From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Nov  1 14:43:00 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 14:43:00 +0000
Subject: Basque 'trebe'
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.144300.0000.>

Rick Mc Allister writes:

>       There's Spanish trebejo "game piece, piece of a tool set, etc."
>  which is not commonly used --at least among Latin Americans. The meaning is
>  not quite there, but there may be a link somewhere but I don't have access
>  to Corominas/Coromines.

I've checked Coromines, and he recognizes no connection with Latin <trebax>.

[LT]

>> Second, Pre-Basque absolutely did not permit plosive-liquid clusters in any
>> position, and such clusters were invariably eliminated in loans from Latin.
>> The usual way of resolving a word-initial /tr-/ cluster was to break it up
>> by inserting an echo of the following vowel.  Hence *<tre-> should have
>> yielded a Basque *<dere->, or at best *<tere-> -- not attested.  Compare,
>> for example, Basque <daraturu> (and variants) 'drill', from the Latin
>> accusative <taratrum>.

>       IF [BIG IF, that is] I remember correctly, you said early Basque
>  /l/ > /r/, so maybe via Spanish taladro or some similar form?

Sorry, folks: a goof.  The Latin word is <talatrum>, not *<taratrum>.  I was
dozily applying a Basque sound law, wrongly, to the Latin word.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Nov  1 15:27:15 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 15:27:15 +0000
Subject: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (1)
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.152715.0000.>

[ Moderator's note:
  Mr. Trask sent the 9 individual messages he mentions below, but in order to
  relieve some of the backlog, I have taken the liberty of combining them into
  a single digest-like message.
  --rma ]

--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 15:27:15 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (1)
Message-Id: <E11iJMZ-00037v-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK.  Lloyd Anderson has raised a number of specific points concerning my
criteria for assembling a plausible list of Pre-Basque words.  His posting is
too long to address at one go, so I'll try to deal with it in a series of
postings, one for each point raised.

But first recall what I'm trying to do.  I'm interested in determining the
morpheme-structure conditions for Pre-Basque lexical items.  Note: *not* the
phonotactics of word-forms generally, but the morpheme-structure conditions of
monomorphemic lexical items.

In order to undertake this, of course, I must first assemble the best possible
list of monomorphemic words which were most likely present in Pre-Basque, and I
must put them into the forms which they most likely had at the time.

>  I have repeatedly expressed my suggestions for improving criteria.
>  That *includes* dropping some.

>  This message is not a mere repeat listing of what has been posted
>  previously.
>  To make it more useful, I haved restated some crucial parts
>  which Trask missed in referring to them, as well as adding further
>  *explanations* and *examples*, which most readers will see
>  as merely details implied by what was already stated.

>  Number one.
>  Counteracting biases of documentation by subject matter.
>  Previously stated, as Trask now agrees,
>  though his restatement makes it appear rather trivial,
>  losing its principled basis and therefore greatly reducing its reach.

>  Number one is not merely the 1700 rather than 1600 cutoff date,
>  but was based on a more principled suggestion
>  that we should avoid biasing by the sheer accident of the limited
>  nature of available documentary evidence for particular time periods.
>  In attempting to find the oldest native Basque vocabulary,
>  there will be semantic domains which are essentially excluded
>  by such sheer accidents, and for these we can take the earliest
>  documentary evidence available which covers those semantic
>  domains, not quite "whatever the date", but with considerable
>  leeway in accepting dates later than 1700 if necessary to get
>  documentation for a particular subject matter.
>  The point was NOT the date (1700 vs. 1600),
>  the point was to avoid the accidents of exclusion.
>  Its implications are both much broader and much more specific.

I have already explained that I am not wedded to a cut-off date of 1600, and
that I am prepared to consider 1700 instead, though certainly nothing later.

The material available before 1600 includes a sizeable body of medieval
fragments -- words, names, phrases -- plus a long personal letter, a volume of
poems (religious, secular, amatory), some religious works (mostly
translations), a dictionary of a western variety, and a volume of proverbs.
The 17th century adds a lot more religious works (including some which are
original, not translations), an unpublished dictionary, a textbook of one
dialect of the language, one or two practical handbooks, another collection of
proverbs, the histories and poems of Oihenart, and a few miscellaneous items.

Will it make any difference which date we choose?  Maybe it will, but I remain
to be persuaded of this.  Most of the strongest candidates for native and
ancient status appear to be recorded very early: for example, <behi> 'cow'
(1562), <buru> 'head' (1042), <gorri> 'red' (15th century), <sei> 'six' (1415),
<gizon> 'man' (15th century), <ate> 'door' (15th c.), <handi> 'big' (1262), and
so on.  It is far from obvious that adding another century to the database will
make any great difference.  And it's even less obvious that any resulting gain
will not be badly offset by the addition of a large number of words of late
origin in Basque.  We're already pretty far away from AD 1: I am not eager to
move even further away merely in order to collect a handful of overlooked
words.  As always, I want the *strongest* candidates, not every possible
candidate.

As for particular semantic domains, I have already commented in an earlier
posting.

First, most of the Basque words in specific domains like seafaring, law,
religion and technology are either obvious loan words or obviously
polymorphemic, and hence of no relevance to my task.  There is no point in
worrying about them.

Second, I find it impossible to believe that the native and ancient words
peculiar to any particular domain, insofar as there are any, should
*systematically* differ in form from other words.  If, as I presume, Pre-Basque
had morpheme-structure cnstraints (all languages do), then there is no reason
to suppose that these constraints varied according to the meanings of the
words.  Is there any language on earth in which, say, kinship terms or color
terms or agricultural terms are systematically constructed according to
different phonological rules from other words?  No?  Then why should I worry
about this in the case of Basque?

It is doubtless inevitable that my list of the strongest candidates will mostly
consist of what might reasonably be called 'basic vocabulary'.  It is hardly
likely that specialist terms from particular subject areas will feature
prominently in my list.

If Lloyd still wants to query this, then I suggest that he should identify some
particular semantic domains of the kind he has in mind, and we can take it from
there.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 15:40:24 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (2)
Message-Id: <E11iJZI-0003ku-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK.  Part 2.

>  Number two.
>  Breadth of attestation required made proportionate to
>  breadth of documentation by subject matter.
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

I'm afraid I don't find it easy to follow this.

Most of the early Basque texts are translations of religious documents or works
of Christian apology.  The remaining few were listed in my last posting.  Many
other conceivable subject areas are not explicitly treated at all before the
late 19th or 20th century -- far too late for my purposes.  For example, Basque
traditions of household management and of inheritance turn up incidentally in
some early texts, but are not overtly treated as such before the late 19th
century -- at least in Basque.  Some earlier materials exist in Spanish, and
may provide some attestations of individual Basque words, but I don't expect a
lot here.  Anyway, once again, few of the relevant terms are both native and
monomorphemic.  I really don't see any ground for concern here.  And, as
before, I can see no reason to suppose that native words in different semantic
areas might be constructed according to different phonological rules.

What earthly *difference* does it make what semantic domain a word belongs to?
I'm interested in phonology, not in semantics.

>       I also proposed a still more refined approach in which the
>  number of dialects we wish to have represented would vary
>  precisely in order to counteract the accidents of preservation of
>  documents in particular subject matters in only some dialects.
>  If for example documents referring extensively to colors
>  were only attested in three dialects, then attestation in only two
>  dialects might count as sufficient to satisfy adequately
>  the criterion of breadth of attestation.

This is not the case with color terms.  In fact, it does not appear to be the
case with any semantic domain I can think of.

Anyway, this proposal strikes me as impossibly complex in practice.  Words
cannot be exhaustively assigned to semantic domains.  For example, to what
semantic domain should we assign <heriotza> 'death', or <bertze> 'other'?

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 15:55:37 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (3)
Message-Id: <E11iJo1-0004Wr-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 3.

>  Number three.
>  Breadth of attestation.
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

> I suggested very early that attestation in all dialects was not required.

And I have never required any such thing.

In fact, I am tempted to insist on this requirement as a maximally strong
criterion.  But I've held back, if only because some dialects are less well
described than others.

>  Some intermediate would be appropriate, though I did not give
>  a particular number.

But *I* did: at least four out of the five dialect groupings I proposed.

>  Even without a particular number, this is still a specific suggestion.
>  Can it be made still more specific?  Of course.  Almost anything can be.
>  In the example just above, for example,
>  I took two out of three dialects as sufficient.

Er -- two out of *which* three?  This sounds to me like two out of the nine
recognized dialects, or perhaps two out of the five groupings I have proposed.

>  Three out of five would also be a reasonable criterion
>  (not as a cutoff, but as a sufficient *minimum* on a criterion
>  of measured degree of breadth of distribution).
>  If only two dialects are available (for the relevant subject matter),
>  I would personally take one as sufficient for a *minimum*.

But I know of *no* subject matter which is treated only in two dialects.  Bear
in mind that the early Basque literature does not offer us a wealth of topics.
This is not very surprising.  How many topics are overtly treated in the Old
English literature before 1066?

>  Remember that by suggestion number seven,
>  all of this information is kept, by tagging on the lexical item,
>  so we can still distinguish cases later if we wish.

But this is not a point of principle: it's only a procedure.  Even if I start
with a vast tagged corpus, I still have to choose the words which will go into
my initial list, and exclude all the others.  As a matter of principle, it
makes no difference whether the excluded words are sitting on a computer
database or merely sitting in the dictionary: all that matters is that they are
not in the initial list.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 17:23:37 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (4)
Message-Id: <E11iLBB-00075F-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; number 4.

>  Number four.
>  Morphemic composites as evidence for their parts.
>  This one is a recent refinement, in response to the example
>  of <uko> 'forearm' included in <ukondo> 'elbow'.

>  The mainstream would I think have included <uko>
>  on the basis of <ukondo> almost without question,
>  because the parts of the (compound?) are transparent,
>  and therefore the root from which it is formed must be
>  at least as ancient or more ancient than the compound.

I don't query the reasoning, but I don't know whether "the mainstream" would
recognize the sparsely recorded <uko> on the basis of its compound <ukondo>,
*for the purposes I have in mind*.  As I think I've made clear, I don't reject
out of hand the inclusion of <uko> in my list, even though it fails to meet my
primary criteria, since it is pretty clearly present in <ukondo>.  But I can
imagine that some other people might object to this -- in fact, I know of one
or two who definitely do ;-) -- and anyway there are potential pitfalls with
this.  See below.

>  I would not have dreamed it was necessary to state explicitly
>  that morphologically complex items can give evidence
>  for the earlier use of their morphemic parts,
>  since I assume linguists generally take it for granted
>  (except in a few special cases like back-formations).

"Can give evidence" -- sure.  But "license for the purposes I have in mind" --
maybe not.

For example, Basque <izotz> 'frost, ice' almost certainly contains <(h)otz>
'cold'.  But what on earth is the first element?  It might be <ihintz> 'dew',
but this is far from certain, and so I doubt that the universal existence of
<izotz> should be taken as licensing anything in particular.

>  In a case in which there is strong support from
>  inclusion of a root in a compound or derivative
>  in another dialect, it can even be possible to include
>  a form attested (as bare root or stem) only in one dialect.

Ah, but I'm not talking about roots or stems: I'm only talking about free
lexical items.

As it happens, Basque, like English, is a language in which roots and stems are
not commonly distinguished from each other or from free forms.  But there is
one complication: word-formation (both compounding and suffixation).  Basque
word-formation is subject to a number of phonological rules which apply *only*
in this domain, and not otherwise -- for example, not in inflection, and not
within monomorphemic words.  Consequently, the form exhibited by an item inside
a polymorphemic word is not, in general, identical to its form as a free word.
Therefore combining forms cannot be trusted as evidence for the forms of free
words in Pre-Basque.

For example, it is far from obvious that the eastern word <ekhi> 'sun' consists
of <egun> 'day' plus <-ki> noun-forming suffix.  We happen to have good
evidence in this instance that the analysis is correct, but we don't always
have such good evidence, and so it seems wise to me simply to exclude
polymorphemic words from initial consideration altogether, including their
parts.  Why should I give myself extra chances to go wrong when I don't have
to?

>  IF (note IF) we were using the criterion of three dialects
>  out of five, then we would merely need <uko> in one
>  dialect and <ukondo> in two other dialects to reach the
>  criterion of a minimum of three dialects for the root <uko>,
>  though of course that would be only two dialects for the
>  compound <ukondo> so the composite form itself
>  would not exceed *this* minimum if it were
>  attested in only two.

Clarification: <uko> is not a root, but a free noun.  Its regular combining
form should be <uka->, and precisely this is attested in the 16th-century
variant <ukaondo>, since replaced everywhere by the contracted <ukondo>, except
that a few western varieties have the variant <ukando>, and that the Gipuzkoan
dialect has the extraordinary variant <ukalondo>, which requires a good deal of
analysis and is probably a partly distinct formation.

Anyway, I doubt that it will make much difference whether we include <uko> or
not.  If it did make a difference, then my whole project would be in jeopardy,
since I can't place reliance on results which are highly sensitive to the
inclusion or exclusion of a single word.  But I'm not expecting that.

>  The exclusion of multimorphemic items is a very strong bias against
>  the result being a representative cross-section,
>  even of the *roots* of a normal language
>  (for those normal languages which do have multimorphemic items).

So what?  I'm not *interested* in roots: I'm interested in lexical items.

Furthermore, I'm not interested in polymorphemic words.  It is perfectly clear
that, in Basque, polymorphemic words are not constructed according to the same
rules as native monomorphemic words.  For example, <ukondo> is a legitimate
word, but it would *not*, I am now rather confident, be a possible form for a
monomorphemic word.

Compare English.  Monomorphemic native English words absolutely do not permit
certain consonant clusters, such as /ph/, /th/, /kh/, /nh/, /ts/, and /St/,
among others.  But polymorphemic words permit these clusters: 'uphill',
'hothouse', 'inkhorn', 'unharmed', 'cats', 'fished', and so on.  Hence an
account of morpheme-structure constraints for English would exclude these
clusters, even though they occur in words.  Basque is much the same here.

>  While the *end goal* may be a list of morphemes or even root morphemes,

It is not.  My goal is to characterize the morpheme-structure constraints
applying to native, ancient and monomorphemic Basque lexical items.  Not roots,
and not morphemes in general: free monomorphemic lexical items.  So it makes
sense to me to choose such items as data, and to exclude items of other kinds.
If I want to characterize ducks, then I choose ducks to work on, and I exclude
even the most fascinating and significant chickens.

(An aside: am I the first person ever to write 'significant chickens'?) ;-)

>  the data used to obtain these should of course include multi-morphemic
>  items.  To do otherwise is an arbitrary, unjustified bias against the
>  normality of languages which do contain multimorphemic words,
>  and some morphemes including some roots occur only in such words.

No.  I absolutely disagree.  The existence of the English word 'bits' /bIts/ is
definitely not evidence that English permits monomorphemic words of the form
/bIts/.

And the doubtless true observation that certain morphemes are attested only
within polymorphemic words is neither here nor there.  Recall: my goal is to
find the *best* candidates for my purpose, not to find *all possible*
candidates.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 17:31:33 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (5)
Message-Id: <E11iLIr-0007D6-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 5.

>  Number five.
>  Balanced use of criteria, each alone not decisive.

>  This one has been made explicit only recently, as soon as I became
>  consciously aware of how near Trask comes to saying that each
>  criterion must be satisfied independently of the others,

"How near"?  I thought I'd said this explicitly.

My criteria are independent.  A word that fails to satisfy *any one* criterion
is excluded, even if it satisfies all the other ones.

>  of what he perhaps means by "best" examples, rather than merely
>  very good candidates for early Basque.

Well, insofar as we can distinguish "best" from merely "very good", I
definitely want to find the best ones.  Why would I want to do anything else?

>       Numbers two and four are examples of the
>  INTERACTION of criteria, that no criterion by itself should be
>  determining of inclusion or exclusion.  I took this for granted,
>  but now make it explicit.  Combine the "scores" from several
>  criteria, make a balanced decision.  That is specific, and can be
>  made more so.  It is fairly common practice in comparative linguistics
>  to have combined lists, those proposed cognates which seem perfect
>  both on sound correspondences and on semantics, those which
>  are perfect on sound correspondences but slightly odd on semantics,
>  and so on, with greater detail and elaboration.  No reason not to
>  do that here also.

But also no reason that I can see to *do* it here.

Of course, if I can't compile a list of reasonable length using my criteria,
then I might be forced to resort to something like this.  But I'd prefer to
avoid it if I can.  And I think I can.  I think my primary criteria will still
leave me a list of a few hundred words.  And I'll be very surprised if that's
not enough to identify morpheme-structure constraints with some confidence --
particularly since those constraints show every sign of having been pretty
restrictive in Pre-Basque.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 09:35:05 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (6)
Message-Id: <E11iaLJ-0001kx-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 6.

>  Number six.
>  Avoiding biases against expressives.
>  Previously stated, as Trask agrees,
>  though he very much misrepresents the content of this one.

[LT]

>> I have seen none, except for Lloyd's suggestion  ...[one above, and]
>> and his insistence that sound-symbolic words
>> should be self-consciously added to the list according to no specified
>> criteria.

> This is most emphatically NOT what I suggested.
> I was explicit that I suggested dropping or modifying criteria which
> had the *effect* of biasing selection against any category of words,
> that I happened to be qualified to talk about why a bias against
> sound-symbolic words might distort any conclusions about
> canonical forms.
> That is quite another matter from self-consciously insisting
> on adding expressives.

OK, Lloyd -- if I've misunderstood your position, then I apologize.  But it
certainly *looked* as though you were proposing to deliberately add expressive
formations which failed my primary criteria.  See further below.

But, if you're not going to add these things, then how precisely do you propose
to get them in without wrecking my criteria?  Recall that expressive formations
in Basque are rarely attested early and are usually confined to small areas.

[snip passing remark about an earlier point]

[LT]

>> but dismissed the second
>> as lacking in specifics and intrinsically circular.

> As Trask restated it, I would agree that self-consciously adding
> expressives to the list would be unprincipled,
> if that were done merely for the purpose of adding expressives.
> But as reiterated above, that was most emphatically NOT what
> I proposed.  I proposed rather eliminating artificial barriers to
> their inclusion, through accidents of more limited attestation
> and the interaction of supposed criteria for number of dialects
> required in attestations.

In what respect are my criteria "artificial"?

I have proposed no criteria which specifically target expressive formations for
exclusion.  Instead, I have merely applied the same criteria to all words.

Now, if you're going to relax the criteria sufficiently to pick up words like
<malmutz> 'fluffy, insubstantial', which is pretty much confined to a single
dialect (Bizkaian) and nowhere recorded before 1802, then how are you going to
exercise any reasonable control at all over the membership of the initial list?
Aren't you just going to open the floodgates to most of the words in the
language, thereby defeating the whole point of the exercise?

> If expressives are attested only in one dialect,
> then only one dialect would be sufficient as a bare minimum
> satisfaction on that criterion of distribution.
> (an instance of suggestion number two above,
> not at all specific to expressives).

The distribution of what I regard as expressive formations varies from the
whole language (for a very few) to a single small area (probably the large
majority).

But look.  Are you suggesting that expressive formations should be singled out
for special treatment?  That they should be deliberately added to my list even
though they fail my primary criteria badly?  Before you accuse me again of
misrepresentation, look at your words above: it certainly looks to *me* as
though that is exactly what you are suggesting.

If you are, then tell me: how do I decide in advance which words are expressive
formations and which are not, so that I can decide which ones to add to my list
in defiance of my criteria?  Isn't this utterly circular?  Remember, one of my
ultimate goals is to characterize explicitly the differences in formation
between expressives and ordinary words.  And I can't hope to do that if I pick
the expressive formations *a priori* -- now can I?

And, if you are not doing this, then what exactly *are* you suggesting?  That I
should include in my list *every* word attested in "only one dialect"?  That
means that I will wind up listing every word recorded in the language at all,
and so I won't even have a list.

Lloyd, what on *earth* is this about? I can't follow it.

>  In fact, I gather from some other remarks
>  by Trask quite recently, that there are numerous alternative
>  words for "butterfly".

There are several different words, attested at different times and in different
places.  All of them appear to me to be expressive formations of one kind or
another.  Not one of them is either recorded early or found throughout the
larger part of the language.

>  If we had a full set of these displayed
>  for us, who knows what we might learn about whether
>  any particular forms should be considered inherited from
>  early Basque?

Oh, I can list them, if you like.  But how will merely staring at them allow us
to learn anything at all?

Anyway, I can state with some confidence that not one of these words is old in
Basque.  We might as well stare at the names of different shapes of pasta, or
at the names of the animals in the African rain forest, and try to decide which
ones are ancient in English.

>  And about our own thinking about criteria
>  for inclusion and exclusion.  Good examples have a way of
>  revealing paradoxes of thinking, or otherwise sharpening
>  our thinking.

I have already put a good deal of thought into my criteria, thought which is
based on my 25 years or so of studying Basque.  I have yet to see on this list
any different criteria which strike me as superior, or even just as good.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 09:41:38 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (7)
Message-Id: <E11iaRd-0001wP-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 7.

>  Number seven.
>  Tagging of items, rather than inclusion and exclusion
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

As I have now said several times, a tagging approach is not a point of
principle but only a procedure.  You can tag words to your heart's content,
but, sooner or later, you are going to have to decide which words should be
counted as strong candidates for native and ancient status and which should
not.  Until you have done this, all you have is the entire known vocabulary of
the language with lots of colored flags attached.  You have no list, and you
can obtain no results.

>  In redefining where on the continuum to draw the line for
>  "best" examples (since to be meaningful we must recognize
>  that is what anyone does by choosing or adjusting their criteria),
>  we can gain the benefits of more information and lose nothing.
>  Any information that someone might have used in a criterion
>  dictating exclusion can be included in a computer database
>  as a tagging of the individual items.  Additional information
>  can also be added as tagging.  The benefits of being able to
>  consider alternative hypotheses so quickly and easily were
>  discussed, and the fact that some questions will simply not be
>  asked if it is too difficult to ask them.

Again, this is procedure, and not principle.  Choosing three or six or fifteen
different sets of criteria and listing the words produced by each set of
criteria may or may not be an admirable procedure.  But, in the end, you must
choose the criteria you are going to go with, and get on with the real work.
Right?

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 10:02:56 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (8)
Message-Id: <E11iamF-0002nN-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 8.

>  Number eight.
>  Slight global preference to include basic vocabulary,
>       unless provably borrowed.
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

But I *did* reply to it in one of my postings.

>  The use of the Swadesh list or other list of *relatively* more
>  basic vocabulary could be used to give an extra point or fraction
>  of a point to items of basic vocabulary, perhaps causing some
>  of them to be included which otherwise would not rate highly
>  enough on the balanced combination of other criteria.
>  The principled basis for this is that languages do have basic
>  vocabulary, that basic vocabulary is, statistically only now,
>  relatively more resistant to replacement by loanwords,
>  and that the positing
>  of a set of vocabulary for an early form of a language should
>  probably include lexical items for most such basic vocabulary.

No doubt.  But how does this help?

The native English words for such basic senses as 'face', 'mountain', 'river'
and 'animal' have been entirely lost in favor of loan words.  How would a study
of early English benefit from including these words in the list, even if only
"fractionally", merely because they are basic?

The key word in the paragraph above is "statistically".  The English word
'face' is not "statistically" more than zero percent native English because
words for 'face' are not frequently borrowed -- now is it?  If we stick to
monomorphemic words -- and I do -- then a word is either 100% native or zero
percent native.  My criteria are designed to locate the ones which are 100%
native with as much reliability as possible.  How on *earth* would I benefit
from counting five or ten percent of items of basic vocabulary which are not
native?

I find this utterly mysterious.

>  This would not overrule clear cases of *known* borrowings,
>  in such case we might indeed appropriately have a "trump"
>  criterion for exclusion, but it should be used as a "trump"
>  only when *known* is meant very strictly, not mere speculation.
>  Trask's example of "mountain" is probably such a case,
>  to be excluded as an obvious loan.

The majority of loans into Basque can be identified as such with 100%
certainty, and must of course be excluded.  But there remains a residue of
cases which are less certain: words which are probably loans, words which are
very possibly loans, words which have been regarded as loans by a few
specialists.

I have maintained, and I still maintain, that the only responsible policy to
adopt is to exclude any word for which a loan origin has been seriously
defended by knowledgeable specialists.  I know that this policy will exclude a
few genuinely native words, but the opposing policy would fail to exclude a
larger number of loan words -- an outcome which is clearly very much worse.

>  But that does not contradict using this criterion
>  to evaluate whether we may have exluded too much, overall.

What do you mean by "excluding too much"?  This makes no sense to me.

For the 87th time, I am *not*, at this stage, trying to locate every native and
ancient word recorded anywhere.  I am merely trying to identify a sizeable body
of words which have strong claims to being native and ancient, so that I can
examine their phonological forms.

>  In effect, this suggestion shifts the burden of proof slightly,
>  so that to exclude an item of basic vocabulary we need stronger
>  evidence than we would for non-basic items.

Really?  Why?

The observation that words for 'face' are borrowed less often than words for
'cauliflower' has *no bearing* on whether any *particular* word for 'face' or
'cauliflower' has been borrowed or not.

>  What exact proportion of a Swadesh list
>  might we want to be sure is included?
>  I do not presume to know,
>  and there certainly are differences among languages in the
>  proportion of basic vocabulary which is native.

Exactly so.

>  But even if
>  not precisely quantified, this criterion is specific and has a
>  principled basis.  That basis relies on the idea that we are
>  evaluating our criteria for their appropriateness, just as we
>  are using them to evaluate items for inclusion or exclusion
>  as within the bounds of "best" candidates for early Basque.

I'm sorry, but I must reject the proposal absolutely.  The meaning of a word is
*not* a reliable guide to its possible native and ancient status.  We cannot
extrapolate from universal statistical tendencies to specific conclusions about
individual words.  And it is definitely individual words that I am interested
in, not statistical tendencies.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 10:17:26 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (9)
Message-Id: <E11ib0I-0004S6-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

At last, bleary-eyed readers (if any remain): part 9 (the last).

>  Number nine.
>  Avoiding cascading errors,
>       not insulating steps in the reasoning.
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

Er -- "cascading errors"?  How so?  My primary criteria are all independent,
and I am picking out individual words.  Where is there any scope for "cascading
errors"?

>  It is important to avoid circularity, by not artificially insulating
>  steps in the reasoning process, by not allowing selection of data
>  to be dictated by the hypotheses one has, more than absolutely
>  necessary.

Fine.  But, tell me, Lloyd: how exactly do my criteria of early attestation,
wide distribution and absence from neighboring languages force me to choose
words (or not) that are "dictated" by any hypotheses that I may be publicly or
privately entertaining?  I think this question is rather important, but I
haven't seen you responding to it so far.  How about now?

>  This was stated first in regard to canonical forms,
>  because of the likelihood that the initial selection under Trask's
>  criteria would bias against expressives which (Trask indicated)
>  do indeed have some different canonical forms from other vocabulary.

If they do -- and I agree that, in Basque, they do -- then this fact will
emerge clearly from my investigation.  If I find -- as I expect to -- that a
word of the form *<mutur> was phonologically impossible in Pre-Basque, then the
modern <mutur> 'snout, muzzle' will be, to some extent, exposed as an
expressive formation.  Now, this is just the kind of result that I am hoping to
obtain.  So what's the problem?

>  In other words, we should avoid excluding these from the
>  beginning,

OK, Lloyd -- gotcha.  Your "these" clearly refers to "expressives", right?
Therefore you are now explicitly proposing that we should take steps from the
beginning to include a whole bunch of expressive formations which fail my
primary criteria, just so my initial list will include a bunch of expressive
formations.  Right?

And how does this square with your protestation of misrepresentation?

>  so that the initial results will include a full range of
>  native canonical forms, and will not bias later work circularly to
>  incorrectly exclude items on the basis of a narrow set of formulas
>  for canonical forms, merely because almost no examples of such
>  canonical forms typical of expressives happened to be included
>  at stage one.

Lloyd, in spite of his protestations, is here *clearly* demanding that I should
find some way of (a) identifying expressive formations *a priori*, before I've
done anything else, and then (b) guaranteeing that lots of these go into my
initial list, *regardless* of how badly they may fail any or all criteria.
This is exactly the position I imputed to him before he accused me of
misrepresenting him.  Own up, Lloyd: I have not misrepresented you in the
slightest.  Rather, I have presented your position accurately, and dismissed it
as untenable.

I rest my case. ;-)

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

--------------------------------------------------------
End of Digest
*********
--------------------------------------------------------


From jer at cphling.dk  Mon Nov  1 23:07:05 1999
From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 00:07:05 +0100
Subject: Dating the final IE unity
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991013094133.15064A-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.000705.0100.>

Dear list fellows,

may it be permitted for an outsider to archaeology to speak a word of
common sense:

Although I can't evaluate the evidence I read that the Kurgan complex
moves - with accompanying changes - into the parts of the world where we
later find the IE languages. To a naive outsider like myself that looks as
if, somehwere on the way, the Kurgan culture was that of the speakers of
the IE protolanguage.
   Now, I also observe a heated debate about the validity of inferences
about language based on material remains, since material culture can pass
from one language community to another without affecting the language.
   Of course I agree that there is no necessary link of this kind,
appearances may be deceitful. But - and that is now my point - can we
accept that the same kind of appearances point in a wrong direction at
every chance they get? Is it a wrong impression that, for the Kurgan
complex and its continuations not to be linguistically IE, would
presuppose that a whole series of cases of expansion of a material pattern
to a place where we later find an IE language all conspire to play a trick
on the observer? If so, what is the probability of that? Is it not like
surviving Russian roulette in the long run - i.e. nil?
   Thus, if there are no basic errors in the presuppositions of the above
(e.g. in the identification of continuations of the Kurgan complex or in
the arrows drawn on maps to show where and when the complex moves), then
it follows that the evidence favoring the Kurgan complex as (pre-)PIE is
logically significant and that, consequently, the Indo-Europeans have been
found.
   Some might say that, for this to be conclusive, the grass has to be
much greener in the archaeological field than it is in that of
lingusitics. The way it seems to me is that, for it to be wrong, the
archaeological grass has to be exceptionally dirty or exceptionally rare.
Is it?

Jens


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 06:33:11 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:33:11 -0800
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY
 ANDLANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <0.28500277.253e9d18@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.223311.0800.>

At 12:20 AM 10/20/99 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>Likewise, efforts to show that chariots are not associated with IE-speakers
>(or at least early Indo-Iranians) have pretty well collapsed now that recent
>excavations have shown the earliest chariots to be placed not in the middle
>east or Anatolia in the 2nd millenium BCE, but in the southern Ural area and
>no later than the 20th century BCE.

Oooh, I had missed that somehow.  Just to make sure I have the right place:
do you mean near the northern shore of the Caspian?  Are they associated
with the NW Andronovo or the eastern (Volga-Ural) branch of the Yamnaya
complex?

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 06:41:21 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:41:21 -0800
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <380ED122.14F73EAE@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.224121.0800.>

At 10:38 AM 10/21/99 +0200, Wolfgang Schulze wrote:

>2) [in re Stanley Friesen] NOBODY can make "a strong case for Hattic,
>Hurrian etc. to be related to (part of) the North Caucasian family":
>First, the notion 'North Caucasian' is a rather suggestive term that
>does not find linguistic support [except by a certain school from
>Moscow].

I am aware of that, that is why the "part of" qualifier.  I always get the
East and West groups mixed up, so rather than say the wrong one, I used the
less specific phrase "part of North Caucausian"

>assumed proto-languages than standard trivialities]. To posit that
>Hattic and Hurrian etc. are related to (parts) of 'North Caucasian'
>cannot reflect more than a pre-scientific 'on-dit', just because we
>still do not have enough scientific evidence for the history of both WC
>and EC.

I never intended to imply any relationship between the East and West
branches, I just couldn't remember which branch Hurrian-Urartean was said
to be related to.  (My source on this was specific on this, I just did not
remember for certain that it was the East Caucasian family it specified).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 06:26:55 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:26:55 -0800
Subject: Hurrian-Urartean (was: Re: Dating the final IE unity)
In-Reply-To: <l03102803b432ae9c34cf@[195.247.226.33]>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.222655.0800.>

At 01:28 AM 10/20/99 +0200, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:

>>Indeed a strong case can be made for them being related to (part of) the
>>North Caucasian Family.

>a case has been made for Hattic being related to North-West-Caucasian
>another case has been made for Hurro-Urartaean being related to
>North-East-Caucasian
>and yet another case has been made for NW-Cauc being related to NE-Cauc

>neither of these cases is, imho, very strong ...

IMHO, the book I read made a more than creditable case for the
Hurrian-Urartean relationship to NE-Caucasian, and a mildly suggestive case
for the Hattic-NW-Caucasian.

I would say the first was certainly a stronger case than the one for the
existence of a Ural-Altaic family.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Tue Nov  2 01:08:59 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 17:08:59 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.170859.0800.>

At 01:34 AM 10/20/99 +0200, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:

>>>Why did Anatolian have to move through the Balkans?

>>Starting from the Ukraine, we have the following constraints:
>>A) there is no evidence of any IE languages ever having been in the
>>Caucasus prior to Armenian, making that route unlikely in the extreme.

>This is a classic argumentum e silentio.

There are times when this is valid. In this case it is at least strongly
suggestive. (And the lack of IE style cultural artifacts at an early date
is even more telling than the absence of IE words to my mind).

> Othoh, while it is true that these
>things are extremely controversial, some possible early loanwords of IE
>provenance in NE Cauc lgs. are sometimes being discussed.

This gets tricky, though. If the suggested relationships of NE Caucasian
languages to the Hurrian-Urartean and or Hattic languages is correct, then
they had very early contact with Anatolian languages, probably prior to
their immigration into the NE Caucasus.

Alternatively, the PIE homeland in the Pontic steps is very close indeed to
the NE Caucasus, providing some opportunity for borrowing.
Besides, I have not heard that these suggested borrowing are considered
securely established yet.

>>B) cultures with written history predate the probable appearance of the
>>Hittites in Anatolian in Mesopotamia. None of these written sources give
>>*any* indication of any likely pre-Anatolian people anywhere near
>>Mesopotamia.

>I'd say Anatolia *is* near Mesopotamia !?!

Yes - and the Assyrians *have* a record of an early Anatolian language
*there* near the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC! There are also good
indication of Indic ties for the Mitanni from an early date.
What is lacking is any records of Anatolian languages anywhere *east* of
Anatolia prior to the break up of the Hittite empire (at which time some
Anatolian languages show up in pockets in north-west Mesopotamia).

>>The first is made unlikely by the lack of IE-related cultural artifacts in
>>the Caucusus

>what is an "IE-related cultural artefact" ???

Certain styles of pottery, wheeled vehicles at an early date, and, more
important, certain burial styles and remains of domestic horses at an early
date.

This is the sort of evidence that makes me conclude the Corded Ware
cultures were IE related. It is missing in the Caucasus
--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Tue Nov  2 01:08:48 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 17:08:48 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.170848.0800.>

At 09:52 AM 10/19/99 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>3. The presence of Elamite (in Antiquity) and Brahwi (Dravidian) in Iran
>strongly suggests that the Dravidian territory stretched far more westward
>than at present. It seems - but I have no documentation at hand - that the
>old Indus valley culture is now recognized as having been Dravidian, which
>reinforces the hypothesis.

While this seems *likely* to me, I know of no substantial evidence
supporting this conclusion. Only decipherment of the Indus Valley script
would really establish the relationships of the Harappan language.

>Personally, I even suspect that a lot of what you might call 'Sanskrit
>culture' actually owes most of its original content to the conquered
>Dravidians since these already had a well established rich culture (like
>Mohendjo-Daro) when the IE warriors(?) invaded their countries.

This, however, is somewhat more secure. Several of the mythic and artistic
elements later so characteristic of Sanskrit culture appear to be present
in Indus Valley artwork. So substantial borrowing in the areas of
religion, myth and art, at least, seems well supported.
--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 01:27:10 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 17:27:10 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <001801bf1aef$79892440$a92b4c86@UHVR-PC9.UHVR-PC>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.172710.0800.>

At 12:37 PM 10/20/99 +0100, Gordon Whittaker wrote:

>such a group, and this evidence argues strongly for the presence of speakers
>of an Indo-European language in the Mesopotamian area itself at a time-depth
>of roughly 3100 B.C. It has long been debated in Assyriology whether a
>number of polysyllabic terms in Sumerian might derive from a so-called
>substrate of unknown origin. ...

>In the first issue of the Goettinger Beitraege zur Sprachwissenschaft
>(1998), based on a series of lectures given since 1978, I discussed
>unmotivated phonetic values in the Sumerian script and their association
>with the pictographic antecedents (Uruk IV) of the respective cuneiform
>signs. Signs depicting, for example, a fish, fox, bird, beer vessel and
>wagon have the orphan phonetic readings *pesh*, *lib/lub*, *hu*, *bi*, and
>*gurush/geresh*, recalling IE *pisk-i- 'fish', *wlp-eh- 'fox', *haw-i-
>'bird', *pih- 'drink', and *krs-o- 'wagon'.

Some care needs to be taken in interpreting these words.  For one thing,
there *is* attested Iranian (or Indo-Iranian) contact at a very early date,
so my first suspicion would be that these are II borrowings, from after the
PIE period.  Certainly, in regards to migrations etc., identification of
subfamily is important, and I am not sure this sample is sufficient for
doing that.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 02:07:58 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 18:07:58 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages (Horses and such)
In-Reply-To: <0.1c40a56f.254164e9@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.180758.0800.>

At 02:57 AM 10/22/99 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 10/19/99 4:58:14 PM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

><<...cultures with written history predate the probable appearance of the
>Hittites in Anatolian in Mesopotamia.  None of these written sources give
>*any* indication of any likely pre-Anatolian people anywhere near
>Mesopotamia.  (They do indicate an early appearance of proto-Iranian
>peoples to the east of Mesopotamia)>>

>The lack of references to "pre-Anatolian people" seems a pretty important
>point. Do those early records identify any "peoples" as living in central,
>northeastern or southwestern Anatolia?

Not always directly, but early Assyrian trade records include names and
words from native languages in all areas where they regularly traded.
Their records, and those of Akkade in the preceding millennium, also often
mention various tribes, ethnic groups and nations on the periphery of
civilization, especially with regard to conquests and exaction of tribute.

Now, admittedly these records are not as complete, nor as precise, as
modern ones would be.  But a good estimate can be made of the tribes and
peoples from southeastern Anatolia all the way to at least central Iraq,
and in earlier times even into modern India.

The only *clear* IE association is found in the Mitanni (names of deities,
nobles, and words for charioteering), and the form of the words indicates
an origin specifically from the Iranian branch.  There are also some words
in SUmerian that have some similarity to IE words, but they are
inconclusive, and Sumerian itself is assuredly NOT an IE language.

>Given the early dates postulated for an IE presence in the area, by e.g.
>Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, what would we expect those IE-related artefacts to
>be?

I am not entirely sure what dates G & I propose, but unless they follow
Renfrew in pushing PIE unity far back into the Neolithic, the following are
minimal: the use of horses (not asses) as a riding animal, the use of
wheeled vehicles, domestic oxen as a draft animal, and use of pigs, cows,
sheep and goats to provide food.

And, if the evidence for PIE originating in the Ukraine is correct, then we
can add: certain burial rites ("Kurgan" burials, or their derivatives),
certain stylistic elements in pottery decoration (impressed decorations),
the use of bronze implements, at least among the elite, and so on.

><<and the *total* lack of any pre-Armenian IE substratal
>influences in any of the non-IE languages of the Caucasus.>>

>Again these are very early dates. Do we have a sense of when those non-IE
>languages first appeared in the area?  And would a migration - as opposed to
>settlements - by way of the Caucasus leave such traces.

The problem is that prior to relatively modern times, long range migration
in one stage, especially via heavy mountainous terrain, is pretty much
impossible.  There would, of necessity, have been intermediate settlements,
just to maintain the necessities of life.

><<the closest relative of Greek seems to be Old Macedonian
>[and] ....there were peripheral populations of Greeks to the northeast of
>Greece proper, whence came the Dorians after the collapse of the Mykenean
>civilization.>>

>But does this give us a definite "directional" sense?  Couldn't both
>Macedonian and Dorian be as well explained as the expansion of Greeks
>northward?  One of the striking things about the Dorian account (which we
>rely upon to explain events before say 700 BC) is that it is fairly
>consistently described as "the return of the Dorians."

I suppose that is a possibility.  Though it would have to have occurred
prior to the split of Greek into several dialects to account for the
linguistic data.

On the other hand, mythic origins are often recast to match a group's
current status, so I am not sure how much credence we can give to this
supposed "return".

>In another message dated 10/19/99 4:03:14 PM, you wrote:
><<The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is
>quite telling here. >>

>But the bit does not appear in Myceneaen remains or in Homer and I don't
>think evidence for it has been found in the Aegean area until after 1000BC.

It is a little tricky, as bits seem to be only rarely preserved.  There are
only a few from the Sredny Stog (I only know of *one* for certain).  More
telling is the arrival of the steppe horse in Greece.  It is not native to
that area, so it had to be brought in by somebody.  It is not well suited
to being raised as a food animal in the harsh climate of Greece (not enough
grass, and too many inedible shrubs), so its presence is most likely due to
use as a riding animal, and as a symbol of elite status.

>advanced metal bits date from 1500BC in the Near East.    As a matter of
>fact, evidence of the "true horse" - equus caballus - does not appear on the
>Greek mainland until the end of the Early Helladic - at more or less the same
>time as evidence first appears in Troy.

Which is when I date the arrival of Indo-Europeans in Greece.  I suspect
these were not Greek speakers, but rather members of some other branch of
the IE family.  (They *may* have been Anatolians, arriving in Greece and
Troy at about the same time as part of a single series of
migrations/conquests).

>It is a little difficult to see how the horse can be especially connected
>with the more western Indo-European cultures with such relative late dates
>compared to the eastern ones. I believe our best evidence (e.g., the Mitanni
>horse manual translated into Hittite about 1400BC) is that the domesticated
>horse was established in the Near and Middle East well before it reached the
>Aegean and Greek mainland (or western/central Europe.)  There is no question
>that the horse came from the northern steppes, but the evidence that it came
>into Greece and Anatolia by way of the Balkans is I believe somewhat poor.

There is evidence of Equus caballus in association with some of the Late
Tripolye cultures in the Balkans (e.g. the Usatovo and Cernavoda).  And
Mallory cites the presence of horse-head scepters in an even wider area as
evidence of the importance of the horse to them.  These put the presence of
the steppe horse in the Balkans back to about 3500 BC, earlier than in
Mesopotamia and Asia.

>I'm having a bit of a problem seeing a pattern here.  And after looking at
>Renfrew again, I have to wonder how much Indo-European cultures crisscrossed
>back and forth over each other.

Probably quite a bit.

>  The notion that the Ukraine may have just
>been a stop along the way - not for Proto-Indo-Europeans but for an early
>group of IE speakers - keeps sneaking back as a possibility when you find
>such a large potential range for IE when historical records show up.  And
>when your first evidence of IE in the Ukraine is not Greek or western IE but
>rather Scythian, which is most often associated with Iranian and the east.

On the other hand, the arrival of the Scytians is moderately well
documented as being somewhat late.  And the core homeland of the Iranian
peoples east of the Caspian is *directly* adjacent to the Ukrainian steppes.

>(And Mycenaean or pre-Mycenaean Greek remains have not been found along the
>north shore of the Black Sea.)

I rather suspect that much of the distinctive cultural characteristics of
the Greeks developed *after* they moved south and came into contact with
civilization.  Indeed, the language itself is probably fairly recent when
they first appear in history.

>And this whole question of toponyms in Greece.  Why don't we encounter this
>problem so extensively in northern and western Europe?

Umm, there are *numerous* old IE toponyms throughout Europe, many of which
do not have the form of words from the IE branch later attested in the
area.  It is just that in Europe the IE languages are not attested until so
much later that the exact relationships are obscured

> We know there was an
>existing population there from well before 2000 BC or even 4000 BC.  What
>happened to that substrate?

It is likely still there to some degree.  There are also many old toponyms
in Europe that are *not* IE in nature.  There are also a *great* many words
in Pokorny (and the other IE dictionaries) that are only attested in the
European branches of the family.  Many of these are very likely substratal
borrowings from the pre-IE languages of Europe.  (Many of words with
reconstructed *a show this pattern).

>  Why aren't there all these non-IE or unknown IE
>place names distributed all over Europe?

There are.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 02:17:32 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 18:17:32 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991019153836.644E-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.181732.0800.>

At 04:21 PM 10/19/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:

>On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, petegray wrote:

>When we have a family of related languages, on what grounds do we decide
>what the internal structure is for the family tree?  In other words, how
>do we decide which of these languages are more closely related than others
>in the family? Nearly everybody agrees that we should do so on the basis
>of shared characteristics of the languages which cannot reasonably be
>attributed to parallel innovation or to borrowing.  The differences of
>opinion arise partly from differing interpretations of the
>characteristics,

And in identifying such characteristics.

For instance, do shared new vocabulary items count?  How do you isolate
vocabulary shared due to ancestry from vocabulary shared due to borrowing?

For that matter, how does one rule out borrowing or influence for
morphological or phonetic features?

>If you believe that there is a grouping of "NW IE" languages (and I put
>quotes around it because I'm not clear on exactly which branches are to be
>included in this clade- Celtic? Germanic? Balto-Slavic?), this amounts to
>a claim that these branches are characterised by a set of shared
>attributes of the sort which I just mentioned.

There are a large number of shared vocabulary items between various pairs
Italic, Celtic and Germanic that are not found outside of Europe.  There
are also a large number of vocabulary items uniquely shared between
Germanic and Balto-Slavic.

This weekend at the library I discovered (or re-discovered) a booklet with
detailed stats on the distributions of roots from Pokorny and Mann.  I
intend to use the correlation tables at the end to apply one of the
grouping algorithms to get an estimated tree.

[I have some issue with the way they handled some of the minor IE
languages: for instance they group Phrygian with Dacian unconditionally,
possibly obscuring the relationships].

>(I earlier listed some of the evidence on whose basis Ringe et. al.
>produced the tree which I quoted; I can repeat both the tree and the
>evidence, if there's interest, but I hate to clutter the list with what's
>already been said.)

Or you could e-mail the evidence to me privately.  (Is this the one of the
U-Penn trees, or another one?)

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From lmfosse at online.no  Fri Nov  5 13:59:50 1999
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 14:59:50 +0100
Subject: SV: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.5.NOV.1999.145950.0100.>

Eduard Selleslagh [SMTP:edsel at glo.be] skrev 19. oktober 1999 08:52:

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> 3. The presence of Elamite (in Antiquity) and Brahwi (Dravidian) in Iran
> strongly suggests that the Dravidian territory stretched far more westward
> than  at present. It seems - but I have no documentation at hand - that the
> old Indus valley culture is now recognized as having been Dravidian, which
> reinforces the hypothesis.

The presence of Brahui has been shown to be due to a migration of Dravidian
speakers from the South of India (probably mercenaries) a few hundred years
ago. They are therefore not relevant for the discussion of the earliest period.

> Personally, I even suspect that a lot of what you might call 'Sanskrit
> culture' actually owes most of its original content to the conquered
> Dravidians since these already had a well established rich culture (like
> Mohendjo-Daro) when the IE warriors(?) invaded their countries.

> What is the present scholarly opinion on these points?

It would seem that scholarship on this matter is starting a new phase. Prof.
Michael Witzel has recently published a large article on the Internet
(Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, access through the Indology web site)
dealing with the linguistic substrates of Northwestern India where he denies
any Dravidian presence. The French scholar Bernard Sergent has on the basis of
anthropological evidence also denied a Dravidian presence in the Northwest. In
other words: the Harappans may not have been Dravidians after all, nor for that
matter Indo-Aryans. So we seem to be back where we were: We don't know who the
Harappans were. (Possibly Munda?)

See:

Sergent, B. (1997). Genèse de l'Inde. Paris, Payot.

Hock, H. H. (1996). Pre-Rgvedic Convergence between Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) and
Dravidian? A Survey of the Issues and Controversies. Ideology and Status of
Sanskrit. Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language. J. E. M.
Houben. Leiden - New York - Köln, E. J. Brill: 17-58.

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 X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Nov  2 06:25:34 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 01:25:34 EST
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.012534.EST.>

In a message dated 10/28/99 12:25:17 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<What I *heard* was a strong suggestion that the continuity of cultures is
evidence *against* an IE incursion at that time.  Of course neither is it
evidence *for* such an incursion.  The conclusion that an incursion occurred
at around that time is developed from other lines of evidence.>>

We are talking about a period between roughly 2650BC - 1650BC in mainland
Greece.  My statement was that there is no serious material evidence of a
significant immigration during that period, EXCEPT from Anatolia.

If there are other "lines of evidence" of an "incursion" from the north, I'd
very much like to hear what they are.

Thoreau said something like: some inferences are as obvious as a trout in the
milk pail.

During the period in time we are talking about, we DO see plain evidence of a
major migration, the only evidence of a change in population.  We DO see
evidence that migration resulted 100s of years later in a clash of cultural
groups and warfare - the only substantial evidence of warfare in the period.
We DO see strong evidence that the migration did not come from the north but
came from Anatolia.

What's the obvious inference?  That migrations do leave evidence.  And that
the warfare later resulting from these cultural differences do leave
evidence.  So why didn't any incursion from the north leave evidence?  The
inference is that it may not have happened.

If above you mean by an "IE incursion," a movement of IE - speaking peoples
from the north, the question becomes where is the evidence?  Any evidence.

<<Nor can it be used to *deny* such things as it stands.>>

It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that there was no significant
incursion during this period from the north into mainland Greece.  It seems
possible to *deny* its likelihood.

As far as I know the theory that IE speakers came into Greece for the first
time from the direction of the Ukraine is based on old assumptions that can
no longer be supported by very much evidence.  There is nothing to suppose
that IE speakers were not already present in Greece when the Anatolian
migration began c.2400 or that the migration did not represent IE speakers.
The continuity of settlements right into the Mycenaean age suggests nothing
else but THAT IF IndoEuropean speakers first came during this period, they
came from Anatolia.  Neither the horse, the wheel, metal nor weapons show
evidence of playing a major part in the expansion of the Anatolian culture
during this period.  If anything, we can attribute it to the advantages of
increased population in the Anatolian influenced zone.  There is also the
factor of the sea - the older Korakou culture seems to have avoided exposing
its settlements to easy access from the sea.

I would suggest that the legitimacy of any theory dealing with this time and
place would need to deal with the evidence as its found.  The evidence that
exists in this case is particularly strong and does need to be accounted for.
 It really does not seem to be satisfactory to suggest that an IE dialect(s)
from the north became the dominant language of Greece without leaving any
significant evidence of arriving there, while major changes in population and
culture coming from Asia Minor are somehow irrelevant to the language issue.

Regards,
Steve Long


From drc at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz  Sun Nov  7 07:26:33 1999
From: drc at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 20:26:33 +1300
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <SUN.7.NOV.1999.202633.1300.>

>>> Stanley Friesen <sarima at ix.netcom.com> 10/20 4:20 PM >>>

><<In the Pacific islands, the replacement of many of the Polynesian languages
>by various European Creoles was *not* accompanied by a
>complete"europeanization" of these islands.  Quite the contrary.  Even to
>this day the peoples of these islands still retain many of the cultural
>practices from before, and continue to make many of the same cultural
>artifacts (e.g. stone heads).  A future archeologist is likely to argue that
>"there is a continuity in many aspects of the Pacific island material culture
>...".>>

I hesitated to question this paragraph, not wanting to start a
discussion in an area remote from Indo-European, but since Stanley
Friesen's "example" seems to have been taken up as exemplifying or
demonstrating something, I must ask how these "Pacific islands" are
related to the ones I am familiar with?

(1) I know of only one Polynesian language which has (largely) been
replaced by a European Creole, namely Hawaiian.

(2) I'm not sure where they make "stone heads" in the Pacific islands.

(3) The last couple of centuries have seen the extremely rapid
introduction of metal tools and abandonment of stone tool making,
sometimes even before direct contact with Europeans. Adzes, knives, fish
hooks, needles and other hard artefacts would shift entirely to new
materials and designs within a short space of time. Some continuity
might be found in the archaeological record in such things as house
building, cooking in the earth oven, manufacture of shell valuables and
so on. But this would be accompanied by an influx of completely new
types of artefacts -- bottles, coins, tobacco pipes etc.

(4) This unmistakeable archaeological break takes place, note, *before*
large scale linguistic replacement, which is (contra Stanley Friesen)
still in the future for most of the Pacific islands.

So where does this leave the analogy?

Ross Clark


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Nov  2 08:20:26 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 03:20:26 EST
Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.032026.EST.>

In a message dated 10/28/99 3:47:23 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<Well, unless he [Renfrew] has *seriously* improved his argument on this
from what he presented in his book, it is woefully inadequate a response.>>

Well, at the time that Archaeology & Language was published, Renfrew's main
argument was with the "majority" theory at the time - which placed IE's
dispersal at 2500BC (Childe-Kossina-Gimbutas).

Quite possibly the book was the stroke that "demolished" that theoretical
date - not the least by pointing out to archaeologists that "the date is not
based on any clear linguistic argument; it is not really a linguistic
argument at all.  It is a conclusion based on consensus.  Yet it is taken by
archaeologists as linguistic evidence,...  There is therefore a complete
circularity.  And in this case it would appear that the consensus may be in
error."  (A&L Cambridge Univ paperback p166)

Now, the new "consensus" date has backed to 4000BC in the recent posts on
this list.  But I wouldn't bet the ranch on it staying there.  Partly because
the actual evidence for picking that date is not much stronger than the old
2500BC date.

One important thing that Renfrew's book did was to bring objectivity back to
archaeology - so that "circular" support for conclusions could be reexamined
and stripped of their presumptions.  The kind Mallory points to in describing
the way that the IE homeland was once placed in the Himalayas, yielding
golden haired horsemen with bronze swords who brought not only elite
dominance but a language to go with it to whoever it was who was living in
Europe at the time.

<<Indeed, I quite agree that IE probably spread largely by elite dominance,
with only the tribal overlords actually migrating to the new areas.>>

And where exactly did these IE speaking "overlords" get their supposed
dominance? It certainly wasn't the horse, which shows no sign of being a
factor in seige or decisive war before 1000BC. And the chariot was just a
platform for conveying war leaders around in Homer.  The wheel is late
neolithic - TRB.  And swords appear on Crete 100's of years before they do in
mainland Greece.  It wasn't archers.  And it wasn't armor.

This business about a few IE speakers being able to come in and convert the
language of an entire people seems to be a vestige of19th Century jingoism
more than it seems to reflect any hard evidence.  If anything, we could just
as easily see any steppe "invaders" of central or southern or even western
Europe turning around and adopting the language of the folk who were already
there.

<<In many ways, I see the spread of European languages to Polynesia, and the
spread of Latin into most of Europe, as the best models for the spread of IE
languages in prehistory.>>

But Latin's prestige didn't come from a bunch of headbashing riders off the
steppes.  The advantages of Latin had to do with access to trade, crafts,
technology and much personal advancement that no profile of a pastoralist IE
speaking barbarian could appear to offer.  The same applies to Polynesia.  The
 theory of some small group of technologically advanced soldiers coming in
and converting primitives does not fit the evidence in the areas where IE
becomes documented at all - UNLESS IE was already the language family of the
original inhabitants of those areas.  And the small group of "overlords" were
assimilated.

In fact that model does work unless the invader has a steady flow of
technologically advanced resources and/or sheer population numbers shoring
him up.  That was the case in the new world.  On the other hand,  the French
don't speak Frankish.  The English do not speak Anglo-Norman or Danish.
Italians don't speak Odacer's language.  And Slavic has consumed a long list
of "dominant elite" languages like they were just popcorn at the ballpark.
When history starts being recorded, small groups of warrior elites are
definitely not the source of language change - except in cases of genocide -
and it takes more than just a few tribal overlords to pull that off.

Larry Trask wrote:

<<But Renfrew has expressly argued that many of these words are not substrate
words at all, but rather late borrowings into Greek long after Greece had
become Greek-speaking.>>

sarima at ix.netcom.com replied:

<<In many cases this is difficult to adequately maintain, since the words do
not correspond closely to the words in the likely source cultures.>>

What likely source cultures would you be speaking of?  Minoan?  or Carian?
Or for that matter Thracian or Getae?  We don't have more than ten sure words
(if any) in any of these languages to correspond to - closely or not.

<< Also, place names based on late borrowings are a trifle unusual.   Even
here in the USA, most non-English place names are substratal (Amerindian or
Spanish), and we are notorious polyculturalists.>>

The "late borrowings" do not refer I believe to place names.  Herodotus
however does mention Pelagasian placenames - and he says he does not know
what kind of language Pelagasian is, but that it is not Greek.

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Nov  2 12:43:54 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 12:43:54 +0000
Subject: Revised: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.124354.0000.>

Lloyd Anderson writes:

[snip stuff I might reply to later]

>  Trask believes the historical phonology of Basque is already *known*,
>  that there is only one viable such phonology, and he is comfortable using
>  it to exclude items.

Not quite.

I do believe that our current understanding of the phonological prehistory of
Basque is substantially correct, and very unlikely to undergo more than minor
clarifications in the future.  But I do *not* appeal to that phonological
prehistory to "exclude" anything at all.  My primary criteria are
non-phonological in nature -- remember?  So I can't possibly be appealing to
phonological criteria.

>  This is not stated overtly in his criteria, but it did
>  emerge explicitly in some discussions with others not long ago.

No.  The phonological prehistory of Basque is nowhere mentioned in my primary
criteria because I make no appeal to it.  If the known phonological prehistory
of Basque were utterly different, this would have no effect: my criteria would
still be the same, and the words picked out by them would still be the same, so
long as the facts of attestation, distribution and shared status were still the
same.

>  But then the procedure which he proposes,
>  to select the "best" candidates for early Basque vocabulary,
>  *is indeed at least to some small degree circularly based
>  on a prior hypothesis about the historical phonology of Basque*.

Lloyd, forgive me, but this is completely false.  Where on earth are you
getting such ideas from?  And why are you imputing them to me -- completely
wrongly?

Whatever hypotheses I may be entertaining about the historical phonology of
Basque, these hypotheses play *no part whatever* in my criteria for selection.
Surely that is obvious.

>  Nothing wrong with pursuing that route,
>  because in the long run we do evaluate the totality of hypotheses
>  and data, and Trask's hypotheses about historical phonology are quite
>  likely correct in most respects ...,

There are not my hypotheses.  The phonological prehistory of Basque was worked
out in great detail in the 1950s, when I was still a schoolboy who had hardly
even heard of linguistics.  The definitive publication came in 1961, when I was
still in high school.

>  but it DOES mean that the results almost *could not* lead to questioning
>  the hypothesis, since the data is selected by conformance to the hypothesis.

Nonsense.  Balderdash.  Lloyd, will you *please* stop making these absurd
declarations?

>  For those interested in the specifics, please go back to earlier
>  correspondence involving others,
>  it is beyond my competence as a non-specialist in Basque.

The earlier correspondence will merely confirm what I have just said (again).

>  However, for other exclusions which are not directly stated by
>  Trask's criteria but are indirect consequences, refer to the discussion
>  of expressives, and why a criterion of wide distribution improperly
>  excludes them (because of biases against recording).

We've discussed this to death elsewhere.  And, Lloyd, you have *still* not put
forward any explicit criteria for selection which you want to defend as better
than mine.

Given any particular Basque word, such as <makur> 'curved' or <tutur> 'crest',
by what explicit criteria will you decide whether it should, or should not, be
included in the list?  You have never answered this question, and I've asked it
about six times now.

>  In turn, their exclusion will lead to a misstatement of canonical forms
>  for the language as a whole. (Trask has stated that indeed canonical forms
>  for expressives are different from those for other vocabulary *in Basque*,
>  where I was myself able only to say that this situation is highly likely,
>  since it does occur in many languages.)

But who ever said I was interested in canonical forms "for the language as a
whole"?  Who has even claimed that there must have *existed* a single set of
canonical forms for Pre-Basque "as a whole" -- by which I take it you mean
"both ordinary words and expressive formations"?

>  Trask intends to use the result of his selection of "best" cases to
>  determine canonical forms, which result he will then use to select
>  further candidates for vocabulary of early Basque.
>  But he simply fails to respond to the point that his
>  canonical formulas may be biased by his starting point.
>  He only answers "not a problem for me"

And quite properly so, because this is not a problem.

Lloyd has raised only two points of possible substance, as follows:

(1) Expressive formations may be constructed according to different rules from
ordinary words.

Indeed they are, but how can I hope to establish this objectively unless I
*first* identify the rules for ordinary words?

(2) Words in particular semantic areas may be constructed according to
different rules from other words.

This I find unworthy of taking seriously.  I know of no language in which such
a thing happens, and I certainly know of no reason to suspect that it might be
true of Basque.  Of course, if it *is* true of Basque, then that fact should
emerge from my investigations.  But I'm not holding my breath.

>  This kind of result snowballs, has a domino effect on later stages
>  of investigation.  Sometimes good, sometimes bad (bad if some wrong
>  assumption slipped in anywhere in the process).

This is a bald assertion, unsupported so far by any evidence at all, and I see
no reason to take it seriously.

>  While his reply under this message title did mention my point
>  about the systematic bias in excluding sound-symbolic words,
>  he transited immediately to a discussion of attestation in only one
>  dialect in cases which were not sound-symbolic.  So he has still
>  not found any solution to this issue of systematic distortion of results.

So, Lloyd -- yet *again* you are telling me that expressive formations should
be picked out, somehow, *in advance* of any investigations, and deliberately
added to the list in defiance of the ordinary criteria, which must still be
applied to other words.  This is how I described your position earlier, and
your response was to claim that I was misrepresenting you.  Do you still think
I was misrepresenting you?

Lloyd, how will you pick out the expressive formations *in advance* of any
work?  What criteria will you use to identify them?  And how will you avoid
circularity?  Moreover, what criteria will you rely on to decide which of your
selected expressive formations will go into the list?  "Attestation in only one
dialect"?  That means you'll have to include *all* of them, now doesn't it?

>  So it is not a problem if his results about canonical forms are wrong,
>  and he then uses those wrong results to select his data (wrongly in
>  some cases because of the initial error) from which he will draw further
>  conclusions?

You know, Lloyd, I'm really getting a little tired of this.  For the last
bloody time, I am *not* appealing to canonical forms to select the data.
Instead, I am selecting the data by purely non-phonological criteria, and then
examining these data to *extract* canonical forms.

>  I simply don't follow this failure to appreciate the
>  snowballing consequence of certain kinds of errors,

And I don't follow this bewildering sequence of plainly false statements about
my criteria and my procedure.

>  or perhaps rather the certainty that he already knows the answers.

Not "certainty".  Remember, I've already done a good deal of work in this vein,
and I have a number of preliminary results which I am confident will stand up
pretty well.  But I haven't claimed any certainty: only confidence that I know
what I'm doing.

>  Because that seems to me to imply that he is only seeking the "best"
>  *examples* to *illustrate* *conclusions he has mostly already drawn*,

The response to this that pops into my head is one that I am sure the moderator
will decline to post. ;-)

So I will content myself with a more measured response: Lloyd, this is an utter
falsehood, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

>  not a reasonable selection of *very good* data from which to consider
>  drawing new conclusions.  He actually states the contrary,
>  but I believe he is not aware of the circularities.

What "circularities"?  I haven't seen any circularities, and you certainly
haven't advanced any.

[snip incomprehensible passage about <uko> and <ukondo> and darkly alleged, but
unidentified, "*non sequiturs*]

>  [LA, clarifying that including nursery words and expressives,
>  for the purposes of having a truly representative sample of
>  early Basque,

More balderdash.  Pre-Basque doubtless had some nursery words and expressive
words.  But how can we know what those were?

Lloyd, are you seriously proposing that I should take any arbitrary nursery or
expressive words from modern Basque (or even all of them?), and then declare by
fiat that they must have been present in Pre-Basque, even though there exists
no evidence that they were present?  If so, this is utterly irrational.  If
not, then what the hell *are* you proposing?

>  is NOT the same thing as handling the difficulties
>  of reasoning about external comparisons,

I am not interested in external comparisons.  I am doing internal
reconstruction.

>  precisely because
>  expressives may not undergo all of the sound changes which
>  apply to other words.

This suggestion has never been demonstrated to be true for Basque.

Anyway, even if it were true, this would have no consequences.  I am not
including or excluding words on the basis of their phonological forms.

>  Therefore, of course, arguments from the *difficulty*
>  of the latter task are not arguments to exclude such words.]

And I haven't argued from difficulty.  I exclude words which fail to satisfy my
criteria, and include words which do satisfy them.  Now where is the
"difficulty"?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Nov  2 14:42:58 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 14:42:58 +0000
Subject: Revised: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.144258.0000.>

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  Trask had mentioned that the 16th-century texts were primarily religious.
>  That is a very strong bias of content, I would think against quite a
>  range of vocabulary from ordinary life.

Oh, not necessarily.  Take Leizarraga's 1571 translation of the New Testament.
In the *first few lines* of the preface, we find the following everyday words,
at least:

<guzi> 'every, all'
<andre> 'lady'
<gehien> 'most'
<bere> 'his/her own'
<txipi> 'small'
<eta> 'and'
<zeren> 'because'
<ni> 'I'
<zu> 'you'
<ezagun> 'acquaintance'
<gabe> 'without'
<bezala> 'like, as'
<berri> 'new'
<hau> 'this'
<izan> 'be'
<on> 'good'
<ahal> 'ability'
<baldin> 'if'
<neure> 'my own'
<zerbait> 'something'
<eman> 'give'
<ez> 'not'
<anitz> 'many'
<bertze> 'other'
<arte> 'interval, between'
<jende> 'people'
<handi> 'big'
<ene> 'my'
<hala> 'thus'
<ere> 'also'
<non> 'where'
<sekulan> 'ever'
<heldu> 'arrive'
<hura> 'that'
<herri> 'country'
<ezen> 'whether'
<ito> 'drown'
<azpi> 'under'
<gogo> 'mind'
<buru> 'head'
<bilo> 'hair'
<latz> 'rough'
<bihotz> 'heart'
<ezin> 'impossible'
<asko> 'enough'
<hain> 'so (much)'
<gauza> 'thing'
<kasi> 'almost'
<egin> 'do, make'
<orain> 'now'
<lehen> 'first'
<eder> 'beautiful'
<denbora> 'time'
<ohi> 'custom'
<frango> 'lots of'
<behin> 'once'
<erran> 'say'
<bezain> 'as...as'
<hitz> 'word'
<behatu> 'look at'
<gaitz> 'bad'
<zuhur< 'prudent'
<egun> 'day'
<bide> 'road, way'
<baina> 'but'
<zer> 'what'
<aitzin> 'front'
<mintzatu> 'speak'
<ilun> 'dark'
<hobe> 'better'
<bat> 'one, a'

And so on.  Not bad for the first few lines of a religious book, is it?

Think using the preface is cheating?  OK; let's look at the text.  I'll skip
chapter one of Matthew, which is the familiar list of begats, and take the
first few lines of chapter two:

<jaio> 'be born'
<izan> 'be'
<errege> 'king'
<denbora> 'time'
<huna> 'hither'
<etorri> 'come'
<non> 'where'
<ezen> 'whether'
<ikusi> 'see'
<hura> 'that'
<izar> 'star'
<eta> 'and'
<entzun> 'hear'
<hori> 'that'
<guzi> 'all'
<bildu> 'gather'
<sortu> 'be born'
<erran> 'say'
<hi> 'you'
<lur> 'earth'
<arte> 'interval, between'
<txipi> 'small'
<ene> 'my'
<orduan> 'then'
<deitu> 'call'
<agertu> 'appear'
<igorri> 'send'
<jaun> 'lord'
<haur> 'child'
<jakin> 'know'
<ni> 'I'
<ere> 'also'
<ukan> 'have'
<aitzin> 'front'
<leku> 'place'
<gain> 'top'
<handi> 'big'
<etxe> 'house'
<sartu> 'enter'
<bere> 'his/her own'
<ama> 'mother'
<aho> 'mouth'
<amets> 'dream'

And so on.

Still think religious texts are woefully deficient in everyday vocabulary?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Nov  9 10:46:06 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 10:46:06 +0000
Subject: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.9.NOV.1999.104606.0000.>

Pat Ryan writes:

[on Basque <ama> 'mother']

>  I continue to believe that some terms which might be classified as
>  Kinderlallsprache such as <ama> are a powerful indication of common
>  linguistic descent; and should not be excluded from consideration of
>  inclusion in Pre-Basque.

>  It may be that this category of terms has preserved an older or non-typical
>  phonological form than other words of the vocabulary but they should be
>  seriously considered because of their ubiqiuity.

No.  Their ubiquity is *precisely* the reason why they should be excluded.
After all, in most of the languages on the planet, the word for a cat-noise is
something like <miau>, but this ubiquity is not an argument for pushing the
word back to Pre-Proto-Everything.  Rather, it is a compelling argument for
disregarding the word altogether, on grounds of *motivated* independent
creation.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Thu Nov  4 20:41:12 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 20:41:12 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <THU.4.NOV.1999.204112.0000.>

From: Patrick C. Ryan <proto-language at email.msn.com>
Date: Saturday, October 30, 1999 2:09 PM

Dear Sean and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 1999 1:29 AM

> On Sat, 16 Oct 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

<snip>

[SC]

> Virtually all syntactic analysis over the last 40 years has defined word
> categories in terms of the distribution of words within sentences- what
> you have called the 'slot' approach.  It's quite true that one can at
> least imagine other approaches, such as one where word categories are
> defined in terms of word semantics rather than word distribution. I might
> say, tho, that we rejected that approach many decades ago for the simple
> reason that it doesn't work as well, as Larry Trask has aptly illustrated.

> If you feel otherwise, then show us a model of language such as English
> which does a more accurate job of assigning strings of English words to
> the 'accept' and 'reject' bins than the best distributional model to date.
> If you can do so, we'll be glad to accept your model.

[PR]

Thank you for affording me the opportunity to explain my views in this forum.

Now, I would say that Larry would be the best choice to explain why a
semantic approach "doesn't work as well" but since I have repeatedly asked,
and in my opinion have not gotten a responsive answer to the question of
'why the "slot-and-filler" approach (Larry's terminology) be characterized
as working better', perhaps you will jump in to explain with specifics not
with generalities why you also hold this view.

If you do not care to do that, could you furnish me with the statements of
Larry that you consider to have "aptly illustrated" this point of view?

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com
(501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA
WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/
and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html
"Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga meiði, nætr allar níu,
geiri undaðr . . . a þeim meiði er mangi veit
hvers hann af rótum renn." (Hávamal 138)


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Nov  3 17:44:42 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 12:44:42 EST
Subject: Re Personal pronouns
Message-ID: <WED.3.NOV.1999.124442.EST.>

In the discussion between Larry Trask and Pat Ryan,
each of them has a partly valid perspective.

Pat points out that "Personal Pronouns" may properly
include "possessives" or "possessive pronouns".
Trask objects that "possessives" are not pronouns,
as proven by distributional criteria.

The gap in Trask's logic is the assumption that
the definition of "personal pronoun"
must depend essentially and exclusively on a distributional meaning,
and cannot have another legitimate basis.

In fact, "personal pronoun" was defined by use long before
Trask or any of the rest of us were born, and does
indeed have "a" (not "the") legitimate use emphasizing more the
semantic content and less the distributional occurrence /
part-of-speech characteristics of use.

It is not a valid counterargument
to say that "possessive pronouns" must be "pronouns" in every respect.
That depends on the assumption that the composite is transparent,
and would lead to the conclusion that "White House" must be a white
house, even if it were another color, patently an error of reasoning.
Rather, "possessive" may already signal a member of the class
of determiners, or whatever one considers "possessive pronouns"
to be closest to, distributionally.

So there is no absolute right or wrong in these discussions,
there are legitimate arguments for each point of view.

Which means it is NOT legitimate to say the other point
of view is simply wrong (however that may be phrased).

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Nov  2 18:48:37 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 13:48:37 EST
Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.134837.EST.>

I wrote:
<<I'm beginning to suspect that the 4000BC "last date of PIE unity" is pretty
much a linguistic conclusion and - be it right or wrong - the material
evidence does not especially favor that date versus an earlier one.>>

Sean Crist replied (dated 10/28/99 2:09:32AM):
<<It's quite true that the reconstructed IE vocabulary puts certain
constraints on the possible dates for the final IE unity.>>

But that is not what I said and I don't believe it's true.  Reconstructions
are relative dates - there's no constraints imposed by the linguistic
evidence alone. WHAT I SAID was that the archaeology will not necessarily
support the dating - not that reconstructions put any constraint on the
objective findings.

Sean Crist continued:
<<For example, we reconstruct "wheel" for the PIE lexicon.  We conclude that
the speakers of PIE at its final unity belonged to a culture acquainted with
the wheel.>>

The dating of the wheel is NOT linguistic evidence.  This cannot be
understated.  If there's supposed to be some CONCLUSION ABOUT DATES drawn
from the commonness of words for the wheel, it is most definitely NOT
primarily based on linguistic evidence.  It MUST BE BASED on the earliest
dates given to the wheel by archaeology.  (Unless of course you are referring
to lexicostatistical analysis, which I'm pretty sure is not the case.)

<<Dating the final PIE unity to 7000 BCE is therefore quite inacceptible,
because the wheel is not attested in the material record until much
later....>>

"Quite incceptible" is quite unacceptible.  There's no reason to say that
this is  finally conclusive or not questionable or anything more than
tenative.  There's actually very little to be sure about here.

Starting with the linguistic side - very clearly, there are cases where
technological and cultural innovations carry their own terminology with them
and enter different languages with a common name long after those languages
have separated.  (In some cases, they have even been conformed after the fact
to the local sound rules.)  IE speakers could have become "acquainted" with
the wheel after they separated and adopted the traveling wagoneer's,
wheelwright's or merchant's word for the item.

And let me question whether the universal shared character of the attested
words for the wheel is even accurate.

What was the Hittite word for wheel?

Awhiles back, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote (3/9/99 12:12:33 AM):
<<The other words related to horse technology yield no Hittite
cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but
<hurki>, related only to Tocharian <wa"rka"nt> "circle, wheel"),
except for two curious items: "shaft/pole", Hittite hissa ~ Skt.
i:s.a:, Grk. oie:ks, Slav. oje(s)- and "(to) harness", Hittite
turiia- ~ Skt. dhu:r-,...>>

And, BTW, how does Greek or Mycenaean jive with the statement that wheel has
a shared form in all IE languages?

Miguel wrote to me:
<<AFAIK, "horse" in Mycenaean is i-qo (Class. Greek hippos), not a regular
reflex of PIE *ek^wos.  "Wheel" is a-mo (Cl. Greek harma "chariot").>>

And a simple reading of the Illiad (as Chapman noted a long time ago and Buck
gave a nod to) makes it rather clear that Homer's specific word for a wheel,
a chariot wheel, a potter's wheel, wheel tracks and a spinning wheel is
<trochos>.  What is equally pretty clear is that <kuklos> refers not
specifically to a wheel, but to anything circular, including a circle of
counselors or the walls surrounding a town.

If <kuklos> did in fact originally refer to a circle (rather than
specifically to a wheel) then there is no surprise that the word would trace
back to PIE long before the wheel - and the fact of the wheel's introduction
would only reflect a later shift in semantic meaning of <kuklos>.  <*rotHo>,
the other supposed IE universal, does not even approach the meaning "wheel"
in Homer.

So, it appears that most of the words for the wheel that are attested or show
a clear path from the 2d millenium BC (Hittite, Tocharian, Mycenaean, Homeric
Greek) don't give much support at all to the universality of wheel
terminology.  Or therefore to the 4000BC dating.

So how is it that such a claim keeps being made?  Is it because all these
early languages "lost" the PIE form?  Or are we assuming that PIE MUST have
had a word for the wheel - based on what?

And how will this rigid theory - about the correlation between the wheel and
the latest dates of PIE unity - change as the evidence for the wheel keeps
moving backward in time?

Archaeologists have begun to adopt the understanding that the earliest
finding of a well-developed technological item cannot be accepted as the
"earliest date" of that technology, anymore than it is likely that the
earliest wheel found is actually the first wheel ever made.  Evidence for
wheel tracks contemporary with early European megalithic material culture may
have been found and is being actively pursued. (see, e.g., Maximilian O.
Baldia, Causewayed enclosures, the oldest roads, the first wagon tracks, and
the development of megalithic tombs in southern Scandinavia and Central
Europe, a copy of which is on the web at
http://209.217.18.237/SAA_1998_Roads.htm.)  The dating would mean the PIE
speakers would be acquiring their common word(s) for the wheel in Germany
about 3750BC about the same time they were picking up the same terminology in
the vicinity of Sumeria.  Not.

But here's the important question: how could a piece of archaeological
evidence that is so uncertain as to both ultimate dating and conclusiveness
become such a rigid date for some linguists?

<<If this is what you mean by "a linguistic conclusion", then yes, dating
the latest IE unity to 3500-4000 BCE is "a linguistic conclusion".  Are
you saying that this is a bad thing?>>

The way this has been done, yes.  There's nothing wrong with saying that the
archaeological evidence looks like right now the earliest wheel is at about
4000BC and the linguistic evidence MAY point to that as a possible time of IE
unity.  It's quite another to dismiss earlier dates as "quite inacceptible."
Or to build a whole house of cards on such a date and then act as if it were
unquestionable proof of the chronology of PIE or its descendents.

The nature of the evidence does not allow anything but a quite TENTATIVE
conclusion, at best.  Your conclusions here are based strictly on things
found in the ground and you can be no more certain about those things than
the people who find them and know what they mean.

There is no reason for any kind of a conflict between the archaeological
evidence - which is becoming harder science everyday - and the linguistic
evidence.  It just requires a realization that nothing can be particulary
written in stone on either side.  And there are many, many unknowns.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 06:56:38 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:56:38 -0800
Subject: Wheeled Vehicles.
In-Reply-To: <0.a3a314fc.253ea121@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.225638.0800.>

At 12:37 AM 10/20/99 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>And that's merely the _latest_ date for it; a classic 'absence of evidence is
>not evidence of absence'.  Since it was already in a high state of
>development at that time and in that area, it's quite possible it was present
>in more rudimentary forms much earlier, and we simply haven't found the
>evidence yet (or it hasn't survived -- light wooden constructions generally
>don't).

Given its design, the chariot is a fairly direct derivation of the
two-wheeled cart, with modifications to make it more suitable for warfare
and.or racing.

In fact I find there is some ambiguity around the edges: when is a cart a
chariot?  A number of war carts in early depictions seem rather outside of
what I would normally consider chariots, yet they are often termed chariots
in the literature (e.g. relatively heavy four-wheeled war-carts)

>Horse domestication on the Eurasian steppe can be placed to around 4000 BCE,
>and equipment _very similar_ to that used in the early Ural-Kazakhstan
>chariots (Antler and bone cheekpieces, riding-crop caps, etc.) can be found
>from the Urals to
>Hungary very early -- earlier than the chariot burials.

Though some of these could be associated simply with riding horses.

>>The second is tools, at least copper tools, and for a really good cart
>>that makes judicious use of hardwood, probably bronze tools.

>-- no, I'm afraid this is not so.  Woodworking with Neolithic tools is
>perfectly satisfactory for hardwoods, as the evidence of the 'lake villages'
>and other neolitic settlements shows.  It's slower and more difficult, but
>you can get very much the same results.

For some purposed stone tools are actually *better* than bronze.  In fact
the main advantage of bronze is greater durability.  Stone blades are
*much* sharper than bronze blades - literally razor sharp.  So, in making a
cart one would simply go through lots of blades, instead of using one blade
throughout.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Nov  2 04:07:44 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 23:07:44 EST
Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.230744.EST.>

[ Moderator's note:
  This is a revised version of an message originally sent privately to me by
  Steve Long.  I encouraged him to submit it to the list, where it was caught
  in the backlog.  I'd like to thank him for his patience.
  --rma ]

This is about Larry Trask's statement: "An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist
with its own descendant."

In a message dated 10/20/99 5:02:33 PM, Larry Trask wrote:

<<First, you are confusing two things: the relation between a daughter and
its ancestor, and the relation between two or more daughters.>>

Unfortunately, I believe that is ALSO what you are confusing.  I believe in
good faith that if you consider the above TWO statements objectively you will
see you have has just committed "reification."

Now whatever definition you are using for "ancestors" or "daughters" above,
let's try to just stick with those for a moment and see them through.

You use the term "daughter" above.  Whatever vague boundaries you used to
decide when a language BECOMES a "daughter" - think of why the other
remaining part of the parent also must at the same time become "a daughter?"
Whatever caused you to call the two languages "daughters", consider what
makes them both BECOME "daughters" and makes the parent disappear?  So you
can say that a parent doesn't coexist with its daughter?

Take the language that you describe an "ancestor" by whatever definition you
use above.  Why are you assuming it also has to change status and become one
of the "daughters" just when another daughter emerges?  And at the very same
time (so that you can say there's no period of co-existence between parent
and daughter?)

"An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist with" a daughter.

Isn't this a reification?   The only reason a parent can't co-exist with a
daughter is because you automatically change it into a daughter when there's
another daughter branching off.  Aren't you creating another "daughter"
unnecessarily?

If you would have been satisfied with a single "ancestor" (by whatever your
definition is above) as a single language - if the branch off had not
happened - why are you turning that "ancestor" into a new language just
because a daughter branches off?

Isn't that reification?  Aren't you unnecessarily creating a new "daughter
language" (however you mean it above) when nothing more than a part of it has
broken off?

Now maybe this is all just a matter of terminology.  And I'd be happy with
that.  Because it would mean that your original statement is just terminology:

<<<<No.  An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>>
[Caps mine]

You can certainly co-exist with your own ancestor. In common sense everday
understanding, an "ancestor" doesn't automatically disappear or turn into a
"daughter" just because a descendent emerges.

You've written that, if regional varieties of a language "would eventually
become so different from one another that they would CEASE TO BE MUTUALLY
COMPREHENSIBLE at all, and we would be FORCED to speak, not of different
dialects, but of DIFFERENT LANGUAGES."  (CAPS ARE MINE.) (The context of this
quote alludes to multiple dialects - ie, not limited to just two.)

If there are many dialects and they don't become "mutually incomprehensible"
at the same time - why MUST they also all become different languages at the
same time?  Why would we be "forced" to call all those different parent
dialects "different languages" just because one became mutually
incomprehensible, branched off and became a daughter?

Now you have said that this explanation was only meant for students, not for
professionals.  Well, then on that basic level at least it seems "an
ancestral language CAN co-exist with its own descendant."

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 02:24:40 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 18:24:40 -0800
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
In-Reply-To: <E11dUj6-0006KT-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.182440.0800.>

At 09:34 AM 10/19/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:

>But the problem does not, I think, lie in the relation itself, which must be
>taken as transitive if it is to have any identifiable content -- at least in
>a non-fuzzy logic.

I guess I am not so adamant that sameness always be transitive.

It is generally rather messy to try to apply a transitive form of
similarity to biological entities, not just language.  For instance,
species delimitation can be difficult if one insists on transitivity (e.g.
the so-called ring species).  When does a fertilized egg become a new
individual?   So I just take it as *given* when talking about a biological
entity that the boundaries *are* fuzzy, as otherwise one must give up
almost all boundaries in biology.

And natural languages are clearly biological entities.  So fuzziness is the
only useful way to go.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Nov  4 15:54:51 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 15:54:51 +0000
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <THU.4.NOV.1999.155451.0000.>

Ed Selleslagh writes:

> Iberian has two sibilants (and also rhotics) that might very well be the same
> as the Basque ones, including the affricated varieties.

Iberian certainly had two contrasting sibilants (at least), but the phonetic
nature of the contrast is entirely unknown.  Aquitanian probably had at least
four, and perhaps six, of the things, but the Roman orthography was defective,
and the various sibilants were not written in any very consistent manner.

> The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type
> distinction, I believe.

I don't follow.  Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it is
apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably laminal.
But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from Latin /k/
before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of affricate
before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region).

> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants.

Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no evidence
that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still less on
Basque phonology.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Nov  6 03:59:42 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 22:59:42 EST
Subject: Northwest IE attributes
Message-ID: <FRI.5.NOV.1999.225942.EST.>

In a message dated 10/26/99 11:09:50 PM, Sean Crist wrote:

<<If you believe that there is a grouping of "NW IE" languages (and I put
quotes around it because I'm not clear on exactly which branches are to be
included in this clade- Celtic? Germanic? Balto-Slavic?), this amounts to
a claim that these branches are characterised by a set of shared
attributes of the sort which I just mentioned.  I'm interested in hearing
what shared characteristics are proposed as evidence.

(I earlier listed some of the evidence on whose basis Ringe et. al.
produced the tree which I quoted; I can repeat both the tree and the
evidence, if there's interest, but I hate to clutter the list with what's
already been said.)>>

Satem is still a very good way to separate I-Ir from the western group.  (I
believe the current stance is that satem may have been adopted by
Balto-Slavic.)  And Hittite separates itself from the northern group easily
enough.  That leaves a distinct NW IE group.

ON THE OTHER HAND:  No one to my knowledge has posted a list of the "shared
attributes" that the UPenn tree is based on.  The best I saw was the few you
posted on the list and the few posted on the web.  Neither have I seen any
list of the "directionality" adjustments that attach a time sequence to those
attributes.

It would be good to know - however - why *specifically* you think some group
of IE speakers could not have branched off from PIE right from the start and
moved Northwest.  That would be very interesting.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Nov  6 04:08:52 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 23:08:52 EST
Subject: What is Relatedness?
Message-ID: <FRI.5.NOV.1999.230852.EST.>

In a message dated 10/26/99 11:09:50 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote:

<<When we have a family of related languages, on what grounds do we decide
what the internal structure is for the family tree?  In other words, how
do we decide which of these languages are more closely related than others
in the family?>>

But what does "more closely related" mean?   This isn't just a question about
terminology.  It rather goes to what we are proving and hope to prove by
establishing "relatedness."

If - for example - a language has innovated and borrowed so wildly that it
retains very little of the ancestor, it may be "more closely related" in some
chronological sense.  But in fact we can imagine it being far more different
from the immediate ancestor than say some conservative cousin that retained
the attributes common to the family.

So a language that has innovated and borrowed away most of its heritage may
not be "closely related" in terms of its vocabulary, use of syntax and just
plain in its sound to the ear.  But yet we would call it "more closely
related" because a few words or sounds give us evidence of "descent" from a
common ancestor.  But a great deal of that language - let's say the majority
and its most distinguishing features - would in fact be descended not from
the ancestor, but from somewhere else.

A "backwoods" language exposed to new and sophisticated cultural and
technological input might expand many times over its original form.  Many new
words and concepts might be introduced.  New tenses might suddenly be needed
to indicate matters of time and relationships that simply did not matter in
the old days.  People who calculated time only in terms of the seasons might
need to start perceiving and discriminating befores and afters, duratives and
completedness, perfects and aorists.  Sounds might have to be borrowed and
allophones split and evolve into phonemes to accomodate subtle differences
between meanings.  (E.g., the defense rests, but "dee-fense" wins ballgames.)
 Everything might be overhauled as a result.

This is a side-path off of the discussion in which Larry Trask discussed a
language changing so much that it might be perceived as a different language.
 And perhaps it raises the question whether counting the number of apparent
differences between languages (as e.g. the UPenn tree does to some degree) is
a valid way to measure genetic distance.

How much must a language borrow, for example, before it starts to owe more to
the loaning language than it does to a parent or grandparent that has just
left a few strands of genetic relation?  And conversely would those few
strands of genetic relatedness mislead us into thinking that it was genetic
distance and not borrowing or innovation that caused so little of the
ancestor to be retained?

<<Nearly everybody agrees that we should do so on the basis
of shared characteristics of the languages which cannot reasonably be
attributed to parallel innovation or to borrowing. >>

And of course there is an inverse function that applies here.  If some languag
es had those shared characteristics, but lost them before they became
documented in writing or otherwise left no evidence - it would be taken as
evidence of relative unrelatedness.  But what might actually have occurred is
that the evidence of relatedness might have been innovated or borrowed away
in a frenzy of change.

So we wouldn't be talking about "parallel innovation or borrowing" misleading
us about shared characteristics, but instead misleading us because they have
destroyed the evidence of the real relationship.

The UPenn seems to use a "value" or a neutral count (in terms of shared
innovations) called "lost."   This APPEARS to apply only to attributes that
are presumed to have been present in PIE.  But the fact is that a truly
innovative language might have lost shared innovations that arose after PIE,
and those lost shared innovations might have given us a completely different
picture of relatedness.

But because the loss happened before documentation, we are mislead into
thinking they were never there.

After all, if presumed attributes of PIE can be "lost" in daughter languages,
then attributes ("shared innovation") of a sub-family - e.g., NW IndoEuropean
- could have been lost in a particularly innovative member of that subgroup -
e.g., Greek or Latin - before documentation.  And I don't believe there is
any methodology that could neceassrily recover them.

Regards,
Steve Long


From michael_nick at mail.ru  Sun Nov  7 12:46:31 1999
From: michael_nick at mail.ru (Michael)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 15:46:31 +0300
Subject: PIE words for sexual organs
Message-ID: <SUN.7.NOV.1999.154631.0300.>

Dear IEists!

	I was told that Walter Wuest had an article on IE words
	denoting sexual organs, but i couldn't find. Could anyone
	give a reference? I myself have not infrequently been puzzled,
	that all three PIE words, which can be reconstructed for 'vulva',
	have at the same time the meaning 'buttocks, anus' (namely,
	*putos, *ksutos and *pisdeH2). Any suggestions? [  :-)  ].

		Regards,
			Mike


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Nov  9 11:04:10 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 11:04:10 +0000
Subject: Maite and Arantxa
Message-ID: <TUE.9.NOV.1999.110410.0000.>

Macia Riutort writes:

> Arantxa wird in Katalonien doch als baskischer Name empfunden. Es ist
> nämlich so, daß es besonders in den Jahren 1977-1980 zu einer gewissen
> Mode wurde, Kinder auf baskische Namen zu taufen.

Most engaging.

> So habe ich zur Zeit in einer
> Klasse eine Aránzazu (23 J.a.) und eine Agurtxane (24 J.a.), obwohl beide
> Studentinnen katalanische Familiennamen tragen, so daß ich bezweifle, daß
> sie baskische Vorfahren haben. Ich glaube, der Name der Tennisspielerin
> wurde ihr vielleicht im Rahmen dieser Mode gegeben (übrigens, Arantxa wird
> hier in Katalonien als Koseform zu Aránzazu verwendet).

Yes.  I guess I should have explained this.

The source is the Basque place name <Arantzazu>, which consists of <arantza>
'thorn' plus the suffix <-zu> 'full of'.  This last is a common element in
place names, though, in the modern language, it has been displaced by the
variant <-tsu> for ordinary purposes.  This probably develops from cases like
<sats> 'ordure' + <-zu> --> <satsu> 'shitty', with regular phonological
developments.

Anyway, Arantzazu is a holy place, which I believe was once allegedly visited
by the Virgin, leading to the use of the toponym as a Marian name for women.
The long form <Arantzazu> is commonly clipped to <Arantza>, which forms a
regular Basque diminutive <Arantxa>.

> Im letzten Jahr
> hatte ich in derselben Klasse zwei Iciar (23 Jahre alt und 27 Jahre alt).

Yes; <Itziar> is another toponym and another Marian name.  Oddly enough, after
the Basques finally abandoned their long tradition of paganism in favor of the
Church of Rome, the Virgin seems to have made a point of dropping in on the
Basques at brisk intervals. ;-)

> Im Gegensatz zu all diesen Namen, die, wie gesagt, als baskisch empfunden
> werden, wird der Name Maite als Abkürzung von Maria Teresa empfunden. Als
> ich eine der Kolleginnen, die so heißen, fragte, sagte sie mir, daß sie
> nicht auf die Idee gekommen wäre, Maite als baskisch zu sehen. Für sie
> und ihre Familie ist der Name einfach eine Koseform.

Most interesting.  But, while we await the evidence, I would still bet on a
Basque origin for <Maite>.

> Andererseits habe ich noch nie eine Frau kennengelernt, die Amada heißt,
> obwohl ich, um die Wahrheit zu sagen, gestehen muß, daß ich Amandas
> kenne.

Yes.  In my experience, the female name <Amada> is virtually unused in Spain,
in contrast to its French cognate <Aimee>.  But, if I recall correctly, there
is (or was) a Spanish linguist called <Amado Alonso>, with the male
counterpart.

Interestingly, Hanks and Hodges tells me that the original Latin name, <Amata>,
may not after all have been derived from the participle of <amare> 'love', but
may have had a pre-Roman origin.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From r.piva at bluewin.ch  Sun Nov 14 12:45:17 1999
From: r.piva at bluewin.ch (renato piva)
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1999 14:45:17 +0200
Subject: gr. laos, basileus, skene
Message-ID: <SUN.14.NOV.1999.144517.0200.>

To the Indo-European community

As I have no access to any University-Library for the moment, I' d like
to ask whether some of you may give me any information about recent
(i.e. post-Chantraine) proposals of etymology for the greek words laos
'people', basileus 'king', and skene 'tent'.

Thanks in advance for your answers,

R. Piva


From Wolfgang.Behr at ruhr-uni-bochum.de  Mon Nov 15 10:04:20 1999
From: Wolfgang.Behr at ruhr-uni-bochum.de (WB (in Frankfurt today))
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 11:04:20 +0100
Subject: herme:ne'us, interpres
Message-ID: <MON.15.NOV.1999.110420.0100.>

Dear IE-ists,

I wonder if you could refer me to any recent reference dealing
wih the etymologies of Gr. herme:ne'us, herme:ne'o: etc. and
Lat. inter-pres. The Greek root her- is assumed to be a loan
from a NE language in Chantraine, Frisk and Krahe, while Latin
interpres has been variously assigned to pretium, *inter-pers
=> -partes, *per- 'take over' with derivations outside Latin
etc. (rejected in Walde-Hoffmann, s.v. interpres). Any ideas or
pointers?

Thank you, best wishes, WOlfgang


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Nov  1 14:43:00 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 14:43:00 +0000
Subject: Basque 'trebe'
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.144300.0000.>

Rick Mc Allister writes:

>       There's Spanish trebejo "game piece, piece of a tool set, etc."
>  which is not commonly used --at least among Latin Americans. The meaning is
>  not quite there, but there may be a link somewhere but I don't have access
>  to Corominas/Coromines.

I've checked Coromines, and he recognizes no connection with Latin <trebax>.

[LT]

>> Second, Pre-Basque absolutely did not permit plosive-liquid clusters in any
>> position, and such clusters were invariably eliminated in loans from Latin.
>> The usual way of resolving a word-initial /tr-/ cluster was to break it up
>> by inserting an echo of the following vowel.  Hence *<tre-> should have
>> yielded a Basque *<dere->, or at best *<tere-> -- not attested.  Compare,
>> for example, Basque <daraturu> (and variants) 'drill', from the Latin
>> accusative <taratrum>.

>       IF [BIG IF, that is] I remember correctly, you said early Basque
>  /l/ > /r/, so maybe via Spanish taladro or some similar form?

Sorry, folks: a goof.  The Latin word is <talatrum>, not *<taratrum>.  I was
dozily applying a Basque sound law, wrongly, to the Latin word.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Nov  1 15:27:15 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 15:27:15 +0000
Subject: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (1)
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.152715.0000.>

[ Moderator's note:
  Mr. Trask sent the 9 individual messages he mentions below, but in order to
  relieve some of the backlog, I have taken the liberty of combining them into
  a single digest-like message.
  --rma ]

--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 15:27:15 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (1)
Message-Id: <E11iJMZ-00037v-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK.  Lloyd Anderson has raised a number of specific points concerning my
criteria for assembling a plausible list of Pre-Basque words.  His posting is
too long to address at one go, so I'll try to deal with it in a series of
postings, one for each point raised.

But first recall what I'm trying to do.  I'm interested in determining the
morpheme-structure conditions for Pre-Basque lexical items.  Note: *not* the
phonotactics of word-forms generally, but the morpheme-structure conditions of
monomorphemic lexical items.

In order to undertake this, of course, I must first assemble the best possible
list of monomorphemic words which were most likely present in Pre-Basque, and I
must put them into the forms which they most likely had at the time.

>  I have repeatedly expressed my suggestions for improving criteria.
>  That *includes* dropping some.

>  This message is not a mere repeat listing of what has been posted
>  previously.
>  To make it more useful, I haved restated some crucial parts
>  which Trask missed in referring to them, as well as adding further
>  *explanations* and *examples*, which most readers will see
>  as merely details implied by what was already stated.

>  Number one.
>  Counteracting biases of documentation by subject matter.
>  Previously stated, as Trask now agrees,
>  though his restatement makes it appear rather trivial,
>  losing its principled basis and therefore greatly reducing its reach.

>  Number one is not merely the 1700 rather than 1600 cutoff date,
>  but was based on a more principled suggestion
>  that we should avoid biasing by the sheer accident of the limited
>  nature of available documentary evidence for particular time periods.
>  In attempting to find the oldest native Basque vocabulary,
>  there will be semantic domains which are essentially excluded
>  by such sheer accidents, and for these we can take the earliest
>  documentary evidence available which covers those semantic
>  domains, not quite "whatever the date", but with considerable
>  leeway in accepting dates later than 1700 if necessary to get
>  documentation for a particular subject matter.
>  The point was NOT the date (1700 vs. 1600),
>  the point was to avoid the accidents of exclusion.
>  Its implications are both much broader and much more specific.

I have already explained that I am not wedded to a cut-off date of 1600, and
that I am prepared to consider 1700 instead, though certainly nothing later.

The material available before 1600 includes a sizeable body of medieval
fragments -- words, names, phrases -- plus a long personal letter, a volume of
poems (religious, secular, amatory), some religious works (mostly
translations), a dictionary of a western variety, and a volume of proverbs.
The 17th century adds a lot more religious works (including some which are
original, not translations), an unpublished dictionary, a textbook of one
dialect of the language, one or two practical handbooks, another collection of
proverbs, the histories and poems of Oihenart, and a few miscellaneous items.

Will it make any difference which date we choose?  Maybe it will, but I remain
to be persuaded of this.  Most of the strongest candidates for native and
ancient status appear to be recorded very early: for example, <behi> 'cow'
(1562), <buru> 'head' (1042), <gorri> 'red' (15th century), <sei> 'six' (1415),
<gizon> 'man' (15th century), <ate> 'door' (15th c.), <handi> 'big' (1262), and
so on.  It is far from obvious that adding another century to the database will
make any great difference.  And it's even less obvious that any resulting gain
will not be badly offset by the addition of a large number of words of late
origin in Basque.  We're already pretty far away from AD 1: I am not eager to
move even further away merely in order to collect a handful of overlooked
words.  As always, I want the *strongest* candidates, not every possible
candidate.

As for particular semantic domains, I have already commented in an earlier
posting.

First, most of the Basque words in specific domains like seafaring, law,
religion and technology are either obvious loan words or obviously
polymorphemic, and hence of no relevance to my task.  There is no point in
worrying about them.

Second, I find it impossible to believe that the native and ancient words
peculiar to any particular domain, insofar as there are any, should
*systematically* differ in form from other words.  If, as I presume, Pre-Basque
had morpheme-structure cnstraints (all languages do), then there is no reason
to suppose that these constraints varied according to the meanings of the
words.  Is there any language on earth in which, say, kinship terms or color
terms or agricultural terms are systematically constructed according to
different phonological rules from other words?  No?  Then why should I worry
about this in the case of Basque?

It is doubtless inevitable that my list of the strongest candidates will mostly
consist of what might reasonably be called 'basic vocabulary'.  It is hardly
likely that specialist terms from particular subject areas will feature
prominently in my list.

If Lloyd still wants to query this, then I suggest that he should identify some
particular semantic domains of the kind he has in mind, and we can take it from
there.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 15:40:24 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (2)
Message-Id: <E11iJZI-0003ku-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK.  Part 2.

>  Number two.
>  Breadth of attestation required made proportionate to
>  breadth of documentation by subject matter.
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

I'm afraid I don't find it easy to follow this.

Most of the early Basque texts are translations of religious documents or works
of Christian apology.  The remaining few were listed in my last posting.  Many
other conceivable subject areas are not explicitly treated at all before the
late 19th or 20th century -- far too late for my purposes.  For example, Basque
traditions of household management and of inheritance turn up incidentally in
some early texts, but are not overtly treated as such before the late 19th
century -- at least in Basque.  Some earlier materials exist in Spanish, and
may provide some attestations of individual Basque words, but I don't expect a
lot here.  Anyway, once again, few of the relevant terms are both native and
monomorphemic.  I really don't see any ground for concern here.  And, as
before, I can see no reason to suppose that native words in different semantic
areas might be constructed according to different phonological rules.

What earthly *difference* does it make what semantic domain a word belongs to?
I'm interested in phonology, not in semantics.

>       I also proposed a still more refined approach in which the
>  number of dialects we wish to have represented would vary
>  precisely in order to counteract the accidents of preservation of
>  documents in particular subject matters in only some dialects.
>  If for example documents referring extensively to colors
>  were only attested in three dialects, then attestation in only two
>  dialects might count as sufficient to satisfy adequately
>  the criterion of breadth of attestation.

This is not the case with color terms.  In fact, it does not appear to be the
case with any semantic domain I can think of.

Anyway, this proposal strikes me as impossibly complex in practice.  Words
cannot be exhaustively assigned to semantic domains.  For example, to what
semantic domain should we assign <heriotza> 'death', or <bertze> 'other'?

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 15:55:37 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (3)
Message-Id: <E11iJo1-0004Wr-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 3.

>  Number three.
>  Breadth of attestation.
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

> I suggested very early that attestation in all dialects was not required.

And I have never required any such thing.

In fact, I am tempted to insist on this requirement as a maximally strong
criterion.  But I've held back, if only because some dialects are less well
described than others.

>  Some intermediate would be appropriate, though I did not give
>  a particular number.

But *I* did: at least four out of the five dialect groupings I proposed.

>  Even without a particular number, this is still a specific suggestion.
>  Can it be made still more specific?  Of course.  Almost anything can be.
>  In the example just above, for example,
>  I took two out of three dialects as sufficient.

Er -- two out of *which* three?  This sounds to me like two out of the nine
recognized dialects, or perhaps two out of the five groupings I have proposed.

>  Three out of five would also be a reasonable criterion
>  (not as a cutoff, but as a sufficient *minimum* on a criterion
>  of measured degree of breadth of distribution).
>  If only two dialects are available (for the relevant subject matter),
>  I would personally take one as sufficient for a *minimum*.

But I know of *no* subject matter which is treated only in two dialects.  Bear
in mind that the early Basque literature does not offer us a wealth of topics.
This is not very surprising.  How many topics are overtly treated in the Old
English literature before 1066?

>  Remember that by suggestion number seven,
>  all of this information is kept, by tagging on the lexical item,
>  so we can still distinguish cases later if we wish.

But this is not a point of principle: it's only a procedure.  Even if I start
with a vast tagged corpus, I still have to choose the words which will go into
my initial list, and exclude all the others.  As a matter of principle, it
makes no difference whether the excluded words are sitting on a computer
database or merely sitting in the dictionary: all that matters is that they are
not in the initial list.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 17:23:37 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (4)
Message-Id: <E11iLBB-00075F-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; number 4.

>  Number four.
>  Morphemic composites as evidence for their parts.
>  This one is a recent refinement, in response to the example
>  of <uko> 'forearm' included in <ukondo> 'elbow'.

>  The mainstream would I think have included <uko>
>  on the basis of <ukondo> almost without question,
>  because the parts of the (compound?) are transparent,
>  and therefore the root from which it is formed must be
>  at least as ancient or more ancient than the compound.

I don't query the reasoning, but I don't know whether "the mainstream" would
recognize the sparsely recorded <uko> on the basis of its compound <ukondo>,
*for the purposes I have in mind*.  As I think I've made clear, I don't reject
out of hand the inclusion of <uko> in my list, even though it fails to meet my
primary criteria, since it is pretty clearly present in <ukondo>.  But I can
imagine that some other people might object to this -- in fact, I know of one
or two who definitely do ;-) -- and anyway there are potential pitfalls with
this.  See below.

>  I would not have dreamed it was necessary to state explicitly
>  that morphologically complex items can give evidence
>  for the earlier use of their morphemic parts,
>  since I assume linguists generally take it for granted
>  (except in a few special cases like back-formations).

"Can give evidence" -- sure.  But "license for the purposes I have in mind" --
maybe not.

For example, Basque <izotz> 'frost, ice' almost certainly contains <(h)otz>
'cold'.  But what on earth is the first element?  It might be <ihintz> 'dew',
but this is far from certain, and so I doubt that the universal existence of
<izotz> should be taken as licensing anything in particular.

>  In a case in which there is strong support from
>  inclusion of a root in a compound or derivative
>  in another dialect, it can even be possible to include
>  a form attested (as bare root or stem) only in one dialect.

Ah, but I'm not talking about roots or stems: I'm only talking about free
lexical items.

As it happens, Basque, like English, is a language in which roots and stems are
not commonly distinguished from each other or from free forms.  But there is
one complication: word-formation (both compounding and suffixation).  Basque
word-formation is subject to a number of phonological rules which apply *only*
in this domain, and not otherwise -- for example, not in inflection, and not
within monomorphemic words.  Consequently, the form exhibited by an item inside
a polymorphemic word is not, in general, identical to its form as a free word.
Therefore combining forms cannot be trusted as evidence for the forms of free
words in Pre-Basque.

For example, it is far from obvious that the eastern word <ekhi> 'sun' consists
of <egun> 'day' plus <-ki> noun-forming suffix.  We happen to have good
evidence in this instance that the analysis is correct, but we don't always
have such good evidence, and so it seems wise to me simply to exclude
polymorphemic words from initial consideration altogether, including their
parts.  Why should I give myself extra chances to go wrong when I don't have
to?

>  IF (note IF) we were using the criterion of three dialects
>  out of five, then we would merely need <uko> in one
>  dialect and <ukondo> in two other dialects to reach the
>  criterion of a minimum of three dialects for the root <uko>,
>  though of course that would be only two dialects for the
>  compound <ukondo> so the composite form itself
>  would not exceed *this* minimum if it were
>  attested in only two.

Clarification: <uko> is not a root, but a free noun.  Its regular combining
form should be <uka->, and precisely this is attested in the 16th-century
variant <ukaondo>, since replaced everywhere by the contracted <ukondo>, except
that a few western varieties have the variant <ukando>, and that the Gipuzkoan
dialect has the extraordinary variant <ukalondo>, which requires a good deal of
analysis and is probably a partly distinct formation.

Anyway, I doubt that it will make much difference whether we include <uko> or
not.  If it did make a difference, then my whole project would be in jeopardy,
since I can't place reliance on results which are highly sensitive to the
inclusion or exclusion of a single word.  But I'm not expecting that.

>  The exclusion of multimorphemic items is a very strong bias against
>  the result being a representative cross-section,
>  even of the *roots* of a normal language
>  (for those normal languages which do have multimorphemic items).

So what?  I'm not *interested* in roots: I'm interested in lexical items.

Furthermore, I'm not interested in polymorphemic words.  It is perfectly clear
that, in Basque, polymorphemic words are not constructed according to the same
rules as native monomorphemic words.  For example, <ukondo> is a legitimate
word, but it would *not*, I am now rather confident, be a possible form for a
monomorphemic word.

Compare English.  Monomorphemic native English words absolutely do not permit
certain consonant clusters, such as /ph/, /th/, /kh/, /nh/, /ts/, and /St/,
among others.  But polymorphemic words permit these clusters: 'uphill',
'hothouse', 'inkhorn', 'unharmed', 'cats', 'fished', and so on.  Hence an
account of morpheme-structure constraints for English would exclude these
clusters, even though they occur in words.  Basque is much the same here.

>  While the *end goal* may be a list of morphemes or even root morphemes,

It is not.  My goal is to characterize the morpheme-structure constraints
applying to native, ancient and monomorphemic Basque lexical items.  Not roots,
and not morphemes in general: free monomorphemic lexical items.  So it makes
sense to me to choose such items as data, and to exclude items of other kinds.
If I want to characterize ducks, then I choose ducks to work on, and I exclude
even the most fascinating and significant chickens.

(An aside: am I the first person ever to write 'significant chickens'?) ;-)

>  the data used to obtain these should of course include multi-morphemic
>  items.  To do otherwise is an arbitrary, unjustified bias against the
>  normality of languages which do contain multimorphemic words,
>  and some morphemes including some roots occur only in such words.

No.  I absolutely disagree.  The existence of the English word 'bits' /bIts/ is
definitely not evidence that English permits monomorphemic words of the form
/bIts/.

And the doubtless true observation that certain morphemes are attested only
within polymorphemic words is neither here nor there.  Recall: my goal is to
find the *best* candidates for my purpose, not to find *all possible*
candidates.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 17:31:33 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (5)
Message-Id: <E11iLIr-0007D6-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 5.

>  Number five.
>  Balanced use of criteria, each alone not decisive.

>  This one has been made explicit only recently, as soon as I became
>  consciously aware of how near Trask comes to saying that each
>  criterion must be satisfied independently of the others,

"How near"?  I thought I'd said this explicitly.

My criteria are independent.  A word that fails to satisfy *any one* criterion
is excluded, even if it satisfies all the other ones.

>  of what he perhaps means by "best" examples, rather than merely
>  very good candidates for early Basque.

Well, insofar as we can distinguish "best" from merely "very good", I
definitely want to find the best ones.  Why would I want to do anything else?

>       Numbers two and four are examples of the
>  INTERACTION of criteria, that no criterion by itself should be
>  determining of inclusion or exclusion.  I took this for granted,
>  but now make it explicit.  Combine the "scores" from several
>  criteria, make a balanced decision.  That is specific, and can be
>  made more so.  It is fairly common practice in comparative linguistics
>  to have combined lists, those proposed cognates which seem perfect
>  both on sound correspondences and on semantics, those which
>  are perfect on sound correspondences but slightly odd on semantics,
>  and so on, with greater detail and elaboration.  No reason not to
>  do that here also.

But also no reason that I can see to *do* it here.

Of course, if I can't compile a list of reasonable length using my criteria,
then I might be forced to resort to something like this.  But I'd prefer to
avoid it if I can.  And I think I can.  I think my primary criteria will still
leave me a list of a few hundred words.  And I'll be very surprised if that's
not enough to identify morpheme-structure constraints with some confidence --
particularly since those constraints show every sign of having been pretty
restrictive in Pre-Basque.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 09:35:05 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (6)
Message-Id: <E11iaLJ-0001kx-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 6.

>  Number six.
>  Avoiding biases against expressives.
>  Previously stated, as Trask agrees,
>  though he very much misrepresents the content of this one.

[LT]

>> I have seen none, except for Lloyd's suggestion  ...[one above, and]
>> and his insistence that sound-symbolic words
>> should be self-consciously added to the list according to no specified
>> criteria.

> This is most emphatically NOT what I suggested.
> I was explicit that I suggested dropping or modifying criteria which
> had the *effect* of biasing selection against any category of words,
> that I happened to be qualified to talk about why a bias against
> sound-symbolic words might distort any conclusions about
> canonical forms.
> That is quite another matter from self-consciously insisting
> on adding expressives.

OK, Lloyd -- if I've misunderstood your position, then I apologize.  But it
certainly *looked* as though you were proposing to deliberately add expressive
formations which failed my primary criteria.  See further below.

But, if you're not going to add these things, then how precisely do you propose
to get them in without wrecking my criteria?  Recall that expressive formations
in Basque are rarely attested early and are usually confined to small areas.

[snip passing remark about an earlier point]

[LT]

>> but dismissed the second
>> as lacking in specifics and intrinsically circular.

> As Trask restated it, I would agree that self-consciously adding
> expressives to the list would be unprincipled,
> if that were done merely for the purpose of adding expressives.
> But as reiterated above, that was most emphatically NOT what
> I proposed.  I proposed rather eliminating artificial barriers to
> their inclusion, through accidents of more limited attestation
> and the interaction of supposed criteria for number of dialects
> required in attestations.

In what respect are my criteria "artificial"?

I have proposed no criteria which specifically target expressive formations for
exclusion.  Instead, I have merely applied the same criteria to all words.

Now, if you're going to relax the criteria sufficiently to pick up words like
<malmutz> 'fluffy, insubstantial', which is pretty much confined to a single
dialect (Bizkaian) and nowhere recorded before 1802, then how are you going to
exercise any reasonable control at all over the membership of the initial list?
Aren't you just going to open the floodgates to most of the words in the
language, thereby defeating the whole point of the exercise?

> If expressives are attested only in one dialect,
> then only one dialect would be sufficient as a bare minimum
> satisfaction on that criterion of distribution.
> (an instance of suggestion number two above,
> not at all specific to expressives).

The distribution of what I regard as expressive formations varies from the
whole language (for a very few) to a single small area (probably the large
majority).

But look.  Are you suggesting that expressive formations should be singled out
for special treatment?  That they should be deliberately added to my list even
though they fail my primary criteria badly?  Before you accuse me again of
misrepresentation, look at your words above: it certainly looks to *me* as
though that is exactly what you are suggesting.

If you are, then tell me: how do I decide in advance which words are expressive
formations and which are not, so that I can decide which ones to add to my list
in defiance of my criteria?  Isn't this utterly circular?  Remember, one of my
ultimate goals is to characterize explicitly the differences in formation
between expressives and ordinary words.  And I can't hope to do that if I pick
the expressive formations *a priori* -- now can I?

And, if you are not doing this, then what exactly *are* you suggesting?  That I
should include in my list *every* word attested in "only one dialect"?  That
means that I will wind up listing every word recorded in the language at all,
and so I won't even have a list.

Lloyd, what on *earth* is this about? I can't follow it.

>  In fact, I gather from some other remarks
>  by Trask quite recently, that there are numerous alternative
>  words for "butterfly".

There are several different words, attested at different times and in different
places.  All of them appear to me to be expressive formations of one kind or
another.  Not one of them is either recorded early or found throughout the
larger part of the language.

>  If we had a full set of these displayed
>  for us, who knows what we might learn about whether
>  any particular forms should be considered inherited from
>  early Basque?

Oh, I can list them, if you like.  But how will merely staring at them allow us
to learn anything at all?

Anyway, I can state with some confidence that not one of these words is old in
Basque.  We might as well stare at the names of different shapes of pasta, or
at the names of the animals in the African rain forest, and try to decide which
ones are ancient in English.

>  And about our own thinking about criteria
>  for inclusion and exclusion.  Good examples have a way of
>  revealing paradoxes of thinking, or otherwise sharpening
>  our thinking.

I have already put a good deal of thought into my criteria, thought which is
based on my 25 years or so of studying Basque.  I have yet to see on this list
any different criteria which strike me as superior, or even just as good.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 09:41:38 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (7)
Message-Id: <E11iaRd-0001wP-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 7.

>  Number seven.
>  Tagging of items, rather than inclusion and exclusion
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

As I have now said several times, a tagging approach is not a point of
principle but only a procedure.  You can tag words to your heart's content,
but, sooner or later, you are going to have to decide which words should be
counted as strong candidates for native and ancient status and which should
not.  Until you have done this, all you have is the entire known vocabulary of
the language with lots of colored flags attached.  You have no list, and you
can obtain no results.

>  In redefining where on the continuum to draw the line for
>  "best" examples (since to be meaningful we must recognize
>  that is what anyone does by choosing or adjusting their criteria),
>  we can gain the benefits of more information and lose nothing.
>  Any information that someone might have used in a criterion
>  dictating exclusion can be included in a computer database
>  as a tagging of the individual items.  Additional information
>  can also be added as tagging.  The benefits of being able to
>  consider alternative hypotheses so quickly and easily were
>  discussed, and the fact that some questions will simply not be
>  asked if it is too difficult to ask them.

Again, this is procedure, and not principle.  Choosing three or six or fifteen
different sets of criteria and listing the words produced by each set of
criteria may or may not be an admirable procedure.  But, in the end, you must
choose the criteria you are going to go with, and get on with the real work.
Right?

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 10:02:56 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (8)
Message-Id: <E11iamF-0002nN-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

OK; part 8.

>  Number eight.
>  Slight global preference to include basic vocabulary,
>       unless provably borrowed.
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

But I *did* reply to it in one of my postings.

>  The use of the Swadesh list or other list of *relatively* more
>  basic vocabulary could be used to give an extra point or fraction
>  of a point to items of basic vocabulary, perhaps causing some
>  of them to be included which otherwise would not rate highly
>  enough on the balanced combination of other criteria.
>  The principled basis for this is that languages do have basic
>  vocabulary, that basic vocabulary is, statistically only now,
>  relatively more resistant to replacement by loanwords,
>  and that the positing
>  of a set of vocabulary for an early form of a language should
>  probably include lexical items for most such basic vocabulary.

No doubt.  But how does this help?

The native English words for such basic senses as 'face', 'mountain', 'river'
and 'animal' have been entirely lost in favor of loan words.  How would a study
of early English benefit from including these words in the list, even if only
"fractionally", merely because they are basic?

The key word in the paragraph above is "statistically".  The English word
'face' is not "statistically" more than zero percent native English because
words for 'face' are not frequently borrowed -- now is it?  If we stick to
monomorphemic words -- and I do -- then a word is either 100% native or zero
percent native.  My criteria are designed to locate the ones which are 100%
native with as much reliability as possible.  How on *earth* would I benefit
from counting five or ten percent of items of basic vocabulary which are not
native?

I find this utterly mysterious.

>  This would not overrule clear cases of *known* borrowings,
>  in such case we might indeed appropriately have a "trump"
>  criterion for exclusion, but it should be used as a "trump"
>  only when *known* is meant very strictly, not mere speculation.
>  Trask's example of "mountain" is probably such a case,
>  to be excluded as an obvious loan.

The majority of loans into Basque can be identified as such with 100%
certainty, and must of course be excluded.  But there remains a residue of
cases which are less certain: words which are probably loans, words which are
very possibly loans, words which have been regarded as loans by a few
specialists.

I have maintained, and I still maintain, that the only responsible policy to
adopt is to exclude any word for which a loan origin has been seriously
defended by knowledgeable specialists.  I know that this policy will exclude a
few genuinely native words, but the opposing policy would fail to exclude a
larger number of loan words -- an outcome which is clearly very much worse.

>  But that does not contradict using this criterion
>  to evaluate whether we may have exluded too much, overall.

What do you mean by "excluding too much"?  This makes no sense to me.

For the 87th time, I am *not*, at this stage, trying to locate every native and
ancient word recorded anywhere.  I am merely trying to identify a sizeable body
of words which have strong claims to being native and ancient, so that I can
examine their phonological forms.

>  In effect, this suggestion shifts the burden of proof slightly,
>  so that to exclude an item of basic vocabulary we need stronger
>  evidence than we would for non-basic items.

Really?  Why?

The observation that words for 'face' are borrowed less often than words for
'cauliflower' has *no bearing* on whether any *particular* word for 'face' or
'cauliflower' has been borrowed or not.

>  What exact proportion of a Swadesh list
>  might we want to be sure is included?
>  I do not presume to know,
>  and there certainly are differences among languages in the
>  proportion of basic vocabulary which is native.

Exactly so.

>  But even if
>  not precisely quantified, this criterion is specific and has a
>  principled basis.  That basis relies on the idea that we are
>  evaluating our criteria for their appropriateness, just as we
>  are using them to evaluate items for inclusion or exclusion
>  as within the bounds of "best" candidates for early Basque.

I'm sorry, but I must reject the proposal absolutely.  The meaning of a word is
*not* a reliable guide to its possible native and ancient status.  We cannot
extrapolate from universal statistical tendencies to specific conclusions about
individual words.  And it is definitely individual words that I am interested
in, not statistical tendencies.

Larry Trask
--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 1999 10:17:26 +0000
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Subject: Re: 9 specifics on Including and excluding data (9)
Message-Id: <E11ib0I-0004S6-00 at rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>

At last, bleary-eyed readers (if any remain): part 9 (the last).

>  Number nine.
>  Avoiding cascading errors,
>       not insulating steps in the reasoning.
>  Previously stated.
>  Not noted by Trask in the message to which I am replying.

Er -- "cascading errors"?  How so?  My primary criteria are all independent,
and I am picking out individual words.  Where is there any scope for "cascading
errors"?

>  It is important to avoid circularity, by not artificially insulating
>  steps in the reasoning process, by not allowing selection of data
>  to be dictated by the hypotheses one has, more than absolutely
>  necessary.

Fine.  But, tell me, Lloyd: how exactly do my criteria of early attestation,
wide distribution and absence from neighboring languages force me to choose
words (or not) that are "dictated" by any hypotheses that I may be publicly or
privately entertaining?  I think this question is rather important, but I
haven't seen you responding to it so far.  How about now?

>  This was stated first in regard to canonical forms,
>  because of the likelihood that the initial selection under Trask's
>  criteria would bias against expressives which (Trask indicated)
>  do indeed have some different canonical forms from other vocabulary.

If they do -- and I agree that, in Basque, they do -- then this fact will
emerge clearly from my investigation.  If I find -- as I expect to -- that a
word of the form *<mutur> was phonologically impossible in Pre-Basque, then the
modern <mutur> 'snout, muzzle' will be, to some extent, exposed as an
expressive formation.  Now, this is just the kind of result that I am hoping to
obtain.  So what's the problem?

>  In other words, we should avoid excluding these from the
>  beginning,

OK, Lloyd -- gotcha.  Your "these" clearly refers to "expressives", right?
Therefore you are now explicitly proposing that we should take steps from the
beginning to include a whole bunch of expressive formations which fail my
primary criteria, just so my initial list will include a bunch of expressive
formations.  Right?

And how does this square with your protestation of misrepresentation?

>  so that the initial results will include a full range of
>  native canonical forms, and will not bias later work circularly to
>  incorrectly exclude items on the basis of a narrow set of formulas
>  for canonical forms, merely because almost no examples of such
>  canonical forms typical of expressives happened to be included
>  at stage one.

Lloyd, in spite of his protestations, is here *clearly* demanding that I should
find some way of (a) identifying expressive formations *a priori*, before I've
done anything else, and then (b) guaranteeing that lots of these go into my
initial list, *regardless* of how badly they may fail any or all criteria.
This is exactly the position I imputed to him before he accused me of
misrepresenting him.  Own up, Lloyd: I have not misrepresented you in the
slightest.  Rather, I have presented your position accurately, and dismissed it
as untenable.

I rest my case. ;-)

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

--------------------------------------------------------
End of Digest
*********
--------------------------------------------------------


From jer at cphling.dk  Mon Nov  1 23:07:05 1999
From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 00:07:05 +0100
Subject: Dating the final IE unity
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991013094133.15064A-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.000705.0100.>

Dear list fellows,

may it be permitted for an outsider to archaeology to speak a word of
common sense:

Although I can't evaluate the evidence I read that the Kurgan complex
moves - with accompanying changes - into the parts of the world where we
later find the IE languages. To a naive outsider like myself that looks as
if, somehwere on the way, the Kurgan culture was that of the speakers of
the IE protolanguage.
   Now, I also observe a heated debate about the validity of inferences
about language based on material remains, since material culture can pass
from one language community to another without affecting the language.
   Of course I agree that there is no necessary link of this kind,
appearances may be deceitful. But - and that is now my point - can we
accept that the same kind of appearances point in a wrong direction at
every chance they get? Is it a wrong impression that, for the Kurgan
complex and its continuations not to be linguistically IE, would
presuppose that a whole series of cases of expansion of a material pattern
to a place where we later find an IE language all conspire to play a trick
on the observer? If so, what is the probability of that? Is it not like
surviving Russian roulette in the long run - i.e. nil?
   Thus, if there are no basic errors in the presuppositions of the above
(e.g. in the identification of continuations of the Kurgan complex or in
the arrows drawn on maps to show where and when the complex moves), then
it follows that the evidence favoring the Kurgan complex as (pre-)PIE is
logically significant and that, consequently, the Indo-Europeans have been
found.
   Some might say that, for this to be conclusive, the grass has to be
much greener in the archaeological field than it is in that of
lingusitics. The way it seems to me is that, for it to be wrong, the
archaeological grass has to be exceptionally dirty or exceptionally rare.
Is it?

Jens


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 06:33:11 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:33:11 -0800
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY
 ANDLANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <0.28500277.253e9d18@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.223311.0800.>

At 12:20 AM 10/20/99 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>Likewise, efforts to show that chariots are not associated with IE-speakers
>(or at least early Indo-Iranians) have pretty well collapsed now that recent
>excavations have shown the earliest chariots to be placed not in the middle
>east or Anatolia in the 2nd millenium BCE, but in the southern Ural area and
>no later than the 20th century BCE.

Oooh, I had missed that somehow.  Just to make sure I have the right place:
do you mean near the northern shore of the Caspian?  Are they associated
with the NW Andronovo or the eastern (Volga-Ural) branch of the Yamnaya
complex?

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 06:41:21 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:41:21 -0800
Subject: Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND
 LANGUAGE)
In-Reply-To: <380ED122.14F73EAE@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.224121.0800.>

At 10:38 AM 10/21/99 +0200, Wolfgang Schulze wrote:

>2) [in re Stanley Friesen] NOBODY can make "a strong case for Hattic,
>Hurrian etc. to be related to (part of) the North Caucasian family":
>First, the notion 'North Caucasian' is a rather suggestive term that
>does not find linguistic support [except by a certain school from
>Moscow].

I am aware of that, that is why the "part of" qualifier.  I always get the
East and West groups mixed up, so rather than say the wrong one, I used the
less specific phrase "part of North Caucausian"

>assumed proto-languages than standard trivialities]. To posit that
>Hattic and Hurrian etc. are related to (parts) of 'North Caucasian'
>cannot reflect more than a pre-scientific 'on-dit', just because we
>still do not have enough scientific evidence for the history of both WC
>and EC.

I never intended to imply any relationship between the East and West
branches, I just couldn't remember which branch Hurrian-Urartean was said
to be related to.  (My source on this was specific on this, I just did not
remember for certain that it was the East Caucasian family it specified).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 06:26:55 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:26:55 -0800
Subject: Hurrian-Urartean (was: Re: Dating the final IE unity)
In-Reply-To: <l03102803b432ae9c34cf@[195.247.226.33]>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.222655.0800.>

At 01:28 AM 10/20/99 +0200, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:

>>Indeed a strong case can be made for them being related to (part of) the
>>North Caucasian Family.

>a case has been made for Hattic being related to North-West-Caucasian
>another case has been made for Hurro-Urartaean being related to
>North-East-Caucasian
>and yet another case has been made for NW-Cauc being related to NE-Cauc

>neither of these cases is, imho, very strong ...

IMHO, the book I read made a more than creditable case for the
Hurrian-Urartean relationship to NE-Caucasian, and a mildly suggestive case
for the Hattic-NW-Caucasian.

I would say the first was certainly a stronger case than the one for the
existence of a Ural-Altaic family.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Tue Nov  2 01:08:59 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 17:08:59 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.170859.0800.>

At 01:34 AM 10/20/99 +0200, Ralf-Stefan Georg wrote:

>>>Why did Anatolian have to move through the Balkans?

>>Starting from the Ukraine, we have the following constraints:
>>A) there is no evidence of any IE languages ever having been in the
>>Caucasus prior to Armenian, making that route unlikely in the extreme.

>This is a classic argumentum e silentio.

There are times when this is valid. In this case it is at least strongly
suggestive. (And the lack of IE style cultural artifacts at an early date
is even more telling than the absence of IE words to my mind).

> Othoh, while it is true that these
>things are extremely controversial, some possible early loanwords of IE
>provenance in NE Cauc lgs. are sometimes being discussed.

This gets tricky, though. If the suggested relationships of NE Caucasian
languages to the Hurrian-Urartean and or Hattic languages is correct, then
they had very early contact with Anatolian languages, probably prior to
their immigration into the NE Caucasus.

Alternatively, the PIE homeland in the Pontic steps is very close indeed to
the NE Caucasus, providing some opportunity for borrowing.
Besides, I have not heard that these suggested borrowing are considered
securely established yet.

>>B) cultures with written history predate the probable appearance of the
>>Hittites in Anatolian in Mesopotamia. None of these written sources give
>>*any* indication of any likely pre-Anatolian people anywhere near
>>Mesopotamia.

>I'd say Anatolia *is* near Mesopotamia !?!

Yes - and the Assyrians *have* a record of an early Anatolian language
*there* near the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC! There are also good
indication of Indic ties for the Mitanni from an early date.
What is lacking is any records of Anatolian languages anywhere *east* of
Anatolia prior to the break up of the Hittite empire (at which time some
Anatolian languages show up in pockets in north-west Mesopotamia).

>>The first is made unlikely by the lack of IE-related cultural artifacts in
>>the Caucusus

>what is an "IE-related cultural artefact" ???

Certain styles of pottery, wheeled vehicles at an early date, and, more
important, certain burial styles and remains of domestic horses at an early
date.

This is the sort of evidence that makes me conclude the Corded Ware
cultures were IE related. It is missing in the Caucasus
--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Tue Nov  2 01:08:48 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 17:08:48 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.170848.0800.>

At 09:52 AM 10/19/99 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>3. The presence of Elamite (in Antiquity) and Brahwi (Dravidian) in Iran
>strongly suggests that the Dravidian territory stretched far more westward
>than at present. It seems - but I have no documentation at hand - that the
>old Indus valley culture is now recognized as having been Dravidian, which
>reinforces the hypothesis.

While this seems *likely* to me, I know of no substantial evidence
supporting this conclusion. Only decipherment of the Indus Valley script
would really establish the relationships of the Harappan language.

>Personally, I even suspect that a lot of what you might call 'Sanskrit
>culture' actually owes most of its original content to the conquered
>Dravidians since these already had a well established rich culture (like
>Mohendjo-Daro) when the IE warriors(?) invaded their countries.

This, however, is somewhat more secure. Several of the mythic and artistic
elements later so characteristic of Sanskrit culture appear to be present
in Indus Valley artwork. So substantial borrowing in the areas of
religion, myth and art, at least, seems well supported.
--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 01:27:10 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 17:27:10 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <001801bf1aef$79892440$a92b4c86@UHVR-PC9.UHVR-PC>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.172710.0800.>

At 12:37 PM 10/20/99 +0100, Gordon Whittaker wrote:

>such a group, and this evidence argues strongly for the presence of speakers
>of an Indo-European language in the Mesopotamian area itself at a time-depth
>of roughly 3100 B.C. It has long been debated in Assyriology whether a
>number of polysyllabic terms in Sumerian might derive from a so-called
>substrate of unknown origin. ...

>In the first issue of the Goettinger Beitraege zur Sprachwissenschaft
>(1998), based on a series of lectures given since 1978, I discussed
>unmotivated phonetic values in the Sumerian script and their association
>with the pictographic antecedents (Uruk IV) of the respective cuneiform
>signs. Signs depicting, for example, a fish, fox, bird, beer vessel and
>wagon have the orphan phonetic readings *pesh*, *lib/lub*, *hu*, *bi*, and
>*gurush/geresh*, recalling IE *pisk-i- 'fish', *wlp-eh- 'fox', *haw-i-
>'bird', *pih- 'drink', and *krs-o- 'wagon'.

Some care needs to be taken in interpreting these words.  For one thing,
there *is* attested Iranian (or Indo-Iranian) contact at a very early date,
so my first suspicion would be that these are II borrowings, from after the
PIE period.  Certainly, in regards to migrations etc., identification of
subfamily is important, and I am not sure this sample is sufficient for
doing that.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 02:07:58 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 18:07:58 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages (Horses and such)
In-Reply-To: <0.1c40a56f.254164e9@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.180758.0800.>

At 02:57 AM 10/22/99 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 10/19/99 4:58:14 PM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

><<...cultures with written history predate the probable appearance of the
>Hittites in Anatolian in Mesopotamia.  None of these written sources give
>*any* indication of any likely pre-Anatolian people anywhere near
>Mesopotamia.  (They do indicate an early appearance of proto-Iranian
>peoples to the east of Mesopotamia)>>

>The lack of references to "pre-Anatolian people" seems a pretty important
>point. Do those early records identify any "peoples" as living in central,
>northeastern or southwestern Anatolia?

Not always directly, but early Assyrian trade records include names and
words from native languages in all areas where they regularly traded.
Their records, and those of Akkade in the preceding millennium, also often
mention various tribes, ethnic groups and nations on the periphery of
civilization, especially with regard to conquests and exaction of tribute.

Now, admittedly these records are not as complete, nor as precise, as
modern ones would be.  But a good estimate can be made of the tribes and
peoples from southeastern Anatolia all the way to at least central Iraq,
and in earlier times even into modern India.

The only *clear* IE association is found in the Mitanni (names of deities,
nobles, and words for charioteering), and the form of the words indicates
an origin specifically from the Iranian branch.  There are also some words
in SUmerian that have some similarity to IE words, but they are
inconclusive, and Sumerian itself is assuredly NOT an IE language.

>Given the early dates postulated for an IE presence in the area, by e.g.
>Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, what would we expect those IE-related artefacts to
>be?

I am not entirely sure what dates G & I propose, but unless they follow
Renfrew in pushing PIE unity far back into the Neolithic, the following are
minimal: the use of horses (not asses) as a riding animal, the use of
wheeled vehicles, domestic oxen as a draft animal, and use of pigs, cows,
sheep and goats to provide food.

And, if the evidence for PIE originating in the Ukraine is correct, then we
can add: certain burial rites ("Kurgan" burials, or their derivatives),
certain stylistic elements in pottery decoration (impressed decorations),
the use of bronze implements, at least among the elite, and so on.

><<and the *total* lack of any pre-Armenian IE substratal
>influences in any of the non-IE languages of the Caucasus.>>

>Again these are very early dates. Do we have a sense of when those non-IE
>languages first appeared in the area?  And would a migration - as opposed to
>settlements - by way of the Caucasus leave such traces.

The problem is that prior to relatively modern times, long range migration
in one stage, especially via heavy mountainous terrain, is pretty much
impossible.  There would, of necessity, have been intermediate settlements,
just to maintain the necessities of life.

><<the closest relative of Greek seems to be Old Macedonian
>[and] ....there were peripheral populations of Greeks to the northeast of
>Greece proper, whence came the Dorians after the collapse of the Mykenean
>civilization.>>

>But does this give us a definite "directional" sense?  Couldn't both
>Macedonian and Dorian be as well explained as the expansion of Greeks
>northward?  One of the striking things about the Dorian account (which we
>rely upon to explain events before say 700 BC) is that it is fairly
>consistently described as "the return of the Dorians."

I suppose that is a possibility.  Though it would have to have occurred
prior to the split of Greek into several dialects to account for the
linguistic data.

On the other hand, mythic origins are often recast to match a group's
current status, so I am not sure how much credence we can give to this
supposed "return".

>In another message dated 10/19/99 4:03:14 PM, you wrote:
><<The appearance of horse-bits (for riding) in the Sredny-Stog culture is
>quite telling here. >>

>But the bit does not appear in Myceneaen remains or in Homer and I don't
>think evidence for it has been found in the Aegean area until after 1000BC.

It is a little tricky, as bits seem to be only rarely preserved.  There are
only a few from the Sredny Stog (I only know of *one* for certain).  More
telling is the arrival of the steppe horse in Greece.  It is not native to
that area, so it had to be brought in by somebody.  It is not well suited
to being raised as a food animal in the harsh climate of Greece (not enough
grass, and too many inedible shrubs), so its presence is most likely due to
use as a riding animal, and as a symbol of elite status.

>advanced metal bits date from 1500BC in the Near East.    As a matter of
>fact, evidence of the "true horse" - equus caballus - does not appear on the
>Greek mainland until the end of the Early Helladic - at more or less the same
>time as evidence first appears in Troy.

Which is when I date the arrival of Indo-Europeans in Greece.  I suspect
these were not Greek speakers, but rather members of some other branch of
the IE family.  (They *may* have been Anatolians, arriving in Greece and
Troy at about the same time as part of a single series of
migrations/conquests).

>It is a little difficult to see how the horse can be especially connected
>with the more western Indo-European cultures with such relative late dates
>compared to the eastern ones. I believe our best evidence (e.g., the Mitanni
>horse manual translated into Hittite about 1400BC) is that the domesticated
>horse was established in the Near and Middle East well before it reached the
>Aegean and Greek mainland (or western/central Europe.)  There is no question
>that the horse came from the northern steppes, but the evidence that it came
>into Greece and Anatolia by way of the Balkans is I believe somewhat poor.

There is evidence of Equus caballus in association with some of the Late
Tripolye cultures in the Balkans (e.g. the Usatovo and Cernavoda).  And
Mallory cites the presence of horse-head scepters in an even wider area as
evidence of the importance of the horse to them.  These put the presence of
the steppe horse in the Balkans back to about 3500 BC, earlier than in
Mesopotamia and Asia.

>I'm having a bit of a problem seeing a pattern here.  And after looking at
>Renfrew again, I have to wonder how much Indo-European cultures crisscrossed
>back and forth over each other.

Probably quite a bit.

>  The notion that the Ukraine may have just
>been a stop along the way - not for Proto-Indo-Europeans but for an early
>group of IE speakers - keeps sneaking back as a possibility when you find
>such a large potential range for IE when historical records show up.  And
>when your first evidence of IE in the Ukraine is not Greek or western IE but
>rather Scythian, which is most often associated with Iranian and the east.

On the other hand, the arrival of the Scytians is moderately well
documented as being somewhat late.  And the core homeland of the Iranian
peoples east of the Caspian is *directly* adjacent to the Ukrainian steppes.

>(And Mycenaean or pre-Mycenaean Greek remains have not been found along the
>north shore of the Black Sea.)

I rather suspect that much of the distinctive cultural characteristics of
the Greeks developed *after* they moved south and came into contact with
civilization.  Indeed, the language itself is probably fairly recent when
they first appear in history.

>And this whole question of toponyms in Greece.  Why don't we encounter this
>problem so extensively in northern and western Europe?

Umm, there are *numerous* old IE toponyms throughout Europe, many of which
do not have the form of words from the IE branch later attested in the
area.  It is just that in Europe the IE languages are not attested until so
much later that the exact relationships are obscured

> We know there was an
>existing population there from well before 2000 BC or even 4000 BC.  What
>happened to that substrate?

It is likely still there to some degree.  There are also many old toponyms
in Europe that are *not* IE in nature.  There are also a *great* many words
in Pokorny (and the other IE dictionaries) that are only attested in the
European branches of the family.  Many of these are very likely substratal
borrowings from the pre-IE languages of Europe.  (Many of words with
reconstructed *a show this pattern).

>  Why aren't there all these non-IE or unknown IE
>place names distributed all over Europe?

There are.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 02:17:32 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 18:17:32 -0800
Subject: Pre-Greek languages
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.991019153836.644E-100000@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.181732.0800.>

At 04:21 PM 10/19/99 -0400, Sean Crist wrote:

>On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, petegray wrote:

>When we have a family of related languages, on what grounds do we decide
>what the internal structure is for the family tree?  In other words, how
>do we decide which of these languages are more closely related than others
>in the family? Nearly everybody agrees that we should do so on the basis
>of shared characteristics of the languages which cannot reasonably be
>attributed to parallel innovation or to borrowing.  The differences of
>opinion arise partly from differing interpretations of the
>characteristics,

And in identifying such characteristics.

For instance, do shared new vocabulary items count?  How do you isolate
vocabulary shared due to ancestry from vocabulary shared due to borrowing?

For that matter, how does one rule out borrowing or influence for
morphological or phonetic features?

>If you believe that there is a grouping of "NW IE" languages (and I put
>quotes around it because I'm not clear on exactly which branches are to be
>included in this clade- Celtic? Germanic? Balto-Slavic?), this amounts to
>a claim that these branches are characterised by a set of shared
>attributes of the sort which I just mentioned.

There are a large number of shared vocabulary items between various pairs
Italic, Celtic and Germanic that are not found outside of Europe.  There
are also a large number of vocabulary items uniquely shared between
Germanic and Balto-Slavic.

This weekend at the library I discovered (or re-discovered) a booklet with
detailed stats on the distributions of roots from Pokorny and Mann.  I
intend to use the correlation tables at the end to apply one of the
grouping algorithms to get an estimated tree.

[I have some issue with the way they handled some of the minor IE
languages: for instance they group Phrygian with Dacian unconditionally,
possibly obscuring the relationships].

>(I earlier listed some of the evidence on whose basis Ringe et. al.
>produced the tree which I quoted; I can repeat both the tree and the
>evidence, if there's interest, but I hate to clutter the list with what's
>already been said.)

Or you could e-mail the evidence to me privately.  (Is this the one of the
U-Penn trees, or another one?)

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From lmfosse at online.no  Fri Nov  5 13:59:50 1999
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 14:59:50 +0100
Subject: SV: Pre-Greek languages
Message-ID: <FRI.5.NOV.1999.145950.0100.>

Eduard Selleslagh [SMTP:edsel at glo.be] skrev 19. oktober 1999 08:52:

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> 3. The presence of Elamite (in Antiquity) and Brahwi (Dravidian) in Iran
> strongly suggests that the Dravidian territory stretched far more westward
> than  at present. It seems - but I have no documentation at hand - that the
> old Indus valley culture is now recognized as having been Dravidian, which
> reinforces the hypothesis.

The presence of Brahui has been shown to be due to a migration of Dravidian
speakers from the South of India (probably mercenaries) a few hundred years
ago. They are therefore not relevant for the discussion of the earliest period.

> Personally, I even suspect that a lot of what you might call 'Sanskrit
> culture' actually owes most of its original content to the conquered
> Dravidians since these already had a well established rich culture (like
> Mohendjo-Daro) when the IE warriors(?) invaded their countries.

> What is the present scholarly opinion on these points?

It would seem that scholarship on this matter is starting a new phase. Prof.
Michael Witzel has recently published a large article on the Internet
(Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, access through the Indology web site)
dealing with the linguistic substrates of Northwestern India where he denies
any Dravidian presence. The French scholar Bernard Sergent has on the basis of
anthropological evidence also denied a Dravidian presence in the Northwest. In
other words: the Harappans may not have been Dravidians after all, nor for that
matter Indo-Aryans. So we seem to be back where we were: We don't know who the
Harappans were. (Possibly Munda?)

See:

Sergent, B. (1997). Gen?se de l'Inde. Paris, Payot.

Hock, H. H. (1996). Pre-Rgvedic Convergence between Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) and
Dravidian? A Survey of the Issues and Controversies. Ideology and Status of
Sanskrit. Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language. J. E. M.
Houben. Leiden - New York - K?ln, E. J. Brill: 17-58.

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 X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Nov  2 06:25:34 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 01:25:34 EST
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.012534.EST.>

In a message dated 10/28/99 12:25:17 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<What I *heard* was a strong suggestion that the continuity of cultures is
evidence *against* an IE incursion at that time.  Of course neither is it
evidence *for* such an incursion.  The conclusion that an incursion occurred
at around that time is developed from other lines of evidence.>>

We are talking about a period between roughly 2650BC - 1650BC in mainland
Greece.  My statement was that there is no serious material evidence of a
significant immigration during that period, EXCEPT from Anatolia.

If there are other "lines of evidence" of an "incursion" from the north, I'd
very much like to hear what they are.

Thoreau said something like: some inferences are as obvious as a trout in the
milk pail.

During the period in time we are talking about, we DO see plain evidence of a
major migration, the only evidence of a change in population.  We DO see
evidence that migration resulted 100s of years later in a clash of cultural
groups and warfare - the only substantial evidence of warfare in the period.
We DO see strong evidence that the migration did not come from the north but
came from Anatolia.

What's the obvious inference?  That migrations do leave evidence.  And that
the warfare later resulting from these cultural differences do leave
evidence.  So why didn't any incursion from the north leave evidence?  The
inference is that it may not have happened.

If above you mean by an "IE incursion," a movement of IE - speaking peoples
from the north, the question becomes where is the evidence?  Any evidence.

<<Nor can it be used to *deny* such things as it stands.>>

It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that there was no significant
incursion during this period from the north into mainland Greece.  It seems
possible to *deny* its likelihood.

As far as I know the theory that IE speakers came into Greece for the first
time from the direction of the Ukraine is based on old assumptions that can
no longer be supported by very much evidence.  There is nothing to suppose
that IE speakers were not already present in Greece when the Anatolian
migration began c.2400 or that the migration did not represent IE speakers.
The continuity of settlements right into the Mycenaean age suggests nothing
else but THAT IF IndoEuropean speakers first came during this period, they
came from Anatolia.  Neither the horse, the wheel, metal nor weapons show
evidence of playing a major part in the expansion of the Anatolian culture
during this period.  If anything, we can attribute it to the advantages of
increased population in the Anatolian influenced zone.  There is also the
factor of the sea - the older Korakou culture seems to have avoided exposing
its settlements to easy access from the sea.

I would suggest that the legitimacy of any theory dealing with this time and
place would need to deal with the evidence as its found.  The evidence that
exists in this case is particularly strong and does need to be accounted for.
 It really does not seem to be satisfactory to suggest that an IE dialect(s)
from the north became the dominant language of Greece without leaving any
significant evidence of arriving there, while major changes in population and
culture coming from Asia Minor are somehow irrelevant to the language issue.

Regards,
Steve Long


From drc at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz  Sun Nov  7 07:26:33 1999
From: drc at stargate1.auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 20:26:33 +1300
Subject: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <SUN.7.NOV.1999.202633.1300.>

>>> Stanley Friesen <sarima at ix.netcom.com> 10/20 4:20 PM >>>

><<In the Pacific islands, the replacement of many of the Polynesian languages
>by various European Creoles was *not* accompanied by a
>complete"europeanization" of these islands.  Quite the contrary.  Even to
>this day the peoples of these islands still retain many of the cultural
>practices from before, and continue to make many of the same cultural
>artifacts (e.g. stone heads).  A future archeologist is likely to argue that
>"there is a continuity in many aspects of the Pacific island material culture
>...".>>

I hesitated to question this paragraph, not wanting to start a
discussion in an area remote from Indo-European, but since Stanley
Friesen's "example" seems to have been taken up as exemplifying or
demonstrating something, I must ask how these "Pacific islands" are
related to the ones I am familiar with?

(1) I know of only one Polynesian language which has (largely) been
replaced by a European Creole, namely Hawaiian.

(2) I'm not sure where they make "stone heads" in the Pacific islands.

(3) The last couple of centuries have seen the extremely rapid
introduction of metal tools and abandonment of stone tool making,
sometimes even before direct contact with Europeans. Adzes, knives, fish
hooks, needles and other hard artefacts would shift entirely to new
materials and designs within a short space of time. Some continuity
might be found in the archaeological record in such things as house
building, cooking in the earth oven, manufacture of shell valuables and
so on. But this would be accompanied by an influx of completely new
types of artefacts -- bottles, coins, tobacco pipes etc.

(4) This unmistakeable archaeological break takes place, note, *before*
large scale linguistic replacement, which is (contra Stanley Friesen)
still in the future for most of the Pacific islands.

So where does this leave the analogy?

Ross Clark


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Nov  2 08:20:26 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 03:20:26 EST
Subject: Renfrew and IE Overlords
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.032026.EST.>

In a message dated 10/28/99 3:47:23 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<Well, unless he [Renfrew] has *seriously* improved his argument on this
from what he presented in his book, it is woefully inadequate a response.>>

Well, at the time that Archaeology & Language was published, Renfrew's main
argument was with the "majority" theory at the time - which placed IE's
dispersal at 2500BC (Childe-Kossina-Gimbutas).

Quite possibly the book was the stroke that "demolished" that theoretical
date - not the least by pointing out to archaeologists that "the date is not
based on any clear linguistic argument; it is not really a linguistic
argument at all.  It is a conclusion based on consensus.  Yet it is taken by
archaeologists as linguistic evidence,...  There is therefore a complete
circularity.  And in this case it would appear that the consensus may be in
error."  (A&L Cambridge Univ paperback p166)

Now, the new "consensus" date has backed to 4000BC in the recent posts on
this list.  But I wouldn't bet the ranch on it staying there.  Partly because
the actual evidence for picking that date is not much stronger than the old
2500BC date.

One important thing that Renfrew's book did was to bring objectivity back to
archaeology - so that "circular" support for conclusions could be reexamined
and stripped of their presumptions.  The kind Mallory points to in describing
the way that the IE homeland was once placed in the Himalayas, yielding
golden haired horsemen with bronze swords who brought not only elite
dominance but a language to go with it to whoever it was who was living in
Europe at the time.

<<Indeed, I quite agree that IE probably spread largely by elite dominance,
with only the tribal overlords actually migrating to the new areas.>>

And where exactly did these IE speaking "overlords" get their supposed
dominance? It certainly wasn't the horse, which shows no sign of being a
factor in seige or decisive war before 1000BC. And the chariot was just a
platform for conveying war leaders around in Homer.  The wheel is late
neolithic - TRB.  And swords appear on Crete 100's of years before they do in
mainland Greece.  It wasn't archers.  And it wasn't armor.

This business about a few IE speakers being able to come in and convert the
language of an entire people seems to be a vestige of19th Century jingoism
more than it seems to reflect any hard evidence.  If anything, we could just
as easily see any steppe "invaders" of central or southern or even western
Europe turning around and adopting the language of the folk who were already
there.

<<In many ways, I see the spread of European languages to Polynesia, and the
spread of Latin into most of Europe, as the best models for the spread of IE
languages in prehistory.>>

But Latin's prestige didn't come from a bunch of headbashing riders off the
steppes.  The advantages of Latin had to do with access to trade, crafts,
technology and much personal advancement that no profile of a pastoralist IE
speaking barbarian could appear to offer.  The same applies to Polynesia.  The
 theory of some small group of technologically advanced soldiers coming in
and converting primitives does not fit the evidence in the areas where IE
becomes documented at all - UNLESS IE was already the language family of the
original inhabitants of those areas.  And the small group of "overlords" were
assimilated.

In fact that model does work unless the invader has a steady flow of
technologically advanced resources and/or sheer population numbers shoring
him up.  That was the case in the new world.  On the other hand,  the French
don't speak Frankish.  The English do not speak Anglo-Norman or Danish.
Italians don't speak Odacer's language.  And Slavic has consumed a long list
of "dominant elite" languages like they were just popcorn at the ballpark.
When history starts being recorded, small groups of warrior elites are
definitely not the source of language change - except in cases of genocide -
and it takes more than just a few tribal overlords to pull that off.

Larry Trask wrote:

<<But Renfrew has expressly argued that many of these words are not substrate
words at all, but rather late borrowings into Greek long after Greece had
become Greek-speaking.>>

sarima at ix.netcom.com replied:

<<In many cases this is difficult to adequately maintain, since the words do
not correspond closely to the words in the likely source cultures.>>

What likely source cultures would you be speaking of?  Minoan?  or Carian?
Or for that matter Thracian or Getae?  We don't have more than ten sure words
(if any) in any of these languages to correspond to - closely or not.

<< Also, place names based on late borrowings are a trifle unusual.   Even
here in the USA, most non-English place names are substratal (Amerindian or
Spanish), and we are notorious polyculturalists.>>

The "late borrowings" do not refer I believe to place names.  Herodotus
however does mention Pelagasian placenames - and he says he does not know
what kind of language Pelagasian is, but that it is not Greek.

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Nov  2 12:43:54 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 12:43:54 +0000
Subject: Revised: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.124354.0000.>

Lloyd Anderson writes:

[snip stuff I might reply to later]

>  Trask believes the historical phonology of Basque is already *known*,
>  that there is only one viable such phonology, and he is comfortable using
>  it to exclude items.

Not quite.

I do believe that our current understanding of the phonological prehistory of
Basque is substantially correct, and very unlikely to undergo more than minor
clarifications in the future.  But I do *not* appeal to that phonological
prehistory to "exclude" anything at all.  My primary criteria are
non-phonological in nature -- remember?  So I can't possibly be appealing to
phonological criteria.

>  This is not stated overtly in his criteria, but it did
>  emerge explicitly in some discussions with others not long ago.

No.  The phonological prehistory of Basque is nowhere mentioned in my primary
criteria because I make no appeal to it.  If the known phonological prehistory
of Basque were utterly different, this would have no effect: my criteria would
still be the same, and the words picked out by them would still be the same, so
long as the facts of attestation, distribution and shared status were still the
same.

>  But then the procedure which he proposes,
>  to select the "best" candidates for early Basque vocabulary,
>  *is indeed at least to some small degree circularly based
>  on a prior hypothesis about the historical phonology of Basque*.

Lloyd, forgive me, but this is completely false.  Where on earth are you
getting such ideas from?  And why are you imputing them to me -- completely
wrongly?

Whatever hypotheses I may be entertaining about the historical phonology of
Basque, these hypotheses play *no part whatever* in my criteria for selection.
Surely that is obvious.

>  Nothing wrong with pursuing that route,
>  because in the long run we do evaluate the totality of hypotheses
>  and data, and Trask's hypotheses about historical phonology are quite
>  likely correct in most respects ...,

There are not my hypotheses.  The phonological prehistory of Basque was worked
out in great detail in the 1950s, when I was still a schoolboy who had hardly
even heard of linguistics.  The definitive publication came in 1961, when I was
still in high school.

>  but it DOES mean that the results almost *could not* lead to questioning
>  the hypothesis, since the data is selected by conformance to the hypothesis.

Nonsense.  Balderdash.  Lloyd, will you *please* stop making these absurd
declarations?

>  For those interested in the specifics, please go back to earlier
>  correspondence involving others,
>  it is beyond my competence as a non-specialist in Basque.

The earlier correspondence will merely confirm what I have just said (again).

>  However, for other exclusions which are not directly stated by
>  Trask's criteria but are indirect consequences, refer to the discussion
>  of expressives, and why a criterion of wide distribution improperly
>  excludes them (because of biases against recording).

We've discussed this to death elsewhere.  And, Lloyd, you have *still* not put
forward any explicit criteria for selection which you want to defend as better
than mine.

Given any particular Basque word, such as <makur> 'curved' or <tutur> 'crest',
by what explicit criteria will you decide whether it should, or should not, be
included in the list?  You have never answered this question, and I've asked it
about six times now.

>  In turn, their exclusion will lead to a misstatement of canonical forms
>  for the language as a whole. (Trask has stated that indeed canonical forms
>  for expressives are different from those for other vocabulary *in Basque*,
>  where I was myself able only to say that this situation is highly likely,
>  since it does occur in many languages.)

But who ever said I was interested in canonical forms "for the language as a
whole"?  Who has even claimed that there must have *existed* a single set of
canonical forms for Pre-Basque "as a whole" -- by which I take it you mean
"both ordinary words and expressive formations"?

>  Trask intends to use the result of his selection of "best" cases to
>  determine canonical forms, which result he will then use to select
>  further candidates for vocabulary of early Basque.
>  But he simply fails to respond to the point that his
>  canonical formulas may be biased by his starting point.
>  He only answers "not a problem for me"

And quite properly so, because this is not a problem.

Lloyd has raised only two points of possible substance, as follows:

(1) Expressive formations may be constructed according to different rules from
ordinary words.

Indeed they are, but how can I hope to establish this objectively unless I
*first* identify the rules for ordinary words?

(2) Words in particular semantic areas may be constructed according to
different rules from other words.

This I find unworthy of taking seriously.  I know of no language in which such
a thing happens, and I certainly know of no reason to suspect that it might be
true of Basque.  Of course, if it *is* true of Basque, then that fact should
emerge from my investigations.  But I'm not holding my breath.

>  This kind of result snowballs, has a domino effect on later stages
>  of investigation.  Sometimes good, sometimes bad (bad if some wrong
>  assumption slipped in anywhere in the process).

This is a bald assertion, unsupported so far by any evidence at all, and I see
no reason to take it seriously.

>  While his reply under this message title did mention my point
>  about the systematic bias in excluding sound-symbolic words,
>  he transited immediately to a discussion of attestation in only one
>  dialect in cases which were not sound-symbolic.  So he has still
>  not found any solution to this issue of systematic distortion of results.

So, Lloyd -- yet *again* you are telling me that expressive formations should
be picked out, somehow, *in advance* of any investigations, and deliberately
added to the list in defiance of the ordinary criteria, which must still be
applied to other words.  This is how I described your position earlier, and
your response was to claim that I was misrepresenting you.  Do you still think
I was misrepresenting you?

Lloyd, how will you pick out the expressive formations *in advance* of any
work?  What criteria will you use to identify them?  And how will you avoid
circularity?  Moreover, what criteria will you rely on to decide which of your
selected expressive formations will go into the list?  "Attestation in only one
dialect"?  That means you'll have to include *all* of them, now doesn't it?

>  So it is not a problem if his results about canonical forms are wrong,
>  and he then uses those wrong results to select his data (wrongly in
>  some cases because of the initial error) from which he will draw further
>  conclusions?

You know, Lloyd, I'm really getting a little tired of this.  For the last
bloody time, I am *not* appealing to canonical forms to select the data.
Instead, I am selecting the data by purely non-phonological criteria, and then
examining these data to *extract* canonical forms.

>  I simply don't follow this failure to appreciate the
>  snowballing consequence of certain kinds of errors,

And I don't follow this bewildering sequence of plainly false statements about
my criteria and my procedure.

>  or perhaps rather the certainty that he already knows the answers.

Not "certainty".  Remember, I've already done a good deal of work in this vein,
and I have a number of preliminary results which I am confident will stand up
pretty well.  But I haven't claimed any certainty: only confidence that I know
what I'm doing.

>  Because that seems to me to imply that he is only seeking the "best"
>  *examples* to *illustrate* *conclusions he has mostly already drawn*,

The response to this that pops into my head is one that I am sure the moderator
will decline to post. ;-)

So I will content myself with a more measured response: Lloyd, this is an utter
falsehood, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

>  not a reasonable selection of *very good* data from which to consider
>  drawing new conclusions.  He actually states the contrary,
>  but I believe he is not aware of the circularities.

What "circularities"?  I haven't seen any circularities, and you certainly
haven't advanced any.

[snip incomprehensible passage about <uko> and <ukondo> and darkly alleged, but
unidentified, "*non sequiturs*]

>  [LA, clarifying that including nursery words and expressives,
>  for the purposes of having a truly representative sample of
>  early Basque,

More balderdash.  Pre-Basque doubtless had some nursery words and expressive
words.  But how can we know what those were?

Lloyd, are you seriously proposing that I should take any arbitrary nursery or
expressive words from modern Basque (or even all of them?), and then declare by
fiat that they must have been present in Pre-Basque, even though there exists
no evidence that they were present?  If so, this is utterly irrational.  If
not, then what the hell *are* you proposing?

>  is NOT the same thing as handling the difficulties
>  of reasoning about external comparisons,

I am not interested in external comparisons.  I am doing internal
reconstruction.

>  precisely because
>  expressives may not undergo all of the sound changes which
>  apply to other words.

This suggestion has never been demonstrated to be true for Basque.

Anyway, even if it were true, this would have no consequences.  I am not
including or excluding words on the basis of their phonological forms.

>  Therefore, of course, arguments from the *difficulty*
>  of the latter task are not arguments to exclude such words.]

And I haven't argued from difficulty.  I exclude words which fail to satisfy my
criteria, and include words which do satisfy them.  Now where is the
"difficulty"?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Nov  2 14:42:58 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 14:42:58 +0000
Subject: Revised: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.144258.0000.>

Lloyd Anderson writes:

>  Trask had mentioned that the 16th-century texts were primarily religious.
>  That is a very strong bias of content, I would think against quite a
>  range of vocabulary from ordinary life.

Oh, not necessarily.  Take Leizarraga's 1571 translation of the New Testament.
In the *first few lines* of the preface, we find the following everyday words,
at least:

<guzi> 'every, all'
<andre> 'lady'
<gehien> 'most'
<bere> 'his/her own'
<txipi> 'small'
<eta> 'and'
<zeren> 'because'
<ni> 'I'
<zu> 'you'
<ezagun> 'acquaintance'
<gabe> 'without'
<bezala> 'like, as'
<berri> 'new'
<hau> 'this'
<izan> 'be'
<on> 'good'
<ahal> 'ability'
<baldin> 'if'
<neure> 'my own'
<zerbait> 'something'
<eman> 'give'
<ez> 'not'
<anitz> 'many'
<bertze> 'other'
<arte> 'interval, between'
<jende> 'people'
<handi> 'big'
<ene> 'my'
<hala> 'thus'
<ere> 'also'
<non> 'where'
<sekulan> 'ever'
<heldu> 'arrive'
<hura> 'that'
<herri> 'country'
<ezen> 'whether'
<ito> 'drown'
<azpi> 'under'
<gogo> 'mind'
<buru> 'head'
<bilo> 'hair'
<latz> 'rough'
<bihotz> 'heart'
<ezin> 'impossible'
<asko> 'enough'
<hain> 'so (much)'
<gauza> 'thing'
<kasi> 'almost'
<egin> 'do, make'
<orain> 'now'
<lehen> 'first'
<eder> 'beautiful'
<denbora> 'time'
<ohi> 'custom'
<frango> 'lots of'
<behin> 'once'
<erran> 'say'
<bezain> 'as...as'
<hitz> 'word'
<behatu> 'look at'
<gaitz> 'bad'
<zuhur< 'prudent'
<egun> 'day'
<bide> 'road, way'
<baina> 'but'
<zer> 'what'
<aitzin> 'front'
<mintzatu> 'speak'
<ilun> 'dark'
<hobe> 'better'
<bat> 'one, a'

And so on.  Not bad for the first few lines of a religious book, is it?

Think using the preface is cheating?  OK; let's look at the text.  I'll skip
chapter one of Matthew, which is the familiar list of begats, and take the
first few lines of chapter two:

<jaio> 'be born'
<izan> 'be'
<errege> 'king'
<denbora> 'time'
<huna> 'hither'
<etorri> 'come'
<non> 'where'
<ezen> 'whether'
<ikusi> 'see'
<hura> 'that'
<izar> 'star'
<eta> 'and'
<entzun> 'hear'
<hori> 'that'
<guzi> 'all'
<bildu> 'gather'
<sortu> 'be born'
<erran> 'say'
<hi> 'you'
<lur> 'earth'
<arte> 'interval, between'
<txipi> 'small'
<ene> 'my'
<orduan> 'then'
<deitu> 'call'
<agertu> 'appear'
<igorri> 'send'
<jaun> 'lord'
<haur> 'child'
<jakin> 'know'
<ni> 'I'
<ere> 'also'
<ukan> 'have'
<aitzin> 'front'
<leku> 'place'
<gain> 'top'
<handi> 'big'
<etxe> 'house'
<sartu> 'enter'
<bere> 'his/her own'
<ama> 'mother'
<aho> 'mouth'
<amets> 'dream'

And so on.

Still think religious texts are woefully deficient in everyday vocabulary?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Nov  9 10:46:06 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 10:46:06 +0000
Subject: Refining early Basque criteria
Message-ID: <TUE.9.NOV.1999.104606.0000.>

Pat Ryan writes:

[on Basque <ama> 'mother']

>  I continue to believe that some terms which might be classified as
>  Kinderlallsprache such as <ama> are a powerful indication of common
>  linguistic descent; and should not be excluded from consideration of
>  inclusion in Pre-Basque.

>  It may be that this category of terms has preserved an older or non-typical
>  phonological form than other words of the vocabulary but they should be
>  seriously considered because of their ubiqiuity.

No.  Their ubiquity is *precisely* the reason why they should be excluded.
After all, in most of the languages on the planet, the word for a cat-noise is
something like <miau>, but this ubiquity is not an argument for pushing the
word back to Pre-Proto-Everything.  Rather, it is a compelling argument for
disregarding the word altogether, on grounds of *motivated* independent
creation.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Thu Nov  4 20:41:12 1999
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan)
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 20:41:12 -0000
Subject: Possessives
Message-ID: <THU.4.NOV.1999.204112.0000.>

From: Patrick C. Ryan <proto-language at email.msn.com>
Date: Saturday, October 30, 1999 2:09 PM

Dear Sean and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 1999 1:29 AM

> On Sat, 16 Oct 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

<snip>

[SC]

> Virtually all syntactic analysis over the last 40 years has defined word
> categories in terms of the distribution of words within sentences- what
> you have called the 'slot' approach.  It's quite true that one can at
> least imagine other approaches, such as one where word categories are
> defined in terms of word semantics rather than word distribution. I might
> say, tho, that we rejected that approach many decades ago for the simple
> reason that it doesn't work as well, as Larry Trask has aptly illustrated.

> If you feel otherwise, then show us a model of language such as English
> which does a more accurate job of assigning strings of English words to
> the 'accept' and 'reject' bins than the best distributional model to date.
> If you can do so, we'll be glad to accept your model.

[PR]

Thank you for affording me the opportunity to explain my views in this forum.

Now, I would say that Larry would be the best choice to explain why a
semantic approach "doesn't work as well" but since I have repeatedly asked,
and in my opinion have not gotten a responsive answer to the question of
'why the "slot-and-filler" approach (Larry's terminology) be characterized
as working better', perhaps you will jump in to explain with specifics not
with generalities why you also hold this view.

If you do not care to do that, could you furnish me with the statements of
Larry that you consider to have "aptly illustrated" this point of view?

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com
(501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA
WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/
and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/proto-religion/indexR.html
"Veit ek, at ek hekk, vindga mei?i, n?tr allar n?u,
geiri unda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i er mangi veit
hvers hann af r?tum renn." (H?vamal 138)


From ECOLING at aol.com  Wed Nov  3 17:44:42 1999
From: ECOLING at aol.com (ECOLING at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 12:44:42 EST
Subject: Re Personal pronouns
Message-ID: <WED.3.NOV.1999.124442.EST.>

In the discussion between Larry Trask and Pat Ryan,
each of them has a partly valid perspective.

Pat points out that "Personal Pronouns" may properly
include "possessives" or "possessive pronouns".
Trask objects that "possessives" are not pronouns,
as proven by distributional criteria.

The gap in Trask's logic is the assumption that
the definition of "personal pronoun"
must depend essentially and exclusively on a distributional meaning,
and cannot have another legitimate basis.

In fact, "personal pronoun" was defined by use long before
Trask or any of the rest of us were born, and does
indeed have "a" (not "the") legitimate use emphasizing more the
semantic content and less the distributional occurrence /
part-of-speech characteristics of use.

It is not a valid counterargument
to say that "possessive pronouns" must be "pronouns" in every respect.
That depends on the assumption that the composite is transparent,
and would lead to the conclusion that "White House" must be a white
house, even if it were another color, patently an error of reasoning.
Rather, "possessive" may already signal a member of the class
of determiners, or whatever one considers "possessive pronouns"
to be closest to, distributionally.

So there is no absolute right or wrong in these discussions,
there are legitimate arguments for each point of view.

Which means it is NOT legitimate to say the other point
of view is simply wrong (however that may be phrased).

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Nov  2 18:48:37 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 13:48:37 EST
Subject: the Wheel and Dating PIE
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.134837.EST.>

I wrote:
<<I'm beginning to suspect that the 4000BC "last date of PIE unity" is pretty
much a linguistic conclusion and - be it right or wrong - the material
evidence does not especially favor that date versus an earlier one.>>

Sean Crist replied (dated 10/28/99 2:09:32AM):
<<It's quite true that the reconstructed IE vocabulary puts certain
constraints on the possible dates for the final IE unity.>>

But that is not what I said and I don't believe it's true.  Reconstructions
are relative dates - there's no constraints imposed by the linguistic
evidence alone. WHAT I SAID was that the archaeology will not necessarily
support the dating - not that reconstructions put any constraint on the
objective findings.

Sean Crist continued:
<<For example, we reconstruct "wheel" for the PIE lexicon.  We conclude that
the speakers of PIE at its final unity belonged to a culture acquainted with
the wheel.>>

The dating of the wheel is NOT linguistic evidence.  This cannot be
understated.  If there's supposed to be some CONCLUSION ABOUT DATES drawn
from the commonness of words for the wheel, it is most definitely NOT
primarily based on linguistic evidence.  It MUST BE BASED on the earliest
dates given to the wheel by archaeology.  (Unless of course you are referring
to lexicostatistical analysis, which I'm pretty sure is not the case.)

<<Dating the final PIE unity to 7000 BCE is therefore quite inacceptible,
because the wheel is not attested in the material record until much
later....>>

"Quite incceptible" is quite unacceptible.  There's no reason to say that
this is  finally conclusive or not questionable or anything more than
tenative.  There's actually very little to be sure about here.

Starting with the linguistic side - very clearly, there are cases where
technological and cultural innovations carry their own terminology with them
and enter different languages with a common name long after those languages
have separated.  (In some cases, they have even been conformed after the fact
to the local sound rules.)  IE speakers could have become "acquainted" with
the wheel after they separated and adopted the traveling wagoneer's,
wheelwright's or merchant's word for the item.

And let me question whether the universal shared character of the attested
words for the wheel is even accurate.

What was the Hittite word for wheel?

Awhiles back, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote (3/9/99 12:12:33 AM):
<<The other words related to horse technology yield no Hittite
cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but
<hurki>, related only to Tocharian <wa"rka"nt> "circle, wheel"),
except for two curious items: "shaft/pole", Hittite hissa ~ Skt.
i:s.a:, Grk. oie:ks, Slav. oje(s)- and "(to) harness", Hittite
turiia- ~ Skt. dhu:r-,...>>

And, BTW, how does Greek or Mycenaean jive with the statement that wheel has
a shared form in all IE languages?

Miguel wrote to me:
<<AFAIK, "horse" in Mycenaean is i-qo (Class. Greek hippos), not a regular
reflex of PIE *ek^wos.  "Wheel" is a-mo (Cl. Greek harma "chariot").>>

And a simple reading of the Illiad (as Chapman noted a long time ago and Buck
gave a nod to) makes it rather clear that Homer's specific word for a wheel,
a chariot wheel, a potter's wheel, wheel tracks and a spinning wheel is
<trochos>.  What is equally pretty clear is that <kuklos> refers not
specifically to a wheel, but to anything circular, including a circle of
counselors or the walls surrounding a town.

If <kuklos> did in fact originally refer to a circle (rather than
specifically to a wheel) then there is no surprise that the word would trace
back to PIE long before the wheel - and the fact of the wheel's introduction
would only reflect a later shift in semantic meaning of <kuklos>.  <*rotHo>,
the other supposed IE universal, does not even approach the meaning "wheel"
in Homer.

So, it appears that most of the words for the wheel that are attested or show
a clear path from the 2d millenium BC (Hittite, Tocharian, Mycenaean, Homeric
Greek) don't give much support at all to the universality of wheel
terminology.  Or therefore to the 4000BC dating.

So how is it that such a claim keeps being made?  Is it because all these
early languages "lost" the PIE form?  Or are we assuming that PIE MUST have
had a word for the wheel - based on what?

And how will this rigid theory - about the correlation between the wheel and
the latest dates of PIE unity - change as the evidence for the wheel keeps
moving backward in time?

Archaeologists have begun to adopt the understanding that the earliest
finding of a well-developed technological item cannot be accepted as the
"earliest date" of that technology, anymore than it is likely that the
earliest wheel found is actually the first wheel ever made.  Evidence for
wheel tracks contemporary with early European megalithic material culture may
have been found and is being actively pursued. (see, e.g., Maximilian O.
Baldia, Causewayed enclosures, the oldest roads, the first wagon tracks, and
the development of megalithic tombs in southern Scandinavia and Central
Europe, a copy of which is on the web at
http://209.217.18.237/SAA_1998_Roads.htm.)  The dating would mean the PIE
speakers would be acquiring their common word(s) for the wheel in Germany
about 3750BC about the same time they were picking up the same terminology in
the vicinity of Sumeria.  Not.

But here's the important question: how could a piece of archaeological
evidence that is so uncertain as to both ultimate dating and conclusiveness
become such a rigid date for some linguists?

<<If this is what you mean by "a linguistic conclusion", then yes, dating
the latest IE unity to 3500-4000 BCE is "a linguistic conclusion".  Are
you saying that this is a bad thing?>>

The way this has been done, yes.  There's nothing wrong with saying that the
archaeological evidence looks like right now the earliest wheel is at about
4000BC and the linguistic evidence MAY point to that as a possible time of IE
unity.  It's quite another to dismiss earlier dates as "quite inacceptible."
Or to build a whole house of cards on such a date and then act as if it were
unquestionable proof of the chronology of PIE or its descendents.

The nature of the evidence does not allow anything but a quite TENTATIVE
conclusion, at best.  Your conclusions here are based strictly on things
found in the ground and you can be no more certain about those things than
the people who find them and know what they mean.

There is no reason for any kind of a conflict between the archaeological
evidence - which is becoming harder science everyday - and the linguistic
evidence.  It just requires a realization that nothing can be particulary
written in stone on either side.  And there are many, many unknowns.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 06:56:38 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 22:56:38 -0800
Subject: Wheeled Vehicles.
In-Reply-To: <0.a3a314fc.253ea121@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.225638.0800.>

At 12:37 AM 10/20/99 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>And that's merely the _latest_ date for it; a classic 'absence of evidence is
>not evidence of absence'.  Since it was already in a high state of
>development at that time and in that area, it's quite possible it was present
>in more rudimentary forms much earlier, and we simply haven't found the
>evidence yet (or it hasn't survived -- light wooden constructions generally
>don't).

Given its design, the chariot is a fairly direct derivation of the
two-wheeled cart, with modifications to make it more suitable for warfare
and.or racing.

In fact I find there is some ambiguity around the edges: when is a cart a
chariot?  A number of war carts in early depictions seem rather outside of
what I would normally consider chariots, yet they are often termed chariots
in the literature (e.g. relatively heavy four-wheeled war-carts)

>Horse domestication on the Eurasian steppe can be placed to around 4000 BCE,
>and equipment _very similar_ to that used in the early Ural-Kazakhstan
>chariots (Antler and bone cheekpieces, riding-crop caps, etc.) can be found
>from the Urals to
>Hungary very early -- earlier than the chariot burials.

Though some of these could be associated simply with riding horses.

>>The second is tools, at least copper tools, and for a really good cart
>>that makes judicious use of hardwood, probably bronze tools.

>-- no, I'm afraid this is not so.  Woodworking with Neolithic tools is
>perfectly satisfactory for hardwoods, as the evidence of the 'lake villages'
>and other neolitic settlements shows.  It's slower and more difficult, but
>you can get very much the same results.

For some purposed stone tools are actually *better* than bronze.  In fact
the main advantage of bronze is greater durability.  Stone blades are
*much* sharper than bronze blades - literally razor sharp.  So, in making a
cart one would simply go through lots of blades, instead of using one blade
throughout.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Nov  2 04:07:44 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 23:07:44 EST
Subject: When a Parent Becomes a Daughter
Message-ID: <MON.1.NOV.1999.230744.EST.>

[ Moderator's note:
  This is a revised version of an message originally sent privately to me by
  Steve Long.  I encouraged him to submit it to the list, where it was caught
  in the backlog.  I'd like to thank him for his patience.
  --rma ]

This is about Larry Trask's statement: "An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist
with its own descendant."

In a message dated 10/20/99 5:02:33 PM, Larry Trask wrote:

<<First, you are confusing two things: the relation between a daughter and
its ancestor, and the relation between two or more daughters.>>

Unfortunately, I believe that is ALSO what you are confusing.  I believe in
good faith that if you consider the above TWO statements objectively you will
see you have has just committed "reification."

Now whatever definition you are using for "ancestors" or "daughters" above,
let's try to just stick with those for a moment and see them through.

You use the term "daughter" above.  Whatever vague boundaries you used to
decide when a language BECOMES a "daughter" - think of why the other
remaining part of the parent also must at the same time become "a daughter?"
Whatever caused you to call the two languages "daughters", consider what
makes them both BECOME "daughters" and makes the parent disappear?  So you
can say that a parent doesn't coexist with its daughter?

Take the language that you describe an "ancestor" by whatever definition you
use above.  Why are you assuming it also has to change status and become one
of the "daughters" just when another daughter emerges?  And at the very same
time (so that you can say there's no period of co-existence between parent
and daughter?)

"An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist with" a daughter.

Isn't this a reification?   The only reason a parent can't co-exist with a
daughter is because you automatically change it into a daughter when there's
another daughter branching off.  Aren't you creating another "daughter"
unnecessarily?

If you would have been satisfied with a single "ancestor" (by whatever your
definition is above) as a single language - if the branch off had not
happened - why are you turning that "ancestor" into a new language just
because a daughter branches off?

Isn't that reification?  Aren't you unnecessarily creating a new "daughter
language" (however you mean it above) when nothing more than a part of it has
broken off?

Now maybe this is all just a matter of terminology.  And I'd be happy with
that.  Because it would mean that your original statement is just terminology:

<<<<No.  An ancestral LANGUAGE cannot co-exist with its own descendant.>>
[Caps mine]

You can certainly co-exist with your own ancestor. In common sense everday
understanding, an "ancestor" doesn't automatically disappear or turn into a
"daughter" just because a descendent emerges.

You've written that, if regional varieties of a language "would eventually
become so different from one another that they would CEASE TO BE MUTUALLY
COMPREHENSIBLE at all, and we would be FORCED to speak, not of different
dialects, but of DIFFERENT LANGUAGES."  (CAPS ARE MINE.) (The context of this
quote alludes to multiple dialects - ie, not limited to just two.)

If there are many dialects and they don't become "mutually incomprehensible"
at the same time - why MUST they also all become different languages at the
same time?  Why would we be "forced" to call all those different parent
dialects "different languages" just because one became mutually
incomprehensible, branched off and became a daughter?

Now you have said that this explanation was only meant for students, not for
professionals.  Well, then on that basic level at least it seems "an
ancestral language CAN co-exist with its own descendant."

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at ix.netcom.com  Wed Nov  3 02:24:40 1999
From: sarima at ix.netcom.com (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 18:24:40 -0800
Subject: Respect goes both ways!
In-Reply-To: <E11dUj6-0006KT-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.2.NOV.1999.182440.0800.>

At 09:34 AM 10/19/99 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:

>But the problem does not, I think, lie in the relation itself, which must be
>taken as transitive if it is to have any identifiable content -- at least in
>a non-fuzzy logic.

I guess I am not so adamant that sameness always be transitive.

It is generally rather messy to try to apply a transitive form of
similarity to biological entities, not just language.  For instance,
species delimitation can be difficult if one insists on transitivity (e.g.
the so-called ring species).  When does a fertilized egg become a new
individual?   So I just take it as *given* when talking about a biological
entity that the boundaries *are* fuzzy, as otherwise one must give up
almost all boundaries in biology.

And natural languages are clearly biological entities.  So fuzziness is the
only useful way to go.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Nov  4 15:54:51 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 15:54:51 +0000
Subject: Basque 'sei'
Message-ID: <THU.4.NOV.1999.155451.0000.>

Ed Selleslagh writes:

> Iberian has two sibilants (and also rhotics) that might very well be the same
> as the Basque ones, including the affricated varieties.

Iberian certainly had two contrasting sibilants (at least), but the phonetic
nature of the contrast is entirely unknown.  Aquitanian probably had at least
four, and perhaps six, of the things, but the Roman orthography was defective,
and the various sibilants were not written in any very consistent manner.

> The Castilian s and z/c (theta) are the descendants of the old Basque-type
> distinction, I believe.

I don't follow.  Castilian /s/ simply continues Latin /s/, except that it is
apical, whereas the Latin /s/, on the Basque evidence, was probably laminal.
But the Castilian theta derives ultimately, in most cases, from Latin /k/
before a front vowel; this is thought to have become some kind of affricate
before developing into theta (or into /s/, according to region).

> What about Arabic? It certainly has various sibilants.

Yes, but it does not have an apical/laminal contrast, and I know of no evidence
that Arabic phonology had any effect on Castilian phonology, still less on
Basque phonology.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Nov  6 03:59:42 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 22:59:42 EST
Subject: Northwest IE attributes
Message-ID: <FRI.5.NOV.1999.225942.EST.>

In a message dated 10/26/99 11:09:50 PM, Sean Crist wrote:

<<If you believe that there is a grouping of "NW IE" languages (and I put
quotes around it because I'm not clear on exactly which branches are to be
included in this clade- Celtic? Germanic? Balto-Slavic?), this amounts to
a claim that these branches are characterised by a set of shared
attributes of the sort which I just mentioned.  I'm interested in hearing
what shared characteristics are proposed as evidence.

(I earlier listed some of the evidence on whose basis Ringe et. al.
produced the tree which I quoted; I can repeat both the tree and the
evidence, if there's interest, but I hate to clutter the list with what's
already been said.)>>

Satem is still a very good way to separate I-Ir from the western group.  (I
believe the current stance is that satem may have been adopted by
Balto-Slavic.)  And Hittite separates itself from the northern group easily
enough.  That leaves a distinct NW IE group.

ON THE OTHER HAND:  No one to my knowledge has posted a list of the "shared
attributes" that the UPenn tree is based on.  The best I saw was the few you
posted on the list and the few posted on the web.  Neither have I seen any
list of the "directionality" adjustments that attach a time sequence to those
attributes.

It would be good to know - however - why *specifically* you think some group
of IE speakers could not have branched off from PIE right from the start and
moved Northwest.  That would be very interesting.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Nov  6 04:08:52 1999
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 23:08:52 EST
Subject: What is Relatedness?
Message-ID: <FRI.5.NOV.1999.230852.EST.>

In a message dated 10/26/99 11:09:50 PM, kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu wrote:

<<When we have a family of related languages, on what grounds do we decide
what the internal structure is for the family tree?  In other words, how
do we decide which of these languages are more closely related than others
in the family?>>

But what does "more closely related" mean?   This isn't just a question about
terminology.  It rather goes to what we are proving and hope to prove by
establishing "relatedness."

If - for example - a language has innovated and borrowed so wildly that it
retains very little of the ancestor, it may be "more closely related" in some
chronological sense.  But in fact we can imagine it being far more different
from the immediate ancestor than say some conservative cousin that retained
the attributes common to the family.

So a language that has innovated and borrowed away most of its heritage may
not be "closely related" in terms of its vocabulary, use of syntax and just
plain in its sound to the ear.  But yet we would call it "more closely
related" because a few words or sounds give us evidence of "descent" from a
common ancestor.  But a great deal of that language - let's say the majority
and its most distinguishing features - would in fact be descended not from
the ancestor, but from somewhere else.

A "backwoods" language exposed to new and sophisticated cultural and
technological input might expand many times over its original form.  Many new
words and concepts might be introduced.  New tenses might suddenly be needed
to indicate matters of time and relationships that simply did not matter in
the old days.  People who calculated time only in terms of the seasons might
need to start perceiving and discriminating befores and afters, duratives and
completedness, perfects and aorists.  Sounds might have to be borrowed and
allophones split and evolve into phonemes to accomodate subtle differences
between meanings.  (E.g., the defense rests, but "dee-fense" wins ballgames.)
 Everything might be overhauled as a result.

This is a side-path off of the discussion in which Larry Trask discussed a
language changing so much that it might be perceived as a different language.
 And perhaps it raises the question whether counting the number of apparent
differences between languages (as e.g. the UPenn tree does to some degree) is
a valid way to measure genetic distance.

How much must a language borrow, for example, before it starts to owe more to
the loaning language than it does to a parent or grandparent that has just
left a few strands of genetic relation?  And conversely would those few
strands of genetic relatedness mislead us into thinking that it was genetic
distance and not borrowing or innovation that caused so little of the
ancestor to be retained?

<<Nearly everybody agrees that we should do so on the basis
of shared characteristics of the languages which cannot reasonably be
attributed to parallel innovation or to borrowing. >>

And of course there is an inverse function that applies here.  If some languag
es had those shared characteristics, but lost them before they became
documented in writing or otherwise left no evidence - it would be taken as
evidence of relative unrelatedness.  But what might actually have occurred is
that the evidence of relatedness might have been innovated or borrowed away
in a frenzy of change.

So we wouldn't be talking about "parallel innovation or borrowing" misleading
us about shared characteristics, but instead misleading us because they have
destroyed the evidence of the real relationship.

The UPenn seems to use a "value" or a neutral count (in terms of shared
innovations) called "lost."   This APPEARS to apply only to attributes that
are presumed to have been present in PIE.  But the fact is that a truly
innovative language might have lost shared innovations that arose after PIE,
and those lost shared innovations might have given us a completely different
picture of relatedness.

But because the loss happened before documentation, we are mislead into
thinking they were never there.

After all, if presumed attributes of PIE can be "lost" in daughter languages,
then attributes ("shared innovation") of a sub-family - e.g., NW IndoEuropean
- could have been lost in a particularly innovative member of that subgroup -
e.g., Greek or Latin - before documentation.  And I don't believe there is
any methodology that could neceassrily recover them.

Regards,
Steve Long


From michael_nick at mail.ru  Sun Nov  7 12:46:31 1999
From: michael_nick at mail.ru (Michael)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 15:46:31 +0300
Subject: PIE words for sexual organs
Message-ID: <SUN.7.NOV.1999.154631.0300.>

Dear IEists!

	I was told that Walter Wuest had an article on IE words
	denoting sexual organs, but i couldn't find. Could anyone
	give a reference? I myself have not infrequently been puzzled,
	that all three PIE words, which can be reconstructed for 'vulva',
	have at the same time the meaning 'buttocks, anus' (namely,
	*putos, *ksutos and *pisdeH2). Any suggestions? [  :-)  ].

		Regards,
			Mike


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Nov  9 11:04:10 1999
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 11:04:10 +0000
Subject: Maite and Arantxa
Message-ID: <TUE.9.NOV.1999.110410.0000.>

Macia Riutort writes:

> Arantxa wird in Katalonien doch als baskischer Name empfunden. Es ist
> n?mlich so, da? es besonders in den Jahren 1977-1980 zu einer gewissen
> Mode wurde, Kinder auf baskische Namen zu taufen.

Most engaging.

> So habe ich zur Zeit in einer
> Klasse eine Ar?nzazu (23 J.a.) und eine Agurtxane (24 J.a.), obwohl beide
> Studentinnen katalanische Familiennamen tragen, so da? ich bezweifle, da?
> sie baskische Vorfahren haben. Ich glaube, der Name der Tennisspielerin
> wurde ihr vielleicht im Rahmen dieser Mode gegeben (?brigens, Arantxa wird
> hier in Katalonien als Koseform zu Ar?nzazu verwendet).

Yes.  I guess I should have explained this.

The source is the Basque place name <Arantzazu>, which consists of <arantza>
'thorn' plus the suffix <-zu> 'full of'.  This last is a common element in
place names, though, in the modern language, it has been displaced by the
variant <-tsu> for ordinary purposes.  This probably develops from cases like
<sats> 'ordure' + <-zu> --> <satsu> 'shitty', with regular phonological
developments.

Anyway, Arantzazu is a holy place, which I believe was once allegedly visited
by the Virgin, leading to the use of the toponym as a Marian name for women.
The long form <Arantzazu> is commonly clipped to <Arantza>, which forms a
regular Basque diminutive <Arantxa>.

> Im letzten Jahr
> hatte ich in derselben Klasse zwei Iciar (23 Jahre alt und 27 Jahre alt).

Yes; <Itziar> is another toponym and another Marian name.  Oddly enough, after
the Basques finally abandoned their long tradition of paganism in favor of the
Church of Rome, the Virgin seems to have made a point of dropping in on the
Basques at brisk intervals. ;-)

> Im Gegensatz zu all diesen Namen, die, wie gesagt, als baskisch empfunden
> werden, wird der Name Maite als Abk?rzung von Maria Teresa empfunden. Als
> ich eine der Kolleginnen, die so hei?en, fragte, sagte sie mir, da? sie
> nicht auf die Idee gekommen w?re, Maite als baskisch zu sehen. F?r sie
> und ihre Familie ist der Name einfach eine Koseform.

Most interesting.  But, while we await the evidence, I would still bet on a
Basque origin for <Maite>.

> Andererseits habe ich noch nie eine Frau kennengelernt, die Amada hei?t,
> obwohl ich, um die Wahrheit zu sagen, gestehen mu?, da? ich Amandas
> kenne.

Yes.  In my experience, the female name <Amada> is virtually unused in Spain,
in contrast to its French cognate <Aimee>.  But, if I recall correctly, there
is (or was) a Spanish linguist called <Amado Alonso>, with the male
counterpart.

Interestingly, Hanks and Hodges tells me that the original Latin name, <Amata>,
may not after all have been derived from the participle of <amare> 'love', but
may have had a pre-Roman origin.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk


From r.piva at bluewin.ch  Sun Nov 14 12:45:17 1999
From: r.piva at bluewin.ch (renato piva)
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1999 14:45:17 +0200
Subject: gr. laos, basileus, skene
Message-ID: <SUN.14.NOV.1999.144517.0200.>

To the Indo-European community

As I have no access to any University-Library for the moment, I' d like
to ask whether some of you may give me any information about recent
(i.e. post-Chantraine) proposals of etymology for the greek words laos
'people', basileus 'king', and skene 'tent'.

Thanks in advance for your answers,

R. Piva


From Wolfgang.Behr at ruhr-uni-bochum.de  Mon Nov 15 10:04:20 1999
From: Wolfgang.Behr at ruhr-uni-bochum.de (WB (in Frankfurt today))
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 11:04:20 +0100
Subject: herme:ne'us, interpres
Message-ID: <MON.15.NOV.1999.110420.0100.>

Dear IE-ists,

I wonder if you could refer me to any recent reference dealing
wih the etymologies of Gr. herme:ne'us, herme:ne'o: etc. and
Lat. inter-pres. The Greek root her- is assumed to be a loan
from a NE language in Chantraine, Frisk and Krahe, while Latin
interpres has been variously assigned to pretium, *inter-pers
=> -partes, *per- 'take over' with derivations outside Latin
etc. (rejected in Walde-Hoffmann, s.v. interpres). Any ideas or
pointers?

Thank you, best wishes, WOlfgang