gavarra, [c] aragon?s garrabera, [c] gasc?n gabarro & gabardero [c] rel. to alcaparra [caper]? [rmcc] ?labe "paddle of a water wheel", "branch fallen to the ground" [PL] s. XIII "ala o lado del tejado de una tienda de campa?a" romance < ??; [c] v. rumano ?rip? [c] ?lamo "poplar tree" 1218, [c] port. ?lemo < pre-rom. < ?celta *almo?; [c] ?rel. con olmo [elm]? [c] alano "mastiff" s. XV "lebrel grande y feroz" [large fierce mastiff], [c] al?n 1200-50 < ?g?tico alans "crecido, grande"? [c] alarido "yell, lament" < ?? [c] aliso "alder" 976, 1330 < pre-rom, pre-celta [c] almeja "clam" 1423, [c] port. am?ijoa s. XIII < ?? [c] alud "mudslide" 1880 pre-rom; [c] rel. con vasco luta, lurte "desmoronamiento de tierras", [c] v. lur "tierra", elur "nieve" [c] amar, amigo, amor < Latin amare, amore-, amicus < Etruscan [cw, pb] amelga "strip of land denoted to cast the seed equally" [sic] s. XIII "faja de terreno que el labrador se?ala para esparcir la simiente con igualdad" [strip of land denoted by the farmer to cast the seed equally] enbelga, [c] leon?s ambelga "foso de l?mites que rodea un terreno" [ditch around a field] s. XIII < ?celta *ambelica? [c] amma Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [cw, wje] -anca pre-Roman suffix [wje] and?n "platform" 1406 Iberia , Francia, Italia < *andagine < ?? [c] ?ngel < Latin angelus < Greek angelos "messenger," akin to Greek angaros "mounted courier," both from unknown source [cw] a?icos "pieces into which something is torn" [PL] c. 1600 ibero-romance < *ann- ??; [c] v. gal?go & port anaco, naco "pedazo", [c] cat. anyoa "racimo, mazo" [c] naco "dirt clod, hick, nerd" in Mexico [rmcc] aparia Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [wje] apitascus Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [wje] ar?ndano "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ??, [c] compara con vasco ar?n "endrino" [c] pre-rom. ra?z de ar?n [c] archivo, archi-, etc. < Greek arhein, "To begin, rule, command." Greek verb of unknown origin; with derivatives arkh?, "rule, beginning" and arkhos "ruler." [cw] ardilla "squirrel" 1620 < harda s. XIII, found in cast. ber?ber, hispano?rabe, vasco v. ber?ber 'agh?rda "rat?n campestre" [c] cast. gardu?a c. 1330 < pre-rom. [c] ardite "small coin" 1400 "moneda de poco valor" [c] gasc?n ardit < ?? [c] rel. to Basque [wje] argamasa "type of rustic cement" 1190 "mezcla de cal, arena y agua" [mixture of lime, sand & water] Iberia < ?? + lat?n masa; [c] v. asturiano argayo "terreno al pie del monte" [field at the foot of the mountain] [c] cat. ant. aragall "barranco" c. 990. cat. xaragall [c] ?rgoma "type of thorny leguminous plant fed to cattle" [PL] s. XIV "tipo de aliaga" pre-rom del norte y noreste [c] arisco "rough, harsh" c. 1330 < ??, v. port. areisco "arenisco" [c] ?rel. to arena "sand", in the sense of "sandpaper" or "sanding" [rmcc] aro "hoop" s. XIII arrabal [suburb], [c] port. 1258. occ. 883 < ?pre-rom IE *aros "rueda, c?rculo? [c] -arra, -arro, arda-, ardo- pre-Roman suffix [rl, wje] "Western Mediterranean" also found in Sardinian also in Sicilian geonyms Ukkara, Indara, Aip?ra, perhaps in Latin words such as acerra "incense box," subarra & vacerra "post, log." [lrp] arrancar "to crank, rip from" c. 1140, [c] cat. ant. renc, ant. fr. ranc < ?germ.? [c] ?rel. to renco "lame, crippled"? [rmcc] arroyo "stream" 775 < arrugia pre-rom "galer?a de mina donde circula agua" [c, rl] < r?gia, r?gia [wje] see Fr. ruisseau "stream" [wje] Friulan roie "stream" [wje] Piedmontese roia [wje] Italian rugia "watercourse" < "Alpine," Ligurian or Rhaetic [bm] artesa "type of box" 1330 "caj?n cuadrilongo de madera que es m?s angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] arto "cambronera" < Basque arte "scrub oak." [rl] -asca, -ascu pre-Roman suffix [rl] Ligurian suffix; abundant in NC Spain, Mediterranian France, Northern Italy and the Rhone valley < -sk- [abi, jr, lrp, wje] also found in Lepontic [lrp] ascua "live coal" 1251 "brasa viva" < ??, [c] v. vasco ausko-a < huats "ceniza" < pre-rom [c] Pre-Roman [wje] asno "jackass" < Latin asinus < Mediterranean substrate [rc] Latin asinus < Greek onos, "ass" [source of onagro "onager"] probably < source of Sumerian anshe "ass" asturco Classical Latin word peculiar to Spain < ? [wje] atracar "to hoard, raise prices, rip off"; [c] in Portuguese "to come"1587 "arrimar", Iberia, occ., genov?s < ??rabe? [c] autumnal [Latinate form], see oto?o < Latin autumnus < Etruscan autu [lrp] aver?a "breakdown" also "damage caused to merchanise at sea" 1494, [c] cat. 1258. genov?s 1200, [c] antes "contribuci?n p?blica para compensar un prejuicio comercial" < ?? [c] avetoro "type of heron" < fr. butor < ?? [c] avi?n "airplane" c. 1330 "vencejo" < ?gavi?n c. 1250? < ?? [c] rel to Latin apis? [rmcc] -az pre-Roman suffux [rl] azcona "dart" 1200-50 Iberia, occ. & vasco < ??, [c] v. vasco azkon, antes aucona s. XII [c] Sources: Anderson, James M. Ancient Languages of the Hispanic Peninsula. Lanham MD: UP America, 1988. [jma] Baldi, Philip. An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983. [pb] Bola?o e Isla, Amancio. Manual de historia de la lengua espa?ola. M?xico: Porr?a, 1971. [abi] Bruneau, Charles. Petite histoire de la langue fran?aise, 3me ed. Paris: Armand Colin, 1962, 2 tomes. [cb] Chadwick, John. The Decipherment of Linear B. NY: Random House, 1958. [jc/58] ---Linear B and Related Scripts. CAL, 1987. [jc/87] Claiborne, Robert. The Roots of English. NY: Random, 1989. [rc] Comrie, Bernard. The World's Major Languages. NY: Oxford UP, 1987. [bc] Corominas,Juan [Joan Coromines] Breve diccionario etimol?gico de la lengua castellana, 2a. ed. Madrid: Gredos, 1980. [c] Elcock, W. D. The Romance Languages. NY: Macmillan, 1960. Entwistle, William J. The Spanish Language. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. [wje] Green, John N. "Spanish" Martin and Vincent 79-130. [jng] Hall Jr. Robert A. External History of the Romance Languages. NY: Elsevier, 1974. [rah] Haiman, John. "Rhaeto-Romance," 351-390. [jh] Harris, Martin and Nigel Vincent, eds. The Romance Languages. London: Croom Helm, 1988. [h&v] Harris, Martin. "French," Martin and Vincent 209-245. [mh] Lapesa, Rafael. Historia de la lengua espa?ola, 5a ed. Madrid: Escelicer, 1962. [rl] Mallinson, Graham. "Rumanian," Martin and Vincent 391-419. [gm] Mallory, J. P. In Search of the Indo-Europeans. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.[jpm] Migliorini, Bruno. The Italian Language. NY: Barnes and Noble, 1966. [bm] Pallotino, Massimino. History of Earliest Italy. Ann Arbor: UMP, 1991. [mp] Palmer L. R. The Latin Language. London: Faber, 1954. [lrp] Parkinson, Stephen. "Portuguese," Martin and Vincent 131-169. [sp] Peque?o Larrouse [PL] Redfern, James. A Lexical Study of Raeto-Romance and Contiguous Italian Dialect Areas The Hague: Mouton, 1971. [jr] Rosetti, A. Br?ve histoire de la langue roumaine des origines ? nos jours. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Spaulding, Robert K. How Spanish Grew. Berkeley: CAL, 1943. [rks] Stamm, James R. A Short History of Spanish Literature. NY: NYUP, 1979. [jrs] Vincent, Nigel. "Latin," Martin and Vincent 26-78. [nv] Watkins, Calvert ed. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, rev. ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1985. [cw] From jer at cphling.dk Thu Mar 11 23:40:11 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 00:40:11 +0100 Subject: lenis and glottalic In-Reply-To: <36f4ed80.80496727@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, [Quoting Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen for]: > > Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask > > this: Is a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > I think so. English and Danish (fortis-lenis) vs. Dutch > (voiceless-voiced), for instance. Or East Armenian vs. West > Armenian. Finnish vs. Estonian (or is that just the spelling?). JER (now): Do you mean that the Dutch voiced d comes from a voiceless lenis d - how can that be known? And that English lenes are voiceless?? [Quoting JER:] > >- Isn't the only thing "wrong" with the IE system > >that the aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh ...) have not been accepted? >[MCV replied:] > Murmured stops are extremely uncommon. There's also the matter of > *b. A labial series *p, *bh simply doesn't make any sense, not > even if you add a teaspoon of *ph's. JER (now:) But if bh dh ... are so uncommon, aren't they very unlikely to arise secondarily out of any other system which must, by implication, be more stable? [Quoting JER:] > > Is it not a very > >strong claim that ALL cases of asp.ten. are in last analysis based on > >mistakes? >[MCV replied:] > Not mistakes, but stop+laryngeal, I think. JER (now): That's what I mean by "mistakes". How can we KNOW that ALL cases of ph, th, kh are from p t k + laryngeal? The truth is we cannot know. Then, why do some take this for granted and rush out and change the system so that their arbitrary choice does not compromise the system then emerging? Why not simply make the opposite arbitrary choice and assume that SOME words had aspirated tenues (ph, th, kh) all along (i.e. even before plain p/t/k + H created some more) and there never was any trouble with the system? What's the point in looking for trouble? --- I know about the scarcity of /b/ and the ban on roots of the type deg-/ged-, and I accept the glottalic theory as the best explanation of these details, but only for the relevant period: Roots weren't created (or, recreated) the day before the IE unity broke up. If the lack of *deg- means that it was once *t'ek'- with TWO glottalics one of which changed into something else, that change can have any age. We only know that its RESULT was present in the IE protolanguage, not that its CAUSE remained: there are comparable holes in the daughter languages (say, Latin) for which glottalics are not assumed to be synchronically present. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Mar 12 00:21:17 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 18:21:17 -0600 Subject: Greek question Message-ID: Dear Alexis and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: manaster at umich.edu Date: Thursday, March 11, 1999 2:41 PM >On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote: >> I have demonstrated it using accepted comparative methodology. >This strains credulity. "Accepted" by whom? The short answer is: by all of you in any other context than the Proto-Language. The more complete answer is: I compare appropriate segments of words in two languages utilizing a table of correspondence from which I diverge only with explanation, utilizing what I believe is allowable semantic latitude. Perhaps I am not doing it well but that is what I am attempting to do. The Proto-Language reconstructions included in each comparison are a tool I am using to form some idea of what the larger relationships might be but, in no case, do they have the slightest bearing on whether the two words compared are appropriately compared or not. If anyone has a specific criticism, such as actually happened when I published the Japanese essay (it had to do mostly with loanwords), I will be glad to consider it and make changes where I agree it is appropriate. Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Mar 12 00:53:28 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 18:53:28 -0600 Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Glen Gordon Date: Thursday, March 11, 1999 5:51 PM >Conjecture IS BY DEFINITION "guesswork". Look it up in a dictionary and >come back to me. What makes good conjecture from bad conjecture is the >amount of likelihood a hypothesis has and how much it explains. This is >how we can logically dismiss theories such as Pat's Sumerian Invention >Process against the likelier scenario that Sumerian evolved like any >other language from an earlier form. Or do you accept this as a credible >possibility?! "Pat" has never proposed a "Sumerian Invention Process" or anything vaguely like it --- ever. I assume that "Sumerian evolved like any other language from an earlier form". Does the name Halloran ring a bell by any chance? Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Mar 12 01:51:48 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 19:51:48 -0600 Subject: Update on *nekw and the N-word Message-ID: Dear Yoel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Yoel L. Arbeitman Date: Thursday, March 11, 1999 5:56 PM > It is suggested that you look in any of Bomhard's three books: Towards >Proto-Nostratic (CILT 27, 1984), The Nostratic Macrofamily (Mouton, 1994, >co-authored with John A. Kerns and dealing also with morphology and >syntax). On p.380ff. his unitary phoneme TL is dealt with. It is a >reconstruct whose appearence in his sub-Nostratic languages are quite >different. The third book is Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis >(Signum, 1996). I do have Bomhard's work, and, though I believe he is essentially on the right track, I believe his reconstruction of a lateralized affricate is, first of all, probably unjustified; but secondly, typologically unacceptable. Of course, it is difficult to judge from the way he presents his cognates. For example, his #200, PN *tl~{h}i/er-, 'highest point', is rendered in PIE as *k{h}e/or-/*k{h}R-, which is fine, but for PAA as *tl~{h}a/6r-. This is almost certainly related to Arabic qarn-un, 'horn', and so I do not believe there is any justification for a PAA *tl~{h} underlying it. Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Mar 12 01:58:39 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 19:58:39 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Yoel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Yoel L. Arbeitman Date: Thursday, March 11, 1999 6:08 PM >The question is dealt with thoroughly in H. Craig Melchert Anatolian >Historical Phonology, both as to the verbal root neku- "become twilight" >and nekut- "night"/ > Yoel For those of us who do not have immediate access to the book, what does he posit as the IE root? Pat From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 12 03:03:58 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:03:58 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: In a message dated 3/10/99 1:57:10 PM Mountain Standard Time, iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >Class dialects have little to do with literacy, especially the very marginal kind of literacy of early medieval Europe.> -- and you still have absolutely no evidence that OE was a class dialect. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 12 03:33:01 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:33:01 EST Subject: Standard Languages Message-ID: Standard national languages are just dialects themselves, and our experience with them tends to lead us to expect unrealistically sharp and definite "edges" to language areas. All languages are dialect clusters; this is particularly obvious with the Romance languages, which (apart from Romanian) have plenty of "bridge" dialects. If you set out from Huelva in say 1500 and zigzaged your way across the Iberian peninsula and through southern France and down Itay to Sicily, there would be few places (execpt where you ran into unrelated tongues like Basque) that you could say "This village speaks X, and the next one speaks Y". They'd merge imperceptibly. I suspect that towards the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE, you could have made a similar journey from the Rhine delta to the Tarim basin, and found a series of overlapping IE dialects all the way. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 12 03:40:43 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:40:43 EST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: >glengordon01 at hotmail.com writes: >The word "roughly" automatically admits to the possibility of long-range >comparison -- let's interject some common sense here. "Agnis" and "Ignis" admit of long- range comparison, especially since they both mean "fire". But for comparisons of this obvious and indisputible nature, the period around 4000 BCE is a _terminus ad quem_. Beyond this there are dust-devils, mirages, and wheel-spinning. Basque probably had lots of relatives at one time. It would be nice to know, but we never will. >What makes good conjecture from bad conjecture is the amount of likelihood a >hypothesis has -- which can only be determined if it can be tested. An explanation attributing everything before 4000 BCE to a playful God who created the world in 4004 BCE with ready-made fossils and potsherds is explains everything, and can't be 'disproved'. That's what makes it a semantic null set; no possible way of disproving it. >Do you realise that you're completely dismissing the field of cosmology >and quantum mechanics because of lack of "evidence". -- they're testable. >it's just accepted that sometimes it behaves as one or the other. -- that can be demonstrated experimentally, and has been repeatedly, as has action at a distance, etc. >but there isn't any undeniable physical proof. -- plenty of it, right there on the laboratory bench. From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Mar 14 03:17:06 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:17:06 -0800 Subject: PIE stops Message-ID: Steven wrote: >What about a stop system distinguishing between voiceless, voiced, and >aspirated (unmarked for voicing)? It's been tried, of course (references here if you want them). The trouble is that it does not explain the evidence so easily. Both the D series and the DH series explain more phenomena if they are voiced. Also devoicing is easier to explain than voicing, especially if the system were indeed unstable. Though of course it may have been glottalic... Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 14 03:17:30 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:17:30 -0800 Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/11/99 3:34:25 PM, you wrote: <<[ Moderator's response: > Greek _nuks, nuktos_, Latin _nox, noctis_, Sanskrit _nak (IIRC), naktam_, > Hittite _nekuz = nek{^w}t+s_, ... > --rma ]>> Does it matter that /t/ does not appear in most of the nom. singulars? I also saw nocz in Polish, nos in Welsh, but was not given declension. It seems the /t/ only makes its appearance in the nom sing in German, French and Sanskrit. Please forgive my ignorance, but sometimes in analysis on this list, this base morphology makes a difference. Why is the /t/ not regarded as just a fairly common stem that sometimes emerges in root and sometimes doesn't? I hope this doesn't sound terribly stupid. Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's response: In those languages in which it does not appear, other processes are at work, usually word structure constraints. Greek and Latin, for example, restrict the inventory of phonemes which can appear word-finally (Greek much more so than Latin); Latin reduces final *-ss to -s (including the results of the more development of *ts > ss); Sanskrit will allow nearly any voiceless stop to appear in final position, but radically reduces final clusters to their first member; and so on. --rma ] From yoel at mindspring.com Fri Mar 12 04:20:31 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 23:20:31 -0500 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <17933459C0@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: While I cannot comment on any "Vasconic"/Greek comparison, the conceptual analogy between that proposed there for "Iron" and "star" does not work by IE Lautgesetz in the parallel Greek "iron": Latin "star" word. The Latin word is generally considered to derive from an IE root *sweid- "shine". This initial consonant sequence would become in Greek *h(e)id-. as the w disappears in "Standard Greek" (remains in some dialects, written with a digamma, is restorable in Homer by meter and is mostly extant in Mycenaean). But even in +w dialects, we would then expect *hwid= in Greek as initial *s- > h in Greek. The alternation sid-us/ sid-er- (nom. nt. vs. stem) in Latin means that the suffix is IE *-os/-es- and that intervocalically the -s- in sideris (genitive) is the product of rhotacism. The same -r- in the Greek word for "iron", sideros, cannot be the product of rhotacism. Thus (1) the initial s- is wrong and the "suffix" -r- is wrong if we are to deem the Greek and Latin words as cognates. The only remaining possibility is to conceptualize the Gk. word as a Wanderwort (from Latin????) or to consider both Gk. sideros and Latin sider- as borrowed from elsewhere. But this is impossible for Latin sid-us. Yoel At 09:15 AM 3/10/99 GMT, you wrote: >Rick Mc Callister wrote:- >> *i:sarno [Celtic, Germanic] > iron, Eisen n. >> [< ?Vasconic *isar "star"; >> see Basque izar "star"] [mcv2/98, tv2/98] >Larry Trask replied:- >> No comment. >Also, Greek `side:ros' = "iron", Latin `sidus' (gen `sideris') = "star". This >semantic association was quite possible in early times when Man had not yet >found how to smelt iron and iron was a precious rarity available only as >natural nickel-iron alloy in meteorites. From yoel at mindspring.com Fri Mar 12 04:44:45 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 23:44:45 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <00f401be6aba$523ddd80$f79ffad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: At 11:52 PM 3/9/99 -0600, you wrote: >Dear Miguel and IEists: > -----Original Message----- >From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >Date: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 10:40 PM >>mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: > >>But I must agree with Rich's "moderator comment" elsewhere that >>in this case the spelling may reflect all of PIE *kw, *gw or >>*ghw [*gwh if you prefer]. After all, if the etymon were *kw, >>the geminate spelling should not be but , and there is >>no way of writing that in cuneiform (nor in ASCII, as the >>recurrent confusions about labiovelars show). The question of what was the form of Hittite and Anatolian "drink" has progressed greatly since Sturtevant's time. In 1980 Morpurgo-Davies showed that the cognate in Hieroglyphic Luwian was /u:/ and since *gw disappears in HL, but *kw does not, the problem is solved. Proto-Anatolian had the verb *e/agw-, known so well in that famed sentence deciphered by Hrozny' nu NINDA adanzi nu watar akwanzi "And they eat bread and they drink water" . It was long thought that here was the cognate, as a verb, of Latin aqua "water". But now it is certain that the iterative-durative form cited represents /akw=skizzi/ with regressive voice assimilation. And, long before the 1980 discovery W. Winter proposed the cognation of Latin ebrius "drunk"/ sobrius "sober" (with -b- < *-gwh-) as well as Greek ne:phalos "sober" with -ph- < only *-gwh-. Thus, far from being cognate with Latin aqua, Anatolian *a/egw- is cognate with Latin ebrius "drunk", Gk. ne:phalos "sober" and the long ago proposed Tocharian yok- "to drink". All argument has been closed by the Hiero. Luw. verb which is reduced to a mere /u:/ and is not open to argument. YOEL >This is interesting speculation but not borne out by the data. See >Sturtevant p. 56: >durative of 'drink' = ak-k{.}u-uS-ki-iz-zi; however the basic form is >written with one -k- upon which S. remarks: "The consistent use of single k >between vowels in the primary verb is difficult, but note -kk- in the >durative". >Pat From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 12 06:05:55 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 06:05:55 GMT Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <19990304073402.16372.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >I know Hittite cannot be >feminine since it doesn't have this gender thing. This is the neuter >*-t/*-d found in words like *kwi-d "what" and the heteroclitic >declension: [nom-acc] **yekwn-d > *yekwr "liver". Thus: > **nekw-d > *nekw-t TADAAAA!!! >[ Moderator's response: > Hittite does not have a separate feminine, but it does have an opposition of > common vs. neuter (or animate vs. inanimate). Hittite _nekuz_ is of common > gender, so I repeat the question: What neuter? > --rma ] Or, put differently, what's the nominative -s doing in nekut-s? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 12 07:52:31 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 07:52:31 GMT Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <17933459C0@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: >Rick Mc Callister wrote:- >> *i:sarno [Celtic, Germanic] > iron, Eisen n. >> [< ?Vasconic *isar "star"; >> see Basque izar "star"] [mcv2/98, tv2/98] >Larry Trask replied:- >> No comment. >Also, Greek `side:ros' = "iron", Latin `sidus' (gen `sideris') = "star". The Latin word is an s-stem *sidos-/*sides-, so there is no connection with Greek sida:ros (Attic side:ros), unless one assumes the word was borrowed directly from Latin. It might be more interesting to compare the Grk. word with Basque zilar ~ zirar ~ zidar ~ zildar "silver" (< *sidar ?). >This >semantic association was quite possible in early times when Man had not yet >found how to smelt iron and iron was a precious rarity available only as >natural nickel-iron alloy in meteorites. Meteoric iron is indeed the earliest source for the metal, as seen for instance in Sumerian AN.BAR "[lit. sky silver] iron". That's what makes a Celtic *i:sar-no- derived from "Vasconic" *isar "star" semantically plausible. Unfortunately, there is zero evidence from Basque itself for the use of in a metallurgical context. Basque for "iron" is (maybe originally "ore", if compounds like burdin-gorri [=red] "copper" and burdin-(h)ori [=yellow] "brass" are not recent coinages). For completeness, the native Basque metal names are: GOLD urr(h)e SILVER zilar ~ zirar ~ zildar ~ zidar LEAD berun ~ beraun IRON burdin(a) ~ burdun~a ~ burni(a) ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From yoel at mindspring.com Fri Mar 12 13:44:27 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 08:44:27 -0500 Subject: PS: Re: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: >Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 23:44:45 -0500 >To: Indo-European at xkl.com >From: "Yoel L. Arbeitman" >Subject: Re: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt >In-Reply-To: <00f401be6aba$523ddd80$f79ffad0 at patrickcryan> In re my message of last night, more precision was needed in the statement that *gw(h) disappears, *kw(h) doesn't in change from PA to Common Luwian: In PA *e/agw-, IE *e/agwh- > Common Luw. u:, the -g- component of he -gw- cluster (the labio-velars are clusters, not unitary phonemes in Anatolian) disappears. This leaves Pre-Luw. *e/au which, in turn > u: "to drink". Thus we have Hittite /agwantsi/ "they drink", /eguteni/ "you [pl.] drink", but Cun. and Hiero.. Luw. /u:tis/ "you (sg.) drink" < *a/e(g)w-tis. Yoel Yoel From iglesias at axia.it Fri Mar 12 23:57:05 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 15:57:05 PST Subject: Celtic Influence Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote on 10 March 1999: >I wonder about the mechanics of this one >In Spanish a'lamo = "poplar" >BUT olmo = "elm" >>5) >>Celtic survivals of northern and central Iberia: >>Sp., Port.alamo `poplar', Cf. It. olmo I think this is in reply to my posting on Celtic influence on Italian and in particular on the North Italian dialects (it looks like my message, but I'm not sure, because I never received a copy back of my message,as my provider made some "enhancements" to the system over the weekend !!!). My apologies to everyone. I misquoted my Spanish source ("Diccionario de Uso del Espan~ol, Mari'a Moliner, Ed. Gredos, Madrid), which sometimes gives etymologies and sometimes it doesn't. The mistake arose as follows. I looked up Spanish "olmo" (etymology given as Lat. "ulmus") = Italian "olmo" (also from Lat. "ulmus") = English "elm" I then looked up "a'lamo" and my eye fell on "Ulmus", but in fact this word (with capital U !) was part of the definition :( "The name of various species of trees of the "Ulmus" genus of the Salicaceae family..."), the etymology was not given... A (silly) mistake on my part and a good example of bad use of dictionaries! Sorry, Rick and everyone else. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 12 15:00:05 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 09:00:05 -0600 Subject: IE and Etruscan Message-ID: > ... the idea that > Etruscan forms part of a longer range construct including but prior > to IE (Kretschmer), just for the record: Kretchmer was Vl. Georgiev's teacher, if memory serves... jpm From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 12 18:05:13 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:05:13 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Would you like to explain what your point is? falda in Spanish is "skirt" or "flank" [of a mountain]. Skirt is obviously the basic meaning As I pointed out, it can't be a native word in Spanish BUT I was asking whether the form /alda, alde, halda/ might exist in Old Spanish, Aragonese or Gascon. As you know, like Spanish, Gascon also changed initial /fVC/ > /hVC/. Aragonese sometimes does this; although descriptions of Aragonese sound pretty lame. If such a form did indeed exist, either of these COULD have provided a source for Basque "alde, alte". Now, what's YOUR point? >On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> This word resembles Spanish falda "skirt, flank"--which >> unaccountably begins with /fV/; which, as anyone who was studied >> Ibero-Romance knows, is a no-no. Is there an Old Castilian, Gasco'n or >> Aragone's form /*alda, *alde/ ? >Sp. falda is a Germanic borrowing into Romance (It., Oc., Cat., Ptg, >falda). Coromines suggests from Frankish *falda `fold', cf OHG falt. ME >fald, related to Goth falthan, OHG faldan, OE fealdan, ON falda `to >fold'; related by Onions to PIE *pel/*pl- with a *-t- extension; cf. Gk >dipaltos, diplasios `twofold', haploos `simple'; Lat plicare `to fold'. >Perhaps if we want to advance this 'research programme' we should impose >on ourselves a self-denying ordinance against etymologizing off the >cuff. >Max W. Wheeler From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Fri Mar 12 18:01:51 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:01:51 -0600 Subject: "Unbalanced" Stop Systems In-Reply-To: <19990311010918.889.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: I don't know that these are so bad. Korean has a three-way contrast, which medially seems to based upon two oppositions 1) long/short, and 2) aspirated/unaspirated, with no short aspirated series existing. (In initial position it appears to be more a matter of voice onset time, with some weak laryngealization figuring in somehow.) But I think such unblanced systems are more offensive to notions of elegance current among some theoretical linguists than to actual users of human language. DLW From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 12 18:20:09 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:20:09 -0600 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >But that leaves the *mora word. Is this the same as Bavarian Mure, and >is it the root of moraine? I wonder if they're not possibly loanwords from Romance, like Mauer. Is there a French-Proven?al or Swiss French dialect word that Mora"ne, moraine could have been borrowed from? From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 12 19:58:03 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 14:58:03 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: >msn.com writes: >I do not want to actively enter this discussion but, for whatever it may be >worth, I believe the Germanic sound system was developed in the IE homeland, >in close proximity to Semitic, as the correspondences I have developed >between Germanic and Semitic seem to suggest --- after other IE branches had >struck for the west. >> -- gee, that sure makes them acrobatic travellers -- bouncing all around the map, getting from somewhere in the Middle East to Jutland, crossing all sorts of other linguistic territory on the way... From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 12 23:53:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 23:53:10 GMT Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns In-Reply-To: <199903110636.BAA64228@cliff.Uottawa.Ca> Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: >2) Eric Hamp has an intriguing suggestion for OCS azu. (IJSLP 1983). Iranian? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 13 01:30:07 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 19:30:07 -0600 Subject: PIE Plosive System Message-ID: (I don't much like the term "stop". Wright's "explosive" conjures lovely images, but it seems better to drop the "ex-".) There are three facts that any posited system must explain: 1) The absence of roots of the form /DeD/. 2) The absence of roots of the forms /TeDH/ and /DHeT/. 3) The absence of/b/. In traditional terms, D, T, and DH stand for any instance of voiced, voiceless, and voiced aspirated plosives respectively. So I would like to know how a fortis/lenis system (with these terms defined in such a way as to be meaningful) does this. DLW From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Sat Mar 13 18:35:28 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 10:35:28 -0800 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: > Borrowing of pronouns is rare, but NOT impossible: [a couple of examples given] Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had become indistinguishable from sing. forms. > 3) And cf. the Muppets. Miss Piggy would often use "moi" as the first > person singular pronoun while purportedly speaking English. And which has since spread to the speech of a great many Americans, many of whom [e.g. my wife] have at best an extremely limited knowledge of French. 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 http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 13 02:47:09 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 20:47:09 -0600 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Debatable. The form is Spanish. Of course it is, BUT it's a Spanish name commonly associated in Spanish literature and culture with the Basques [despite Sancho Panza], along with In~igo [vs. Ignacio, with which it is correctly or incorrectly associated]. That's why I qualified it as "Spanish spoken by Basques". Elsewhere in Spanish, the proper name developed as Santo or, more often, Santos. In Latin America, I've only come across Sancho as a dog's name. >The medieval Basque form of >the name is , which must derive from * by dissimilatory >loss of the first sibilant. And I don't see why this form would develop >from a palatalized coronal (/ts/ notates an apical affricate). >There is no need to appeal to a Romance palatal to account for the >Basque /ai/. For example, the word for `fast, quick, soon' was mostly > in the 16th century but is mostly today. Then what's the reason? Is it an analogy to words with /ay/ --which underwent this change previously because of metathesis of palatal, etc. Is it part of a regional phenomenon? --as in Portuguese, in which stressed /a/ often > /ay/ among certain speakers, e.g. the proper name Bras, which is often /brayz, brayzh, braysh/ Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Mar 13 03:06:57 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 22:06:57 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: In a message dated 3/12/99 7:30:14 PM, Sheila Watts wrote: <> The large and somewhat disquieting 'The World's Major Languages' (Oxford Univ Press 1987). Actually Comrie was the editor and did the section on Russian. The part I quoted (p.71), connecting the first sound shift in German with the earlier non-IE language, was by John A. Hawkins (also from USC), who did the sections on Germanic Languages and on German. Philip Baldi did the section on Indo-European. Regards, Steve Long From yoel at mindspring.com Sat Mar 13 04:32:47 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 23:32:47 -0500 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: <199903112110.NAA26993@netcom.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 01:10 PM 3/11/99 -0800, you wrote: >Steve Long raises the question of the length of time it would take for >speakers of a generic Indo-European to lose the ability to interact (in >conjunction with the issue of the splintering of the IE Ursprache into a large >number of small languages). The point as a whole is well taken. Yet the implied analogy between the differing languages of non-Greek Italy before its Latinization with the dialects of Greek in Magna Graecia and with the Germanic and Celtic languages is inadequate. Osco-Umbrian, at the earliest attested stage is not at all dialectal to Latin as e.g. the Greek dialects are one to another. Furthermore, the foremost authority on Venetic wrote in 1981 (Gs J. Alexander Kerns, CILT) that after 50 years of full time devoting himself to the question, he could not conclude whether or not Venetic was a genetically Italic Language. The other recently worked on lE languages of pre-Latinized Italy, e.g. South Picenean (sp.?) are available only to the specialists at the present. So Italy was already by the time of its first literacy so divided as to allow no communication amongst Latin, Osco-Umbrian, and Venetic, and other languages of which we know little. The question of Etruscan, which is most likely not Italic, if IE, is another matter. But how long then do we ascribe the presence of these IE languages in Italy? YLA >First, let me note that in, for example, the Italian peninsula, we find at the >time of our earliest records a number of languages, all with recognizable >dialect differences from place to place within the language areas, or in the >Greek world a couple of dozen widely diverging dialects with literary >traditions till the koinization brought on by the Alexandrian conquests and >their aftermath. The same thing we would expect to hold in the Celtic and >Germanic regions of Europe. From yoel at mindspring.com Sat Mar 13 04:47:45 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 23:47:45 -0500 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: We cannot ignore the famed example of Sapir's. Hittite /kubaGi/ (/G/ - voiced pharyngeal, ghain) has a double representation in Biblical Hebrew: qoba'' ('' = ayin) and koba''. From this Sapir concluded that whereas Hebrew is aspirated phonetically and Hebrew /q/ is non-aspirated, but glottalized or pharyngealized (emphatic), the Hittite which was phonetically [k] i.e. [-aspiration, -emphaticness], could not adequately be represented by either Hebrew grapheme. So the alternating writings. As for the cluster /nt/ in Anatolian into Greek, this is a special combination. Witness its pronunciation in Modern Greek. One cannot extrapolate from how a /nt/ would be transcribed into Greek to how any non prenasalized unvoiced obstruent would be realized phonetically and/ or graphemically. Yoel At 02:56 PM 3/11/99 -0600, you wrote: > On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very >early, evidently), it would seem unlikely that the /t/ was aspirated. >Such a notion, would also have broader implications: that every >IE-Anatolian /p-t-k/ that was wound up in Greek should appear as >/ph-th-kh/. Is this true? > > DLW From obaumann at stud.uni-frankfurt.de Fri Mar 12 23:32:27 1999 From: obaumann at stud.uni-frankfurt.de (Oliver Baumann) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 00:32:27 +0100 Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: > In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" >besides Germanic or Modern French?Wayles Browne wrote: > Also Slavic: Russian noch', Old Church Slavonic nosht' etc. go back to Common > Slavic *nokt-. but see also Polish _noc_ notice Rumanian _noapte_ and Catalan _nit_ -- Oli From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 13 08:36:21 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 08:36:21 GMT Subject: lenis and glottalic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >JER (now): Do you mean that the Dutch voiced d comes from a voiceless >lenis d - how can that be known? In theory, it's also possible that only Dutch maintains the original situation and all the other Germanic languages have changed the voiceless/voiced opposition to fortis/lenis or aspirated/non-aspirated. But that would be no help at all in explaining phenomena like the High German consonant shift. I believe the evidence from the Dutch dialects also indicates that the loss of aspirated stops in standard Dutch is secondary. >And that English lenes are voiceless?? They are in initial and final position, and generally whenever preceded _or_ followed by voicelessness. They are fully voiced only when preceded _and_ followed by voicedness (e.g. intervocalically). The defining characteristic of the English lenes (and I believe that goes for Scandinavian and High/Low German as well) is not voice, but lack of aspiration. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 13 08:44:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 08:44:10 GMT Subject: Anatolian /nt/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very >early, evidently), What evidence? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 14 00:32:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 00:32:10 GMT Subject: PIE plosives In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> It's a generally recognized fact that a PIE stop system *t, *d, >> *dh is typologically unacceptable. >Perhaps not so generally. A number of languages have turned up which >have voiced aspirates but no voiceless aspirates. For example, the >Indonesian language Madurese has a /p/ series, a /b/ series and a /bh/ >series, but no /ph/ series, exactly like the standard reconstruction of >PIE. Good point (but Madurese has /b/). I had always kind of assumed without looking that Madurese voiced aspirates must be due to Sanskrit influence, but I see that Mad. has dhu(wa') "2", so that's presumably the Madurese reflex of PAN *Duwa, where *D is what? Retroflex? And where do the other Madurese voiced aspirates come from? Ross? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 13 09:43:18 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 09:43:18 GMT Subject: rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > /tsoBu, LoBu/ are found in E. Galicia according to Galician >speakers I've talked and /shoBu/, I believe is found elsewhere. According to Zamora Vicente "Dialectologi'a espan~ola", there is a small area of Galician speech where the Asturian palatalization of initial l- is found. To be precise, the valley of the Navia river. Administratively, however, this area as well as some more territory to the west of it (until Ribadeo), belongs to Asturias. Obviously, it depends on how one defines "Galician" vs. "Asturian". Usually, the defining isogloss is taken to be that of diphthongization of e (>ie) and o (>ue). West of that isogloss, it's Galician and Portuguese, east of it it's Asturian, Leonese and Castilian. The l- > ll- (> tS-, ts-, d.-) isogloss runs a bit west of that, at least in the north. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 01:02:28 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 17:02:28 PST Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay Message-ID: DLW: See coming response to Glenny. Both /m/ and /n/ tend to occur in words for female care-givers, with /n/ typically referring to more secondary ones, as in "nanny". So what. You haven't demonstrated a link between relationship-words and pronouns nor proof that your "mama" theory is attributable to pronouns. DLW: 1st pronouns do show a statistically significant tendency to use nasals, [...] If a mother is going to imagine that her baby, who is in fact only babbling, is talking to her, then "mama" and "me" are the words she will want to hear the baby say. Which can be caused by anything, including mass linguistic relationships. That languages can be related is ubiquitously demonstrated throughout linguistics. The "mama syndrome" in relation to pronouns is not in the least. I am terminating the discussion. Again, you're being Eurocentric. Imagine an Abkhaz mother whose word for "me" is , if the baby is practicing the /m/ sound, she will never hear "me" at all in her baby's babbling nor will the baby grow up saying instead, unless the baby is wrought with dysphasia. Please cease this blatantly moronic topic. If I seem angry again, it's because I can't believe that someone, who evidently has a reasonable command of the English language, can honestly persue such an intuitively bad theory. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From iglesias at axia.it Sat Mar 13 19:33:10 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 11:33:10 PST Subject: Rate of change Message-ID: Rick Mc Calister wrote on 11 March: >/tsoBu, LoBu/ are found in E. Galicia according to Galician speakers I've talked and /shoBu/, I believe is found elsewhere. E. Galicia (!nos gustari'a!) could mean what the Galician nationalists call la "Franxa exterior" (Cast. "Franja exterior"), i.e. the transition areas of Asturias and Leon that speak Galego and/or Asturo-Leonese, depending on who's judging. The two strongest iso-glosses are: initial L palatised in AL and not in Galician, e.g. Gal. "lobo", Ast. "llobu", Cast. "lobo": Latin short "o" and "e" as dipthongs in AL and not in Galician, e.g. Gal. "ollo" (= Port. "olho"), Ast. "uello", Cast. "ojo". In Asturias, the local dialects as far as the river Navia are officially called "a nosa fala", to avoid using the word Galego! (Somewhat like not using the N word on the IE list FR) !Ay, ay, ay! (see, as suggested by Max W. Wheeler, A. Zamora Vicente, Dialectologia Espan~ola, 1967, map on page 84). To call the rest of Asturias "Galicia" is like calling Arizona "Sonora Norte" or Ontario "Que'bec Ouest"! >One problem is that spoken Galician is largely rural and fragmented. True >There is, evidently a "neo-Galician" which amounts to a Castillian >pronunciation of written Galician. And, I'm told, this is used by >Castillian speakers in Galicia with nationalist leanings. Not quite. It's also used by those who, like me (Pilar) were deprived of their language. For example, in my schooldays in the 40's under the Franco regime we were made to kneel on rocks if we used Galego words or expressions in our Castillian. We Galicians, whether Castillian or Galician speaking, have always valued our identity, even those of us who are not (ultra) Galician nationalists. Franco himself, although he persecuted Galician nationalists, made no attempt to play down his Galician origins (El Ferrol), and he frequently came to Galicia during the summer, where he had a residence known as the "Pazo" (Cast. "Palacio"). The Galicians are famous for their "retranca", which means answering a question with another question. There is a story that Hitler after meeting Franco at Hendaye said: "Rather than meet that man again, I prefer to go the dentist!" >The difference between the two is probably like that between Catalan and >Valencian --which sounds like Catalan being spoken by a Castillian. Galego sounds like Castillian, e.g. "theta", etc., because it followed a parallel path of development (see Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, Ed. Gredos, Madrid, in particular the chapter on "El Gallego"). If anything it was Portuguese that changed with the Reconquista of Lisbon with its Mozarabic population (ibid.). The "Portuguese Galician" of Minho, for example, is still close to, although different from, "Spanish Galician". The socio-linguistic situation in Galicia is indeed very similar to Valencia, where the cities and the upper classes speak Castillian. There is a story in Valencia that if you go to the market early in the morning, the people speak Valencian and the language becomes gradually more Castillian as the day goes on. The same applies to La Corun~a or Vigo. In Barcelona, on the other hand, an immigrant from southern Spain, who worked on the construction of the subway, was recorded as saying: "Very few people spoke Catalan, when we built the subway. The people who spoke Catalan worked in the offices". >In any case, rural Galician is definitely more difficult for a >Spanish speaker to understand than Portuguese. Probably. Joint message from Frank Rossi and Pilar Iglesias Lo'pez, Galega Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 01:23:19 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 17:23:19 PST Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: ANTHONY APPLEYARD: I agree, particularly as I believe also that the H2 laryngeal was the {h.} sound as in Arabic {h2aram} = "sacred, forbidden", (Muh2ammad}, and H3 was the ayin (e.g.root H3-D-W in Arabic {h3aduuw} = "enemy" and Greek {odussomai}). I believe that the usual H1 was the glottal stop. I agree with *H1 = /?/ and *H2 = /h./ but I don't think that a simple voicing of *H2 to make *H3 is adequate to explain the apparent "rounding" effect that *H3 has on vowels. A labial quality must be added to explain this - thus *H3 = /h./ and it is a labial *H2. I believe both *H2 and *H3 had the potential for voicing and I don't think there is any evidence that would suggest that *H2 and *H3 differed in voicing. Anatolian languages treat both phonemes the same. Additionally, in this interpretation, we have a laryngeal series that is quite similar to the velars, except that, to my knowledge, no evidence exists for a palatal counterpart. *H1 = /?/ *H2 = /h./ or /3/ *H3 = /h./ or /3/ -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's comment: The evidence adduced in favour of voicing of *H3 is Skt. pibati, Latin bibit "he drinks", a reduplicated present from a root reconstructed as *peH3-, in combination with Sturtevant's Rule. A tad thin, I admit. --rma ] From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Fri Mar 12 22:20:55 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 17:20:55 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Sheila Watts wrote: >If anyone is working in linguistics who finds it a problem when an >orthographical symbol has different phonetic value in different languages, >he or she should get out fast and try maths instead. As a mathematician, I resent that remark, especially since I have finally gotten used to z being used for palatal sibilant in the Harvard-Kyoto convention for Sanskrit e-texts and zh for the final consonant in ``Tamil'':-) Actually context dependent meaning is rife everywhere. Math papers in different specialties use the same grapheme in very different meanings. However, we don't have amateurs trying to read math papers, they just write and try to publish them :-) From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 03:30:31 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 19:30:31 PST Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns Message-ID: ROBERT ORR: Borrowing of pronouns is rare, but NOT impossible: Yes, that's great but no amount of evidence drudged up from popular 70/80's TV shows can make the borrowing of an entire set of pronouns any more likely than it really is. :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's comment: Or less... --rma ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 04:28:02 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:28:02 PST Subject: lenis and glottalic Message-ID: JENS: If the lack of *deg- means that it was once *t'ek'- with TWO glottalics one of which changed into something else, that change can have any age. We only know that its RESULT was present in the IE protolanguage, not that its CAUSE remained: Which is the precise reason why I'm afraid of reconstructing ejectives in IE proper. However, I don't think that it is better to just reconstruct *ph, *kh, *th in absence of strong evidence just to balance the stop system. That appears lazy in my view. IE lgs seem to only support three types of stops. On the subject of lenis/fortis, Miguel seems to be suggesting that lenis stops (or "long stops") tend to voice more often than fortis stops. So might I ask, is this true? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's comment: "Long" stops are more often treated as "fortis" than as "lenis", in my experience. Voicing of intervocalic stops is usually considered a lenition, of course, so one might expect lenis stops to be more subject to voicing. --rma ] From lmfosse at online.no Sat Mar 13 12:16:16 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 13:16:16 +0100 Subject: SV: Standard Languages Message-ID: Joat Simeon wrote: > All languages are dialect clusters; this is particularly obvious with the > Romance languages, which (apart from Romanian) have plenty of "bridge" > dialects. > I suspect that towards the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE, you could have > made a similar journey from the Rhine delta to the Tarim basin, and found a > series of overlapping IE dialects all the way. This situation is certainly true about the Sami dialects of Arctic Norway. A Sami speaker once explained to me that he could understand the dialects "to the left and to the right" without problems, the dialects beyond them with more difficulty and the dialects beyond those again hardly at all. There are a total of some 40,000 Sami speakers in North of the Arctic circle, and this should give a perspective on such things as dialects and numbers of speakers. South Sami, which is now practically extinct, is/was a different language altogether. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 04:32:04 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:32:04 PST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: PATRICK RYAN: "Pat" has never proposed a "Sumerian Invention Process" or anything vaguely like it --- ever. I assume that "Sumerian evolved like any other language from an earlier form". Does the name Halloran ring a bell by any chance? Come to think of it, you may be right. An apology to Ryan-Halloran. I get you two easily confused :) From jer at cphling.dk Sat Mar 13 14:48:24 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 15:48:24 +0100 Subject: PIE stops In-Reply-To: <007e01be6c09$6197db00$f83763c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > [...] Both the D series and > the DH series explain more phenomena if they are voiced. Also devoicing is > easier to explain than voicing, especially if the system were indeed > unstable. Though of course it may have been glottalic... Listen up, everybody! That was a word of reason to be heeded by all who are currently losing their heads. Jens From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 04:48:43 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:48:43 PST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>The word "roughly" automatically admits to the possibility of >>long-range comparison >-- let's interject some common sense here. "Agnis" and "Ignis" admit of >long-range comparison, especially since they both mean "fire". But for >comparisons of this obvious and indisputible nature, the period around 4000 >BCE is a _terminus ad quem_. 4000 BCE is a completely arbitrary point of time and can't be used as a barrier of knowledge without question. >Basque probably had lots of relatives at one time. It would be nice to >know, but we never will. >>What makes good conjecture from bad conjecture is the amount of >>likelihood a hypothesis has >-- which can only be determined if it can be tested. An explanation >attributing everything before 4000 BCE to a playful God who created the world >in 4004 BCE with ready-made fossils and potsherds is explains everything, and >can't be 'disproved'. That's what makes it a semantic null set; no possible >way of disproving it. >>it's just accepted that sometimes it behaves as one or the other. >-- that can be demonstrated experimentally, and has been repeatedly, as >has action at a distance, etc. >>but there isn't any undeniable physical proof. >-- plenty of it, right there on the laboratory bench. _Physical_ proof of the nature of particles?? I don't think so. It is based on observation. Experiments can only tell us a pattern. It can't tell us the actual form of a particle. Don't be daft. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 13 16:26:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 10:26:12 -0600 Subject: Rate of change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Concerning the Galician language, my wife is from La Corun~a and with her >assistance I would like to give the following input: >1) Galician is quite distinct from Castillian. Very true >2) Whether it is distinct from Portuguese is a matter of opinion. The >Portuguese (nationalistically ?) consider it a "co-dialecto". And Galicians tell me that Portuguese is a dialect of Galician :> Which has a grain of truth in that the Portuguese literary language began in Galician in the Middle Ages >3) The pronunciation of Galician is very different from the standard >Portuguese of Lisbon, but if we consider the dialects of Northern Portugal >the distance is much less. (For example no difference between "b" and "v"). But that depends on the dialect of Galician, right? Some are virtually the same as northern Portuguese while others are pretty close to bable, spoken in Asturias > The dialects differ mainly as a result of the influence of the official >languages. The dialects in Galicia are very much alive. [snip] >Subjectively, my wife >has no problem in communicating with Northern Portuguese speaking in her >version of Castillian, but with a friend from Lisbon they have to speak >very slowly. People from Lisbon that I've met tend to swallow their vowels but I can understand them better than the northerners. And I can understand northern Portuguese better than Galician. >However, this person's father is from Minho (Portuguese >Galicia), so that helps. >With Brazilians, it depends on the person. Some >kinds of Brazilian seem closer to Galician. But I think this may be due to Spanish influence in "urban" Galician and in southern Brazilian --as well as the million or so Galicians in southern Brazil. >5) Galician may sound like Castillian, but in fact its sounds including the >lisped "s" were a local development parallel to that of Castille. (See >"Grama'tica Portuguesa" by Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, Ed. Gredos, Madrid, >chapter on "El Gallego") The south of Galicia uses "seseo". How about intervocalic , final & among your wife's family? >6) There is another phenomenon known as "geada", which is the pronunciation >of velar "g" similar to the Spanish "j", e.g. "lujo" for "Lugo", but this >is not considered "correct", although many other Spaniards consider it the >very essence of Galician as they find it funny, e.g. "jato" for "gato". I've heard Galicians who pronounce & "soft g" [/zh/ in Portuguese] as /sh/ >7) Galician has been recognised as an official language alongside >Castillian, on the same level as Catalan and Basque in their respective >areas. Like Basque, Galician had to develop a modern written standard over >the last few decades. There is currently a debate between the Autonomous >Government of Galicia, which has adopted a Spanish-like orthography, and >those who would prefer a Portuguese-style orthography, e.g. Espanha, rather >than Espan~a. >Un sau'do carin~oso a todos da lista indo-europea. Boa tarde. So, how does your wife pronounce this? southern Brazilian Portuguese would be --more or less, with some local differences, etc.- something like /u~ saudu c at riNozu a toduz da lishta indu-eurupe@ bO@ tahji/ I've also heard /lIshta/ as well as /lista/ and /taRji/ as well as /taRdi/ [R = velar] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 14 05:53:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 00:53:51 EST Subject: IE Technological lexicon: Linguistic Archaeology Alive and Well Message-ID: We should note that there are PIE roots not only for "wheel" (several different words) but for a whole series of related terms -- axle, nave of a wheel, wheeled vehicle/wagon, yoke, 'to make a journey by wagon', etc. There are also terms for wool, woven cloth, sewing, spinning, and weaving. The above are unambiguously 4th-millenium, no earlier. From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Sat Mar 13 11:43:01 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 06:43:01 -0500 Subject: Chariots Message-ID: maher, johnpeter wrote: >in Bulgaria/1966 I saw a long-legged man "riding" a donkey: He sat, feet >dragging, not amidships, but back on the animal's hip [pardon: I'm a city kid]. Actually this is said to be the right way to ride a donkey because donkeys have carry their necks low. In the earliest representations from the Ancient Near East, people ride horses too this way. But it is bad for the horse. [That is why Littauer and Crowell object to the idea that the horse was introduced to the ANE by horse riding people. and not by trade.] -Nath From DRC at antnov1.auckland.ac.nz Mon Mar 15 05:08:32 1999 From: DRC at antnov1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 00:08:32 -0500 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Peter wrote: > Steve said: > >1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the > >non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations? > You're making an assumption that doesn't fit the facts. Some non-IE > languages splinter, some don't. New Guinea is very mountainous and a > tradition developed of warfare between small local tribes. Compare that > Polynesia, a vast area, where different languages have indeed developed, but > it is remarkably homogenous linguistically. Some of the languages are > mutually comprehensible, with willing listeners. We cannot extrapolate > from New Guniea and assume all the world followed that model. > And in Polynesia, or course there are indeed thousands of years with slow > language change. One might think of Lithuanian... Not all languages > change rapidly! Whoa! Let's keep the time scale in mind if we're using this comparison. Polynesia: not much more than 2,000 years since Proto-PN, 35 languages. Still a pretty clear family resemblance throughout, but time has not stood still. Comparable to Romance? New Guinea: 40,000 years since first human colonization, several hundred languages in several distinct families. Foley in his Cambridge Green Book on Papuan points out that at a very modest rate of differentiation this amount of time would have been enough to produce 10^12 languages from a single ancestor. Geographical factors have certainly contributed, but people tend to exaggerate their importance. We could throw in for further comparison Vanuatu: 3,500 years since first human occupation, 100+ languages, much more diverse than Polynesian, but all related. Probably at least 90 of these are from a single ancestor. A group of medium-to-small islands, most within sight of each other, no major geographical barriers. This looks like the New Guinea pattern at a much earlier stage. Foley and others mention Melanesian attitudes as placing a positive value on local linguistic distinctiveness while freely borrowing linguistic and cultural items from neighbours. Is this a peculiarly Melanesian ethos? Or is it typical of human life before centralized states take over? To return to IE -- how soundly based are linguists' assumptions about what life was like in pre-state Eurasian societies, particularly non-material factors like language attitudes? Ross Clark From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 13 16:38:22 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 10:38:22 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <4a8ef738.36e8841e@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > -- and you still have absolutely no evidence that OE was a class dialect. Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages of stratified societies are always class dialects. DLW From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 13 17:52:28 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 12:52:28 EST Subject: Chariots Message-ID: In a message dated 3/12/99 2:11:17 PM Mountain Standard Time, jpmaher at neiu.edu writes: >In Bulgaria/1966 I saw a long-legged man "riding" a donkey: He sat, feet dragging, >not amidships, but back on the animal's hip [pardon: I'm a city kid]. >> -- there was a Viking chief who was so tall he had that problem with horses -- he was known as "Hrolf Granger", "Hrolf the Walker". Incidentally, many early Middle Eastern inscriptions show men riding horses in that position, over the rump. From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Sun Mar 14 07:17:04 1999 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 08:17:04 +0100 Subject: Reconstructing *sH- for PIE Message-ID: I'd be interested in learning of any studies on Indo-European laryngeals after word-initial S-. I'm only aware of Henry M. Hoenigswald's 1993 article at present (Comparative-Historical Linguistics (Papers in Honor of O. Szemerenyi III), J. Benjamins). Is anyone working on this topic at the moment? Many thanks, Dennis. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 14 08:12:12 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 03:12:12 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: I wrote: <<1. Why do we assume that the IE languages would not act precisely like the non-IE languanges and splinter into extremely local variations?>> In a message dated 3/13/99 12:20:16 AM, petegray at btinternet.com replied: <> The rest of my post that you quoted would have clarified some things. My points were with regard to the idea that PIE accompanied the introduction of agriculture into Europe or across Europe. First, with regard to New Guinea/Polynesian comparison, the difference between the two is fairly easy to understand. New Guinea is striking for its lack of centralized market systems. The speakers of the various languages, before outside incursions, simply had no way to interact and standardize or maintain continuity of language. Geography and relations no doubt had much to do with this - although in similar terrain, market systems do arise. What matters however is that this is in marked contrast to the Polynesian situation, where the first migrations were actually in part a promulgation of a market network (as evidenced by the large inventory of innovations and transplantations that would follow those first migrations.) < I've just received my copy of "The Mummies of Urumchi" by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. She's primarily an expert in the history of textiles, and is fascinating on that subject -- here, mainly the characteristics of the textiles buried with the mummies and the technology used to produce them. She's also been closely involved with the recent investigations of the Tarim Basin mummies (generally agreed to be Tocharians and proto-Tocharians) and is very interesting on the more general aspects of the area as well. In particular, the unique characteristics of the Tarim Basin -- its isolation, the natural phenomena which make mummification so prevalent, and the absence of any substantial population before the arrival of the population which produced the mummies around 2000 BCE -- give us a fascinating insight into an early IE-speaking group. In fact, if we accept that the proto-Tocharians moved off from the PIE core very early (which the linguistic evidence would seem to indicate) and then stayed isolated in the Tarim Basin for a long time (which the linguistic and archaeological evidence would seem to indicate), then we may be getting a glimpse at what the earliest Indo-Europeans actually looked like and what clothes they wore. From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 14 08:12:30 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 03:12:30 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/12/99 10:54:07 PM, our moderator wrote: <> I believe this is true. But the situation in Neolithic Europe should have been different. The languages you mention have been subject to strong standardizing agents that froze them to some degree against diverging far from their common ancestors. And of course there is the open and constant lines of communication and commerce between the different languages that permit borrowing and mutual understanding in other ways. We don't have evidence of such influences that hold up in the Neolithic - except for the slow spread of agriculture. And agriculture tends to create localization. (Aside from the notion that one would need to adopt a new language whole cloth in order to adopt farming.) The fact is that when we've seen an internally stable language suddenly covering large distances and populations, it has happened quickly - so the language doesn't have time to splinter. How long did it take an insignificant dialect in a corner of Italy to suddenly become the primary language of half of Europe. Start Roman expansion at about 300bce and it took about 500 years. Mallory has a chart in his book about the spread of Turkish, which is even more phenomenal and happens in something like 300 years. For PIE to have stayed one thing or even a group of similair languages, it should have moved faster than 3 or 4000 years. I think that the agricultural hypothesis is the result of us having nothing much else to go by that far back. It's the one singularity that passes through Europe before the Bronze Age. But trying to correlate it to the spread of IE leads us to make language do things it just doesn't do. And creates impossibly distant dates for the prolonged unity of PIE. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 13 18:38:45 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 13:38:45 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi (2) Message-ID: Barber also notes, of course, that there are indications of contact between early IE-speakers (Indo-Iranian, proto-Tocharian, and "just IE") and the early Chinese. The Old Chinese vocabulary for wheeled transport (chariot, axle hub, etc.), and for some elements of magic and divination contains many IE loanwords. This isn't really surprising -- it wasn't likely that the chariot was independently invented in China, after all. The remaining question (likely unsolvable) is whether the Shang Chinese simply borrowed these elements, or whether they were transported there by IE-speakers who were subsequently absorbed -- rather like the situation in Mitanni in the Near East. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 13 18:45:50 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 13:45:50 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >lpechor at yahoo.com writes: >It strikes me that the Indo-European-speaking peoples must have had some >advantage in terms of time or resources -- the main determinant of advantage in intergroup relations is what might be called "cultural software" -- skills, habits, attitudes of mind, institutions. These are, by their nature, very difficult to recover. They leave little or no trace in the archaeological record and can only be teased out of the linguistic one with extreme effort and to a limited extent. Eg., if one culture is egalitarian and closed to outsiders, while another has a mechanism for integrating outsiders as individuals into its social/household structure, then the second culture will have a tremendous advantage over the long run. On the basis of "what's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable". There's only one end to an interaction like that. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 14 10:30:54 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 10:30:54 GMT Subject: "Unbalanced" Stop Systems In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: >Korean has a three-way >contrast, which medially seems to based upon two oppositions 1) >long/short, and 2) aspirated/unaspirated, with no short aspirated series >existing. (In initial position it appears to be more a matter of voice >onset time, with some weak laryngealization figuring in somehow.) Indeed, as Theo Vennemann suggested, before the fricativization of the long/aspirated series (*ph > *f etc.), Proto-Germanic must have had a system exactly like the Korean one. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 13 18:50:43 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 13:50:43 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/12/99 8:54:07 PM Mountain Standard Time, alderson at netcom.com writes: >So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required >for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years >for them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one >party to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if >both are members of the same general speech community. -- in general, but not necessarily in particular. Drastic modification is possible in a fairly short time -- the Netherlands/Afrikaans divergence, for instance, or that between Old and Middle English. Or the way Lithuanian can be read as a proto-language for Latvian. I think 'punctuated equlibrium' is a useful model here. Instead of a steady gradual series of changes, long periods of relative stasis with short periods of rapid change interspersed. Eg., the restructuring of Insular Celtic in the first few centuries CE, or what apparently happed to proto-Germanic in the first millenium BCE. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sun Mar 14 12:47:11 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 06:47:11 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: In addition, there are many Americans using "moi" who not only do not know French, but who never directly saw/heard Miss Piggy'. In addition, Casdtilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; and Italian "Lei" is a calque of sorts on the latter. Steven Schaufele wrote: > Robert Orr wrote: [ moderator snip ] > > 3) And cf. the Muppets. Miss Piggy would often use "moi" as the first > > person singular pronoun while purportedly speaking English. > > And which has since spread to the speech of a great many Americans, many > of whom [e.g. my wife] have at best an extremely limited knowledge of > French. [ moderator snip ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Mar 13 19:38:58 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 14:38:58 EST Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/13/99 7:41:51 AM, you wrote: <<[ Moderator's response: > In those languages in which it does not appear, other processes are at work, > usually word structure constraints. Greek and Latin, for example, restrict > the inventory of phonemes which can appear word-finally (Greek much more so > than Latin); Latin reduces final *-ss to -s (including the results of the > more development of *ts > ss); Sanskrit will allow nearly any voiceless stop > to appear in final position, but radically reduces final clusters to their > first member; and so on. > --rma ]>> So, if I understand correctly, the nominative sing form in Latin and Greek reflect the dropping of the -t due to the internal rules of those languages regarding "the inventory of phonemes which appear word-finally." Does this also account for the loss of the -t in Welsh and Polish for example? Does Celtic prohibit the ending of a word in /t/? Can any of these t-less nominatives be explained as a borrowing? Does that make any sense? Regards, Steve Long [ Moderator's response: For Polish and Welsh, presumably so; I am not versed in the histories or the synchronic phonologies of those languages. Word-final *-t > Proto-Celtic *-d if I remember correctly, but the *t in the word for "night" is not word-final in PIE. And why should we bother with borrowing when there are perfectly good explanations for the forms encountered that do not require an outside influence? --rma ] From yoel at mindspring.com Sun Mar 14 12:56:30 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 07:56:30 -0500 Subject: IE and Etruscan In-Reply-To: <36E92BF5.4A29138E@neiu.edu> Message-ID: Dear J Peter and Fellows: And this work of Kretschmer, "Kretschmerian perspective", has been vigorously carried on for the last 30 years by the Belgian "amateur" in the good sense, scholar J. Faucounau who has published a host of "tirades" on the Gospel of Kretschmer and the Etruscan connection. Three of them are in the Gsen Kerns (CILT), Schwatz (Louvain), and Carter (Peeters, forthcoming), all ed. by Yoel L. Arbeitman (the first with Allan R. Bomhard) and in journals, both scientific and popular. At 09:00 AM 3/12/99 -0600, you wrote: >> ... the idea that >> Etruscan forms part of a longer range construct including but prior >> to IE (Kretschmer), >just for the record: >Kretchmer was Vl. Georgiev's teacher, if memory serves... >jpm From jer at cphling.dk Sat Mar 13 15:12:51 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 16:12:51 +0100 Subject: Gender In-Reply-To: <3703ab0c.194569195@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > [...] > The lack of feminine gender in Hittite (Anatolian) suggests that > the PIE three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter) is > datable to the time between the split-off of Anatolian and the > break-up of the rest of IE (beginning with Tocharian). > [...] I don't think this can be true, because: (1) How could the feminine marker *-yeH2-/*-iH2- have been hit by the working of ablaut if it only arose after the split-off when the process must have been over? (2) Adjectives like dankuis 'dark' appear to have the same background as Lat. svavis, viz. the feminine in *-w-iH2- of u-stem adjectives (Skt. sva:du'-s, fem. sva:d-v-i:'). (3) The allative of 'one' is sa-ni-ya in the Anitta text, rather obviously based on *s(V)m-iH2- (Gk. m?a fem. 'one'), conflated with some form where the /m/ was word-final and so changed to /n/ (cf. Gk. ntr. he'n from IE *se'm). All in all, it looks like a two-bit reduction of the system of three genders to two, whereby masc. and fem. formed a "common gender" opposed to the surviving neuter just as in Dutch, Danish and Swedish. Jens From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sun Mar 14 12:56:46 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 06:56:46 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ Message-ID: -- some data from Greek and Greek-English bilinguals to render more concrete Yoel A's incisive point: '5' can be pronounced PENDE or PEDE; PENTE is not heard in modern Greek. The same mutatis mutandis for OLIMBIKOS and OLIBIKOS. 'Hsmburger' on signs sometimes appears as HABURGER Homophones BED/BEND. MUDDY/MONDAY "...the FIGURES/FINGERS of speets" "She has a nice FIGURE/FINGER" "how do you ADDRESS/UNDRESS a LADY/LAINDY?" jpm ........................ "Yoel L. Arbeitman" wrote: > We cannot ignore the famed example of Sapir's. Hittite /kubaGi/ > (/G/ - voiced pharyngeal, ghain) has a double representation in Biblical > Hebrew: qoba'' ('' = ayin) and koba''. From this Sapir concluded that > whereas Hebrew is aspirated phonetically and Hebrew /q/ is > non-aspirated, but glottalized or pharyngealized (emphatic), the Hittite > which was phonetically [k] i.e. [-aspiration, -emphaticness], could not > adequately be represented by either Hebrew grapheme. So the alternating > writings. As for the cluster /nt/ in Anatolian into Greek, this is a > special combination. Witness its pronunciation in Modern Greek. One cannot > extrapolate from how a /nt/ would be transcribed into Greek to how any non > prenasalized unvoiced obstruent would be realized phonetically and/ or > graphemically. > Yoel [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 13 05:07:58 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 23:07:58 -0600 Subject: gender In-Reply-To: <3703ab0c.194569195@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Growing up in a Spanish family in Holland, certain Dutchisms >tended to creep into our (my siblings and mine's) speech, which >my father was constantly combatting. One of them was saying "Voy >a Juan" [I go to John] (Dutch "Ik ga naar Jan toe"), which my >father always corrected to "Voy a ver a Juan" [I'm going to see >John] or "Voy a casa de Juan" [I'm going to John's house]. It >seems that Castilian also doesn't normally allow a >locative/directional preposition followed directly by an animate >noun (phrase). You don't say "Voy donde Juan"? [lit. "go-I where John"] "I'm going to John's" It's very common in Central American Spanish and shows up in a few places in South America but not, evidently, in Mexico or the Caribbean and I've wondered what part of Spain it came from They also use "cuando" similarly "?Vos recorda's cuando Franco?" "Do you remember back in the days of Franco?" Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From thorinn at diku.dk Sat Mar 13 22:11:39 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 23:11:39 +0100 Subject: STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS In-Reply-To: <004b01be6218$4028b7a0$aed3fed0@patrickcryan> (proto-language@email.msn.com) Message-ID: From: "Patrick C. Ryan" Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 00:12:13 -0600 Thank you for a lucid explanation of probabilities for all of us. I agree with everything you have written with the exception that the situation in historical linguistics is so problematic. But, why do you not explain in detail why you think it is --- not based on a priori asssumptions but on analysis of data? I'll tell you what would be needed for a probabilistic test of language relatedness to be valid. First, you must decide on a protocol to follow which will provide an objective measure of the similarity between two languages. The important thing is that this measurement must not depend on the researcher's knowledge of the languages --- on the contrary, it should be repeatable with consistent results by different people. NOTE: this measure of similarity is your experimental result --- any conclusions about relatedness would only follow after statistical analysis. One possible protocol might be to simply hand out dictionaries to a few undergraduates that never even heard the names of the languages before, and letting them find as many similarities as they can. Your experimental result is the median number of entries in their lists. Another would be to let an expert in each language supply the best word for each node in one of the `semantic networks' that are being promoted, expressing it in IPA. The researchers must work separately, neither knowing the identity of the other language. You could then let a computer program compare the lists, using a fixed algorithm to look for inexact semantic and phonological matches, and giving points for each according to the exactness. Next, you must apply this experimental method to a large number of language pairs where there is already general agreement about their degree of relatedness (by descent and borrowing). Large probably means a few hundred to a thousand. Draw up charts of your experimental score against the known degree of relatedness, and see if something statistically significant emerges. But even if you find a significant correlation, it's quite possible that it is not strong enough to predict anything. For that you need a result like '90% of language pairs related at a depth of less than 500 years scored more than 82 points', which will allow you to assert that a new pair of languages that scores less than 82 points is probably not related at a depth of less than 500 years. For your purposes, a last problem remains. There _is_ no agreement on language relatedness at the time depths of Nostratic, much less Proto- World, so you would have to extrapolate your data. Even if a trend could be identified by proper statistical analysis, extrapolation will lessen the credibility of the final results. Once you have done this work, you can run Igbo and Inuit through your measurement process and see if the number you get tells you anything besides 'not discernably related'. And if it does, you can claim to have statistical evidence of their relationship. This is something like the standard social scientists have to live up to if they do not want their results to be dismissed out of hand. But, to borrow a phrase, you must surely agree that this is not the way historical linguistics are done today, by you or anybody else, and therefore any attempt to use statistics to defend your hypotheses is just so much hot air. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From yoel at mindspring.com Sun Mar 14 13:21:13 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 08:21:13 -0500 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EAAFF0.3730@mail.scu.edu.tw> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 10:35 AM 3/13/99 -0800, you wrote: >Robert Orr wrote: >Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, >borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had >become indistinguishable from sing. forms. But the entire paradigm of the 3rd pl in NE is "they, them (acc.-dat.) and their". So it might be less hyperbolic to say the "the-" stem for the 3rd pl. This kind of pidgin is not unlike Pseudo- (movie) American "ME wanna take white man's scalp" or such. Additionally, French does use the disjunctive emphatic as in "Moi, je prefere parler le pidgin" or such where English would not naturally say: *"Me/ As for me, I prefere to speak pidgin". This may be contributory, take it from one who has NEVER seen the Muppets. YLA (see the end). >> 3) And cf. the Muppets. Miss Piggy would often use "moi" as the first >> person singular pronoun while purportedly speaking English. >And which has since spread to the speech of a great many Americans, many >of whom [e.g. my wife] have at best an extremely limited knowledge of >French. >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 >http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html > ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!*** > ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!*** I finally got to look up obex the word I didn't know. O.K. "O syntagms of human tongues, free yourselves. You can lose nothing except your barriers". Or is the construction (with rare gen. in this function) "O Syntagms, free yourselves of human tongues/ languages. You can lose nothing but your barriers"? From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 14 00:31:23 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 16:31:23 PST Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns Message-ID: DLW: Please try to remain calm, Mr. Gordon. Actually the study I am thinking of showed, as I now recall, a tendency for 1st person pronouns to have nasals. The matter of /m/ or /n/ was not, and to my knowledge has not been, adressed. My "mama" thing is just a guess at what lies behind the facts. I'm sorry if I seemed wrought with hypertension, but I just do not think that this is an idea that should be considered. It is logically flawed from the get-go. There couldn't possibly be any way for this hypothesis to be realistically tested in a scientific way and amounts to nothing more than a fantasy concocted by linguists who are not good at what they do. Can you explain to me how this could be credibly tested? No? I thought not :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Mar 14 13:24:33 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 13:24:33 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > A while back I had threatened Larry, Miguel & Theo with this list > Like the list for Germanic, these are only possibilities > well, some are more possible than others > some arrive via other languages, e.g. Latin > Some will make Larry see red :> Oh, I never see red. ;-) > BUT I'm sure he will again be kind enough to send me corrections > Some will be obvious errors to everyone but me :> > Please excuse my typos Just a few comments on the Basque items. > Possible non-IE etymologies in Ibero-Romance /pre-1600 > abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] > rel. con vasco abarka; ra?z de alpargata [sandal] [c] > pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] Basque denotes a kind of rustic sandal, traditionally a soft leather moccasin held on by a cord passed through holes in the sandal and wrapped around the calf. The word is very probably native, but cannot be monomorphemic, with that plosive in the third syllable. The favorite guess sees it as a formation involving `branch(es)' and a noun-forming suffix <-ka>. This is semantically awkward, and seems to require that ancestral abarkas were made of foliage -- not very comfortable, I would have thought. Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from Romance or from Basque. > agavanzo "wild rose' [PL] > c. 1100 gab?nso < pre-rom; [c] > rel. con vasco gaparra, kaparra "zarza, chaparro" & gavarra, [c] > aragon?s garrabera, [c] > gasc?n gabarro & gabardero [c] > rel. to alcaparra [caper]? [rmcc] The Basque word is actually ~ , with the form in /k-/ predominating, though , at least, is also recorded. There is yet another form, , which has a very sparsely recorded variant . There are also some other somewhat similar forms with vaguely similar meanings, but these are thought to represent one or more distinct words. The word has been much discussed. Lots of people would like to see it as native Basque, but there are problems. First, fluctuation in the voicing of an initial plosive is usually a reliable guide to borrowed status. Unfortunately, there is one exception, and it's relevant here: in Basque, a word-initial voiced plosive sporadically assimilates in voicing to a voiceless plosive in the second syllable -- so might derive from by just such voicing assimilation. But then itself is very odd: there are very few native and monomorphemic Basque lexical items of the form CVC- in which both consonants are plosives, and, in those that exist, both plosives are normally voiced. There are just three apparent exceptions in the clearly native vocabulary: `full', `always' and , originally `small' but today `few, little'. The third has a simple explanation: it's probably bimorphemic. The other two are puzzles which we've debated for years. Accordingly, an original Basque * is suspect on phonological grounds. And that still leaves the problem of ~ , for which the only available explanation is somewhat tortuous. > alud "mudslide" 1880 pre-rom; [c] > rel. con vasco luta, lurte "desmoronamiento de tierras", [c] > v. lur "tierra", elur "nieve" [c] Basque ~ ~ `landslide, mudslide' is real enough, and is obviously a derivative of `earth'. This has the regular combining form in old formations, so the variants in are probably recent re-formations. It's not clear to me how the Basque word would give rise to Romance . As for Basque `snow', this is hardly likely to be related to : there are major problems with the phonology, with the morphology, and with the semantics. > ar?ndano "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ??, [c] > compara con vasco ar?n "endrino" [c] > pre-rom. ra?z de ar?n [c] Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . > ardite "small coin" 1400 "moneda de poco valor" [c] > gasc?n ardit < ?? [c] > rel. to Basque [wje] Basque is indisputably borrowed from a medieval Romance word, in a perfectly regular way. There is no evidence that the Basques used coins before they encountered these in use among the Iberians and the Romans, and every single Basque word pertaining to money is either borrowed from Latin or Romance or calqued upon these languages. > artesa "type of box" 1330 "caj?n cuadrilongo de madera que es m?s angosto > hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] > v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] Basque has various senses, most of them denoting various kinds of cracks or fissures on human or animal bodies. The word is suspected of being a derivative of the common word `interval, gap', but, if so, the second element is obscure. The Basque word does not denote any kind of container. > arto "cambronera" < Basque arte "scrub oak." [rl] Actually, `holm oak', `holly oak', `evergreen oak'. > ascua "live coal" 1251 "brasa viva" < ??, [c] > v. vasco ausko-a < huats "ceniza" < pre-rom [c] > Pre-Roman [wje] Basque means `bellows', and it is very likely derived from (thus) `dust, powder, ash'. I don't have Corominas handy, but this etymology looks a trifle hopeful. > avi?n "airplane" c. 1330 "vencejo" < ?gavi?n c. 1250? < ?? [c] > rel to Latin apis? [rmcc] No Basque here, but I'm certainly startled to see a word for `airplane' figuring in a discussion of supposedly pre-Roman words. > azcona "dart" 1200-50 Iberia, occ. & vasco < ??, [c] > v. vasco azkon, antes aucona s. XII [c] The word is puzzling and much discussed. The fact that the word is reported as in the 12th century (by Picaud, a French pilgrim) is even more baffling. Picaud's other transcriptions are mostly pretty accurate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From Bomhard at aol.com Sun Mar 14 16:10:17 1999 From: Bomhard at aol.com (Bomhard at aol.com) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:10:17 EST Subject: Indo-European Phonology Message-ID: Since there has been some discussion on this list regarding the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop System and of the glottalic reinterpretation of Indo-European consonantism, it might be helpful to review the history of the reconstruction of that system and the reasons why the glottalic reinterpretation was proposed in the first place. 1. August Schleicher Although the comparative-historical study of the Indo-European languages did not begin with August Schleicher, he was the first to attempt, in the first volume (1861 [4th edition 1876]) of his (in English translation) "Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages," to reconstruct the phonological system of the Indo-European parent language. Earlier scholars -- especially Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm -- had worked out the fundamental sound correspondences between the various daughter languages, and the need to reconstruct the phonological system of the parent language had been recognized as early as 1837 by Theodor Benfey, but no one prior to Schleicher had actually undertaken the task. 2. The Neogrammarian Period Schleicher's reconstruction remained the accepted standard until the late 1870's, when a series of brilliant discoveries were made in rapid succession: 1. First, there was the discovery of "The Law of Palatals" (Das Palatalgesetz), which established the antiquity of the vowel systems found in Greek and Latin and recognized, for the first time, that the Sanskrit vowel system was an innovation. 2. The next major discovery was that Proto-Indo-European had syllabic nasals and liquids. 3. Following these discoveries, the system of vowel gradation (Ablaut) became clear, and the original patterning was worked out in precise detail. 4. Finally, Verner's Law explained several annoying exceptions to the expected developments of the earlier voiceless stops in Proto-Germanic. First, the voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives in Proto-Germanic. Then, at a later date, these voiceless fricatives became voiced fricatives except (A) initially and (B), in some cases, medially between vowels. The problem was that both voiceless and voiced fricatives appeared medially between vowels, and the choice between voiceless fricatives, on the one hand, and voiced fricatives, on the other hand, appeared to be entirely random. What Verner figured out was that the patterning was tied to the original position of the accent -- the voiceless fricatives appeared medially between vowels when the accent had originally fallen on the contiguous preceding syllable. If the accent had originally fallen on any other syllable, however, voiced fricatives appeared. By the end of the nineteenth century, the phonological system reconstructed by the Neogrammarians was widely accepted as being a fairly accurate representation of what had existed in Proto-Indo-European. To this day, the Neogrammarian system, or slightly modified versions thereof, commands a great deal of respect and has many defenders. The Neogrammarian reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European phonological system, which was arrived at through strict adherence to the principle that sound laws admit no exceptions, was notable for its large inventory of stops and its extremely small inventory of fricatives. The stop system consists of a four-way contrast of (A) plain voiceless stops, (B) voiceless aspirated stops, (C) plain voiced stops, (D) voiced aspirated stops. This system is extremely close to the phonological system of Old Indic. Actually, there were two competing versions of the Proto-Indo-European phonological system at this time: (A) the German system (as exemplified in the works of Karl Brugmann, for example), which was phonetically based, and (B) the French system (as exemplified, in particular, in the works of Antoine Meillet), which was phonologically based. It must be pointed out that, in spite of its wide acceptance, a small group of scholars has, from time to time, questioned the validity of the Neogrammarian reconstruction, at least in part. Brugmann, in particular, reconstructed five short vowels and five long vowels plus a reduced vowel, the so-called "schwa indogermanicum", which was written with an upside down e and which alternated with so-called "original" long vowels. A full set of diphthongs was posited as well. Finally, the system contained the semivowels *y and *w, a series of plain and aspirated spirants, several nasals, and the liquids *l and *r. The nasals and liquids were unique in their ability to function as syllabics or nonsyllabics, depending upon their environment. They were nonsyllabic (A) when between vowels or initially before vowels, (B) when preceded by a vowel and followed by a consonant, and (C) when preceded by a consonant and followed by a vowel. The syllabic forms arose in early Indo-European when the stress-conditioned loss of former contiguous vowels left them between two nonsyllabics. It should be noted here that the Proto-Indo-European vowels were subject to various alternations that were partially correlated with the positioning of the accent within a word. These vowel alternations served to indicate different types of grammatical formations. The most common alternation was the interchange between the vowels *e and *o in a given syllable. There was also an alternation among lengthened-grade vowels, normal-grade vowels, and reduced-grade and/or zero-grade vowels. Meillet's reconstruction differs from that of Brugmann in several important respects. First, Meillet reconstructs only two tectal (guttural) series, namely, palatals and labiovelars -- he does not recognize a separate pure velar series. Brugmann posited a separate series of voiceless aspirates for Proto-Indo- European on the basis of an extremely small, and somewhat controversial, set of correspondences from Indo-Iranian, Armenian, and Greek. In the other daughter languages, the voiceless aspirates and plain voiceless stops have the same treatment, except that *kh appears to have became x in a small number of examples in Slavic -- however, these examples are better explained as borrowings from Iranian rather than as due to regular developments in Slavic. As early as 1891, in a paper read before the Societe de Linguistique de Paris, the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure suggested that the voiceless aspirates might have had a secondary origin, arising from earlier clusters of plain voiceless stop plus a following "coefficient sonantique". This idea was taken up by Meillet, who pointed out the great rarity of the voiceless aspirates, noting in particular that the dental voiceless aspirate *th often appears to be the result of aspiration of a plain voiceless dental by a following *H: *t + *H > *th, at least in Sanskrit. Current thinking on the part of a great many linguists is that the series of voiceless aspirates reconstructed by Brugmann and other Neogrammarians for the Indo-European parent language should be removed, being secondarily derived in the individual daughter languages. The main opponent of this view has been Oswald Szemer?nyi, who has argued for the reinstatement of the voiceless aspirates and, consequently, for a return to the four-stop system (plain voiceless, voiceless aspirated, plain voiced, voiced aspirated) of the Neogrammarians. Particularly noteworthy is Meillet's treatment of the resonants. Here, he considers *i and *u to be the syllabic allophones of *y and *w respectively and classes them with the resonants, thus: *i/*y, *u/*w, *m/*m, *n/*n, *r/*r, *l/*l (the first member is syllabic, the second non-syllabic), that is to say that he does not consider *i and *u to be independent phonemic entities. The diphthongs are analyzed by Meillet as clusters of (A) vowel plus nonsyllabic resonant and (B) nonsyllabic resonant plus vowel. 3. The Twentieth Century to 1970 In 1878, the young Ferdinand de Saussure attempted to show that so-called "original" long vowels were to be derived from earlier sequences of short vowel plus a following "coefficient sonantique". In 1927, Jerzy Kurylowicz demonstrated that reflexes of de Saussure's "coefficients sonantiques" were preserved in Hittite. On this basis, a series of consonantal phonemes, commonly called "laryngeals", was then posited for Proto-Indo-European. Jerzy Kurylowicz, in particular, set up four laryngeals. The overwhelming majority of scholars currently accept some form of this theory, though there is still no general agreement on the number of laryngeals to be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European or on their probable phonetic values. With the reduction of the gutturals to two series, the removal of the traditional voiceless aspirates, the reanalysis of the diphthongs as clusters of vowel plus nonsyllabic resonant and nonsyllabic resonant plus vowel, and the addition of laryngeals, we arrive at the system of Winfred P. Lehmann, which consists of the contrast (A) plain voiceless stops, (B) plain voiced stops, and (C) voiced aspirates. Now, the removal of the traditional voiceless aspirates creates a problem from a typological point of view. Data collected from the study of a great number of the world's languages have failed to turn up any systems in which voiced aspirates are added to the pair plain voiceless stop / plain voiced stop unless there are also corresponding voiceless aspirated stops in the system. This is an important point, affecting the entire structure of the traditional reconstruction. In order to rectify this imbalance, several scholars have sought typological parallels with systems such as those found, for example, in Javanese. In these rare systems, there is a three-way contrast, sometimes described as (A) plain (unaspirated) voiceless, (B) voiced, (C) "voiced aspirated": /T/, /D/, /Dh/. However, this interpretation is based upon a lack of understanding of the phonetics involved. Series (C) in such systems is, in reality, voiceless with breathy release and not "voiced aspirated". As we have seen from the preceding discussion, Lehmann's reconstruction is problematical from a typological point of view. However, from a structural point of view, it presents an accurate analysis of Proto-Indo-European phonological patterning. Several scholars have proposed various solutions in an attempt to eliminate the problems caused by the removal of the traditional voiceless aspirates. For example, in 1964, Kurylowicz tried to show that the voiced aspirates were not phonemically voiced. However, this interpretation seems unlikely in view of the fact that the daughter languages are nearly unanimous in pointing to some sort of voicing in this series in the Indo-European parent language. The main exceptions are Tocharian and possibly Hittite (at least according to some scholars). In each case, however, it is known that the voicing contrast was eliminated and that the reflexes found in these daughter languages do not represent the original state. The Greek and Italic developments are a little more complicated: in these daughter languages, the traditional voiced aspirates were devoiced, thus becoming voiceless aspirates. Then, in Italic, the resulting voiceless aspirates became voiceless fricatives. According to Eduard Prokosch (in 1938), on the other hand, the voiced aspirates of traditional grammar were really voiceless fricatives. This interpretation seems unlikely for two reasons: (A) as noted above, the daughter languages point to voicing in this series in Proto-Indo-European, and (B) the daughter languages point to stops as the original mode of articulation and not fricatives. This latter objection may also be raised against the theory -- advocated by Alois Walde (in 1897) and Johann Knobloch (in 1965) -- that the voiced aspirates may have been voiced fricatives. Next, there is the theory put forth by Louis Hammerich (in 1967) that the voiced aspirates may have been emphatics. Hammerich does not define what he means by the term "emphatics" but implies that they are to be equated with the emphatics of Semitic grammar. Now, in Arabic, the emphatics have been described as either uvularized or pharyngealized. Such sounds are always accompanied by backing of adjacent vowels. In Proto-Indo-European, all vowels were found in the neighborhood of the voiced aspirates, and there is no indication that any of these sounds had different allophones here than when contiguous with other sounds. Had the voiced aspirates been emphatics such as those found in Arabic, they would have caused backing of contiguous vowels, and this would be reflected in the daughter languages in some manner. However, this is not the case. If, on the other hand, the emphatics had been ejectives such as those found in the Modern South Arabian languages, the Semitic languages of Ethiopia, and several Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects (such as, for instance, Urmian Nestorian Neo-Aramaic and Kurdistani Jewish Neo- Aramaic), the question arises as to how these sounds could have developed into the voiced aspirates needed to explain the developments in Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, and Armenian. Oswald Szemer?nyi was one of the first (in 1967) to bring typological data to bear on the problem of reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European phonological system. Taking note of Roman Jakobson's famous remark that "...no language adds to the pair /t/ ~ /d/ a voiced aspirate /dh/ without having its voiceless counterpart /th/," Szemer?nyi reasoned that since Proto-Indo-European had voiced aspirates, it must also have had voiceless aspirates. Though on the surface this reasoning appears sound, it puts too much emphasis on the typological data and too little on the data from the Indo-European daughter languages. As mentioned above, there are very cogent reasons for removing the traditional voiceless aspirates from Proto-Indo-European, and these reasons are not easily dismissed. Szemer?nyi also tried to show that Proto-Indo- European had only one laryngeal, namely, the voiceless glottal fricative /h/. Szemer?nyi does not include diphthongs in his reconstruction since their "phonemic status is disputed". Szemer?nyi's reconstruction is in fact typologically natural, and he defended it strongly right up to his dying day (1996). His system -- as well as that of the Neogrammarians, it may be added -- is merely a projection backward in time of the Old Indic phonological system. In certain dialects of "Disintegrating Indo-European" (specifically, in the early development of Pre- Indo-Iranian, Pre-Greek, and Pre-Italic), such a system no doubt existed in point of fact. Next, there are the proposals put forth by Joseph Emonds (in 1972). According to Emonds, the plain voiced stops of traditional Proto-Indo-European are to be reinterpreted as plain lax voiceless stops, while the traditional plain voiceless stops are taken to have been tense and aspirated. Emonds regards the voicing of the lax stops as common to a Central innovating area and the appearance of voiceless stops in Germanic, Armenian, and Hittite as relics. Similar proposals were put forth by Toby D. Griffen (in 1988). According to Griffen, Proto-Indo-European had a three-member stop system, which he represents as (using the dentals for illustration) *[d], *[t], *[th] (media, tenuis, aspirata). While this system was maintained in Germanic with only minor changes, a series of sound-shifts in the other Indo-European daughter languages completely restructured the inherited system. Thus, Germanic emerges as the most conservative daughter language in its treatment of the Indo-European stop system. There are other problems with the traditional reconstruction besides the typological difficulties caused by the removal of the voiceless aspirates. Another problem, noted in most of the standard handbooks, is the statistically low frequency of occurrence -- perhaps total absence -- of the traditional voiced labial stop *b. The marginal status of *b is difficult to understand from a typological viewpoint and is totally unexplainable within the traditional framework. This problem was investigated by the Danish scholar Holger Pedersen (in 1951). Pedersen noted that, in natural languages having a voicing contrast in stops, if there is a missing member in the labial series, it is /p/ that is missing and not /b/. This observation led Pedersen to suggest that the traditional plain voiced stops might originally have been plain voiceless stops, while the traditional plain voiceless stops might have been plain voiced stops. Later shifts would have changed the earlier plain voiced stops into the traditional plain voiceless stops and the earlier plain voiceless stops into the traditional plain voiced stops. In a footnote in his 1953 BSL article entitled "Remarques sur le consonantisme semitique", Andre Martinet objected to this "musical chairs" rearrangement. "Since there are extremely few examples of the Common Indo-European phoneme reconstructed 'analogically' as *b, it is tempting to diagnose a gap there as well, as did the late Holger Pedersen... But, instead of assuming, as did Pedersen, the loss of a Pre-Indo-European *p followed by a musical-chairs [rearrangement] of mediae and tenues, one should be able to see in the series *d, *g, *gw the result of evolution from an earlier series of glottalics, without labial representative." This appears to be the first time that anyone had proposed reinterpreting the plain voiced stops of traditional Proto-Indo-European as glottalics. Martinet's observation, however, seems to have influenced neither Gamkrelidze and Ivanov nor Hopper, each of whom arrived at the same conclusion independently of Martinet as well as independently of each other. In the preceding discussion, only the more well-known counterproposals were mentioned, and only the briefest of explanations were given. More details could easily have been given. Insights gained from typological studies, for example, could have been used to strengthen the arguments: no phoneme stands alone; it is, rather, an integral part of the total system. Each and every phoneme is tied to the other phonemes in the system by discrete interrelationships -- to disturb one phoneme is to disturb (at least potentially) the entire system. This is basically the message that Jakobson and Martinet were trying to bring home. All too often, this message is ignored. Moreover, the interrelationships are not only synchronic, they are diachronic as well. 4. The Glottalic Theory Discovery -- perhaps "rediscovery" would be a better term since Martinet's insightful remarks first appeared in 1953 -- of what has come to be known as the "Glottalic Theory" came from two separate sources, each working independently. On the one-hand, the British-born American Germanist Paul J. Hopper hit upon the notion that Proto-Indo-European may have had a series of glottalized stops while he was a student at the University of Texas and taking a course in Kabardian from Aert Kuipers. Hopper went on about other business after graduation, waiting five years before putting his ideas into writing. On the other hand, the Georgian Indo-Europeanist Thomas V. Gamkrelidze, a native speaker of a language containing glottalics (Georgian), had been investigating the typological similarities between Proto-Kartvelian and Proto- Indo-European. It did not take Gamkrelidze long to realize the possibility that Proto-Indo-European might also have had glottalized stops. Gamkrelidze, in a joint article with the now-immigrated Russian Indo-Europeanist Vjacheslav V. Ivanov, was the first to make it into print (in 1972). Hopper might have beat them into print had his paper on the subject not been rejected by the journal Language. He was then obliged to search for another journal willing to publish his views, which finally happened in 1973. Then, in 1973, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov published a German language version of their 1972 paper. In his 1973 paper, Hopper proposed reinterpreting the plain voiced stops of traditional Proto-Indo-European (*b, *d, *g, *gw) as glottalized stops (ejectives), that is, (*p'), *t', *k', *k'w respectively, because the traditional plain voiced stops "show many of the typological characteristics of glottalized stops (ejectives), e.g. they are excluded from inflectional affixes, they may not cooccur with another in the same root, etc." Hopper also reinterpreted the traditional voiced aspirates as murmured stops. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov also reinterpret the traditional plain voiced stops as ejectives, but, unlike Hopper, they reinterpret the traditional plain voiceless stops as voiceless aspirates. They make no changes to the traditional voiced aspirates. They point out, however, that the feature of aspiration is phonemically irrelevant in a system of this type. In an article published in 1981, Gamkrelidze claims that such a system exists in several modern Eastern Armenian dialects (however, this is challenged by the Armenian scholar Gevork B. Jahukyan in a 1990 rebuttal). Many of the points discussed above by Gamkrelidze were also noted by Hopper, in particular the root structure constraint laws. Hopper also discusses possible trajectories of the new system in various Indo-European daughter languages. The system of Gamkrelidze, Hopper, and Ivanov has several clear advantages over the traditional reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop system: 1. Their reinterpretation of the traditional plain voiced stops as glottalics (ejectives) makes it easy to account for the fact that the phoneme traditionally reconstructed as *b was highly marked in the system, being characterized by an extremely low frequency of occurrence (if it even existed at all). Such a low frequency distribution is not characteristic of the patterning of the voiced labial stop /b/ in natural languages having a voicing contrast in stops, but it is fully characteristic of the patterning of the labial ejective /p'/. 2. Not only does the reinterpretation of the traditional voiced stops as ejectives easily account for the frequency distribution of these sounds, it also explains the fact that they were used only very infrequently in inflectional affixes and pronouns, since this type of patterning is characteristic of the way ejectives behave in natural languages having such sounds. 3. For the first time, the root structure constraint laws can be credibly explained. These constraints turn out to be a simple voicing agreement rule with the corollary that two glottalics cannot cooccur in a root. Hopper cites Hausa, Yucatec Mayan, and Quechua as examples of natural languages exhibiting a similar constraint against the cooccurrence of two glottalics. Akkadian may be added to this list as well if we take Geers' Law to be a manifestation of such a constraint. 4. The so-called Germanic and Armenian "consonant shifts" (in German, "Lautverschiebungen"), which can only be accounted for very awkwardly within the traditional framework, turn out to be mirages. Under the revised reconstruction, these branches (along with the poorly-attested Phrygian as well) turn out to be relic areas. In 1984, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov published their monumental joint monograph (an English translation of this work has since been published by Mouton de Gruyter [in 1995]). As is to be expected, this massive work (2 volumes, 1,328 pages) contains the most detailed discussion of the Glottalic Theory that has yet appeared. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's book also contains trajectories of the revised Proto-Indo-European phonological system in the various Indo-European daughter languages, original proposals concerning the morphological structure of the Indo-European parent language, an exhaustive treatment of the Proto- Indo-European lexicon, and a new theory about the homeland of the Indo- Europeans (they argue that the Indo-European homeland was located in eastern Anatolia in the vicinity of Lake Van). One of the most novel proposals put forth in the book is that Proto-Indo-European may have had labialized dentals and a labialized sibilant. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov also posit postvelars for Proto-Indo-European. The Glottalic Theory has attracted a good deal of attention over the past two decades and has gained widespread -- though not universal -- acceptance. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sun Mar 14 13:36:01 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 07:36:01 -0600 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u Message-ID: The following is not taken as a refutation, but a complication: The term METEORITE is a 19th century coinage, according to the OED. An astronomer at the Chicago Planetarium told me some twenty years ago, if memory serves, that the ancients did not know the source of meteorites. Are we being anachronistic? Is another principle involved. Cf. STAR SAPPHIRE: Reichelt adduced that in support of his thesis of "der steinerne Hiimmel". jpm ................................... Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: [ moderator snip ] > Meteoric iron is indeed the earliest source for the metal, as > seen for instance in Sumerian AN.BAR "[lit. sky silver] iron". > > That's what makes a Celtic *i:sar-no- derived from "Vasconic" > *isar "star" semantically plausible. Unfortunately, there is > zero evidence from Basque itself for the use of in a > metallurgical context. Basque for "iron" is (maybe > originally "ore", if compounds like burdin-gorri [=red] "copper" > and burdin-(h)ori [=yellow] "brass" are not recent coinages). [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 14 17:31:34 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:31:34 -0600 Subject: Non-IE roots in Germanic/@, a, e, i, j, o, u In-Reply-To: <3715c794.267388840@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: As Yoel Arbeitman points out, --and others have pointed out before-- the initial /s-/ in Greek is unexpected Is there any possible explanation other than as a loanword? [btw: we had the beginnings of an interesting discussion about s- initial words in Greek a while back, that I wish would continue] Could Latin sidus be a back-formation based on a loanword? Or is this reaching too far? [snip] >>Also, Greek `side:ros' = "iron", Latin `sidus' (gen `sideris') = "star". >The Latin word is an s-stem *sidos-/*sides-, so there is no >connection with Greek sida:ros (Attic side:ros), unless one >assumes the word was borrowed directly from Latin. >It might be more interesting to compare the Grk. word with Basque >zilar ~ zirar ~ zidar ~ zildar "silver" (< *sidar ?). [snip] If I remember, you had proposed a possible Semitic source for this Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Mar 14 14:35:07 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 16:35:07 +0200 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <36E9A40B.A4198426@stud.uni-frankfurt.de> Message-ID: On Sat, 13 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/11/99 3:34:25 PM, you wrote: ><<[ Moderator's response: >> Greek _nuks, nuktos_, Latin _nox, noctis_, Sanskrit _nak >> (IIRC), naktam_, Hittite _nekuz = nek{^w}t+s_, ... >> --rma ]>> >Does it matter that /t/ does not appear in most of the nom. >singulars? I also saw nocz in Polish, nos in Welsh, but was not >given declension. It seems the /t/ only makes its appearance in >the nom sing in German, French and Sanskrit. Please forgive my >ignorance, but sometimes in analysis on this list, this base >morphology makes a difference. Why is the /t/ not regarded as >just a fairly common stem that sometimes emerges in root and >sometimes doesn't? I hope this doesn't sound terribly stupid. >[ Moderator's response: > In those languages in which it does not appear, other processes > are at work, usually word structure constraints. > --rma ] What has been pointed out here is another pitfall of using dictionaries to do comparative linguistics without knowing anything about the languages that are being compared. Dictionaries traditionally give the nominative singular as the lexical entry. In many instances the nominative singular is the linguistically least-marked form. Many times features of the root that are important for comparative work are suppressed in the nominative singular because of the phonotactics of the language, but will still be found in the stem (the form to which other case endings are added). Thus using a dictionary without being aware of the phonotactical rules of the language is a recipe for disaster when doing comparative work. Not only can you get false positives by comparing two similar looking forms that may have resulted from the suppression of entirely different elements from the stem, but you can also get false negatives from words where one language has suppressed or mutated a stem element and another hasn't (e.g., Lat. - Ger. ). Similarly, if you don't know that the stem of Fin. vesi (the dictionary entry) 'water' is vete- you are likely to miss the connection with IE *wat-/*w at t-. So doing comparative work by looking words up in a dictionary is just a matter of collecting "lookalikes" that have similar meanings. Some may be valid comparisons and some not; but if they are, it is more a matter of luck rather than skill since most dictionaries simply don't tell you everything that you need to know to do comparative linguistics beyond this simplistic level. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 14 17:54:19 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:54:19 -0600 Subject: Greek question (night?) In-Reply-To: <36E9A40B.A4198426@stud.uni-frankfurt.de> Message-ID: >> In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" >>besides Germanic or Modern French?Wayles Browne wrote: >> Also Slavic: Russian noch', Old Church Slavonic nosht' etc. go back to >>Common >> Slavic *nokt-. >but see also Polish _noc_ It goes back to Common Slavic [see above] >notice Rumanian _noapte_ and Catalan _nit_ both are from Latin nocte- intervocalic velars get labialized in Rumanian, someone else can explain the exact details and conditions the Catalan form palatalized the /k/ to /y/; which is normal in /kt/ clusters inherited by Ibero-Romance from Latin, someone else can elaborate on the transformation of the vowel >-- >Oli Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu From neander97 at yahoo.com Sun Mar 14 18:16:51 1999 From: neander97 at yahoo.com (Hal Neumann) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 10:16:51 -0800 Subject: Chariots Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: [ moderator snip ] Horses were always strong enough to carry a person on their back_for a while_. Zebras, wild horses, and ponies no larger than the neolithic/Bronze Age chariot pony could all do this. The question actually relates to how long they could be ridden and how much gear the rider could carry. ------------------------------------- Both the Tarpan (Equus ferus ferus Boddaert) and Przewalskis horse Equus ferus przewalski Poliakof) fall within the size range of "modern" ponies such as the Celtic, Devonshire, Exmoor, Iceland, and Shetland--all of which can carry a rider and saddle for some time and some distance. [A pony is commonly defined as a horse which stands less than 14 hands at the withers/shoulder--a hand equals 10.16 cm.] For those who doubt the endurance of ponies carrying a rider and gear, consider the North American mustang, which average 14 hands(140.2 cm.) at the withers, with a range from 13 to 14.2 (132.08 to 144.27 cm). Mustangs proved quite capable of bearing Native American warriors, impedimenta and all, over long distances. These ponies likewise served to bear "cowboys," complete with Texas-style saddles and personal gear, for long periods of time. Some say that the horse when first domesticated would not have had the muscular and skeletal strength to bear a rider on their backs. Even if this were the case, evidence exists (as late as the third millennium) of horsemen riding seated over the hind quarters of their mounts the so-called "donkey seat" (Moorey 1970). The horse remains uncovered at Dereivka on the Dnieper (a late Neolithic site) fall within the range of 132-144 cm. Telegin 1986, Levine 1990, Anthony 1991, Anthony and Brown 1991) These ponies fall well within the parameter of what could be considered a "riding pony." It is my understanding that Anthony (1991) and Anthony and Brown (1991) believe that horses were "kept" (if not "domesticated") at Dereivka for hundreds of years. As a child, my family raised horse on the high plains of eastern Montana (both gentled and free-ranging stock), I fail to see how it would be possible to raise horses without being mounted. Unlike livestock such as cattle and goats, it would be impossible, I believe, to herd horses on foot. It just seems a given that if you raise horses in any number beyond the occasional pet/oddity, then you must ride horses. --Hal W Neumann From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Mar 14 18:34:54 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 18:34:54 -0000 Subject: k and q Message-ID: Joel draws phonetic conclusions from the representation of Hittite /k/ in Biblical Hebrew as or . Modern Hebrew routinely represents English /k/ as even though it is phonetically closer to Hebrew /k/. The reason is morphophonemic, not phonetic. The written is subject to fricativisation in certain conditions, whereas the written is not. Writing the loan sound as prevents inappropriate fricativisation. This indicates that the logic behind Joel's argument may not necessarily follow. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 14 20:52:53 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 14:52:53 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Yoel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Yoel L. Arbeitman Date: Saturday, March 13, 1999 11:16 PM > The question of what was the form of Hittite and Anatolian "drink" has >progressed greatly since Sturtevant's time. In 1980 Morpurgo-Davies showed >that the cognate in Hieroglyphic Luwian was /u:/ and since *gw disappears >in HL, but *kw does not, the problem is solved. Proto-Anatolian had the >verb *e/agw-, known so well in that famed sentence deciphered by Hrozny' nu >NINDA adanzi nu watar akwanzi "And they eat bread and they drink water" . >It was long thought that here was the cognate, as a verb, of Latin aqua >"water". But now it is certain that the iterative-durative form cited >represents /akw=skizzi/ with regressive voice assimilation. You seem to be saying, if I understand you correctly, that ak-k{.}u-uS-ki-iz-zi [akuSkitsi] is derived from /akw+sk+izzi/, representing [aguSkitsi]. Do you have other examples of devoicing a stop before /sk/ in Hittite since, of course, it is, to my knowledge, unknown in IE? >And, long >before the 1980 discovery W. Winter proposed the cognation of Latin ebrius >"drunk"/ sobrius "sober" (with -b- < *-gwh-) as well as Greek ne:phalos >"sober" with -ph- < only *-gwh-. Thus, far from being cognate with Latin >aqua, Anatolian *a/egw- is cognate with Latin ebrius "drunk", Gk. ne:phalos >"sober" and the long ago proposed Tocharian yok- "to drink". All argument >has been closed by the Hiero. Luw. verb which is reduced to a mere /u:/ and >is not open to argument. Thomas reconstructs IE *eg{w}- for Tocharian yok-; while IE g{w} normally corresponds to Latin [v] and Greek [b/d/g], even IE g{w}h does not yield the required Latin [b] either though it *might* yield Greek [ph]. We are being asked to accept an IE root, *eg{w}h-, which appears *without* the expected Latin reflex [v] for IE *g{w}h, and with a *-ri formant; and to equate that with Greek *ne + *eg{w}h with a *-l(o) formant. While this may be correct, I do not think that the data is so conclusive as to foreclose argument. Also, are you asserting that IE g{w}h like g{w} appears as HL /u:/? Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 14 21:06:44 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 15:06:44 -0600 Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: Sunday, March 14, 1999 3:22 AM >>msn.com writes: >>I do not want to actively enter this discussion but, for whatever it may be >>worth, I believe the Germanic sound system was developed in the IE homeland, >>in close proximity to Semitic, as the correspondences I have developed >>between Germanic and Semitic seem to suggest --- after other IE branches had >>struck for the west. >> >-- gee, that sure makes them acrobatic travellers -- bouncing all around the >map, getting from somewhere in the Middle East to Jutland, crossing all sorts >of other linguistic territory on the way... Yes, acrobats just like the Huns. Pat From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 15 04:36:16 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 22:36:16 -0600 Subject: Ix-nay on the ostratic-nay Message-ID: Dear Glen and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Glen Gordon Date: Sunday, March 14, 1999 7:16 PM >DLW: > See coming response to Glenny. Both /m/ and /n/ tend to occur in > words for female care-givers, with /n/ typically referring to more > secondary ones, as in "nanny". >So what. You haven't demonstrated a link between relationship-words and >pronouns nor proof that your "mama" theory is attributable to pronouns. >DLW: > 1st pronouns do show a statistically significant tendency to use > nasals, [...] If a mother is going to imagine that her baby, who is > in fact only babbling, is talking to her, then "mama" and "me" are > the words she will want to hear the baby say. >Which can be caused by anything, including mass linguistic >relationships. That languages can be related is ubiquitously >demonstrated throughout linguistics. The "mama syndrome" in relation to >pronouns is not in the least. I am terminating the discussion. >Again, you're being Eurocentric. Imagine an Abkhaz mother whose word for >"me" is , if the baby is practicing the /m/ sound, she will never >hear "me" at all in her baby's babbling nor will the baby grow up saying > instead, unless the baby is wrought with dysphasia. Glen, you are really in trouble now because both Mark Hubey and I agree with you (`:--|) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/comment-Baby-Talk.htm Pat From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Mar 15 06:57:09 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 23:57:09 -0700 Subject: lenis and glottalic Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Glen Gordon wrote: > On the subject of lenis/fortis, Miguel seems to be suggesting that lenis > stops (or "long stops") tend to voice more often than fortis stops. So > might I ask, is this true? In the Numic languages of Uto-Aztecan, this is a cold, hard fact: Short voiceless plosives are voiced and become [+cont] between vowels absolutely and in casual speech in initial position as well (but not [+cont]). Long voiceless plosives are not even shortened in intervocalic position, but remain voiceless and [-cont]. John McLaughlin Utah State University From philps at univ-tlse2.fr Mon Mar 15 07:03:20 1999 From: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 08:03:20 +0100 Subject: PIE Plosive System Message-ID: Part of original message : > There are three facts that any posited system must explain: > 1) The absence of roots of the form /DeD/. > 2) The absence of roots of the forms /TeDH/ and /DHeT/. > 3) The absence of/b/. Based on Benveniste (Origines...1935:170), surely posited systems must be able to explain the absence of *any* /CeC/ root where C is identical? In the canonical root form, B. states that "C can be any consonant provided that C- is *different* from -C" (translation and emphasis mine). Benveniste goes on to say that the only combination not found in PIE is /voiceless + (e) + voiced aspirated/, but he does not explain why. One hypothesis might be that this is because other than just phonological constraints are at work here. Dennis. From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 15 09:12:44 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:12:44 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <40c19da0.36eb6f5c@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Yet the premise is that PIE somehow crossed the continent in this plodding >manner over thousands of years, not due to migration or trade, but following a >technology that created not mobility (as with the Polynesians) but sedentary >local populations. >JS has written on this list of a kind of gradient of dialects spreading from a >core. Renfrew mentions that the Polynesian migration can (to some degree) be >traced linguistically. Where is the gradient of language variation across >Europe from the core? A lot has happened in Europe since the Neolithic. Whether IE began to spread across Europe from the Balkans in the mid sixth millennium, as I claim, or from the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the early fourth millennium, as claimed by the Kurgan theory, any initial dialect gradients that came into being have been destroyed by later language spreads. Celtic has been largely swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern Europe with new dialect gradients. Etcetera. >Mallory in In Search of the Indo-Europeans writes (for another reason) that >generally, "before the emergence of major state languages we encounter most >linguistic entities in the world occupying areas that range from the extremely >small up to 1,000,000 sq kilometres." That rather high top number is an area >about 380 miles on each side. The figures on North America in 1492 Mallory >gives has each language of the estimated 350 with 64000sq km - about 150 miles >on a side. At that rate Europe would have about150 different languages. That's a pretty meaningless number. Where does one draw the line between language and dialect, especially when dialect gradients are involved? What are the geographical conditions? What are the social and technological conditions? What is the recent history? All we can say with confidence is that the number of languages has been going down on average since the Paleolithic. >The idea that PIE could have avoided this splintering outcome, without an >extraordinary standardizing agent (like Mallory's "state languages" or strong >central markets), just simply goes against anything we know about the >neolithic period in Europe. In fact it even goes against all we know about >the behavior of pre-standardized languages themselves. Nobody is denying that PIE *has* splintered. The extent of the splintering is somewhat obscured by the fact that many of the splinters have not survived at all and are not known to us, or only very marginally. There is a large number of real or hypothesized IE languages that have been swallowed up by later migrations and language replacements: "Nordwestblock", "Alteuropa"isch", Lusitanian, Siculan, Elymaean, Messapian, Illyrian, Venetic, Daco-Thracian, Phrygian, Cimmerian, "D-Baltic", etc. And there's no reason to think that this process of language spread, followed by differentiation (dialect gradients), followed by yet another spread of one or more of the dialects, obscuring the gradient, etc. hasn't been going on since the very beginning of the Indo-European expansion. In fact, it *is* the IE expansion. At any given time, IE languages have expanded mainly at the expense of other IE languages and dialects. Only at the edges of the area, IE expanded at the expense of other language groups. This is what makes the subgrouping of IE such a difficult matter. Transitional dialects between one variety and the other have been wiped out, and languages from different dialect gradients have later come into contact with each other, drawing closer together again after an initial differentiation. As I have stated, I think there's evidence that this has happened with Germanic and Balto-Slavic, and with Greek and Armenian. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 15 09:32:05 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:32:05 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EBAFCF.1BE5EA8@neiu.edu> Message-ID: "maher, johnpeter" wrote: >In addition, Casdtilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; Surely not. Usted < vuestra merced. >and Italian "Lei" is a calque of sorts on the latter. Lei = "she" (namely, "eccelenza", "maesta`" and other such feminine abstract nouns). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 09:42:57 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:42:57 GMT Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: Glen Gordon wrote:- > I agree with *H1 = /?/ and *H2 = /h./ but I don't think that a simple > voicing of *H2 to make *H3 is adequate to explain the apparent > "rounding" effect that *H3 has on vowels. A labial quality must be added > to explain this - thus *H3 = /h./ and it is a labial *H2. ... The moderator commented:- > The evidence adduced in favour of voicing of *H3 is Skt. pibati, Latin bibit > "he drinks", a reduplicated present from a root reconstructed as *peH3-, in > combination with Sturtevant's Rule. A tad thin, I admit. --rma In my mouth at least, I find that the /e/ in /h.a/ tries to acquire a distinct flavour of /a/, and the /e/ in /3e/ (where /3/ is ayin) tries to acquire a distinct flavour of /o/. It seems that having to nearly close the pharynx at the epiglottis to produce /h./ or /3/ interferes with the mechanism that moves the arytenoid cartilages to make the vocal cords operate or not, so that voicing or devoicing /h./ or /3/ affects the timbre of nearby vowels. The root H3-D-W = "enemy" or similar meaning occurs in in Greek "odussomai", and in Arabic "H3aduuw" = "enemy". [ Moderator's response: There exist in the phoneme inventories of several NW Caucasian languages both voiceless and voiced labialized pharyngals, which cause rounding in adjacent vowels; thus, "o-coloring" need not imply voicing in *H3. --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Mar 15 19:08:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:08:02 -0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: I accept Ross's comment about the difference in time scale between Polynesia and Melanesia (Ross says about 2,000 and 40,000 years respectively). However, if PIE is roughly 4500 - 2500, and the attested languages appear from roughly 1500, we do seem to be more in the "ballpark" of Polynesia than Melanesia, so a comparison with the degree of differentiation in New Guinea may still be misleading. Peter From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Mon Mar 15 22:00:36 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 22:00:36 +0000 Subject: new book on insular 'celts' Message-ID: This is not directly linguistic, but possibily relevant to the input from Brittonic into English. An archaeologist called Simon James, now at Durham but formerly at the British Museum, has written a book called 'Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?', which was discussed on BBC Radio 4 today in 'Start the Week'. Enquiries at Blackwells show that the BM/Thames and Hudson are the publishers and that they have the book on order, but with an expected publication date in September. I am seeking more info. Gordon Selway Message-Id: Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 22:27:07 +0000 To: Indo-European at xkl.com From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Subject: new book on insular 'celts' - PS The BBC say that the book is being published on April 8th by British Museum Publications. No price or ISBN - the information from Blackwells was GBP 6.99. Gordon Selway From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 11:24:53 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 11:24:53 +0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: <199903112110.NAA26993@netcom.com> Message-ID: >So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required >for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years >for them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one >party to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if >both are members of the same general speech community. This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful way. A lot depends on exposure: in Scandinavia, for instance, some Swedes understand Danish rather well, and others find it very difficult, mostly depending on how close they live to Denmark and whether they are within range of Danish TV. Some Germans understand Dutch reasonably well without learning it, others don't - and vice versa. Again, this is at least partly regionally dependent, partly dependent on the degree of communicative need felt by the speakers. Some Swiss dialects are wholly impenetrable to German speakers from Germany or Austria. Yet these languages have all been separate for less than 1000 years (I mean, in each pairing I describe, not the whole group). The ancestors of English and German were probably mutually comprehensible less then 2000 years ago, yet now they aren't even close. The Normans have a lot to answer for. It seems to me that trained linguists tend to overemphasise wildly the ease with which ordinary people will understand a spoken language in real time - not a written document over which they can pore, but an utterance at which you only get one chance. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 [ Moderator's response: As I mentioned in the preamble comments before the suggestion quoted above, I have myself seen communication among a mixed group of speakers of Slavic languages, none of them trained linguists and most with high school level educations. It is not a matter of instant understanding, but of working at understanding by all parties. I do not mean to imply that a Gael and a Turfanian of c. 700 AD could have understood each other in this fashion, but that 3500 years or so earlier, speakers of the easternmost and westernmost IE dialects might, with a will, have done so. I certainly do not think we should reject the latter notion out of hand. --rma ] From henryh at ling.upenn.edu Mon Mar 15 23:35:03 1999 From: henryh at ling.upenn.edu (Henry M. Hoenigswald) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:35:03 -0600 Subject: Reconstructing *sH- for PIE In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >I'd be interested in learning of any studies on Indo-European laryngeals >after word-initial S-. I'm only aware of Henry M. Hoenigswald's 1993 >article at present (Comparative-Historical Linguistics (Papers in Honor of >O. Szemerenyi III), J. Benjamins). Is anyone working on this topic at the >moment? >Many thanks, >Dennis. Thanks! You'll find my main argument in Lg. 28 (1952) 182-5 (minus the final peroration). Sincerely, HMH Henry M. Hoenigswald 908 Westdale Avenue Swarthmore PA 19081-1804 Tel: 1-610 543-8086 From yoel at mindspring.com Mon Mar 15 13:00:09 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 08:00:09 -0500 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Point well taken. But, dictionaries of "Classical Languages", Lat. and Gk., will always give both the nom. citation form AND the stem, usually in the form of the genitive sg. Case under discussion: Lat. nox, noctis will always be the listing from which one knows that the nom. nox /noks/ represents a reduced stem /nok-/ + the desisence -s. And OIndic (Skt.) dictionaries give for noun and verb the stem rather than either resp. the nom. sg. or the third sg. active present. For the verb Classical Dictionaries give first sg. act. present. In Semitic the verb is given in the past/perfect(ive) 3 sg. masc., etc. Thus there is variation in what is given as the basic datum. Probably what is here said about Finnish I am sure is true irrespective of whether or not I want to compare it to the hypothetical IE cited. And this is probably true for most modern language dictionaries. The Classical, OIndic, Hebrew, Arabic, etc., cases I am most familiar with, have a very long grammatical tradition. Yoel Bob Whiting wrote: >What has been pointed out here is another pitfall of using >dictionaries to do comparative linguistics without knowing >anything about the languages that are being compared. >Dictionaries traditionally give the nominative singular as the >lexical entry. In many instances the nominative singular is the >linguistically least-marked form. Many times features of the >root that are important for comparative work are suppressed in >the nominative singular because of the phonotactics of the >language, but will still be found in the stem (the form to which >other case endings are added). Thus using a dictionary without >being aware of the phonotactical rules of the language is a >recipe for disaster when doing comparative work. Not only can >you get false positives by comparing two similar looking forms >that may have resulted from the suppression of entirely different >elements from the stem, but you can also get false negatives from >words where one language has suppressed or mutated a stem element >and another hasn't (e.g., Lat. - Ger. ). Similarly, >if you don't know that the stem of Fin. vesi (the dictionary >entry) 'water' is vete- you are likely to miss the connection >with IE *wat-/*w at t-. >So doing comparative work by looking words up in a dictionary is >just a matter of collecting "lookalikes" that have similar >meanings. Some may be valid comparisons and some not; but if >they are, it is more a matter of luck rather than skill since >most dictionaries simply don't tell you everything that you need >to know to do comparative linguistics beyond this simplistic >level. From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Mar 15 13:18:55 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 13:18:55 -0000 Subject: k and q Message-ID: We cannot ignore the famed example of Sapir's. Hittite /kubaGi/ (/G/ - voiced pharyngeal, ghain) has a double representation in Biblical Hebrew: qoba'' ('' = ayin) and koba''. From this Sapir concluded that whereas Hebrew is aspirated phonetically and Hebrew /q/ is non-aspirated, but glottalized or pharyngealized (emphatic), the Hittite which was phonetically [k] i.e. [-aspiration, -emphaticness], could not adequately be represented by either Hebrew grapheme. So the alternating writings. Modern Hebrew routinely represents English /k/ as even though it is phonetically closer to Hebrew /k/. The reason is morphophonemic, not phonetic. The written is subject to fricativisation in certain conditions, whereas the written is not. Writing the loan sound as prevents inappropriate fricativisation. This indicates that the logic behind Joel's argument may not necessarily follow. Not necessarily, but it's pretty good. Modern Hebrew is inapplicable; it has two phonemes /k/ and /x/; the first is written with qoph or (initial/double) kaph, the second with heth or (postvocalic) kaph. Modern Hebrew has been through a European mangle and lost its Semitic phonetics. (I don't know any Modern Hebrew and maybe non-European Jews did preserve [q], but I believe I'm describing the standard modern language.) Biblical Hebrew had /q/ and /h./ and /k/. At the time it was borrowing from Hittite these would have been like the Arabic. (Okay, the batteries on my tape-recorder ran out that day.) The three consonants /q/ and /s./ and /t./ (qoph, sadhe, teth) were emphatic and didn't have a voicing contrast. Whereas /k/ was part of the series /p b t d k g/: and at a much, _much_ later time (Masoretic pointing is about as close to us in time as it was to the Hittite period) these had fricative allophones (entangled with morphology but not depending on it), suggesting that at an earlier time the voiceless members either had aspirated allophones or were aspirated. I don't know what the evidence is for when the fricatives came in, but my pedantic old Hebrew teacher saw no good evidence for them in the Biblical language. The point about Hittite /k/ falling between the available [kh] and [q'] is reasonable. Nicholas Widdows [Disclaimer: If another disclaimer appears below this one, it isn't one of mine, it's Trace PLC in Big Brother overdrive.] Disclaimer This email is confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Trace Computers PLC. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this email in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this mail is strictly prohibited From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 15 22:36:51 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 22:36:51 GMT Subject: PIE Plosive System In-Reply-To: Message-ID: philps at univ-tlse2.fr (Dennis Philps) wrote: >Part of original message : >> There are three facts that any posited system must explain: >> 1) The absence of roots of the form /DeD/. >> 2) The absence of roots of the forms /TeDH/ and /DHeT/. >> 3) The absence of/b/. >Based on Benveniste (Origines...1935:170), surely posited systems must be able >to explain the absence of *any* /CeC/ root where C is identical? That too, although I don't think the answer lies necessarily in phonological constraints. It would have been less confusing to state the above as: 1) The absence of roots of the form /DeG/. 2) The absence of roots of the forms /TeGH/ and /DHeK/. 3) The absence of /b/. >Benveniste goes on to >say that the only combination not found in PIE is /voiceless + (e) + voiced >aspirated/ Even less confusing: 1) The near absence of roots of the form /DeG/. 2) The near absence of roots of the forms /TeGH/ and /DHeK/. 3) The near absence of /b/. The vast majority of roots are of the form DHeGH or TeK. DeG, TeGH, DHeK are extremely rare to non-existent. DeK, TeG and DheG are medium fequency (probably because of the relatively low frequency of *d and *g and (near) absence of *b). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From lmfosse at online.no Mon Mar 15 09:34:28 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 10:34:28 +0100 Subject: SV: Reconstructing *sH- for PIE Message-ID: Dennis Philps wrote: > I'd be interested in learning of any studies on Indo-European laryngeals > after word-initial S-. I'm only aware of Henry M. Hoenigswald's 1993 > article at present (Comparative-Historical Linguistics (Papers in Honor of > O. Szemerenyi III), J. Benjamins). Is anyone working on this topic at the > moment? You may find useful information in the following book, which is a general treatment of the L. T.: Fredrik Otto Lindeman, "Introduction to the 'Laryngeal Theory'", Norwegian University Press, Oslo 1987. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From iglesias at axia.it Mon Mar 15 22:29:54 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 14:29:54 PST Subject: Rate of change Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote on 13 March: >Galicians tell me that Portuguese is a dialect of Galician :> Yes, that's exactly how (anachronistically ?) most Galicians view the matter. Otherwise, why bother with the Reconquista? :) The similarity between modern official Galician and Portuguese is highest for morphology, followed by lexicon, syntax and pronunciation, which is the most divergent. The situation is bit like British and American English. Sometimes Galician has preserved the archaic feature and Portuguese has innovated, and vice versa. But here we are speaking of twice the time span of separation of the official languages, since the 15th century. And this brings us back to the topic of the thread. >>3) The pronunciation of Galician is very different from the standard >>Portuguese of Lisbon, but if we consider the dialects of Northern Portugal >>the distance is much less. (For example no difference between "b" and "v"). >But that depends on the dialect of Galician, right? Yes, but nobody in Galicia pronounces "b" and "v" differently. >Some are virtually the same as northern Portuguese while others are >pretty close to bable, spoken in Asturias Yes and no. All Galician is similar to northern Portuguese, although perhaps in different ways, i.e., one dialect shares one feature and another dialect another, but only the Galician bordering on Asturias is similar to Asturian. >But I think this may be due to Spanish influence in "urban" >Galician and in southern Brazilian --as well as the million or so Galicians >in southern Brazil. That may be. >>5) Galician may sound like Castillian, but in fact its sounds including the >>lisped "s" were a local development parallel to that of Castille. (See >>"Grama'tica Portuguesa" by Pilar Va'zquez Cuesta, Ed. Gredos, Madrid, >>chapter on "El Gallego") The south of Galicia uses "seseo". >How about intervocalic , final & among your wife's family? The Galician silibants: "z", as in Castilian (= Eng. "th"); "s", as in Castillian or Basque; "x" as in Port. (=Eng. "sh"), are all unvoiced, including those in the intervocalic position. Also, those in southern Galicia who use "seseo" use the Castillian "s", not the Eng. "s" or Basque "z". And this kind of "seseo" is considered incorrect by the Castillians, but obviously not by the Galicians! Final "s" is very distinct, like the Mexicans and unlike the southern Spaniards! is /sC/ Some northern portuguese dialects have both the voiced and unvoiced series. See in addition to the book by Pilar Va'zquez, Celso Cunha, Lindley Cintra, "Grama'tica do Portugue^s contempora^neo", Ed. J. Sa' da Costa, Lisboa, 1985, pages 6 to 12. >I've heard Galicians who pronounce & "soft g" [/zh/ in >Portuguese] as /sh/ Yes, that's standard, as /zh/ doesn't exist in Galician. Port. Janeiro = Gal. Xaneiro, with final "o" as in Castillian, not as in Port. or Asturian /u/. >>Un sau'do carin~oso a todos da lista indo-europea. Boa tarde. I (Pilar) pronounce this as follows: /u~ Saudu cariNoSo a todoS da liSta indo-europeo. boa tarde/ S = Castillian and Basque "s". You will say shockingly Castillian, but that's the way Galician developed. (Possibly speakers of country dialects would have more exotic pronunciations). But Galicia has been linked to Castille and even more to Leo'n for centuries and has been separated from Portugal by lines of castles and forts with rusty canons pointing at each other, and yet the dialects, the food ("o caldo galego"/"o caldo ... verde" /b/), the wine "vin~o do Ribeiro" / "vinho ... verde" /b/),, the maize stores ("ho'rreos"), the music and the dances, and the folk dress and even the physical appearance of the people, many of whom have light skin, hair and eyes, in, particularly, Minho ("A Costa ... verde" /b/), and Galicia still remain remarkably similar. It should be added finally that Castilian as spoken by Galicians (offensively called "Castrapo") is distinctive, and the other Spaniards say it is less harsh and more "dulce y carin~oso" than Castilian as spoken by natives of Castille. Extensive use is also made of the diminutive "-in~o, -in~a", e.g. "despacin~o" = slowly. Joint message from Frank Rossi and Pilar Iglesias Lo'pez Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 15 22:56:15 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 16:56:15 -0600 Subject: STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS Message-ID: Dear Lars and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Lars Henrik Mathiesen Date: Monday, March 15, 1999 3:16 AM [ moderator snip ] >I'll tell you what would be needed for a probabilistic test of >language relatedness to be valid. >First, you must decide on a protocol to follow which will provide an >objective measure of the similarity between two languages. The >important thing is that this measurement must not depend on the >researcher's knowledge of the languages --- on the contrary, it should >be repeatable with consistent results by different people. NOTE: this >measure of similarity is your experimental result --- any conclusions >about relatedness would only follow after statistical analysis. I could not agree more. No one attempting comparison among very disparate language families is ever going to be able to achieve the expertness of a Larry Trask in Basque or a Sasha Vovin in Altaic, men who have devoted their lives to such study, and, as a consequence, the depth of knowledge of whom cannot be matched in *multiple* disciplines. >But, to borrow a phrase, you must surely agree that this is not the >way historical linguistics are done today, by you or anybody else, and >therefore any attempt to use statistics to defend your hypotheses is >just so much hot air. I have never tried to use statistics to "defend" my hypothesis but perhaps I should. Excellent contribution! Pat From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 15 23:35:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:35:30 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: >> abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] >> rel. con vasco abarka; ra?z de alpargata [sandal] [c] >> pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] >Basque denotes a kind of rustic sandal, traditionally a soft >leather moccasin held on by a cord passed through holes in the sandal >and wrapped around the calf. The word is very probably native, but >cannot be monomorphemic, with that plosive in the third syllable. >The favorite guess sees it as a formation involving `branch(es)' >and a noun-forming suffix <-ka>. This is semantically awkward, and >seems to require that ancestral abarkas were made of foliage -- not very >comfortable, I would have thought. maybe from cord made from pliable bark of branches? would that work? >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from >Romance or from Basque. The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, doesn't exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian Arabic may have allowed it or not. There are words, though, with al-p- associated with Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras [sp?] and others that escape me now. Maybe someone else can help explain this From yoel at mindspring.com Mon Mar 15 13:46:21 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 08:46:21 -0500 Subject: k and q In-Reply-To: <001801be6e4a$d0256720$c1eaabc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: Dear Peter, There is a name miscalling involved and a prime point missed: (1) I am Yoel, the Hebrew name that comes into English as Joel, but I am not Joel. Joel Arbeitman is a cousin of mine, I believe. You'll find him elsewhere on the WWW. (2) What is said about Modern Hebrew is largely true. But the pattern of transliterating alien , , goes back to early Post-Biblical Hebrew times when the spirantization for b,g.d, k, p, t post vocalic rule was flourishing. It was likely not flouring or existant at the time that Anatolian entered Biblical Hebrew (via the Philistines is one main theory). Modern Hebrew writes both emphatic k. and emphatic t. (there is no emphatic *p.) for alien /k/, /t/ and such., while reserving t for transcribing Gk. theta, k for Greek khi. I do not really see that your exposition of PBH clarifies or in any way diminishes Sapir's magisterial demonstration. BTW, k. is also transliterated often as q. t., on the other hand, has no such luxury in the Greco-Latin-English alphabet. And b, g, and d in Hebrew have no emphatic counterparts (d. does in other Semitic languages). The Hebrew transliteration of the -h- in Hittite (Anatolian) kupahi as an ayin confirms the pronunciation of this singularly written intervocalic laryngeal as a voiced velar laryngeal as at this early period Hebrew ayin represented both phonemes ayin and ghain. Yoel At 06:34 PM 3/14/99 -0000, you wrote: >Joel draws phonetic conclusions from the representation of Hittite /k/ in >Biblical Hebrew as or . >Modern Hebrew routinely represents English /k/ as even though it is >phonetically closer to Hebrew /k/. The reason is morphophonemic, not >phonetic. The written is subject to fricativisation in certain >conditions, whereas the written is not. Writing the loan sound as >prevents inappropriate fricativisation. This indicates that the logic >behind Joel's argument may not necessarily follow. >Peter From yoel at mindspring.com Mon Mar 15 14:05:04 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:05:04 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <000801be6e5c$e2563660$2e54fad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: Dear Pat and Colleagues, In a word the answer is YES. The durative-iterative, same morpheme involved, of Hittite dai- (< IE *dhe:) "to place, etc." is written which represnts /t-skizzi/ where the root d(ai-) is reduced to its minimum and the iterative -ski- is added with retrogressive assimilitation of radical d to t. [Answers continued below]. At 02:52 PM 3/14/99 -0600, you wrote: >Dear Yoel and IEists: >-----Original Message----- >From: Yoel L. Arbeitman >Date: Saturday, March 13, 1999 11:16 PM >> The question of what was the form of Hittite and Anatolian "drink" has >>progressed greatly since Sturtevant's time. In 1980 Morpurgo-Davies showed >>that the cognate in Hieroglyphic Luwian was /u:/ and since *gw disappears >>in HL, but *kw does not, the problem is solved. Proto-Anatolian had the >>verb *e/agw-, known so well in that famed sentence deciphered by Hrozny' nu >>NINDA adanzi nu watar akwanzi "And they eat bread and they drink water" . >>It was long thought that here was the cognate, as a verb, of Latin aqua >>"water". But now it is certain that the iterative-durative form cited >>represents /akw=skizzi/ with regressive voice assimilation. >You seem to be saying, if I understand you correctly, that >ak-k{.}u-uS-ki-iz-zi [akuSkitsi] is derived from /akw+sk+izzi/, >representing [aguSkitsi]. Do you have other examples of devoicing a stop >before /sk/ in Hittite since, of course, it is, to my knowledge, unknown in >IE? >>And, long >>before the 1980 discovery W. Winter proposed the cognation of Latin ebrius >>"drunk"/ sobrius "sober" (with -b- < *-gwh-) as well as Greek ne:phalos >>"sober" with -ph- < only *-gwh-. Thus, far from being cognate with Latin >>aqua, Anatolian *a/egw- is cognate with Latin ebrius "drunk", Gk. ne:phalos >>"sober" and the long ago proposed Tocharian yok- "to drink". All argument >>has been closed by the Hiero. Luw. verb which is reduced to a mere /u:/ and >>is not open to argument. >Thomas reconstructs IE *eg{w}- for Tocharian yok-; while IE g{w} normally >corresponds to Latin [v] and Greek [b/d/g], even IE g{w}h does not yield the >required Latin [b] either though it *might* yield Greek [ph]. We are being >asked to accept an IE root, *eg{w}h-, which appears *without* the expected >Latin reflex [v] for IE *g{w}h, and with a *-ri formant; and to equate that >with Greek *ne + *eg{w}h with a *-l(o) formant. While this may be correct, I >do not think that the data is so conclusive as to foreclose argument. >Also, are you asserting that IE g{w}h like g{w} appears as HL /u:/? To the last question, the IE labio-velar and aspirated labio-velars as part of the general obstruents and aspirated obstruents had merged in Pre-Anatolian. So the outcome is the same. For the earlier question, the Greek and Latin outcomes are discussed in detail in e.g. Ernount-Meillet, Chantraine, etc., the standard Latin and Greek etym. dictionaries. The connection actually goes back to Juret. Sorry I can't quote the details,which are convinicing,off the the top of my head, and I don't generally go to ref. books for these postings. BTW, Latin outcome of IE *gwous should be *vos, but it is, like the Greek bous, bos. Contributory here are both dialect forms and the convergence with Latin vos "you (pl.)" hat would have resulted. W. Winter's article in in the '50's Journal of the LSA. The refs. are for sure in Tischler's Hittitisches eymologisches Glossar. YLA From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Mar 16 02:44:12 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:44:12 -0800 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Pat said: >Do you have other examples of devoicing a stop >before /sk/ in Hittite since, of course, it is, to my knowledge, unknown in >IE? Devoicing before s is regular in IE, of course, so why should we question devoicing before /sk/? Peter From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Mar 15 14:32:00 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 14:32:00 -0000 Subject: Fortis Consonants Message-ID: > The term "fortis" is not really one which has a clear and > objective phonetic meaning. According to Catford, "the terms tense/lax, > strong/weak, fortis/lenis, and so on should never be loosely and > carelessly used without precise phonetic specification." Thank for that. It's not just me then. I was never taught those terms, and whenever I read them I'm thinking What? What? I don't want a theatre critic's opinion of the sound. Tell me which bits of my mouth to move! Using terms like this that (as far as I can tell) don't accurately describe the physiology is often a source of misunderstanding. These "aspirated" voiced stops, is anyone really suggesting they were aspirated, with breathy voice on the onset of the following vowel, or were they murmured the way modern Indian ones (I think) are? It could make quite a difference to the glottalic theory. English [sp] is compared to Danish or Icelandic [sb] because the [b] fits the rest of their phonology, and I've heard it said that our choice of [p] is (phonetically) arbitrary. But voiceless [p] is not the same as devoiced [b]. The arytenoid cartilages are held and are moving differently. That's where the tenseness and weakness partly are, but I would prefer to see them described in (laryngal)phonation terms: voiced, devoiced, voiceless, breathy, creaky, etc. A sound law might be more easily expressed if the right structural features were chosen. I've seen a book on Arabic say that English vowel-initial words also begin with hamza. But the larynx can presumable make plosive, implosive, or ejective stops; most of us have one, Arabic and German have the other, Maltese contrasts them (if I read it right). Phonation: Cinderella's kid sister. Nicholas Widdows (probably) Disclaimer This email is confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Trace Computers PLC. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this email in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing, or copying of this mail is strictly prohibited From jrader at m-w.com Mon Mar 15 10:40:16 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 10:40:16 +0000 Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: Some wild stabs in the dark, so to speak, here. Am I the only one who would be too embarrassed to post guesses without looking in the standard handbooks of historical phonology for Slavic or Celtic? At any rate, Polish and all the cognate words for "night" in Slavic show regular development of <-kti(:)->. There is no dropping of . Welsh is the outcome of a derivative, <*nokt-stu->, according to Pedersen. The regular outcome of intervocalic <-kt-> in Welsh is <-th->, a voiceless interdental fricative. The base shows up regularly in Welsh in the word "last night." The outcome of <-kt-> in Irish is <-cht->, which shows up in Old Irish "tonight," Modern Irish . Jim Rader > In a message dated 3/13/99 7:41:51 AM, you wrote: [ moderator snip ] > So, if I understand correctly, the nominative sing form in Latin and Greek > reflect the dropping of the -t due to the internal rules of those languages > regarding "the inventory of phonemes which appear word-finally." Does this > also account for the loss of the -t in Welsh and Polish for example? Does > Celtic prohibit the ending of a word in /t/? Can any of these t-less > nominatives be explained as a borrowing? Does that make any sense? > Regards, > Steve Long >[ Moderator's response: > For Polish and Welsh, presumably so; I am not versed in the histories or the > synchronic phonologies of those languages. Word-final *-t > Proto-Celtic > *-d if I remember correctly, but the *t in the word for "night" is not > word-final in PIE. And why should we bother with borrowing when there are > perfectly good explanations for the forms encountered that do not require an > outside influence? > --rma ] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 16:45:22 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 16:45:22 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > artesa "type of box" 1330 "caj?n cuadrilongo de madera que es m?s angosto > hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] > v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] Coromines, Onomasticon Cataloniae, s.v. Artesa (de Segre) glosses the Spanish word `pastera, conca de fe`nyer pa etc.' [kneading trough] and suggests the toponym may be a metaphorical application of the (pre-Romance) common noun seen in Spanish (otherwise absent from Catalan). S.v. Artana he lists several other pre-Romance toponyms in -esavfrom Catalan territory: Olesa, Albesa, Manresa, Ardesa, Utxesa, Montesa, Anesa. Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 16:49:51 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 16:49:51 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 12 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [LT] > >Debatable. The form is Spanish. > Of course it is, BUT it's a Spanish name commonly associated in > Spanish literature and culture with the Basques [despite Sancho Panza], > along with In~igo [vs. Ignacio, with which it is correctly or incorrectly > associated]. Yes, the personal name `Sancho' is associated above all with the medieval Kingdom of Navarre, which was predominantly Basque-speaking at the time. The most famous bearers of the name were the Kings of Navarre, who were certainly Basques. In all likelihood, we are looking at a Basque name, though not necessarily one of ultimately Basque origin. This name is totally opaque in Basque, and I am aware of no plausible etymology for it. It should be borne in mind that medieval Romance names which were taken into Basque often developed very distinctive Basque forms. For example, it is hardly obvious that is merely the Basque form of the medieval Spanish given name , or that is a vernacular form of the name which appears in French as . And you might like to puzzle over how it is that the traditional Basque form of `Jim' is -- the etymology is straightforward if you know one or two things about Spanish personal names. > That's why I qualified it as "Spanish spoken by Basques". Elsewhere > in Spanish, the proper name developed as Santo or, more often, > Santos. In Latin America, I've only come across Sancho as a dog's > name. And I have never encountered anybody called in Spain -- I gather that the name is no longer conferred. However, or is still a vernacular form of in the French Basque Country, though the southern Basques prefer as their equivalent of . The first French Basque woman I ever met was called in French, in Basque, and I've more recently come across another French Basque with the same two names. My little 1972 dictionary of French Basque reports that is a possible male name equivalent to French , but I have never encountered anybody with either name. By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? [LT] > >The medieval Basque form of > >the name is , which must derive from * by dissimilatory > >loss of the first sibilant. And I don't see why this form would develop > >from a palatalized coronal (/ts/ notates an apical affricate). > >There is no need to appeal to a Romance palatal to account for the > >Basque /ai/. For example, the word for `fast, quick, soon' was mostly > > in the 16th century but is mostly today. > Then what's the reason? Is it an analogy to words with /ay/ > --which underwent this change previously because of metathesis of > palatal, etc. Is it part of a regional phenomenon? --as in > Portuguese, in which stressed /a/ often > /ay/ among certain > speakers, e.g. the proper name Bras, which is often /brayz, brayzh, > braysh/ Nobody knows what the reason is. All I can report is that /a/ in the first syllable of a polysyllable sometimes develops into /ai/, in a purely sporadic manner. But I *think* this only ever happens before a coronal consonant, which may be relevant. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 15 17:04:13 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:04:13 GMT Subject: Gender In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> [...] >> The lack of feminine gender in Hittite (Anatolian) suggests that >> the PIE three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter) is >> datable to the time between the split-off of Anatolian and the >> break-up of the rest of IE (beginning with Tocharian). >> [...] >I don't think this can be true, because: >(1) How could the feminine marker *-yeH2-/*-iH2- have been hit by the >working of ablaut if it only arose after the split-off when the process >must have been over? >(2) Adjectives like dankuis 'dark' appear to have the same background as >Lat. svavis, viz. the feminine in *-w-iH2- of u-stem adjectives (Skt. >sva:du'-s, fem. sva:d-v-i:'). >(3) The allative of 'one' is sa-ni-ya in the Anitta text, rather obviously >based on *s(V)m-iH2- (Gk. m!a fem. 'one'), conflated with some form where >the /m/ was word-final and so changed to /n/ (cf. Gk. ntr. he'n from IE >*se'm). >All in all, it looks like a two-bit reduction of the system of three >genders to two, whereby masc. and fem. formed a "common gender" >opposed to the surviving neuter just as in Dutch, Danish and Swedish. Supposing the two examples above are correctly analyzed as containing *-iH2, it only follows that Anatolian had nouns and adjectives ending in *-iH2. As it probably (had) had *-eH2 and *-uH2. The question is whether it can be shown that these suffixes (if suffixes they are) at one stage served to denote feminine gender in (Pre-)Proto-Anatolian. Now, if the neuter of dankuis were danku, you would have a case, but I believe it's dankui. We also have *-(e)H2 in Anatolian to mark the neuter plural, but no trace of it as a feminine marker. By the same token, I cannot prove that such forms are *not* relics of what once were feminine markers in Anatolian, instead of what I believe they are: merely root endings or extensions which were grammaticalized into feminine markers in non-Anatolian IE. There are indications even outside of Anatolian that the feminine gender is of relatively recent origin. The lack of formal marking in many common nouns (Beekes mentions dhugH2te:r, snusos), the adjectival classes that do not distinguish a separate feminine form. The general impression one gets of Hittite is that of an "active language" in Klimov's terms (see Lehmann, G & I), with a central role played by the opposition animate ~ inanimate. The use of the "ergative" suffix -ant(s) (inanimate --> animate when the subject of transitive sentence), the mi- (active) and hi-/-ha (stative/middle) conjugations. There is no sign or trace of feminine gender, no 3rd. person feminine pronominal forms [tell-tale sign in Dutch, Swedish and Danish that these languages once had a feminine gender; but of course also absent in e.g. Armenian], the lack of any formal marker for feminine nouns (except suffixed -sara) and the lack of feminine agreement in the adjective. In view of this, I prefer the more parsimonious explanation that Hittite maintains the ancient state of affairs (active/inactive nouns and verbs) and the other languages have developed a 3-gender system out of an earlier animate ~ inanimate one, than to suppose that Hittite once had a feminine gender, then lost it, and reverted exactly to the state PIE must have had in the first place before feminine gender developed. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 17:10:02 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:10:02 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > arrancar "to crank, rip from" c. 1140, [c] > cat. ant. renc, ant. fr. ranc < ?germ.? [c] > ?rel. to renco "lame, crippled"? [rmcc] Coromines, in his Catalan Etymological Dictionary, rejects the suggested Germanic etymology he had proposed in DECH, preferring a non-Celtic but IE etymon (sorota`ptic o li'gur [Sorothaptic or Ligurian]), citing Lith, rin~kti [pick, collect], paranka` [gleaning], OPruss ra~nk-twei [steal], isrankeis [let go!, deliver!], Germ wrankjan [> Eng wrench], BSl *wranka: [hand, leg]. This or a similar root is the source by a different route of Romance BRANCA [leg, paw], [branch]. The verb certainly extends to Oc. and NW Italian dialects, and less surely to the rest of Italy. Coromines's discussion of the etymology extends to 4 columns, where in part he's arguing that this word's distribution is typical of the IE dialect-type he calls Sorothaptic (lexically and geographically between Celt, BSl, Illyrian-Venetic and Germanic), though he agrees that variation in treatment of *wr- is problematic. Max From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Mar 15 23:53:27 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:53:27 -0600 Subject: Indo-European Phonology Message-ID: Dear Allan and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Bomhard at aol.com Date: Monday, March 15, 1999 3:56 AM Thank you for an excellent summary of the work that has been done on IE phonology. For the record, I subscribe to the Glottalic Theory. I believe that IE [b/d/g] can best be explained as a result of (pre-)Nostratic [?p/?t/?k], with pre-glottalization of the voiceless stops. But I also reconstruct glottalized affricates [?pf/?ts/?kx], which, I believe, on the strength of the AA reflexes, became IE [bh/dh/gh]. I think you have done better than anyone else I know in properly reconstructing affricates for Nostratic. But to your [ts], I would add [pf/kx]. It is the merger of this series of voiceless and aspirated affricates into plain voiceless aspirated stops [ph/th/kh] which has unbalanced the system typologically. Of course, I also agree with you that it is perfectly legitimate to reconstruct palatalized varieties in each stop or affricate configuration but I do not believe that velarized stops are reflected in the daughter languages as allophones of the simple stop and affricate series. IE g{w} and k{w} are the missing dorsal fricatives ([x/x{h}]) that should be reconstructed for Nostratic since they show up in AA as fricatives (Arabic S; Egyptian S and X). Thus, I believe the plan of glottalized and aspirated stops and affricates + representive fricatives in all positions ([f,v ->w; s,z ->s; G,x -> g{w}/k{w}]) represents a typologically balanced system that alows for all developments in the derived languages. Pat From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 00:19:55 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:19:55 EST Subject: IE to ProtoSteppe Message-ID: >In a message dated 3/14/99 9:06:56 PM Mountain Standard Time, >glengordon01 at hotmail.com writes: >_Physical_ proof of the nature of particles?? I don't think so. It is based on >observation. -- that is physical proof -- experimental validation. All humans can do is observe. >It can't tell us the actual form of a particle. -- yes it can, insofar as "form" is meaningful when speaking of say, an electron, which is best described in terms of probability shells. >Don't be daft. -- right back at you. [ Moderator's note: This has drifted beyond the scope of linguistics, Indo-European or otherwise. No further discussion on this branch of the discussion will be posted to the list; please take it to private e-mail if you wish to continue. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 00:37:26 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:37:26 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Agriculture appears in Greece between 7000 and 6000 bce. It reaches Denmark >about 3900 bce. It is truly adopted on the North European Plain about 3500 >bce. And there is evidence that dirt farming (versus husbandry) did not take >hold in the British Isles until the early bronze age. -- these dates are out of date, I'm afraid, apart from the one on Greece. And that should be "Greece and the southern Balkans"; they received agriculture at about the same time. Agriculture reached the Hungarian plain in the 6th millenium BCE (5000's) and spread across Europe in the late 6th and early 5th millenium with the Linear Pottery culture. Agriculture was established in Britain in the centuries after 4000 BCE and the plow was already employed there in the 4th millenium. (Dates from the OXFORD PREHISTORY OF EUROPE, chs. 4&5). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 00:28:05 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:28:05 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages of stratified societies are always class dialects.> -- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- based. "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, and they have no correlation to class at all. The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a very rare phenomenon. Standard languages are usually simply a regional dialect Eg., the Border ballads show laird and crofter speaking the same dialect... because that's exactly what they did. Prior to the 18th century, squire and tenant in England also spoke the same regional dialects. There's absolutely no reason to assume that the situation was different in Anglo-Saxon times; thegn and peasant and thrall (unless imported) all spoke various regional dialects of Old English; nor is there any reason to suppose that the standardized written tongue of the Wessex kings' scribes was much different from the spoken language. Perhaps a bit more conservative, but then, contemporary written English is more conservative than the spoken language as well. From lmfosse at online.no Tue Mar 16 09:34:18 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:34:18 +0100 Subject: SV: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Sheila Watts [SMTP:sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk] skrev 15. mars 1999 12:25: > This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful > way. A lot depends on exposure: in Scandinavia, for instance, some Swedes > understand Danish rather well, and others find it very difficult, mostly > depending on how close they live to Denmark and whether they are within > range of Danish TV. .... It would seem that the three standard languages of Denmark, Norway and Sweden do not present many problems as far as mutual comprehensibility is concerned, at least not to educated speakers. (Typically, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian newsreaders would present few problems to speakers of other Scandinavian languages). However, non-educated speech and dialects pose problems, not only to speakes of a different language, but sometimes even to speakers of the same language. There are Norwegian dialects that I find hard to undestand, and a Danish colleague of mine complained about not understanding certain Jutland dialects. Particularly spoken Danish seems to move away fast from the "comprehensible version" that Norwegians could dechifre without too many difficulties. Danes seem to begin having a similar problem with Norwegians. At least I have noticed that some Danes simply switch to English when talking to me, as that apparently feels more comfortable. Admittedly, these observations are based on random personal experience, but may still have some validity. Thus, when we discuss the ability to understand closely related languages, we should not forget that there is a difference between societies with educated, literate elites and standard languages on the one hand and societies without such things on the other. It would be interesting to know how Germans relate to their various highly different dialects. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone/Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 Email: lmfosse at online.no From jpmaher at neiu.edu Tue Mar 16 00:51:45 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:51:45 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: "Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; > 1. Surely ... Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or homework. Spell out the phonetic developments and refute the ascription to Arabic > 2. Lei = "she" (namely, "eccelenza", "maesta`" and other such > feminine abstract nouns). Certainly [i.e. I would suppose that] a feminine pronoun presupposes a feminine noun, real OR IMAGINED. jpm From jpmaher at neiu.edu Tue Mar 16 10:21:02 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 04:21:02 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A Message-ID: a parallel in Slavic: "koryto" 'trough' is also used as a toponym. Cf. German "Kessel, Sattel"... ................................... Max W Wheeler wrote: > On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> artesa "type of box" 1330 "caj?n cuadrilongo de madera que es m?s >> angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] >> v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] > Coromines, Onomasticon Cataloniae, s.v. Artesa (de Segre) glosses the > Spanish word `pastera, conca de fe`nyer pa etc.' [kneading trough] and > suggests the toponym may be a metaphorical application of the > (pre-Romance) common noun seen in Spanish (otherwise absent from > Catalan). S.v. Artana he lists several other pre-Romance toponyms in > -esavfrom Catalan territory: Olesa, Albesa, Manresa, Ardesa, Utxesa, > Montesa, Anesa. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 00:49:10 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:49:10 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: >proto-language at email.msn.com writes: >Yes, acrobats just like the Huns. -- who left so little trace of their language that we're not even completely sure if it was Turkic. They certainly didn't succeed in imposing their language on any area -- it became extinct within a century of their entry into Europe. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Mar 16 10:26:47 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:26:47 GMT Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >Nobody knows what the reason is. All I can report is that /a/ in the >first syllable of a polysyllable sometimes develops into /ai/, in a >purely sporadic manner. But I *think* this only ever happens before a >coronal consonant, which may be relevant. Are there any examples before a single (coronal) consonant? Unless I'm overlooking something, all the examples seem to be before sibilant+stop or nasal+stop clusters. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Mar 16 00:59:53 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:59:53 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Peter &/or Graham Date: Monday, March 15, 1999 6:23 PM >Pat said: >>Do you have other examples of devoicing a stop before /sk/ in Hittite since, >>of course, it is, to my knowledge, unknown in IE? >Devoicing before s is regular in IE, of course, so why should we question >devoicing before /sk/? If one assumes that [k-ku] is not k + u but a mere "grapheme" for [k{w}], then, of course, there would be no question. Pat [ Moderator's comment: What exactly are you asking? You appear to be back-pedalling on several issues you have argued over the past weeks. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Mar 16 11:07:37 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 11:07:37 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sheila Watts wrote: >>So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required >>for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years >>for them to be so large as to prevent communications, i. e., to require one >>party to learn the other's language before communication can take place, if >>both are members of the same general speech community. >This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful >way. A lot depends on exposure > [...] > It seems to me that trained linguists tend to overemphasise wildly the >ease with which ordinary people will understand a spoken language in real >time - not a written document over which they can pore, but an utterance at >which you only get one chance. But this works both ways. An unintelligible written document does not rephrase itself, while an interlocutor will try again until he's understood (if it's in his own interest, of course). A lot indeed depends on exposure, but the interesting cases from a historical linguistic point of view are by definition the cases where a lot of mutual exposure is involved. In the case of late OE / late ON it's often said that the two languages were "very close" and mutually intelligible. My own exposure to ON is negligible (and I can't say I'm fluent in OE), but it seems to me that such claims are exaggerated. West and North Germanic had already been diverging for quite some time a thousand years ago. But if those claims are made, it's not because the people making them are trained linguists, but it's because the *evidence* shows a degree of interaction between the two languages that can only be explained if there was indeed a fair amount of mutual intelligibility. But this mutual intelligibilty was probably not "automatic" as in the case of two dialects of teh same language, but the result of lots of exposure. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 16 01:04:36 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 20:04:36 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In fact, Scandinavian, German and Old English were probably mutually comprehensible as recently as 1000 CE -- at least on an elementary level. Hmmm. Well, perhaps we should limit that to Old English, Scandinavian, and Low German. From martinez at eucmos.sim.ucm.es Tue Mar 16 11:23:00 1999 From: martinez at eucmos.sim.ucm.es (Javier Martinez) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 12:23:00 +0100 Subject: `Sancho' < Sanctius; Panza < lat. pantex Message-ID: LT wrote > at a Basque name, though not necessarily one of ultimately Basque > origin. This name is totally opaque in Basque, and I am aware of no > plausible etymology for it. < lat. Sanctius? > I gather that the name is no longer conferred. However, or > is still a vernacular form of in the French Basque > Country, Pancho belongs like Paco or Curro to Francisco, like Pepe to Jose. But Sancho Panza has his name because his potbelly, viz. Panza < lat. "pantex" Javier Mart?nez Garc?a ~ Dpto. Filolog?a Griega y Ling. Indoeuropea Facultad de Filolog?a ~ Universidad Complutense ~ E-28040 Madrid Fax: +34- 9131 49023 ~ Tlf. +34- 91314 4471 ~ (secret.) -91394 5289 http://www.ucm.es/info/griego/ ~ TITUS-Projekt: Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft ~ Postfach 111932 Universit?t Frankfurt ~ D-60054 Frankfurt http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 02:28:09 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 20:28:09 -0600 Subject: alud In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Could be from Iberian Arabic? Is there such a form as al-lud? Could it be related to lodo? i.e. deformed by passing through Iberian Arabic? My wife uses for "mudslide" [which dictionaries agree with] --also no snow in Costa Rica -- so a question for Miguel or whoever-- is it ever used in any part of Spain for [snow] avalanches? >> alud "mudslide" 1880 pre-rom; [c] >> rel. con vasco luta, lurte "desmoronamiento de tierras", [c] >> v. lur "tierra", elur "nieve" [c] >Basque ~ ~ `landslide, mudslide' is real enough, >and is obviously a derivative of `earth'. This has the regular >combining form in old formations, so the variants in are >probably recent re-formations. It's not clear to me how the Basque word >would give rise to Romance . As for Basque `snow', this is >hardly likely to be related to : there are major problems with the >phonology, with the morphology, and with the semantics. But if had a different origin, I could see how, in the Pyrenees, and ~ ~ could have influenced one another in the minds of bilingual speakers--but that's supposing a lot OR the possibility that ~ ~ could be a "folk etymology" of by Basque speakers --or is that too far out? From jpmaher at neiu.edu Tue Mar 16 13:38:54 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 07:38:54 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Compare: ?... in October 1913, the Balkan League of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Monte Negro, encouraged by Russia, declared war on Turkey. In Belgrade, Trotsky watched the 18th Serbian Infantry marching off to war in uniforms of the new khaki color. They wore bark sandals and a sprig of green in their caps .? Barbara W. Tuchman. 1966. The Proud Tower. A Portrait of the World before the War. 1890-1914.Page 536. Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] > >> rel. con vasco abarka; ra?z de alpargata [sandal] [c] > >> pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] > > >Basque denotes a kind of rustic sandal, traditionally a soft > >leather moccasin held on by a cord passed through holes in the sandal > >and wrapped around the calf. The word is very probably native, but > >cannot be monomorphemic, with that plosive in the third syllable. > >The favorite guess sees it as a formation involving `branch(es)' > >and a noun-forming suffix <-ka>. This is semantically awkward, and > >seems to require that ancestral abarkas were made of foliage -- not very > >comfortable, I would have thought. > > maybe from cord made from pliable bark of branches? would that work? > > >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and > >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all > >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic > >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from > >Romance or from Basque. > > The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, doesn't > exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian Arabic may have > allowed it or not. There are words, though, with al-p- associated with > Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras [sp?] and others that escape > me now. > Maybe someone else can help explain this From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 02:34:11 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 20:34:11 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > ar?ndano [ara/ndano] "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ??, [c] > compara con vasco ar?n [ara/n] "endrino" [c] > pre-rom. ra?z de ar?n [rai/z de ara/n] [c] Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . Could aran be from an original form *agran-? btw: what are the other forms in Romance & Celtic? Maybe Dennis "Donncha" King might have some insights on the Celtic forms From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 15:47:31 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 09:47:31 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> artesa "type of box" 1330 "caj?n cuadrilongo de madera que es m?s >> angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] >> v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] >Coromines, Onomasticon Cataloniae, s.v. Artesa (de Segre) glosses the >Spanish word `pastera, conca de fe`nyer pa etc.' [kneading trough] and >suggests the toponym may be a metaphorical application of the >(pre-Romance) common noun seen in Spanish (otherwise absent from >Catalan). S.v. Artana he lists several other pre-Romance toponyms in >-esa from Catalan territory: Olesa, Albesa, Manresa, Ardesa, Utxesa, >Montesa, Anesa. [snip] I'm trying to imagine what a kneading trough looks like --in conjunction with . In Peque?o Larrouse, I seem to remember accompanying a picture of a basket-like contraption with 2 rectangular rims [both rounded off] and no bottom; the upper rim was about twice the size of the lower one. There was no indication of size or use. Now I'm trying imagine how this can relate to a toponym, could it be a box canyon? From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 02:47:31 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 20:47:31 -0600 Subject: avio/n In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > avi?n "airplane" c. 1330 "vencejo" < ?gavi?n [gavio/n] c. 1250? < ?? > [c] rel to Latin apis? [rmcc] >No Basque here, but I'm certainly startled to see a word for `airplane' >figuring in a discussion of supposedly pre-Roman words. It means "airplane" now but it does go back a ways. vencejo --acc. to Vel?squez dictionary-- means "swift, black martin, martlet, martinet [Hirundo apis]. Not a word I've come across in Latin America gavi- appears as the first element of a couple of birds: gaviota "gull" & gavila/n "small hawk" but I seem to remember seeing somewhere used to mean "bumblebee" or some sort of large bee I also seem to remember seeing somewhere that the use of avio/n as "airplane" comes from French --that whoever the French claim as the inventor of the airplane called his contraption an "avion", is that right? From yoel at mindspring.com Tue Mar 16 15:49:20 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:49:20 -0500 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: >Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:46:04 -0500 >To: proto-language at email.msn.com >From: "Yoel L. Arbeitman" >Subject: PersonalResponse: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt >Dear Pat, >I have not been able to work through Melchert's explanation and summarize >it until now. In general I avoid doing research for these postings and only >give what I know off the top of my head. And Melchert's book is one of >constant crossreferencing for each word, by segmentable phenomena of said >word. >So here directly to you and then to the List (to save time to you) is the >best I can do with complicated argumentation: > (1) PA has [a] a retrogressive voicing law which disappears before >[b] the PA rule of medial */kw/ to */gw/ change. > (2) By [1b], IE *nekw-t- > PA *negw-t(+s), /negu-t+s/ 'evening, >twilight'; /negu-/ 'become twiglight'. > (3) It was canonized decades ago by Sturtevant that 'night', as 'the >time of undressing', was cognate with the IE word for "naked" in Hittite >. But this < *PA negw-mo- (for IE or Pre-PA *negw-no-) as shown by >non-Hittite cognates. > Watkins AHDIER gives the root as *nogw- 'naked', with suffix -e/oto- >English (Germanic) "naked", with suffix -edo- > Latin nudus, and with >suffix *--mo- > Gk. gymno-. > Thus 'night' is IE *nekw-, 'naked' IE *negw-. > Melchert operates on the principle of finding the Anatolian word, >comparing what we can of cognate IE matches and then ordering rule >operations. It's complex, but the best we have around. > Yoel [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 03:17:13 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 21:17:13 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EBAFCF.1BE5EA8@neiu.edu> Message-ID: >In addition, there are many Americans using "moi" who not only do not know >French, but who never directly saw/heard Miss Piggy'. >In addition, Casdtilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; and ustad/ustaz "sir, maestro" definitely looks like usted but most other Spanish professors I run into swear that it's from vuste/ a corruption of "vuesa/vuestra merced" >Italian "Lei" is a calque of sorts on the latter. I've been told that Mussolini encouraged Italians to use by explaining that was from Spanish and was from French and so, was the "national" form Did he really say that? From jer at cphling.dk Tue Mar 16 15:50:24 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:50:24 +0100 Subject: Gender In-Reply-To: <3702333b.72098857@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Supposing the two examples above [Hitt. dankui-s 'dark' and sani- 'one, > same' - JER] are correctly analyzed as > containing *-iH2, it only follows that Anatolian had nouns and > adjectives ending in *-iH2. As it probably (had) had *-eH2 and > *-uH2. The question is whether it can be shown that these > suffixes (if suffixes they are) at one stage served to denote > feminine gender in (Pre-)Proto-Anatolian. Now, if the neuter of > dankuis were danku, you would have a case, but I believe it's > dankui. We also have *-(e)H2 in Anatolian to mark the neuter > plural, but no trace of it as a feminine marker. What would (pre-)Anatolian have these forms for, if not for the feminine? What is the common indication of < + >? By normal standards that is . Comparing Icelandic _widh_ 'we' and _thidh_ 'you' with extra-Norse Germanic one will immediately guess that they match the duals, OE wit, git (especially since hvadh matches hwaet), the 2nd person with /th-/ from the sg. thu. But you could object saying, No it only means there were FORMS of the shape matching the duals of the other languages, not that they WERE ever duals themselves - they may instead proceed from an older system from which the duals also come, but - unfortunately - have lost their mysterious but interesting original function. Now, in this case older Icelandic does restrict these forms to dual function, so here we know. The only difference I see between this easy example and that of the fem. morphemes lying around in Hittite is that, in the latter case, we have no direct attestation of the stage where the morphemes were still fem. markers. > There are indications even outside of Anatolian that the feminine > gender is of relatively recent origin. Sure, but there are more than two stages in pre-IE. There is ample time for a "relatively recent" feminine marker to lose its gender-distinguishing function and just become an occasional stem enlargement of individual adjectives. That is a process we know and understand and one that would lead to the picture we find. > The general impression one gets of Hittite is that of an "active > language" in Klimov's terms (see Lehmann, G & I), with a central > role played by the opposition animate ~ inanimate. The use of > the "ergative" suffix -ant(s) (inanimate --> animate > when the subject of transitive sentence), the mi- > (active) and hi-/-ha (stative/middle) conjugations. There is no > sign or trace of feminine gender, no 3rd. person feminine > pronominal forms [tell-tale sign in Dutch, Swedish and Danish > that these languages once had a feminine gender; but of course > also absent in e.g. Armenian], the lack of any formal marker for > feminine nouns (except suffixed -sara) and the lack of feminine > agreement in the adjective. The "ergative" extension of neuters is post-Old Hittite according to Kammenhuber (Fs. Winter 1986), but that is of no relevance to the gender question. There is ergative in Kurdish, and Proto-Iranian did have three genders. > In view of this, I prefer the more parsimonious explanation that > Hittite maintains the ancient state of affairs (active/inactive > nouns and verbs) and the other languages have developed a > 3-gender system out of an earlier animate ~ inanimate one, than > to suppose that Hittite once had a feminine gender, then lost it, > and reverted exactly to the state PIE must have had in the first > place before feminine gender developed. I do not see the parsimony - or even the good sense - in assuming that dankuis contains a suffix of "some-other-function-just-for-heaven's-sake-not-feminine" and has used it in a place where a feminine marker would have made sense and it is indeed used in the other languages - as opposed to the very simple assumption that this IS the feminine marker that has lost its meaning, just as it has in many adjectives of later individual languages. Jens From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 03:30:52 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 21:30:52 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt In-Reply-To: <001a01be6d43$aa4c0de0$3671fe8c@raol.lucent.com> Message-ID: How would you describe that sound? a voiced apical sibilant lateral? [if that makes sense] I've had Tamil friends and it's a sound that stands out Are there any non-Dravidian languages that have it? [snip] >zh for the final consonant in ``Tamil'' [snip] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 15:55:19 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 15:55:19 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ snip note to moderator ] On Fri, 12 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Would you like to explain what your point is? > falda in Spanish is "skirt" or "flank" [of a mountain]. Skirt is > obviously the basic meaning > As I pointed out, it can't be a native word in Spanish > BUT I was asking whether the form /alda, alde, halda/ might exist > in Old Spanish, Aragonese or Gascon. As you know, like Spanish, Gascon also > changed initial /fVC/ > /hVC/. Aragonese sometimes does this; although > descriptions of Aragonese sound pretty lame. If such a form did indeed > exist, either of these COULD have provided a source for Basque "alde, alte". > Now, what's YOUR point? > >Sp. falda is a Germanic borrowing into Romance (It., Oc., Cat., Ptg, > >falda). Coromines suggests from Frankish *falda `fold', cf OHG falt. ME > >fald, related to Goth falthan, OHG faldan, OE fealdan, ON falda `to > >fold'; related by Onions to PIE *pel/*pl- with a *-t- extension; cf. Gk > >dipaltos, diplasios `twofold', haploos `simple'; Lat plicare `to fold'. > >Max W. Wheeler In his 7th March post Rick Mc C mentioned a resemblance between the Basque forms _halde_. _alde_, etc. `side' mentioned in his _haltha_ entry (On-line dictionary ... non-IE/Germanic) and the Spanish word _falda_ `skirt, etc'. Since Larry Trask (01/03/99) had already pointed out that the Basque evidence pointed to _alte_ as the earliest recoverable form of the word in Basque, I understood Rick to be speculating on whether the Basque word (in one of its forms) might be the source of Spanish _falda_. My reply was intended to rebut this speculation by mentioning the well-known, and to my mind pretty convincing, etymology of _falda_, showing it to be of good IE stock, and therefore out of place in the context of substrate vocabulary. It seems he meant rather to suggest that the Romance word might be a source of the Basque. But quite apart from the semantic problems, there are 3 phonological mismatches, each of which would need an ad hoc account, viz. f- > h-/0- (very rare shift, except before /o/; Michelena, Fonetica Historica Vasca para. 13.3), -d- > -t-, and -a > -e. This is not greatly improved by searching out a Spanish form _halda_ (though this is apparently attested). Gascon _hauta_ would be a marginally better bet, formally. But Larry had already cast doubt on the reliability of the supposed Basque form with initial _h-. Anyway, it's not quite true that _falda_ 'can't be a native word in Spanish'. According to Penny, History of the Spanish Language, once the contrast between [f-] and [h-] became phonemic, there was a fair amount of lexical diffusion. Other 'native words' with retained /f-/ are: _fiero_ `proud', _feo_ `ugly', _faltar_ `to lack', _fallar_ `to fail', _fiesta_ `festival', _fiel_ `faithful', _fin_ `end', and, among Germanisms, _feudo_ `fief', _forro_ `lining'. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Mar 16 05:16:16 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 23:16:16 -0600 Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: Dear Yoel and IEists: -----Original Message----- From: Yoel L. Arbeitman Date: Monday, March 15, 1999 8:47 PM >Dear Pat and Colleagues, > In a word the answer is YES. The durative-iterative, same morpheme >involved, of Hittite dai- (< IE *dhe:) "to place, etc." is written > which represnts /t-skizzi/ where the root d(ai-) is reduced to >its minimum and the iterative -ski- is added with retrogressive >assimilitation of radical d to t. [Answers continued below]. Although the word is written zi-ik-ki-iz-zi according to Sturtevant, I understand your point. However in view of te-ih-hi, I am more more inclined to interpret this as tsikitsi, with a simple metathesis of the -s- because we have no reason to think zero-grade of tei- should be simply t-. Before metathesis took place, we should have expected **ti'skitsi. Thank you for your informative answer otherwise. Pat From MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 16:13:05 1999 From: MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:13:05 GMT Subject: Vocalic /r/ and /l/ in Mycenean Greek Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] For those who think that vocalic /r/ and /l/ persisted from IE into Mycenean Greek (as some Greek dialects present IE vocalic /r/ as {ar}, {ra} and others present it as {or}, {ro}, e.f. {stratos} / {strotos} = "army": there is evidence from Homer. In Homer several times a line ends in the standard formula {li/pous' andro/te:ta kai /he:be:n} = "[when he was slain, his soul fled] leaving manhood and youth": the / / mark the ends of the metrical feet. The foot /pous' andro/ is not valid for dactylic meter. As with many metrical faults in Homer, this fault may have been caused by a language change after the text was composed: if {androte:ta} was pronounced {a-nr-ta:-ta} with a vocalic /r/ (from the root {H2-n-r} = "man") when this formula was invented, it scans correctly. From BMScott at stratos.net Tue Mar 16 07:54:08 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 02:54:08 -0500 Subject: `Sancho' Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? In strictly onomastic sources I have usually seen them ascribed to Latin and respectively. In the Castilian and Aragonese citations that I've seen from the period 900-1300, is by far the most common form, followed by . Others include , , , , , , , and . Brian M. Scott From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 16:37:47 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:37:47 -0600 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Yes, the personal name `Sancho' is associated above all with the >medieval Kingdom of Navarre, which was predominantly Basque-speaking at >the time. The most famous bearers of the name were the Kings of >Navarre, who were certainly Basques. In all likelihood, we are looking >at a Basque name, though not necessarily one of ultimately Basque >origin. This name is totally opaque in Basque, and I am aware of no >plausible etymology for it. [my editing] >By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? Not quite, they are cognate, both are from /sanktu-/ shows up in Old Spanish for "holy, saint" and does conform to a greater degree to the usual treatment of Latin /-kt-/, which normally becomes /ch/ in Spanish words inherited from Latin --as opposed to Latinate loanwords e.g. leche < lacte-, hecho < factu-, dicho < dictu- , etc. Taking this into acount, looks more like a loan word. But Antso < Santso, while it definitely looks cognate to , , looks a bit askew given that Basque does have /ch/ yet we don't see *Santxo /sancho/. So it didn't come from . And Old Spanish had /ts/ but we don't see *Sanzo /santso > sanso or Santho/. So, is Old Basque Santso from some other Romance language, i.e. Gascon or a dialect of Aragonese or directly from Latin? >It should be borne in mind that medieval Romance names which were taken >into Basque often developed very distinctive Basque forms. For example, >it is hardly obvious that is merely the Basque form of the >medieval Spanish given name , or that is a vernacular >form of the name which appears in French as . And you might like >to puzzle over how it is that the traditional Basque form of `Jim' is > -- the etymology is straightforward if you know one or two >things about Spanish personal names. Sure, Xanti looks like Santiago but the others are straight from hell :> [snip] >However, or > is still a vernacular form of in the French Basque >Country, though the southern Basques prefer as their equivalent >of . The first French Basque woman I ever met was called > in French, in Basque, and I've more recently come >across another French Basque with the same two names. So Pantxika is not just a Basque spelling of Spanish Panchica? Then can we blame Pancho and Paco on the Basques? [snip] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 16:30:36 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:30:36 +0000 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/m In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 12 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >But that leaves the *mora word. Is this the same as Bavarian Mure, and > >is it the root of moraine? > I wonder if they're not possibly loanwords from Romance, like Mauer. Is > there a French-Proven?al or Swiss French dialect word that Mora"ne, moraine > could have been borrowed from? I'm not the person to ask about Bavarian Mure. Ger. Mora"ne is clearly a straight borrowing from Fr moraine, which according to Meyer-Lu"bke (s.v. murru) is from sav. morena (i.e. Franco-Provencal). Also Oc. mor(r)ena, which may also be borrowed rather than cognate. Before the spread of geological knowledge, moraines were, I suspect, associated only with visible glaciers. 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 X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 16 07:55:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 02:55:41 EST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, Bob Whiting wrote: <> I think I should explain that I was well aware that languages that have dropped case systems and case endings generally don't use the nominative as the surviving form. (The example I had in front of me was Latin "infans"(nom) > Old French "enfes" (nom.) but "infantem" (accusative)> Mod French "enfant.") If you look at my original post, however, I was stumbling towards a slightly different question. What I asked was why the nominative singular (in those languages in which they occur) was not in considered in reconstruction. The answer that both you and our moderator have given is that they are I guess "truncated" forms, not revealing or mutating the stems. (Part of the "phonotactics" - interesting word.) As you say, the nominative is "linguistically the least marked form." But that was of course the reason I choose the nominative singular, precisely because it was the least marked form. I don't think its that hard to see why one might naturally go to the form stripped even of stems to get to the elemental form of the word. Not that one should, but that one might. After all, to say that only the "ablative" form survived is to suggest that the word now carries the additional grammatical baggage of the ablative. Or, to go further, the notion that some stems might be nothing more than phonetically dictated walls, separating sounds in the roots that cannot be adjacent to the sounds of regular case endings. They could even survive as such in daughter languages where the endings no longer exists. Or that the stem served no other function than to signal the user that a particular word followed a peculiar or dialectical case-ending system. In that light, I hope the question why the nominatives were not considered in the reconstruction of the word doesn't sound that ludicrous. I wasn't for a moment doubting the reconstruction (of "night.") And the explanation of word-ending rules is good enough for me. (But I wonder why e.g. Latin couldn't have solved the problem the way it did in forming the rather regular-looking adjective - nocturnus.) So I'll take a chance and ask the question anyway - can a stem ever be seen as something like a vestigal case ending in reconstructing PIE - not part of the original word, but a compounded form that produced a universal "stem" in the daughter languages? <> Well actually the dictionary did give me some nominative singulars - which is what my question was about. And as far as the languages go, I'm still not bad at Greek or Latin, though I've forgotten a bit. And (but only if you insist of course) I can give a number of instances where prominent native speakers of both tongues expressed the notion that the nominative was "the true form of words." By the way probably just as serious a problem with dictionaries appears to be on the "semantic" side. 3000 year old words are often defined with a precision that - if you know your Homer, so to speak - can be as perilous as assuming that the nominative is worth talking about. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 16 16:32:04 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 11:32:04 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 5:21:05 PM, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: <> I don't want to give the impression that much of what you've said about this isn't plausible or compelling. The question I think it does not address is: What is the latest that PIE could have emerged from a local homeland and expanded to where we find it when the evidence gets direct? (I.e., written evidence) This is a natural governor - a reality check - on the tendency to keep back- dating PIE to the point to alleviate the very ungradiated jumble of IE languages. <> I don't think that is an answer in itself. Because the later languages you mention fall into Mallory's category of "state languages." Whether the exact term is right or not, the meaning is that there is a standardizing agent or agents that prevents splintering. Whether it's trade or the school marm or the Academie or the Latin grammarian or the mass media or even a dictionary, you have a strong force working against splintering and gradients. Without this standardizing force, epecially among sedentary populations, like sedentary farmers separated by thousands of years from one another, one should not even expect PIE to have been PIE a relatively short distance from the place of origin. Especially, if one follows Renfrew's "a few square miles per year" rate of expansion for agrnts of PIE suddenly pick up and "swallow up" another gradient of PIE? Did PIE follow the spread of agriculture all the way through to its outer fringes and then suddenly some of those dialects start moving and replacing other dialects? Did the first PIE converts wait 3 or 4000 years till the whole European gradient process was completed before they started mucking it up by moving around? Or did they move ahead of agriculture by trade or war, converting before agriculture got there? In the 5000 years that separates first agriculture from direct evidence of the languages of Europe (aside from Mycenaean), there should have been dozens of "swallow-uppers" that preceded Celtic or German or Romance. And these might have moved back and forth all across the continent in a way that would put many ancestors between the first historical IE languages and PIE. There might be many proto's between Proto-German and PIE. <> But you know, Mallory's expert on the North American tribes says the exact opposite. That the number of languages and language families actually substantially increased over time and with the coming of agriculture. The reason is obvious. Farming causes stabilization of location and localization promotes local diversity in language. Standardization is only something that happens with centralization - a very different event. I wrote: <> You wrote: <> But we have the answer to those question. The only singularity we have in late Neolithic Europe is the final conversions to agriculture. Otherwise we have a tremendous patchwork of cultural groups with some regionalized pockets that show evidence of common material cultures. And once again there is no historical evidence that one needs to adopt a language in order to adopt agriculture. Some of the existing cultures were doing materially better before agriculture, so the appeal is questionable. There is quite a bit of current literature that points out that the adoption of agriculture does not always make sense and does not necessarily increase population. <> But when we speak of the initial spread of PIE, we are talking about nothing but expansion at the expense of non- IE languages. By definition, the "edges of the area" would be right next to the core. At this point - if agriculture is spreading IE - we should expect that splintering should have started taking place very early - as you say. And wouldn't that mean that further out from the core, the source of expansion would not have been PIE but a dialect or language that was already an ancestor. And the next expansion would have been descended from a descendent. While nothing was keeping the original parent particularly stable. The whole scheme sends us to diversity and not uniformity. But the unique thing about IE languages is not their diversity but their commonality, something that makes the reconstruction of the proto language at all plausible. I think when you look for the latest possible date for a unity you get closer to the truth. PIE gives evidence of having been a standardized language in some way early on. The kurgans may explain it. Agriculture doesn't - not by itself. It creates the opposite effect without a standardizing agent. If Latin had been PIE, for example, it accomplished a lot of what it did in less than 600 years. And it did it without mandating conversion - in comparison for example to the German laws against speaking Wendish in the middle ages. I don't think elite dominance describes the Latin phenomena either. Whatever the Romans did, it seems to be one of the best historical model we have for what happened in the days when PIE was just another local dialect BUT on its way to turning into "the first ancestor" of a whole new family of languages. Regards, Steve Long From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 08:11:10 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 08:11:10 GMT Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: Glen Gordon wrote:- >... A labial quality must be added to explain this - thus *H3 = /h./ >and it is a labial *H2. ... The moderator commented:- >The evidence adduced in favour of voicing of *H3 is Skt. pibati, Latin bibit >"he drinks", a reduplicated present from a root reconstructed as *peH3-, in >combination with Sturtevant's Rule. A tad thin, I admit. --rma Anthony Appleyard replied:- >In my mouth at least, I find that the /e/ in /h.a/ tries to acquire a distinct >flavour of /a/, and the /e/ in /3e/ (where /3/ is ayin) tries to acquire a >distinct flavour of /o/. ... The moderator commented:-: >There exist in the phoneme inventories of several NW Caucasian languages both >voiceless and voiced labialized pharyngals, which cause rounding in adjacent >vowels; thus, "o-coloring" need not imply voicing in *H3. --rma If H3 was /h.w/ or similar, with a labial component, surely in at least one of PIE's many descendant languages we would find H3 presenting as /w/? [ Moderator's comment: Why? What would privilege any such language to be preserved? (Remember that the evidence we have for any reconstruction of any protolanguage results from the historical accident of preservation.) We might indeed find such evidence at a future date--but we cannot demand it _a priori_. --rma ] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 16:49:43 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:49:43 +0000 Subject: Greek question (night?) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> In which IE languages does -t appear in "night" > >>besides Germanic or Modern French?Wayles Browne wrote: Not actually Modern French where is [nhi]. Add MGk /nixta/ (or is only word-final -t sought?). According to Morris Jones, Welsh _nos_ is from *noss from the nominative *not-s < *nok{w}t-s; the oblique stem is seen in (tra-)noeth `the next day', OWelsh henoid [-] `tonight'. NB in _nos da_ `goodnight' we seem to have radical /d-/ preserved after /-s/, instead of lenited as is normal after a feminine noun. 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 mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 08:31:02 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 08:31:02 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Someone wrote:- > So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required > for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years > for them to be so large as to prevent communications ... Sheila Watts replied:- > This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful way. > ... and others have written about the amount of change since dispersion in e.g. Polynesian compared with Melanesian. I read a theory that there is one mechanism whereby a massive change in a language, or even a completely unrelated language, can develop quickly: in some natural environments where living is easy: very rarely but in theory it could happen, some children too young to have learned much of their parents' language could stray, or be the only members of their tribe to survive an enemy attack in a tribal war, manage to survive uncontacted to adulthood, and start a new tribe. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 17:07:19 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 11:07:19 -0600 Subject: arrancar In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Corominas/Coromines sounds like he had a bit of a split personality but this does happen when we switch languages How does fit in here? Or does it? Semantically it might fit providing it's from Romance Watkins's chart in his Dict. of IE Roots matches Germanic /hw/ with Latin /qu/ But can we have /QUr-/ & /hwr/? But then Watkins goes and says that is from IE *wer- and he leaves out . So Silent Cal is no help. And then there's renco BTW: what else is known about Sorothaptic? And the Sorothapts? [ moderator snip ] >Coromines, in his Catalan Etymological Dictionary, rejects the >suggested Germanic etymology he had proposed in DECH, preferring a >non-Celtic but IE etymon (sorota`ptic o li'gur [Sorothaptic or >Ligurian]), citing Lith, rin~kti [pick, collect], paranka` [gleaning], >OPruss ra~nk-twei [steal], isrankeis [let go!, deliver!], Germ wrankjan >[> Eng wrench], BSl *wranka: [hand, leg]. This or a similar root is the >source by a different route of Romance BRANCA [leg, paw], [branch]. >The verb certainly extends to Oc. and NW Italian dialects, and less >surely to the rest of Italy. Coromines's discussion of the etymology >extends to 4 columns, where in part he's arguing that this word's >distribution is typical of the IE dialect-type he calls Sorothaptic >(lexically and geographically between Celt, BSl, Illyrian-Venetic and >Germanic), though he agrees that variation in treatment of *wr- is >problematic. >Max From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 16 09:28:54 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 09:28:54 +0000 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [on the proposed derivation of Basque `sandal' from `branch(es)'] > maybe from cord made from pliable bark of branches? would that > work? Quite possibly. Even though I grew up in a very rural area, my knowledge of rustic crafts is severely limited. By the way, my sources tell me that a certain Zamacola, who is unknown to me, once actually defined as `a kind of shoe made of small branches', but I have to wonder about the reliability of this isolated and obscure source. The 18th-century writer Astarloa also defined as `thing made of branches', but Astarloa was just about the craziest etymologist in the solar system, and nothing he says can be taken at face value. [LT] > >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and > >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all > >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic > >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from > >Romance or from Basque. > The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, > doesn't exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian > Arabic may have allowed it or not. There are words, though, with > al-p- associated with Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras > [sp?] and others that escape me now. > Maybe someone else can help explain this According to Agud and Tovar, the Arabic word in question is recorded both as and as , with a dot over the whose significance is unknown to me. I too am surprised by that second form, but maybe /p/ was possible in the Arabic of Spain. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Mar 16 18:47:56 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 13:47:56 -0500 Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) Message-ID: I meant to respond to this, but had other things to attend to. But I would like to resurrect this thread. wrote, (eons ago) >Exactly, the fact that the imperative has the secondary (short) >endings shows that these were the unmarked, neutral ones. >Present (Non-past) = neutral + ``here and now''. The forms >without the -i extension then become past forms (aorist or >imperfect) by default. But the distinction was already in >Anatolian (-mi present vs. -m past). According studies of contemporary language, present vs non-present distinction is rare to non-existent (Comrie says the latter in his ``Tense''). Zero past does not seem to occur among languages with forms restricted to past that is obligatory. It seems better to assume that SE marked only person and number and could indicate past only when implied by context or by inference. But then there must have been some way (particles?) of overtly marking past when needed. Now, there is some evidence for augment outside Gr.Arm.I-Ir (Rasmussen indicated some in a post to the previous incarnation of this list). It is possible that the augment disappeared as the past became overtly marked otherwise (we can see this in progress in Pali). It may even be that the augment was grammaticized independently in Gr. and I-Ir: I don't know if the patterns of Myc., Homer and Avestan have been fully explained. In fact the zero past vs marked non-past of Hittite seems quite unusual. (i.e., Hiittite has its weirdness :-) I am not well read on the role of sentence particles in Hittite. Do they have any role in this? [I remember some work arguing that -kan marked perfectivity.] >Some features that are unique to the "Indo-Greek" verbal system are: >- the perfect as a separate "aspect", besides present (impfv.) >and aorist (pfv.). This is precisely what I objected to in the first place. There is no morphologically marked aspect in Vedic or any stage of Sanskrit. The so-called imperfect is the usual tense of narration and does not indicate non-attainment of result or non-total event etc. If PIE had no perfective vs imperfective contrast and I-Ir did not either, then why posit it for Gr-I-Ir? The `perfect' is just a resultative. The pluperfect and moods of the perfect do not carry any particular `aspectual' meaning. To put it bluntly: The usual morphological classification of Vedic verb forms found in grammar books has no syntactic justification, but is due to 19 c. prejudices. It is a serious methodological error to base syntactic comparisons on the mere names. > In Hittite, the perfect is still simply the past tense of the stative > (hi) conjugation. There are examples of resultative > `present perfect' > (perfective) past. But ``past state'' > resultative? IMHO, it would be better to assume that Hittite extended its use of -i for present into the `stative' by analogy, while the rest of IE extended the stative into resultative with further evolution into (a kind of) past in individual languages at different times. [Looking at some old messages, I found that I have asked this before and you agreed that PIE `perfect' was tenseless. In that case, Hittie -hi is an innovation.] >- the imperfect as a simple past tense of the present ((augment >+) present stem + secondary endings). What does `simple past tense of present' mean? If it means aspectually unmarked past, how does that indicate closer relationship with Greek? If it means ``present (imperfective) in the past'', the claim is wrong. And Armanian aorist has `eber' which is usually traced to `ebheret'. Slavic aorist and Baltic preterit also have forms which seem to be from present stem + secondary endings. so such a form is not just Gr-I-Ir. >- the subjunctive (conjunctive) as a thematic (of athematic >verbs) or doubly thematic (of thematic verbs) formation, without >additional markers. The only parallel is I think Latin ero:, the >future tense of "to be". I thought that there were other examples of Latin futures that can be traced to the root subjunctive and that there are a few Celtic traces as well. That leaves only the present subjunctive. But in Vedic, we see the present subjunctive (and moods generally) replace the root forms. So these may have started as analogical creations. >- The augment for past tenses. Also found in Armenian (3rd.p.sg. >of monosylabic verbs only). See above. >sigmatic aorist and future forms, Opinion seems to be mixed about the sigmatic future of Sanskrit: the -s- may be that of the sigmatic aorist or of the desiderative. General opinion seems to prefer the latter. The only reason to even suggest the former is the limitation of the -sya future to proximate future. But then that very fact begs for an explanation if try to connect it to other IE futures. Furthermore, why was the -sya future rare in RV with its place seemly often taken by subjunctives? And when it did become common, why was its domain restricted to proximate future, with periphrastic future used for predictions? > Italic, Celtic and Albanian ... but their forms are best described > as s-preterites. So what is the difference between s-preterite and s-aorist? But be sure to make the case for Vedic aspect before appealing to perfectivity. >And if the Armenian imperfect is indeed derived from the optative, >that's a remarkable Armenian-Tocharian (and Italo-Celtic?) isogloss. Past habitual is indicated in Avestan and Old Persian by the optative (sometimes augmented). I believe that Greek optative, in relative clauses can be ~ past habitual (cf English ``would''). If you want to change the picture of the IE verb because of the difficulties in explaining the syntactic evolution of various languages, you must explain the syntactic evolution of the Vedic verb as well, before connecting it ore closely to the Greek verb. What is sauce for the goose ... -Nath From yoel at mindspring.com Wed Mar 17 03:48:55 1999 From: yoel at mindspring.com (Yoel L. Arbeitman) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:48:55 -0500 Subject: Vocalic /r/ and /l/ in Mycenean Greek In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] At 04:13 PM 3/16/99 GMT, you wrote: TWO COMMENTS BELOW, ONE LIGHT AND ONE SERIOUS. >For those who think that vocalic /r/ and /l/ persisted from IE into Mycenean >Greek (as some Greek dialects present IE vocalic /r/ as {ar}, {ra} and others >present it as {or}, {ro}, e.f. {stratos} / {strotos} = "army": there is >evidence from Homer. In Homer several times a line ends in the standard >formula >{li/pous' andro/te:ta kai /he:be:n} = "[when he was slain, his soul fled] >leaving manhood and youth": the / / mark the ends of the metrical feet. The >foot /pous' andro/ A LITTLE FUN, PLEASE. IN SAYING "THE FOOT /POUS' ANDRO/", YOU MADE AN INVOLUNTARY PUN. YES, WHILE -POUS' HERE IS THE SECOND SYLLABLE OF LIPOUS(A) "LEAVING", I READ IT FIRST AS THE NOM. OF GREEK POUS "FOOT" AND UNDERSTOOD YOU TO BE SAYING "FOOT /(greek POUS/!!!! >is not valid for dactylic meter. As with many metrical faults in Homer, this >fault may have been caused by a language change after the text was composed: >if {androte:ta} was pronounced {a-nr-ta:-ta} with a vocalic /r/ (from the root >{H2-n-r} = "man") when this formula was invented, it scans correctly. WE HAVE IN OUR HOMERIC TEXT THE UNCONTRACTED FORMS, E.G. ANEROS "OF THE MAN" AND THE CONTRACTED FORMS ANDROS, WHERE- ONCE CONTRACTION OF THE E HAS BROUGH THE N AND THE R INTO IMMEDIATE PROXIMITY-, THE HOMORGANIC STOP TO THE DENTAL NASAL, VIZ. -D- IS EPENTHESIZED, WITH THE RESULT ANDRO-. WE HAVE NO STAGE OF GREEK ATTESTED EVER WHERE NASAL AND R MEET WITHOUT THE EPENTHESIS OF HOMORGANIC STOP. E.G. *MROTOS "MORTAL" > *MBROTOS > ATTESTED BROTOS. SO, WHILE WHAT YOU PROPOSE MAKES GOOD SPECULATION AND ACCORDS WITH THE THE RESTITUTION OF E.G. DIGAMMA IN HOMER, WE HAVE EVIDENCE FOR DIGAMMA IN OTHER GK., BOTH DIALECTALLY AND IN LINEAR B. FOR YOUR PROPOSAL, THERE SIMPLY IS NO EVIDENCE UNLESS WE SAY THAT THE HOMERIC METER IS THE EVIDENCE. YLA From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 16 18:48:59 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 12:48:59 -0600 Subject: "mama" Syndrome in 1st Person In-Reply-To: <00e001be6e9d$5e28b700$2e54fad0@patrickcryan> Message-ID: > >So what. You haven't demonstrated a link between relationship-words and > >pronouns nor proof that your "mama" theory is attributable to pronouns. Nor have you demonstrated the contrary. All we have is a fact, that 1st person pronouns show a statistically significant tendency to use nasals, which is the same thing that happens with female care-givers. I have one guess at why this might be. If you have another one, let's hear it. But the main thing is to realize that, contrary to what might be expected, the distribution of sounds in 1st person pronouns is not in fact random, so that finding "Nostratic" forms with nasals does not mean much. > ...including mass linguistic > >relationships. That languages can be related is ubiquitously > >demonstrated throughout linguistics. The "mama syndrome" in relation to > >pronouns is not in the least. I am terminating the discussion. I don't think so. So your explanation is effectively "Proto-World"? You do indeed have more in common with Pat Ryan than you may be pleased to contemplate. > > >Again, you're being Eurocentric. Again, I am not. To note that a tendency is statistically significant is not to assert that it is universal. The survey which revealed the anomaly was of languages of the world, not of IE languages or languages of Europe. (Oh where is that reference, someone out there must know ...) DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 16 18:53:16 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 12:53:16 -0600 Subject: IE Plosive System In-Reply-To: <36f088ed.13984101@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > Even less confusing: > 1) The near absence of roots of the form /DeG/. > 2) The near absence of roots of the forms /TeGH/ and /DHeK/. > 3) The near absence of /b/. Most of us would agree that "near absence" as well as absolute absence requires some explaining. (Not that anyone has denied this, I am just "moving right along". > So if there is an explanation, what is it? DLW From TomHeffernan at utk.edu Wed Mar 17 03:54:04 1999 From: TomHeffernan at utk.edu (Thomas Heffernan) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:54:04 -0500 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Although I teach Old English, I do not profess to be a practicing linguist rather more of a textual scholar. However, I am somewhat skeptical of the degree of intelligibility claimed for Old Norse, Old English and Old High German. If one looks at a very familiar text -- a text we know was preached in the churches on Sundays in the vernacular -- like that of the Parable of the Sower and the Seed in the three languages the differences seem considerable enough to preclude immediate intelligibility. I would have thought in places like Yorkshire in the late 9th century and 10th centuries that long association would more likely account for intelligibility. I have selected a line that although it shows a number of obvious cognates would still I think present problems for the non-native speakers. Old Norse reads " En sumt fellr i [th]urra jor[th] ok grjotuga...; Old English reads " Sum feoll ofer stanscyligean...; Old High German reads: "Andaru fielun in steinahti lant...." Yours, Tom Heffernan From alderson at netcom.com Tue Mar 16 22:22:01 1999 From: alderson at netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 14:22:01 -0800 Subject: [linguist@linguistlist.org: 10.393, Jobs: Historical ... ] Message-ID: For those on the mailing list who do not read LINGUIST: Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:05:54 -0500 From: LINGUIST Network Subject: 10.393, Jobs: Historical, Phonetics, Semantics, Computational LINGUIST List: Vol-10-393. Mon Mar 15 1999. ISSN: 1068-4875. Subject: 10.393, Jobs: Historical [ moderator snip ] -------------------------------- Message 1 ------------------------------- Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 16:09:17 -0500 From: Wayles Browne Subject: Historical, Phonetics, Semantics; Visiting Prof at Cornell Cornell University: The Department of Linguistics will be seeking to fill a tenure-track position for a historical linguist specializing in Indo-European to begin July 1, 2000. In the interim, the department has been authorized to appoint a visitor (rank open) to teach courses in historical and Indo-European linguistics either for the entire academic year 1999-2000 or for the spring semester only. For further information, contact Alan Nussbaum (ajn8 at cornell.edu). To ensure full consideration, candidates should send application statements, vitae, three letters of recommendation, and (no more than three) representative publications by April 16, 1999 to: IE Visitor Search Committee, Department of Linguistics, 227 Morrill Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701 USA. Cornell is an AA/EO Employer. [ moderator snip ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-10-393 From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 03:51:32 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 19:51:32 PST Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: ME (GLEN): A labial quality must be added to explain this - thus *H3 = /h./ and it is a labial *H2. ... MODERATOR: The evidence adduced in favour of voicing of *H3 is Skt. pibati, Latin bibit "he drinks", a reduplicated present from a root reconstructed as *peH3-, in combination with Sturtevant's Rule. A tad thin, I admit. --rma It does seem kind of thin. APPLEYARD: In my mouth at least, I find that the /e/ in /h.a/ tries to acquire a distinct flavour of /a/, and the /e/ in /3e/ (where /3/ is ayin) tries to acquire a distinct flavour of /o/. Well, certainly *H2 and *H3 appear to lower IE vowels. As far as I understand, both *a and *o are low vowels (an important thing to keep in mind), *a being unrounded front and *o being rounded back. If both *H2e and *H3e become Anatolian *ha in sharp contrast to the result of IE *H1e, then we must conclude that there is something special about both *H2 and *H3 that makes it quite different from *H1 which shows up with virtually no trace in later IE lgs. Thus the logical choice for *H1 has to be /?/. Since *H2 and *H3 both agree on lowering vowels and since laryngeals are known to do such a thing, */h./ might be a logical choice. Yet *H2 and *H3 are different in that *H3 in addition to lowering, rounds vowels, thus the labial */h./ for *H3. Voicing doesn't necessarily accomplish this feat as the moderator points out. Labials are a more direct choice. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Tue Mar 16 22:41:13 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:41:13 +0000 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: At 7:28 pm 15/3/1999, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >>Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages >>of stratified societies are always class dialects. >-- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- >based. "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland >dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, >and they have no correlation to class at all. >The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a >class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a very >rare phenomenon. The English upper classes in the earlier part of the 19th century spoke regionally (Lord Derby, with a base outside Liverpool in Lancashire, served as a Tory and then as a Liberal cabinet minister in the 1860s to 1880s, and is credited with having a Lancashire sound to his voice). Earlier this was even more so (and Gladstone is also reputed to have had a Liverpudlian tinge to his speech). But their vocabulary &c was another thing (and that may have been the case in other places and times). And were not the French aristos in the tumbrils reputed to be identifiable by their speech? The English case (and it may be found in certain strata in Ireland and Scotland) probably arose from the railways, the great extension of the boarding system of "public" schools, and the need for many more people to staff the empire. >Standard languages are usually simply a regional dialect >Eg., the Border ballads show laird and crofter speaking the same dialect... >because that's exactly what they did. Prior to the 18th century, squire and >tenant in England also spoke the same regional dialects. But was not the first standard late middle/early modern English the result of a government civil service standard? There was a standard Gaelic at the same time, but that was established by bards and the like. >There's absolutely no reason to assume that the situation was different in >Anglo-Saxon times; thegn and peasant and thrall (unless imported) all spoke >various regional dialects of Old English; nor is there any reason to suppose >that the standardized written tongue of the Wessex kings' scribes was much >different from the spoken language. Perhaps a bit more conservative, but >then, contemporary written English is more conservative than the spoken >language as well. But in late AS times, of course, there was an importation of Normans and others, such as Richard who set up his Castle where I used to live under the aegis of the Confessor in the 1050s. And at 7:37 pm 15/3/1999, JoatSimeon at aol.com also wrote: >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >> >>And there is evidence that dirt farming (versus husbandry) did not take >>hold in the British Isles until the early bronze age. > >Agriculture was established in Britain in the centuries after 4000 BCE and the >plow was already employed there in the 4th millenium. >(Dates from the OXFORD PREHISTORY OF EUROPE, chs. 4&5). There is evidence to suggest that not only was agriculture in place in this part of the Severn Valley (Worcestershire) in the fifth millenium BCE, but that some at least of the bones of the present road and field systems were in place then. Gordon Selway From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 04:39:16 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 20:39:16 PST Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: ANTHONY APPLEYARD: If H3 was /h.w/ or similar, with a labial component, surely in at least one of PIE's many descendant languages we would find H3 presenting as /w/? This is not necessarily so since we don't find even the "unlabial" *H2 in non-Anatolian languages. It should be noted that /h./ doesn't mean /h.w/. The latter is a consonant cluster whereupon we would expect such a thing as you say. The phoneme /h./ means that the labial superscript denotes a _quality_ of the phoneme. An example is English "ship" which has automatic rounding of "sh". This is pronounced in contrast to "shwip" yet most English speakers don't pay attention to the contrast. However, I have been wondering about things like Sanskrit da-u (1rst person singular). It almost looks like *-H3 (*-h) had become *-w in this instance. I'll let others respond to its validity however. I may be wrong. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 16 22:54:09 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:54:09 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <7460dd16.36eda595@aol.com> Message-ID: >In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >>Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages >of stratified societies are always class dialects.> >-- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- >based. "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland >dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, >and they have no correlation to class at all. There are very strong class accents in many parts of the US. Here in Mississippi and in much, if not most of the South, the middle and upper classes [at least those under 50 or so] speak a dialect very similar to Midwestern English but they still use "y'all". Older upper class white women around here tend to drop final -r and speak very differently from lower class white women. Lower class whites speak a dialect similar to Appalachian English [with final /-r/ and leveling of /ae/ & /E/ to /ey/]. Have you heard "Burghese" in and around Pittsburgh? Have you noticed that on the East Coast that in the suburbs people tend to sound like they're more from the Midwest than from the East Coast? My friends in college from Moorestown NJ & Bucks Co PA didn't sound anything like Rocky. Very few of my daughters' friends in her MA prep school who are from Boston sound anything like Will Hunting. The only ones who do are from ethnic families who moved out to the suburbs. Have you noticed that in much of the Midwest, the West and the Northwest, working class whites often sound like they're from Appalachia? Have you noticed that upper-class African-Americans often have a distinctively class-based accent that is recognizable as African-American --e.g. the older woman in the Disney commercial. Friends of mine have referred to this as an "AME accent". There is a very definite class diglossia in the US in which regional accents tend to be much stronger among the lower classes. It is not a sharp divide but it's noticeable. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 17 04:50:16 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 23:50:16 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (dates) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/16/99 4:14:11 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> That's fine. The Balkans then too. Again my whole point was that it took multiple millenia for agriculture to move across Europe. And that if we identify PIE or spin-offs with the spread of agriculture, the language is moving incredibly slow. And btw it looks like we both might be out-of-date. I just received a post that says that dirt farming may have been practiced periodically in Greece even before 7000 bce: See, though I haven't read it: S. Andreou, M. Fotiadis, and K. Kotsakis, "Review of Aegean Prehistory V: The Neolithic and Bronze Age of Northern Greece," American Journal of Archaeology 100 (1996) 537-97. <> That seems about right. Two thousand years to go about 600-800 miles. Just about slow enough. <<..and spread across Europe in the late 6th and early 5th millenium with the Linear Pottery culture.>> Linear Ware Culture raced ahead of agriculture. "In physical extent, the LBK in its early phase began in Hungary, reaching Holland in two to three centuries,..." In fact, T.D. Price in "Affluent foragers of Mesolithic southern Scandinavia,"(1995) claims that LBK culture spread five and a half times as fast as Ammerman and Cavalli- Sforza's model of demic advance predicted. And of course there were whole sections of Europe (including Greece) where Linear Ware (LBK) did not go at all. <> This is where I think some of our problem arises. Evidence of agriculture is not evidence of the adoption of agriculture. Iron fragments have been found in Scandinavia dating to 1200 bce, but iron usage came much later. Bogucki (Forest Farmers and Stockherders: Early Agriculture and its Consequences in North-Central Europe, Cambridge Univ Press1995) showed how the transition to farming on the northern plain took nearly a thousand years AFTER the arrival of the first signs of agriculture. The evidence has continued to suggest that early dates reflect availability without acquisition. (see Zvelebil and Rowley-Conwy's work.) As of 1996, the date I had consistently seen for TRB farming in Denmark is 3900 bce and I'd love to know if anything much earlier has been found. Otherwise let's just say it takes another 1000 years for farming to go another what 800 miles? <> The evidence in Britain is even more telling. Although husbandry clearly comes to Britain early, it looks like that plough was strictly ornamental. This is the first news brief from British Archeaology March 1996, and I've seen nothing that contradicts these first findings: <<...bones of about 23 Neolithic people from ten sites in central and southern England, suggests that these `first farmers' relied heavily on animal meat for food, or on animal by-products such as milk and cheese, and that plant foods in fact formed little importance in their diet. The bones date from throughout the Neolithic, c 4100BC - c 2000BC. ... There are a number of ways of tracing the original food source of some of our tissues, and one way is to look at the relative ratios of certain elements, known as `stable isotopes', in bone protein. One particular isotope gives evidence of whether humans were getting most of their food from plant or animal sources.... Human bones from the Iron Age and from Romano-British sites were also tested, and their isotope values were a little higher than those of herbivores. This is as we might expect, as there is little doubt that in these periods people practised relatively intense cereal agriculture, and only supplemented their diet with meat.... The Neolithic results, however, were surprisingly different. They were as high, and sometimes even higher, than stable isotope values of carnivores. This suggests these Neolithic people had relatively little plant food in their diet and instead were consuming large amounts of meat.... Grain and agricultural implements have, of course, been found at Neolithic sites in Britain. The isotope results do not rule out some limited grain production and consumption; but they suggest it did not form a significant portion of the diet. The sites where grain has been found generally seem to have been used mainly for ritual purposes, and it is possible (as archaeologists such as Richard Bradley and Julian Thomas have argued) that in Britain,... grain was grown, or even imported from the continent, only for ritual purposes. Agricultural implements may also have assumed a largely ritual significance...." So I don't think my dates, given my meaning, are all that bad. 7000 bce to about 3500, a little later in some corners. About 3-4000 years, from Greece (and the southern Balkans) to Trafalger Square. Much longer than any pre-literate language could stand itself, much less stay even remotely stay the same from one end to the other. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Mar 16 23:12:03 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:12:03 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: Dear Joat amd IEists: -----Original Message----- From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: Tuesday, March 16, 1999 3:57 PM >In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >>Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages >>of stratified societies are always class dialects. >-- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- >based. "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland >dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, >and they have no correlation to class at all. [ moderator snip of remainder of long article ] There is no way, of which I am aware, to really prove this but I will relate my experiences to you for whatever it may be worth. I have lived on both coasts of the United States, in the Midwest, and currently in the South. My experience has been that professional managers, with whom I have principally dealt in business, speak a standard English with very few regional differences, in every part of the country. Sometimes the business owners, if they are first generation nouveau riche, speak the local dialect --- in fact, sometimes exaggerate it (for psychological reasons, I believe) but the second generation of rich shed the regionalisms, and join the managerial classes of the rest of America in speech if not in anything else. Pat From DRC at antnov1.auckland.ac.nz Thu Mar 18 03:54:02 1999 From: DRC at antnov1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 22:54:02 -0500 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard wrote: > Someone wrote:- >>So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is required >>for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and more than 2000 years >>for them to be so large as to prevent communications ... > Sheila Watts replied:- >>This seems to me to be too broad a generalisation to work in any useful way. >> ... >and others have written about the amount of change since dispersion in e.g. >Polynesian compared with Melanesian. I read a theory that there is one >mechanism whereby a massive change in a language, or even a completely >unrelated language, can develop quickly: in some natural environments where >living is easy: very rarely but in theory it could happen, some children too >young to have learned much of their parents' language could stray, or be the >only members of their tribe to survive an enemy attack in a tribal war, manage >to survive uncontacted to adulthood, and start a new tribe. I've seen a reference to this theory recently -- I'll see if I can find the source, but I believe it was attributed to Horatio Hale, in a paper I haven't seen. Since I have great respect for Hale as a linguist, I am reluctant to associate him with a theory that sounds to me like fantasyland. I believe Hale had in mind the striking linguistic diversity of California, compared to areas further east. Ross Clark From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Tue Mar 16 23:41:11 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:41:11 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <7460dd16.36eda595@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time, > iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: > >Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages > of stratified societies are always class dialects.> > -- That's simply not so. In the US, dialect is regional rather than class- > based. It's both. I hear lower-class dialect fairly frequnetly. > "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland > dialect. I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week, > and they have no correlation to class at all. > The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a > class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a very > rare phenomenon. Not that rare. Classical Latin was also a class dialect. In general anything that leads to lessened contact will lead to divergence, and that includes class barriers, gender barriers, even (dare I say it) mountains. > > Standard languages are usually simply a regional dialect Of an upper class. > Eg., the Border ballads show laird and crofter speaking the same dialect... > because that's exactly what they did. Prior to the 18th century, squire and > tenant in England also spoke the same regional dialects. The situation in England of that time is a little anomalous, because the previous standard had been destroyed by the Norman Conquest. As a new one emerged, for a time everyone spoke his local dialect, because there was nothing else. Thus the class barriers in English at that time were relatively recent, and there had not been much time for much divergence to occur. > There's absolutely no reason to assume that the situation was different in > Anglo-Saxon times; thegn and peasant and thrall (unless imported) all spoke > various regional dialects of Old English; nor is there any reason to suppose > that the standardized written tongue of the Wessex kings' scribes was much > different from the spoken language. Perhaps a bit more conservative, but > then, contemporary written English is more conservative than the spoken > language as well. Yes, and various sub-standard features, such as the accumulative ("double") negative and Black English "be", despite being old, are suppressed. DLW From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 09:03:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:03:14 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' < Sanctius; Panza < lat. pantex In-Reply-To: <36EE3F13.B693C0D9@eucmos.sim.ucm.es> Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Javier Martinez wrote: > LT wrote > > at a Basque name, though not necessarily one of ultimately Basque > > origin. This name is totally opaque in Basque, and I am aware of no > > plausible etymology for it. > < lat. Sanctius? Oops -- I meant to write "no plausible etymology for it *in Basque*", since I haven't looked at any attempts to find Romance etymologies. I don't know whether a Latin * would be a plausible source for Spanish . In any case, should have been taken into Basque as *. Since the observed points to an earlier *, we would have to suppose that the unrecorded * was interprteted by the Basques as a diminutive, and that * was created from this by back-formation. The point of this last is that Basque forms diminutives by palatalization. Hence, for example, `Joseph' --> `Joe'; `Martin' --> `Marty'; and so on. There exist apparent parallels for such back-formation. For example, the widespread word `lopped off, stubby, short' has an attested variant , and appears to have been borrowed from the synonymous Castilian , with resulting from back-formation. (Both and palatalize to , so a back-formation might give either result. In the case of *, though, only * could be formed, and not *, since Basque has sibilant harmony: a word may contain only apical sibilants () or only laminal sibilants (), and not both.) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 17 00:12:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 00:12:35 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EDAB21.6322E788@neiu.edu> Message-ID: "maher, johnpeter" wrote: >"Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. No. >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: >> "maher, johnpeter" wrote: >> >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; >> 1. Surely ... >Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly >vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or >homework. I'd say absence of homework is rather exemplified by (1) getting the Arabic word ('usta:dh) wrong, (2) claimimg that Italian is "a calque of sorts" (?) on <'usta:dh>. Surely. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 09:11:02 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:11:02 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> ar?ndano [ara/ndano] "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ??, [c] >> compara con vasco ar?n [ara/n] "endrino" [c] >> pre-rom. ra?z de ar?n [rai/z de ara/n] [c] [LT] > Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, > but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. > According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words > require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither > of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . > Could aran be from an original form *agran-? In borrowings taken into Basque from the Roman period onward, a medial plosive-liquid cluster (intolerable in Basque) is normally resolved by the insertion of an epenthetic echo vowel, and hence * would be expected to surface in Basque as *. But, if the word was borrowed earlier, perhaps different strategies were in use for resolving such clusters. > btw: what are the other forms in Romance & Celtic? The only forms I have handy are these: Aragonese Irish Welsh , singulative Other forms can be found in the standard etymological dictionaries. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 01:04:27 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:04:27 PST Subject: Greek question & the pre-history of *nekwt Message-ID: ME (GLEN): I know Hittite cannot be feminine since it doesn't have this gender thing. This is the neuter *-t/*-d found in words like *kwi-d "what" and the heteroclitic declension: [nom-acc] **yekwn-d > *yekwr "liver". Thus: **nekw-d > *nekw-t TADAAAA!!! MODERATOR: Hittite does not have a separate feminine, but it does have an opposition of common vs. neuter (or animate vs. inanimate). Hittite _nekuz_ is of common gender, so I repeat the question: What neuter? MIGUEL: Or, put differently, what's the nominative -s doing in nekut-s? Yes, I'm in deep error. I was starting to realise this when the Anatolian form was spoken of like it was an animate noun. Whoops. There goes my theory, down, down, CRASH! -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 09:45:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:45:53 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [LT] > >By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? > Not quite, they are cognate, both are from /sanktu-/ > shows up in Old Spanish for "holy, saint" and does > conform to a greater degree to the usual treatment of Latin /-kt-/, which > normally becomes /ch/ in Spanish words inherited from Latin --as opposed to > Latinate loanwords e.g. leche < lacte-, hecho < factu-, dicho < dictu- , > etc. > Taking this into acount, looks more like a loan word. > But Antso < Santso, while it definitely looks cognate to , > , looks a bit askew given that Basque does have /ch/ yet we don't > see *Santxo /sancho/. So it didn't come from . And Old Spanish had > /ts/ but we don't see *Sanzo /santso > sanso or Santho/. > So, is Old Basque Santso from some other Romance language, i.e. > Gascon or a dialect of Aragonese or directly from Latin? I don't know. But the first Romance variety I would look at is Navarrese Romance, since this was the Romance variety used in Navarre by non-Basque-speakers, and the second is Gascon, since Gascon, or at least some variety of Occitan, was widely used in the early days of the Kingdom of Navarre as the language of polite society. (Basque was *never* used in this function, even though it was the majority language in the larger part of Navarre.) Unfortunately, there exists no comprehensive and reliable reference work on Basque personal names. (Surnames, yes, but not given names.) Observations about possible etymologies for given names are scattered widely through the specialist literature. Since I've read just about all of this literature, I ought to know if a proposal exists, but I can't recall one. However, it may be that I've just forgotten it. [LT] > >It should be borne in mind that medieval Romance names which were taken > >into Basque often developed very distinctive Basque forms. For example, > >it is hardly obvious that is merely the Basque form of the > >medieval Spanish given name , or that is a vernacular > >form of the name which appears in French as . And you might like > >to puzzle over how it is that the traditional Basque form of `Jim' is > > -- the etymology is straightforward if you know one or two > >things about Spanish personal names. > Sure, Xanti looks like Santiago but the others are straight from > hell :> Yes, it is Spanish `Saint James' which is the source of Basque , with both the usual Basque clipping of long names and the usual palatalization to create a diminutive. Assuming that the orthographic in Spanish genuinely represents [f] and not [h], I would surmise, without checking, that we might be looking at an original Romance *, which would regularly yield Basque * --> * --> * --> * --> . As for , the direct source would be something similar to the well-recorded Basque form `John', of transparent origin and commonly pronounced as two syllables, roughly [jwanes]. Conversion of an initial consonant to /m/ is another Basque process for forming diminutives, and palatalization of the sibilant is, of course, normal. [LT] > >However, or > > is still a vernacular form of in the French Basque > >Country, though the southern Basques prefer as their equivalent > >of . The first French Basque woman I ever met was called > > in French, in Basque, and I've more recently come > >across another French Basque with the same two names. > So Pantxika is not just a Basque spelling of Spanish Panchica? Oh, it very likely is, since that final <-ika> is not normal in Basque in forming diminutives. But, curiously, is common only in the French Basque Country. I've never encountered anybody with this name south of the Pyrenees. > Then can we blame Pancho and Paco on the Basques? Maybe, but I doubt it, especially for , which does not at all conform to the usual Basque patterns for forming diminutives. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 01:30:32 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:30:32 PST Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: >> Borrowing of pronouns is rare, but NOT impossible: ROBERT ORR: Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had become indistinguishable from sing. forms. Yes, yes, and I don't think anyone is disputing that it happens from time to time, here and there, nth person by nth person, but so far people have been citing tidbits of scattered factoids to pettily ignore something that is blunt and obvious, trying desperately to derail the topic perhaps because some think that "debate" equals "arguement". It doesn't change anything. The probability remains likelier that languages that show evidence of a specific ENTIRE paradigm and an ENTIRE (as in WHOLE) set of pronouns are genetically related somehow until such time as proof showing that it IS the result of borrowing is found. (I'm stressing ENTIRE so that people understand what I'm talking about when I say ENTIRE as in WHOLE). We can't say that the similarities found between IE and Uralic are in fact 100% borrowed. We can only dilude ourselves into thinking that our precious and pure IE can't be genetically related to anything which is irrational. In the absence of evidence either way, we must accept that genetic ties between IE and Uralic are the best possibility above all else and all the examples in the world of pronominal borrowing aren't going to change that because borrowing of an ENTIRE set of pronouns or an ENTIRE paradigm is rare, rare, rare. It happens but it's rare. Rare, I say. Did I say "rare" yet? We should put these insignificant thoughts in the far reaches of our mind until such time as they are warranted. Are they warranted? No. Nothing much more will be gained in IE studies until people in general bravely address these kinds of issues with honesty instead of with a purely opposition frame of mind. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 09:59:26 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:59:26 +0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: <36f53280.57403725@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: >But this works both ways. An unintelligible written document >does not rephrase itself, while an interlocutor will try again >until he's understood (if it's in his own interest, of course). This is true, of course, and a good point. But see below. (snip) >In the case of late OE / late ON it's often said that the two >languages were "very close" and mutually intelligible. My own >exposure to ON is negligible (and I can't say I'm fluent in OE), >but it seems to me that such claims are exaggerated. West and >North Germanic had already been diverging for quite some time a >thousand years ago. >But if those claims are made, it's not because the people making >them are trained linguists, but it's because the *evidence* shows >a degree of interaction between the two languages that can only >be explained if there was indeed a fair amount of mutual >intelligibility. But this mutual intelligibilty was probably not >"automatic" as in the case of two dialects of teh same language, >but the result of lots of exposure. Roger Lass and I once had an interesting discussion on the question of mutual intelligibility of OE and ON, which neither of us thought was likely in any widespread sense. There are textual references to interactions in whichOE and ON speakers seem each to have spoken his own language (e.g. in 'The battle of Maldon'), but these are works of literature rather than history. Even if we take them at face value, we cannot know whether such exchanges really occurred, how much each party understood of what the other said, whether they had interpretative help and indeed, how much contact each had had with the language of the other before the events descirbed in the text. I think the problem I had with Rich Alderson's original posting was that I thought it posited rather too undifferentiated a view of what mutual intelligibility means. We need to distinguish between 'so intelligible that tow speakers can just hold a conversation straight off', 'intelligible enough for speakers to make themselves understood if they really want to' 'intelligible enough for speakers to convey very simple messages when there is a very high degree of need.' And the boundary between language acquisition through contact and language learning also seems to me to be a fuzzy one. In conclusion, I still think it's an oversimplification to try to talk about time depths at which mutual intellgibility can be predicted. Modern related language and dialects show us that this is a very complex issue. Best wishes SheilaWatts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 [ Moderator's comment: I agree with what Sheila Watts has to say on the subject. What I originally responded to was the notion that such communication must be rejected based on a relatively short time frame, which I hope we can agree is also simplistic. --rma ] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 02:19:49 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 20:19:49 -0600 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > In fact, Scandinavian, German and Old English were probably mutually > comprehensible as recently as 1000 CE -- at least on an elementary level. > Hmmm. Well, perhaps we should limit that to Old English, Scandinavian, and > Low German. I actually find myself agreeing with Joat ... what a concept. DLW From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 10:13:29 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 10:13:29 +0000 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: <36EE5EEE.A08968C1@neiu.edu> Message-ID: >?... in October 1913, the Balkan League of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and >Monte Negro, encouraged by Russia, declared war on Turkey. In Belgrade, >Trotsky watched the 18th Serbian Infantry marching off to war in uniforms of >the new khaki color. They wore bark sandals and a sprig of green in their >caps. These were perhaps sandals made of a substance called bast, traditionally used for a kind of basketwork in Russia (to my knowlegde) and quitte possibly also in other Slav countries. My Cahmbers dictionary says it is 'inner bark, esp. of lime' (also 'phloem' (?), 'fibre' and ',matting'), though it looks rather like woven rushes or reeds. Russian folktales frequently refer to peasants wearing this kind of footgear. According to Chambers also, it rhymes with gas, not with mast, in RP. Sorry everyone, this is an answer to a question Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen asked me nearly 15 years ago. In my variety of English all the -as words rhyme with each other (gas, gassed, past, mast, mass etc.), so I couldn't answer Jens' question at the time. Best wishes Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 02:32:25 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 18:32:25 PST Subject: PIE plosives Message-ID: MIGUEL: Good point (but Madurese has /b/). I had always kind of assumed without looking that Madurese voiced aspirates must be due to Sanskrit influence, but I see that Mad. has dhu(wa') "2", so that's presumably the Madurese reflex of PAN *Duwa, where *D is what? Retroflex? I assumed so. Tagalog has dalawa. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 17 13:29:35 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 08:29:35 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/16/99 7:09:19 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> And that of course brings up the whole issue of "the second language." In some cases, we just mean exposure to a foreign language. But in others, we are talking about bi-lingualism - presumably a critical stage in the PIE- related situation where a non-IE speaker might be adopting IE. Are there tendencies in such situation that might affect the phonological structure of the adopted language? BTW, there is on the web, a neat site called Enthnologue put up by the SIT that is a catalogue of world languages (I think it is UN info.) There one learns for example such things as: "ALLEMANNISCH (ALEMANNISCH, ALLEMANNIC, ALEMANNIC, SCHWYZERD?TSCH, ALSATIAN) [GSW] (300,000 in Austria; 1991 Annemarie Schmid; 4,225,000 in Switzerland; 1986). Southwestern. Also in Alsace, France. Indo-European, Germanic, West, Continental, High. Approximately 40% inherent intelligibility with Standard German. Speakers are bilingual in Standard German. Called 'Schwyzerd?tsch' in Switzerland, 'Alsatian' in southeastern France. Similar to Swabian. Differs from most other German varieties in not having undergone the second lautverschiebung, or vowel shift. NT 1984. Bible portions 1936-1986." The URL is: http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/countries/Germ.html And finally it is odd to hear two speakers of different languages using two languages to speak back and forth. If they have any sense of accomodation between them, for example, they do tend to make concessions - e.g., if the topic is a dog, it is odd to use the different words to refer to the dog. This is why a third neutral language is as much a matter of etiquette as it is a matter of understanding. Lingua Franca's however also help to get past all that. Regards, Steve Long From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 03:49:11 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (David L. White) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:49:11 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Yoel L. Arbeitman wrote: > We cannot ignore the famed example of Sapir's. Hittite /kubaGi/ > (/G/ - voiced pharyngeal, ghain) has a double representation in Biblical > Hebrew: qoba'' ('' = ayin) and koba''. From this Sapir concluded that > whereas Hebrew is aspirated phonetically and Hebrew /q/ is > non-aspirated, but glottalized or pharyngealized (emphatic), the Hittite > which was phonetically [k] i.e. [-aspiration, -emphaticness], could not > adequately be represented by either Hebrew grapheme. So the alternating > writings. As for the cluster /nt/ in Anatolian into Greek, this is a > special combination. Witness its pronunciation in Modern Greek. One cannot > extrapolate from how a /nt/ would be transcribed into Greek to how any non > prenasalized unvoiced obstruent would be realized phonetically and/ or > graphemically. I think it is not unreasonable to suppose that Greek would probably have borrowed [nt] as /nt/ and [nd] as /nd/. I note as well that if Greek /depas/ is a borrowing from an Anatolian word with /-p-/, the the fact that we do not find */dephas/ suggests that the Anatolian voiceless plosives were not aspirated. DLW From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 03:49:18 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (David L. White) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:49:18 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /nt/ Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > > On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very > >early, evidently), > What evidence? I have no idea. Whatever Palmer was using .... From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 13:42:49 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:42:49 +0000 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] > >> rel. con vasco abarka; ra?z de alpargata [sandal] [c] > >> pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] > >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and > >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all > >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic > >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from > >Romance or from Basque. > The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, doesn't > exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian Arabic may have > allowed it or not. There are words, though, with al-p- associated with > Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras [sp?] and others that escape > me now. > Maybe someone else can help explain this Coromines mentions, to explain Hispano-Arabic . possible contamination with some (unidentified) oriental word [i.e. some hand-waving by Coromines]. The plural is the source of Sp. . The cognates in Cat., Port, have the form . 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 03:49:23 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (David L. White) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:49:23 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Steven Schaufele wrote: > Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, > borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had > become indistinguishable from sing. forms. That's only borrowing (in the usual sense) if the languages were mutually incomprehensible. That it occurred at all suggests that they were not. DLW From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 14:02:12 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 14:02:12 +0000 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36EDAB21.6322E788@neiu.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > "Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > > >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; > > 1. Surely ... > Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly > vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or > homework. > Spell out the phonetic developments and refute the ascription to Arabic Well, part of the argument involves, would you believe it?, some comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has , and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only but also , , , , ; and in mod. Sp dialects (including America) . With all those, alongside, of course, of the perfectly well attested Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp and Ar begins to look rather less interesting. I go along with Miguel CV on this, and the accusation that he hadn't done his homework is gratuitously offensive. If JPM had done his, he'd have known the sort of facts I mention in the previous paragraph. 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 iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 03:49:28 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (David L. White) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:49:28 -0600 Subject: /m/ in 1st Person Pronouns Message-ID: Glen Gordon wrote: > I'm sorry if I seemed wrought with hypertension, but I just do not think > that this is an idea that should be considered. It is logically flawed > from the get-go. There couldn't possibly be any way for this hypothesis > to be realistically tested in a scientific way and amounts to nothing > more than a fantasy concocted by linguists who are not good at what they > do. Can you explain to me how this could be credibly tested? No? I > thought not :) A good part of what we do in historical linguistics cannot be tested, as researchers in ther fields would use that term. But if what I am suggesting is true, then 1st person pronouns in /m/ should be more common than those in /n/. As far as I know, nothing has been done on this. By the way, how can "the mama syndrome" be tested? DLW From iglesias at axia.it Wed Mar 17 20:30:33 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:30:33 PST Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Lei e Loro in italian were apparently copied from the Spanish usage at the height of Spanish power in Italy and stand for "Signoria" = my Lord, my Lady (source Giacomo Devoto). Yes, Mussolini did try to impose Voi instead of Lei, but he was unsuccessful. Today, people still use Lei, but Loro in the plural is often replaced with Voi, without necessarily implying familiarity which singular "tu" implies. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 17 02:53:02 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 18:53:02 PST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >>So can we not assume that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 years is >>required for communications difficulties to become strenuous, and >>more than 2000 years for them to be so large as to prevent >>communications, >-- in general, but not necessarily in particular. Drastic >modification is possible in a fairly short time Ain't that the truth! Ever listened to rap lately?? Does anyone REALLY understand Shakespeare anymore? "Whan thaet April with his showres soote..." What the &*@#???! [ Moderator's comment: Chaucer, of course. Shakespeare is easy. --rma ] Yet another reason why Miguel's arguements, about how "different" IE languages have become over a seemingly short interval to substantiate a different locale for IE, don't sway me either. And if you think about it, there's no reason not to think that IE had differentiated BEFORE these dialects had spread out. Thus differences between Anatolian and Greek after a millenium or so don't get me in a big tizzy. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 16:03:22 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 16:03:22 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > > ar?ndano [ara/ndano] "blueberry" 1726, s. XI "adelf" [sic] < ??, [c] > > compara con vasco ar?n [ara/n] "endrino" [c] > > pre-rom. ra?z de ar?n [rai/z de ara/n] [c] > Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, > but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. > According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words > require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither > of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . > btw: what are the other forms in Romance & Celtic? High Aragonese , ; Catalan (var. , , , , , ; Oc gascon/lengadocian (var. , , , ), Oc gasc (Aran) , Oc , , , ; all `sloe'. Mozarabic ? OIr , W `plum', W (pl.) 'fruits, berries'; MBret NBret `sloe' Coromines suggests three base forms: *agri:nia, *agranio. *agrena; and mentions that Pokorny related the Celtic forms with Goth `fruit', OE `acorn' CSl <(j)a'goda> `small fruit, berry' Lit id., 'cherry'. He suggests that Biskaian `plum' may be < *okran < *akran < *agranio, influenced by `bunch of fruits' and other words in where is < `bread'. (How does that grab you, Larry, Miguel?) He doubts a connection between Basque and Sp , Ptg 'bilberry' beyond the possibility of (a cognate of) the latter having influenced the transformation of *agranio > . Coromines's account of *agr- > in the Aragonese, Cat., WOc etc. forms, while not without parallels, is somewhat ad hoc. Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 16:10:19 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 16:10:19 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> artesa "type of box" 1330 "caj?n cuadrilongo de madera que es m?s > >> angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] > >> v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] [snip] > In Peque?o Larrouse, I seem to remember accompanying a > picture of a basket-like contraption with 2 rectangular rims [both rounded > off] and no bottom; the upper rim was about twice the size of the lower > one. There was no indication of size or use. > Now I'm trying imagine how this can relate to a toponym, could it > be a box canyon? Tell us what a box canyon is. Are there such things in Europe? Max ___________________________________________________________________________ Max W. Wheeler School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975; fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 ___________________________________________________________________________ From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 16:45:07 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 16:45:07 +0000 Subject: alud In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [LT] > >Basque ~ ~ `landslide, mudslide' is real enough, > >and is obviously a derivative of `earth'. This has the regular > >combining form in old formations, so the variants in are > >probably recent re-formations. It's not clear to me how the Basque word > >would give rise to Romance . As for Basque `snow', this is > >hardly likely to be related to : there are major problems with the > >phonology, with the morphology, and with the semantics. > But if had a different origin, I could see how, in the Pyrenees, > and ~ ~ could have influenced one another > in the minds of bilingual speakers--but that's supposing a lot > OR the possibility that ~ ~ could be a "folk > etymology" of by Basque speakers --or is that too far out? Interesting question. I've done a little digging, and it turns out that there is a substantial literature on these words, with varying views. Here's a brief summary. First, the Basque word is confined entirely to the four eastern dialects Low Navarrese, Zuberoan, Salazarese and Roncalese; it is unrecorded elsewhere. All four of these dialects are spoken in or next to the Pyrenees. Second, the Basque word appears variously as , , , with a variant also recorded without provenance, and two further variants recorded only in Roncalese, and . Roncalese is the easternmost dialect, deepest into the Pyrenees, and it often exhibits Romance words and forms unknown in other varieties of Basque, as well as a number of idiosyncrasies of its own. At this point, my guess would be that the odd represents a cross between the Basque word and the Romance word, but see below. Third, `earth' has the regular combining form in old formations, but in newer ones. The noun-forming suffix <-te> is common in Basque, and semantically appropriate in this formation. But <-ta> is another matter: save only in Roncalese, where <-te> itself has the variant <-ta>, no such noun-forming suffix as <-ta> is known in Basque. Fourth, the following Romance forms are reported from the area in the sense of `landslide': Castilian Bielsa (sorry; don't know what this is) Bearnais , (I presume is a palatal lateral) Bearnais , , , Aragonese Gascon , Now, how to interpret this? The Romanist Gerhard Rohlfs sees the Romance forms, or at least some of them, as borrowed from Basque, and he sees the Basque word as a derivative of `earth'. The Romanist Joan Coromines sees the word as being of "pre-Roman" origin, with the Basque word and the Castilian word (at least) independently continuing the pre-Roman source. He proposes a prehistoric word *, contaminated in some cases by Basque and/or by Basque `snow'. But he also believes that not all the Romance forms can be traced to a single etymon, and he therefore concludes that we must be looking at at least two distinct original formations. The Vasconist and Romanist Gerhard Baehr likewise believes that the data represent two distinct prehistoric words, with one continued as Basque (and as some Romance forms), and the other continued as Basque (and other Romance forms). The Vasconists Agud and Tovar, in contrast, prefer to see only a single pre-Roman source as accounting for all the Basque and Romance words; they propose * ~ * ~ *. Well, you pays your money... As a postscript, the Romanist Hubschmid suspects that the place name mentioned by Pliny, and the place names and , mentioned in Roman sources, may contain the word or words under discussion. And Corominas wants to include also the place name in Andorra. (Andorra is Catalan-speaking today, but was probably Basque-speaking once.) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 18 19:28:37 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 11:28:37 -0800 Subject: Gender In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: >What would (pre-)Anatolian have these forms for, if not for the feminine? It looks like an adjectival suffix to me (parku-i, danku-i), maybe *-iH, but might very well be just *-i (does Hittite have thematic *-io-?). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 17:18:08 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 17:18:08 +0000 Subject: avio/n In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [on Spanish ] > It means "airplane" now but it does go back a ways. > vencejo --acc. to Vel?squez dictionary-- means "swift, black martin, > martlet, martinet [Hirundo apis]. Not a word I've come across in Latin > America > gavi- appears as the first element of a couple of birds: gaviota "gull" & > gavila/n "small hawk" Most interesting. Without ever really thinking about it, I'd always vaguely assumed that the word was `big bird' plus the augmentative suffix <-o'n> -- hence `really big bird', or some such. OK; it's dumb, but it's cute. A propos of nothing much, the Basque verb for `fly' is , which is `wing' plus <-z> instrumental plus `do, make' -- hence, literally, `make with the wings', I guess. Reminds me of the slang expression `make with the feet' for `walk', which was prominent in my childhood but which I don't think I've heard for over 30 years. The Basque for `airplane' is the neologism , from plus <-gin> `maker, doer', and hence literally `flyer', or, even more literally, `thing that makes with the wings'. Who says those Basques don't have a sense of humor? > but I seem to remember seeing somewhere used to mean > "bumblebee" or some sort of large bee > I also seem to remember seeing somewhere that the use of avio/n as > "airplane" comes from French --that whoever the French claim as the > inventor of the airplane called his contraption an "avion", is that right? Well, certainly *is* the French for `airplane', but I confess I've no idea what its origin might be. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Mar 17 17:58:25 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 11:58:25 -0600 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: <36EE0E20.580C@stratos.net> Message-ID: This definitely makes sense re: the name Sancho. But there's also Old Spanish and non-standard Spanish , used instead of . >Larry Trask wrote: >> By the way, is it certain that is a development of ? >In strictly onomastic sources I have usually seen them ascribed to Latin > and respectively. In the Castilian and Aragonese >citations that I've seen from the period 900-1300, is by far >the most common form, followed by . Others include , >, , , , , , and >. >Brian M. Scott From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Mar 17 17:58:55 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 11:58:55 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: That would be ghayn For the form alpargata, I'd also wonder if it ended in ta marbuta--which is /h/ in Levantine Arabic but was once /t/ If I can remember to trudge to the library to check Wehr, I'll see if there's anything like b-r-gh or b-r-gh-t [ta marbuta] [snip] >According to Agud and Tovar, the Arabic word in question is recorded >both as and as , with a dot over the whose >significance is unknown to me. [snip] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 17:47:52 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 11:47:52 -0600 Subject: "mama" Syndrome Message-ID: So, Mr. Gordon, exactly which of the following propositions is "blatantly moronic"? 1) That languages of the world do show a striking tendency to have words for 'mother' that begin with /m-/". (Counting "nursery words", probably something close to 100 percent.) 2) That this is not due to common descent from "Proto-World". 3) That this is not due to words that are [+ primary care-giver] being marked as [+ /m-/] as part of "Universal Grammar". 4) That it is an artifact of babbling and the mother/infant relationship, in that mothers tend to attribute the meaning 'mother' to things that the infant is merely babbling. 5) That if mere babbbles can be given a meaning that applies to one party in the mother/infant relationship, they can be given a meaning that applies to the other party. If the infant is to be regarded as speaking, this other party would have to be what we call "1st person. I note as well that what we have here (apart from the usual failure to communicate) is one linguist who reconstructs Nostratic 1st person pronouns without being aware that the distribution of sounds in these is not in fact random (which is to say that the critical leverage we get in other cases from the idea that "it can't be a coincidence" is lacking) and another who points out the problem with this. So here is another question: which of these two is more properly described as "not doing his job"? If you are going to start using expresions like "blatantly moronic" and "not doing his job", then you will have to start answering questions like these. DLW From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 17 18:07:39 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 18:07:39 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <6105f8bc.36ee8784@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I don't want to give the impression that much of what you've said about this >isn't plausible or compelling. The question I think it does not address is: >What is the latest that PIE could have emerged from a local homeland and >expanded to where we find it when the evidence gets direct? (I.e., written >evidence) Given the enormous variations in rate of change, that's not easy to answer. We have Mycenaean Greek, Vedic Sanskrit and Hittite attested c. 1500 BC, and comparing those three, one doesn't get the impression that the split had been very recent. Even Greek and Sanskrit, which are reasonably close to each other within the whole of IE, are more divergent than any Romance or Slavic language, maybe roughly comparable to West Germanic and North Germanic now, so somewhere between 2000 and 3000 years of separation would be a fair guesstimate. Give or take, your mileage may vary, etc. That would take us back to 3500 ~ 4500 BC, which is a good match for the Kurgan expansions into the Balkans. The distance between Hittite and the other two is doubtlessly greater. But it's even harder to put a date on that. One, two millennia more? My own theories call for a date of 5500 BC. ><destroyed by later language spreads. Celtic has been largely >swallowed up by Romance and Germanic, the Slavic and Hungarian >spreads have replaced whatever gradients there were in Eastern >Europe with new dialect gradients. >> >I don't think that is an answer in itself. Because the later languages you >mention fall into Mallory's category of "state languages." Slavic too? >Whether the exact >term is right or not, the meaning is that there is a standardizing agent or >agents that prevents splintering. Whether it's trade or the school marm or >the Academie or the Latin grammarian or the mass media or even a dictionary, >you have a strong force working against splintering and gradients. Part of the "state" effect is optical. Dialects still exist, but people write in the official language. Of course the Roman Empire had a unifying effect for quite a long time. Whether the rate of change of Latin itself was affected (other than optically) is a different matter. I doubt it. So the "state effect" means we have less variation in space, but probably the same variation in time. >Without this standardizing force, epecially among sedentary populations, like >sedentary farmers separated by thousands of years from one another, one should >not even expect PIE to have been PIE a relatively short distance from the >place of origin. Especially, if one follows Renfrew's "a few square miles per >year" rate of expansion The "wave of expansion" model is just a model. What I like about it is that it explains how a language group might have spread across a whole continent without anybody actually setting out to do so (no Anatolian farmer said: "let's invade Europe"). But the model is too imprecise to accurately reproduce what really happened. The process was not so gradual and uniform: farming quickly spread from Anatolia to Greece and the Balkans (7000-6000), but then the advance completely stopped for more than a millennium, until a new wave (LBK) spread rapidly from Hungary across most of temperate Europe (5500-5000). >In the 5000 years that separates first agriculture from direct evidence of the >languages of Europe (aside from Mycenaean), there should have been dozens of >"swallow-uppers" that preceded Celtic or German or Romance. And these might >have moved back and forth all across the continent in a way that would put >many ancestors between the first historical IE languages and PIE. There might >be many proto's between Proto-German and PIE. Yes, I think so. ><languages has been going down on average since the Paleolithic.>> >But you know, Mallory's expert on the North American tribes says the exact >opposite. That the number of languages and language families actually >substantially increased over time and with the coming of agriculture. The >reason is obvious. Farming causes stabilization of location and localization >promotes local diversity in language. Standardization is only something that >happens with centralization - a very different event. I don't know much about agriculture in North America, but I would have thought that the linguistic map of Northeastern North America, with wide-spread language families like Algonquian, Iroquoian and Siouan, shows very little diversity compared with places like California (hunter-gatherers) or NW Coast (sedentary salmon fishers). Isn't that the consequence of a relatively recent spread of agriculture up the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio? Of course, with time, these more or less sedentary farmers would have developed as much diversity as the Pacific NW people. Standardization (in the sense of little divergence) is something that happens with centralization or with expansion. Divergence is the result of decentralization and just time. >But the unique thing about IE languages is not their diversity but their >commonality, something that makes the reconstruction of the proto language at >all plausible. The unique thing about IE is the amount of data that we have. There's nothing unique about being able to reconstruct a proto-language. Given enough data, we can do that for any group of languages that stem from a common ancestor. >I think when you look for the latest possible date for a unity you get closer >to the truth. PIE gives evidence of having been a standardized language in >some way early on. The kurgans may explain it. Agriculture doesn't - not by >itself. It creates the opposite effect without a standardizing agent. >If Latin had been PIE, for example, it accomplished a lot of what it did in >less than 600 years. And it did it without mandating conversion - in >comparison for example to the German laws against speaking Wendish in the >middle ages. I don't think elite dominance describes the Latin phenomena >either. Whatever the Romans did, it seems to be one of the best historical >model we have for what happened in the days when PIE was just another local >dialect BUT on its way to turning into "the first ancestor" of a whole new >family of languages. I disagree completely. The mechamism(s) by which PIE and its daughter languages (Latin excepted) expanded was nothing like the Roman Empire, and given the time-frame, it couldn't have. PIE was not a "standardized language" in any way. It was just a language like any other, and it fell apart into different dialects like any other. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 17 18:09:21 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 18:09:21 GMT Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >According to Agud and Tovar, the Arabic word in question is recorded >both as and as , with a dot over the whose >significance is unknown to me. Arabistic transcription of ghayn, teh voiced velar fricative (/G/). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 18:10:24 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:10:24 -0600 Subject: Dating of Anatolian /nt/ vs. /nd/ Message-ID: The idea that /nt/ is earlier is from Kretschmer(1896) "Einleitung in die Geschict der Griechischen Sprache". Whether his views are based on anything more than the observation that a change of /nt/ -> /nd/ is more probable than the other way around I have, once again, no idea. I am just parroting Palmer ... I take this opportunity to note that the same suffix, /-nth-/, also occurs in Pre-Greek words like "asaminthos" 'bathtub' "me:rinthos" 'thread' "erebinthos" 'pea' "olunthos" 'unripe fig' "Huakinthos" 'Hyacinth' where a meaning 'collective' seems improbable. It is also true that the element /parna-/ in "Parnassos", which occurs on both sides of the Aegean, is recognized as pre-IE, so if the first element in such words can be from a common substrate, why can't the second element also be from a common substrate? But the main thing is that there is no sound-sequence in Anatolian which we would expect to be borrowed into Greek as /-nth-/. DLW From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 18 14:55:55 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 08:55:55 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: 1. No, no, a 1000x no = no argument. As an argument from authority is no argument. 2. <'usta:dh> ~ "ustaeth" are both transcriptions; I doubt if the net has an Arabic font. Spaniards didn't hear the /?/ [glottal stop/ alif, anymore than French and Italians "hear" /h/, glottal continuant, in English etc.. And English speakers don't hear the glottal stop onset when they pronounce the names of the letters A E I O. 3. If is the source of was there, in the early period of the usage, gender concord in complement adjectives? . E.g. "!Vd. est? viva! " [I lack Castilian font: please invert first /!/.] When did the masculine adjectives achieve acceptance, if was ever = ? ...................................... Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > >"Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. > No. > >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >> "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > >> >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; > >> 1. Surely ... > > >Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly > >vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or > >homework. > I'd say absence of homework is rather exemplified by (1) getting > the Arabic word ('usta:dh) wrong, (2) claimimg that Italian > is "a calque of sorts" (?) on <'usta:dh>. Surely. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 18:33:18 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:33:18 -0600 Subject: IE Plosive System: DLW Explains It All For You Message-ID: The Javanese system (it is relevant, bear with me) has recently been re-analyzed as being one of, in L&M's terms, plosives with "stiff voice" versus plosives with "slack voice". These two are basically just weaker versions of larngealization and murmur, respectively. The two series might also be termed "fortis' and "lenis". (Thus I am in effect agreeing with MCV after all, after much baring of teeth that would have seemed to presage the oppostite.) But these distinctions, which are of course a matter of phonation (states of the glottis and all that), are necessarily realized in the associated vowels. Not surprisingly, there are languages, for example Bruu, that have the same distinction but regard it as part of the vowels. Thus they have what might be called stiff-voiced/semi-laryngealized/"fortis" vowels versus slack-voiced/semi-murmured/"lenis" vowels. If PIE has such a thing, which it later re-analyzed as belonging to the Cs, that might explain a few things. In an original TVT(not followed by V) syllable, a fortis vowel if reanalyzed in such a way could only lead to a newly "modal" vowel flanked by two fortis plosives, and likewise a lenis vowel could only lead to two lenis plosives. Thus mixing of the two types in one root could wind up effectively (though accidentally) illegal, if the restrictions originaly proper to the closed syl type were generalized. Before going on to the next part of my brilliant "tour de force", I need someone to answer for me a very basic question: does Semitic permit consecutive pharngealized ("emphatic") consonants in its roots? DLW From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 18 15:12:55 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:12:55 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: BAST, LIME etc. 1. North Americans, Aussies etc. might take LIME as the citrus. They know the fragrant tree as LINDEN is the usual term in USA/Canada. 2. Bast, soft inner bark, is good for confection of a lot of household objects. It is turned into a verb in German: translates as 'build [model airplanes etc.]' Shops that sell do-it-yourself supplies bear the sign ,Bastelbedarf. 3. The bastwood tree in the USA Midwest, lost the /t/ in sandhi; came out as . In early summer, when the tree are putting out pollen, this is like cotton fibers, hence also the name . 4. Birch bark, everyone knows, was used for canoes by N. American Indians; the large birch in question was nearly exterminate by Europeans, who used the wood for industrially made thread spools. [I have forgotten the British term for the latter.] 5. Beech was much used of yore in Europe. Both have paper-like, easy to peal bark. Early Russian writings often are on birch, the "papyrus" off the North. 6. Note bark cloth in Africa... .................................................... Sheila Watts wrote: [ moderator snip ] > These were perhaps sandals made of a substance called bast, traditionally > used for a kind of basketwork in Russia (to my knowlegde) and quitte > possibly also in other Slav countries. My Cahmbers dictionary says it is > 'inner bark, esp. of lime' (also 'phloem' (?), 'fibre' and ',matting'), > though it looks rather like woven rushes or reeds. Russian folktales > frequently refer to peasants wearing this kind of footgear. [ moderator snip ] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Wed Mar 17 18:38:26 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:38:26 -0600 Subject: Bartholomae's Law and Greek 'night' Message-ID: So if B's Law would not (necessarily) apply save across a (productive) morpheme boundary, what is wrong with /-ght/? (Labialized or not, as appropriate.) DLW [ Moderator's response: I was heavily influenced by reading Kuryl~owicz as an undergraduate; his version of Bartholomae's Law obviously stuck with me for a long time. If it would not apply except across morpheme boundaries, nothing but Occam's Razor is wrong with **nog^wht- as the stem: All the unambiguous languages attest a cluster *-k^wt-, so without external evidence why postulate **-g^wht-? I'm sorry, but I am not convinced by the Greek and Hittite evidence (yet). --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 15:42:12 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:42:12 -0600 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Navarrese is usually considered a form of Aragonese and I've read in some places that Navarra is now the only place where "Aragonese" is now spoken. Similarly, Asturias is about the only place where "Leonese" is now spoken --although its speakers generally call it "bable". >I don't know. But the first Romance variety I would look at is >Navarrese Romance, since this was the Romance variety used in Navarre by >non-Basque-speakers, and the second is Gascon, since Gascon, or at least >some variety of Occitan, was widely used in the early days of the >Kingdom of Navarre as the language of polite society. (Basque was >*never* used in this function, even though it was the majority language >in the larger part of Navarre.) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 17 18:46:53 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:46:53 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >In the case of late OE / late ON it's often said that the two languages were >"very close" and mutually intelligible. >> -- they were intelligible at the level of pointing at a house and saying "house" and both parties understanding the word. Saying the equivalent of "Me burn house." would also probably get across. Roughly the situation with Swedish and Danish today, in other words. It would be difficult to have an actual conversation, but you could get basic concepts across. Not the same language, but not the sort of total incomprehension that monoglot speakers of say, English and Polish would face. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 18 15:26:10 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:26:10 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] 1. The formulation "looks less appealing" does not amount to a demonstration or refutation, but is an initial call to reconsider, verify or disprove the proposition. Go to it, muchachos! 2. It has been sagely noted that dictionary entry forms are a only convenient way to access lexical items in books, but, given the particular traditions of entering nominatives stems or whatever, it is necessary to consider forms that give more information. It is just as wise to remember that we do not walk around uttering isolated words, and to be aware that that words are for the most part extracted from syntax, that most or our word are back-formations from experienced syntagmata. Hence: 3. What is the history of gender concord between these feminine head nouns and accompanying adjectives? ............................................. Max W Wheeler wrote: > On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > > "Vuestra Merced" is a folk etymology. > > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > > "maher, johnpeter" wrote: > > > >In addition, Castilian has "Vd/Usted" from Arabic "ustaeth" 'teacher; > > > 1. Surely ... > > Whoah! --- The rhetorical emission "surely" [vel sim : "clearly, certainly > > vel sim] is hot air emitted in the absence of argument, evidence or > > homework. > > Spell out the phonetic developments and refute the ascription to Arabic > Well, part of the argument involves, would you believe it?, some > comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has , > and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only > but also , , , , ; and > in mod. Sp dialects (including America) . With all those, > alongside, of course, of the perfectly well attested > Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp and Ar > begins to look rather less interesting. > I go along with Miguel CV on this, and the accusation that he hadn't > done his homework is gratuitously offensive. If JPM had done his, he'd > have known the sort of facts I mention in the previous paragraph. > 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 17 18:57:38 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:57:38 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Without this standardizing force, epecially among sedentary populations, like >sedentary farmers separated by thousands of years from one another, one >should not even expect PIE to have been PIE a relatively short distance from >the place of origin PIE Lithuanian *wlkwos vilkas -- that's a pretty emphatic resemblance, seeing as it's at least 4000 years, and probably about 5000, since PIE arrived in the East Baltic area. Myself, I'd say sometime around 3500 BCE makes a sensible date for the spread of PIE into Europe. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 15:47:18 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:47:18 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >According to Chambers also, it rhymes with gas, not with mast, in RP. In my English gas & mast rhyme. Why ain't they a-larnin' folks good English over thar? Sorry >everyone, this is an answer to a question Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen asked me >nearly 15 years ago. In my variety of English all the -as words rhyme with >each other (gas, gassed, past, mast, mass etc.), As they should :> [snip] From xdelamarre at siol.net Wed Mar 17 23:41:22 1999 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 00:41:22 +0100 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote : >Basque `plum' resembles various words in both Romance and Celtic, >but no direction of borrowing seems to be phonologically plausible. >According to the standard etymological dictionaries, the Romance words >require *, while the Celtic ones require * -- neither >of which looks like an obvious relative of Basque . >Could aran be from an original form *agran-? >btw: what are the other forms in Romance & Celtic? >Maybe Dennis "Donncha" King might have some insights on the Celtic forms 1/ Romance :Proven?al _agreno_, Catalan _arany?_, Aragon. _ara?on_ point to an original Gaulish _*agranio(ne-)_ 2/ Insular Celtic : O.Ir. _?irne_ 'wild plum' is from _*agrinia:_, W. _eirin_ 'plums' < _*agri:no-_, _aeron_ 'fruits, berries' < _*agra:n(i)o-, Bret. _irinenn_ 'prunelle' is _*agri:no-_, LEIA A-48, Meyer-L?bke n. 294. 3/ The root is possibly the one of Latin _agrestis_, Greek _agrios_ 'wild' ("sauvage, des champs, non cultiv?") 4/ Further connections : Goth. _akran_ 'fruit', O.Icel. _akarn_ 'fruit of trees in wild' etc. (<_*akranan <_*agro(no)-) and (possibly)the group of Lithuan. _uoga_, O.Slav. _jagoda_ etc. 'berry' (<_*o:ga:_ < _*og-_, Lex Winter), IEW 773, Lehmann GED 24. 5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental Celtic *agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, gereta, mando_ etc. are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, mandu,_ . X. Delamarre Ljubljana From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 16:07:34 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 10:07:34 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I checked Wehr for b-r-gh, b-r-q, b-r-j, b-r-k, b-r-3 I even tried with alif, w & y there's nothing even close but Wehr only has standard Arabic Even if it were an "Oriental" word, if it passed through Arabic, it would still show /p > b/. And even if Spanish Arabic had /p/, which I don't know, it's a far ways off from the "Orient". It sounds like he's fudging this one [snip] >Coromines mentions, to explain Hispano-Arabic . possible >contamination with some (unidentified) oriental word [i.e. some >hand-waving by Coromines]. The plural is the source of Sp. >. By , does Corominas/es means standard /j, zh/ [from /g/]? or /gh/? >The cognates in Cat., Port, have the form . [snip] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 18 02:44:55 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:44:55 -0600 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Thomas Heffernan wrote: > Although I teach Old English, I do not profess to be a practicing > linguist rather more of a textual scholar. However, I am somewhat > skeptical of the degree of intelligibility claimed for Old Norse, Old > English and Old High German. If one looks at a very familiar text -- a > text we know was preached in the churches on Sundays in the vernacular -- > like that of the Parable of the Sower and the Seed in the three languages > the differences seem considerable enough to preclude immediate > intelligibility. I would have thought in places like Yorkshire in the late > 9th century and 10th centuries that long association would more likely > account for intelligibility. I have selected a line that although it shows > a number of obvious cognates would still I think present problems for the > non-native speakers. > Old Norse reads " En sumt fellr i [th]urra jor[th] ok grjotuga...; > Old English reads " Sum feoll ofer stanscyligean...; > Old High German reads: "Andaru fielun in steinahti lant...." Yes, but this "Old Norse" you are using is actually contemporaneous with Middle English, not Old English. That is a gap of about four hundred years, which was probably enough to convert "semi-mutually intelligible" into "mutually unintelligible". DLW From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 18 16:00:00 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 10:00:00 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: More: 1. In northern Italy there was dislike for the southern etiquette with instead of vs. . A driver stopped by the Polizia Stradale -- cops, typically serve far from home, where they might sympathize with the locals -- could be toyed with, given the pronominal sociology. The northern speeder could address the cop, in full compliance with the Mussolinian etiquette, with , with both parties knowing full well that the northerner scorned both the usage and the cop from the south. 2. As of 1960, in the Veneto, dialect speakers were uncomfortable with the feminine pronoun in addressing a man. They address a man with their masculine pronoun . jpm .......................................... Frank Rossi wrote: > Lei e Loro in italian were apparently copied from the Spanish usage at the > height of Spanish power in Italy and stand for "Signoria" = my Lord, my > Lady (source Giacomo Devoto). > Yes, Mussolini did try to impose Voi instead of Lei, but he was > unsuccessful. > Today, people still use Lei, but Loro in the plural is often replaced with > Voi, without necessarily implying familiarity which singular "tu" implies. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 18 02:49:03 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:49:03 -0600 Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <19990317035132.6645.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > > Well, certainly *H2 and *H3 appear to lower IE vowels. As far as I > understand, both *a and *o are low vowels (an important thing to keep in > mind), No, /o/ is a mid vowel and a front low vowel (unrounded, which would be the expectation) would be /ae/ (the vowel of "cat"), not /a/. DLW [ Moderator's note: The usual ASCII IPA transcription for the front low unrounded vowel is [&]. I have stated in the past that I think we should adopt this transcription until we can start using real IPA fonts, so that we all know what is meant by a form in someone else's posting. -rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 16:24:22 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 10:24:22 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: But Corominas proposed such a link in 1980 What is this? A case of a man with two brains? Corominas says ara/n is "sloe" "ara/ndano" is "blueberry" in Latin America my cheapo office dictionary has "cranberry, blueberry" for ara/ndano but AFAIK cranberries are unknown in Latin America and in Europe, cranberries are something different from what Americans call cranberries, I have know idea what they look like --just that, like American cranberries, that they're reputed to taste like crap I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? [snip] >[Coromines] doubts a connection between Basque and Sp , Ptg > 'bilberry' beyond the possibility of (a cognate of) the latter >having influenced the transformation of *agranio > . >Coromines's account of *agr- > in the Aragonese, Cat., WOc etc. >forms, while not without parallels, is somewhat ad hoc. [snip] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Thu Mar 18 04:22:49 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 22:22:49 -0600 Subject: Addenda/Corrigenda to Recent Missives Message-ID: It occurs to me I was not clear about what PIE series I was saying was "lenis". It is the "voiced aspirate" series, not the voiced series, so my agreement with MCV is only partial. It also ocurs to me that the Greek words in /-thos/ that I gave may well be plausible as colectives, but I must ask: where is this Anatolian "collective" coming from? I have never heard of collective /-nt/ in other IE (which does not necessarily mean much). DLW From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 16:36:50 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 10:36:50 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> >On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> >> artesa "type of box" 1330 "caj?n cuadrilongo de madera que es m?s >> >> angosto hacia el fondo" pre-rom.; [c] >> >> v. vasco artesi "grieta, agujero" [c] >[snip] >> In Peque?o Larrouse, I seem to remember accompanying a >> picture of a basket-like contraption with 2 rectangular rims [both rounded >> off] and no bottom; the upper rim was about twice the size of the lower >> one. There was no indication of size or use. >> Now I'm trying imagine how this can relate to a toponym, could it >> be a box canyon? >Tell us what a box canyon is. Are there such things in Europe? In Spanish, it's called a [which also means garbage can/truck, among other things], hence the town of El Cajo/n. Box canyons figured in most westerns filmed in Arizona, so if you've seen John Wayne movies, you've seen plenty of them. They're the places where the bad guys are usually holed up in. At least in the films, they're canyons that have only one entrance, which is narrow with steep walls. They widen out inside and often have a bit of a flood plain where farming is possible. I'd imagine there'd be quite a few of them in parts of southern and eastern Spain where smaller streams flow down from the plateau. From DFOKeefe at aol.com Thu Mar 18 07:22:11 1999 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 02:22:11 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: Hello I-E-ists, One nation with both a class and a regional based system of dialects used to be pre-Revolutionary China. The Classical Chinese of the early 1900s was quite different from ordinary speech. It contained many older features which were difficult for less educated folks to learn, and which separated educated people from uneducated people. This isn't to say that many of the local dialects had older features of their own, too. Add numerous local dialects, often with millions of speakers, and you have a class & regional based system of dialects. The Beijing tongue is now the standard. The standardized "PuTongHua" now used by the professional Chinese is the same as ordinary speech. For many Chinese, simplified characters and PinYin promote a standard national language, which still permits regional accents. Traditional characters are still used by many millions of overseas Chinese and in Taiwan. In Taiwan, Mandarin is the professional language and Fujian (or Fukien) the actual major spoken language. Literacy is universal on Taiwan, so that the traditional characters are not symbolic of class differences. Add to this the fact that Mandarin and Fujian both use the same characters and class differences are somewhat lessened. Hope this promotes the discussion at hand. Regards, David O'Keefe [ Moderator's comment: I'm not sure that it does, but thanks for trying. It appears to me that the discussion has come to an impasse, with neither interlocutor likely to change point of view, so I am going to suggest that we discontinue this thread on this list. --rma ] From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Mar 18 09:23:23 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:23:23 GMT Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Frank Rossi wrote:- > Lei e Loro in italian were apparently copied from the Spanish usage at the > height of Spanish power in Italy and stand for "Signoria" = my Lord, my Lady > (source Giacomo Devoto). ... The same seems to have happened in Dutch. Spain got possession of Holland (not by conquest but by the chances of marriage and birth and death and inheritance among noble and royal families, and Holland got free afterwards in a long savage religious war.) In Dutch originally: {du} = "thou", {jij} = "ye", {uwe}?= "your (pl)", or similar (I think). Later:- {jij} used as polite singular as in French and English. {Uwe Edelheid} = "Your Nobility" used as polite "you" sg & pl, later abbreviated in writing and then in speech to (U E} and then {U} (by imitating Spanish {usted}?) {jij} no longer used as plural. (du} fell completely out of use :: in the 16th century it was a literary rarity. (But I have seen {dou wilde se} = "thou wild sea" in a poem in modern Frisian.) The present situation is (I think: my Dutch has got a bit stale; I learned it for 2 holidays motorcycling around Holland around 1980):- nom gen jij & je jouw you (sg) (intimate / condescending, like French {tu}) gij & ge thou (sg) (religious / dialectal / poetical) jullie van jullie you (pl) (familiar) (< "you people") u uw you (sg & pl) (polite) Anthony Appleyard, UMIST, Manchester, UK; http://www.buckrogers.demon.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 17:32:26 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 11:32:26 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] > The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a >> class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a >>very >> rare phenomenon. [snip] In every Spanish-speaking country I've been in, including Cuba, class dialects are very noticeable. Although Cuba is a communist country, you can tell someone's class origins or professional status by his/her accent --whether someone is a blue collar or white collar worker. In Latin America, just as in the US, the upper and upper middle classes speak a dialect that, on the whole, transcends national boundaries, while regionalisms tend to persist in the lower and lower middle classes. Even in countries that have very distinctive national accents such as Mexico and Argentina, people from the upper classes speak a much more standardized version of the language. Among Spanish-speaking cities, Madrid, Buenos Aires and Mexico City are well known for their lower class accents. As in the US, class differences can be found among members of the same family living in the same town. My guess is that class accents are the norm and that they are eradicated only when social classes are eradicated. From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Mar 18 09:38:39 1999 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:38:39 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Max W Wheeler wrote:- >... comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has > , and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only > but also , , , , ; and in > mod. Sp dialects (including America) . ... perfectly well attested > Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp > and Ar begins to look rather less interesting. (1) Ar. still could have played a part in it. Perhaps, once {usta:d> had got into Spanish, it sounded like a collapsed form of and coalesced with it. (2) Re borrowing a pronoun of one language into some other use in another language: etymological dictionaries say that US English "bozo" = "fool" < Spanish "vosotros": could it also be that the US English slang term of address and then nickname "buster" came from the abovementioned Spanish dialect ?, and not the English for "one who busts (= breaks) things". Anthony Appleyard, UMIST, Manchester, UK :: http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Mar 18 18:06:03 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 12:06:03 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This one's hard to prove either way. That usted looks like ustadh is obvious but forms based on vuesa merced, vuestras mercedes DO come close to usted. BUT if usted is documented before the other forms, I'd say it is very possible that usted is from Arabic and that the other forms are folk etymologies. Conversely, one could argue that usted is the folk etymology --provided that one could show that the other forms predated it. The problem lies in that one has to wonder why usted didn't appear in Old Spanish when Arabic influence was much strong. I'd guess that the only possible way to argue that Usted is from Arabic would be to try to maintain that's it's a loanword from Mozarabe that spread from the South. But you'd have to document that. [snip] >Well, part of the argument involves, would you believe it?, some >comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has , Voce^ is more often said to stem from vossa excelencia, at least according to the Portuguese professors and Brazilian linguistics students I knew in grad school. >and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only > but also , , , , ; and >in mod. Sp dialects (including America) . I've never come across vuste', ect., anywhere in Latin America but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But I'd wonder if it wasn't heard from a Spanish immigrant. >With all those, >alongside, of course, of the perfectly well attested Vuestra merced is technically wrong in that vuestra is used to address more than one person. The corresponding singular form is vuesa merced. >Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp and Ar > begins to look rather less interesting. >I go along with Miguel CV on this, and the accusation that he hadn't >done his homework is gratuitously offensive. If JPM had done his, he'd >have known the sort of facts I mention in the previous paragraph. [snip] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 18 17:52:21 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 17:52:21 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Max W Wheeler wrote: > Coromines suggests three base forms: *agri:nia, *agranio. *agrena; and > mentions that Pokorny related the Celtic forms with Goth > `fruit', OE `acorn' CSl <(j)a'goda> `small fruit, berry' Lit > id., 'cherry'. > He suggests that Biskaian `plum' may be < *okran < *akran < > *agranio, influenced by `bunch of fruits' and other words in > where is < `bread'. (How does that grab you, Larry, > Miguel?) It strikes me as pretty fanciful, I'm afraid. The combining form of `bread' is , not *, and there is absolutely no parallel in Basque for the steps involved in the proposed derivation of , except that a putative * would indeed be borrowed into Basque in the form *. Moreover, the strictly eastern word `bunch' (of fruit) is not attested at all in the western dialect Bizkaian, or even in its neighbour Gipuzkoan, and, in the east, so far as I can tell, only ever appears as the final element in a compound, and never as the first element. This is reasonable, since plus in that order would have to mean `bunch-plum' -- presumably a distinctive kind of plum that grows in bunches. Noun-noun compounds are always head-final in Basque. I agree that, in the face of common `plum', the common Bizkaian form is a puzzle. Agud and Tovar discuss this last item briefly, but fail to make any suggestions beyond the obvious: it's related to . But I have a suggestion. The very frequent Basque word `woods, wilderness' is very commonly used as the first element in compound nouns to denote the equivalent of English `wild'. In this position, exhibits both the combining forms (regular in old formations) and (more usual in newer formations). For example, from `lord, gentleman', we have both and for `the Old Man of the Woods', a character in Basque folklore. Among the numerous formations are ~ `wild boar' ( `pig'), `wildflower' ( `flower'), `wild leek, asphodel' ( `leek'), `deer' ( `goat'), `wild grapes' ( `grapes') and , today `farmhouse' but formerly `remote village' ( `settlement, habitation'). Now, the Basque word for `sloe' is in most varieties , literally `wild plum'. This word is the direct source of , the name of a favourite Basque beverage made by soaking anisette in sloes. But there also exists a derivative of , , which as an adjective means `wild' (of fruits and apparently only of fruits) and as a noun means `wild fruit' (in general) in most places, but in one locality means specifically `sloe'. The possible variant * does not appear to be recorded as such. However, a certain unidentified manuscript uses the interesting word for `sloe', strongly implying that the variant * must once have existed. But, whether it did or not, I can see here an obvious origin for the Bizkaian . Given the recorded `sloe', we have a simple four-part analogy, where the word for `hen' is chosen somewhat arbitrarily: `wild hen' : `hen :: `wild plum' : X And solving for X yields the required `plum'. Don't know if this is right, but I'll back it against Coromines's contortions. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Thu Mar 18 13:45:21 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 13:45:21 +0000 Subject: mutual intelligibility of OE with ON, &c Message-ID: A couple of thoughts to do with OE/ON/OLG/OHG/Frisian &c mutual intelligibility (which I may have mentioned long ago on a different but related thread): there are reports that LG/Flemish and some versions of OE or MiddE had a degree of mutual intelligibility, or at least of recognition of consistent differences (a 'shibboleth' case for example to do with 12th century settlements by traders from the Low Countries - 'he says 'keyse' for 'cheyse' and 'brode' for 'brede' - which led to murder); there are also reports of internal non-intelligibility in insular Germanic - 'eggys' -v- 'eyer' - but what the level of direct contact between SW and NE was then, and the dates, and whether this is by inference rather than written contemporary evidence I do not know; of course, mutual lack of comprehension (demotic Glaswegian, of which I have a passive understanding and a limited ability to deploy, against standard British English; or Northumbrian, or East Anglian, or the more rustic forms of south-western/western English [or Black Country] with an RP speaker) may not yet be dead. Though how far it is a class thing against a local thing I am not sure: my knowledge of Glasgow comes from childhood and hearing respectable Glaswegian speech from people born 120 years ago, so that I noticed a certain difference, down to parental speech first acquired 80-90 years ago, and I have a similar knowledge of rustic SW English. Oddly in Glasgow, it can be thought that I have a tinge of Edinburgh, though I am understood readily enough. But I digress; experience suggests that, with a little attention and understanding of how languages work on both sides (which is almost proverbially not to be found in the native English speaker), there could still be some degree of mutual intelligibility between spoken Scandinavian and spoken English, but the context would have to be right. it could be similar to the proposition made to us when I was a schoolboy that we did not need to learn Italian in order to read and understand Dante, because we all had a thorough grounding in Latin. Gordon Selway From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Mar 18 17:58:40 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 17:58:40 +0000 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Max W Wheeler wrote: > Tell us what a box canyon is. Are there such things in Europe? My dictionary asserts that a box canyon, in the western US, is a canyon with vertical walls. But that's not quite what it means to me (an easterner): for me, a box canyon is a canyon enclosed on three sides and open only at one end. Box canyons in this sense are numerous in Hollywood westerns of the 1940s. Just how many there might be in any part of the world, I can't tell you. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Thu Mar 18 14:27:37 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 06:27:37 PST Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: From: Larry Trask Subject: Re: non-IE/Germanic/h Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 14:42:07 +0000 (BST) On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: {RMC] > haltha- "slope, slant, incline" > Halde "slope, hillside", heald [OE] > "hillside" > [< ?Vasconic; > see Basque halde, alde, ualde < ?*kalde "face, side, flank"] [tv95, tv97] [LT] The Basque word is in the eastern dialects but everywhere else, as a result of the categorical voicing of plosives after /l/ in all but the eastern dialects. No such form as * is known to me. Lhande's 1926 dictionary cites and attributes it solely to the 17th-century writer Oihenart, but Oihenart in fact used , and so I suspect an error here. (Lhande is full of errors.) The form is an error: this must be the compound with initial `water', which appears as ~ , and means literally `waterside'. The central meaning of the Basque word is everywhere `side', with transferred senses like `flank' and `region'. I don't think it really means `face', and it certainly doesn't mean `slope'. [RF] Part I , and There are several aspects of in Euskera that are not immediately apparent from the discussion above. For example, it is commonly used in conjunction with the derivational allative suffixing element <-era> (as are other root-stems in Euskera) in its directional meaning of "toward." Hence, "We are going toward the mountain" can be converted into a spatially understood "noun-like" notion, namely, one that refers to "the place that is ." That spatial notion is not directly equivalent to "mountain-slope". But it certainly does approach it in the sense that you are moving through a space identified as "[the part] toward (the) mountain." In many senses the referentiality of would correspond, in terms of the spatially grounded notion it comprises, what is understood in spatial terms to be "a slope" or "mountain-side" in English. Similarly, the verbalized form means either "to approach" or "to go away from" depending on the positionality of the speaker's frame. Furthermore, in the case of spatial content of expressions such as when they are used more abstractly, they come to be understood as a close equivalent of the Spanish word . In Euskera (or more explicitly ) can be glossed as "the space/side near you" and is used as an equivalent for "cercanma, regisn" and consequently, in given contexts is equivalent to (Sp.) in its application as a "hamlet". In other contexts, <-alde> can be used in a more collective (spatial) sense, e.g., "family property; household" from "house" ; ) "flock of sheep"; beitalde (< bei "cow" <-(t)-alde>" "herd of cows'. When the definite article (actually an old demonstrative) is added, the resultant geographical/spatially oriented expressions take on meanings close to those of "hamlet, village", e.g., "the area/location/community of Aranzazu," with a similar sort of semantic extension as in the items cited previously meaning "collective." Moreover, the frequency of such compounds in the language have given rise to the phonological variant -talde, now understood by many speakers only to mean "group, collective". For anyone bilingual in Euskera and Spanish, the phonological correspondences between and "la ladera del monte" are striking. I take no position concerning the role played by as a possible candidate inherited by Euskera and IE from some earlier (pre-Rom.) linguistic substrate (substrata). I only want to indicate that things are a bit less clear cut than they might appear at first glance. Also, I'd mention that Azkue I:28 lists (BN-baig, L-ain) and (BN, Sal.), the latter with the following definition: "faldsn, parte inferior de una casaca, saya, levita o levitsn"/ "pan, basque, partie infirieur d'un habit, d'une robe, d'une redingote." In Euskera one of the meanings of is "reverse, reverse side", specifically Azkue I: 29 includes the following definition: "anverso, cara de un objeto"/"face, endroit d'un objet." From the point of view of sewing, it would be the "facing" of the garment or its "inner/under-liner." Not exactly the same meaning as "skirt" but close, particularly if one keeps in mind that (Sp.) has a very similar definition in sewing terminology: it's the "(inside) flap, fold." One would need to look more closely at the context of the Romance item in Medieval writings, e.g., in Berceo or El conde Lucanor. Part II. (Eusk) vs. (Sp.) Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >> abarca "sandal" s. X < pre-rom. [c] > >> rel. con vasco abarka; ramz de alpargata [sandal] [c] > >> pre-Romance, Basque origin [abi, wje] [LT] > >Basque denotes a kind of rustic sandal, traditionally a soft > >leather moccasin held on by a cord passed through holes in the sandal > >and wrapped around the calf. The word is very probably native, but > >cannot be monomorphemic, with that plosive in the third syllable. > >The favorite guess sees it as a formation involving `branch(es)' > >and a noun-forming suffix <-ka>. This is semantically awkward, and > >seems to require that ancestral abarkas were made of foliage -- not very > >comfortable, I would have thought. > maybe from cord made from pliable bark of branches? would that work? > >Words of somewhat similar form and sense are found in Ibero-Romance and > >in Iberian Arabic. There has long been a debate as to just how all > >these words are related. Spanish appears to show the Arabic > >article, but the Arabic word itself might be borrowed either from > >Romance or from Basque. > The problem with is the /p/ which, of course, doesn't > exist in Standard Arabic--but I don't whether Andalusian Arabic may have > allowed it or not. There are words, though, with al-p- associated with > Andalusian toponymy,etc.; e.g. the Alpujarras [sp?] and others that escape > me now. X Maybe someone else can help explain this [RF] Although I've lost track of who said what in the exchanges above, the following is one model for explaining the concern raised : In reference to the other ongoing discussion concerning (Eusk) and (Sp.), the suffixed expression aldaketa (Eusk) is also of interest. In it the common ending <-keta> is encountered. The root-stem in compounds becomes . In Euskera and especially the phonologically altered also carry the meaning of "change, alteration." In the case of the aforementioned it can be understood to mean "to change place(s)," i.e., "to move to one side." Similarly, the meaning of can be expanded to by adding the derivational suffix <-ka>. In many contexts the suffix <-ka> conveys a verbal notion of reiterative movement, i.e., somewhat like a gerundive, whereas in others the reiterative force of <-ka> can be reprocessed cognitively so that it produces a type of concept more like a verbal noun. Indeed, <-ka> even can be suffixed to conjugated verb forms themselves to create emphatic expressions such as ( "yes, [they insisted that] it certainly is there!" Thus, we have the compound which can be translated simply as "side" or "change" while it carries a hidden verbal charge of reiterative movement that is not apparent in the translation. The same root-stem is brought into play in the compound which again would translate simply as "change" but because of the presence of <-keta> the compound refers to "change" in terms of the notion of the "(concrete) operation/action of changing." However, since <-keta> does not refer necessarily to the actual action (in process). Rather its referentiality is to the notion of "action" as a (concrete individuated) abstraction. Perhaps because of the meanings circulating in the underlying structure of the suffix <-keta) (<*-ke-eta>), compounds in <-keta> are commonly used to refer to a sort of verbal noun. In addition, it is frequently used to refer to a collection, conglomeration, or quantity of the same substance/thing, e.g., beiketa "a bunch of cows." There are also other nuances of <-keta> that could be discussed. However, for our purposes let it suffice to say that <-keta> is a common suffix and one understood to be indigenous to Euskera. Furthermore, as I'm certain Larry can demonstrate with a long list of examples, the ending is found in many place-names and therefore is not considered an innovation in the language. At this point we can turn to the other Euskeric root-stem that of late has been mentioned frequently on this list: . First, I would like to ask Larry what those involved in reconstructions of Euskera say about the possible relationship between the forms and . Certainly their meanings are quite close as well as their phonology. It would seem that -if this is the innovative phonological form- has become more specialized in its meaning, while continues to refer to both a tree "branch" and/or "other branch-like protuberances," e.g., "horns" Indeed, the meaning of "horns" may well be the dominant one in today's usage. If I'm not mistaken has been compared to forms in Celtic (sorry I have almost no reference books where I am here in Panama). A strong point in favor of the root-stem Being a phonological innovation is the fact that it has produced no compounds that do not have their direct phonological counterpart in derivational forms in , e.g., , with the same identical meaning. The only compound of whose meaning is not encountered among those derived from is precisely , a point that I will return to in the latter part of this mailing. Finally, we have the form that Eduardo Etxegaray recorded in his Diccionario etimolsgico (cited by Azkue I: 6) as a genuine Euskeric compound meaning (Sp.). Whether this is a correct assumption I do not know. But what is clear is that at least a few speakers of Euskera must have heard (Sp.) and reprocessed it as . Moreover, from the point of view of Euskera's derivational rules, the alleged meaning of the compound , i.e., as equivalent to (Sp.) and (Sp.), has always bothered me. It never has felt right to me. In other words from the point of view of derivational forms in Euskera, the type of referentiality conferred by simply doesn't match what would be needed to speak of "shoes made out of bark, branches." For example, one would have expected to encounter the use of the compound derivational ending in <-z-ko> in which the instrumental suffixing element of material, <-z > would be functioning, e. g., arrizko (< arri-z-ko>) "something made of stone." In contrast, * could refer to something that the branches (or perhaps the bark of the branches) had done or produced. For instance, from "snow" we have "snow-fall." In contrast, the referenitality of the compound is more like "to go about branching" or perhaps "to branch about,." or perhaps even "to stick out one branch after another", none of which make much sense, not even in Euskera, although maybe one could imagine a scenario in which the speaker was trying to portray a scene in which the movement of a tree was portrayed with it "rapidly sprouting one branch after branch." In contrast, the root-stem with its strong meaning of can easily be turned into a verbal noun or gerundive as "repeatedly striking blows with its/one's horns." In the case of the word's other meaning "branch" is suppressed in interpreting the compound's referentiality since there would appear to be no logical counterpart for type of referentiality in question. For this reason I have always held a rather heretical position, although I've never put it into print: that the borrowed form is , i.e., that it is a reflex of the Castillian forms of . As far as I'm concerned, the original form, the one that does make more sense in Euskera, would have been (although perhaps in its original phonological shape *). In this simulation * or would have passed into Castillian in the Middle Ages through mechanisms not clear to us today, perhaps together with the object itself, something seen as a unique type of shoe. There it would have undergone phonological reduction to and/or undergone further modification to in some environments (the variant would have emerged through some sort of popular analogy to Arabic works beginning with what sounded like the same initial vowel/consonant cluster). Nonetheless, the longer form of the compound would have survived in Ibero-Romnce as . And in this simulation of events, eventually the apocapated form was borrowed back by Euskera as if it were one of its own because of the fact that the speakers recognized the root-stem in it. In these wanderings, one should not underestimate the possible role of Mozarabic speakers in converting the * to . I leave the questions of the phonological likelihood of such changes having taken place in Ibero-Romance and Arabic and the hands of those on this list who have far more expertise than I do in those fields. This is one explanation for the data. There are probably many others. Izan untsa, Roz March 17, 1999 Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 U.S.A. e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [Currently on leave in Panama] From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Mar 18 18:01:24 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 19:01:24 +0100 Subject: Mummies of Urumchi In-Reply-To: <7458c234.36eaafec@aol.com> Message-ID: >She's also been closely involved with the recent investigations of the Tarim >Basin mummies (generally agreed to be Tocharians and proto-Tocharians) generally accepted on which kind of evidence, if I may humbly ask ? Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 18 23:48:46 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 23:48:46 GMT Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <19990317043917.15292.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >However, I have been wondering about things like Sanskrit da-u (1rst >person singular). And 3rd. person (dadau). >It almost looks like *-H3 (*-h) had become *-w in >this instance. All laryngeal stems do this: dadhau with H1, yayau with H2. Also the duals in -au. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 18 19:17:44 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 11:17:44 PST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >[ Moderator's comment: > Chaucer, of course. Shakespeare is easy. > --rma ] Certainly, Shakespeare is more understandable than Chaucer and it may be easy for one who dabbles into languages and linguistics, however there are jokes and such in Shakespeare that are lost amongst the contemporary laymen. The degree of comprehension depends too on what modern dialect you compare it to. For all intents and purposes, Early Modern English is different enough from Modern English to make comprehension difficult after only 400 years or so. By comparing even Shakespeare's English to Chaucer shows how much things can change in an even shorter period. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's response: There are jokes and such understandable to members of my generation (1951) that are lost on those born 10 years later, but the language is such that the jokes can be explained--as with Shakespeare. Before the jokes in the _Canterbury Tales_ can be explained, the language itself must be explicated. I do agree that the changes between 1400 and 1600 appear more radical than those between 1600 and 1999--though the Great English Vowel Shift is obscured by the orthography, so how do we measure the difference? --rma ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Mar 19 00:03:55 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 19:03:55 EST Subject: Indo-European Phonology Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 4:53:39 AM, Bomhard at aol.com wrote: <<4. The so-called Germanic and Armenian "consonant shifts" (in German, "Lautverschiebungen"), which can only be accounted for very awkwardly within the traditional framework, turn out to be mirages. Under the revised reconstruction, these branches (along with the poorly-attested Phrygian as well) turn out to be relic areas.>> First, thanks for the terrific summary that you've given us here. As to the reconstructed obstruents as applied to the German/Armenian "shift," Philip Baldi explained and endorsed it in Comrie's "The World's Major Languages" not 40 pages from where Hawkins postulated that shift might be due to "the speakers of a fricative-rich language with no voiced stops making systematic conversions of IE into their own nearest equivalent..." in a prior nonIE tongue. Of course, he also mentioned the usual 30% non-IE lexical substrate. Baldi states that the retention of the German/Armenian archaism is the logical result if we "recognize the uneveness of the records and the fact that some of the languages split off from Proto-Indo-European long before others did,..." citing Bomhard (1984). My question is can the archaism only represent a early split-off? Aren't there other explanations for the retention of the glottalized stops? One that comes to mind is that German and Armenian were languages that were not split-off but cut-off from at the time PIE was somewhat cohesive. Historically this would mean that that for example Germanic did not move ("split-off") but rather that it stayed in place but was not in contact with changes that were happening in the rest of IE. The linguistic split would have happened afterward over time as development proceeded that created the other IE languages. And if dropping glottalizing was "an innovation" that was transferred from one IE language to another (let's say as a fashion) then we would not necessarily say that German split-off earlier, but that it was never exposed to the spreading innovation. I'd think archaic speech doesn't only happen because of an early split-off. It could happen because innovations could not reach isolated areas. The older English that has been found on isolated islands of the Atlantic Coast in America have not always happened because of the earliness of these settlements, but because subsequent changes did not reach these outposts. As to what could have cut Germanic or Armenian off from the mainstream, there may be some candidates. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 02:03:02 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 02:03:02 GMT Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) In-Reply-To: <001601be6fdd$9b4e2d40$d370fe8c@raol.lucent.com> Message-ID: "Vidhyanath Rao" wrote: >>Exactly, the fact that the imperative has the secondary (short) >>endings shows that these were the unmarked, neutral ones. >>Present (Non-past) = neutral + ``here and now''. The forms >>without the -i extension then become past forms (aorist or >>imperfect) by default. But the distinction was already in >>Anatolian (-mi present vs. -m past). >According studies of contemporary language, present vs non-present >distinction is rare to non-existent (Comrie says the latter in his >``Tense''). Zero past does not seem to occur among languages with forms >restricted to past that is obligatory. I don't know, maybe the -i originally marked something else (imperfective?). For PIE, all we can recover is that it marked the present. Compare Akkadian, where the unmarked form (iprus: -C1 C2 V C3) was the simple past, versus marked perfective [perfect] (ip-ta-ras: -C1 ta C2 V C3) and imperfective [durative] (ipar-r-as: -C1 a C2C2 V C3) forms. >It seems better to assume that SE >marked only person and number and could indicate past only when implied >by context or by inference. But then there must have been some way >(particles?) of overtly marking past when needed. Now, there is some >evidence for augment outside Gr.Arm.I-Ir (Rasmussen indicated some in a >post to the previous incarnation of this list). It is possible that the >augment disappeared as the past became overtly marked otherwise (we can >see this in progress in Pali). It may even be that the augment was >grammaticized independently in Gr. and I-Ir: I don't know if the >patterns of Myc., Homer and Avestan have been fully explained. >In fact the zero past vs marked non-past of Hittite seems quite unusual. >(i.e., Hiittite has its weirdness :-) I am not well read on the role of >sentence particles in Hittite. Do they have any role in this? [I >remember some work arguing that -kan marked perfectivity.] >>Some features that are unique to the "Indo-Greek" verbal system are: >>- the perfect as a separate "aspect", besides present (impfv.) >>and aorist (pfv.). >This is precisely what I objected to in the first place. There is no >morphologically marked aspect in Vedic or any stage of Sanskrit. I'm not sure what you're saying here. Vedic and Sanskrit have categories called (using the Greek terminology) "imperfect", "aorist" and "perfect", which are morphologically marked in different ways (root/reduplicated/-i-/-sk-(cch)/nasal presents, root/reduplicated/thematic/sigmatic aorists, reduplicated perfects [with special personal endings]). These three categories are found in Greek and Sanskrit/Avestan, and only there do we find all three categories (marked in almost exactly the same ways). The fact that the Vedic, Sanskrit and Avestan imperfect, aorist and perfect are not used in the same way as the corresponding Greek categories is interesting, underpublicized and also needs to be explained, but doesn't in any way affect the obvious close genetic connection between the two systems. At the PIE, or "Indo-Greek" level, the three categories can be described conveniently as "aspects", since they are all "past" in terms of tense. >To put it bluntly: The usual morphological classification of Vedic verb >forms found in grammar books has no syntactic justification, but is due >to 19 c. prejudices. It is a serious methodological error to base >syntactic comparisons on the mere names. The comparison is based on the forms rather than the names. >> In Hittite, the perfect is still simply the past tense of the stative >> (hi) conjugation. >There are examples of resultative > `present perfect' > (perfective) >past. But ``past state'' > resultative? IMHO, it would be better to >assume that Hittite extended its use of -i for present into the >`stative' by analogy, while the rest of IE extended the stative into >resultative with further evolution into (a kind of) past in individual >languages at different times. [Looking at some old messages, I found >that I have asked this before and you agreed that PIE `perfect' was >tenseless. In that case, Hittie -hi is an innovation.] The 1p. sg. thematic in -oH shows that a stative present was not limited to Anatolian, although the addition of -i may have been an Anatolian innovation. In fact, the morphologically marked form here seems to be the past, with -e suffix (*-H2-e, *-tH2-e, *-0-e). >>- the imperfect as a simple past tense of the present ((augment >>+) present stem + secondary endings). >What does `simple past tense of present' mean? If it means aspectually >unmarked past, how does that indicate closer relationship with Greek? >If it means ``present (imperfective) in the past'', the claim is wrong. >And Armanian aorist has `eber' which is usually traced to `ebheret'. >Slavic aorist and Baltic preterit also have forms which seem to be >from present stem + secondary endings. so such a form is not >just Gr-I-Ir. The point is that neither the Armenian nor the Baltic and Slavic *imperfect* are simply made from the present stem + secondary endings. Only Greek and Indo-Iranian make the imperfect that way. Slavic does have some root *aorists*. The Armenian aorist, apart from the 3rd.p.sg., cannot be derived from either root imperfects or aorists. >> Italic, Celtic and Albanian ... but their forms are best described >> as s-preterites. >So what is the difference between s-preterite and s-aorist? Italic, Celtic and Albanian "preterites", as a category, are a mix of aorist and perfect forms. There is no difference between Latin dixi (formally an s-aorist) and pependi (formally a reduplicated perfect), etc. There *is* a difference between pf. nina:ya and aor. anais.i:t (and impf. anayat). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Mar 18 20:08:42 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 22:08:42 +0200 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19990315080009.006a8e90@pop.mindspring.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Yoel L. Arbeitman wrote: > Point well taken. But, dictionaries of "Classical Languages", Lat. and > Gk., will always give both the nom. citation form AND the stem, usually > in the form of the genitive sg. Case under discussion: Lat. nox, noctis > will always be the listing from which one knows that the nom. nox /noks/ > represents a reduced stem /nok-/ + the desisence -s. And OIndic (Skt.) > dictionaries give for noun and verb the stem rather than either resp. > the nom. sg. or the third sg. active present. Yes, dictionaries of different languages and different kinds of dictionaries will give different information both with respect to types and tokens. But the primary point was that regardless of how much information the dictionaries provide with respect to lexicon, they usually provide either limited or no systematic information on phonology or morphology. And the real point behind it all, which I was making rather obliquely, is that for comparative work you want to have the best philological information available and that dictionaries only provide a part of this. > For the verb Classical Dictionaries give first sg. act. present. In > Semitic the verb is given in the past/perfect(ive) 3 sg. masc., etc. True for West Semitic, but dictionaries of East Semitic give the so-called "infinitive" (nomen actionis) as the lemma for verbs. The Akkadians themselves generally used this form in their lexical lists so this is a lexicographical tradition with a very long history. But using this form hides information about the stem vowel of the verb from the user and this information has to be given separately in the header or excavated from the article by the user. > Thus there is variation in what is given as the basic datum. Probably > what is here said about Finnish I am sure is true irrespective of > whether or not I want to compare it to the hypothetical IE cited. And > this is probably true for most modern language dictionaries. The > Classical, OIndic, Hebrew, Arabic, etc., cases I am most familiar with, > have a very long grammatical tradition. All true, but I expect that all dictionaries anticipate that the user is familiar with the mechanics of the language involved and therefore focus on lexical usage rather than morphophonology. But in raising the point that "using a dictionary without being aware of the phonotactical rules of the language is a recipe for disaster when doing comparative work" on this list I was hoping that I was preaching to the converted, and that such a comment would be more appropriate on something like sci.language. Surely no one with linguistic training would base language comparison solely on dictionary entries without a knowledge of the morphophonology of the language. But we have all seen the results of doing just that. A good example can be found at http://members.aol.com/IrishWord/akkadian.htm which presents a comparison between Akkadian and Irish words and shows no knowledge whatsoever of the Akkadian language. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 02:07:49 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 02:07:49 GMT Subject: Anatolian /nt/ In-Reply-To: <36EF263E.8AD66407@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu> Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote: >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > >> iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > >> > On the evidence of IE-Anatolain /nt/ changing into /nd/ (very >> >early, evidently), > >> What evidence? > > I have no idea. Whatever Palmer was using .... But what was Palmer saying? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Mar 18 20:19:43 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 22:19:43 +0200 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 16 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, Bob Whiting wrote: > > < linguistically least-marked form. Many times features of the > root that are important for comparative work are suppressed in > the nominative singular because of the phonotactics of the > language, but will still be found in the stem (the form to which > other case endings are added). >> > > I think I should explain that I was well aware that languages that have > dropped case systems and case endings generally don't use the nominative > as the surviving form. (The example I had in front of me was Latin > "infans"(nom) > Old French "enfes" (nom.) but "infantem" (accusative)> > Mod French "enfant.") This is a different principle, but is part of the explanation of why part of the stem that is not found in the nom. sing. of the parent language may turn up in the daughter languages. > If you look at my original post, however, I was stumbling towards a > slightly different question. Yes, and I must admit that I was not responding to your question, but taking the opportunity to make a different but not entirely unrelated point. But I must also admit that part of the reason that I didn't respond to your question was that I found it difficult to understand what was being asked. As I remember your question, it was "Does it matter that /t/ does not appear in most of the nom. singulars? ... Why is the /t/ not regarded as just a fairly common stem that sometimes emerges in root and sometimes doesn't?" The answer to the first part is no, as long as we know why it doesn't appear. To be able to answer the second part, I need to know how you are using "stem" and "root." This problem is not necessarily your fault, but 'stems' from the fact that different linguists use the terms in various ways. > What I asked was why the nominative singular (in those languages in > which they occur) was not in considered in reconstruction. The answer is that they are. The fact that the segment in question has disappeared in the nominative singular does not affect the reconstruction as long as the reason is known. The problem is that most dictionaries don't give the reason for the disappearance. But if you don't see it in the dictionary entry you don't have any right to assume that it wasn't (isn't) there. > The answer that both you and our moderator have given is that they are > I guess "truncated" forms, not revealing or mutating the stems. (Part > of the "phonotactics" - interesting word.) "Truncated" is not really the right term. The disappearance of /t/ in this position in both Greek /nuks/ and Latin /noks/ is simply the result of a phonotactical rule: A dental stop + s is assimilated [note assimilated from ad+similated] to ss, which is further simplified to s after a consonant, long vowel, or diphthong, and when final in both Greek and Latin. C. D. Buck, _Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_, p. 145 So the reconstructed forms of the Greek and Latin nominatives are simply */nukt-s/ and */nokt-s/, respectively, with */ts/ > */ss/ > /s/ by a normal phonological rule. This makes more sense than assuming that the nominative is the "basic" form and the genitive et cetera have some miscellaneous garbage thrown it that has nothing to do with the root. > As you say, the nominative is "linguistically the least marked form." Not "is" but "in many instances is." There is no rule that says it has to be. There is rather a tendency for languages to use the least-marked form for the most frequently used form. This is a simple rule of economy. > But that was of course the reason I choose the nominative singular, > precisely because it was the least marked form. I don't think its that > hard to see why one might naturally go to the form stripped even of > stems to get to the elemental form of the word. Not that one should, > but that one might. Again, your use of "stems" here is not transparent. > After all, to say that only the "ablative" form survived is to suggest > that the word now carries the additional grammatical baggage of the > ablative. Sorry, but huh? > Or, to go further, the notion that some stems might be nothing more than > phonetically dictated walls, separating sounds in the roots that cannot > be adjacent to the sounds of regular case endings. They could even > survive as such in daughter languages where the endings no longer > exists. Or that the stem served no other function than to signal the > user that a particular word followed a peculiar or dialectical > case-ending system. Ah, are you using "stem" in the sense of "root consonant" or "root augment/extension"? > In that light, I hope the question why the nominatives were not > considered in the reconstruction of the word doesn't sound that > ludicrous. > > I wasn't for a moment doubting the reconstruction (of "night.") And the > explanation of word-ending rules is good enough for me. (But I wonder > why e.g. Latin couldn't have solved the problem the way it did in > forming the rather regular-looking adjective - nocturnus.) The phonotactical rules that produce are not operative for . It's not a question of "solving the problem"; it's a matter of what happens in a language when certain sounds (or classes of sounds) come in contact. The answer wasn't worked out by a committee or an academy. It is a matter of a tradeoff between ease of articulation and the level of morphological differentiation needed to disambiguate meaning that the users of the language resolve with even thinking about it. > So I'll take a chance and ask the question anyway - can a stem ever be > seen as something like a vestigal case ending in reconstructing PIE - > not part of the original word, but a compounded form that produced a > universal "stem" in the daughter languages? If by "stem" you mean "root augment" this is a very complex question that has been discussed extensively without reaching any particular conclusion. There is an extensive literature on this, not only for PIE but for other language families as well. The problem is that "root extensions" don't behave mathematically. > < of the language is a recipe for disaster when doing comparative work.>> > > Well actually the dictionary did give me some nominative singulars - > which is what my question was about. And as far as the languages go, > I'm still not bad at Greek or Latin, though I've forgotten a bit. And > (but only if you insist of course) I can give a number of instances > where prominent native speakers of both tongues expressed the notion > that the nominative was "the true form of words." Prominent native speakers of Greek and Latin knew more about Greek and Latin than any of us ever will. But they didn't know much about historical linguistics. Have a read through the Cratylus to get an idea of the level of historical linguistics of the time. > By the way probably just as serious a problem with dictionaries appears > to be on the "semantic" side. 3000 year old words are often defined > with a precision that - if you know your Homer, so to speak - can be as > perilous as assuming that the nominative is worth talking about. When you get right down to it, nobody really knew his Homer except Homer. Contrary to popular opinion, dictionaries do not define words (Academies do that, or try to) but only record usage (or at least they are supposed to). As A. Leo Oppenheim (for many years Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary) was often heard to mutter "I know what it says, but what does it *mean*?" Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Mar 18 20:47:17 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 15:47:17 EST Subject: Using Dictionaries: Pros and Cons Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 4:13:07 AM, thorinn at diku.dk wrote in a note titled "Re: STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS:" <> In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, whiting at cc.helsinki.fi wrote in a message titled " Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?))": <> What a comparison of the two points-of-view given above might suggest is that Statistics and Linguistics may not be precisely on the same track. My own experience (obviously) is that even dictionaries will not inform you of the complete "phonotactics" of a language. (Although I DID know something about some of the languages involved in the "night" discussion, I sure didn't know how perverse the inventors of the nominative case could be.) Dictionaries also may not give you an accurate idea of the phonology or the comparative phonology between two languages. (Especially in dictionaries with generalist pronounciation guides where look-alikes versus sound-alikes don't always separate - Irish/Welsh can really do you in if you are not careful.) And even phonetic or historical linguistic dictionaries can REALLY ask too much when it comes to the supposed meaning of old words. However, the new digital dictionaries (such as the Perseus Project which incorporates Lidell-Scott) do have one strong advantage that they share with concordances, but perhaps do one better. And that is they report the number of incidences and give phonetic, syntactic, contextual and actual usage for the meanings they report. The incidences especially can be surprising when compared with standard dictionaries, which not only may lack "phonotactics" but also can assume usages and standardizations of words that don't always stand up to a number count in text or context. This kind of approach is I suspect where STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS might becomes meaningful. And also it does not call for the abandoning of all comparative expertise while handing out dictionaries to undergrads. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Mar 18 21:17:22 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 16:17:22 EST Subject: *p>f Revisited - When was German invented? Message-ID: In a message dated 3/14/99 4:19:24 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> --gee, that sure makes them acrobatic travellers -- bouncing all around the map, getting from somewhere in the Middle East to Jutland, crossing all sorts of other linguistic territory on the way...>> Just to be fair: East Gothic pulled off close to the same trick by ending up in the eastern Ukraine in the 1700's. Armenian certainly needs to account for how it got where it ended up, jumping languages by whatever route (except, come to think of it, if it took the Black Sea line.) And I understand the until the 1930's the Amish were essentially unilingual German speakers out there among those Pennsylvania English. The Germans have seemed to hopped before. In frontier worlds, group migrants don't really have to assimilate every language they cross. The 49'ers did not arrive in California speaking Sioux. And just to give the other POV, Cavalli-Sforza's premise with regard to that genetic information was partly I think to suggest a migration of Middle Easteners up through the heart of Europe. German being "archaic", we hear, it might have retained the memories of that visit more intact than the more "innovative cores." Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Mar 18 21:27:04 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 16:27:04 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a message dated 3/17/99 8:06:51 PM, TomHeffernan at utk.edu wrote: <<...I am somewhat skeptical of the degree of intelligibility claimed for Old Norse, Old English and Old High German. If one looks at a very familiar text -- a text we know was preached in the churches on Sundays in the vernacular -- like that of the Parable of the Sower and the Seed in the three languages the differences seem considerable enough to preclude immediate intelligibility.... Old Norse reads " En sumt fellr i [th]urra jor[th] ok grjotuga...; Old English reads " Sum feoll ofer stanscyligean...; Old High German reads: "Andaru fielun in steinahti lant....">> My question of course would be how long did it take to see this kind of divergence and why it would not apply to PIE as it "spread" from the Danube over a period of thousands of years. A similar thing did not happen in the Latin version of that parable, of course, because something was keeping it from happening. And from the things I understand those old missionaries went through out among those pagans, it was not "elitism." Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Mar 19 04:44:37 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 23:44:37 EST Subject: Greek question (night?) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/17/99 5:29:48 PM, you wrote: <> Now slow this down for me, if you would. I see three reconstructions there, but the second one is from the nominative. Is that *not-s supposed to be Celtic? Regards, Steve Long [ Yes. -rma ] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 14:34:26 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:34:26 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? A bilberry is a blueberry, or a kind of blueberry. It appears to be more or less the same thing we call a huckleberry back home. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 19 08:09:58 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 02:09:58 -0600 Subject: "mama" Syndrome Message-ID: A note of levity, which is not intended to mock the discussion: The Latin for "teat" is . The Italian is POPPA. Then there was the Rock Group "The Mommas and the Poppas". [Hope I spelt 'em write: i hate Rottenroll] [ moderator snip of long DLW post ] From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 14:36:59 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:36:59 GMT Subject: Borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: >The same seems to have happened in Dutch. Spain got possession of Holland (not >by conquest but by the chances of marriage and birth and death and inheritance >among noble and royal families, and Holland got free afterwards in a long >savage religious war.) In Dutch originally: {du} = "thou", {jij} = "ye", >{uwe}?= "your (pl)", or similar (I think). Later:- > {jij} used as polite singular as in French and English. > {Uwe Edelheid} = "Your Nobility" used as polite "you" sg & pl, later >abbreviated in writing and then in speech to (U E} and then {U} (by imitating >Spanish {usted}?) 19th c. spelling /y'We/ > /'yW@/ > /y/. > {jij} no longer used as plural. > (du} fell completely out of use :: in the 16th century it was a literary >rarity. (But I have seen {dou wilde se} = "thou wild sea" in a poem in >modern Frisian.) Yes, Frisian is different: 1. ik mij/my 2. do/du^ dij/dy (fam.) jo jo (form.) 3. hij/hy him (masc.) sij/sy/hja har (fem.) 1. wij/wy u's 2. jim(me) jim(me) 3. sij/sy/hja har > The present situation is (I think: my Dutch has got a bit stale; I >learned it for 2 holidays motorcycling around Holland around 1980):- > nom gen > jij & je jouw you (sg) (intimate / condescending, like French {tu}) > gij & ge thou (sg) (religious / dialectal / poetical) > jullie van jullie you (pl) (familiar) (< "you people") > u uw you (sg & pl) (polite) nom acc gen jij jou jouw (unstressed: je - je - je) gij u uw (unstressed: ge - u - u) jullie jullie jullie (unstressed: jullie - je - jullie) U U Uw In Southern dialects, there is a single 2nd. person form (no familiar, formal; singular, plural distinctions) gij/u/uw, much as in English. Jij/gij and jou(we)/u(we) are phonetic variants (the first northern, the second southern). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 19 08:28:20 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 02:28:20 -0600 Subject: IE Technological lexicon: Linguistic Archaeology Alive and Well Message-ID: good Do you know Piggott's Ancient India [Penguin]? good discussion of same. p. s. aNNus / milleNNium JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > We should note that there are PIE roots not only for "wheel" (several > different words) but for a whole series of related terms -- axle, nave of a > wheel, wheeled vehicle/wagon, yoke, 'to make a journey by wagon', etc. > There are also terms for wool, woven cloth, sewing, spinning, and weaving. > The above are unambiguously 4th-millenium, no earlier. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 19 14:43:40 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 08:43:40 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Let's say I was gratuitously offensive. MCV was gratuitously dismissive. Don't pepper your prose with "clearly, surely, perhaps", and -- shifting metaphors -- your balloon won't get pricked. I knew about both etymologies. He didn't, or he did not deign to show why the Arabic etymology should be excluded. It is beyond question that generations of Castilians and foreigner have been taught that is a compression of . Which doesn't make it true. Now, if should be the source of , was there, in the early period of the usage, gender concord in complement adjectives? E.g., spoken to a man: "!Vd. est? viva! " [I lack Castilian font: please invert first /!/.] And, when did the masculine adjectives achieve acceptance, if was ever = ? IE Etymology needs not only Cognates, Sound Laws, and Analogy, but also syntax and morphology. jpm ...................................... Rick Mc Callister wrote: > This one's hard to prove either way. > That usted looks like ustadh is obvious but forms based on vuesa > merced, vuestras mercedes DO come close to usted. > BUT if usted is documented before the other forms, I'd say it is > very possible that usted is from Arabic and that the other forms are folk > etymologies. Conversely, one could argue that usted is the folk etymology > --provided that one could show that the other forms predated it. > The problem lies in that one has to wonder why usted didn't appear > in Old Spanish when Arabic influence was much strong. I'd guess that the > only possible way to argue that Usted is from Arabic would be to try to > maintain that's it's a loanword from Mozarabe that spread from the South. > But you'd have to document that. [ moderator snip of remainder of long RMcC post ] From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 09:29:40 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 09:29:40 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >OIr , W `plum', W (pl.) 'fruits, berries'; >MBret NBret `sloe' The Irish one, like the Breton, means 'sloe'. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 14:50:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:50:07 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick: > I've never come across vuste', ect., anywhere in Latin America but >that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But I'd wonder if it wasn't heard >from a Spanish immigrant. Coromines (DEiCCat): "vuste' en el Nord d'Equador (Lemos, Prov. ecuatoriano, $54); buste' en boca d'un venec,ola` amazo`nic (Eust. Rivera, La Vora'gine, p. 194); a zones colombianes: Cuervo, Obra Ine'd., p. 160, i n. 50, a la Gram. de Bello, tambe' ho cita en valls del Sud de Col.; i en una <> oi"da cap a Bogota`: <> (Cuervo, Apunt. Bog.7, 587). Doesn't Corominas mention 'usta:dh in DCEC/DCEH? I seem to recall that he does, but I don't have either at hand. In DEiCC, he just says: "Com e's ben sabut, voste` resulta` d'una contraccio' de vostra merce`". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From jpmaher at neiu.edu Fri Mar 19 09:24:58 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 03:24:58 -0600 Subject: "mama" Syndrome Message-ID: Dear DLW, I posted a note on Latin MAMMA, Italian POPPA to the net. I'm unsure if it will appear. [ Moderator's note: It will have, by the time this one goes out. --rma ] You probably know Roman Jakosbsons's Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine Lautgesetze. jpm [ moderator snip of long DLW post ] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 14:53:01 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:53:01 +0000 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > (2) Re borrowing a pronoun of one language into some other use in > another language: etymological dictionaries say that US English > "bozo" = "fool" < Spanish "vosotros": Odd. The several sources in my office all describe `bozo' as being of unknown origin, and some of them offer speculations which are all utterly different from this one and from one another. The word is recorded from 1920, and all the early citations appear to place the word in urban use and in urban contexts in the east -- not what I'd expect for a borrowing from Spanish. > could it also be that the US > English slang term of address and then nickname "buster" came from > the abovementioned Spanish dialect ?, and not the English > for "one who busts (= breaks) things". The OED regards `buster', as a term of address for a man, as derived from the earlier, and well-attested, slang use of the word to denote `a roistering blade, a dashing fellow', a sense recorded from about 1850 -- rather early for a loan from Spanish, I'd hazard, and apparently itself derived from an earlier use of `buster' to mean `something impressive'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 09:37:29 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 09:37:29 +0000 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >BTW, there is on the web, a neat site called Enthnologue put up by the SIT >that is a catalogue of world languages (I think it is UN info.) There one >learns for example such things as: >"ALLEMANNISCH (ALEMANNISCH, ALLEMANNIC, ALEMANNIC, SCHWYZERD?TSCH, >ALSATIAN) [GSW] (300,000 in Austria; 1991 Annemarie Schmid; 4,225,000 in >Switzerland; 1986). Southwestern. Also in Alsace, France. Indo-European, >Germanic, West, Continental, High. Approximately 40% inherent >intelligibility with Standard German. Speakers are bilingual in Standard >German. Called 'Schwyzerd?tsch' in Switzerland, 'Alsatian' in >southeastern France. Similar to Swabian. Differs from most other German >varieties in not having undergone the second lautverschiebung, or vowel >shift. NT 1984. Bible portions 1936-1986." I _do_ hope this is not the UN's info. Though it could be a good reason to persuade them to hire some linguists at large salaries. Just a few things: - 'speakers are bilingual in Standard German' - not necessarily, most of the Alsatian ones speak French as their standard language. - 'similiar to Swabian'. Facile. They're German dialects. You could add 'similar to Bavarian, not unlike Franconian etc.'. - 'not having undergone the second lautverschiebung or vowel shift'. Wow! Swiss German has more second Lautverschiebung than most, e.g. kchind. It doesn't have anything to do with vowels. What they probably mean is 'the NHG Diphthongisation', which really is absent in that southwestern corner. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 15:21:44 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 15:21:44 GMT Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Max W Wheeler wrote: >> Coromines suggests three base forms: *agri:nia, *agranio. *agrena; and >> mentions that Pokorny related the Celtic forms with Goth >> `fruit', OE `acorn' CSl <(j)a'goda> `small fruit, berry' Lit >> id., 'cherry'. >> He suggests that Biskaian `plum' may be < *okran < *akran < >> *agranio, influenced by `bunch of fruits' and other words in >> where is < `bread'. (How does that grab you, Larry, >> Miguel?) >It strikes me as pretty fanciful, I'm afraid. The combining form of > `bread' is , not *, and there is absolutely no parallel >in Basque for the steps involved in the proposed derivation of , >except that a putative * would indeed be borrowed into Basque in >the form *. It seems to me that Corominas is suggesting that was borrowed from Gothic , and --> under the influence of . Whether has anything to do with is another question (but ot- + g- or k- > ok-, as in okin "baker"). >Given the recorded `sloe', we have a simple >four-part analogy, where the word for `hen' is chosen somewhat >arbitrarily: > > `wild hen' : `hen :: `wild plum' : X > >And solving for X yields the required `plum'. Sounds plausible. Better than a Gothic loan in any case. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 11:24:03 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:24:03 +0000 Subject: `spool' In-Reply-To: <36F117F6.71E7DF0C@neiu.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > 4. Birch bark, everyone knows, was used for canoes by N. American > Indians; the large birch in question was nearly exterminate by > Europeans, who used the wood for industrially made thread spools. [I > have forgotten the British term for the latter.] It's `reel', generally confined in the US to things around which films, tapes and fishing lines are wound. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 15:27:10 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 15:27:10 GMT Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Xavier Delamarre wrote: >5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental Celtic >*agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, gereta, mando_ etc. >are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, mandu,_ . You forgot the Gaul. for azkoin ("badger")? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 11:32:12 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:32:12 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Navarrese is usually considered a form of Aragonese Yes, this is correct. > and I've read in some places that Navarra is now the only place > where "Aragonese" is now spoken. Interesting, but I haven't come across such a report. Outside the Basque-speaking region, I've only ever encountered Castilian in Navarre, but then I don't suppose many people would try to speak Aragonese to me even if they knew it. Interestingly, the larger cities of Navarre all contain significant numbers of Basque-speakers today, thanks to immigration from the Basque-speaking area to the north. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 15:50:02 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 15:50:02 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Xavier Delamarre wrote: > 5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental > Celtic *agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, > gereta, mando_ etc. are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, > mandu,_ . Well, I'd be a bit cautious about asserting that these items are "obviously" of Celtic origin. In fact, only one of them appears to be indisputably of Celtic origin. The problem with deriving `plum' from * is that this would violate the usual rules for adapting loan words to Basque phonology: we would have expected something like * in Basque, not the observed . Basque `lady' has long been suspected of being borrowed from Celtic, given the existence of a possible Celtic source represented by Old Irish `young (woman)'. But there is another possibility, pointed out a few years ago by Joaquin Gorrochategui. G notes that the Aquitanian ancestor of Basque exhibits both a female name ANDERE and a male name ANDOSSUS, with ANDOS(S)- also appearing as a first element in other male names. He proposes that the second represents a Pre-Basque word * with a Latin ending, and he proposes to derive both and * from a stem *(and->, with a female suffix *<-ere> in one case and the attested male suffix <-(d)ots> in the other. If is `lady', then this * must be `lord'. Support for this idea comes from the observation that, while `lady' is down to the present day, the word for `lord' in the historical period is . Now, this word has a very strange form for a noun in Basque: normally we find initial /j/ only in non-finite forms of verbs, and nowhere else. As it happens, looks for all the world like the perfective participle of a verb, and so we may surmise that might derive from the participle * of an otherwise lost verb, meaning perhaps `exalted' or something similar, and having displaced the earlier word for `lord'. All this sounds more than plausible to me. Basque `badger', with *many* regional variants, is a puzzle, but few have suspected a Celtic origin. Most of the variants point to an original *, and many commentators have been quick to suppose a borrowing from Late Latin `badger', itself reportedly of Germanic origin. Admittedly, though, the borrowing of as * would be somewhat unusual phonologically. A complication is the Zuberoan variant , which appears to point to an earlier *. This leads some observers to suggest a derivative of native <(h)artz> `bear', with an unidentifiable second element. It is true that a badger somewhat resembles a bear cub. As for a putative Celtic origin, I can find no suggestion beyond that of Wagner, who wants the Basque word to derive from a Celtic *, the source of regional English `brock', but just how this is supposed to yield * beats me. The strictly Bizkaian Basque `habit, custom' has sometimes been derived from a supposed Celtic *, but most specialists from Schuchardt on have rejected this, not least because it appears that no such Celtic word exists. Schuchardt and Michelena prefer to see the word as deriving from some Romance reflex of Latin `fault, defect', which develops the sense of `habit, custom' rather widely in western Romance. Basque `salmon' is widely suspected of being *ultimately* of Celtic origin, but not *directly*: instead, a Celtic loan into Late Latin is favored by most commentators as the direct source of the Basque word. Basque (and variants) `rustic gate' (and other senses) is likewise suspected of being ultimately from Celtic, but probably directly from a Late Latin *, whose reflexes are prominent in western Romance. A puzzle here is the form of the Basque word, since, by the usual rules, * should yield a Basque *, and not the observed ; it may be that a Romance development * has intervened, since this would yield the attested Basque form straightforwardly. If not, then the word has developed somewhat irregularly, though not wildly so. Finally, `mule' is the one word here which is more or less universally believed to be diectly from Celtic. The word is reportedly found widely in IE languages to denote various equine animals, but the sense of `mule' is said to be specifically Celtic. The paucity of direct Celtic loans into Basque is a puzzle, since we know that an ancestral form of Basque was in contact with Celtic for centuries before and after the Roman conquest. Michelena once hazarded the suggestion that more Celtic loanwords into Basque must have existed once, but that many were either displaced by Latino-Romance loans or simply re-formed under Latino-Romance influence. A Celtic origin has also been suggested for ~ `oar', pointing to earlier *, possibly to be identified with the word represented by Old Irish `oar'. Don't know if there's anything much behind this, especially since the nasal appears to be wrong. Finally, `beloved' has been thought for a century to have been borrowed from the Celtic word represented by Old Irish `good'. The semantics requires some fancy footwork, but the Basque word has an anomalous form for a native word, and is surely borrowed from somewhere. I should add that Vasconists and Romanists have at times been rather eager to see Celtic solutions for problematic words, but that a Celticist colleague has pointed out to me that some of the convenient Celtic solutions put forward do not appear to have existed in Celtic. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 11:41:53 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:41:53 +0000 Subject: `bast' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > >According to Chambers also, it rhymes with gas, not with mast, in RP. Interesting and curious. Both my Collins dictionary and John Wells's Longman Pronouncing Dictionary recognize the pronunciation with /-st/ as the only possibility for RP, though Collins notes that `bass', so spelled and so pronounced, is a variant of `bast'. My copy of Chambers is at home. I might note, though, that the Chambers dictionary is Scottish, not English, and that it is traditionally somewhat eccentric from an English point of view. Its rather distinctive approach is evident in all the numerous editions with red covers, but, sadly, in its most recent edition, the one with a black cover, Chambers has gone mainstream and abandoned its traditional foibles. An example: try looking up the word `eclair' in any of the red editions, and then compare the entry in the new black edition. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Mar 19 11:53:24 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:53:24 +0200 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36F113FA.6CDAA0B5@neiu.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > 1. No, no, a 1000x no = no argument. > As an argument from authority is no argument. An argument from authority can be quite valid. There are a number of rules that have to be observed to qualify an argument from authority, but if they are met then the argument can be accepted. Anything that you have knowledge of that you have not verified personally is an argument from authority. The reason that I know that the moon is not made out of green cheese (or Normandy brie) is that reasonable people who have been trained to investigate the matter and who have no reason to lie have told me so. It is an argument from authority. Do not confuse expert authority with institutional authority. The two are quite different an a logical context. Any time you look up a word in a dictionary or check out something in an encylopaedia it is an argument from authority. Now if you wish to say that such references are invalid because an argument from authority is no argument, then the only arguments that you can use are ones that you have personally verified. Therefore we can assume that your connection of Arabic <'usta:dh> and Spanish is based on your personal knowledge of the two languages and the histories of the words in those languages. In which case it would seem more useful to share this information with the rest of us than to shout down "arguments from authority." It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a non-native word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, argument from authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your own knowledge why the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that the same word exists in Persian (<'usta:d>). > 2. <'usta:dh> ~ "ustaeth" are both transcriptions; So are ~ "duh". But one is standardized and one is personal. Is it your point that <'usta:dh> is invalid because it is an argument from authority while "ustaeth" is based on your own personal experience? > I doubt if the net has an Arabic font. Strictly speaking, the net doesn't have any fonts at all. What you see on your screen is what you tell your terminal to show you. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Fri Mar 19 15:53:33 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 09:53:33 -0600 Subject: Celtic Influence Revisited Message-ID: Or re-conceptualized, so as to break out of the recent "is not / is too" cycle ... The proposition that OE was a class dialect is to some extent more assumption than conclusion. No, this does not make the argument circular. There is evidence, such as the forms and usages found in ME texts, that allow it to break out of itself, so to speak. The basic idea is that if we assume certain things about socio-linguistics, secondary languageu acquisition, and the nature of the two languages in contact, the evidence found in ME becomes in a sense predictable rather than simply random. The main assumptions are: 1) That OE was a class dialect. That is to say that suppression of sub-standard features would not surprising, until the Norman Conquest made old notions meaningless. 2) That secondary language-acquirers tend to model their use of the secondary language upon a primary language. (This is not controversial, I include it only for clarity). This modeling DOES extend to non-sound features. 3) That the Celtic language that the Anglo-Saxons found in England a) had severely reduced nominal morphology, and b) made extensive use of periphrasis in its verbal system. 4) The the language the Anglo-Saxons brought wih them was of the familiar Old Germanic type. 5) That there was extensive "Celtic survival" in what might be called "the Greater North and West", a term which I mean to include much of the Midlands. 6) That there was extensive Norse influence in the North and East (East Anglia), which would have tended to produce both something superficially similar to creolization and, less obviously, to suppress the use of periphrasis in the verbal system, as such usages were alien to Norse. With these assumptions, the pattern of non-sound innovations seen in the ME dialects pretty well falls out, as has been noted. (I am not going to say things that might be prefaced by "Let me reiterate ..") So the question becomes, since it works to explain something which has not previously been explained, is it falsified, or even made improbable, by anything else? Since we are dealing with the Dark Ages after all, which are not called dark for nothing, to demand direct "proof" one way or another would be unreasonable. It is only be using such indirect evidence as is provided by the ME dialects, our general knowledge of socio-linguistics and secondary language acquisition, Higham's non-linguistic arguments in favor of substantial Celtic survival, etc., that the darkness can be lifted at all. Anyway ... I wrote about a hundred pages worth of material on this subject over ten years ago, and I do not think anybody (including me) wants anything close to a repeat performance here and now. Yes, more could be said ... DLW From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Fri Mar 19 11:49:33 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:49:33 -0000 Subject: IE Plosive System: DLW Explains It All For You Message-ID: [ note to moderator snipped ] DLW wrote: > Before going on to the next part of my brilliant "tour de force", > I need someone to answer for me a very basic question: does Semitic permit > consecutive pharngealized ("emphatic") consonants in its roots? Someone who looked at this less than ten years ago and/or who has dictionaries to hand, or who just knows more than I do, is probably better equipped to answer this, but I like seeing my name in print, so here goes. My recollection is that the main restriction is that consecutive velars didn't co-occur, and that emphatics (but not q) counted as velar(ized). So you don't get *ks~C or *Ct~g or t~s~C or the like as Hebrew roots. In Arabic it's slightly disguised: [j^] comes from earlier [g], so you don't get *kj^ or *j^t~ or *kz~. But [q] collocates freely, as in [qas~r] 'castle', [qit~3ah] 'piece'. Another complication is that [x] and [G] don't count as velar, presumably because they derived from something more guttural in the restriction period. So you do get [s~aGi:r] 'small', [xit~a:b] 'letter', [?axd~ar] 'green'. The archaeo-velars [k j^ s~ z~ t~ d~] happily co-occur with other gutturals: [2is~a:n] 'horse', [2uj^rah] 'room', [t~a:?ir] 'bird', [qat~a3a] 'he cut'. I can't remember whether the restriction is across the whole root or just neighbouring consonants, but I can't think of any words like *[t~alas~a] or *[j^abaka]. Nicholas Widdows (using [2] and [3] for the pharyngals) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:26:16 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:26:16 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (dates) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Linear Ware Culture raced ahead of agriculture. -- nyet. LBK spread rapidly, and so did agriculture -- all the way from Hungary to northern France in a few centuries. That left a lot of uncultivated ground in between, and of course hunting continued right down to historic times as a supplement, gradually decreasing in importance. Bottom line: they were farmers. It took less than 500 years for farmers to colonize the entire loess soil belt. This shouldn't be surprising. A human population faced with an open land frontier doubles every 25 years or so. 1,000 2,000 4,000 8,000 16,000 32,000 -- and that's in only 150 years and starting from a very low base. >This is where I think some of our problem arises. Evidence of agriculture is >not evidence of the adoption of agriculture. -- walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. They were cultivating crops, using the plow, and herding domesticated livestock. The pollen samples register both grain pollen and indications of forest clearance. That's agriculture in my book. Agriculture includes livestock, by the way. We're an agricultural civilization, and we eat a lot of meat. So did our ancestors, in periods when there wasn't much population pressure -- post Black Death, for example, northern Europeans ate over 2 pounds a day, on average. >that in Britain,... grain was grown, or even imported from the continent, >only for ritual purposes. -- maybe they gave it to the Saucer People in return for pyramidic sharpening of razor blades. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:34:15 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:34:15 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >Iiffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >The situation in England of that time is a little anomalous, -- normal. >for a time everyone spoke his local dialect -- as virtually everyone in Europe did prior to the emergence of the modern State and standardized languages in post-Renaissance times. Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. >Thus the class barriers in English at that time were relatively recent, and >there had not been much time for much divergence to occur. -- nice try but it won't work. Lowland Scotland, which spoke a Northumbrian dialect, was never conquered by the Normans, and the court and nobility there used Lallans right down to the late 17th century. Same dialect as the farmers, with some Latinate words thrown into the court poetry for effect. Awa' wi' it. Substantial class differences in accent are a rare phenomenon, and vanishingly rare in preliterate societies. Remember, an Anglo-Saxon landowner's main social contacts would be with his social inferiors, not his peers. Everything from his nursmaid to his groom. Those are the people he'd spend most time talking to. Note the similarities of black and white English in the antebellum Southern plantation belt -- every traveller noted how the planters and their families "talked like Negroes". That was because they spent most of their time talking _to_ Negroes. From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 12:08:14 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:08:14 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: <10d71913.36eff89d@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>In the case of late OE / late ON it's often said that the two languages were >>"very close" and mutually intelligible. >> >-- they were intelligible at the level of pointing at a house and saying >"house" and both parties understanding the word. Saying the equivalent of "Me >burn house." would also probably get across. Roughly the situation with >Swedish and Danish today, in other words. No, *much* further apart. More in the neighbourhood of French and Spanish, English and German. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 12:32:03 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 12:32:03 GMT Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36F113FA.6CDAA0B5@neiu.edu> Message-ID: "maher, johnpeter" wrote: >3. If is the source of was there, in the early period >of the usage, gender concord in complement adjectives? > >. E.g. "!Vd. esta viva! " [I lack Castilian font: please invert first /!/.] In the early period, i.e. when fully pronounced "vuestra merced", such concord might occasionally have been used. Cf. "Vuestra majestad esta' viva / vivo". But the usual concord would have applied otherwise, exactly the same as in the case of "vos": "... pide verbo en plural, pero concierta en singular con el adjetivo aplicado a la persona a quien se dirige: vos, don Pedro, sois docto; vos, Juana, sois caritativa" (Dicc. de la Lengua) ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Fri Mar 19 12:42:29 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:42:29 +0200 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <19990317013032.7830.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Yoel L. Arbeitman wrote: >>Robert Orr wrote: >>Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English, >>borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had >>become indistinguishable from sing. forms. >But the entire paradigm of the 3rd pl in NE is "they, them (acc.-dat.) >and their". So it might be less hyperbolic to say the "the-" stem for the >3rd pl. One might throw in "theirs" which is actually the pronoun (gen.), "their" being an adjective ('these books are theirs' ~ 'these are their books'). One could also note that the old form of the oblique (acc.-dat.) has not been completely replaced but the form 'em (dat.-acc. pl. of OE he:) continues to be used ("stick 'em up; up and at 'em; head 'em up, move 'em out; give 'em hell, Harry") informally; most people, however, think that 'em is just an abbreviation of 'them' without realizing its origin. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From adahyl at cphling.dk Fri Mar 19 13:44:33 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:44:33 +0100 Subject: lenis and glottalic In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, > [Quoting Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen for]: > > > Not wanting to open the whole can of worms again, let me just ask > > > this: Is a change from lenis to voiced stop natural and frequently seen? > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > > I think so. English and Danish (fortis-lenis) vs. Dutch > > (voiceless-voiced), for instance. Or East Armenian vs. West > > Armenian. Finnish vs. Estonian (or is that just the spelling?). Concerning Estonian: Yes, it is just the spelling. The letters , and represent the phonemes /p/, /t/ and /k/ respectively, i.e. short voiceless plosives, whereas

, , represent /pp/, /tt/, /kk/ respectively, i.e. geminated voiceless plosives. In addition, the digraphs , , represent the three overlong voiceless plosives, which we may notate here as /ppp/, /ttt/ and /kkk/ respectively. Adam Hyllested From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 13:49:40 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:49:40 GMT Subject: Dating of Anatolian /nt/ vs. /nd/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > I take this opportunity to note that the same suffix, /-nth-/, >also occurs in Pre-Greek words like > "asaminthos" 'bathtub' > "me:rinthos" 'thread' > "erebinthos" 'pea' > "olunthos" 'unripe fig' > "Huakinthos" 'Hyacinth' > where a meaning 'collective' seems improbable. Quoting Friedrich's Hittite grammar: Das Suffix -ant- ist in verscheidenen, noch nicht restlos klaren, Verwendungen belegt [...]: a) Es bildet Substantiva, hinter denen man 1. Kollektiva vermutet: utne:- "Land" und utne:yant- "Land (in seinem Gesamtfassung)", tuzzi- "Heer" und tuzziyant- "Heeresmasse", antuhsatar "Menschheit" und antuhsannant- [..] "Bevoelkerung", parn- "Haus" und parnant- "Hauswesen" [..] Anm.: Laroche [..] sieht in dieser Gruppe vielmehr Singulative [..] 2. Eine besonder Gruppe bilden Zeitbestimmungen, vor allem Bezeichnungen von Jahreszeiten: hamesh(a)- un hameshant- "Fruehjahr", gim- und gimmant- "Winter" [..]. Goetze sieht in den Formen auf -ant- Bezeichnungen der Zeitdauer (wie in frz. anne'e, journe'e neben an und jour). 3. In vielen Faellen unterscheiden sich Gruntwort und Ableitung auf -ant- bedeutungsmaessig gar nicht von einander: sankunni- und sankunniyant- "Priester", huhha- und huhhant- "Grossvater", hilammar und hilamnant "Torbau", eshar und eshanant- "Blut", uttar und uddanant "Wort, Sache", kast- und kistant- "Hunger". Anm.: Innerhalb dieser Gruppe koennen eine Anzahl Koerperteilnamen besonders zusammengefaesst werden: kalulupa- und kalulupant- "Finger", tapuwas- und tapuwassant- "Rippe, Seite", hasta:i- und hastiyant- "Knochen", sankuwai- und sankuwayant- "Fingernagel" [..] b) Auch von Adjektiven gibt es mit dem Grundwort gleichbedeutende Weiterbildungen auf -ant-: assu- und assuwant- "gut", irmala- und irmalant- "krank", suppi- und suppiyant- "rein", dapiya- und dapiyant- "ganz" [..] 2. Vielleicht sind aber auch adjektivische Ableitungen auf -ant- von substantivischen Grundwoertern anzuerkennen: perunant- "felsig" von peruna- "Fels", kaninant- "durstig" von kanint- "durst" [..] Anm.: Hierher oder zu $49 d [-want-]: akuwant- "steinig" von aku- "Stein". [Some of the words mentioned under point 3. may be showing the "ergative" suffix -ant-, used when an inanimate (neuter) noun is used as subject of a transitive verb]. [The suffix -want- means "having, provided with": samankurwant- "bearded" (zamankur "beard") kistuwant- "hungry" (kast- "hunger"), also esharwant- "blood red" (eshar "blood")] Under (Cuneiform) Luwian, Friedrich notes: "-(a)nt- und -(a)nti- ist zur Bildung von Ableitungen ebenso haeufig wie im Heth.: parnant- "Haus", tiyammanti- "Erde", tappasanti- "Himmel", apparanti- "Zukunft", urant- "gross". The general Luwian plural suffix -nzi (acc./dat. -nza, abl./ins. -nzati, gen. -nzan (?)) is also derived from *-nt (Friedrich compares Tocharian and Slavic [Russ. kotenok, kotjata < *-enta]) > It is also true that the element /parna-/ in "Parnassos", which >occurs on both sides of the Aegean, is recognized as pre-IE, so if the >first element in such words can be from a common substrate, why can't the >second element also be from a common substrate? I don't happen to think that parna- is necessarily non-IE. In Hittite it's an irregular noun (pir < *perr < *pern, parnas < *porn-os), which doesn't fit the loanword theory too well. And the only external source I've ever seen mentioned is Egyptian which doesn't seem appropriate either geographically or phonetically (no -n in Egyptian, and Eg. /r/ < *l. Why not pick on Grk. ?) > But the main thing is that there is no sound-sequence in Anatolian >which we would expect to be borrowed into Greek as /-nth-/. Whether Hittite was /ntt/ (/nt/) or /nt/ (/nd/) is not recoverable in any way from the orthography. Maybe Lycian and Lydian spellings a millennium later show /nd/ (is that what Palmer is going on?), but that doesn't prove much about the situation as it was when pre-Greek borrowed these words from some Anatolian-like language spoken in Greece. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 13:51:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:51:52 GMT Subject: IE Plosive System: DLW Explains It All For You In-Reply-To: Message-ID: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > Before going on to the next part of my brilliant "tour de force", >I need someone to answer for me a very basic question: does Semitic permit >consecutive pharngealized ("emphatic") consonants in its roots? Yes. I have the impression that Semitic rather encourages them (or at least that pharyngeal /H/ and /3/ sometimes cause neighbouring etymologically non-emphatic consonants to become emphatic). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 14:20:36 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:20:36 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? Small mountain fruit called 'fraughan' in Ireland (in English, so to speak). They grow on low scrubby bushes and attain about the size of a blackcurrant. They are junior cousins of the US blueberry, which we don't have. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 14:18:41 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:18:41 GMT Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Navarrese is usually considered a form of Aragonese and I've read >in some places that Navarra is now the only place where "Aragonese" is now >spoken. The original Aragonese fabla is spoken in Upper (Pyrinean) Aragon. Jaca and thereabouts. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:41:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:41:00 EST Subject: Bilingualism Message-ID: Here in Santa Fe, one will often hear people switching back and forth from Spanish to English in the middle of sentences. "His pay is (spanish phrase) but he never thinks to (spanish phrase) the dirty (spanish phrase). Goddamned hijo de puta!" (Recently overheard.) That's mainly among the older generation. The younger seems to largely speak English to each other and Spanish to older people; of course, local English is full of Spanish loan-words and occasional turns of phrase. From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sat Mar 20 04:45:24 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 23:45:24 -0500 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (dates) Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > >Linear Ware Culture raced ahead of agriculture. > -- nyet. LBK spread rapidly, and so did agriculture -- all the way from > Hungary to northern France in a few centuries. That left a lot of > uncultivated ground in between, and of course hunting continued right down to > historic times as a supplement, gradually decreasing in importance. > Bottom line: they were farmers. It took less than 500 years for farmers to > colonize the entire loess soil belt. This shouldn't be surprising. A human > population faced with an open land frontier doubles every 25 years or so.  > 1,000 > 2,000 > 4,000 > 8,000 > 16,000 > 32,000 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 25*64=1,600 years. Starting with Adam and Eve, and doubling every 25, after 64 doublings is 1,600 years and the population is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 because that is what 2^64 is computed to be. > -- and that's in only 150 years and starting from a very low base. Can't get much lower than Adam and Eve. -- Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 19 18:43:56 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 18:43:56 GMT Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > In Spanish, it's called a [which also means garbage >can/truck, among other things], hence the town of El Cajo/n. > Box canyons figured in most westerns filmed in Arizona, so if >you've seen John Wayne movies, you've seen plenty of them. They're the >places where the bad guys are usually holed up in. At least in the films, >they're canyons that have only one entrance, which is narrow with steep >walls. They widen out inside and often have a bit of a flood plain where >farming is possible. > I'd imagine there'd be quite a few of them in parts of southern and >eastern Spain where smaller streams flow down from the plateau. As to Artesa de Segre, and as one who nearly drowned there once [I must have been 10 or so], I must say it's not really a box canyon in my recollection, but the river (Segre) does flow through mountainous territory there. Indeed the fact that the waterlevel rose so quickly on the particular day of my near-drowning (some bozo must have opened the floodgates of the Oliana reservoir upstream), suggests that the valley is rather narrow, I think. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From donncha at eskimo.com Sat Mar 20 05:33:39 1999 From: donncha at eskimo.com (Dennis King) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 21:33:39 -0800 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Sheila Watts: >>I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? > >Small mountain fruit called 'fraughan' in Ireland (in English, so to >speak). fraughan < Irish "fraocha/n" (< "fraoch" (= heather) + dim. suffix) = vaccinium myrtilis = whortleberry Dennis King From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:51:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:51:51 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >DFOKeefe at aol.com writes: << One nation with both a class and a regional based system of dialects used to be pre-Revolutionary China. >> -- many Chinese "dialects" are actually separate languages, as distinct as Spanish and French. I've personally seen Mandarin and Cantonese speakers try to communicate, give up, and drop into English instead. Of course, the _written_ Chinese language, being largely ideographic, was standard everywhere. That's one reason why it's of limited value in reconstructing earlier stages of Chinese, of course, except for poetry. [ Moderator's note: One for two: The Chinese writing system is not ideographic, but logographic. This is a source of endless discussions on various newsgroups; the DejaNews search engine can aid anyone interested in following up on the point. --rma ] From donncha at eskimo.com Sat Mar 20 05:56:33 1999 From: donncha at eskimo.com (Dennis King) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 21:56:33 -0800 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: <371f6c44.258300489@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal: >You forgot the Gaul. for azkoin ("badger")? >From Continental Celtic *tazgo-, attested in the Gaulish names "Tasgilllus" and "Moritasgus", and in the Irish name "Tadhg"?? Dennis King From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:55:36 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:55:36 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >In every Spanish-speaking country I've been in, including Cuba, class >dialects are very noticeable. >> -- that's odd, because my mother grew up in Lima, Peru, and when we were travelling in Spain in the 1950's, if she didn't tell the locals about it people were repeatedly puzzled as to _where_ she came from, and thought she had a rather old-fashioned way of speaking (like some remote village), but the question of social class didn't come up. From iglesias at axia.it Sat Mar 20 02:48:42 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 18:48:42 PST Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: JPM wrote: >2. As of 1960, in the Veneto, dialect speakers were uncomfortable with the >feminine pronoun in addressing a man. They address a man with their >masculine pronoun . The same applies to Lombardy today. Dialect speakers who don't speak Italian well (and there are still many around), address strangers as Lui, which is considered quite incorrect in Standard Italian. In MIlanese Lombard dialect, the correct term is "Sciorlu" (shurly), i.e. "o" = Italian "u", "u" = French "u". In Bergamasco Lombard dialect, which usually differs considerably from Milanese in its phonetics, the same term is used with the same pronunciation. Milanese may have borrowed this usage directly from Spanish, as Milan was under Spanish domination for 200 years, but in Bergamo this cannot have been the case, as Bergamo was under Venice. Today, as I was out walking with my wife, we were addressed as "Loro" by an old lady, and it struck us as this form is rapidly losing ground in the plural as I said in my earlier posting. Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 19 18:58:05 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:58:05 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >generally accepted on which kind of evidence, if I may humbly ask ? -- I'll refer you to the JIES and the volume of monographs that Mair edited. It's also common sense. There population in question abruptly appears in the (previously virtually uninhabited) Tarim basin in the 2nd millenium BCE. There's no abrupt discontinuity in the record after that until the arrival of the Uighurs in historic times, and we have records that the people there prior to the Uighurs were Tocharian-speaking. It's not in serious dispute. From iglesias at axia.it Sat Mar 20 16:33:02 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 08:33:02 PST Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: Although similar, this post *is* different from Mr. Rossi's previous posting on the topic. --rma ] JPM wrote: >2. As of 1960, in the Veneto, dialect speakers were uncomfortable with the feminine pronoun in addressing a man. They address a man with their masculine pronoun . The same applies to Lombardy today. Dialect speakers who don't speak Italian well (and there are still many around), address strangers as Lui, which is considered quite incorrect in Standard Italian. In MIlanese Lombard dialect, the rules of which are codified, the polite forms of address are: Lu (French "u") for men, Lee (long closed "e") for women, Lor ("o" = Italian "u") plural both sexes; familiar singular "ti" = Italian "tu", plural "vialter" = Italian "voi", cf. Cast. "vosotros", Fr. "vous autres". The long / short vowel contrast is typical of Western Lombard and may derive from the influence of the Germanic Longobard superstrate (as also in Friulan). By way of contrast, in Bergamasco (Eastern Lombard), the terms are: .Lu: (French "u") for men, Le' (closed "e" no length difference), Lur plural both sexes; familiar singular "te" = Italian "tu", plural "voter"/"oter" = Italian "voi", Cast. "vosotros", Fr. "vous autres". Milanese may have borrowed the usage of the 3rd person for the 2nd directly from Spanish, as Milan was under Spanish domination for 200 years, but in Bergamo this cannot have been the case, as Bergamo was under Venice. So probably both were influenced by what was then the Tuscan literary language, which as sustained by Devoto and most others, borrowed the usage from Spanish. Yesterday, as I was out walking with my wife, we were addressed as "Loro" by an old lady, and we were (pleasantly) struck by this, as this form is rapidly losing ground in the plural as I said in my earlier posting. Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From mantzou at compulink.gr Fri Mar 19 11:01:39 1999 From: mantzou at compulink.gr (George A Mantzoukis) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:01:39 +0200 Subject: gender Message-ID: Dear Glen Gordon and IE-ists, The opinion that "Originally, (P)IE distinguished between animate/inanimate gender" appears to be quite popular and it has been expressed by list members in the past. On Sat, 23 May 1998, Peter Whale wrote > 6. Grammatical gender itself may be a development within early PIE, > perhaps from a yet earlier animate / inanimate distinction. and On Thursday, 04 Feb 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote > Originally, PIE distinguished between animate and inanimate > (neuter) gender. The split of the animate gender into masculine > and feminine is a later development, which e.g. Hittite did not > participate in. On the other hand someone might argue that "in PIE no gender distinction existed at all" or as you (Glen Gordon) put it some time ago ( on Sat, 23 May 1998 ) > ................................................... I would argue that IE > originally started out with no gender distinction at all, like Uralic. On Thursday, 04 March 1999, you (Glen Gordon) wrote > ... I'm sure you must have come across the idea that the feminine is > not archaic but derivative from the previous animate/inanimate > distinctions found in Anatolian lgs. If I am interpreting you right, Glen, you think that 1) IE originally started out with no gender distinction at all 2) Animate/inanimate distinctions developed sometime "later". When do you think these distincions developed? Was it within PIE and the Anatolian group inherited it, or was it within Proto-Anatolian? The animate/inanimate distinction does not appear to apply to Greek. Greek nouns are classified according to g r a m m a t i c a l gender in three "genders" or "classes" ie., masculine, feminine and neutral. Because of the coincidence of masculine and feminine endings, masculine and feminine are classified together in a common class. The neuter forms its own class with its own endings. This classification of Greek nouns in two classes is not based on animate/inanimate distinctions. Both classes contain very large numbers of animate as well as inanimate nouns. The "common gender" contains probably more inanimate than animate nouns. The neuter contains animate nouns like the third declension tek-os (offspring ) or the second declension tek-n-on (offspring) or plas-ma (creature) or thy-ma (victim) or zo:-on (animal) or kte:-n-os (beast) or ...... All these are of indifferent (or irrelevant) natural gender. It is very difficult to associate the "animate gender" with the "common gender" and the "inanimate gender" with the "neuter". The same arguments apply to Latin. ( It is probably worth noticing that even the Latin word "a n i m a l" does not belong to the Latin common class but to the neuter) Are there any good arguments in favor of animate/inanimate distinctions in Greek or Latin? [ Moderator's note: A language that distinguishes animate/inanimate may also distinguish gender --the two are not mutually exclusive. The claim for an animacy distinction in PIE is based on lexical distinctions such as *egnis "fire (animate)" vs. *pur "fire (inanimate)", *ak^wa "water (a.)" vs. *wodr/wednes "water (in.)". The distinction of common vs. neuter gender in Hittite is defined by the presence of distinct endings for neuter nouns in some cases, unrelated to the issues in Latin and Greek (where there are different endings associated with the "masculine" and "feminine" genders, shown by adjective concord of o-stem adjectives when modifying non-o-stem nouns, and there is no common gender). I think your question arises from a confusion of these various systems as being somehow interchangeable. They are not. --rma ] From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Mar 19 21:00:51 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 21:00:51 -0000 Subject: Laryngeals Message-ID: Re the note on laryngeals and -u, what about laryngeals and i (outside the Sanskrit reflex of syllabic laryngeals)? 1. Sanskrit forms such as de- from da: (before y- in some forms) 2. The number of laryngeal roots which appear with -i forms in some languages: (s)terH(i), (s)perH(i), treH(i) and a number of others. (3. Does the Hittite -i- in dai have an explanation within Hittite?) Is there a connection, or is this a chimaera? Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Mar 20 09:34:56 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 04:34:56 EST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, Bob Whiting wrote: <<...But I must also admit that part of the reason that I didn't respond to your question was that I found it difficult to understand what was being asked. As I remember your question, it was "Does it matter that /t/ does not appear in most of the nom. singulars? ... Why is the /t/ not regarded as just a fairly common stem that sometimes emerges in root and sometimes doesn't?".... The answer is that they are....>> This is one of those unusual times when the question I asked was not remembered, not understood, misquoted and then quoted back verbatim and answered, all in the same post. I do appreciate you taking the time to address these things and I learned quite a bit from your explanations. But my question was specifically about the way the word was being reconstructed in the posts on the list. I looked back again and for the most part the nominative (in those languages where it occurs) was not mentioned. I now attribute that to the knowledge of those involved who all knew but did not say that (in the case of this "night") the nominative form was irrelevant - based on the phototactics of the various languages mentioned. I wrote: <> You replied: <<"Truncated" is not really the right term. The disappearance of /t/ in this position in both Greek /nuks/ and Latin /noks/ is simply the result of a phonotactical rule:..>> On closer consideration - with regard to "nos"(Welsh), "noc"(Pol), "nux"(Greek) and "nox"(Latin) - whatever the process, the result are all truncated. No doubt about it. I looked up "truncated" in the dictionary and it hits the nail on the head. < are not operative for .>> came out of */nokt-s/> */ts/ > */ss/ > /s/ "by a normal phonological rule" - how is (adj) reconstructed? <> Sounds like classic problem-solving to me. "Disambiguating" is definitely problem-solving. I wrote: <> You replied: <> In Romance languages like modern French, it is said that "in all but a few cases, the oblique ? often the ablative ? form survived the loss of Latin inflectional morphology,...while the nominative did not..." I don't think I need to remind you that the nominative is "often" the least marked form. The markings you refers to includes those related to the ablative as a "grammatical case expressing relations of separation, source, cause or instrumentality,... not found in the nominative." Voila. The ablative's extra grammatical baggage. In letter (and verse, if need be.) <> Time to send an angry letter to Noah Webster. In the absence of an Academie, of course, dictionaries can and have "defined words according to their proper usage" or their common usage. Contrary to non-popular opinion, dictionaries have had a powerful effect on usage and definition - as Mr. Webster's did. There should be NO question that "usage" overwhelmingly says that the "definition" of a word is the "dictionary definition." And the dictionary says that the "definition" of a word is the "meaning of the word." If you think "dictionaries do not define words..." your usage is so uncommon it has not been recorded in Webster's. Being an American, I tend to go by Webster's. <> And when you get right down to it, nobody really knows your posted message but you. Although I occasionally appreciate Zen and the aloneness of oneness and all that, this is obviously a bit too much. We do know what Homer meant most of the time, and his intention was to be understood. Language's #1 function is communication and Homer was damn good at. <<"I know what it says, but what does it *mean*?">> But that is a whole different can of worms, isn't it? Since the changing meaning or function of words can be quite independent of their structural linguistics. When I read the word "gay" in an old novel, I am reminded that phonology cannot tell me how or why it came to mean what it means today. I wrote: <<...can a stem ever be seen as something like a vestigal case ending in reconstructing PIE - not part of the original word, but a compounded form that produced a universal "stem" in the daughter languages?>> You wrote: <> So the answer is: ...maybe. Regards, Steve Long From Georg at home.ivm.de Sat Mar 20 09:14:45 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 10:14:45 +0100 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>BTW, there is on the web, a neat site called Enthnologue put up by the SIT SI*L* (The Summer Institute of Linguistics) >>that is a catalogue of world languages (I think it is UN info.) UN ? Heaven forbid. The moment the SIL takes over the UN I'm going to change planets. Seriously, the SIL is a private organisation, founded by Kenneth Pike (also known as language theoretician, the founder of Tagmemic Grammar). Its members are field linguists who over the decades have produced some very fine pieces of work on a great deal of hitherto undescribed languages of the world, mostly in Central America, Africa and the Pacific. I respect their linguistic output very much, use it regularly and wouldn't want to be without it. At the same time it should not be overlooked that the prime object of SIL's activity is not so much linguistics (this is a necessary side-effect), but rather Bible translation and straightforward mission, hence my initial sentence (and that's why they got kicked out of some countries, where any field-linguist may now have a hard time explaining that s/he is not one of them, as it happened to me). The Ethnologue is a language catalogue which is remarkably detailed and complete (if there can be such a thing as a complete language catalogue at all). Unlike other works of the kind, it is regularly updated and web-accessible. The information found there on language classification, though, is not always the result of original research and should be read with a critical eye (as the Alemannic part demonstrates, inter alia). But if you encounter a language/dialect name you've never heard of before, you are more likely to find it mentioned in this book than anywhere else, and at least you'll find a rather precise localisation for the lg. (that is the one most important piece of information for a missionary ;-). St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From BMScott at stratos.net Fri Mar 19 21:37:06 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 16:37:06 -0500 Subject: mutual intelligibility of OE with ON, &c Message-ID: Gordon Selway wrote: > there are also reports of internal non-intelligibility in insular Germanic > - 'eggys' -v- 'eyer' - but what the level of direct contact between SW and > NE was then, and the dates, and whether this is by inference rather than > written contemporary evidence I do not know; Caxton, Prologue to Eneydos (1490), writing of an occurrence 'in my days': 'And one of theym named sheffelde a mercer cam in to an hows and axed for mete. and specyally he axyd after eggys And the goode wyf answerde. that she coulde speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry. for he also could speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges/ and she vnderstode hym not/ And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren/ then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel/ Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte. egges or eyren/ certaynly it is harde to playse euery man/ by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage.' Brian M. Scott From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Sat Mar 20 02:46:34 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 21:46:34 -0500 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > > It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a non-native > word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, argument from > authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your own knowledge why > the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that the same word exists > in Persian (<'usta:d>). IT is most likely Turkic, yes Turkic. Look at internal evidence; Us (top of, above), UstUn (superior, above others), oz (to surpass, to overtake, to be above others), ozghun (someone who is excessive), usta (an expert in something), ustalik (expertise). Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 19 23:18:05 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 17:18:05 -0600 Subject: avio/n In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Most interesting. Without ever really thinking about it, I'd always >vaguely assumed that the word was `big bird' plus the augmentative >suffix <-o'n> -- hence `really big bird', or some such. >OK; it's dumb, but it's cute. [snip] It definitely makes sense at a superficial level but if avi?n originally applied to swifts then it couldn't fit, given that these are rather than From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Mar 20 14:34:14 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 16:34:14 +0200 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36F30C0A.62E3355F@montclair.edu> Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, H. Mark Hubey wrote: >Robert Whiting wrote: >> It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a >> non-native word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, >> argument from authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your >> own knowledge why the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that >> the same word exists in Persian (<'usta:d>). > IT is most likely Turkic, yes Turkic. Look at internal evidence; > Us (top of, above), UstUn (superior, above others), oz (to surpass, > to overtake, to be above others), ozghun (someone who is excessive), > usta (an expert in something), ustalik (expertise). Ah, yes, Turkic. Sorry, Mark, but Turkish slipped my mind. But if a word appears in both Arabic and Persian then it is usually a pretty safe bet that it appears in Turkish also (unless it has be purged as a foreign word). Sure enough the word is there: Ustat 'Meister', 'meisterhaft'; Ustadane 'meisterhaft' (all I have at home is a Turkish-German dictionary published in 1931). Ustaz is given as a variant of Ustat and is presumably based on the Arabic pronunciation (/dh/ realized as [z]). Leaving Spanish usted out of the picture for the moment, we now have what is obviously the same word in three languages belonging to three different families. The question would seem to be, which language is it native to? Or did it originally come from yet another language? Now Turkic would seem to have a good claim because of Turkish usta 'Meister', 'Handwerksmeister'; ustalIk 'Meister-Sein', 'Geschicklichkeit eines Meisters'; and ustalIklI 'meisterhaft', and because of Ust 'Oberseite', 'Oberflache'; UstUn 'ueber', 'ueberlegen'; UstUne 'auf ihn, sie, es'. The only problem would seem to be the variation between u- and U- (U for u with dieresis, I for undotted i) in usta and Ustat (and of course the occurrence of U and a together in Ustat, Ustaz, and Ustadane) which someone with more knowledge of Turkish than I have will have to explain. My lack of knowledge doubtless is the basis of the fact that I find Mark's lexical information somewhat confusing. My dictionary gives Us (Mark: 'top of, above') as 'Grundlage', 'Basis' while Ust (not given by Mark) seems to correspond to the meaning he gives for Us. And my dictionary does not give oz or ozghun at all so I suppose that they belong to a different branch of Turkic. I am surprised, though, that Mark did not come up with Ustat (Ustaz) and Ustadane, but perhaps these have been expunged from the language as being seen as having been borrowed from Persian or Arabic. But since Mark knows more about Turkish and Turkic than I ever will, I expect that there is a simple explanation. It does, however, reinforce the point about doing comparisons with only a dictionary and a very limited knowledge of the language involved. And I have a question of Mark: Is the term Ustat used an an honorific in Turkish as 'usta:dh is generally in Arabic? Coming back to Spanish usted, since we can be fairly sure that the word 'usta:dh is not native to Arabic, and since Arabic is the only one of the three languages where we have noted it to have been in close contact with Spanish, the question becomes whether the word could have come into Arabic early enough for it to be passed on to Spanish before the end of the 15th century. Or is the question whether 'usta:dh didn't come into Arabic from Spanish usted and then pass to Persian and Turkish? Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 19 23:24:46 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 17:24:46 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: <36F117F6.71E7DF0C@neiu.edu> Message-ID: >BAST, LIME etc. >1. North Americans, Aussies etc. might take LIME as the citrus. They know the >fragrant tree as LINDEN is the usual term in USA/Canada. [snip] >3. The bastwood tree in the USA Midwest, lost the /t/ in sandhi; came out as >. In early summer, when the tree are putting out pollen, this is >like cotton fibers, hence also the name . Basswood where I grew up in Ohio was a type of linden that had triangular or heart shaped leaves, soft wood, smooth bark and "helicopter" seeds. Older people called all lindens "basswoods". Cottonwood was a completely different tree, although the shape of the leaves was similar From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 20 14:35:22 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 08:35:22 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /-ant/ In-Reply-To: <37154cdb.250259954@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > I don't happen to think that parna- is necessarily non-IE. In > Hittite it's an irregular noun (pir < *perr < *pern, parnas < > *porn-os), which doesn't fit the loanword theory too well. And > the only external source I've ever seen mentioned is Egyptian > which doesn't seem appropriate either geographically or > phonetically (no -n in Egyptian, and Eg. /r/ < *l. Why not pick > on Grk. ?) Because theres is also Hurrian "purni". Perhaps the observed instability in vowels comes from different ways of rendering (or phonologizing) a syllabic /r/. > > But the main thing is that there is no sound-sequence in Anatolian > >which we would expect to be borrowed into Greek as /-nth-/. > Whether Hittite was /ntt/ (/nt/) or /nt/ (/nd/) is not > recoverable in any way from the orthography. Maybe Lycian and > Lydian spellings a millennium later show /nd/ (is that what > Palmer is going on?), but that doesn't prove much about the > situation as it was when pre-Greek borrowed these words from some > Anatolian-like language spoken in Greece. Since we are both saying that the Anatolian form was in /nt/, not /nd/, I do not see why you care about whether a later change of /nt/ -> /nd/ is posited to account for Palmer/Kretschmer's Mystery Evidence. Note that "huakinth-" is yet another word where an Anatolian voicless plosive was borrowed into Greek as a voiceless plosive _without_ aspiration. We've got three of those now, without any serious digging. So why should /t/ after /n/, where even in a language that did have aspiration this would be lessened or absent, be borrowed as /th/? It is also true that the /-ant/ suffix has /a/, not /o/, so the same sort of question arises: why would the Greeks not borrow /a/ as /a/? The obvious answer here is that the borrowing predates the change of /o/ to /a/ in Anatolian, but is there any other reason to date this change so late, and are there no reasons not to date it earlier? Falling together of /a/ and /o/ is not exactly rare in PIE-to-IE (occurring in about half the family), and is generally considered (as far as I know) quite ancient where it occurs. Finally, is this /-ant/ thing securely established for PIE? It does not seem so, on the basis of one or two stray forms in Slavic and Tocharian, which might be from something else. Welsh and Gothic have plurals in /-n-/ that come from things entirely different. For a pre-IE derivational suffix to be borrowed would not be that odd, where many pre-IE words were borrowed. Compare how English has in effect borrowed many Latin (and some Greek) derivational suffixes merely as a side-effect of borrowing lots of Latin and Greek words. More to the point, American English might be said to have borrowed German /-burg/ as a toponymic suffix, merely by having a lot of toponyms in /-burg/. Any American would recognixe any "X-burg" as a toponym. DLW [ Moderator's comment: Isn't this last Anglo-Saxon rather than a German borrowing? Cf. Edinburg (a calque on Dunedin). --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 19 23:34:39 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 17:34:39 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] Thanx for the info on Celtic >5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental Celtic >*agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, gereta, mando_ etc. >are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, mandu,_ . I'd like to hear Larry Trask's opinion on the other words. It's my understanding that "lady" may NOT be from Celtic in that in Aquitanian, there seems to be a corresponding masculine form --something like , from something like *. Is that correct? If so, is and- from the same root as ? Presumibly the other morphemes mean "male, man" & "female, woman." Now, if this is so, could Celtic andera: be the reason that survived and [sp?] didn't? [snip] From iglesias at axia.it Sat Mar 20 22:04:22 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 14:04:22 PST Subject: Sancho Message-ID: MCV wrote: >The original Aragonese fabla is spoken in Upper (Pyrinean) >Aragon. Jaca and thereabouts. The Spanish census data for Aragon (1981) was: Province of Huesca: Castilian 76.36% Catalan 11.92% Aragonese 11.72% Province of Zaragoza: Cast. 95.58% Cat. 3.05% Arag. 1.37% Province of Teruel: Cast. 90.60% Cat. 9.09% Arag. 0.31% The maximum number of people involved is about 18,000. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From Bomhard at aol.com Fri Mar 19 23:35:23 1999 From: Bomhard at aol.com (Bomhard at aol.com) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 18:35:23 EST Subject: Indo-European Phonology Message-ID: Dear Steve, Thanks for your comments. Yes, indeed, Germanic and Armenian could have retained an earlier system with glottalics. Allan From TomHeffernan at utk.edu Sat Mar 20 16:12:49 1999 From: TomHeffernan at utk.edu (Thomas Heffernan) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 11:12:49 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Someone wrote: > We're an agricultural >civilization, and we eat a lot of meat. So did our ancestors, in periods when >there wasn't much population pressure -- post Black Death, for example, >northern Europeans ate over 2 pounds a day, on average. It is true that agricultural Europeans ate a considerable amount of meat post Plague. However, the increse in meat consumption is a direct response to the exegencies of the Plague and is not reflective of the situation pre 1340's. It does not seem to be the case that pre-Plague European society consumed nearly as much meat as after the Plague. It appears that the diminished population caused the increased consumption in meat and meat products after the Plague of the mid-14th century. Less population meant less land necessary for cultivation amd less cereal grains necessary. Marginal lands were no longer necessary for cropping as was the case before the 1340's. Herding as practiced then was less labor intensive than cropping. Hence with fewer people and more available land there was an economic advantage to herding that had not previously existed. Yours, Tom Heffernan From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Mar 19 23:57:41 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 17:57:41 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I seem to remember that Gaidhlig [Scots Gaelic] calqued French by using "you all" [sp?] for formal 2nd person singular [snip] In Dutch originally: {du} = "thou", {jij} = "ye", >{uwe}?= "your (pl)", or similar (I think). Later:- > {jij} used as polite singular as in French and English. > {Uwe Edelheid} = "Your Nobility" used as polite "you" sg & pl, later >abbreviated in writing and then in speech to (U E} and then {U} (by imitating >Spanish {usted}?) > {jij} no longer used as plural. > (du} fell completely out of use :: in the 16th century it was a literary >rarity. (But I have seen {dou wilde se} = "thou wild sea" in a poem in >modern Frisian.) > The present situation is (I think: my Dutch has got a bit stale; I >learned it for 2 holidays motorcycling around Holland around 1980):- > nom gen > jij & je jouw you (sg) (intimate / condescending, like French >{tu}) > gij & ge thou (sg) (religious / dialectal / poetical) > jullie van jullie you (pl) (familiar) (< "you people") > u uw you (sg & pl) (polite) [snip] From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 20 17:33:05 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 11:33:05 -0600 Subject: Stigmatization and Celtic Influence Message-ID: Some have objected 1) that the amount of Celtic borrowings in English is too low, and 2) that the time that alledged Celticisms appear is too late. Actually a high level of stigmatization could well explain both. Apart from pragmatic consderations ("Do we have a word for this?"), the main thing that controls borrowing is the reaction that the would-be borrower expects: will I get laughed at?, etc. The higher the level of stigmatization of a subject (i.e. conquered) language, the less likely a would-be borrower is to think that the reaction he would get from using a word from the subject language would be good. Also, the higher the level of stigmatization, the more resistance there will be to characteristic features of a stigmatized dialect being accepted as standard, which is to say the longer it will take. (Of course these are both "ceteris paribus" things, but that's life.) So a high level of stigmatization (one may compare how the Irish were called "white apes") can be said to predict (in the atemporal sense of 'imply') both of the supposedly surprising things that cause some to reject the notion that there has been significant Celtic influence in English. DLW P.S. I also take this opportunity to note that Norman (or Anglo-Norman) French was for a time the high prestige language of Scotland. Scottish English did not really get on its feet there till the Stuarts, which is to say that English became official and high prestige and all that in Scotland at about the same time it did in England. Thus the difference that Joat alledges is a non-difference. From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sat Mar 20 01:18:49 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 19:18:49 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: alternative: can't lay my hands on the source right now, but in the last wo years I saw a piece about some do-gooder Venetian monk, whose name got transmogrified to the name of a circus clown. A Chicago TV station WGN [World's Greatest Newspaper] has long had a popular show, "Bozo's Circus". 1900ca. A popular US comic strip was "Buster Brown";.a Little Lord Fauntleroy clone. A "BB collar" linen, starched, worn with a satin ribbon, was standard choirboy regalia. My sisters 1930s would invert it, wear it as a cap, when playing nurse... jpm [ moderator snip: It is unnecessary to quote entire posts that have just gone out to the list. ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sat Mar 20 18:52:20 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 10:52:20 PST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: ME (GLEN): For all intents and purposes, Early Modern English is different enough from Modern English to make comprehension difficult after only 400 years or so. By comparing even Shakespeare's English to Chaucer shows how much things can change in an even shorter period. MODERATOR: [...] the language is such that the jokes can be explained--as with Shakespeare. Before the jokes in the _Canterbury Tales_ can be explained, the language itself must be explicated. Well, as far as I understand, Early Modern English has slang terms and such like for instance the rather rude "to die", that mean nothing other than "to cease to exist" in Contemporary English. In some cases, the language still needs to be "explained". MODERATOR: so how do we measure the difference? ...which is of course a matter of interpretation and in effect, we're both right/wrong about Shakespeare's English. Oh well. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sat Mar 20 01:39:57 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 19:39:57 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >Is it your point that <'usta:dh> is invalid because it is an argument >from authority while "ustaeth" is based on your own personal experience? Not at all. I intended only that ideally we should work with authentic scripts to back up transcriptions. For classical Latin e.g. there are problems that are solved only when working with majuscules/capitals, and which are concealed or worse, by writing in Carolingian minuscules. jpm Robert Whiting wrote: > On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, maher, johnpeter wrote: > > 1. No, no, a 1000x no = no argument. > > As an argument from authority is no argument. > An argument from authority can be quite valid. There are a number of > rules that have to be observed to qualify an argument from authority, but > if they are met then the argument can be accepted. Anything that you have > knowledge of that you have not verified personally is an argument from > authority. The reason that I know that the moon is not made out of > green cheese (or Normandy brie) is that reasonable people who have been > trained to investigate the matter and who have no reason to lie have told > me so. It is an argument from authority. Do not confuse expert authority > with institutional authority. AGREED. good point. > The two are quite different in a logical > context. Any time you look up a word in a dictionary or check out > something in an encylopaedia it is an argument from authority. Now if > you wish to say that such references are invalid because an argument from > authority is no argument, then the only arguments that you can use are > ones that you have personally verified. Therefore we can assume that your > connection of Arabic <'usta:dh> and Spanish is based on your > personal knowledge of the two languages and the histories of the words > in those languages. In which case it would seem more useful to share > this information with the rest of us than to shout down "arguments from > authority." AGREED. It would seem useful, as well, to consider that I referred to bald, without argument. --But didn't you hear the shouted "NO" that provoked my counter-shout? > It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a non-native > word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, argument from > authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your own knowledge why > the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that the same word exists > in Persian (<'usta:d>). I DON'T KNOW, whether from percept or precept. Can you perhaps tell us? > > 2. <'usta:dh> ~ "ustaeth" are both transcriptions OF ______ ? I meant, not a "transcription/1" from speech, but a "transcription/2" from one script to another. And I don not mean "transliteration". > So are ~ "duh". ? -- from what is transcribed? > Is it your point that <'usta:dh> is invalid because it is an argument > from authority while "ustaeth" is based on your own personal experience? NOPE. Why would you want to say that? From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 20 19:34:27 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 13:34:27 -0600 Subject: DLW's Final Missive Message-ID: It occurs to me that before desubscribing I did not finish what I was saying about the PIE plosive system. I think the voiced series was pharyngealized. This would predict both a labial gap and a labio-velar gap, which does not occur, but if the labio-velars were at some point uvulars, and only later developed into labio-velars (where they did), this is not a problem. Whether such a theory/notion predicts the abence/rarity of roots of the form /DED/ is another matter. It might. If both Cs were pharyngealized, then the nature of the gesture in question is such that it would almost certainly have to be carrried across the V. So if for some reason, some folks did not much like this, that would work. That reason might be either 1) that pharyngealization would alter the character of the V, moving it in the direction of [o], or 2) that pharyngealization might somehow interfere with a distinction of fortis/lenis (in MCVs terms, "stiff voice vs. slack voice" might be better), that was being made in the Vs. I suspect the second is more likely to be true, though I am not enough a phonetician to know how. Anyway, now that I am gone feel free to go ahead and call me "all sorts of perfectly true and applicable names", as Tolkien might say, or pehaps to send me emissives of praise extolling my manifest and manifold virtues, or whatever. My great swan-dive into the Flames of Well-Merited Oblivion officially begins now: down, down, down, CRASH (not to mention screams of agony, etc.). DLW From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sat Mar 20 01:42:58 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 19:42:58 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano Message-ID: a nice Slavic cognate in e.g. Polish , Serbian ljiva>, and derivative ljivovica> 'plumb brandy. Sheila Watts wrote: > >OIr , W `plum', W (pl.) 'fruits, berries'; > >MBret NBret `sloe' > > The Irish one, like the Breton, means 'sloe'. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 20 20:08:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 15:08:00 EST Subject: Celtic Influence Revisited Message-ID: >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >The proposition that OE was a class dialect is to some extent more assumption >than conclusion. No, this does not make the argument circular. -- actually, it does. >There is evidence, such as the forms and usages found in ME texts -- a hypothesis that the nobility were speaking OE and the commonality ME is, to put it mildly, a wild violation of Occam's Razor. >1) That OE was a class dialect. -- no evidence. >our general knowledge of socio-linguistics and secondary language acquisition, -- small populations of preliterate conquerors do not successfully impose their speech. Or the French, Spanish and Italian populations would be speaking Germanic languages. What did the Anglo-Saxons have that the Franks, Vandals, and Goths didn't? From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sat Mar 20 02:00:04 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 20:00:04 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was > nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of > the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Not quite. The Upper Silesian dialect had a wide currency in many courts outside its own region as Kanzleisprache before Luther. That's why he used it. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 20 20:13:36 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 15:13:36 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >No, *much* further apart. More in the neighbourhood of French and Spanish, >English and German. -- not at all. There's no basic intercommunicabilty of that sort between modern English and German. OE and ON are structurally much more similar -- they're both highly inflected, for instance. OE and ON are also much closer in time than modern English and modern German. English began diverging from the other western Germanic dialects during the Migration Period, 1500 years ago. 1500 years before 1000 CE takes you back to 500 BCE -- Proto-Germanic period, _early_ proto-Germanic at that, pretty well complete linguistic unity, less divergence than among English dialects today. From iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu Sat Mar 20 02:40:04 1999 From: iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu (iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 20:40:04 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <6ea4f1e7.36f298a7@aol.com> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Fri, 19 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Iiffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >>The situation in England of that time is a little anomalous, >-- normal. No. The general rule, as some others have noted, is that where there are classes, there are class dialects. >>for a time everyone spoke his local dialect >-- as virtually everyone in Europe did prior to the emergence of the modern >State and standardized languages in post-Renaissance times. No. >Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was >nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of >the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Regional _class_ dialects. I grow weary of this. >>Thus the class barriers in English at that time were relatively recent, and >>there had not been much time for much divergence to occur. >-- nice try but it won't work. Yes it will. The kingdom of Scotland had been Gaelic-using till shortly (as linguistic time is measured) before. Thus, just as in England, there had been little time for divergence to evolve. >Lowland Scotland, which spoke a Northumbrian dialect, was never conquered by >the Normans, and the court and nobility there used Lallans right down to the >late 17th century. >Substantial class differences in accent are a rare phenomenon, and vanishingly >rare in preliterate societies. Accent, which in popular usage is generally taken to refer only to sound features, is not the same as dialect, a point you repeatedly fail to appreciate. Thus Southern Senators like Ernest Hollings and Strom Thurmond have a southern accent, and in acordance with custom speak in a regional dialect (as British lords used to), but they do not speak a lower class dialect. The lower class dialect of the regions they are from is appreciably different. >Remember, an Anglo-Saxon landowner's main social contacts would be with his >social inferiors, not his peers. Everything from his nursmaid to his groom. >Those are the people he'd spend most time talking to. >Note the similarities of black and white English in the antebellum Southern >plantation belt -- every traveller noted how the planters and their families >"talked like Negroes". >That was because they spent most of their time talking _to_ Negroes. So your theory then enables us to confidently (or should I say immodestly) predict that Southern aristocrats speak Black English. As someone once recently said: 1) Nice try but it won't work 2) QED The travellers in question must not have been from that region, and must have been mistaking the shared similaritiies of Southern American English and Black English (which is of course a Southern dialect) as identity. But rather than engage in this all too good imitation of a Monty Python skit (argument, or is that just contradiction), let us return to the Bickerton challenge. If you've got something that explains 1) why ME diverges from the rest of Germanic and converges with Celtic, and 2) why the geographical pattern of innovations is as it is, let's hear it. If not .. [use your imagination]. DLW From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 20 20:56:02 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 20:56:02 -0000 Subject: Sanskrit Tense & Aspect Message-ID: Miguel said of imperfect, aorist, and perfect in Skt and Greek: >the three categories can be described >conveniently as "aspects", since they are all "past" in terms of >tense. I wonder if Miguel is bending the meaning of "aspect" beyond its usual function here. They would be "aspects" (in its usual meaning) if there were something about the way in which the action were done, quite apart from the time of them, which distinguished these three forms. Miguel also said: >There is no difference between >Latin dixi (formally an s-aorist) and pependi (formally a >reduplicated perfect), etc. There *is* a difference between pf. >nina:ya and aor. anais.i:t (and impf. anayat). The difference in Sanskrit is slight, at best. I quote Stenzler, (1997): "In Classical Sanskrit the aorist is used in narrative as a past tense alongside the imperfect and perfect, without any distinct function." There is a slight difference in time of reference, (recent or more remote past) but this is not aspect. Perhaps it is different in Vedic, although my Vedic grammar tells me the names refer to the formation, and not to the use of the tenses. It is Latin and Greek which show the aspectual distinction of continuative / punctative. Sanskrit has no tense at all like the imperfect in Latin or Greek. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 20 21:10:56 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 21:10:56 -0000 Subject: no standard German? Message-ID: Joat said:> >Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was >nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of >the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Rubbish, I'm afraid. (a) There was a substantial literature in Middle High German, in a form which avoided the more obvious local peculiarities. (b) Saxony Chancery German was wide spread as a precise language, needed for legal use over a wide German speaking area. (c) Luther himself says that he uses "the common German language which both High and Low Germans understand ... that is to say, the Saxon Chancery language ... which all princes and kings in Germany use." (My translation - I'll give you Luther's German if you want it.) Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 04:28:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 22:28:30 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] > (2) Re borrowing a pronoun of one language into some other use in another >language: etymological dictionaries say that US English "bozo" = "fool" < >Spanish "vosotros": That sounds pretty farfetched. More likely it came from baboso "drooling idiot, drooling drunken idiot, etc." could it also be that the US English slang term of address >and then nickname "buster" came from the abovementioned Spanish dialect >?, and not the English for "one who busts (= breaks) things". I always heard buster was from "ballbuster" From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Mar 20 23:50:32 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 18:50:32 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: In a post dated Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Sheila Watts wrote: <> To be more accurate, I only saw that UN data was cited and the UN probably has nothing to do with this site. I don't know anything about "the Summer Institute of Linguistics" or what kind of organization they are, though I did note that the year of the first translation of the Bible is included in most of the language descriptions. Also, Alsatian is called a distinct dialect in Comrie and certainly deserves a separate historical and political identity. And yes I think they are referring to the retaining of dipthongs in Upper German, calling the shift towards monophthlongs in High German a "vowel shift" (and perhaps confusing it with the Second Consonant Shift.) Can't say that other information isn't also off. But it is at least interesting that someone tried to catalogue the world's lanuages in this way and put some emphasis on cross-"intelligibility" in many of their descriptions. If this is perhaps a guide for religious missionaries (I don't know that) maybe its based on reports from the field or something. And perhaps it's of some small use in that way. I just hope I haven't referred everyone to a cult site or something like that. Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 04:39:59 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 22:39:59 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <371d615c.255509055@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: Okay, La vora/gine was published around 1920 and written a few years earlier and the plot centers on the rubber boom of the 1880s. We're going pretty far back in time. Bello wrote about 180 years ago. Cuervo is also about as old as dinosaur poop. That's leaves a peon heard in Colombia --which may originally be from Spain or God knows where. That's scraping the bottom of the barrel. >Coromines (DEiCCat): >"vuste' en el Nord d'Equador (Lemos, Prov. ecuatoriano, $54); >buste' en boca d'un venec,ola` amazo`nic (Eust. Rivera, La >Vora'gine, p. 194); a zones colombianes: Cuervo, Obra Ine'd., p. >160, i n. 50, a la Gram. de Bello, tambe' ho cita en valls del >Sud de Col.; i en una <> oi"da cap a Bogota`: <un cuartillo 'e chicha / ... / ya vuste' me entendera' / ... >> >(Cuervo, Apunt. Bog.7, 587). >Doesn't Corominas mention 'usta:dh in DCEC/DCEH? I seem to >recall that he does, but I don't have either at hand. In DEiCC, >he just says: "Com e's ben sabut, voste` resulta` d'una >contraccio' de vostra merce`". >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 03:40:11 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 21:40:11 -0600 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >Basque `salmon' is widely suspected of being *ultimately* of >Celtic origin, but not *directly*: instead, a Celtic loan into Late >Latin is favored by most commentators as the direct source of the Basque >word. I seem to remember a Spanish dialect form esoqui/n [maybe Asturian] Wasn't the Latin form something like esox? The ending -i/n, of course, is diminutive in Spanish --with similar forms in just about all Romance languages. [snip] >A Celtic origin has also been suggested for ~ `oar', >pointing to earlier *, possibly to be identified with the word >represented by Old Irish `oar'. Don't know if there's anything >much behind this, especially since the nasal appears to be wrong. Spanish for "oar" is "remo." So a form similar to Irish was floating around the area. >Finally, `beloved' has been thought for a century to have been >borrowed from the Celtic word represented by Old Irish `good'. >The semantics requires some fancy footwork, but the Basque word has an >anomalous form for a native word, and is surely borrowed from somewhere. I've heard it said quite a few times that Maite is a "nickname" for "Mari/a Teresa." And indeed, I've Maites whose legal "Spanish name" was "Mari/a Teresa." [snip] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Mar 21 12:47:18 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 12:47:18 +0000 Subject: Ethnologue In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Sheila Watts wrote: [somebody else] > >BTW, there is on the web, a neat site called Enthnologue put up by > >the SIT that is a catalogue of world languages (I think it is UN > >info.) [snip sample] > I _do_ hope this is not the UN's info. Though it could be a good > reason to persuade them to hire some linguists at large salaries. The Ethnologue volume is compiled and published by a division of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). As far as I know, it has no connection with the UN. The information contained in it is derived from an almost limitless variety of sources, of quite variable nature and quality, and there are lots and lots of errors. The book is updated every few years. The most recent paper edition, I think, is still the 12th (1992), but a new edition is in preparation and should be out soon, or it may even be out already, though I haven't seen it yet. I haven't checked the Website lately; maybe that has already been updated. The editors of Ethnologue actively encourage specialists to write in with corrections, which they are happy to incorporate in their next edition. I've done this myself, and anybody who finds misinformation on the site or in the paper edition should consider sending in corrections. Ethnologue is the most serious attempt I know of at assembling comprehensive information about the world's languages (signed as well as spoken) in one place, and it deserves support. Incidentally, the 1992 edition reports just over 6500 spoken languages as currently in use, plus some dozens of sign languages. This is probably the most accurate count we have. Strangely, though, a recent survey based in Wales and carried out by an organization called (I think; might have this wrong) the Observatoire Linguistique, which seems to have some kind of link to UNESCO, has apparently reported the astounding total of over 10,000 languages -- a number which I will take with a grain of salt until I see the data. This was reported in the newspaper a year or two ago, but, since then, I've heard nothing further. Has anybody else? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Mar 21 12:50:27 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 12:50:27 +0000 Subject: Basque `plum' In-Reply-To: <371e69a1.257625625@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > It seems to me that Corominas is suggesting that was > borrowed from Gothic , and --> under the > influence of . OK; but I've already pointed out some serious difficulties with this. > Whether has anything to do with is another question (but > ot- + g- or k- > ok-, as in okin "baker"). Yes, plus a * would indeed yield * by the usual rules, but I know of no evidence for any *. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 20:27:26 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 14:27:26 -0600 Subject: Dating of Anatolian /nt/ vs. /nd/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Most of those words look like they could be collectives to me. A tub is a collective of water Thread comes in a spool, skein, etc. Peas come in a pod. The flower my wife calls a "jacinta" comes in a cluster. [I don't know what a Greek hyacinth looks like] And I don't know about unripe figs other than if you open them too early, you'll get of a collective of maggots Are there any known meanings for asam-, me:r-, ereb-, etc.? Ereb- does superficially resemble Spanish arveja, erveja, alverja, etc. a few of the many words for "pea" [snip] > I take this opportunity to note that the same suffix, /-nth-/, >also occurs in Pre-Greek words like > "asaminthos" 'bathtub' > "me:rinthos" 'thread' > "erebinthos" 'pea' > "olunthos" 'unripe fig' > "Huakinthos" 'Hyacinth' > where a meaning 'collective' seems improbable. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 20:29:48 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 14:29:48 -0600 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <94403f06.36effb22@aol.com> Message-ID: So, you believe it was in Anatolia or Central Asia before that? [snip] >I'd say sometime around 3500 BCE makes a sensible date for the spread >of PIE into Europe. From ECOLING at aol.com Sun Mar 21 23:02:10 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 18:02:10 EST Subject: background noise Message-ID: In a message dated 3/11/99 9:56:17 PM, Larry Trask wrote: >I don't think it's realistic to try to estimate the degree of background >noise for languages generally: there are just too many complicating >factors. Agreed, that was a part of my point. >For one thing, languages with similar phoneme systems, similar >phonotactic patterns and similar morpheme-structure constraints are >likely to show a higher proportion of chance resemblances than arbitrary >languages. If that is true, then we need to introduce a correction factor into our tools, in other words, we have recognized a distortion imposed by our tools, and we can attempt to counteract that distortion. >For another, no general approach to background noise can >hope to distinguish between common inheritance and borrowing; this is >something that has to be done by painstaking and hard-nosed linguistic >investigation, and sometimes it can hardly be done at all. Once borrowed, words become part of common inheritance relative to later descendents. Lloyd Anderson From sidonian at ggms.com Mon Mar 22 15:38:40 1999 From: sidonian at ggms.com (sidonian) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 10:38:40 -0500 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Very interesting thread: Although I'm more of an historian than a linguist I *do* think it plausible that English was much influenced by the Celtic of pre Saxon Britain. It can certainly explain some of the features in English that are non-typical of Germanic languages. iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > Accent, which in popular usage is generally taken to refer only to > sound features, is not the same as dialect, a point you repeatedly fail to > appreciate. Thus Southern Senators like Ernest Hollings and Strom > Thurmond have a southern accent, and in acordance with custom speak in a > regional dialect (as British lords used to), but they do not speak a lower > class dialect. The lower class dialect of the regions they are from is > appreciably different. Good point. I do agree with you that in almost every language there are formal and vulgar modes. The upper classes invariably have better acquaintance with, and more occasion to use, formal language while the lower classes sometimes always speak in a "slang" version of the language. Even in "classless" America we have this. Whether someone is from New York or Atlanta he or she will often switch back and forth between formal and vulgar depending on social context. (q.v. I speak to clients one way but quite another way to buddies) but I would expect that if one people conquer another people and the conquered are pressured into using the conqueror's language that there would be a much larger influence on the sound features of the conqueror's language than on the lexicon or grammar. One of the most difficult tasks for someone when learning a foreign language is learning how to properly make unfamiliar sounds. Even after learning to speak a foreign language fluently, many speakers are still unable to pronounce all of its sounds properly. It is reasonable to assume that when the Anglo-Saxons conquered Britain that they intermarried quite a bit with some of the indigenous inhabitants? (I know it's dreadful to suggest this about the ancestors of the English, but the kill all of the men and make concubines of the women method of conquest was pretty standard up until this century.) It's plausible to suggest that much of the population of the early Anglo-Saxon regions in Britain were celtic in background (far more plausible than the idea that every single celt was either killed or tossed into the fringe. Wouldn't the accent and idiosyncratic use of the conqueror's tongue by those whose mothers or nurses spoke with thick accents have greatly influenced the speech patterns of subsequent generations? > So your theory then enables us to confidently (or should I say > immodestly) predict that Southern aristocrats speak Black English. As > someone once recently said: > 1) Nice try but it won't work > 2) QED > The travellers in question must not have been from that region, > and must have been mistaking the shared similaritiies of Southern American > English and Black English (which is of course a Southern dialect) as > identity. I don't think this is at all an unreasonable theory. As someone who _is_ from the American south I am intimately acquainted with the dialects here and, with eyes closed or over the telephone it is often impossible to tell the difference between a "black" dialect and a "thick" southern accent. Furthermore, in "The Story of English," the authors point out that the similarities between southern American dialect and black dialect stem from the fact that even the most wealthy had black nannies and lived very closely with their black house servants. They also point out how this similarity is even more marked among the women who, at that time, spent most of their time at home while many of the men were sent away to schools where they learned to speak in a more formal dialect. This same book also states that prior to the 17th century that many English dialects shared many common sound features with the Irish dialect of English today. Although they suggest that this is because the older pronunciations were better preserved in Ireland and America it could just as easily be proposed that these features stemmed from a celtic substrate that was partially purged (in England) through public education. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 21 23:09:42 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 15:09:42 PST Subject: `spool' Message-ID: LARRY TRASK: >It's `reel', generally confined in the US to things around which >films, tapes and fishing lines are wound. US, US, US! Nothing but US! What about Canada?! We ain't just maple-syrup eatin' inuit, you know! The term "reel" is confined to the sense of "films, tapes and fishing lines" in ALL of North America, even amongst us much-neglected Canadians. :P -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 15:45:31 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 09:45:31 -0600 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <36F30C0A.62E3355F@montclair.edu> Message-ID: >Robert Whiting wrote: >> It might be useful for a start to note that <'usta:dh> is a non-native >> word in Arabic (according to Lane's dictionary; oops, argument from >> authority -- well perhaps you can tell us from your own knowledge why >> the word violates Arabic phonotactics) and that the same word exists >> in Persian (<'usta:d>). >IT is most likely Turkic, yes Turkic. Look at internal evidence; >Us (top of, above), UstUn (superior, above others), oz (to surpass, >to overtake, to be above others), ozghun (someone who is excessive), >usta (an expert in something), ustalik (expertise). Ustadh/Ustad/Ustaz exists in a number of Muslim countries [perhaps nearly all]. It's applied in Pakistan and Bangladesh to master musicians, e.g. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. But re: Turkish, it doesn't have /dh/, does it? If not, the term can't be Turkish. Yes, there are a lot of Turkish expressions used in certain local Arabic dialects/languages but there's a lot more Arabic vocabulary in Turkish From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 21 23:37:14 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 17:37:14 -0600 Subject: Spanish substrate/A In-Reply-To: <37239ac8.270204894@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: >Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> In Spanish, it's called a [which also means garbage >>can/truck, among other things], hence the town of El Cajo/n. >> Box canyons figured in most westerns filmed in Arizona, so if >>you've seen John Wayne movies, you've seen plenty of them. They're the >>places where the bad guys are usually holed up in. At least in the films, >>they're canyons that have only one entrance, which is narrow with steep >>walls. They widen out inside and often have a bit of a flood plain where >>farming is possible. >> I'd imagine there'd be quite a few of them in parts of southern and >>eastern Spain where smaller streams flow down from the plateau. >As to Artesa de Segre, and as one who nearly drowned there once >[I must have been 10 or so], I must say it's not really a box >canyon in my recollection, but the river (Segre) does flow >through mountainous territory there. Indeed the fact that the >waterlevel rose so quickly on the particular day of my >near-drowning (some bozo must have opened the floodgates of the >Oliana reservoir upstream), suggests that the valley is rather >narrow, I think. Okay, maybe ravine or possibly what my folks call a "holler" ["hollow"]--they live about 2 miles up the holler on Cobb's Creek where they grow taters and maters :> In any case, the v-shaped valley walls resemble the picture I saw of an . As to -esa. Could it be "valley," "wadi," "arroyo"? Any ideas? From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 16:01:21 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 10:01:21 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] > Yes it will. The kingdom of Scotland had been Gaelic-using till >shortly (as linguistic time is measured) before. Thus, just as in >England, there had been little time for divergence to evolve. I'd strongly suspect that in much of Scotland that class differences were based on language rather than dialect differences. The Edinburgh region, AFAIK, never spoke Gaelic and I'd imagine that in Glasgow, Briton was the language of lower classes for a few centuries. And then around the time the lower class Glaswegians learned Gaelic, the nobility settled on Lallans. Does this sound right? >>Lowland Scotland, which spoke a Northumbrian dialect, was never conquered by >>the Normans, and the court and nobility there used Lallans right down to the >>late 17th century. [snip] > Accent, which in popular usage is generally taken to refer only to >sound features, is not the same as dialect, a point you repeatedly fail to >appreciate. Thus Southern Senators like Ernest Hollings and Strom >Thurmond have a southern accent, and in acordance with custom speak in a >regional dialect (as British lords used to), but they do not speak a lower >class dialect. The lower class dialect of the regions they are from is >appreciably different. And younger middle and upper class Whites now tend to speak with an accent that is much closer to Midwestern English. Although Lowland South Carolina is one of the places where a Southern accent is hanging on to a greater degree than most areas of the South. From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 22 16:38:06 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 16:38:06 +0000 Subject: `Sancho' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > But Antso < Santso, while it definitely looks cognate to > , , looks a bit askew given that Basque does have > /ch/ yet we don't see *Santxo /sancho/. So it didn't come from > . And Old Spanish had /ts/ but we don't see *Sanzo /santso > > sanso or Santho/. We do have the surname Sanz, however, /san/ < /sants/. In the 9-10th centuries Sanctus, and Sanctius (f. Sanctia) seem to have been reasonably common given names in Catalonia (Bolo's and Moran, Repertori d'Antropo`nims Catalans, 1994). Spellings for the male name(s) are Sanc, Sanca, Sanccio, Sanci, Sancii, Sancio, Sancione, Sancius, Sanctio, Sanctius, Sanco, Sancone, Sancto, Sanctus. Sanga, Sango, Santio, Santioni, Santo, Santus, Sanxo, Sanzi, Sanzio, Sanzione, Sanzo, Sanzoni This range of forms suggest to me that at least /santo/, /santso/, /santSo/, /santson(e)/ were current in Romance as given names. That is to say, there's nothing specially Basque about Sancho. 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 glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 22 03:24:56 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 19:24:56 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: ME (GLEN): First off, I had the funny notion that the 1rst person perfective was *-H3 not *-H2 [...] The fact that non-Anatolian languages seem to have either -o or both -o AND -a (like Greek) suggests to me that -o is archaic and -a is not. MIGUEL: How can /a/ be a derivative of *(e)H3? We *can* derive /o(:)/ from *(e)H2 (O-Stufe). [...] Huh? Which -o are you talking about? Which langauge has -o in the 1sg. perfect? Alright, I'll listen. I'm curious: How do we obtain /o(:)/ out of *(e)H2 then? [ Moderator's comment: As MCV parenthetically noted, it has been hypothesized that **oH2 (that is, "apophonic *o which alternates with *e") > *o: rather than *a:. It has its attractions. --rma ] MIGUEL: Tocharian shows how easy it would have been to newly develop a conjugation based on the personal pronouns [...] But the fact is that all other IE languages have stubbornly held on to *-m, *-s, *-t, which must have a different origin. ME (GLEN): Must have? Alright, what is that "different origin"? MIGUEL: Who knows? I can offer all kinds of speculations: an earlier stage where the pronominal elements *so and *to were distinguished by having 2nd and 3rd person deixis respectively, [...] Which is more involved a theory than to say that they derive from the personal endings (which seems the simpler conclusion). Please don't say "must have" unless you really mean it. MIGUEL: [...]a connection with 2d.p. plural su-mes/su-wes, etc. In any case, the PIE *-m, *-s, *-t system is independent of the PIE pronominal *m-, *t-, [*s-] pattern. It cannot be otherwise. Really. You're being cleverly distractive now. There's nothing that should have us conclude anything stranger than that Tocharian endings derive from IE endings. You've shown us nothing that fortifies this assertion. ME (GLEN): I still maintain that some instances of IE *-s derive from a previous **-t. Examples of this besides the 2nd person singular *-s would be *-mes "we" (**-mit), *-tes "you" (**-tit) and the plural *-es (**-it). MIGUEL: Well, I maintain that **-t > *-H1. Witness the Hittite instr. -it > PIE *-(e)H1 [Beekes]. Also **-ent > **-erH1 > -e:r. But are we assured that Hittite -it can only derive from a form like *-eH1, as opposed to endings like *-od [ablative] or *-dhi that would follow a more oft-seen sound correspondance? You've had this idea for a while now and no doubt, being that you strike me as a good chess player, you've contemplated firm answers long ago to the questions I'm going to pose but here we go... This would mean that IE *-H1 becomes Hittite -t? Why does one need to posit something so strange? The heteroclitic can be explained as *-nD > *-r (D being a dental stop), as I've been saying without the need for positing "stealth" suffixes. If we accept your proposal of *H1 > Hittite and **n>*r (I'm assuming you mean in final position only, not mediofinal), we first have a sparsely attestable suffix *-H1 for instrumental that would often end up as a long vowel in non-Anat lgs that could be derivable from anything within the confines of our tiny universe. Second, why is the heteroclitic so special, lacking a nominative suffix the way it does? That on top of an odd IE *H1 > Hittite sound change to begin with, that hasn't been shown to be necessary. How often does a final glottal stop become a final dental? I've heard of the reverse. If it does happen in real languages, it ain't too common at all, you'll have to agree. If you can accept those kinds of rarities, I fail to see why you've bothered to rearrange the IE stops due to the rarity of its system. This is alot of g'fuffle for very little. I think the more direct sound changes that I propose are still more reasonable and doubly provide more correlations between IE and Uralic in the process: *- < **-n *-s < **-t *-r < **-nt/**-nd/**-ndh (This one's from Joachim-Alscher, btw) *-r < **-rC *-n < **-nV *-t/*-d < **-tV *-C < **-CV It even shows a pwetty pattern. They can be split into two: sound changes arising from final phonemes laxing up & simplifying, and sound changes arising from the loss of final syllable. It's basically a reshuffling of final consonants. *H1 > is a plug-hole theory that explains too little. -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 22 17:18:55 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 17:18:55 +0000 Subject: borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > Max W Wheeler wrote:- > >... comparative linguistics. Corresponding to Sp. , Ptg has > > , and Catalan has . In renaissance Spanish we have not only > > but also , , , , ; and in > > mod. Sp dialects (including America) . ... perfectly well attested > > Cat. the similarity between Mod Sp > > and Ar begins to look rather less interesting. > (1) Ar. still could have played a part in it. Perhaps, once > {usta:d> had got into Spanish, it sounded like a collapsed form of merced> and coalesced with it. But there's no evidence that did get into Spanish. By the 16th century when Sp. usted arose, Spaniards were into ethnic cleansing of Arabic speakers, not into borrowing high-status words from them. Max From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 22 04:06:05 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 04:06:05 GMT Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In Romance languages like modern French, it is said that "in all but a few >cases, the oblique -- often the ablative -- form survived the loss of Latin >inflectional morphology,...while the nominative did not..." I don't think I >need to remind you that the nominative is "often" the least marked form. The >markings you refers to includes those related to the ablative as a >"grammatical case expressing relations of separation, source, cause or >instrumentality,... not found in the nominative." It was rather the accusative forms that survived. You can't tell the difference in the Western Romance singular (-am > -a, -a: > -a; -um > -o, -o: > -o; -em > -e, -e > -e), but Romanian and Sardo have -u (< acc. -um) not -o, and the plurals are clearly accusatives [but nominatives in Eastern Romance -e, -i]: -as, -os, -es. The ablatives would've given -is, -is, -ivos. A form like Sp. quie'n "who?" < quem also betrays its accusative roots. What did happen was that the ablative took over the genitive case (Gen. > de: + Abl.), as it already had taken over locative (in + Abl) and instrumental (cum + Abl) functions, while the dative case was replaced by ad + Acc. This left only the nominative, accusative and ablative. But given the phonetic merger (except partially in Romanian and Sardo) of the Acc.sg. and Abl.sg., accusative and ablative merged into a general oblique case, used whenever a noun was preceded by a preposition or the object of the verb. The nominative, as the subject case, became the marked form, and was eventually discontinued in Western Romance. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From adahyl at cphling.dk Mon Mar 22 19:22:19 1999 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 20:22:19 +0100 Subject: Ethnologue In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Mar 1999, Larry Trask wrote: > The book is updated every few years. The most recent paper edition, I > think, is still the 12th (1992), but a new edition is in preparation and > should be out soon, or it may even be out already, though I haven't seen > it yet. The 13th paper edition *is* indeed out (1996). Adam Hyllested From Osmantul at aol.com Mon Mar 22 04:54:24 1999 From: Osmantul at aol.com (Osmantul at aol.com) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 23:54:24 EST Subject: Arabic /usta:dh/ Persian /usta:d/ Span /ustedh/ Message-ID: I want to propose that Vuestra Merced of Spanish was the origin of the /ustadh/ form in Arabic and Farsi. The Spanish word "usted" can be traced to the abbreviation of "vuestra merced". It's clearly documented in Spanish etymological dictionaries. I propose that the original diglossic situation in Spain had Spanish as the hi code and Arabic as the low code, and during this time we would expect to see a lot of borrowing of Spanish vocab into Arabic. Many non-arab clothing items have Spanish names..... Span / camisa/ Arabic /xamis/ span /pantalones/ Arabic / bantalon/ Span /zapato/ dialectical Arabic /zab ba/ Span / banyo/ arabic /banyo/ Span /balco:n/ Arabic /balco:n/ Perhaps the Moors were the first people in Spain to pronounce the abbreviation Vsted as /usted/. At a time when Arabic was the low code it would have been very acceptable to borrow the form from Spanish. Then as Arabic rose in importance the Spanish may have absorbed the Arabic usage of the Vsted form. I wish I had more time to include some documentation, but I have to prepare for classes tomorrow. Timothy Goad Mark Hubey writes: IT is most likely Turkic, yes Turkic. Look at internal evidence; Us (top of, above), UstUn (superior, above others), oz (to surpass, to overtake, to be above others), ozghun (someone who is excessive), usta (an expert in something), ustalik (expertise). From thorinn at diku.dk Mon Mar 22 19:29:59 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 20:29:59 +0100 Subject: Using Dictionaries: Pros and Cons In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: From: X99Lynx at aol.com Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 15:47:17 EST In a message dated 3/15/99 4:13:07 AM, thorinn at diku.dk wrote in a note titled "Re: STATISTICS IN LINGUISTICS:" <> [Quote from Bob Whiting about the uselessness of dictionaries]. What a comparison of the two points-of-view given above might suggest is that Statistics and Linguistics may not be precisely on the same track. I agree completely that this experimental procedure --- you elided the better one --- will probably give random results in nearly all cases. If the control experiments and statistical analysis I described --- and you also elided --- is done properly, the lack of correlation with `reality' (or anything else) will be painfully evident, and the whole thing will be written off as an exercise in futility. Come to think of it, it might be a good result to have, as proof that dictionary comparisons are in fact worthless. Then Larry T would not have to spend so much time correcting `data' about Basque. But the real point of my post was not the use of dictionaries, but the use of an unbiased `mechanism' to compare languages, with control experiments on known cases to calibrate it. [...] Dictionaries also may not give you an accurate idea of the phonology or the comparative phonology between two languages. That's exactly why my other suggested procedure was to have experts in each single language produce lists of words in IPA, to be compared by a computer program. At shallow time depths, this might actually have a chance of producing results that fit tolerably well with accepted views --- while still producing nonsense for longer range comparisons, I would expect. [...] And even phonetic or historical linguistic dictionaries can REALLY ask too much when it comes to the supposed meaning of old words. [...] And why I was talking only about comparing modern languages. (But I may have forgotten to write that). Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu Mon Mar 22 05:36:35 1999 From: HubeyH at Mail.Montclair.edu (H. Mark Hubey) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 00:36:35 -0500 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > My lack of knowledge doubtless is the basis of the fact that I > find Mark's lexical information somewhat confusing. My > dictionary gives Us (Mark: 'top of, above') as 'Grundlage', > 'Basis' while Ust (not given by Mark) seems to correspond to the > meaning he gives for Us. And my dictionary does not give oz or > ozghun at all so I suppose that they belong to a different branch > of Turkic. yes, Karachay-Balkar. >I am surprised, though, that Mark did not come up > with Ustat (Ustaz) and Ustadane, but perhaps these have been > expunged from the language as being seen as having been borrowed > from Persian or Arabic. But since Mark knows more about Turkish I did not find these in Redhouse. I think ustat is there. > and Turkic than I ever will, I expect that there is a simple > explanation. It does, however, reinforce the point about doing > comparisons with only a dictionary and a very limited knowledge > of the language involved. Well, a dictionary of the Turkic languages would/could have easily been used (especially if in electronic form) to find all these VC forms quite easily. In fact, I often do wish that electronic dictionaries were available for all the IE and AA languages (and others too). Writing a java program to do this would have been lots of fun :-) My reasoning says that the root/stem of this word has to do with us, Us, or es, Os, or even oz (U is u-umlaut and O is o-umlaut). us is archaic Turkish for 'mind, intelligence' etc. KB for 'us' is 'es' Us is KB for 'on top of' as in UsUnde. Ust is the Turkish version so it would be 'UstUnde'. The word 'oz' means 'to surpass, overtake' in KB, and shows up in Turkish as 'az' (as in 'to be excessive'). In KB Os (o-umlaut) means "to grow, grow high". Many words are derived from these as in UstUn (superior), ozghun (someone who is excessive), azgIn (ditto), usta (expert), uslu (well-behaved), usul (method), esle (to remember), eskertme (memorial). In fact, it goes even further I think, and it could be related to Or (high), Orle (climb), Orge (upwards), etc or even uch (to fly (high)), uca (Azeri for 'great' whose Turkish version is yUce), uc (end), uz (?) uzun (long), uzak (far), etc. I'd think that 'us' means nothing useful in Farsi or Arabic, and if it did, neither has probably as many words derived from it. The root/stem has been in Turkic for a very long time apparently even if it is borrowed which I find unlikely. > And I have a question of Mark: Is > the term Ustat used an an honorific in Turkish as 'usta:dh is > generally in Arabic? Usta means 'master craftsman, expert', and is used to refer to people, so it could be used as an honorific. ustad itself is also used, actually it is more like Ustad. I believe that most Turks themselves believe that it is from Farsi because it is probably written that way in some dictionary. Best Regards, Mark -==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 19:39:30 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 13:39:30 -0600 Subject: Anatolian /-ant/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] >American >English might be said to have borrowed German /-burg/ as a toponymic >suffix, merely by having a lot of toponyms in /-burg/. Any American >would recognixe any "X-burg" as a toponym. > DLW >[ Moderator's comment: > Isn't this last Anglo-Saxon rather than a German borrowing? Cf. Edinburg > (a calque on Dunedin). > --rma ] A bit of both BUT as I understand it Anglo-Saxon had /burx/, hence . The story that I've heard is that Pittsburgh was laid out and named by a Scot, who pronounced it /pItsb at r@/ --or something to that effect. But others saw the spelling and assumed it was /pItsb at rg/ --with <-burg> from German. And from then on, there was a slew of burgs, especially in Midwest with all of its settlers of German origin. OR so I've been told. BTW: I've also seen the argument that Dunedin is a calque of "Edwin's burh". From DRC at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz Mon Mar 22 07:55:37 1999 From: DRC at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 19:55:37 +1200 Subject: avio/n Message-ID: Dauzat and Robert credit the invention of Fr avion "airplane" to someone named Ader, in 1875. It is said to be based on Latin avis, with, I guess, the same suffix. In the absence of mention of any other language I would have to assume that this Ader person was French. Ross Clark >>> Rick Mc Callister 03/20 12:18 PM >>> [snip] >Most interesting. Without ever really thinking about it, I'd always >vaguely assumed that the word was `big bird' plus the augmentative >suffix <-o'n> -- hence `really big bird', or some such. >OK; it's dumb, but it's cute. [snip] It definitely makes sense at a superficial level but if avi?n originally applied to swifts then it couldn't fit, given that these are rather than From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 22 19:39:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:39:41 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> The issue then once again comes down to how one turns the difference in language into a separation in time. When you've discussed this in the past, an important difference you've often noted is verb tense systems, particularly the way these languages handle the aorist/perfective aspect (although you mention others.) A breakdown you once gave went: <<1) no -s or *-s is a 3rd.p.sg. personal marker: Hittite, Tocharian, Germanic. 3) *-(i)sk-: Armenian. 4) s-preterite: Italic, Celtic, Albanian. 5) s-aorist: Greek, Indo-Iranian, Slavic(-Baltic).>> I'm impressed by this method of dividing IE languages because it strikes me as the kind of changes that clearly take a bit of time and work. One doesn't transfer a perceptual system of time-stream and events into language overnight. The serious problems created by semantics and borrowings and dialects are considerably reduced. (In contrast, lexical comparisons seem unacceptibly unreliable in separating IE languages through time. The glottochronological approach, for example, really suffers from the fact that differences in vocabulary are just not regular or predicatible or transparent when it comes to either borrowings or lost meanings or small changes in sounds. The similarity or dissimilarity between basic words just involve too many factors to justify many conclusions about time of separation. And the true downfall is the "semantic" shifts which make our modern references to ancient entities demonstrably unreliable. E.g., there was no word for color in Homer.) Assuming that these differences in verb tense structure do reflect real differences in time, is there a logical way to explain how such differences came about? This would seem to be a clear way of tracking both time and location. For example, was the aorist/perfective aspect a borrowing? I'm totally unaware of its history in other language groups. Was it sui generis? You mention <> I have some reason to believe that a simple change in locale and neighbors can account for the lexical or basic phonological differences between Greek and Sanskrit in a relatively short time (much shorter than the 2000-3000 years you've estimated.) Ancient German and Latin traveled a much shorter distance to become modern English and French in a much shorter time. But subtleties like the aorist do ask for a change in thinking that must always take more time. Is there a historical or geographical correlation that you've made that accounts for the differences you mention? And how do you arrive at a number like 2000 to 3000 years to account for the differences? Could this whole aspect thing have developed and travelled (in wagons or on horseback) as late as 2500-2000 bce? And finally is it possible that the archaism of German/Hittite actually reflects an innovation? Could it be a more modern simplification to make the language easier to assimilate among non-speakers? Like possibly the loss of inflection? Regards, Steve Long From iglesias at axia.it Mon Mar 22 16:22:19 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 08:22:19 PST Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: My apologies to you all for sending a duplicate message. The second message was intended to be the final version, but my system betrayed me and sent both! The first message, in which I referred to Milanese "Sciorlu" (= hypothetical Italian *Signor Lui), was based on my own personal observations, but talking to other people I came to the conclusion that this form of address is now very, very rare, as anyone speaking that formally would use Italian and, therefore, Lei. However, I know a person (a bulder) who uses precisely this form and all his customers are very flattered! The content of the second message was based on published grammars of Milanese and Bergamasco respectively. Thanks to the moderator for pointing out that the two messages were similar but not identical. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Mon Mar 22 19:18:55 1999 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:18:55 -0500 Subject: no standard German? Message-ID: >From: IN%"Indo-European at xkl.com" 22-MAR-1999 02:17:09.03 >Subj: RE: no standard German? >Joat said:> >>Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was >>nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of >>the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Peter said: >Rubbish, I'm afraid. >(a) There was a substantial literature in Middle High German, in a form >which avoided the more obvious local peculiarities. Perfectly true. But the scribes of the next few centuries felt no compunction whatsoever about introducing more modern forms (especially in the vowel system) which had been adopted in their dialects. And even Middle HIgh German lit isn't anywhere near as uniform as the normalized printed editions would suggest -- check out the manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied. Some of the poets did *not* avoid their local peciliarities. Also, when German began to be used for civil records (mainly from 1250 on), we find something resembling, if not necessarily identical with, the local dialects. The scribes did *not* follow the literary tongue found in the epics of Hartmann von Aue or Gottfried von Strassburg. Their influence (and it seems to have been great) was primarily on the literary works. >(b) Saxony Chancery German was wide spread as a precise language, needed for >legal use over a wide German speaking area. Saxon chancery German was widely used. But it was not identical with imperial chancery German, which was also widely used. Indeed, the imperial form, also known as "das gemaine deutsch" (note _ai_ for Saxon _ei_), persisted into the start of the 18th century as a written medium. And then there was Low German... >(c) Luther himself says that he uses "the common German language which both >High and Low Germans understand ... that is to say, the Saxon Chancery >language ... which all princes and kings in Germany use." (My translation - >I'll give you Luther's German if you want it.) You know, of course, that Luther, at the same spot, also credited the chancery of Emperor Maximilian for helping develop this tongue. Not that this is strictly true, or that all the rulers actually used one of these standards. And it is hard to believe that all Low Germans would have understood his language -- his Bible was even translated into Low German for the use of northerners! I'm afraid both of you have misstated the situation. There certainly were written forms which were used and acknowledged even in places where people talked differently. There had been some in earlier times as well, at least in the sense that manuscripts written in one place sometimes used the (apparently more prestigious) dialect of another. There were also attempts at standardization (Notker's usage was even imitated). But even if Luther's language eventually came to be the standard, this process took a good long time, during which many continued to write, wie ihnen der Schnabel (die Feder?) gewachsen war. I should also add that "minstrel" misstates the position of the medieval poets and singers. The word comes from Lat. _ministerialis_ 'court official', or even one kind of knight. Hartmann actually was a knight of this sourt -- and proud of it. A poet like Walther von der Vogelweide could eventually boast in one song: "Ich ha^n mi^n le^hen!" -- 'I have my fief!' He must have been rather more than a poor wandering minstrel! It is a matter of dispute whether anyone but these poets actually used their language -- the only candidates are the court nobles and officials, who certainly appreciated it but did not necessarily use it themselves. Leo Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at latte.memphis.edu University of Memphis From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 22 09:18:42 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 09:18:42 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [LT] > >Basque `salmon' is widely suspected of being *ultimately* of > >Celtic origin, but not *directly*: instead, a Celtic loan into Late > >Latin is favored by most commentators as the direct source of the Basque > >word. > I seem to remember a Spanish dialect form esoqui/n [maybe > Asturian] Wasn't the Latin form something like esox? The ending > -i/n, of course, is diminutive in Spanish --with similar forms in > just about all Romance languages. Yes, and yes. The Asturian form, ~ `young salmon', is suspected of being a loan from Basque. Tovar wanted to see the Basque word as borrowed directly from Celtic, but Michelena takes that ending as pointing rather to a Romance origin. [LT] > >A Celtic origin has also been suggested for ~ `oar', > >pointing to earlier *, possibly to be identified with the word > >represented by Old Irish `oar'. Don't know if there's anything > >much behind this, especially since the nasal appears to be wrong. > Spanish for "oar" is "remo." So a form similar to Irish was > floating around the area. Possibly. [LT] > >Finally, `beloved' has been thought for a century to have been > >borrowed from the Celtic word represented by Old Irish `good'. > >The semantics requires some fancy footwork, but the Basque word has an > >anomalous form for a native word, and is surely borrowed from somewhere. > I've heard it said quite a few times that Maite is a > "nickname" for "Mari/a Teresa." And indeed, I've Maites whose legal > "Spanish name" was "Mari/a Teresa." Yes, it is true that the female given name is the conventional Basque equivalent of the Spanish . However, the adjective `beloved' has existed in the language for as long as we have records. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 22 23:47:37 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 15:47:37 PST Subject: gender Message-ID: GEORGE MANTZOUKIS: Dear Glen Gordon and IE-ists, [...] Zzzz, zz, huh? Oh-oh, my name is being mentioned. I guess that means I have to respond... :) GEORGE MANTZOUKIS: If I am interpreting you right, Glen, you think that 1) IE originally started out with no gender distinction at all 2) Animate/inanimate distinctions developed sometime "later". Yes to both. GEORGE MANTZOUKIS: When do you think these distincions developed? Was it within PIE and the Anatolian group inherited it, or was it within Proto-Anatolian? Both Miguel and I, at least, think that Indo-European and Etrusco-Lemnian are related and part of a larger language group (in other words a kind of Early PIE or Pre-IE). I personally call it Indo-Etruscan but I think I've heard Miguel mention "Indo-Tyrrhenian". When we examine Etruscan or Lemnian, we don't really find any evidence of grammatical gender distinctions at all whether that be masculine-feminine-neuter or animate-inanimate, of course this may be due to the scarcity of linguistic material to examine. Getting out of Indo-Etruscan and into Indo-Anatolian IE, we find a common system of animate-inanimate distinctions but no trace of use of any suffixes for purposes of feminine like the ones we find in non-Anatolian languages. Mind you, there are nouns with "feminine suffixes" but they are nonetheless declined as "animate" nouns. The feminine grammatical gender as we know it in non-Anatolian languages simply isn't there in Anatolian. This combined with the fact that other grammatical systems appear lesser developed in Anatolian compared to the non-Anatolian languages makes it very likely that Anatolian preserves a simpler state of affairs. It's hard to uphold the arguement that features like the feminine had been simply lost because, as I say, we really can find no trace at all of an earlier feminine gender and we should expect such a feature to still have been preserved in some way if this were the case. Lastly and most superficially, I take a possible genetic relationship between Indo-Etruscan and Uralic as being most probable. We don't find any trace of gender distinction at all in Uralic. If you're asking about when I think gender distinctions of any kind developed in IE, I would wager sometime between 4,500 and 3,500 BCE as a vague guess. GEORGE MANTZOUKIS: Are there any good arguments in favor of animate/inanimate distinctions in Greek or Latin? Words like "farmer" is a usual one. Of course, you really can't beat "mother" with the *-ter ending that marks the masculine word *pHter. Eventually, everyone must succumb to the idea that there was once only an animate-inanimate grammatical contrast. Resistance is futile. :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Mon Mar 22 11:24:42 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 03:24:42 -0800 Subject: pre-modern standard languages Message-ID: maher, johnpeter wrote: > The Upper Silesian dialect had a wide currency in many courts > outside its own region as Kanzleisprache before Luther. That's why he > used it. Wasn't it also his native language/dialect? Not that this necessarily makes a great deal of difference (if it were already a lingua franca in at least part of 15th-cent. Germany, that would probably have been reason enough), but i seem to remember being told that -- by fortuitous circumstance -- Luther happened to be a native speaker thereof. 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 23 01:55:31 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 20:55:31 EST Subject: Stigmatization and Celtic Influence Message-ID: >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >Apart from pragmatic consderations ("Do we have a word for this?"), >the main thing that controls borrowing is the reaction that the would-be >borrower expects: will I get laughed at?, etc. -- unlikely in a community of peasants most of whom, allegedly, are speaking Brythonic themselves. Who is going to be doing the laughing? Other Brythonic-speaking farmers? Where is there any indication of such an Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the Celtic languages? >The higher the level of stigmatization of a subject (i.e. conquered) >language, the less likely a would-be borrower is to think that the reaction >he would get from using a word from the subject language would be good. -- this did not prevent hundreds of Celtic loan-words in Gallo-Romance. This whole argument is circular, ludicrous, and a non-falsifiable hypothesis; ie., a meaningless semantic null set. From Georg at home.ivm.de Mon Mar 22 10:05:55 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 11:05:55 +0100 Subject: Mummies of Urumchi In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>generally accepted on which kind of evidence, if I may humbly ask ? >-- I'll refer you to the JIES and the volume of monographs that Mair edited. The JIES does not publish exclusively first-rate papers, but that's of course only my personal opinion ;-) >It's also common sense. There population in question abruptly appears in the >(previously virtually uninhabited) Tarim basin in the 2nd millenium BCE. >There's no abrupt discontinuity in the record after that until the arrival of >the Uighurs in historic times, and we have records that the people there prior >to the Uighurs were Tocharian-speaking. > >It's not in serious dispute. Well, I would dispute it. What we have here is basically the fault of argumentum e silentio. Tokharian preceded Uighur in Turkestan (right, but so did Iranian languages), but our Tokharian texts are from the early Middle ages, and the mummies are *millennia* earlier. It is true that between the Mummies and Tokharian we don't have really much in the way of records which would tell us anything about the ethnolinguistic makeup of any population there, but isn't the simple identification of those two entities (the mummies - Tokharians) an oversimplification ? It is like claiming that the Similaun man was an Italian (OK, I'm drawing a caricature, but is it very far from the issue here ?). I cannot help suspecting that the whole business of identification of the mummies with Tokharians (or sometimes Celts) is mainly based on the fact that the mummies were palefaces (and thus, for some people, could only have been Indo-Europeans of some kind). By allowing this we repeat age-old mistakes of confusion of race and language over and over again. I prefer to stand by a position which says simply and painfully: we don't know (whether any Tokharian was spoken in the region as early as the mummies' days and whether these very bodies are anything in the way of evidence fo that). Next step will be that I read in some textbook that the presence of Tokharian in Turkestan is secured for this early time (in fact I don't have the shred of a doubt that this is precisely what is going to happen). It isn't. Those mummies could have spoken anything (ignoramus ignorabimus). Of course it could have been sthl. Tokharian or Indo-European, but there is no way to *know* this. Wor"uber man nicht reden kann, dar"uber muss man schweigen, if you allow for yet another rehearsal of this very popular Wittgenstein-quote. The phenomenon which is unfolding here yet another time is that, whenever we *don't know* and cannot possibly hope to *know* one day (in the strictest sense of the word), people talk possibilities. OK with that. But after some time these possibilities develop into "secure knowledge" by virtue of being repated over and over again (and appeals to "common sense", whatever that may be) and, voil?, we have a new and intriguing fact for the tabloid press. Come to think of the story of Troy being Luwian-speaking. Could well be, I'm not doubting this here on principle, but the *only* piece of evidence for this so far is *one* tiny little Luwian seal unearthed on a site in Troy. Could have got there by zillions of ways, but no, Troy was Luwian-speaking, a major breakthrough in ancient Anatolian studies. Although sad, it's not the main point that the popular press brings it across like that, the sad thing is that healthy skepticism in the scientific community dwindles away so easily and quickly. For who wants to be a spoilsport nowadays ? So, I take the freedom to call both stories ("Tokharian" mummies and Luwian Troy) hypes. Possibilities, yes, possibilities are both, but we should not mistake (even plausible) possibilities for established facts. St.G. St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 23 02:05:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 21:05:00 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >So, you believe it was in Anatolia or Central Asia before that?> -- somewhere in the Ukraine-Kazahkstan area. Of course, it was probably already _spreading_ before that, perhaps at the expense of related languages of the same family. We can't recover those, of course. [snip] >I'd say sometime around 3500 BCE makes a sensible date for the spread >of PIE into Europe. From fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw Mon Mar 22 11:56:40 1999 From: fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw (Steven Schaufele) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 03:56:40 -0800 Subject: just what is it about written Chinese anyway? (was: Celtic influence) Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > -- many Chinese "dialects" are actually separate languages, as distinct > as Spanish and French. I've personally seen Mandarin and Cantonese > speakers try to communicate, give up, and drop into English instead. > Of course, the _written_ Chinese language, being largely ideographic, > was standard everywhere. That's one reason why it's of limited value > in reconstructing earlier stages of Chinese, of course, except for > poetry. > [ Moderator's note: > One for two: The Chinese writing system is not ideographic, but > logographic. This is a source of endless discussions on various > newsgroups; the DejaNews search engine can aid anyone interested in > following up on the point. We're getting a little off subject (topic?) here, but just for the sake of scholarly nit-picking i would note that even the Chinese written language isn't as general as it is commonly cracked up to be. One of my students, in her term paper last semester, raised the issue of the claim that written Chinese is equally intelligible to all literate Chinese people, but then noted that she, a native speaker of Mandarin and Taiwanese and about as well-educated as one can reasonably expect of a university undergraduate, found herself unable to read a Cantonese newspaper printed in Hong Kong. When i asked her for further particulars, she said that (1) there were characters in the text that she didn't recognize at all and, more importantly (2) there were a lot of sentences in which she could recognize each individual character but the combinations made no sense to her as a Mandarin-speaker. From which she concluded that the grammar of Cantonese was sufficiently different from that of Mandarin that the writers/editors of the newspaper were combining the morphemes she recognized in ways that would have been impossible in Mandarin. For what it's worth ... 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 JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 23 02:03:20 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 21:03:20 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes: >Yes it will. The kingdom of Scotland had been Gaelic-using till shortly (as >linguistic time is measured) before. Thus, just as in England, there had >been little time for divergence to evolve. -- Lothian was settled by Angles at the same time as the settlements further south. The Lowlands were Lallans-speaking by the early medieval period. The line of division with Gaelic then remained fairly stable until the early modern period. >So your theory then enables us to confidently (or should I say immodestly) >predict that Southern aristocrats speak Black English. -- "spoke". A closely related dialect. They've diverged since 1865, as social distance grew. >1) why ME diverges from the rest of Germanic -- languages diverge. >and converges with Celtic -- there are a limited number of ways they can change. Why does Frisian share most of the English innovations? Are Celts prowling the Frisian swamps? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Mar 22 11:02:14 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 11:02:14 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: [somebody else] > >5/ Basque _arhan_, _aran_ 'plum' is obviously from continental Celtic > >*agran(io)-, exactly as _andere, azkoin, bezu, izokin, gereta, mando_ etc. > >are from Gaul. _andera:, bessu, eso:ks, cle:ta:, mandu,_ . > I'd like to hear Larry Trask's opinion on the other words. I've already posted some comments on the Basque words. > It's my understanding that "lady" may NOT be from Celtic > in that in Aquitanian, there seems to be a corresponding masculine form > --something like , from something like *. Is that > correct? As I pointed out earlier, it is possible that and * contain a stem *. Bot `cold' cannot be present in *. > If so, is and- from the same root as ? Presumibly the other > morphemes mean "male, man" & "female, woman." Michelena once suggested `big, great' as the stem of the Aquitanian personal name ANDOSSUS. It is still possible that might be the stem of both and *, though I myself am troubled by the fact that is strictly an adjective in the historical period. It is, at best, somewhat unusual for a personal name in Basque to be based on an adjective, but there are nonetheless a handful of certain or possible examples, so I can't rule it out. Gorrochategui sees his * as containing the attested suffix <-(d)ots>, which does indeed appear to mean `male' in one formation. He needs a female suffix *<-ere> for which there exists no independent evidence. > Now, if this is so, could Celtic andera: be the reason that > survived and [sp?] didn't? Don't see how. Celtic seems to have died out in Gaul within a few centuries of the Roman conquest. The historical Basque word for `lord', is first recorded in the 14th century -- plenty of time for the Basques to replace a few words for strictly internal reasons. But who knows? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 09:40:12 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 09:40:12 +0000 Subject: Basque In-Reply-To: <19990318142742.24301.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: > Part I , and > There are several aspects of in Euskera that are not > immediately apparent from the discussion above. For example, it is > commonly used in conjunction with the derivational allative > suffixing element <-era> (as are other root-stems in Euskera) in its > directional meaning of "toward." Actually, <-ra>, I think. > Hence, > "We are going toward the mountain" can be converted into a spatially > understood "noun-like" notion, namely, one that refers to "the place > that is ." That spatial notion is not directly > equivalent to "mountain-slope". But it certainly does approach it in > the sense that you are moving through a space identified as "[the > part] toward (the) mountain." In many senses the referentiality of > would correspond, in terms of the spatially grounded > notion it comprises, what is understood in spatial terms to be "a > slope" or "mountain-side" in English. Yes; as I mentioned earlier, means not only `the mountains' but also `the place near or toward the mountains'. It is true that commonly means `toward the mountain(s)', since has become a common postposition in the sense of `toward'. Roz appears to be suggesting that a reanalysis of as <[mendialde]-ra> has led to the creation of as a noun meaning `place near or toward the mountain(s)', and I think this is reasonable. But I've never heard used to mean specifically `slope', which in my experience is most commonly expressed as , or . However, since the Basque Country is anything but flat, any journey toward the mountains, assuming you're starting in a valley, must inevitably take you uphill pretty quickly. Unless you're following a valley toward the sea, there aren't many places where you can travel much more than 100 meters without going uphill. Croquet is never going to catch on in the Basque Country. ;-) [snip] > For anyone bilingual in Euskera and Spanish, the phonological > correspondences between and "la ladera del monte" are > striking. I take no position concerning the role played by > as a possible candidate inherited by Euskera and IE from some earlier > (pre-Rom.) linguistic substrate (substrata). I only want to indicate > that things are a bit less clear cut than they might appear at first > glance. It is certain that eastern is the conservative form of the Basque word, and that common is secondary, resulting from the medieval voicing of plosives after /l/. Compare eastern , central , `altar', from Latin (though here the west also has ~ , possibly by reborrowing from Spanish). And compare `height', borrowed from Spanish , which has everywhere this form (except where it's been folk-etymologized to ), while * is unrecorded. Since the voicing of plosives after /l/ has never occurred in Castilian (though it *has* occurred in some Pyrenean varieties of Romance), no inherited Castilian form in * can be cognate with the Basque word. > Also, I'd mention that Azkue I:28 lists (BN-baig, L-ain) and > (BN, Sal.), the latter with the following definition: "faldsn, > parte inferior de una casaca, saya, levita o levitsn"/ "pan, basque, > partie infirieur d'un habit, d'une robe, d'une redingote." Yes, but I think averyone agrees that ~ is borrowed from medieval Spanish , the word which appears today in Castilian as , and which we discussed a few days ago. This Basque word is surely the direct source of Basque ~ `slope', with the common suffix <-pe> `below', and vowel assimilation in the more widespread variant . > In Euskera > one of the meanings of is "reverse, reverse side", specifically > Azkue I: 29 includes the following definition: "anverso, cara de un > objeto"/"face, endroit d'un objet." From the point of view of sewing, it > would be the "facing" of the garment or its "inner/under-liner." Not > exactly the same meaning as "skirt" but close, particularly if one > keeps in mind that (Sp.) has a very similar definition in sewing > terminology: it's the "(inside) flap, fold." One would need to look more > closely at the context of the Romance item in Medieval writings, e.g., > in Berceo or El conde Lucanor. My knowledge of sewing terminology is not comprehensive in *any* language, so I can't usefully comment here, except to point out that Basque ~ clearly cannot be related to Spanish . Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Mar 22 13:02:01 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 06:02:01 -0700 Subject: borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Rick Mc Callister wrote: > > (2) Re borrowing a pronoun of one language into some other use in another > >language: etymological dictionaries say that US English "bozo" = "fool" < > >Spanish "vosotros": > That sounds pretty farfetched. More likely it came from baboso > "drooling idiot, drooling drunken idiot, etc." > could it also be that the US English slang term of address > >and then nickname "buster" came from the abovementioned Spanish dialect > >?, and not the English for "one who busts (= breaks) things". > I always heard buster was from "ballbuster" I'm only a casual observer in this particular thread and haven't read every post. That said, I'm a little curious about "bozo". OED says, 'origin unknown' and cites the earliest occurrences as in the 1920s. That surprised me. As a baby boomer, I always assumed (like everyone else born after 1950), that the origin is in the TV clown's name. I guess that's folk etymology? John McLaughlin Utah State University From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 12:48:25 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 12:48:25 +0000 Subject: `bast' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Rick Mc Callister wrote: >> >According to Chambers also, it rhymes with gas, not with mast, in RP. >Interesting and curious. Both my Collins dictionary and John Wells's >Longman Pronouncing Dictionary recognize the pronunciation with /-st/ as >the only possibility for RP, though Collins notes that `bass', so >spelled and so pronounced, is a variant of `bast'. Sorry, I didn't make myself clear here (the first snip was a quotation by Rick McAllister from a mail of mine). I wasn't referring to the presence or absence of the t in the pronunication, but to the character of the vowel. In RP, there are two possible pronunciation of the vowel spelt in words of this type (and elsewhere, but let's not spread this net too wide), one more raised and fronted than the other. The pronunciation difference is noted in Alan Ross's essay on 'U and Non-U' where he refers to whether people pronouce 'mass to rhyme with pass instead of gas'. All three rhyme for me, and for many years I believed that this reference was a rather jokey thing connected solely with people so upper-class that they had died out. But not so! Now that I live in Britain I find that most people here do not allow, say 'gassed' and 'past' to be a rhyme, as they have different vowels. I find by asking such speakers that they have no way of knowing which group new vocabulary items belong to, so my native-speaker informants can't tell me about bast, as for most of them it is an unknown vocabulary item. What Chambers' source is, I don't know. By the way, in Ireland too we say 'spool of thread', whereas here they say 'reel of cotton' - cotton, in Ireland, is the raw material or the fabric, not the stuff you sew with. Best wishes, Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Mar 22 13:10:02 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 13:10:02 -0000 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > In Romance languages like modern French, it is said that "in all but a few > cases, the oblique - often the ablative - form survived the loss of Latin > inflectional morphology,...while the nominative did not..." I don't think I > need to remind you that the nominative is "often" the least marked form. The > markings you refers to includes those related to the ablative as a > "grammatical case expressing relations of separation, source, cause or > instrumentality,... not found in the nominative." This common claim about the ablative is misleading. In modern Italian or Spanish the noun ends in or or and thus has an almost identical form to the Latin ablative. But the Latin accusative ended in a nasal vowel [a~] or [e~] or [u~], written <-am> etc. As Latin changed to proto-Romance these nasal vowels became oral and final [u] became [o] in most descendants; and vowel length was lost. Thus the accusative and ablative became indistinguishable. As prepositions took on more of the case load, it would be more accurate perhaps to say that the ablative was absorbed into the accusative. Its grammatical baggage was lost; it became less marked. The test is in those neuter words where the early Romance reflexes of the two cases did not phonetically fall together: and since the likes of and turn out as , it looks as if it was the accusative, not the ablative, that gave rise to the later caseless forms. In terms of semantic "baggage", this is more understandable. Of course the nominatives in <-us, -a, -um> also fell together with their other cases. But there are many words in the athematic declension, where the nominative ending [s] caused phonetic change, so nominative and oblique remained different, as in [noks ~ nokte]. I think you're right that there is a genuine question here, of why the stem was generalized rather than what was felt to be the citation form. Is it that there was still palpably a case-ending [s] on the nominative, so it was not truly "unmarked"? Nicholas Widdows From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 13:59:38 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 13:59:38 +0000 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: <19990318142742.24301.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: > Part II. (Eusk) vs. (Sp.) [snip quotes] > Although I've lost track of who said what in the exchanges above, > the following is one model for explaining the concern raised : > In reference to the other ongoing discussion concerning > (Eusk) and (Sp.), the suffixed expression aldaketa > (Eusk) is also of interest. In it the common ending <-keta> is > encountered. The root-stem in compounds becomes . > In Euskera and especially the phonologically altered > also carry the meaning of "change, alteration." In the case of the > aforementioned it can be understood to mean "to change > place(s)," i.e., "to move to one side." Similarly, the meaning of > can be expanded to by adding the derivational suffix > <-ka>. In many contexts the suffix <-ka> conveys a verbal notion of > reiterative movement, i.e., somewhat like a gerundive, whereas in > others the reiterative force of <-ka> can be reprocessed cognitively > so that it produces a type of concept more like a verbal noun. > Indeed, <-ka> even can be suffixed to conjugated verb forms > themselves to create emphatic expressions such as > ( "yes, [they insisted that] it certainly is there!" I agree with most of this. The noun `side' exhibits the expected combining form in word-formation, and hence the verb `change' (and other senses). The localized noun `moving (house)' (and other senses) is clearly related and is likely a back-formation from the verb. I would describe the suffix <-ka> as adverbial in nature, though I agree it often forms adverbs with iterative senses, though not always: `on horseback', from `horse', for example, is not iterative. The adverb is unremarkable. Adverbs in <-ka> do indeed sometimes get reinterpreted as nouns, a fine example being `speaking to someone with the familiar pronoun ', which is now a noun for many speakers. Finally, the noun `(a) change, transformation' is unremarkable, being formed with the remarkably productive suffix <-(k)eta>. [snip] > Perhaps because of the meanings circulating > in the underlying structure of the suffix <-keta) (<*-ke-eta>), I don't think <-keta> is *: I think it's just a variant of <-eta>, exhibiting the frequent, if rather puzzling, Basque pattern of variant forms with and without initial /k/. > compounds in <-keta> are commonly used to refer to a sort of verbal > noun. In addition, it is frequently used to refer to a collection, > conglomeration, or quantity of the same substance/thing, e.g., > beiketa "a bunch of cows." There are also other nuances of <-keta> > that could be discussed. However, for our purposes let it suffice to > say that <-keta> is a common suffix and one understood to be > indigenous to Euskera. Furthermore, as I'm certain Larry can > demonstrate with a long list of examples, the ending is found in > many place-names and therefore is not considered an innovation in > the language. Agreed. The suffix <-(k)eta> is exceedingly common, both in common nouns and in place names, and is clearly of some antiquity. But its indigenous status is questionable. It may possibly derive from Latin <-eta>, the plural of the collective suffix <-etum> and the etymon of the Castilian collective suffix <-eda>, but we are not sure about this. (Spanish also use <-edo>, from singular <-etum>, of course.) The Castilian suffix is chiefly used with plant names; the Basque one is widely used with plant names but has other uses, as Roz points out. > At this point we can turn to the other Euskeric root-stem that of > late has been mentioned frequently on this list: . First, I > would like to ask Larry what those involved in reconstructions of > Euskera say about the possible relationship between the forms > and . Certainly their meanings are quite close as well as > their phonology. This is a celebrated vexed question. The next three specialists you ask will probably give you three different answers. But let's look at the evidence. The word is attested from the 12th century, or about as early as anything is attested in Basque. The very first attestation, in Picaud's famous glossary, *appears* to mean `horn' (the musical instrument), though the context is not totally clear. An early Spanish chronicle, for which I have no date, also reports the word as denoting a kind of trumpet, apparently used for calling attention, not for music. The word's first appearance in a Basque text comes in 1545 (Detxepare), where it means `horn (of an animal)'. From 1562 it is attested in Basque texts as `horn' (the musical instrument); from 1692 as `drinking horn'; from 1745 (Larramendi's dictionary) as `horn' (the material). However, from 1571 (Leizarraga), it is attested as `major branch of a tree, one growing from the trunk'. Finally, from 1664, it is recorded as `branch' in the extended English sense: `branch of a river', `branch of a road', and so on. The word appears to be old, but the evidence points somewhat toward the conclusion that `horn' (of an animal) is the original sense. The word does not appear to exist in any neighboring Romance variety. Note also that the existence of Old Irish `horn' and of related Celtic words has led most Vasconists to see the Basque word as borrowed from Celtic, though the IEist C. D. Buck interestingly prefers to see the Celtic word as borrowed from Basque, an interpretation which requires a certain amount of fancy footwork to account for that final plosive. Any comments here from IEists? The word , interestingly, is nowhere recorded before Araquistain's 1746 supplement to Larramendi's 1745 dictionary. The earliest sense is `branch (of any size) of a tree or bush', `branches, foliage'. Especially in the plural, it is also well recorded from an unspecified later date as both `branches collected for firewood' and `remains, residue'. In the form , what appears to be the same word appears in several neighboring Romance varieties, with senses like `long, thin branch' and `firewood'. We may surmise a loan from the Basque definite form . Now, what the hell does all this mean? There are several views, but pretty much everyone believes that and are unrelated words which have become to some extent tangled up because of their chance resemblance in form, and probably because `horn' has developed extended senses overlapping with those of `branch'. Only van Eys and Gabelentz have dissented here, but Gabelentz was no Vasconist, while van Eys, who was, was just about the worst etymologist that Basque historical linguistics has ever seen, save only for the outright loonies. An interesting proposal, put forward several times, sees as deriving from . This word commonly means `pillar, column' today, but its earliest recorded sense is simply `tree'. The key here is that Basque has a number of two-syllable nouns ending in a morph <-ar>, most of which denote things commonly encountered in bunches, and not individually, like `tears', `star', `apple', `sand', `remains', `peas', and others. We have long suspected that this <-ar> might represent a fossilized collective suffix, and the suggestion here is that might derive from `tree' plus this *<-ar>. Anyway, the absence of early attestations of is curious, since the word is common enough today. But I might note that a word `hailstorm' is recorded in 1571. Here the first element is clearly `stone', but what on earth is the force of ? Suggestions on a postcard, please. > It would seem > that -if this is the innovative phonological form- has become > more specialized in its meaning, while continues to refer to both > a tree "branch" and/or "other branch-like protuberances," e.g., "horns" > Indeed, the meaning of "horns" may well be the dominant one in today's > usage. If I'm not mistaken has been compared to forms in Celtic > (sorry I have almost no reference books where I am here in Panama). A > strong point in favor of the root-stem I think it's the other way round: two unrelated words which have become entangled, with `animal horn' being the original sense of . > Being a phonological innovation is the fact that it has produced no > compounds that do not have their direct phonological counterpart in > derivational forms in , e.g., , with the same > identical meaning. The only compound of whose meaning is not > encountered among those derived from is precisely , a > point that I will return to in the latter part of this mailing. > Finally, we have the form that Eduardo Etxegaray recorded in > his Diccionario etimolsgico (cited by Azkue I: 6) as a genuine Euskeric > compound meaning (Sp.). Whether this is a correct > assumption I do not know. But what is clear is that at least a few > speakers of Euskera must have heard (Sp.) and reprocessed > it as . Interesting. According to Sarasola, does not have the same meaning as : rather, denotes a leather moccasin tied up with laces, while denotes a rope-soled fabric sandal. The word is recorded only from 1893, while is recorded in the 11th century. It is possible that represents a folk-etymology of Spanish , but the phonological resemblance is sufficiently vague to make me cautious about such a view. > Moreover, from the point of view of Euskera's > derivational rules, the alleged meaning of the compound , i.e., > as equivalent to (Sp.) and (Sp.), has always bothered > me. It never has felt right to me. In other words from the point of view > of derivational forms in Euskera, the type of referentiality conferred > by simply doesn't match what would be needed to speak of > "shoes made out of bark, branches." For example, one would have > expected to encounter the use of the compound derivational ending in > <-z-ko> in which the instrumental suffixing element of material, <-z > > would be functioning, e. g., arrizko (< arri-z-ko>) "something made of > stone." In contrast, * could refer to something that the > branches (or perhaps the bark of the branches) had done or produced. For > instance, from "snow" we have "snow-fall." I broadly agree, but is the form -- though bear in mind that its derivation from is not certain. [snip] Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Mar 22 13:43:06 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 06:43:06 -0700 Subject: Ethnologue Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > The Ethnologue volume is compiled and published by a division of the > Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). As far as I know, it has no > connection with the UN. The information contained in it is derived from > an almost limitless variety of sources, of quite variable nature and > quality, and there are lots and lots of errors. One problem is that they have a separate entry for each language in each country in which it is found, so an entry for, say, Blackfoot in the USA will differ slightly (or sometimes majorly) from the entry for Blackfoot in Canada. If one is looking for complete information on a language spoken in the border region of five small west African countries, one must look at five separate (and sometimes differing) entries. There are a high number of typos and since they use an electronic data base for creating their language classification trees, there are a few places where the ancestry for a given language has been entered (by typo) incorrectly and thus shows up at an odd place in the classification. There are more errors that one might expect to find in a thoroughly edited work, but the level of error doesn't obviate its exceptional usefulness. > The book is updated every few years. The most recent paper edition, I > think, is still the 12th (1992), but a new edition is in preparation and > should be out soon, or it may even be out already, though I haven't seen > it yet. I haven't checked the Website lately; maybe that has already > been updated. The 13th edition (1996) is the current one on the shelf and the web. The website is www.sil.org/ethnologue. It's easier to use on the web. > The editors of Ethnologue actively encourage specialists to write in > with corrections, which they are happy to incorporate in their next > edition. I've done this myself, and anybody who finds misinformation on > the site or in the paper edition should consider sending in corrections. > Ethnologue is the most serious attempt I know of at assembling > comprehensive information about the world's languages (signed as well as > spoken) in one place, and it deserves support. I completely agree. I've sent in corrections and the editors are quite pleased and friendly about it. There is a form on the web site that makes sending in corrections electronic and easy. This is arguably the best single site for defining and listing the languages of the world (including population data). The Summer Institute of Linguistics has been heavily involved in the Americas and New Guinea for decades and has an exceptional handle on these most difficult regions. Some linguists never look at the site (or at Ethnologue) because SIL's primary mission is to translate the Bible and some scholars scoff at that, but that should not dissuade any scholar from using it as a primary source for languages of the world information. (If you're offended, just don't read the last line of each entry which often includes the history of Bible translation in that language.) Ethnologue (1996), Voegelin & Voegelin (1977), Ruhlen (1991), and the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (1992) tend to be our main sources for worldwide coverage of languages. I rely on the first three (the fourth is a bit too pricy to have in my personal library). Ethnologue's coverage of extinct languages is very sketchy. It excludes most of them, but includes some that are still used in formal and literary communication, such as Standard Arabic and Latin, and a few other odd ones (such as the four extinct "Gulf" languages--Tunica, Natchez, Atakapa, and Chitimacha and the extinct "Coahuiltecan" language Tonkawa). I rely on Ruhlen and Voegelin for extinct tongues (the Encyclopedia also excludes them from its classifications--most of its living language information comes from Ethnologue). As far as the classification scheme goes, Ethnologue tends to use the most recent classification for each group that seems to be accepted by specialists. "Indo-Pacific" is out, "Amerind" is out, "Nostratic" is out, "Austric" is out. But some groupings which haven't been completely demonstrated, but are of longstanding interest, are included such as Hokan and Penutian. It is superior to Ruhlen's classification system and more current than Voegelin & Voegelin's > Incidentally, the 1992 edition reports just over 6500 spoken languages > as currently in use, plus some dozens of sign languages. This is > probably the most accurate count we have. The 13th edition raises that number to 6690. That's probably more than most of you ever wanted to know about Ethnologue. John McLaughlin Utah State University From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 15:03:22 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 15:03:22 +0000 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <36F30124.546C075A@neiu.edu> Message-ID: >JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible. There was >>nothing _but_ regional dialects until then. Unless you count the language of >>the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them. Then John Peter Maher replied: >Not quite. The Upper Silesian dialect had a wide currency in many courts >outside its own region as Kanzleisprache before Luther. That's why he used it. It was Saxon, not Upper Silesian. And both of these statements are pretty wild simplifications. But I'm going to be pompous and say that this has nothing to do with Indo-European (admittedly like many topics discussed here, included ones on which I've contributed). Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 [ Moderator's comment: I am in agreement with Dr. Watts that this has drifted very far from the discussion of Celtic substrate influence in the development of English, where it began. Please take any further discussion to private e-mail. --rma ] From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 17:05:29 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 17:05:29 +0000 Subject: Greek question (night?) In-Reply-To: <8d449416.36f1d635@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 18 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > < *not-s < *nok{w}t-s;>> > Now slow this down for me, if you would. I see three reconstructions there, > but the second one is from the nominative. Is that *not-s supposed to be > Celtic? > Regards, > Steve Long > [ Yes. -rma ] > Not three alternative reconstructions, but rather one source, viz. PIE nominative *nok{w}t-s, with some suggested intermediate forms to get you to W _nos_. Whether the sound changes involved are independently supported, or are just offered as phonologically plausible, I am not knowledgeable enough to say. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 22 13:59:07 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 13:59:07 GMT Subject: Sanskrit Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <005801be7316$44a9b540$38f0abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Miguel said of imperfect, aorist, and perfect in Skt and Greek: >>the three categories can be described >>conveniently as "aspects", since they are all "past" in terms of >>tense. >I wonder if Miguel is bending the meaning of "aspect" beyond its usual >function here. Of course. I was talking about PIE, or at least a portion of it, an unattested language. >They would be "aspects" (in its usual meaning) if there >were something about the way in which the action were done, quite apart from >the time of them, which distinguished these three forms. The question isn't *if* there was something distinguishing the three forms. Of course there was, or we wouldn't have three *forms*. The question is *what* distinguished them. The imperfect vs. aorist distinction was one of (im)perfective aspect, that much is clear from the way it is formed (present stem vs. aorist stem) and the attested uses in Greek. I'm not sure if the Greek perfect qualifies as an "aspect" (I guess that depends on your definition of "aspect"). Would Aktionsart be better? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From gordonselway at gn.apc.org Mon Mar 22 14:01:20 1999 From: gordonselway at gn.apc.org (Gordon Selway) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:01:20 +0000 Subject: esox and -i/n [was: Re: ara/ndano] Message-ID: '-i/n is of course also a common diminutive/affectionate/uncomplimentary &c ending in Gaelic: eg Sea/nai/n ['Johnnie', but also a 'shawneen' = 's.o. not agin the ('Brits') govt'] caili\n ['young woman', and cf 'cail(l)eag' = girl] [NB Scots, not Irish usage here: 'caili/n' in Ireland may have a slightly different semantic range; but 'cailleach' = old woman, witch, hag, nun (and the odd mountain (Sc) - de Bhaldraithe (?sp) is not to hand for a fuller range of Irish usages] No idea if there is a 'brada\nain/brada\ini\n' or Irish equivalent :-). Is -in- in this sense a more generalised IE diminutive, &c? Gordon On Sat, 20 Mar 1999 at 21:40:11 -0600 Rick Mc Callister wrote: >I seem to remember a Spanish dialect form esoqui/n [maybe Asturian] Wasn't >the Latin form something like esox? The ending -i/n, of course, is >diminutive in Spanish --with similar forms in just about all Romance >languages. From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 22 14:23:15 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:23:15 GMT Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>No, *much* further apart. More in the neighbourhood of French and Spanish, >>English and German. >-- not at all. There's no basic intercommunicabilty of that sort between >modern English and German. OE and ON are structurally much more similar -- >they're both highly inflected, for instance. OK, highly inflected. Anything else to support your bizarre assertion that Old English and Old Norse were as close as modern Danish and Swedish? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Mon Mar 22 14:16:53 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:16:53 -0000 Subject: Using Dictionaries Message-ID: > < do that, or try to) but only record usage...>> > Time to send an angry letter to Noah Webster. In the absence of an Academie, > of course, dictionaries can and have "defined words according to their proper > usage" or their common usage. Contrary to non-popular opinion, dictionaries > have had a powerful effect on usage and definition - as Mr. Webster's did. > There should be NO question that "usage" overwhelmingly says that the > "definition" of a word is the "dictionary definition." And the dictionary > says that the "definition" of a word is the "meaning of the word." If you > think "dictionaries do not define words..." your usage is so uncommon it has > not been recorded in Webster's. Being an American, I tend to go by > Webster's. Tsk tsk, these American dictionaries. My British one resolves the confusion, even if it is Chambers's and (as Larry Trask rightly says) eccentrically Scottish. Under "define" we have among others "to determine with precision: to describe accurately: to fix the meaning of". The colons indicate they are three distinct meanings. Recording the common usage is "describing accurately", which is what all dictionaries do (well, _dormitat Websterus_); but "fixing the meaning of" is what _no_ good dictionary these days does, though most people still think they should. Or think they still should. To complete the triolet, "determining with precision" is what I'm doing now. Nicholas Widdows From jpmaher at neiu.edu Mon Mar 22 14:39:53 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 08:39:53 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] calquing in pronouns: Modern Greek uses the apparently French system, with old singular and plural further specialized to indicate not number alone, but relative status: /esi/ /esis/ [ECY ECEIC]. --Byzantinist lettering in Greece today often uses the lunate sigma, which was adopted in Cyrillic. In the Balkans, it is anecdotal that if, instead of old singular , a [polite] stranger employs the polite (old plural) to a solitary farmer, the latter will turn around to see who else is there. In Poland 'sir, Mister, Lord; lady, madame' are used as '[your] majesty, worship, highness' etc. Only members of the communist Party deviated from this, using the Russian model of . --In days of yore, the Tsar was addressed with , not . --Cf. French, where Catholics pray to God with , Protestants with , an exception being the Angelic Salutation (Ave Maria), which Catholics recite as "Je Vous salue, Marie...". In German, which as is well known opposes and , old second singular and third plural, augments the etiquette in a restaurant setting: the waiter or waitress addresses a group at table with <... die Herrschaften> 'the lordships'. So, it seems pronouns are as exportable as etiquette, because of the social climbing gene. In Carinthian (Austria) the German dialect (there is also Slovene) has polite , or . Initial consonants are neutralized re voicing. (See Issatschenko in Trubeckoi on that.) j p maher Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I seem to remember that Gaidhlig [Scots Gaelic] calqued French > by using "you all" [sp?] for formal 2nd person singular [ moderator snip ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 15:10:08 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 09:10:08 -0600 Subject: Sancho In-Reply-To: Message-ID: So then what is the "Aragonese" spoken in the mountains of Navarra that I've read about? [ moderator snip ] >The Spanish census data for Aragon (1981) was: [ moderator snip ] >Frank Rossi >Bergamo, Italy >iglesias at axia.it From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 22 15:38:43 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 09:38:43 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <8b45b9c0.36f29da8@aol.com> Message-ID: Educated Peruvians have an accent corresponding to a Midwest accent in American English or to the BBC accent in the UK. In Peru, class differences are more often based on language than dialect. The middle and upper classes speak Spanish and the lower classes generally speak Runa [AKA Quechua/Qheshwa] or Spanish with a strong indigenous accent. There is also an Afro-Peruvian minority that has its own accent as well. Speaking Spanish "perfectly" is essential to social advancement in the Andean countries. As I said, differences in accent among people of the upper classes are often less than the difference between upper and lower classes in the same country. I have the same experience as your mother when I go to Spanish speaking countries. My wife is from Costa Rica, which has a rather "neutral" accent --there are some peculiarities but they generally involve familiar expressions which you wouldn't use with strangers. But Spaniards knew that your mother was not from there. Which is the experience I usually have in Latin America. In Mexico, people asked me if I was Cuban. In Cuba, people asked if I was Mexican. And given that Mexican and Cuban Spanish sound about as different as Ross Perot and Rocky Balboa, this was a strange experience. In Honduras, people did ask why I sounded like I was from there given that they had never seen me before [it's a small country with an even smaller educated middle/upper class] but as soon as I explained that my was Costa Rican, they realized why. Besides social accents, Latin American Spanish also tends to have stronger sex-based accents than contemporary American English. This is often related to social class in that women are more likely to marry upward in the social hierarchy than men. Among the lower middle classes and working classes in some countries, women are more likely to attend college as well and move into white collar professions while their brothers work in the factory or on the farm. >>rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >>In every Spanish-speaking country I've been in, including Cuba, class >>dialects are very noticeable. >> >-- that's odd, because my mother grew up in Lima, Peru, and when we were >travelling in Spain in the 1950's, if she didn't tell the locals about it >people were repeatedly puzzled as to _where_ she came from, and thought she >had a rather old-fashioned way of speaking (like some remote village), but the >question of social class didn't come up. From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Mar 24 05:05:59 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 22:05:59 -0700 Subject: background noise Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/11/99 9:56:17 PM, Larry Trask wrote: >>For one thing, languages with similar phoneme systems, similar >>phonotactic patterns and similar morpheme-structure constraints are >>likely to show a higher proportion of chance resemblances than arbitrary >>languages. >If that is true, then we need to introduce a correction factor into our tools, >in other words, we have recognized a distortion imposed by our tools, >and we can attempt to counteract that distortion. I did some random language generation and comparison on computer based on known phonological inventories and frequencies. The results were published in the most recent Mid-America Linguistics Conference Proceedings and are also available on Pat Ryan's web site (where he graciously notes that I don't agree with hardly any of his findings)--although without the tables yet. Computer-controlled comparison revealed that the closer two phonologies were to one another the higher the frequency of random lookalikes and the smaller the phonological inventories the higher the frequency of random lookalikes. John McLaughlin Utah State University From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 07:13:41 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 02:13:41 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, you wrote: <> The fact that Latin was or wasn't optical is irrelevant in the context of my original point. WHATEVER keeps a language from splintering either phonetically or grammatically is a standardizing agent - and that must include writing. Someone quoted the passage from Caxton about eggs - note that Caxton spelled the two dialectical forms differently, showing a standard for pronouncing either form. In fact the primary reason we can feel confident about how for example the OE alphabet was pronounced is because of our confidence about how the borrowed Roman letters were pronounced. And one only needs to see something like the bilingually glossed text (OE and Latin) in an 11th Century manuscript (reproduced in D. Crystal - The Cambridge Encyl. of the Eng. Lang) to understand the spoken nature of Latin 600 years after the Empire fell. ('We boys ask you, master, to teach us to speak Latin correctly, because we are ignorant and speak ungrammatically,') It is quite clear that Latin remained a spoken language well into second millenium, and it is difficult to believe there would not have been a rather high degree of comprehension between a 1st Century bce and a 15th Century ace speaker of the language. Again, the notion of a "state" language is inadequate to describe the full spectrum of language standardizing agents. The American experience provides a very good example of how normative standards in word pronounciation, definition and acceptible vocabulary were created by forces outside both government and officialdom. George Philip Krapp's 'The English Language in America' (1925) is filled with hundreds of cited examples of standardization (also including Webster's) that came from the likes of Baptist ministers, Yankee pedlars and Irish politicians. Lingua francas are not "state" languages, but their effectiveness rests entirely upon a self-enforced standardization of pronounciation, syntax and reference - and of course these languages were not optical. The three agents that Mallory cites as the bringer of new languages (the merchant, cleric and soldier) just as logically continue as agents of standardization after a language is adopted. And there are obviously others - not the least of which in modern times are radio, film and tv. The Hittite, Sanskrit and Mycenaean texts that are all we know about those languages are all optical. The very fact that those languages were written tells us that standardization was possible before the 1700's when "state" languages became "official." A logical question regarding PIE was whether it was a "standardized" language and how that would affect our analysis. Would it suggest PIE was spread through the adoption of agricultural technology? Conversion to agriculture in itself does not seem to be a standardizing situation. In fact, the sedentary and spread out form of neolithic settlement would suggest the opposite. It would seem to encourage splintering and localization. And finally I have searched in vain for ANY historical instance where the adoption of agriculture resulted in a change of language in an indigenous population. And remember that even under C-S's formula, the ancestors of the majority of modern northern European were already there when agriculture began to be adopted. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 07:14:12 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 02:14:12 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Farmers) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: << What I like about it is that it explains how a language group might have spread across a whole continent without anybody actually setting out to do so (no Anatolian farmer said: "let's invade Europe"). I do too. But even in historical times we can't see a uniform langauge crossing that much ground without someone getting the notion to do something to Europe or some other continent. Whether convert or invade or civilize or settle or trade to, the historical result has always come more quickly than slow, random migration. <> Not most of temperate Europe. Not between 5500-5000. That surge you're describing for LBK does not cover anything but a corridor that for some reason headed towards Holland (chocolate?). And LBK's movement is not the "one kilometer per year" (in all directions) movement of agriculture, but closer to Zvelebil's often repeated comparison to it sweeping across Europe "in the manner of German panzer divisions." Even as LBK expands and then disappears about 3700bce, the northern European landscape is described as a "mosaic." Some areas are definitely quickly "colonized." Others are definitely not. The appearance of domesticated animals does not necessarily correlate with grain agriculture, suggesting that the domestication appearing in LBK was closely tied to grain-feeding as opposed to pastural methods. And finally it has become clear that it wasn't all that keen an idea to adopt agriculture. This was the subject of keynote by Clark Spencer Larsen at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences held at Williamsburg, Virginia last year. For some time now, there's been strong evidence that "hunter-gatherers typically do less work for the same amount of food, are healthier, and are less prone to famine than primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, 1989)." More recent research indicates that neolithic agriculture was particularly susceptible to Biblical-style patterns of famine and disease. And mesolithic settlements like Biskupin and coastal fishery settlements in the north show population concentrations could reach Late Neolithic levels but with stronger trade advantages and sophisticated building techniques. Why some prosperous "hunter/gatherers" would adopt grain farming is an open question and there is evidence that many did not, except in a superficial way for thousands of years after grain agriculture was introduced. And there is evidence in many areas that the introduction of grain agriculture actually caused a reduction in average population - only partially because mesolithic settlements had to spread out to farm. All this had led some scientist to conjecture that it wasn't agriculture but some very inviting by-product that fostered the conversion. See 'The origins of agriculture ? a biological perspective and a new hypothesis' Greg Wadley & Angus Martin, University of Melbourne, in Australian Biologist June 1993. (Was fermentation the real secret of LBK? In which case was PIE the language of neolithic brewers?) The paradigm for agriculture's spread in Europe still remains "one kilometer per year" despite LBK. And that suggests that PIE must have somehow traveled thousands of years intact or disappeared well before northern Europe was finally "agriculturalized." The kind of splintering and "swallowing up" that might have gone on at this time, not excluding by non-IE speakers, would make it all but impossible to accurately reconstruct a PIE. But the fact that IE languages are so closely related in so many ways over much greater distances also suggests that this whole scenario can't account for IE. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 07:17:07 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 02:17:07 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> Slavic too?>> Church Slavonic was designed specifically to give "all Slavia one tongue to worship with" and it provides the earliest records preserved of Slavic. That is planned standardization. But even before that Slavic may have been standardized by traders as the lingua franca of the northeastern trade routes - this is pretty much Dolukhanov's theory for the enormous ground Slavic already covers when it first appears in history. Conversely, the greatest diversity (least standardization) among early Slavs is said to appear between the Elbe and Vistula, where agriculture is attested to have been more intense and productive than even among the northern Germans and Church Slavonic never reaches due to persistent paganism. <> But there is no data before 1500bce. Putting PIE at 7000bce or 5500bce means no data for 5500-4000 years. Finding a common ancestor dating back that far is like reconstructing a trip from NY to LA based on information that the travellers were at one time in Salt Lake City. When I read that "Kurylowicz demonstrated that Hittite preserved laryngeal-like sounds precisely in those positions where Sassure had theorized they had existed in PIE" (aside from being amazed) I was struck by the fact that it wasn't PIE but Hittite. Somewhere around Kansas City. Once again can PIE origins possibly found a bit closer than those long ago dates? <> Please be patient with me here. I'd ask you to temporarily suspend these conclusions, if only to do a small thought experiment. If IE was a Latin, at an earlier, probably pre-literate time, how would that change the outcome of what you find starting 1500 bce? Would the linguistic distance between PIE and its daughter languages be more or less than the distance between Latin and French or Romanian? Could PIE like Latin have turned something like a Gallic into a French? Perhaps more importantly if PIE affected distantly related languages the way Latin affected English, would we be able to spot it? If PIE was like Latin, could it have persisted like Latin did, as a language of court and law and international relations - and thereby have continued to influence its daughter languages and others long after it was the official language of a specific group? Did Greek grammarians in Rome in 200 ace or at Oxford in 1880 preserve Attic Greek so that we could have lots of borrowed words to use - remembering that we chroma-key and sync and morph and hexacolor and put an audio-stripe on video-tape today not because these procedures were invented by Greeks or Romans? Or did they preserve it because it was a model tongue - the way that PIE may have been preserved and constantly returned to for new uses? Why does it say e pluribus unum on every American dollar? Didn't modern English, Spanish, Russian and French spread pretty much like Latin did? Finally, what would have prevented PIE from even being a "state" language in its own right, like Egyptian or Minoan or Akkadian or a Hittite? LBK or Kurgan are as much unified cultural entities as we find later on in history. Why couldn't PIE represent a language preserved by kings or priest or the requirements of trade? Thanks for your patience, Steve Long [ Moderator's comment: The only reason that Latin or Attic Greek or Sanskrit is available to us is writing. Grammars of Attic and Sanskrit were created by near-native speakers because they were no longer commonly spoken, and important texts would be lost if the knowledge of the languages themselves was lost (Homer on the one hand, the Vedas on the other); grammars of Latin were created because it was culturally important to the Romans to emulate what the Greeks did. Note that being written had no effect on language change in the long run. The only way for the Indo-European Ursprache to have survived to fill the role you suggest is writing--and as we have seen in history, even a written language will change out from under the written form. Since there was never a written form of Indo-European, I think your final questions are answered. --rma ] From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Mar 24 08:35:44 1999 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 03:35:44 -0500 Subject: Anatolian /-ant/ Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > BTW: I've also seen the argument that Dunedin is a calque of > "Edwin's burh". In that case wouldn't the Old Welsh (or Cumbric?) form be something like rather than ? There's also an Old Irish , I believe. I don't think that you get forms like and until the early 12th c. or so. Brian M. Scott From sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk Wed Mar 24 09:53:08 1999 From: sw271 at cus.cam.ac.uk (Sheila Watts) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 09:53:08 +0000 Subject: ara/ndano In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Somebody else: >>>I have no idea what a "bilberry" is. Is it something Hobbits eat? Sheila Watts >>Small mountain fruit called 'fraughan' in Ireland (in English, so to >>speak). >fraughan < Irish "fraocha/n" (< "fraoch" (= heather) + dim. suffix) >= vaccinium myrtilis = whortleberry >Dennis King Whortleberries and bilberries are the same thing - both vaccinium myrtillus. Sheila Watts _______________________________________________________ Dr Sheila Watts Newnham College Cambridge CB3 9DF United Kingdom phone +44 1223 335816 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 24 09:57:31 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 09:57:31 +0000 Subject: `spool' In-Reply-To: <19990321230943.20293.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 21 Mar 1999, Glen Gordon wrote: > LARRY TRASK: > >It's `reel', generally confined in the US to things around which > >films, tapes and fishing lines are wound. > US, US, US! Nothing but US! What about Canada?! We ain't just > maple-syrup eatin' inuit, you know! The term "reel" is confined to the > sense of "films, tapes and fishing lines" in ALL of North America, even > amongst us much-neglected Canadians. > :P Sorry, pal -- no offense intended. Or should that be `no offence'? ;-) It's just that I didn't know what the facts were in Canada, so I said nothing. I personally have never neglected a Canadian in my life. Actually, I come from so far north that I'm practically an honorary Canadian. I even have Canadian Raising in my speech. And, when I was a kid, we used to make our own maple syrup. I watched ice hockey on TV when the NHL had only six teams, Maurice "the Rocket" Richard was Top Player, and Wayne Gretzky wasn't even a twinkle in his father's eye. However, I do *not* have the `cot'/`caught' merger, and I *never* start a sentence with `as well'. I gotta have *some* standards. By the way, are you sure the Inuit eat all that much maple syrup? Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From jpmaher at neiu.edu Wed Mar 24 11:23:17 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 05:23:17 -0600 Subject: avio/n Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] French <-on>, Italian <-one> : Etymologically from the same source, it us usual for this suffix in French to indicate diminutive, in Italian augmentative. This seeming contradiction parallels the use of English and , as in "you big sissy" and "you little sissy">, as opposed to , . -- The common thread is better known in French linguistics than in English as "morph?me affectif". It is left to the interlocutor to infer if the AFFECT is positive or negative. Thus would be a wry term for a little thing that soars. Swallows are above all maneuvrable. Saul Levin pointed out, personal communication ca. 1969, that urban folk were more familiar with sparrows, little fluttering birds, , rather than big, soaring birds, /; cf. Italian , from Latin , diminutive of . --Airplanes should soar, be maneuvrable, but not flutter. Then note good French diminutive sense in v , v the Italianism hall, big room'. j p maher [ moderator snip ] From iglesias at axia.it Wed Mar 24 21:20:20 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 13:20:20 PST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <372abac1.474935274@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: MCV wrote: > It was rather the accusative forms that survived ... in Western Romance languages In this connection, I recently read that in the early North Italian and Rhaeto-Romance dialects, like Old French and Old Provencal, there was a two case declination (nominative and accusative). With the collapse of this two-case system, the accusative forms usually became generalised in the singular (e.g., mort, caval), while in the masculine plural there was a long struggle between the two variants. The Gallo-Italic and Venetian dialects opted for the nominative plurals (e.g., morti, cavai), possibly under the influence of Tuscan, while Romantsch and Ladin in Switzerland opted for the accusative (e.g. morts, cavals), and Dolomitic Ladin and Friulan opted for a compromise solution (.e.g., muarts, cavai). There is also a parallel in the Provencal dialect of Occitan, with the creation of a plural ending -ei or -i for pronouns and adjectives: i for als, di for dels or de las, polidi(s) for polidas. However, these developments in Provencal apparently took place much later. Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk Wed Mar 24 12:16:18 1999 From: nicholas.widdows at traceplc.co.uk (Nicholas Widdows) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 12:16:18 -0000 Subject: `bast' Message-ID: Sheila Watts wrote: > In RP, there are two possible pronunciation of the vowel spelt in words > of this type (and elsewhere, but let's not spread this net too wide), one > more raised and fronted than the other. The pronunciation difference is > noted in Alan Ross's essay on 'U and Non-U' where he refers to whether > people pronouce 'mass to rhyme with pass instead of gas'. There was a change in London/SE speech of [&] as in 'cat' to [A:] as in 'father' in the environments before [s], [f], and [T], but not before [S]. It applied to familiar words, so we use [A:] in glass, pass, past, castle, master, plaster, ask, mask, laugh, half, chaff, raft, shaft, bath, path, and many others. But it generally stayed [&] in (even slightly) learned or foreign words, so we say [&] in bass (fish), gas, vassal, pastel, castanet, mastiff, masculine, Mafia. Also b&ffle: and always m&ss for 'amount; weight' and almost always for 'church service', [mA:s] being extremely antiquated or pretentious. I vacillate on graph, say photogrAph but (photo)gr&phic, stick to [&] for pathos or blastocyst or chloroplast. In unfamiliar but old-looking words like lath and bast I automatically go for [A:]. All in all, one simple rule with complicated ramifications. It's now a regional thing rather than class. It must antedate the settlement of Australia, where they always use [A:], except uniquely in the regionally/class varying 'castle'. Yet as late as the 1890s it was castigated as a Cockney vulgarism: writers made their characters say . The [A:] among modern Cockneys is very slightly further back. The same change also happened before [ns] and [nt], as in dance and plant, but here Australia retains [&]. I find it odd to say two [A:] syllables, so I tend to say tr&nsplAnt and Afterm&th. By the way, my Chambers's shows 'bast' with a-circumflex, which is their symbol for "& or A:, your choice". This eccentric dictionary tries to cover Scottish, Northern English, and Southern English with a single transcription. Nicholas Widdows From DFOKeefe at aol.com Wed Mar 24 12:43:00 1999 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 07:43:00 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: Good Morning I-E-ists, As to the ethnic background of the mummies of Urumchi, how about giving the researchers time to do some dna-rna tests. Won't that settle the argument? They'll get to it one of these days when they have an extra $50,000 worth of research grants to have hair sample checked at a scientific laboratory. Best regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas [ Moderator's response: No, I doubt that genetic testing could possibly settle "ethnic" questions-- there is no way to assign a culture to a gene. It might help to localize their genetic provenance, though. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 24 14:34:26 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:34:26 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990322032457.12045.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >MIGUEL: > Well, I maintain that **-t > *-H1. Witness the Hittite instr. > -it > PIE *-(e)H1 [Beekes]. Also **-ent > **-erH1 > -e:r. >But are we assured that Hittite -it can only derive from a form like >*-eH1, as opposed to endings like *-od [ablative] or *-dhi that would >follow a more oft-seen sound correspondance? You've had this idea for a >while now and no doubt, being that you strike me as a good chess player, >you've contemplated firm answers long ago to the questions I'm going to >pose but here we go... >This would mean that IE *-H1 becomes Hittite -t? No. -t becomes -H1. We have **-et (Hitt. -it) > *-eH1, but **-od (Hitt. -az < *-od-s) remains as *-od. In the secondary verbal endings -(e)t and -(e)nt, -t has probably been restored analogically from -(e)ti, -(e)nti, but we also have lautgesetzlich -e:r < **-ent. And maybe (this just occurred to me, so bear with me) **-t > *-H1 can explain some of the lengthened grade preterites around. Final -s remains after a vowel, but **-Cs also becomes the equivalent of *-H1C (lengthened nominatives). While some traces of *-t have remained, we have no trace at all of *-k and *-p in PIE. It is tempting to reason by analogy and hypothesize that if **-t > *-H1, then **-p > *-H3 and **-k > *-H2. In the case of *k ~ *H2 we have just a few interesting clues, such as Grk. gune:, pl. gunaikes "women". ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 15:45:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 10:45:24 EST Subject: Using Dictionaries Message-ID: On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, Nicholas Widdows wrote <> I know Steve Jones and he has no opinion on dictionaries. <> This gentle condescension is still delighful after all these years. <<...but "fixing the meaning of" is what _no_ good dictionary these days does, though most people still think they should. Or think they still should. To complete the triolet, "determining with precision" is what I'm doing now.>> And of course the "better" modern American dictionaries do awkwardly attempt to affect this semblence of propriety. But it's a facade, revealed in the definitions themselves ("dictionary definition") and blissfully disregarded on the ground floor in everything from the Dictionaries of Sports Terms to translating dictionaries. "Glossaries" and "Vocabularies" are by tradition not something you buy, but rather are bonuses found in the back of books. Needless to say, there were few other ways or no other ways to "fix the meaning" of words in America than going to the dictionary. As to why meanings, spellings (or, later, pronounciations) had to be "fixed" - even arbitrarily by the dictionary editor as language umpire - well, that goes to the whole issue of standardization. (I was surprised - why I don't know - when a while back I saw a "Dictionary of the Speech of the American South" from the 1850's or 60's give a pronunciation of "rights" as "rats.") Despite these opinions on what the proper role of the dictionary should be, such a statement of policy does not provide any alternative to get the "definitive" meaning of a word - which on game shows and in arguments about meanings or spellings are always settled by the final and official authority - a dictionary (sometimes in exchange for promotional considerations.) Standardization has many vehicles. It may be inappropriate for dictionaries to "fix the meaning" of words in terms of scholarship. But it is inaccurate for scholars not to recognize that dictionaries do fix the meaning, spelling and sounds of words for many, many users - including for several non-English speakers I know. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 24 16:25:21 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:25:21 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Assuming that these differences in verb tense structure do reflect real >differences in time, is there a logical way to explain how such differences >came about? This would seem to be a clear way of tracking both time and >location. For example, was the aorist/perfective aspect a borrowing? I'm >totally unaware of its history in other language groups. Was it sui generis? The categories perfective/imperfective are quite common in verbal systems all over the world. But the distinctions between present and aorist stem in IE are absolutely "sui generis", and it's out of the question that they were borrowings. >I have some reason to believe that a simple change in locale and neighbors can >account for the lexical or basic phonological differences between Greek and >Sanskrit in a relatively short time (much shorter than the 2000-3000 years >you've estimated.) Ancient German and Latin traveled a much shorter distance >to become modern English and French in a much shorter time. What has distance traveled to do with it? The dialect of Lazio didn't travel at all, and it's still very different from Latin. I don't think you need external causes at all to account for language change. It just happens. The distance, or rather the amount of mutual contact, only determines whether two dialects will change in the same direction or not. >Is there a historical or geographical correlation that you've made that >accounts for the differences you mention? And how do you arrive at a number >like 2000 to 3000 years to account for the differences? Just an informed guess. Greek and Sanskrit are not mutually intelligible, and neither are Mycenaean and Vedic of a millennium earlier. Looking at everything, lexicon, grammar, phonology, syntax, I just "know", holistically, that the separation must be greater than a thousand years. The Slavic lgs. split up some 1500 years ago, and the differences between Greek and Sanskrit and even Mycenaean/Vedic are bigger than that (now Vedic-Avestan does feel like somewhere in the 500-1500 year range). Two millennia is more like it: something like French and Romanian. Maybe a bit more: German and Swedish. Greek-Hittite is more difficult, because it feels like more than German-Swedish, but I have no other known time ranges to compare it with. Russian and Latvian? Persian and Hindi? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 24 16:44:49 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:44:49 GMT Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <00f001be724b$d8fc9c60$d3ebabc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Re the note on laryngeals and -u, what about laryngeals and i (outside the >Sanskrit reflex of syllabic laryngeals)? > 1. Sanskrit forms such as de- from da: (before y- in some forms) > 2. The number of laryngeal roots which appear with -i forms in some >languages: (s)terH(i), (s)perH(i), treH(i) and a number of others. Also Skt. a:-stems (e.g. voc. in -e < *-ai < *-H2[i]). > (3. Does the Hittite -i- in dai have an explanation within Hittite?) Yes, it's the normal 3rd.p.sg ending -i of the hi-conjugation (-(h)hi, -(t)ti, -i). There is no -i- in the stem of da(:)i "he takes" (*deh3-): da:hhi, da:tti, da:i, tumeni/da:weni, datteni, da:nzi (but there is loss of the laryngeal). But if you meant the other da(:)i, "he puts" (*dheh1-), then there is an -i-: tehhi, daiti, da:i, tiiaweni, taitteni/taisteni, tianzi. Also in tiiami "I stand up" if from *(s)teh2-. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 24 17:13:40 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 12:13:40 EST Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, jpmaher at neiu.edu wrote: < 'sir, Mister, Lord; lady, madame' are used as '[your] majesty, worship, highness' etc.... In German, ...the waiter or waitress addresses a group at table with <... die Herrschaften> 'the lordships'... So, it seems pronouns are as exportable as etiquette, because of the social climbing gene.>> Or, from the other perspective, the great leveling gene. Plurality became associated with status for a very apparent conceptual reason. The person of a king or a lord was not him alone, but also represented his people. This idea is older than feudalism but runs through it. The Pharaoh is Eygpt. "Ceasar is Rome." "L'etat c'est moi" - Louis XIV. Therefore when Victoria says "we are not amused" she is speaking as England. This concept also applied to the nobility of course - where smaller flocks were still represented by a single body. The shake-up in the concept of status was signaled by such ideas as the English Leveler John Lilburne's "every man his own king and every woman his lady." By the time this attitude erupted in America (where in the early days accepting a foreign title would automatically strip you of your citizenship), every man was a "sir" or a "mister." "Ladies and gentlemen" was the expected address (sometimes sarcastically) to the most ungentlemenly and unladylike of crowds. Of course, 'sir' as in 'dear sir' is no longer a vested title. <> is inaccurate. 'Pan' does not mean majesty any more. <... die Herrschaften> does not really mean 'the lordships'. These vested titles and indicia of title were usurped and re-distributed in the adoption of the concept of natural rights into the language. "You" in English replaced "thou." On the other hand, there was also the conscious adoption of the familiar singular in those subgroups where religious humility seasoned the leveling. E.g., the American Quaker's persistent use of "thou." <. --In days of yore, the Tsar was addressed with , not ... In Carinthian (Austria) the German dialect (there is also Slovene) has polite , or . Initial consonants are neutralized re voicing.>> Maybe these are the humility approach. Maybe they are some other gene. Regards, Steve Long From jrader at m-w.com Wed Mar 24 13:41:23 1999 From: jrader at m-w.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 13:41:23 +0000 Subject: Etymology of bozo (Was: Borrowing pronouns] Message-ID: This is pretty far off comparative and historical Indo-European, but as long as the subject has been broached: The history of as a clown name has never been thorougly researched (as far as I know), though it's certain there has been more than one Bozo in the clown world. Commercially, was introduced in 1940 when Capitol Records began a series of childrens' records using this name. In 1949 Capitol hired an actor named Larry Harmon to create a character for television. Harmon bought the licensing rights to the name from Capitol in the early 1950's and has been associated with Bozo the Clown ever since (I believe he's still alive), most notably in a long-running children's television show initiated by WGN-TV in Chicago in 1960. The original Bozo of the Capitol recordings seems to have been an actual circus clown named Edwin Cooper, who performed with Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Brothers. When he died in August, 1961, at the age of 41, newspaper accounts claimed that both his father and grandfather performed as --which would push the name back into the 19th century. Determining whether this claim is true would require digging in circus archival material--something I have never attempted. Other than the clown name, there have been lots of imaginative hypotheses about the origin of the American slangism. The earliest cite given in Jonathan Lighter's _Historical Dictionary of American Slang_ is 1916, though the bibliography to Lighter's work is yet to be published, and I'll believe the dates when I've checked the cites out personally. The earliest cite I've actually seen is from the Dec. 11, 1920, issue of _Collier's_ magazine. I believe that (with , not ) has been used as a Serb or Croat male given name--there are people on this list, such as Alemko Gluhak, who could readily confirm this--but has never been used as an ethnic slur, to my knowledge. Its meaning is something like "oaf" or "lout" or "fool." Probably more than anybody wanted to know. Jim Rader [ Moderator's comment: And probably all that needs to be said. No further commentary on the etymology of _bozo_ will be entertained unless it provides insight into the workings of Indo-European society. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:29:07 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:29:07 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >sidonian at ggms.com writes: >I don't think this is at all an unreasonable theory. As someone who _is_ >from the American south I am intimately acquainted with the dialects here >and, with eyes closed or over the telephone it is often impossible to tell >the difference between a "black" dialect and a "thick" southern accent. -- this was exactly my point. It is _impossible_ for a minority not to be profoundly affected by the speech of the majority among whom they live. The process is unconscious (like most linguistic change) and irresistable. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:37:33 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:37:33 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >sidonian at ggms.com writes: >(I know it's dreadful to suggest this about the ancestors of the English, but >the kill all of the men and make concubines of the women method of conquest >was pretty standard up until this century.) -- well, no. People learn their mother-tongue from their mothers. A group of predominantly male invaders who rely on local women for their offspring will be assimilated and lose their own language in a single generation. Men -- particularly high-status warrior males -- don't spend much time around small children. Even if it's only the nursemaids who are all local, the next generation of the invaders will be completely bilingual from infancy and this will inevitably "slop over" into their own formally dominant language. There's a very good study of this (and other issues) in a monograph, "White Farmers and Black Labor-Tenants", on a small rural community in Natal. The white landowners are formally English-speaking, but live among a very much more numerous community of black Zulu-speakers, who furnish their servants, including nursemaids. By the time of the monograph (a century after the British settlement of Natal) the white farmers used Zulu not only to communicate with their underlings (who were effectively serfs) but often with each other. The English they actually spoke was also thickly larded with Zulu loanwords. And this is in a setting where Standard English has tremendous social prestige and is the sole official language, backed up by universal education, literacy, and mass media. Likewise, a minority so small that their _household interactions_ are with speakers of another language will probably be assimilated in a few generations. To successfully impose their language (especially in a preliterate setting) the incomers have to have more than political and economic dominance. They have to bring intact family units (meaning women), and they have to be numerically significant in relation to the locals. It also helps if they smash the local social structure very thoroughly, disrupting communities and families. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:46:25 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:46:25 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >but our Tokharian texts are from the early Middle ages, and the mummies are >*millennia* earlier. -- no, the mummies are _continuous_ from millenia earlier up until attested Tocharian. The physical type remains constant, and the material culture shows a smooth development over time. When a new language comes in (Uighur) so does a new physical type. The material culture (textiles, etc.) also shows clear links further west. Old Chinese also has a fund of early Indo-European loanwords, some of them identifiably Tocharian (or proto-Tocharian, to be picky). And Tocharian demonstrably separated from the IE mainstream rather early, and shows no close affinities with Indo-Iranian. It doesn't even have many early loanwords from Indo-Iranian. This means that Tocharian had to be isolated from the otherwise-predominant Indo-Iranian linguistic environment. Do you have a better place in mind to be isolated _in_ than the Bronze Age Tarim Basin? >isn't the simple identification of those two entities (the mummies - >Tokharians) an oversimplification? -- no. Not by the usual standards of the field. From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 24 16:44:51 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 16:44:51 GMT Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: >Anyway, the absence of early attestations of is curious, since >the word is common enough today. But I might note that a word > `hailstorm' is recorded in 1571. Here the first element is >clearly `stone', but what on earth is the force of ? >Suggestions on a postcard, please. I'm all out of postcards, but I note that Azkue also gives a variant (BN-s, R) "pedrisco", and for "horn; branch" also the glosses "borrasca" and "manga de agua". Neither harriabar nor arri-adar look like ancient formations, or else the -i of would have been dropped. So is this yet another etymologically unconnected word that has become entangled with "horn/branch" /? Or should we perhaps compare with two cases (neither of them very clear) in IE of association of "tree" and "horn" with stormy weather: Grk. "thunderbolt", possibly connected with *k^er-Hw- "horn", and Lith. "thunder(bolt)", connected by Gamqrelidze and Ivanov with *perkw- "oak"? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:50:14 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:50:14 EST Subject: IE and Substrates and Time Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Anything else to support your bizarre assertion that Old English and Old >Norse were as close as modern Danish and Swedish? >> -- speakers of those languages tell me that they can, with considerable difficulty, by concentrating hard and repeating often, understand basic phrases, but can't really carry on a conversation. That seems to have been roughly the situation with OE and ON by the 11th century. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 19:56:16 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:56:16 EST Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: >rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >The middle and upper classes speak Spanish and the lower classes generally >speak Runa [AKA Quechua/Qheshwa]> -- it's geographical, actually. There aren't many Quechua speakers on the coast, except recent migrants from the highlands. In the 1930's, when my mother was growing up there, nearly everyone locally born spoke Spanish. My mother tells me that apart from more slang and a less educated vocabulary, the people she met in the streets spoke pretty much the same variety of Spanish as she acquired in her convent school and among upper-class Peruvians. Things were different in the highlands, of course. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 24 23:59:58 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 18:59:58 EST Subject: background noise Message-ID: >mclasutt at brigham.net writes: >The results were published in the most recent Mid-America Linguistics >Conference Proceedings and are also available on Pat Ryan's web site >> -- could you post the URL, please? [ Moderator's note: Pat Ryan's home page is at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803 from which you should be able to find the paper in question. --rma ] From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 25 02:13:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 02:13:32 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) In-Reply-To: <55e69866.36f890a5@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/19/99 2:14:58 AM, you wrote: ><people write in the official language. Of course the Roman >Empire had a unifying effect for quite a long time. Whether the >rate of change of Latin itself was affected (other than >optically) is a different matter. I doubt it. So the "state >effect" means we have less variation in space, but probably the >same variation in time.>> >The fact that Latin was or wasn't optical is irrelevant in the context of my >original point. Not the language, the lack of change and variation is "optical". The Romance languages seem to pop up practically ex nihilo because of the masking effect of the standard language. >And finally I have searched in vain for ANY historical instance where the >adoption of agriculture resulted in a change of language in an indigenous >population. What about Bantu and Austronesian? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 25 03:21:16 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 03:21:16 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Farmers) In-Reply-To: <3741844e.36f890c4@aol.com> Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >Not most of temperate Europe. Not between 5500-5000. That surge you're >describing for LBK does not cover anything but a corridor that for some reason >headed towards Holland (chocolate?). And LBK's movement is not the "one >kilometer per year" (in all directions) movement of agriculture, but closer to >Zvelebil's often repeated comparison to it sweeping across Europe "in the >manner of German panzer divisions." Whether it was the occupation of most of temperate Europe or just the initial "pincer movement" between 5500 an 5000, the effect is historically the same: LBK becomes the dominant culture and population from the Netherlands to Poland. The most likely linguistic outcome would have been a single dialect continuum (with increasingly rare pre-LBK Mesolithic enclaves). This is comparable to the Bantu advance in Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, which also looks like a pincer movement on the map (but Bantu technology was Iron Age, so more advanced). >Even as LBK expands and then disappears about 3700bce, Disappears or mutates? The decentralized nature of LBK culture first results in a number of subdivisions (Roessen, Lengyel, SBK, Tisza) after 500 years or so, and then some 500 years later most of the northern part of the area (but extended now to Denmark and the Baltic) is again united archaeologically as the TRB culture, which might have resulted from a "merger" of (post-)LBK agriculturalists, ultimately from Hungary, with indigenous people, like the Ertebo/lle-Ellerbek "shellfish eaters" (and if the LBK people were IE-speakers, as I maintain, that suggests a convenient source for the famous "30% non-IE lexicon" in Germanic). >the northern European landscape is described as a "mosaic." >Some areas are definitely quickly "colonized." Others are definitely not. >The appearance of domesticated animals does not necessarily correlate with >grain agriculture, suggesting that the domestication appearing in LBK was >closely tied to grain-feeding as opposed to pastural methods. Yes. >And finally it has become clear that it wasn't all that keen an idea to adopt >agriculture. This was the subject of keynote by Clark Spencer >Larsen at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological >Sciences held at Williamsburg, Virginia last year. For some time now, there's >been strong evidence that "hunter-gatherers typically do less work for the >same amount of food, are healthier, and are less prone to famine than >primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, 1989)." More recent >research indicates that neolithic agriculture was particularly susceptible to >Biblical-style patterns of famine and disease. And mesolithic settlements >like Biskupin and coastal fishery settlements in the north show population >concentrations could reach Late Neolithic levels but with stronger trade >advantages and sophisticated building techniques. A lot depends on climate and environment. The nuclear LBK zone was not very populated before the Neolithic. At least very few Mesolithic remains have been found. The introduction of agriculure and livestock really did produce a population explosion there. The coastal areas around Denmark, on the other hand, resisted the adoption of agriculture for more than a millennium, and must have sustained population densities comparable to or even higher than in the LBK area. >All this had led some scientist to conjecture that it wasn't agriculture but >some very inviting by-product that fostered the conversion. See 'The origins >of agriculture  a biological perspective and a new hypothesis' Greg Wadley & >Angus Martin, University of Melbourne, in Australian Biologist June 1993. >(Was fermentation the real secret of LBK? In which case was PIE the language >of neolithic brewers?) Quite possibly. >The paradigm for agriculture's spread in Europe still remains "one kilometer >per year" despite LBK. And that suggests that PIE must have somehow traveled >thousands of years intact or disappeared well before northern Europe was >finally "agriculturalized." The kind of splintering and "swallowing up" that >might have gone on at this time, not excluding by non-IE speakers, would make >it all but impossible to accurately reconstruct a PIE. But the fact that IE >languages are so closely related in so many ways over much greater distances >also suggests that this whole scenario can't account for IE. But the actual LBK scenario can. We have a fairly rapid expansion originating from a fairly small area in Hungary: that's your fairly uniform proto-language and its initial spread. After 500 years, cultural differences (and no doubt dialectal differences) begin to appear. Additionally, "LBK people" might have diffused into areas outside the LBK zone proper, to Poland, Bielorussia and the Ukraine, where "sub-Neolithic" communities appear c. 5000 BC (livestock, pottery, but little agriculture), eventually developing into the steppe cultures of the 5th and 4th millennia. Meanwhile a northwestern group (LBK-Roessen) fuses with the local Mesolithic (Ertebo/lle-Ellerbek) population, providing a historical basis for the non-IE element still discernible in Germanic. Later still (c. 3500 BC), this pre-proto-Germanic and some of the Eastern groups (pre-proto-Balto-Slavic) interact in the Corded Ware culture, which extends from Holland to Moscow, while a southern branch (proto-Italo-Celtic) starts the Indo-Europeanization of South-Western Europe. The role played by the Tripolye culture (5000-3000 BC), at the crossroads between the Balkans, the steppe and the "LBK/TRB zone", must also have been of great importance. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From G.Halliday at xtra.co.nz Thu Mar 25 05:04:31 1999 From: G.Halliday at xtra.co.nz (G Halliday) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:04:31 +1200 Subject: Celtic influence Message-ID: wrote Subject: Re: Celtic influence > -- Lothian was settled by Angles at the same time as the settlements further > south. The Lowlands were Lallans-speaking by the early medieval period. The > line of division with Gaelic then remained fairly stable until the early > modern period. This is incorrect. Gaelic was widely used south of the Highland line in the middle ages particularly in Galloway and it would seem, Fife. Nicolaisen's "Gaelic Place-names in Southern Scotland" Studia Celtica V is a good place to start for understanding a complex linguistic situation. He claims that only in parts of Lothian was there a "mere sprinkiling of Gaelic speakers". Areas of "full-scale settlement of Gaelic speakers for a long period" include Kirkudbright, parts of Ayrshire, Dumfries, Dumbarton, Stirling, West Lothian. There is some evidence that there was still some Gaelic in Carrick in Burns' time. There have been recent claims that the glottal stop which has become widespread in Britain this century in lower class speech spread originally from west central Scotland. A case could be made for influence from the (former) neighbouring Argyll Gaelic dialects that were spoken the other side of the Clyde which are characterised by this feature ;-). George Halliday From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 25 07:05:12 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 23:05:12 PST Subject: just what is it about written Chinese anyway? (was: Celtic influence) Message-ID: JOATSIMEON at AOL.COM: [ Moderator's note: Actually, Steven Schaufele . --rma ] >One of my students, in her term paper last semester, raised the issue >of the claim that written Chinese is equally intelligible to all >literate Chinese people, but then noted that she, a native speaker of >Mandarin and Taiwanese and about as well-educated as one can >reasonably expect of a university undergraduate, found herself unable >to read a Cantonese newspaper printed in Hong Kong. Yes, exactly. There ARE symbols specific to Cantonese as opposed to Mandarin. A good example is the word in Cantonese, meaning "to not have, to lack, isn't there". The word is actually a contraction of the negative plus the affirmative . In Mandarin, doesn't exist but rather is equivalent to _two_ words . So in Mandarin, two words are printed. Step into Hong Kong or Taiwan however, where Cantonese is more popular, only a single character is printed, an invented character which is the sign for minus a few lines to convey "emptiness" and hence . You yisi ma? I guess this is un-IE though... ;( -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com [ Moderator's note: Yes, and we've moved too far from the topic. Those interested should take the discussion to private e-mail, please. --rma ] From jpmaher at neiu.edu Thu Mar 25 08:14:47 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 02:14:47 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, jpmaher at neiu.edu wrote: > In Poland 'sir, Mister, Lord; lady, madame' are used as '[your] > majesty, worship, highness' etc.... In German, ...the waiter or waitress > addresses a group at table with <... die Herrschaften> 'the lordships'... > . < are used as '[your] majesty, worship, highness' etc. >> is inaccurate. 'Pan' > does not mean majesty any more. I didn't say it does, bu that i.e "like". I did not say that is used LIKE those terms. > <... die Herrschaften> does not really mean > 'the lordships'. I didn't offer that as a gloss, but as a parallel archaism, a fossil. The waiters' usage is [+restaurant], as opposed to "Meine Damen and Herren" , which is [+podium]. [ Moderator's comment: In a strict sense, the meanings are as noted by Mr. Maher; the pragmatics are what make us say that they "do not really mean" what they seem to. It is of course conceivable that these forms could develop into unmarked 2nd person pronouns, but such speculation is beyond the scope of the Indo-European list. I think we have shown that pronouns can be borrowed or created anew, as needs warrant, and can bring this discussion to a close. --rma ] From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 25 08:15:01 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 00:15:01 PST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: STEVE LONG: Finally, what would have prevented PIE from even being a "state" language in its own right, like Egyptian or Minoan or Akkadian or a Hittite? LBK or Kurgan are as much unified cultural entities as we find later on in history. Why couldn't PIE represent a language preserved by kings or priest or the requirements of trade? MODERATOR: The only way for the Indo-European Ursprache to have survived to fill the role you suggest is writing--and as we have seen in history, even a written language will change out from under the written form. Since there was never a written form of Indo-European, I think your final questions are answered. No, a state language is pushing it because IE-speakers wouldn't have had the level of organisation that Romans and Greeks later had. IE would always have been split into dialectal regions. However, I don't see why IE couldn't be thought of as a kind of disorganized "language of commerce" whose popularity had spread out of the Pontic-Caspian (or Balkans, to appease Miguel). -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Thu Mar 25 09:02:14 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 01:02:14 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MIGUEL: Well, I maintain that **-t > *-H1. ME (GLEN): This would mean that IE *-H1 becomes Hittite -t? MIGUEL: No. -t becomes -H1. We have **-et (Hitt. -it) > *-eH1, but **-od (Hitt. -az < *-od-s) remains as *-od. Ah, I think I understand now. This means that IE (IndoAnatolian) *-t > CentumSatem *-H1. Hmmm. Alright, that's a little better. I can live with that peacefully. MIGUEL: In the secondary verbal endings -(e)t and -(e)nt, -t has probably been restored analogically from -(e)ti, -(e)nti, but we also have lautgesetzlich -e:r < **-ent. Yes, thus justifying **-nD becoming *-r, not **-n > *-r. If I have this right, **-ent would first become **-e:n before becoming *-e:r because according to you **-n > *-r. So, the change of **-VCs to **V:C (such as **-Vns to *-V:n) must occur later: 1. *-n > *-r 2. *-ns > *-:n (: indicates lengthening of prec. vwl) *-rs > *-:r Wait a minute, how do *-ter endings react in Hittite nominative then?? Why would **-nC (in this case, **-nt) be simplified to *-:n FIRST before the *-n>*-r change? This would mean that the simplification of the cons. plus neuter *-d/*-t occured well before the cons. plus animate *-s changes instead of concurrently! Thus: 1. **-nD > *-:n (inanimate simplification) 2. **-n > *-r (heteroclitic) 3. **-ns > *-:n (animate simplification) **-rs > *-:r Saying that **-nD > *-r and **-n > *-n is much simpler because you have this scenario instead: 1. **-Cs > *-:C (inanimate/animate simplification) **-nD > *-:r See? Animate, inanimate AND heteroclitic can be explained in one big swoop. MIGUEL: Final -s remains after a vowel, but **-Cs also becomes the equivalent of *-H1C (lengthened nominatives). Alright we basically agree on this change here. MIGUEL: While some traces of *-t have remained, we have no trace at all of *-k and *-p in PIE. It is tempting to reason by analogy and hypothesize that if **-t > *-H1, then **-p > *-H3 and **-k > *-H2. In the case of *k ~ *H2 we have just a few interesting clues, such as Grk. gune:, pl. gunaikes "women". I don't find it so tempting. I think there's a very good reason why *-k and *-p don't exist in IE. Simply put, words either end with pronominal endings of some kind or with a declensional suffix - none of these possible suffixes have *-p or *-k and exposed roots are non-existant as well. Words would have originally ended with *-k and *-p before the nominative endings were established many millenia before Common IE. Verbs would have been free to be made into nouns by taking extensions like **-k and **-p without nominative endings (gee, kind of like Uralic as in *tumte-pa "knowing" and the *-ka "non-past"-ending). If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE *-k > CS *-H2 and IE *-p > CS *-H3. This means that we should see Anatolian languages with a cornucopia of *-k's and *-p's. Is this what we find? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From ECOLING at aol.com Thu Mar 25 14:14:13 1999 From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 09:14:13 EST Subject: background noise Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] In a message dated 3/24/99 7:58:55 PM, John McLaughlin wrote: >I did some random language generation and comparison on computer based on >known phonological inventories and frequencies. The results were published >in the most recent Mid-America Linguistics Conference Proceedings and are >also available on Pat Ryan's web site (where he graciously notes that I don't >agree with hardly any of his findings)--although without the tables yet. >Computer-controlled comparison revealed that the closer two phonologies were >to one another the higher the frequency of random lookalikes and the smaller >the phonological inventories the higher the frequency of random lookalikes. Good. Now if we were doing radiocarbon dating, what would we do? Introduce a "corrected" radiocarbon date. In this case, "corrected" by some factor based on simplicity of phoneme inventory, and based on similarity of two phonologies. (The last of these seems to imply that human judgements are influenced by superficial similarities, or that some mechanical formula was done in such a way that it is influenced by such superficial similarities. It is not clear from the quotation above whether the "comparison" part was by human or machine.) So here, what we can do is introduce a "corrected" measure of similarity, with an appendix to any work which uses such methods, indicating exactly what the corrections are, because these corrections will be continually modified over time, and will vary from user to user, based on their judgement of what corrections should be used. Gradually, as a field of historical lingusitics, our measures should converge on some asymptotes (though with additional discontinuities never excluded, as we learn more of what influences judgements of random lookalikes). It would be important that the data of any such studies of randomness, and the exact computations used, should be in public view at all times and electronically available, so anyone with a more refined formula for counting things as "alike", or better, degree-of-similarity, can see the result of such definitional changes on the computations. That way we can refine our ideas of what we can look for in seeking similarities which are less likely to be due to chance. And as I have urged a number of times, this should ALSO be tested against cases where languages are known to be related, to see whether degree of relationship can be estimated (of course given different degrees of intensity of change, it cannot be exactly a measure of time, but on average it could be. We can have a two-dimensional graph of similarity-computations on one axis versus ranked but not precisely quantified (ordinal not necessarily interval) categories of intensity of exposure to outside forces on the other axis. I am not naive enough to think that a mechanistic approach can substitute for good historical linguistics and philology. I am simply advocating that when we use any tool, including statistical estimates, that we A propos of Don Ringe's work recently, it strikes me that by using all of the knowledge of sound changes and etc. done previously, it can readily be said to build in its results through the choice of the data used. This may be unfair, and I have not read extensively in Ringe's work. But his claims in at least one presentation that his results came out very similar to what historical linguistics has done, coupled with comments that the previous historical linguistics work was not done carefully or scientificially, strike me as very very odd in several respects. It tempts reactions like "of course it came out very much like what historical linguists had done, if it did not we would be inclined to doubt it", and "if a supposedly more scientific method comes out with nearly the same results as produced by historical linguists, then their work cannot be all that bad". My point here is the difficulty of finding any absolute mechanistic approach. Ringe could not have done his work without the prior extensive work of the historical linguists. Lloyd Anderson From jer at cphling.dk Thu Mar 25 14:26:32 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 15:26:32 +0100 Subject: Laryngeals In-Reply-To: <00f001be724b$d8fc9c60$d3ebabc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Peter &/or Graham wrote: > Re the note on laryngeals and -u, what about laryngeals and i (outside the > Sanskrit reflex of syllabic laryngeals)? > 1. Sanskrit forms such as de- from da: (before y- in some forms) > 2. The number of laryngeal roots which appear with -i forms in some > languages: (s)terH(i), (s)perH(i), treH(i) and a number of others. > (3. Does the Hittite -i- in dai have an explanation within Hittite?) There is between 2 and 3. For 1, the optative stem deya:- of da:- is a commonplace case of levelling; the original form *diya:-, retained in Avestan, from *dH3-ieH1-, took over *daH- from the (predecessor of) the aorist *daH- > da:-, thereby becoming *daH-iyaH- whence *da.iya:- > deya:-. 2. IE had some roots in -Hy, even some in -RHy. I have treated their alternation rules in a book from 1989 (Studien zur Morphophonemik der indogermanischen Grundsprache, Innsbruck), finding i.a. that -VHy is reduced to -VH before a tautosyllabic consonantism, and that the zero-grade of -VRHy is metathesized to -RiH (> -Ri:) before a consonant (the same thing applies to -CRHu/-RuH). 3. The Hitt. inflection of IE *dheH1- as if it were *dheH1y- must be analogical on other roots that ended in -VHy ("long-diphthong roots) from of old (as, ispa:i 'eats his fill' based on a perfect *spe-spoH1y-e, whence stem /spa:y-/). The long-diphthong structure had the advantage of providing a buffer consonant before the vocalic ending of the 3sg of the perfect (> hi-conjugation); no such adjustment was needed for the same root in the meaning 'say', tezzi, 3sg prt tet from the aorist *dheH1-t 'put (forward)'. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Thu Mar 25 17:34:46 1999 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 11:34:46 -0600 Subject: JIES Index online Message-ID: The Index of JIES is now available on the Linguistics Research Center's website at http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc under the further rubric Journal of Indo-European Studies. The Index can be searched alphbetically by author or numerically by issue number. We owe this electronic version to Tracy Smart (tsmart at mail.utexas.edu) and the Diebold Foundation. The Monographs are also listed in a separate file. CFJ From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 25 17:27:01 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:27:01 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) In-Reply-To: <6475eab0.36f89173@aol.com> Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: ><There's nothing unique about being able to reconstruct a >proto-language. Given enough data, we can do that for any group >of languages that stem from a common ancestor.>> >But there is no data before 1500bce. Which means that we have 3,500 years worth of data more than we would otherwise have had. >When I read that "Kurylowicz >demonstrated that Hittite preserved laryngeal-like sounds precisely in those >positions where Sassure had theorized they had existed in PIE" (aside from >being amazed) I was struck by the fact that it wasn't PIE but Hittite. Unfortunately, reality is not as nice as it's pictured to be. Hittite fails to have laryngeals where we would expect them to be, hence the need for H4 etc. We can infer a lot about PIE, but a lot of things remain obscure. You won't find two scholars in complete agreement about the reconstruction of PIE. The discovery of Hittite, apart from conforming some things, like the laryngeal theory, has also cast doubts on other aspects of reconstructed PIE that had previously been taken for granted. Talking about PIE as a "standardized" language strikes me as premature. Every reconstruction creates its own "standard PIE" (that's how reconstruction works), but all the reconstructions are different. >Please be patient with me here. I'd ask you to temporarily suspend these >conclusions, if only to do a small thought experiment. If IE was a Latin, at >an earlier, probably pre-literate time, how would that change the outcome of >what you find starting 1500 bce? Less subgroups, same "distances". >Could PIE like Latin have turned something like a Gallic >into a French? Yes, PIE-speakers undoubtedly assimilated non-IE populations. >Perhaps more importantly if PIE affected distantly related >languages the way Latin affected English, would we be able to spot it? It depends. I don't think we know enough about PIE and its immediate successors to be sure. >If PIE >was like Latin, could it have persisted like Latin did, as a language of court >and law and international relations - and thereby have continued to influence >its daughter languages and others long after it was the official language of a >specific group? PIE wasn't written, there were no "courts", no written laws, so the comparison completely breaks down here. >Finally, what would have prevented PIE from even being a "state" language in >its own right, like Egyptian or Minoan or Akkadian or a Hittite? LBK or >Kurgan are as much unified cultural entities as we find later on in history. But without writing. >Why couldn't PIE represent a language preserved by kings or priest or the >requirements of trade? Kings and tradesmen are usually concerned with the here and now, and all they require is a language that is flexible (and thus changes). Priests and poets are a different matter. The only (remote) possibility for PIE or any other pre-literate language to have been preserved more or less unchanged beyond its "natural lifespan" is if it was the vehicle of something like the Vedas or the Homeric poems. It cannot be excluded that something like that happened to PIE, but it's not a necessary condition (we DON'T NEED a "standardized" language to reconstruct a proto-language), and I'm not aware of any evidence for it. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Mar 25 17:31:46 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:31:46 GMT Subject: Mummies of Urumchi In-Reply-To: Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >>but our Tokharian texts are from the early Middle ages, and the mummies are >>*millennia* earlier. >-- no, the mummies are _continuous_ from millenia earlier up until attested >Tocharian. The physical type remains constant, and the material culture shows >a smooth development over time. When a new language comes in (Uighur) so does >a new physical type. In the case of Iranian too? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 25 18:10:02 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:10:02 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >WHATEVER keeps a language from splintering either phonetically or >grammatically is a standardizing agent -- the point made here was that a standard written form doesn't keep a language from splintering; it just disguises the process. Latin had a standard form, but nevertheless went right on splintering into regional dialects, and eventually into separate languages. >It is quite clear that Latin remained a spoken language well into second >millenium -- on the contrary. Nobody actually spoke it as a first language; it had become a "learned" tongue, used only for scholarly and religious purposes. Medieval churchmen and scholars used Latin as a written language, but spoke early versions of French, German, Italian, and so forth. >The Hittite, Sanskrit and Mycenaean texts that are all we know about those >languages are all optical. -- you're confusing the standardization of poetic or administrative languages with effects on what people actually speak. Incidentally, Sanskrit wasn't written down until over a millenium after the composition of the Rig-Veda; it was preserved orally. Meanwhile, the actual spoken language continued to change, becoming the Prakrits and eventually the modern Indo-Aryan languages of Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Orissian, etc. >language change -- people change which language they speak for political and social reasons, generally. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 25 18:15:34 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:15:34 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Farmers) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >That surge you're describing for LBK does not cover anything but a corridor >that for some reason headed towards Holland (chocolate?). -- it follows, quite closely, the distribution of light, fertile, easily cleared loess (wind-deposited soils. LBK agricultural methods were specialized for that environment. >For some time now, there's been strong evidence that "hunter-gatherers >typically do less work for the same amount of food, are healthier, and are >less prone to famine than primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, >1989) -- true but irrelevant. Farming supports a much denser population than hunting and gathering in the main areas of LBK settlement -- it was largely confined to the interior of the continent, away from the seacoasts. Therefore farmers can displace hunter-gatherers, usually without much effort. The hunter-gatherers either have to adopt agriculture themselves, or be driven off their ranges. And the LBK farmers weren't IE speakers, in any case. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 25 18:18:32 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:18:32 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Could PIE like Latin have turned something like a Gallic into a French?> -- Latin didn't "turn Gallic into French". It _replaced_ the Gallic language(s). People stopped speaking Celtic and started speaking Latin, over a period of some centuries. All that was left of Gallic was some loan words and possibly a few grammatical influences. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Mar 25 18:30:47 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:30:47 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >The Slavic lgs. split up some 1500 years ago, and the differences between >Greek and Sanskrit and even Mycenaean/Vedic are bigger than that -- true, but the Germanic languages have a similar time-depth (perhaps slightly more) and they're far more diverse. The Slavic languages are unusually uniform, given the degree of spread. There's still a high degree of mutual intelligibility. Mycenaean and Vedic aren't mutually comprehensible, true, but they're transparently very similar. Even some stock poetic phrases are still pretty much the same; Homeric "heiron menos" and Vedic "ishiram manas", for instance. 1000-1500 years seems more than ample. Sometime between 3000 and 2500 BCE, in other words. >(now Vedic-Avestan does feel like somewhere in the 500-1500 year range). -- far too long. They're virtually the same language. Eg., Avestan: tam amavantam yazatem Sanskrit: tam amavantam yajatam surem damohu sevistem suram dhamasu savistham mithrem yazai zaothrabyo mitram yajai hotrabyah From thorinn at diku.dk Thu Mar 25 19:50:46 1999 From: thorinn at diku.dk (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 20:50:46 +0100 Subject: IE and Substrates and Time In-Reply-To: (JoatSimeon@aol.com) Message-ID: From: JoatSimeon at aol.com Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:50:14 EST >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Anything else to support your bizarre assertion that Old English and Old >Norse were as close as modern Danish and Swedish? >> -- speakers of those languages tell me that they can, with considerable difficulty, by concentrating hard and repeating often, understand basic phrases, but can't really carry on a conversation. That seems to have been roughly the situation with OE and ON by the 11th century. That probably depends on the speakers. People with some sort of higher education may have an easier time of it, simply because they have been exposed to foreign languages in general; but of course that would not apply to 11th century Vikings and English farmers. Anyway, I have had occasion to try this out in the course of my real life as an IT consultant. For me it works reasonably well, even for technical subjects, if I speak Danish to a single Swede or Norwegian, and they reply in their own language. The `stress level' of doing that is about the same as if both parties speak English. It's doable, but more stressful, with three people; larger groups fall back on English immediately. (Note: this is among IT specialists, who all have English as their second language, and are good at it). Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) (Humour NOT marked) From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Mar 25 20:47:47 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 20:47:47 -0000 Subject: Tense & Aspect Message-ID: Miguel said: >The question isn't *if* there was something distinguishing the >three forms. Of course there was, or we wouldn't have three >*forms*. The logic of this is open to dispute. A language may have more than one way of saying something without also having a formal distinction of meaning between the various "forms". Miguel continued: > The question is *what* distinguished them. >The imperfect vs. aorist distinction was one of (im)perfective >aspect, that much is clear from the way it is formed (present >stem vs. aorist stem) and the attested uses in Greek. In general you are right, but different formation does not guarantee any distinction whatever - for example the Latin perfects based on o-grade (PIE perfect, singular) or on reduplication+zero grade (PIE perfect plural, or aorist) or on +s- (PIE Aorist) are indistinguishable in meaning and function. Furthermore, the distinction in Greek is classical. In Homer the differences are much less clear. Palmer (speaking of Homer) says "The imperfect and the aorist are indistinguishable in function" and he gives examples where aorist and imperfect are used in the same place in a phrase, sometimes in the same line, sometimes within two or three lines of each other, without any distinction of meaning. He also quotes a couple of places in Homer where the aorist is "almost indistinguishable from the perfect". He points to Iliad 14:178ff where he calls the alternation of tenses "bewildering". Even in classical Greek prose there are surprises. Plato (Phaedo) uses an imperfect to say "we caught sight of ..." How can that in any sense be continuative? (The usual explanation is that it is "infective" - that is to say, it shows the beginning of the action.) There are also cases where the aorist indicative is used timelessly (as are the other non-indicative forms). This can point to a distinction not of aspect but of time marked and non-time marked. That may or may not be true, but my point is that the distinction of imperfect / aorist / perfect, which is often so tidy and pleasing in the books, is occasionally much muddier in the reality of actual usage. This might in turn indicate that it is a late development - hence its restricted occurrence in IE languages. Peter From xdelamarre at siol.net Thu Mar 25 22:02:02 1999 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 23:02:02 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I confess that the celticity of _*andera_ 'woman' (found in French dialects) is extremely uncertain.Moreover there is another Gaulish _andero-_ in the inscription of Chamali?re : _brixtia anderon_ "by the magic of the infernals" (anderon : genitive plur.), which is, for sure, IE and Celtic, making an exact phonetic equation with Latin _inferus_ O.Ind. _adhara-_ < IE _*ndhero-_ "d'en-bas, d'en-dessous, infernal". But words like _izokin_ < _eso:ks_ "salmon", _mando_ < _mandu-_ (Mandu-essedum, Mandu-bracius) "mule", and most probably, with unexplained loss of initial, _azkoin_ < _tasgo-_ "badger" (on which see the beautiful article by Joshua Katz in a recent issue of HS), show the early contacts between continental Celts and (proto-)Basques. X. Delamarre Ljubljana From nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu Fri Mar 26 00:59:24 1999 From: nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu (Barbara Need) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 18:59:24 -0600 Subject: Borrowing pronouns Message-ID: I have noticed that, in this discussion on the possible sources of Spanish Usted (Vuestra Merced vs. an Araboc word for 'teacher'), nothing has been said about the fact that, at least in Modern Spanish, the pronoun occurs with _third_ person forms, not second person forms. Having only just read the proposal that the form is from Arabic, I accepted that Vuestra Merced, like Your Majesty in English, would occur with third person verbs. Is it equally likely that the Arabic Teacher would also have occurred with third person verbs? Barbara Need University of Chicago--Linguistics From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 26 18:29:38 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 10:29:38 -0800 Subject: `bast' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have no intuitive knowledge of the pronunciation of this word, but as I native speaker of RP I observe that <-ast> in a final syllable under primary stress always has /A:st/ for me: cast, last, mast, aghast, repast, etc/. Not necessarily secondary stressed, however: gymnast, pederast, bombast have /&/. 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 mclasutt at brigham.net Fri Mar 26 12:22:51 1999 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 05:22:51 -0700 Subject: background noise Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] ECOLING at aol.com wrote: > In a message dated 3/24/99 7:58:55 PM, John McLaughlin wrote: >>I did some random language generation and comparison on computer based on >>known phonological inventories and frequencies. The results were published >>in the most recent Mid-America Linguistics Conference Proceedings and are >>also available on Pat Ryan's web site (where he graciously notes that I don't >>agree with hardly any of his findings)--although without the tables yet. >>Computer-controlled comparison revealed that the closer two phonologies were >>to one another the higher the frequency of random lookalikes and the smaller >>the phonological inventories the higher the frequency of random lookalikes. > Good. > (The last of these seems to imply that human judgements are influenced by > superficial similarities, or that some mechanical formula was done in such a > way that it is influenced by such superficial similarities. It is not clear > from the quotation above whether the "comparison" part was by human or > machine.) The comparison was based on a table of correspondences constructed by me. The computer then slavishly matched according to this table. I also did one run where the computer only accepted exact matches. The table of correspondences is located with the paper at Pat Ryan's web site so you can see what I was comparing. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/1998_MALC_PAPER.htm In the case of the "similar phonologies", I'll explain what happened. I used the phonological inventories of eight languages and determined the frequencies of each of the phonemes by doing some counting in dictionaries. For the smallest phonology and the largest phonology, I simply used them twice. That gave me ten sets of rules that the computer used to construct random vocabulary. So when I stated "similar phonologies", the phonological patterns were identical. > It would be important that the data of any such studies of randomness, > and the exact computations used, should be in public view at all times > and electronically available, so anyone with a more refined formula > for counting things as "alike", or better, degree-of-similarity, can > see the result of such definitional changes on the computations. > That way we can refine our ideas of what we can look for in > seeking similarities which are less likely to be due to chance. I'm working on a revised version of my original simple program that will do a variety of different kinds of comparison. For the published version, what kinds of "data and...exact computations" would you like to see in the paper? (NOTE: I'm not a mathematician or computer theorist so please don't use words that are highly specialized in meaning.) > And as I have urged a number of times, this should ALSO be tested > against cases where languages are known to be related, to see whether > degree of relationship can be estimated (of course given different > degrees of intensity of change, it cannot be exactly a measure of time, > but on average it could be. Because of the semantic assumptions that I program into the computer-generated languages, this is exceptionally difficult to do. Additionally, the results would not really match the results of computer-generation because a complete pattern may not be possible between any two natural languages, let alone between five related languages. In addition, we are always stuck with holes in the data. However, I've developed a method to simulate it in the program. When constructing the random language data, to replicate relatedness, the computer takes languages X-Y (when I tell it to) and makes them related by (depending on the time depth that I tell it to simulate) taking a certain percentage of forms in L1 and copying them directly into L2 (sound change is taken into account). As L3 is constructed, the same procedure is used. Different percentages are used in a formulaic way to simulate different distances from L1 (sort of a lexicostatistic method of subgrouping). > I am not naive enough to think that a mechanistic approach can substitute > for good historical linguistics and philology. Nor am I. When one looks at Sir Jones' original assumptions about Indo-European, there was far more there than simple lexical comparison and Bob Rankin reminded me of this when I read the paper at the Mid-America Linguistics Conference. Language families that have been widely accepted as proven have rule-governed morphological, syntactic, and semantic similarities on a large scale as well. The computer program simply gives us a feel for how close lexical similarity should be before we get excited enough to do the other comparisons. Thanks for the input John McLaughlin From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Mar 26 13:55:25 1999 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max W Wheeler) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 13:55:25 +0000 Subject: Borrowing pronouns In-Reply-To: <199903260059.SAA12047@harper.uchicago.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 25 Mar 1999, Barbara Need wrote: > I have noticed that, in this discussion on the possible sources > of Spanish Usted (Vuestra Merced vs. an Araboc word for 'teacher'), > nothing has been said about the fact that, at least in Modern > Spanish, the pronoun occurs with _third_ person forms, not second > person forms. Having only just read the proposal that the form > is from Arabic, I accepted that Vuestra Merced, like Your Majesty > in English, would occur with third person verbs. Is it equally > likely that the Arabic Teacher would also have occurred with > third person verbs? Indeed not; which is yet another reason not to take this `look-alike' as a serious etymology. And why anyway take a word for `teacher' to do general duty for persons of superior status? There's no evidence I know of to separate , or , , etc., from that general range of items alluding to the superior person's qualities: `grace', `excellence', `majesty', `honour', `gentitlity',etc. 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 mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 14:22:15 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 14:22:15 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <5f377e51.36fa80d7@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>The Slavic lgs. split up some 1500 years ago, and the differences between >>Greek and Sanskrit and even Mycenaean/Vedic are bigger than that >-- true, but the Germanic languages have a similar time-depth (perhaps >slightly more) Definitely *much* more. West Germanic started to split up c. 500 BC (Mallory's Jastorf Iron Age), which still makes West Germanic, as we would expect, older than Slavic or Romance. The split with North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that, possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age). >and they're far more diverse. The Slavic languages are unusually uniform, >given the degree of spread. There's still a high degree of mutual >intelligibility. I don't see anything particularly unusual about it. Most Romance languages (time depth c. 2000 years) are also mutually intelligible, although with a little more effort than in the case of Slavic. >Mycenaean and Vedic aren't mutually comprehensible, true, but they're >transparently very similar. Even some stock poetic phrases are still pretty >much the same; Homeric "heiron menos" and Vedic "ishiram manas", for >instance. >1000-1500 years seems more than ample. Sometime between 3000 and 2500 BCE, >in other words. >>(now Vedic-Avestan does feel like somewhere in the 500-1500 year range). >-- far too long. They're virtually the same language. Eg., >Avestan: tam amavantam yazatem >Sanskrit: tam amavantam yajatam > surem damohu sevistem > suram dhamasu savistham > mithrem yazai zaothrabyo > mitram yajai hotrabyah Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are similar, but they're not in any way "virtually the same language". The differences are far greater than between Swedish and Danish. [ Moderator's comment: I'm not sure that the attested differences are much greater than between, for example, the forms of Spanish spoken today in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Mexico DF. --rma ] ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 15:11:06 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 15:11:06 GMT Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Xavier Delamarre wrote: >I confess that the celticity of _*andera_ 'woman' (found in French >dialects) is extremely uncertain.Moreover there is another Gaulish >_andero-_ in the inscription of Chamalihre : _brixtia anderon_ "by the >magic of the infernals" (anderon : genitive plur.), which is, for sure, IE >and Celtic, making an exact phonetic equation with Latin _inferus_ O.Ind. >_adhara-_ < IE _*ndhero-_ "d'en-bas, d'en-dessous, infernal". >But words like _izokin_ < _eso:ks_ "salmon", _mando_ < _mandu-_ >(Mandu-essedum, Mandu-bracius) "mule", and most probably, with unexplained >loss of initial, _azkoin_ < _tasgo-_ "badger" (on which see the beautiful >article by Joshua Katz in a recent issue of HS), show the early contacts >between continental Celts and (proto-)Basques. There are more possible examples. Classics are Bq. hartz "bear" ~ Celtic *artos, Bq. adar "horn" ~ OIr. adarc "id." and Bq. harri "stone" ~ OIr carrac "rock". Also interesting are the Gaulish "intensive" prefix ande- (Ande-roudus "the very red one", *ande-bannos "big horn") and Bq. handi "big". Bq. orein "deer" (*olein ~ *oleni) ~ We. elain (*el at ni:) "Hirschkuh". Further, with loss of initial t-/k- (besides *karr- and *tasg- above), Bq. ahuntz "goat" (*anuns < *kamuns?) and Alpine pre-Latin (Celtic?) camox (*kamo:ss) "chamois". Celtic *teg- "house" ~ Bq. -(t)egi "place" (e.g. ardan-tegi (ardandegi) "wine place/house, tavern, cellar"), maybe also Bq. etxe "house" < egi, et- + dim. -xe. Finally, in view of the discussion we had here about a possible Celtic origin of English "dog" (dag-cu: > daggu: "good dog"), and considering my theory that the absence of Basque initial d- is due to a development d- > z-, I have this crazy notion that Bq. zakur "dog" (besides [older?] "dog") might be from *daggur. [For d- > z- cf. also Bq. zaldi "horse", Pliny t(h)ieldones "Cantabrian ambling horses", German Zelter "ambling horse", PIE *del-t-]. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 16:09:06 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 16:09:06 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990325090215.17071.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >MIGUEL: > In the secondary verbal endings -(e)t and -(e)nt, -t has probably > been restored analogically from -(e)ti, -(e)nti, but we also have > lautgesetzlich -e:r < **-ent. >Yes, thus justifying **-nD becoming *-r, not **-n > *-r. If I have this >right, **-ent would first become **-e:n before becoming *-e:r because >according to you **-n > *-r. So, the change of **-VCs to **V:C (such as >**-Vns to *-V:n) must occur later: > 1. *-n > *-r > 2. *-ns > *-:n (: indicates lengthening of prec. vwl) > *-rs > *-:r >Wait a minute, how do *-ter endings react in Hittite nominative then?? I don't think there are any. Non-neuter r-stems go: Nom. sakuwassar-as, Acc. sakkuwassar-an. The word kessar "hand" is neuter in Old Hittite, or at least doesn't distinguish nom. from acc. (kessar), later it has Nom. kessaras, Acc. kessaran. >Why would **-nC (in this case, **-nt) be simplified to *-:n FIRST before >the *-n>*-r change? This would mean that the simplification of the cons. >plus neuter *-d/*-t occured well before the cons. plus animate *-s >changes instead of concurrently! Thus: > 1. **-nD > *-:n (inanimate simplification) > 2. **-n > *-r (heteroclitic) > 3. **-ns > *-:n (animate simplification) > **-rs > *-:r >Saying that **-nD > *-r and **-n > *-n is much simpler because you have >this scenario instead: > 1. **-Cs > *-:C (inanimate/animate simplification) > **-nD > *-:r >See? Animate, inanimate AND heteroclitic can be explained in one big >swoop. But you seem to imply that inanimate nouns (always?) had an ending -d/-t, which I cannot agree with. The *-d is pronominal only. We do have cases like Skt. yakrt "liver" (as well as asrk "blood", with unexplained -k), and generalized Greek -at- < *-nt- (onoma, onomatos etc.). But except for the n and n/r stems, all other neuters have a zero ending [or *-m in the o-stems]. Surely the neuter nom.acc. was unmarked. What happened was that there were neuter stems in -nt (and -nk?), as well as plain -n (and -r?). Just like we have m/f stems in -n(s), -nt(s) and -r(s). In absolute auslaut (because of -0 ending), these developed to -r (-n, -r) and -:r (-nt, -nk) and tended to merge into a single r/n heteroclitic paradigm. One might object that there *are* a number of neuter n-stems, but most of them end in -m(e)n, where the preceding nasal consonant may have prevented the regular development of -n > -r. >MIGUEL: > While some traces of *-t have remained, we have no trace at all > of *-k and *-p in PIE. It is tempting to reason by analogy and > hypothesize that if **-t > *-H1, then **-p > *-H3 and **-k > > *-H2. In the case of *k ~ *H2 we have just a few interesting > clues, such as Grk. gune:, pl. gunaikes "women". >I don't find it so tempting. I think there's a very good reason why *-k >and *-p don't exist in IE. Simply put, words either end with pronominal >endings of some kind or with a declensional suffix - none of these >possible suffixes have *-p or *-k and exposed roots are non-existant as >well. The neuter nom/acc (and sometimes the loc. of all nouns) had an exposed root. Furthermore, isn't it rather odd [not that that proves anything, but still...] that neither *-k nor *-p (nor *-t, verbal 3rd.p.sg. secondary and Hittite instr. excepted) occur at all in grammatical endings, while *-H1 and *-H2 abound? >If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE *-k >> CS *-H2 and IE *-p > CS *-H3. This means that we should see Anatolian >languages with a cornucopia of *-k's and *-p's. Is this what we find? No. We must simply assume that the loss of **-p was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-k, and the loss of **-k was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-t. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Fri Mar 26 16:41:32 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 08:41:32 PST Subject: Fwd: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >From: Xavier Delamarre >Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 23:02:02 +0100 [XD] >I confess that the celticity of _*andera_ 'woman' (found in French >dialects) is extremely uncertain.Moreover there is another Gaulish >_andero-_ in the inscription of Chamalihre : _brixtia anderon_ "by the >magic of the infernals" (anderon : genitive plur.), which is, for >sure, IE and Celtic, making an exact phonetic equation with Latin _inferus_ >O.Ind. _adhara-_ < IE _*ndhero-_ "d'en-bas, d'en-dessous, infernal". [RF] I'm curious what your opinion is of Theo Vennemann's lengthy discussion of this root, _*andera_ 'woman', in his recent article in the JIES Monograph Series No. 28 (1998), especially pp. 12-17. The article is called "Andromeda and the Apples of the Hesperides" (pp. 1-68). I have my own opinions as I'm certain Larry and Miguel do, but I'd first like to understand the reasons, if any, why the item cannot belong to a common lexical heritage (pre-IE) that passed it onto IE and Euskera. Also, in reference to the second item, has anyone thought of its possible relationship to _andiron_ (Mod. Eng.) for which the AHD (171: 49) lists the following entry: "One of a pair of metal supports for holding up logs in a fireplace. Also called 'firedog.' [Middle English _aundiren_, variant of Old French _andier_, firedog, from Gaulish _andero-_ (unattested), young bull (andirons were often decorated with heads of animals at the top).]" The origin of the expression "firedog" is quite obvious since in times past, i.e., in the Middle Ages and beyond, in the Pyrenean region a small dog was kept in a revolving squirrel-type cage at the side of the hearth. The cage's construction was such that it forced the dog to walk in order to keep its balance and that walking movement was transmitted by means of a simple gear mechanism to the iron rod or spit that turned the carcass of meat empaled on it above the fire. That way those who tended the fire were, indeed, actually dogs. The gear mechanism slowly rotated so that the piece of meat didn't burn and those in the house didn't have to sit next to the fire all day turning the spit. The practice was probably widespread throughout Europe, but I'm speaking of drawings that I've seen with pictures from the Pyrenean region showing this breed of dog. Evidently, there were small dogs especially bred to fit into the cages and capable of tolerating the onerous nature of the task. In fact, one writer mentioned that in the house where she stayed when the dog would awake, it often tried to escape, before it was locked up in its cage for the day's work. However, in the Pyrenees it wasn't always a dog that ended up tending the fires, particularly in the case of the fires for communal ovens used to make bread. There the woman who was in charge was called the _labandere_, a compound in Euskera derived from _labe_ with the phonological reduction to _lab(e)_ or _laba_ in composition and, of course, . It would translate as something like "oven-woman". Could the French term cited above, namely, _andiere_, be nothing more than _(labe)andere_. If one were to try to carry the comparison further, it might be necessary to speak of some sort of palatalization of the /d/ which is not at all unusual in Euskera, and perhaps even more common in northern dialects of the language. What do you think, Larry? Miguel? In conclusion, I have no idea whether there is any connection between any of the above and your earlier remarks on the Gaullish item _andero-_ which I gather from the AHD entry someone thought meant "young bull". I do recall once reading that there was some Celtic form with the meaning "young cow, heifer" or something like that which was listed as cognate with the Euskeric work /. Larry, do you remember the citation? >But words like _izokin_ < _eso:ks_ "salmon", _mando_ < _mandu-_ >(Mandu-essedum, Mandu-bracius) "mule", and most probably, with unexplained >loss of initial, _azkoin_ < _tasgo-_ "badger" (on which see the beautiful >article by Joshua Katz in a recent issue of HS), show the early contacts >between continental Celts and (proto-)Basques. At present I'm working on a response for the list concerning a probably eytmology of in Euskera. Would you be able to send me the full reference to Katz's article (off the list) and/or a short summary of it. If you have his email address that, also, would be much appreciated, again off the list. Agur t'erdi, Roz Frank Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu [currently on leave in Panama] Contribution # 2 March 26, 1999 From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 17:07:52 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 17:07:52 GMT Subject: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <007e01be7701$997aff40$cb3863c3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: "Peter &/or Graham" wrote: >Miguel said: >>The question isn't *if* there was something distinguishing the >>three forms. Of course there was, or we wouldn't have three >>*forms*.  >The logic of this is open to dispute. A language may have more than one >way of saying something without also having a formal distinction of meaning >between the various "forms". Accepted. I might object that such a stage is always transitory (different meanings have merged, new distinct meanings will develop, or distinct forms will disappear), but then everything is transitory in language. >Furthermore, the distinction in Greek is classical. In Homer the >differences are much less clear. Palmer (speaking of Homer) says "The >imperfect and the aorist are indistinguishable in function" and he gives >examples where aorist and imperfect are used in the same place in a phrase, >sometimes in the same line, sometimes within two or three lines of each >other, without any distinction of meaning. He also quotes a couple of >places in Homer where the aorist is "almost indistinguishable from the >perfect". He points to Iliad 14:178ff where he calls the alternation of >tenses "bewildering". Interesting. Of course, the fact that the Iliad is poetry does play a part (if an impf. doesn't fit the metre, maybe an aorist does?). >Even in classical Greek prose there are surprises. Plato (Phaedo) uses an >imperfect to say "we caught sight of ..." How can that in any sense be >continuative? (The usual explanation is that it is "infective" - that is >to say, it shows the beginning of the action.) There are also cases where >the aorist indicative is used timelessly (as are the other non-indicative >forms). This can point to a distinction not of aspect but of time marked >and non-time marked. >That may or may not be true, but my point is that the distinction of >imperfect / aorist / perfect, which is often so tidy and pleasing in the >books, is occasionally much muddier in the reality of actual usage. This >might in turn indicate that it is a late development - hence its restricted >occurrence in IE languages. It's interesting to compare the situation in Spanish Spanish, which also has three past tenses (imperfect: , "aorist" (preterit): , (periphrastic) perfect: [there's also the pluperfect ]). In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect (used for past action within the same time frame as when the speaking is done, implicitly "today", explicitly "this year" or "this century", for instance), has been abandoned in favour of the preterit. Spain: "la he visto" (I saw her [today]), "la vi" (I saw her [not today]) == Argentina: "la vi". In Portuguese, surprisingly, the periphrastic perfect (ter + vb.) denotes a kind of past iterative ("a repetic,a~o de um acto ou a sua continuidade ate' o presente em que falamos", Cunha/Cintra "Breve gram'atica do portugue^s contemporaneo"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Fri Mar 26 17:41:19 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 17:41:19 GMT Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: "Frank Rossi" wrote: >There is also a parallel in the Provencal dialect of Occitan, with the >creation of a plural ending -ei or -i for pronouns and adjectives: >i for als, di for dels or de las, polidi(s) for polidas. >However, these developments in Provencal apparently took place much later. But Occitan and French hung on to the nominative case longer than other West Romance languages (from memory, "(h)alt sunt li pui" in the Chanson de Roland, with nom. pl. in -i). There is also a theory [which I do not subscribe to], that the Italian plurals in -i and -e are also accusatives, resulting from a development -s > -i (undeniable in monosyllables like noi < nos, voi < vos, crai < cras, poi < pos(t), sei < sex, dai < das, stai < stas, etc.) and further reduction of unstressed -oi, -ei > -i and -ai > -e [but apparently -i in 2sg. canti "you sing"]. One might further object that if this were true, we'd expect It. *andiami instead of (< *-mos < -mus). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Mar 26 21:22:08 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 16:22:08 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >In the case of Iranian too?> -- yes, actually. Pamir-Ferghana type in the southwestern part of the Tarim basin, related to but distinct from the more pronouncedly Europoid type of the earlier mummies, and which persisted in those areas (later known to be Tocharian-speaking) in the rest of the area. From adolfoz at tin.it Fri Mar 26 21:32:02 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 22:32:02 +0100 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: I think that Etruscan /z/ in most cases corresponds to IE /st/ both at the beginning and in the middle of a word. According to this suggestion the shift should be attested in words of the VIII-VII BC, so that it was presumably actual some centuries before the first Etruscan writings. I do not want to say that Etruscan is an IE language, but just to fix a correspondence, since undoubtly the Etruscans, if they were not cognate, had to borrow many words from the IE peoples during their secular touch (e. g., all the 7-8 etruscan names of vases are borrowed from Greek and Italic dialects, according to a common agreement). I should want to know if : 1) the shift "st > z > s" is attested in other old languages, besides Celtic (Stirona > Zirona > Sirona, Bret. sterenn, W. seren "star" etc. and Italic words (Lat. satelles, saucio, sileo etc.); 2) or my hypothesis is unreliable for some reason. Thanks Adolfo Zavaroni From jer at cphling.dk Sat Mar 27 01:30:20 1999 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 02:30:20 +0100 Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: <36ff05b7.61874288@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > [...] The dialect of Lazio > didn't travel at all, and it's still very different from Latin. > I don't think you need external causes at all to account for > language change. It just happens. The distance, or rather the > amount of mutual contact, only determines whether two dialects > will change in the same direction or not. [...] I'll make an exception to my policy of only replying to statements when I disagree: This is simply too good and too important to pass unnoticed. In Finno-Ugric linguistics it was for a long time a matter of hot debate which Finnish sound changes were due to Germanic influence - and which ones to Baltic. It may have dawned on the field since then that any language can change by itself, but simple things just need to be said once in a while. Jens From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Mar 27 03:24:27 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 22:24:27 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: >Definitely *much* more. West Germanic started to split up c. 500 BC >(Mallory's Jastorf Iron Age) -- This is a strange statement, given the virtual uniformity of West Germanic until the Migrations period. The Jastorf Iron Age culture also shows a high degree of uniformity. The first runic inscriptions, from the 3rd-4th century on, are still virtually proto-Germanic. >The split with North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that, >possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age). -- hell, in 1500 BCE there probably wasn't much difference between proto- Germanic and the other northwestern IE languages, much less within proto- Germanic. >Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are similar, but >they're not in any way "virtually the same language". The differences are >far greater than between Swedish and Danish. -- apparently not with any profit. The languages (or, better, dialects) are clearly mutually intelligible; the differences are comparable to those between English dialects. Broad Yorkshire and Deep Texas are considerably more distinct. Or don't you think that "tam amavantem yazatem" is similar to "tam amavantam yajatam"? You don't think two people speaking these dialects would get the meaning? >[ Moderator's comment: I'm not sure that the attested differences are much >greater than between, for example, the forms of Spanish spoken today in >Madrid, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Mexico DF. --rma ] -- agreement there. From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Mar 27 17:04:31 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:04:31 -0000 Subject: Tense & Aspect Message-ID: Miguel said: >In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect has been abandoned in favour of >the preterit. Interesting - it seems the opposite of what we see in the sprach-bund of France, South Germany, Northern Italy, where the preterit is being abandoned in favour of the periphrastic perfect. What does North American Spanish do, and what does Canadian French do? Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 22:00:06 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:00:06 -0600 Subject: Arabic /usta:dh/ Persian /usta:d/ Span /ustedh/ In-Reply-To: <98aa9e4d.36f5cd00@aol.com> Message-ID: >I want to propose that Vuestra Merced of Spanish was the origin of the >/ustadh/ form in Arabic and Farsi. The Spanish word "usted" can be traced to >the abbreviation of "vuestra merced". It's clearly documented in Spanish >etymological dictionaries. Are you sure it has "vuestra merced"? Because if it does, then it means that the entry in question is unreliable. "Vuestra merced" is a hypercorrect form of "vuesa merced". Given that vuestra/o/s is the possesive form of the PLURAL vosotros/as, the form betrays an ignorance of grammar. Vos is the corresponding singular form of vosotros [as well as tu/, of course]. The possessive form of vos in the era we're speaking of is vuesa/o/s [now tu is used instead in countries that still use vos]. In Old Spanish, vos was the plural form and seems to have gradually conformed to the same usage as French vous, given that vosotros later arose to distinguish the plural form. So, "vuestra merced" is about as logical as addressing the British royal family as "thy highnesses". Spanish etymological dictionaries have a fair share of errors and often betray the authors's prejudices in favor or against arabicisms, etc. Corominas is generally regarded as the best of the lot and even he has an occasional howler [snip] >Perhaps the Moors were the first people in Spain to pronounce the abbreviation >Vsted as /usted/. At a time when Arabic was the low code it would have been >very acceptable to borrow the form from Spanish. Then as Arabic rose in >importance the Spanish may have absorbed the Arabic usage of the Vsted form. >I wish I had more time to include some documentation, but I have to prepare >for classes tomorrow. > >Timothy Goad [snip] My suspicion is that there very likely was a conflation of folk forms of "vuesa merced" & usta:dh --provided that usta:dh was used, say, in Mozarabe. A lot of "mozarabisms" entered Spanish in the 1500s for various reasons: the 1st Spanish dictionary was written in Sevilla in 1492; with the "discovery" of the Americas, Andalusia was the most vibrant region in cultural terms; much of the literature of the time focuses on Sevilla and often features its slang. As Miguel and others have pointed out, Arabic was a spent force in cultural terms in regard to the rest of Spain. Any arabicisms that entered Spanish around this time were most likely picked up via mozarabe or directly from North Africa --where a series of "crusades" alternated with trade. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 22:15:23 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:15:23 -0600 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <372abac1.474935274@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: HMMMM. Portuguese also has /-u/ but spells it <-o> True, it does have /ke~, kay~/ "who" [snip] >It was rather the accusative forms that survived. You can't tell >the difference in the Western Romance singular (-am > -a, -a: > >-a; -um > -o, -o: > -o; -em > -e, -e > -e), but Romanian and >Sardo have -u (< acc. -um) not -o, and the plurals are clearly >accusatives [but nominatives in Eastern Romance -e, -i]: -as, >-os, -es. The ablatives would've given -is, -is, -ivos. A form >like Sp. quie'n "who?" < quem also betrays its accusative roots. [snip] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 22:46:33 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:46:33 -0600 Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Does Basque -ar have a connection with Spanish -ar/-al? <-al> --on the whole-- is a dialect form [e.g. Central American ], as well as an allophonic form /-al/ in dialects where final /-r > -l/ although there are certain forms that use /-al/ everywhere /-ar/ is the more common form Spanish -ar/-al is commonly used for groves of certain trees e.g. pinar, pinal "pine grove" mazanar "apple grove" [no apple trees in Central America, so no *manzanales] naranjal "orange grove" but oddly, a pear tree is a other usages are dineral "a shitload of money" polvazal "dust devil, cloud of dust, pile of dust, dusty place, etc." >[snip] >An interesting proposal, put forward several times, sees as >deriving from . This word commonly means `pillar, column' today, >but its earliest recorded sense is simply `tree'. The key here is that >Basque has a number of two-syllable nouns ending in a morph <-ar>, most >of which denote things commonly encountered in bunches, and not >individually, like `tears', `star', `apple', > `sand', `remains', `peas', and others. We have long >suspected that this <-ar> might represent a fossilized collective >suffix, and the suggestion here is that might derive from >`tree' plus this *<-ar>. [snip] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 23:09:16 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:09:16 -0600 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) In-Reply-To: <6475eab0.36f89173@aol.com> Message-ID: I've heard/read that Old Macedonian/Bulgarian was the Slavic dialect in closest proximity to Byzantium and therefore, the most convenient Slavic language for Byzantine monks to learn. So in that sense, standardization was really serendipitous. [snip] >Church Slavonic was designed specifically to give "all Slavia one tongue to >worship with" and it provides the earliest records preserved of Slavic. That >is planned standardization. But even before that Slavic may have been >standardized by traders as the lingua franca of the northeastern trade routes >- this is pretty much Dolukhanov's theory for the enormous ground Slavic >already covers when it first appears in history. Conversely, the greatest >diversity (least standardization) among early Slavs is said to appear between >the Elbe and Vistula, where agriculture is attested to have been more intense >and productive than even among the northern Germans and Church Slavonic never >reaches due to persistent paganism. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 23:13:48 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:13:48 -0600 Subject: avio/n In-Reply-To: <36F8CB25.C7EF6930@neiu.edu> Message-ID: In Spanish, this kind of word play with bird names tends to be phallic rather than avian >French <-on>, Italian <-one> : >Etymologically from the same source, it us usual for this suffix in French to >indicate diminutive, in Italian augmentative. This seeming contradiction >parallels the use of English and , as in "you big sissy" and >"you little sissy">, as opposed to , little doll>. -- The common thread is better known in French linguistics than >in English as "morph?me affectif". It is left to the interlocutor to infer >if the AFFECT is positive or negative. [ moderator snip ] >j p maher From roborr at uottawa.ca Sat Mar 27 23:06:09 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 18:06:09 -0500 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: A question: >IE *{kuon} (likely *{kewon} before zero-grading started) = Modern Chinese >{chu"an} (Wade-Giles spelling), Ancient Chinese *{kywan} (1 syllable) = "dog". >But when and where was the dog domesticated? Did this word travel along with >the animal from whoever first domesticated it, rather than being a sign of >language cognateness? Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku - "herd(?)". While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., "wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. forms would be a desideratum. Any references? Robert Orr For IE *kuon < *pekuon, see Hamp, Eric P. 1980. "IE *()kuon - dog". Indogermanische Forschungen 85.35-42. Knobloch, Johann. 1971. "Die indogermanische Benennung des Hundes", Donum Indogermanicum. ed. by Robert Schmitt-Brandt, 39-40. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Osthoff, Hermann. 1901. Etymologische Parerga, Erster Teil, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Mar 27 23:39:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:39:01 -0600 Subject: Celtic influence In-Reply-To: <23cff69.36f94360@aol.com> Message-ID: >>rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: >>The middle and upper classes speak Spanish and the lower classes generally >>speak Runa [AKA Quechua/Qheshwa]> >-- it's geographical, actually. There aren't many Quechua speakers on the >coast, except recent migrants from the highlands. Who are now possibly a majority of the population of Lima given the rapid growth of the shanty towns. But in Lima, so I'm told, highland immigrants have by and large given up Runa In the 1930's, when my have >mother was growing up there, nearly everyone locally born spoke Spanish. My >mother tells me that apart from more slang and a less educated vocabulary, the >people she met in the streets spoke pretty much the same variety of Spanish as >she acquired in her convent school and among upper-class Peruvians. I went to grad school with limen~os of different social backgrounds and the difference in accent between upper class and lower class limen~os was very noticeable. The lower class limen~os from "barrios populares" had a different pronunciation --which actually sounded a bit more standard in that the males from Miraflores and Barranca tended to drop final /-s/ and pronounced <-ado> as /ao/ in colloquial speech. Lower class pronunciation was more "tense" and the vowels a bit more hightened and fronted. The lower class speakers all knew slang from Runa >Things were different in the highlands, of course. From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 27 23:56:29 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 23:56:29 GMT Subject: Fwd: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990326164136.86816.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "roslyn frank" wrote: >>From: Xavier Delamarre >>Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 23:02:02 +0100 >[XD] >>I confess that the celticity of _*andera_ 'woman' (found in French >>dialects) is extremely uncertain.Moreover there is another Gaulish >>_andero-_ in the inscription of Chamalihre : _brixtia anderon_ "by the >>magic of the infernals" (anderon : genitive plur.), which is, for >>sure, IE and Celtic, making an exact phonetic equation with Latin _inferus_ >>O.Ind. _adhara-_ < IE _*ndhero-_ "d'en-bas, d'en-dessous, infernal". >[RF] >I'm curious what your opinion is of Theo Vennemann's lengthy discussion >of this root, _*andera_ 'woman', in his recent article in the JIES >Monograph Series No. 28 (1998), especially pp. 12-17. The article is >called "Andromeda and the Apples of the Hesperides" (pp. 1-68). I have >my own opinions as I'm certain Larry and Miguel do, but I'd first like >to understand the reasons, if any, why the item cannot belong to a >common lexical heritage (pre-IE) that passed it onto IE and Euskera. What exactly does that mean? A common language, say Nostratic, from which both IE and Basque are descended? Or a common (substrate) language from which both IE and Basque have borrowed? The latter solution raises more questions than it answers, as it's hard to imagine any prehistoric language that would have been in contact with both PIE and Pre-Basque, at a time when linguistic diversity must have been much greater than it became after the IE expansion. >Also, in reference to the second item, has anyone thought of its >possible relationship to _andiron_ (Mod. Eng.) for which the AHD (171: >49) lists the following entry: "One of a pair of metal supports for >holding up logs in a fireplace. Also called 'firedog.' [Middle English >_aundiren_, variant of Old French _andier_, firedog, from Gaulish >_andero-_ (unattested), young bull (andirons were often decorated with >heads of animals at the top).]" >The origin of the expression "firedog" is quite obvious since in times >past, i.e., in the Middle Ages and beyond, in the Pyrenean region a >small dog was kept in a revolving squirrel-type cage at the side of the >hearth. The cage's construction was such that it forced the dog to walk >in order to keep its balance and that walking movement was transmitted >by means of a simple gear mechanism to the iron rod or spit that turned >the carcass of meat empaled on it above the fire. That way those who >tended the fire were, indeed, actually dogs. The gear mechanism slowly >rotated so that the piece of meat didn't burn and those in the house >didn't have to sit next to the fire all day turning the spit. The >practice was probably widespread throughout Europe, but I'm speaking of >drawings that I've seen with pictures from the Pyrenean region showing >this breed of dog. Evidently, there were small dogs especially bred to >fit into the cages and capable of tolerating the onerous nature of the >task. In fact, one writer mentioned that in the house where she stayed >when the dog would awake, it often tried to escape, before it was locked >up in its cage for the day's work. Can't blame the poor beast. Interesting, but it doesn't explain Catalan "fire horse" or German "fire goat", nor the alleged connection with Celtic words for "bull". >However, in the Pyrenees it wasn't always a dog that ended up tending >the fires, particularly in the case of the fires for communal ovens used >to make bread. There the woman who was in charge was called the >_labandere_, a compound in Euskera derived from _labe_ with the >phonological reduction to _lab(e)_ or _laba_ in composition and, of >course, . It would translate as something like "oven-woman". >Could the French term cited above, namely, _andiere_, be nothing more >than _(labe)andere_. If one were to try to carry the comparison further, >it might be necessary to speak of some sort of palatalization of the /d/ >which is not at all unusual in Euskera, and perhaps even more common in >northern dialects of the language. What do you think, Larry? Miguel? According to my information, the French word is (misanalyzed from ), with the usual French development of *E > ie. Pokorny glosses as "Feuerbock" (firedog), "Widder" (ram), and also "Mohn" (poppy, but my French dictionary says: "furze, gorse"), comparing this to It. madonna, fantina "poppy" < "young girl". (But Pokorny lists all this under PIE *andh- "to bloom, sprout", Greek anthos "flower"). >In conclusion, I have no idea whether there is any connection between >any of the above and your earlier remarks on the Gaullish item _andero-_ >which I gather from the AHD entry someone thought meant "young bull". I >do recall once reading that there was some Celtic form with the meaning >"young cow, heifer" or something like that which was listed as cognate >with the Euskeric work /. Welsh anner "young cow", OWelsh enderic "calf", Welsh enderig "bull, ox", Breton ounner, annouar, annoer "young cow" (besides MIr. ainder, aindir "young woman"). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sat Mar 27 23:59:35 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 23:59:35 GMT Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ In-Reply-To: <36FBFCD2.179B@tin.it> Message-ID: Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: >I think that Etruscan /z/ in most cases corresponds to IE /st/ both at >the beginning and in the middle of a word. Why? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Sun Mar 28 03:26:21 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 19:26:21 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: Let's try this again. This isn't a good week for sending messages for me. Hopefully this one will get through to yous... ME (GLEN): See? Animate, inanimate AND heteroclitic can be explained in one big swoop. MIGUEL: But you seem to imply that inanimate nouns (always?) had an ending -d/-t, which I cannot agree with. The *-d is pronominal only. We do have cases like Skt. yakrt "liver" (as well as asrk "blood", with unexplained -k), and generalized Greek -at- < *-nt- (onoma, onomatos etc.). But except for the n and n/r stems, all other neuters have a zero ending [or *-m in the o-stems]. "We may have this, we may have that but aside from even more evidence on your side..." - this is basically what you're saying. It's much simpler to say that the neuter was generally marked with *-d unless the word already ended with another declensional suffix, isn't it? The *-d suffix IS being used for things other than pronouns later in IE languages so there's nothing to make us think that IE itself didn't use *-d similarly and more extensively, especially if it derives from an affixed *to meaning simply "this, that (inanimate)". It's simply perfect for an all-purpose inanimate marker. There is loss of *-d after consonant-ending roots (hence the heteroclitic) so of course there are a bunch of "zero-ending" neuter nouns - half of them are from a *-d that disappeared and the other half of the neuters are formed on OTHER declensional suffixes that didn't mix with *-d. [ Moderator's query: What happened to your proposed *-d ending in neuter i- and u-stems? --rma ] MIGUEL: Surely the neuter nom.acc. was unmarked. In Pre-IE, it was. It can be seen that there was originally only a contrast of animate/inanimate made in the accusative where animate took *-m and inanimate took *-ZERO. When the nominative *-s and nomino-accusative *-d came along, it became a different story. The consistent use of *-s and *-d forms in the nominative (whether just in the pronominal forms or not) MUST be a recent innovation if they are to be linked with Etruscan grammar. Etruscan has no *-d, period. [ Moderator's query: Where did they come from? Endings do not just jump up out of the grass of the steppes, do they? --rma ] MIGUEL: What happened was that there were neuter stems in -nt (and -nk?), as well as plain -n (and -r?). Just like we have m/f stems in -n(s), -nt(s) and -r(s). In absolute auslaut (because of -0 ending), these developed to -r (-n, -r) and -:r (-nt, -nk) and tended to merge into a single r/n heteroclitic paradigm. One might object that there *are* a number of neuter n-stems, but most of them end in -m(e)n, where the preceding nasal consonant may have prevented the regular development of -n > -r. Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. Endings of the sort *-n(s), *-nt(s) and *-r(s) all end in *-s (very badly done). Similarly, the heteroclitic and pronominal forms with *-d derive from *-d. Simple, no? We don't have to posit **-nk and other forms that aren't there. Everything can be generalised into a few simple cases. Finally, there ARE forms in *-mer and *-wer (thus deriving from **-men-d and **-wen-d). Let me ask you something: Why do we find endings like -ant-s in Hittite? Doesn't it look like *-nt + nominative *-s to you? Don't endings like *-m(e)n look kind of like *-m-(e)nt-d? See? More wonderful simplification - *-men and forms with -ants are the same suffix *-nt-[s/d]. MIGUEL: While some traces of *-t have remained, we have no trace at all of *-k and *-p in PIE. It is tempting to reason by analogy and hypothesize that if **-t > *-H1, then **-p > *-H3 and **-k > *-H2. In the case of *k ~ *H2 we have just a few interesting clues, such as Grk. gune:, pl. gunaikes "women". ME (GLEN): I don't find it so tempting. I think there's a very good reason why *-k and *-p don't exist in IE. Simply put, words either end with pronominal endings of some kind or with a declensional suffix - none of these possible suffixes have *-p or *-k and exposed roots are non-existant as well. MIGUEL: The neuter nom/acc (and sometimes the loc. of all nouns) had an exposed root. Furthermore, isn't it rather odd [not that that proves anything, but still...] that neither *-k nor *-p (nor *-t, verbal 3rd.p.sg. secondary and Hittite instr. excepted) occur at all in grammatical endings, while *-H1 and *-H2 abound? You're right - it proves nothing. Mandarin has no *-p, *-k, *-t, *-m, *-l or *-st. So? I told you the reason. All IE stems end with a suffix of some kind and take from a limited number of endings which happen to not have *-k or *-p. It's not the end of the world. ME (GLEN): If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE *-k CS *-H2 and IE *-p > CS *-H3. This means that we should see Anatolian languages with a cornucopia of *-k's and *-p's. Is this what we find? MIGUEL: No. We must simply assume that the loss of **-p was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-k, and the loss of **-k was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-t. What did you say? "No"? Thank you, that'll be all, your honor. [ Moderator's comment: Nonsense. One postulated development does not require any others. Thus, the fact that we do not find the developments you postulate simply means that no such developments took place; the lack of such developments has no bearing on the existence of others which *did* take place. --rma ] -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From jpmaher at neiu.edu Sun Mar 28 06:26:32 1999 From: jpmaher at neiu.edu (maher, johnpeter) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 00:26:32 -0600 Subject: avio/n Message-ID: Italian "bird" phallic as well: cf. , Veneto dialect ; cf. English ... Rick Mc Callister wrote: > In Spanish, this kind of word play with bird names tends to be > phallic rather than avian [ moderator snip ] From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Mar 28 08:12:12 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 02:12:12 -0600 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Dear Robert and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Robert Orr Sent: Saturday, March 27, 1999 5:06 PM > A question: >> IE *{kuon} (likely *{kewon} before zero-grading started) = Modern Chinese >> {chu"an} (Wade-Giles spelling), Ancient Chinese *{kywan} (1 syllable) = >> "dog". But when and where was the dog domesticated? Did this word travel >> along with the animal from whoever first domesticated it, rather than being >> a sign of language cognateness? > Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a > zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku - "herd(?)". > While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., > "wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the > extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely > nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. > forms would be a desideratum. Two of the elements I work with frequently are IE *k{^}e/o(i)-, 'grey', and *wa(:i)-, 'wolf/predator, wail'; I have not have the pleasure of reading the references provided but in the absence of that knowledge, I would like to propose an analysis of *k{^}won- as simply consisting of these elements plus individualizing -*n: 'the grey-wolf/predator-one', similarly patterned to 'lion': *le:/o:-, 'spring, jump (?)'. This analysis is supported by another related root: *1. k{^}e:u-, 'wag', a characteristic supremely idiosyncratic to 'dogs'. However, if someone would be kind enough to summarize the argument for *pekwon-, I would be interested in learning its basic points. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From Georg at home.ivm.de Sun Mar 28 08:46:29 1999 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Ralf-Stefan Georg) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 09:46:29 +0100 Subject: Mummies of Urumchi In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >>but our Tokharian texts are from the early Middle ages, and the mummies are >>*millennia* earlier. >-- no, the mummies are _continuous_ from millenia earlier up until attested >Tocharian. The physical type remains constant, and the material culture shows >a smooth development over time. When a new language comes in (Uighur) so does >a new physical type. So we have a) a continuous record of mummies from the earliest times down to the times of the Tocharian texts (with a clear and foolproof indication that the most recent ones were Tocharian speaking - I mean an indication other than their being palefaces ?), b) it is common knowledge that the people who wrote/read/used the Tocharian texts *were* palefaces in the first place and c) the identification of race and language is correct and the one thing to do after all ? >The material culture (textiles, etc.) also shows clear links further west. What does that tell us about the Tocharians ? West = Indo-European seems to be a hazardous equation, though west = palefaces is of course slightly less hazardous. The Tocharian language (and the *only* meaningful way to use the designation "Tocharian" is in connection with *language*) is only known from the *East*; if the mummies show material items which point to the (far) west, this could equally be taken as pointing *away* from Tocharian, rather than the opposite. >Old Chinese also has a fund of early Indo-European loanwords, some of them >identifiably Tocharian (or proto-Tocharian, to be picky). Yes, such a body of loans has been pointed to, but this is a matter of ongoing debate rather than one of established fact. I don't take issue with the fact here, but it could be interesting to discuss the Proto-Tocharian/Old Chinese evidence here to see what there is really to it. >And Tocharian >demonstrably separated from the IE mainstream rather early, Please, demonstrate this, if it is demonstrable. Doing this, please identify the IE mainstream and its common traits (which then would have to be identifiable as common innovations not shared by Tocharian), and name the features of Tocharian which are so archaic that the language occupies such a special place in the family due to them. I'm not denying that a lot of things underwent great changes in Tocharian, but it remains to show how far this justifies atributing it an Anatolian-like position in the family. >and shows no close >affinities with Indo-Iranian. It doesn't even have many early loanwords from >Indo-Iranian. OK >This means that Tocharian had to be isolated from the otherwise-predominant >Indo-Iranian linguistic environment. Do you have a better place in mind to be >isolated _in_ than the Bronze Age Tarim Basin? Sorry, I'm not questioning the fact as such, I'm questioning the methods used to establish this as proven. Certainly a question like "do you have a better idea ? No ? So, here we are" is not the kind of reasoning much confidence should be built upon, or is it (e.g. I don't have a "better idea" for the genetic affiliation of Turkic, yet I'm sure that - beyond the shadow of a doubt - the "Altaic" hypothesis, linking it with Mongolian is wrong and misleading; by this logic this wrong idea should be taken as the current state-of-the-art until a "better idea" is found. I, for one, regard the formulation "I don't know" as enough of a "better idea"). >>isn't the simple identification of those two entities (the mummies - >>Tokharians) an oversimplification? >-- no. Not by the usual standards of the field. If these are the usual standards of the field, then - to relieve you personally from my attack - it is the field which tends to oversimplifications and has, if true, adopted standards which might well be regarded as appalling (especially the language = race bit, which should be rotting in the most forgotten section of linguists' cellar of embarrassing ideas). A different case: come to think of the Baltic. "The physical type remains constant, and the material culture shows >a smooth development over time" is exactly what archaeologists tell us >about people there. No indication of the arrival of different people from >somewhere else over a considerable span of millennia. This can only mean >(and it has been said by Balticists !) that the Baltic region is simply >the Urheimat der Indogermanen. Now do we follow this ? We have to, by the >"usual standards of the field" ... That this says *nothing* about how the Baltic *language* came to the region, because a change/spread of language does *not* imply a change/spread of different people, let alone of a different physical type, is my humble idea of a valid standard of the field. But the field is bored by this, saying hell, we cannot identify race and language and that's bad. We could have such a tremendous number of positive hypotheses if we could, so why don't we (tacitly, if need be) declare this procedure possible after all ? Regards, St.G. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG +49-228-69-13-32 From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 28 11:33:46 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 06:33:46 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <> But don't you see where this approach gets you? What evidence is there that this view of Medieval Latin is any different from the texts we have in Hittite, Mycenaean, Sanskrit, Homeric Greek, etc.? We know that "Attic" Greek was not the majority language of either Greece or perhaps even that small part of Greece. You mention early runes as proof of the unity of Germanic, but why wouldn't those runes be written in some ancient and specialized runic liturgical language just like Latin? - runes were not used for real text writing probably for that very reason. First of all, Latin stayed a spoken as well as written language for well over a thousand years. It was elitist, but it was SPOKEN and not just by churchman and scholars. CC Love in the intro to "Five Sixteeth Century Latin Plays" writes "Latin, of course, was necessary for the educated, that is, the nobility and the upper classes, because it had become the language of diplomacy, of the law, medicine and commerce, as well as continuing to be the language of the church, and it seemed that Latin would probably become the standard European language. ...the learning of Latin was not left to chance. Most of the (English) schools included in their statutes that boys must speak Latin to each other "as well in the school as coming to and from it" (Oundle 1556), and Rivington (1566) decreed "in the School they that can must speak nothing but Latin." In most schools the boys were birched if they were caught speaking English. Similar rules were enforced on the Continent, where it is reported that Montaigne at the age of six spoke Latin at his school in Bordeaux and in his teens acted in the Latin play Baptistes,..." Toynbee; "Sir Philip Sidney at Shrewsbury School spoke Latin and regularly, as part of his school work, acted with his classmates in parts of plays every week..." And so forth. Long before that it had been established that one could not even speak at many western European royal and baronical courts without speaking Latin or using a translator that did. The canonical courts and courts of equity - often the most powerful across Europe during most of the middle Ages - required that all testimony be taken in Latin. The Teutonic Knights only spoke Latin at the their ccouncils and the Hanseatic League would distinguish and favor merchants at foreign ports according to whether they spoke Latin or not. The major trials and treaties of the whole period were all heard or negotiated in spoken Latin. Martin Irvine wrote: "Latin was the language of power and prestige, of law and learning, of religion and official culture." S. Coates in an NYT on modern Latin as a language of international science wrote: " in the Middle Ages..., Latin thrived in Europe as a lingua franca for international scholarship, diplomacy and commerce." The "vernaculars" (the "state languages" and other dominant local dialects) fought Latin through the likes of Chaucer and Dante and Luther throughout this time and eventually prevailed. But what prevailed was not the thousand and one dialects that would have been forever turning up on the level of the villiages or towns or backstreets of the city. EB White wrote: "Long after Charlemagne, scholars, clerics, merchants, lawyers and diplomats throughout Europe continued to write and converse fluently in Latin, many of them perhaps exclusively or nearly so. That this can be said only of a cultural elite is true enough. But the same view can be taken of the rise of any official modern vernacular, such as Italian, which in its 'official' form was spoken by only a tiny fraction of the total population of Italy until late in the last century." The fact that Latin was a second language during this time really means nothing in the context of the early data that is used to reconstruct PIE. Precisely because that written data could very well also reflect the elite language of the scribes or the elite. In fact, that would make the most sense, because the regular dialects mutated too fast from generation to generation and so were therefore too unreliable for writing records or other important information. That is why Latin persisted for so long with so little change. It was meant to be conservative. And that is why 80% of all the records we have from Northern and Western Europe in the Middle Ages are written in Latin. Writing aids this process but is not necessary to it. Oral tradition will perserve a language along with the information that is being preserved. We call such languages archaic or administrative or poetic without recognizing that it was meant to be independent of the vagaries of local dialects and changes they would go through. And it is the basis of what we really know about early IE. <> Nyet. Latin did both. It stayed a standard languages while it also splintered into other dialects and languages. <<-- you're confusing the standardization of poetic or administrative languages with effects on what people actually speak. Incidentally, Sanskrit wasn't written down until over a millenium after the composition of the Rig-Veda; it was preserved orally.>> You are confusing the evidence. All we have until relatively recent times are the poetic and administrative and other standardizing languages. We have no idea how Hittite mothers spoke. Sanskrit is a perfect example. One reconstructs PIE from standardized languages, not how people actually spoke. <<-- people change which language they speak for political and social reasons, generally.>> People change which language they speak when they have a good reason to. See Mallory ISIE about p257 or 259. Those reasons change constantly. One good reason to speak a standarsized language is to preserve information accurately - the same reason one uses writing. Imprecise or changing languages or dialects defeat that purpose - preserving information, dependable understanding, commonality of hearing and meaning, recognition over time. And that is why people will sometimes KEEP some languages they speak from changing. That is why they will standardize. And that may be why we have any solid evidence of IE ancestral languages at all. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Mar 28 11:34:54 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 06:34:54 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 3/25/99 2:00:39 AM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> But this is aside from the point being made. The point was that the difference between Greek and Vedic Sanskrit and their common ancestor could be explained geographically. I was saying was that when speakers of a common language go to different geographical locations, their languages will predictably lose commonality. This is rather obvious and I'm sure you are making some other point, but I'll address it just to be clear. Distance in terms of geography will predictably have an effect on the way two languages diverge from a common ancestor. Otherwise we'd have to think that, say, the differences between Low and Upper German had nothing to do with geographical difference. From the names themselves - geographical distinctions - distance did split these dialects. Would the split between Low and Upper German have occurred if all the earlier speakers have stayed in the same location? Are we to think that the difference between Norweigan and Danish would have developed anyway, even if they were not geographically separated? In an old post re "the Danube Homeland" dated 3/6/99, you wrote: <> Aren't you suggesting that the "Kurgan" model - in terms of time and distance -needs to "explain the linguistics facts" here? Isn't "the limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements" a function of distance? And what about "peripheral conservatism?" Isn't that really a matter of distance or what is peripheral about? <> And this is so obviously untrue that I can only think that I've misunderstood you here, once again. [ Moderator's comment: Modern Icelandic has, until very recently, been unaffected by linguistic externals, yet it has changed radically in pronunciation from Old Norse. You have obviously misunderstood MCV's point: Languages change, and they do so without external cause. The existence of external forces in some kinds of linguistic change do not necessitate their existence in all forms of change. --rma ] You've mentioned the possible 30% non-IE in German vocabulary. If you accept that possibility, the only way you can account for it is "external causes." You mentioned that the way B-S may have obscured elements of Germanic or Greek may have done the same to Armenian. These are causes external to the languages themselves. Conversely, if you mention the fact that German retains "archaic" features, it assumes that change in this case DID NOT "just happen," but in fact failed to happen. If you don't attribute some external cause for this, then why is the archaism in German so singular? Chance? Or isn't it more likely that Germanic was either cut-off, isolated or geographically distant from the "innovative core" - all external factors. It may be valuable for methodological purposes to suspend consideration of external causes in linguistics, but it cannot be correct to say that you don't "need external causes at all to account for language change. It just happens" - especially if you are drawing general historical conclusions based on those language changes. If the linguistic evidence is going to assume no external causes for change, then it can tell us nothing about external events. <> This goes back to the original point, if Sanskrit or any of its proto- predecessors "travelled," than the separation of distance would not only reduce "mutual contact" with Greek or its predecessors, it would also explain why they are different. If nothing else, lack of mutual contact caused by distance would have been enough for the languages not to change "in the same direction." But there are other things that happen to languages when they travel and that is also obvious. (E.g., Germanic in Britain becomes exposed to Danish and Norman invasions that will influence English in ways that did not affect continental Germanic.) Finally, the statement that change "just happens" inverts the question really, doesn't it? If change is so inevitable, then why should there be any commonalities left to find in IE languages? Obviously, the key to this whole thing is not what changed but what didn't. It's not that when you give a "holistic" sense of difference between Greek and Vedic, it does not carry weight. But it also seems worthwhile to take a closer look at some of the pieces that make up that holism. The degree of continuity that you found in Greek/Sanskrit aorist may reflect a shorter difference in time between the languages than 2500 years. It is a subtle and apparently unique feature for both languages to have and one that would seem easy to lose. And it may be more compelling as a continuity than the differences between the languages that may have "just happened." Regards, Steve Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Mar 28 12:23:18 1999 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 15:23:18 +0300 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] On Sat, 20 Mar 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, Bob Whiting wrote: >But my question was specifically about the way the word was being >reconstructed in the posts on the list. I looked back again and >for the most part the nominative (in those languages where it >occurs) was not mentioned. I now attribute that to the knowledge >of those involved who all knew but did not say that (in the case >of this "night") the nominative form was irrelevant - based on >the phototactics of the various languages mentioned. >I wrote: ><they are I guess "truncated" forms,...>> >You replied: ><<"Truncated" is not really the right term. The disappearance >of /t/ in this position in both Greek /nuks/ and Latin /noks/ is >simply the result of a phonotactical rule:..>> >On closer consideration - with regard to "nos"(Welsh), >"noc"(Pol), "nux"(Greek) and "nox"(Latin) - whatever the process, >the result are all truncated. No doubt about it. I looked up >"truncated" in the dictionary and it hits the nail on the head. Truncated generally means "cut off" but usually not "cut out" so whether these forms are "truncated" or not depends on how one views the process. The two possible views more or less correspond to the difference between synchronic and diachronic grammar (or generative versus historical). Given the stem nokt-, the generativist would say that the nominative ending -s is added to a truncated stem *nok-; the historical linguist would say that when the nominative ending -s was added to nokt-, the resulting cluster was simplified by assimilation followed by degemination. In both cases the result is the same: the nominative form is noks. But whether the historical reconstruction corresponds to any kind of reality depends on whether there was ever a stage of the language where *nokts was an acceptable form. If this form was never allowed to exist then the historical reconstruction is just an abstraction, because the generativist knows that no speaker of the language creates a form *nokts and then simplifies it to noks. Noks is the first form of the nominative that the speaker calls up even though the same speaker knows that the stem is nokt-. >< are not operative >for .>> > came out of */nokt-s/> */ts/ > */ss/ > /s/ "by a normal >phonological rule" - how is (adj) reconstructed? Nocturnus is created from the stem nokt- plus a suffix -urnus, an adjectival formative relating to time. No cluster reduction rules apply. ><matter of a tradeoff between ease of articulation and the level >of morphological differentiation needed to disambiguate meaning >that the users of the language resolve with even thinking about >it.>> >Sounds like classic problem-solving to me. "Disambiguating" is >definitely problem-solving. This is too big a can of worms to open here. It is more of a philosophical problem than a linguistic one. It revolves around whether you can call it problem solving if you don't realize that there is a problem to be solved. >I wrote: ><suggest that the word now carries the additional grammatical >baggage of the ablative.>> >You replied: ><> >In Romance languages like modern French, it is said that "in all >but a few cases, the oblique ^? often the ablative ^? form >survived the loss of Latin inflectional morphology,...while the >nominative did not..." I don't think I need to remind you that >the nominative is "often" the least marked form. The markings >you refers to includes those related to the ablative as a >"grammatical case expressing relations of separation, source, >cause or instrumentality,... not found in the nominative." >Voila. The ablative's extra grammatical baggage. In letter (and >verse, if need be.) I'm beginning to get the idea: this is some kind of free association test. If you say stems are removed I have to understand that you mean that affixes are removed from the stem. If you say that the word now carries the additional grammatical baggage of the ablative you mean that the ablative form now has the additional grammatical baggage of all of the other cases plus the ablative. But you are not looking at the process of development, only the end point. And you are not taking all the developments into consideration. If we consider Latin with five cases (leaving the vocative out), then the nominative is likely to be the most frequently used case. Most sentences will have at least one nominative. They may or may not have genitives, datives, accusatives or ablatives. So the simplest case marker (-s) gets used for the nominative. Adding this ending to the stem often creates final consonant clusters that are usually resolved by the removal of a consonant which often turns out to be an affix to the root. Now as the language develops, genitives and datives tend to be replaced by prepositional expressions with the object of the preposition being in the accusative or ablative. Finally the accusative and ablative merge leaving only one oblique case. Whether the surviving form is the accusative or the ablative is not really important. What is important is that there is now only one oblique case and this is now the most frequently occurring case (all of the four original oblique cases which were individually less common than the nominative have now been combined into a single case which is more common). Furthermore the case ending has usually developed into a short vowel so that the oblique form is usually the full stem plus a short vowel which is often no more heavily marked than the nominative (or another way of looking at it is that as the most common form it becomes the unmarked form by default). So when case distinctions are finally dropped, it is the oblique case (both as the most common form and potentially the least marked) that survives. WARNING: This is an extremely simplistic explanation of a large number of extremely complex developments. Do not try this at home. :) ><(Academies do that, or try to) but only record usage...>> >Time to send an angry letter to Noah Webster. In the absence of >an Academie, of course, dictionaries can and have "defined words >according to their proper usage" or their common usage. Contrary >to non-popular opinion, dictionaries have had a powerful effect >on usage and definition - as Mr. Webster's did. Gee, I hate being quoted out of context.:) My remark was a comment to your statement that 3000 year old words are often defined with a precision that - if you know your Homer, so to speak - can be as perilous as assuming that the nominative is worth talking about. With dead languages there are only two clues to meaning: usage and etymology. Of these two, usage is the more reliable, but if the word only occurs in limited contexts, etymology may be important as well. But there are no native informants to ask about the meaning or usage. Conversely the "dictionary definition" cannot be considered prescriptive for speakers of a dead language. And a philologist is under no obligation to accept the "dictionary definition" (many often do not) in her translation. So the precision with which such a word can be defined is a function of how widespread and varied its usage is and how well its etymology is known (and understood). I will freely admit that Webster's is a prescriptive dictionary and has arrogated to itself the function of an American Academy. The prescriptions of Noah Webster are why Americans spell the verbal suffix -ize rather than -ise and write favor rather than favour, etc. I find that Webster's is also prescriptively trying to block the natural development of "all right" in some usages to "alright." It also sometimes simply ignores usage that is incorrect according to its standards. As an example, many people use the adjective "fulsome" to mean 'tending to be complete' considering the root of the word to be "ful(l)-." But the meaning of the word actually is influenced by ME "fu:l", the ancestor of modern "foul." So the word "fulsome" actually means 'disgusting', which is the only meaning that will be found in Webster's despite the widespread folk-etymologized usage. >There should be NO question that "usage" overwhelmingly says >that the "definition" of a word is the "dictionary definition." So why do you not use the "dictionary definition" of words like "cognate" or "stem"? I can find nothing in my dictionary that says that "cognate" means 'synonym' or that "stem" means 'root affix'. If you so firmly believe that the "definition" of a word is the "dictionary definition," why do you ignore it and make up your own? >And the dictionary says that the "definition" of a word is the >"meaning of the word." If you think "dictionaries do not define >words..." your usage is so uncommon it has not been recorded in >Webster's. There are lots of things that are not recorded in Webster's. The f-word is one of them. This does not mean that things that are not recorded in Webster's do not exist. >Being an American, I tend to go by Webster's. I go by Webster's too, unless I want the answer to something particularly difficult and then I use Chamber's. But let me offer you a quotation from Otto Jespersen, _Language. Its Nature, Development and Origin_ (London and New York, 1922) [old, but still useful], p. 25: The vocabulary, too, was treated from the same point of view [as grammar]. This is especially evident in the case of the dictionaries issued by the French and Italian Academies. They differ from dictionaries as now usually compiled in being not collections of all and any words their authors could get hold of within the limits of the language concerned, but in being selections of words deserving the recommendations of the best arbiters of taste and therefore fit to be used in the highest literature by even the most elegant or fastidious writers. Dictionaries thus understood were less descriptions of actual usage than prescriptions for the best usage of words. So I will stick by the intent of my original statement: Dictionaries should be descriptive of usage. This of course leads to a cycle. If one doesn't know how the word is used (whether one is a native speaker or not), one looks it up in a dictionary to find out, and then uses it accordingly and thus the dictionary becomes prescriptive. The dictionary becomes an "authority." Hence the popular opinion that dictionaries define words, held by those who haven't thought the process through. But the word doesn't mean what it does because the dictionary says so. It means that because that is the way it is used. When a new usage becomes widespread enough, it will be recorded in the dictionary. Webster's now lists a meaning of "gay" as 'a homosexual person'. Is the word used that way because Webster's defined it so? No. Usage came first, then the dictionary entry. That is the way that words change meaning. ME "nice" meant 'ignorant, foolish' (comes through French from Latin ne-sci:re 'not to know'). Today the word has almost exactly the opposite meaning. The same thing will eventually happen to "fulsome" as the ful- part (rightly or wrongly) becomes more firmly identified with "full" rather than "foul." ><except Homer.>> >And when you get right down to it, nobody really knows your >posted message but you. Precisely. And when you say "... one might naturally go to the form stripped even of stems to get to the elemental form of the word," you are the only one who knows that you are using "stems" to mean "root affixes." Now being a trained philologist, if you use it that way in enough different contexts, I can eventually figure out what you mean. And this is precisely the way that one defines 3000 year old words. >Although I occasionally appreciate Zen and the aloneness of >oneness and all that, this is obviously a bit too much. We do >know what Homer meant most of the time, and his intention was to >be understood. Language's #1 function is communication and Homer >was damn good at. Now when I compare this statement with your earlier quoted 3000 year old words are often defined with a precision that - if you know your Homer, so to speak - can be as perilous as assuming that the nominative is worth talking about. I have a hard time figuring out whether your point that there is no way to define 3000 year old words with any precision or that Homer was so good at communicating that we know exactly what he meant and his words can be defined with precision. Which position are you actually supporting? ><<"I know what it says, but what does it *mean*?">> >But that is a whole different can of worms, isn't it? Not at all. Writers, especially of poetry, often use words in unusual ways both for expressive effect and because they are constrained to a certain number of syllables or to a stress pattern by meter and foot. What the words say and what they mean can often be two entirely different things. Irony and sarcasm often invert or shift meanings in ways that are difficult to detect. To illustrate this, I have a few examples that I have gleaned from my experience with discussion lists of the difference between what people say and what they often mean: What the writer says: What the writer means: in my humble opinion I know more about this than you do, so listen up and learn something everyone's entitled to their you don't have a clue what own opinion you're talking about I don't mind constructive mind your own business and criticism, but what do you know about it, anyway I must have gotten it wrong I'm sure I'm right, but I don't want to argue with due respect thinking as little of your argument as I do you and I both know you don't know, but I'm telling you you will appreciate that you won't like this at all I really hate to say this, but I am really enjoying pointing out this simple fact that you obviously don't know >Since the changing meaning or function of words can be quite >independent of their structural linguistics. Change "can be" to "is" and you have a basic principle of language. It is called "duality of patterning" and was listed by Hockett as one of his design features of language. In fact it is probably the most important single one of these features. Spoken language communicates meaning through sound, but the individual sounds do not have any meaning themselves. The sounds are combined to created morphemes that do have meaning. This means that the myriad words of a language (all languages that we know of) are built up by varying arrangements of a limited number of sound units, themselves meaningless in isolation. Thus a language can have tens of thousands of words built from a remarkably small number of sound units (almost always less than 100, usually less than 50). >When I read the word "gay" in an old novel, I am reminded that >phonology cannot tell me how or why it came to mean what it means >today. Duality of patterning, especially the fact that the individual sound units do not have any meaning themselves, is what allows a word to change its meaning without changing its phonology or to change its phonology without changing its meaning or change both without the new meaning or new phonology necessarily being predictable. On the other hand, there is something called "sound symbolism" which does hold that there is meaning associated with individual sounds (universally), but investigations have yet to turn up generally applicable principles. Sound symbolism is of course connected with onomatopoeia, but it may also go deeper than this. Investigations are continuing, but far more descriptive data as well as experimental investigations into speakers' intuitions about the relationships between sounds and meanings are needed. >I wrote: ><<...can a stem ever be seen as something like a vestigal case >ending in reconstructing PIE - not part of the original word, but >a compounded form that produced a universal "stem" in the >daughter languages?>> >You wrote: ><question that has been discussed extensively without reaching any >particular conclusion....The problem is that "root extensions" >don't behave mathematically.>> >So the answer is: ...maybe. Definitely. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 28 17:27:20 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 17:27:20 GMT Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: >HMMMM. >Portuguese also has /-u/ but spells it <-o> The spelling is historical. Portuguese reduces unstressed /o/ to /u/ (in Brazilian Port. this applies only to posttonic final position -o > /u/, in Portugal to all unstressed /o/'s, except absolute initial o-, some learned words, and cases where /o/ derives from oo < *ono, olC, ou). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From xdelamarre at siol.net Sun Mar 28 17:39:38 1999 From: xdelamarre at siol.net (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 19:39:38 +0200 Subject: IE & Celtic badger : literature In-Reply-To: <19990326164136.86816.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: For Roslyn Frank and others interested in lexicography, some recent literature on the words for "Badger" in IE & Celtic : - Joshua T. Katz : 'Hittite _taSku-_ and the Indo-European Word for "Badger"', _Historische Sprachforshung_ 111. Band (1998), 1. Heft, 61-82. [adduces Hittite cognate ; the article, erudite and convincing, full of humor, received an award, I think] - Julie Bonner Bellquist : '"Badger" in Indo-European', _Journal of Indo-European Studies_ 21 (1993), 331-46. [Concludes, wrongly in vue of J. Katz' article, in the bizarre absence of designation for badger in IE]. - John T. Koch : 'Gallo-Brittonic _Tasc(i)ouanos_ "Badger-slayer" and the Reflex of Indo-European _gwh_', _Journal of Celtic Linguistics_, 1 (1992), 101-118. [Important as it establishes definitly the outcome of IE _gwh-_ in Gaulish (> w), after the _uediumi_ (>_*gwhedio:-mi_) "I pray, I invoque" of Chamaliere]. - Alan Mac an Bhaird : 'Tadhg mac Cein and the Badgers', _Eriu_ 31 (1980), 150-55. [Irish stuff : _tadg_ "poet" and the PN _Tadg_, meant initially "badger") - Joseph Vendryes & Alii : _Lexique ?tymologique de l'Irlandais Ancien_, TU, 5-6. Paris-Dublin (1978). Entry _tadg_. [Yet no mention of "Badger"] >From the preceding literature, it shows that the semantic shift of the original IE _*tasKu/o-_ "badger", ranged from "poet" (Irish) to "anus" (Hittite) ! X. Delamarre Ljubljana (where the noise of the Nato bombers in route to Serbia to defend Civilisation can be heard). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Mar 28 18:10:13 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 13:10:13 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] And Old Church Slavonic was comprehensible to "all Slavia", at the time. Not surprising, given the fairly high degree of mutual comprehensibility among Slavic languages now, more than a millennium later. From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 28 18:18:32 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 18:18:32 GMT Subject: Arabic /usta:dh/ Persian /usta:d/ Span /ustedh/ In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Are you sure it has "vuestra merced"? > Because if it does, then it means that the entry in question is >unreliable. "Vuestra merced" is a hypercorrect form of "vuesa merced". >Given that vuestra/o/s is the possesive form of the PLURAL vosotros/as, the >form betrays an ignorance of grammar. Vos is the corresponding singular >form of vosotros [as well as tu/, of course]. The possessive form of vos in >the era we're speaking of is vuesa/o/s [now tu is used instead in countries >that still use vos]. In Old Spanish, vos was the plural form and seems to >have gradually conformed to the same usage as French vous, given that >vosotros later arose to distinguish the plural form. There is no special connection between nuestro/vuestro and nosotros/vosotros as opposed to nos/vos. The Latin possessives for 1&2pl. were [nos:] noster, nostr- and [vos:] vester, vestr- (OLat/VLat. voster, vostr-). Sp. nuestro and vuestro descend directly from these Latin forms. Besides nostro and vostro, Vulgar Latin also had the reduced variants *nosso and *vosso > Spa. nues(s)o, vues(s)o, but there never was a difference in meaning. , is thought to be derived from because of the -st-, which is difficult to explain if the form came from . *is* the source of the variants , , and forms with , not , are also the source of (, ) <-- , or (, , ) <-- . ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From iglesias at axia.it Sun Mar 28 16:54:18 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 08:54:18 PST Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: However, in the area around the city of Rome itself, unlike the country districts of Lazio, the language has changed even more due to the outside influence of Tuscan, itself a descendant of Latin, but with an Etruscan substrate. The pre-modern "romanesco" dialect, as spoken for example in the last century, was not a pure local dialect of Lazio, descended without interruption from Latin, but was strongly influenced by Tuscan, cf. Corsican. Secondly, the present spoken language in the city of Rome is the Roman version of the Italian language, itself based on the Florentine dialect of Tuscan, and of course influenced by the "romanesco" substrate. ---------- [ moderator snip ] > I'll make an exception to my policy of only replying to statements when I > disagree: This is simply too good and too important to pass unnoticed. In > Finno-Ugric linguistics it was for a long time a matter of hot debate > which Finnish sound changes were due to Germanic influence - and which > ones to Baltic. It may have dawned on the field since then that any > language can change by itself, but simple things just need to be said once > in a while. > Jens From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 28 18:59:41 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 18:59:41 GMT Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia In-Reply-To: <199903272306.SAA28828@cliff.Uottawa.Ca> Message-ID: Robert Orr wrote: >Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a >zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku - "herd(?)". >While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., >"wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the >extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely >nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. >forms would be a desideratum. >Any references? Illich-Svitych's "Opyt" of course contains the entries #238 (vol. I) *K.u"jnA "wolf, dog" (PAA *k(j)n/*k(j)l, *k(w)l "dog, wolf", PIE *k^wo:n-/*k^un- "dog", PU *ku"jna" "wolf") and #375 (vol. III) *p`ok.we "livestock" (PAA *bk.r "cattle, ox", PIE *pek^u- "livestock", Alt. *p`oke-r^ "ox, cattle"). I haven't seen Hamp on *pek^u ~ *k^uon, but the only evidence for a connection I can think of is Slavic pIsU "dog" (*pik^-, from *pek^-?). What else is there? Any theory about the PIE "dog" word should deal with the irregular Latin form canis (*k^an-). All I can suggest about it is that there may be an alternation Lat. a ~ *aw, as is also seen in Lat. caput ~ Pre-Gmc. *kawput? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Mar 28 20:25:20 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:25:20 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <42074505.36fc4f6b@aol.com> Message-ID: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >>mcv at wxs.nl writes: >>Definitely *much* more. West Germanic started to split up c. 500 BC >>(Mallory's Jastorf Iron Age) >-- This is a strange statement, given the virtual uniformity of West Germanic >until the Migrations period. I don't think we have any attestation of any West Germanic language before c. AD 700, so I wonder what this "virtual uniformity" is based on. >The Jastorf Iron Age culture also shows a high degree of uniformity. But apparently, it didn't extend to Scandinavia, where East and North Germanic were spoken. >The >first runic inscriptions, from the 3rd-4th century on, are still virtually >proto-Germanic. Debatable. Enc.Brit. : "The scantiness of the material (fewer than 300 words) makes it impossible to be sure of the relationship of this language to Germanic and its daughter languages. It is traditionally known as Proto-Scandinavian but shows few if any distinctively North Germanic features and may reflect a stage, sometimes called Northwest Germanic, prior to the splitting of North and West Germanic (but after the separation of Gothic)." It should be noted that this so-called "Northwest Germanic" phase postdates the "Gotho-Nordic" phase, which accounts for the similarities between North and East Germanic. We have: Proto-Germanic / \ West Germanic North-East Germanic \ / \ ("North-West Germanic") East Germanic / \ West Germanic North Germanic >>The split with North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that, >>possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age). >-- hell, in 1500 BCE there probably wasn't much difference between proto- >Germanic and the other northwestern IE languages, much less within proto- >Germanic. I don't think so. >>Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are similar, but >>they're not in any way "virtually the same language". The differences are >>far greater than between Swedish and Danish. >-- apparently not with any profit. The languages (or, better, dialects) are >clearly mutually intelligible; the differences are comparable to those between >English dialects. Broad Yorkshire and Deep Texas are considerably more >distinct. >Or don't you think that "tam amavantem yazatem" is similar to "tam amavantam >yajatam"? Of course it is. But the fragment was chosen deliberately to stress the similarities between Gatha Avestan and Vedic. I suggest you compare the Sanskrit and Avestan entries in C.D. Buck's dictionary to get a more balanced impression of the similarities and differences between the two languages (admittedly, Buck's entries are mostly Classical Sanskrit and later Avestan). A direct comparison between Gathic and Vedic verbs is found in Beekes' "A Grammar of Gatha-Avestan", pp. 200-216: "17.1. In the following pages the Gathic verbal system will be compared with that of the Rigveda. This is important, because Gathic has the same system as Vedic, whereas in Late Avestan the aorist is moribund [...] 17.2. Results We find the following numbers: 159 verbal roots in Gatha-Avestan; 36 roots have no corresponding root in Sanskrit; 7 roots have a doubtful correspondence in Sanskrit; 116 roots remain that have a corresponding form in Sanskrit; [...] 78 roots remain that have an exactly corresponding formation in Sanskrit for all their stems (often only one stem is known in Gathic)" This stresses both the similarities (the verbal systems are virtually identical) and the differences (almost 25% of the Gathic verbal roots are not etymologically connected to Vedic verbal roots). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 28 20:51:43 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 14:51:43 -0600 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <36fe91a6.87869981@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] >>Avestan: tam amavantam yazatem >>Sanskrit: tam amavantam yajatam >> surem damohu sevistem >> suram dhamasu savistham >> mithrem yazai zaothrabyo >> mitram yajai hotrabyah >Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are >similar, but they're not in any way "virtually the same >language". The differences are far greater than between Swedish >and Danish. >[ Moderator's comment: > I'm not sure that the attested differences are much greater than between, > for example, the forms of Spanish spoken today in Madrid, Buenos Aires, > Caracas, and Mexico DF. > --rma ] HMMM. Those forms of Spanish are pretty close. Each has a distinguishing feature or two but other than that, they're virtually identical. You can "fish" out contrasting features to make them look more different than they are. And, of course, working class dialects will be more diverse. The intonation and rhythm are what really distinguishes those forms. [ Moderator's reply: There are of course extremely noticeable phonological differences among the four forms I named, as well as lexical distinctions. If these were written in a broad phonetic transcription, rather than the standardized spelling of Madrid, we might think them more different than they are. My point, really. --rma ] From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Mar 28 21:00:13 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 15:00:13 -0600 Subject: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <002c01be7874$70f69420$36f0abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: My wife, who is from Costa Rica, uses the periphrastic perfect pretty much like English present perfect as well as an emphatic form of the preterite corresponding to English "did you?" "have you ever?" And this is the usage I've run into among most people. >Miguel said: >>In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect has been abandoned in favour of >>the preterit. >Interesting - it seems the opposite of what we see in the sprach-bund of >France, South Germany, Northern Italy, where the preterit is being abandoned >in favour of the periphrastic perfect. >What does North American Spanish do, and what does Canadian French do? >Peter From jorna at web4you.dk Sun Mar 28 18:30:03 1999 From: jorna at web4you.dk (Carol Jensen) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 20:30:03 +0200 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <36fe91a6.87869981@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: At 14:22 26-03-1999 GMT, you wrote: JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too. Avestan and Sankrit are >similar, but they're not in any way "virtually the same >language". The differences are far greater than between Swedish >and Danish. I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic and Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then like virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and Danish. Now Norwegian, one variety, is virtually the same as Danish, for political reasons. Carol Jensen From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 29 01:10:24 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 17:10:24 PST Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: FROM SOMEBODY (I forgot who, sorry): A question: IE *{kuon} (likely *{kewon} before zero-grading started) = Modern Chinese {chu"an} (Wade-Giles spelling), Ancient Chinese *{kywan} (1 syllable) = "dog". ROBERT ORR: Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku- "herd(?)". While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., "wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. forms would be a desideratum. I'm not sure what "evidence" Robert is refering to but this proposed etymology of *k^won from *pekuon has always given me upset stomach. Until we find a *p- before that word in some attested language, it's all but one of many possibilities (Probably the unlikeliest possibility too). I find the original concept the most reasonable - *k^won has been reduced from a longer form **kewon. It explains the palatalization of the velar without positing an arbitrary consonant that conveniently disappears even though there is little evidence for such a thing happening in IE besides the *d- in *dekm (which I have an alternative explanation for). As well, such a reduction due to stress accent is less awkward. Allan Bomhard reconstructs a Nostratic item, #652 *k[h]uwan-/*khuw at n- "dog", to account for both IE *k^won and AfroAsiatic with similar forms. Illych-Svitych's earlier Nostratic reconstruction of #238 *K.u"jnA "wolf, dog" (? AA *k(j)n/*k(j)l, *k(w)l "dog, wolf"; IE *k^uo:n/k^un- "dog"; Uralic *ku"jna" "wolf") is mentioned and is also based on Uralic forms like Lapp "wolf"; Mordvin/Udmurt "wolf"; Cheremis/Komi "wolf", all of which Bomhard had trouble finding at the time of his publication of "Studia Nostratica, 1 - Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis" by Signum Desktop Publishing, Charleston, SC (1996) Not knowing alot of detail behind the forms sited for AA, it looks intriguing but IE and AA are very far apart. I'd be interested to know if others have found these forms in Uralic that Illych-Svitych mentions and if so, could they simply be borrowed from IE? -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Mon Mar 29 01:22:07 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 17:22:07 PST Subject: Tense & Aspect Message-ID: PETER: Interesting - it seems the opposite of what we see in the sprach-bund of France, South Germany, Northern Italy, where the preterit is being abandoned in favour of the periphrastic perfect. What does North American Spanish do, and what does Canadian French do? In French, I'm aware of only two past tenses being commonly spoken (as opposed to written). One is for ongoing actions such as "I was going" and the other for actions that are sudden or that happen once as in "I have gone". I can't think of much else. There're other past forms, like the pluperfect for instance, but they're pretty much restricted to literature and aren't heard much. Mais, ch'ais po, ch'uis anglo. :) -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Mon Mar 29 02:46:02 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 18:46:02 PST Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: >From: Rick Mc Callister >Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 16:46:33 -0600 >Does Basque -ar have a connection with Spanish -ar/-al? ><-al> --on the whole-- is a dialect form >[e.g. Central American ], >as well as an allophonic form /-al/ >in dialects where final /-r > -l/ >although there are certain forms that use /-al/ everywhere >/-ar/ is the more common form >Spanish -ar/-al is commonly used for groves of certain trees e.g. >pinar, pinal "pine grove" >mazanar "apple grove" [no apple trees in Central America, so no *manzanales] >naranjal "orange grove" > >but oddly, a pear tree is a [ moderator snip ] Rick, I don't know what the answer is to your question. Nor do I know how this ending is explained in Romance languages (I assume it appears in other ones). But I would like to ask Larry the following. In reference to what you say above, do you mean to infer, therefore, that there are/were once two suffixes in Euskera both spelled <-ar> but with different meanings? Or that they might be (have been) related? I am referring to the fact that the suffixing particle <-ar/-tar> is alive and well in Euskera. However, to my knowledge its meaning is not precisely that of a "collective suffix" and it clearly is not "fossilized" in any sense of the word. I'm thinking of the <-ar> of expressions like (from "on the verge of death" or the common use of <-ar/-tar> to refer to "someone or something from a given place (with no gender or animacy/inanimacy specified), "oriundo de", e.g., "someone from Bilbao." Certainly the same particle also seems to shows up occasionally as a suffix on free-standing root-stems, in contrast to the examples that you give where (at least today) there is no free-standing root-stem. At the moment none of the former examples come to mind (I don't have my files here), but, as I recall, their referentiality might be closer to what you are trying to get at with the above. Nonetheless, to my knowledge, in Euskera this last ending is never used to create collective abstractions of the type "apple-grove". As you well know, to construct those abstractions the suffix regularly used (today) is <-di/-ti>. Since we already have the suffixing element <-ar> "male" occupying this slot, to add a third member would make for a pretty crowded closet.... In other words, do you see the possibility that <-ar/-tar> mentioned above might be connected in some way to the "fossilized" ending you are discussing? Beste bat arte, Roz March 28, 1999 From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Mon Mar 29 03:05:49 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 19:05:49 PST Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: >From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) >Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 15:11:06 GMT Miguel Carrasquer Vidal said: [snip] >There are more possible examples. Classics are Bq. hartz "bear" >~ Celtic *artos, This is a particularly interesting example. Can anyone give me a synopsis of Karalinuunas' article on "Reflexes of IE *h2rtko- "bear" in Baltic" (JIES Vol. XX1, num. 3-4)? Just curious. Are any of the reflexes diminutives? Also, any other recent bibliography on this specific topic would be most welcome. I already have the reference to Paveluescu's "The Name of the 'Great Bear'" (JIES XVI, num 1 & 2), although I haven't read it yet. Roz Frank March 28, 1999 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 04:07:59 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 23:07:59 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/25/99 9:32:03 PM, mcv at wxs.nl wrote: <> I understand that I misuderstood "optical." I don't think I'm way out of line in seeing this "masking effect" as an everyday occurence. Dominant languages and dialects have their run of the media - pre-printing press writing in particular - that makes them "optical" to later observers. Governments, merchants, religions, military, scholars, scribes, bards and skalds all need a language that stays stable in time, sound, form and meaning. Various methods are used to create that stability - by standardizing language. This need to standardize fights the natural tendency to change and splinter. In those areas and layers of society where the power to standardize becomes minimal, the dominant language speakers and dialectical speakers are not subject to the controls that are meant to prevent change. Standardized languages, of course, tend to become archaic or specialized because they generally cannot keep up with external changes (new ideas, new things, new borrowings) as well as looser disciplined languages or dialects. In the meantime, non-standardized versions become more vital and are picked up by emerging social forces. But because the dominant standardized tongue still has control of the preserving media (writing, bards, clerics, etc.) during the process, the newly emerging dialects and languages will in some circumstances appear full blown - as it did in the case of the Romance languages. In Comrie's TWMLs, the commentator notes that Italian only appears for the first time in the official records (otherwise Latin) as a piece of verbatim testimony by a witness in a legal case in the 1200's. This is a rather predictable way for a non- standardized language to sneak into written records. The interesting corrolary question to this is what is standardizing the non- literate underlanguages and dialectics before they can get into writing. This is relevant because it might indicate what could have standardized *PIE or its immediate daughter languages - if they were standardized, which they should have been. In pre-literate standardized languages, we see writing emerge as pretty much a function of commercial and governmental record keeping (e.g., Linear B) or diplomacy (e.g., stelae inscriptions, Rosetta stones, Hittite epistles). However, broader textual examples seem to arise out of oral traditions that preserve the language and meaning of cultural/religious matters (e.g., Homeric Greek, Gothic Skeireins, the Eddas, Sanskrit, Church Slavonic, Gilgamesh, etc.) It would seem that there are two different veins of standardization, and the cultural/religious vein has a claim to stronger standardization because it is more amenable to preservation by oral tradition than commercial or governmental language. In fact, the oral traditions are so strong that the languages are already becoming "archaic" when they come into writing. (Meter, a memory aiding tool, also specializes these language examples.) I wrote: <> mcv at wxs.nl replied: <> Both suggest - from what I understand - much more than at work than agriculture. Both seem to have carried a bundle of new technology with them, along with strong new trade ties and population advantages from the start. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 29 04:34:40 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 04:34:40 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <19990328032623.17159.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: "Glen Gordon" wrote: >MIGUEL: > But you seem to imply that inanimate nouns (always?) had an > ending -d/-t, which I cannot agree with. The *-d is pronominal > only. We do have cases like Skt. yakrt "liver" (as well as asrk > "blood", with unexplained -k), and generalized Greek -at- < *-nt- > (onoma, onomatos etc.). But except for the n and n/r stems, all > other neuters have a zero ending [or *-m in the o-stems]. >"We may have this, we may have that but aside from even more evidence on >your side..." - this is basically what you're saying. It's much simpler >to say that the neuter was generally marked with *-d unless the word >already ended with another declensional suffix, isn't it? It's much simpler, but unfortunately the neuter was *never* marked with *-d in nouns and adjectives. >MIGUEL: > What happened was that there were neuter stems in -nt (and -nk?), as > well as plain -n (and -r?). Just like we have m/f stems in -n(s), > -nt(s) and -r(s). In absolute auslaut (because of -0 ending), these > developed to -r (-n, -r) and -:r (-nt, -nk) and tended to merge into > a single r/n heteroclitic paradigm. One might object that there > *are* a number of neuter n-stems, but most of them end in -m(e)n, > where the preceding nasal consonant may have prevented the regular > development of -n > -r. >Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx). >Endings of >the sort *-n(s), *-nt(s) and *-r(s) all end in *-s (very badly done). >Similarly, the heteroclitic and pronominal forms with *-d derive from >*-d. Simple, no? Simple, but again there *are* no heteroclitic forms with *-d. What we have is a couple of *-t's (from neuter nt-stems, I say). I haven't got the time to check all the facts, but on p. 176 of Beekes Comparative IE, there's an interesting table, listing the possible PIE consonant/sonorant stems: n. -s -r/n -l/n -n -i -u mf. -s -r -l -n -i -u -k -t -nt -m -H1 -H2 (Where neuter l/n-stems consist of one word only, and n-stems are mostly -mn). There is not a shred of evidence that the neuter nom/acc. forms should be derived from *-sd, *-rd/*-nd/*-ld, *-id or *-ud. On the other hand, it *is* interesting to speculate about what might have caused the heteroclitics, what happened to neuter -k, -t, -nt, -m stems, and what the laryngeal stems are all about. I like JER's suggestion of -n > -r (and I would add -nt > -r(t), to explain yakrt etc., and -mn > -mn to explain the neuter n-stems), and I like (of course) my own suggestion of -t > -H1, -k > -H2 (which would make the feminines in -H2 (-H1?) originally neuters, which is good). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam [ Moderator's comment: I'm a little confused: If *-t# > *-H_1# and *-k# > *-H_2#, what do you mean by *-t and *-k in your table above? Or are all of those to be read as *-t-, *-k-, ktl.? --rma ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 05:38:44 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 00:38:44 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/27/99 11:46:34 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu wrote: <> Not serendipitous by a long shot. The fact that they were using a local Slavic dialect in no way changes the strong historical evidence that Church Slavonic was developed as a missionary tool for converting Slavs to eastern Christianity and thereby bringing them within its sphere of political influence. Emperor Micheal says as much. The creation of a uniform Slavic liturgical language also permitted a uniform language of mission and diplomacy. This use of the vernacular for liturgy however ran right up against the German and Italian bishops who were introducing the same vernacular in Latin, and would get Cyril and Methodius's Greek clergy kicked out of Bohemia. Also, the Greeks may not have realized that assuming a uniform Slavic dialect would already create difficulty in the far northwest - Richard Fletcher mentions this in The Barbarian Conversions. The tradition that the Serbs were orginally from the Sorbs who lived on the Elbe presumed a common language that may not exactly have been there. And this may have accounted for why the German bishops were able to prevail against the Greeks in the Slavic west, despite the Greek trump card of being able to transmit the religion in the vernacular. BTW, the story is that when Emperor Micheal III sends Cyril and Methodius to Moravia (the lower Moravia), he says "You two are from Thesslonica, and all Thessalonians speak the [Slavic] tongue well." This mission is in evidence and tradition the first appearance of Glagolitic (before the adoption of Cyrillic) and Old Church Slavonic. Cyril preaches and trains other missionaries in OCS and these will be successful in Serbia, Bulgaria and Russia. But the Slavs of Thessaly end up worshiping in and speaking Greek. In STANDARD LANGUAGE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CULTURE AND THE PRODUCT OF NATIONAL HISTORY by Pavle Ivic (Porthill Publ 1995) the author write: <>. In reading pieces of the above, one gets an unshakeable impression that the old saw that Slavic was pretty much a unitary language in 500ace is partly an artifact of the subsequent standardization accomplished by OCS (as well as the rise of the western Slavic states.) Southern and eastern Slavic may have in fact been more fractured before that, though we have no direct evidence either way before OCS. Regards, Steve Long From mcv at wxs.nl Mon Mar 29 06:49:43 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 06:49:43 GMT Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: >The point was that the difference between Greek and Vedic Sanskrit and their >common ancestor could be explained geographically. Not "geographically". The main factor is time. >I was saying was that when speakers of a common language go to different >geographical locations, their languages will predictably lose commonality. >This is rather obvious and I'm sure you are making some other point, but I'll >address it just to be clear. Distance in terms of geography will predictably >have an effect on the way two languages diverge from a common ancestor. It's not a function of distance. If we compare Greek and Sanskrit the actual distance does not matter one bit. What matters is contact, and no contact is no contact, no matter if there's 100, 1,000 or 10,000 km in between. Conversely, English borrowings are entering almost all languages of the world at this time, without there being _geographical_ contact with any English speaking region. >In an old post re "the Danube Homeland" dated 3/6/99, you wrote: <importantly, the "Kurgan" model cannot adequately explain the linguistic >facts. The gap between Anatolian and the rest of IE is too large to be fitted >into the limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements into SE Europe. The >unique features of Western languages like Germanic,... also remain largely >unexplained.>> Aren't you suggesting that the "Kurgan" model - in terms of >time and distance -needs to "explain the linguistics facts" here? Isn't "the >limited time allowed by the Kurgan movements" a function of distance? >And what about "peripheral conservatism?" Isn't that really a matter of >distance or what is peripheral about? It's about location. There are indeed cases where location (geography) matters. We expect "archaisms" to turn up in peripheral, or mountainous areas, where isogloss waves do not travel so fast or so often. But that doesn't mean that "peripheral" languages don't change: they do, and the changes often look very striking (odd, bizarre), precisely because they are shared by no-one else. And it doesn't mean that archaisms cannot survive in central areas. They do. ><language change. It just happens.>> >And this is so obviously untrue that I can only think that I've misunderstood >you here, once again. >[ Moderator's comment: > Modern Icelandic has, until very recently, been unaffected by linguistic > externals, yet it has changed radically in pronunciation from Old Norse. > You have obviously misunderstood MCV's point: Languages change, and they > do so without external cause. The existence of external forces in some > kinds of linguistic change do not necessitate their existence in all forms > of change. > --rma ] Precisely. There are all kinds of external factors: borrowings, sub-, super- and adstrates, Sprachbunde, etc. There are also geographical factors: peripheralisms, innovative cores, etc. But change itself just happens (for one thing it's an inevitable result of the language learning process). If there's something external that can be used as a trigger or source, it may well be utilized, but then again it may not and instead some new and completely random change will take place. Or no change takes place, for no reason. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 08:26:55 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 03:26:55 EST Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: In a message dated 3/27/99 9:10:56 PM, jer at cphling.dk wrote: <> But the question was slightly different: Assuming two daughter languages (Greek/Sanskrit) of a parent tongue are separated by distance, does the amount of distance make a difference? The original point was that there is enough geographical distance between the two to account for differences even in the short term, even given the ordinary natural changes each would go through on its own. The answer given was that lack of "mutual contact" would at least account for why they don't develop in the same direction. As far as the even more original point - the similarity of the aorist in Greek and Sanskrit and whether that says something about time and descent of the two languages - I thought that was such a striking common feature that perhaps it deserved some special attention. If the aorist is found nowhere in the world but in this little corner of IE, then the possibility that both languages developed it independently would seem a little bit unlikely. But who's to say. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 09:04:34 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 04:04:34 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/29/99 2:09:37 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <> I've been looking for the historical source for that idea for awhile, specifically with regard to the northwestern Slavs (the Wends), Czechs and Poles, etc. But I haven't found it. The problem with this assertion about OCS and that group is that it is difficult to find instances where many western Slavic speakers would have been even exposed to OCS. Developed in the mid 9th century, OCS and Greek Orthodoxy were pretty much one and the same. The Wilczi, Obrodorites, Pomeranians, etc. were fundamentally abject pagans circled on all sides by Latin-speaking Christians from the 600's to the late 1100's and would have had little contact, much less need for OCS. The Poles and Czechs were also Latin Christians from very shortly after or before the beginnings of OCS. In another post, I quoted a historian who seems to say that OCS consolidated the languages of the Serbs, Bulgars and Russians - so I'm not sure that the comprehensibility didn't to some degree come from OCS rather than being a reflection of it. <> Well, in the meantime, there has been a high degree of mutual contact too. The teaching of Polish was banned for example for a time under the Tsarist occupation and Polish speakers would have been exposed to Russian as the dominant language. Czechs also have heard a fair amount of Russian in the last 50 years. Some western Slavic speakers do nevertheless have a bit of difficulty with Serbian except on the basic level. The standardizing function of OCS is nevertheless something worth considering: "During... the ninth century, two educated Byzantines from Salonica, the brothers Constantine (later known as Cyril from his monastic life) and Methodius, with their knowledge of the Slavonic language spoken [in Thessaly], translated the most important Orthodox religious books into Slavonic by order of the Byzantine emperor Michael. By the end of the tenth century, the language of those translations had become the liturgical and literary language of most Slavs in the area encompassing the Adriatic and Aegean seas and all the way to northern Russia... Old Church Slavonic... thus entered the family of great universal languages of Christian Europe, parallel to Greek and Latin. Beyond the borders of the Christian world, similar roles were played by Hebrew, classical Arabic and Sanskrit.>> - Pavle Ivic, STANDARD LANGUAGE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CULTURE AND THE PRODUCT OF NATIONAL HISTORY (Porthill Publ 1995) Regards, Steve Long From adolfoz at tin.it Mon Mar 29 09:14:40 1999 From: adolfoz at tin.it (Adolfo Zavaroni) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 10:14:40 +0100 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] > Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: > >I think that Etruscan /z/ in most cases corresponds to IE /st/ both at > >the beginning and in the middle of a word. > Miguel Carrasquer Vidal (mcv at wxs.nl) asked: > Why? I add that the southern Etr. (SAN) = northern is a fricative dental (likely weaker than /z/). In Raetic too and mark a fricative. This explains a lot of words that allow a reliable interpretation of the sentences: Etr. zam- < *stembh- Etr. zan- < *stan- 'stand, statue' etc. Etr. zat- < *stat- (Lat. statuo, satelles) Etr. zarf- < *sterbh- Etr. s/aukh- < *stakhuk- 'wound' (lat. saucio) Etr. sa/t- < *stakhat- 'to prick, afflict' Etr. zec, s/ec < *steg- 'mark, sign' (Lat. signo) Etr. s/ikh- 'to sign; to investigate' Etr. zar-, s/ar, s/er- 'rigid, stiff, solid' (Lat. sterilis) Etr. s/ert- 'star, bright' < *stered- Etr. zia < *stigha- (lat. si/ca) Etr. zik(h)u- < *steig(h)- 'incide, write' Etr. zeri < *zeheri < *steig(h)- 'incision, writing' Etr. zil- and s/el- < *stel- 'order, govern' Etr. zip- < *stip- (lat. sti/po) Etr. zivas < *stew- (lat. sti/va) 'to assist, direct' Etr. ziz- < *stist- (Lat. sisto) Etr. zuk, s/uk- < *stuk- 'stock, piece, part' (Lat. socius) Etr. zus- < *stus- < *stu(n)d-s- (Lat. studeo, ON stunda 'streben') Etr. zut(h), s/uth- < *studh- (ON. OE. sto/dh) Etr. s/ure < *staur- (lat. su/rus, restauro) Etr. supri = lat. stupendus (-ri gerundive morph.) Etr. s/ep- < *step- Etr. caz- < *cast- < *kwedh-t- 'sharp, acute' Etr. vez- < *vest- < *khwedh-t- (see above) I could continue; but likely it would be useless. As I don't know to explain why this happened, I asked if the same result is known in other languages. In the middle of the word an original -th-t- ( > IE. -st- ) may be supposed (cf. Celt. ss < -dh-t-). According to Helmut Rix, "Raetisch und Etrusckisch", 1998, p. 52, the letters , , , in both languages (which are cognate) mark "im Anlaut ... stimmlosen Spiranten /f/, /kh/, /th/", but in Etruscan , could mark also "palatisierte /p'/ und /t'/". Then a particular emphasis could give s+th' > s+z > z. The equivalence = is attested in Raetic where the word is written also , while the interchange between initial and mean

and is attested too. In Etruscan

, and alternate in every position of the word, but and in general alternate in the middle and at the end of a word only. I should like to know other suggestions. Adolfo Zavaroni From lmfosse at online.no Mon Mar 29 14:42:16 1999 From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 16:42:16 +0200 Subject: SV: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: Carol Jensen [SMTP:jorna at web4you.dk] skrev 28. mars 1999 20:30: > I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic > and Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then > like virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and > Danish. Now Norwegian, one variety, is virtually the same as Danish, for > political reasons. Ahem.... As a Norwegian, I must protest. The variety of Norwegian called Bokmaal is certainly in its written form very similar to Danish, but the spoken language is a different matter. However, tests show that Norwegian has a kind of intermediate position between Danish and Swedish, so that Danes and Swedes are better able to understand Norwegian than each other. Otherwise, communication may influenced by the fact that Danes and Norwegians love each other, whereas noone loves the Swedes. (Sorry, Swedes.....) Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax: +47 22 32 12 19 MobilSvar: 914 03 654 From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Mar 29 15:13:31 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 10:13:31 EST Subject: Sw, Dan and Nor Message-ID: In a message dated 3/29/99 4:40:40 AM, you wrote: <> Apparently, the differences between Sw, Dan and Nor (NN and BN) are a bit complex and in some ways recent. The commonalities and differences have created a situation along phonologic and lexical lines where it has been said that "Norweigan is Danish spoken in Swedish." A late developing difference is in southern scandinavian to voice "short fortis stops p, t, k to b, d, g after vowels," and going even further in Danish proper, "turning d and g into spirants or even vocalic glides" - though this apparently has not been reflected in spelling. It is said that this and "a general devoicing of lenis consonants" makes Danish word endings "difficult for other Scandinavians to hear correctly." Also the accentual system in Nor and Sw use of "tonemes" is observably different in Danish where the 'stod' or thrust sometimes takes the place of the "rising or falling melodies" one hears in the other two languages. One can sometimes distinctly hear the difference between Swedish and Danish even if it is hard to hear what is being spoken. Conversely, I'm told Norweigans and Swedes speaking may recognize or hear each other's words relatively easily, but not understand what the words mean. This once again brings up what the measure of difference between languages, especially if those differences are supposed to tell us about the time since separation of languages with presumed common ancestry. The recent Danish phonological development mentioned above is an example where current lack of mutual comprehension is not due to any early split and therefore perhaps does not tell us much about the matter of time of separation. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Mar 29 17:39:25 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 18:39:25 +0100 Subject: Latin /a/ Message-ID: Miguel spoke of >the >irregular Latin form canis (*k^an-). And gave a connection to explain the /a/. I would be interested in other suggestions. There are a number of words where Latin has an /a/ which does not appear to be from a syllabic laryngeal (e.g. where it corresponds to Sanskrit /a/ rather than Skt /i/), and where it does not appear to be from h2e (e.g. where it does not correspond to /a/ in Greek). Some occur before /n/, so may be from syllabic /n./ somehow, although the reason for the syllabicity escapes me at times (e.g. madeo & mando = to chew [not man-do = to command]; pando, prandeo, scando, langueo). Others occur near /v/ (e.g. faveo, lavo, caveo, paveo). Others do not occur near a resonant (e.g. capio, scabo). Any ideas? Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 17:59:35 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 12:59:35 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >So we have a) a continuous record of mummies from the earliest times down to >the times of the Tocharian texts (with a clear and foolproof indication that >the most recent ones were Tocharian speaking - I mean an indication other than >their being palefaces ? -- yes. The texts show that in historic times Tocharian was being spoken in those areas. b) it is common knowledge that the people who wrote/read/used the Tocharian texts *were* palefaces in the first place and -- yes; their own art depicts them as of the same type as the mummies, the chinese chronicles record them as pale, big-nosed and with peculiar light- colored eyes and hair. c) the identification of race and language is correct and the one thing to do after all ? -- as Cavalli-Sforza points out, while there's no one-to-one correpsondence between genes and language, there are consistent links. Language barriers tend to correspond with genetic clines, at least in the Old World. (Areas of post-Renaissance European expansion are another matter.) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 18:06:51 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:06:51 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >But the field is bored by this, saying hell, we cannot identify race and >language and that's bad. We could have such a tremendous number of positive >hypotheses if we could, so why don't we (tacitly, if need be) declare this >procedure possible after all ? -- taboos eventually wear out and die. This one had nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with the political/cultural repercussions of WWII. That's receeding into history now. You should bone up on Cavalli-Sforza's work, using genetic analysis to trace prehistoric migrations. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 18:05:07 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:05:07 EST Subject: Mummies of Urumchi Message-ID: >Georg at home.ivm.de writes: >a smooth development over time" is exactly what archaeologists tell us >about people there. No indication of the arrival of different people from >somewhere else over a considerable span of millennia. This can only mean >(and it has been said by Balticists !) that the Baltic region is simply >the Urheimat der Indogermanen. Now do we follow this ? We have to, by the >"usual standards of the field" ... >> -- actually, there's one clear disruption in the archaeological continuity of the area; the Corded Ware/Battle Axe expansion of the late 4th and early 3rd millenia. The extreme conservatism of the Baltic IE languages would support this; no significant outside contact (except peripherally with Finno-Ugrian speakers) since then. In point of fact, since the introduction of the Corded Ware material complex coincided with the beginnings of agriculture in much of that area, implying (as in the Tarim Basin) the absence of a large substratum population, you could make a very good case for the Balts being the other 'pole' indicating of the type of the early IE-speakers. And they do, of course, look much like the Tarim Basin mummies; or the Tarim Basin mummies share many characteristics with Lithuanians, to put it in reverse. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 18:22:00 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:22:00 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >What evidence is there that this view of Medieval Latin is any different from >the texts we have in Hittite, Mycenaean, Sanskrit, Homeric Greek, etc.? -- try proving a negative. This is silly beyond words. I need merely point out that when Mycenaean Greek was decyphered in the early 1950's, it contained exactly the sound patterns which reconstructive linguistics had predicted. (Eg., 'gwous' rather than 'bous' for "cattle") >First of all, Latin stayed a spoken as well as written language for well over >a thousand years. It was elitist, but it was SPOKEN -- you're confused as to the definition of "spoken". This generally means a natural language, one learned by children from their mothers and used for everyday communication. Latin was not a spoken language in this sense after the Migrations period. As early as the 4th century AD authors were commenting on the gap between the 'vulgar' tongue and the written form, which was mutating into the various Romance languages. The written form merely maintained the polite spoken form of the late Republic and early Empire, somewhat popularized in early Church writings. >In fact, that would make the most sense, because the regular dialects mutated >too fast from generation to generation and so were therefore too unreliable >for writing records or other important information. -- this statement is incoherent and incomprehensible. Incidentally, most preliterate cultures aren't even aware that language changes over time. They have no sense of historic time; they see the past as very much like the present. Even medieval Europeans thought this way. That's why Chaucer has Trojans dressing, speaking and acting like his contemporaries, and why the chanson du gest have King David and Alexander the Great as medieval-style knights. They just didn't know any different. >It was meant to be conservative. -- once a language is no longer used and learned by children from their parents, it fossilizes because it's not subject to the usual pressures of linguistic change. The pace of change in it slows down dramatically. Meanwhile, the actual day-to-day language changes right on, unaffected. Moreoever, no language starts out this way. Vedic Sanskrit was a living language when the first of the Vedas was composed (albeit it was a rather flowery, poetic form). It became fossilized later. >Nyet. Latin did both. It stayed a standard languages while it also >splintered into other dialects and languages. -- nope. It died as a living tongue and was replaced by the Romance languages. By the eight-ninth century AD, it was dead as the dodo, learned only by the literate in schools. Repeated "renaissances" (the Carolingian, etc.) were required to keep it from disappearing altogether. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Mar 29 18:29:50 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:29:50 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >jorna at web4you.dk writes: >I would protest! Swedish and Danish, to me, are farther apart than Vedic and >Avestan. It's been 30 years since I studied them, but they seemed then like >virtually the same language, which no one could say about Swedish and Danish. -- exactly. If we put the earliest Avestan around 1000 BCE or a little earlier, and the earliest of the Vedas around 1200-1500 BCE, which seems generally accepted... ... then the date for Indo-Iranian unity would be around 2000 BCE. At which point all the Indo-Iranians were still in Central Asia and points north, apparently. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Mar 29 23:35:58 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 17:35:58 -0600 Subject: Distance in change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Frank: Can you elaborate? I've read several in several places that the fricativazation of medial stops is said to be from Etruscan but in others that this phenomenon only dates back to the 1500s or so. But given that Etruscan died out around the time of Caesar, it could not have had too much of an effect on local Italian What I notice about Roman speech is /-L- > 0/ e.g. figlio > "fio" /-nd- > -nn-/ e.g. andiamo > "annamo" >However, in the area around the city of Rome itself, unlike the country >districts of Lazio, the language has changed even more due to the outside >influence of Tuscan, itself a descendant of Latin, but with an Etruscan >substrate. >The pre-modern "romanesco" dialect, as spoken for example in the last >century, was not a pure local dialect of Lazio, descended without >interruption from Latin, but was strongly influenced by Tuscan, cf. >Corsican. >Secondly, the present spoken language in the city of Rome is the Roman >version of the Italian language, itself based on the Florentine dialect of >Tuscan, and of course influenced by the "romanesco" substrate. From roborr at uottawa.ca Tue Mar 30 06:42:27 1999 From: roborr at uottawa.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 01:42:27 -0500 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Hamp's article in IF 1980 deals with all the questions raised in this e-mail. At 06:59 PM 3/28/99 GMT, you wrote: >Robert Orr wrote: >>Actually, there is evidnece to suggest that IE *kuon is probably from a >>zero-grade of *pekuon (*pkuon) > *kuon, and related to *peku - "herd(?)". >>While semantically-based criticisms of comparing *kuon ("dog" > "wolf"., >>"wolf > "dog" is almost a commonplace sematic development, although the >>extinction of the wolf over vast territories makes it a little less likely >>nowadays) will not do, a comparison between IE *pekuon and Nostratic, etc. >>forms would be a desideratum. >>Any references? >Illich-Svitych's "Opyt" of course contains the entries #238 (vol. >I) *K.u"jnA "wolf, dog" (PAA *k(j)n/*k(j)l, *k(w)l "dog, wolf", >PIE *k^wo:n-/*k^un- "dog", PU *ku"jna" "wolf") and #375 (vol. >III) *p`ok.we "livestock" (PAA *bk.r "cattle, ox", PIE *pek^u- >"livestock", Alt. *p`oke-r^ "ox, cattle"). >I haven't seen Hamp on *pek^u ~ *k^uon, but the only evidence for >a connection I can think of is Slavic pIsU "dog" (*pik^-, from >*pek^-?). What else is there? >Any theory about the PIE "dog" word should deal with the >irregular Latin form canis (*k^an-). All I can suggest about it >is that there may be an alternation Lat. a ~ *aw, as is also seen >in Lat. caput ~ Pre-Gmc. *kawput? >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl >Amsterdam From iglesias at axia.it Sun Mar 28 16:39:46 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 08:39:46 PST Subject: Sancho In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick McCallister wrote: >So then what is the "Aragonese" spoken in the mountains of Navarra that >I've read about? The only census data I have (1995) on Navarra-Nafarroa indicates only: Basque speakers (Euskaldunes-Euskaldunak) bilinguals 10.22% partial bilinguals 16.40% and non Basque speakers (Erdaldunes-Erdaldunak). 83.44% Also, Alonso Zamora Vicente in "Dialectologi'a espan~ola", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1979, shows the language frontier as coinciding with the Navarra-Arago'n border. I have no other information. Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From iglesias at axia.it Mon Mar 29 03:21:56 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 19:21:56 PST Subject: R: Re: Tense & Aspect In-Reply-To: <002c01be7874$70f69420$36f0abc3@niywlxpn> Message-ID: > Miguel said: > >In Spanish America, the periphrastic perfect has been abandoned in > >favour of the preterit. 1) In the Castilian spoken in *Galicia* ("Castrapo"), the usage is as in Argentinian Spanish See Pilar Va'quez Cuesta, "Grama'tica Portuguesa", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1971, p. 95, who speaks of "..the preference for the "pret. indefinido" instead of the "perfecto compuesto", i.e. "vi" instead of "he visto". Also, Alonso Zamora Vicente , "Dialectologia espan~ola", Ed. Gredos, Madrid, 1979, p. 208, says that in some *Asturian* regions, the periphrastic perfect is not used and that even in the cultured speech of some families, in Castilian, the use of the composed forms is rejected, e.g. " ? oiste lo que digo? "; " hoy llovio' todo el di'a ". North-West Spain, Galicia and Asturias, is considered, rightly or wrongly, the most Celtic area of Spain. Question 1: Could the enormous number of Galician emigrants have influenced the Spanish of Argentina? I also read elsewhere (Bertil Malmberg, "La Ame'rica hispanohablante", ISTMO, Madrid, 1966, p. 196) that the Argentinian usage is not considered correct elsewhere, for example in Mexico. Peter wrote: > Interesting - it seems the opposite of what we see in the sprach-bund of > France, South Germany, Northern Italy, where the preterit is being > abandoned in favour of the periphrastic perfect. 2) a) The predominant substrate of Latin (and Latin later replaced by High German) in all these areas is Celtic, associated with speakers of La Te'ne iron age culture. b) In Occitan, the language of southern France, the preterit is (or was, considering the present state of the language) still used alongside the periphrastic perfect.. However, as far as I know, the substrate of Southern France was less uniformly and less unquestionably Latenian Gallic, and I have read somewhere that there was probably only a dominant Gallic element co-existing with pre-Gallic (Ligurian?, Iberian?, Vasconic? Aquitanian?) subject masses. Question 2: Could there be a parallel influence of the Celtic substrate both in North-West Spain and in the Sprachbund area in the sense of a rejection of two forms for the past tense, i.e. either the preterit or the periphrastic perfect, but not both? What do the Celtic experts think? Regards Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy iglesias at axia.it From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 30 16:01:19 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:01:19 -0600 Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: <370e64da.176457374@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: >Rick Mc Callister wrote: >>HMMMM. >>Portuguese also has /-u/ but spells it <-o> >The spelling is historical. Portuguese reduces unstressed /o/ to >/u/ (in Brazilian Port. this applies only to posttonic final >position -o > /u/, in Portugal to all unstressed /o/'s, except >absolute initial o-, some learned words, and cases where /o/ >derives from oo < *ono, olC, ou). This is true but I'm wondering whether Portuguese ever did pronounce unstressed and if the spelling might be a convention derived from Spanish From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Mar 30 16:15:01 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:15:01 -0600 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis In-Reply-To: <37118038.183464124@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: [snip] >It should be noted that this so-called "Northwest Germanic" phase >postdates the "Gotho-Nordic" phase, which accounts for the >similarities between North and East Germanic. We have: > Proto-Germanic > / \ > West Germanic North-East Germanic > \ / \ > ("North-West Germanic") East Germanic > / \ > West Germanic North Germanic >>>The split with North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that, >>>possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age). [snip] I've read in some places that the languages formerly spoken in present Jutland, Schleswig & Holstein were "in between" North Germanic & West Germanic and that when the Angles migrated to England, that a gradual linguistic frontier was replaced by a barrier of non-mutually comprehensible languages. On one level this has a certain logic but on the other hand, English & Frisian do seem much closer to Low German. I can appreciate that Frisian may have been affected by Low German and Dutch but English wasn't. Another contradiction that I've seen are charts that list East Germanic with North Germanic. Why all the confusion? Has all of this been straightened out? From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 17:55:48 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 09:55:48 -0800 Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MODERATOR: What happened to your proposed *-d ending in neuter i- and u-stems? What examples do you have in mind? And are you sure they aren't derived from other case forms? I'm interested. List them. [ Moderator's response: You are the one who is claiming that all neuters at one time had a final -d. It is up to you to explain where it went in words such as *peku "herd", *doru "tree", *gonu "knee", and the like. The simpler explanation is that it never existed in those forms. --rma ] ME (GLEN) in response to MIGUEL: In Pre-IE, it was. It can be seen that there was originally only a contrast of animate/inanimate made in the accusative where animate took *-m and inanimate took *-ZERO. When the nominative *-s and nomino-accusative *-d came along, it became a different story. The consistent use of *-s and *-d forms in the nominative (whether just in the pronominal forms or not) MUST be a recent innovation if they are to be linked with Etruscan grammar. Etruscan has no *-d, period. MODERATOR: Where did they come from? Endings do not just jump up out of the grass of the steppes, do they? Funny, I thought I explained this already. The *-s and *-d are from affixed demonstratives. Is this a problem? Maybe you can ask questions with a less arrogant tone next time and read what I write thouroughly before responding too soon. Hostility isn't doing any of us any good, especially the list in general. ME (GLEN): If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE *-k CS *-H2 and IE *-p > CS *-H3. This means that we should see Anatolian languages with a cornucopia of *-k's and *-p's. Is this what we find? MIGUEL: No. We must simply assume that the loss of **-p was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-k, and the loss of **-k was earlier and more complete than the loss of **-t. ME (GLEN): What did you say? "No"? Thank you, that'll be all, your honor. MODERATOR: Nonsense. One postulated development does not require any others. Thus, the fact that we do not find the developments you postulate simply means that no such developments took place; the lack of such developments has no bearing on the existence of others which *did* take place. Mr. Moderator, I hope this is not in reference to my first quote above that starts "If you're saying that IE *-t > CS *-H1 then you have to say that IE..." because this would prove that you are not paying attention to the discussions that are taking place. That quote is referencing an even earlier quote by Miguel where he in fact seems to be positing such a thing. I was simply rephrasing to make absolutely certain that I understood what he was saying and to make it clearer (in terms of time-frames such as Indo-Anatolian vs. Centum-Satem) for my further arguements. Please re-read the archived discussions and get back to me. The fact that Hittite which is suppose to precede these sound changes does not abound with -p's and -k's is very relevant to Miguel's assertions. He might be able to say that Indo-Anatolian *-t becomes a later *-H1 and get away with it but if no evidence exists of *-p to *-H3 as he has stated then this is pure speculation. In terms of Greek and evidence for a -k- (which really shouldn't be there in the first place if *-k became *-H2 in Centum-Satem), I question whether Greek's -k- is archaic or whether this is simply an intrusive phoneme serving to mark the boundaries between vowel-final root and vowel-initial suffix. No doubt the ka-perfect is weaved into this. [ Moderator's deepest apologies: I am sorry. I had missed MCV's claims regarding the possibility of *-p and *-k developing into laryngeals in non-Anatolian Indo-European, and believed that you were setting up a straw man argument against his *-t > *-H_1. I remain agnostic on the latter claim, but like you see no evidence for the former. --rma ] -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Mar 23 09:09:57 1999 From: MCLSSAA2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 09:09:57 GMT Subject: April foolery Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: The following was submitted early for posting in the spirit of the season. Enjoy! --rma ] (1) New evidence has come in about the etymology of the English word "morning": it seems to come from the same root as the Anglo-Saxon verb {ginnian} = "yawn", i.e. "m-yawn-ing", a point likely appreciated by many down the ages. Another theory is that "morning" is a haplologized form of "manure-ning", as (in the time before motor vehicles) the first thing to do in the morning, whatever the weather and how grotty you feel that early, was to go down and across the stable yard and muck the horse out. (2) The usual purpose for keeping cats in the old days being what it was, a connection between "miaow" and "mouse" and "mouth" is obvious. Anthony Appleyard, UMIST, Manchester, UK :: http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 30 23:15:24 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:15:24 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypopothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: In a message dated 3/30/99 05:12:40 PM, I wrote: <> This record actually dates from the 10th Century ace. My apologies. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Mar 30 23:53:09 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:53:09 EST Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? Message-ID: In a message dated 3/26/99 04:30:24 AM, xdelamarre at siol.net wrote: <> I've been confused as to why none of the replies mention a possible Greek connection. I'm may be missing something very obvious again. Please forgive me ahead of time. The old Celtic-Greek contact point in the south of France is well established. "Aner, andr-" is man (versus female, as opposed to "anthropos" - man versus beast.) "Androo", to become a man or raise to be a man, in Classical Greek was sometimes generalized to the feminine. "Andris" in later Greek I believe came to be used as woman. And in such terms as "anandria" (want of manhood, eunuch, unmarried woman) the term was extended beyond the male. Couldn't this be the Greek word with a Romance feminine ending dropped on it? What have I missed? Regards, Steve Long From vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu Tue Mar 30 16:30:24 1999 From: vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 11:30:24 -0500 Subject: How weird is Hittite? Not weird enough :) Message-ID: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote: > I don't know, maybe the -i originally marked something else > (imperfective?). For PIE, all we can recover is that it marked > the present. Compare Akkadian, where the unmarked form (iprus: > -C1 C2 V C3) was the simple past, versus marked perfective > [perfect] (ip-ta-ras: -C1 ta C2 V C3) and imperfective [durative] > (ipar-r-as: -C1 a C2C2 V C3) forms. I am completely ignorant of Akkadian. But it seems that the durative/imperfective can also be used in the past. Then the simple past may have been a perfective limited to the past (according to Dahl, Tense and Aspect Systems, this is quite common) and that being zero is found in a few places. But that is not what you are proposing for PIE, if I understand you right. [I have edited things out to save bandwidth. Hopefully those interested can go to the archives if necessary.] > The point is that neither the Armenian nor the Baltic and Slavic > *imperfect* are simply made from the present stem + secondary > endings. Only Greek and Indo-Iranian make the imperfect that > way. What about the forms Szemerenyi quotes, Armenian eber, Slavic vede and mino (with a cedilla under the o) as going back to forms made from Indo-Greek present stem? If you mean that these are aorist in Arm/Slavic, then aren't you comparing apples and oranges here? If Vedic imperfect was not imperfective, how can we compare it to Armenian, Slavic or Baltic imperfects (the last of which is said to be past frequentative)? This is what I meant by basing comparisons on names rather than syntactical roles. [BTW, note that Vedic has a past habitual (pura: [sma] saca:vahe) based on the present (not the present >stem<) and asacat does not carry this meaning.] Thus, my questions is, if present stem did not carry imperfective meaning by itself in a stage that included these languages, why should be posit it for a stage that includes Vedic when Vedic `imperfect' is >the< tense of narration? > Slavic does have some root *aorists*. The Armenian aorist, apart > from the 3rd.p.sg., cannot be derived from either root imperfects > or aorists. But the forms Szemerenyi cites are not root forms. Turning now to the perfect: If resutative > past is known from elsewhere, but past > resultative is unknown, then the languages in which the reflex of the perfect is a (perfective) past have to be considered as showing a later stage than those in which the perfect is a resultative. Unless the direction of evolution can be challenged, the use of perfect outside Indo-Greek has to be taken to be secondary. --- From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 31 00:17:48 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 19:17:48 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Church Slavonic was developed as a missionary tool for converting Slavs to >eastern Christianity -- Old Church Slavonic is simply what was spoken by the Slavs with whom the Byzantines were most familiar. At that point the Slavic peoples all spoke dialects of one language. >This use of the vernacular for liturgy however ran right up against the >German and Italian bishops who were introducing the same vernacular in Latin -- the Roman Church did not use a vernacular liturgy; it used Latin, which was equally foreign to everybody. >And this may have accounted for why the German bishops were able to prevail >against the Greeks in the Slavic west, despite the Greek trump card of being >able to transmit the religion in the vernacular. -- try being closer to Germany and more exposed to the military and political power of the German rulers. From proto-language at email.msn.com Wed Mar 31 01:14:04 1999 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 19:14:04 -0600 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Dear Miguel and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal Sent: Sunday, March 28, 1999 12:59 PM > Any theory about the PIE "dog" word should deal with the > irregular Latin form canis (*k^an-). All I can suggest about it > is that there may be an alternation Lat. a ~ *aw, as is also seen > in Lat. caput ~ Pre-Gmc. *kawput? I believe the preferable explanation is that Latin canis is from a slightly different IE root, namely *^w'niH-. Whether or not this zero-grade *k^w- could result in Latin ca- rather than the more usual cu- is a question others will address more competently than I can. Pat PATRICK C. RYAN (501) 227-9947; FAX/DATA (501)312-9947 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: and PROTO-RELIGION: "Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meipi, nftr allar nmu, geiri undapr . . . a ~eim meipi er mangi veit hvers hann af rstum renn." (Havamal 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 31 01:39:14 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:39:14 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: >mcv at wxs.nl writes: << If there's something external that can be used as a trigger or source, it may well be utilized, but then again it may not and instead some new and completely random change will take place. Or no change takes place, for no reason. >> -- good point. It's a chaotic process. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 31 01:42:27 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:42:27 EST Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >Assuming two daughter languages (Greek/Sanskrit) of a parent tongue are >separated by distance, does the amount of distance make a difference? -- the relative intensity and frequency of contact is what matters, because lack of contact leads to innovations not being shared. Conversely, where innovations are shared one can postulate contact. Linguistic separation may be a function of distance, or of geography (mountains, rivers, etc.), or environment, or politics (the creation of Netherlandish as a separate language is almost entirely due to the political history) or whatever. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 01:50:03 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 17:50:03 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: ME (GLEN): "We may have this, we may have that but aside from even more evidence on your side..." - this is basically what you're saying. It's much simpler to say that the neuter was generally marked with *-d unless the word already ended with another declensional suffix, isn't it? MIGUEL: It's much simpler, but unfortunately the neuter was *never* marked with *-d in nouns and adjectives. You can't assert that. I'm objecting to your abuse of absolute terms like "never" - some kind of logical proof is needed. ME (GLEN): Hypotheses built on hypotheses. There is no **-(n)k in IE. MIGUEL: Not sure. There is in Greek (lynx). Come on, Miguel. First, why does it end in -nx instead of **-nk? Are y'sure it's not from IE *-nk-s? Second, even if we can say that the *-s is not there (now), how do we know that it couldn't have underwent the same process as *-rs > *-r? Third, I thought you were trying to tell me that _inanimate_ nouns are zero-marked. This idea creates more problems than it solves. Doesn't Occhim's Rasor hold weight anymore? ME (GLEN): Endings of the sort *-n(s), *-nt(s) and *-r(s) all end in *-s (very badly done). Similarly, the heteroclitic and pronominal forms with *-d derive from *-d. Simple, no? MIGUEL: Simple, but again there *are* no heteroclitic forms with *-d. What we have is a couple of *-t's (from neuter nt-stems, I say). I haven't got the time to check all the facts, but on p. 176 of Beekes Comparative IE, there's an interesting table, listing the possible PIE consonant/sonorant stems: n. -s -r/n -l/n -n -i -u mf. -s -r -l -n -i -u -k -t -nt -m -H1 -H2 (Where neuter l/n-stems consist of one word only, and n-stems are mostly -mn). There is not a shred of evidence that the neuter nom/acc. forms should be derived from *-sd, *-rd/*-nd/*-ld, *-id or *-ud. I've obviously confused everyone a little. First, whether the heteroclitic stems end in *-t or *-d changes nothing since I've been saying that there was no pronunciation contrasts in IE between *-t and *-d (or *-dh). Second, to make very clear, I'm not saying that ALL inanimate forms end in *-d. This seems to be the interpretation of the moderator as well as you, Miguel. I'm saying that much can be explained with *-d but some of the inanimate forms happen to end in other declensional suffixes, in which case the *-d is not added because that would put the nominative endings together with other declensional suffixes (bad!). Thus here's my explanation so far of the inanimate: -s, -i, -u - declensional suffixes, no *-d added -r/n, -l/n - n-stem with *-d (*-nd > *-r) -n - non-existant And of the animate: -s - animate *-s (duh!) -r, -l, -n, -H2, -t, -nt - originally -Cs -m, -i, -u - declensional suffixes, no *-s added -k - non-existant -H1 - non-existant and probably impossible I currently have a hunch that mediofinal *H1, a glottal stop, had become *H2/H3 long ago as in this possible case: *-?u > IE *-h [1ps perfective] MIGUEL: On the other hand, it *is* interesting to speculate about what might have caused the heteroclitics, what happened to neuter -k, -t, -nt, -m stems, and what the laryngeal stems are all about. A neuter *-k is not reconstructable. All there are are fragments here and there like your isolated examples of (Hittite eshar, no -k at all) and . AFAIK, there's no need to reconstruct *-k at an IE level. MODERATOR: I'm a little confused: If *-t# > *-H_1# and *-k# > *-H_2#, what do you mean by *-t and *-k in your table above? Or are all of those to be read as *-t-, *-k-, ktl.? So am I. The time-frame doesn't seem to be properly laid out. If the Greek -k-'s as in are suppose to be Miguel's evidence for an Indo-Anatolian *-k that on the other hand is supposed to have changed to a later *-H2 that Greek is descendant from, I think we should all be thouroughly confused by this point. If Greek /k/ is just some kind of reflex of *H2 then all we have is evidence for *-H2 (or even *-H3) which says nothing in the end (but then why was it mentioned...?). -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Mar 31 01:47:56 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 20:47:56 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Latin et al.) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >I've been looking for the historical source for that idea for awhile, >specifically with regard to the northwestern Slavs (the Wends), Czechs and >Poles, etc. But I haven't found it. -- there isn't enough difference between the Slavic languages even now for there to have been any significant distinction at that time. Also, the extreme archaism of OCS (and of the Slavic languages generally) argues powerfully that they were quite uniform then. Except where they are separated by other languages (such as Magyar or Rumanian) the Slavic tongues all have bridge-dialects; they melt into each other rather seamlessly. Analysis also indicates that before the intrusion of the Magyars, this was true of Czech and Slovene. This is a classic case of rapid language spread from a relatively small nuclear area promoting relative linguistic uniformity. >The teaching of Polish was banned for example for a time under the Tsarist >occupation and Polish speakers -- sigh. We have written records of Polish and Russian from the 11th century on. Take a look. They were extremely similar back then, too. Much more so than now, in fact. From glengordon01 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 02:00:04 1999 From: glengordon01 at hotmail.com (Glen Gordon) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:00:04 PST Subject: Uralic and IE Message-ID: MODERATOR: What happened to your proposed *-d ending in neuter i- and u-stems? ME (GLEN): What examples do you have in mind? And are you sure they aren't derived from other case forms? I'm interested. List them. MODERATOR: You are the one who is claiming that all neuters at one time had a final -d. False. I never said anything of the kind. Please re-re-read the archives and you'll get a better picture. I use it to explain both heteroclitic and pronominal... and that's it! -------------------------------------------- Glen Gordon glengordon01 at hotmail.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 31 04:24:23 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 23:24:23 EST Subject: Lithuanians looking like Tarim Mummies Message-ID: In a message dated 3/30/99 10:11:46 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: <<>> <<-- taboos eventually wear out and die. This one had nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with the political/cultural repercussions of WWII.>> Well, it certainly had something to do with certain people interpreting the evidence in some pretty nefarious ways. And definitely reflected an overconfidence in the what is reliable genetic evidence to say the least. Caution about this kind of evidence is totally justified. For a long time, what showed up as genetic evidence has often been unsound and self-fulfilling. <> A good example. Sykes and Richards MtDNA studies cast a serious doubt on Cavalli-Sforza's work. What seems like conclusive science today becomes inconclusive or Saucer people stuff tommorrow. There are some who still race to Cavalli-Sforza to support conclusions unsupported by quite possibly the more valid scientific evidence supplied by mtDNA and isotope analysis of bone and hair fragments. The mtDNA evidence strongly suggests that the vast majority of the present population in Europe arrived during the Paleolithic (@10,000bce), and therefore that the population has remained relatively genetically constant ever since. Although Sykes has upped his estimate of Neolithic and post-Neolithic incursions and there have been challenges based on some kind of accelerated rate of mutation theory, the work has yielded highly reproducible results that can't be honestly disregarded. The Tocharian situation, being on a frontier of sorts, may be a valid identification of a specific people with a language. But generalizing from it is probably uncalled for. In the arena of genes and language, there's been plenty of reason to watch out for such "evidence" as Lithuanians looking "much like the Tarim Basin mummies." Obviously if there are enough Lithuanians, sooner or later, some of them will like like Egyptian mummies. This is the kind of evidence that caused so many wrong conclusions in the past. Regards, Steve Long From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Mar 30 23:43:20 1999 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:43:20 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: >X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >This need to standardize fights the natural tendency to change and splinter. -- no, it doesn't. That goes right on happening. Think "optical illusion". From richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 31 07:39:26 1999 From: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Richard Coates) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 08:39:26 +0100 Subject: `bast' Message-ID: _Bast_ and so on: For the little that it's worth, I am a native speaker of an English that has /&/ in _past_, _laugh_, and so on, but heavily overlaid with the /A:/ type which I now use in practically all circumstances. My childhood home was biaccentual in this respect. I learned the word _bast_ long after the overlay was complete, but nevertheless pronounce it /b&st/, possibly analogically through early knowledge of the place-name _Woodbastwick_ (Norfolk), /wud'b&stik/. I therefore have a near-minimal pair /b&st/, /'bA:st(@d)/; except that I have an occasional tendency to use /&/ in the latter in its earlier historical sense (i.e. not as an insult). I have a quasi-minimal pair also in /mA:st/ `fruit of the beech', learned relatively late in my development, vs. /m at st/ `pole for sails, etc.'. This latter was a familiar word from my earliest childhood as I was brought up in a port town. I still have quite serious difficulty in pronouncing it /mA:st/ in most contexts, and it's clear to me that to pronounce /mA:st/ I have to more or less consciously apply a phonological transformation. (I don't appear to have the same difficulty with other words of the same lexical set.) I sometimes have a fudged pronunciation /mast/. Just a reminder that real phonology shouldn't be easy - and possibly that I have a screwed-up idiolect. Richard Richard Coates School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK > I have no intuitive knowledge of the pronunciation of this word, but as > a native speaker of RP I observe that <-astin a final syllable under > primary stress always has /A:st/ for me: cast, last, mast, aghast, > repast, etc/. Not necessarily secondary stressed, however: gymnast, > pederast, bombast have /&/. > Max W. Wheeler [ moderator snip ] Richard Coates School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Tel.: +44 (0)1273 678030 (secretary Jackie Gains) Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: richardc at cogs.susx.ac.uk From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 31 10:38:20 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 11:38:20 +0100 Subject: andera 'woman' Celtic ? In-Reply-To: <19990329030550.76785.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [Miguel C V] > >There are more possible examples. Classics are Bq. hartz "bear" > >~ Celtic *artos, > This is a particularly interesting example. It has been debated for generations whether Basque `bear' might be borrowed from Celtic * or from a related IE form (this `bear' word is certainly IE). The Celtic source is phonologically awkward, though: we would have expected * to be borrowed as *<(h)artotz>, not as the observed -- assuming, of course, that it was the nominative that was borrowed, but the accusative would be even less suitable. One or two people have suggested an IE source other than Celtic, but no IE language with an even vaguely suitable form of the word is known to have been in contact with Basque. Just to complicate matters, it is very unusual for a Basque lexical item to end in a consonant cluster. Save only for `black', which we have good reason to suppose is a syncopated form of earlier *, all seemingly native words which end in a cluster end in <-rtz>, like `bear' and `five'. There are some grounds for supposing that these clusters too are secondary and result from some kind of vowel loss, but the evidence is not sufficient to support this view securely. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Mar 31 05:50:33 1999 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 00:50:33 EST Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis (Standardization) Message-ID: I wrote: <<>What evidence is there that this view of Medieval Latin is any different >from the texts we have in Hittite, Mycenaean, Sanskrit, Homeric Greek, etc.? In a message dated 3/30/99 10:46:25 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: -- try proving a negative. This is silly beyond words.>> It's not proving a negative. It's proving a difference. As far as silly goes - I refer you to Tasim Basin Mummies who look like Lithuanians. <> Which proves absolutely nothing and if I remember the Ventris story right it wasn't exact at all. But the real question is what rate of change we see in Mycenaean. A standardize language should change slowly. A non-standardized language should show all the variation that non-standardized languages show. <<-- you're confused as to the definition of "spoken". This generally means a natural language, one learned by children from their mothers and used for everyday communication. Latin was not a spoken language in this sense after the Migrations period.>> What can I say? Only languages learned from your mother are "spoken?" Let's get this clear. Latin was spoken. No if's, and's and but's. Latin was used for everyday communication by a whole layer of European society. Deals were made, jokes were told, treaties were made and lovers talked, all in spoken Latin. "Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, etc." Spoken means spoken. Plain English. <> I'm pretty sure the difference was between spoken Latin and the spoken vulgar dialects. That's what Donatus talks about and that's what Dante talks about. I don't think you'll find anyone pointing out that people were not speaking written Latin. And Latin did not mutate. It gave birth to daughter languages. But it did not die in child birth. <<-- this statement is incoherent and incomprehensible.>> For your benefit, I'll write it slowly. Non-standardized languages don't get into writing as often as standardized languages. Non-standardized languages can change too fast to be pinned down in written form. <> This makes no sense. The most primitive people normalize their language and will correct anthropologists who misspeak it. They know that spoken words have to be standardized when communication is important because otherwise meaning will be lost. And besides, this has nothing to do with any early IE language we know about. Every single one of them knew they had a past. And everyone of them was literate. Herodutus tells about a pharaoh isolating two new-born children to find out what language was the oldest based on what words they first said - early Chomskism. And pre-literate bards of the IE languages were all about preserving history. You don't need writing to enforce standardization in a language. But the need for standardization is a darn good reason to invent writing. <> You've got to be kidding. Do you really think that Chaucer, trained in Latin and the Classics, didn't know that Trojans didn't speak English. This may be a surprise, but the filmmakers of the Ten Commandments didn't really think that Moses spoke English. Anachronisms are for the benefit of the audience. They may fill in holes about what we don't know about. But the purpose is dramatization, not reconstruction. <<-- once a language is no longer used and learned by children from their parents, it fossilizes because it's not subject to the usual pressures of linguistic change. The pace of change in it slows down dramatically.>> Look what you are saying here. If kids learn language from their parents, then that language changes. All of creation disagrees with you. Getting it passed on from your parents is supposed to be what passes it on unchanged. "Learning it from your parents" has no application for generations of Americans who did no such thing but nevertheless acquired a second-language that was scorching hot with change - and that they often contributed to. <<-- nope. It died as a living tongue and was replaced by the Romance languages. By the eight-ninth century AD, it was dead as the dodo, learned only by the literate in schools. Repeated "renaissances" (the Carolingian, etc.) were required to keep it from disappearing altogether. Latin was a powerful language for all those centuries ? much more effective at communication and affecting the course of history than many of the "living" languages you are talking about. Like Chaucer you are anachronizing. Because Latin wasn't a national language or spoken among the common folk (actually it was, but that's another matter), you are arbitrarily eliminating it. The test of a language is whether it works like a language. And Latin did that in spades. (Walks like a duck...) You are under the impression that a disciplined language of limited distribution is not an language. The distinction you are making isn't rational. Regards, Steve Long From ERobert52 at aol.com Wed Mar 31 12:10:32 1999 From: ERobert52 at aol.com (ERobert52 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 07:10:32 EST Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: [ moderator re-formatted ] Adolfo Zavaroni writes: > could give s+th' > s+z > z. The equivalence = is attested in > Raetic where the word is written also , I don't think you should rely too heavily on this for your argument. I presume you are referring to the Steinberg inscriptions, which alone of the Raetic inscriptions are outdoor rock inscriptions. They contain a number of difficulties in reading. Z differs from T by the addition of one horizontal stroke. Z occurs nowhere else in Raetic except one of the Magre' inscriptions and many writers transcribe it as a kind of T. Also we do not know how to apportion Etruscan and Venetic influence on the Raetic writing system(s). If the latter, it is a D, not a Z. Without doubt words supposed to be cognate written with Z in Etruscan are written with this or one of the four other kinds of T in Raetic. But what can be made of these different letters phonologically is not clear. BTW, am I the only person whose mail system messes up when people put things in that could be construed as HTML commands? Ed. Robertson From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 12:31:58 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 04:31:58 PST Subject: R: Re: Tense & Aspect Message-ID: >From: "Frank Rossi" >Date: Sun, 28 Mar 99 19:21:56 PST [big snip] Frank Rossi said: >b) In Occitan, the language of southern France, the preterit is (or was, >considering the present state of the language) still used alongside the >periphrastic perfect.. >However, as far as I know, the substrate of Southern France was less >uniformly and less unquestionably Latenian Gallic, and I have read >somewhere that there was probably only a dominant Gallic element >co-existing with pre-Gallic (Ligurian?, Iberian?, Vasconic? Aquitanian?) >subject masses. Some years ago I was told by Andolin Eguzkitza, a Basque linguist, that in Euskal Herria the preference for the periphrastic perfect in Spanish (and/or French) was influenced by Euskera's insistence on distinguishing between what has happened in the same "day" and what took place in the time period(s) before. However, a difficulty arises in reconstructing the cognitive background of this usage in Euskera since there is clear evidence that in the not too recent past, it was a "night count" rather than a "day count" that governed the 24 hr. period in question. The count went from "sunset" to "sunset" or if you wish from "night-to-night." Euskaldunak have told me that the periphrastic perfect needs to be used to talk about what's happened since "you woke up this morning." Larry would be able to give us more information on this phenomenon as well as the rules set forth by Euskaltzaindia (the Basque Academy of the Language) for its "proper usage." My impression is that today there is significant variation in usage among native-speakers of Euskera. There also seems to be evidence of a kind of "narrative style" that uses the periphrastic perfect for stylistic effect when speaking about actions in the (remote) past. But I'm a bit out of my depth in this particular issue. [snip] Izan untsa, Roz Frank From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Mar 31 13:17:25 1999 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 14:17:25 +0100 Subject: Basque <-ar>, <-(t)ar> In-Reply-To: <19990329024605.27720.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, roslyn frank wrote: [Rick Mc] > >Does Basque -ar have a connection with Spanish -ar/-al? [ moderator snip ] > I don't know what the answer is to your question. Nor do I know how this > ending is explained in Romance languages (I assume it appears in other > ones). But I would like to ask Larry the following. In reference to what > you say above, do you mean to infer, therefore, that there are/were once > two suffixes in Euskera both spelled <-ar> but with different meanings? > Or that they might be (have been) related? OK. First, Basque has a very frequent suffix <-(t)ar>, which is attested, I think, in only one function: the creation of ethnonymics. As a rule, we find <-tar> after a consonant and <-ar> after a vowel, but there are exceptions. Examples: `(person) from Donostia' (a city); `(person) from Zarautz' (a town). In the usual Basque fashion, the form is <-dar> after /n/ or /l/: hence `(person) from Irun' (a town). We also find <-tiar> or <-liar> on occasion, somewhat curiously. It is widely suspected, but not established, that this suffix derives from one or both of the Latin suffixes <-aris> and <-arius> -- more likely the first, if anything, since <-arius> appears clearly to be the source of the Basque professional suffix <-ari> (and variants), as in `merchant', from `market', and `jai-alai player', from `jai-alai'. The development of the variant <-tar> from <-ar> would not be unusual in Basque. A complication is that <-(t)ar> appears to be present in the compound suffix <-(t)arzun>, which corresponds to English `-ness', and whose second element appears to be shared with the noun-forming suffix <-kizun>. This <-(t)arzun> remains in the east, but has developed regularly to <-(t)asun> in the west, as in `beauty', from `beautiful'. It is far from clear what an ethnonymic should be doing in a suffix forming abstract nouns. > I am referring to the fact that the suffixing particle <-ar/-tar> is > alive and well in Euskera. However, to my knowledge its meaning is not > precisely that of a "collective suffix" and it clearly is not > "fossilized" in any sense of the word. I'm thinking of the <-ar> of > expressions like (from "on the verge of death" or > the common use of <-ar/-tar> to refer to "someone or something from a > given place (with no gender or animacy/inanimacy specified), "oriundo > de", e.g., "someone from Bilbao." Certainly the same particle > also seems to shows up occasionally as a suffix on free-standing > root-stems, in contrast to the examples that you give where (at least > today) there is no free-standing root-stem. At the moment none of the > former examples come to mind (I don't have my files here), but, as I > recall, their referentiality might be closer to what you are trying to > get at with the above. The <-ar> that appears in `on the point of death', from `death', is functionally distinct from all other suffixes, and it is of unknown origin. Nobody knows if it has any connection with any other suffix of similar form. The item I was talking about is functionally and formally distinct from all the others, and its reality is not certain. The point is that Basque has a sizeable number of nouns which end in a morph <-ar> and which denote things commonly encountered in bunches. This has led some people to suggest that *<-ar> might be an ancient collective suffix, now fossilized in some nouns, like `star' and `tears'. Only in a couple of cases is there a plausible attested source for such a derivative: `tree' and `branch(es)', `residue' and `residue'. We simply don't know whether the proposed collective *<-ar> is real or merely a chimaera. In any case, this *<-ar>, if it ever existed, never seems to surface as *<-tar>. > Nonetheless, to my knowledge, in Euskera this last ending is never used > to create collective abstractions of the type "apple-grove". As you well > know, to construct those abstractions the suffix regularly used (today) > is <-di/-ti>. Agreed, of course: in the historical period, <-di> has been the productive suffix for constructing collective nouns for plant-names. The proposed *<-ar>, if it ever existed, must have been far earlier, and there is no evidence that such a morph was ever used with plant-names in any systematic way. > Since we already have the suffixing element <-ar> "male" occupying this > slot, to add a third member would make for a pretty crowded closet.... > In other words, do you see the possibility that <-ar/-tar> mentioned > above might be connected in some way to the "fossilized" ending you are > discussing? Yes, `male', whose existence is beyond dispute, frequently functions as a final element in compounds, as in `tomcat', from `cat'. But I see no reason to relate this item to any of the preceding. On the whole, I can't see any reason to suppose that our hypothetical collective suffix *<-ar> is related to the ethnonymic <-(t)ar>. It should be pointed out that Pre-Basque had a modest phoneme inventory, with severe restrictions on phonotactics and on morpheme structure. There were relatively few forms which were well-formed (pronounceable) in Pre-Basque, and the typically monosyllabic suffixes exhibit little variety of form. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From roslynfrank at hotmail.com Wed Mar 31 16:30:22 1999 From: roslynfrank at hotmail.com (roslyn frank) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 08:30:22 PST Subject: abarca/abarka/alpargata Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: [snip] > But I might note that a word > `hailstorm' is recorded in 1571. Here the first element is >clearly `stone', but what on earth is the force of ? >Suggestions on a postcard, please. Miguel Carrasquer Vidal replied: >I'm all out of postcards, but I note that Azkue also gives a >variant (BN-s, R) "pedrisco", and for "horn; >branch" also the glosses "borrasca" and "manga de agua". Neither >harriabar nor arri-adar look like ancient formations, or else the >-i of would have been dropped. >So is this yet another etymologically unconnected word that has >become entangled with "horn/branch" /? Or should we >perhaps compare with two cases (neither of them very clear) in IE >of association of "tree" and "horn" with stormy weather: Grk. > "thunderbolt", possibly connected with *k^er-Hw- >"horn", and Lith. "thunder(bolt)", connected by >Gamqrelidze and Ivanov with *perkw- "oak"? [RF] Interesting cognitive analogy, Miguel. What you you think about the image schemata behind these last items, i.e., the metaphoric traditions, being related to the backgrounded figure of an axis mundi/World Tree? Any ideas, Xavier? Agur t'erdi, Roz March 31, 1999 e-mail: roz-frank at uiowa.edu From iglesias at axia.it Wed Mar 31 15:44:37 1999 From: iglesias at axia.it (Frank Rossi) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 07:44:37 PST Subject: Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?)) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: In this discussion it should be kept in mind that Old Portuguese and Old Galician, spoken in the NW corner of the Iberian peninsula, were *the same language*, from the time when the South of Portugal with Lisbon was still under the Moors and the local people there spoke a Mozarabic dialect until quite some time after the independence of Portugal. So the question is did Portuguese /u/ preserve the older pronunciation or did modern Galician /o/, (which is described as "very closed" by phoneticians). Frank Rossi Bergamo, Italy igleasis at axia.it ---------- > >Rick Mc Callister wrote: [ moderator snip ] > This is true but I'm wondering whether Portuguese ever did > pronounce unstressed and if the spelling might be a convention derived > from Spanish From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Mar 31 19:55:04 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 20:55:04 +0100 Subject: Distance in change Message-ID: Stev asked about the aorist >. If the aorist is found nowhere in the world >but in this little corner of IE, then the possibility that both languages >developed it independently would seem a little bit unlikely. Do you mean form or function? If form, then aorists are found scattered over the IE languages. There are root aorists, reduplicated aorists, thematic aorists, sigmatic aorists, and aorists in -eh1. Outside Greek & Ind-Ir we can find reduplicated aorist formations and sigmatic aorist formations in Latin; we find aorists in -eh1 in BS, root aorists are found in Armenian, sigmatic aorists in Slavic, and so on. If you are talking of function, then you need a little bit caution: the aorist in Sanskrit is certainly not the beast it is in Greek. In Greek the indicative is a past tense contrasting with the imperfect; and the forms outside the indicative (generally) are timeless, contrasting with forms on the present stem. In Sanskrit the indicative is merely one way of making a past tense, and no real distinction between imperfect, aorist, and perfect is recoverable from the actual usage in the texts (I use Whitney and others for this). The grammarians make a fine distinction, but in practice it does not exist. The word "aorist" in Sanskrit refers to the formation only, not to any aspect. So the languages have not developed "the aorist" independently, since (a) the forms are inherited, and (b) the function is different. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Mar 31 20:05:38 1999 From: petegray at btinternet.com (Peter &/or Graham) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 21:05:38 +0100 Subject: IE, Genetic Data, Languages of Anatolia Message-ID: Miguel asked about the Latin canis with its irregular /a/ I read Peter Schrijver's vast book today on the reflexes of PIE laryngeals in Latin. He suggests a delabialisation of *o to a in Latin in certain contexts, including after /u/. His suggestion for canis is therefore: Accusative PIE *k'uon-m > *kuonem > *kuanem > kanem. The /a/ forms then generalise throughout the paradigm, just as /k/ generalised, replacing /kw/ in vox, vocare etc. He also notes the PIE word (s)kenH "young dog" (I haven't had time to check it) This would give the Latin form can-. Not totally convincing, but food for thought! Peter From edsel at glo.be Wed Mar 31 19:25:14 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 21:25:14 +0200 Subject: IE /st/ > Etruscan /z/ Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Adolfo Zavaroni Date: woensdag 31 maart 1999 3:54 >> Adolfo Zavaroni wrote: >> >I think that Etruscan /z/ in most cases corresponds to IE /st/ both at >> >the beginning and in the middle of a word. [ moderator snip ] >I add that the southern Etr. (SAN) = northern is a fricative dental >(likely weaker than /z/). In Raetic too and mark a fricative. [ moderator snip of remainder of very long post. Please don't do this. ] [Ed Selleslagh] My suggestion, without any pretense: I think z in Etruscan, certainly when written with Latin characters, was actually a rendering of Greek zeta, pronounced dz (or maybe ts in certain contexts) at the time (nowadays it is just English z). So, st > Etruscan z could be just a metathesis. Would this be valid? Ed. From edsel at glo.be Wed Mar 31 19:31:38 1999 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 21:31:38 +0200 Subject: The Neolithic Hypothesis Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Rick Mc Callister Date: woensdag 31 maart 1999 7:54 [ moderator snip ] > I've read in some places that the languages formerly spoken in >present Jutland, Schleswig & Holstein were "in between" North Germanic & >West Germanic and that when the Angles migrated to England, that a gradual >linguistic frontier was replaced by a barrier of non-mutually >comprehensible languages. > On one level this has a certain logic but on the other hand, >English & Frisian do seem much closer to Low German. I can appreciate that >Frisian may have been affected by Low German and Dutch but English wasn't. > Another contradiction that I've seen are charts that list East >Germanic with North Germanic. > Why all the confusion? Has all of this been straightened out? [Ed Selleslagh] Some comments: Around here (Flanders) it is - more or less - generally believed that the Frisian people and the closely related West-Flemings (not just linguistically) are descendants of probably southern Danish or other more or less Scandinavian tribes that migrated south over the coastal sand bars/islands, the last remains of which are the Dutch and German 'Waddeneilanden' and part of Sylt. Don't forget that even as late as in J. Caesar's time the geography of the coastline of the Low Countries was very different: it consisted of 'lido's' separated from the mainland by shallow sea/lagoon/marshland, similar to the lagoon of Venice. This lagoon and its marshes stretched from the hills of Picardy to the IJsselmeer and the Waddenzee and part of inland Friesland. It seems almost obvious that modern Frisian has a Scandinavian sounding base, but was profoundly influenced by Dutch/Low German. West-Flemish dialect is by far the most archaic Dutch dialect. The early inhabitants of these coastal islands and peninsulae were pretty separated from those of the mainland (first the Brythonic Belgae, then the Gallo-Romans, and finally the Salic Franks). Tacitus called the Germanic people of the coastal areas Ingaevones, who lived 'proximi Oceano'. I am not sure at all that you can say English wasn't influenced by Dutch/Low German, albeit in a somewhat convoluted way: Saxon itself is - or was - a (collection of) Dutch/Low German dialect(s), while Anglian may be considered to have been something in between Danish and Low German. Anyway, Old English (pre-1066) and Old Dutch (which lacks almost entirely equally old texts, say pre-1100) are remarkably close. In Eastern Holland, there are still Saxon dialects. Finally, there are only a few tens of nautical miles between English and Dutch, and both have a long seagoing tradition (Don't forget that the earliest cultural center of Dutch was in the southernmost part of the domain, in mainland West-Flanders). As to 'northwestern Germanic', I am very, very skeptical about that idea. The least you can say, is that it is not a necessary hypothesis. Postulating mutual (or one-way west > east?) influence between east- and west Germanic seems sufficient to explain the observed phenomena. There was ample opportunity for it to occur after the split of northeast into north and east Germanic Ed. From mcv at wxs.nl Wed Mar 31 23:43:05 1999 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 23:43:05 GMT Subject: Uralic and IE In-Reply-To: <3718fe36.215719489@mail.wxs.nl> Message-ID: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote: >I haven't got the time to check all the facts, but on p. 176 of >Beekes Comparative IE, there's an interesting table, listing the >possible PIE consonant/sonorant stems: >n. -s -r/n -l/n -n -i -u >mf. -s -r -l -n -i -u -k -t -nt -m -H1 -H2 >[ Moderator's comment: > I'm a little confused: If *-t# > *-H_1# and *-k# > *-H_2#, what do you mean > by *-t and *-k in your table above? Or are all of those to be read as *-t-, > *-k-, ktl.? > --rma ] The dash is indeed confusing (Beekes does not use it here). I meant masc/fem. s-stems, r-stems etc., which in the nominative sg. end either in -s or a lengthened vowel before the final stem consonant (-:s, -:r, -is etc.). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl Amsterdam From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Mar 17 03:29:38 1999 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 22:29:38 -0500 Subject: non-IE/Germanic/h In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Words like fiero "beast, wild animal" fiesta "party" & fiel begin with /fy-/, so they fall into the same category as other /fC-/ words The same is true of /fw-/ words such as fuego /fwego/ I can only guess that words such as feo, falla, falta, etc. are from a dialect that retained initial /f/ or are loanwords from other Romance languages However, rural dialects often change all initial /f-/ > /h-, x-/ and retain /h-, x-/ in words where initial /f-/ of Latin > /h-/ > /0/. My father-in-law says /hlor/ for standard & /hwego/ for standard /fuego/. In Central America Peninsular /alar/ is /halar, Halar/. You also have doublets such as "stinky" and "stanky" [which in Southern US English is a lot worse than mere "stinky"]. Although textbooks don't mention it [at least as far as I remember], I've wondered if there was a /ph/ stage, given that standard /f/ is often pronounced /ph/ and it would balance out /bh/. So maybe it was /f > ph > h > 0/. I can only guess that words such as feo, falla, falta, etc. are from a dialect that retained initial /f/ or are loanwords from other Romance languages. Given that the Medieval literary language was "galaico-portugue/s" [the term used in literary history] and that the during the Renaissance, salmantino [a stylized form of Leonese close to Castillian] was the predominant literary language, it's very possible such words could have snuck in. Other 'native words' with retained /f-/ are: >_fiero_ `proud', _feo_ `ugly', _faltar_ `to lack', _fallar_ `to fail', >_fiesta_ `festival', _fiel_ `faithful', _fin_ `end', and, among >Germanisms, _feudo_ `fief', _forro_ `lining'. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 MUW Columbus MS 39701 rmccalli at sunmuw1.muw.edu