Using Dictionaries (was Re: Greek question (night?))

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/15/99 5:22:43 AM, Bob Whiting wrote:

<<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). >>

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?

<<Thus using a dictionary without being aware of the phonotactical rules 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."

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